I like to hold myself to these monthly check-ins but sometimes I’m just too busy to give them proper time. There is so much happening each month, around the house and also – during these summer months – out and about as well. Although pandemic concerns persist, we did venture a bit farther from home this month to visit family in NJ and CT and of course did plenty of exploring in our own area closer to home. We took a break from thinking about house projects, orchard projects, work projects for our job…well, we tried really hard to do this. We were able to take a bit of a mental break by physically getting away from home for awhile. A change of scenery has done us some good and I think – and hope – it will find us renewed and reenergized to tackle some of our lofty goals and more tedious to-do tasks for the homestead during the fall and winter seasons. I hope to make these monthly updates more robust with recaps of what we actually have done and highlight some of our long-term plans. But right now it is easiest and smartest to just take one day at a time, appreciate the breather we have given ourselves, and focus on the ebbs and flows of each day. It’s really all we can handle, and all that any of us can handle, with all that goes on in our daily lives, and in our communities and in the world around us. We’ve been blessed with several beautiful rainbows this summer, which I always find to be a wonderful reminder of how the bright and grey always mix to produce some degree of positive end results. We will keep slogging through the grey of the every day, knowing that there will always be slivers of color to come.