March was a huge month of spending.
Travel
We headed home from Ft. Lauderdale in the normal fashion- as fast as we could go! But its a two day trip and on the morning of the second day, I had an onset of back spasms. These were the kind where I couldn't tie my own shoes, where standing up or sitting down or anything in between just took my breath away. Thankfully, DH was following me. We hobbled along for a good part of the day but ended up spending another night in a motel. $$
Land Improvements
We've got several old trees on our little acre and had put off the necessary trim work for way too long. Every year we cross our fingers that the old limbs that fall will miss our home, fences, automobiles, critters, etc... With the thought of the looming spring storms, we knew we couldn't put it off any longer so we hired a crew to come in and trim all the good trees and take down all the bad ones. It took them over a week (Four days of which our power line had to be down for safety. We lost some of the food in our freezer. $) This was a project that we couldn't do ourselves and even though we shopped around, it was an expensive one. $$$
We also had a couple of nice days to work on the garden. After 2 solid years of dumping all the piles of wasted straw, hay, and manure on it, we were ready to spread it out. To save my bad back from all the raking, DH found a rake-like attachment for the back of our riding mower. It worked like a dream! $$
Critters
One night while the power was out, we went to the auction for a date night (only homesteaders will understand that.) We were on the lookout for a buck rabbit since we don't have one yet. It wasn't a good night for rabbits but we did chance upon an adorable buck pygmy goat. He is still very young but hopefully will be able to breed by this fall. $$
Then while we were at the feed store, I got lured over to the stock tanks full of little chirpers- I SWEAR it's the lights, they get me every time! Anyway, they had a bunch of cute baby turkeys and I have always wanted to try raising turkeys and my enabler was right there with me saying, "Why don't you get a couple and see how they do for us?" So we came home with baby turkeys- which, by the way, cost about 3 times as much as baby chickens.$ And baby turkey feed. $
Taxes
We pulled off our yearly Oh-my-gosh-it's-the-end-of-March-and-we-haven't-done-our-taxes dance just in time -again. "How did that go?" you might ask. And, "No comment" would be the most tactful answer I could muster. $$
So March has been spent. Here's to a less expensive April!
