A Good Day

June 14, 2008 - Today was a good day. Now, I know that from reading our happy blog, many of you think that all our days are good days. Not the case. But today was definitely a good day. As part of our attempt to establish some sort of specialization in the many tasks involved in building a house, Joe and I decided that I would be dealing with the building inspector. I am certainly the organized planner on our two-man team, and I also happen to believe that I think like an inspector - not just a building inspector, but any inspector for that matter - because I have that neurotic obsessive compulsive thing going for me. In a good way.

So anyway, after a few phone conversations with the guy, this morning I drove myself, along with our mounds of paperwork, over to the town hall. What I returned with was this -

Victory! I would never have expected something as simple as a demolition permit to make me so happy, but we feel like we can finally get STARTED. When I got home, Joe and I were so excited, we actually did our victory dance in front of other people. Now I had already known that this was going to be the outcome of the meeting so in the past few days lined up the actual inspection as well as the dumpster delivery - er 'container' delivery. See, I'm learning. So on Monday the inspector will come take some measurements of the existing house just to make sure we're building in the same spot and not any closer to the property lines, and on Tuesday the 'container' will be delivered and we will start tearing the house down. Totally psyched.

In the meantime, Joe has done a bunch of tree work over at the property. He took me over last night to see it and it is really starting to look great. Here's one of the clearings he made -

And then this is an area he cleared for our tent site, which is beautiful -

My meeting with the inspector also gave me a chance to show him our plans so far and find out what kind of detail he would be looking for. We really just have a few more things to figure out - the roof trusses, the basement design, and some floor framing. We're hoping to have the drawings finished by the 23rd, which is when we should be done with the demolition, which means we'll need to get our building permit before we take any more steps.

We've also started gathering things for our camping adventure. I did some shopping today with the help of my sister and my mother (the camping expert), and came home with a tent, two 4-foot tables, and two plastic tubs for keeping our clothes in. Oh and 12 rolls of paper towels. You can never have too many paper towels. Really need to figure out where to store this stuff as we accumulate, since it is currently stored under my mother's dining room table... there is just no limit to that woman's generosity.

And for some gardening news, we started harvesting the collard greens today! They've been pretty big for a while now, but I just hadn't gotten around to cooking them, so today was the day. It happened to be raining when I needed to go cut the greens, so here's me getting ready to go out in my raincoat and galoshes-

And me back inside with my loot -

And then the finished product - I cooked the greens in sesame oil with ginger and garlic, and fried some tempeh in sesame oil and soy sauce. Totally 'winged' it tonight, and it turned out fantastic.

Oh, and the other night I cooked the turnips we picked up at the market - I just mashed the turnips with some potatoes and added some goat cheese to it, cooked some onions for a good 15 minutes, and cooked the radish greens separately in a little oil. Layered it all on top of one another and voila!

I have also now harvested the rest of our radishes and we really need to start eating more lettuces - it's amazing how big the romaine has gotten in the past week or so. But tomorrow is a gardening day, so more on that tomorrow evening. Night!