Despite almost two months of not gaining weight despite feeding on demand, our daughter is finally up to the 41st percentile for weight gain by age and is hitting her developmental milestones. Trying to focus on those positives instead of all the negative emotions I’m harboring right now. Trying to remember that she’s a tiny little vibe-o-meter and that my primary focus has to be her well-being in spite of everything else that’s going on.

That’s what I’ve used them for as well =D

Happy planning / planting!

You can check out the toolkit over at Permapeople.org, though I’m unsure exactly how open the codebase is. I do know they’re hoping to make it community run in the future, and that the devs share pretty much whatever is asked of them.

Less in the spirit of your question, but something I’ve used relatively extensively is the mymaps.google tool. Here’s hoping someone with some better answers than me comes along (and I remember to check back) to give additional alternatives

Attended a fair on Saturday as a vendor but didn’t make back the table fee, which is really kind of a shame. The weather was brisk and incredibly windy, which contributed to folks not really coming through. While I lost some cash doing it, maybe half of the other vendors had broken tents and merchandise by ninety minutes in, so I have to be grateful that our plants are a little heavier than that and I bring enough weights to hold our tent in place. What I missed in dollars I may have made up for in contacts, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

My parents visited for the first time since our daughter was born, which was really nice for everyone involved. They even babysat so my wife and I could go out for our 7th wedding anniversary! Five minutes into being seated at the restaurant, my wife took my hand, gazed deeply into my eyes, and said “do you think she’s behaving for them?” XD

Yes, but those skills of effective communication are able to be universally applied, even in private conversation. The fact that it’s a positive environment and one focused on constructive feedback is why I feel that it might be an avenue for OP

Try finding an open club with Toastmasters and go practice speaking and communicating with folks who are also there to practice speaking and communicating. That kind of space alone may give you the chance to see differences between their interactions and yours, but it’s an incredibly helpful group for so many people who struggle with their communication in everyday life.

Henry Agard Wallace

My side of the family is slowly trickling into the state for their annual vacations in Maine, for two weeks this year instead of the usual 7 days. It’s nice though, getting to see each group when they arrive instead of showing up to 20-something people all at once, all in one house. It will be that level of craziness come Sunday, when they’re planning to throw (yet another) baby shower for us. Much as I enjoy not spending money, three baby showers is too damn high. I’m hopeful that my brother found the copy of Go the F#$k to Sleep we gave them when my niece was born.

One of our ducks, Pearl, hatched out a dozen little babies under my potting bench. While she’s exceptional at hatching them, she is a less than stellar mother and I have been responding to alarm peeps regularly while she sits around with the ones who manage to keep up with her.

I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals, like on youtube where I get hundreds of comments and I’m not going to bother reading usernames

Like @Vodulas I’m a little perplexed by this and hope you won’t mind providing some more clarity

We had our baby shower this past weekend, and I’m glad to have it behind us. There’s still another one for/from my side of the family in two weeks but it should be very low-key comparatively. My mother drove for 8 hours to be here for the weekend (New England summer roadwork smh) and it was the first time we’ve seen her since last August, so it was really wonderful to have her up. I sent her home with so many plants…

I’m nearly done rebuilding our original bird coop, and it’ll be super great to have that finished and ready. It was a huge pain to move by myself with no tractor access but the frame held up admirably, and the new tweaks should make maintenance way easier - it feels like a prerequisite with all of the additional work we’ll be facing in another month.

I’m with you 100% on the music helping with time management, there’s nothing like putting on an album with the right bpm for what needs to get accomplished. And the small dance movements, head bops, and shimmies while working helps to prevent getting burned out on the chores. Plus that feeling of serendipity when the task completes around the same time as the album… pure magic.

Went to the farmers market from 7-1 today, came home to find my wife running a fever so I’m now doing laundry and dishes. I’ll have to go do all the watering a little later today, but that’s okay. I still have about 7 cubic yards of wood chips to move, and our pond is now low enough to allow me to buck and remove the trees that fell into it during a wind storm earlier this year. Some of that will get done today, and I’ll be doing more of it tomorrow before and after the weekly grocery run. I also recorded and edited a video for our channel but I’m sorta 50/50 on it a few hours later and don’t know whether it’ll be posted or just deleted despite the time it took to do all that.

I, too, clean to music! It’s usually some kind of bop like Parov Stellar or Caravan Palace to prevent me from stopping to admire my work partway through.

Hey thanks! He stopped by the farm today to take a short tour (nothing like you all are dealing with but it’s hot & dry for us northerners) and I’m going to be visiting one of his rewilding projects in a week or two to consult. We’ll see where it goes!

We’ve had a friend visiting for a few days to help build out his photography portfolio and get some nice pictures of stuff around the farm, which I’ll be sure to share once I’ve gotten them. It’s super nice to have outside perspective - I don’t always feel the progress that others perceive, and don’t give much credit to the work that’s put into it. I should put more into validating myself and my efforts, but it’s still nice when other folks help out with that.

I’m also nearing functional completion of my bookshelf project but have been a little bad about documenting it for !diy - I have a few photos I’ll share once I have regained some of my bandwidth. I’ll still have to do the trim but will be able to start storing our books, records, and stuff there soon instead of all the small shelves and stacks scattered around the house.

Wednesday morning edit: a few weeks ago I met another photographer, one who works for National Geographic. They reached out this morning to see if I’d be interested in collaborating on a project or two of theirs and I’m crazy excited for that opportunity

Built a new PC for my wife and I, first I’ve done in over a decade. Mini ITX boards are wicked cute but it did start feeling a little cramped by the end. I also built a little egg washing station to hopefully save me some time cleaning eggs this year.

I’m really proud of you for rescheduling and not just canceling your appointment, which I did for years every time I had finally reconvinced myself to resolve my anxiety and depression. I’m hoping things line up better for you in May.

• Plants, particularly perennial ones
• Plant propagation
• Compost
• Biochar
• Garden design
• Dog training

Same! Just a little south of there though

This past week was a bit of a doozy. Lost power and a way out of our dead end street on Thursday morning when a tree fell across our road and took a power pole with it. A neighbor who’s an electrician and I cut the way out for the street and cleared one travel lane despite the fire department’s protests, while two other neighbors with plows cleared what they could. Power was restored Sunday night, but none of the crews cleared the road obstruction, so another neighbor with a bigger tractor than the rest of us rolled up and cleared it.

I’m fortunate enough to be able to carry on phone conversations while I’m doing the tasks for our nursery, so I started calling the town manager and the chiefs of the fire and EMS crews to start a conversation about having a real plan for the next time it happens. And it will, because Maine passed a law several years ago that incentivized the power utility to do as little as possible maintaining the trees near the lines. I started a text chain with the neighborhood to keep them updated on what’s being discussed and to solicit feedback and suggestions for the solutions we’d like to present to the town, and that text chain has gotten the neighbors offering further assistance to each other to help recover from the storm (does my little socialist heart proud!). Folks have been dropping off cookies and stopping by to thank me, even though I keep telling them it’s just my way of repaying them for being wonderful neighbors.

In other news, all the plants I stupidly potted before the storm survived!