Nervous Tension

Yep, that's snow. It was beautiful for a little while but no accumulation. What you see on the ground here is all we still have.

We're still on pins and needles waiting for the call for hubby to get back to work. The wait kills me. I occupy some time each day in the kitchen, creating breads and other edibles but I end up with my mind wandering, worrying.

Winter is always a rough time for me. The chores revolve around keeping the animals fed and watered and not much else. Winters here are either muddy or covered in ice.

It's just 6 weeks until I can get started with seeds for the coming garden. 6 weeks seems like a long way off when you're sitting here, waiting. I already have all my peat pellets and ziplocs lined up, waiting on seeds. It's hard to resist the temptation to start a few, just so I have something to tend to. The constant overcast days are really contributing to the feeling of melancholy I'm experiencing. Of course, the lack of charge going into the battery packs from the solar panels is non existent and now I'm worrying about how to pay the electric bill I'm going to have too.

The dwarf bananas are still a month or so away from making their little nanners and the coffee plants are still hanging on after the temperature shock they got. I fuss over them each day but that only takes around 10 minutes of my day. Then I walk past my quilting projects, not being able to finish those with no fabric. I'd do some construction work in the house but again, I'm stopped by lack of supply funds. This feeling is really a weird one for me.

This year, coming to a close, is one I'm glad to see gone. Farewell and good riddance! Everything we've done this year has been a fight. Even the garden was a real project with the constant spring rains and the never ending weed growth, crop failures and late harvests. Plus the equipment failures thanks to my own stupidity of letting a neighbor use them. boy, did that put us behind in our bills, trying to get that stuff running again. Lesson learned the hard way there. The loss of the hay due to the equipment failure was a bit costly too. That was all our profit hay lost so on top of a poor year economically, the money we needed to make it thru the winter never came. So, goodbye 2009, not sorry to see you go.

I'm not sorry I chose to live this way and every year isn't a good one, that's just part of it. This little self sustained farm is a ton of work, the rewards are just sometimes better, sometimes not so great. One bright spot of even a bad year is the food we have to eat. Even tho the harvest, the hay and the baby critter production was poor this year, we still have plenty to eat for ourselves. So, that is a bright spot because feeding ourselves is the whole point.

So, as I sit here and squirm, worrying about the future, I can still have a little something to fill my belly and then worry some more..........