NotSoThoreau

Well, I’ve been moving through summer like most of you. We have yet another set of kids. We are up to 13 goats, but that number will change as we start to butcher some of the wethers. We have more rabbits. I bought a nice buck and two does. They are still fairly young so I am not planning to breed just yet. Jeffrey has been feeling better since he discovered he has a milk allergy. (He can drink goat’s milk and cow’s milk that has been cultured.) Our friend Mike is fighting lung cancer, so Jeffrey has had to help out there. We are also trying to get the winter firewood cut. Not a lot of progress on anything, but certainly enough work to keep us busy.

I have plans to update this site more regularly, and the next thing I know, a month has passed by. Sometime, I’ll have to write up my tech rant about the “cold pizza of doom”. Anyway, a quick update in the meantime. Something, likely a rabbit, got in and wiped out all the cole crops I had planted in the garden. It’s getting too late to replant cabbage, so I am going to replant with a bunch of old seed and see if anything comes up. I can still replant collards and kale. We have a live trap out to see if it comes back.

We are still working on the yurt but I suspect it is going to have to go on hold until next year. I’m going to try and felt some of this stuff up anyway, just to clear up some space. We really need to hook up the wood stove and start getting ready for winter. Likely, Jeffrey will build yet another extension onto the trailer for now. We need to move some cats in and find a place for my bird.

Speaking of cats, Jack had urinary blockage, something I haven’t dealt with in a long, long time. But I recognized it right off. Managed to find credit enough to get him unblocked. He’s been back home for a week and seems okay so far. He now gets to eat expensive food for the rest of his life, but I’m glad he’s back home.

We are planning to start butchering out wethers when the weather cools, including Ragnar (the goat in the lawn chair picture.) Hay is pretty expensive, $250 a ton for grass. Many folks are getting rid of their livestock as a result. Not a good time for me to do that. I’ll try to pull the rest of them through the winter and will wait until November or so to breed. We might manage it.

Loretta is still a handfull. She’s more like a dog now than a puppy. I wish she minded better, but she just doesn’t hear you sometimes. She’s such a good dog otherwise. She is a bird dog, so I guess it’s not surprising that she likes to flush chickens from the brush.

So, I guess that’s it for now. Maybe I can pull together that tech rant.

and we’re at about halfway towards building the yurt. Jeffrey has been cutting poles for the walls, mostly maple and hazelwood. We are going to take a walk around and look for poles for the roof this weekend. Meanwhile, I am fluffing wool, to get enough to start my first large felted piece. I’m shooting for next weekend. I worked on it all last weekend, spending a bit of the time tearing apart a grey fleece that was already trying to felt. So, I guess the stuff really WILL felt!

As for the garden, I finished planting it last weekend. The first potatoes are up and looking good. The volunteer potatoes are starting to flower. I have cabbage and collards starting to come up. We had a little rain today, which should help too. I’ll be glad when I can really see things come up. It is a lot of work to go out and water the plants every morning. Still, it’s nice to finally have a garden at long last. Everything seems to be coming right along.

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!