What do I do with my free time?

For those who don't know, we moved in November. I heart our new house! One of the many reasons I like it so much is the backyard. At our old house, the only way to get to the backyard was through the garage. It was also very shady - my attempts at growing veggies all failed. Partly because of the shade, and partly because I never went back there to water the plants.

Our new backyard gets plenty of sunshine and I have been reaping the benefits. We've been able to pick lettuce whenever we want salad. No more wasting wilted lettuce! The picture above is my first harvest of snow peas... yes, all 6 of them. I plan on plucking more off the vines later this week, hopefully eventually to have enough for some yummy stir fry.

Here are more pictures of my garden!

Over the weekend, we went to a composting class. I plan on starting my own worm bin this week and throwing all our peelings and dealings in for the worms to eat. Free fertilizer!

Still here...

I feel the need to explain my hiatus. Around the end of March, I broke out in some unexplained rash that was both painful and itchy. It was mostly on my hands and then on my arms. And then it spread all up and down my legs.

After some internet research I determined it was contact dermatitis aka poison oak. However I don't know if it was actually poison oak that I rolled around in since I haven't ever seen the culprit.

I was miserable... couldn't sleep, couldn't concentrate, the discomfort was great. Topical steroids didn't help. Tried every OTC medicine possible. Tried acupuncture and herbal topicals. Tried homeopathic remedies. Nothing worked and it just kept spreading. This lasted for about 3 weeks before I saw the dr. again and she put me on oral steroids.

The steroids helped but for about a week after I stopped them I encountered various side effects... blurred vision, headache, restlessness, feelings of weirdness i think i'm in the twilight zone...

Anyway, I'm almost back to normal. When the busy slows down, I'll put up a meaningful post.

By the way, the picture above was not me. Through my internet research I found a fascinating gallery of poison oak/ivy victims. I wasn't as bad as the worst pictures, but my rashes looked similar to the ones here. Here's the link, but warning... it's not for the faint of heart!