I was up late researching something last night and DH doesn’t have to work today, so we slept in. Sorta. I just finished Cuppa #1.

Last week was intense; we finished up two major farming projects (pig harvest and goat kidding season), and went right into the next items: starting to get fields ready for either grazing, haying or plowing. Plus we’re helping our landlord get his land certified organic, and there’s a lot of stuff to consider with that. But we’re honored to be asked to help with that task. In the middle of that, DH managed to injure his hand really badly, badly enough that we had to drop everything at 9pm at night and speed down to the ER to have it assessed by doctors more skilled than I at triage. Happily, no permanent injury, some stitches and bandages that had to be changed every day, but he gets the stitches out today. That meant that I had to do all the chores again during the week since he couldn’t lift anything and couldn’t get that hand wet. So it was a hugely busy week. BUT, we had several nice conversations about how to manage money, which is such a huge improvement over the fights we used to have.

One big update – that escrow refund? We’ve decided to put it into savings for the time being, while we continue to consider options and particularly while we wait to see what a few certain things are going to cost us. But long term, it looks like the money will be used as “starter money” for an ongoing farm sinking fund. We came to that decision via a roundabout way. We have predictable, repeating costs well in hand with our monthly budget, for both the household and the farm, and our snowball is clicking along OK. But sometimes we would still bicker as we came upon unexpected, non-repeating costs or one-time capital investment expenses for stuff with the farm. For instance, getting a new pasture fenced in, so that we can expand our grazing area and cut down on feed costs. But it’s going to cost us about $1000 to get that initial setup done. Once it’s done, it’ll pay for itself within a few months. But until now, we just couldn’t quite squeeze the weekly/monthly budget enough to get that money together. With this refund, we’ll be able to get an account going for that sort of thing, start it off with a nice fat amount, then continue to contribute to it and pull from it over time as needed. I’m pretty happy with that solution and DH is too. So I guess that’s our biggest news.

Oh, and whatever folks do, try real hard not to injure their hands when they do manual labor every day. Really messes up the schedule. I’m glad he’s OK but wow he’s getting stir crazy, waiting for his hand to heal.