Plan it, and it will rain...

We're all set up for the big BBQ, and it's started to lightly rain. A perfect day in the pacific northwest. More updates as the evening progresses...

Here we are a few hours later. I think the final headcount was 25 people. Naturally, it continued to rain most of the evening, but everyone seemed to have a good time anyway. Meat was grilled, mead was spilled, dogs ran amok, and Stella frowned at all those hard-hearted guests who didn't bother to feed her.

The rain tapered off enough for the night shift to sit around the fire and help us quality-control check the beverages. We never did get around to making smores.

Here I am, being mocked for drinking water! As you can see by the droplet on the camera lens, the rain came & went the rest of the night. We ended up going lights out around 2:30.

And the Seven Trees inaugural shindig's final departing guest got to gather her own souvenir eggs. Tubby, Neil & Boldy weren't too thrilled with the interruption, but that's a hen's life!

Our thanks to everyone who braved the weather and long drives to eat, drink and be merry with us. If we manage to recover from this shindig soon, we might actually start planning another one!

Another rainy day!

Here are a few pics of Seven Trees' goings-on, or lack thereof. We're still on the garden-prep trip. Lots of digging, compost mixing, seeding, watering. Except for today. It finally rained.

Here's the crew on a grazing field trip, courtesy of the new ElectroNet fencing. It's a mesh with little stick-in fiberglass posts that is connected to the main hotwire. This way we can let them get to areas that aren't perimeter fenced yet. When I went in to close it up for the night they all had gigantic grass-bellies!

A wonderful new tool for the mead-making part of our "brewery" - a floor corker. There is a doohickey that compresses the corks right as another doohickey pokes the cork into the bottle. With this we can use a better quality cork, which is important for meads which are usually cellared for a long time. Oh yeah...that's heather mead getting corked. A really sweet mead, with a gallon of honey in a 5 gallon carboy. I added dried heather flowers and plant tips for a historical recipe with medicinal qualities.

And Crichton the sleeping wonder cat! According to our calculations, he manages about 19 hours of sleep indoors, with an unknown amount outside. It's a hard life!