Well, Hello, Dear Readers!  Happy Fancy Coffee Friday to you and a top ‘o the morning as well.

I know, I know… two whole damn weeks since I’ve written.  What the fuck is up with that shit?  Three cuss words in two sentences!  YES!  I feel better now.  Do you?  You better.

(Also, I received an email from a dear friend asking if I was okay as I hadn’t posted to the blog since the 6th.  I figured I better take time out from my busy schedule to write!)

So, what have I been up to?  The elephant in the room is that I turned the big 3-9 on the 12th.  Actually, I don’t really consider it an elephant, at least not a big elephant… more like a cute, baby elephant playing in a tub kind of elephant.  My mother in law asked me over dinner if I was “going to now stay at 39”.  What?  Really?  People actually do that for real and not just in a sitcom joke sort of way?  Yeah…. no.  Age is just a number and while the years keep adding up, I still feel like I’m about 25; my body just makes a few more noises after a day of hard work (or not).

Now, celebration-wise, I went to dinner with Mr. Muse and my in-laws the night before my actual birthday.  An acquaintance asked us out to dinner on my actual birthday for another reason (and I didn’t mention it was my birthday… because, well, need-to-know sort of thing) which was cancelled at the last minute.  Then, a text at the end of the day from a friend who’d been invited out to the same cancelled event asking if we were then going to go out to dinner for my birthday and another text from her husband saying, “Where are we going to dinner… I need a drink,” meant that we threw together a quick plan and went out on my birthday after all.

The actual plan for my birthday was to have a pizza and ice cream party.  I’m not making that up.

But, Sarah, you’re 39 years old – why do you want to have a kids party?!  So, here’s the thing.  I had a birthday party (outside of family at the kitchen table) once when I was around 12, and like Grumpy Cat, “it was awful”.

It was one of the few times I tried to fit in with the “in crowd”.  I invited the girls I thought I was supposed to be friends with, plus the ones I already was, and we went to Shakey’s Pizza in Green Bay (not there anymore).  I ended up sitting next to my mom while the popular girls all crowded around each other at the opposite end of the table with my friend Jamie trying to split herself between me and them.   I came to a decision early in the night that my attempt to “fit in” was a bad idea, that I’d embarrassed myself enough for one adolescence, and I should never try to “fit in” again.

Thankfully, this attitude has worked out in my favor.  Flash forward 27 years and I’m taking a mulligan on that birthday party debacle all those years ago.  This time, I’m ordering pizza, cupcakes, picking up some frozen custard and getting together at the house of some friends with more friends and acquaintances and a whopping eight of us will be eating, drinking and playing games like Cards Against Humanity.

And not to worry, I celebrated my birthday with my family as well on Pi Day – with a delicious Pecan Pie and frozen custard.

In the meantime, things have been busy!  The farmstead added new layer chicks on the 28th of February.  They lived in an unused bathtub in my bathroom in the house and were put outside after a week as they were already trying to fly.  They had to go to accommodations with higher walls.

Mr. Muse made the decision last year that this spring he’d try making maple syrup and the sap is running!  The fridge and the freezer has been filled, emptied and refilled with gallon jugs and food-grade 5-gallon buckets of sap.  I’ve been forced to roast the first batch of lamb bones for making stock because he needed more room for sap.  Stock is good.  Homemade stock is better.

And then there is work.  Work is good, but work is work (it pays for my vacations… so there is that), and sometimes it gets really busy.  Since I work in social media for part of my job, I was tasked to bring some social media advertising in-house to bring down costs.  I’m happy to say things are working well, but it also means I have had to carve time out to work on marketing and learning about advertising.  It’s been an interesting ride, though, and when I discovered that my ad campaign was working… I think I looked like this:

So, chickens, maple sap and syrup, gardening season is almost upon us (time to plant the peas!) and in May?  Honeybees!  The fun (and work) never ends!

PS – If you haven’t read it yet, my most popular blog post continues to be “I’ve been POISONED” from May 25th of 2012… read the comments.  Really!