I’m a little late writing this, sorry. Today I’m going to write about wildlife. I’ve had two experiences with wildlife in the last week or so that I want to tell you about, dear reader, one good, one bad.

First, the bad, to get it out of the way. I discovered that I have mice in the house. I’m not exactly surprised, as I’d discovered a couple of mice nesting in a shop vac the previous owner had left in the (detached, unsealed, completely uninsulated) garage. But I started noticing what I was pretty sure was mouse droppings under the sink in the kitchen, then I noticed a couple of kids treats that were gnawed open and eaten. One rice cripsy treat, one mini candy bar. Not like the kids snuck them and ate them, but like something with very small, very sharp teeth had opened them. So I took a quick trip to the nearest home improvement store and bought some Tom Cat bait stations.

As I mentioned last week, when you have all the possibilities of a new place, it’s hard to pause and look around before jumping into projects.

One thing I have going for me is that I still have a ton of unpacking and organizing to do, and this week I have my kids with me, so that keeps me from grabbing something simple from the fridge for dinner and spending all my time on projects.

As I mentioned in my re-introduction post last week, I just bought a house on five acres, and I’m busily thinking about how to turn it into a homestead. I know enough not to try to do everything at once, but I’m trying to decide what to prioritize, and what I’m thinking about long-term.

I’d like to have some small-scale livestock. There’s not a lot of open space, so I think chickens are a bad idea, at least at first, so I’m thinking quail and/or rabbits. In either case, I’d want to breed my own and have a self-sustaining population, as well as meat and possibly eggs. But that’s a big endeavor, so I’ll put it off for now and do the one thing I am already set up for: bees.

It’s been exactly a year since I last wrote anything of significance in this blog, and I didn’t actually publish that. In 2021, I had big goals of what to write, how to eventually monetize it as a side hustle, and how to track my move from happily married to suddenly divorced, and rebuilding with basically nothing. I was going to call the series “Starting from Scratch,” and while it’s about two years later than I expected, I’m going to write the series now.