In which the New Year approaches, and I don't write a "Holiday Card"

Every year we get a few "Holiday Letters from Our Family" in the mailbox.

You know the kind: a 1- or 2-page brag sheet for the most perfect and highly-accomplished family on the planet, disguised as a holiday greeting card, telling about everybody's perfect grades in school, everybody's major promotion at work, etc. etc.

Humbug, sez I.

And yet....

2009 has been a heckuva year. Why, at the beginning of 2009, "Haiku Farm" didn't even exist.

Wow.

If I were the type of person to send a "Holiday Letter from Our Family", this would be a good year to send it!

But I'm not. I'm the type of person who blogs. So, I'm gonna write a blog post about this entire year....because it was really a good one!

January, 2009 Isn't this sweet? An aerial photo of the farm, with our hopes and dreams scribbled all over it. Yup, the barn will go right there....as soon as the Money Fairy klonks us a couple more times.

February 2009: A view of the pasture and house, before the fences were installed.

March, 2009: Good news came in batches! We bought the farm, moved the household, and got a great kid, all in the same week. Willy came to live with us when the ink was still damp on the first mortgage payment.

There was so much work to do. We pruned as much of the orchard with handtools as possible, and then Jim and Willy went to work with the chainsaw.

Building fences seemed to take forever. I pounded so many t-posts that I dreamed about t-post pounders for a month.

We also used Larger Tools to build parts of the fence

April 2009 : We added dozen Minerva Louises to our farm!

May 2009 : We planted a garden, which was not a complete failure, and we apparently totally sidestepped the tomato curse.

Summer 2009 : The horses came home at last!
We had some great parties.

We took some lessons and learned some stuff.

We went camping, and built trails....

...and went camping just to have fun and relax.

August 2009 : things weren't silly enough around here. We got goats.

September 2009 : the First Egg.

Winter 2009: our Minervas produce an average of 9 eggs each day.

We celebrated the winter holidays by toasting with a bottle of Round and Red, Jim's first batch of cherry wine, made from our own orchard cherries. That's a picture of Hana on the label--our roundest and reddest resident.

Didn't you know this already?

Life is GOOD!

Happy New Year!