Monthly Archives: November 2007

Working my way through November

Jeffrey’s birthday is this Saturday, although we don’t have plans to do anything. I will make a batch of gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. I do have a new typewriter, but don’t have pictures yet. It’s the strangest thing. I put in a very specific prayer for another typewriter in better shape than my current ones, and asked for a 1950s Smith-Corona Silent-Super (their top of the line typewriter). And amazingly, Freecycle came through with exactly that. It matches the Clipper but it has key set tabs. I am really enjoying the writing, although it’s pretty dreadful at this point. Still, I know how it should be written now, and I just need to finish up with the story so I can do it right.

We are going to be getting a wood stove, a nice small Waterford. It’s from the house we have been caretaking for the church. I also need to get the two cats moved out of there and merged with mine somehow. All of this depends on finishing the porch, which is getting closer. We had snow the other night (most of which is gone today) so we definitely need a way to bank a fire overnight. The cookstove is not doing a bad job. I am hoping that we can get back enough from taxes to build something larger. Even a Thoreau sized cabin (10 ft by 18 ft, if you were wondering) would be nice.

The goats tried to kill Jeffrey yesterday, so I guess things are normal. They’ve been kept in the last few days due to weather. He had to get in to put halters back on Maddie and Scamper. The terrible two kept knocking the stall door on him. I’m going to see if we can make halters for them this weekend, so they can be confined out of the way if needed.

I’ll be taking a vacation day on Friday, so I’ll have a real 4 day weekend. Hope everyone out there has a nice holiday!

Nanowrimo

I don’t know if the word count widget will work in a post but let’s try it.

wordcount widgets
I am having a lot of fun with this. And I’m especially enjoying typewriters, strange as that may seem to you. We are getting a small wood stove to heat the porch. I’m just as happy as I can be about that and will post pictures soon. We butchered out one of the goat kids this weekend, Pete G as we called him. Repete will probably go in the next week or so. These goats are due to kid out in January and they need some space for that. The terrible twosome, as we call Lily and Ragnar, will provide us with plenty of entertainment.

moving right along

The Nano novel is coming right along and my word count is about where it should be. The typewriters are great fun and I suspect that there is another one in my future. The important thing for me is that I believe I am going to try my hand at writing for money. It’s time. I’ve wanted to do it for a long time. And it doesn’t much matter if I just manage to sell a magazine article or two, instead of a book.

The goats are doing fine, although I haven’t been taking many pictures lately. We are going to go ahead and butcher the two Scamper kids. It will make it easier to afford hay for the winter. We’ve been lucky so far, but the weather won’t hold. Spacewise and feedwise, it makes sense. We’ve just been waiting for cooler weather. We have little chickens everywhere. The 10 chicks from the Rock have tailfeathers at this point. We’ve been letting them back out to forage. The 10 buff chicks are still small but getting bigger every day. And we still have the five larger chicks from the earlier hatches. I hope they can make it through. It would be great to have replacement chickens for the spring. The buffs we have are getting old. We lost the last Lorp and are down to one Rock. But it seems that we have chicks from those too, so there’s a chance to carry on.

We patched a hole in the floor of the porch and the cookstove is doing a decent job of heating the trailer. We can’t bank a fire in it, so we are going to need a real wood stove at some point. Jeffrey has been out cutting firewood. We have been cutting dead standing wood, so it burns okay. And we had elk steaks a few nights ago. A friend got one this year and gave us some to try. Not bad, but we should have pressure cooked it a bit to tenderize. That’s how we do goat and it makes a huge difference.