Burning burning burning!

I may have forgot to mention - last week I finished up my portfolio, teacher work sample, research papers, and everything else needed to finish my degree (good enough). I still haven't heard back from the director of the program, but hopefully I'm done! Since completing my degree (presumably), I'm now on to the next life phase: get a job. I looked around at what's available and decided there are only a few jobs available, and all teacher jobs start in August or September anyways which is long from now - so I made my own! It even has a website already: CraftsOnWhidbey.com. I've hired my first employee or two and have fliers and brochures ready to get printed and hang up around town. To summarize, my business plan is to teach arts and crafts workshops and lead nature walks for tourists and locals, and work on getting gigs leading party-type craft activities for family reunions, kids birthdays, etc. Our friends who I am hiring are also starting a landscaping business and invited Tim to help out; so between the four of us, we will make ends meet!

Now that you're all caught up on the news and business, I'll give you a little more about the fun stuff. Or farm stuff anyways. With mom here, we spent Tuesday at the Tulip Festival up in Anacortes and had time to stop in and see Aunt Noree and Bill and her 16-year-old little dog, Lucky. Today I finally got the chicken wire over the hen house windows! And I planted the first of my eight garden beds using the cardboard-then-dirt method and putting half a toilet paper tube around each seed to mark the plants to keep. When I came back from my morning chores, I smelled smoke! Mum had lit up the brush from the giant chipper pile that has been there since we arrived. Over the next few hours, we kept feeding branches into our burn pile until all that was left is about a foot thick, twenty-foot across circle of excellent composted mulch to fill with potato plants. We then moved the fire via wheelbarrow down to the lower yard to continue the burning and dispose of the limbs from the trees Dad thinned in September. After many more hours of continually stoking the fire, we have turned mountains of branches as tall as me into a one foot by four foot circle of ash.

Now we are all very tired and ready for movies or naps or books or researching my lessons for my upcoming classes.