Not because of horse races or laziness. No garden because we started building the house last year and I can't do anything outside until that is done.

We live on five acres in what hipsters would kindly call the bumfuckmiddleofnowhere. My fab GF and I both work at home, have for years, which is a house of less than 600 square feet and poor construction. I won't say the small house looks like raccoons built it as I'm pretty sure raccoons have better construction skills.

For fourteen years we planned and saved to build our house next to this one.

We built a loadbearing strawbale house. It's a rectangle, 32x64 feet, one story, with a hipped roof. Imagine the top of that roof, 40 long. Now lift it up 4 feet and stretch it out 8 feet. That is our cupola, which brings light right into the middle of the house.

We broke ground in March of 2007. And that's literal. Me, a shovel, and Judy, our dog, watching puzzled over the purpose of digging where there isn't anything dead and rotting close enough to the surface worth finding. We got the plumbing groundwork in, foundation poured, radiant tubes in, the slab (some areas of floor will be concrete) poured, and the toe-ups in by June.

Our carpenter, Ryan, helped me build the cupola before the bale walls. The top of the cupola is about 17 feet up, so we set the posts and the beams, then Ryan built a catwalk on the posts. We had stacked or 3-string bales around the slab floor, so it was possible to do all this by climbing up on the bales, and scrambling onto the catwalks.

It was also terrifying. I hate ladders because they are the devil's chew toy and this required a lot of ladder work. I did have a half hour of being trapped at the very top of the cupola wall, unable to convince myself to climb down because I had very stupidly looked down and imagined what my brains would look like splattered all over what is going to be our kitchen floor. (I have since gotten past this, but that was a bad half an hour.)

We built the cupola. Actually, Ryan built the cupola. I fetched and cut. We raised the bale walls in August and the only thing I can say about that right now is: never hire hippies.

Ryan and I got the roof on and sheathed, our roofer, Rick, got the metal roof on. And we got dried in last September. Several more weeks of bale work (lath, stuffing, and stitching) and we got the three coats of plaster on by October. I built and installed most of the windows, though I have all the big ones now to finish. I built the windows by slicing pieces of salvaged old growth cedar then laminating them together with a marine-grade epoxy. They're quite beautiful if I say so myself.

Winter was cold enough that it was too uncomfortable working outside. I continued gathering our salvaged materials---most of the lumber we used was salvaged, except the sheathing (plywood and OSB) and most of our finish materials are salvaged.

This includes a tiny barn I took down last spring. The people who had the barn had two massive gardens and four kids. The barn was at the back of their property and had started to fall down. It had been there since the 1890s and they were planning on just burning it and building a machine shed on the spot. I showed up with a wrecking bar, hammer, and pick-up I borrowed from a friend.

Normally, carpenter ants will not attack Western red cedar but if the oils have dried out, they'll tunnel right into it. In one very large piece of decking that had been sitting on the ground, they had made themselves to home. When I picked up that piece of decking and shifted it, the piece cracked and a nest of carpenter ants flew in the air and landed on me. I even had ants in my bra.

They bite, you know.

I cried a little tiny bit.

I hauled the cedar to a small sawmill six miles from where we live and had them cut it all up. It is some of the most amazing stuff I've ever seen. The square nails that I pulled before taking it to be resawn I gave to my neighbor, who is a blacksmith who swears he's going to teach me how to beat up metal with fire and a hammer as soon as I'm closer to done with the house. I'd like that. Metal. Fire. Hitting stuff. Yep, that's my idea of fun.

The cedar sits in a 40 foot cargo container in the front pasture, along with some 1x4 tongue and groove from the 1930s, some 1x8 tongue and groove, and some hundred-year-old doug fir from a Seattle flour mill that was demoed a while back. To the side of the cargo container sits about 2200 lineal feet of big leaf maple from our trees.

We still have a clump of big leaf maple in the upper garden, near where I had planted 156 arbor vitae between us and some neighbors and 4 Gravenstein apple trees in sore need of cutting back. Further down the slope on the other side of the drainfield was another large clump that we had taken down. A portable sawmill guy and his father, Tracy and Terry, came out and sliced up the maple, all of which I hauled in six trips to the sawmill so they could dry it in their kiln.

More of the maple trees sit in the yard at the edge between the grass and the blackberry brambles. The logs were too big to get out with the small loader the sawmill guys brought out. I am thinking of slicing it up to make end-grain cutting boards as is. That and bucking it for firewood as hardwood burns great and the small house uses wood for heat and the new house will have a masonry heater requiring very dry hardwood for fuel.

But now I wait. Our rough-in plumbing is done and our plumbing fixtures are on their way. Our rough-in electrical is almost done---our heating guy had a very bad fall and is laid up, but he has to install the electric boiler and our electrician can't finish until it's in. Our heating guy is also going to help me install the solar thermal hot water heating panels on the roof, so everything waits until he heals.

I feel sorry for the guy. He fell when a ladder (see? ladders are evil) broke under his foot. He thought he was okay, but evidently the fall was worse than he thought. I could have told him that, considering the man is 6'6" and close to 300 pounds. I mean, the human ankle is designed to only withstand a certain amount of force. He himself admitted he broke terminal velocity four inches below where he started the great plunge downward.

Fact is, getting hurt is just the nature of the business. Every one of the people who worked for us has some terrible story and the scar to back it up. Ryan even nailed his finger with his own nail gun while he was here. I had to bandage it with duct tape. They all work knowing they're going to get hurt and hope it isn't so bad they can't work anymore.

So I wait. I could be out running lumber through my planer. My neighbor swapped me some reclaimed mahogany and miscellaneous wood for some 12 inch by 12 inch concrete pavers, so I have plenty to do. While I normally like running the planer (a lot more than the table saw, ye gods, table saws are even eviler than ladders), today I am too impatient. Planing is a very zen activity. Whether electric or hand, your job is to provide only the minimal force required and no more.

You never know what you'll get until you got it. That's part of the joy of it. Impatience is the enemy of the planer. You start feeding material in too quickly or try to take too big of a bite.

The sun is shining and the trees are still. A quiet breeze from this morning blew itself out around lunch time. There is a blue hydrangea bush outside the window I planted for the fab GF years ago. There was a jaquemonti birch next to it for the longest time until three years ago, when the heat and drought killed it. But the hydrangea blooms in big blue puffs of flowers and is always cheerful.

I don't remember if the honey bees like the hydrangea. I know they love the California lilac up in the other garden. There would be so many the fab GF says the ground looked snowed on with all the pollen that had fallen.

We didn't keep bees last year, and though we captured a swarm, it didn't stay. Hive Collapse Disorder has taken its toll. Honey bees that would work the blooms around here haven't shown up. Bumble bees still growl around the lavender and other plants, big and furry. We have to burn all of our hive equipment because no one is sure why the hives are collapsing, other than that it may be a combination of viruses, bacteria, stress, and they don't know what.

We will have a bonfire in September on a night when autumn has settled and only waiting for an opportunity to move in completely. We'll sit and look at the trees on the back three acres and plan the planting of the front pasture. I'm going to re-plant my vineyard and asparagus bed, both destroyed when the hemlock fell on the little house. The fab GF wants a swath of lavender for new colonies of bees. I want to plant some hickory and hazelnut trees down where it gets a little wet, and another black walnut tree. They're not native species but I love the spread of the branches.

And a madrona tree. I'd like to plant a madrona tree.