NotSoThoreau

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.

The Nano novel is coming right along and my word count is about where it should be. The typewriters are great fun and I suspect that there is another one in my future. The important thing for me is that I believe I am going to try my hand at writing for money. It’s time. I’ve wanted to do it for a long time. And it doesn’t much matter if I just manage to sell a magazine article or two, instead of a book.

The goats are doing fine, although I haven’t been taking many pictures lately. We are going to go ahead and butcher the two Scamper kids. It will make it easier to afford hay for the winter. We’ve been lucky so far, but the weather won’t hold. Spacewise and feedwise, it makes sense. We’ve just been waiting for cooler weather. We have little chickens everywhere. The 10 chicks from the Rock have tailfeathers at this point. We’ve been letting them back out to forage. The 10 buff chicks are still small but getting bigger every day. And we still have the five larger chicks from the earlier hatches. I hope they can make it through. It would be great to have replacement chickens for the spring. The buffs we have are getting old. We lost the last Lorp and are down to one Rock. But it seems that we have chicks from those too, so there’s a chance to carry on.

We patched a hole in the floor of the porch and the cookstove is doing a decent job of heating the trailer. We can’t bank a fire in it, so we are going to need a real wood stove at some point. Jeffrey has been out cutting firewood. We have been cutting dead standing wood, so it burns okay. And we had elk steaks a few nights ago. A friend got one this year and gave us some to try. Not bad, but we should have pressure cooked it a bit to tenderize. That’s how we do goat and it makes a huge difference.

I thought it might be nice to post my typewriter pictures. I finally found the old Royal, after digging through the shed multiple times. Still needs a ribbon but it actually is typing better than before the move. Here it is:
This is the first typewriter that I was given. I guess it started me on this madness.

Next up is the Remington. I bought this at Value Village. Still a great typer.

Last is the newest one. This is a 1951 Smith Corona. Picked this up for $10. It’s the only typewriter with Elite type that I’ve owned and may be my machine for Nanowrimo.

I forgot to mention that I have a temporary site up for the church. I want to do something better looking but this works for now. The site is here.

Didn’t mean to take so long too post. Must have been busy killing those spam comments. Anyway, in the last week, we’ve lost the Buff that had two chicks and the mama Rock. Really hated to lose that Rock. I’d see her out with all those chicks, some running between her legs and usually about three perched on her back. We suspect a coyote as both hens disappeared during the day. We have the chicks penned up (fortunately they have feathered out pretty well.) I will likely move them to a cage in the other trailer for a few more weeks.

We have wood heat of sorts. Jeffrey has closed in the porch front. He’s in the process of closing in the side next to the trailer. We’ll hang a door and will really be able to heat the trailer with wood. We’ve been using the wood cookstove all summer. It would be nice to put in another heater but even one is good. Jeffrey has this interesting wooden box above the stove that funnels warm air down into the window of the trailer below. It does make a difference. It can get in the way when you are cooking, so part of it can be swung up out of the way.

I’m going to participate in Nano this year. And I’ve joined the Typewriter Brigade so I’ll be typing at least part of my story. I’m planning to set my story in Stabler in the late 1940s. I’ve wanted to try this but somehow just wasn’t serious enough. This year I am. So next month will be very busy. I’ve also been sketching a bit. I want to start working with watercolors. I don’t pretend to be very good at this stuff. That’s okay. You have to start somewhere.

We have more chicks. One of our partridge rocks was sitting a nest. We didn’t know until she came out and we saw little heads under her. When she got up, oh my! She had 10 chicks under her, newly hatched. There was only one chick that didn’t hatch out. She has them up and moving. So far, they are doing fine.

I am on a very tight budget this month. I’ve never been very good at budgeting. But so far, I’ve done good. I guess we’ll find out how good I do about three weeks from now. I do have a tip for those trying to eat for very little money. Make a soup one day. The next day, add beans and possibly rice. It tastes different and is filling.

We are trying to move forward with building the addition to the trailer but no real progress to date. In the meantime, I’ve become fascinated with typecasting. It means that you use a typewriter to do your blog post and then scan it to post it as an image. This site will show you what I mean. I dug the old Remington out and have been practicing a bit. If I can get the scanner set up, I hope to do a typecasting post of my own.

All the goats are doing well. This time of year, they’d prefer to stay inside and eat hay. Since the goats are on a tight budget too, we kick them out and make them go eat weeds. We did kill last year’s kid, as he was fighting with Bucko. We have been eating him. He was almost a year old so we tenderize the meat first by using a pressure cooker, then cooking in the usual way. It’s been some time since I’ve had goat and it still tastes good. We’ve had reasons for keeping the little guys we have now (mostly because they seem trainable) but we may raise up some to butcher in the next batch.