Much ado

Spinning group with Gustavus friend-of-a-friend, spinning Tilly's wool, spinning with Tim's mechanical questioning, spinning while watching Toy Story.

Green and blue wool spun and plied, ready to be knit or woven

Dogs playing on the beach, dogs tearing toys and chewing bones, dog rocking Search and Rescue training, dogs swimming in the ocean, dog learning to open gaits, dog very snugly in bed.

Tilly's swimming lesson

A deer in the water, a dog on the shore

Every day is a beautiful day for a beach walk

Who could refuse stick tug?

Plant sale with master gardeners, planting over 40 free tomato starts, planting strawberries here and there, plantlings needing lots of watering, plant fertilizer being made by turning compost and mowing lawns.

Job interview coming up, jobs non-stop substitute teaching, job starting soon summer commercial fishing, jobs going slow starting new business, jobs now qualified for with degree officially finished, jobs in progress while Joe visits.

Building slatted driftwood benches, building custom chicken feeders late at night, building drop spindles for future classes, building improvements on the little tool shed.

Chickens grow and peck and scratch and roost, chicks make new friends with clever canines, chicks explore the great outdoors, chicks eating all the worms in site, chicks enjoying sunny days and warm nights.

Potatoes

I planted the potatoes! Up in the old mulch pile there should now be about 50 potato plats preparing to burst from the earth. When there is some green up and it doesn't just look like a big pile of rotting sticks and leaves (beautifully composting into tremendous soil of course) and there are some little green tops showing, I will take a picture.

Next year, perhaps I will spread all that broken down mulch on the other gardens and try out a potato box! This comes from Tim's favorite website,  USpotatoes.com - who knew there was such a thing!

The little kale plants are looking happy up in the garden. My onions are a little yellow on the bottom leaves but otherwise big and strong. I will have to break out my master gardeners diagnostic sheet and see if there is anything I can do to help them out.

Our beautiful hot and sunny weather has finally gave way to some cooler, wetter days, which is nice for the young plants but not so nice for the young chicks who had their outdoor privileges revoked just as they were learning about the great outdoors. I will have to do some more weeding to keep them busy and happy while locked in the coop. Little "Hospital Chicken" is still alive, now living reintegrated with the others despite falling behind to half their size. Amazingly, the others seem to be mostly leaving her alone or mothering her. Every time I go in the coop, all the chicks are running about except one or two who stay with that sickly little one and cuddle in close, often fluffing up and sitting over her like miniature mother hens. I hope this loving, goose-like behavior keeps up.

Tilly had another excellent day at Search and Rescue training on Friday. She's currently working on learning to leave the "victim" and come get me once she's completed the find. Its a little tricky to break through her excitement to the next step, but she'll get there. On the SAR trainer front, I might get sponsored to go to a two-week intensive Wilderness EMT training course this summer! I hope it works out with puppy-sitters and work and such.

With work, I am lining up subbing jobs at the Waldorf school, applying for the 6th grade teaching position for fall, and eagerly anticipating teaching my first Crafts on Whidbey classes, assuming anyone signs up. Joe will be coming up to Whidbey soon with more general maintenance work to be done on the boat. By the way, have you checked out the Kachink Kachink and recommended it to all your friends? Please do! Price recently reduced, delivery negotiable!

Press Release

So I think I alluded to this, and made the announcement on facebook and to some extent through email, but not yet through our blog: I've started a business! www.CraftsOnWhidbey.com "Workshops and crafting parties for adults, kids, or mixed age groups. Scheduled or on demand." Last night, we had a practice drop-spindle spinning class with Grandpa, Mom, and Tim all bravely agreed to learn to spin just for me. To all of our surprise, they enjoyed it! And they did well at it! Amazing! So with that hurdle passed, I'm ready for my first real class. Today I picked up my brochures and fliers from the printer and hung up nearly all 30 fliers around the island, as well as scoping good places for the brochures. Anyway, if you could frequent the site a bit, that would make the traffic go up and the Google search placement go up?

Additional somewhat related exciting news: today I got a loom! Tim has been working hard on an older couple's property fixing machines and doing yard work and today he came home with a beautiful four-harness floor loom, about 40" wide - for those of you who are "fiber-phobes", that's a really awesome, expensive loom! I now have a loom, a spinning wheel, a serger, and a really nice computerized sewing machine and thus can be a properly snootie and well-equipped fiber crafter, with a dedicated room increasingly set up for it.

On the chick front, we have a purple bird. One chick was picked on pretty badly a few days ago and has been stuck in a box ever since to have some quiet healing time. Today, Mom and I gated off the section of the hen house under the future nest boxes to make a deluxe chick hospital with proper visitation, heat, and enrichment. Additionally, I picked up some "Peck-no-more" from the farm supply store and painted the little bird with the purple goo. She didn't seem to appreciate it as much as you might hope, but hopefully it will give her a better chance to heal.

Have I mentioned we're now a two-dog family? Sanch, Brother Tim and Sister Krista's dog, is staying with us for the next couple weeks until they find out if he's going on the NOAA boat with them as the new mascot. The first day, the two terriers weren't too sure about living together but things are settling in to a good routine of two long walks on the beach a day and lots of practice with their obedience training.

Pitter patter of tiny feet

How can I think of anything else when they're so cute? You know you can click on the pictures and make them bigger and a slideshow, right? Anyways, I know you all are holding your breath waiting for more pictures of the chicks and care about little else, so without further ado...

We had been doing our best to enrich their environment in the boxes in our house...

...but the peeping persisted and late-night squabbles, until it was time to go to the big house!

Isn't is lovely out? Spring is marvelous! The whole property is in bloom and we've been walking the beaches every day. So lovely to be here!

So, Tilly diligently followed me as I brought two chicks at a time to their new digs.

With the help of a few worms, they were soon racing around the room like mad 

(as seen here - lead chicken has worm, 12 or so chasing after at top chick speeds).

You will note the excellent job Tim did building a barricade around the door for easy entry and viewing, and the excellent job my staple gun and I did on those chicken wire windows.

They look pretty happy to me! At 10 days old they are already roosting pretty well.

Other doings... mom stained the deck! And we had an excellent dinner of corn on the cob (which the chicks appreciated), local oysters, and yummy mushrooms and asparagus. Pretty much shopping (for all those wood shavings you see above and their super cool new food bowl to be altered as they get larger) and staring at the chicks took up most of the day. I think we are still tired from all that burning.

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.

Spring means work

Tim mowed all the grass again - some how after only a few days, it was over the ankles already!

The baby chickens ate about 50 worms - lots of fighting and frantic running about.

Tilly learned to come when I whistle - first try and she got it instantly, even while playing or eating barnacles.

Mom helped pull weeds - I hauled off 30 gallons of highly compacted weeds and found some lettuce hiding in the garden under all those horse tales

Grandpa got out the leaf blower - and lo and behold, the entire stairs to the beach were leaf-free again! (thanks mom)

I finished digging the garden! Mom said it looked hopeless and like it needed some serious work and possibly heavy machinery, so I'm not posting pictures until the paths are covered in wood-chips and the whole things planted... I think it's glory is a bit hard to make out to the untrained eye.

Last night, Mom and I sat down to write out my latest business plan - one that will hopefully be implemented this week, and while sitting at the table talking and working, we heard a strange noise. I couldn't understand why Tilly would possibly be making such weird noises when she should be passed out on my bed, and the chicks aren't all that loud or deep sounding, so I stepped out on the porch. We thought perhaps Tim was making strange noises out the downstairs door, but no - the noise was coming from up in the nearest tree. Hoo-hoo and squawking from at least two owls! After a while of listening, at least one flew off right over our heads. Such a lovely place to live!

Chicks and Searches

Oh last night! I think I'm still a little out of breath! Evidently the first day of Search and Rescue training, where I was the one to run and hide, was the easy part. Today we switched the game so I hold Tilly while Don, the leader of our group, wanders off with her sticks, cackling, and hides some place about a two-minute walk away. Then, I release Tilly and she takes off like a mad bullet, and I am supposed to keep up and arrive at Don at the same time as her?! Running flat out as fast as I could, she got out of sight of me and had to stop and look back. But, hopefully there won't be too much more of that before I get to walk through the woods and she gets to run back and forth between me and the "victim". This game not only completely wears me out, but also Tilly! Thank goodness! She was too tired when we got home to bother eating Tim's potato pieces and when I woke up this morning, she was laying between our feet on the bed - for the first time she's stopped insisting on personal space in the night.

After the pleasant surprise of waking up to a cuddly puppy, I checked on the chicks and had the unpleasant surprise of finding one chick who wasn't ready to wake up. I separated her from her brothers and sisters, carefully helped her out with some sugar water. My book suggests it could be an impacted crop from eating paper towel or whatever else, so I gave her a bit of olive oil to see if we could get things moving. Not a lot of luck. She's given us a start to our new pet cemetery.

Busy babes 

Little ones falling asleep at the bar. 

Big Chicken, Tim's little buddy, hunting and pecking on the internet.