Update

With spring right around the corner it's time to think garden. Last weekend I went to a meeting for the local community greenhouse project. They've got a near wholesale price on the materials and great design ideas, and while it's true that I'd like nothing more than to build a state-of-the-art greenhouse, it's also true that I have other uses for what would amount to a couple thousand dollars. When I built our first greenhouse about six years ago, I had to buy a 20' x 100' roll of greenhouse plastic when I only needed about a fifth of that. My plan, then, is to go with what I've got. For a couple hundred bucks in materials I can build a very basic greenhouse (12' x 32') and use the plastic I've got to cover it not once but twice (8 years worth). I'll use the greenhouse project folks to buy enough polycarbonate panels to make some nice cold frames to go inside the greenhouse for the winter.

I been slowly finishing the drywall returns on the windows upstairs. I looked into buying a sander that attaches to a shop-vac so I could finish the windows downstairs without covering everything we own with a layer of joint compound dust. But then I read a suggestion that was worth a try: Sand with one hand and hold the shop-vac hose underneath. For someone doing this sort of thing professionally, I suppose this arrangement would get tiresome, but for what I've got to do it worked like a charm.

Chickens are loving the weather. I've got to fence them in some time soon. We're getting about a dozen eggs a day. Half for us. Half for the neighbors. And every now and then we give a dozen to friends.