I am not sure what happened here, but I seem to have been absent for a couple of years. Shame on me! So here I am again and I will try not to be so remiss in my blogging from now on. Life has changed quite a bit since my last post. I will try to catch you all up.
I used to sit and blog while my youngest daughter was doing her school work. You all know we are homeschoolers. It gave me something to do while she was working. She isn’t a great self-starter, so sitting with her worked better than leaving her work on her own. After we closed the business, my part-time job began giving me more hours. My daughter is now almost 16 and is in the 11th grade. I no longer have to sit with her while she does her school work and I am now working 4 hours per day. By the time I get home, it seems that I have much to do and very little energy to spare and so the blog took a back seat.
In January of 2009, I began taking harp lessons and that has been very exciting for me and I try to spend 2 to 3 hours a day practicing and learning. It is extremely challenging and my teacher tells me it takes a minimum of 5 years of lessons and experience until you are fairly good at playing. I am only 2 years in so I have a loooong way to go yet. My goal is to not only play for my enjoyment, but to eventually earn a part-time income from playing gigs around town. I will eventually make a harp blog to let everyone know what is going on with that and so I don’t blog this blog down with harp stuff.
We closed The Cottage Bathe on Dec. 31, 2008. It was a wise choice. It was getting harder and harder to keep up with it both physically and financially. Prices on raw ingredients have risen so dramatically that it really didn’t make sense to continue on. We did not want to expand further than we already were as it would have involved renting a new production space and buying ingredients by the pallet.
As far as the house and the garden go, money has been tight and we have not achieved nearly as much as we had hoped to. I will update with some current projects. We still have 5 goats and 9 chickens. Our last batch of chickens have not been that great and several have already died off. I am hoping to order a few more in the next month or two. We still have not been able to build our cottage chicken coop, but it is high on our to do list for this spring, so hopefully now that I am working steady, some of these projects will come to fruition. I will be posting pictures and our progress.
I want to thank everyone who continued to find this blog and read it during my absence. I am getting back in the saddle and hope to post regularly from now on.
Vicki
