Christmas on the Farm – 2016

So many parts of this year have been a blur. It’s been a lot of work, a lot of good times, and– every once in a while– the chance to just take a minute to stop and appreciate where I’m at.

Thanksgiving is the kind of crazy holiday where I drive everywhere to see everybody I can, but Christmas? Christmas is for mimosas, and brunch, and playing with toys, and hanging out on the farm.

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My mom comes up on Christmas eve, and we wake up early for champagne and quiche, and everybody opens presents. Including the cat.

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Notable among the gifts this year: Legos for me (because building things with legos is still awesome, even when you’re 35 and licensed to build actual houses with actual power tools), a xylophone for the chickens (because viral videos of chickens play xylophones is a thing), and a calendar with some of the best memories from the last year on the farm for my mom…

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Also, one of these fun little drones, which in theory means I could take some beautiful aerial shots of the farm…

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In reality, it’s going to take a lot of practice because most of what I did the first day I got it was to try and get it down from all the places it got stuck.

 

But I did get one good aerial shot of the farm in winter before losing control of the drone crash landing it in a snowbank.

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So… I’ve got a little work to do on piloting, but maybe come Spring we’ll have more luck. Or I’m just going to get a lot more tree-climbing practice in.

However, for the moment I’m enjoying one of my very favorite Christmas traditions

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Unwrapping and reading the books I bought myself earlier this month!

I’ve read four of the five so far, and this has been my favorite:

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And there’s one other present I gave myself just before Christmas this year…

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(That is if you consider spending 5 hours painting cabinet doors after work every night for a week a gift…)

I mean, the real “present” here is that I can’t see the mess behind those doors anymore, and I’ve made just a little more progress on the kitchen before the end of the year. More on that coming soon, but right now I’m taking some time with my books and my lists, dreaming up all of the projects I’ll tackle in 2017.

17 Responses

  1. You’re a barefoot hoot! Enjoy your books and chill time. The 6 year old just got back today so the gifts are unwrapped and he and his Dad are currently alternating between Crayola marker sprayer and Snaptronics (learning about electronics thing). Me? Headed upstairs with a drink and a book !

  2. So happy to see your post! Checked your site this morning because I was jonesing for an update on Kit and Black Feather Farm! Nothing new found, but hours later, here you are…thx for sharing the latest…

  3. WOW! Love this whole post 🙂 Love the cat and his ribbon, love the gifts, love the drone footage, love the barefoot climbing, love hearing your partner in crime filming you, and love the kitchen progress! Merry Christmas & Happy New Year Kit!

  4. Good to see your post late last night, thought I’d wait to read it this am while over a little bean juice. Your kitchen cupboard door etc. finish quality time before Christmas was well spent. Sans a backsplash, receptical/switch plates,base cove it looks fairly finished and turned out nice and bright (no dark cealing) – open and huge with lots of counter room for canning, proccessing honey etc. You folks have much more snow on the ground than us and is to be expected with the lakes and your proximity to the origination of many winter storms. What little snow we had left here is about melted off with last weekends temp run in the high 40’s with sun. What ice we had isn’t really safe for ice-fishing anymore so we are, like many this time of year, planning 2017 projects and working on inside winter ones….and chillaxing and playing with toys, I’m so looking forward to the nugs on the xylophone thing w/sound. We are rigging our fishing kayaks on a dime, for Fla. gulf coast spring salt fishing trip complete with diy fabbed cut down trolling motors, GPS/fish Graphs/lights and building a four place kayak trailer w/lockable storage area under the racks.
    You’ll have a ton of fun w/the drone, I tried talking my son into starting a side business with his dji phantom 3 standard (factory refubished) he’s had for months and thought it would be a good idea but he keeps quite a bit on his plate as is. He ended up taking his drone apart drilling holes in it and installing some range extender antenna. He brought it out to my ranch running it with a downloaded app on his IPAD connected to the controller and blew my mind away with what it would do. It takes off in auto or manually, it will lock onto something w/camera and follow it around. If it gets out of control range it’s built in program with bring it back home to where it took off and land. He also took a sherical globe 360 shot of my place running footage through an app for that and sent it to me…cool. With lots of battery left he ran it out from my place 16,900 ft. and back which totally amazed me, almost 3 miles. They’re farmers around here that use them for checking farm crops and what not already. I’ve rambled enough…sorry, can’t wait to hear of your new items on 2017’s list….

    cheers 🙂

  5. Yea!! You are alive. 😉

    Barefoot climbing a tree. 😮 HA!!

    Yea for progress on your kitchen. Love the photo of your kitty.

    Happy New Year!!

  6. I love to see your updates. Xylophones for the chickens? Oh my gosh, I have to get one for mine!

    Have a Happy New Year! And be careful up in the trees because I am guessing you might have to go up there again 🙂 !

  7. Oh, and as an aside, I also got a xylophone for my chickens as a Christmas gift. Judging by the number of those I saw posted on chicken groups over the past few days I’m thinking there was a major spike in xylophone sales this year

  8. Welcome back 🙂 I’ve entered your website into the address bar of my internet every day since your last post, eagerly anticipating any updates on the farm. Yeah, I totally sounds like a creeper now… Anyway, glad you’re back here and that your Christmas went seemingly well. Happy New Year!

  9. This is a great post. So glad I came across it and I am inspired to capture more than just faces on Christmas mornings. I focused so much on the house and getting everything tucked away. I even got a storage unit at http://www.CommercialSTORAGEBirmingham.com to store furniture that was in the way after putting up the mammoth tree. They are always so much bigger in the house than they look at the tree farm. LOL!

  10. Just getting a chance to get caught up…my son received a $100 drone for Christmas from a family friend and I, not him, decided to learn how to use it. Being a very cheap version of a drone, it does NOT hover well…first time I put it up it took off on me. Directly towards my neighbors pond. I am outside in flip flops and baggy sweats that were falling down as I was running thru the bramble patch separating our properties, praying it didn’t land in the pond. It sat not 2 feet from the water’s edge. Yours looks much nicer than ours. LOL Have fun with it and the kitchen is looking AWE-SOME!

    1. I don’t think mine was that expensive! But there’s definitely a knack to learning how to fly them!

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