New Years Goals

Goals.  Resolutions.  Winning outcomes (fancy pants Weight Watchers term).  Hopes.  Dreams.

Our number one goal for the year is to finish our new house and move in!  We hope to move in by the end of May so that we don't have to renew our lease.  And well, spending time out at the new house constantly reaffirms to us that we are indeed doing the right thing :-)  Kole absolutely loves being out there.  And we have some pretty kick butt views from all of our windows!

All other goals pale in comparison to the first, really.  But, here goes:

-- Start a small garden. 
   I already ordered seed from Seed Savers Exchange.  I plan to utilize the lasagna gardening technique (ooohhh...I see a potential blog post!).  I had a list a mile long of seeds and garden ideas, but Dan reined me in a bit.  What we don't grow ourselves we hope to get at the Farmer's Market. 

-- Can and freeze as much as we can.
   Well, we have a walk in pantry, a root cellar, and plan to get another freezer for the basement.  While our eventual goal is to preserve most, if not all, of our food, we have to start somewhere.  I got some canning resources for Christmas and am already making lists of what I want to try.

-- Get some chickens.
   This will probably be a late summer project.  We would love to get some chicks, but for starters we might look into some pullets locally.  We could get chicks next year to start!

We have sooo many ideas for what we are going to do with the place when we get more established out there.  I hope to tell you all about them, but that is for another post. 

I should add in one more goal: start blogging more!  While this blog is to document our progress on the house, I want to develop my skills as a blogger.  I hope to start writing about all kinds of things.  Stay tuned - 2012 is going to be G R E A T!

Where, oh where, could our water be?

Water - it's what has been on our mind all week.  The rain and drilling our well.  On Monday, things worked out better than planned, as the dozer was delivered for starting on the foundation.  The foundation contractor told our well guy to use it as he needed it.   They got the rig into place and the drilling commenced.  He hit water at 100 feet and 200 feet.   There was a problem, though.  Apparently there was some sort of horizontal crevice that the water was just leaking out of.  Ugh.  And unfortunately, we still had to pay for the drilling although there was no water to show for it.

Dan and the well guy got the truck moved out.  The well guy and his wife came back out to look for water.  They use an old method called dowsing, or divining.  , or water witching.  A y-shaped piece of wood (in their case, a piece of wild cherry) is held while the holder walks across where there is suspected water.  The rod, or stick, will "bend" towards the water.  They found a vein of water running across a lower meadow.  This is approximately 200 feet below where he drilled before, so we are hoping we avoid the crevice issue.  The dozer was utilized to build a road so that the drilling rig could easily get into position.  The well guy needed to fix a piece on his rig and plans to be out there tomorrow afternoon.  Keep your fingers crossed we find water!

Kole and I visited the Winter Farmer's Market today.  We got some meat for the month - we have committed to buying only local meat.  I even put in an order for a local ham for Christmas.  We think Kole just went through a growth spurt, on top of cutting his canines.  He all of a sudden seems taller and is much more pleasant to be around.  He was a bear this week (hence my lack of blogging!).  We are going to go to a local Christmas tree farm next weekend to get a real tree for our little apartment.  Kole's final Christmas present was ordered tonight and everyone else is done.  Christmas cards will go out tomorrow.  Cookies will be baked soon.  Oh, yea, and hopefully a house will be under roof!