Hellloooooo out there! Anyone around? Can you believe the month is almost over? Spring is coming...REALLY! I actually saw some pavement today so the salt is working again (temps went down a bit). Still haven't seen The Two Towers. Working early tomorrow and am quite cranky about it. The store opens at 7 AM now and I told dh if he wanted to do that then do NOT look at me to do the opening but he has an early meeting in the city for his business so that only leaves me. YUCK! I know I'm being a big baby but I really detest early mornings. On a brighter note. I have been flipping through Harrowsmith, The Herb Companion, and Garden Life magazines and feel the urge to potter about. Unfortunately everything is buried in snow...bleah. This year I am gonna garden for FUN. You heard me. I am taking the "work" outta the whole thing and making it fun again. I was getting caught up in the whole "gotta feed my family and livestock from this" theory of gardening and so I got really pissed everytime the chickens dug something up, when another tomato plant bit the dust or failed to produce(same with everything else..no cukes, too many beans) or felt guilty when I tended my flower beds. Not this year baby! I'm just going to play in my gardens this year and make my spirit dance again!!! It feels sort of liberating to take the yoke off (metaphorically). By the end of last season I thought I'd never garden again and thats pretty extreme for me and my garden. I'm not going to enlarge it either this year. Thats always worth several blisters and bruises from running my ol' pig of a tiller. I think I'll go slip into a bath with my garden magzines and seed catalogues now and look up fun things!!! Love to you all and happy dreams of Springs fragrant kisses!

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2003

Answers

Hey there, everyone! I'm gonna try posting here and see what happens. Probably I'll have to break this up into segments!!

Same old, same old here. Just sort of hibernating and waiting for winter to release it's grip. We've had some below normal temps, but not alot of snow. Oh well, Groundhog Day is right around the corner!! What's really encouraging is when we see a few robins around picking at the wild berry bushes or eating any suet that falls on the ground. Those robins are from the REAL north and come to this part of Maine for the winter!

Good for you, Alison, on "liberating" yourself from the work of gardening. It SHOULD be fun, too! We garden to keep ourselves in veggies, but the past several years we've been expanding our garden in order to have extra to give away (to my MIL, friends and son & family). I told Harry that this year we're down-sizing our garden and just growing enough for us and the pigs. Who cares if people get P-O'd with us 'cause we're giving our extra veggies to our pigs! My MIL needs a garden to occupy herself, anyways :-)! Alison...you probably told us, but what kind of store do you folks have? Excuse my memory lapse if you've already mentioned it. Do you have a website? Sounds like you all are doing really well!!

I've been keeping busy refinishing another clawfoot tub. I'm sanding the bottom down and then I have to prime and paint it...probably a Victorian rose color. Harry sandblasted the "feet" for me since they're too ornate to try to hand sand them! Our upstairs bedroom and bath are all partitioned in, the closets are done and the electricity is all wired. Next comes the paneling and plumbing.

I think I'm gonna give up on the B'day annuncements. We're probably all tired of being reminded of how old we're getting :-)!! Stay well, everyone! Hope this posts for me...I'm hitting the submit button right......now!!!

-- Anonymous, January 29, 2003

Just a quickie to make sure this is working. I didn't even try the forum yesterday.

A virus was released a few days ago that affected a lot of servers. I don't know if that was the source of our problems or not. After all, we've been getting the "OUCH" for long posts for quite awhile. I hope THAT has gone away as well, but only time will tell. Okay, going to submit now . . .

-- Anonymous, January 30, 2003

I keep getting sent a virus from someone on cox.net...Norton grabs it and that's the end of it, so I don't know if it is the same one.

I haven't even been able to get into the site for days on end to find out what is going on or not going on.

We're under a foot+ of snow, which is more than we had all the rest of the winter around here, I swear. Since the temps are plunging again, maybe it will keep a few more people from frozen septic troubles tho, so that's not all bad. The barn's septic is frozen and they want it used sparingly, which is no problem for me -- all those years of the Bath With A Path and diving into the shrubbery along backroads gave me a lot of practice in going out back and using the manure heap instead.

And up until we went subzero again, it wasn't even very bad. The house plumbing holds -- huzzah!!!

Things are kind of slow and uneventful (another big Huzzah!) aside from getting stuck in the driveway and having to dig out. I've been concentrating on doing stuff indoors, moving furniture around, collecting up recycling and getting rid of it, that sort of thing. Or as my Gramma would say, 'Backing up for a running start'.

-- Anonymous, February 04, 2003