Hello there! I’m so glad to share a cuppa with you! How the heck are you?

Can I offer you some hot tea? I can happily put the kettle on for you if you’d prefer coffee, too, or maybe herbal or iced tea is more your style? We have it all so just let me know :-)

The Spring rains have moved on and the weather is lovely! Rather dry, but expected for mid-June, and truly lovely! Shall we sit under the big apple trees and listen to the breeze make its music through the leaves?

Blogging and Journaling and Writing

As I mentioned in my last Over a Cuppa, I’ve remained quite inspired as Spring begins to shift into Summer (officially very soon) and have been working to establish a routine with writing, despite it being High Season on the farm.

I find that lunch time (during the hottest heat of the day when it’s impossible to be outside) is my best bet if I can stay off of Social Media and surrender some of my reading time as a solid swap.

In addition to this online space where I focus on family history, I am also trying to be more consistent on the farm blog and am inspired to write again about the importance of growing some of your own food/purchasing from local agricultural producers and choosing sustainable practices whenever possible in the face of climate change, continued supply chain issues, and the literal cost of inflation.

I’m aiming for a post a week here and two posts each month on the farm blog. So far, so good!

Though I’m currently sitting on a handful of ideas for the farm blog, I’ve only published a short, photo heavy post this week about our hail recovery and having absolute trust in the goodness of the earth! But hey, who doesn’t like happy farm photos and cute ducklings, amiright?

This site has faired much better though! Since we last shared a cuppa, I’ve stayed on track and have written the following posts:

• 5 Ways to Find Clues About Your LGBT Ancestors where I offer suggestions on, you got it, where one can find clues to their LGBT ancestors and inferred relationships.

• The Search for Delia Duval: Two where I provided an update on my hunt for information and possible photos of one of Great Grandmothers… and was rewarded with two beautiful photos of Delia and her five sisters, including this beauty right here!

If you like to fancy yourself a Detective of sorts, please pop over and let me know your thoughts on the two photos I was gifted! If you don’t want to have an opinion and just like old photos, these are pretty special so you should pop over either way :-)

Beyond the outward facing writing I’m doing I also have some personal projects that aren’t shared with “the public”.

I have two journals I try to work in regularly but would like to get much more intentional with. One is a proper journal that I started writing in consistently when the Pandemic first hit but that has been largely neglected for several months now. This is a traditional journal, mostly just writing, with a few occasional additions of concert stubs and the such.

The second contains all of my herbal workings and folk practices and is more in the “junk journal” style, except that everything I put in there has a purpose (not just for aesthetics as some junk journals do). Think collages and stickers and colorful writing, recipes, methods, preparations, etc.

Then, of course, is the methodical documentation of our family history, which is a very slow process, but one that must be addressed here if I am to talk about any of my other writing. Although, truth be told, it’s much more fact gathering and outline forming at the present than actual writing.

So…yeah. The struggle is real and I’m beginning to understand why writers have Studios or hole up in a cabin for months at a time ;-) Maybe my next Life Chapter will allow for such things, but for now I’m simply stealing moments where I can.

Do tell, what creative projects are you working on these days? I’d love to hear all about them! Feel free to share links if you have them!

Helping

If you are on Ancestry.com, you might have noticed a few new features they’ve been rolling out. One of them is a Story feature, similar to Instagram’s, where users can post short stories or pose challenges their facing or ask questions to the community about certain ancestors or “brick walls” they’re facing, excpet the Stories go out to the general public, there’s no “follow” feature, so you just see everyone’s posts.

I’ve answered a few people’s “challenge” posts and have struck up a new acquaintance with one woman in particular who is trying to find her 4x great grandparents through DNA. Since so much time has passed, this is proving quite challenging, but it’s not impossible! Even a 6cM match could help lead her in the right direction! So, I’m lending my eyes and a bit of research time to her and am enjoying the process of looking at a whole new family for a short while.

It’s quite the story, too, so there’s some fun energy to it!

Have you worked on any fun projects lately? encountered anything challenging that’s pushed you from your Comfort Zone into your Learning Zone?

Weeding, Irrigating, & Re-sowing

Beyond the “fun stuff” is real life (not that that can’t be fun, too)…

And real life in high summer as a farmer consists of weeding weeding weeding, irrigating, and re-sowing seeds where they make sense after our hail loss.

Remarkably, the storm I told you about in my last Cuppa was followed by an even worse storm. I’ve truly never seen such devastation and my wife and cried big tears over the immense damage.

Larger things, like the berries and blue corn, are bouncing back and re-growing, despite being stripped to sticks and thoroughly shredded. But the smaller things, like 95% of my little tomatoes and peppers, are simply gone. Now, instead of being ahead of the season, we’re about a month behind on getting new seeds/starts in the ground and I’m assessing what’s worth re-sowing and what we just won’t grow this year.

Everything else is limping along, trying to get its roots under it again, and proving downright amazing resilience.

Farming is wild and forces you to surrender to Nature in all her ferocity and glory.

On that note…

I should take my leave and go pull some weeds :-)

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 weird 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 can head straight to you and return the favor… if I didn’t already hit you first ;-)!

I hope that whatever you’re up to this weekend (and beyond) it’s thoroughly enjoyable!

Onward,

Melis