looking back, looking forward...

and trying not to go cross-eyed.

I can't help but feel a sense of ...hmm I don't know what the word is, its not jealousy per se, nor hopelessness, but when I look at what other people have done, how far they have come I can't help but wonder if I will ever get half as far as I want. So occasionally it helps to look back and see how much I actually have accomplished. So here is the list

1 7x7 garden bed
1 2x4 bed in the shade for lettuce
around 50 square feet of planting space is raised stone planter (if only the trees will get on with it and grow. The rest I use for understory planting.
a burgeoning herb garden area
every non dimming bulb in the house is now a CF(it doesn't hurt as much if you replace them as the old bulbs die, which is surprisingly sooner than you think)
a compost pile <-fought hard for this one and it will be well worth it come spring time
a 165 gallon pond (now to get some reeds and water flowers in there)
a damn nice deck where we can sit and enjoy the fruits of our labor
a trellis for grapes

skills I have picked up along the way...
seed saving: beans, lavender, various flowers
carpentry
(I'm leaving gardening off this list because I hardly consider myself even competent)


and my baby steps for this year.
Rain barrel
turn the 7x7 bed into 2 5x10 beds
add another 25 sq ft of bed somewhere
expand and diversify the herb garden
get a cutting of a friend's grapevine and "go for it"


On the gastronomical front
last week I made carrot soup on sunday, I liked it, but it did not meet with great acceptance. This week I decided to play it safe and go the french onion route. I enlisted my daughter's help last night to make it and this morning she kept asking if we were having it tonight with dinner...a good sign. Its my wife's favorite, so I think I'm pretty safe. And one other thing...Its devastatingly cheap. A little butter, a little oil a couple pounds of onions. Top it with some old bread and a little cheese. We had a block of mozzarella in the fridge and some french bread that is about to go crouton, so all I needed was $2 worth of onions...film at 11