Thanksgiving.

I spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Texas with my family. It was a nice visit filled with queso, rellenos, margaritas and breakfast tacos. I also got a couple runs in there too (thank God!). I'm back now and feel the need to make a to do list that I'm going to stick to. I've just been getting things done willy-nilly the last couple months and I need to get some structure back in my self-sufficiency dreams.

I made a large outline calendar of skills and accomplishments I hope to achieve that spans five years and includes things like "Learn to use sewing machine", "Make a soft cheese" and "90% vegetable growth" by 2013. This one might be a little out of reach, but I'm setting my sights high!

Anyway, I only have a few things left on my list for 2010 that I haven't done yet. They are:

• Learn how to use sewing machine
• Sew something
• Research organic pest control

I can definitely track down a copy of my sewing machine model's manual and I can definitely research organic pest control. Actually sewing something within the next month might be a little much, but maybe I can try to make a throw pillow or something. Gotta keep on track!

Winter is upon us.

I woke up this morning to a frosty landscape. Kale covered in ice crystals.

Frosty leaves covering the winter garden.

Our dirt.

We made dirt. This used to be bits of onion and stems of broccoli and eggshells and squash innards. Now, it's black gold! Thanks, worms.

First Fire.

We got the fireplace all fixed up just in time. Chance of snow tonight and lows in the 20's this week. Brr.

First Frost.

It's getting cold! There is a call for snow in the valley on Monday! Yikes! And my garden is sitting out there exposed. I don't have any sort of cold frame or cloche; I am woefully unprepared. I'm not too concerned about it though. Frankly, the winter garden is pretty sad anyway and I'm seeing this as a good not-so-scientific experiment to see just how long I can grow things here without protection. I think the kale and cabbage should be OK and they are the two crops that are actually growing well and I would be concerned about losing. In fact, kale is supposed to sweeten after going through a frost.

I'm hoping in the next couple weeks to make a real plan for next year's garden expansion and maybe even get myself a some cover built by next spring for early crops.

The Bathroom: Epilogue I

It started pouring in Portland at some point during the day. I work in a room with no windows, so I wasn't privy to the whole thing, but I do know that it was raining when I went to lunch and it was raining the whole way home. For some reason Portland traffic gets exponentially worse in the rain, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense since it is raining all the time. It took an hour today to make it from the office to the vanpool drop-off. Then I had my bike ride home ahead of me.

I invested in a new cycling rain jacket this summer and this was the first time to wear it in a heavy rainshower. I'm glad to say when I got home and took off my rain gear there wasn't a drop of water on me! I'm also glad to say when I got home that the vanity was installed in the bathroom!! Mike had told me earlier in the day that he wasn't going to have time to get it installed like he had planned, so I certainly wasn't expecting it. It was a great little surprise.

Now, just to get the baseboard trim and maybe paint our wall cabinet to match (but I'll take my time on that one).

Workday dinners.

One of the hardest things I have had to adjust to with working again is trying to still cook from scratch. I simply don't have much time and I have certainly not had the motivation to prep in the mornings. I have a hard time waking up before the sun does. On a good day I get home by 7pm. Today is one of the good days. I also managed to actually find a quick recipe and it utilizes ingredients that I need to use and have on hand already. It's the merging of all three elements. Fresh Tomato Lentil Soup with homemade whole wheat toast:

After so many nights of getting home in a frenzy and rushing to get dinner on the table by 9pm or getting stuck in traffic and not even getting home until after 8 with no chance of a homemade dinner it's a welcome relief to be able to put fresh garden produce (tomatoes, onions and herbs) on the table in a half an hour and still have time to play with the dog in the backyard.

Patio: Complete.

It's been a big day on the homestead today. We finished our patio (Aside from sealing up some holes, which has to wait for two consecutive days of good weather. This may take a while.)!!

We got the chimney cleaned! When the inspection was done on the house they said the chimney needed cleaning before making a fire. It's only taken a year to finally get around to it. But, we finally have everything now - wood, a clean chimney and fireplace tools to boot. Mike is out back chopping wood as I type to christen the fireplace tonight. So, without further ado, here's a photo log of building the patio cover:

First side up...

Becoming a structure. Mike says hi!

Triple rainbow to christen the patio. Seriously....triple!!

Finished! Playing with Lemon and keeping dry!

Southern foods from the North.

I did some cooking Saturday and finally got around to making those green tomato pickles. They had been sitting for so long that some of them started to ripen! And rot. I lost a few tomatoes, but still had enough to make a couple jars of pickles and make a nice plate of fried green tomatoes for Cajun night (I also made Gumbo. yumm). They were pretty delicious.

I was really pleased when I looked down at the counter mid-prep and saw all my green tomatoes from the summer garden, onions from the fall garden and fresh kale from the winter garden all coming together.

I also got a nice surprise in the mail from Texas. My friend has a pecan tree in her yard and I am reaping the benefits! Turns out these things are really hard to shell. Like Mike said, I could eat pecans as much as I want as long as I shell them myself. It's kind of a pain in the butt. But a delicious one.

Dreams.

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my life lately. I had a lot of time to think about it this year. I've been thinking about how I have my dream job now and it's not really what I want out of life. If 13-year-old me could see me now working at a feature animation studio alongside people who have worked on every animated movie I've seen since I was born I would have exploded with excitement.

But now that almost 30-year-old me is here it feels like it's something that I get to check off the list once this film is done. Worked on a feature film, check. Now, moving on...

If I go back even further though, 8-year-old me would explode with excitement if I lived in a cabin the woods. So maybe that's the next thing on my list. In all seriousness, though, I do have a dream of my life where I can spend the majority of my working time working at living and not at an office. I would be much happier spending my time directly providing my own food than abstractly getting a paycheck to go and buy it later.

One of the other blogs I follow wrote a little piece on dreams and I really enjoyed it:

"Believe–and make no mistake, believing means working. Dreaming AND doing. (Doing doesn’t mean you have to buy a farm tomorrow. But if it’s what you want, you should be doing something toward the goal. Every day.) There is no greater obstacle to your dreams than fear. And common sense. Common sense is a huge obstacle. If I had been making my decisions based on common sense, I would still be living in a 4000-square foot house in a posh suburb in North Carolina buying Viking cookware while I fed my kids mashed potatoes out of a box."

So I am going to keep working on that dream a little every day and just like with my animated film dream one day I might wake up and find that I'm already there.