Another Year Gone By--

Year # 27 is going to be a great one!!

Happy Birthday.... me

Finally Sunny!

Feels like years since we've seen a day of sun! Last week was rainy, snowy or icy all week. Cloudy, and the temperature rarely ventured above 35. The dogs were going stir crazy, but loathed to step foot outside in the mucky mess. Yours truly was also going stir crazy with my work schedule and lack of partner around. I'm telling you, this living single thing is no piece of cake! And the hormones! Ooooh, the hormones! Saturday night found me bawling for 20 minutes at the end of a not-so-great movie, laughing at myself, and eating a hot dog... all at the same time. Maybe it's good that my loving partner isn't here to see this....Anyhoo, Sunday was fantastic! The sun came out, the temperature rose comfortably, and the parents came out to help clean and organize and prepare for the move! And as an added bonus, Pops fixed the scooter! I took a couple of loops around the block, but am still too afraid to take it any further than my neighborhood. Hope everyone else had a great weekend!

Snowy!!!!

Winter has finally hit Dallas! We had a big (small) ice storm come through Monday, and today it's surprise snow! I knew something was up at about 4am this morning when the Nova-dog freaked out and tried to jump into bed with me. She is terrified of anything "falling" outside, and since her chair is by the window, she scrambles for a new place to sleep about 30 minutes before any kind of real "weather" starts up. Then, when I let the dogs out for their morning run, the deck was covered in snow! The TV stations and all are going CRAZY, since they predicted no snow for Dallas today, and half of the freeway overpasses are closed. ALL of the school systems are closed, but here I am, like an idiot, at work. Unfortunately I live about 2 miles from work, all on surface streets, so there's not much of a reason for me to not come. However, the only other people that are here right now are two others that walk to work from their downtown apartments, and I swear, if we're the only ones here at 10am, I'm going home!

Hope everyone's having a lovely wintery day!

*No photos due to the fact that I'm working overtime for the forseeable future, and I leave the house and come home in the dark.... :(

First Homemade Egg Sandwich

Yay! My first mostly homemade egg sandwich. Made with egg from my backyard (and one other organic one from the grocery) and spinich from my little roadside garden. And it was delicious!!

And for my mom and all of her teacher friends (for whom my one homemade egg sparked a multitude of questions), I took a photo of my backyard egg side by side with a week or so old organic egg from the grocery store.

(Grocery store on left, Backyard on right)

The only difference I can see is that the white of the egg is clear in my fresh egg, and cloudy in the other (though this is probably due to age), and though by backyard egg is smaller, the yolk is bigger. I'd like to compare it to a non-organic, non-freerange egg to check the difference in yolk color, but that would require buying gross eggs, so it probably won't happen...

On another note, these photos suck, even though I got a super fancy pants new camera for Christmas, but have unfortunately misplaced the charging cord..... so I was relegated to the crappiness of my camera phone.

2007

Well, looks like 2007 is shaping up to be a banner year in our household...

First, my illustrious hens decided to ring in the new year in the RIGHT way, by finally laying their first egg!!!! We're hoping it's the first of many, and I'm looking forward to finally enjoying some fresh omlettes.

Undoubtedly, the reason they have finally started laying is the fact that we're looking for new homes for them. Surprisingly this is not due to their egg-less-ness (we would love them if they NEVER laid eggs!) but due to the fact that we're moving-- again-- back to California. Not to the city, however. This time we're moving out to the sticks to a beautiful little town in the southern Sierras. It's farming land, there's apple orchards and people riding horses on the side of the road, goats, sheep, chickens and turkeys in people's yards; it's the next step in our journey towards a simpler life. The hubby got a job designing spaceships out in the desert, and the dogs and I are tagging along for the ride. I will be going into temporary retirement for a couple of reasons. One, the distinct lack of architecture firms in a town of 5,000, and two, the most exciting news of 2007 (besides the egg, of course), we're having a baby.....

So, not unlike 2006, (in which we moved 1,300 miles, got married, aquired our first farm animals, and created a garden out of a wasteland) 2007 is looking like it's gonna be a wild ride (in which we move 1,500 miles, add a member of the family, aquire MORE farm animals, and go on further adventures).

So there ya go! Might be late in posting, but chock full of information!