here it comes. the air is suddenly cold in the mornings, slightly damp. i can't stay warm enough at night, and pile on the bedding. a few leaves drift across the patio, a few more each day, though when i look up at the glorious canopy of cottonwood boughs, they are all dark green and shining in the low sunlight ( Read more... )

we're migrating the SR livejournal over to wordpress. i don't have it ready enough to post the address yet, but you are hereby warned! in the next month or so, we will move this journal. LJ is just too ad-ridden and spammy these days, and no longer the community hot-spot that it was four years ago when it made sense to blog here as a community ( Read more... )

( so we are moving much slower on the wall these days, having learned the cost of moving too fast. )

spring is springing. it has stepped in by degrees this year, starting the week after the alarmingly northern freeze. a bit early, and quite a lot dry, but spring nevertheless. the quince behind my office are starting to bloom (photos when they hit full bloom in a couple days) and the forsythia out front are a cascade of living gold. i swear ( Read more... )

we have had a 15-20 foot stretch of wall that we knew needed to be taken down and rebuilt, because it is severely out of plumb. it's out front, near the cottonwood tree, facing the road. it was built by volunteers on a day when none of the regular supervisory types were around to make sure that the plumb was taken into consideration, and sure ( Read more... )

Saturday we had a stellar team of volunteers come out to put in a day on the wall. we finished the front! for a second definition of finished -- the main stretch is completely done up to the south apse, and we installed the package chute for the new mailbox, and filled in the big hole in the wall around that area, which feels VERY good ( Read more... )

okay, so we're not *entirely* done. but wow have we made some progress. the main part of the wall construction is finished.

( photos behind this nice cut )

( autumn coming in the garden )

house meeting last week consisted of canning plum jam until after 11pm, using our nifty outdoor setup. A crew had been canning pickles, chutney, jam, and green bean pickles all day long, but the quantity of plums was so vast that the work kept going right through house meeting.

( film noir version: late night canning party )

That wall that we're building? We've got a stretch around a cottonwood tree where we want to build three linked apses (half-cone shapes) with bancos inside for seating and a little altar in the center. It'll be gorgeous when it's done -- but it'll also be about 12' tall for a few feet. The county says that to get a permit for that, we need to ( Read more... )