I'm Baaaa-aack! (with lattice frames for the porch)

So hey all you out there in blogland!  It's been awhile <cough>.  Yeah, like about two years of while.  What can I say?  Life got busy!  The biggest project of my life came along and my husband and I welcomed our daughter into the world in April of 2013.  Since then I've become a stay-at-home mom and a college adjunct professor instead of a full-time high school teacher.  For the most part I LOVE my new life.  Hanging out with my daughter every day is a luxury that I feel so lucky to take advantage of.  She's the light of our lives, and watching her grow up is amazing.  Sometimes I do miss the excitement of planning lessons with my teaching team and taking part in the high school culture, but I definitely don't miss the stress and emotional drain of teaching high school.  I never realized how intense of a life it was until I stepped away.

So how about all of those trades that my blog title refers to?  They're still around.  I've learned to take advantage of naptime to feed the "maker" part of my personality (yes, I only recently realized it had a name.  See this Wikipedia page for more info and find out if you have it, too!)  The baby monitor has been my savior because I can toodle around in the garage and barn and still listen for a waking baby.

My most recent project to get completed was putting lattice frames under the porch to clean up the view and keep my dog from sleeping in the mud under there (sorry, Luca!).  It took me ages to get done, mostly because other things kept taking up my time instead, but thankfully I finished before this fall so we can stain the whole shebang once it's less humid outside.  The porch connecting our house and garage is such a nice place to sit and enjoy a beautiful evening, I can't believe the previous home-owners didn't take better care of it.  Hopefully giving it a good wash and stain this fall will make it perk right up.

 The lattice along the front of the porch.  Chester, my ever-present helper, can't help but jump in the picture.  What a camera ham.

The view from the back.

Progress

Happy Sunday!  I'm making progress-- not just on the garden, but in my other life, too, that of a high school teacher.  I teach math and pre-engineering and this school year is coming to its close!  We're going to get out early this year-- May 23rd to be exact, almost one month from today.  The craziest part is, I really only have one week of "new material" lessons left to go.  After that the kids start prepping for their end-of-the-year speeches (we call them Presentations of Learning, or POL's).  Then they give their POL's, prep for final exams,  and take final exams.  Voila!  School year, complete.  I am so ready to have a life and mental space of my own again.  During the school year I spend so much time thinking about stuff for class, working on stuff for class, then rethinking stuff for class, it hardly seems like I do much else.  I know it's bad when my husband talks on the phone to his family and they ask what I'm up to and he replies "Oh, you know, school stuff, she's really busy," and those are the only words that describe my life.  :(  I've done a little better this year trying to take more time for myself.  I started to play Skyrim after my husband got it for Christmas and that's really helped.  Sometimes I rebel and instead of grading or planning I'll lose myself in a video game for a couple of hours.  In fact, my goal this morning is to grade some engineering papers, then reward myself with a little Skyrim.  I'll have to post more about my gaming life some other time.

To wrap this up, here's the most recent picture of my progress on the garden bed-- they pyramid is starting to take shape!

Cloudy Morning

Feels like a VEISHEA weekend to me.

VEISHEA is the annual spring celebration at Iowa State University, my alma mater, and there are always a ton of events on campus geared towards Iowa State families.  Parade, cherry pies, concerts, booths, art exhibits and demonstrations, open houses at all the colleges... and on and on... it's usually really fun, but almost every time I've gone to VEISHEA it's a cool, drizzly, rainy weekend.  When I was a student I even spent one VEISHEA Saturday walking around to all the events wrapped in a blanket.  That's why a cool, rainy weekend in April always makes me think I should be on campus with thousands of other Cyclones.

We've got a slow, cloudy Sunday morning going on here at our house.  Stayed up pretty late last night, partly due to the storm, but mostly because of a late-night (10pm, late for me!) phone call from a friend I haven't talked to in a long time.  We chatted for almost an hour an a half while the rain, thunder, and lightning came down outside.  I don't mind being a little tired today!

Finished the first garden box yesterday before the rain-- now on to the strawberry pyramid that's going on top of it.

On Air in 3... 2... 1...

Look out everybody, this blog is LIVE!

It's taken awhile to get myself going, but it's time to give this blog the ol' college try.  I'm old enough/young enough to have had a Xanga account back in the day and I used to love writing there, so we'll see what happens here.  I couldn't decide what my blog theme would be-- cooking?  sewing?  teaching?  gaming?  I'm really not enough of an expert at any of those things that I felt I could make an entire blog dedicated to the topic, so instead this blog is about everything.

First project up for review: Garden Boxes!
My garden has been more of a jungle the last couple years, which I blame on the fact that it's too big for a household of 2, but it also could be because I start with really good intentions but then get too busy and forget to tend it.  To address these issues, I've decided to take our 16' x16' garden space and turn it into two small, raised garden boxes.  One will be 4'x4' and will contain a strawberry pyramid, and the other will be 4'x6' and will contain various types of veggies.  I'm in building and digging mode now, here's the progress so far:

Actually, I finished this one with its third layer, but forgot to take the final pic.  I'd put up a picture of the digging, but I'm too embarrassed to post "before" pictures of the garden until it finally looks all beautiful and complete.