Summer Fun

I admit it. That's what I've been having. Summer fun. I've been having so much of it, in fact, that I just haven't had time to blog. Shame on me, I know.

Let's see - what has been happening? On a personal level, I signed up for and have been training and competing in triathlons. Yes, triathlons. This non-runner, former swimmer decided to give it a shot and sure enough...I got hooked. I've now completed 3 sprint triathlons and 1 super sprint (all approx 0.5 mile swim, 13 mile bike and 3.1 mile run). I've got one more on my schedule for the end of the summer and then I will take the winter off from racing and focus only on improving my running (which is pathetic, at best). In the process, I've lost about 25 lbs and I feel 100% better about myself and my health.

We have also finally ventured off farm this summer. We found a lovely local girl to watch our animals and we went for a weekend hiking trip this past weekend. It was our first time leaving the farm together in over 2 years! We had a great time. The photo above was taken of me as I stood at the edge of our campsite with one of many waterfalls behind me. I'll post more photos later - it was a beautiful area called Goat Rocks Wilderness of all places!

We have one more weekend trip planned in a couple of weeks. We will be traveling to southern Oregon to complete the Crater Lake Century bike ride. We feel woefully ill-trained, but we are going anyway. I think it'll be a blast!

On the farm front, things are moving along. We think that Skylark is pregnant (it's kind of hard to tell on goats!) and if so, she is due the end of the month. We cannot wait to have goat babies around again, but I'm not really looking forward to the twice daily milking routine again. It will be nice to have fresh milk though. We still need to find a mate for Pepper. We've also asked a barn builder to draw up some designs for us, so there may be a REAL barn in our future. We'll see what he comes up with and how it'll sit with us financially, of course. I am just giddy at the thought of having a real barn with a real milking parlor. Strange that these things make me 'giddy', huh?

The fruit trees and grape vines are producing and the garden is exploding. We've had some successes and some failures, and I will definitely be back to share those stories with some accompanying photos.

The new chickens are shooting out eggs faster than we can eat them, so I'm once again on the hunt for egg recipes. And of course, now that we have more friends, we have more people with whom we can share eggs...thankfully!

Work is the same for both of us. We joke that if we ever come into enough money to pay off our mortgage, we'll probably get a divorce fighting over who gets to quit their job first! It's not that either of our jobs are so dreadful...it's just that we've both finally found so many other things that we'd rather be doing that work just gets in the way. I guess it's nice to have such a full life. I should not complain. :-)