"I want you to move to California for yourself"

Well that was a nice little break wasn't it? :) Things have been weird, but I want to start writing again so, here I am.

They all look so happy pre-squirrel attacks

So on a lighter note, we've been quite the outdoorsy set lately! Really sprucing up our back patio and this past weekend we had our Wilderness Survival Class. I wanted this to be a picture heavy post but as I'm coming to realize more and more, iPhones are the WORST. They seem really cool and awesome. Until they cost a million dollars and you can't do something as simple as rotate a picture on your computer because Apple and PC's refuse to get alone. Of course. So I'll just post the handful of pictures my iPhone has deemed acceptable. Son of a.... (EDIT - Using Ed's Mac, I'm attempting to post what seem to be rightly oriented pictures... Success! So I'll also update my post on my 10k with a couple other pictures if you are interested!)

My happy place

Anyways. The patio (and upstairs study) gardening has been more amazing than we could've imagined. The potato box is exploding in general. We had to pull up one plant that wasn't performing very well and up came the CUTEST baby potato you have ever seen. It was about the size of my thumb nail. I have picture but I couldn't rotate it... grrr... The rosemary and basil are fighting to hang on, and I'm not sure why they are struggling so much. The other herbs are going gangbusters. Ed also finished making me a beautiful new table so I can sit and have coffee or read during the day by all the lovely plants. We moved our indoor tomato plants out next to it as well and I looooove the smell of tomatos. With my lovely colored lights it reminds me of Mom's, which is a very good feeling indeed.

Our adorable baby potato!

We've been waging a war against the squirrels here. I'm partly to blame because I refuse to give up my wonderful bird feeders, thereby disposing of the cats day-long entertainment. But that means that all the little seeds that drop down from the feeders scatter everywhere and attract everything onto the patio and also into all the plants on the patio. Several of the herbs have met a grisly end, uprooted by these chubby grey squirrels who are truly very UN-afraid of us. If I had any reservations about getting a BB gun before, those reservations were gone with the last murdered parsley plant. We're trying a less violent option of chicken wire first so think happy thoughts for it or these squirrels are going to have a lot more than poor defenseless plants to contend with... In fact, we have been training Rosie pretty intensely lately... Hmmmm.....

Awesome path up to the training area... left everyone pretty winded

Now about the Wilderness Training! We had to drive up into the Santa Cruz Mountains, always terrifying for me in any car because the roads are so tiny and the drops are straight down and extremely far. I highly recommend anyone who wants to visit California that they must make a trip into the woods. It's stunning. The trees go on for ages. Everything is just so much bigger than on the East coast. Too bad I'm too terrified to drive the truck up those tiny roads or I'd visit more often! The training took place on a boy scout reservation high up this windy, woodsy trail following Boulder Creek. Our teacher Jack, who was the real deal, was my sister's age and had spent many a night out in the wild. He said he lived outdoors for a year, and was very familiar with spending the night in a debris hut. What is a debris hut you might ask? It's exactly what you think it is. And we got to make them during our shelter training. (You can see Ed enjoying our group's shelter at the bottom of this post)

We also learned how to make spoons and bowls out of pieces of wood, and then how to boil water using rocks. One of the sillier, but still fun and useful parts of class was learning how to stalk prey in the woods (they do offer a traps class but they had to separate it from their usual stuff because people kept trapping and injuring house pets - yikes) But my favorite part was making fire with the Bow Drill technique! Muahahaha! Let's be up front and honest here. Ed did all the hard work.We tandem whittled a spindle and a fireboard and a handhold, and notched a bow. Ed did the manual labor after that in terms of burning holes and creating the dust coal and I made a beautiful tinder ball (blame iphone for the lack of pictures) that nurtured that coal until it burst into flames! I learned two things from this experience. One, Ed and I will not die during the Zombie Apocalypse or Hunger Games situations of the future. Two, people do not know nearly enough about survival or basic respect for nature. It was really good to get out there and learn things that as Jack and his co-teacher Mark put it, are skills that our ancestors have used and passed on for thousands upon thousands of years. 

This was the insanely hard part, using the bow to make the spindle rotate until wood dust collected and then smoked itself into a tiny coal

My beautiful tinder bundle :)

Finally! After a lot of sweat and a little blood, no tears, we got a coal!

Nurturing the coal in the tinder like a crazy person

FIRE!

And Ed decided he could live here happily ever after :)

"Home is wherever I'm with you"

Does anyone else hate new years resolutions? I truly hate them. I think they are the lamest excuse for people to brag about doing great for a month and then they are forgotten or mutilated beyond recognition. Why can't you eat better and lose weight in December? Or August? What made you fat in May will still be making you fat in January. Same with whatever made you procrastinate, or flake out, or just be damn lazy. You are not suddenly full of more willpower and energy in January. I don't hate resolutions, or comments like, 'I've decided I'm going to be better about eating or working out or writing more' ad naseum. But when it's chalked up to new year's resolutions, it makes me angry. I can't fully explain why but... I just wanted to put it out there. I'm a new year's resolution scrooge. :)

Anywho, I've obviously been doing poorly with writing about what we're up to out here, but I've been doing great with my reading. Powering through books of all different genres. It's been... really refreshing. And I've also been doing great with studying my German. I need more practice putting thoughts together, but I'm retaining a lot and actually feeling able to speak clearly. Watching some of these travel shows, namely The Layover, it astounds me how crippled the US is by the lack of bilingualism (or more). Ed wants to learn Korean and I'm interested in Swedish and Italian. How exciting would that be?

I wish I had more to write about on here. I had wanted to keep everyone updated on our lives out here, but we've been keeping a low profile. I don't mean that in a bad way, it's very calm and simple, I cook a lot (which I love and it's fun) and have my routines. I just wanted to check in this time and write something to let everyone know that much like all the other people returning thanks to new year's resolutions, I had not forgotten about this blog... just haven't had much to write about.

This is all about to change! Well, at least change a little in the next month or two. We've signed up for a survival class. Yes, I know this will be hilarious but if I don't get a good blog post out of that then clearly somethings not clicking. We also signed up for a beekeeping class :) Ed is quite excited about that and it definitely plays into out future plans of a farm life. Also I'm going home for a visit! Jan 18th thru the 25th I'll be on a whirlwind visit to MD to get a new license, plan this damn wedding and run many other errands along with visiting with friends and family. Ed will only be there for the weekend, so it'll be quite a madhouse of a visit. I'm just so excited to go visit. So excited to see people and get things done. I even get to pick up my wedding dress :) There's tons to talk about in the coming weeks and even a couple days. Joe said he'll have my save the dates ready to preview in the next few days and sent out this month. I'm pretty psyched. Yay Joe!!

So. All in all. I'm not dead. Things are good and are going to get even more amazing and I cannot wait to tell everyone about it. Thanks for sticking with me :)