The good folks from Professional Chimney Services have completed their work now, and our little Regency F1100 wood stove is installed and ready for use. Now we wait for cooler weather.

I realize this is the third post in a row that ends in an exclamation point. Yet I am unbowed and unapologetic. All three have been good news, and we know that optimistic people (or at least optimistic women) live longer, so here you have it: another optimistic post from […]

Whether you get excited about this one probably comes down more than anything else to your gender. Men tend to be interested in septic tanks, women not so much.

Our little apartment is looking more each week as if it could be our home. This week, the big change was that we installed the kitchen cabinets.

I’m not saying, mind you, that all beer drinkers are assholes. I’m simply saying there’s an unusually high correlation between beer-drinking and assholism.

By American standards Amanda and I don’t normally generate much garbage. Amanda is fanatic about her recycling, and we buy less packaged goods than most folks, so a typical week’s garbage is a small bag or two. Now all of that is changing.

We were planning to extend wood flooring into the tiny bathroom of our tiny apartment, even though Amanda and I were both a little apprehensive about having all the water from the bathroom on wood floors. The call from our friend Scott Ruppert changed that.

Amanda and I are still recovering on Monday morning, but our marathon painting work in the pole barn is more or less complete.

We still get funny looks when people learn we will have no range in our apartment in the pole barn. How can that be? How will we survive? Actually, neither of us is worried, and I’m downright excited.

Amanda and I live in central Alabama, and all our children live 2,000 miles away in California. So most of what we do on the farm has to happen without them. All three of them are interested in their weird parents’ adventures in agriculture, however, so when they came to […]