Living in Maine

We met the neighbors recently.

Seriously, they live across the street.  They usually wander over to the road once a week or so.  And their boyfriends live up the road a bit.

Isn't this such a gorgeous view?

If anyone comes to visit, we'll take you for a walk.  There's a 4 mile loop that's mostly road but partially trail through the woods.  We have a few of those - trails in the woods for ATVs that show up as "roads" on Google Maps.  Don't try to take a car on them, though.

One of the things I think is just so cool about living in farm country is all the locally-produced stuff you ca buy.  There's a natural food store a few miles away (the yoga studio I go to is attached to it) and they sell milk in glass bottles from a dairy a few towns over.  I've started buying it - because it takes less time to bring it over from the farm to the store, it lasts WAY longer in my fridge.

And I tried buying eggs from the guy up the road from me, but he wasn't home.  I supported him anyway and bought eggs from his farm at the natural food store (they list the farm the eggs came from on the carton, so you can decide which farmer you want to support).  There's a farmstand on the way into town that sells their own local honey, and they just opened for the season.  I'll be trying that soon, too.

Since we're in a rural area, we don't have trash pickup, so we have to bring our trash and recycling to the "transfer station", which a fancypants word for the town dump.

I don't mind doing that, but I definitely love having recycling available.  Living in the apartment complex, we weren't able to participate in the town recycling program.  We use about half the trash bags as we used to when we separate out the cardboard, paper, and recyclables.

Oh, and the cardboard and paper goes here:

Yeah, we're kind of pyros.  But don't tell the local fire chief.   We just save up all the cereal boxes etc and burn them with the branches we collect from the yard and all the dead trees Matt has been cutting up.

People have been asking how I like working remotely.  It's definitely different.  I do miss having everyone in the office to talk to, and it gets lonely sometimes.  But I'm always able to call, IM, or email people to say hi.  My department has a team meeting once a week, and since my boss and I both have iPhones, we've started to do the meetings over FaceTime so I get to see everyone weekly.

My furry coworker has started to hang out for about 10 minutes in the mornings.

Then the printer will scare him away and he'll start his daily 8-hour nap under the skylight in the loft.

Have a great day!
xo