I am So Happy Suzanne McMinn Can't Keep Her Stove Lit Either

Here's the link to her blog where you can read about her fire issues:
http://suzannemcminn.com/blog/2009/12/02/practicing/

I mean this in the most constructive of ways!  I felt like an idiot last year when I struggled to keep the stove lit.  Remember that I was trying to housetrain Maggie too, so had her attached to me on a 6 foot leash ALL the time I was home, even sleeping.  I would come home from work, take the dogs out, light the fire, then start thinking about dinner.  But think about dinner is all I could do.  Because if I stepped away from the stove for even 5 minutes, the fire would go out.  Then I'd scream, cry or both and re-light the fire.  I had to re-light the fire a lot, because the dogs and I didn't have a schedule yet (I got them at the beginning of November last year).  And because Maggie wasn't housetrained - if she even looked a little funny, it was outside for all of us, like 10 times an evening.  I was attached to the stove (and Maggie) for hours, until the fire got warm enough to self-sustain.  Usually, that was around bed time.  And then the fire would go out overnight.

I never had the energy or time to go through that routine in the mornings, so mornings were just cold.  (Actually mornings weren't all that cold.  I kept the thermostat at 60 degrees, but still went through an entire tank of oil a month for three months.  Expensive! Then I lowered it to 50 degrees.)  I'd come home from work every evening, prepared to do battle with the stove and the dogs thinking, "it can't be this hard! This isn't the way normal people do it!"  But I didn't know how normal people DID do it, so I continued to struggle.

FINALLY, at the end of January a friend came over and showed me how to use all the levers on the woodstove, and helped me hang contractors plastic to close off 2/3 of the house.  It was like day vs night!  It got a little warmer inside (I could never get it warmer than 58), but I stopped using oil like it was rushing out the bottom of the tank.  From February through October, I only used 1/4 tank of oil, because now I could keep the fire lit 24 x 7, and I was only trying to heat part of the house.

Anyway - that's all a distant memory now.  I read Suzanne McMinn's blog about her struggles keeping the fire lit and constant re-lighting of her fire, and I can smile now.  I'm only a year ahead of her on that, but she does so many things well that I can't help but realize - what I was going through was exactly what normal people do!

Here's a shot I took last year shortly after I got the dogs, of them playing under trees that aren't there anymore.  With the exception of the apple tree at the far left, all those tall trees are gone now (meaning the winter sun can actually warm the house).  I started a fire on Thursday that's still going strong.  Cindy put it well in a comment this morning - I'm not playing defense any more!

This Winter It's Warmer

On the far left of the mantel, you can see that I've put my indoor thermometer to check how warm it's been getting above the stove.  What I'm getting is 75 degrees there, and 65 degrees across the room at the sofa.  This is a psychologically important 7 degrees warmer than it got at all last winter.  (Last winter, the warmest I EVER got the inside of this room was 58 degrees!)  Outside temperature this morning was 17 degrees and the inside temps are maintaining at 65-ish at the sofa.  So all  the work I did to tighten the house worked!  Woo hoo!  Thanks to everyone for the suggestions!

If I put this temperature gage on the floor, it'd be colder of course, because heat rises.  The Lehman's holiday catalog (thanks Chicken Mama for the suggestion!) has some heat-powered fans that sit on the stove and will move the hot air from above the woodstove, but they're spendy (to use a west coast term).  I think I'll research options for evening out the heat across the room.  I'm so thrilled that there's heat to even out!!

On the left side of this picture, you can see the single most useful thing I've bought in the last year, the hand truck.  I went through most of last winter carrying wood in by armloads.  Us woodstove people know that an armload of wood will get you a few hours at most, so it was a pain.  I bought the hand truck in February and it holds several days worth of wood.  It takes two hand truck-loads to fill the round thing near the wall.  With that full, and a full hand truck here, I can get through an entire week without carrying wood.  What a difference that made!

The Winter Configuration

Over the weekend I moved the vehicles to the winter configuration I'm going to try this year.  The car in front of the outside woodpile, the truck in the driveway and the log skidder ...  huh ... log skidder?  Oh yes, the log skidder isn't mine.  But it's broken (first the battery, now they're cannibalizing it for the other log skidder up on the hill) so if it moves, it will have to be dragged by the other skidder.

Last year was totally different.  Where the car is now was a lake that eventually froze.  I had the truck parked there, a little farther back, and had to walk through water to retrieve it after a rainstorm dumped the water in that low spot that stayed from December until about April. 

I parked the car in between those two lilac bushes, facing out (dumb, dumb, dumb).  The mountain of snow from plowing blocked it in, and then after I decided to back it out through the yard in February, I realized it was truly stuck.  It stayed stuck for 6 more weeks after that with me making pathetic attempts to get it out every week or so, like trying to pull it with the truck, push it with the ATV, pouring sand around the wheels or salt, or hot water.  Eventually the Ace hardware man gave me the suggestion that made the difference.  Bathroom rugs under the motive tires (front, in this case).  I'll never drive anywhere without my trusty bathroom rugs in the car again.  Funny, yes!  But they really worked!

The loggers have got to move the skidder back up the hill.  I don't care if they have to pull it.  The town plows a nice big turnaround here which cleans out about half of my driveway.  Loving it!  The skidder definitely puts a cramp in that plan, and we can't have that!

Caught up on Wall Street Journals

Finally caught up!  Except they keep coming, one every day.


This picture shows an article from Thursday's edition, about the trend of families and singles moving back to the country.

Here's a link to the article (may require a subscription): Wall Street Journal - Green Acres

Stop Trying to Figure it Out and Just Enjoy It

This is turning into a bit of a mystery and it's a little frustrating (in a nice way).  This isn't something I can figure out with my engineering ways, and I'm not getting to the right place looking it up in Peterson and online.

I'll go through my logic and let's see where it goes.  First, these are alternate, simple leaves.  The leaves are finely serrated, shiny on the top and bottom.  Yesterday I said it was evergreen, but when I went outside today to steal this branch, it was looking decidedly less healthy than yesterday.  Since November was so warm, it may just have not lost it's leaves yet.  I took some pictures a few weeks ago of other plants in my yard that got confused about winter vs. spring.  It's got one bundle scar, I think.  (It was impossible to see this with my naked eyes, and I've got 20/20 vision!)

The entire thing is about 4 feet tall.  And the bark looks like this, flaky:

As far as I can tell, this is a Mountain Fetterbush (Pieris Floribunda) (or maybe it's: Eubotrys recurva.  Good grief, the internet with all it's errors, is confusing today!) that got confused about when spring is and started to blossom.  The blossoms on the Fetterbush are white, but these may be white when they open.  The only problem?  NY is not in the range of this plant, which should be found, say in the Appalachians, in the south-er east of where I am.

Another possibility is swamp doghobble (Eubotrys racemosa), but these flowers are terminal and the doghobble aren't.

I'm stuck.  Linda? 

Edit, 10 minutes later:  I think I've got it!  Now I think it's a Lily-Of-the-Valley Shrub, Pieris Japonica.  Here's a picture from M.S. Growers.com.  Peterson's was no help at all since this is a shrub that most purchase at nurseries.  Time to get back to my regularly scheduled day!

December Walk Around the Yard

It's been snowing since about noon and so far, I've got about 3 inches on the ground.  It's the first real snowfall of the season and it looks beayootiful!  Before it started snowing, I went out to collect tinderwood and took a walk around the yard to see what's interesting in the beginning of December.

What's interesting today?  A lot!  One short walk around the yard in early December yields some questions and some discoveries.

Rose Hips.  I read that they're best harvested after the first frost, but then I forgot about them.  What does one do with these things?  Tea, I've heard, but what else?

Here's a bush I never really noticed until today, despite walking by it a hundred times (that's an exaggeration - I haven't had time to walk around here a hundred times yet).  It's evergreen as you can see, but what is it?  The bush is maybe 4 feet tall.  Is it blossoming, just now?  I never noticed any flowers on it before.

Maggie, harvesting cherries.  I had put that bench up on end so anyone grading the area would know not to touch that tree.  It worked, but now the picture is obscured a bit.

And finally, the big discovery...
Part of being scared of this place means I haven't explored the whole lot yet.  Today I explored an area I've been only a few times, when things were green.  What I didn't notice then, but discovered today is that every single one of the bushes you see in this picture is a blueberry bush.  I counted 20 of them.  That's THREE major areas of blueberry bushes instead of the two I thought I had.  It's hard to estimate, but I guess the areas add up to about an acre of blueberries, 60+ bushes.  Wow.  That's a little overwhelming.

I have absolutely no plans until tomorrow evening's choir rehearsal, and that's perfect for me right now.  I need to figure out how to balance social time and solitary time.  These days it's too much of one making me crave the other. And so much freakin' driving!

The Fruit Advisor and My Nasty Apples

I'm not sure how I ended up here yesterday, but the University of Massachusetts Amherst has some wonderful information on fruit trees.  I started by going through the PDF on Fruit Tree Management for the Home which covers apples, pears and peaches, plums and cherries (all trees that I want to plant next spring in my new orchard that I'll be making next spring, but maybe apricots instead of plums). 

http://www.umass.edu/fruitadvisor/ctc/index.html


The discussion is so clear and the pictures are so good that now I have the answer to a question I asked earlier in the season.  "What is wrong with my apples?"


The answer, according to this information is the following:
- plum curculio
- apple scab

Gotta go - I have some researchin' to do!

First it Gets Darker and Then it Gets Lighter

Here's a picture of the front porch doorway, taken on October 29th, 2008, over a year ago, when the leaves were still on the big maple tree.  The storm that left six inches at my place didn't even touch the Hudson River.  I'd been in this house for exactly a week and didn't have snow boots or an ice scraper when they started to forecast a storm.  That's the beginning of the tough surprise that was last winter.  By the first week of December, it had been cold and nasty for about a month.  This year - - not so much.  It's been wonderful so far, and warm, warm, warm.

One of the things that carried me through (although I couldn't say that anything "carried" me.  Mostly I fell metaphorically, over and over.) was thinking about the sun.  For example - today is December 4th which means that the solstice is in 2-1/2 weeks.  That's the shortest, darkest day of the year, and after that it starts getting lighter every day.  So, 2-1/2 weeks after that, there will be as much light as there is today.  Every morning I'd look up how many extra minutes of light there was, and think, "In a week, there will be 25 minutes more light."  It's not much, but it worked for me.

This door stopped closing when it got cold and there was a constant 6-inch opening.  It looks OK in the picture, but the bottom part was pretty mangled from multiple repairs.  I got a new (salvage) door put in this past March which was wonderful.  On top of the outside door being open - the inside door had a french doorknob (you know, the one with the handle instead of the knob).  It didn't take my younger dog, Maggie, long to figure out how to open that door by pushing the handle down to let herself out.  Of course she didn't shut the door behind herself!  Another source of cold, the outside just coming right in and making itself at home.  I replaced the doorknob, but couldn't get it to seat properly.  It's comical now, remembering how I struggled to get the inside door to stay closed when the outside door was wide open.  And it's zero degrees outside.  That's all better now!  Whew!  I think I'm writing all this stuff about last winter not to complain about how bad it was then, but to appreciate how good it is now.  Even in the depths of that miserable time, I did remember that I'm better off than most.  I'm lucky to have a job, good friends and overall, a great life.

This winter, when it comes, is sure to hand me a new set of surprise obstacles.  I have no idea what they are, but I'm standing loose on my feet, ready to bob and weave!

Last Year I Was Afraid of Everything

Everything seemed so wild and untamed and ... scary.  I moved into this house in the woods all alone and the silence and the darkness terrified me.  I thought axe murderers were crawling up the hill, (wo)man-eating coyotes were lurking just past every tree.  It didn't help that the coyotes frequently and loudly made their presence known.  For the first month or so, I kept the front porch lights on all the time because, well, I don't know why. I was afraid.  Then I got the dogs and I couldn't avoid the outside at night or in the morning because I had to walk them (pre-invisible fence).  Here I am, right at an edge of my property looking uphill on a foggy morning.  The lights from my house are at the very faaar right of the shot. 

It was terrifying to drive home at night in the dark and see nothing but trees.  I felt like I had to keep eagle eyes open for deer running into the roadway.  Things seemed so 'Blair Witch Project' scary all the time.  There were a lot of trees and wildness very close to the house.  Here's a picture of the area that was graded a few weeks ago, my future orchard.  Now it's clear and smooth and open, but this time last year it looked like this. Total, over-my-head wildness.

When I got the dogs, Maggie was NOT housetrained yet, so I was learning how to make a fire in the woodstove and keep it going at the same time I was keeping a puppy on a six-foot leash and trying to watch her all the time.  She was crated when I wasn't home, so I rushed home after work to let her out.  Desmond went on jaunts for hours and I got many phone calls from people miles away telling me they had my dog.  I was cold all the time. Everything was out of control and terrible and scary.

What made me think of the contrast between last year and this year is this.  I'm not scared and super-alert driving home through the woods in the dark any more.  I'm getting a sense of how to keep an eye open for motion and be ready to slow down quickly.  But I'm relaxed about it.  Desmond and Maggie stay in their electric fence while I'm gone and I can stay out late if I want now because I know they're OK (hungry maybe, but OK).  I can start a fire on one try and keep it going for days.  It's still wild around here and scary to newbies, but I'm feeling more at home, which is a pretty nice feeling compared to last year.

Salvation Army Score!

 
Ten bucks for the chair!  I love this store!  The fabric and color match exactly a chair I got for free about 5 years ago.  Plus, this one is really sturdy and comfortable.  Just the other day I was wishing for a recliner that is on the small side, and now here it is!  I'm so lucky.

It looks like I need to load up on wood.

The Moon, the Snow and the Road

How many of you know that the moon was full last night?  That's one of the advantages to living in a house where the outside creeps in any way it can.  I slept lightly, wandering in and out of sleep last night because the moon was so bright, first shining in the east windows as it rose higher and then shining in the west windows as it set.  I don't have any curtains to keep the outside out.  There's no need for curtains when the only soul looking in is a rabbit, or maybe a deer.  I can't get away from the night light and I don't want to.  For me, that's all a part of being connected to nature. I had a fire in the woodstove and it was almost too warm inside.  To be fair, it wasn't that cold, only about 25 and it wasn't windy.  Inside, 70.

The moon was so bright it made sharp shadows against the snow.  It reminded me of those cheap western movies where they film night shots in daytime and put a blue filter up, making it all look like night.  Not realistically night, but enough to get their point across.  I tried to take a picture of the huge moon against the snow at night, but it was too much for the camera to take in.  You'll have to settle instead for a morning picture of the moon setting right before sunrise.

It snowed yesterday but didn't stick most places. My house is at 1800 feet altitude, the snow looks like this now and the road is a bit icy. The mailbox, 3/4 mile away is 300 feet lower and there is no snow there. Downtown bustling metropolis, my small town is 7 miles away, 800 feet lower than the house and it looks like it never snowed at all.

Twenty-four and a half miles of my 25-mile commute takes place on dry roads.  It's the last 1/2 mile that always seems to cause the trouble.  Last night on the way home, my car slipped a little bit in that half mile, making me think that I should drive the truck today. 

But I'm going to drive the car today.  The weather man says it's going to get quite a bit warmer today, and besides, I have an errand to run at lunchtime - it's Salvation Army day. (80% of the store is 50% off on Wednesdays and I have a new sewing project to buy materials for.)  The parking lot at the Salvation Army is small and yukky - I would regret taking the truck there.  Today shopping won out over the last 1/2 mile when I made the decision about what to drive.  In a month, I'll likely make a different decision.

Stories in the Stars

Before I forget:
The next meteor shower will be the Geminids, which will be overnight, December 13-14th. (quoting the Amateur Astronomical Society of Rhode Island) "The most reliable meteor shower of the year, the Geminids are characterized by their multi-colored display--65% being white, 26% yellow, and the remaining 9% blue, red and green."  This shower is from an asteroid instead of a comet as most are.

I've been interested in the stars ever since I was a child.  In high school, I wanted to be an astronomer until I took my first astronomy class and was thwarted by a terrible teacher.  It didn't turn out badly - after all, engineering pays better than astronomy.

I lost track of my love for the stars for many years.  Decades, really.  In downtown Cleveland, downtown Washington, DC, and downtown any other city I've lived in, the sky never gets darker than purple and one can see maybe 5 stars in the night sky.  In South Carolina I had a hammock in my yard and frequently spent the night outside (in the summer anyway).

It wasn't until November, 2007 when I was laying under some stunning stars in a bedouin camp in the Jordan desert that I made a promise to myself to re-connect with that childhood love of the stars. And here I am two years later with my homestead in the hills.  I can see the Milky Way on clear nights, and sometimes it's hard to make out constellations, there are so many more stars making it difficult to make out their shapes.

On Saturday, the planetarium lady told the story of Cassiopieia and her husband Cepheus, her daughter Andromeda, the sea monster Cetus, and rescuer Perseus.  All are constellations in the fall/winter sky.  I already knew a few of those constellations and had read the story, but somehow hearing it again finally made the whole thing stick together for me.  When the the planetarium lady tells the story about the late winter constellations, Orion and Taurus, I will go back to hear it.

PS - I did send Jenna an email yesterday offering to take her animals if she needed it, but she didn't respond. She's about 40 miles from me.  From reading the comments on her blog it looks like she's found homes for them.  It doesn't bother me - I'm not ready for goats just yet.  Soon...soon.

Mud Puddles and Trenches

My driveway looks like this these days, higher than the yard on both sides, and mostly mud puddle.  Last year, I had moved in for a whole week before it started snowing and the puddles froze.  To avoid the ice, I parked on the far side of the driveway on the yard (thanks to my time in SC I know that's OK).  What happened is that I killed all the grass over there with dripping salty water.  It's just now mostly grown back.  Some people advised me to fill in the holes (ie, raise the driveway more), but it seems to me that's just going to make the problem worse in the long run.

When the ground thawed in the spring I took a shovel out and dug a trench on both sides of the driveway so water could drain  into the yard.  (The lower right corner of this picture shows one of the trenches.)  The trenches worked great, so I tried to "make it better" by filling the trenches with sand.  It should work!  Wastewater treatment plants use sand to filter water.  But in this case, the sand completely stopped the water and I ended up digging the sand back out.

What's happening now is that trucks (logging, garbage, etc) and my car ride over the trenches and I need to re-dig the trenches after every rain to empty the puddles.  I desperately want to make sure there's no ice in here over the winter.  I think I need to bury pipes in those trenches to keep them open, but I have no idea what to buy.  Just a standard PVC schedule 40 pipe?  Something special? It's OK if I don't immediately find out the exact right thing to do.  I've got a shovel and two good hands.

Western Massachusetts Wind

I took a trip into western Massachusetts yesterday to finish shopping for Christmas.  I've only been there a few times and took a new route.  Here's what I saw on the western edge of the Berkshire mountains, just into Massachusetts.  Wind turbines.  This is less than 10 miles east of my house as the crow flies (quite a few more driving miles though).  Google maps terrain view indicates that the higher turbine is at about 2400 feet.  Hmm.

Cheeseburger Conversions

Yesterday was a trip to the planetarium in Schenectady and a visit to the attached museum.  The planetarium show was very nice and the museum was surprisingly interesting.  Here's what I learned at the museum - a gallon of gas contains roughly 30,000 kilocalories of energy.  This is the same kcal that we eat 500 of when we eat a big mac.  So it's pretty easy to calculate how many big macs would equal the equivalent of a gallon of gas (about 60 in this calculation).  Interestingly, the museum got it wrong in their exhibit - obviously not made by anyone with a mathematical bent!



Further, if we use about 100 kcalories by walking a mile, it would take us walking 300 miles to work off the amount of kcals in that 60 big macs or 1 gallon of gas.  So ... we humans have an mpg of 300.

The other thing I learned, but not at the museum, is that google does calculations now.  If you type in "500 x 60" in the google place, the answer comes up as your first search result.

Why I Don't Have Mice Anymore

These murderous beasts have systematically slayed every single rodent in the house, and many outside, too. And I've only had them since the beginning of August!  I meant to call them Pancho and Lefty (anyone know the reference?), but since I got them in response to the mouse problems I had with the truck, resulting in the truck starting itself in the middle of the night prior to spending 2 months at the repair shop - I'm calling the left cat Sparky.  Pancho on the right and Sparky on the left.

I've been being a hermit here at the homestead since Wednesday, and these days at home have been a godsend.  Last week I wrote that I was going to relax, but anyone that knows me knows I am constitutionally incapable of relaxing (oh how I wish that were different!).  Instead, I got many things done that were lower on the list.  I set up a wireless network in the house, sortof.  All the computers can print wirelessly to the printer, but the computers can't see each other.  I'd like for them to see each other so that I can move pictures all to one central location.  Maybe I'll get to that this weekend, or maybe it will happen next time I "relax."  I put a few hooks in the basement so I can hang clothes coming out of the dryer.  I finished constructing the raised beds.  I cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner.  I washed many loads of laundry. I took a savage axe to all the stacks of disorganized paper, shredded a years worth of things, and filed the things I want to keep a while longer. Yay for finally being better organized, paper-wise!  My house was built before closets were desirable, I guess, and there aren't any closets on the first floor, except a broom closet in the bathroom.  It's taken me a long time to make places for everything with shelves and boxes, so that it looks relatively OK and everything has a place.  (Of course, different people have different definitions of OK....)

And ... I mostly finished the neckwarmer!  All that's left is to put the buttons on, and I went to my button stash to find some good candidates.  I can't believe I successfully made buttonholes!  This knitting thing is pretty neat.  I may be hooked.

 

Today's plan is either a guest here at the homestead, or a visit to the planetarium in Schenectady, depending on the weather.  The precipitation has stopped, but I have about 3 inches of wet snow on the ground, slowly slumping into mush.  I'm leaning towards going to the planetarium, and my companion would probably prefer that, too.  He's not a fan of the rustic nature of the homestead, and besides, the road isn't plowed.

Here's the Spread

Right after I took this picture, I remembered the mashed potatoes, still on the stove.  So, add those to the spread.  Everything, including the cranberry sauce, was home-made (except the pie crust).  I made the cranberry sauce and dried the stuffing bread earlier this week.  The blueberries in the pie are from my bushes, but the green beans, turkey and bread were store-bought.  In future years, I'll move further towards using food from the homestead. Small steps!

The tablecloth is the only link to those past years when I used to cook a huge Thanksgiving spread for my husband, his brothers+ girlfriends and various friends and family.  My husband's family is russian orthodox, (they celebrate Christmas and New Years eve on different dates than we do), and Thanksgiving was the beginning of a season full of feasts (two christmases, two new years' eves, one birthday), fueled by alcohol and family stressors.  Over the years I grew to dread this season.  I didn't help myself by planning elaborate, showy menus that required a huge amount of preparation and ingredients.  Last night I looked at this tablecloth and appreciated even more this simple meal that took only a few hours to prepare. I was also thankful for the absence of alcohol-fueled crying, fighting, making up and other dramatic things that happened so often between the brothers during the holidays.

Kate asked about cooking in the toaster oven.  I'll start off by saying that this house came full of appliances (a selling point!) that were all about 30 years old (not a selling point!).  The tiny refrigerator smelled and leaked.  There was a rolling dishwasher and ancient microwave that I made the seller throw away.  The only appliance that's still here is the propane stove, and looking into the oven is a scary event!  I think mice lived there.  So I bought a toaster oven big enough to work for most things except bread, cookies and ... meat.  Since Thanksgiving just isn't Thanksgiving without turkey I bought the smallest turkey breast the store sells, six pounds worth.  It had bones and structure so that stuffing could fit in there, and altogether it fit into the toaster oven - barely.  I had to tilt it on its side to make it shorter, and since the toaster oven only goes to 50 minutes, I had to restart it three times in the two hours of cooking.  Thank goodness for oven bags and my meat thermometer!  The turkey and stuffing were MOIST, and cooked just right!  Yum.

So, why did I replace the refrigerator but not the stove?  Last year I was thinking that I'd eventually get a wind turbine and convert the entire house to electric.  Now I realize that even if I were to get a wind turbine (solar electric is more likely than wind at this point - fewer moving parts), it would still be smart to keep using the propane tank.  So yesterday evening I shopped for a new gas stove on Sears.com.  I picked the new guy out and may buy him in a few months.  A new stove is about the same price as my drum carder was, which is interesting.  For the money, I would have used the oven more than I've used the drum carder so far.

Here's the blueberry pie.  It's a variant on Mama Pea's recipe, except the bottom layer is a cream cheese mixture with sugar, milk, vanilla and crushed pineapple. I'm obviously a whipped cream newbie - I whipped this either too much or too little.  It still tasted good, but no peaks for me!  (Yes, I did read the newspaper at dinner.  I'm almost caught up on Wall Street Journals!  Unfortunately, they keep sending more, so I have this backlog of four that I can't get rid of....)

Happy Thanksgiving to All

Here's one of the advantages of living alone, and hermit-ing over the holiday.  Today is going to be the last nice day in a while, so I decided to postpone Thanksgiving cooking until the raised beds were finished.  (I can cook tomorrow if I have to, but I will not want to finish raised beds in the rain!)  Now the bed construction is complete, the turkey breast and stuffing are in the toaster oven (boy I hope THAT goes OK), and I am making blueberry pie with blueberries from MY bushes, taking a break while the base pie layer cools in the fridge.

I am thankful for so much.  When I moved here last fall, I had this vision that I would have a goat business going now.  I had an expensive horseshoe-shaped road built for loading and unloading goats that I am still paying off.  After I realized that this business would start much slower than I had planned, I worried that I had made an expensive mistake, that maybe I should have used that money for other things instead.

But now it's beginning to look like having the road built wasn't such a bad idea after all.  The loggers are using the road for staging their(my) wood, and for loading wood onto trucks, and having the loggers around is affecting many other things.  This picture has the fingerprints of the loggers all over it, starting with one of their log skidders at the end of my driveway.  (If you click on the picture, it should get bigger.) There's a pile of 2x4s to the right of the building that will be used to rebuild the woodshed, which is the middle "structure" with the rusty, uneven roof.  There's a pile of dirt just past the far corner of the right-most raised bed that they dropped off yesterday.  That dirt (plus gravel they'll bring later) will be used to fill in the depression from the old swimming pool.  They'll be bringing over some topsoil and manure to fill the raised beds.  And, last but not least - I'm standing where the 10 stumps used to be, recently graded, grading paid for by the logger.  I have no illusion that this work is free.  I'm paying for it.  But I can say for definite sure that each one of those things would have involved MUCH more effort and time if I had to do them myself, or learn how to get them done.  So I'm thankful for the loggers - and that it was these loggers that posted the craiglist ad I responded to.  (And no Chicken Mama, they're not single.)

The black lump to the left of the dirt?  That's Maggie, rolling in the grass.

So mom - you can start planning what to put in the raised beds!  There are three of them, at 4ft x 12ft each.

There's more that I'm thankful for, but this post is long enough already.  I'll post about the rest later. Now, off to finish the blueberry pie and start the potatoes and beans - there'll be a Thanksgiving feast today after all!

Christoph Niemann

Find more of them here: http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/bio-diversity/?hp

The West Side Market

One of my Facebook friends from Cleveland mentioned shopping at the West Side Market and it brought back some fond memories of this Cleveland institution.  It's been a farmer's market on the west side of Cleveland since 1840 and for the last 100 years has been a huge brick landmark near the Cuyahoga River.  Every year around election time politicians come to the market to shake hands.  Visit the hoi polloi.  It's that entrenched.

Here's the website for the market: http://www.westsidemarket.org/about.html

I lived in the same neighborhood as the West Side Market for the last 10 years that I lived in Cleveland.  Most Saturday mornings involved buying far too much food there, and then buying an apple fritter and a diet coke.  There is a semi-secret observation deck on the second floor where I would sit and watch people milling about and eat the fritter and drink the diet coke.

I don't visit Cleveland much any more, but every time I visit, I make a point of stopping at the West Side Market, usually early in the morning before the crowds arrive.  I buy an apple fritter and sit in the secret observation area and think a bit about the trajectory of my life and give thanks for how good it's been, so far.

Today, the day before Thanksgiving, and all this week, this place would be jam-packed with shoppers.  Here are some pictures I took in April, 2008, the last time I was in Cleveland.  I got there shortly after it opened and before most of the shoppers arrived. 

This outside area goes around two sides of the building and is where you buy fruits and vegetables.

Inside are the meat and cheese vendors.

Almost makes me want to go on a roadtrip to Cleveland!