The Rain is Raining

Thunderstorms hit last night as I drove home from the Catawba farmer's market. I felt hopeful that the rain would fill up the pond, but it didn't. We got lots of lightning and thunder but very little rain.

It was enough rain to fill up our little valley with misty fog early this morning.

I made the executive decision to change my baking hours this week. Starting at 3am means for a very wonderful early start and a very exhausted baker. I never could figure out how to go to sleep early enough. As of this week, the baker's hours have moved to 5am. I figured if I could work from 5am to 8pm I would be able to get everything done plus get a decent night's sleep.

The baking and wrapping got finished up at 8:30 tonight. I didn't do quite as much as I might have wished, but even so, have six dozen loaves of bread, a dozen spelt pound cakes and almost 50 pizza crusts. I start with milling the grain into flour, then make big batches of dough. After several rounds of rising and punching down, each loaf is hand-kneaded into its proper shape. Pizza crusts are rolled out and everything gets popped into the very hot and wonderful convection oven.

Lots of coffee is consumed and even more water on days like today. I put up curtains on the doorways into the rest of the house to keep from heating everything up. It worked well. The rest of the house stayed around 78-82 degrees. The bakery hovered in the 90 degree range.

As I baked, Rachel drove the little girls up to Stuart's Draft to purchase our non-GMO animal feed. Maggie washed laundry and swept up and Thomas dug up some potatoes, moved chicken house detritus out to the garden and cleaned his room.

We got a nice afternoon shower, but the pond still wasn't even halfway filled. As I finished up the bread wrapping to go milk the cow another rain started to fall. I am giving it a few minutes to stop, then shall join Coco for our evening chat.

I will fall into bed tired, but not as exhausted as I have been in weeks past. It did help having Rachel come home and volunteer to wash up a big pile of dirty dishes, God bless her! I hope that she is rewarded greatly for all her service to me.

I never thought that sleeping in until 5am would feel like a break to me!!! Well, the rain has paused, so off I go to milk the dear cow. Good night!