I’m tired tonight. More than just tired. I’ll probably head to bed when the kids go to bed.

We started this morning at 5:30 when Will and his friend, Shane, woke up. Sleep overs are fun, except at 5:30 in the morning.

Will and Ben had a great morning spent mostly fighting with each other – got to love brothers. At least by the afternoon they were finally playing nicely together. I’m sure it didn’t help that everyone was up early and didn’t get enough sleep. But that is okay, they will go to bed early tonight, and hopefully sleep in. I told them tomorrow is house cleaning morning, unless they sleep in too late to clean the house – I’ll see if that works. If not, at least we will have a clean house early in the morning.

I took the boys over to Rob and Anna Sawyer’s farm to pick up fresh eggs and a trailer load of horse manure compost. I spent the afternoon spreading compost and getting the garden ready for the spring. It wasn’t as warm out today as I had hoped, but it wasn’t too cold to get some yard work done. I could at least get some chores done while watching the boys run around the yard and the woods behind the house.

I didn’t get any time in the shop, except to build swords for the boys. But that is okay, maybe I’ll get in the workshop tomorrow. Tomorrow should be a nice quiet day – no friends over.

Breakfast is done; the boys are packed and ready to go to their mother’s house. Time to snuggle the dogs on the couch and play games on iPods and tablets.

I figured it would be appropriate to follow a post on renovating the house with ADHD with a post on a completely unrelated (new) project.

Sprouting. Luckily this project doesn’t take much time.

We had periodically purchased sprouts at the store and used them in place of lettuce on sandwiches and for snacks. However, they are expensive, and the quality at the store greatly varies. So, I bought some seeds and tried sprouting in a mason jar. It was amazingly simple.

This time of year, getting greens is difficult. The lettuce at the store is bland. Most of the vegetables have been shipped from the southern hemisphere. Sprouts are a good way to get some variation with little work.

I purchased two Easy Sprout Sprouters from the The Sprout House. They came with a pound of valentines day sprouting seeds each. The process is pretty easy:

1. Take a 1/8-1/4 cup of seeds and soak in a weak bleach solution (1 tsp bleach/1 cup of water) for 15 minutes.
2. Rinse thoroughly.
3. Fill the sprouter with water, covering the seeds.  Soak for 8-12 hours and drain.
4. Rinse and drain two to three times a day.
5. After 3-5 days, the sprouts are ready to harvest. I rinse them and spin them out in a salad spinner and let dry on the counter for a couple of hours before putting in the refrigerator.

Two Easy Sprout Sprouters gives us more sprouts than the two of us can eat. I have decided to wait a day between harvesting a batch and starting a new batch. The home-grown sprouts are much better tasting than the ones you get from the store, and there are lots of choices for sprout seed mixes.

In a (mostly) unrelated topic (only related somewhere in my mind), I started seedlings for the garden this spring. I started the pepper plants this weekend.  I’ll start the tomato plants in a month or so. I’m trying to get a few more plants growing in the garden than I did last year, but not making any more garden space.  I’m planning on building trellises this spring and growing the plants up. More about that as the spring gets closer.

Throughout my life I have, periodically, attempted to keep a journal. The attempts rarely last very long, and the entries are very sporadic. The few journals I have are interesting to go back and look at; they help me reflect on what I have done over the years. I wish I had been more consistent with keeping a journal. That is where this blog fills in.

I started this blog on November 3rd, 2010, over 2 years and 3 months ago. I started it after returning to my house in Preston after having moved out for a year in the process of my divorce. There used to be a blog on this site from before the divorce (from 2004 to 2005), but none of that information still remains here (though I can find some of it on web.archive.org).

So far it has been a pretty good undertaking.  This will be the 214th post on the blog. I have written 60,688 words in this blog (including this post), with an average of 290 words per post. I have printed two books from this blog, so it won’t be lost as a journal. I’m sure as blogging goes, this isn’t a great accomplishment, but I am content with the progress. 

I have started encouraging (or as they would say, forcing) the boys to write in their own blogs. Although they haven’t been the only ones to write in their blogs (a handful of the entries are from either myself or their mother), they have pretty impressive numbers.  Will has written 3,172 words, with an average of 30 words per post.  Ben has written 2,126 words, with an average of 29 words per post.  They both have a printed book each from their blogging last year.

Targa and Tucker took off again yesterday morning. This time they got out of the yard. Tucker has gotten out of the yard before, but I think this is the first time Targa has run through the invisible fence. They have been gone overnight – this is the second time they have been gone overnight (the last time, they took off on a walk in the woods). I don’t usually worry if one of them is gone by himself – alone they don’t go far. But together they can go for hours.

I think it is a combination of Tucker being a beagle, and the invisible fence covering too much of the yard.  For most of the yard, the invisible fence follows the property boundaries, even when there is no natural barrier for the dogs (e.g. a stone wall).  It makes it difficult to train Tucker to the boundaries in the back of the yard – he is pretty good at not approaching the boundaries when someone is watching him.

Yesterday, Will and I rerouted the invisible fence. It now only will allow the dogs in about half of the yard. It now follows a stone wall (a natural boundary for the dogs) for about half of the boundary. Hopefully this eliminates the section of the yard that Tucker has been escaping from. We also will build a fenced (real fence, not just invisible fence) section of the yard to let the dogs run in when we can’t watch them outside.

Our friends, Rob and Anna are re-homing their dog, Dillon, because he isn’t getting along with their horses. Rob asked if I wanted Dillon (he offered free eggs along with the dog – I was heading over to pick up eggs from their farm yesterday). I told him (joking) that we would trade Tucker for Dillon. When he told Anna what I said, she thought for a second and then said that they would rather keep Dillon.

The boys’ blog books arrived today from Lulu.com. They are perfect – the boys immediately took them out and read them. And Will didn’t even complain about having to write in his blog tonight.

Now I feel obligated to write in my blog.  I have taken a nice 10 day vacation between posts. I think it was a combination of the cold weather, maybe being a little burned out of writing, and the stress of worrying if (thanks to congress failing to do their job) there will be a furlough of federal employees starting this April.

Susanna has started school again – her last semester. That means that she won’t be free to work on house projects during the week. And probably not much during the weekends as homework starts to pile up.

We have made some progress on Will’s room. I have most of the drywall up, and the window repaired/repainted. I’ll try to get pictures up later this week.  I hadn’t spent much time at all in the workshop – I’ve been waiting for the weekend temperatures to get above freezing. Working on the power tools when it is too cold outside sucks. Even after I get the workshop warmed up, the heavy tools are still bitter cold to the touch.

The weather today gives hope for warmer weather. I know by Sunday we will be back into winter, but hopefully not for that much longer.

Or, a visit to Madame Tussaud’s museum. Of course that isn’t all we did. But it is most of what we did. We were a bit slow getting out of the house (we couldn’t find Targa’s invisible fence collar that had been misplaced – but don’t worry the dogs found it while we were gone and chewed it up), but made it by lunch time. Will picked Mexican for lunch.

After lunch we walked through the museum. We then walked back to the train station, stopping at the New York Library for a short break (in the kids section). We were back in New Haven by dinner time (an exciting dinner at IKEA), and home before bed time.