I Thought The Labour Day Weekend Was Supposed To Be A Holiday

Or "Why I Haven't Been Reading". Instead, I've been busy.

We went away for the weekend, and I haven't worked that hard in a long time, but I had an incredible amount of fun at the same time. Some of my relatives have a farm, and they're in the process of replacing a barn. The destruction has started. We moved the last few things out, and cut back the blackberries that had taken over the outside of two sides of the building. That was a fun job, considering the thorns were going through everything - including skin. I've bathed my two cats and gotten less scratches.

Once the blackberries were removed, then the true destruction started. Out came the crow-bars and the hammers. By the end of the afternoon, everyone had gotten the metal siding off of the two sides and some of the interior braces out, as well as the floor boards. There was also a wasp's nest discovered, although nobody got stung. The actual structure got left for another day (and perhaps some professionals to remove).

I ended up being coached through driving the tractor with the trailer full of trash from the barn most of the way to the burn pile. Given that it's a much slower-moving vehicle, with no other traffic around, I found it less terrifying than attempting to drive a car.

When not doing any of the above - which also included helping to medicate one of their horses - I had either my drop spindle or my spinning wheel going.

That was Saturday. Sunday was a bit of an easier day - slept through the morning chores unfortunately. I'd kind of wanted to participate. Still, got to groom both horses and help to give them a bit of a work-out before cleaning out the paddock and feeding them. Then it was time to go home again and back to the city - taking with me a big bucket of blackberries for jam as well as a couple of dozen farm-fresh eggs.

Monday ended up super-busy as well, though not with working-type things (at least not until really late). After we got home from everything else though, I still had a big bucket of blackberries to deal with and they were starting to go. So, from about eleven until one thirty this morning, I was busy making blackberry jam. Turned out I had just enough berries for the recipe, but the recipe also ended up making an extra jar's worth of jam. Absolutely delicous.

And the trend is continuing even though the weekend is over. This morning, I ended up making a batch of soda bread to eat with the jam. It deserved to be spread on something a bit more special than mere store-bought sliced bread.

All in all, in the past four or five days I've gotten maybe ninety pages read from any novels, and something like thirty from one of my indexing books.