The Phoenix, Great Northern Garlic, and Sub It Club aka My Life

So yeah, I've been a little bit busy lately. Let's see...what have I been up to?

The Phoenix Cafe & Gallery where we lived and served up some great breakfast.  Just thinking about it makes me want Eggs Benedict.

Well, first of all we moved out of the Inn we were care-taking and back to our house on the mountain. The Inn was fun. Who wouldn't want to live right outside of a ghost town? The kids loved riding their bikes down to Old Molson to play. The first winter we were there we ran a restaurant out of the house. We had music nights and lots of parties. Can't really beat that, or can you?

It is a beautiful house built from 80% reclaimed materials, and designed by the fabulous artist Dan Hulphers. It's for sale if you're looking to run an inn! 

We decided that having a restaurant in our house wasn't much fun for the kids so the next winter my husband and I worked at the local ski hill. On Thursdays schools brought kids up on field trips. My husband taught the snowboarders, I taught skiiers. On weekends we gave some lessons too but mostly we skied with our kids. There's nothing better for a kid than skiing all weekend, every weekend. If there is, we need to try that next. ;)

Yes, I tried snowboarding too. But I'm much better at skiing.

But, life can't be fun and games all the time I suppose. My husband and I have also been working on our farming business. Working for yourself and getting to be outside all day is pretty darn nice in my book, but it is also a lot of work, of course. We've been planting and planning daily. Over the winter we built our Great Northern Garlic website and are looking forward to our first year selling organic seed garlic! You can check out our gardening capers at Great Northern Garlic on Facebook and at @OkanoganOrganics on Twitter. Oh yeah, and I've been trying in earnest, finally, to figure out Pinterest.

We got some goslings. I refer to them as The Ryans.                                

Lambing season has come and gone already!

And of course, I keep up with Sub It Club every day. It's been really great keeping up with other writers who are working towards publication. SCBWI France RA and my partner in subbing, Dana Carey motivates us to set goals every month, and the Facebook chat is always open for questions and encouragement. Making goals and "saying them out loud" has certainly kept me on task as I work to get my work out there!

Some of the beautiful Sub It Club artwork created by Dana Carey.

So...have I been writing? The answer is... yes! I keep a notebook in my pocket. Every day I write down ideas for all sorts of things. As you can see I run a lot of social media pages now and I like to keep those going. I've been working on some farm & garden articles. (Imagine that!) I'm still working on my picture books and am so close to having my chapter reader done, if I could just have enough brain power to do it when I finally get to open the file.

Fun on the farm!

Yeah, it's been a lot lately. (Did I mention that I'm coaching soccer?) But things are going to slow down a bit soon. Summer is coming! I looked at my calendar today and there is actually nothing scheduled on it after this week! I know there will be a lot of farming but it's fun being out there with the family. Work and play really mixes when you're outside. There will be lots of sun, lots of food, and there are lakes on the way to and from the farm in the valley to our house in the mountains. I'm sure we'll be taking lots of dips!

Bet you we'll be running in to some more of these guys soon.

Okay, that's enough about me. I know, it's my blog, but if you have any questions you'll have to ask. I've got to get back to doing monster list posts and interviews and that sort of good stuff. Here's to living a full life! You all have fun out there!