Shhh… Don’t tell Colleen, but I just bought a book from Amazon called, “Chicken Coops: 45 Building Plans for Housing Your Flock”.  The kids and I went over to one of Violet’s friend’s houses yesterday and bought some chicken eggs.  They house 7 chickens in the big area in their backyard.  They get about 6 – 7 eggs a day.  Their daughter sells the eggs for $3 a dozen.

I’ve been buying eggs from the Farmer’s Market for $5.50 a dozen this season.  $5.50 a dozen is a stupidly obnoxious price.  $3, I can deal with.  But, even better, after the initial cost is paid for is not paying for eggs at all.  We’ve got an acre yard, we can afford to use some of that space for chickens.

It’s my goal for the summer, build a chicken coop.  That goal trumps the building a shed goal of earlier, which trumped the finish the attic goal from even earlier.

My gorgeous daughter taken tonight:

The kids built birdhouses today…

We had to bundle up to hang the bird feeders.

A picture, drawn by Violet, of our family.

Notice Violet’s new found butterfly drawing skills.  This picture has the “morning sky.”  She drew three pictures that night, each with a sky from a different time of the day.

They just clearcut about twenty acres of trees near our house and this is the mess they left…

A random house (with chickens) on my drive home from work:

Our day at the park last Sunday:

We’re at a stand still. We’re already wondering if I’m going to be able to go to work on Monday. There’s about 6 inches of snow on the ground and underneath that a sheet of ice. It’s not supposed to warm up around here until Monday. I do not like being stuck in the house for days straight.

On the other hand, it is quite beautiful outside.

Exciting stuff here. I just spent the afternoon updating the backend of my website in preparation for the New Year and a new promise to myself to blog on a more regular basis. I updated the “theme” as well. Isn’t it pretty?

This is really just a test post to make sure everything is working. I will come back later to post the VIDEO FROM THE CHRISTMAS CONCERT from earlier today.

It’s autumn in North Carolina. We know by several different reasons:

the constant shotgun shots that we can hear from our entirely closed up house signifying the slaughter of those obnoxious deer that like to run into the side of my car, the turning of the leaves (supposedly rather beautiful in the “mountains” of North Carolina), the turkey shoot at the “Concerned Bikers of North Carolina” club, the fun we had trick-or-treating last night, the subsequent crash from the sugar rush from last night, the changing of our clocks (which to most of you is a blessing, but for me it’s another hour of trying to entertain a four year old and a two year old), and, it gets dark at 5 o’clock…

We had a really fun time trick-or-treating last night. We went to my (soon-to-be-ex) boss’s neighborhood last night. Yeah, he’s leaving me after six years, I’m not happy about that. But, the neighborhood was nice. Literally, hundreds of children in costume wandering from house to house. One house played “Thriller” on a loop, an entire cul-de-sac decorated their section, handing out candy and adult beverages (to the adults, we hope), scary movies played from projectors on to the sides of houses, and men on stilts dressed as larger-than-life scary monsters. It was a lot of fun. Once again, Violet got that overwhelmed look on her face and Mason just took it all in.

The leaves turning around here really is spectacular. There are millions of trees around so there is quite a bit of color. I really enjoy this time of year around here. I really enjoy my yard this time of year.

Violet’s artwork is getting more complex by the day. She’s broken in to using numerous colors on the page instead of keeping it monotone. She sees more about the picture than she used to, like the picture I put up here: notice the dirt. We got her an Ed Emberly book from the library the other day. I remember those books from my childhood, how incredibly cool they were. She thinks they are just as cool. She’s drawing giraffes, lions, cats, pigs, the list goes on and on. We’re getting several of them from Amazon for Christmas for the kids.

We discovered this new (to us) band a few weeks ago, the Avett Brothers. They’re local to North Carolina, from Charlotte to be more precise. So, we’ve been listening to them a lot. We’ve got a performance tivo’d from David Letterman where they sing a really pretty song. The kids are pictured here playing along to the song.