Update

A lot has happened since my last post.  Some highlights:

I have a new hip joint.  The joint on my right side was bone-on-bone, painful enough to restrict my activities.  The surgery went quite well -- I was out of hospital the same day of the procedure!  And right now I'm pretty much back to normal as far as muscle strength in that leg.

Another interesting project:  our old barn.  Two winters ago we had a fairly heavy snow fall, and the weight was enough to cause one of the walls to buckle.  Not much of a foundation, especially after many years of dry rot.  Fortunately the wall just dropped a few feet before finding a new equilibrium, and the rest of the barn was flexible enough to not shatter.  It just looks pretty bent.  I am in the process of rebuilding the wall.  I am jacking up that side using some harbor freight "farm jacks".  The temporary support header is several feet over from the old wall, so, once the barn is back to square (more or less) I will install new concrete footers and a new wall.  I will post some photos when I have a chance.

The garden is our perennial summer project, and like previous summers it took a lot of time.  I'm just glad I was in good enough condition so we could get the garden in.  We did have some help putting in some things, like the cucumber and bean trellises -- thanks to Mike and Debbie for that!  However, I wasn't quite in good enough shape to mulch the garden like I usually do, and we paid the price -- weeds galore.  And perhaps that is why our peppers and tomatoes didn't do as well this year as previous years.  Even so, we got enough tomatoes to put up 40 pounds of tomato-vegetable juice and 20 pounds of pasta sauce.

Another milestone:  we initiated a quarterly "draw" from our investments, to cover expenses.  Up to that point we were funding our expenses from savings in the bank accounts.  I have tracked our burn rate so had a pretty good idea on what we would need on a quarterly basis.