Thank goodness for the diversion of Maurice. He has taken to sleeping under the eaves of our small barn and there is perhaps nothing cuter than a sleeping moose curled up in the snow.

At dawn, we watch him wake up, swiveling his mammoth ears back and forth to listen to every noise in our household. When he gets to his feet, it is at once so graceful and so impossible to imagine how he has gotten those gangly legs under himself so fast and so artfully.

At night, we listen to him munch his way through every twig on the property. I have decided that for this year at least, the trade off of less fruit is worth it. Darling Maurice can eat those buds with impunity.

William is taking care of the neighbor’s chickens this week and as he heads off after dusk to shut the chickens in their coop, he scans with a big flashlight. He really doesn’t want to accidently run into Maurice. His flashlight has caught Maurice in its beam a couple of times. Fortunately, Maurice has just kept on with his meal and William has navigated around him.

This is all lovely diversion from tiresome February snowstorms and snowballing issues with our new labels. We now find ourselves hand gluing as well as varnishing each label because the glue on the label is not holding and the labels are peeling at each end.

The label company and I have come to terms and they are going to rerun the labels, but they want me to test other materials before they rerun the labels. This means a bit more time using these half baked labels while we try to figure out what constitutes testing different label materials.

Besides asking them to guide me in this test process, I keep asking for the label material we got last time that worked perfectly fine. So far no one has told me if that is available, or told me how to test the different materials either.

All this to say, thank you for your patience if you were one of the lucky folks who got either unvarnished unsticky labels on your Essences or varnished but not sticky labels- I am so sorry! Until this experience I had no knowledge or opinions about “paper memory issues” and frankly, I preferred it that way.

So Maurice is my favorite visitor right now.

And the varnish bottle and the glue stick are the visitors that are overstaying their welcome.

On another, happier front, the new guide is at the printers. I met with all sorts of people involved in the print process this morning, ever so grateful to have Jess at my side translating the printspeak. We don’t have an exact print date yet, but I don’t think we are more than a month or two out. In the meantime, we have a few extra boxes of the 2005 guides. If you would like some to share, we are happy to send you whatever you want. Please email green.hope.farm@valley.net or call us at 603-469-3662 if you want copies to share in any way. Thank you! And now, I have to get back to my craft activities……..