A Few of My Favorite Things

We have enjoyed the peppers, tomatoes and zucchini from our little backyard garden so much this year. We are really looking forward to having a huge garden next year at our new house and growing all of our vegetables that we can.

Every day lately is harvest day.

I love cooking with fresh herbs, so I usually plant plenty. I've always wanted to dry them, but haven't had the time. That's one of the things I want to start doing next year. But for this year, I did try something I've not done before - I put quarts of basil and rosemary in the freezer, following freezing instructions I found on the Internet. Supposedly they freeze well, we'll see.

We will hopefully have some good news on the house-building front tomorrow. We are supposed to close on the construction loan tomorrow afternoon, after many, many trials. There has been concern by the property department at our mortgage company, who looked at the property pictures the appraisers provided them and deduced that we are building in the middle of nowhere. And a house in the middle of nowhere doesn't appraise for a lot, so they couldn't agree with the appraisers on the appraised value, evidently. It took our loan officer driving out to our property and taking pictures of surrounding properties, measuring distances to Huntsville and to schools and other houses, etc. You get it. A lot of work. And a lot of postponed closing dates. FINALLY today all the new evidence was accepted and everything closed out. Our very patient builder has everything in order, ready to break ground as soon as we give him the go-ahead. Hopefully that will be tomorrow.

We did get a nice surprise last weekend when we made our usual trek to look at the property (yes, we look at it a lot. Just look at it.) When we turned off the main road we saw a beautiful site over the rise...utility power poles! Two of them, down the property line, ready for power to be turned on when we take the building permit to the utility company. They will later run underground cables from the property line to the house.

It doesn't take much to get us excited these days :-)