midweek mumblings

We had a nice little rain over the weekend as well as a nice break from  gardening and other homestead chores.  A break from both were much needed and praise be that we didn't get inundated or get any bad weather along with the rains. We so need a  good year from the gardens this season so each time I hear of bad weather I wish it on to someplace other than here.

The gardens are doing well thus far.  Everything in the ground is up now with the exception of my Asian long beans  of which only one sprouted, grew three inches and promptly keeled over and died.  I threw some corn and squash in its place and they are doing fine. Okra is a bit slow to come up but it is there and growing. I  am going to pick up a bit more okra seed  on the next town trip and plant it as we enjoy our okras both a food dish as well as a coffee substitute.  We are now harvesting, turnips, greens, salads, broccoli,  strawberries   and peas. We should also be picking our first cucumbers,  and  cabbage this week both from  the greenhouse and some rhubarb should also be ready.

I am now a school girl again.  It is something I have pondered and tossed around in my head for a couple years. Though I am trained in nursing,  it is not something I can do again on a full time basis. No place in their right mind would hire me because of health issues and I know that while I can still do it, my body would revolt  and it simply wouldn't be worth the pain it would put me in. The economy does not seem to be getting any better  and if anything is on a road straight to the toilet if the pump monkeys  would stop pumping and printing.  Employment here in the mtns is few and far between so finding a puny manual labor job that can pay our few bills has proven to be a difficult task but we still need to have a small income  to keep afloat.  As much as we  would like to think we could keep growing the gardens and sell  extra in a market  atmosphere, it too has proven to be difficult to provide all our own food let alone have enough extra to sell and make enough money to live on

As a kid I wanted to be an educator or doctor.  Med school is still at 40 out of the question and I no longer believe in our system of public education. We have no plans of relocating unless absolutely necessary so getting a degree in education would be pretty useless where there are no real alternative forms of school to go and teach in.  The medical field  however is still one of the fields that is growing and will continue to do so over the next several years. With the new goobermint health care overhaul   medical records, billing and transcription are  fields that are expected to grow exponentially  so I  have enrolled full time   in a degree program for this field.  

School starts today so if on occasion I miss a few days of bloggin it is for this reason and keeping up with things on the homestead.   We are coming in to our busiest time of the year around the farm and I will  be trying to adjust to being a school girl again, something I haven't been in about 15 years now. It should be interesting for sure.