a new apprentice

Today has been a delightful day--this morning we moved some rocks so that we will be able to concrete them into the earth cellar wall later. Then I baked some yummy bread rolls filled with a ( delicious blend of nuts and berries )

Then, while the bread was baking I used the electric mixer to churn some cream into butter, then took out a pie-crust I had previously frozen and filled it with chopped broccoli, a blend of eggs and the buttermilk from making the butter, and a bit of Parmesan cheese. This was ready to go in when the rolls came out, and while it baked I made a fruit salad.

That left me a half an hour to relax before it was time to start ( the rest of dinner )

The food was pretty much ready just as A & G arrived (I didn't drop the noodles into the boiling water they they got here, since they take only seconds to cook), and we enjoyed a nice and really yummy meal, and gave them the tour of the house, earth cellar, and nearby outbuildings. By which time the other laurel in the shire arrived to pick up his computer which lord_kjar had fixed for him. He has recently taken G on as his apprentice, and had encouraged me to take on A as mine. She and I have been chatting about the possibility on facebook, and she has finally decided to say "yes". So now I have a local apprentice. She is the one who did all of the beautiful tablet weaving on my new dress, my new hood and belt pouch, my sexy Viking cloak in progress (we won't discuss how long it has been "in progress"). I have bought so much trim from her that I have joked that I had crossed the line from "customer" to "patron", so becoming her Laurel was the next logical step.

She and I are discussing making a cloak together as regalia for the "Norrskensbard", since we will be having a contest to select a bard for the northern Nordmark groups at Norrskensfest in November.

It was really fun to have people over--we should do that more often, and I think I will enjoy having a local apprentice.

we didn't buy a tractor today

While that might be said about every day, this time we actually considered doing so, and even went so far as to drive across town and look at one that is for sale. It was a cute little thing, built in 1960. No where near as strong as the one we have been borrowing from lord_kjar's dad, but big enough to do some of the things we want in our earth cellar building project. However, after looking at it and messing with the controls, he decided that he would be too likely to break the tractor by asking it to do too much, and we are probably better off saving up a list of tractor tasks to be done, and when we have enough just rent a big one for a couple of days and get them all done quick.

I think one of the things that inspired me to look on line for tractors at all was having lord_kjar's brothers here visiting today. His eldest brother, youngest brother, their wives, and the three daughters of the first and the one son of the second all dropped by this afternoon for a visit, and to look at how the earth cellar is going. The boys had some good suggestions for continuing with the project, the most important of which means we are closer to putting on a roof than we had thought.

We have considered many different options for a roof, but the one that has been hovering at the top of the list for a while was to build the walls up as high as they will go, then build a flat frame over the middle, and hire a cement truck to come pour a flat roof (reinforced with re-bar) at one go. However, the eldest brother suggested today that one potential problem with that plan is that would mean that there would be more mass of the concrete roof at the edges, where it overlaps the walls, than in the middle of the earth cellar, and that there would likely be a difference in drying times for the edges vs the middle, and a difference in drying time could result in cracking, which is really undesirable.

Therefore we are now leaning towards the option of doing an arched roof of stone and concrete, built one section at a time. This means that the back end of the earth cellar, where the walls are already higher my shoulders, needs only one more row of rock and concrete before we can start building the wooden frame to support the arch for that part of the roof. This is a very exciting thought--even though the front end still has walls only about hip height, starting the roof on part of the project still has some serious psychological value in terms of feeling like progress.