Fizzy Pickles: May 2017

Our house is in escrow. We've been dealing with all the back and forth with that. It feels a lot like the buyers are trying to nickel and dime us. Like we agreed to have some repairs done, and they'd like to do the work themselves, but they also want us to pay them for labor. It's been a pain, but we should be over all the hurdles now, and are just in the waiting period and we close June 8th. Thank goodness for that at least. We've been working on a solid plan for getting things going on building the house. We're so excited to get things moving finally. We've all got cabin fever from living in such tight quarters.

Our garden has been a major bust. The ground doesn't drain well, and it rains a LOT here (more on that later). Our potatoes started out growing well, but have since started rotting in the ground. We decided to harvest them all, and save them for seed potatoes next year. It was so much fun to harvest them! The kids love it, and we got a decent amount. We also got lots of potato greens to add to the compost. We also have a couple snap peas growing, but not much else. The corn started out well, but hasn't grown any taller. We'll definitely be investing time and money in raised beds for next year.

We've found a bunch of snakes, which Shane is loving. He wanted to be a herpetologist when he was a kid, so it's basically paradise. The kids love getting to see them when he catches them and they do a pretty good job keeping watch for them. So far they've all been all been non venomous, thank goodness since we keep finding them in the creek right where the kids play. Thorin found a baby snapping turtle in the creek one day. He has a bunch of toy dinosaurs down there, and I think he didn't even realize this wasn't one of them. When I got down to him, he was bouncing it around making roaring sounds 😂. I had to take it from him (even though I didn't really want it either).

We've had a lot of tornado warnings recently. One night was also full of thunderstorms, and I had a treacherous drive home. I was literally two minutes from the house, when the road was flooded. I sat there for a few minutes trying to decide if I should chance driving through, but decided against it. I don't want to be one of those people you see on the news who tried to drive through a flooded road and instead floated downstream. I have new sympathy for those people though, because I badly wanted to just drive through and get get home. Instead, I turned around and drove 40 treacherous minutes around to the other side and a different road. By the time I got home, it was after midnight and I was shaking because my nerves were so shot. Lucky for me, my two year old had been awake for over a half hour, waiting for me... he was ready for cuddles though, and so was I.

We had a wonderful day recently. We spent the morning at the park, and when we got home, we noticed that there were some ripe blackberries. We spent the afternoon hunting blackberries, and after filling up our bellies, we went down to the creek to cool off. It felt amazing, and we had our evening baths in there too. Since then, we've been going blackberry picking every morning before breakfast, and having yogurt with fresh blackberries for breakfast. I am seriously loving having fresh fruit growing wild right outside the door.