Blueberry Hills Homestead

Midway through

2011-11-19T15:35:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty proud of myself right now. The new toilet is in and works fine. There were only a few moments of, "uh oh, what do I do now," when I couldn't shut off the water to the toilet so I shut off the water to the whole room. But the valve still leaked, drip, drip, drippety, drippety drip, and I had to make a fast trip to the hardware store to get new shutoff valves. That's a retro corningware thing sitting on the floor to catch water.

The white toilet definitely does not match the decor of the room. I hope it's one of those things where a guest will say, "I love what you've done with this room," and I point out all the mistakes I made (because they're too minor to be noticeable). I could have taken the time to order a matchy matchy toilet - but I didn't, because I'm impatient.

Or maybe not that impatient. A plumber came over this morning to look at repairing the pipes where one burst this past January. Yep, 10 months ago. I haven't had heat in 1/3 of the house for 10 months. So, I'll get this bathroom all nice and pretty, and guests will say, "It's COLD in here!" They just might not notice that the toilet doesn't match because they're freezing.

We'll see how it all looks when I get the new vanity in. It's sitting in the living room right now. I'll wait until the hardware store opens tomorrow before I disconnect the water to the sink - I want to be able to make another fast trip if necessary!

See those two nice, round holes in the wall? They're investigatory holes because I was planning on putting a medicine cabinet in the wall. And then I found a stud right between the two holes. I may go with a simple mirror, rather than cut a stud to put a medicine cabinet in. It's really not that important. In fact - I can put the old mirror back up over the holes and put the whole decision off until some future date. See, I can be patient!

I'm Not Going to be a Purist About This

2011-10-25T09:29:00.000-04:00

Here's one of the bathrooms in my midcentury house. It's got cool, old tile on the floor and walls, and a genu-wine Universal Rundle peach-colored one-piece toilet to go with the peach and brown vanity. It used to have brown walls and a brown ceiling until I took care of that with primer.

In true fashion, the toilet didn't work when I bought the house, and I had a bear of a time finding parts to fix it. So now, I'm scared to use the toilet because I'm worried it might break again and parts for this puppy are hard to come by! How useful, exactly, is a bathroom that I'm afraid to use?

That's why I made the hard decision to find this toilet a new home, and go the Home Depot route for a replacement. That and the vanity. I'm all for peach, so my plan is to leave the bathtub exactly the way it is. (Plus, I don't want to touch any of this wonderful midcentury tile if I can help it!) I might possibly replace only the vanity cabinet and re-use the sink, but the jury is out on that so far.

I'm thinking of something like this, ... or this, or this.

And lights that look like this. Or maybe this (both from EBay).

The pictures show that over the years the sink has aged to a different color, more pink-y, than the apricot-colored toilet and the more brown-y, tan-y tub. I've waffled on the order of the steps

Paint the vanity first, to see what color I'm looking for? Or replace the toilet first to see how the room looks with a lighter toilet, ... which might change my vanity choice? I'm 100% sure that the toilet is going bye-bye - so I think that's what I'll do first. (Plus, I should take up the current vanity and make sure the tile underneath is in good shape before buying something newer!) I'm about 75% sure that a smaller sink will look better (this one is 30 inches wide on a 27 inch cabinet). Twenty-four inches will look much better, I think.

I also think that I can do this plumbing job myself, so replacing this stuff could (ideally) be a weekend project.

I have to keep reminding myself that I bought a project house on purpose, because I like this kind of work. Yeah. I like this. Yeah.

Harvest

2011-09-16T10:38:00.000-04:00

I looked at my harvest yesterday morning. Here it is (or will be). Maybe.

One tiny cucumber.

One little tomato.

Aaand ... that's it.

Here's a look over my garden domain, from the platform down a hill to the garage. In June, I plopped a few cukes, a few tomato plants and a few basil plants into the ground. I didn't know at the time, but I had lyme disease. I did know that I was exhausted! It was all I could do to dig holes and put plants in. No soil prep. No fertilizer. No nothing.

Most of the plants died, but some of them hung on and struggled through the season, and soon I'll harvest my lonely cuke and tomato.

Update

2011-09-05T09:16:00.000-04:00

I think I have a few posts started but never posted over the last few weeks, so, since it's Labor Day and I'm starting the morning slowly, I'll take the time to post an update and actually get it up so others can read it.

I started a new batch (batches?) of hard cider yesterday. It's 4 gallons using the same juice from Indian Ladder Farms, but 4 different yeasts. The last batch I made 1-1/2 years ago turned out to be barely drinkable. I had made a 5-gallon commitment on that batch, so it took quite a while to drink it all. This is my third attempt at hard cider. Just like cheesemaking and yogurt making, I'm beginning to see the point of each step, and it's becoming more of a process and less of me blindly following steps that someone else wrote down. If I didn't make any dumb mistakes, it will be 2 weeks in primary fermentation, then 2 weeks in secondary fermentation before I bottle it. Then, it gets better, the longer it's in the bottle (I tried some cider at the brewing supply store that was a year old). I'll probably start drinking this stuff in about 6 months.

Beer is faster, and I've considered brewing beer. The problem is that I don't want to drink beer all that much these days, so the idea of making 5 gallons of it doesn't appeal to me. I DO want to grow hops next year though. I asked the dude at the brewing store if they buy hops from local farmers, and he said that the output from the average Joe's 2 plants (exactly what I was thinking of growing!) isn't enough to make one barrel of beer. No matter. I was thinking of growing it for my own beer that I may make sometime. Or, since it grows so fast, maybe I could grow it on the sunny side of the house to provide shade in the summer, and do nothing else with it.

Here's an update on progress on the Swedish Heartwarmer Shawl from Ravelry. Each nubbin is 1 ounce of fiber, 50% merino, 25% tussah silk and 25% angora (yeah, it feels really soft). I've carded 32 of these and am about halfway through the dying. The pink is supposed to be red, so I'm going to have to buy more red dye. The purple is supposed to be burgundy. The blue piece hanging on the back of the sofa is one of three that I rinsed so thoroughly they kinda felted. I carded the other 2 of the 3, but am not sure they'll be usable to spin. I may have to buy more tussah silk so that I can make some more nubbins.

The pattern calls for 2800 feet of sock weight yarn. Each nubbin will have to make almost 100 feet of plied yarn (200 feet of single ply). I've never spun anything that thin before, and am thinking that if I don't have extra fiber, I'll be short on yarn. Then I'll be months into it and end up buying yarn to make this thing! I don't want that!

Weekend of Destruction

2011-08-15T11:02:00.000-04:00

I said I would wait, but I couldn't.

I've been thinking about what changes I'm going to make to my yard, and had plans to terrace the west side of the garage and the south end of the lot, put fruit trees in the driveway loop, and, and.... Lots of plans! I was doing some online research on landscaping for midcentury houses, thinking about who could do the terracing work and how I'd pay for it, when I realized that I had skipped a VERY important step. **How do I want to relate to the out of doors? What's my overarching landscape philosophy?** (yeah, OK, this is a bunch of hoo hah - but it's the backbone of just about everything. If ya got a philosophy, then it's easy to make individual decisions. Just align to the philosophy.)

Which got me thinking about the prior owner (and wife of the guy who built the house). How did she relate to the out of doors? That's when I realized that she kept most of the landscaping to act as a wall between her and the rest of the world. Example: the top picture shows a dark square, just above the blooming bush. That's the front door. Yup. The front door of the house. Hidden behind a huge Korean Spice viburnum and some huge rhododendrons. After I understood her philosophy, I understood why things were the way they were in the yard, and I felt pretty good about making changes. (Note: I talked to a neighbor and friend of the prior owner and he confirmed my understanding.)

My philosophy is a little more outside-based. Grow food, cook outside, lay in the hammock and sometimes sleep outside. No barriers between inside and out. It's difficult with this house. The living level is one floor up, so every trip outside involves a flight of stairs. Not fun, when balancing a tray with raw steak, beer, a magazine and cooking implements on the way down to the grill. I'm just sayin'.

Anyway. I don't have the money to make the big changes I was planning. But now that I understand the philosophy thing, it's easy to take baby steps that cost nothing to implement. Starting with the front door. Bye to three rhododendrons, aggressively pruned to about a foot above ground.

The left side of the sidewalk has an evergreen and another rhody. If it weren't for the viburnum and the evergreen, both sides of this walkway would be perfectly nice, sunny space that could be used for "useful" stuff, like rhubarb, lovage, and other edibles. I'm going to cut down the viburnum and the evergreen, and transplant all of it to somewhere else. If it doesn't survive, I'll be OK. Then I'm going to bring some of the blue flag iris and peonies from the other house and put them on the right side of this walkway, where the viburnum is. I'll put lovage from the other house on the left side of the walkway and plant rhubarb, chives and some other stuff.

Here's the north side, where I want to terrace. The first picture is in June, when I was letting everything "express itself." The second picture is yesterday after I did a hack job on the stuff next to the house.

This steps/ramp thing drives me NUTS! I was thinking of hiring someone to get rid of it, and terrace this slope up to the platform. But now I'm thinking that since I have 2 arms and no extra money and could use a workout, I can start to do it myself. Get rid of the walkway and make the first, lowest level next to the wall into space for next year's garden.

Here's another view. This platform (below) makes no sense, in a how-does-the-inside-relate-to-the-outside kind of way. To get to it, you have to walk down the steps to the driveway, and then back up to the platform. Huh? My current thinking is to get rid of it, and use pavers to make a patio-thing. But, if there were to be a patio, it should be on the same level as the driveway, not up a hill. An alternative is to bust a hole in the master bedroom and put some steps down to the thing. I still have some thinking about that. The incremental approach means I've got a few years to figure something out.

I am going remove the roses, honeysuckle and the yucca from near the house, and plant other edibles there. Possibly blueberries, but I have a perfect space on the other side of the house for them.

(I've been spewing off names of plants like I'm an expert or sumthin'. But really, when I wasn't being destructo-mama, I was in the books or online, researching plant names. It's nice to know what I've got, but sad to realize that so much of my yard is overwhelmed with invasive honeysuckle and multiflora rose. It'd be nice to have the goats now. They like the stuff.)

I'm going to go around the rest of the house and show you what's there and what I'm planning, but this post is pretty long already, so I'll save it for another day.

The Line in The Sky

2011-08-03T11:41:00.000-04:00

Last night I found myself laying on the hammock on the porch to relax a bit before bed. I haven't hammocked much this year as the Lyme meds made me sensitive to heat and it has been dreadfully hot in the sun this summer. Plus, I'm living lower this year, closer to the city where it's warmer.

I flopped into the hammock and put my eyes to the stars and they felt like new things I hadn't seen before. Then, as my worldly stuff fell to the side, my eyes resolved the cross of Cygnus the swan right above me. I remember from the mountain that the backbone of Cygnus lies along the line of Milky Way, so I looked hard, but didn't see the Milky Way - there's too much light here in the 'burbs. I rested a little while and looked in the way of seeing without focusing, and eventually, or maybe I imagined it, the cloudiness of the Milky Way appeared. Up on the mountain, the Milky Way is blotchy and bright.

I laid some more on the hammock and thought about "stuff." We'd had a carbon monoxide call earlier and I went out in the first apparatus, and got to hold the CO detector as we went through the house, in full gear and on air. It felt really really good (aside from being uncomfortable and hot and sweaty).

As the new person, I concentrate on not being a drag on the group and not screwing up too much stuff, while trying to be a contributer and a problem solver (not a problem generator). Yesterday I got the air pack on, got gloved, got air started and got to the doorway at the same time as the other two guys (yay). (Aside: it's notable how much better I'm fitting in - it just occurred to me this morning that I pointed my back side at the driver and said, "turn me on," and neither one of us thought that was strange - for him to turn the knob on my air tank so I could breathe the air.) Also cool was that one of the guys got the CO detector out while we were enroute - and as we went in the house he asked if I knew how to use it (no), and then he handed it to me. Then later, someone else showed me how to use the tank-refiller and I refilled all our air tanks.

I feel like a sponge with these guys. I anticipated/hoped all along that eventually things would right themselves, and they appear to be doing just that. They're no longer afraid I'm going to sue if they swear, which helped them relax, and I can have a potty mouth myself at times. Are these guys my tribe? I can't tell yet. I still don't have anyone I can call when I feel like hanging out. That was one of my objectives and I'm not there yet.

I'm going to a concert tonight with NM, the guy I dated for 5 months earlier this year. It bothered me that I didn't have any friends that I could ask to the concert, so I eventually tried NM, who rearranged his schedule to be in town. We'll see how it goes - I don't think either of us wants to date again, but we might turn into doing stuff friends. Maybe.

Then I saw a shooting star. I thought about my wish, what I wanted to wish for. It occurred to me that, for the most part, there's nothing I need to wish for. Stuff is pretty good in my world. I concentrated on letting go of yesterday and letting go of tomorrow and just enjoying the moment. Then I saw another shooting star as the big guy up there said, "that's right."

It's Blueberry Season!

2011-07-15T11:46:00.000-04:00

I went to visit the folks at the mountain house last weekend (friends of mine that are renting my homestead in the mountains). We hung out for a while, and they showed me that the blueberries near the house are starting to ripen. Then I showed them the blueberry hill, where there's a lifetime supply of berries if only they could all be picked in a month. We picked and picked and picked and picked, and I got to go home with the booty.

Now, these are wild highbush blueberries that have been unsullied by human contact for nigh on 20 years. The berries are small-ish. The bushes are tall-ish (as in it would be perfect if I were 8 feet tall). Two of us picked for maybe 1/2 an hour and the booty was something like 2 cups of berries, which doesn't seem like a lot.

But this morning I made blueberry pancakes and boy oh boy were they good! I'm going to make muffins with what's left and then invite myself back to their house to pick more!

Am I Creating Addicts?

2011-07-14T16:17:00.000-04:00

I so enjoyed watching hummingbirds feeding at my sister's house that I up and got a hummingbird feeder as soon as I got back from Oregon. It didn't take the little dudes and dudesses long to find the thing, and I get a huge kick out of hearing them zoom up and watching them do the sippy, tilty thing. Here's some pix.

The feeder's on the steps just outside the kitchen window. Doesn't seem to bother the hummingbirdies and I get to sit at the counter and watch.

Now, I am not an experienced birder, so to me, this looks like the same bird. (Every picture is a different feeding event - about 5-15 minutes after the last one.) If it's really one bird, this feller (or lady) is going to get too fat to fly one of these days. Not to mention being dependent on me to feed her/him. I'm concerned that maybe I shouldn't be feeding her/him. Opinions?

Five minutes of google searching leads me to thinking that this is a female. Apparently it has to be a ruby-throated hummingbird because those are the only ones found east of the Rockies. Pretty cool!

I need to do something about the greenery around the house (that you can see in the first picture). This is the year that I'm observing and not destroying, but it's becoming apparent that trimming is in order, if not outright removal of a thing or two.

Waiting for Sleep

2011-06-29T13:57:00.000-04:00

Here I am watching cop movies on Netflix, carding mohair, and waiting to be smacked upside the head by the sleep train. You see, it goes like this....

It started two weeks ago with a bug bite. Then the bug bite got infected (or so I thought). Then the infected bug bite turned out to really be a symptom of Lyme disease. Then I started on Doxycycline, the antibiotic of choice for Lyme disease. Then, I got hives. Red, itchy, spreading hives. Did I say itchy? I meant ITCHY. All over.

So back to the doc, who doesn't want to take me off the Doxycycline because it really is the best thing for Lyme. Then came Benadryl, and shortly after Benadryl comes Must. Sleep. So, I'm isolating myself even more than usual, which is too easy for me, and trying not to scratch.

So where does the mohair come in, you ask?

I want to make this Swedish Heartwarmer Shawl. I've been lusting after it for over a year now. It doesn't matter that I can't remember how to knit, or that I have no idea how to knit with different colors, or that I'm going to MAKE the yarn instead of buy it. None of that matters. I'm going to make this beautiful thing.

I'm going to make it 50% merino, 25% mohair and 25% tussah silk. I've got the merino and the silk fiber already, but here's what the mohair looks like: I traded a friend for it 2 years ago. Her angora goats are all grown up now, but they were babies when this stuff was cut. So soft!

I figure I'll need about 2 pounds of yarn. So, roughly, the steps are: card the mohair, card all three fibers together, split it up into about 10 different chunks, dye each chunk a different color, mix colors back together in a pleasing way and spin 4 different yarn colors. I think I'll need 500-600 yards of each color. The yarn they used is 4-ply, but I don't think I can do 4-ply. In fact, I've never done 3-ply. If I'm feeling adventurous, I'll try 3-ply, but if not, I'll stick with the good ole 2-ply that I already know how to do.

This is totally a time vs money tradeoff. This time I'm going to choose time. And enjoy every minute of the loong time it's going to take to make this. Or not. I could just buy the yarn for $200 and I almost did. But that's not the point of this project. The point of this project is not to run as fast as possible to the destination, but enjoy the journey a little more than I generally do. A long journey this will be.

I Know, It's Been A While

2011-06-01T10:46:00.000-04:00

I can't explain it, except to say that I've lost the urge to blog. I see things and think, "boy, that would be an interesting blog posting," but then lack the interest to turn the thought into an actual post.

We're in the height of hot, hot, humid summer, with highs in the high 80s and huge humidity. This is only two weeks after we had high temperatures in the 40s and walked around bundled up. It's a shame, really, because I thoroughly enjoy those 50s, 60s, 70s and low 80s that we missed this year. I'm getting a crash lesson in how to exist in my house when it's hot. Hint: Find someplace cooler to sleep (my bed is on the side of the house that's hot at night).

I've kept my promise not to make any changes to the yard. I'm thinking seriously of buying a few tomato plants from some store and plopping them somewhere, just to be able to taste fresh tomatoes this year. I may regret this, but zucchini is on the wish list, too, and I've used up the last of last year's basil pesto, which froze really well. I want basil. Lots and lots of basil. Last year I had about 12 plants, which was maybe too many for me to keep up with.

The slope past the walkway and to the left of the garage is a candidate. I'm guessing that the former owner had stuff growing there, but have no idea what it might be. There's nothing coming up now.

I'm looking longingly at the below area that's surrounded by driveway, currently halfway occupied by some evergreen bushy thing. There are 4 tree stumps and a fair amount of unused space. I wouldn't be irreparably damaging anything, I don't think, if I snuck a few plants in there. I can also use pots, as suggested by commenters. Eventually, I'd like to clear out the stumps, the brush, the driveway crossover, and make it all into a garden. But not this year. It's like the former owner was trying to pave as much as possible.

I'm watching, and attempting to identify the plants here and figure out what's a weed and what's a keeper. Many plants are totally new to me, but one, at least, I recognize from the last place, garlic mustard. It's everywhere, and it's a weed. I pulled a bunch of it a few weeks ago, but this battle is just getting started.

It Didn't Sell ... But it rented!

2011-05-02T13:07:00.000-04:00

I think.

Only 2 parties looked at my house in the 5 months it was for sale and I was beginning to get a little desperate. All the doom and gloom articles about the terrible housing market didn't help. The long, cold winter depleted my cash reserves and I was beginning to worry about how tight I'd have to budget in order to continue paying for multiple houses. (Like, I'd have to be more disciplined about always bringing my lunch to work and never going out to dinner - something I've never been good at. No vacations, rice and beans for dinner, etc, etc. You get the picture.)

Then 2 weeks ago, some friends of mine from the country fire department called to see if they could rent it. Um, ... of course! The rent will mostly cover the loan payment, and they'll put the utilities in their name, saving me another few hundred a month. Whew! I had mixed feelings about selling the house, and I'm happy to have friends renting it. I'll still be able to pick blueberries, elderberries, and apples and I'm uber happy to have some breathing room between my paycheck coming in and bills going out.

Then last weekend, these folks moved all my stuff from the other house to this one. Can you say, "thrilled?" Of course, I've lived for so long with most of my furniture at the other house, that my current place feels crowded now. I missed my sofa, but I'd forgotten about most of the other stuff. It's a little embarrassing that when the men were unloading the truck they'd say, "Where do you want this?" and I'd say, "I have no idea. I forgot I even owned it!" Hee hee. I'd been trying to be less of a control freak, and not have every little detail planned out - but I don't think those big burly men appreciated that the same way I did.

I've made a promise to myself that I'm not going to make any (big) changes to the lot this year, like building raised beds or planting any fruit trees. It's almost painful to hold back, but only 2 years ago, I did major stuff at the other house and regretted it. So I'm going to wait, impatiently.

Here's some pictures of the new place. It's sortof a panorama. I'm standing on the porch on top of the garage, looking down the driveway, then taking pictures rightward.

One good reason to wait is that I've never seen how sunny or shady parts of the yard are. In fact, the leaves fell off the trees about a week after I moved in. Smart people plant things in sunny areas. There are so many trees, if only I knew where the sun will land in the summer...

I'd love to put beds along the edge of the driveway where it curves here. Probably not raised beds though. It wasn't too long ago that there was about 4 feet of snow piled up on the sides of the driveway. Plowing would really damage anything I put there.

I totally want to use those inside-the-loop areas to plant yummy stuff (there are 4 tree stumps in the right-er space. It'd be cool to have a mini-orchard there). And I'd love to plant berry bushes along the outside edge of the driveway. Just gotta account for the fact that snow has to go somewhere, and gotta see if there's any sun over there.

And finally, I took an EVOC (Emergency Vehicle Operations) course over the weekend. Saturday was classroom training and Sunday was driving on an obstacle course that included a serpentine forwards and backwards. (Yes, it was an extremely busy weekend, what with this class and moving all in one weekend.) Chief was only going to let me drive the small vehicle, but I asked nicely and got to drive the big truck! (It was a smaller one than this ladder truck, but still big! I think they got a little calmer when I told them I had had a 3/4 ton pickup truck and was totally comfortable doing the backwards serpentine in that.) I did pretty good, considering that my very first time behind the wheel of that fire truck was to do this course! Every day I spend in bunker pants earns cred with these guys and helps me fit in. This weekend was hard, but it was a big step forward.

What I'm Doing These Days

2011-04-05T12:01:00.000-04:00

A few people have mentioned being curious about what's going on with me these days, so I'll oblige. It's just been so ... ho hum, that I haven't had the oomph to put it into a posting. In no particular order, here's the poop.

1. I've been working on making friends. I joined a group a year ago, but hadn't devoted any time to it until a few weeks ago. Some of them get together every Wednesday night for fiber-y stuff. Last Sunday it was beermaking. Every Thursday it's dance practice 5 minutes from my new house. They're very active and I could devote a LOT of time to these folks if I wanted, but I'd rather test out a few "tribes" before I commit to one. I may prefer to be half-into a few "tribes" instead. I'd much rather have one or two close friends, but I don't have a formula for that other than if you want friends, be a friend.

2. Speaking of tribes, I'm trying to settle in at the fire department. I joined the department closest to my house, even though they didn't have a good reputation. It's been tough. The guys haven't been friendly. I dread drills and I've almost quit a few times. But a few of the guys are getting a little nicer and this is something I suspect will work out well if I put in effort and time to show up and do my share of the work. I have to earn respect. Last night was the best drill yet. We practiced search and rescue, on air tanks, crawling around a smoky house and "rescued" a baby (doll). I was probably the worst performer, but I was in there with everyone else, doing the work. Then we drove around in the fire truck and I rode in the back feeling like part of the team. I felt great when I got home last night.

3. I've been eating low carb and reading up on the current state of research. The engineer in me isn't satisfied with mainstream media's treatment of it. I've recently realized that age is only going to make my current out-of-shape-ness worse, and if I want to be fully mobile at 60 or 70, I'm going to have to get into better shape, starting with losing a bunch of weight.

4. I've been researching midcentury modern design, decorating my house, and beginning to appreciate what's here. I subscribed to a really cool magazine called Atomic Ranch where less than 10 pages into my first issue, I learned about the weird, round, push button light switches that are all over my house. Current research project is my one-piece pink Sears toilet. I was going to replace it, but now that my plan is to celebrate the midcentury-ness of my house, I'm going to fix it. Of course the folks at Home Depot have never seen anything like this. They don't sell parts for this one.

5. I've been bringing pieces of the other house to their new abode. Here's the hammock on the porch. I may have shown you this picture already, but so what. I brought over the patio table and chairs since then and put them just outside these doors.

5. NM and I started dating again, sortof. It's much more casual this time, which seems to suit us both better right now. Less time required, less drama, more fun.

Time to Take it Easy

2011-03-20T09:30:00.001-04:00

This is the first weekend that I've had no plans since I've bought this house. It's a weekend of nothing special, piddling around, rearranging stuff, and small painting and repair projects. Knocking down the list of niggling items and getting comfortable in my space. You see, 3 weeks after I moved in (if putting a mattress on the floor can be called moving in), I got into the car accident. Then 3 weeks after the car accident I met NM, and we did stuff on weekends until recently. And when I was with NM, I had no desire to organize the pantry, or scrub dog pee off the basement floor, or fix the kitchen cabinet door that won't stay closed.

Yesterday I fixed the cabinet door and painted a bench, and set up the hammock on the porch. This is in an unheated part of the house, but it will be toasty warm this afternoon after the sun's been warming the space up all day.

I've had some time to think since NM's been gone. About patterns in my life and being mostly alone for the last 12+ years after my divorce. About how I've been happiest when I've had friends and how hard I worked up on the mountain to accomplish the goat-y goal, but didn't invest the time to make friends. I invested time to find a partner too, and was unsuccessful at that as well.

So here I am, half an hour closer to the world, coming out of the hardest winter since my first winter on the mountain 2 years ago and thinking about what to focus on this year. I'm not going to plant a garden this year. I'm going to watch what the place wants, and hit it hard next year. I'm not going to work so hard at finding a partner. I'm going to take all that energy I spent and put it into ... taking it easy. Getting comfortable with those assholes at the fire department. More and more of them are being nicer every week. Good thing I can be persistent. Taking the dog for walks. Finding people to relate to, and turning those into relationships that support and nourish my soul.

It's tremendously freeing to know that I'm not going to do any big projects this year except the Make Friends project. And all I have to do for that one is allocate my time to doing outside-in-the-world-with-people things that I like doing, and be myself. (It's telling that I have to give myself permission to relax and make it a project, isn't it?)

The only other thing I have to get done is actually move my stuff from the other house to this one. It's been on the market for 4 months now (here's the listing, probably safer to post now that I don't live there any more) and not a single person has been to see it. Two folks almost walked through it, but decided that it was too far away. I lowered the price two weeks ago and it hasn't made a difference. I'll probably lower the price again, and then just rent it out if there's still no interest. I've already found a property management company who can deal with finding and managing a tenant (and fixing maintenance issues), so it won't be a big deal when I make that decision. I'm kindof in limbo here though, as long as most of my furniture is still there. No matter. That decision will wait. Time to take it easy!

Try, Try Again

2011-03-10T09:16:00.000-05:00

I've done a bunch of homestead-y things in the last week or so. Most of them are firsts, or first-time variants. Some of it isn't. I made venison jerky, which is drying in the dehydrator now. I know that will taste good.

I made cheddar cheese with 2 of the 4 gallons of raw milk. It seemed to go well, but the cheese is aging now in a "cave" (a plastic tote with water, to raise the humidity level) for at least 3 months before it can be tasted. I've never made cheddar before. The parts of the cheesemaking process that I've done before went well, but the "cheddaring" part was new to me, so I'm not sure if I did it right.

With another gallon, I made mozzarella cheese the long way. I've made mozzarella a few times the short way, with varying success. It's tasted OK, but wouldn't hold it's shape. I don't think this round was a success. It holds it's shape just fine, but is harder than I wanted, and doesn't tase very good. Mozzarella cheese freezes well, so it's off to the freezer with these guys.

With the last portion of the raw milk, I made yogurt. Not a success. It was my first time making yogurt, and although I pasteurized it, I didn't make any other allowances for using raw milk. After culturing overnight, the "yogurt" was still runny like milk, so I dumped it out and tried again with store-boughten whole milk mixed with cream. This super fatty, creamy stuff turned into great yogurt, and I've had some yummy smoothies in the last few days. I'll happily try this again, but the other parts of cheesemaking I'm not so sure about. Both the cheddar and the mozzarella consumed most of a day. It's tough to rationalize spending so much time on something that can be easily bought at the grocery store or farmer's market (and tastes better). Better to spend time making cheese (or yogurt) that is hard to find, and spend my precious little free time on other pursuits.

Take yogurt. The grocery stores I frequent don't seem to sell whole milk yogurt in anything other than Plain. It apparently takes space away from the sugary, low fat yogurt that fills the shelves. Extra fat, creamy yogurt doesn't exist in the store. Yogurt was easy to make, so I can make exactly what I want and skip the grocery store for that item.

NM and I are taking a "break," which may or may not ever end. He's 8 months off the end of his marriage, and it was too soon for him. We talked about that fairly extensively at the beginning, and he thought it would be OK. I'm an optimist and I hoped it would be OK, but the cliche about it being a bad idea to date someone soon after the end of a long relationship is a cliche because it's so often true. I'm sad, but not heartbroken, and not looking forward to jumping back into the casual dating scene. But this is another area where I must try, try again. This time I'm going to take my time, be less single-minded about it and try to have more fun. It's possible that NM and I might get back together, but our agreement is that I'm not going to wait around. Spring is coming and while I'm sad, it's hard not to feel a little joy when the sun shines. It's been too long waiting for the sun to not enjoy it when it comes.

Bye Sweetie

2011-03-03T16:49:00.000-05:00

It snuck up on me, Desmond's last day. He was fine in the morning and at dinner time, but when I got home from NM's house, he couldn't put weight on one of his front legs. I felt it up and down and nothing made him wince. I thought it would get better, like so many other times, but overnight he developed a fever and the shakes, and whined from pain, and couldn't get up at all. I gave him a painkiller, and then another one an hour later and when morning came I made the appointment.

I wasn't this prepared last April, when Desmond had his last health emergency. I ran him to the vet for blood tests and xrays and poking and prodding and a very expensive operation to remove a cancerous spleen. I wasn't ready to say goodbye to this old dog and spent a LOT more money than I could afford just to buy more time. I swore I wouldn't let feelings of guilt keep Desmond alive when/if it was time for him to go and prayed to be able to see when it was time.

So I watched over the months as Desmond became less able to navigate the two steps into my country house. Started to soak his food when the dry foot hurt his teeth. Added canned food when the wet/dry food didn't taste good enough. Picked him up when he fell in the snow and cleaned up after him when he pooped and peed inside. He was still happy to go outside and stand for a few minutes, and still had a healthy appetite. But somehow I knew that last night was different, and it was time to let him go. I was prepared this time and in the end it wasn't as hard as I imagined. I'm sad because I miss him, but happy because he's running in heaven now, and all his pains are gone.

Going Away and Coming back

2011-03-01T15:14:00.000-05:00

Funny how life goes in circles sometimes. When I moved to the city, I knew I wasn't going to lose lessons I learned in the hills, but I never thought about how things would evolve and circle back onto themselves. Here are two examples of homesteading skills I taught myself last year that I'm thankful I have.

A few months ago I made jerky with some venison NM brought over. It was such a hit that it's become a regular request. Here's the latest four pounds of venison on the way to the jerky marinade and dehydrator.

On our Saturday furniture-picking-up trip to Vermont we drove right past the dairy I bought raw milk from last year. I'd been thinking about making cheese, and couldn't resist the siren call of that raw milk. But first, a cheese press (my last one was utterly dependent on using a certain windowsill at a certain country house as the end of a lever). NM just happened to have some corian solid countertop material laying around. We did some cuttin' and some drillin' on Sunday, and ta daaah, a new cheese press. So here I am, (ahem) working from home while cultures ripen on the stove in front of me. In three months it'll be cheddar cheese!

Mom, dad, remember these glasses with the balls on the bottom? I love 'em so much I keep them out on the counter.

Midcentury Modern and a Road Trip

2011-02-23T16:59:00.001-05:00

I've been in my suburban house for exactly 3 months today. It's been a rollercoaster ride with a car accident and a new car, frozen pipes, broken boiler and a ton of other stuff that kept my attention in fight or flight mode for most of the last 3 months. A new person in my life kept my attention in better places as well.

As daylight hours grow longer, I'm beginning to look around my new place like I'm seeing it for the first time. Since I'm living in the middle third of the house, I really haven't spent any time in the other 2/3 of the house! Sunlight falls in new places on the walls. Actual sunlight! Last week I saw light in a weird place in the basement and I started a bit before realizing that it was the natural stuff, made by the big guy upstairs.

My house is Midcentury Modern, designed by an architect and built in 1962, the middle of a time now known as the Midcentury Modern period, roughly 1950 to 1970. (I can't find a pic of the house right now) Houses were designed to blur the lines between inside and outside. Huge walls of windows bring nature into the house, and natural building materials like stone and wood make it seem like the inside is outside. In the 50 years since my house was built, the original owner enclosed a few outside rooms, and covered up the walls of glass with thick curtains and drywall. And awful pink paint.

But she left the blueprints behind and I can see how this house was originally full of light and air. The room you see across the kitchen peninsula used to be open to the outside, a porch, before she made it closed in and dark and weird. Now that the string of winter emergencies seems to be over, I look at this room and imagine opening it up again, with glass walls on all sides and no roof, like it was designed. I'm dreaming midcentury and salivating over Ebay listings of Eames furniture and atomic lights.

Which is how we come to be making a road trip to New Hampshire this weekend to pick up a $69 bench that I saw on Ebay and couldn't resist. I bid low, but was unopposed. Apparently other people are too socked in by winter to furniture shop. It was too easy.

Yeah, I know, I'm not looking for furniture. But the price was right and I was looking for an excuse to take the new-to-me car out for a long spin and get a change of scenery to boot. Plus, this bench totally fits in the house. Here's a picture showing the room I'm using as a bedroom, and the wall of windows. It's supposed to be a living room. The air conditioner completely messes up the lines of the room and if I can stand it, it'll be gone, gone, gone after it stops being so bloody cold. The curtains and blinds mess up the space too and are going away as well, after I prudently wait a bit to make sure it won't be too hot in there in the summer. The prior owner really loved to cover up the windows. And the floor? And the 1980s-era ceiling fan? I'm still thinking about what to do about those.

Here's another porch and another wall of windows. I haven't figured out what to do with it yet, but in the short term at least, a hammock will be involved.

See? Can't you tell I'm past the whole winter series of emergencies? Someone caught in the throes of getting through each frozen day doesn't have time to think about architecture. I'm too busy making dastardly plans and dreaming MidCentury dreams to be glad, but it sure feels good!

Someone's Coming to Visit

2011-02-16T11:40:00.000-05:00

Here's the house on Sunday, looking as desolate as it can possibly look. I'm giving some of my wood to NM, so we went up to snowblow and move wood. While he and his grown sons were throwing wood about, I did some inside cleaning of mouse poop and other little messes.

Fortuitous timing, because I got an email the next day from the real estate agent. Someone wants to see the house! First showing in the three months the house has been on the market. I hope she likes it!

Realistically though, the deep snow completely covers all the nice stuff outside. The hammock I so artfully placed in November. The table and chairs on the south side. The raised beds. The chicken coop. All covered. Since the yards are one of the best things about this house, it's hard to believe that someone will see how wonderful this place really is over the crooked floor or through the loose windows. We'll see. Hoping for magic, but not expecting it.

Probie

2011-02-15T07:39:00.000-05:00

I'm a probie!
Was voted in last week after a multi-month process and finally got the turnout gear, and hat for the new department. I can go on calls now, but can't do interior firefighting until after I pass the 6-month probationary period.

February Snow

2011-02-10T08:03:00.000-05:00

My diabolical plan to make the snow stop was to borrow a plow blade for my ATV. So, here's NM (New Man) trying out the blade last weekend at the top of the driveway. I had this idea that as soon as I got prepared for this snowy weather, it would stop snowing. OK .... hear me up there? It can stop snowing now!

It's coming up on two months with this guy and I'd been holding off on writing about it for fear of jinxing it. He knows I write a blog, but has never seen it (a good decision, I think). I've thought (but not too much) about how as soon as (literally 3 weeks after), I moved off the mountain and stopped being so desperate for a partner, one comes along. I've never been in a relationship like this. He lets me know during the day that he's thinking of me. We talk a few times a day. It's new stuff for me, and pretty cool. I'll write more when I'm less concerned about jinxing it.

Desmond is still perking along, more or less OK. He's still interested in food and his surroundings, has learned to get up sometimes when he falls, so I don't have to pick him up as much. He's not too upset by living in the basement (he can't go up stairs and I can't carry him up and down). So we're in a holding pattern for now, until the next emergency happens. He's such an easygoing dog!

Maggie jumps over the piled-up snow, but Desmond's world got smaller when the snow piles got too high for me to dig a path through them.

Top of the driveway looking down to the road and the pond across the street. I was a little terrified of sliding down the hill, but my new car is heavy and all-wheel drive, so I haven't slipped even once on this hill.

And finally, the mailbox. It's a little amusing to drive down the street and see people digging out their mailboxes.

Let Us Go and Make Our Visit

2011-02-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

The title is a nod to a poem by T. S. Eliot and describes what we did Sunday. Visit the house in the hills with a snowblower. Good thing, because the snow was over three feet deep around the door. It would have taken hours to move enough snow to get into the house with shovels. At the end of the driveway, it was solid and frozen. And deep. I had a chair leaning up against the woodshed door to hold it shut, that was completely covered with snow. This house has been here for well over 100 years (some would say it's been 200 years), and even though I've worried about it this winter from my house down in the city, every time I come here and step inside, I see how solid it is. It could easily stand another hundred years. It's got a nice, new, metal roof!

The other house has only been on this planet for 49 years and it's youth is showing. Things break. Things don't work. But it's close to work and to life in the city and I like it very much. At least the 1/3 of it that I'm living in.

Here's a picture of the parking lot at work yesterday, showing Mount Snow growing daily. Much of the problem this time of year is where to put the snow, since it's not melting between snowstorms. Huge piles around driveways and stop signs make it difficult to see when cars are coming. Snowblowers reveal archeological layers of white snow, then grey snow, then more white, etc, etc. One can count the snow layers and tie them to particular storms. "That one is the Christmas Eve storm," and "the one above it is the storm a week later", etc, etc.

It's interesting, but I feel a major case of winter blahs coming on. The temperature has only turned the corner for warmer within the last week. Thankfully, the extra minute or two of light each day mean that I can turn the light off at home while I am gone during the day. It will be light when I get home from work. That counts for something.

Amazing, I Know

2011-01-24T10:07:00.001-05:00

But on the coldest morning in umpteen years (-14 on the way to work. Thirty degrees colder than normal for those of us keeping track), everything is OK. All my animals are alive and healthy and at home. All the systems I use to live, like the shower, the sink, the stove, the boiler and the car are working as they should. I breathed (brothe?) a big sigh of relief this morning and was very thankful.

Maggie makes herself a nest in the snow and sits for hours (in this weather it's more like minutes) watching for deer. Like this one who showed up outside the bedroom window on Saturday afternoon. Since Maggie was keeping vigil on the other side of the house, she missed him entirely.

It's indescribable how much calmer I am now that I am back in the city. Some aspects of the homesteading dream are still there, but are sleeping for now, while I thrill at being able to be at a restaurant in 5 minutes instead of 45. I've been reading the travails of another solo female homesteader, frozen pipes, nonworking vehicle, dead animals, afraid to leave the 'stead for fear of a catastrophe, but afraid to skip work for fear of losing a job. I remember the feeling, reeling from the body blows of solo country living and I'm glad I don't feel those now, in this sub-zero weather. Thankful I am. Yes, thankful.

Bundt Cake Anyone?

2011-01-20T11:30:00.000-05:00

I'm such a resourceful person! Snow season caught me a little flat-footed, and I successfully repurposed whatever was lying around in service for spreading salt on the driveway hill. Since I've never in my adult life (or childhood life) made a bundt cake, I doubt I'll miss this cake pan in the kitchen. Or maybe an extremely important Bundt cake event is coming up soon!

I swear this winter has been the coldest, snowiest that I remember. Even colder than my first winter on the mountain, two years ago, where my power was out for 3 days. This winter, I've got a small, plastic shovel that I'm using to clear my 250 feet of driveway and the hill. Yeah, it's not working well. Maybe because I've gotten something like 4 feet of snow this month, in snowstorms that seem to be coming two a week.

I've got a plan though, to attach a borrowed plow blade to my ATV. Crossing fingers that we can get that done this weekend.

Where would we be if things that we thought were fixed didn't keep on breaking? Being relaxed and calm is overrated (ha!). I came home from work yesterday afternoon to a very cold house and a nonworking boiler. Aside from being in the same (boiler) system, this failure is completely different than Sunday's failure. A similarity though? Both required an emergency call to the fuel company and scrapping any other plans. Here are the repairman and the new dude. At least yesterday's emergency call came at a reasonable hour!

Lest I Become Complacent

2011-01-17T10:26:00.001-05:00

God Forbid I relax or anything!
After a few weeks of relative peace, beginning to enjoy city life and new "friends," I was woken up at 5:00 Sunday morning by the boiler's constant noise. It was not going off. After a little investigation, I found out that it was not going off because a pipe had burst in the back bedroom, and the entire back of the house was flooded with warm water, spraying from the baseboard and pouring down into the basement.

I called my new "friend" who was like all sane people at 5am Sunday, sleeping, and didn't hear the phone. Then I called the gas company and 3 hours later the emergency was over, but several pipes in the basement had been cut to empty water and isolate the back of the house from the rest of the house. Small sigh of relief, but emergency over meant that the cleanup could begin, starting with an early morning trip to Walmart to buy a wet/dry vacuum, disposal of the soaking carpet and cleaning up of water. The gas company had to come back in the afternoon when one of the cut and capped joints started leaking, but I think it's all OK now ... more or less.

Here's the culprit break in the pipe that caused the ruckus. The blue-striped wood at the front of the picture used to hold down a carpet.

I didn't sleep well last night. The heating system sounds different now, that it's been emptied, filled and purged a few times. I'm different, too. I've lost some trust in this house and I start at every strange noise, meaning I woke up about a thousand times last night listening for rain in the basement. I got up a few times and walked the house, making sure that the water noise in the pipes was safely confined to the pipes where it belongs.

Another thing is different now. After almost 12 years of having only myself to rely on, another person asked me to let him help. I've been through so many emergencies like this alone, that I'd forgotten how nice it is to share my nerves, "should I worry about the washing machine pipes freezing, or the floor freezing because it's not totally dry all the way through," "what do you think if I put a heater here ... and here," etc, etc. It's all stuff I would have struggled with alone, and turned over and over in my head until I had it figured out. With this other person around, I can bounce it off, answer it, do something, and move on. That's nice.

December is the Darkest Month But January is the Coldest

2011-01-13T11:15:00.000-05:00

This is the time of year when I pore over weather averages and records, day by day, and get indignant when temperatures are below average, like they were today, this week and most of the last month. I almost can't remember the brief January thaw we had a week ago. It's been frozen out of my head. Today's average high temperature is 31 degrees, 15 degrees higher than it is now. Average nightly low is 12 degrees, higher than tonight's expected 4. I can't imagine the warmth of 31 degrees. It seems balmy. If it were 31 degrees, I might wear shorts, like so many hardy upstate NY souls.

For the next 17 days, the average temperatures continue downward, until finally, on January 30th there's an infinitesimal turn for the warmer. February is slightly warmer than January. Slightly. You can be sure that I'll be throwing as much ooomph as possible to make sure that February is, at least, average. I'll be keeping track. Closely.

So This is What it Feels Like

2011-01-09T17:59:00.000-05:00

I've always been a, "finish everything that needs to be done and then relax" kinda gal. If that didn't work, I was a, "worry about everything that needs to be worried about and then relax after everything's fixed" kinda gal. Or maybe I was a, "work really hard to get everything just right and then relax" kinda gal. You've probably figured out that I don't relax often! That carried over into the realm of finding a partner because I viewed that as another task on the never-ending list. At times I felt a bit desperate as I struggled with 2 cats, 2 dogs, 5 chickens, 2 goats, a full-time job, etc, etc, while looking for someone to share the load and, oh yes, be the love of my life. It was tough. No wonder I didn't succeed.

When I raised the white flag and moved back into town, I promised myself that I'd use the hour a day I save on my commute to take care of myself better. I specifically meant working out, but shopping for and cooking good food for myself falls into the realm of taking care of myself. It was hard to do for a while as I recovered from the car accident and kept up on my list of things to worry about, like frozen pipes, Maggie's leg, Desmond, fast disappearing oil, where my WSJs were disappearing to, did I buy a lemon car, etc, etc. But slowly, over the last few weeks, I've been putting together something. Oh, and I met and started dating someone.

He showed up on OKCupid, a dating site I've been using for 8 years. Yes, that's right. Eight years. We're only 3 or so weeks into it, so I'm not going to say much now. But in the last few weeks, stuff has been falling together and I realized this morning that everything is fine. I have no tasks that I have to get done. Nothing is broken. I have nothing to worry about. Of course that's not really true if I examine it, but I'm not worried, or running down my invisible to-do list. The car is fine, Maggie's leg is healing just fine, the pipes won't freeze, both houses have full oil tanks ($1,400 worth!).

I'm relaxed! It's been so long, I couldn't remember exactly how it feels. I got up this morning and did stuff I wanted to do, including an errand trip to JoAnne fabrics and the grocery store, and some cooking for next week. Now that I live close-in, it's easy to run out to the store. It's easy to fit stuff into my life that wouldn't fit before, including another person. Funny how it happens. We were talking the other day when I learned that he worked on a farm from age 10-17 and milked cows, mucked stalls and all that good farmy stuff. And yesterday I learned that he used to keep bees. Pretty neat.

That's all I'm going to say for now about that. Except that things have gotten better (literally and emotionally) with him around and that's a good feeling to have.

You Would Tell Me if it Clashed, Right?

2011-01-04T10:33:00.000-05:00

Here's Sparky, trying out the pocket on my spinning wheel bag. (Who says cats aren't social creatures?) Yup, it doesn't match. But I couldn't resist the orange-y midcentury pattern. And there will not be another bag like this in the whole, entire world! I'm going to use the same fabric for straps on the other side, so the whole thing will be sullied with "clash." Oh, the thrills.

Yesterday was a good day. A very good day. My boss notified me that I'll be getting a raise in this week's paycheck, which is nice after two years of frozen pay, and very nice to help me worry less about paying multiple mortgages. (I think I'll take 25% of that raise and get that membership to the YMCA that I was hesitating on for not wanting to spend money.) Then later, I got a call from the fire department on how my application is progressing. Good conversation. The department has a new chief since last month, and the guy explained why they have a poor reputation, what's changed (ie who got kicked out) and what they're doing to change their rep. He also said that they've had girls before (local college students from Rennselaer Polytechnic), and suggested that I go down right away and meet the new chief. Which I did. I've got a MUCH better feeling about that place!

Very good start to the year. I said this last year, but I have a feeling this year is going to be a good one!

Peace and Pieces and Piecing

2011-01-02T14:32:00.001-05:00

It's been so blasted COLD for the last month, that I got the idea I needed some decent turtlenecks. Last year, or maybe it was 2 years ago, I bought some cheap turtlenecks, and the sleeves shortened when I washed them. I *hate* too-short sleeves, so planned a self-treat day of shopping for my birthday, Dec 30th, to look for some quality turtlenecks. (Yeah, what was I thinking.)

I stopped at LL Bean where I saw these - any size you want as long as it's Extra Small and any color you want as long as it's something garish (apologies to anyone who loves these colors, but they're too bright for me.) I tried another store or two, but quickly lost interest in shopping. After years of only shopping at the Salvation Army, anything that costs more than a few dollars feels too expensive.

I also bought some pieces parts for my current sewing project - a carrying bag for my spinning wheel. It's pretty easy to buy a boughten bag, but they run $120+, which is too rich for my blood. I had a great time picking out upholstery fabric for the bag, and a semi-clashing fabric for the handles/straps. My current house has me in a midcentury mood, and it looks like I'm going through an orange phase, colorwise.

There aren't any patterns for these things and the wheel is irregularly shaped, so I used dimensions from a blog post. And then proceeded to cut a bigger bag, meaning I had to add pieces to the long, side part that I had cut too short, then cut a piece of woven plastic to be a bottom cover piece to cover up my ... seamy indiscretions. First, I sewed batting to the side piece, then added the long outer piece. And then remembered I had to put in the zipper (cue the sound of doom soundtrack).

Good lord, but it's been years since I put a zipper in anything, I'd forgotten how, and I've NEVER put a zipper in upholstery fabric this thick, after it'd been sewn to something thick and big. It wasn't pretty as I worked out how to use a walker foot and the zipper foot alternately, depending on what worked best. Don't tell anyone I broke a needle and the top half of the bag is an inch narrower than it's supposed to be, but the finished product will look just fine! Piecing this thing together is kinda fun, but hard work using rusty brain circuits. Ninety percent of sewing is half mental ... or maybe that was something else.

And the last piece is "peace." In the single digit temperatures of the last month, I've been worrying about pipes freezing at the country house - and running out of oil, hastening said freezing of pipes. A friend with a truck came to the house with me yesterday. We took a load of stuff from the shed and drained the water pipes. No more chance of frozen pipes! Whee! Peace of mind! (If only it were that easy...)

Snow!

2010-12-27T08:01:00.000-05:00

I fell asleep early last night, reading the Grapes of Wrath (I know that reading in bed has dangers of falling asleep, but I still do it. Go figure.), and woke up to this. To get a sense of scale, the snow is approaching 2 feet on this railing.

In my few waking moments through the night, I thought about shoveling the driveway and getting to work, but realized this morning that that will be impossible. Gotta wait for plow guy to clear the driveway. I waited until the moderately reasonable 7am to call plow guy's house, where his wife says he'll be out - sometime this morning.

It's still snowing. Beautiful, white, fluffy flakes. I didn't think (last Wednesday) to bring my work laptop home, so I'm stuck here, thinking that this is a real snow day. Time to realize that I've done everything I can do for now and relax and enjoy, just like in school. Wonder if I want to go out with the dogs and make some snow angels. More likely I'll make some hot chocolate, put real marshmallows in it, and open the book.

Everybody's Better

2010-12-23T11:25:00.000-05:00

Things got so much better after the vet (on our second trip yesterday) showed me a trick to keep Maggie's bandage from sliding down her leg and her from taking it off so often. Tape. Specifically sticky tape. Stuck to her hair. This particular bandage has stayed on since dinner time yesterday, which is kindof a record for us. When I was comfortable that the bandage wouldn't come off, I let her out off leash, making her a happier dog, and all of us a happier family.

The boiler peeps are coming today ... sometime. Meaning I have to stay home until they arrive. Not an awful thing. I'm slowly coming out of emergency management mode as things resolve themselves and stopped at the library yesterday to pick up a classic to read. My attention span has gotten so short, by reading news articles, that it's time to stretch the old attention span a bit by giving it one of the oldies. The Grapes of Wrath. I started it last night and fell asleep on about page 5. Not an auspicious beginning! I checked out Anna Karenina, too, which I have also never read. But it's a thicker book, so to the shorter one I went!

(The above pic was taken with an iPhone app that Walt Mossberg recommended, Hipstamatic. It makes pictures look all old-timey. Cool, huh?)

Against the good advice of my mother, I bought the car in the lower pic, a VW Passat 4motion station wagon earlier this week. I traded in the monster truck and used some of the money from the Scion settlement. The car is All Wheel Drive, so should be able to get me up the hill to the country house with no problem. And it has excellent reviews and only 75,000 miles. Plus, the place I got it is the repair shop I've been using for the last 2 years - folks I trust. It makes me happy to get decisions like, "what am I going to drive" out of the way, and for less than the combined value of the truck and the car, giving me a small cushion in case of emergency. To address my mother's concern about giving up the hauling/transporting capacity of the truck, I've got a few options that are less wonderful than just having a big truck sitting ready, but more wonderful than having to drive, and park, said truck every day. Thankfully, about 90% of what I'd want to transport will fit in here, and the other 10% (all the furniture in my country house), can go in one trip of a moving truck.

Playing With Fire

2010-12-20T10:32:00.000-05:00

Someone from my old fire department invited me to a live burn exercise Saturday morning. Since I haven't gotten a new fire department yet, I can still play with the old one, and I'm so glad I did. We burned a house down!

I'm finally getting serious about taking care of Maggie's wound. I was SO resentful that she cut herself mere hours before I was going to let her and Desmond stay in the yard (and feeling badly from the accident myself), I wasn't willing to give her the extra work required, and I let her outside unsupervised even after being warned not to. I'm not surprised that she busted her stitches, but it took a while for me to internalize that if she's going to get better, I HAVE to put in the time to take care of her. Back on the leash for her time outside. Rewrap the wound as many times as it takes to give it 10 or so days to heal. The human equivalent is that she partially cut off one of her fingertips (pads. The one partway up her leg.). I suspect that she'll just pull it off again if it's not fully healed and I'll have to go back and spend more money to have it re-stitched. It's going to be painful to spend that money twice, but I have nobody to blame but myself. I hate when that happens.

It's still pouring. The check engine light came on in the truck and something is wrong with the boiler/hot water heater combo at the new house and I'm running out of hot water ... sometimes. I can't describe the feeling of being in the shower and running out of hot water when the bathroom is only 44 degrees to begin with. Picture an agony of coldness. This system is supposed to give me infinite hot water, but it's obvious something isn't working right. Plus, I've somehow run through 1/2 a tank of oil in three weeks at the new house, even though 2/3 of the house is set at 50 and the the 1/3 I'm living in is set at 62 degrees. The hot water and the oil situation were better at the old, crooked country house. It sounds like I'm complaining (and I AM). It's time to stop wishing things were magically under control and put in the time and effort to take care of my "issues." Including the four-legged furry one.

Managing

2010-12-17T10:16:00.001-05:00

Here's the peanut butter and pill sandwich I give Desmond every morning.

He's thrilled to eat anything that has peanut butter in it, so I don't even have to disguise the pills, two glucosamine pills and one pain pill. In the evening, it's one pain pill.

Maggie, on the other hand, likes to examine everything before she considers consuming it. She eats in tiny bites, and a pill doesn't fall in the realm of yummy for her, even if it's hidden in liver.

I forgot that (blocked is more like it) Maggie's stitched wound on her paw has to be managed. Keep the bandage dry with a plastic bag over her foot every time she goes out. Don't let her run or jump or go up or down stairs. Don't let her lick the bandage.

Most people with dogs know stuff like that is more aspirational than directive. I spent Monday evening making Maggie a great plastic bag thing that tied at the top, and it lasted, oh, about 5 minutes on Tuesday morning before being shredded. Then her bandage was wet and I had to take it off. (oh yeah, and go to work worrying that she was going to lick the wound back open). We got through Wednesday with the wound uncovered before she reopened it and pulled a stitch out while running across the yard Thursday morning. Now, I'm reapplying the bandage about 4 times a day, as she takes it off. I'm trying anti-chew spray to keep her off the bandage while I'm at work. I just want to get a good scab or something on it, so it'll stay closed by itself. She's getting used to being re-bandaged, and I'm getting used to doing it to her. Only 8 more days of this!

On top of that, I have to feed Maggie a pill twice a day. For her, it's a little peanut butter on the pill, shoved far down her throat. Then peanut butter on my finger to get her to lick my finger, accidentally swallowing the pill while she's focusing on my finger.

I've been a little resentful of the time all this managing takes, since I'm also focused on trying to feel better myself from the accident, while worrying about money, frozen pipes in the country, getting the ATV and lawn tractor over here and selling them, getting a possible new(er) car. Oh, and learning my new house. The bathroom I take a shower in was 44 degrees this morning, in the cold part of the house. Last Friday, I made toast and set off a smoke alarm. It's not terrifying unless you realize that one of the smoke alarms is hard wired to something (ie, the fire department comes when the smoke alarm goes off). That's why I was freakily trying to STOP the thing, and why I was so shaky after I ripped it from the wall and realized the one that went off is not the one that's hard wired. Whew.

Yesterday I tested the 1960s-vintage oven and made sure several fans and the vent were on high, ... just in case. (FYI, it works, but appears to run much hotter than the chosen temp. Now I can make cookies for Monday's cookie exchange. Must pick something that's tolerant of being burned.)

Now, was there something about some dogs needing attention?

Ouch!

2010-12-13T14:43:00.000-05:00

On Friday afternoon I blithely wrote something about overcompensating with my left side for my right-side rib that still hurts from the accident. That was about 2 hours before I got hit by the figurative truck and spent most of the rest of the weekend in bed with a hotpad. I first lay down right about dinner-time with the hotpad, and a few hours later idly looked up "symptoms of a heart attack" on the internet. Big mistake. I had most of them, except the sweating and the nausea. Sharp pain up my back, radiating up the side of my neck and down the inside of my left arm. Dull pain in front. The hotpad wasn't going to warm up the muscles that hurt like heck going through the inside of me from front to back (or back to front).

Soo - it was a long, scary night Friday. I didn't think it was likely that I was having a heart attack. More likely a stress thing (think Jack Nicholson in that movie with Diane Keaton where they're both "old"), or pulled muscles from the accident. I went to urgent care Saturday because I wanted to rule it out though - and they wouldn't. Rule it out, that is. The EKG was OK, but my pulse and heart rate were elevated. Of course! Duh! I'm stressed! They wanted me to go to the ER, but said I could drive myself, thankfully. So I did drive myself. Home. I was pretty sure, by that point, that it would be hours of very expensive tests to tell me that I have some pulled muscles.

Finally yesterday morning I began to feel a little more normal. It's been a long time of feeling crappy one way or another (it started with plantar fasciitis from firefighter training in October, which had just begun to lessen), so I had started to long for the days when I feel the age that my body is. Not feel twenty years older. I don't feel good now. Not at all. I still feel like crap. But the way the pain feels now, I'll bet it was (and is) a direct result of the accident, like whiplash or whatever. Not an indirect result of me favoring my right side as I had thought. Surprised it took a week to show up. Hello pain.

That Friday night was kindof a wakeup call. To start treating my body better, get in better shape, etc, etc. Both of my mother's parents died young-ish, something I remembered Friday night.

Bad stuff comes in waves. Maggie sliced one of her foot pads yesterday. I had to physically force her to not lick it overnight (an ace bandage and one of Desmond's pain pills helped! And I held her head away from her leg all night as we sortof slept.) until I could get her to the vet today. It's too big a wound to heal with pressure, and she is at the vet now for sedation and stitching. Pow! Money I was hoping not to have to spend.

It's so weird that the only times Maggie has hurt herself have been times when I was feeling extremely bad myself. Maybe Maggie is super sensitive, or maybe it's like a karma thing. My normal good luck deserts me, and has me hunkered down in a foxhole looking to the left and to the right. "What's next?" "Where's the next pow coming from?" And come, they do. Good thing it's not very often!

Prattling

2010-12-11T15:12:00.000-05:00

Nothing important to say, just a bit of this and that. This picture is from the top of the hill looking down to the road (and the pond!). The turnaround is behind me.

There was a business card in my mailbox yesterday, from the guy that plowed the previous owner's driveway (for, like 45 years!). I had been avoiding thinking about snow removal, being very uninterested in buying another piece of big equipment, like a snowblower or plow. My suburban driveway is about four times longer than my country driveway (and on a hill, and with a turnaround), so my country solution (drive on top of the snow) wasn't going to work. I completely lucked out when this business card presented itself before any snow presented itself! Talked to the guy today and we have an agreement. Whew! Bullet dodged.

I spent most of last week favoring my right side, where one of my ribs hurt from the accident. So Friday it boomeranged, and now my back and shoulder are killing me because I've been so unbalanced. Grr. No more meds. The hotpad and some aspirin is all I can do. It's a message that I didn't slow down enough after the accident. I was asked multiple times if I took time off work. Yeah, Saturday and Sunday!

Found out what the insurance settlement will be for the Scion. Nowhere near enough to buy a replacement. I started thinking about what I would get if I traded in the truck and used the Scion check, but the things I'm looking at would require a bit more on top. It occurs to me that the best thing to do is keep the truck, at least until my country house sells. I don't want to drive the freakin' huge truck as my main vehicle, but would be kicking myself if I wanted to, say, move stuff from house to house and I didn't have a truck! Plus, with multiple mortgage payments, spending money on a car is kindof the last thing I should do. Sigh.

Desmond is losing patience with his basement arrangement. One option that Sue suggested, is for me to contact the rescue agency I got him from to see if they think it's better for him to go somewhere else, or stay here. There are arguments both ways. One good thing is that the invisible fence was installed on Wednesday. Maggie got it right away, so she can run free. But Desmond can't hear the warning beeps and doesn't really see the warning flags (I don't think). I gave them a trial where I walked down the hill to the mailbox and they didn't try to follow (good dogs!). Tomorrow I'll try driving away for a short bit to see how they act. If it works, then they can be outside while I'm at work, with the garage for a warmish place. That should go a long way towards giving Desmond some peace (because all day outside will make him tired enough so that sleeping in the basement will seem like a fine thing to do), and Maggie some exercise. That's the theory anyway.

Being in the Fire Club

2010-12-09T10:06:00.002-05:00

I always loved these clothing items that say you're in a club. It's like a secret society that only the pure can enter (hah!) and every time I wear this, I advertise that I'm good enough. I'm one of the initiated. This watch cap has gotten some serious wearing these last few weeks as I've spent hours outside with the dogs at the new house. I'm proud to wear this cheap, acrylic thing and happy to be a member of that group.

One of the decisions I'm making is which department to join in my new neighborhood. There's the one that's really, really close to my house that nobody seems enthusiastic about, or there's the one that's a few miles away where I already know a few folks and their chief already said they'd love to have me.

So, on Monday I went to the closer department and spoke to the chief and the membership person. On Tuesday I had the fire instructor call the chief as a reference, returned with a completed application, my $6 fee, and a few other required items. I walked into the building about 15 minutes before their monthly meeting, into a room with 10-15 guys and noted as conversation stopped ... and 10-15 male heads swiveled towards me, not looking friendly. I gave my stuff to the membership guy and he said (wait for it) ... they'd get back to me. Clearly an invitation to leave. I left not feeling good about this. Not at all.

I have a pretty strong suspicion that I would be the first girl in this department, and that girls aren't exactly welcomed. Never mind that most of the other departments in the area have gotten over this hurdle. For some around here, it's been decades that they've had women firefighters.

This is another example of should I choose to stay and fight the good fight or "give up" and take the easy road out. In another realm, I recently took the easy way out when after two years of struggle, I gave up the lonely fight to raise goats by myself up on the mountain (where, by the way there are now several inches of snow.).

I understand that staying and struggling to earn respect would somehow make me a more virtuous person, but I have exactly zero desire to fight the good fight here. History remembers the firsts. The women who do the challenging, difficult thing and struggle to make the path easier for those who follow. If history doesn't remember me, but I get to be part of a supportive fire department where I look forward to being with the crew, I'm OK with that. It's been a rough few months (actually years), and all I want to do right now is take it easy for a while. I do not want to move from one struggle right into another one.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet, but one of these days, hopefully I'll get a hat from a new department, either the close one or the farther one.

On a more positive note: I put off trying the washer and dryer at the new house as long as possible (because they look pretty old), but had to finally give them a whirl (ha ha) last night. I'm pleased to report that they both work fine. Whew! I may ride this streak as long as possible and give the oven a try this weekend. If everything works, I'll probably allocate scarce dollars to getting a new-to-me vehicle (trading the truck in), instead of buying kitchen appliances. The truck is too big to realistically work as my full-time vehicle.

Car Photo

2010-12-06T09:37:00.000-05:00

Here's what the Scion looks like now.

It's really cool how the crumple part crumpled and the passenger part stayed completely normal. Good design! I'm amazed at how the airbags went off at exactly the right moment to keep my head from going through the window. Excellent design!

It Pours

2010-12-04T21:39:00.000-05:00

In the, "It never rains but it pours" category, as if I didn't have enough things going on these days, I got in a car accident Friday morning on the way to work and the Scion gave it's life for mine.

The headline is, I'm fine. Bruised and sore, but nothing is broken. Nothing bled. Both front airbags went off, giving me a very sore chest, and some serious bruising where the seat belt restrained me. The hospital xrayed me to determine that nothing broke, gave me some tylenol+codeine and sent me home to rest.

The details are that I was driving merrily along and someone driving the other way on the same road turned left right in front of me. The other driver and his passenger were not injured, but he did get a ticket and the dubious honor of being at fault.

It's my first car accident where I was driving, and I'm still amazed at how there was only an instant of notice, it happened so fast. Now I understand that phrase, ("it happened so fast") in a whole new way. I'm completely grateful to the Scion for saving me. This car that so many think is flimsy did it's job perfectly, and here I am to testify. After I free the pictures trapped in my camera, I'll put them up here. You'll be amazed, too.

Less Campy

2010-12-01T15:29:00.000-05:00

Partial list of things that I picked up from the old house yesterday after work. I totally need lists these days or I'd forget something... like the cat.

-shoe rack
-table from porch
-wire shelves from 2nd flr BR
-cat

Yup, I left Sparky to fend for himself for a few days while me and the dogs learned our way around the new spread. He didn't like the ride at all (not much of a travelin' cat I guess), but he got happy as soon as he saw his doggy friends at the new place. He's being a bit clingy. I guess several days alone will do that, even for a cat.

We got the refrigerator TO the new house on Sunday, but weren't successful at getting it up the stairs to the kitchen, so I hired movers to do a fridge switcheroo this morning. Old fridge downstairs ... new fridge upstairs. After a week of having no usable refrigerator, I'm pretty excited to have normal, cold food, like everyone else in the civilized world. Now I only need to get a working oven and a stove with more than one working burner. Baby steps, I guess. I'm so happy about saving an hour a day of driving that I won't even complain.

The cable company is coming on Saturday to give me fast internet. I REFUSE to pay for television (one thing living on the mountain has taught me. The digital antenna I have still works and I can get all the same TV stations I had before. Free. ), but the internet I'm getting is going to be super fast. I'm half expecting the cable company to find some reason not to be able to sell me internet, but if it works, my internet will be something like 30 times faster than it was before (and $10 a month cheaper). I'll be able to watch all those cable shows I refuse to pay to watch on TV ... online. And YouTube? I've completely missed the YouTube revolution. I want to watch all the videos of firefighters that I've heard so much about through firefighter training.

Then, next week the invisible fence peeps are coming and I'll be able to retrain the dogs to the fence. Maggie will get it quickly and earn herself free rein around the yard, but Desmond, who can't hear the warning beeps, may have to continue to be walked, if he's to stay on the property. Not such a bad thing for me, ... or him.

Every little improvement makes it feel less like camping here and more like living. I'm even contemplating bringing over the propane stove for when I pull out this '60s thing I'm cooking on. How's that for camping?

Maggie's Place

2010-11-30T10:06:00.000-05:00

I finally cleared up enough of the moving piles to be able to take a not-so-awful picture of the current scene. I'm sortof camping in one of the front rooms for now. It's 20+ feet downhill to the road and there's a pond on the other side. The view at night is beautiful, with glimpses through the trees of lights reflecting off water

Maggie has calmed down a bit since there's something soft for her to lay on that's close to me, and I've calmed down a bit since Desmond isn't acting like he's being tortured by being kept in the basement. He doesn't love it, but he's not whining or barking or anything that would really break my heart. It helps that we have together time and he gets sensory stimulation on our walks around the yard. I'm not taking them down the driveway for a real walk down the road, because I don't want to confuse them when the invisible fence gets put in and the driveway and road will be off limits. We walk around and around the yard.

One thing Desmond's good at that I never taught Maggie is pooping on cue. He must've been leash walked in a prior life, because he's fallen right back into the poop rhythm. I think Maggie used to do her business in the rough areas at the other house, and since we aren't walking in the rough, she doesn't poop outside. Her system hasn't yet caught up to the fact that she's got several short windows of opportunity to poop. Good thing the basement floor is concrete! Unfortunately, even though I've blocked off half the basement, it's still large enough for her to find a place away from the "living area" to leave me little poopy presents.

What this all means is that Maggie's place right now while I'm at work, is in a crate. She never grew to like that thing, so she thinks she's being tortured. I'm hoping that a few days will be enough for her to start leaving the poopy presents outside, where they belong.

Country Bumpkins

2010-11-28T15:35:00.000-05:00

I went to the old house earlier today to get some things I had forgotten (paper towels, sponges, a trash can, pet odor eliminator, some sneakers, dish soap, hand soap, the TV remote, a duvet, some bath towels, a bathroom rug). You know, just a thing or two.

I passed my normal gas station on the way back, thinking that it'd be easier to get gas tomorrow when there aren't two dogs in the car. But then I realized that it's going to get mighty cold tonight and the car likes having more gas in it when it tries to start on a cold winter morning. So I drove a block past my new house and got gas on a main thoroughfare.

There I was, standing by the car putting gas into it when I noticed a commotion in the car. Both dogs were excited by all the "ruckus" outside (ie, cars driving by). That's when I realized that my dogs are country bumpkins. On my country road, every single car is cause for barking and guarding. So here, closer to the city, they're doing familiar behaviors. Something tells me they'll get tired of this rather soon.

I hope.

Domestic Bliss

2010-11-28T08:21:00.000-05:00

This seems like the first opportunity I've had in a long time to choose the time option over the money option when given the eternal choice of whether to spend time or spend money to get something done. The long Thanksgiving weekend, combined with me not going anywhere special has meant that I've had time to run load after load back and forth to the new house.

I put it off as long as reasonably possible, but finally brought the dogs to the new house and we all spent the night here last night. I suspected it would be stressful for the dogs (and probably me, too). Desmond, who avoided the "final"vet visit when he perked up immensely after I started feeding him more treats is now living in the basement, because I can't carry him up the stairs into the living quarters. And Maggie has never really lived anywhere but in the country where it's quiet and there are no cars.

So Maggie has this constant walking around and whining thing going on. When a car goes by. When geese honk, when sirens and other normal city noises happen. We've all gone out umpteen times (it's back on the leash for everyone) because I've thought she had to, you know, poop. Of course I missed the actual time she had to poop (because it was about 10 minutes after we'd all come inside), so she did her business in the basement. So did Desmond. Frabjous. Just frabjous. My dogs have both forgotten that they're house trained. Surprisingly, Desmond doesn't seem too bothered by being in the basement, which I was feeling incredibly worried and guilty about.

I gave up on the refrigerator and unplugged it. You don't really appreciate those things until you don't have one! I'm only heating part of the house, so I've got the essentials (eggs, bacon, half and half) sitting in a bag in a cold part of the house. It's only for today, thank goodness! Someone is going to help me move a real bed and my fridge from the other house sometime later today, and I'll feel less and less like I'm camping in my house as time goes on.

I hope the dogs feel that way, too!

Closing and Opening

2010-11-25T19:59:00.000-05:00

The house closed on Wednesday after all, two days too late for my overwhelmed immune system. I took a truckload full of stuff to the closing and started moving in immediately afterward, coughing and sneezing and wheezing.

Yesterday at noon, I arrived for the walkthrough to find deer in the yard. It's a much smaller yard than I have now, but it's got a swingset! I love swings!

I took the tape off the vintage refrigerator, turned it on and opened it up. I think it's the same age as the house. The fridge still works, sort of. The freezer gave up the ghost years ago, which is ironic, considering how much frozen blueberries, peaches, pesto and other garden bounty I have in the freezer at my place in the country. (Yeah, it sounds way weird to say, "my place in the country.")

Looking inside, the shelves are metal and they rotate out! I was hoping I could use this for a while, but it's obvious that I'll have to buy a new refrigerator really soon, as in if I want anything cold, I'll have to have a new fridge. It's a shame to let Sears take this one away, so I'm thinking about putting it on ebay just to see if anyone's interested in a vintage fridge. I doubt it, since there are other vintage refrigerators on ebay that are un-bidded-upon, but I should give it a chance. It'll be a good excuse to take a break from packing and moving and curl up with the hotpad and the laptop.

Felled

2010-11-23T11:21:00.000-05:00

The stress of the past few months has finally caught up with me and I feel like crap. Achy sore, tired, worn out, scratchy, hurty throat. I went to bed crazy early last night and wrapped myself in the blanket cocoon and read for a bit before going to sleep early. Looking forward to doing that tonight, too.

You see - on top of all the other stress and stuff, I was hoping that the new house would close tomorrow and I'd have the long weekend to start moving in.

It wasn't so far-fetched. The close date was scheduled to be Monday, just one business day later. However, for underwriting purposes, the funding bank has to treat everyone like they're a potential liar and make us document everything. Perfectly. Perfectly perfectly. Something wasn't perfect enough and I had to produce a statement on one of my 401(k) accounts after I'd already closed the account and moved the money. (It gets better. They had pages 1-3 with all the balances, but want and don't have pages 4-7 with all the junk on it.) Unfortunately, Vanguard will NOT email statements to people who don't have open accounts. I tried multiple times. They will only mail paper, and it will take 7-10 days for me to receive it. This means that not only will we miss my want-to-move-in day, we will also miss the scheduled closing day. This house could close in December because the bank wants pages 4-7 of a statement where they already have the pages with the good stuff. I've sent them two other complete statements that include the junk pages, but it's not good enough for them.

Up until yesterday afternoon I was trying very hard to make the closing happen this week, but when the bank called me yesterday afternoon requesting something more, I gave up. They're saying stuff doesn't show ownership when the account numbers are right there! I surrender. Immediately after I gave up, I started sneezing.

I completely believe that my cold and flu load depends on a large extent on my mental, emotional and stress level. Even though it's been a stressful few months, I never felt so overwhelmed as I felt yesterday afternoon (except for one, lousy, loud night spent listening to my neighbor's noise and worrying for my safety).

Anyway - I had the refrigerator mostly empty (because I don't know if the 40-year old fridge in the new place even works!). But yesterday after I gave up, I stopped at the grocery store and bought enough food to get through the weekend. I've packed enough to get me started at the new place and left unpacked enough for me to stay here a while longer. I'm in limbo.

I brought the truck into the shop this morning. Again. According to them, it's a water pump and a few other pricey things. I've been worried about this old thing and the best way to make sure it'll help me move is to get it fixed at the shop. Again. In the 2 years I've had it, this truck has seemingly spent more time at the shop than taking me places. I made the decision this morning to sell it. I got this huge truck to haul goats, and if I'm not going to do that, this truck is about 10 times too big for me. Not to mention the constant, "is it going to get me all the way to where I'm going?" stress that I don't want.

To end on a good note, my new roof is about halfway on. Yes, roof, truck, and house (multiple houses!) are putting a big strain on the bank accounts. But I think they'll be OK. Believe it or not, money is the one thing I'm not worried about! (probably just too low on the list!)

Something Bigger

2010-11-21T09:29:00.000-05:00

Last night was pizza night at the fire department and I pulled my weight as the topping lady. It was exhausting but exhilarating in a way. This group of folks isn't a tribe in the same way that my friends were in 1983, but I really enjoy being around them and my contribution is much appreciated. We're all working for something bigger than ourselves, and I love that.

I had put off telling the department that I'm leaving because I felt bad about abandoning them so soon after they'd invested in my gear and training. I had said something general a few weeks ago, but told them the specifics on Thursday, firefighter graduation night (great timing, huh?). After they got used to the idea, they were very supportive (short of offering to help me move!), and they asked me to stay involved with them as a social member. Something I will enjoy doing, too. It sounds a bit strange, but even after I leave, I think I'll come back and help with pizza nights - it makes me feel that good.

At the Beach - 1983

2010-11-19T14:37:00.001-05:00

I love this picture. It reminds me of those grainy shots you see of the 1950s family, where the greens and the peaches and the oranges are all a little too bright and there's an old Buick or Pontiac somewhere in a driveway. I look at those old photos and think, "I may be stressed and worried and not calm right now," but there's a world that's perfect. I always feel calm when I look at those old pictures.

So here we are. That's me in the center, in 1983. (At least we think it's me. I don't remember this day, but others do, and I'll believe them when they say I was there.) That's the year I graduated from high school and this picture captures us all being together. Friends. Part of a tribe. I've written before about being new in this area and looking for friends. Now that I've got some I realize that I want more. Not necessarily more friends, but friends in a different way. I want to be part of a tribe, like I was in 1983. The kind of tribe where some group thing is going on most weekends, where you don't need an invite to attend, just know where people are and show up.

I was in a few tribes back then, and one of them is still together, almost 30 years later, raising their children in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I see them on Facebook, still a tribe. It felt so enveloping. So safe to be part of something bigger. It's an easier push, that pushing, when you're not alone.

There's a quote I latched onto many years ago that feels relevant now. A band was being interviewed and the interviewer asked a band member what they were after. "I want what we all want," he said, "Connection. Clarity. Bendiction."

Drivin' and Cryin'

2010-11-18T09:15:00.001-05:00

So I went to pick up a refill on Desmond's painkiller prescription today and spoke to them about his final appointment. For the last six weeks Desmond's been getting high twice a day on some opiate - and it's made a huge difference in his demeanor. There's no pain anymore in him and he notices things now that he used to ignore in his focus on the basics. Get up. Walk. Pee. Poop. Lie down. Now his ears perk up, and sometime he trots. He trots!

But the last week or so has found him unable to get up without a boost and I've realized that it's time for him. I've known for a while that it was coming and am secretly thankful that it comes before we move to the new house. The basement is the only place where a dog could live without walking up steps, and he'd have to live down there by himself or be carried up and down. The one would make him very unhappy and the other, he's made clear hurts him.

It's been a year full of loss and tears over various things and here I am, eyes melting in the car on the way home. But I come around the final bend and see Desmond and Maggie both upright and running (or trotting) to meet me as I stop the car and I think that maybe it's not time after all. Then later he accidentally leaves another poop bomb in the house as he's been doing almost daily for a year and I remember that it really is time for him. I'm sorry Desmond. I'm glad that you're happy and you feel no pain and I'm sorry that it's only because of the drugs. This week you'll eat like a king! Cheeseburgers, ice cream, whatever you want! Too bad you can't tell me to make you a hamburger pie with lamb gravy. Maybe I'll make one anyway.

Urban Sharecropping

2010-11-16T12:38:00.000-05:00

Saturday's Wall Street Journal had an article entitled, "The Rise of the Lazy Locavore," about the juncture between folks that have land but don't grow food and other folks that grow food but don't have land.

Link to the article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703882304575465720930763784.html?KEYWORDS=locavore#articleTabs%3Darticle

The last three paragraphs of the article discuss how landowners and gardeners can connect, mentioning an organization called Sharing Backyards, and some great examples of connections made. I would love to post parts of the article, but it looks like my subscriber agreement prohibits me from doing that.

A Day of Rest

2010-11-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

Last week was a busy one, and now that some things are done, today stretches out like a wide open expanse of nothingness. Relax time.

Yesterday was the last firefighter class. We divided into our crews and practiced putting out several fires in the training tower. As usual, it was pretty tough getting up at 5:30 on a Saturday, climbing up the ladder in full gear plus SCBA, hauling the full hose, going in the window, etc, etc. But now it's over and there'll be no more Saturdays or Sundays lost to training. I'm glad to have that time back. It seems like the time since Labor Day has gone by in a whirlwind. I raised my head yesterday afternoon to notice that fall's gone.

One of the instructors introduced me to the chief of a department I could transfer to. They want me, which is heartening. But there's another department quite close to my new house (as in virtually around the corner), and I think I'll approach them first. I'm happy that this training won't go to waste. These new departments get more calls than my current department's one per month.

My house was listed for sale yesterday, after a horrendous week of rushing to make it presentable for picture-taking. I won't post the listing here, since I don't want to publicize where I live (even though it wouldn't be difficult for someone to suss it out). I'll post the listing after I move, or will send the link to anyone that's interested and sends an email.

The neighbor's dogs came over to visit twice, so far. Court order be damned. Last Sunday morning and this morning. I'm terrifically tense, expecting the neighbor herself to drive up and threaten me again. Unreasonable fear, yes. I know that. But it's like waking from a nightmare - knowing that the feeling is not real isn't enough to make the fear go away. Last week the dogs didn't have any collars on, indicating to me that she wasn't even trying to keep them contained. Today at least, I see collars. (Yes, I got pictures both times.) I've decided not to call the dogcatcher. If there was something I could do to guarantee that I'd never see the neighbor again, I'd do it gladly and watch as this fear slides from my shoulders.

So today, in honor of finishing firefighter training. In honor of getting the house listed, I'm going to relax. I really should clean the house more, to make it ready for actual showings, but I think I'm going to relax instead. I'm burnt out and tired of running. I think I'm going to go see a movie (a first since I moved out here!), and then I think I'm going to get a pedicure. Ha!

Hard Things

2010-11-11T10:19:00.001-05:00

This picture from firefighter training last night. Only one more class to go and firefighter training will be over! Complete! Fin!

It was hard. This 86 hours of training over 9 weeks was the hardest thing I've done in years. I'll remember it as harder than getting my college degrees because it was SO far outside of where I'm comfortable (is this a theme with me? I'm beginning to think so. I have this idea that I should be able to do anything I put my mind to, and off I go, comfort zone be damned.)

Here are some examples of why I thought this training was hard.

- Class started at 7 (be there 10 minutes early please!), so it was drive 45 minutes home, feed the dogs, stuff a few things down my throat and drive 30 minutes back into class. Every time I had a big dinner, it seemed, we'd get suited up in our turnout gear, SCBA mask on, and do something REALLY exerting and scary, like a claustrophobic obstacle course in the dark, or crawl at full speed dragging a charged hose, or run up 3 flights of stairs dragging a hose. I always felt like I was going to throw up after stuff like that. So it got to where I was wary of eating much before class.

- standing for 3 hours with full gear on, plus SCBA, in dinky rubber boots that provided NO support added about 50 pounds to my weight and aggravated my plantar fasciitis. Anyone that's had this will know that it's an inflammation of stuff in the foot making it painful to walk. It takes several days for it to un-inflame, but since we were doing this standing for 3 hours thing several times a week, I've been walking like an old lady for a month now.

- class goes to 10 pm, which would normally be my bedtime. Then it's drive home, have the rest of dinner and try to come down enough to go to sleep so I could get 5-1/2 hours of sleep. I *lurve* my sleep (!), so this one hurt.

- The ONE time I came to class without the requisite 2 full air tanks (I brought my 2 partially full tanks from the prior class) was the day we did vehicle fires. First I used up one tank and then I used up the other one. The sound the air tank system makes when it's approaching empty is a scary sound. I've got a better feel for how much on-air time I really have after it starts making that sound. But it's still scary in an elemental way. Breathing is elemental. I appreciate that now.

- I am the oldest person in the class by 5 years, and out of shape to boot. I struggled with some basic things like climbing up the ladder in full gear plus SCBA. Things that the 16-19-year-old rest of the class had no (overt) problem with. My team compensated, but I was a drag on team performance.

Anyway - it's almost over, and I've been thinking about comfort zones. I think the last time I was in one (comfort zone, that is) was when I lived in Washington DC, before I went overseas for a nonstop year of out-of-the-comfort-zone living all over the world. That was three years ago and I'm ready to go back there (to my comfort zone). They say that you need to push yourself out of your zone, but I think that's for people who don't leave it. For me - I want in!

I FB-status-ed about firefighter training last night and got a chorus of "awesome," "admirable," etc, from my FB friends to whom I hadn't previously mentioned firefighter training. That's what people think about people who do hard things, like firefighter training or solo homesteading in the wilderness. That's the land I'm leaving, at least for a while. The land of hard things. The land of out-of-my-comfort zone. I may come back to these hard things, but next time I'm going to have more backing me up than optimism and hard work. More planning. More practice. More support.

I've decided what I'm going to do with the extra hour every day that I'll have because my commute will be so much shorter than now. I'm going to take care of myself better. Spend time on better food, on moving my body, on feeling better. I'm looking forward to it in a way that feels like coming home. I think it's my comfort zone calling.

Noncombustible

2010-11-09T13:25:00.000-05:00

I spent the weekend in hazmat training. The ENTIRE weekend, both days. Doing my duty to finish up firefighter training.

It's amazing how when you need time, time is the last thing you've got. The real estate agent is coming over Friday to take pictures of the house so it can be listed for sale, and there are some visible, ugly things going on here that are fixable with a little time. I want to get the house listed before Thanksgiving so that (hopefully) a few folks will want to come see it that weekend and maybe it will sell a little quicker.

What's wrong? First, earlier refrigerators have leaked and prior owners pulled up tile and put down plywood (which was then leaked on and rotted). I'm planning on taking this fridge with me (it's a nice one and I've grown attached to it!), so this rotted plywood area will be visible. Also, I had to remove cabinets over the old fridge when I replaced it, because nobody makes refrigerators that small anymore so now there is a dark, sunken area on the wall where the cabinets were. Also, the first floor bathroom has some severe water damage on the walls that needs to be covered, and the porch has some rot that I want to minimize. None of these things need to be perfect (heck, nothing in this 200-year old house is perfect), but they do need to pass the first, "is it ugly" inspection by a potential future owner.

Plus, there's this whole thing about "staging" a house that I've got to get ready for. As in making the floors gleam, the rooms and counters clean and inviting so that the pictures in the listing will make someone want to live here.

So there I was in hazmat class, counting the minutes that I was losing and being a little resentful about the whole thing.

I was driving to work Monday when I realized that there's no chance for success unless I take some time off work. So, here I am blogging from home. I just put a raft of leveling compound down and need to let it dry before I put a second layer on. A little lunch, a little more cleaning (gleam-ifying, if you will), and it'll be time for layer two of leveling compound.

Strange what grabs the attention. I was hoping there was a way to NOT have to use this old, ugly noncombustible piece in front of the wood stove. I priced replacement pieces online (all in the $180-$300 range), and realized that I can *make* a replacement easily enough for a fraction of the price. A little plywood and glass tile later, and there it is in front of the stove. I put the tiles on one night while watching TV and grouted it last night. It will be shinier when I clean off the grout haze, and look better when I find a border to put on it. It's probably borderline in its noncombustible-ness, but I enjoyed making it and it felt like I was accomplishing something useful at the same time.

Midcentury

2010-11-05T20:18:00.001-04:00

Just finished the inspection for the new house, and am glad to say there are NO major findings. That's right, none. The worst thing this highly respected inspector could find was that the railings on the porch would allow a child to get through. This is the 6th house I've bought in my life, and the one in the best shape, by far. There's a reason for that. This house is not even 50 years old, less than half the age of all the other houses I've bought. Compared to the struggles I've had trying to learn how to live alone out here in the woods, buying houses is a breeze and something I'm totally comfortable doing (too bad I'm not rich!).

The kitchen is bright, clean, in good shape, plenty of cupboard space ... sigh. All the bedrooms have closets, some closets even have lights!

Yeah, maybe the oven and the refrigerator are the same age as the house, but I have a 2-year old fridge ready to move. No problem. Looks like I'm going back to no-oven-land though! At least for a while.

You could roller skate in this huge, clean, dry basement! This picture shows only HALF of the basement. It's SO far away from the rock and dirt floor with the 5 foot ceiling that is the basement in my current house. I think about living in this house and a feeling of peace comes over me.

The thoughts that I might not want to live alone in the country any more began to creep into my mind in July after I briefly dated a writer. Time I spent talking to him and other city folks made me remember how much I had enjoyed city stuff. That's when I re-subscribed to that girl magazine I used to like and when I got a pedicure - and red toenails. Sometimes it's the small things that start the ball rolling!

It's like the washing machine. After I moved in with my husband-to-be, I did our laundry at a laundromat for years. We lived on the 2nd floor of an up-and-down and every few weeks I'd take 10 loads of laundry out, wash it, dry it, fold it and then haul it back home and up the stairs. I hated it, but you really can't hate something you have to do like that and besides, we were poor and didn't have any options. (Don't even ask why, if we both had full-time jobs and I was also taking a full course load, why it was my responsibility to do the laundry. It was a few years before I even asked myself that question.) Then a friend sold us a washing machine cheap, and I began to do laundry at home. I can't overstate how much it changed my life by taking away some of that time-consuming drudgery I had refused to think about because I felt we didn't have any options. (Eventually I made my unsupportive husband-at-the-time do his own laundry, but was then and that's another story.)

I don't revisit decisions after I've made them, so here I am in the woods, struggling through first after first after first. Desperately wishing it wasn't so hard and such a struggle and that I didn't have to do it alone. And then it was July and I dated the writer, and then August and the goats died, and then September, or maybe it was October and my neighbor was a complete scary jerk, and then I realized that it doesn't have to be like this and I made a different decision and here we are.

This house has a distinctive midcentury modern style. It's like the architect was copying the Jetsons in places. Yes, this house was "architected," also a first for me. Everything is solid. Everything works, everything is straight and no floors are soft and everything is square and I don't have to replace the roof or snake any drains that fall apart if you run too much water. Like I said, peace.

How Much Wood ...

2010-11-03T09:55:00.001-04:00

After a few weeks of starting a fire in the woodstove and letting it go out, I started a fire Friday that is still going, using up wood like a bandit, but keeping the place toasty warm. Two years ago when I was doing this for the first time, I had NO idea how to start a fire and keep it going and the fire went out constantly. I would restart it every evening (several times!) and just shiver through the cold mornings. I feel like an old timer now, but really I am/was just beginning to learn the ins and outs of when to use different types of wood.

My new house doesn't have a woodstove. It's got a few fireplaces (2, plus a double-sided one in the basement!), but they're not intended to be used for heat. Earlier this week I brought a load of wood in from the woodshed and realized that soon I won't have to haul wood any more. Managing wood and the stove was a really time-consuming aspect of learning to homestead, on top of all the other time-consuming and hard aspects (don't get me started). I enjoy(ed) having a fire going, but I'm really going to enjoy not having to do that any more. The new house closes at the end of the month, so this is my last month here. Ideally, the 'stead will sell quickly, but realistically, it may be spring before someone else calls it home. I can't have it both ways (buy low AND sell high), so I'm settling in for a long haul on selling this house (and contemplating not making any money on it, despite all the work I did).

There's one more looong night of firefighter training this week, all weekend and one night next week before this class is *finally* over. I'll find out tonight if my new neighborhood has a volunteer fire department, and if they need people.

On another note - I don't know how long I'm going to continue this blog after I move (sorry Melanie from MN!). The aspects of discovery and learning about homesteading that were so constant here won't be relevant there, and I have lost interest in posting any more details about my personal life or living my life as publicly as I have been. I considered starting another blog, but I'm currently thinking that I don't want to do that. I'll leave this blog open, since there's likely some homestead-y things left in my creaky bones (and several totes of raw fiber to be spun and knitted!), but I've noticed that the desire to post frequently has left the building. We'll just have to see how it goes!

[Edit: Hm. I didn't intend to convey that I'm going to stop blogging immediately, although several commenters got that impression. I haven't decided anything, but I don't have an urge like I did before is all I meant to say. I want to leave it open in case I have a burning need to tell you all about some really important thing like an article in WSJ, or my dog doing a cute thing, etc, etc.

It bothers me when people misread or misinterpret my stuff because I feel that the error was mine in not clearly expressing myself. This highlights what I'm struggling with - how difficult it is to accurately get across thoughts and feelings to people I don't know. There are two ways to fix that (actually three): 1) try harder to be clear, 2) don't care if I'm misread, and 3) don't write things that can be misread. I'm currently leaning toward the third option. It may be a phase, ... or it may not.]

25 to 1.5 Equals 230

2010-10-30T08:29:00.001-04:00

It's kinda done. Or starting to be done, at least. Offered and accepted, I'm under contract to buy a house about 2/3 of the way into town from my current house. The property is 1-1/2 acres, which is unusual that close in, but the housing crunch benefits us buyers and my lowball offer was accepted after a short negotiation.

The key part is that my commute will be about 1/3 of what it was. I'll do the math for you: it takes me 45 minutes to get to work in the morning now. It will take me 15. That's an hour a day saved. I drive to work about 230 days a year, so there's 230 hours right there. Ta Dah!

It's very close to things I want to do, so I anticipate being less alone than I currently am. The yard is garden-able, there is space for Maggie to run. Desmond, who can't go up more than one step will be a problem here, but there are non-wonderful optons so that he can at least live out his days with me, continuing to sleep 23+ hours a day. My current plan is to put my rocky 25 acres on the market soon. Anyone want a breezy hilltop house built on 25 acres of rocky goodness? Not even if it's got blueberries, apples and cherries, I mean crabapples? Onset of winter is a bad time to sell a house that requires 4-wheel drive on snowy days to even look at. The realtor wouldn't even be able to get here, ha, ha! If it doesn't sell, I could rent it out.

Thanks for the support yesterday! It felt a little wierd a few months ago when I realized that I'm more comfortable in a sketchy city neighborhood than in a sketchy country 'hood. I paused for quite a while on writing about it because I wasn't sure about the reaction of folks that "met" me when all I was writing about was learning to homestead. I'm humbled.

Debating and Dreams

2010-10-29T10:45:00.000-04:00

One of my weaknesses is that I enter into debates that smarter people know to avoid. Here I go... knowing fully that if I were smarter, I would let this one go. (against the advice of my mother, putting waders on and wading in)

I don't know who the anonymous commenter is. I have two or three guesses, based on people I've had discussions with recently and over the past year. I could be totally wrong and this could be someone new.

I think it's amusing that folks like this commenter who have only known me within the last year think that they can read a few blog posts and know who I am. And then lecture me about what my dreams are.

Twenty years ago I had a dream to be an environmental engineer so that I could save the environment. I worked *very* hard for years and made that dream come true (not the saving the environment part unfortunately!), and then more clearly found out what's involved with being an actual environmental engineer working in the world. Hint: it's more about lawyers and less about improving the world.

I used to dream about having a job that would let me travel - and then that dream came true. Too true. Try traveling 90% of the time, with weekends for laundry and one week out of 10 spent at home. Picture living a life like that. And then know that I lived variants of that for years. Years! I actually loved it for much of that time.

Five years ago I had a dream to be a citizen of the world. I wanted to live overseas so badly I could feel it in my gut. I made that dream happen and after many very painful months in exotic locales realized how difficult that dream actually is to live.

For years, I wanted very badly to live in New York City. I never made that dream come true, but I lived in other large cities (and loved it).

The "dream" to homestead that the anonymous commenter chides me for 'giving up' was born in an apartment in the Middle East as I was daydreaming about being anywhere but in the Middle East. It is inaccurate .. strike that. It is totally wrong to assume that a dream I birthed mid-2007 is more important than any of the other dreams I worked for years to accomplish.

People read this blog that have known me for years, decades even. Some people read this blog that have known me my entire life. They are the ones that asked me privately, "what air did this 'homesteading' thing come out of?"

There are many folks that have been dreaming their entire lives about being a homesteader, and many who have been working very hard to make that dream come true. I am not one of those people. My homesteading dream was very new and very uninformed, but I can truly appreciate those who've been working harder and longer than me, now that I've worked for 2 years on it. I am going to spend my money and my time in ways that can make a better difference in the world, farmer's markets, local initiatives, helping other people that are spending time tilling dirt, making cheese, knitting, spinning, cidering, gardening, etc. I am not going to throw any more energy into the pit that is my huge commute and my lonely, snowy mountain far away from friends.

To the anonymous commenter: Go put *your* dreams of homesteading onto someone for whom it is really appropriate. My shoulders will not carry your dream for you.

Reassessing Reassessing

2010-10-28T11:28:00.000-04:00

Over the past week I've had the chance to observe the page hits as someone has read my blog. All of it. From the beginning. All 619 posts. Since he's read page by page, I've seen post titles from things I posted a year ago flash by. Posts like, "Reassessing," and "This is Not Working," and "Balance." It's surprising how frequently I've written about trying to balance friendships and a social life with living out in the woods, and how I failed, bouncing from one extreme to the other, alternating being a hermit with being a social butterfly. Instructive. I'm not really a hermit, but I did enjoy time alone in the woods, and I seem to have written a lot about it.

Melanie posted a post that shows some of my former chickens, being happy and doing their scratching thing. That's one of the funnest things about owning chickens, watching them do the back and forth as they scratch and then back up to look at what they scratched up. And I enjoyed listening to them making happy noises. Chicken TV. It's as good as cable, and cheaper. (cheeper?)

Sooner or later Blueberry Hills Homestead is going to move away from these hills. If ongoing negotiations work out, it will be sooner, and I'll let you know when I have something concrete to say. If not, it will be later, but it's gonna happen. I'm looking for a place with some space that's closer to the places I want to spend my time. Rather than live out in the woods and work extremely hard to get needs met, I can live closer in and work less hard. Took me a while to get here, but it makes more sense for this solo city girl to move closer to the city. Plus, the city I'm looking at allows chickens!

In a Better Place

2010-10-26T12:04:00.000-04:00

The chickens have moved on. They're in a better place now.

Not THAT better place! Nope, these hens are at Casa Wee Farm where they're gamboling with Melanie's other chickens and having a gay ole time free ranging and doing other chicken stuff. It's down to 1 female, 1 cat and 2 dogs at the 'stead.

No leaves left, up here on the mountain. Leaves are at their peak down in the valley though. Later this week, Mom and I will head downhill for another afternoon of civilized city stuff and leaf peeping.

Punkins

2010-10-25T11:16:00.001-04:00

Mom wanted to taste a local specialty, cider donuts. So the other weekend, we went to a local apple orchard to get the things from the horse's mouth, so to speak. The donuts were OK. I'm not sure what everybody thinks is so special about cider donuts, because they just taste like donuts to me. But it was nice to do leisurely things off the ranch for an afternoon.

We stopped for a moment at the pumpkin patch, where we noticed an odd thing. No stems, leaves, or anything attaching the pumpkins to the ground. In a CSI detective moment, we realized that these pumpkins were probably trucked in instead of grown here. Doesn't bother me, but it was amusing how we had both assumed they were grown on site.

My company recently merged with another chemical company, and the VP of Global Six Sigma is coming to our plant tomorrow to meet with all of us Six Sigma types. This merger spells opportunity for some folks, and I checked the job postings board to see what opportunity there may be for me. There are five Master Black Belt positions around the world (Rotterdam, Houston, Germany, Australia, and Columbus, OH). Since Master Black Belt is what I was before I stepped off the career track to live in the woods, and I'm qualified, I briefly considered throwing my hat into the ring for one of those jobs. But I can picture it now - move somewhere interesting, like Australia, live an extremely interesting life for 1-4 years, and then want to come "home". Still alone. Still choosing an interesting life over what most people have. Stability. Connection. At least this time I can see it now, *before* I go and do something interesting.

PS: - Here's information on Six Sigma for those who have never heard of it: isixsigma.com

City Stuff

2010-10-21T14:18:00.000-04:00

Ma Mere is still here, and I'm really glad about it. When she was here in the summer, I don't think we went off the property much, except to hit the hardware store and the dump. This time, I'm showing her more of the surroundings.

Last weekend, we went to Hudson, a walky, shoppy town a bit south of here on the (ahem) Hudson River. It was full of New York City types and expensive antique furniture, but a nice trip anyway. I'll give you two tries to guess what I was most interested in. Here's a clue: it's red. Another clue: it's to the right of this picture, and hidden inside a building.

We honked around Troy and Albany on Tuesday, and may head back in this weekend. As I've mentioned before, this is an either/or thing. Either city stuff OR country stuff. I live too far out to do both. (Oh sure, I could do both as I have tried this past 2 years, but it's both ... badly and neither thing well.) So we're dropping country stuff this visit, in favor of seeing the city a bit more.

I spoke with a friend today who raised sheep in the past. She processed the wool all the way from her sheep through shearing, washing, carding, spinning and weaving, into a dress. She lives in one of the river industrial towns north of Albany now, and understands *exactly* how I feel. She raised her children in the country, but after her nest emptied and she was alone, made a choice to give up the country for the city about 10-15 years ago and hasn't looked back.

Here's gramma using high tech to talk to the chilluns from home... Hi kids!

Freeing

2010-10-20T10:18:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog, I made an effort to write every day, and for a while really enjoyed the discipline of frequent updating. I believed that in order to be a good blogger, I needed to post every day. That was a home-made rule that came out of my head - there are plenty of really good bloggers who only blog when they have something to say (and plenty of good bloggers who have something to say every day).  It strengthened my writing skills.

It was intended to be a journal of sorts, of me learning how to fend for myself out in the country. I called it learning to homestead, even though I didn't really know what homesteading means. But I also added personal stuff about my hunt for a partner. When I started this, I didn't know anyone else doing the same thing as I am, live alone with animals, work a full-time off-farm job, try to find a partner. Now I know several; three come to mind immediately - other strong women, making successful lives out of hard work and chutzpah.

The hard life has taken it's toll, and I've made mistakes, too. Aside from the normal mistakes of doing stuff I didn't know how to do, I made the mistake of putting personal things in the blog, and putting the blog out there for potential partners to see. Potential partners have read the blog and have made mistakes themselves. Big ones.

Several (as in more than 3) potential partners have read the blog and thought that it contains the entirety of my life. That people I wrote about are the only people I have met, or dated. It does not.  Several folks (as in more than 3, a different 3) read the blog and decided that's as far as they wanted to know me. Several were concerned that they would end up in the blog. Also wrong. The folks I wrote about never even knew that I have a blog, and other not-important and important people in my life will likely never grace these 'pages' (unless they want to). Most read the blog and think that in reading the blog they know who I am, which is also wrong, and the biggest mistake of all. This blog is about less than 1% of my life. The rest is private, between me and my friends and my lovers.

I can say, unqualified, that Every. Single. Time. I have let a potential partner read the blog before we know each other, I have regretted it. It will not happen again. Other female bloggers have made the same mistake, have had the same results and came to the same conclusion.

So when Heather, who writes nagoonberry, wrote about an online journaling program called 750 words, I jumped at it. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.  She wrote about it near the end of August, and I've been doing online journaling since then. It's separated the I-need-to-write-about-this personal stuff from the public persona and made it easier to keep my personal stuff to myself or close friends (meaning that the blog contains even less of "me" in it than it did before).

It was even more freeing when I took away the invisible, made-up rule that I needed to post every day. Instead of manufacturing something to write about every day, doing my best to make it amusing, I can wait until I have something meaningful to say, or a point I want to make in a public forum. As I evolve in understanding and separating my needs from my wants and focus on reliably getting the needs met (homesteading is hard and satisfying in some ways, but it is a want, not a need), my life will change more, and this blog will likely change with it. Thanks for coming on the ride with me!

Survival Skills

2010-10-18T15:10:00.002-04:00

Firefighter training is about halfway through. I'm amazed at what I know now that I didn't know a few short weeks ago.

File it under How to Get Out of a Burning Building: (Picture this. You can't see. It's smoky and dark, and besides, you're wearing full turnout gear, an SCBA and a face shield.) And oh yeah - it's hot. You find a fire hose, but don't know which way to follow it. Follow it (on your hands and knees, bro) until you find a connector. Feel (with your gloves on), and you'll notice that one side of the connector is bigger and has bigger nuts. Yep, uh huh. That's the male side. Follow the male side to water and outside, and safety.

I don't think I've ever in my entire life been challenged the way this training is challenging me. The other week we got suited up, on air, and did a maze in the dark, one at a time (similar to the pic below, but our maze was narrower, and had a trap door, a wall joists like this, and some other stuff). The firefighter below will probably have to take off their air tank to get through this wall. I was terrified. I can't specifically say what frightened me so much, but I was definitely terrified. I've seen live-your-life-better things say to, "do one thing that scares you every day." Do I get two or three days' worth if I'm three times more frightened?

The maze was for Mask Confidence, and the instructor made it only as hard as we could stand. For me, he shone a flashlight on every obstacle before I did it, so that I could see what I had to do. Others did it completely in the dark by feeling their way through. One person got turned around in a dead end, and we could all hear his harsh breath faster, and faster as he figured his way out. Sounded like Darth Vader, if he were breathing fast.

I'm the oldest person in the class, and I struggle with exercises like Saturday's, where we climb on the truck, pack the hose, then jump down and practice different ways to carry the hose off the truck. Or the one where we connect and disconnect hose lines from the truck, or roll and unroll hose lines. At the end of the class, most of us struggled to lift the hoses to put them away, we were so tired.

Tonight we get suited up, go up a ladder to a 'roof simulator' and learn how to break through a roof. Betcha class goes to 10 and I get home about 10:30 - again. Exhausted. Then it's up at 5:30 to start again tomorrow. I suppose it could be worse. My crew chief is a nursing student and she has 4 midterm tests this week! All I have to do is work.

Yay, Us!

2010-10-16T06:53:00.000-04:00

Ever since it became obvious that the Chilean mine rescue operation was a well-managed operation, I've been wondering who the project manager was. Every time something like this happens, the guy (yes, pretty much always a guy) behind the scenes is usually an engineer or a project manager or both. In certain circles, these guys are superstars.

And here he is:

Straight-talking engineer was behind Chile rescue

SAN JOSE MINE, Chile – Three days after 33 men were sealed deep within a gold mine, Andre Sougarret was summoned by Chile's president.

The Chilean leader got right to the point: The square-jawed, straight-talking engineer would be in charge of digging them out.

more here

Yay, us!

Apples and Things

2010-10-15T11:23:00.000-04:00

Here's what's happening with my apples. What you see are some experiments: the far right bag are McIntosh apple slices, dried after being dunked in lemon water (to retard darkening). The middle bag is Cortland apples, dunked in lemon water, the leftmost apples are Cortland, not dunked in lemon water. The slices didn't darken, but there's a little less *zing* in the flavor.

The McIntosh are almost gone for the year. We had a windy storm last week and a bunch of apples fell. I went to pick some up the other day and most of them are partially rotted already. The Cortland apples are looking great! Unfortunately those don't cook well - which is why we're into drying these days. I considered trying to root cellar some apples, but all the literature on the topic says that the apples to be stored should be perfect, and I don't have any of those. There's no such thing as a perfect apple on this 'stead.

Sharon Astyk, who writes a blog called Casaubon's Book, wrote about re-evaluating her life today. Her stuff, is normally pretty dense, weighty and doom-y so I don't read it often, but the topic of reevaluating is hot for me these days. She talks about reevaluating on several aspects, but the aspect that strikes me is community, something I totally ignored when I bought this place, but have been struggling to find. I wrote a blog post almost exactly a year ago saying that I was going to find comunity, darn it, even if I had to drive an extra hour and a half every day (or something like that). We'll I've tried the whole "drive an extra hour and a half a day just to be part of a tribe" and it doesn't work. I wonder why I didn't learn that lesson when I lived in a similar situation in South Carolina. The lesson is Live Where You Want to Spend Your Time. Not 45 minutes away. Not an hour away. Actually, when I had the apartment in The Hague, I knew I'd want to be in the Centrum, so that's where I got my apartment. I'm only dumb sometimes, like when I want to totally change my life to something I've never done before! Alone. In the woods. Leaving my family shaking their heads in curiousity. OK, OK, we'll call it optimism, not totally dumb.

I am finally beginning to give myself permission to not try and do everything all at once, by myself out here, alone in the woods. What I feel is relieved. That ... and sad.

Wardriving

2010-10-13T10:15:00.000-04:00

Back in the early, early days of internet over wi-fi, the term "wardriving" came up, to describe folks driving around looking for open wi-fi signals. This ancient past was maybe, 5 years ago. I never did 'wardriving,' but I find the term interesting, and it fits something I've been doing over the last few months. First let me digress a bit.

I'm a bit of a technogeek. I've had various smartphones ever since they've existed, and before they were even very smart, like, about 7 years or so. At the beginning of August, my last phone contract loosened up enough for me to get a new phone and I got ... an iPhone. This phone has changed everything. I don't need a separate GPS any more, I don't need a separate MP3 player. I will never get lost again. This phone (and apps) does stuff I've been hoping for for years.

In addition to being a technogeek, I'm a bit of a real estate geek. When I was living in sketchy Cleveland neighborhoods in the 1990s, I avidly followed which houses were for sale, for how much, how long, etc, etc. When I was trapped in hotel rooms in the middle east in 2007-8, I looked up real estate listings as a way of daydreaming about being anywhere but by myself in a hotel room in the middle east. (Note that the Cleveland neighborhood, Ohio City that was so sketchy then is now the hottest place in the city, or at least one of them. It's older than Cleveland, beautiful old, well-made houses and based around a farmer's market that has been there for around 100 years. Also note that the line from me daydreaming in the middle east to the remote acreage I own now is pretty bright. As soon as I came back to the US and found a job, I bought the closest thing I could find to what I had been daydreaming about.)

So here I am, this morning, driving to work.

About 10 minutes into the drive, the first road with a line on it.

Moving' right along as the sun rises, burns the frost off the fields and begins to show off the flaming trees.

About 40 minutes into the drive, I cross the Hudson River, still shrouded in fog. It's the lowest thing around, and the last to burn clear. I'm only a few miles from work now.

Here's the wardriving part. Realtor.com has an iPhone app uses the phone's GPS to show nearby houses for sale and link to the listings. In the phone pic below, I'm the light blue dot in the center of the pic (stopped at a red light). It's SO easy to stop while I'm driving through an area and see how many homes are for sale, for how much and for how long. There's a Zillow app that shows home values for nearby homes, too, so I can see values for homes not on the market.

This is stuff I've been interested in for years, so don't read too much into this. I'm an information geek. The iPhone and these apps have finally put together information I've been manually looking at for years. It wasn't possible to do something like wardriving for real estate before, but now it is thanks to the iPhone, pulling together several long-time interests of mine into one small package.

Farming as High Drama

2010-10-11T13:04:00.000-04:00

This headline from the weekend's WSJ about the USDA lowering crop projections for corn by 3.9%, a greater figure than expected. Oh, the drama!

Mom is here. A few folks that I've known for years recently wondered aloud (in writing, after I began to question it myself), how I magically transitioned from a city girl to a homesteader-wanna-be-girl. Where the sudden urge to "homestead" came from. I can explain the chain of events that led me to here, but can't explain why I threw out everything that I loved before to live by myself so far out here in the country; leading directly to me missing city things that I loved before, and partly ... my angst.

You see - I'm an engineer. My entire career (all 25 years of it) has been about me successfully making things happen that didn't exist before. I don't really pay attention when people say things are impossible or hard to do, because that's stuff we engineers get done regularly. I've done the same thing in my personal life (make big, hard changes), and then ended up changing back when I've realized that things aren't working. Still thinking about that, and mom is here to help provide perspective.

Notes From the Universe

2010-10-06T12:27:00.001-04:00

I was reading Hope Dies Last the other day and saw this thought-provoking thing:

She started her post with this phrase, "A couple of weeks ago The Universe sent me this note:"

Curious about how The Universe sends emails, I followed the link, read a bit, and then signed up to get emails from The Universe myself. I kinda believe that my thoughts have an impact on my life, so a daily reminder to think constructively is a good thing.

Here's the email I got yesterday morning from The Universe:

Simply put, Jordan, the reason there are things you want that have not yet appeared in your life, is because you're just not used to thinking of yourself with them.

Sorry, kind of wish it was more complicated.

A tiny bit of fluff, but useful for me, especially right now when I'm tempted to get caught up in negative thinking. Another blogger, Julie, from 47 and Starting Over had this to say last week:

So Dr. Penny has been telling me for years...YEARS....that I have to change my thinking in order to change my life.

I hate it when that b*** is right. LOL She NEVER lets me forget it.

Seriously though....

I finally took her advice. And I changed my perception...my thoughts...my actions. I stopped "wanting" what I didn't have, I stopped the constant barrage of negative, toxic thoughts (read more of her blog post here).

Pretty cool, huh?

I'm so questioning everything these days that ALL options are on the table, except continue things exactly the way they were. I don't feel safe alone out here any more. Maybe I'll stay in the country and get a roommate or rent the place out and move closer in, or sell the place and move closer in. My dreams of homesteading were not because I've always dreamed of homesteading, but were to enable me to quit the corporate life. I see now how superhuman of an effort that would have been. I don't know if my plan would have ever allowed me to quit corporate life. I think I'll come back to parts of homesteading (good lord, I have a room full of raw fiber that needs to be spun and now that I know how to make cheese, I'm never going to stop!), but as long as I am alone, I have to consider other options that allow me to get my needs met. Homesteading is a want, not a need.

My company has recently merged with another chemical company. My boss has been incredibly understanding of me being essentially half an engineer for the last two years while I gave most my mental energy and all my emotional energy to trying to make it in the woods. We spoke today and I let him know that I'm back in. I'm coming back to work, at least more than I have been for a while.

What Mothers Do

2010-10-04T08:58:00.001-04:00

Mothers read anguished blog posts by their daughters and then they buy plane tickets east.

I've been taking the time since Penny and Coco died to think about why I'm here in the woods and what I'm trying to accomplish, except now I'm trying to be more realistic than optimistic. Now that I've got 2 years under my belt, I have a better sense of how much I have time to do, how long it will take to get where I want to go, or if I could even get there and what the quality of my life would be like. I see that I can't live alone, have a full-time job, grow and process food, get the 'stead ready for a goat business AND have a social life. AND deal with a vindictive neighbor that just moved back after almost 2 years away. I suspect something is going to change, but I'm not sure what, just yet.

I've been in this place before, and I think it's because I've stretched so much in my life. I've pushed my life into places that most people never go, and then evaluated and made changes when I had to. When I find myself crying at unusual times, that's generally a clue that it's time to evaluate. It's time to evaluate.

And that's something else mothers are good for.

PS - Examples where I've stretched my life that maybe some people have not. These are all after my divorce 12 years ago, so I had no partner through any of this: job with 50% travel all over the country, job with 90% travel teaching Lean Six Sigma to defense dept folks, job with 100% travel literally living out of suitcases, living overseas, living in hotels, living in the middle east. (Note to self and others, 90% travel and 100% travel is a HARD life. Especially in countries that don't speak english and you can't drink the water.) And now, alone, 45 minutes away from civilization, stuff you know about. This is also a hard life. Most people don't even try to do what we're trying to do.

Neighborliness

2010-10-02T13:19:00.001-04:00

I'm really disturbed. When I came home from firefighter training, the neighbor drove up the hill to ask me not to call the dogcatcher today while she tries to train her dogs. We ended up yelling and talking for something like 1/2 an hour. She still doesn't think her dog killed my goats. She still thinks I am being incredibly not country savvy and kept on asking me over and over why I was starting trouble. She told me that I don't like the way her dogs look, I don't like her roommate, all stuff she pretty much made up out of thin air. She gave me advice on how to keep animals safe.

When I told her that she had a court order to keep her dogs on her property and she should just do it, she called me a b***h and a c**t, came up close to me, waggled her finger in my face, told me I had no idea what I was in for, because she put her dad in a nursing home and was back living in her house full time. She told me that there's no guarantee of peace and quiet when you live in the country and she can do whatever she damn well pleases on her property and I better get used to it.

I'm obviously much less happy than I was an hour ago. I wish I could transport myself to another place where I don't live next door to a hilbilly nutcase, where people are sane and I don't have a whole load of crap to look forward to.

The Dogs I Wasn't Supposed to See Again

2010-09-30T10:25:00.000-04:00

When I came home from work yesterday, I had four-footed guests. The neighbor came and got them about 10 minutes after I got home.

I was wondering why I saw tire tracks from my neighbor's house to my house yesterday morning (meaning she had come up to my house while I was gone Tuesday evening).  I'm guessing her dogs had come to visit Tuesday, and she retrieved them. So last night makes the second time they've been to my place, that I know of, since the court order saying she had to keep them on her property.

It's hard to describe how annoyed and powerless this makes me feel. I knew that this whole thing wasn't over, but it's been 6 weeks, so I was hoping it was.

On another note, I'm close to cancelling my match.com gig. I feel like I've given it a good shot, but overall, I'd say the impact on my life has been negative. I'd been erring on the side of meeting more people (being less choosy), and have met a ton of people who are just plain bad fits with me, and communicated with a ton more. Someone always gets kinda hurt, either me or the other person, and I don't like feeling that way and I don't want to make other people feel that way.  Match has a deal where if you don't find someone in 6 months, you get a free 6 months, so I was considering just hanging in there one more month to get the free six months. But honestly, more of a bad thing does not turn it into a good thing.

The other dating site I'm on (OKCupid) is a less negative experience and I've met people that fit better with me. But it's still sucking time and energy away from more positive things I could be doing.  I'm thinking of taking a complete break from the whole man-hunting thing for a while, and focusing on other things I want to spend my time on. It's hard to argue (as we all do on these dating sites) that life is good and we're complete on our own, while spending so much time looking for a partner to come along and completely change things. I think it's time to align my words ("I'm happy with my life") and my actions.

Sunday Project

2010-09-29T09:29:00.000-04:00

When I don't have a project planned for Sunday, I start the day with breakfast and the WSJ, and wait for inspiration to strike. The other day, I found myself taking off the molding below the window sill to see what was underneath. Good thing I did! There's nothing underneath, besides shims. Nothing stopping wind from coming into the house through the sizeable cracks. Aah - so that's why I still felt a breeze, even though I had fancy plastic storm windows resting on the sills inside all the windows! There's insulation in the walls (I checked that already), but these wide open gaps and spaces make it seem like there's no protection at all.

With a handy tube of silicone caulk, the gap was filled in no time. I caulked a few windows, too, while I had the tube and the gun out.

See that piece of angled dowel? That was one of last year's big improvements. A piece of wood to hold the windows closed. You laugh, but you shoulda been here with me watching the windows fall open over and over, my first winter here. Especially when it was zero outside and wind was ripping plastic off the windows. The plastic was inside. Yup. Not fun.

The propa fix is replacement windows, I'm guessing. But it's lots of caulk that will get me through this winter. And, guess what? My company makes the stuff. The tube you see in the window is one we couldn't sell because the label is crooked (or some other silly thing makes it unsell-able). If our company was public, I'd buy stock!

Malus Sargentii, Sargent's Crabapple

2010-09-28T09:28:00.000-04:00

(Picture and text from the Royal Horticultural Society, here.)

Malus sargentii is a spreading shrub or tree with ovate or 3-lobed, dark green leaves, to 8cm (3in) long. In late spring it bears broad-petalled, saucer-shaped, pure white flowers profusely borne in umbels all over the bush. These are followed by dark red fruits up to 8mm (about 0.25in) across in late summer and autumn.

It is a native of Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, and perfectly hardy in this country.[the UK]

It was introduced from Japan in 1892 and named as a new species although it is closely related to M. toringo (syn. M. sieboldii), a similar but more tree-like species which has pale pink flowers and smaller fruits.

Two folks commented yesterday with thoughts about what the trees are - and they're good thoughts. I had the same ideas myself, and set them aside earlier. Last night I came across what I really think these trees are. Everything fits. The three-lobed leaves, the dark red, small fruit that stays on through winter, the 4-6 foot height. The fact that pruning them didn't make it better.

Also - I've got another Japanese-sourced plant nearby, Pieris Japonica. I wonder if a previous owner had a thing for Japanese plants. I know *just* the person to ask; fire-department-doctor-guy who lived in my house 1985-1991.

Of course, I was certain last year when I said these were cherry trees. Just take everything I am "certain" of with a grain of salt!

Crabapple

2010-09-27T15:47:00.000-04:00

Amazing how these questions can be so consuming! Don't ask me how much work I got done at work today.

Now I think they're crabapple trees, not cherry trees. Kinda fits with the ripening timeframe. They're not wild, unless wild crabapples plant themselves in a straight line about 10 feet apart from each other. That's as far as I'm gonna go on these trees, too many crabapple variants make a more solid identification of these unlikely.

Blossoms opening, Spring, 2009

Identifying the Cherry Trees

2010-09-27T10:52:00.000-04:00

Two commenters to my last post gently pointed out that cherry season is long gone, which I think is hilarious! Of course! I knew cherry season was, like 6 weeks ago because I have some cherry ice cream in my freezer that I made with fresh cherries from a farm stand. That was early August. What I was doing is ignoring evidence that doesn't fit with my worldview that these are cherry trees. Not on purpose. I really never made the connection.

So it's back to trying to figure out what these trees are if they're not cherries.

Two years ago when I first saw this house, I took pictures of some trees in the yard. Not knowing what the fruit was, I held off on tasting it.

Mid-September 2008

Then last summer, I tried to identify the trees and decided they were Northstar cherry trees. I wrote blog posts about not knowing here, and then deciding here. I posted a picture of my lawnmower in front of two of the trees. This area is much tamer now than it was last summer.

June, 2009

Here's what the fruit looks like on the outside and the inside. They largest are about 1 cm diameter (yes, I know that's very small for cherries. I just thought my soil was inhospitable. Yup, that's me, ignoring facts.)

Here's what the leaves look like. They have the pinnate, serrated leaves as expected, but many leaves are lobed.

So, um, if anyone knows what this is, I'd love to be enlightened. I've got 2 cups of the berries in the house and I'm not entirely sure what to do with them!

Cherry Time

2010-09-26T15:32:00.001-04:00

I've been running around so much, I almost missed cherry season. Last year they tasted like nothing and were mealy. This year they're still mealy, but definitely taste like pie cherries! They're still small, too. I picked a bowl-ful, will pit them and decide what to do with them. I could make 1/3 of a pie!

(this space is for the picture I can't upload. Blogger has changed picture uploading and it doesn't work.)

Deciding what to do with the cherries reminds me that wise people advise to preserve stuff that you eat. Interesting to remember this as three flavors of home-made ice cream sit in the freezer. I was so excited to make yummy ice cream when it was hot that I forgot I'm not much of an ice cream eater. I canned 6 pints of tomatoes earlier this week. That's more than I use in a year. I've got another basket full of tomatoes and am thinking of making salsa, which I use more than I use tomato sauce. Now - what to do with those cherries??

[edit: This is extremely weird. These cherries don't have pits. They have seeds. It's like the pit is 4 sections. Is that even possible? Are these maybe not cherries at all? Maybe some kind of buckthorn? Geez - I'm going to have to take and post pictures of these little trees all over again.]

Festival Weekend

2010-09-25T12:57:00.000-04:00

There's a bunch going on in the small city this weekend. Last night was Troy Night Out and a football game between my local high school team and my boss's son's team. Today is the Lark Street Festival, an ethnic festival in Troy's Little Italy, and a Greek festival at a Greek church somewhere. This is on top of a balloon festival in Glens Falls and a ton of other stuff.

I haven't gone to any of it ... yet. I was going to come home, feed the beasts and head out last night, but I was tired when I came home after a long week of running around. And here I am, still tired late this morning. I enjoy street festivals, but it's hard to justify 45 minutes each way of driving when there's nobody to meet at the other end. Ah well - to force myself to get off my substantial duff I have to give myself an assigment. Go downtown and buy myself a gyro for dinner. I'll let you know how it goes.

My computer essploded the other day. Actually, it kind of dribbled. First one screw loosened and fell out, then two others. I'd been pretty happy with Dell for the last 15 years or so, and had bought all my computers and laptops from them (and recommended same to family). But this last one, bought in Jan 2009 was step change worse than earlier ones, confirmed by WSJ articles about Dell quality degrading. Now I'm back to my old laptop - the one that I've had since 2006 - the one that went across the country twice and around the world with me. Still works fine, even though the comma key doesn't work and the space key works too much. Not sure if I'm going to do nothing, repair the new one, or buy a cheap netbook, but I do know I'm moving away from Dell.

Following Directions

2010-09-23T11:20:00.000-04:00

The comments on my last post (and an email - thanks sis) helped me realize that the temperatures in the canning directions are more vague suggestions than they are iron-clad rules. In this, as with every single other thing ... ever, I have to wobble unsteadily through the first few times before becoming sure-footed. Ya never know until afterwards, that when the instructions say "heat to 180 degrees," it really means "make it hot but not boiling."

Making cheese, on the other hand - when the directions say warm to 90 degrees, they mean 90. Not 95. not 85.

I could think of many, many other examples of directions that clearly state what you have to do without mentioning that things will work out fine if you don't really follow directions. [Actually, my brain is full right now and I can't think of any examples. I have to turn my head sideways and shake some stuff out to make space in my head.] The key for me has been just to struggle through something new - following written or video instructions. The clearer the better. When I screw it up, I write a post about it here and learn what I did wrong. It's been pretty consistent - and frequent!

This year's firsts:
- hard cider
- cheese
- chickens
- goats
- garden and starting from seeds
- firefighter stuff
- lost cat, lost goats
- gun
- grill
- canning

How many of you do so many brand new-to-you things in a year? It boggles the mind now that I look at the list and I better understand why I'm weary of firsts these last few weeks.

I've recently re-discovered some stuff I used to enjoy. City stuff. I see now that part of the reason is that the city stuff is familiar and comfortable for me and I'm not trying to figure everything out. By myself. I'm very happy to have the country to come home to, but the car is racking up miles fast!

I Will be Bad At This

2010-09-22T08:52:00.000-04:00

The water should be boiling NOW as I write this, or otherwise there won't be enough time to process these for 40 minutes before I have to leave.

My first attempt at canning. I started these on Monday and have been boiling water off as I got a chance until this morning. The tomato-y goodness is about half the volume it was when I started. After putting the job off for weeks, it became obvious that I was going to have to do something, or miss it entirely.

Do not EVER expect an Industrial Engineer to be good at tasks requiring detail like bring 3 pots of water with different contents up to 180 degrees, etc, etc, etc. I keep on wanting to make it more efficient! I think efficiency is the enemy of things like canning and cheesemaking.

Here's what this efficiency expert did. Since I didn't have room on the stove for the tomatoes AND the three pots, I took the tomatoes off. When all the pots were the same temperature, I put the food in the jars and went forward. However - the temperature was 160 degrees, not 180 degrees as all the references say it should be. I would have had to wait who knows how much longer if I waited until everything was at 180 degrees. That is SO not efficient. I hope I'm not going to kill anyone because I cut that corner!

PS - I had a job as a lab technician once, when I was getting my ChemE degree. The job was to run equipment to determine the concentrations of stuff in other stuff. Every step has to be done perfectly, all the equipment and glassware has to be cleaned perfectly or the measurements will be inaccurate. Good lab tech = bad Industrial Engineer. Good Industrial Engineer = bad lab tech. I learned this in about 1991 - so I've known for years that I'll be bad at detailed chores where every step has to be done perfectly.

PPS - Not one to miss an opportunity to do an engineer-y thing, I checked the thermometer after the water started to boil. Either my water boils at 205 degrees, or the thermometer is off. A distressing way to start the day.

Sparky and the Apple Basket

2010-09-21T09:05:00.000-04:00

What circuit is hardwired in a cat that makes them look at a new thing and think, "This will be a good place to sleep."

The Grill and the Dog

2010-09-20T10:59:00.000-04:00

I never managed to get myself a grill. Grilling is one of those things that I've felt was more of a man's thing and so I haven't had one (a grill or a man). I considered buying one (a grill) last summer, but hemmed and hawed and eventually decided against spending the money.

A few weeks ago, I helped some of the fire people move. They had an extra grill that they were going to get rid of, and so here I am with a free grill, grilling hamburgers, watched over carefully by one old dog. It didn't seem to make sense to only grill what I would eat (one burger), so I cooked them all up.

The other thing I've never had before is a propane tank to fuel a grill. Purchasing the tank was yet another in a long line of firsts for me, where I do something kinda wrong before I get it right. I walked into the hardware store and said, "I need a propane tank." (pretty straightforward, huh?) The lady there assumed that I needed a tank filled, so sent me out to the filling station to meet the guy. Then I had to come back into the store, start all over again with the lady, buy a tank, wait for them to find a tank, they can't find a tank and have to refund my money, then they find a rental tank to loan me until they get tanks back in stock. Good grief that was more painful than it needed to be. It's getting old, this whole part where every single thing that I do is a first. I'm not in the mood these days to be out of my element all the time and make so many beginner's mistakes. (I think I'm grumpy because fall is coming...)

Desmond is slowing down pretty quickly. I've started to feed him only soft food, and on a raised box so he doesn't have to bend down so far. He slips and falls a lot, and doesn't get up as much anymore. Now he often thinks about getting up and decides to stay where he fell. There are two steps into the house from the front yard and our new routine is that when he wants to come in, he waits for me to go out and walk next to him so I can catch him if he falls on one of the steps. He's not entirely continent. He sometimes doesn't realize that he's pooping until it's too late. Often it's in his sleep or right after he gets up, so when I come home from work, I make sure we all stay outside until his system is clear. He's still very interested in food though, as the picture shows. His family may have had a grill in his previous life.

The High, the Medium and the Low

2010-09-16T13:18:00.000-04:00

You could fill a full-size shipping container with all the magazines I've subscribed to over the years. Growing up was Smithsonian and National Geographic. Later it was Glamour, Vogue, Dwell, and Metropolis. Then all those plus W. Then Newsweek and the New Yorker when I was hurting for culture in South Carolina. For the dollar spent, magazines are far and away the cheapest way to get information. As my attention span has gotten shorter making full-size books less interesting, magazines fit the bill there too.

It was a simple matter when I moved to the hills to find a few magazines to subscribe to. I get Organic Gardening, Countryside, Hobby Farmer, and a few newspapery periodicals through NOFA, the Northeast Organic Farmer's Association. I get Newsweek and the New Yorker weekly and the Wall Street Journal daily. Plenty to read. I recently realized that I don't really read the homesteady journals (let's call them the "high" because they reach to the highest part of why I'm here in the hills). I flip through them and stack them.

I do read the "medium" periodicals like Newsweek and the WSJ, and sometimes the New Yorker, if I have time. But what I didn't have, until recently, was a "low" magazine. That's the one that I'm embarrassed to tell people I subscribe to, but when it arrives I enjoy taking time out to read it cover to cover. It's like candy. I missed one of my old favorites, resubscribed, and now I've got the whole spectrum covered, from high to low.

What's the old favorite? It's Glamour magazine. Not brag-worthy, I know, for a wanna-be homesteader. But I do enjoy it!

Car = Life

2010-09-15T16:11:00.002-04:00

Two years ago today, I was driving across the country, from Corvallis, Oregon to Albany, New York. It took me 8 days to go the ~3000 miles, from about the 10th of September to the 19th. Slow because I stopped in Colorado and Cleveland to visit with friends. Plus, since my car doesn't have cruise control, anything more than about 500 miles a day was just painful. I hadn't started my job, hadn't seen the property that is my house, didn't have dogs, cats or chickens. Two years ago I was a city person.

One month ago, tomorrow, the goats died. It seems longer ago than that.

Over the year and a half-ish that I've been blogging, I've shown pictures of various things in the back of my car. Once it was a spinning wheel, once it was a chainsaw. A few times it was flowers on their way to work. I won't go as far as to say that a snapshot of the back of my car is like a snapshot of my life at that point, but sometimes it seems that way.

Here's what's in the back of my car now.

Monday night we practiced getting in and out of our gear in less than a minute. Into the gear, check it, get out of the gear. In, check, out. In, check, out. Later, we'll add the SCBA to that and have 90 seconds to get suited up. Later still, we'll run an obstacle course suited up and on air to see how long the tanks last. Class, practice, read, study, drill. Repeat. This picture accurately depicts my life right now! (outside of the 11 hours a day that is work and commuting)

What I'll Do to Avoid Going to Work

2010-09-14T10:05:00.000-04:00

As a morning person, my mind is sharper at 7:30 am than it is at 7:30 pm. In the morning I'm curious, interested, engaged, alive, awake, etc. All the wonderful things. In the evening, I'm done, mush, not there, blank, etc.

So there I was this morning, wondering again, what kind of apple trees do I have? I went to four apple trees around the house and picked one apple from each. The top right, dark red apple is an excellent cooker, but sometimes a little too tart to eat. This is the apple I cooked with on Sunday. The top left are excellent eating apples, but turn mushy and bland when cooked, from an experiment I ran last year. The lower right tastes like Golden Delicious and the lower left is totally unknown.

Websites on apple varieties note the overcolor of the apple, the undercolor (greenish or yellowish), the streakiness and splotchiness, spots and their color, color of the flesh, crunchiness, smell and a few other things to identify apples. The top right apple is definitely different from the top left. The top right apple is darker and more solid in color than the top left, which is streaky, blotchy red on top of greenish yellow.

The two left apples look like McIntosh but act like something else. The upper right looks like something else, but acts like McIntosh. I think the lower right is Golden Delicious. One of the differentiators that I read about yesterday is that some apples darken faster than others when cut. I can't help it! I'm an engineer. I HAD to cut those apples open and see what happened.

So there I was this morning, sitting in front of four cut apples, waiting for them to darken. Kinda like watching paint dry! How's that for avoiding work?

The Golden Delicious began to darken immediately. The dark red one began to darken after a few minutes. But the other two apples did not darken much in ten minutes. I wanted to extend the experiment, but since I get paid to do other things, I had to regretfully leave the apples behind. Now I have more data to add to the, "what kind of apples do I have," question. And as you may have guessed, I'm all about data!

One thing I know about cut apples though, is how fragrant they get when left out - so these went in a plastic bag and into the trash on my way out the door.

Did I resolve anything about my apples? Not really. I'll continue calling them the cooking apple tree and the eating apple tree.

I didn't pick any apples from the tree I've been calling the Grandpa tree. It's a huge, gnarled old tree that didn't bear last year. The trunk is 18 inches in diameter at chest height. Huge for an apple tree. This year it bore ONE apple. From the looks of the apple, I'm guessing it's golden. Plus, the Golden Delicious tree is about 50 feet away from this tree, the Grandpa tree might be the daddy of the Golden Delicious tree. Isn't detective work cool?

Sunday was Apple Day

2010-09-13T09:45:00.002-04:00

Many Sundays I start the day unsure of where the day will take me. I eat breakfast, push through the last of last week's Wall Street Journals, piss around a bit. Then something seizes me and I'm off on a project. I had multiple options yesterday. Finish painting the woodshed. Move wood into the woodshed. Caulk the shedbarn. Take out and re-place the window in the sliding shed door, caulk and re-paint it. Reglaze windows on the house. Start tightening up the house for winter. But first, since it was cool, I put dough materials into the breadmaker and chose a recipe for apple breakfast cake. While the dough percolated, I moved some wood into the woodshed and finished cutting the grass.

I went out to pick up fallen apples from the cooking apple tree, brought them in and peeled one and had a piece. I don't remember ever tasting a better apple. A sweet, complex flavor with a teeny bit of tartness at the end. I made the bread filling with the apples, some raisins, brown sugar, nutmeg and ginger (instead of the cardamom the recipe called for that I don't have). It was heavenly. And that's when yesterday's project seized me.

I picked (up) more apples and made an apple pie. Then I picked more apples and made an apple-sausage-cheese pie on phyllo dough because I ran out of pie crusts. Then I ran out of time. Peeling and cutting away bad parts is pretty time consuming! I'm really thankful for the cold, spitty day that was yesterday, because now I have enough food put away to last me the rest of the week. I'll need it too - fire stuff will consume most weekday evenings this week, and all day Saturday.

I went on my first call over the weekend! A 2am EMS call where I sped down to the station, rode the ambulance, and then stood around in the background as about 5 people took care of the patient. A frequent flier who had stabbed herself on purpose while drunk.

Ten Pounds

2010-09-12T11:21:00.000-04:00

I got on the scale yesterday and found out that I've lost ten pounds in the last few months. I'm happy about that, but since this is the ten pounds that I'd gained in the past 2 years, I'm now only coming off of my highest weight ever, 50 pounds higher than it was 5 years ago. I've struggled with weight my entire adult life and have lost a whole me (in pieces, through sheer willpower and awfullness) and then gained me back. The times when I've successfully lost weight (if keeping it off for a year can be counted as successful), the shift is not so much in what I eat or how I exercise - it's in my psyche. Some mysterious internal thing changes and I no longer want to use starchy food to comfort myself, and no longer stuff myself at every opportunity. When I think about dieting, I don't think about calories or carbs (much). I think about having happy things in my life. I do things that make me happy. I enjoy myself and the weight melts off. For me, weight is a visible indicator of my state of mind.

I've kind of thrown away (for now at least) the endless lists and the continual focus I've kept about what I need to do to accomplish my goals. The house and homestead aren't going to fall apart if I piss around and do fun things for a few months. I've given myself permission to stop trying to accomplish something Every. Single. Waking minute of my life, and enjoy the things in my life that make me happy. It feels good and my body thinks so, too.

A Rafter of Turkeys

2010-09-10T11:13:00.000-04:00

I had to look up the name for a group of turkeys. If it had been a group of crows, I would have known what to call them. A murder! But then, I wouldn't have taken pictures of a group of crows.

They conveniently placed themselves on the far side of some bushes. I stepped outside with the camera to get a closer look and they quickly moved on, melting into the trees on the far side of the road.

Five minutes later it was time to leave for work and I did the normal routine of giving the dogs a treat on the porch, to get them outside. Maggie instantly knew there was somthing interesting nearby, even though the birds had gone. Anything past the yellow flags is outside her fence and she is not happy, but respects that.

Back to School

2010-09-09T11:46:00.000-04:00

Firefighter training started last night. It's a 90-hour class that will be finished before Thanksgiving. If I remember right, from my college days, 90 hours is two college courses-worth that we will finish in 10 weeks - meaning 9 hours a week of classes. Many weeks is two evenings of class. Several Saturdays will disappear this fall for training. Lunchtime errands will disappear to homework. In fact, it's looking like this entire fall will disappear in a blur of fire training.

The class has 32 people, of which 6 are women. The 26 guys look like their average age is about 14. Seriously. The instructor asked how many of us were over 21 and it wasn't many! I'm still looking forward to it.

Gotta go! I have homework to do before tonight's class.

Oh Fig!

2010-09-08T15:30:00.000-04:00

I went out this morning to feed the chickens and noticed this. One of the figs on my tiny fig tree has turned brown-ish! The entire tree is about 1 foot tall. If every single fig ripens, I'll have, oh, maybe 6 figs.

Fake it Till You Make it

2010-09-07T10:30:00.001-04:00

It works! Mostly. I used to be pretty uncomfortable teaching, but would fake being comfortable, calm, in control. Eventually it would happen. You can fake being happy. Smile, laugh. Act happy. You'd be surprised at how often you eventually end up being happy. Sometimes you can fake being a homesteader. Eventually you make it.

But sometimes faking it just doesn't work. Lately I've been going through the motions of some homestead-y stuff. Last week when it was still 1000 degrees outside and a million percent humidity (hottest summer on record in these parts!), I tried to can tomatoes. I started to cook the tomatoes down, but then decided it was too hot and put the whole pot into the fridge. There the pot sat until yesterday when I needed the pot to make the mozzarella cheese I've been thinking about making all summer.

I wanted to try Italian style mozzarella cheese which is much more lengthy and difficult than American style mozzarella cheese (and better tasting). When I finally got around to reading the directions again, I realized that it's a two-day process. Good thing I waited until the last day of a 3-day weekend to read the instructions! So I decided to make American style mozz cheese, but then screwed that up too. I let the temperature get too high, and was lazy about getting the temperature back down before adding citric acid. The milk got really clumpy and stringy before I added the rennet, and the curd never formed where I could get a clean break. I didn't know what I had done wrong, I read and read online but could never quite figure out what I did wrong or if the cheese was rescue-able. I thought I had over-acidified the milk, but the litmus paper said No. Other options are bacteria in the raw milk, or possibly the milk was too hot. Since I didn't know what the problem was, I didn't try to rescue the cheese. Here are the non-curds.

Boy are the chickens happy about that! The cheese non-curd AND the tomato stuff.

I couldn't fake those two things. My mind had to be on the subject at hand. I had to be fully present, and I just ... wasn't.

That's why I did so much of the one task I don't need to be present for. I moved wood into the really nice looking new woodshed! I also did a bit of spinning, which is also tolerant of me being not focused.

The fire department's gotten 3 calls since Friday morning, which is unusual. I missed the Friday morning call because the radio didn't work and my phone ringer was off. (Rats! It was a structure fire we were third on!) I couldn't go on the Saturday night call because I couldn't keep Percy contained - it took him a whole minute to push the shed window open and jump out. So when the radio went off on Monday morning for a structure fire, flames through the roof with our station as primary, I was ready. I threw half-eaten eggs and bacon in the fridge and zoomed to the station. I was pulling on my gear, the door was opening for the first truck to roll out as people ran in - and then it was called in as a controlled burn (flames higher than a roof). The exhale from all 5-6 of us was audible. We hung around for 10-15 minutes to chat and then filtered home, me to some cold breakfast. Oh, the adrenaline!

Metal or Shingle? Shingle or Metal?

2010-09-06T13:30:00.000-04:00

I realized about two months ago that I'll have to have the roof on the house replaced this year instead of next year as I had hoped. (Pretty much right after I spent my entire tax return on a barn/shed for the goats I don't have anymore.) My plan was to have this 50-year-old standing seam metal roof replaced with another standing seam metal roof. Of this I was absolutely certain. It didn't matter that a metal roof costs at least twice as much as a shingle roof, or more. I thought the house deserved a metal roof and I didn't ever want to worry about replacing the roof again as long as I live.

A few people called me an idiot but I ignored them. I can be stubborn that way.

But now I wonder. There's not much in this house that's original or architecturally relevant, why should I be a stickler about the roof? It would be really helpful to not spend so much money on the roof, money I don't have. The cost isn't just for the roof - as with most things on this house, the under part isn't good either, so I'll have to get that done, too.

So, what do you think? Should I stick with my original plan and go with a metal roof, or should I be financially smarter and go with a shingle roof instead? What have I not thought of?

PS. The black truck in the lower left of the picture is full of wood. After I took Percy back, I started moving wood down from the hill into the woodshed. It's going slowly, but you'll have that with only one person doing the work. I just brought down the third truckload of wood, and almost a cord of it is stacked in the shed. I want to have 3 cords of seasoned wood in the shed by the time it gets cold and I won't know how much I've got until I stack it. I suspect I'll have to buy one more cord, but we'll see.

Back to Two

2010-09-05T08:30:00.000-04:00

I just hit send on the email telling the rescue organization that I'll be bringing Percy back. I wasn't looking forward to picking him up yesterday. I think something's changed and I really don't want a third dog any more. I just had to go through the exercise with Bo and Percy before I realized it.

Actually, ever since the goats died, a few things have changed that I didn't really realize. I began to get it when I looked at the prospect of a long weekend alone on the mountain, something that would have thrilled me before. I don't want to be alone. I normally thoroughly enjoy solitude, but now something's different. I'm not entirely sure what's going on, but I don't feel like examining it right now and since I'm the ruler in my world, I say I don't have to.

Firefighter stuff can be as time-consuming as I want it to be. I helped someone move yesterday and that took most of the day, before picking up Percy. Thankfully I'm near the city and there's plenty of stuff going on there. Maybe this feeling of wanting to be around people will go away and maybe it won't. It's fine either way.

Heere's Percy

2010-09-04T20:45:00.000-04:00

Percy is my latest attempt to get a playmate for Maggie. This dog is worse than the last one. In constant motion, destructive, escape artist. Puppy stuff, except he's probably 80 pounds. I've had him for about 3 hours and I'm plotting how soon I can give him back. He's probably trainable - he didn't know his name 3 hours ago and he's got that now. I just don't know if I'm willing to be that person who's life and possessions are turned upside down for some unknown period of time. When firefighter training starts next week, I'll be away from the house at least 2 evenings a week, meaning I won't be able to be home as much as I think this dog needs. Am I talking myself out of this dog? Yes. I'm beginning to think that deep down inside I don't really want a third dog. Definitely not a rescue dog and probably not a puppy.

I'm not on a date tonight with Mr Vermont because we ended up getting together last night. Much better than I expected, one of the best first dates ever, but not likely to turn into anything. I'm OK with that; 90 minutes of driving to see someone is too much for me. It gives me hope that there are people out there who are fun to talk to and spend time with. I'm still seriously thinking of taking a break from internet dating - thinking about how much time spent on this feels like work and not fun and how much of my life is consumed by things I don't enjoy. I really want to think about getting more fun in my life and less work.

September Garden and a Rant

2010-09-03T12:28:00.001-04:00

Next year I'll stake the tomatoes better. They all fell down. Next year I'll keep better track of where I put what, because outside of the cherry tomatoes, I have no idea what's where. The pepper plants on the end are making new blossoms. They haven't made a single pepper all year - maybe now's the time. Only a few of the basil plants flourished. Next year I'll put all the basil together and keep them farther away from the tomato plants, which fell on them.

A few weeks ago I pulled out all the zucchini plants except one, and that one is bravely making more stuff. Maybe I'll get a few more zukes yet!

I'm sitting here in a bad mood. I'm supposed to meet someone from match later this afternoon and I'm NOT looking forward to it. I originally refused to meet with him, making the excuse that he's too far (true - he's an hour and a half away), but really it's because he can't write a coherent sentence, and our phone conversation wasn't good either. But last weekend I changed my mind and decided to give him a chance - why? He's from a wealthy family, and if it clicked, it could be really cool. The problem is - I'm pretty sure it won't click (keep an open mind, keep an open mind, ommm). It's too late to change my mind back - I have to meet him. Then I'm going to have to be explicit and firm if I don't want to see him again and feelings could be hurt. I should have just left it at not meeting him, but I've been doubting some of my decisions, thinking I'm being too hard on folks. Grr.

And then there's the guy I'm supposed to meet tomorrow night. I was really looking forward to meeting him last week. He said he'd call and firm up plans, but he didn't. Then he postponed on the morning of the day we were supposed to meet. We spoke on the phone earlier this week, and again said he'd call during the week to firm up plans - except he hasn't yet. I think I can see the end of this one as well. The only question is whether it will end before we even meet. If he gives me the courtesy of giving me notice when he postpones again (as I expect), I can get the new rescue dog on trial a day early (more later on this). I'll be pretty annoyed if our date day and time passes with no contact from him (which I also halfway expect). Grr.

And then there's the guy I met on Tuesday for lunch. His profile picture was so fuzzy, I had no idea what he looked like. He's several inches shorter than his profile says, shorter than me. I'm not initially attracted to him. But he writes well, he listens well, he makes his own living and we had a good conversation that day. Out of the three current prospects, he's the most likely. I said I'd see him again, but my gut doesn't say, "soon as possible." My gut says, "sometime next week if something better doesn't come along" Grr.

Here's what's frustrating about all this. Labor Day weekend last year, I was talking to someone I met on line and liked that didn't turn out. Here it is a whole year later and I'm in exactly the same place. I'm getting discouraged again and I want to stop this time-consuming crap. But there's a small part inside me that says, "the next guy you contact will be the one," and that keeps me going. Grr. I mean really. Grr. It's cliche the part about "when you stop looking, that's when you stumble upon the one." It didn't happen any of the other times I stopped looking over the last 12 years, I have no reason to expect it would happen this time either if I stopped. I think I have better odds if I keep on looking. The match membership's paid for another 3 months. But really. Grr.

[edit: I re-read what I wrote and the overwhelming thought comes to mind - Life's too short to waste so much time on something I don't enjoy. I believe that worthwhile things are worth working for, but I also believe that something needs to change with me and internet dating, either my attitude, the amount of time I spend on it, or something else I haven't figured out yet. Amen.]

T G I S (Thank Goodness It's September!)

2010-09-02T09:34:00.000-04:00

August was a terrible month. It started fine. I was happy about how the goats were coming along, and had spoken casually to a few folks about getting them a small, paid job. I test-adopted a third dog as a playmate for Maggie.

In mid-August, my neighbor's dog killed both goats and a week later I went to court to ask a judge to make her keep her dogs on her property. A few days later I gave the trial dog back to the rescue agency because it wouldn't leave my cat or my chickens alone, and wouldn't stay confined.

It seemed like the strong winds we had in mid-August had brought a malevolent force to these parts. The neighbor had thrown a bunch of nasty statements my way and I began to wonder if there might have been some truth there. I lost my feeling that my home was a refuge, felt besieged and un-nerved. The moon went full and started to wane, but the silvery light felt evil instead of comforting as it normally feels. Maggie did her normal nighttime barking, but it seemed she was barking against evil things instead of rabbits. The neighbor did target practice, the same as friends had suggested I do - letting people know that there's a gun here now. I stopped sleeping well. Sleep has always been one of my favorite things, so I felt the loss of it keenly. I was glad to see September come.

And yesterday, while I stopped at the mailboxes on the way home, I chatted with the folks who live there. The husband was the fourth person I went to on that awful night in my futile quest to have someone with a gun put my goats out of their misery. Both husband and wife were there yesterday. I learned more things about my neighbor and her history on the street, and with that conversation I came back into the fold in the neighborhood, on this street. It was a gift, that conversation. I slept well last night. Finally.

The sunrise this morning was not stunningly beautiful like some have been. But it was pretty in a way that seems hopeful and nice. It says, "September is here. It's OK."

Death by Powerpoint

2010-09-01T12:01:00.000-04:00

In recent years I've managed to avoid daylong, Powerpointy meetings. My boss thinks that I don't toot my own horn loud enough (um yeah - on purpose), so invited me to the CEO's meeting to present my in-progress projects. Thankfully, I got there a few minutes late and all the seats at the table were taken. Whew. I got to sit in the corner and nobody saw my pained expression when multiple people ignored the agenda and went waay over schedule. That's my boss to the right of the shot with his face in his hands. I'm not the only one who's pained.

It's not all bad. With the Powerpoint agony come tickets to a nice part of the Saratoga Racetrack for the afternoon. Looks like the recession's lightened up a bit in these parts!

I Smell Dead Things

2010-08-31T09:15:00.000-04:00

Normally my three-animal cleanup crew works like a well-oiled machine. Sparky the cat flushes mice and brings them inside either alive or dead. If alive, Maggie kills the mouse. Then Desmond eats it, crunchy bones and all. Desmond's gotten into the habit of making a first-thing-in-the-morning circuit sniffing the floor looking for mousy, crunchy goodness. I've gotten in the habit of not taking a single step unless I can see where I'm putting my foot, so I can make sure not to step on a dead mouse. We go through the drill 2-3 times a week.

Sometimes however, the mouse manages to crawl under something and die on it's own. Nobody figures it out until a few days later when I walk through the kitchen and sniff, "Hm, there's something dead around here." Three-four times this summer, I've nose-found something dead, behind a door, next to the cat litter, under a shelf, halfway under the refrigerator.

This time though, I think it's all the way under the refrigerator. I've checked all the standard dying places and got nothing. I pulled the fridge partway out and it's not enough. I'm going to have to jack that puppy up and give it a good look-see. First, I think I'll check all the other places I can think of - it'd really annoy me if I broke the fridge, and then found a mouse, say, in the back of a cabinet, or some other easy-to-get-to place. I think Maggie the Mouse Killer is slacking on her job!

Apples are Ripe

2010-08-30T10:14:00.000-04:00

The first apples of 2010 are ready. I took a bite of one yesterday and it was perfectly ripe, a little sweet and a little tart.

Here is an apple from each of the two trees near my house. I spent a huge amount of time last year trying to identify what type of apples they are and had found some good web resources (I'll have to locate them again, since apparently I didn't keep the links). The left apple is streaky over a greenish base, and the right apple is a darker, more solid red. I think the right apple is a Macintosh, it's tart like that and cooks really well, but I never pinned down the left one. Cortland maybe. It got mushy and bland when cooked. I've got maybe 2-3 other apple trees that bore fruit this year, the Golden Delicious tree, the grandpa tree made a few apples, and one other tree.

I took a container up to upper blueberry hill to pick what I could pick, but there's nothing left. Blueberry season up and went without me. I made ice cream, sold a few pints through Melanie, and had some friends over for pickin', but that's it. I didn't save any this year.

The guy I was supposed to meet last Thursday postponed until later this week. After that first really good phone call, he hasn't called or emailed. Using the philosophy that if a guy likes you, you'll know; the fact that he hasn't called is a bad sign. I've adjusted my hopes downward. It's disappointing, but it's not productive to dwell. I'm meeting someone else for lunch tomorrow, and someone else for dinner Weds. I had originally refused to meet the Weds person using distance as an excuse, but changed my mind yesterday. Yes, this whole thing is incredibly frustrating and time-consuming, but I believe that anything worthwhile is worth working for, and I'm willing to do the work. Plus, it keeps me moving and not dwelling on might-have-beens with the goats, which is also worthwhile right now.

Some Things DON'T Like it Hot

2010-08-29T15:36:00.000-04:00

My upstate New York yard is feeling the heat. Badly. The browning grass is receding, like gums around raising teeth, to expose rocks and more rocks. First the grass turns brown, then doesn't grow back after mowing, then a rock starts to show. My mountain is a thin skin of green over a core made of rock. Last year was lush and moist and I didn't see all these rocks. It turns cutting the grass into a random pattern of rock-avoidance.

I am a task-oriented person. I learned this when I worked at GEICO. (GEICO is the best place I ever worked. It took a while to get past my dislike of insurance in general, but afterwards, I saw that it's a very well-managed company, and the place where I've gotten my best working experience.)

One of the extensive trainings they give teaches people how to work effectively with other people (good for people like me whose job it is to make change happen). It teaches not the golden rule (treat people the way you want to be treated), but the platinum rule (treat other people the way they want to be treated). First, it teaches you whether you're a person who is motivated by relationships or motivated by tasks, and how to identify which type of person you're working with based on what questions they ask. "Who will I be working with?" is a relationship person. "What will I be doing?" is a task-oriented person. If you want to successfully make change happen, you deal with task-oriented people differently from relationship-oriented people. It's one of the most valuable lessons I've learned. Ever. I'm a task-oriented person.

Normally I relish a weekend alone on the mountain. I get a sense of accomplishment from completing farm-y tasks. But this weekend, my first without the goats (it's actually the second weekend, but I was busy last weekend with social stuff), finds me all, "what now?," and thinking about relationships. The list of tasks that held me to the ground is gone. I made a substitute task this week - can tomatoes, but I find myself with a counter full of tomatoes thinking, "bleh." A real homesteader would do it anyway, because these tomatoes are this winter's food. But I have the luxury of feeling sorry for myself and wimping out. I wandered around the house, picked things up, put them back down and felt at loose ends and lonely.

Then I hit upon the one task that unfailingly makes me feel good - cutting the grass. It's several hours if you include all the preparation. I divided it over two days, added some general neatening up and that's the weekend, gone.

A Day in the City

2010-08-28T10:11:00.000-04:00

In these parts, "the city" means only one thing - Manhattan. New York City. Never mind that there's a small city right here. We call this one, "Albany," and the other one, "the city."

I got up at 4:30 yesterday morning. Fed the dogs once, then again at 5:45 when I left for the train station. Left the still-sleeping chickens enough food to last for 24 hours. Then took the train south along the Hudson River as the sun rose and the moon set.

I met my father and a friend at breakfast, and gave my father a lunch cooler full of hand-picked upstate NY elderberries. We walked along the High Line, a park made on an abandoned elevated train line rescued from demolition. It's so popular that famous architects are building hotels above the park and other cities are trying to duplicate it. I think that white striped building in this picture is a Gehry building, but I'm not positive. I used to really be into that sort of thing.

Then we separated for a few hours while I ran to an appointment. I don't remember these bike lanes being here before. Bike lanes are one of the best parts of Europe that I'm glad to see us adopting.

and we met up at Rockefeller Center, where the uniform of choice was leggings, or "jeggings," jean leggings.

Dad had free tickets to the observation deck at the top of Rockefeller Center. I'd never been there before, and it was very nice. Looking north past Central Park toward home.

Looking south past the Empire State Building. When the twin towers were still standing, they were two extremely tall buildings at the southern tip of the island. They would have stuck up just to the right of the Empire State Building in this picture, but farther down, at the end.

Finally I took the bus back down through Times Square back to Penn Station and home.

I got home at midnight after a long day full of running and touristing. The animals made it through their 18-hour stay without me swimmingly. I used to badly want to live in this city. My mother said once that she envisioned me as the aunt the kids visit in the city. Today was only touristy places though, and more Australian accents than I've ever heard here before, among the babel of languages I always hear here. I'll be back, city, if only to visit!

Retail Therapy

2010-08-26T13:51:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of retail therapy. When I lived in DC and worked in Chevy Chase (for those of you unfamiliar with Chevy Chase, it's a retail hotspot in the DC metro area), it was pretty dangerous. I had to walk through Hechts to get to the Metro stop. Puhleese.

Now I indulge in retail therapy at a safer place, the Salvation Army. I went today at lunch and made a major score. It's an Armani sweater made from superfine alpaca, merino and polyamide (a fiber I'm not familiar with but it sounds chemical engineer-y. Quick research indicates it's probably nylon.). The sweater is super comfortable. It's boyfriend sweater-sized and will go perfectly with jeans.

I got so excited about it, I decided to splurge and pay full price. $3.99

Lets Call it the Kitchen Sink Argument

2010-08-26T09:52:00.005-04:00

It wasn't the normal judge that listened to our arguments, it was a new judge. He listed as the animal control officer read his report. He listened to me tell the story of how I came home to find my goats dying behind the shed. How I yelled at Atticus to get him off Penny and Atticus ran home. How I tried so many people looking for someone to shoot the goats before the sheriff came and we found the goats had finally died by themselves. How I'd been concerned enough about Atticus the week prior to bring one goat inside the house to keep it away from the dog. How my mother is afraid enough of Atticus that she went inside and closed the door every time the dog came over.

Then the judge listened as my neighbor spoke about where she was born and grew up, how many dogs she's rescued, how beautiful Atticus is. How she's an expert on goats because her ex-husband was nicknamed "goat." How a dog belonging to the previous owner of my house killed a cat she was catsitting and the cat was a member of the family because it had slept in the same bed as the owner for 10 years. How it's harsh country up where we live. How everyone on the street has lost at least one animal and that's just part of living where we live. How someone is leaving deer carcasses in the woods. How she can't imagine Atticus hurting anything because she wouldn't keep a dangerous dog. How she thinks that a wild animal killed my goats and Atticus just happened to discover it later. How she has purchased an invisible fence (she showed it to us, still in Petsmart bags) and will install it soon, but her dogs might run through it. How she brings the dogs out to the country to let them run because they don't have running space in the city. How her dog doors let her dogs out, but might let wild animals in. How she worries that if another wild animal kills another of my animals, I might blame her again. How she installed fence for her birds and she knows how hard it is on our rocky land. I wouldn't have been surprised if she brought the kitchen sink into her argument. It had everything but.

She told all of this about 5 times, in one big, long rush, barely pausing for air. The judge listened to it all and the rest of us listened with him.

Then he ordered her to keep her dogs on her property and me to keep my dogs on my property. There's one difference. I got a piece of paper with the judge's signature on it and the words "confine and keep on her property," referring to the neighbor and her dogs. The neighbor got the certainty that if her dog comes to my place again, I can shoot it.

It's probably best that I'm not considering getting goats again until next year. It looks like this thing has a little more playing out to do. I fully expect to see the dog again. I fully expect to call the animal control officer, to come get the dog, and then who knows what will happen. The piece of paper says the dog can be destroyed if not kept under control, but let's see it play out.

No, I'm not happy. I don't see any winners here. I'm sad the neighbor has pushed it to this, but now she knows I will do whatever I have to do to keep my charges safe. This little saga has bumped forward a little bit. And now it's time to lay more track.

Wednesday Wanderings

2010-08-25T14:10:00.000-04:00

The lockers at the firehouse with our pants lined up on our boots, ready to be quickly put on. Official firefighter training starts in two weeks!

My stomach is tied up in knots about the court hearing tonight. Mostly because of not knowing what to expect. That's the same reason it also gets all twisty every time I drive up the hill to the house. I almost had a coronary the other day when Desmond wasn't in his normal place in the front yard when I drove up. The air went out of my stomach in a big whoosh when I saw him slowly trotting around the corner of the house. That's as fast as he goes, slow. But it was good enough for me; happy to see everyone alive and safe.

I met another potential Mr on Monday and will meet another one tomorrow. It seems to come in waves. I have no interest in seeing Monday's man again (didn't really want to meet him in the first place), but am looking forward to meeting Mr Tomorrow, we had a nice phone conversation the other day. I drove by a Home Depot yesterday and felt almost a sense of revulsion - home construction projects are just not something I want to think about right now. I think it's OK to think about other stuff: fighting fires, finding a date, and canning tomatoes. The house and farm structures will have to wait until I can stomach it. Need to lay more track first.