Guests at the Feeder

A few new and colourful visitors to our bird feeder: a purple finch, and a pair of evening grossbeaks.

The Missing Gene

One of the things I most admire about my parents is their tidiness and organization. They live in a tiny home, and there's a place for everything and everything is in its place, more or less. Ahem. Somehow, the combination of chromosomes that resulted in me did not pass on to me the ability to live in a small space in any sense of order.

I've tried. I've taken my best stab at being organized in 900 square feet. And I can't do it. And it's driving me nuts. Mike is much better than me at creating order, but is equally impaired at maintaining it. Our closets overflow, our kitchen cupboards are bursting. After a major tidying spree, it takes about 48 hours for things to degenerate into chaos. Having company over strikes fear into my heart.

"Establish good habits," you say. "Put things away when you're finished with them". Right. There's just nowhere to put anything. I've given living in a wee home my best shot. We've parted with a ton of our possessions to try to downsize to the point of order. And it just isn't going to happen...

And so we're going to build a house next spring. A real house with a full basement. And we'll have room for everything, with no tripping over each other, the dogs, or our stuff.

And here's the house we're going to build:

Sunday

We got some rain yesterday afternoon and overnight, and a little more this morning. I hope it was enough to do some good; everything has dried again, although perhaps we're a little less dusty than usual today.

Other than poop-scooping in the pasture, we've had a pretty lazy day. We had breaky at the Roadhouse, and then took a drive. We found Higgins Lake, and then puttered over to check out the sights at Deka Lake. On our journey we encountered five deer, and a big cow moose across the road from the end of our "pasture" as we came home.

Seeds

I put some spinach seed in this morning, and nasturtiums. Dori gave me tons of flower seeds, which I've hummed and hawed about where to plant. This morning, tired of trying to decide where I should put what, I mixed them all together and scattered them on the "miscellaneous flower/veggie bed. Mother Nature can decide what happens with them!

Well, I got two pics uploaded.

Still no pics...

The photos still won't upload.

I planted potatoes today. Jasper unplanted them shortly after. Jasper is a very, very, very, very bad dog. He left the leeks alone, though, which I should probably be grateful for.

Some of our tractor attachments got delivered this evening, the subsoiler should be here next week.

This afternoon after work, I puttered. I filled the bird feeders, did the aforementioned planting, and also put in some strawberries. I got out Alice, my trusty easy-start chainsaw, and cut up a spruce tree that blew down a couple of weeks ago. And then I grudgingly went inside and did mundane domestic chores.

Got Rocks...

Excuse my absence...the PC has been in computer hospital for the last few days.

One thing we have in plentiful supply in Lone Butte is rocks. Big rocks, small rocks, rough rocks, smooth rocks, volcanic rocks, we have them all. They're everywhere. Over the last few days we (mostly Mike) took a bunch of rocks, and made them into something quite beautiful. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't want to upload photos of our new perrenial garden right now. Will try again tomorrow.

The veggie gardening is coming along...a few more things to get into the ground still, but we're well on the way.

Birds of note over the last few days...a merlin, and a great grey owl. Of all the hummingbirds who are frequenting the feeder, the most fearless are the male caliopes. There was one feeding out of the feeder when I was hanging it up the other day. That happened last year too.

Things are very dry here. We've had a couple of brief showers in the past few weeks, but nothing substantial. I kind of wish it would rain.