Over a Cuppa: Six
Oh hello there! I’m so glad to share a cuppa with you! How the heck are you?
Can I offer you some hot, black tea? The kettle is hot if you’d prefer coffee, too, or maybe herbal or iced tea is more your style?
We have it all so no need to be shy, just let me know and we’ll settle in down by the orchard and watch the goats graze on the field. We’re all enjoying the cooler temps that have blown our way over the past few days.
Living
My youngest finished up Summer Camp at the end of July leaving us with a liminal space of about four weeks before our homeschool learning begins. These weeks have been a lovely mix of down time, travel and visits, farm management, and curriculum planning.
Highlights include a trip my wife and daughter took to the St. Louis area to visit family and my best friend visiting me for a long weekend. While my family bounced between seeing all the brothers and cousins and grandparents, my BFF and I visited the Farmer’s Market, had a lovely lunch in the park with my immediate family, spent some time at my favorite bookstore in Santa Fe, and visited Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (a wild feast for the senses), broken up by chill days at home where we watched ridiculous movies, laughed our asses off, listened to lots of music, and reflected on our 33 years of friendship.
It was magic.
To top it all off, we’ve also added two (yes, two) new kittens to our home which is soaking up every excess second we have at our disposal!
Reading & Writing
Reading & writing absolutely took a back seat this month as I focused on friends, family, and the farm but I did get a few planning tasks done for this site and managed to publish two posts this week as I get back in the swing of things:
Re-inspired by some communications with distant cousins and the cooler weather/Spooky Season ahead of us, I’m excited to get my writing groove back!
Miraculously, I also managed to make my way through a couple of short, easy reads, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed:
The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, Reese Witherspoon’s book club pick for August
I’ve just started Long Live the Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw which is proving fun so far and should immediately tell you which generation I belong to ;-) Any guesses?
What have you been reading/writing/planning/inspired by recently?
Farming
As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s been a doozy of a season on the farm. Between the hail, consistently (& stifling) above average temps, and the pest pressure, it’s all easily added up to our worst growing year in about 15 years.
I don’t have any hard or fast answers right now, because I’m tired and worried about the future, but I’m not a fatalist so I’ll keep plugging away, doing what I can to tend the land in present time and working on a larger scale to maybe help ensure a healthy future for our kids and grandkids.
The blackberries and raspberries are finally ripening up and we’ve harvested a handful of the most glorious strawberries so there’s hope in that in addition to the blue corn thriving and sizing up and carrots coming out of the ground in bunches.
There’s something to be said for heirloom/landrace seeds and a lot of humility as we face more climate uncertainty. Maybe I’ll get around to writing about it on the farm site soon.
On that note…
I should take my leave and go harvest some berries :-)
Thanks for popping by for a cuppa! I always enjoy hearing what you’re up to and how life is treating you!
Big thanks to Natalie the Explorer for providing us the platform to get together each weekend! I’ll be popping around throughout the weekend, visiting as many spaces as possible and thank you for doing the same! Comments here on Square Space are a little wonky and don’t allow for direct links to your site when you leave a comment. Please feel free to leave your website link directly in your comment so I (and others) can head straight to you and see what you’ve been up to!
I hope that whatever you’re up to this weekend (and beyond) it’s thoroughly enjoyable!
Onward,
Melis