We drove down to the airport today to drop my wife’s sister off for her flight home. it was so good to have her over for the last month and change. She is an active and happy person and really enjoyable to have around. She has helped us out with getting set up for Farmer’s Markets and has really enjoyed exploring around and learning what she can of our many hobbies. It’s been a bummer that she was out during the hot season, but at this point, she has seen our place at the hottest and coldest periods of the year. I hope she can come again when it is much more temperate and enjoyable, and easy to be outside or in the shop busy doing things. She never got to spend as much time at the lathe as she wanted to, nor did she get to work at the sawmill. But that’s fine too, since she was happy to be working on everything she did keep busy at, especially working with the laser, which she says she wants one of. Well, who doesn’t?
Naturally, Sis gets on the plane and the wind howls all the way home and all evening as the temperature drops to a much more pleasant one. We are meant to only get to the mid 70’s tomorrow and the next day. Classic. We have been soaring around the high 90’s the bulk of the time she’s been here. Yeah, next time she comes, it needs to be in the spring or autumn. What a laugh!
Well, with the temperatures dropping, I need to get at some of my chores around here and get things done that must be done before the snow flies. I’d be really excited to get that woodshed done. I have secured more cinder blocks to prop it up, and that is great! I think it will need them. The extra blocks came from under the sawmill. I am setting it on treated wood, and that on the ground for the time being.
It’s been a long day today, and I am off to bed now. I put my hand made table under the monitor at my computer and put my keyboard on it. I restarted the computer, too. I’d like to fix the chair height adjuster so it will keep me up on the normal level so I can feel like a grown up at my desk. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.
This weekend I finally crossed a threshold I have long awaited. I got myself a sailboat. It is not a liveaboard type. In fact, it doesn’t even have an electrical system in it at the moment. It is an old one, too. The boat is a 21-foot Macgregor Venture from 1970. It needs a lot of work, but it should be manageable work on a relatively small budget.
The first big job is restoring the swing keel on it. The keel is a 400 pounds steel plate that drops down from the bottom extending the draft from about 18 inches to five and a half feet. It is coated in house paint from its previous owner, who kept it on a budget. I’d like to see her gel-coated with some lovely rich colors like blue gunwales and a red bottom with a white strip at the waterline. Something classic like that. White topsides and a sand color for the tread would probably come together real nice. I can see a couple of instruments and a radio, and I can also see a slight modification to the trailer in her future, too. What it also needs desperately is a mast raising system. That is one job that is a challenge! There is plenty to do, as one would expect from a cheap, old boat. But with any luck, I will never be heard to say, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
So, as of this weekend, I have embarked on a new adventure. It is one I have dreamed of for ages, at least in part. Okay, true I have always wanted to live aboard. But for where we are at and what we are doing, this will do for now. I get to spend a bit of time working on the boat, getting to know it, and learning all the things I will need to do to maintain her going forward. I could sail it soon, but why take the chance before I get to understand the rigging and components of the boat really well. I can do a lot of that on the trailer, messing about and familiarizing myself with positions and the overall shape of things.
Is it a proud moment? A proud moment would be a Cabo Rico or an Island Packet that is live-able and blue water ready. I go into this with some trepidation, but a readiness to learn for real something I have only got some of the terms down for. It’s like knowing Chess rules of Castling, or En Passant Capture, or knowing the Ruy Lopez opening, but having never played a game. It’s different to be sat at the board. It is different to hold a tiller in my hand and look up at the rigging and know I have got to get this right. Safety and enjoyability are at stake here.
So where will I begin? I need to order a part for the boom to get it fully operational, and I will need to replace a cable on the standing rigging, if not most of them just to get rid of rust. There is the keel. Maybe some new sailcloth is in order, if not at least some repairs. I can get by with handheld electronics to substitute for instrumentation for a sail or two, but if I am going to sail properly, I would like to sort out a VHF, GPS, wind direction and speed, and maybe even a chart plotter after a bit, as there is no room for a nav table in this tiny little boat. I can always set my app on my cellphone as a back-up. Anything drastic enough to knock out both will also require rescue and an insurance claim. If I can see all that done by then end of next summer, I think I will be ahead of schedule.
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Early this week I had the roughest time with my rheumatism. That cost me two days. Then I got a visit from a guy who lives in town, but has a house down here, too. He asked me if I wanted the wood from a tree he was having cut down at the house in town. I went up far too early as it took longer than I thought it might to get the tree down, so I visited the kids for a bit. It was good to get up there early so I could specify to the tree cutter how I wanted the wood pieced up. When I went to pick it up, the wood had to be machine lifted onto the trailer. I have three pieces that are long enough to make into boards of some sort. There will be a lot of knots in whatever I make of it. I don’t yet know if I will make something like 6 or 8 inch wide by 1 inch thick, or 2×4’s.
I went back over today. The guy who owns the house decided on taking down a second smaller tree. I told the cutter to go ahead and make it into firewood or anything that works best for him. That is sat on the trailer and in the bed of the truck right now. I’ll get that out at any dry points tomorrow. The second tree is an Austrian Pine, so said the tree cutter. I am not sure of the big tree. Might be the same as it came out of the same yard, but the tree cutter never said.
So what will I do with the wood? I will cut the smaller bits into firewood. There are some longer bits that might just fit between the bolsters on the mill, and I am thinking I want to try milling them into basically large cubes. I’ll have to put some Anchorseal on them and leave them for a year or more. They need to leak out a lot of sap. I’ve got a couple of boards from a pine I took down in our yard a year ago, and it is in pretty good shape. Once dry, I am sure I can sell them.
So there’s this week so far. Perhaps this should be on the homestead blog, but it is what I am up to. It is warmer now that it is springtime proper. I am going ot need to get down to the dump and get some wood coming back to the house. I’ll need some for lumber and for firewood. There are things to build around here, and the firewood needs time to dry. Somehow I need to fit in the installation of a septic system too. Nothing to it.
Today I took care of two things I have been putting off for far too long! I had a meeting at 9AM with the man in charge of the county health department to discuss planning for our septic system. He went over the specifics of what has to be done and how it has to be done. It seems like there is a little tiny bit of wiggle room that will set me up to be able to do this okay as long as I don’t need a pump to get the effluent from the septic tank to the drain field. I will have to do some measurements to see about that. I might make it, but because of the high water table here, I don’t have a lot of wiggle room on that. The rest of it sounds pretty easy apart from collapsing the old tank. That is a pretty strong piece of concrete, and may require renting a jackhammer.
After all that, I came home and helped Missus out with some things, and then went out and pruned back the whole orchard. It is only about a dozen trees, but this is a job I have been needing to do for some time now. Some of the trees have got pretty good sized and have a lot of limbs and branches on them. They all needed some work. Some only a little bit, and others needed a right butchering! I worked on shaping this year and let the consequences follow. I think next year I can work on trying to maximize production. I also have one dead tree out there that needs to be replaced. It is a prune tree right back with the apples. There are two other prune trees that are alive at the front, and they got a trim and hopefully will produce. But that dead one needs to be replaced with a proper apple tree, I think. No other fruit trees we have tried have survived. Just the prunes and apples.
We have an old apple tree sperate from the orchard by a little way. I gave that one the once over too. It has produced the last couple of years, but very poorly. Hopefully this year will see a change! I butchered the living hell out of that tree, too. It had the most prolific collection of stems and such on it. Now it looks like the others. I know I was only supposed to take off about a third of the tree at max. I am sure I exceeded that. But I think it is worth the risk. It is an old tree and very well established. Besides, I have had a couple of trees that have started out small and been completely knocked over and destroyed, then resprouted off the root ball. I am sure this one could do the same if it had to.
Missus needs help in the cottage tomorrow. I also need to remember to pop open the air tank on the compressor. I have been poor at doing that lately. I need to get the trailer up to the dump and empty it out and ready up for another fill. I could do one or two more before I get the bulk of the old compost pile finished and ready to redistribute the soil where it needs to go. I really want to get some flowers in this year and get Missus going on selling some or getting the place looking better at the very least.
Now that I am pretty sure on where the septic is going, I think I can make up my mind on the gourd tunnel and on the woodshed and a couple of large planters. A couple of lean-tos would not hurt. One for the chicken coop, and one for the tractor. Also, the septic guy approved the idea of building a leech field, then putting a coop next to it and fencing in the field and letting chickens roam around on it. Yeah, I’d like that. Then the ground would not be going to waste.
Our male cat is roaming around the house like he is having some sort of anxiety. I figure it is either the onset of the frogs he can hear through the open doors and windows, or he is missing the female cat who is out in a pen by the chicken coop because she keeps crapping in the house. We are going to try to get her used to being outside in a safe place, then letting her run free a bit then come back in to visit. This keeping her in the house business is just not working out. She keeps spewing out both ends, to be honest. It’s too much. The other three cats that either live here or visit are fine. But this one likes to put her mess where it is nearly impossible to clean. Enough is enough.
Well, there’s my report for today. It’s late enough for an early night now. I might give that a go in a few minutes.
It’s Sunday, normally a relaxing day around here. Missus isn’t relaxing, so I have helped her with moving things around and getting things put away. She is trying so hard to get things organized better. She finally went for a nap, and I went and did my chores feeding the animals and recovering the hay from the recent wind, and unfortunately, rain we had. The hay got wet, which is unfortunate. It did not penetrate too deep, so hopefully it will at least be fine for the time I will have it before it is used up on the goats and llamas.
The rain has restored our lovely mud outside, making it miserable and a little unsafe to work out there. I won’t use the sawmill in the mud, for example, till I can get it up on a platform of some sort, and maybe even a roof built over it to keep the platform dry. Last thing I would want to do is slip and fall while pushing the blade through a cut! I have a fair load of logs towards such a project. I need to set me up a cut list and finish it. Then maybe I could get on it.
I am also concerned about the woodshed. I need one of those built, and the sooner the better. It would sure be a bonus to have that built and be able to stack the wood into it to dry up for next winter. To be fair, I have still got a fair amount left from this winter, and that can go in first! Put it all in the south side of the bunk, take out the north side, build a shed there, then transfer the wood in, and clear out the south end and put a second shed there. The problem is that I am only allowed a certain size in our county without a permit, and that size is not big enough for a whole winter’s worth of wood. If I build two at the limit, I should be able to hold enough for more than a winter’s worth. Nothing wrong with too much wood!
This stuff is a change from when I first started this blog, isn’t it? Who would have thought back then that I would have ended up going on like this? Certainly not me. But here we are. Though, there is the threat of getting our bikes out and going for a ride somewhere around here. Probably not too long of one, but the kids are eager to.
On that note, I have got to do something about my photography. I am not feeling inspired. It is mostly what is around me. It could be because of the winter and brown grass all about. It’s been the mildest winter I can remember here, by far. Mud season is pretty much over, apart from the shallow mud outside right now because of the rain. But the deep mud is not affecting us. The place looks bland, and almost colorless in its otherwise drab winter regalia. Not just around the yard, but the whole area we live in.
Well, that’s enough of being boring for now. I would like to stop and have a thought before I write more. Writing this much has me thinking of things I’d be better off doing than writing about.
Honestly, it’s days like this that worry me. I woke up feeling fair to middling, did my morning chores feeding llamas and goats and even giving a shot to one of the llamas who has a swollen leg from some kind of injury he has given himself. Around noon I had finished up and my youngest daughter and I sat on the tractor bucket, and I told her some of the old stories of rounding up cows when I first came to visit Idaho, and how her oldest brother learned to ride from a champion barrel racer in Nevada.
Lunchtime came and I fixed up me some hotdogs and ate them. It was around that time I also started feeling quite poorly. It started like the old rheumatism in the hips and spread throughout my torso and arms. That finally got to the point I could no longer stay awake, so I went up to take a nap for more than an hour and a quarter on my bed. That is not right for me as I normally only nap for some twenty minutes or so. Now it is gone past seven in the evening an I am still feeling like Wile E. Coyote after the fall from the cliff and the huge boulder landing on me. With any luck, I will feel much better after tonight’s sleep and for all of tomorrow. I have an important errand I need to run as soon as I can.
The pain of it is debilitating and were I working a regular job that required reporting into some stuffy manager, I would have been in trouble for a day like today. That is not interesting to me. I don’t want to have to have my security and livelihood threatened over something beyond my control. I will try to report into myself in full health tomorrow.
I have just about finished a stand for Missus’ loom. She has an Ashford rigid heddle loom that is some 18 inches wide. She told me that a stand would cost us $175 or so, so I took some of the wood I milled and made her one for about $15 in parts. I *think* that saved us a few dollars. Perhaps you know the old meme that says “why buy it for $35 when I can make it myself with $97 in craft supplies?” I have spent well over that amount in supplies and tools and the mill and so on. Well, I have got to trim the tops of the legs and tighten a couple of bolts, then it is as done as can be. I more or less followed the specifications of the stand she does have, and replicated it as close as possible, except the type of wood and the thickness of my pieces. I think it came out pretty good, and I understand some of the things they did on their model to help it work better than the methods I might have chosen on my own. I also need only make one spare part, only longer, to make this stand fit a wider loom. Well, I am happy with it.
The ideal situation this year is to make anything like this that we can here on the farm. We’d like to give up on buying things as much as we can, buy quality when we do have to, and make quality when we don’t. I need to get the trailer fixed and start making trips down to get firewood and milling wood. The weather today was perfect for it. We have a bit more to come before it starts getting wet late this week or early next.
Off to an early night to bed tonight. I need to recover from this awful feeling. Best wishes reader.
The winter has been shockingly warm compared to the past winters we have had here in our part of Idaho. I took a photo last week while warming the truck up to take the girls to school that I thought demonstrated just that. It was of the rain on the windshield. It was just after seven in the morning on February 15th. We were only a week or so past the dead middle of winter and it was raining early in the morning! I could not believe it! Any normal winter and we would have had snow instead! But not this year. It snowed this morning though, as a storm blew through! I fed the animals and shot two photos of what it looked like as I did. Those looked far more typical of what Idaho should look like this time of year.
To be honest, the snowfall seems minimal, but it is usually spring when it falls the most, as the weather warms, and the seasons ready for a change. It has fallen a fair amount for the year, but with the warmth and the rain, it has melted more quickly than usual. That is probably a fair assessment and explains the water forming what looks like a lake in the field behind our house. The moisture is there, but it is just not there in its normal fashion.
Rainfall at a little past even in the morning reminds me more of English or even Californian winter weather!
Perhaps we will pick up a lot more snow in the spring this year. and perhaps it will also come in unusual form instead of snow. So long as it is snow when it hits the mountain tops! And that brings up the next concern. It needs to be snow on the mountains so it can last till early July or so. Then it can melt in the summer heat and come down to the river to be pumped into the irrigation canals and eventually onto crops.
This winter has been unsettlingly warm, and I do wonder what the summer temperatures and weather will be like. Will it be much warmer than we are used to in summer too? Warm weather encourages thunderstorms, and thunderstorms encourage wind. What are we in for?
The horse is looking forward to the feed in the tractor bucket as I drive it along and shoot her photo. Hard to believe the field was clear of snow just yesterday. I expect it will be again soon!
All we can do is ride it out. But if it is exceptionally hot, I will still need to create firewood for the following winter, despite that. I will also need to work in the workshop despite it. That may mean nightshifts. So be it. I am not sure how to deal with the mill, but I will work something out. Maybe it requires building a shed with a roof over it for shade? Maybe it requires moving it? That is probably in the cards anyhow.
No matter the case, I need to work through it. My arthritis does not hurt like it has been the past I don’t know how many years. It is feeling much better thanks to some tablets I have been taking to reduce it. But even with them, I am limited. Before the tablets I would wake up sore and hurt all day. I would limp while walking. I would not be able to move much for long. Now I wake up feeling much better. I can work a while. What I cannot do it keep at it for long without it feeling a dull awful feeling that requires me to stop and rest off the pain, to the point of even having a short nap to recover. This year promised to be better, though with these limitations. But I will do what I can. I know for a fact I have passed this on to one child. It may have gone to even more. Time will tell. I just hope not, but if so, there is not much I can do apart from advise them of it and help them to work and will through it.
Looking down the road beyond where I turn to feed the llamas on the back pasture over the road from ours. Visibility was just shy of a mile. It’s not bad, but it landed as a surprise to me, full stop.
It’s not the summer I look forward to. It is the intermediary season of spring. Those in-betweens here are wonderful. I was told many years ago that the summers were nice here. They were not too warm. Even in 2010 the high temperatures for July and August were an occasional 93F with more falling in the 80’s than 90’s. By 2019 we saw the high reach 97F with several more days falling into the mid 90’s. Tree rings I have seen around here suggested to me that the 1980’s and before saw more rainfall, taking into account early wood growing years of a tree, as it does.
In other news, we are living with three cats in the house now. All of them are “fixed” and their attitudes towards each other and everything shows it. They wrestle together. The older one tolerates the younger ones better. He was fixed a while back, but he seems to have improved on the two young ones for them not producing so many hormones. I’d like to see them all shitting outside rather than in the litterbox in the house, and especially just in the house. I found three parcels under my desk upstairs, and they were just starting to go to town under Missus’s big loom in the library. We have a spray that is meant to stop them doing it where we spray, which is where they have gone. I am waiting with bated breath. We’ll see how they do! I have sprayed the entire upstairs carpet for good measure!
Wood is loaded into the fire for the evening. I am tempted to go up to bed early and watch some YouTube videos. There is no school tomorrow, so I can cancel the alarm and just enjoy the evening and the morning. Such rare opportunities should be taken. My wife is good at knowing that. I have been so ingrained with “you should be busy” that it is hard for me to remember it is okay to do such things, even when I am limited by my health. It is likely to snow again tomorrow, and a little bit likely the two days that follow it. High temperatures will hover around 40F throughout the next ten days, according to the forecast. Before long it will be real spring and the temps will begin to rise. It will be time to work hard and get done all the things that need to be around here. I have a long list.
There is much more I could talk about. Everything from politics to why I am not photographing as I should be. But a relaxing evening is calling to me, and I do wish to go and enjoy it thoroughly.
I went up to town and picked up the car on the trailer today. That cost me $89 to confirm what the service desk manager suspected. The engine was built faulty, and overheats because of the problem with the block. I am not sure of the specifics, but what it results in is Ford recommending that the owner do a long block engine replacement, which is to say the engine block and heads. Amazingly the cost is estimated at $9,000.00. They say the new block is corrected, but come on, the engine was meant to be right when it was new. How am I to know that another new engine is right this time? I think not. I am not buying Ford again after this crap. The car has fewer than 140,000 miles on it. It was okay till the engine started overheating on us when we took that drive to Wyoming. It has been giving us troubles since. Yeah, I am done with Ford.
As whatever car we get after this is going to be driven by my daughter, I am thinking something like a Subaru. I like the 4×4 or AWD that every Subaru has. Looking through the used ones they seem to run for a few hundred-thousand miles. We want economical too. I would like to have something we can do a little travelling with. It’d be nice to get out and see some of the country with the kids.
Anyway, I brought the car home, and we will clean out the personal belongings then send it off to the salvage yard. I think I would like to put a note in it saying what is wrong with it. It would not be good for someone to come along and pick the engine when it is so badly built. I hope we can get it turned in by Monday.
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Today was meant to be a nice day to go get some firewood home to split and ready up for burning, but it was not meant to be. Today was also meant to be a day to get the car loaded on the trailer to get a diagnostic done to see what kind of repair is required to get it to stop leaking water into the cylinders and causing it to overheat repeatedly. But alas, that was not meant to be. Last night I got a message that one of the boys was having trouble with the back wheel of his car making a grinding sound and it not driving well. So today was meant to be a day to go help him instead. Then the water heater at our house went on the frtiz. That would have to wait. I started off taking our grandson to school with his dad since their car was out of service. Then we got parts and tools and then some penetrating oil and some more tools and got at the job of changing his back brakes, pads, rotors, and all.
That would be a fairly easy task, but his car has wheels on it that don not quite fit right, and they will not let go properly when the lug nuts are undone. Getting the wheels to come off is a hell of a chore. But we got it in the end, and the brake rotor and pad changes were dead easy.
We ran to get the kids in the afternoon and then he took them to my house while I went and got an element for the water heater. I came back and sat down feeling so tired by this point that I wanted to give up, so I got up and got at it instead. I got a hose and drained and flushed the water tank, then changed the element and went out with our son to tighten his lugs again after he has driven it for a while. I came back in to realize I should have shut the pressure release valve on top of the water heater to stop it overfilling and flooding the pantry. Oh well. But since it was full, I cleaned up and put on the power and the water heater is working again just fine! So, happy days.
On top of it all, I was very tired today as I could not sleep last night. I was watching a lot of videos of a singer that YouTube rudely stuffed under my nose about a week ago. I finally gave it and watched a video, and it was plain to see she was an amazing opera singer. Her name was Patricia Janeckova, from the Check Republic. I say was because five weeks ago she got married, and four weeks ago she died of breast cancer. I’ll say this: she was a truly gifted and amazing singer! Sadly, she was only 25 when she died. All death is horrible, especially when someone is so young.
I could have gotten into opera to hear her some more. Instead, I’ll leave it for now. It wasn’t meant to be.
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I was up to answer nature’s call this morning about 4AM, and to stoke the fire to keep the chill off the house. I also heard the alarm going off on the weather station to announce that it was 20F outside, the temperature that risks our pipes under the house freezing if we don’t have water running. So, I put the kitchen sink on super low and said goodnight to Missus, who asked me last night to wake her when I am up any time after 4AM. She was up when I found her and is going to bed instead of waking up.
As I came up to my room and looked out the window as I walked in, I could see that Mars was just above the horizon on its rise. Like the Moon when it is just on the horizon, Mars looked bigger. It was an amazing sight to see! It is just a planet rising, which is does daily. But the title of the post sure is ominous! Mars, the God of War is on the horizon, rising to rule the sky.
On a personal note, I have some DVD-ROMs that my step-dad gave me before he died. I ended up with two sets of them in an effort to read the files, but never could. I managed to get a couple of minutes out of the first of each disc, then it would not play anymore. I never did figure it out. But I found a DVD-ROM while cleaning up the house yesterday and plugged it into my computer in a couple of fashions till I was no longer overloading the USB controller and got it to open in software that has been allowing me to rip the discs into playable files on my computer. My daughter sat with me and for me it was like she was looking through a window into my childhood and seeing people I have told her about, and seeing a world that no longer exists.
The first Christmas recorded was 1983. It was the greatest year I had ever experienced for presents on Christmas morning. I remember it as a time the living room was brimming with joy for all of us kids. Then, watching the video, I came out into the space to see what I had got, which was highly embarrassing because I had sneaked out during the night, and was not surprised that morning and was lying through my teeth. Incidentally, that was the last time I ever peaked ahead. It ruined it for me. Anyway, looking at the video, the room was not near as full as I remembered thinking it was. Our gifts were lovely, but few, and the space far more spartan that I remembered it being. But things are relative. I remember a good childhood growing up. Was it less than I remember in material things? Must be. But we always had enough. Have things changed today?
