Garden Update

We've lived in South Carolina for two and a half years. Time has just flown by. It really doesn't seem like that long ago that we got here, but so much has happened that it has to be true. Genevieve will be three at the end of the summer and she was only four months old when we moved. Aaron turns one in just a bit over a month. This last year especially has just flown. It was like each day was slow but then suddenly weeks and months had just disappeared.

We haven't done that much traveling since we moved here. I site grad school income limitations for that travesty as both Bill and I love to travel, but that's as it is. Let's just say I've gotten very settled in and very used to the weather as it happens to be around here. And let me tell you, that weather is glorious. The winters aren't that cold. The summers aren't that hot, at least not compared to other places. It's humid as can be in the summers, but calms down late fall through early spring. I find I actually like the way the humidity makes me feel and I've been here long enough that the fact that I'm always about ten seconds from breaking out in a sweat regardless of my body temperature has just become normal. That probably sounds awful to everyone out west but you'd be surprised how fast that becomes normal and okay. It happens to everyone, so we're all in the same boat. People are more understanding of it.

Anyway, the beautiful weather means we have maximum opportunity for awesome gardening. I'm a total novice in that area, but it's hard not to grow things here. They just flourish. My garden is out of control at the moment. I saw a picture of my SIL's container garden today, and she is a rather skilled and knowledgeable gardener, and all the plants are just a few inches tall. The difference in weather makes such a huge difference. Her garden will be incredible in a few months too, but mine just got a two-month start already. My tomatoes are literally three to four feet tall and so heavy with tomatoes I'm having to prop them up beyond the cages they're in. I had to tie them all together so the end one stopped falling over from the weight. The strawberries that I expected to not grow that many berries this year are doing surprisingly well. We have a critter of some kind swiping the ripe berries unfortunately, but hopefully soon we'll get a few for us. Today I discovered one of our pickling cucumbers looks to be ready to pick. There are gobs of tiny ones on the plants too, but this one is fully grown.

 I did make a few mistakes with my garden. I initially planted the cucs in the same box as the strawberries and sugar snap peas. That was just way too much in there. I ended up moving them and they're much happier now. Next year I'll build more boxes and let the strawberries have their box to themselves. I planted the carrots and onions and lettuce in the shadow of the tomato plants. It didn't occur to me when I put them in that the tomatoes would get so huge and block the sun. So those will probably not do so well. They're still alive but virtually not growing. We'll see what happens throughout the summer. Apparently I also planted some cooler weather plants that won't do well when it gets hot, but it's already hot and they're okay, so the mistake isn't too bad for now.

But regardless, we are going to have more tomatoes than we know what to do with, and tons of them are going to be ripe when I am in Utah, so I need to figure out what Bill can use them for and the best ways to process them. The cucumbers show tons of promise. The sugar snap peas are already prolific. Hopefully we'll be eating off those all summer.

Spencer dumped a whole pile of onion seeds in one spot by accident when we were planting, so we have a little forest of onions and he and Genevieve snack on them when we go water the garden. That may be my favorite part of my garden this year. Spencer, my poor little stressed out food son, is snacking on onions and mint leaves and talking about when the tomatoes get ripe and contemplating whether he'll try the peas. They're just little steps here and there, but for me, who has struggled through with him since he was 18 months old with the food troubles, these are huge forward steps. Things are getting easier for him with food in the most incremental way. I don't know how many times I've wished for a magic button to just make it all work for him, but the small steps feel good.

My little side hobby

I build furniture. It's a hobby that evolved out of a necessity five years ago that is just starting to grow into something bigger.

A little background. When Bill and I got married our first apartment was furnished so we used our excess wedding money to buy random other things we needed to setup a house, but no furniture. When we moved from there we had a bed and two saddle stools to our name. That summer I was not working full time due to a series of events surrounding Bill and my search for internships. We would be moving back to a normal, unfurnished apartment after that time and the lack of furniture was weighing on my mind. Around that time I happened upon a new blog, ana-white.com, that had knockoff wood plans of Pottery Barn furniture. That blog has evolved over the years to include a huge readership and thousands of plans, but I've followed it from just months after its founding. I still love it.

I had done some wood and metal working in middle school and my freshman year of high school, so I wasn't unfamiliar with building things, but just little boxes and pens and wind chimes and things like that.

Anyway, I decided at the time that building furniture sounded like a fun challenge, so I took it on. I guess I could have just shopped at DI and Walmart and other places I could afford to find some furniture for our place, but I chose to learn to build stuff myself instead and that has actually become a trademark decision for lots of aspects of my life.

Five years later I am much more skilled at this hobby. I can design my own plans now. I use other's ideas as a base, but rarely make exactly the same thing as others. Instead I fit furniture to the needs we have and the style I like. It's an awesome hobby. I've built loads of different things: tables, chairs, a pantry, several beds including our current one, a porch swing, a kitchen table, and many other things. Some we still have, some didn't make it through all the heavy use. My biggest limitations are access to some expensive tools I don't currently own as well as the cost of quality wood. Oh, and fitting my efforts around my three kids, though they love to help, so that's not as hard as I would have thought. I've also built all the easy things now for the most part and I'd rather build things that will last for years now instead of just to fill a need that will probably not last. My expectations for the quality of the final product have gone way up over the years, so I don't build things as cheaply anymore.

Building is a deeply ingrained part of my life and something I miss when the break between builds gets too big. Lately that hole has been filled in a way I never expected. People have started to commission me for projects they need built. It's only happened a couple times but I'm thoroughly enjoying it and it's totally filling my need to build when I can't do it for me.

Earlier this year I looked very closely into expanding the work I do for my job into some other areas and possibly walking away from my current job that has filled a need for the last decade. I nearly jumped head first into it, but I had some trouble committing to going down that path because I just don't love editing or designing for other people as much as I like some other things. If people would pay me to go hiking or play sports or read books or run, or play with my kids, heck, I'd be all over that. But editing or designing PowerPoints and teaching people how to make better decisions? Yep, I'm skilled in those areas and I find a decent level of fulfillment there, but sometimes it just seems like entirely too much work and not enough enjoyment. And it feels like I do entirely too many things that feel like work and not enough that feel like fun. And since I spend my days with three little buddies that focus entirely on how to best have fun, I feel like I'd like some of that too. Haha! Well it turns out that there is something that I consider fun, building furniture, that others will pay me for. So hey, I'm trying it out a bit. No plans to quit my day job, but you never know what might happen. Though I can pretty much guarantee that if I do more of this that some new tools will make their way into our possessions. Hahahaha!

So who knows, maybe I will pull the trigger on those other work ideas sometime and maybe I won't. Maybe I will start doing a lot of building for friends, maybe I won't. For now the few projects I've done so far are fulfilling and we'll see what happens. Suffice it to say I'm open to requests.

The benefits of grad school

Being in a PhD program is a mixed bag. Your time isn't really your own. If Bill's advisor tells him he needs something right away, Bill leaves and goes in to take care of it. He has spent numerous nights and weekends at the lab doing extra projects. We survive on a pittance of an income. We dream about someday actually building a savings and saving for a house and not qualifying for government programs and little things like that. :)

However, in our particular instance there are some really good things about being in grad school. Clemson is a lovely place to live. There are mountains nearby with great hiking, several lakes if we want to do water sports, a fantastic ward at church. On a regular basis Bill actually works pretty awesome hours, which I know is totally different from some grad programs. He has a ton of flexibility, so if I need his help during the day, he can switch things around to help me out. He works a pretty normal schedule each day, in his case going in pretty early and coming home at about 4PM. I keep reminding myself this is a total oddity so enjoy it to the fullest as it will probably never happen again.

One of the best perks we get for being here is that Bill's lab is a wind tunnel that has just about every tool you could imagine. We have borrowed a number of tools to improve our yard and work on woodworking projects, etc. Most recently Bill told me that they have a burn pile full of perfectly usable wood that they've discarded after various research was done with them. So in the last few weeks Bill and I have gone scavenging and been able to salvage a bunch of it and put it to good use.

We found a rickety old swingset in our backyard when we moved here and put up a couple swings, but it was really not very usable, so I used some of the scrap wood I got to build a new one. For the price of a bunch of hex bolts we have a working swing set that is much sturdier. I'm actually going to build a second one with a longer top beam so I can fit three swings on it and use the one I already built for something else.

After I built the first swing set a friend asked me to build some stuff for her, including a porch swing, which got my gears turning and I was able to find a plan for a porch swing that I could build with more of my scavenged wood, so I've been slowly building that of late. All I have left to get for that is the chain to hang it, and I need to put a few more coats of oil on it. So it is very close to done. I love how it is turning out. The stain is my favorite color. I've tried other colors but always gravitate back towards this one, red mahogany. I will hang it on the first swing set as soon as it is done.

So it had been a while since I had built anything because I didn't have the funds to get enough wood to build any of the projects I have in my queue. It was a huge blessing to find out about that wood at Bill's lab. I figured out what I spent and I had to get $20 worth of bolts for the swingset. I'm $32 into the porch swing hardware and will need probably about $15 more for the chains. I need to purchase one piece of wood for the second swing set I'm building plus another $20 worth of bolts. So for less than $100 I will have a swing set for my kids, a porch swing, and a stand to hang it on. I can't buy even one of those things for that price. If I were interested in building to sell to people, I could make tons of money on these. I do a bit of that here and there, but not as my job because fitting it in around the three kids is a bit complicated.

Folks, this is why I got into building in the first place. It is so stinkin' affordable. I can have some of the things I want on the budget I have. I've taken to picking up a few pieces at a time for these projects so it doesn't feel like $100 dropped on them either. $10 here, $10 there, awesome new usable pieces. Seriously, this brings me so much contentment. I'm doing the same thing for a console table I intend to build out of nicer wood once I accumulate all the parts I need. There's a slowly growing pile of wood next to Bill's side of the bed in our room. I get a strange sort of satisfaction seeing it grow. lol.

And it's things like this that make the grad school slog a little less of a slog. Someday we'll be done and hopefully finances will be a bit better. But for now it's okay. We're happy. We have what we need and some of what we want. It's a good place to be.

It's all gone again

I think I'm a fraud. I've always wanted to be a long-haired girl, and in theory I have been one for a goodly number of years now, but when it comes down to it, I'm really just faking. I have so much hair and it gets so hot and heavy, that no matter how much I love the long ringlets and bouncy curls for the first few minutes after I do my hair, really most days it just ends up in a ponytail, especially here in the south in the summer.

After pulling my hair up into a ponytail and braid for weeks on end, I finally decided I was done. It was time to go back to short, and it has to be short enough that it's not just weighing down on my neck making me hot. So behold, the new haircut. I don't' really love selfies of just me, and haircut pictures always seem to be the worst, but hey, who cares. The cut is cuter in person, but whatevs. Here it is. I kind of wondered if the curls would go away with it as short as it is in the back, but no worries. They're all still there. I have to remember that despite having straight hair until I hit puberty, my hair is definitely curly and not changing anytime soon.

And for the sake of matching and all, actually not for that reason at all, but it just happens to coincide this week, Genevieve got a cute new bob as well. It was my first effort at cutting girl's hair and I'm quite pleased with the result. It is the first time her hair has been cut since she was born, no joke. She had these adorable wispy curls down to the middle of her back, but she really needed them trimmed up so the thickness higher up was more uniform. She could rock any hairstyle, but hey, I didn't ruin it and that's just lovely. :)

Getting stronger

I ran my first five-mile run since before I got pregnant with Aaron this evening. I figure that was somewhere around 18 months ago. It felt amazing. I ran an 8:34 pace, which is a whole lot better than where I started back in January, but with room to go towards where I was speedwise back in my running hey day. I'm very pleased.

It got me thinking, because there was a time in my life, not too many years ago, though it's beginning to feel further away than I would like, where five miles was a standard length run I did several nights a week without thinking anything of it, not a huge accomplishment that has taken me several months to achieve. I started counting and I've run four marathons, one half marathon, one ten-mile race, a bunch of 10k races, and tons of 5Ks. When I was doing all that racing I regularly ran from a 7:30 to 8-minute mile. Thing is, a lot of that kind of went away close to five years ago now when I was about halfway through Spencer's pregnancy. I've been head down pregnant, nursing, with little kids for a good long while now and somewhere in that time running became something I used to do or that I just dabbled in as opposed to something I actively do now and is one of the things that defines me. 

At the beginning of this year I decided that needed to stop and I wanted to find this part of myself again. I started running as a sport in and of itself back in 2001 when I started at BYU and realized that eating brownies and cookies and other amazing delectables that my roommates and I concocted at 3AM every night wasn't doing any favors for my fitness and weight. As I ran to get back in shape I discovered that running made me feel amazing. I'm only 5'2" tall and I've played a lot of sports growing up where my height was a pretty big disadvantage. That's just not the case for running. I found a lot of success, placed in quite a few races, and really reveled in the success I found there. 

So here I am, nearly 15 years later and I've had a few years now where running hasn't played a big part of my life. I would never have thought that would happen after I discovered how much I love it, but it's all good. I like my babies and while having them has done quite a number on my fitness and my body, I wouldn't trade it. It takes a lot of effort to get back in top shape, but that can be an enjoyable process too, at least to see the changes happen. Aaron's pregnancy particularly really did me in. There was this amazing combination of nausea and migraines that just laid me out and I never quite recovered the whole pregnancy. So I really started from ground zero at the beginning of this year trying to build strength and endurance. It has felt like a really long time, but it's only been four months and I've seen amazing changes and results. 

And you know what the best part of all this process is? I had a very full day. Bill and I did a bunch of different things. We were outside a good portion of the day, working hard. Yet when we got the kids in bed, I was only too pleased to go and hop in my running clothes and head out the door. Previously I would have flopped down on the couch exhausted after a full day. The energy levels I'm developing feel so much better than before. For heaven's sake, Aaron, lovely child that he is, woke me up three times last night. That's not normal, but it also isn't that unusual. Someday he will sleep again. Someday he will have all his teeth. I think the two may well go together. But even if he doesn't, I still have the energy to do five miles at the end of a day and not even feel that fatigued. And when all is said and done, that is incredible, because it means that there is more of me to share with my littles, and that makes me very happy. So cheers to getting back in shape, for all the good endorphins I get, for the energy, for the positive effects on my body. It's a good thing all around.