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.