Sorry the site was down for a bit. Was late making my payment. But maybe it was long enough to drop off the radar of the spammers. Anyway, I am in the middle of one of the craziest projects I’ve ever tackled. We’re building a yurt. Now, that’s not so crazy. Lots of people would like to have a yurt. I’ve wanted one for about 30 some odd years. But I’ve decided that I agree with Froit . It has to have felt covering to be a yurt. That sounds easy enough. I have wool. I’ve done a little felting.

For the first time in my life, I don’t have enough wool. I’ve been told it takes about 500 pounds of wool to cover a 21 ft yurt in felt. I’m making a 16 footer. So I am going to pick up 300 pounds of fleece on Monday. I think, by purging a lot out of my stash, I’ll have enough. I know that this will likely be an insane amount of work. Nevertheless, we are building. We are tired of the Silver Streak. It’s not well laid out and has poor storage capacity. We need more room. I want something we can heat easily in the winter. And we have next to no money for this project.

Most yurts have some sort of a canvas cover. We’re not going to be able to do that this year. So, we are going to put it in an uninsulated covered building. I want to attach a greenhouse to this, to use up all the double paned windows we have. This should even give us a place for the cats to play safely. I’ve got two step-cats that needed to be moved in with us, plus Chuck (who’s been exiled to a smaller trailer for peeing on the beds in the trailer.) It’s the only way I can figure to pull it all together. We have lumber from a neighbor’s shed to use. We still haven’t decided if we are going to use small trees or sawn lumber for the yurt frame. I’d love to use trees. We have an area we can thin and I think we could find enough to use easily. I’ve got enough oak lumber to make the center ring. All I need is a lot of time and a good, quick way to churn out felted panels.

That’s why I have four garbage bags full of fleece in my car today. Hope your summer is going as well.

Still in progress:

Garden in progress

It still doesn’t look like much and it’s hard to tell how big it is from this picture. I’ve got one more section at the bottom to work on and then we can fertilize and plant. Still need to fence it. I’ve got some volunteer potatoes in one corner and found three asparagus crowns that I moved to a better spot. We are doing just fall crops, so it’s still not to late. It will be so nice to see real veggies growing. I can’t believe it’s been two years since I’ve had a garden.

We’ve been spending our weekend time trying to put in a garden. Jeffrey digs it up during the week too. I think we’ve got all the space spaded over. I go back through it with a digging fork to break things up farther down, then rack to get the grass and clods out of the way. It’s slow going for me. I think we are going to try and fence it this weekend and see if we can start planting. It may sound late, but it’s not. Temperatures have been in the 60s. I’m planning to grow primarily fall crops, so I should be okay. We need to get something in the ground, somehow.

I’ve been waiting for my stimulus check to come in. I had direct deposit, so it should be in this week. Then I had a horrible thought on Monday. I’d paid for Tax Act, to file my taxes. They routed my money through their bank, so they could take out payment for their software. And what that means is that I will be getting a check payment, instead of direct deposit, sometime in early July. It was pretty devastating, but I think I’ve recovered for now. We’ll still need the money for the things we’d planned for. It just means another two very difficult months ahead financially. The continuing spike in gas prices does not help at all. I’m up to almost $50 to fill the tank in my car, which is close to 5 hours work at my pay rate. Multiply that by at least once a week and you can tell that it’s not going to be easy.

In the meantime, I’m going to try and get the garden in this week. We are also going to have to make halters, something that I thought I would be able to buy this week. We’ve got to be able to stake out all the goats. Lily and Ragnar are prone to wander off. The weather is better and we’re not having to feed hay, which is a huge help. We’ve got plenty of stuff to do in the meantime. Somehow, there’s just not enough hours in the day for it.

I took Loretta out back this morning, like I do before work. I was about to throw her a stick until I looked up the hill. I saw a group of six elk, just up the hill, looking down at us. Loretta got wind of them and wanted to go up, but I managed to call her back down. We have so much wildlife around now.

Last week, I watched a ruby throated hummingbird. I know what it was because it lighted on a branch about seven feet away from me. It flew straight up in the air and then dive-bombed right back down. It made a big loop and then hovered, repeating again. I am guessing that it was diving for bugs. The clouds were just right to watch it silhouetted against the air.

The more bad news I read online, the less I seem to worry about it. I’m not happy about gas prices, obviously. Food prices aren’t helping either. Still, it looks like the cold weather is leaving slowly. (KATU reports snow level down to 2000 feet this week, just above our heads.) We’ve been able to let both the goats and geese out a bit, although we still need to put in pens for both. We’re planning where we want to put in the new building, whatever it is. I re-read the underground house book and we talked about a place where we can build into the slope. There’s actually a perfect spot for it, already dug out. We’d have to shore up the slope in that spot and it is on the wet side of the place. I still doubt that we’ll build underground, but it’s a spot I hadn’t considered before. The view from that spot is not as nice as up top, but it is a lot more sheltered.

We are getting use of a couple of mountain bikes that were donated to the church several years ago. We can use those to ride over to the place we caretake for the church. We’re getting use of Mike’s chainsaw, the one that Jeffrey moved inside after Abe left it out on a stump this fall. We’ve got the word out that we’re looking for an old snowmobile, which would really make life easier for us in the winter. The puppy is getting bigger and easier to deal with every day. This week, we’ve been letting her sleep on the floor with the big dogs, instead of in the cat carrier. So far, she’s behaved well.

So I guess we need to focus on the things going well in our lives, instead of listening to how bad it is supposed to be. Maybe the problems are being overstated. Maybe it’s those folks out there somewhere, that have the problems, not us in Stabler. Folks in Stabler live in hard times pretty much always. So they have ways to deal with it, mostly sharing what they have and trying to find ways to do without what they don’t have. Things may get worse, but then again, maybe they will get better. Who really knows?

Had to wait for these guys to get out of my way on our road Friday.

another view:

This is a picture of Loretta in the snow a couple of weeks ago (all gone now!) She’s chewing on a lettuce leaf. It’s just hard to get a good picture of black dogs.

This is probably the best picture I have of her. It’s a little washed out because we had sun coming in through the front window. You can actually see her face and she’s not chewing on anything.

And this is what she normally looks like, rolling her eyes and chewing on something. Good thing she was calm when I took this!

This was taken on my commute home the other day. This is one of the small elk herds in the area. The larger herd has over 30. I just pulled off at the side of the road and snapped my pictures.

On the home front, Loretta the puppy is growing in size. We think she’s doubled since we got her. She is not a fussy eater. Cucumbers? No problem! Cabbage cores? Why, certainly! She is extremely happy to see that we’ve gotten snow again. We are not so happy. Yesterday’s snow melted right off but today’s might stick around for a few days. I managed to go up on Tuesday and plant a batch of iris bulbs. Jeffrey had to work on the car as the shifting linkage on the car went out when I pulled in on Monday night. He did manage to fix it, but I was late to work. Thought it would be good to get the bulbs in the ground and I’m glad I did. While I was digging up top, I kept hearing a woodpecker close by. I looked in the maple tree next to me but didn’t see anything. Then I heard some birds fussing and managed to spot them. It was a pair of tiny woodpeckers, about the size of a towhee or sparrow. One is hollowing out the top of a dead maple and the other one, I guess, was supervising. I hope that they do settle in up there. We are planning to put the new living quarters up on the hill. I don’t think I’ve talked about that. We’re going to do a double-wide travel trailer. We have two old travel trailers to tear down, each about 18 foot long. We’ll tear down to the frame and then build a single, shed roofed building on each frame. We’ll connect the two at the roof and frame, to form a single building. One side will have bedroom and bath, the other, kitchen and living room. I want a porch across both front and back. On the back porch, we’ll put a small pantry. That room just might be glassed in, so that we have a way to merge the step cats with the rest of the group. I don’t know if we will get enough stimulus money to fund this. If not, we plan to build it uninsulated and can do that if I manage to get a bonus around Christmas time. You can get away with that when using wood heat. A lot depends on how cheap building supplies are right now.

I’ll try to see if I can get pictures of Loretta this weekend. I’ve not had a chance to take pictures of the goats kids, but all the goats are fine. They’re just a bit tired of all the winter weather.

Man, I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without posting. Well, we did lose a couple of kids. Found one of Scamper’s kids, a doe, dead in the pen when about two weeks old. I’m not sure what happened to her as she seemed fine. The next week, one of Maddie’s does was accidentally crushed when Bucko knocked down the pen gate. The remaining four kids are doing fine although I’m sure they’d like to get out more. Scamper seems to be weaning hers. They are eating hay.

We have roosters everywhere and are starting to get eggs. We are going to try and butcher a few roosters over the next couple of weeks. It’s been warmer and we’ve seen a lot of snow melt, but it’s still not the sort of weather you want to pluck chickens in. Jeffrey dug out a path down the driveway yesterday as the snow path was breaking up so badly as to be treacherous. There are still areas where the snow is knee high. It may be mid to late March before we can use the driveway. He was able to get the house dug out at Mike’s which will make it easier to haul water.

I picked up some gardening books with my tax return. One is Steve Solomon’s Gardening When It Counts. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Really, if you have just one garden book, this is it. It even tells you what to do when you are just starting out. My second book is Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Gardening. This one has some good info on things like poly tunnels. I haven’t read it just yet, but it looks good. If you are not thinking about gardening seriously this year, I recommend you take a look at your grocery bill. It’s going to be higher yet this year. If you start planning now, there’s no reason you can’t grow at least a little of your food. If we can grow it at 1700 feet up, you can too.

I wish I had time to write more. I was out sick yesterday, so this is really the first chance I have to post the latest snow pictures. This has a lot to do with why there haven’t been any good updates lately. The first two are from Sunday, pictures of Lily goat.

The next pictures are from today. We got a bit more snow, but the weather has warmed a bit. We’ve gotten a little snow melt, so it didn’t stack up as high as we expected. The first picture is Jeffrey out in the snow

I haven’t been able to take goat kid pictures yet, because it is just too dark back in the goat shed. I am hoping that we can catch a break this weekend and just maybe turn them all loose for a day. They can’t really go anywhere right now, except down the paths. The kids are heading for three weeks old, so it would be nice to let them try their hand at snow. It is at least a bit warmer now and they are all starting to grow. They will still get buried under the snow, at this point.

This is looking down towards the road. It’s hard to see in this one, but the pickup is almost covered in snow just to the right, beyond the trailer.

This is the trailer and goat shed. Still hard to tell how much snow is out there. Keep in mind that this is what it looked like AFTER a day of rain and no fresh snow.

Maybe this will help. This is our neighbor’s truck, parked next to the road. I have to park just off the road because there’s no way anyone is going down the drive way any time soon.

Someone commented on Maxed Out Mama about losing his job. The guy said he was a programmer and figured he would be okay if he could get a job paying 75% of his current pay. But the only things he is seeing are jobs that pay 50% of what he makes. He said he is scared of losing his house.

The fact is that folks, when they post things like this, are hoping that someone will say, “Why no, don’t worry. The job with the pay you need is out there and you’ll find it in the next six weeks or so.” What they don’t want to hear is along the lines of what I posted, which was “Expect to be out of work longer than you planned, with a new job at less pay than you expected. Start by cutting back to the bone on absolutely everything you can, starting today. Get rid of cable tv, cut back to a single phone, etc. Buy bulk foods and stock up, especially if you get severance pay.” Now, I could be wrong. But if I am wrong and he follows my advice, he’s no worse off. He can get cable again, pick up a new cell phone plan and be back in business. If I’m right, he just might have a chance to save his house. We’ve gotten out of the habit of planning for hard times. Why, we have credit cards for that. But what if your credit card jacks up the rates so that you are paying double what you pay now? What if there are none of those zero percent transfer cards? Credit card companies can change what they charge you at any time. And all of it has to be paid back sometime, with interest.

On one of the preparedness lists I’m on, they talk a lot about storing foods and have emergency kits. But a one time member, respected by all of them, encouraged them to grow their own food. He said that if you weren’t doing that, you really weren’t prepared. Now is the time to take that step. Spring is coming up. You have time to start taking that step to taking care of yourself and your family. Food prices will likely continue to rise, so every bit that you grow saves you just that much. And you gain experience that money can’t buy.

This is how much snow we have.

Notice the terrible twosome in front of the door.

The other goats refuse to come out.

The new stove.
The picture doesn’t really show how small this stove is. It’s small but tall. And it’s even an EPA approved one. We’re just waiting to get the stovepipe.

It’s a good thing I took this last night, as the cats knocked the cranberries down a bit and a lot of the popcorn. But it’s not a bad little tree, complete with a star cut out of a candy wrapper for the top. Somewhere, we have little ornaments that would have worked, but I don’t have time to dig through the bins in storage to find them. So Merry Christmas to you all! I’m still trying to recover from all the sweet stuff we had at the church Christmas goodies party.

I guess that would be me. We are in the process of putting in a small Waterford wood stove, that should give us something resembling heat plus the ability to bank a fire overnight. It’s even been moved into the porch. It’s just a question of setting up the stove pipe. I went into town yesterday and did a shop at Winco. Somehow, Christmas just means getting groceries to me. I picked up some Russian chocolates, which has been a nice change. We will be having Christmas goodies at the church tomorrow.

And speaking of that, some kid broke into the church, leaving a mess of glass that took four hours to clean up. The sheriff said it was a “mal-adjusted youth”. Don’t know why they would break in. We don’t have any money to steal.

I’ll be working on Christmas, so I’ll try to have pictures and a longer post then.

Do we have snow?

Why yes, we do.
This is the new porch on the trailer, which lets us add things like a wood cookstove and soon to be wood heater. And it will give us space for more cats and typewriters.

Speaking of that, here’s the new typewriter:

This is a 1954 Silent Super. It’s really a nice machine and I’m looking forward to using it daily. I finished Nano and so I can display this:

Jeffrey’s birthday is this Saturday, although we don’t have plans to do anything. I will make a batch of gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. I do have a new typewriter, but don’t have pictures yet. It’s the strangest thing. I put in a very specific prayer for another typewriter in better shape than my current ones, and asked for a 1950s Smith-Corona Silent-Super (their top of the line typewriter). And amazingly, Freecycle came through with exactly that. It matches the Clipper but it has key set tabs. I am really enjoying the writing, although it’s pretty dreadful at this point. Still, I know how it should be written now, and I just need to finish up with the story so I can do it right.

We are going to be getting a wood stove, a nice small Waterford. It’s from the house we have been caretaking for the church. I also need to get the two cats moved out of there and merged with mine somehow. All of this depends on finishing the porch, which is getting closer. We had snow the other night (most of which is gone today) so we definitely need a way to bank a fire overnight. The cookstove is not doing a bad job. I am hoping that we can get back enough from taxes to build something larger. Even a Thoreau sized cabin (10 ft by 18 ft, if you were wondering) would be nice.

The goats tried to kill Jeffrey yesterday, so I guess things are normal. They’ve been kept in the last few days due to weather. He had to get in to put halters back on Maddie and Scamper. The terrible two kept knocking the stall door on him. I’m going to see if we can make halters for them this weekend, so they can be confined out of the way if needed.

I’ll be taking a vacation day on Friday, so I’ll have a real 4 day weekend. Hope everyone out there has a nice holiday!

I don’t know if the word count widget will work in a post but let’s try it.

wordcount widgets
I am having a lot of fun with this. And I’m especially enjoying typewriters, strange as that may seem to you. We are getting a small wood stove to heat the porch. I’m just as happy as I can be about that and will post pictures soon. We butchered out one of the goat kids this weekend, Pete G as we called him. Repete will probably go in the next week or so. These goats are due to kid out in January and they need some space for that. The terrible twosome, as we call Lily and Ragnar, will provide us with plenty of entertainment.