He loves me!

Grass grows really well in Oregon. Mowing is a constant struggle to keep up with if you care and want to be able to maintain any ability to enter your home or walk to the other buildings.If it was up to Nick he would let it go because he is a man of intellectual pursuits and cares naught for outward appearances. But I am an insecure nagging woman who has been sick for the past few days. The overgrown grass became a taunting symbol of my inadequacies and inability to achieve anything in my life. It represents all the loads of laundry and dishes that need to be done and all the home repairs and improvement projects that have yet to be tackled. It is the sound of all my neighbors and family and friends mocking me for messy home in my silly mind.
Irrational and extreme "black and white" thinking ? Yes! Partially a symptom of being exhausted and unable to do much because I have been sick with this flu like thing and just the usual demons that surface from time to time.
So who does the emotional woman take it out on and nag! The dear sweet husband.
So today he got the old rusty mower going that had been sitting out in the rain all winter long. I am amazed he even made it work. And he mowed and mowed and mowed.



and mowed...


and mowed. What a good man! He works so hard to make me happy. All is well in the world again.
Now I won't
bug him about his airgun obsession and I can hold off the mowing nagging for the next few weeks when it will come up again. Because the grass never stops growing and the crazy woman never really stops nagging.


The boys have been on bug hunts lately. Today we found this lovely snail. He is unfortunately now lost somewhere in the house.

We have been unable to locate a slimy trail from the windowsill he was left on.
I'm just going to let this one go....

Gardens, Goats and Hexes

Well apparently you can put a hex on yourself when you proclaim your success on your blog even though I thought I took all proper anti voodoo wood knocking precautions. As soon as I posted my last blog post all our Etsy sales dried up. We went 4 days without a sale. We broke the dry spell with the sale of one of my aluminum big wire earrings on friday night.
I went to the market yesterday. It was pretty darn cold and sales were barely adequate especially for the day before Mother's Day. I drank my whole thermos of coffee by 2 and ate every crumb of food I brought with me while trying to keep my toes from going numb.
Well the good thing about not having a lot of sales is that there isn't a lot of jewelry to be made and we can focus more on the other stuff in life that really is more fun and important anyway. Nick has been mowing like a madman. When you have 3.8 acres there is nothing sexier than your man mowing (except as Nome pointed out, your man on a tractor mowing.) But since we don't have a tractor our DR Mower will have to do. We now have our garden area under control so the boys and I took to weeding and adding some bags of real good soil to our hard clay and infertile dirt we call a garden. We planted the mandatory bed of pumpkins and then some peas and beans. Today we planted some basil seeds.



Henry , the forlorn gardener.

Max, the thoughtful gardener.

We now have new squaters on our land too! Our wonderful hardworking neighbors Chris and Shelley ran out of pasture land for their flock of 4 goats and Mama Lama the guardian lama .So on friday Chris took his tractor with the mower attachment to our place and carved out a huge area for them to fence. They fenced it all in one day and now these guys are here in our back 40 (or rather 4) eating up all the nastiness that we can't get under control.


Hey good lookin'.



Max enjoys his goat friend.



I call him sweet ears.

And of course I couldn't post without adding one new pair of earrings. These are my newest giant crazy big aluminum earrings. I sold a pair last week to a young funky hip girl who liked having something dangling inside the middle of a big hoop on her ears. Hopefully others will have the same desire.

They are called Swinging Interior Spiral Light Aluminum Earrings.

Aluminum Market Debut

Well I finally managed to get my butt and all my stuff to the market this past Saturday. Once again the weather forecasters were mistaken in their predictions but it was good enough. No, it was not warm and sunny for most of the day, but overcast and chilly. It took me forever to set up as I discovered all the little things that I could have done earlier to make things go more smoothly. Luckily I had little pieces of scrap aluminum wire to keep together some of the hanging displays that were missing crucial screws that got lost somewhere along the way.

And that's not all that aluminum is good for. My new line of big bold aluminum earrings were a hit! I sold about 8 pairs once I figured out that I needed to have a little sign next to them saying " Light Weight Aluminum Earrings". The light weight factor is the key since they kind of have a big heavy industrial look to them that could scare you away.

As I lay awake at 5:30 am this morning after the annoying cat woke me up for no good reason other than he couldn't get outside because the screen door was closed and covered up his cat door, I thought of some new earring ideas and came up with these:


I call them "Ebb and Flow Swinging Spiral Aluminum Earrings".

Today the allergies officially began for me. The itchy eyes, face,nose,sniffly snorty coughing scratchy annoying allergies that can make me irritable. I usually don't get this way until June but it has come early this year for many people and I knew my turn was coming. Oh well.
The other spring related news is that Nick finally got our trusty old DR Mower running. We knew we were getting behind in the mowing when we were losing the children in the grass in the front yard.
I'm off to snort and sniffle now and dream of aluminum spirals.