Mild Winter in the Bitterroot

This winter has been much nicer than our first. A lot of sunny days and pretty mild weather for Montana. We have 2 pregnant goats now. 1 alpine and one lamancha. They are both due in May. We'll have a few babies running around and plenty of milk I guess. Our rabbits continue to breed like crazy. We are up to 30 or so. Nice, lean meat and great for rabbit and dumplings. We gets eggs every day although our duck has stopped laying this week. Not sure what is up with her.

Wyatt , Abbey and I went to atlanta during the last week of 2011 and stayed at mom and dads house. I must have put on 10 lbs. All they do it eat and eat and eat. :) Mom spent a couple of days in the hospital with pain in her midsection. We are still not sure what the cause was, but she seems to be better now.
The kids and I went up to Charlotte and went sailing with Gehrig on his 26 ft sailboat. I loved it and could definitely live on the water. My dream.

It is definitely good to be home back in Montana where people are real and care about each other. We have built some great relationships out here and this is definitely home. I am glad Jehovah led us out here, I believe God was leading us to a better way of life.

I started teaching Jak to read this week. I forgot how frustrating it can be to teach a 4 year old to read. But he is catching on. Typical boy, though. He can't sit still. I biked up to the kids school to drop off some lunch money and played football with Wyatts class at recess. Now they all want me to come up there every day at recess. :) Those were the days when I was Wyatt's age 10 and all we did was play football every day all day after school. There was nothing better than that.

Crazy Ex Landlords

So we are getting a solid 10 eggs per day now. One of our ducks mysteriously drowned in the horse trough the other day, kind of weird. I did not know ducks could drown. The ducks are very cool.
We are breeding the goat sometime soon so we'll have babies and milk in the spring. More self sufficient.

We had a great thanksgiving at David and Amys, kudos to them for throwing a great dinner party. The kids had fun playing with Nick and Jacob. I had the privilege to talk with Davids dad for a while. What a wealth of knowledge and experience he has.

And just when you think you have seen the last of our psycho ex landlords, we get 3 voicemail death threats from them. We of course have to go down and file a police report. They basically tell us that since he has no business ever coming to our house, if he does, use deadly force to protect our family if necessary. Then the next day, Jason Terry calls back apologizing. A totally different tone.

Now today someone is using my identity to sign up for match.com and datehookup.com. Probably the ex landlords. It is almost humorous, but we are having the FBI investigate them. This would equate to 5 felonies between the death threats, some cross state issues,  and identity theft. These 2 just keep digging their own grave. It is a shame.

Suburban Bits the Dust

Wow, 3 months since my last post. Life is way too complicated right now. I spent 3 weeks in Atlanta with Michael, picked up Abbey from camp, and drove back to Montana with our stuff. This is the last time I want to do that drive.
It has been a beautiful summer here in Montana. We moved to a new house August 30 after our landlords flaked out. Jason and Nicole Terry ended up being a couple of crooks and scammed us for a 1000 bucks. Live and learn. Karma will get them, I am certain of it.

Anyway, the new place is an older house but on 5 acres, so more room for the animals and farming. We got a dairy goat last week, so that makes 2 horses, 1 goat, 6 chickens, 11 rabbits, 2 dogs and 1 cat. Jenny and Josh helped us put up a fence and I built a structure for the rabbits and chickens.

The kids had to switch schools because of the move and are going to lone rock school now. A very small school, the oldest in Montana. The community is great.

After the grueling move, we have settled in to the new house and things are getting back to normal. Nice high speed internet from rocky mountain.


We get a steady 5 eggs per day now and after a few more months, we'll start eating rabbit regularly. We got some pretty good bounty in the garden in spite of having to harvest early. 10 gallons of potatoes, 10 lbs of carrots, a little corn, strawberries, tomatoes, beans and more. Next year is going to be even better.

Just when I thought things were getting back to normal, some guy hit our suburban today at 80 miles per hour while it was parked on the side of the road and totalled it. He launched it almost 100 feet. Unbelievable.

PHP High CPU

So after wrestling with performance issues for over a week on our web server running PHP, I finally found the culprit.

ob_start();

session_start();

These 2 lines of code in our header file were causing the CPU on our web server to run at 100%. I have not gotten feedback from one of my developers yet on what we were using those for, but they were the culprit. I figured I  would post this in case anyone else ran into this issue since we have been trying to solve this for over a week. We read through tons of web posts on PHP and high CPU, but none applied to our situation. The CPU's on our server were completely maxed out.

Summer 2011

I can't believe it has been 2 months since my last blog. The weather has been absolutely amazing. We have our garden planted with potatoes, corn, strawberries, squash, okra, tomatoes and more. The beans are not looking too good, though.

Our chickens are laying eggs now. Yummy. And we should have some baby rabbits in a month or 2.

Abs headed to camp this week. Monica dropped her off. Kelsie is her counselor. Cool.

We hiked Blodgett with the Callo family yesterday. There are some nice walls in there. Can't wait to climb them. Mill creek is very impressive as well. 700-800 ft walls. But the ticks suck out here.

Mikey has a summer job cutting the grass at a realty company. 40 per week.

Montana Spring 2011

Today was the most beautiful day in the bitterroot valley 65 and sunny. The kids got some school awards today. A combination of learning awards and fitness awards. Michael was the most physically fit kid in the school and he got straight A's all year.
Abs got honor roll all year and some fitness awards.
Wyatt got honor roll 3 quarters with some PE awards as well.

Jak got to play at the park with his buddy Angus. They had a blast. I walked into town like normal, 3 miles. I actually biked to the Super 1 this week, 7 miles each way. Trying to stay in shape a little.

So we finally saw Atlas Shrugged Part 1. I thought it was great considering the small budget. What a great story.

Whirlwind Month

Man am I busy. 5 of out 6 sites had record months. Things are moving so fast I can barely keep up. We got 2 rabbits and 6 chickens this month for eggs and meat. Home grown eggs are the best, yummy. Jak is talking more these days and the other 3 are making friends left and right. The weather has been nice all month. Low 50's during the day. A little overcast, though.

I have to keep exercising regularly because my body is falling apart from sitting too much. Volleyball was fun while it lasted, but it is over now.

We are seriously considering moving out of the country again to Chile or New Zealand. If I were a betting man, I would say it is 50/50 that we'll move out of the US within 2 years. Of course you never know what can happen in 2 years. It is just hard to see any future in this country for our kids. Too many government moochers and looters and criminals here. If we do stay, Montana is definitely the place. What a beautiful place.