I don’t think this is my first “Catching Up” post, and it probably won’t be my last.  I promised myself that when all the holiday parties were over (I attended nine get-togethers between Dec. 20th and Jan. 2), I’d get back to blogging regularly.  So I’ll start by catching up on the past couple months.

Angel and I created a new web site for our webmaster business, to try to get the word out a bit and answer some of the common questions people have.  I’ve been telling people for years that I don’t do web design, so now that she’s taking care of that end of it, we need to let people know that’s changed.  Along with info about our services, we’re also going to be offering some free stuff.  She’s created a whole bunch of background images for use with PowerPoint, and they could also be used as desktop backgrounds or for other purposes.  I’m also writing up some guides to help people get better rankings on the search engines, and I’m planning to do other tutorials on things web site owners can do for themselves.  I’ll be writing more about that here.

The chickens are managing the cold weather just fine, though they don’t come outside very much.  They definitely don’t like the snow, but the sunlight brings them out for short periods.  The Ameraucana, which quit laying eggs a couple months ago when the temperatures first dropped, has started laying again already, so we’re getting green eggs again.  That’s good, because the brown egg layers have dropped off somewhat, so we’re down to 3-4/day.  The Leghorn is still churning out 6-7/week.  She’s a tiny little egg factory.

There’s not much garden news this time of year.  We picked the last of the beans and cabbage and dug the sweet potatoes right before frost, and pulled all the remaining plants for the compost pile.  The sweet potatoes produced almost nothing; we planted them too late and they don’t like cool, wet weather.  We finally got garlic planted in mid-December, which is pretty late, but it may do okay.  A few hard frosts in a row killed off the Swiss chard way back in November, which was disappointing, since I’ve been able to use it past Christmas some years.

Seed catalogs have arrived, but I don’t really have the fever yet.  Morning temperatures of -5° might have something to do with that.  One of these days we’ll get a warm spell, and I’ll start itching to plant something.

I got rid of my small truck (yes, just a couple months after replacing the back window; good thing I didn’t spend much on that) and got a small car to replace it.  More on that in another post with pictures and a cautionary tale.

I’m looking forward to my Latin class, but getting a little nervous too, because I’ve never really “taught” before, and I don’t usually go around looking for opportunities to speak in front of groups of people.  I think it’ll go okay, though.  I’ve got my first lesson plan sketched out, and I think class will start next week, as soon as I get anyone to tell me they prefer a particular day of the week.