/now

An at-a-glance view of the things that I am saying “yes” to now. Whereas my about page will tell you how I got to where I am, this now page updates you on what I am currently doing, on a much slower cadence than a mastodon (or twitter if you’re cool with supporting nazis) feed would.Now pages are a thing I am probably way late to. You can make one for yourself if you want. It’s sort of a version of what I would tell a friend I hadn’t seen in a while what I’ve been up to.

June 2024

Late planting, late land clearing, late late late. Four months have passed since I felt I was doing anything productive on the farm. Plenty of reading and thinking have been accomplished though, and I have a better sense of what direction we need to take in the short term to arrive at the long-term goals. Much work has gone into designing a permaculture design for the farm, and we have gone quite a ways down the road towards a single despensa for the whole village.

May 2024

Broken ankle hibernation is officially over! I am cleared to get back to work, though it is healing slower than the doctor would like. No doubt that is due to me having to be active around the village and the farm regardless. Hopefully I won’t stress it too much.

April 2024

Slowly, slowly. Carefully and slowly I return to working around the place.

March 2024

A broken ankle short circuited my plans for February and March and only in the middle of the month was I able to even begin to work on the projects I had slated for last month. While I did most definitely catch up on both a large film backlog and quite a bit of reading, the lack of progress on the farm front is dismaying. The remainder of the spring and the summer now look to be far more stressful than I was hoping for. Among the accomplishments for my enforced downtime was beginning to refactor Eating Asturias into markdown now that I am satisfied that Jekyll can handle what I want the site to do better than Mediawiki.

February 2024

I am deep into pruning long-neglected fruit trees, and removing the last of the Colorado Cypress (hooray!). Eating Asturias is waking up from its winter slumber and content is finally being published again. New culinary tour offerings are right around the corner, as soon as I get the new section polished up and ready for the summer tourist season. The stack of albums to talk about is growing and growing! I’ve hit a rich vein of cool albums recently. I am trying to get all my old reviews moved into the new site first though, so there’s my motivation. Garden boundaries are laid out, and plowing is next.

January 2024

An unseasonably warm (worryingly so) late winter has accelerated both our and all our neighbors plans for the year. I am out of doors and working on projects around the village in anticipation of planting early this year, as we seem to already be past our last frost date. We have added an orphan goat to our menagerie, and are preoccupied with defending our feral cat colony from marauding random Tom cats who are stressing everyone out. We have finally made noticeable progress on both clearing overgrown hedge trees (curses on all Colorado Cypress!) and removing the detritus of 50+ years of farm hoarding. If only we had a trailer or a van to haul things away faster…

December 2023

The farm (or village or off-grid permaculture boondoggle or whatever you call it) has swallowed me whole. I have been dealing with structural (literal structure) issues for the last several months, and have let most everything else slip as a result. A freak rainstorm a month ago exposed some very shady (or was that shoddy? both? definitely both) building practices surrounding gutters, soffits, fascias, and general building envelopes, and I’ve been both remediating water damage and forestalling any further episodes by actually waterproofing exterior walls. I’ve got an absolutely enormous backlog of content for Eating Asturias, but a serious lack of time/effort to deal with it. I’ve fallen in love with both the Horus Heresy series of novels and the works of Roberto Bolaño. I’ve been spending every spare moment engrossed in his final novel, 2666, recently.