Ending July...

I haven't blogged much lately because, well, there just isn't much of anything news-worthy going on. We are in a rut here on the homestead it would seem. A rut in terms of...

Dewey still works away from home. Last job was Indiana, now he's in Arkansas for a week or so, then off to west central Illinois for close to 9 months.  Life just rolls along same as usual. He was home for a couple of weeks, so we went wild on building the addition here. It ended rather abruptly, with his heading back to work a bit sooner than we were originally told he would be.

Right now, we have walls and a roof on a 16x32 addition. We still have another 16x28 portion to build. The new addition will be the living room space. We will turn the existing great room/kitchen/living room (approx. 32x27) into all dining room. Well, school room and sewing room, but mainly kitchen/dining room area.
We will tear out the back wall, leaving the kitchen counter as an island thru to the new addition.  The new area will also house an extension to our master bath by 4ft and a new pantry area of 12x16ft.

 We also put together a chicken house for the incoming chicks this year. Dewey ordered 50 chicks for us. All pullets. Of course, they arrived during the deep summer heatwave, and we lost 2 a couple days in.  The remaining ones are doing great now, entering their 'teen years' where they get really ugly looking...all stretched and plucked looking.

 We also went haying. During those incredible HOT summer days of 110* heat and then some.  The opportunity presented itself for my load of square bales to be cut, and we had to move on it. It was miserable. It was absolutely beautiful, but downright nasty HOT.

And we managed to collect 600 hay bales, in field, over a couple days. I can haul about 130 bales, absolute max, on the trailer. It took a few trips to get it all. Then we had to get it here to unload into the barn loft, and head back out to gather more.  

We started a last minute unit study/lapbook on amphibians. We are just about finished with it,and will officially move into the 'new school year' Monday morning. Yes, we school year-round here, and I really don't care much for tracking 'year by year' but for all the traditional folks, the new year for us begins Monday.

 This new year will be Middle Ages. We will focus the year around the Vikings, knights, castles, Robin Hood and King Arthur. In fact, I just spent the day finishing adding the links and such to the game plan over at our school blog (A Plain Homeschool).

It rained. Finally. And, as usual for our homestead of clay, after so much drought, rain means flood and mush here.

And, finally, for everyone who wonders if my constantly saying we live in the hinterlands on the other side of nowhere, here is the GoogleEarth shot of our homestead area. That blue dot...that's us. follow the road trail, such as it is, 'above' that dot, and that is our only neighbor here.  That's it. Lots of mountain nothingness. No roadways, not many horse trails, lots of timber and miles of not much else. Wilderness family. sort of.

Those 'cleared' areas you see...those are feed plots for the local mountain hunt clubs.

 Rural life, just rolling along. Same ol' same ol' every day homestead living going on around here. Like I said, not a lot of news-worthy stuff happens around here really. I could dramatize things a bit more I suppose to spice it up for you, but really, you wouldn't want that. Boring and mundane is what brings you back, right?