Big Ideas, Many Hiccups

Soooooo, it has been more than a year since a post.

The hiccup came from the goal setting.  I determined that I would service my sewing machine and move along quickly with my sewing projects, giving myself a target date of maybe two weeks following that post.  Apparently, with fewer people sewing, fewer businesses are around to service the machines, so the ONE place in Rhode Island I found for servicing my machine told me it would be at least three weeks before I could pick it up.  Oh, and it cost over $80 for the servicing.  It put me so far off of my timeline that I got discouraged, then was too embarrassed to post again.

In the mean time, though, I did keep busy with a number of projects.  There was additional soap-making, many goat and pseudo-goat cheeses, my first Parmesan cheese, a failed farmhouse cheddar that became a tangy, crumbly cheese we called "Farmhouse Feta" because it more closely resembled the Greek block then the English wheel, a few quilts, a Han Solo costume for Maddie, herbal oils, mock-raised beds for the garden, renovations to the kids' rooms, mats for some large photographs printed off Shutterfly and then the frames to go with them (that I cut on a crappy mitre box and ended up with frames too big for the mats and specially ordered glass!), oh, and I had a BABY somewhere in there.  I also set a goal for beating the Oral Assessment for the Foreign Service in the midst of all this which, alas, I failed at too after passing the Written Exam (and more than 20 points above the minimum requirement), clearing the essays, and getting invited to the Orals.  Oh, well!

In the future, I am going to decline setting time-based goals, because I find my interests are too fickle--one day I may be gung-ho to make cheese, the next I am pouring ten pounds of salt over a "pork picnic" to make prosciutto (oh, yeah, I made a 12 pound prosciutto during this time).

I am going to do some back-posting--essentially, breaking down the things I have already done that I can remember, and that I have some photographic evidence of (which means I'll have another goal here--figure out how to include pictures in these posts!).

I am also excited for the year to come--I'm planning some major gardening projects, figuring out how to cold frame so I can harvest veggies into the late fall and winter, maybe building a picket fence, building a compost bin, finishing some more quilts, and canning my own vegetables (eeek, so exciting!) thanks to the awesome stovetop canner my younger brother sent me for my birthday.  I am also planning to copy my dad's great pancetta (he got into charcuterie this past year, too).  I still have big dreams of renovating the basement into a curing room, cheese room, seedling-grow-zone, and MAYBE a partial chicken coop (with a run to the world outside) but those seem further off and far more unlikely.

Well, enjoy the pictures.  I enjoyed the process.