It has been quite some time since my last post, and this one won’t be easy. I had been sick for a couple of weeks before the holidays, so that was my excuse for not writing. Things changed pretty rapidly after that, however, when my father passed away unexpectedly the day after Christmas. I have never experienced a loss like this, and it’s hard to imagine that I will ever again. My father was the most important and influential man in my life, and we were very close. I have taken a month off from work to cope, and I quit my extra jobs. In my grief I have been unable to do much for the last month, and working certainly was not high on my priorities.
I started this blog because I wanted to document our journey and experiences with creating and maintaining our homestead. I wanted to be a source of information for other like-minded people who were interested in similar things. I also wanted it to tell a story to our future children. When I was deciding whether or not I would in fact create this blog, the one deciding thought that I had was the thought of our children reading back on the stories that we encountered. I thought that would give some credence to the work and toil that we are about to undertake so that they can understand everything that we’ve gone through- and maybe learn something along the way. (more…)