random notes from a winter day

This morning Della wanted me to wake up and get up, and demonstrated this by walking across my chest repeatedly, and sometimes flinging herself down across my collarbone as if she was going to go to sleep (yay!) but then getting up seconds later and starting the Grand March again. Usually it's Moxie who wants me to get up before dawn, and she indicates this by patting my face gently with one paw. There are worse ways to be awoken, and besides, Moxie knows that if I don't get up right away, she might as well go back to bed. If Della's new method becomes an ongoing thing it's going to be more challenging, because when I resisted the marching and flinging, she escalated things by knocking an unknown item off the bedside table. Okay, fully awake now, Della - was that my water bottle? But it's still totally dark so no one is going outside just yet.

I turned on the lamp and decided to finish knitting the decreases to shape the sock toe begun the night before. After perhaps an hour, I reached the final fiddly row - I was working with seven little needles - and somehow dropped a stitch. After many, many minutes of trying to see the decreases well enough to reclaim the drop, then unravelling a couple of rows to try to find a perfect row to pick up and knit from, I finally did what would have made the most sense in the first place: I pulled out the whole toe, reclaimed the 68-stitch row prior to the toe shaping, and put the sock aside because now it was light enough to see the snow still falling and the first little birds arriving for breakfast. Let the morning chores begin, Della!

Fed the cats, fed the stove, and went out to water the hens and feed the wilds - birds and squirrels. I bring the big seed feeder and the suet feeder in every night and put them out again as soon as it's light enough to see. There are also two little hanging teacup feeders that I leave out because they are usually completely empty by dusk and also they are right outside my window and when the little birds arrive just before dawn they land there and alert me that if I'm not already heading outdoors, I should be.

There are many creatures with a demonstrated interested in my routines.

Is it snowing where you are? It's been snowing here since the wee hours, and a wet snow it is - every trip outside today has meant a soaked coat left to dry by the heater. Even the goats have spent most of the day in their shelters, because it's so wet out. Makes a change from the bitter cold and strong winds we've been having in recent days and weeks, but the cold doesn't bother the goats as much as the wet, and I feel much the same. But now it's going on 3 PM and it's so gloomy that I'm going to get out there again for early Evening Chores. And take a cautious walk down to the letterbox as well, because a pound of crimson clover seed was delivered earlier today. Nothing like a packet of seed to make Winter seem very much here.

Are you planning your gardens? I updated my Seed Inventory - an actual spreadsheet, which was well worth the effort a year or two ago - and concluded that I don't "need" to buy anything but pole beans and possibly some herb seeds this year. So I celebrated my efficiency by ordering a pound of clover seed for a 2025 experiment in competition. May the crimson clover win!

Meanwhile, here's hoping my boots have had time to dry, because I'm outward bound. I can see Violet in the doorway of the barn, looking for That Woman With The Hay.

a glimpse of 2024

 

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Dearest blogpals: 

I hope you also found an ice rose in one of your water buckets this year.

Thank you so much for sharing your time and thoughts with me over the past 12 months. Shall we continue?

Onward into 2025.

~~~~~

happy day

Wishing you and yours a very happy 25th of December,

in whatever context you choose.

I hope it is full of peace and light and hay. 

"December 25th"  Victoria Crowe

~~~~~

one done

It was 2F when I was up at 3 this morning, and it's a brisk 3F now at 8 am.

Seems a good day to write about a recent project.

2024 has been a year of major projects, some of which are going to flow into 2025. But one project that was undertaken and completed in two November days, is the rebuilding of my chimney.

Ever since the roof was replaced in 2017, there has been a gradually increasing leak in the parlor, from around the chimney. Whether the leak was coming from the 85-year-old chimney itself, the flashing, or the roof, was uncertain. Even if I was still capable of clambering around on my roof I might not have been able to identify the source, but in previous years I would have at least gone up to take a look. Not this time.

Back in February I decided that regardless of whether I would continue heating with wood - a question at the heart of a different 2024 project which will be a topic for another post - I needed to get a chimney professional out here to do whatever it would take to stop the leak.

The mason came out in June and looked at the job, answered all my questions about repair versus replacement, assured me that the leak in the parlor would stop, agreed that height could be added to improve the draw, and gave me a quote of $1500. to take all the original brickwork down to the tile liner and rebuild the chimney. The work was going to be done "either in August or after September." He gave me the names of a few places where I could see the various brick options, and one day I borrowed a car specifically to go brick-gazing. This decision was important; in recent years I've made a couple of big, bad, expensive decisions, the visual and practical results of which I live with every single day, and I'm trying very hard not to make more. (The metal roofing was one of those bad and expensive decisions, by the way. How I wish I had just stayed with ordinary shingles.)

Anyway. After considerable pondering, I selected the brick, and five months later the busy mason finally had the time to do my little two-day job. He arrived with an assistant and the two fellows had scaffolding up in the blink of an eye. They began removing the original brick, saving quite a bit of it for my use in a future project.

Original chimney just before work began.

Brick removal underway.

The entire 2-day process went so smoothly there are only a few snapshots. I try not to hover around people who are doing their work so I puttered by the barn, right arm still in a sling at that point, staying available for questions but also staying out of the way.

Here's the new chimney and the first fire, on November 15th:

This is one of those unforeseen tasks that was thrust upon me, so to speak. It had never once occurred to me that the chimney would need replacement in my lifetime, but the leak made it necessary to take action even if the chimney was no longer going to be used.

And it is certainly being used.

I am very happy with the replacement. (Whew.) The chimney "fits" both visually and functionally - the proportions are excellent, the appearance is smart but not glaringly new-looking. And the draw is much improved, which is a very nice bonus after 40-odd years!

How are your 2024 projects looking?

I'll bet you got more finished than I did!

~~~~~

he died in the woods

My friend Jim died last Tuesday, while working alone on a logging job. He'd been a logger forever, and was very happy to be back in the woods this year, after a frustrating moratorium on forestry operations on State lands kept him from working locally. But this particular job required a significant commute to the site. Long days of driving in the dark, then working hard from daylight to dusk, then driving home in the dark, were taking a toll. When I saw Jim two weeks ago, he talked about how tired he was - something I'd never once heard him say in all the years I've known him. Complain about bureaucracy? Anytime. Complain about lazy people? Oh my, yes. But complain about being tired? From working? Never. It was worrying, but at least I knew this job was almost finished; he intended to be "out of there before Christmas."

I met Jim years ago when he was helping friends in town with their tractor. We identified many common connections in Massachusetts forestry, and he became my local go-to for tree work. He tackled some jobs, and told me straight up if there was something he would not take on. A few years ago when we had so much rain and wind that trees were blowing down all over the region, one of my tall, healthy oaks fell, leaving the root plate vertical and the entire bole suspended horizontally a few feet above the ground. Jim shook his head and said, "that's a young man's job." But when a maple came down across one of my paddock fences, he cut it up for me the same day, so I could repair the fence immediately and keep the goats safe. Jim liked to come across as gruff and grumpy, and he never walked through my paddocks without saying, "Those goats hate me," even as Tsuga would be trying to get close enough to tug on his jacket.

Despite his cultivated persona of old curmudgeon, Jim was a person  with a kind heart, who couldn't do enough for people. In fact, he had a hard time letting me ask for help when it was needed, instead of just doing things he thought would be helpful. An example that makes me smile: my woodstove. It drove Jim a little bit crazy that my small woodstove burns wood under 13 inches long. Any stove that couldn't take at least a 16" stick just didn't make sense to Jim. And while I agreed every time the subject came up - which was often - that it would indeed be convenient not to have to feed a stove in the middle of the night, I always pointed out that my little Waterford is a fine size for heating my tiny house. We had probably had this conversation 20 times before Jim appeared one day with a woodstove in the back of his truck. He had just helped someone else remove it from their house, and thought he'd bring it by. "Just for you to take a look at," he said casually. "Just in case you want it."

I shouldn't have been surprised; Jim always had opinions about what was wrong with a situation - on a scale ranging from personal to global - and what should be done to fix it. From some people, this might be grating, but from Jim it wasn't, because it was so clearly based on good intentions. Last October, the day I told him I'd decided to try to get by without a vehicle was the same day he started telling me I needed to replace my truck. About a month ago, feeling overwhelmed by the list of medical appointments I suddenly needed to beg rides for, I said, "Okay, Jim, I'm looking for a vehicle. Would you please keep your eyes open for a small truck?" and without even saying "I told you so!" Jim said he had been keeping his eyes open all along. I suppose if he had found an old Tacoma for sale last Winter he would have shown up in it one day, "Just for you to take a look at. Just in case you want it."

Jim kept an eye out for lots of things and lots of people. Although he chose to work alone and in the woods, he was a very sociable person with a wide network of friends and acquaintances. He had a regular Saturday chinwag with not one, but two, separate groups of friends, putting the world to rights on a weekly basis. He probably interacted with more people in a week than I do in a year. If he hadn't heard from me in a while, he'd call just to see how things were going and remind me to ask if I needed a hand with anything. "You're one of my clients," he would say. "You're Good People. You're on my List." I can't imagine how long Jim's "List" was, but I expect to hear a lot of tales from other "clients" as time goes on.

Jim was Good People, and I'm missing him already.

~~~~~