Gathering our January Days up

Really, nothing exciting has been going on around here since my beginning of the month post. How sad is that?  We were flooded up with rain for a couple weeks, everything was a sloppy mucky mess here. The cow was muddy from belly up, the goats were thick with mud and hooves have been a mess, the chickens took to walking their system of PVC roosts rather than attempt the ground. It was messy.

We did have Dewey home a couple times this month, and he'll be in again this weekend for 3 days for our anniversary. That's been nice. The headache he has to deal with leaving the job site under another Superintendent isn't so nice, but these days, decent grown men willing to actually WORK for a living are scarce it seems. He is basically becoming a babysitter of grown-up man-children.

...but I won't even get started on that. Lucky you. I have extremely strong opinions on the lazy, uselessness of a growing majority of today's workforce. I imagine you already suspected as much, though. 

Dewey had his ortho visit, two of them already. First visit, he was given a cursory view and a cortisone shot. It actually helped more than he expected. I mean, he is still in some pain and discomfort, but nothing like he was before the shot, so that's a plus for sure. The next visit was basically pointless....
Dr: How did the shot work?
Dewey: Well. There is still some discomfort, but it's more tolerable than it was.
Dr: That's good. Well, the shot is all we can do for you. Go ahead and call me to schedule the surgery whenever you feel the shot has out-lived its usefulness.

And out the door he went  O.o
So....I guess whenever this current job winds up, we'll plan for some down time and his surgery. Or maybe I'll just use my feminine wiles to keep his home when he arrives this weekend...

I've been working on the same slow-going diagonal box stitch afghan I started after this holdiays. Dewey has enjoyed, and gotten plenty of use, of the one I made for him for Christmas, and I'm sure we'll like having an extra here for the couch.  Part of my slow-motion on that afghan has been the start of another one, for an online friend. I posted some ideas on my Facebook Wall for a possible crocheted block swap I am thinking about, and she loved this Daisy Granny block. We discussed her favorite color ideas, and I got started. The blocks I'm working up are daisies with bright orange centers, and the surrounding block rows are being done in a robin's egg blue, a navy blue, tea leaf green, and a pretty, soft brown called cafe latte. I'm really liking the colors so far. I've figured I will need roughly 140 blocks to get a decent sized afghan. I'm about half-way there.

I've also started on my knitting goal. I know the mechanics of knitting, I just don't do it well. It isn't comfortable for me coming from my long-term, crochet-only yarnwork. The needles and yarn are clunky and fiddly for me, but oh whatever...I am going to master this to at least a passable level. I love knitted items, and I fully intend to add several goodies to my Grandmother's Hope Chest for future grandbabies. So, onward I trod, clunky and fiddly needles and all!

I've also been working on homestead plans for the year. I've got ideas for shelters in the goat and cow areas, and for some feed bins and field troughs. These aren't fancy at all, trust me. I know my carpentry skills and they simply don't lend themselves to fancy barns and high quality feeders, but they do get me by and we don't always have the appearance of total hillbilly rustic-ness.
My garden plans are, as every year, ambitious considering I never harvest much more than brown weedy growth and frustration. This year, the main garden will be in the back yard, where Miss Judy the Jersey lived for a good 3 seasons, depositing her wonderful bovine compost material. If that ground proves to be as useless as the rest of the clay crud out here, even after all that wonderful compost and manure, I will have to concede that I'm destined for only farmer's markets to stock my pantry. I will plant in the side area as well, where we got off to such a great looking start last year, and perhaps between the two of them, and some well-placed granular fertilizer, we will see a suitable homestead garden come to fruition.

Schooling moves along as we spend the year with the Middle Ages. I found some goodies at the dollar store back in the autumn, some costume parts like helmets, swords, breast-plates, gauntlets...they will have a lot of fun re-creating the many tales of Robin Hood, of King Arthur, of knights and castle's won. Our lapbooks are coming along nicely, although perhaps a bit hodge-podged with the collection of varied resources I've gathered for our use during my online travels.
I am back on track, with any luck, on posting the Science Week studies on the school blog, too...

We are also working on doing a family/children's version of  the 52-in-52 Reading Challenge this year. We won't always be reading the extras and fun stuff, I plan to include our school reading, but we will hopefully stay on track with a book each week. We have read the original Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Anderson, free text online), The Hollow Tree Snowed-in Book (Albert Bigelow Paine, free at Project Gutenberg), and we're about to start Miss Hickory (Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, free lapbook at Homeschool Share) and I think we'll craft some Miss Hickory dolls while we're at it. We've read several short stories from our Candlelight Bedtime Stories, too. We found most of A Wrinkle in Time series by Madeleine L'Engle at a local thrift store, and while I've read A Wrinkle in Time years ago, I've never read the other titles in the series. And the Redwall Abbey series (Brian Jacques)...we might go ahead with whole series, and loosely tie it into the We also have several audiobooks waiting in my Audible account we might include in the year-long list.

Let's just say we have a lengthy list of titles to get us started. I'll try to keep them up-to-date here or on the school blog. Maybe someone else will join in and we can do some list encouragement.