The Beginning of a New Adventure

If you would have asked me 5 years ago where I thought I would be now, Polson, MT would have been the furthest thing from my mind. 5 years ago I was graduating college, I had just married my husband Brian, and we were living in Chico, CA to be close to my family. I had always imagined that I would end up in a large city, like San Francisco, and done who knows what for a living. I've never really had a sense of direction in the career department.

Instead of settling down in the big city we somehow ended up in the relatively small college town Corvallis, OR, population 54,520. I think this is really where we started shaping our values. I had developed a love of fiber arts (knitting and spinning) and we both have always loved learning how to do things for ourselves. We learned more about self sufficiency, the "home arts" of canning and cooking from scratch, and developed a desire to learn more and do more. Corvallis was definitely the place for that. I really thought we would be there forever.

When a job opportunity became available for my husband in November 2011 in Polson, MT it was exciting and scary. It was a great career move for him (from Physical Therapist to Physical Therapy Department Supervisor) and we would be closer to my father whom I've never really lived near, and closer to my birth place that I knew very little about. There was just one problem: Polson has a population of about 5,231 people in the winter, and closer to 15,000 in the summer. We were going in the wrong direction! I didn't want smaller, I wanted bigger!

Polson is a beautiful place. It's at the base of Flathead Lake, has incredible views of the Mission Mountains, and is less than 2 hours drive from Glacier National Park. As nervous as I was, it really didn't take that much convincing. I'm pretty much willing to live anywhere because I know if we hate it, we can leave.

Well, that all changed in June, 2012. We bought our first house. And not just any house. We bought a small farm on 5 acres. That's where this blog comes in. As much as I wanted to live in a big city, the thought of having my own small farm is so exciting I can hardly stand it! I planned on writing about it immediately but this past month has been so busy, exciting, eventful, and all around crazy that I am just now getting around to getting some thoughts down, as I stand in my living room, about to paint it.

I think a lot of my entries in the first months are going to be memories of this past month. I suffer from instant gratification syndrome and it kills me that we weren't able to work fast enough to get a garden going and get bees and chickens. But we've done so much more, things that I am very proud of, and I hope you enjoy reading about our journey as much as I enjoy telling about it.

For now I will leave you with a teaser photo of our back porch on the day we moved in: