the reason why we love Framboise Manor so much!

yesterday i did a post that showed you the interior of Framboise Manor. our little house is a little crappy but we have done everything we can to make do until we have saved enough to build an addition. a sunroom - to be built off of the kitchen. i can't wait.

but do you know why we really love Framboise Manor so much? i will tell you. this is out front and we see it every day.

this is out back. same thing - we see it every single day.

beautiful clouds always.

rocking chairs to sit in and stare at the sky and Strachan's Brook. every day.

another beautiful sky day.

more beautiful clouds.

then there is the river.



sometimes the river backs up.


that's a nekkid jambaloney going to check on our canoe - bahahahahah!

whenever i am making food, i make it on the table. that's Edgar Houdini's (aka the Rat) towel. he likes to sleep on it. this is my view when i am making food.

this is the view from the living room/dining room. that's noodie-noo's little blanket.

here's out back. if i stand on the back deck on my tippy-toes i can see the river.

here's the back deck with our patio set, swing and hottub. i love this area!

and there is the monster greenhouse! jambaloney has a little thing for overkill on all of his projects!

tractor-dura, van-dura and the shed made from junk.

not quite as junky as the shed made from the top of ftruckdura v 1.0!

oooh! caribou-dura!

we've never owned a new vehicle before and this baby is a dream! notice how far back the driveway goes. and here's looking at the other end of the driveway.

can you believe my man spent 7yrs shovelling all of that mostly by hand with a little help from atv-dura????

here's my favourite tree - i call him bonsai.

who ami kidding? every tree on our land is my favourite tree!

here's my beautiful pond...aka really overgrown sink-hole.

but every year the spring peepers lay their eggs in our pond and we get the egg sacks out and take them to the river. we love hearing "meep-meep-meep" every night!

and ted's beautiful bench and the old tree roots that jambaloney turned into legs. our tires, our greenhouse, our laundry blowing in the wind. these are the reasons that we love Framboise Manor so much.

oh ya. i forgot to mention our beautiful beach, 5 mins away, and nobody ever goes there!



our little house is a little crappy but we have done the best we can with it and we are happy! our land brings us such joy! sometimes we can go a week without hearing a vehicle and when we do hear one, we get a toot which means it's one of our friends.

 Framboise Manor is a very special place. we give thanks every day for finding this piece of paradise. when we say our prayers, we hope that all of our friends can be in a place that provides this much joy.

our funny little house

i had been thinking about this post for a few days. and then finally decided to do it. even tho the day i chose to take the pictures was rainy and grey. but i realized how much i enjoyed looking at my blog friends' houses. some are renovating, some just put up pics of certain rooms or some such thing. and i realized that i had never done a proper tour of Framboise Manor. no worries kids - it only costs 5 bucks and we accept paypal, visa, checque or money order for your convenience. click any of the pics to enlarge and see all of the dust and cat hair!

Framboise Manor starts at the deck that jambaloney originally wrapped in plastic and then built walls and windows from stuff he found in the garbage in order to enclose it like a proper porch.

i love it and so do the cats!there's a door at the front and back and 4 cat doors. there's my sister C's cabinet on the left and matching white shoe rack just beside it. the bins are for dirty dishes as at this time of the year the dishwasher is still in the basement. it's coming back up to the porch this week - HALLELUJAH!

here is one side of the kitchen with the barbie fridge and stove. i can't wait to have regular-sized appliances!

here is the other side of the kitchen with my table that works as extra counter space with K ampersand J carved into it. oh and Munkley-Spontooch with the devil eyes.

jambaloney built that extra cupboard space for me. i love the way it looks!

here is the kitchen past the table. with the greenhouse in the house for starting seeds. normally the white hutch thingy is up against the back wall beside the door but for seed-starting purposes it moves out front of the other cool hutch thingy that jambaloney built me. and that's the back end of Edgar Houdini aka The Rat.

this is the kitchen from the upstairs...not very big but with the two hutch things that jambaloney built it has been livable.

this was a section of wall that really wasn't doing anything. jambaloney built me a floor to ceiling place to put all of our dishes and our pots and some pans hanging off of it.

this is the funny little hallway from the kitchen to the bedroom and bathroom. notice the handle on the wall?

this is another unused space that jambaloney built me another floor to ceiling storage cupboard. my sister C told another friend that jambaloney had built me a cupboard out of a wall. needless to say, a funny conversation ensued. here is the wall-cupboard.

thank The Lord for these wall cupboards that he built for me!!! opposite the wall cupboard is our bedroom. and by bedroom, i mean a room full of bed! have a look-see:



i am a bed hog. i roll and toss and turn all night long sometimes ending up upside down. so that is a queenbed smashed up against a doublebed. and it fills the whole room. jambaloney built the frame and we have 8 long rows under the bed for prep storage.

this is the entry to the bathroom.

it is L-shaped so this is looking at the sink from the toilet area. and there's another wall-contraption-cupboard that jambaloney built. also good for bathroom prep storage.

and here is the toilet area.

this is looking up from the kitchen stairs to the living room.

the torn-up box on the stairs is "The Rat Box". we left the box there one day and he started scratching it and so we left it there for him.

here's a bit of a better picture of the living room/dining room. all of the wood furniture refinished by jambaloney. of note, all of my collected encyclopaedias.

here's looking at the other end of the living room/dining room. more encyclopaedias.

this is the little shelf on the stairs is a collection of our most useful and relied on books.

this is the strange little hallway between the living room, pantry and computer room.

here is a pic of our preps area that jambaloney built.



i removed a bunch of our preps so that you could see how deep it goes.

and finally our computer room. we're still working on it. all of the cables and cords that you see are not normally placed like that.

but as we lost our internet for a week, jambaloney did a full diagnostic and wanted all of the cords/routers/etc. available for the technicians.

and here is the other side of the room.

this house was built in 2 parts and is very awkward space-wise. we are planning an addition, a sunroom which will be built off of the kitchen. it will allow for moving things around and give us, and 4 cats more room...and cat doors.

well, i have showed you our little crappy Manor....now it's your turn!

world...meet Flower325b - and some other stuff!

what a gorgeous day and we got a ton of stuff done even though jambaloney has been working on his contract ALL.DAY.LONG.AGAIN. and he is back in to work - AGAIN - tomorrow. arghghghgh!

here is one of our 2 famous ravens.

they jump on the roof of our house every morning in order to alert us to the fact that they need to be fed. they seem to have a thing for eating old cat food. who knew?

kids - do any of you like kombucha? it is a fermented, fizzy tea drink. we have been enjoying it for years - it's very healthy and if you would like more info go here. people say it is an acquired taste but we loved it the first time we drank some - soooo deelish!

anyway - we have bought organic kombucha over the past several years. and benefited from it. but it is expensive. and as you all know - we DO NOT accept any kind of advertising on our blog so if we recommend something - we mean it. this is our very favourite "bought" kombucha and we can't recommend it enough!




finally, i decided that if i could make several different kinds of kimchi, sauerkraut, sauerruben, etc. - then there was no way that i couldn't make our own kombucha! a few weeks ago, i ordered a kombucha scoby from Karma Cultures and could not be happier with the product we received! again, we receive nothing for our reviews and we accept no ads...but if a product exceeds all of our expectations - then we share it with you all. especially if it promotes good health.

about 10 days ago i received my scoby and additional implements and instructions. MY Scoby is named Flower325b which means she comes from a long line of scobies. i followed the instructions to a tee and check out my results:

 i am not just proud - i am super proud! in the big jar you can see the Mother Scoby (Flower325b) and a secondary Mother beginning at the side of the jar. you can see 2 mason jars filled with kombucha - and the third was filled but then we had to test-taste it. OMG! OMG! OMG! soooo super delicious! a one-time investment and we will be drinking kombucha for the rest of our lives!

if anyone would like me to send a scoby once i have a secondary Mother going - i will send it. the only problem is shipping costs. i will have to vaccuum seal the mother in a bag with at least 2 cups of kombucha, include directions, etc.....but it will have to be expressed ship as the Mother scoby can only survive so long in a bag. but if any of you are serious and are willing to work out shipping details - let me know. i don't want to sound cheap but shipping anything from this remote island costs nothing short of a fortune!

again - it has been a majestic day! in the middle of the pic below is a ....."craven". we have crows and ravens here all day long and when we can't tell whether it is a raven or a crow - we call it a "craven" - bahahahahah!

kids - when your day is going to filled with scobies and cravens and transplanting a bunch of tomatoes - you need a good breakfast! we are still up to our eyeballs in our own potatoes from last year - woohoo! so we had our own fried potatoes, poached eggs, from-scratch hollandaise sauce poured over the eggs, potatoes and steamed broccoli, some tomatoe slices and a fresh sprig of our own parsley.



yummeh.

dinner (lunch to some) was a very basic salad with a kick.



lettuce, tomatoe, cucumber, our own green onions and our own parsley. the kick? a salad dressing of cold-pressed hemp oil, a ton of apple cider vinegar with the Mother (think scoby), a ton of fresh pressed garlic, fresh pressed ginger, a good squeeze of lemon and the usual suspects: turmeric, cumin and cayenne. you can't go wrong with that dressing as it goes with everything.

here's supper after a long day.

a salad of lettuce, chicken, mango, seedless grapes and the same dressing as i mentioned above. and a lobster roll...made proper with the bun toasted lightly with butter and a bucket load of fresh-caught lobster (jambaloney gets it cooked right before he leaves at end of day...and the lobster is caught that day!), mayo, lettuce and salt and pepper.

we transplanted 22 tomatoes into their forever-home pots in the greenhouse - buried them right up to their little heads in order to encourage lots of root growth.

comfrey tea was poured into each pot of dirt before the tomatoes were added. here's a ton of garlic coming up - woohoo!

and the most beautiful vision of all - potatoe tires!

jambaloney topped these tires up in the fall with all kinds of good stuff, raked it all in, they get more comfrey tea tomorrow and we'll be planting potatoes in the next few days. and this is the first year that we are still EATING our potatoes from last year. 40 tires stacked 3 high (as we hill them) produced 200lbs of potatoes last year plus all of our seed potatoes for this year.

kids - we looooooove potatoes!

i know i have only hit up a few of your blogs in the past day...but i had correspondence that needed attending to, bills and crap - plus all of the great fun in the garden and greenhouse. as you know, i like to keep this blog as a journal for what we are doing when...it makes it easy to look back over the years and see when we planted this or moved that to the greenhouse. which is why making this post is important to me. your blogs are important to me too. just give me a breath or two and i'll hit you all up and catch up to you all.

sending love. xoxo

we're back!

we're back kids! it has been a raining deluge all day and when the internet guys came out, 2 very polite, young, tattooed gentlemen who didn't want to drip all over my kitchen floor when they came in to call our internet provider, set up ladders and climbed up and installed a whole new antenna-2-tower wireless system - they did it quickly and with smiles! man, the service we get here in the middle of nowhere???? jambaloney will be calling their manager in the morning!

here's a beautiful sunrise from the other morning.

click the pic to enlarge and see the moon and the sun. such beauty. the snow is all gone and i think it is finally spring.

i thank the heavens every day for the ability to see Strachan's beautiful brook, fed by unknown mountain springs (mountains here on cape breton are more like other people's hills...but hey! we like hills!) and a whole pile of delicious winter run-off.

sorry kids. yesterday was the day that our friend A started cooking the lobster.

those are two 1 and 1/2 pounders that were caught about 6 hours prior to us eating them. maybe Rain will be the only one to understand that i suck the juice out of all of them. and eat the paste. oh Lord - it's lobster season AND we got the internets back - teehee.

how did we fare without the internets? not too badly indeed. we missed being able to check on our internet friends...but other than that, jambaloney worked, i made food - a lot of which came from our greenhouse, we spring-cleaned, we played cards.

we made a new daily ritual ((daily mcssauge (massauge) for the cats having been started years ago)) - we started getting up, hottub dip, playing our morning cards, another hottub dip - and then the new thing - daily getting into our comfy living room chairs and planning out our day - oh this is a biggee! every morning after all of the other stuff, we get in our chairs, we talk, we plan, we hold hands. and then we do what needs to be done. my man is up to his eyeballs in work and going in 3-4 days a week for the past several weeks. NOT WHAT WE ORIGINALLY PLANNED FOR WHEN WE GOT HERE! but it's a great job, he really loves staying sharp on his development skills, and we are now in the heyday day of spring and lobster season!

we are trying to outdo the happiest of the happiest. i know - we're competitive! feels like we're winning. there might be a 2 million dollar prize at the end...that would be great! but right now, we are trying to just be as happy as we can with everything that we have. and i really think we are winning.

give us a few days to get to your blogs. and catch up. we have some good planting days coming and all we really want to do is PLANT! and catch up with our blog friends. we're back, friends, with a vengeance!

sending much love to all of you and especially to my friend Wendy and her family at Little House in the Big Woods. their homestead burned down in March. Wendy and her family have always been a huge inspiration to me and jambaloney. please stop by and offer her and her family words of encouragement. they have lost more than most of us will ever have lost in our entire lives. think about that for just a moment.

again, we're back thanks to the good people at seaside. man, we get some good services for being out in the middle of nowhere.

i got lots of good meals to catch you all up on, greenhouse progress, seed-starting progress and a whole pile of other crap. it's nice to be back out there among friends.

thank you to all of you who leave comments - we don't need 'em, jambaloney is not going to strip dance for them (bahahahahahah! oh come on! that was funny!), and we have only had a blog for a few years. we can live without it. the point being - we choose to live with it when we can. we like knowing that there is a bunch of nutters out there who think like we do.

no other way to end this post except by sending you all a big, giant XOXO.