The Christmas Coop Scoop

Count your chickens before they melt!

The lumber delivery...

Dogs inspect the wood...

It will do...

The deck gets assembled next door at our son Andy's place where he has a fully equipped tool trailor...

Transporting the deck to our yard...

Cory lays the deck while Cairn enjoys the winter sun...

Alec put in a bunch of solo building hours over New Year's...

It was Alec's idea to mount this old rooster on the chicken coop - it was part of the weather vane on the old barn - it survived that big fire!

The ghost of Christmas future...

Our son Andy donated some roofing shingles from his business...

Kaitlyn cutting the shingles...

She's one cute chick!

The Independent Man...

Last week our son-in-law Cory spearheaded the building of a chicken coop for Miller Mountain as a Christmas gift for my husband, Garry, (Garry had a coop started in our old barn that burned down in 2002...) and rallied the help of his wife, our daughter Kaitlyn, and our son Alec, who was home from California for the holidays. (I was the official documenter of the project... :^) We will be getting a dozen laying hens in March, and Garry plans to purchase some guineafowl, as well, and eventually some meat birds.

What a fabulous gift! We're all looking forward to an eggcellent New Year!!

Home

(the beginnings of a mail art project...)

So happy to be settling back into my home in Woolwich (I will continue to maintain my studio in downtown Portland). I've been busy nesting - cleaning, painting walls, de-cluttering, rearranging - pottering about with gray squirrel energy. Already I feel less scattered and more rooted. Fun as it was to have an apartment in town, I was constantly packing bags and moving between three places. I felt at times like the scarecrow from the Wizard of OZ, slayed open on the ground after being attacked by the flying monkeys...

"Some of me is over here! Some of me is over there! I'm all over the place!"

Right now two places feels like plenty.
Happy Autumnal Equinox, all!

A New Old House

in the basement...

raspberries...

a shed for Kait's pottery studio and Cory's carpentry...

wooden pegs on an old tree for a clothesline...

a field of lupines...

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. I've been travelling, visiting family, working and vacationing - taking a bit of a blog break. Here are pics of my daughter Kaitlyn giving me a tour of her new old house on Little Cranberry Island. Kaitlyn and her husband Cory are making the commitment to live on the island year round, and will be closing on their house in September. It's a very sweet place - like something out of a movie set - built in the twenties. It's been empty for several years, just waiting for new life. Kait and Cory plan to have a big garden and will raise chickens, a goat, and pigs (good thing they have that bacon drawer! :*)

I did several portraits while out on Little Cranberry and will post about that soon. We are finally getting some real summer weather, and I am enjoying every bit of it! Hope that you are, too!