Nicole Ford Thomas

It’s the one year anniversary of adopting Blue! He has been a very good boy, for the most part, if we don’t include him peeing at random, eating my slippers, eating my sneakers, and hogging the couch when we try to watch something. Yeah, he’s pretty okay. I think I’ll keep him, the little beef loaf.

In other news of the fauna variety, we have a chicken in the Chicken Hospital while she recovers from being horribly over-paid-attention-to by one of the roosters. It’s not a pretty sight, but in some ways it’s our fault for keeping two roosters to three hens. We need to find a new home for one, if not both of the roosters. It makes me sad, but if he’d just keep his pecker to himself…

With winter giving way to spring, our work around Quill Cottage is picking up. We managed to keep our trip to Germany way under budget (more on that in a minute) so there’s a bit extra money that can go into some repairs around the house. After a Coffee Walk* we decided to work on some curb appeal this year, since all of our other plans have gone awry. While we may be able to clear out the front yard, we agree it’s not the right time to put in the orchard, which makes it not the right time to set up the apiary. We had already agreed to let the garden rest a year, throwing compost and manure into the dirt to let it get good and healthy before we go garden crazy next year, so our only other responsibility to the homestead is keeping the hens happy. So, curb appeal it is. There is plenty that needs stripped and repainted, and we may finally get to take out the railroad ties (turns out “rustic” has its limits before becoming “derelict”) and put in a nice stone retaining wall. I have a strange love of power-washing, so that’s going to be a full day of fun for me when it warms up a bit more.

*Coffee Walk: Back when we first bought Quill Cottage, Kyle and I would walk around the property every morning, sipping coffee and daydreaming about all the things we wanted to do here. Over time, life got in the way of Coffee Walks, but we’re slowly trying to bring them back.

Germany! Yes, I’m finally making the pilgrimage back to the Motherland, and I get to take Kyle and Ginger with me. Roman opted to stay home to work on Big Boy Career stuff and I understand, though he will be missed. We have a full week booked with hotels and a car–and nothing else. Oh, wait, we have tickets to see Rammstein in Munich but aside from that, we are free to roam about Germany, going wherever our hearts take us, including the town I was born in, which is a gorgeous spa town in Bavaria! I’ve been working to have enough German under my belt to communicate slightly better than a toddler, but Ginger is the ace in our sleeve with translation. The kid is brilliant at German, so thank you, Til Lindemann for inspiring my daughter to be better at my own language than I am. If you could write a song about how to read road signs, that would be awesome.

We’ve got a lot of plates spinning here, but it feels good to be waking up from that long winter’s nap. This gal needs some sunshine.