that lame first post

Well, hey there.

(There is no way for a first post on a new blog to be anything but lame. I know this because I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes, and I’ve written fifteen different paragraphs and then erased them, and I’ve given up on this post being anything but lame. But here goes...)

We just planted our family in a beautiful farmhouse on a completely untamed patch of land that is part of a big farm near the Snake River. Our front yard is a gravel driveway and a decrepit orchard that was destroyed by goats several years ago. Our backyard is a brambly mess of trees, both living and dead, that includes a little old brick house that is nasty and needs torn down. Our property includes a cute little red barn, a half-finished chicken coop, and a whole lot of mud. (SOOO much mud...) Our house is so new that I can’t even bring myself to hammer a nail to hang a painting. (And, since I have kids and pets, it is also full of mud.) We are completely in love with the whole place. Everything in life feels like a blank canvas right now.

There is a lot of taming that needs done around here, and I am, frankly, a little overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done. But there are great possibilities.

Since everything else is new in life, it just makes sense to also start fresh with a blank canvas here. I could go back to an old, well-established blog, but it feels like going back to the old town. There’s nothing wrong with it. There's some great history and a lot of great memories there. But I don’t live there anymore.

So, welcome to Wild Dirt (a fairly literal title, but also somewhat representative of the chaos that comes with living with my particular mix of children and animals). For the moment, I am looking at this as an experiment in whether I want to keep up with a blog or not, so I hope you will visit the way my friends in real life visit—with a full awareness that life is a little wild and unpredictable and that I can’t be trusted to stick with anything. But I will do my best to chronicle the ups and downs of life on an Idaho farm, particularly as we have NO idea what we are doing, which I figure is always fodder for some good entertainment.

My next post will, hopefully, be less lame.