Projects:  well, there's too many to list, but the top two at the moment are to get ahead of my bills, and to transform my front yard into a sustainable, edible, beautiful oasis that contains no grass and requires minimal watering.  I'm fairly sure that both of these objectives are possible given enough time and creativity. 

To that end I have enrolled in an online envelope budgeting system that lets me import my banking info into a very mobile ledger which makes faces at me when I'm spending too much from my budget categories, and I have cut back my seed buying from roughly $60 to about $25.  That $25 in seeds is much more goal-oriented, though.  Usually I just buy what looks interesting and I think will survive our brutal summers.  This year I focused on things that will survive, produce well, and be perennial or nearly perennial.

For example, grain chuffa.  It looks like monkey grass, but it produces little tubers that are edible, and apparently taste a bit sweet and nutty.  I think I will start it in a few areas that I know I will need border plants--like in the parkway and around the mailbox.  Currently I have lots and lots of Liriope, so that will eventually need to be replaced by something that is actually useful--or at least potentially useful.

I also bought sorghum seeds because it's tall and (I think) pretty, and I've always wanted to try making molasses.  Then there's the bunching onions.  I'm a bit nervous about those because I haven't ever had good luck with onions from seed, but I'm hoping automatic lights and self-watering seed trays will help with that.  Usually small stuff like that gets a couple of inches tall and then I forget to water it one day and I come in to find it flopped over and looking disturbingly like a dried up earthworm on the sidewalk the hot and sunny day after a big rain. 

There are a few other seeds, and a couple that I really want, but still need to find and order, but if my other main project is going to succeed, then I can't order them until late next week.

Speaking of which, I think I'll update more on that next week sometime.  I hate spending money to fix a cash flow problem, but I hired a financial advisor to help me work out some of the more unusual and short term issues I'm currently having, and I have to say that so far it has been more than worth it.  My financial advisor is awesome, and it makes me feel so much better to know that someone who knows what she's doing is looking out for me.  I can wade through financial stuff and mostly understand it, but it's like reading and translating a foreign language.  She's fluent in that language, though, and she's really good at explaining in my language what she reads in the number language of my financial statements.  It takes her about five minutes to do what takes me an hour.

My original intent in starting this blog was to document some of the projects I do so that my "reinvent-the-wheel-every-time" strategy might evolve into something a bit less cumbersome and failure prone.  In particular, I want my projects to get cheaper as I get more efficient.  Unfortunately, the names I wanted were already taken, and I think the blog should be at least somewhat tied to the name.  So I will simply have to change the focus a bit from what I wanted to do.

BTW, I hope to be good one day about taking pictures and putting them into these posts, but for tonight I will stick to words--I know that if anyone is reading this I probably just lost you, but tough, it's my blog.

The last six months have brought a lot of changes in my life, and I have learned a ton about life, the universe, and everything, but I'm not going to share those new and vulnerable thoughts until I feel a bit safer here. I'm new to this kind of thing, so bear with me. I'm sure I'll open up more when I start to feel more comfortable here.  It's weird in here--kind of like the training room in the offline Matrix--I imagine I'm sitting in a plain white room that's kind of echo-y.  If you haven't seen The Matrix, you should--just the first one, though.  There are lots of useful parallels to real life, but judging from the second and third ones, I think they were accidental.

I feel I should give a little bit of background about me, but I think I'll leave out the personal stuff for now--still not ready to commit on that level yet.  I have lots of hobbies--in fact, learning new hobbies is probably my real hobby.  Forever, it was reading and gardening, but I don't have time to read much anymore, and I don't really have a garden at the moment, so I guess my new hobby is blogging.  It's a strange hobby to try out, because I'm a very private person generally.  In fact someone asked me recently if my Facebook profile had a virus, because the only things posted were put there by other people. 

I'm a big Tolkein fan, and the thing that comes to mind just now is from The Hobbit (3movies?!).  Bilbo says, "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door."  This blog feels a little like going out my front door, and I must say that I'm a bit nervous about where it will lead.  I'm not really sure if I'm more afraid of it going somewhere, or nowhere.  I think I'd better just hit, "Publish" and not think about it too much. 

So this is my inaugural post, and I already have writer's block.  : P