Fishing and ideas...

I've been struggling to write a cheese making post for the last several weeks. Trying to strike a balance between enough and too much detail. Its still a work in progress. To summarize I made an attempt to make feta with local raw goats milk but had some temperature issues so the bacteria didn't fully convert the milk leading to weak curd and meh flavor. The good news is that I know what to fix for the next time.

In the mean time, while I was struggling to write that post, life had moved on. My kale is going wild after 3 weeks straight of rain and I'm freezing it in large quantities. We went fishing last weekend and we had amazing luck. My husband used to have terrible luck fishing but since we took a fishing class last year his luck has improved tremendously. He has out fished me on our last few trips. This last weekend he caught these two beauties (I caught a few more smaller fish) and we ate smoked trout for a week. Delicious....

They were both over 16 inches long

This brings me to the ideas part of the post. I spend a lot of free time scanning the MLS site for the area we are planning on relocating too. We aren't ready to move from here yet so this activity is just sort of daydreaming for me. However I have seen a few perfect properties, perfectly priced and been so upset that we weren't ready to buy and we missed our chance with the property. This got me thinking and I realized that we live in a townhouse that my husband bought when he was single and when you add in the fact that my salary has increased significantly in the last year and a half it turns out that we are very under housed. We spend less than 15% of our take home pay on housing (30 % is recommended and in reality most spend more than that). We also only have one other source of debt, the student loan, which we are paying double payments on to pay down. Looking at our monthly budget there is a plenty of wiggle room and we could afford a second mortgage payment with out additional stress. So after much discussion, the plan is to buy our property sooner rather than later, before interest rates and property values go up significantly.  We will pay two mortgages until we are ready to sell our current place and move out there. We plan on buying in 2016 rather than 2018 or 2019. We need get pre-approved for our loan and find a really good real estate agent so hopefully I will spend part of this year making it happen.

The other big change that is coming in 2016 is bees. I had the bright idea that I could keep them at my in-laws place. My HOA here would never allow it, but my in-laws have a much bigger place and no HOA. Laws here in the Beehive state are very friendly to bee keeping so I wouldn't have any trouble at their place. When I mentioned this to my mom she suggested I keep the bees at her place instead, she has huge bee garden, but I am reluctant because my dad is really afraid of bees. The same way I am afraid of spiders, a true phobia. Strangely enough he said he wouldn't mind them in the back yard but I know it would cause anxiety so I am going to stick with my in-laws for now and keep my parents as a back up. My mom is going to plant some extra bee forage since her house is close to my in laws and is in bee foraging range of my hive.  Stay tuned for more bee posts as we prepare for 2016.