Garden overdose

This summer is just rolling along - it kind of feels like I'm being "rolled over". There haven't been too many quiet relaxation hours since the snow melted.

I have accomplished, finally, purchasing a house in Winnipeg for the kids to live in while they go to school there for the next few years. The actual deed was much harder to do than I had anticipated. By month two of searching, viewing, and bidding on (unsuccessfully) houses all over southwest Winnipeg I had begun to mutter under my breath "How can it be so hard to buy a house in a whole city of freaking houses?" I think I was even talking in my sleep - when I actually managed to get to sleep. This has not been a low-stress summer.

But, as I said, that's all behind me now and possession day is the 12th of August - in plenty of time for the kids to get settled before their classes start. The girls are enrolled at the U of M for this fall and Mitchell will have to wait for what he wants to take at Red River College next year. He admitted that the extra year was a good thing as he wasn't 100% sure if he still wanted to take computer graphics after all. But, he still wants to be in the city! It doesn't make sense to either one of his parents that he would rather work for minimum wage there than stay in Saskatchewan and rake in the money with an oil patch job for the year. You can't tell them anything when thy're 20 and invincible! Oh well, the main thing is that he will work for the next year, and if he's not sure about school, the more contact he has with other ideas, the better.

At the moment I'm trying to stay on top of my garden produce. I always plant one, but success is not guaranteed. 2006, although very dry, seems to be outstanding for vegetable production. There is no way we can eat it all ... and it just keeps coming and coming and coming. Glen and I plan to be away this weekend at a camping weekend with my family, so I've offered the kitchen and supplies to the daughters to come and pickle to their heart's content. Sandy took me up on it right away because she is trying to unload belongings and she has boxes of jars from her "canning phase" that she wants to be rid of. She is happy with the opportunity to come out to the farm, fill the jars, and leave them, knowing full well that if she ever wants some of the produce, she can come right back and get it with no guilt attached.

The rest of the summer is stacked with committments: move furniture to WPG next weekend and arrange for the rest of what we need there, home to get harvest underway, ship the feeder cattle we've been finishing off all summer, and haul the bales home. Come the long weekend in September we're back into the city to a nephew's wedding and then our son Wayne, and his family are coming to stay with us for a week before they leave the country for her native Australia ... and then there will be the farewells. By the end of September I'll be ready for a padded room - or at least some down time all alone in my own space.