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The Living Without Series

This is a series of posts that I wrote back in 2006 on living with less stuff. Check them out: liv011Living #2liv031liv04

Coal Creek Farm on Facebook

The Chicken Doctor

April

The Architect

Clay

About April

AprilAngel

Welcome to Coal Creek Farm!  My name is April, I’m a chicken doctor, I specialize in therapeutic treatments such as spoinking and cluckectomies. I just earned my wings and am ready to teach my patients how to fly.

Oh, come on…it’s a little funny, right?

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Okay here’s the real deal.  My parents named me April Dawn because I was born early in the morning in…..you guessed it, April.  I have heard every comment you could ever think of about my name.  I’m 6 feet tall, taller than both my parents and my sister.  The hair color truly is my real hair, sometimes my hair dressers don’t believe me and it’s much, much, much darker than the freaky white color it was when I was younger.  Combine all these things; the name, the height, the hair…oh, and the freckles and you get one messed up chick.

Then along came Clay.

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Clay the Architect is my husband.  Guess what?  His parents gave him a name that kids made fun of too!  He’s a freakish 6’5″ tall and he used to have auburn hair and big giant freckles.  If ever two people were made to be together it was us two weirdos.

We have no problem laughing at each other or making fun of other people or being horribly sarcastic.  Please accept my apologies now.

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Clay is featured pretty heavily in my blog, most of my readers like him more than me which makes him unbearably hard to live with.  We have four children, one girl and three boys.  My children are weird, that’s all I can really say about them.  You will experience them off and on here and I will most likely do my fair share of complaining about their filthy trails and smelly smells.

We live on a micro-farm, if there is such a thing.  It has always been our dream to live in the country and have animals and grow lots of things.  In September of 2007 that dream came true when we moved to Kansas and bought a century old American Foursquare home. We have a small orchard and a garden that we are making larger every year.  We have one dog, Preacher, an assortment of cats, pigs, chickens, turkeys and one turken.  Life is sweet on this little place.

Several months after we bought our little dream spot Clay was prematurely made a partner in his firm.  This wonderful opportunity came at a huge cost, the cost of buying a portion of the business.  We found ourselves just recovering from moving and setting up house and then basically buying what we like to refer to as ‘The Luxury Villa’ that we never get to enjoy.  We found ourselves steeped in debt and were very uncomfortable with that fact.

In February 2008 we read Dave Ramsey’s books and decided we were going to live like the cheapest people in the world and get our family out of debt.  It’s been a rewarding journey, but hard.  I write a lot about this journey and the comments I receive from readers is one of the biggest reasons we have been able to stay focused.

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Other things I should warn you about:

This blog contains a lot of dancing.  The dancing may not be technically correct, but it’s good for the soul and a belly laugh.

I say the word Damn when referring to Dave Ramsey, it’s entirely appropriate.

I like using biblical words such as ass, damn, hell and jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, because I’m a Christian and those words are in the Bible.  If any of those things bother you, then we might have a problem.

If you ever fill the need to contact me I now have an email address dedicated to Coal Creek Farm at april@coalcreekfarm.com.  I would love to hear from any of you.

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