cantaloupe??

Accidental gardening has to be one of the best surprises of life. We do a fair amount of composting in our home, our kitchen waste includes fruit & veggies skins & seeds, as well a few other non-meat items - don't want rats ya know. 

Back in early September I was working in my tomato garden and noticed a crazy vine growing out of my compost bin. It looked very similar to a cucumber and since my cukes did nothing this year I thought "great!" As it continued to grow it flowered an amazing amount of blooms which then turned into a small round green ball of sorts. At this point it was losing it's similarity to the cucumber and my intrigue was greatly increasing. I sent the message out to the grass cutters of the home "beware and do not cut near the vine...", everyone got on board and we watched this plant grow.  

I kind of forgot about the crazy vine, until last week when my attention was turned back to the yard, as things are getting a bit cool here. I checked to see what had become of the little green balls when I realized woah! the little green balls were now quite big and were... 

...cantaloupes!

Now, it is really late for anything to be growing in these parts and even during the heat of summer our zone is not known for it's cantaloupes, but hey if mother nature is handing it out, I'll take it.

Now that the cool weather is upon us, I have at least one homegrown cantaloupe ripening in my kitchen. I sure hope it tastes good!  

peanuts for thanksgiving :)

Happy be-lated Thanksgiving Canada from the duckyhouse and family!



And just because no buddy does thanksgiving better than the Peanuts gang!

balance

I have a few million things to share with you about life, craft & our goings-on. My problem over the past year has been time, I feel really short on it, and brain energy for writing up a post is lacking. On top of it I never know if the things that I am working on are blog worthy or not, since this started out as my is supposed to resemble a craft blog. In the end I write nothing and that is not a great way to go for blog followers, sorry :( 

I'm on another big learning curve at this stage in my life. Learning how to balance all the things that are pulling at me: renovation planning, renovating, homeschooling, part time work, home responsibilities and relationships. I've been fighting with them all over the past few years trying to see which of them I can cut out and I finally realize that none of them can be cut out, they all need my attention and that is not a bad thing. Balance is the key and I've learned that balancing takes practice. It seems to me that for balancing to work you have to know when to let go, or walkaway and when to embrace. It reminds me of the "work hard - play hard" line of thinking with a "rest well" twist. I personally struggle with the last part - rest well - but my blogging absence has been teaching me the latter and by resting well, I've learned to walk away and let go.

In a perfect world I would be able to do it all, but I'm sorry folks, I'm just not that girl. While I like to think I can do it all, this 40 something girl has learned that tomorrow seems to take care of itself and has it's own list of things that need to be done adding to the previous days list (Ugh! but lets not go there, okay).

Why I am sharing this? Well, it's always on my mind, to explain my lack of blogging and to update you to where I am at and I think this explanation may be as much for me as it is for you. I need to make sense of my life, I need to journal these thoughts and days for what they are and because I don't think this is the end of blogging for me.

I am dabbling in a bit of everything right now because that is what life is demanding of me. I'm okay with it and I'm adjusting, I'm not kicking and screaming anymore and I feel less whiny about the whole thing. Yay, progress! 

So here's what I would like to do, I'd like to go through my gazillions of photos and chronicle what I can of some of the projects we've been working on for the past couple years that were photographed but were never blogged on. I don't intend on turning this into a home renovation blog, because I will be so happy when things are done, done, done; but I would like to share some of the changes we made because it is where my energy has been for so long. I will also continue you with crafty life posts as inspiration comes. Sound good to you?

One more thing... Happy Fall!  The weather has been beautiful here and the photos are from a recent walk we took through our forest where I followed that squirrel through the woods trying to get a photo of him, he was so fast and when he finally did slow down I snapped and snapped. It was kind of un-nerving as I had this ominous feeling like the big fella was going to jump on me and I would be explaining to the folks at emergency how exactly I got a bit by a squirrel on my head....ha!