Starting Again

Hello!  I'm happy to be back here after a loooong hiatus from the blog.  It's been a crazy 18+ months of post-back surgery life-rebuilding and life-living.  The short version is that my back pain is gone although a nasty infection nearly killed me in February, everyone else is fine and we started work on another beautiful Victorian house restoration.

Our house, along with the project house and another one we completed a few years ago were both featured on the Historic Fall Homes Tour in October, which almost killed us.  It certainly killed our garden, since we were so busy trying to make the project house walkable and ready for the tour that we didn't have time to tend to the veggies.  So they ended up looking sad and forgotten among a sea of ever-encroaching rye grass and weeds. I suspect the super-wet Spring this year and then bone-dry summer had something to do with it also.

It's with a heavy heart that I mention that we lost our entire flock of chickens not long ago.  We suspect it was a possum given the small space that the fiend would have had to fit through to get to them in their enclosed kennel.  J. and I had never fully re-fortified the coop and pen when we moved it to make way for the solar panels, so it's entirely on our heads.  My beloved green-feathered Kermit, the oldest of the flock and J.'s self-declared nemesis, will never again follow him around the yard demanding mealworms.  She made it to the ripe old age of 4, which I suspect is old age for a chicken in  most cases, though.

R.I.P. Kermit. We will miss you giving us a stern talking-to every time we visited the coop.

And I just realized that there's a lot of references to death in this post, which makes this title so apropos.  It's the circle of life that ends and then begins anew and that's where we are now on the cusp of the new year.  2017 will bring a new flock, a renewed garden, a honey-do list dragged out from under the cobwebs and spit-cleaned, and a revitalized hope for what we can accomplish this year. 

Let's begin, shall we?