Alrighty then. Breeding goats is going to be a little more challenging than I thought. You know, it's nature and you just let nature take it's course right? Well, um, no.

Doesn't Russ look happy? That's because it's our second 1 hour round trip excursion to take one of the girls to see their "boyfriend," Stormy, who lives a few towns away via back roads. We don't keep a buck at our place because bucks are rowdy, stinky, and otherwise obnoxious. Boaz, our male goat is a wether, meaning he'd wether not participate in that business, thank you, because he's been fixed. That means bringing the girls to where the action is.

Ruth and Naomi are cousins, but they really couldn't be more different. Ruth is petite and pretty. She's quiet and reserved, not very vocal. Naomi is big boned and hearty. She represents her Nubian breed well by being quite vocal, more so when she's randy, and she demands attention from her people. She loves her love. We missed Naomi's window a few weeks ago because I'm a clueless first time goat owner so I've been keeping a close eye on Ruth, figuring she'd be next.

Kind of like human beings, the mystery of fertility is not an exact science.  First of all, you gotta watch the doe's, you know, girlie bits to see if it looks like a green light. I'm NOT going to go into detail on that part. Buy your own damn goat book. But mainly you have to watch her behavior. Does in season tend to wag their tails alot, bellow, want a lot of attention, go off their feed, and possibly mount other goats. Ruth, however, has no "behavior" other than being sweet and quiet. She's like this Victorian lady goat who learns French and the piano and never does anything impolite or inappropriate. She just stands around looking cute with her goatie eyes and inquisitive head tilt. But according to this:

I should be seeing a wagging tail. "Extra" vocalization. Mounting other goats or allowing other goats to mount her. I have never seen that with Ruth.

Now Naomi, on the other hand, is a more boisterious goat. If Ruth is our Elinor Dashwood then Naomi is Marianne, so I figured she'd be easier to breed. This is proving not to be true. Both of the gals have made the ride out to Stormy, and while both reacted predictably (Ruth was terrified and practically leapt over the gate to get away from her amorous host while Naomi was curious about what was going on but was rather put off by Stormy's earthy attempts to impress her with his big, bad buckness) neither on of them seemed to be ready to do the deed. I'm assured that it's never easy with first time fresheners, which is goat talk for virgins.

We left Stormy sans brand new embryos but we did get a "buck rag," which is a cloth that has been wiped all over the stinky buck and will be hung on our fence as way to watch our does to see when they show interest in Stormy's eau de bucklogne.

Catching up!

Never got the after pictures, did you? Ha!

So much has gone on this past year, I guess I'll have to take some time to fill in the gaps later, but I did want to finish writing about the kitchen transformation. My husband worked SO HARD to make my dream kitchen for me and he did a fantastic job. We started with virtually nothing that had gross yellow gold walls:

 

To this, after some salvaging and drilling:

 

 

 

To this! The almost finished product! Just a few more details that need to be addressed. We were on a tight budget so I'm thrilled that we managed to salvage some granite countertops and a slate sink, as well as add some cherry butcher block counters. Didn't Russ do a fantastic job?

 

 

Before

 

 

After

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love a bargain!

I don't like to shop, but I love a bargain. Well, let me amend that. I do really enjoy combing through consignment stores and thrift shops looking for incredible bargains but I don't care about shopping for new stuff. Generally speaking contemporary stores are geared to sell you things you don't really need and didn't know you wanted until you saw it arranged on a display table in bright packaging = ooooh pretty. I mean, if you're shopping for a new sofa and you need a new sofa, that's one kind of shopping. But wandering around Wal*Mart or Macy's encourages one to fall victim to the machinations of marketing gurus and advertising hacks. Give me a Salvation Army Thrift Store or a mom and pop antique shop any day. And salvage stores are fun when you have a big project, like a kitchen renovation.

My husband Russ and I are cut from the same cloth in that regard. We both love old, idiosyncratic stuff. We would happily spend hours together driving around from one target bargain destination to another and probably don't do it as often as we'd like. At one point several years ago my husband found a solid set of cabinets at a salvage store for $40 and couldn't pass up the deal. He figured they'd end up in his workshop for storage. Little did we know they were going to end up as part of our kitchen cabinets in our little farmhouse in town.

Before we bought this place I pilfered one of the larger cabinets for an island in our rented lakehouse. For two years we rented a charming cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee. We got reduced rent in exchange for fixing up the place a little bit -- something that suited both Russ and myself. Russ, who is nothing if not handy and creative, fixed up the doors of the old cabinet and placed beadboard around the sides and back and then trimmed out the bottom. A good coat of white paint and viola! I had an island that added much needed countertop in our modest little lake cottage kitchen. I will say this, a little time, paint, and hardware can go along way. Oh yeah, some new flooring too. Another bargain Russ found because the flooring had some minor flaws. The lakehouse kitchen went from this:

To this:

When all was said and done however, at that time we couldn't afford a decent countertop to the island so I had to live with plywood for two years. I kept it covered with seasonal tableclothes and made do. That island moved with us to the new house and it became one end of the massive island that was going to become the focal point of the new kitchen.

Despite all the bargain hunting we did splurge on a few things in our new kitchen, the main thing being a six-burner Imperial gas range that was going to live in the middle of the huge island. I love to cook and I love being in the kitchen and it was extremely important to me to have a kick-ass domestic goddess zone to call my own. Three things I really wanted: a beastly gas range, an electric wall oven, and a slate or soapstone sink. The slate sink was in, now came time for the range.

The island was a project that was months in the making.

An Immoveable Object

First things first. That sink has got to go.

After we passed papers my husband sat down with some grid paper and a pencil and began planning the layout of the kitchen. After we passed papers I started shopping. In my marriage we are nothing if not gender stereotypes and since I'm the cook in the family my husband was delighted to have the opportunity to create for me the kitchen I've always wanted. While I'm not an incredibly picky person, I do like what I like and there were some things that weren't negotiable for me when we were looking for a house. I wanted a big kitchen. My husband wanted a big barn. Living at the lake house was dreamy in a lot of ways but ultimately it was a summer cottage and as such, it had a summer cottage kitchen, meaning it was small. The only real working kitchen counter space I had was an island my husband built for me using a salvaged cabinet he had originally purchased to use in his (some day) workshop in the (some day) barn. That island was now earmarked to be the cornerstone of our new kitchen island in the new house. So while the new house was only offering a Naked Kitchen at least it was a big Naked Kitchen.

But back to that sink. Yes it was an old-fashioned porcelain sink that is common to farmhouses but this girl had certainly seen better days. I played around with the notion of repairing her and sewing a little skirt to hid her silly legs and extended belly, but on the list of things I knew I really wanted was a slate or soapstone sink, so Bessie the porcelain sink was destined to live out the rest of her life as the barn sink or perhaps a garden sink. The placement of the sink in Naked Kitchen was one thing that wasn't negotiable because we didn't have the resources to move the plumbing, nor was there any real need to do so.

As mentioned, we were working on a limited budget so my shopping was not based on casually flipping pages in a catalogue or making pilgrimages to Ikea or Ethan Allen. No, I was hardcore, camping out at salvage shops, foraging at local antique stores, and feverishly clicking away on Craig's List and eBay. What I realized while I was bargain-hunting was that I was not only looking for good deals but I was being "green," a term I really kind of hate because for some people being green means using their plastic grocery store bags more than once, like to pick up their dog's droppings or lining their bathroom trash can. For people like my parents, who grew up during the Depression, being "green" is just common sense -- don't throw something away if there's still some life in it. I was remodeling a kitchen during the Great Recession so I liked the idea of being both frugal and reusing items that were still useful.

My first major score in that regard was a slate sink I found on Craig's List.

This sink was listed on Craig's List for $850 at a location about an hour north of the new house. The owner discovered the old girl on the floor of his garage behind an antique car. I found a similar but longer sink a couple of hours away in Maine for only $600, so I used what little persuasive charm I had to talk the guy down to $600 for the sink that was geographically closer. It worked! So my husband and I hopped right into the truck and picked up our first major purchase for the new kitchen.

Of course all recycled items need a little TLC before you can lock and load, but this sink proved to need remarkably little work. There are a couple of significant nicks, but in our opinion it adds to the old house charm we're looking for. Some Brasso on the "Monson Maine Slate Company" plate on the front of the sink and a good rubbing with mineral oil brought out her natural rich beauty.

What we didn't realize until after we bought the sink was that it would be a challenge to find fixtures for the 18 inch faucet openings...

Creating a Kitchen

I'm a complete victim of lifestyle/decorating magazines -- This Old House, Handyman, Old House Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Country Living -- I've always loved reading magazines about fixing up old homes or getting all crafty during certain holidays, so when we knew we were going to buy a 220 year old house I began to study these magazines like scripture, memorizing styles that I liked, studying color schemes, wedging sticky notes onto pages that had something on them I'd like to replicate, and otherwise fantasizing about my dream home. And just as often, reading about how to modernize something quirky that goes with an old house, like floors that aren't level, having one electrical outlet per room, or figuring out how to eliminate mystery drafts.

Because it doesn't quite look like Martha Stewart's Maine estate "Skylands" (yes, I know the names Martha has for her homes) our new house fell a bit short of "dream" status. In all honesty though, it's pretty close, or as close as I want to get without the the benefit of a full-time housekeeper and groundskeeper. AND! the property came with an unusual bonus... a naked kitchen.

We all know that the kitchen is a key selling point for any home so we surmised that Naked Kitchen (see right) was probably one of the main reasons why the house had been on the market for so long. Naked Kitchen was basically one large, long room. No counters or cabinets at all. All this room had to offer was a standalone refrigerator, a lonely gas range, and a spindly looking old-fashioned porcelin sink with it's belly and pipes shamefully exposed. When we first went through the house I desperately wanted to grab a curtain and cover it's scrawny 2X4 legs and provide it with some dignity. While the cranberry-painted trim had a period look the walls were sponge-painted a yellow gold. Very, very wrong.

But my husband and I are optimists. We tend to see all the possibilities in something rather than all the problems so for us Naked Kitchen was a selling point. We could make our dream kitchen because all we had right now was a big blank slate! There was just one problem: budget.

The house was a short sell and we were shopping on a short-sell budget. For the past two years we had been renting a small cottage on a lake in central New Hampshire, a cottage that got much smaller when my older stepson dropped out of college and moved back in with us. With a certain budget in mind my husband and I started househunting, one of those couples in a position to take advantage of the disaster zone that the housing market had become in recent years. We had been casually looking around for 12 or so months and even considered an old farmhouse that had not yet been outfitted with indoor plumbing or heat. Yes boys and girls, believe it or not there are still some folks who live on the farm like it's 1910.

Anyway, we fell in love with this house almost immediately. We lumbered through the tedious process of purchasing a short sell property and when we finally signed the papers Naked Kitchen became our challenge. The mission: Create a kitchen we could love on a shoestring budget.

Fallinter

You know, like we were enjoying Fall and we were choosing our pumpkins and picking apples, considering that it was probably about time to unpack our winter boots and gloves, and start getting the wood into the woodshed. And then we got 16 inches of snow overnight on October 30th and it was suddenly winter. Fallinter.

I didn't even get my bulbs into the ground! In my memory I don't recall seeing snow before Halloween. All I can say is thank goodness my husband found a deal on a snowblower a few months ago.

So I'm planning on enjoying a snowy Sunday at home. Puttering around the house and doing some baking. A classic apple pie is on the horizon, as well as my stepson's favorite winter (or Fallinter) cookie. I use an Ina Garten recipe that can't be beat. Try it, you'll like it.

Ina's Ultimate Ginger Cookie

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup dark brown sugar, lightly packed
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup unsulfured molasses
1 extra-large egg, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups chopped crystallized ginger (6 ounces)
Granulated sugar, for rolling the cookies

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, and salt and then combine the mixture with your hands. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the brown sugar, oil, and molasses on medium speed for 5 minutes. Turn the mixer to low speed, add the egg, and beat for 1 minute. Scrape the bowl with a rubber spatula and beat for 1 more minute. With the mixer still on low, slowly add the dry ingredients to the bowl and mix on medium speed for 2 minutes. Add the crystallized ginger and mix until combined.

Scoop the dough with 2 spoons or a small ice cream scoop. With your hands, roll each cookie into a 1 3/4-inch ball and then flatten them lightly with your fingers. Press both sides of each cookie in granulated sugar and place them on the sheet pans. Bake for exactly 13 minutes. The cookies will be crackled on the top and soft inside. Let the cookies cool on the sheets for 1 to 2 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely

Martha Stewart = FAIL!

Oh, the joys of old home ownership. We moved into the house in the middle of June and have spent essentially the entire summer working on it -- painting it inside and out, renovating the kitchen, scraping, priming, and painting the porch, floor to ceiling. I feel like my right hand has actually turned into a Purdy angled paint brush and edging has become my form of caligraphy.

Finally it was time to have a housewarming. Fall is here, the trees are ablaze, my husband can still take the kids out in the Model A, and the goats have settled in. The kitchen isn't quite finished, I'm still painting some of the drawers and all the hardware isn't on yet, but all the housewarming tips I recently read said "just do it." Much like trying to pick the perfect timing to have a baby, there is never really a perfect time for inviting people into your "new" old home, there will always be a missing knob, an unpainted corner, a broken doo-dad. Just do it.

The housewarming was great. Lots of folks showed up and we had a great time, but WOW, am I out of practice on throwing a party. Two years in the tiny lakeside cottage that preceeded buying this house limited me to family events and the occasional summer beach party where it's mainly burgers on the grill and bowls of chips. In the summer it's all about the weather, which you cannot control. When it gets chilly it's all about the food and whether or not you're a good conversationalist/housekeeper. Martha Stewart seems to be able to do both. But she also has a personal assistant and a gardener. And lots of money. The issue of Martha Stewart Living where she had a photo spread about a dinner party in her barn still haunts me.

I was afraid of making food to early and having it sit out so I underestimated the time I would need to get everything ready. The quiche came out at the right time but I never even got to the deviled eggs at all because once people started to arrive I simply didn't have time to make them. Same with the tomato salad I had planned to make. Which is stupid because both could have easily been made earlier that morning and put in the spare fridge -- I was just so busy cleaning that I didn't plan well. I'm totally out of practice.

Of course it doesn't help at all that my husband was out of town for three days right before the party. He literally got home after midnight Friday night, then he chose to leave the party about an hour in so he could see his son's soccer game. He was gone for two hours leaving me alone to entertain. Jerk. lol.

Oh well, live and learn. I'll just have to throw a Christmas open house to keep the ball rolling and get back in the game.

Things that worked? Cherry tomatoes mixed with bocconcini and fresh basil drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Green olives stuffed with blue cheese. The ubiquitous platters of cheese, fruit, and crackers. Ham and cheese quiche. Platters of high-end salami with sliced cucumbers. Chili with nachos for scooping.

Guests love to bring dessert and THAT I remembered, so I made a batch of mint brownies and let the guests do the rest. They did not disappoint. Apple crisp, pumpkin pies, and cookies showed up just like I thought they would.

I'm thinking December 10th for a Christmas Party. That gives me eight weeks to get my act together.