living in blue

Guess what? It turns out that, in addition to eating and shitting, chickens also lay eggs!

I'd nearly forgotten.

How can I describe my joy at finding this egg? This perfect, tiny, blue egg. Blue! It's really blue! It doesn't look blue, but trust me, it is. The five eggs laid since then have also been in shades of blue and green.

In other news, we have walls now. Real walls! We had a crew in the house for three days, while Jeremy was at Rudolf Steiner College for a teaching conference, and the kids and I crashed at a friend's house. I love the walls. Our insulation is made from recycled blue jeans, which was covered with reed fencing, and then plastered over with a mixture of mud and straw. They'll be drying for a few weeks.

My original plan was to paint the walls with a blue pigment, but now I think it would be easier to lay down blue tile and keep the earthy color. And we asked the crew not to wipe away the trowel marks. I like the handmade look.

Living in an A-frame is tricky. I can't exactly hang frames on the wall, because of the angle. It also cuts way down on our usable floor space. I'm trying to think of creative ways to decorate our walls without having to put holes in the plaster. Any suggestions?

I also have a new oven and range. Well, new to me. It was pulled from an old camper, so it's short and tiny, but all four burners work, without pouring out soot and, most likely, carbon monoxide, from inefficient combustion. The oven has an actual temperature dial, too. I won't describe the tricks I had to employ to use the old oven. They'd make your head spin.

The oven is also blue, that weird turquoise-blue from the '50s. Blue seems to be my color right now.

This weekend our friends Tim & Jeanette rented a (blue) house on the (blue) coast, overlooking the ocean (under a blue sky), to celebrate Tim's 40th birthday. We played games, got rowdy, braved the windy beach, and consumed our body weight in fine cheese. (Some of them were blue.)

Dudes, I ate Humboldt Fog for breakfast. With a mimosa. Yowza!

This is our life. Do you ever have that thought, or even say it aloud? This is my life. This is what I do.

I had this thought when our friends Kathleen and Greg came to visit, to card wool, and stuff gnomes for a fundraiser, and by the way, learn to slaughter a chicken. Such is our life that this can happen spontaneously.

After, Kathleen said she felt like a goddess, an Amazon, a wild woman. "I can kill my own meal," she said, in awe.

The dark days are over. We've barely had a winter and people are worried. But I'm just soaking up that bright blue sunshine and dreaming, for the first time this season, of summer.