Well, it’s the 2nd week of March and I’ve burned less than four cords of wood since the season began last October. The cost to me? Oh, a lot of entertainment last summer with chain saw and maul. The thrill of assembling the most Dr. Seussian wood shed in the county. The delight of a …

Jess and I are super-hyper-overachievers, and with the first half-dozen of our children we thought we could handle it all while our children sat around reading The Lightning Thief (where does he keep the lightning once he’s stolen it, by the bye?) or Harry Potter for the 17th time.
But with seven children, we can’t do …

Out at our place I find that we have to jury-rig things a lot. That is, figure out a way to make stuff work. (Or is it jerry-rig? Or rerry-jig? Depends who you ask, I guess.) Making do makes for a lot of ugly stuff, but maybe that’s the reason homesteaders build their hodge-podge empires …

I promised you Homemade Week last week, and I made good on that promise by staying home on Friday. So no post. Actually I wasn’t home much that day, having accepted an invitation to spend my day off first at the local high school career day, talking up my career (such as it is), and …

Well a few months back I mentioned my homemade laundry detergent and bragged about what a great job it did getting our clothes clean. There was only one problem: it was lumpy. This must be because I used half a bar of Fels Naphtha soap ( which I completely forgot to use this time). I …

Actually I can’t make weeks at home, so I can’t truthfully advertise homemade weeks. If I could, I would have made about a thousand of them already and quit my job. In the absence of that, however, I’ll document all the homemamde stuff I made this weekend. I’ll also try to document how those homemade …

As I write this I’m eating homemade butter on homemade wheat & buckwheat bread. (What is buckwheat? If you can tell me without Googling it or looking in Wikipedia, you win! I have no idea what buckwheat is. Jessica ground some to put in muffins the other day and there was still some buckwheat flour …

Steller’s jay? Jeller’s stay? This is English; you can never tell how something is supposed to be written. I used to pride myself on my spelling capability (even though I lost the 6th grade spelling bee on “asterisk”, a word I’d never heard before, but I’m not emotionally damaged, waaa!). But now that I’m getting …

This is about a week’s haul in the winter—2 dozen eggs, give or take. (I can’t see through Abby’s hand.) In springtime, it will be about one day’s worth. We will have so many eggs floating around that we’ll have to find a way to freeze them, or something. Can you freeze eggs?
Jess took this …

But you really should have sent some of your snow our way. If everybody goes outside right now (you’re all home from work and school anyway, right?), takes a deep breath, and blows as hard as they can, it should push the storms all the way to, say, Ohio.
We’ll have to make do with our …