New Year

I know it's cliched to start out the new year with lofty goals about being a better, thinner, healthier, richer, person, but, well I'm going to do it anyway. Except for the thinner thing.

I had a conversation with my cousins last year in which it came out that apparently everyone thinks I'm a put together, organized adult or something. Which is kind of hilarious to me, because most of the time, I feel like my life is a runaway train, and I'm barely keeping my fingertips on the caboose. Or, something that makes sense.

What it comes down to is I'm going to focus some of my energy into getting my life together so I can be at least a little like this persona I apparently present to the world.
Let's call it project get my sh*t together.  

The house
    Our house is over a hundred years old, and while that means its got some awesome features, it also has a ton of problems. For an old house, we have a good amount of storage, yet I always feel like I'm searching for places to put stuff. Part of that problem is the amount of stuff we have, and I plan on tackling that, but I like my stuff, I'm not going to part with all of it. 
     On the heels of the stuff issue, is the mess issue. I have a 3 year old, I know my house isn't going to be up to Martha standards, but I also don't think I need to have a deep down fear that someone may stop by before I've had a chance to take a couple of days to clean. Right now, my cleaning schedule is haphazard and consists of looking at something grody, realizing that I can't remember the last time I scrubbed said area, getting disgusted, then cleaning said area. For my own sanity, this must change. 

The garden
    My mother had not just a green thumb, but a couple of greens hands. The house I grew up in had amazing gardens, and I never realized just how much went into making them that way. Now, I have almost an acre of land, and every spring I am so excited to get my hands in the dirt. That excitement lasts until about June, when the reality of weeds and heat set in and I get over the whole thing. I'm going to try to improve on that this year. Peter's already thinking about what vegetables we're going to grow, and we're going to try to solve our groundhog problem (hopefully without ammunition), but since it's currently 22 degrees outside, this one is heading to the back burner for a while.

Work
     Ugh. I don't think I can actually improve on the technical aspects of my job. I do the best I can every day I'm there, and I AM only one person. What I can try to improve on is my attitude about my job. I really do like pharmacy in general, and retail in particular. I do not love the company I work for and the non-pharmacy crap that they pile on us to no end. However, the burn out inducing stress is not the patient's fault. I need to remember that.

Hobbies
    Until recently, I was a prolific knitter. Hats, gloves, sweaters, I made them all. My guest room is filled with bins of yarn. I have a spinning wheel and literal sheep worth of fleece. And short of the sweaters I've made for 2 babies, I've done nothing with it for 2 years. This needs to change. 
     I've been doing better with sewing than knitting, at least as far as actually doing it. I would like to improve on my actual skills though. I've been sewing for a really long time, but I was only "taught" the basics of how to run a machine, read a pattern, etc. I can make stuff that looks good, and fits ok, but I'd really like to know how to do those things well and correctly. 

So, there you go. Some areas of focus for getting my sh*t together.  

CSA Week 3

Yeah, I'm late updating again. Get used to it, I kind of suck.

Onto this week's pick up ...

We're getting out of the spring greens and into the good stuff. A huge head of green leaf lettuce, more shelling peas, kohlrabi, beets, dill, a cucumber, new potatoes and tomatoes!!

We went a little crazy after our pick up on Thursday. We needed to go to Home Depot for the supplies to finally replace our mailbox which hasn't stood up straight for 2 years. Naturally, it's impossible for the  two of us to go to Home Depot and only get what we came for. 

I don't know what the occasion was for the sale (Father's day, I guess) but patio furniture was on sale, and I've been wanting to replace our hand me down table so ...

We did!

A close up

Since we had people coming over for dinner on Friday, we just had to put it together when we got home, so dinner was just a little bit late.

Still yummy though

Here we have pan fried pork chops, peas with butter and herbs, shredded beet salad, and the remainder of last weeks butter crunch lettuce. 

Finally, I just need to show off how stinkin' cute our little helper is

That would be Chuck the Truck hauling some freshly shelled peas around the island. That little girl gives me more joy than I can describe.

How did we get here

By way of introduction, let's flashback a few years to May 2007. Peter and I had spent the last four years living in a funky little house (technically two very little houses connected by a door on each floor) in downtown Baltimore city while I attended pharmacy school at the University of Maryland.
According to my mother (and one should always follow their mother's advice, right?) I simply had to live in a city at least once in my life. Well we did it, hookers on the corner, friends getting mugged, and a corpse discovered around the block and all.
Finally, graduation had come and gone, the house was sold, our stuff was packed and we (and by we, I mean I - Peter would happily live in the concrete jungle until the end of time) escaped to West Chester, Pennsylvania to search for our next home.
I knew I wanted an older home and space for a garden. Plenty of hours spent searching online later and I had found my house.

 
It would have been the only house we looked at, but we had another showing already scheduled, so we kept the appointment. But, honestly, my mind was made up the minute we pulled up the driveway. Why?

Wood-burning pizza oven, that's why!

So we got my dream house, and it has been a work in progress ever since. We've painted, and fixed, and have only scratched the surface of things we want to do here.
Our second summer, we built two raised beds, added another in the third year, and this year we put in an asparagus patch and cleared a tremendously huge pile of crap to have an area to let squash go crazy.  Thankfully, Peter has gotten bitten by the gardening bug (let's be honest, the more veggie patches we have, the less lawn he has to mow), and Gabriella loves to get her hands dirty, so the edible garden is a family affair.