Catching up to myself - Squirrel!

I woke up this morning at 4:30 ready to write this blog post. It's a fairly normal time for me to get up, I allow myself to get out of bed anytime after 4 a.m., and it's the best time for me to do my school work. This was going to be a post about goals, and objectives, and pushing boundaries to get to where you want to be... when I get to it. But it's already Squirrel! kind of day.

Squirrel - Needle felted from Demi's wool. Pictured in the Ozark Folk
Center State Park Craft Village, Feb. 13, 2014

Like I said, I woke up with this idea. I went to the kitchen to get my morning coffee. We've just started remodeling the kitchen. When we bought this house in 2009, the interior had just been updated with new wallpaper and paint and some new flooring (all except the bathroom, which was and still is pretty reprehensible, though I did paint it this summer!). The wall paper in the kitchen and living room is striped dark blue, gold and maroon. Not bad, but not my colors. And they put popcorn paint on the ceiling in the kitchen. Just try to clean that! So, as we just bought a new gas stove and a dishwasher (never been one in this house), and they will be delivered January 16, we need to make some changes to the kitchen. I started stripping wallpaper this week. On my way to get coffee (remember that?) I decided to start scraping the popcorn off the ceiling. I did go get a drop cloth, and scraped a decent 2-foot by 4-foot swatch clean before I got off the step-stool and made my way to the coffee pot. I cleaned up the mess while I waited for coffee to brew. Squirrel!

Coffee in hand, I sat down at the computer to write this post. I wanted to pull some pictures of my looms that I took yesterday, the experience on which I am basing this post. Apparently, neither my OneDrive or Google Drive are backing up my phone pictures right now. But, they are going into Google Photo. But I can't get Blogger to pull from Google Photo. Don't I remember that Google photo is going away at some point? Got to go look that up. Stop that Squirrel!

There were lots of picture of our sheep in my Google photos. I've been filing the recent ones into albums on my phone, but I don't seem to be able to access those albums from other devices. So, as one of my goals for this year is to get the registrations done on all our sheep (bad shepherd for letting those get behind!) I started creating a Google photo album with all my Jacob Sheep photos. I'm back to 2014, have 1,376 photos in the album and have enjoyed a trip down memory lane. Wow, we've done a lot of improvements on this farm! But how can I get Blogger to access Google photos? Squirrel!

So, now it's 7:22, the sheep are starting to get vocal about not being fed yet, and I still haven't started this blog post. So, working on goals, objective, and accountability, here is a rundown before I go do chores.

I like doing slogans, tag-lines, or whatever you want to call them for a year. 2019 was Focus & Finish, you can see that I need that one, and it has been amazingly powerful. I have nine blog posts drafted to cover my highlights for 2019 (hope I can find where I stored that draft). 

My tag-line for 2020 is #PushingBoundaries2020. Yeah, life is all hashtags now. Why pushing boundaries? Well, when I finish morning chores, and figure out how to get my loom pictures over here, I'll explain that one. Hope to see you tomorrow.

And the Seasons, They Go 'Round-an-'Round...

Buddha-cat keeps my neck warm these
frosty mornings

Fall Greetings from Havencroft Farm

 We are modern homesteaders, small holders, shepherds, and crafts people. We pay our electric bill, use the internet, drive our cars to our jobs, and store food in our refrigerator. But, we are still tied to the seasons  of the Earth. 

It's fall now, and we've had a few frosts. The garden is tucked in for the winter and the green tomatoes are sitting on the counter ripening for a few last summer-type dinners. The cats are looking for laps.

East Richwoods Nutmeg, our Alpine dairy
goat buck knows he's beautiful.
Fall is goat and sheep breeding season.
Having seasonal polyestrous animals
helps cement the cycle of the year.

It's sheep and goat breeding time. I breed the dairy goats first, so we have a supply of milk in case we have any bottle baby lambs or angora goat kids. Knock on wood, we won't, but best to be safe. At this point, the dairy goats are all confirmed bred and the breeding sheep are in with the rams. I got a new angora buck goat kid this year, Whisper Hills Oberon. He may or may not be ready to work, but he lives with the girls, and if they figure it out it's a bonus. Kid mohair is my favorite fiber.

Gibbs dog prefers to hang out in the
studio on now that mornings are cooler.

I spin and weave year-around, but I really seem to tuck into it in the fall. That's when I pull out my dyepots and make all the pretty colors for my yarns. We have our two annual shows in September and December, so much of my production schedule is geared around those.

My dad and my grandbaby Zo.

Now that we have a grandbaby in the family, it's another cue of the flow of life and the circle of time. I am luck to have both my parents and they dote on little Zo, who will not be little for long. Luckily human babies don't grow as fast as the sheep and goat kids!

In addition to farming, shepherding, spinning, weaving, and working full time, I am in the process of finishing out my bachelor's degree. I hope to graduate in May of 2020. One of the lesson I've learned is to be ok with my own schedule and my own cycle. My early 20's was my time to experience and explore, now is my time to put it all together into a formal credential. So, while I do seem to write more here in the winter (maybe it's because I'm inside more, or not at work quite as many hours!) it may be a while before I post regularly. In the meantime, if you've found our Havencroft Farm through this blog and are interested in the happenings here in the rural Ozarks, take a look at our Havencroft Farrm Facebook page. If you're looking for brooms or shawls or our other products, try our Havencroft Farm Etsy Store.

And, if you're just interested in a glimpse of our homesteading journey, scroll back through the archives here. Every once in a while I enjoy going back through this blog and remembering seasons past and the joy of the journey to today. Happy Fall 2019!

Harvest moon over the barn & good
brown dirt resting for the 2020 garden.