Strawberries, Exploring Weymouth, and Sugar Wine

Well well. What a neat little place we live in. We've been exploring our new neighborhood and have been finding some gems! We came across a farm stand yesterday that had fruits and veggies galore, along with plants for purchase. We found a small corner that had a few things discounted so we got an enormous bag of strawberries for 99 cents.

The largest appliance we own is a food dehydrator, which we just can't seem to part with. It has made us many tasty batches of beef jerky and has given us abundant dried fruits that store well for an incredibly long time. It turns out dried strawberries are amazing. We filled the thing up and voila! tasty treats.



There's a cute little park really close by that we've been taking Willie to. It's hilly, and sometimes a dog trots her way over from the other side of the road to bark at us and sniff Willie. We call her Beefcake.

Beefcake.

The park.

Indexing has been a gift and has allowed me so much more time in my life. I've actually not had a book to work on in a little over a week (ok, that's a little scary) but I've been working hard at revamping the website (it's going to look GOOD), organizing lots of little things, and contacting a ton of publishers. Today was by far the best day for responses, so I'm feeling really good about things. I'm lined up for two projects at the moment (one isn't for a few months, but at least it's something) and I work with enough publishers quite regularly that I'm not really that concerned. But still, I'm putting full-time hours (or just about) and because I don't have to commute (or index when I get home from a full-time job) I've been granted gobs of time to enjoy life again. I take the time to hang out with the mutt, I've been cleaning, and I've been reading for pleasure. Seriously! I can't remember the last time I read a book just to read it. Amazing.

And hobbies. Justin and I have been picking up hobbies again! Because I was so busy working and indexing (and he was indexing too), we really had to stop focusing on so many things and we simply worked, minimally cleaned, etc.

So, we finally took a couple of hours out of our day to pick up the Alaskan Bootlegger's Guide (that we spoke of here) and we took good ole Leon's advice and started with the simplest wine we could make - Sugar Wine. He says "You can even drink this stuff, but don't expect to impress your true love with it during a romantic candlelight dinner." As you can see in the pictures below, this is really bottom shelf stuff we're making. We used bread yeast, for goodness sake. But who cares, we're not selling it and it's more for enjoyment than it is for anything else. It was nice to have the time to carefully sterilize everything and do things the right way (as right as you can with sugar wine, haha).

Somewhere along the way, Justin decided it was best to keep his hair out of his face.

Anyway, we're really enjoying ourselves here. It's starting to feel like home already. We're still one of the only boats here, but I expect that a lot of people will be coming in this weekend to snuggle into their new summer homes.