Weekly Update: 5.27.23

Well, this update is a bit late today. I had planned to write it up yesterday afternoon, but I thought I had plenty of time to finish the dog crate project first. I was wrong. Very wrong. Giving-up-because-it-was-almost-11-pm wrong. But, oh well. It's mostly done now, with the crates neatly tucked into their newly formed corner of the tent (we had to re-arrange -- a lot) .

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We had a busy week that started out with some surprise fun.

We took a grocery run to Bolivar last Saturday. When we got home, we planned to have a belated Easter egg hunt for the kids, as with all the moving we had skipped it this year. Our brother Jeremiah surprised the adults, however, with their own egg hunt, hiding a dozen large eggs around the property. The eggs were stuffed with bottles of lotion, nice ink pens, bookmarks, and even a T-shirt. It took us all afternoon to find them all. My brother had buried some -- in post-holes, rock piles, the trash barrel -- even a compost pile! It was weird taking so much time away from doing something productive, but the experience was incredibly rewarding. It was a beautiful spring day, and it was a treat to just wander around our field and woods taking it all in together.

While we were out egg hunting, we stumbled onto a patch of wild irises (Southern Blue Flag, I believe) growing in and along a dry creek bed we have. They were gorgeous -- just take a look.

On Sunday, we enjoyed a day of rest. We went to church in the morning, and when we got home tried a new recipe for orange homemade ice cream with fresh orange juice. It was delicious. We also played a new card game -- Sheep in Disguise.

The rest of the week was a blur of projects. The most interesting thing that happened is that we had some lightening strike close by enough to fry several of our electronics as well as our wireless router, despite the fact that we were using surge protectors. The electric company had to come out and fix our meter as it wasn't working right. We weren't really even expecting much of a storm that night -- we had gone to bed with the windows unzipped. We woke to rain first and then loud thunder with lightening that felt like it was right above us. The whole storm only lasted a couple minutes, but the damage was done. Our new equipment is trickling in. Hopefully we won't have a repeat experience too soon!

Most of the family started every morning this week with an hour and a half in the garden. Some of us work on breaking and removing sod, while others dig post-holes. The holes have been incredibly difficult, but we are making slow progress. Our garden will likely be late getting in this year, but we will have plenty of time for a few things.

On Monday, Levi and I used our new Huepar 360-degree line level to adjust our batter boards and put our stringline back up. It was too bright outside to use the line, but thankfully our level has a pulse mode. We had purchased a laser receiver, so we used that to level our boards.

Once the batter boards were up, Grace and Levi started cleaning the footing holes back out (they had filled in a bit during the winter).

Bonnie-Jean and I worked on building some stacking dog-crate frames for our tent. As I mentioned in our previous update, she and Jeremiah have new German Shepherd puppies coming in the next few weeks, so we needed to make space for their extra-large sized dog crates. I had moments of wondering if it was possible to fit more into our tent, but by stacking our old dog crates and the new ones, we found a way. It was a fun project, and I think they will work great! Dolly and Rascal slept in theirs last night, just as cozy as can be

Aside from major projects, we finished some small tasks we had been working on. We completed our storm-shelter project once the new cushions arrived, and we hung up some old lights Levi and Erin had. It's downright cozy in there now.

We were also busy with regular chores like cooking and campsite upkeep.

Our mom sponsored a mini-flower bed this week that Levi's kids got to prepare themselves. It turned out so cute, I just had to feature it here.

In other news, our swimming pool came! The Lowe's freight truck driver was afraid to pull-in our driveway, so our dad met him with his truck to unload the pool. This next week we will make time to prepare a site for it, as the heat in late afternoon feels brutal already, and it's not even June!

And just in time to level a spot for the pool, we got the tractor working! We had to go to town this week to pick up some parts. The plastic fuel line had melted, so we replaced it with some metal break line. Our dad and Levi worked on it today. Thankfully, it's finally running again! It has been sitting in the middle of our camp area since we moved out here, right next to our shower shed. Now our campsite feels much more roomy and the tractor can be used to make improvements around the homestead.

We will doubtless be using the tractor a lot in the coming week. Until then, I'm thankful it's the weekend. I'm looking forward to the day of rest tomorrow!