Our back yard, showing off a bit

Down in the lower right you can see the 5-foot fence and the extension ladder for scale. Click for the bigger version if you've got the bandwidth and the screen size.

One of my favorite things about moving here has been the fall. It starts a little later than I'm used to. It's quite a bit warmer than I expected. (I haven't really been wearing a jacket regularly - we're still breaking 70 during the day.)

It also lasts A LOT longer. In Ohio, it seemed that the trees would change color one day and then be bare the next. Here, it seems like the trees change one by one, with each type getting the spotlight for days at a time. Maybe it was just that there are a lot more trees here than there were back in Pickaway County. I don't know. But whatever it is, I like it.

And the best part? No long, grueling winter at the end of it. A couple months of chill, an occasional dusting of snow to make it pretty, a few ice storms, and we're done. At least that's what I'm told.

In other news, we may have chickens by the weekend after Thanksgiving. More to come on that one...

Drinkin' expired Nyquil and bitchin' about the weather

Ok, It's 3am and I feel like holy hell. Painful deep chest cough, muscle aches, pounding headache, and I can't breathe. I just took some Nyquil that expired in March of '07. Ahh, that was a good year.

It's been that kind of day. That kind of week.

First, my partner in crime at work was out of town, which is always a signal for all hell to break loose. I don't know if it's because he's doing all this stuff behind the scenes to keep things running, and when he steps out it all comes crashing down, or if it's just bad luck. But I had a whole series of WTF? problems. One was coming and going so fast I couldn't get a good look at it. The database would go nuts and I'd start trying to track it down and then everything would be fine. Then 10 minutes later it would happen again. Just about the time I'd start to see some potential explanation, it'd be gone. It was like playing Whack-A-Mole. I was on a conference call for 4 1/2 hours Tuesday with all of us scratching our heads.

All this in the middle of a snow-ice-snow storm that's been causing havoc all over, with stir crazy kids who haven't had school for days and who are very hard to keep entertained.

Then this afternoon, the power goes out. After about 30 minutes, we start thinking about contingency plans. For us, no electricity means, among other things, a) no heat, and b) no water. Theoretically, I have a solar charged deep-cycle battery that will run our heat stove for about 2 hours, but we just used it not that long ago (during the last outage), and there has been little sun and plenty of snow cover. It had no juice left.

We've had outages before, but never under these circumstances. And given these particular circumstances, it was likely to last for a while. So we decided to try to track down a generator. Of course, we're not the only ones with this thought. The proper time to buy a generator is not during a power outage.

After a few phone calls, I find a place 20 miles south of us with a few left. And I know there are several other stores in that same area that might have them too, just in case.

Only, our vehicles are encased in 1/4 inch of ice. I can't even open the door to start the engine or get the scraper out.

After much pounding and pulling, I was finally able to get the passenger door open. I started the engine and got to work on scraping. Then I realized it was a pretty futile task.

So I left the motor running and walked over to a neighbor's house to see what kind of generator he had. A good 20 minutes later, and the minivan is still nowhere near drivable. More scraping, more whacking. More scraping, more whacking. More advice from my 5-year-old son.

Eventually I cleared enough that I could feel sort of safe driving 20 miles on awful roads. And when I got to the aforementioned store, the only thing they had left was a $3000 diesel generator. Diesel - that stuff that prefers to congeal in really cold weather. 3 grand. That was just not going to happen.

We tried another store. Sold out. The next two weren't even open. And the big shiny new home improvement store doesn't open it's doors until next week.

More phone calls. 20 miles in the other direction from our house (so 40 miles from our present location) is a store that has a few left. Not a ton of options available. So my son and I set out on the next leg of our quest. The roads are, if anything, worse than before. I'm not sure how, since it hadn't rained or snowed or anything in the meantime, but we weren't making very good time.

We finally walk into the store that had, and hour ago, "a few" generators left. Fingers crossed....

One generator. The last one. I stood by it, waiting for an employee to come into view. I wasn't leaving the side of that box for any reason. I asked if there were any other options. I asked him to get me a flatbed cart. We grabbed several other supplies. We made the purchase.

Now it was time to load the beast into the back of the minivan. Only the back of the minivan was still encased in ice. The window was clear, but there was still 1/4 inch of ice aorund the outside, not to mention a good inch of ice on top, where it's hinged.

So me and a couple of store employees start banging and scraping and prying and pulling. It probably took another 15 minutes to get the door to open. We get it loaded in and the guy asks for my receipt so he can mark it as loaded or whatever.

Only there's no generator on my receipt. I was -> <- this close to getting a $700 generator for $80. I never even noticed the total. So now I have to go back in and get this thing paid for. Thank goodness we're getting a tax refund soon.

So on the way home, we get stuck behind a car stuck in the snow, miss 2 traffic light cycles trying to get him out so the rest of us can go. Then we get behind some slow moving trucks, which can't be passed because there's only one lane cleared on the highway. When we start getting close to home, everything grinds to a halt because of an accident. I take a "shortcut" through town, which I'm pretty sure took longer.

I get home and the house has a definite chill. The candles are getting low. I've been gone a good 4 hours or more by now. The remaining 2 kids missed me and want my attention. But we've still got to unload and set up the generator, so I head out back outside to get the power cord and stuff...

And as I'm walking up to the front door, all the lights come on.

On that note, I shall now attempt once more to sleep, without actually being able to breathe. Wish me luck.

--

Fun with a rainbow

Looky! A rainbow!

A rainbow and lightning

You'll never get me pot o' gold!

--

Catching up, plus some gratuitous baby photos

Well, in the midst of all this baby stuff, we went from flooding, to blizzard, back to flooding. With a bridge out and several roads closed due to flooding, we had an interesting time finding an open route back to our house from the hospital. (Luckily, it's nice now, and everything's drying out.)

Here's the old steel bridge near our house. You can see the concrete walls that normally mark the edges of this river:


And here's what it looked like from on the bridge. You can see the tree lines that grow on either bank:


We went to the hospital on Tuesday night last week. Here's the note from Amelia's teacher from the next day:

Amelia was sad on Wednesday. She held pictures of Mom and Dad and played in [dried] beans. That helped somewhat, but it was a sad day for her.

And when she went back to school on Monday, after we came home:

Amelia is very happy today!
Congratulations!
Thanks for sharing O.N.'s picture.
Amelia liked sharing it at Circle Time.

So, Amelia, how happy are you to have Mom & Dad home again?

So, e5, how do you like having a new baby brother?

So, O.N., what do you think about your big brother's reaction?


Okay, a few more baby photos, just because...




Updated: How could I forget?? Word to the wise: Do not contract food poisoning when you have a six-day-old baby. Especially not when said baby is insatiably hungry, and his mother has been up all night with him. Puking in a bucket at 3am while simultaneously, um, evacuating the opposite end of the plumbing is bad enough under any circumstance. Under those particular conditions, my wife and I were no match for the children. Thanks to my mother-in-law for riding to our rescue.

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A flurry of posts, part III

Top Ten Things to Do When You're Snowbound

10. Lay around in your jammies and vej out.
9. Pretend you are a flamingo

"Cold! Cold! Cold! Cold!"

8. Make Doughnuts
7. Take cover until the sun comes out

7. Bask in the sun when it does show up

6. Take advantage of a ready-made snow fort


5. Do some renovation and remodeling on the snow fort's front entryway4. Install a personalized "Memory Snow(tm)" bed for your snow fort

3. Try a new formulation for soil blocks that is, hopefully, somewhat further from concrete than last year's batch. (Sorry, forgot to take pictures.)

2. Forget your Tech Break commitment twice, by watching the bonus features from The Business of Being Born DVD, and the last five minutes of an exciting basketball game involving your alma mater, both of which your wife was watching and that you got sucked into. Then get two calls from work requiring you to get online briefly, really throwing off that whole low-tech thing.

1. Find out your blood pressure is rising and your extremities are getting puffy while you are 39 weeks pregnant and really hoping to have a home birth, once again riding the Emotion Roller Coaster; Consulting with the experts who advise bed rest and various other possible remedies, and keeping fingers crossed.

I don't recommend that last one. It's kind of a pain.

--

A flurry of posts, part II

Well, it may or may not have qualified as a blizzard, depending on your definition. But it did snow quite a lot, and got very cold and windy. I don't even know how much snow accumulation there was, because it was drifted all over. Some places it didn't even cover the grass and other places it was knee deep. 48 hours before these photos were taken, we had no snow at all.

You can see the snow blowing. You can't see the bottom half of that shelter.
I was glad there weren't goats to be fed out there right now...

Remember those salvaged greenhouse materials?
Remember that truck cap doubling as a chicken fort?
Yeah, all that stuff is under there.

Too bad the sparklies don't come through in the photo.

--

A flurry of posts

Get it? Flurry?

But why aren't you laughing?

Okay, how about some pictures then...

We've had some really wacky weather lately.

First was the minor ice storm, followed by a heavy hoar frost, which made everything look a bit strange...



Then came the fog, which, combined with the snow cover, made the entire outside world disappear...

Then it all started to melt, which resulted in some crazy icicle formations sliding off the roof of our pole barn.

Then it all dissolved into a big sloppy flood.
This was after the water had gone down quite a bit, but if you click to enlarge, you might be able to see the continuous stream of water all the way to the far corner of that pasture, at the upper right corner of the photo. At the maximum, the entire foreground of this photo was submerged.

Up next, "blizzard" photos...

--

Good, bad, good, bad, etc.

The good news is that the rains stopped long enough for much of the standing water to drain away. The bad news is that we're now replacing rain with snow. There was no snow at 9:00 this morning, but it's been coming down in drifts since then. The roads are a slippery, sloppy mess. They've closed down a stretch of I-70, and I saw four cars off on the six-mile not-that-busy road between here and town. We may get 15 inches by tomorrow night. Now there are probably some readers in the higher latitudes (or altitudes) who scoff at anything less than a good ol' Canadian metre of snow, but we're clearly not set up for it. I think they close schools here if there's a chance of snow in the 5-day forecast. The good news is that e5 can romp and play and burn off some energy. And the other good news is that weather forecasters almost always wildly exaggerate, at least around here...

The other good news is that Lori's hemoglobin has vaulted past the magical homebirth threshold, and her blood pressure is holding steady inside the acceptable range. Coming up on 39 weeks, and All Systems are Go at this point. The bad news is that we may be starting in on a new round of colds. The other bad news is that we may be snowed in for a bit. The good news is we have everything we need. Well, except maybe midwives.

Got all that?

--

Ups, Downs, Skunks, Rain, & Ducks

My Tech Break Sunday was pretty good. The weather was nice for the first time since, oh, September, so I spent the day outside working my butt off. I was sore and exhausted by sunset, but that's not a bad thing. Like I told Lori - I don't mind hard work; I just get frustrated by work that isn't productive. Luckily it was pretty productive. I moved a ton or two of hay, I started on a small pen, and I hauled some fencing materials from where they were to where they needed to be. And in the process e5 and I got to meet our newest barn resident - a skunk.

He was nesting in behind the hay bales, and since it was mid-day at that point, he was snoozing. I'm glad I didn't startle him. He seemed pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, which seems typical of the few skunks I've known. And so far his worst crime has been making the local barn cat - and our car - stink to high heaven. The cat and the skunk have had several encounters, and I'm not sure why the cat hasn't learned. Maybe a role-reversal from the Pepe Le Pew cartoons or something. The skunk hid under a wooden pallet, and Kiki was actually batting at the little tufts of skunk fur sticking up through the cracks. Anyway, apparently they must have had one confrontation near the back of our car because it's been skunky for a week. The good news is it's now very hard to forget where you parked it.

Things are going pretty well for us in general, but today was definitely not the best.

On the baby front, Lori found out that despite extensive countermeasures, her blood pressure is up and her hemoglobin is not. This defintely lowers the odds of a home birth. It may not sound like a big deal to most people, but it's become pretty important in our house, so it's been a discouraging and disappointing development. And tomorrow morning Lori gets to go to the O.B. to get pressured for various medical interventions.

We're also in the midst of the most significant flooding we've seen since moving here. Our driveway was nearly impassible, at least without oars. There was a good 100 yards of water almost up to the bottom of the car doors this morning, and it was hard to know if you were still on the driveway or veering out into the Mud of Doom. Our truck had to be pulled out of the Mud of Doom just yesterday, and then promptly towed to a service station. It entire exhaust system has fallen out, and it's starter seems to have gone bad.

Our big pond overflowed it's banks a bit and flooded the area in and around our barn (which was already pretty spongy from the snow melt). We're actually in better shape than our neighbors, who appear to have an actual river running through their barn at the moment.

I was surprised to see the chickens actually wading through the swamp, rather than hanging tight in the high and dry Chick Shalet. Our small pond (a.k.a. Crater Wetland) is usually dry or nearly so, but it's full to the brim and backing up the drainage ditch toward the house. I wonder how much longer our sump pump can keep draining water down that way. There's alternating rain and snow in the forecast for the foreseeable future, so it may get worse before it gets better. I'll try to take some pictures sometime soon.

And to top it all off, some things didn't go well at my job today, to the point that I'm writing this blog entry between work tasks. It's about 10:30pm, and I've been periodically pushing work buttons almost all night.

And nobody got enough sleep last night. So Grumpy is the order of the day.

But at least the red-winged blackbirds, the killdeer, and even one of those lovely hooded mergansers are starting to arrive, so Actual Spring must be close.

(Not my picture - Thanks ODNR!)

We should start hearing those beloved peepers before long!

--

Um

A few days ago I shoveled about a ton and a half of free topsoil into the back of our pickup truck. I was planning to use it to alleviate some drainage problems around our foundation. The damp basement is not good. So I had this idea that I would load as much as I could stand on Friday, unload it on Saturday, and go back for more on Sunday. But on Saturday, after a night in the pickup truck bed, the dirt was frozen about four inches deep. I broke it up a bit with a mattock and did get maybe a fourth of it unloaded, but at that point the wind chill and the sweat were turning into a bad combination. So I gave up my plan. I decided I'd just wait for a thaw to do the rest, and hope for some more free topsoil another time.

Not a fascinating story, per se. But you know the part about the dirt freezing four inches into the pile overnight? And the wind chill forcing me inside? On Saturday. It's 70 degrees right now, by Fahrenheit's thermometer. On Monday. Our windows are all open. Motorcycles are out in full force. The kids are all playing outside.

What. The. Hell. What month is it anyway?

--

And yet...

I'm feeling mostly human again, and yet, I apparently have nothing of interest to say here. It was cold and snowy for a couple days, and now it's cold and rainy. The snow melt plus the constant rains have made quite a mess.

The chickens wanted nothing to do with the snow, and stayed in the barn for about 48 hours straight. They've also decided that it's pretty much too miserable to lay eggs. At the end of summer we were getting upwards of 15 eggs a day. Now we're down to about three a day.

A wandering cat has adopted us. Our neighbors were (and perhaps still are) feeding it, and named it Kiki. But his heart is apparently with us. Or at least the warm soft hay in our barn. He's very friendly, and I've got no problem whatsoever with a cat in the barn. The mice and rats seem to have moved on. Thanks Kiki.

I planted some sunchokes over the weekend, as well as a few dozen trees. Well, okay, I buried some apples that were way past their prime, some hazelnuts, pecans, and walnuts from a bag of mixed nuts, some acorns and a chestnut that e5 collected from various places, and some apricot pits from somewhere or another. I'll be shocked if they amount to anything - especially the mixed nuts and apricots since they are from parts unknown. But what the heck...

Other than that, we're mostly just hunkering down and waiting for some non-icky weather. Maybe I'll have some good stories by springtime!

Cool shower

In a rare moment of timely foresight, I spent my lunch hour yesterday setting up a new rainbarrel.

Why? Because IT RAINED TODAY!

It was a nice light shower that lasted a solid two hours. It only amounted to about a quarter inch on the rain gauge, but I have a feeling it'll still make a nice difference. The slow, steady trickle of rain helped it soak in rather than just running off into the pond or off to the river.

Would I like three more days of that? Absolutely. But I'll take it.

It was doubly nice, because it was cool all day too. We've had the windows wide open. The breeze has been wafting through, bringing with it the giddy and gleeful songs of the local birds, and the happy sound of rain running down the downspouts.

It was very timely too, because our neighbor said his well was drawing sand yesterday. Now I think our well goes about 10-20 feet deeper than theirs, but still. A dry well would Not Be Good... At All...

Not much rain in the forecast, but then, it wasn't supposed to rain today either, so there you go...

Unbeleivable

To the North:

To the east:

To the West:

(The "To the South" picture didn't
come out. But it was there too...)

At our house:

NOTHIN'!!

The sum total of all our rain:

Our lush, green pastures:

Standing in tall clover:
A shrubbery:

Not much left:
Our willow nursery (formerly known as "our pond")
is the only thing keeping the goats happy.

I learned an important new phrase today: "willow hay."

How do you do a rain dance?

Man is it dry. Dry and hot.

At least it's a dry heat.

We topped out around 94F today. Low humidity, and a bit of a breeze, which made it better than most 94 degree days around here, but man...

Since the first of May, we've had about one inch of rain. A few showers that barely registered on my rain gauge in May, and a couple t-storms in early June that brought 3/4 of an inch in a ocuple days.

So far I've lost two redbuds, a sweet bay magnolia, and a beautiful tricolor beech tree, as well as a few shrubs. I've been watering the garden, and all of the new transplants, so a lot of our plants are treading water (so to speak). I've had to carry quite a few buckets out to the farthest baby trees. I may lose a few of them anyway.

I planted a bunch of woody things this year, and so I've spent the last couple months watering bare sticks. Three of my four peach trees leafed out nicely, but the last one steadfastly refused to show signs of life. But the branches were still bendy, and scraping under the bark still showed green, so I kept watering. It finally came out with some leaves just a few days ago. I still have three more stick trees and many more stick raspberries with no vital signs, but I'm keeping the faith. For now.

Unfortunately, my rain barrels ran dry again. Guess I need to add more capacity. I generally try not to use the well water for anything but the garden. It sucks up way too much softener salt as it is, and I don't know that all that salt is great for the plants. But what can you do? (You can get the water pre-softener, if you were smart enough to plumb it that way. It never crossed my mind at the time.)

We may lose our fish if the pond goes much lower, but at least the willows are growing around the edges. I can give the goats an occasional armload of stuff that's actually more green than brown.

It's been a tough year weatherwise. Mild winter = lots of hay consumption. (The animals were more active while the pastures were dormant.) Then we had a frigid March, including an ice storm, which stressed out the plants and made them confused about when to start growing. Then from April until now, it's been pretty nice from a recreational point of view, but from a garden & farm point of view, waaaay too dry. Less water means less growth.

We hear thunder and see lightning from time to time. But it always misses us. Today there was a passing shower that speckled the back windows. But it didn't even get the ground wet.

Tomorrow is scheduled to be hotter, with some chance of rain. Cooler temps arrive on Tuesday, and hopefully that means a front is coming. We'll see...

Frost, fog, and a little alliteration

What happens when you get an ice storm, and then snow, and then rain, and then freezing temperatures overnight?

You get a big mess, a lot of funky fog, and some incredibly fuzzy frost.

A few more winter photos...