YIKES!

I knew I was a bad blogger, but two months is sad. A lot has happened and I am not prepared to write it all out now, but in a nutshell: We are doing well...happy and healthy. Henry got a job! Holy Week starts tomorrow. The chicken coop is coming along. The farmer's market starts up again next week. We are headed to Texas at the end of the month. (Yea!) Life is good. Our veggies are doing great in our boxes out front. Henry is quite the wood worker and has made another bird house and a bat house! We've gotten a lot of rain and the pollen here is ridiculous. More soon...we'll add pictures, too. Peace. Em and Hen.

Chicken Run and Spring Crop...

We have had a gorgeous day and have been busy outside. 

Here is the beginning of our chicken coop and run. The run still needs a top and the coop only has a floor. The coop is the house part, totally enclosed, where the chickens sleep at night and lay their eggs. The run is where they hang out during the day to get some sun and scrounge for whatever they can find in the grass/dirt....

...like giant worms such as these which we found in the dirt and moved to our garden.

Here is Henry with his recently turned compost. We were hoping the compost would be done for this Spring planting, but it is still cooking, so we had to buy some this round.

Here I am standing on the floor of the coop. It will be 8Ft by 4ft. The Matthews rules state that each chicken has to have 4sq. ft. of floor space. Our chickens will have 8 sq. ft each. Spoiled chickens!

This is me inside the run. The only piece of wood we bought for this project so far was the floor of the coop. We have enough to frame out the coop, but will have to buy more wood for the walls and roof.

Here is Henry with one of our square foot gardening boxes that we put in the front. These little ones have brussel sprouts and onions.

Here you sort of get an idea of what it looks like. We put two larger square foot gardening boxes on the porch and two smaller ones in front. The ones on the porch have sugar snap peas, two varieties of lettuce, carrots and spinach. So I guess we are growing a salad on the porch.

A top view of one of the smaller boxes. You can just barely see the onions up front.

The twine is for the sugar snap peas to grow on. We thought we were pretty clever with these.

And here we are soaking the seeds. One of the books said it helps to give them a boost in getting ready to grow. I guess we'll see!

Hope you have had a wonderful day, too! Peace! Emily and Henry

More snow....

More pictures of the snow! It is already mostly melted, but it was fun while it lasted.

Henry made this snowman for Carson.  He watched out over things all day.

This is a sign in front of our local hardware store. I think they made some good money on sleds today.

Our house looking cold.

It is fun snow...very fluffy...I think this looks like cotton.

The bug looking chilly...

Love, Em

SNOW!!!

I know we are terrible bloggers,  but the last few weeks have been VERY busy.

I suppose I just needed a SNOW day to catch up!!!

Here is what I saw when I looked out the back door...

And the view out the front...

Judging by the railing on our porch, it looks like about 2 inches, but it is still snowing and will most of today!

Fun, fun! 

Peace, Emily

A fun New Years...

We decided that we would really love to be with friends for New Years, so we called Laura and Ryan Jensen...friends from seminary... to see if we could invite ourselves down for a visit. They agreed and we had a fantastic time. We bundled up on New Years Eve and went downtown to see what all the buzz about the Moon Pie over Mobile was all about. It wasn't amazing, but it did cause buzz for the city so that is good.

This is especially funny because I really don't like moon pies at all! Apparently they throw them from floats at Mardi Gras in Mobile.

That dot in the middle is the moon pie. I think it said 2009 when it hit midnight.

The Jensens in awe of the lit up moon pie.

On New Years Day we made a feast of fried shrimp and fried oyster po boys. I use the term "we" loosely as Ryan did almost all of the cooking. I'm not sure why I was even standing by the oven to be honest. He also made fried pickles and Laura made homemade cole slaw. It was all delicious!

Happy New Year to you all... a special hello to my family who are all in Sante Fe for an exciting celebration. Lots of love to Jenny and Elizabeth! Peace, Emily

A Christmas Miracle...

We found good Mexican food in North Carolina! Hallelujah! We went to a place tonight called La Paz and it was fantastic! $2 margaritas!

This is me pointing to a tamale. It is a tradition in both of our families to eat tamales at Christmas and there is NO place to find tamales here in Charlotte. We found this place that wanted to charge us $33 for a dozen! We said no thanks so I ordered one tonight...very different from Texas tamales, but still delicious.

Henry got fajitas...yum!

We had fun....we'll definitely go back when we need some decent Mexican food to tide us over until we can get back to the best Tex Mex food which can only be found in Texas!

Love to you all, Emily and Henry

Finally......a new post!

We have been VERY busy, so sorry it has been so long with no update. We made a trip to Asheville the weekend after Thanksgiving to see one of our favorite musicians....David LaMotte. He is moving to Australia so this was a farewell concert, for a while anyway. Henry wanted you all to know that someone thought this was such a great picture that they stole it off facebook and put it on their own facebook page. Or something like that. I got confused.

While we were there, we happened to run into (and meet for the first time) Henry's second cousins - Michael and Sarah Montgomery so we sat together. It was a LOT of fun!

Last weekend, we had friends come in from Colorado and Pittsburgh. The girls ran a 5K on Saturday morning and we had a good time hanging out. Caitlin stayed one extra night so we made Christmas candy. Caitlin is in seminary in Pittsburgh and was my co-chaplain last summer at camp.  It was fun and the candy turned out great. We made cherry, strawberry, wintermint, cinnamon, peppermint, buttered rum and lemon. All delicious!

We also popped some crackers after a yummy dinner.

Candy making in progress...

The final product....fun, easy and delicious!

Here is a shot of Leo. The cats have really enjoyed the cold weather and have been extra cuddly. 

And an update on the Christmas decorations... thanks for all the nice comments. We now have presents (way too many) and some beautiful stockings (thank you to our mothers!) 

Peace and love to you this Christmas! Love, Emily and Henry