Happy happy birthday Maxine!!

Its Maxine’s first birthday today! My little girl is getting so big; it’s hard to imagine our family without her. I tell her often that I’m very glad she didn’t die when Kim ran her over with his truck. I’ll probably never deal with another broken leg again though. Too much can go wrong during recovery and Maxine still favors the leg some after six months. But she’s a special dog and a special case so I’m beyond glad that she’s still with us.

Busy farm day today. I missed the ferrier last week and Dad missed him last month, so he managed to fit us in today. I puttered around the farm this morning waiting, fixed nest boxes for the chickens (the older hens are now laying, five eggs so far, so cool!), got peas, tomatoes, kohlrabi, and the first summer squash out of the garden, and stapled Gram’s screens for her. I got home around noon and started shelling peas and fixing beet relish to can. I’ve got three quart jars of beet relish now and three quarts of pickled beets. They’ll be tasty in February, I keep telling myself that. By five I managed to get a workout in, then down to the farm to feed the chicks feed and veggie scraps, walk fence, check Gram, then home to do peas and now I’m sitting down with a beer and chilling at a quarter to eight.

I haven’t made any pages today or yesterday really, but I’ve been doing character sketches for the second Taylor book and it’s really yielded some interesting stuff. Like I had no idea one of the characters was over 1,000 years old and his mother was fay and kicked out of faerie. He’s a man who honor means everything to, but who has been forced to live without it, doing things that are far from honorable. I’m interested to find out how that works out for him, now that he has free will again. Almost all my characters are damaged in some way, but being around Taylor, my heroine, gives them a chance to heal. Which is surprising since she tends to destroy things around her. I like seeing how the characters interact on the page and exploring the group dynamics and how different characters react differently to the circumstances.

Anyway, busy day today, busy day tomorrow. Life on the farm goes on. Just gotta figure out what to make Dad for dinner. Knowing him, he’ll do just fine with a kohlrabi sandwich.