How can I title any post anything but "Another Amazing Day on Honeymoon Bay!"?

Every day has been so full and so fun that by night I am exhausted, and by morning I am ready for more! Last night, we got motivated to do some pickling. We pickled cucumbers and Thai peppers from the public market and half the garlic from our garden. We grew plenty of garlic this year and it is good to have something successful in abundance. The second half of the garlic still needs to be harvested, but the fridge is now full of hot water bath canned goodies. Our recipe was a ratio of one cup water to one cup vinegar and 1 1/2 tablespoons salt multiplied to fill all our jars, with a pit of pickling spices in the bottom of each jar, then boiled them for about 5 minutes. Pickling was about all we had the energy for after driving to Seattle and back to return our visitor, Zac, to his house and get our major grocery shopping trip of the summer done. 

Today has been a day to avoid any more driving and enjoying our ever more awesome home. At the thrift store nearest to our house, Tim found a score on perhaps the best speakers ever to come out of the 1970's and was thus inspired to spend his afternoon in the shop building me a proper hamper from the extra stakes left over from the fence building project - I assume. There were boxes of sticks in the barn when I set about cleaning, and now they are rearranged into a lovely item of functional furniture.

While Tim was building, Nancy and I headed down the road to milk another half gallon from the Alpine and Nubian goats while their regular milkers are away. It really is a two person job to milk these goats as they eat faster than I milk and so someone has to keep them happy and distracted so they don't get board and try to leave with goat-like determination. For the second goat, I believe Nancy slowly fed her grain by hand, intermittent with petting and kind words. Goat Miah was not particularly thrilled about going through the gait with me to get milked by a stranger again tonight, but my persistence won out.

Oh! And this morning, I continued with the clean-up from chicken killing - removing blood stains from all our clothes and collecting lost feathers from the yard. I attempted to wash the feathers today in large lingerie bags, though without a proper bin to soak and wash them in, the hose did little good and they are beginning to smell rather 'fowl'. I also recruited Tim to help me finish cutting the window opening in the barn and do a little brainstorming for how best to clean and remodel the barn to be ready in under a week. The decision was made to not make things impossible on myself and to get it inhabitable before worrying about turning it into Ruminant Disney Land. I've been banned from plumbing the barn any time soon, but have made good progress on sweeping the loft, walls, and ceiling. I try to avoid publicly making projections about what might happen tomorrow, but I hope to be putting up the siding and getting busy whitewashing soon. I am optimistic about getting (working names: Petunia and Violet) in there next week.