Life on Battery Power

   Yikes! I hate the sound of the low power alarm on our inverter. I've been hearing it a lot lately. It's not surprising really considering the age of our batteries and how often I have ran them down well below 50 %. They are definitely due to be replaced but I want to get a better charging system first.  We hope to add  some solar this year but that will depend on price and availability.

   We don't really use much power. A couple of fluorescent lights, the modem and computer, and a 12 volt water pump we use for our shower are about it. If Ann wants to use the vacuum cleaner or some small kitchen appliance for very long we fire up our generator. I'd like to have a lot more battery capacity but big batteries have big price tags.

    I'm hoping to build a steam driven alternator that I have plans for but I don't have a heated shop built yet and it's not the kind of project you can work on while stamping your feet and rubbing your hands to stay warm. I guess I won't run out of projects for a while.

Woodpecker Home

  The big rectangular holes in this tree are probably from a pilated woodpecker. I hope so, they are spectacular, being almost as big as a crow! I haven't seen one in several years. They tend to be fairly shy and the few times I have seen them they were moving when I was still.

 I spotted these holes while looking for likly trees to cut for fire wood. Although there would be a lot of wood in this tree I will leave it stand. If I'm lucky and it is a pilated's nest site I might get to see it next year. That would be worth a lot more to me than what ever fire wood I'd get from cutting it.

  Some of the benifits you get from living as we do are easy to overlook. Having time to admire mother natures work is one of them.

2009 WHAT EVER

It's tempting at this time of the year to get all wrapped up in what will be or what was. I thought about using that as my topic today but then I thought, Why? What is, is. What was, was. What will be, will be. LIVE IN THE PRESENT.

Life goes by fast enough when you pay attention to it. When you get wrapped up in worries about what if, it slides by without our even being aware of it. Life is short, enjoy it.

Tommorrow the sun will rise, greet it with joy in your heart. It is a new day, who knows what adventure it will bring?

Yule

There is not a lot of room in our cabin so we get a tree that is only about 3 foot tall and put it on a table. It's always an adventure looking for a tree in the woods. Most people are used to tree farm trees which have been sheared every year. Wild trees are much more open and much more uneven. Charlie Brown trees are the norm rather than the exception.
We only covered about a 1/4 of a mile to find one this year. I don't know if that means we are more realistic in our expectations or if we got lucky. Some years it seemed like we put on 10 miles! Snowshoes would have been a good idea but for some reason we didn't wear them. Oh well, the snow was only a foot deep.
We like balsam because of the wonderful scent. After we had cut the tree it looked a lot thinner. A lot, lot, thinner. Not a problem, we just cut another thin tree and put them together! The second one was a white pine so we had a ball-pine or a pine-sum or some such thing. Anyway, it looked fine. The goats get our tree after we're done with it and they love them. They don't leave much but the trunk and biggest limbs and they take the bark off those. This spring I'm going to transplant some balsam to the edge of the field. Out in the open they grow much thicker even if you don't shear them.In 5or 6 years I won't have to look as hard to find a tree.

Ann is baking,Yum Yum!!

Ann is shown kneading bread dough. She baked 3 loaves of bread and a bunch of buns for burgers. It won't take us long to go through those! Even though Ann bakes almost every week we sometimes run out of homemade bread and pick up a loaf at the store. What a poor excuse for bread that stuff is.

Ann adds lots of goodies like oatmeal, cracked wheat, flax seed, etc., to her bread. It really makes a hearty loaf and the whole grains seem to keep it moist. In case you couldn't tell, I'm a really,really, big fan of Ann's homemade bread.

Well, while Ann was baking ,our son Dane and I were cutting fire wood. It was below zero so we had to bundle up which makes it harder. Just moving in those extra clothes adds to the job and of course as soon as you start working you over heat and have to shed some of them.

I found several elms that were standing dead. While I hate finding trees that have been killed by Dutch Elm Disease they do make excellent fire wood. They seem to make it for 30 or 40 years and then it gets them. It really is a shame we have lost such a magnifecent tree.

Most of the firewood I cut is from blow outs or tree that have died for some reason or that have been damaged badly by ice storms or wind. I always try to cut so that I improve my wood lot and don't do too much damage. I leave old half rotten snags for the woodpeckers and build brush piles to help provide cover for song birds. I do every thing I can to protect our sugar maples as we love making and using maple syrup.

Busy Time of Year

This year for Yule my wife had a short wish list, only two items. I was lucky because I've
managed to get them both done. The first wish was for me to get windows installed on the east end of our cabin. That was easy enough except for one little detail. I had to build them first.
Building a fixed glass window is not really very difficult. It's merely a shallow box,the jamb, with another shallower box fastened inside of it, the exterior stop. You apply a strip of self adhesive foam tape to the stop and then set your glass onto the foam. Now make another box, the interior stop, and nail that in against the glass. You then run a bead of silicon caulk against the exterior stop/glass joint and you have your basic window. Now apply what ever sort of exterior trim you want and you're ready to cut a hole in the wall. Of course I had to do it 4 times,but I was set up for it so it was still fairly quick.
Her other wish was for a real floor in the cabin. Not a unreasonable request since we have been living on a dirt floor covered with plastic that's covered with Masonite that's covered with carpet. That was a little bigger project but not too bad. I basically just layed in 2x4's from side to side for joist. A 2x4 would be awful light so I have blocking under them every 4 feet. Then I nailed 3/4 inch chip board on them. I used cheap self stick tile for a finish. As of this post I've got both wishes fulfilled so I'm a happy man since my wife is satisfied with the results.

Here's a pic of one of Ann's spinning wheels. We formerly had a flock of Shetland Sheep but had to give them up when we moved. Now we are starting to build up a new spinning flock for Ann. So far we have one Suri Alpaca and one Shetland Sheep wether. This flock is going to be mostly neutured males so that it does't grow as fast as the last flock which ended up numbering over 60. Way beyond hobby flock!

Today Ann was carding some wool. She dyed it pink using Koolade! This year we will be adding dye plants to our garden . We have a nice loom but neither of us has learned to weave yet. Hopefully one of us will have time to do that one of these days.Meanwhile,we have quite a pile of wool left to wash,card and spin from that former flock.