Loafkeeper Farm

Like most folks, I ate way too much over the holidays and gained a couple of pounds. It's okay, though, because I am following the (soon to be patented) Loafkeeper Post-Holiday Diet Plan. It's not quite as simple as my famous Snickers diet, but it still seems to be working.

Loafkeeper Post-Holiday Diet Plan
Step 1: Buy a house with a very long, winding, hilly driveway.
Step 2: Wait for tons of snow followed by several weeks of below freezing temperatures.
Step 3: Do not clear the snow from your driveway.

That's it! If you try it, let me know how it works for you!

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Using skills honed when writing performance plans for folks in my group at work, I decided to put together some measurable, finite goals for all us here for 2010. Some people were more cooperative than others, so I may have had to make some stuff up on my own.

Dad

+ Quit complaining
+ Help Mom paint the bedroom by Mom's birthday
+ Get the floors done
+ Finish painting the kitchen
+ Fix the microwave handle
+ Build a pond and waterfall in the yard

Mom

+ Sew Carol a knitting needle case before the end of January
+ Get three estimates for bathroom remodel
+ Make winter pajamas for Anya before September
+ Make two jumpers for Anya
+ Work on Craig's afghan with Carol
+ Finish Carol's bathmat

Craig

+ Do well in school
+ Learn to juggle flaming torches
+ Teach Chewy to run an agility course
+ Bench press 300 pounds
+ Write memoirs
+ Join a woodwind ensemble

Carol

+ Finish Anya's year 1 scrapbook
+ Finish Anya's year 2 scrapbook
+ Enter something in the county fair
+ Work on Craig's afghan with Mom
+ As a family, go on a hike or camp once a month
+ Complete a 5k walking race

Andy

+ Finish the plant room
+ Finish laying the floor, putting in the trim, and painting the "hallway" area of the basement
+ Refinish the floors in the sun room and Anya's room
+ Take a beginner's blacksmith class
+ Finish prepping the wood for the kitchen / living room floors
+ Get the generator fixed up

Kenny

+ Make a five course meal from scratch
+ Paint a picture for Carol
+ Learn to play the guitar
+ Go on a date with the captain of the cheer leading squad
+ Get an A in English
+ Ride across the country on a bicycle

Anya

+ Ditch the diapers
+ Learn colors
+ Learn shapes
+ Learn to ride tricycle
+ Paint a picture for Mommy
+ Learn to play the bongos, eukelele, and recorder

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We're very lucky because two of my friends have children a few years older than Anya, and they are always giving us things their kids have outgrown. I can't even begin to list all the wonderful things we've been given, but among the recent gifts was a bag of books. The books have been sitting in our car about a week until today when we tobogganed them down our still very snowy driveway. Right around the point where we reached the shoveled out part of the driveway near the sheep, Anya hopped off Andy's shoulders and investigated the items in the little purple sled we borrowed from daycare. She found a book that interested her so much that she didn't even care that Andy and I had already walked the rest of the way up and gone into the house. He and I peeked out the windows and watched her staring at her book. She'd walk a few steps and then look at the book some more. Walk a few steps. Read. Walk. Read. It looked like she was talking to herself, and then I realized it was a music-making book and she was singing. I'm not sure what made me more happy, that she is such a big girl she can walk up the driveway alone or that she was so excited about her book that she was oblivious to her surroundings.

In other news, we took Anya to a Santa story time at the library two weeks ago. She thought Santa was okay, but the candy canes...those were fantabulous.



While all the other kids sat quietly and listened to Mrs. Clause read stories, Anya got up and ran around and looked at everything in the room. And when we all sang Jingle Bells, Anya got down and boogied.



Boy oh boy does that girl love to dance. Too bad she's got Andy and I as her dance instructors.

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We received some snow yesterday. On the drive home I got stuck once on a hill, and while slowwwwwwly creeping up to the top, a pickup came zooming up, trying to keep enough momentum to avoid our predicament. I think their mirror missed ours by about 3 inches. But we made it home! We wisely left the car near the hay shack, although I had to push it up the little hill to get it there. Not that I expect us to move it again before at least Monday or Tuesday...

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This week we finally got to pick up poor departed Lil Loaf's new brother, a VW Jetta Sportwagen TDI:





When we first decided to get the car, we couldn't find any bare bones ones (Anya really liked the giant sunroof, but unfortunately for her she doesn't have any money). So we ordered a blue one with the extra back airbags. Time went by. After a few weeks I called the dealer, and it was still backordered, and after it went into production it would be another 6 weeks. Since I was getting quite sick of driving the truck, we asked him to see if he could find a base one in any color but black.

A dark gray one was found, coming in within a week. We went down to First Team Auto, and signed all the paperwork. Gave them a check. Dealt with a really annoying woman who tried to sell us undercoating junk (whom we complained about later, and the president told us we weren't the first to complain that week). Also got a little frustrated with the hard selling of an extended warranty. The next week rolled around, when it should be in...and we get a call from our salesman telling us that it had been sold out from under us. Surprise!

We were a little annoyed. After all, we had given them money and signed all the paperwork with the VIN on it. We wrote an angry email. The president of First Team called me back, it turns out the dealership in Richmond did not log something properly, so a salesman saw the car and didn't know it was sold. But to make things better, they loaned us another TDI wagon until another one showed up on the 15th of December. They even delivered it to our house in the boonies.

This past Saturday they called and it got here early, so Tuesday we drove out and swapped it for the new one. Hooray!

Now we just need to think of a new license plate. Cabol doesn't like DAS LOAF.

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I bought a new 27" iMac yesterday. Cabol said it is my early Christmas present from her. Not the actual computer, but the fact that she didn't kick me out of the house for buying it.

Anya gave me a present of her own. She was taking a bath this afternoon, and I had to step out into the kitchen for a minute to check on the beer on the stove. Soon, I hear, 'Daddy! Daddy!' I come back in to find her...holding her present up for me. This reminds me of the reason we do not usually take baths before potty time.

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It's never too early to learn a valuable life skill.

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I talked to my parents yesterday, and they were sad because there were no pictures of our recent projects. So, here ya go!



The kittybox room is finished. Huzzah! So far, though, it appears as though Big Kitty is the only one to have mastered the kitty door. Finishing the plant room will have to wait until spring.



After I took this photo, Anya ran over by Andy to pose. I liked this picture better. The "soil" is all fairly leveled out, and I've dug the first path between rows in the berry patch. Only four more paths to go. Won't plant anything until spring, though. Well, maybe some daffodils.



What good are kids if you can't put them to work? This morning Andy moved about 25 buckets of gravel from our parking spot to other parts of the driveway. I figure there are about another 100 or so buckets to move.

That's it for now. Andy's next project (after / while finishing the gravel move) is to finish off the rest of the basement where the kitty boxes have been (lay floor, paint, install trim). Winter is coming, so I'm not sure what he'll be up to next. Perhaps I can get him to start knitting!

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We've got gravel, yes we do! We've got gravel, how 'bout you?!

Anyone who has ventured up our driveway during the last few years will understand the hugeness of this: "We got gravel." Four trips by the dump truck, and our driveway is no longer something we have to warn people about. At least we don't have to warn them in all capital letters. There are still a few rough spots, but most of the canyons are filled in.

Half of the last truck load was dropped in our "parking spot" Monday afternoon. It may come as a surprise to you, but dump trucks don't really dump all that accurately. They can do okay given enough room, but in the confines of our parking spot, the best the driver could do was get the gravel dumped out in two patches about 6-8 inches deep. It was up to us to get the extra moved from the center out to the sides. Monday is one of my work-at-home days, so at 5:00 I headed out with a shovel and a rake and tried to move stuff around. The light was fading fast, so I brought out our electric lantern and kept shifting it every few minutes. Do I need to say how hard it is to spread and level dark gravel in the dark? There was a lot of squinting and wishing for cat vision. I stopped when Andy got home, and he went out for a bit but gave up.

It rained yesterday and all day today. Now we have WET gravel to move. Whose idea was this anyway?

The worst part is we've had to park the truck on the hill since the parking spot is under construction. The parking brake on the truck has never really been 100% since we moved here. I worry a bit that we'll wake up in the morning, and the truck will have rolled down the hill into the barn or the pond or the sheep.

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We're working on constructing a new garden. It's the berry bed. My plan is to put all the (I bet you can't guess!) berries in this one garden, and then we (i.e., Andy) can build a little cage around it with pvc pipes and netting to keep the birds out. I may also put asparagus in there because of its perennial ways.

The garden started a few months ago when we bought some ginormous locust beams from craigslist. They became the border of the garden. And that was where it stopped (except for the four foot tall weeds that kept growing). Finally, when my folks were here a couple weeks back, Andy hacked down the weeds. He and my dad drove the twisty, hilly, backroads (aka everywhere around here) and got two loads of free horse poop. YUMMMMMM!

Of course I can never get enough horse poop or compost or soil or straw or leaves, so when a person nearby advertised MORE (composted!!) horse poop, we couldn't pass it up. Last night after picking up Anya, we went and got another truck load. To explain our detour (Anya is very big on telling us if we go the wrong way) we mentioned we were going to get horse poo. Anya thought this was really awesome and kept saying, "Poop! Poop! Poop!" What are we going to get? "POOP!" What is the tractor putting in the truck? "POOP!" What is your favorite color? "POOOOOP!"

This afternoon we went out to the berry garden to spread stuff around. "Poop!" Anya brought her kid-sized garden tools down, but mostly she sat in the poo and dug around and picked up big "rocks" to show me. My little poo baby! She had poo under her nails and in her socks and mixed with the snot running down her nose. When we came back to the house, she took off her shoes and clothes and the poo dust fell all over the floor like giant, brown dandruff. It was almost magical.

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