Follow the shenanigans of a woman's attempt at going green while trying to raise a little one on a small ranch in Arizona with chickens and horses.
- Woot!!! New Fluffy-Butts!!! (New chickens)
- Moooooo! We’ve got cows!
- Let’s talk about poo… yeah, poo…
- Solution for out of reach egg collection
- C.O.B- What to do when you’re hungry and have a zillion cans of tuna.
- New blog series – Chicky on a Budget.
- Commuting via bus/lightrail.
- Floorganized
- Crafty Soup Can Storage
- Tardis Fridge, I Wonder if it’s Bigger on the Inside?
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Happy NewYears Chickypoo Fans!
I hope everyone who sees this has a truly blessed 2012, with growth in love, happiness and who couldn’t use a little extra wealth?
My new year resolutions are:
Family First (always):
- Taking care of my little girl and helping more around the ranch to take a load off of my husbands work-load which might be tripling this next year if I stop working next week.
Financial Freedom:
- to stay at home or if I do continue to work, have my income as 100% extra income into the household for building purposes.
- Grow my web-business (we run our own private hosting server and do small business shopping carts and blogs)
Ranch Life:
- Get the boarding facilities up and running and fill my pole-barn with boarders and get a pasture rented.
- Getting the horses back in shape for riding and get to riding this year!
- Spend a lot more time outdoors this year with Lilly, working on a garden and growing most of our food.
- Add more chicks to the flock!
Personal Growth:
- Take better care of myself and do a complete body over-haul.
- Meet new friends and stop being such a hermit
- Get my self-confidence up while talking to people I don’t know. I’ve gotten kind of shy over the years and it makes it hard to meet new people.
- Get more actively involved with my local community if I am able to quit working.
- Blow through the majority of my last classes this year, and hopefully leave only 1-2 classes for the Spring term next year and be done. And stop being afraid to take my final 2 spanish classes.
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What a year!!!
It has been an incredible year here in my life. Usually it’s like “oh yeah, another year… gone… okay, what’s next” but this year has been just amazing.
I haven’t been able to blog much at all because of all the changes going on here but if my hope of quitting my job here next week happens, I’ll be blogging more and should have new chickens soon to write about!
I got my chickens almost a year ago, it will be a year on January 5th. I can’t believe it’s been a whole year already, and I will most likely be adding 5-10 chickens to my flock here shortly, just trying to figure out if there’s a way for me to have them safely outside or if they have to be inside for their first couple months (if so, I’m going to have to wait till spring to add to my flock)
As for Life with Lilly:
Silly Lilly will be 4 months old on the 1st. She is giggling like crazy, she has several “grins” that she does, from her “I’m so happy!” grin to her “I’m going to be shy grin” (usually when I kiss her cheeks), to her “Sly” grin which is her “I”m up to no good.. in my pants…” grin. (the picture below is her “I’m So Happy!” grin. Sorry it’s washed out a bit, the flash and a bad camera. oooh, but I got a new camera for Christmas! I’m still working out how to use it, lol…)
Lilly has turned my life upside down in so many good ways… the thing is, I think my life was truly upside down before she arrived and she has “right-side” up’d it. My priorities changed, my life has changed, and I absolutely love it all.
This has been an amazing year here in my household and I am truly looking forward to 2012 and all the joys that come with it!
What… A… Night!!!
Tonight was our 2nd annual Star Party and our Halloween Potluck. We invited the mom’s group that I belong to, along with our friends from across the valley. Pics and the first part of the video linked below.
I couldn’t have done any of this without the help of the awesome Ashley, Ashley and Zel. (Yes, 2 Ashley’s, with the same last initial, I still haven’t found a good nickname for them to differentiate them, so we’ll go with Ashley 1, and Ashley 2.
Ashley 1, our group leader, made an awesome cake (2 actually) of Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein.
Ashley 2 lent us a HUGE bouncy-house, and tables/chairs for the event! The kids loved the bouncy house and it was great to have a place for everyone to sit and eat this year, last year we didn’t have tables/chairs so that was such a big help!
Zel came out and helped me pack up all the goody-bags for the kids, (30 bags!) and helped me build the Candy HayDive and hide all the pumpkins for the pumpkin hunt. Her oldest daughter kept an eye on Lilly and Zel’s little one so that we could get everything done.
We took 2 bales of straw and at least 14 big bags of individually wrapped candy (skittles, nerds, smarties, lollipops, tootsi rolls, gummy things, a bunch of stuff) and we layered all the candy into it and put it in a big pile. I think all bags totalled, there were probably 400+ pieces of candy or more, not really sure, and I’m pretty sure the kids didn’t get all of it. I’ll be going out tomorrow to find out what’s buried and was missed.
We started at first by sending in the 4 youngest who were lined up, and at first, I’m pretty sure they didn’t believe us that there was candy in there… until they started finding it. Then they started to get excited.
I realized that there was a lot of hay in there and giving 4-5 kids at a time only 5 minutes just wouldn’t give them much for their bags, so spur of the moment I sent everyone in. The results were hilarious.
We had hay flying everywhere, the pile got smooshed pretty quickly into one layer about 4-5 inches deep across one of our stalls (our stalls are huge). We even had one kid doing a “Hay-Angel” in it for awhile.
I took 20 minutes of video before turning off the camera, and the kids were still going long after that! The kids played in it for at least an hour if not more, and later on in the night they were in there again. Cassandra even brought out a spare bag she had in her car and started throwing it in to get them rolling again. It was a total hoot!
It was a great night, after all the candy-hunting settled down and everyone ate, Ray broke out the telescopes and started pulling up the constellations, the Orion Nebula, and Jupiter and it’s 4 moons. I ended up back inside with Lilly and missed out on that part of things (and on everyone leaving) but still, I’d say all in all, it was a success.
Earth Day- So Far
Today is Earth day (shouldn’t they all be?!) We aren’t through the day yet but here’s how we have spent it so far.
We got up at 6am to see our friends head back off to Illinois. As soon as they headed out, we decided to:
1.) Turn the AC off for the day and open up all the windows and turn off all the lights. (Yeah, I know, I’m on the computer, ssshhhh)
2.) Went to Schnepf farms and see what they had there.
We’ve lived in Queen Creek for 5 years and had never gotten to their U-pick organic farms. Sadly, I realized that I’m still a city girl and I had no idea what to do with picking Cauliflower and Broccoli. They looked like giant huge leaves… so where’s the giant heads we’re used to seeing? We didn’t see any signs saying to dig so we weren’t sure what to do. Blah. I did get a little fresh spinach though and some gorgeous looking tomatoes.
We stopped by their market and picked up jars of Strawberry Preserves (not that I can’t make that myself, I’ve just been too lazy), and a jar of Strawberry/Rhubarb Preserves that I can’t wait to try out. A little expensive, but we just did it for part of the experience and the fact that we only got 26 cents worth of spinach. HA!
3.) We left Schnepff, stopped by A&P to price out our dwarf citrus trees we’re planning to get next week. (Oranges, Lemons, and Grapefruit.) I also want a plum tree (LOVE plums) and a peach tree eventually, though I think we’re going to partake in Schnepf’s U-Pick Peach Festival in 2 weeks.
4.) After that, we tried to stop by my favorite wholesale nursery, only to discover it was no longer there and a gigantic southwest mcmansion was going up in it’s place! BLAH!!
There’s a small chance that the nursery might have just moved because we think we spotted their stuff not far away, but if they did, they didn’t appear to be open. I could just cry though, their plants were the only ones that survived out here and I paid a fraction of regular prices for the plants. I really hope they just moved.
5.)Then we headed out to Tru-value for the tiller we’ve been meaning to rent for the garden area, and Ray started working on tilling up my future garden bed while I started to soak down the area we will be planting grass in near my flower beds to help with the dust control issues we have out here.
Suffice to say, it’s only 1:30 in the afternoon, the AC is still off (usually it would be on as soon as it hit 78 in the house). I’ve gotten a decent amount of vitamin D today and I feel great!
My New Year Resolutions
Sending out a warm thought to everyone for the New Year! Please be careful out there and enjoy the time with your family. I’m actually working tonight (boo hiss!).
So here are my New Years Resolutions:
- Have the best year yet in 2011!
- Finish my chicken coop by early spring and get in the chicks by March.
- Start building our guest house.
- Work on getting a garden into place and finish working on my landscaping- tough one since I do not have a green thumb and this is Arizona after all. Everything pretty much dies in the summer.
- Get in better shape, at least enough so that I don’t throw my back out every time I do major yard work or exercise.
- Get home for the holidays this time, either Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Upcoming awesome things for this year.
- I’m supposed to be going to HAWAII in May!!!
- Naming Contest for the Chickies on the blog! I’m looking forward to this one!
Well, that’s it for now. It’s a short post, but then again, work and all.
HAVE A SAFE AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
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