I have been a BAAAAD girl!! 10 days without an update! Well, I guess I have a lot to catch you up on.
Biggest news by far is our new puppy. We adopted Shay from the Palouse Humane Society. She's a 7-month old Chow mix and is just about the sweetest thing there is. She thinks she's a lapdog, but she's already as big as Max, so it could be interesting. She also thinks the middle of the bed belongs to her, and her ALONE. Mike has fun working his way under the covers at night. :) They told us she wasn't housebroken, but so far so good. Max likes having a playmate, too.
We also bought a tiller the same day. Mike's been messing around with it, getting to know how it works and stuff. As far as I can tell, it works just fine. Makes nice, plantable, soft soil. Shouldn't be too much of a problem to get our garden in the ground after the wedding. We've also been doing some work around the farm. Stuff like clearing more brush (it's EVERYWHERE) and cleaning out the chicken coop. OK, here's my gross story of the month - I was shoveling out the chicken droppings from the chicken coop, getting ready to put new chickens in there someday, and I found a VERY old chicken carcass, wedged between a table and a wall. It was disGUSTing. Mike dubbed it "dumb chicken".. a little redundant, maybe...
We had a real bad scare over the last couple of days. Owen, our baby kitty, disappeared. Mike noticed mid-afternoon that he wasn't around. He's snuck out of a closing screen door several times, so we assumed he probably got out when we weren't looking. But to be sure, we scoured the house... several times. First we looked in all his usual haunts, then we looked in every box, corner, drawer, cabinet, everywhere. No Owen. So we looked outside. Mike walked all the way down to the Palouse River looking for him. No luck. We called and called and called until we were hoarse. Then we gave up. Cried. Held each other. This is coyote country, after all. We moped. We mourned. Then we finally tried to work. We were just sitting here, when he appeared at the top of the stairs. I was dumbfounded. I thought I had imagined it. But it was real. We picked him up, checked him over, made sure he was ok. Then we checked the doors; they were all closed. So he was either hiding or trapped somewhere. But darned if we can figure out where!
We got our first wedding presents! Thank you thank you thank you. I know some people are very private about gift-giving, so let's just say that if we received your gift, we are grateful. It means alot to us that people wish us well, and want to help us to start our life together.
I'm getting back in "Wedding Mode". We leave here in 2 weeks to go to Dallas. I'm starting to get excited again. I just hope we get a nice turnout, and that the weather cooperates. Incidentally, if you need the name of a hotel in Dallas to make reservations, email me. Maybe we can get discounted rates if enough people express interest. And we could get a little Wedding Block Party thing, too. :)
Today we drove over to Moscow. That was about our last major sight-seeing trip planned for this area. Moscow is just BARELY inside of Idaho, and it's the "big" town around here. It has a Wal-Mart, Staples, a mall, several fast food joints, a 24-hour grocery store, and the purported "Most Interesting Store in Idaho". I forget the name of it, but that slogan was too much for Mike to resist, so we stopped. No lie, they were holding a turkey-calling class. Standing room only. We looked around; it's basically an outdoorsy haveny fishing-and-hunting-and-stuff-like-thaty kind of place. I was interested to note that they had horse tack. :) No western riding saddles, though; only English. We bought a bunch of stuff from the Wal-Mart, including my hard-fought-for pressure cooker! I can now can vegetables. And don't think I won't!!
Before that, we did some work outdoors. Clearing brush is HARD work (see today's Farm Lesson). More bookwork, some laundry.. Oh, speaking of laundry! We bought a washing machine! Up until then Mike had been washing his clothes by hand and I .. well, I just have too many clothes. <blush> We bought it from the appliance store in St. John (about 15 minutes north of us). The owner, Don, came by and installed it himself. While he was here, we had him take a look at the washer and dryer we had in the garage, and he ended up carting the washing machine back with him. In exchange, he's going to get us an attachment we need for the dryer and fix whatever might be wrong with it. In the meantime, we're line-drying. But it rained today, so... (ah, the joys of country life!)
We did some target practice today, too. We set up some tires, taped targets onto them, and went to it. We went through 2 boxes of range ammo with our 3 handguns. Which reminds me, I need to clean mine....
I guess that's about it for now. We're just doing what we've been doing since we got here -- settling in, figuring out what works and what doesn't, fixing as much of what doesn't as we can, and cleaning up.
We woke up this morning to snow. About a half-inch to an inch fell last night, and it was covering everything by the time morning rolled around. Of course, by now it's all melted away and it's warmed up enough out there that it was uncomfortable to wear a coat. I found that out as we took another long walk today. This one really was a long walk. We drove the truck down as far as where the road/trail crosses our creek, then we walked all the way down to the Palouse River. All told, it was about a mile to a mile and a half. Not flat, either -- it was rugged cliffs and game trails. The way back was almost completely uphill. We didn't see any deer this time, but we did see lots of pheasant. We also found the owl that normally roosts in our barn. He "walked" along with us. We saw him twice. Snuggles went along, too. She didn't think much of the riding-in-the-truck part, but she handled it pretty well.
Today I got a feel for just how much land this is. It's alot. Down by the Palouse we own a stretch of cliffs about a quarter mile long. Keep in mind this is right smack in the middle of wheat country, so it's just crawling with deer (they like the coverage) and pheasant and God-only-knows-what-else. The Palouse is about 50 feet across where it lies close to our property, and we're pretty sure it's got fish. I might apply for a fishing license and go down there some time (assuming, of course, that I can get permission to fish from the people who own that stretch of riverfront).
Other than that, it's pretty much just been work, work, work. I've been taking a close, hard look at Access, and doing some work on the website I'm designing. Mike's been writing and editing his little tushy off. He still takes walks with Max at least twice a day, and we still do lots of work around the farm when we have time. None of it's easy, but it's all worth it.