Well one of the next steps we have taken towards being more self sufficiient has been to acquire rabbits. We only have 2 of them, one of each, they are Silver fox? Anyway, we thought we would try to keep them alive over the winter, and if successful we will try to breed them in the spring. We hope to raise them for meat. But I have never purposely killed anything except a vegetable plant or an insect, so I am not sure if we will be able to harvest them. My DH says it is all up to me since I am the one who wanted to try raising them.... gee thanks. But I will definitely try. If I can bumble my way thru this successfully, we will get another female or two and really try to go into meat production for family usage. I am trying not to get too attached. They are cute, but very skittish. I have not really tried to tame them yet because of the whole harvesting thing. I am afraid once I see the babies, it will be all over...

I would like to eventually have chickens, but that will have to wait I think until we move to a place with more land and NO HOA. I hate having an HOA. You would think that with 3 acres, we would have a bit of room for a few ladies, but it is not allowed. I hope to move within the next year. It makes the whole adding to the orchard thing very difficult because I dont want to put in alot of trees just to move.

We finally got our soapstone stove put in. It is really great and heats the house wonderfully. We are only using half the heat from last year. We still use some because we are not home alot and for example dont want to start a fire first thing in the morning when we are leaviong for the day in 2hours. So we will take off the morning chill with the regular furnace and then build a fire when we are home in the evenings until we go to bed.

Well, it is almost the end of the year, hopefully the next year will bring more changes.