Friday, December 11, 2009

More random pix

It's been freezing, freezing cold this past week - high temps of 9 degrees, but sunny. Here the cattle soak up the sun while they can.



It was my turn to host our Tuesday evening neighborhood dinner this week. I had a burrito bar.


This particular hen seems to like an elevated perch.



Lydia still crams her growing body into her favorite chair. How much longer?


We're expecting snow this weekend - the first significant snow of the year (which could mean anything from half an inch to eight inches), so we decided to batten down hatches, clean up the driveway, and stack wood. Up to this point it's been freezing cold and absolutely snow-less. Today the temp reached a balmy 25 degrees, making it much nicer to work outside.

We stacked and tarped the unsplit wood. The garbage can holds long thin sticks that I'll slice for kindling.


We also have some uncut log pieces.


We stacked all the split wood on the porch.



No way is this enough wood to get us through the winter (we often use the woodstove through May) but we have other wood up our sleeves - several dead trees waiting to come down, etc.

6 comments:

  1. I love your kitchen cabinets! Are those something you had made for you, or were they made at home? They are really beautiful.

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  2. Until I read the last paragraph, I was going to say that you must be planning on a mild winter due to global warming - Ha Ha!
    Just wanted to tell you that I have enjoyed your blog since I came across it a few months back. My take on this blog is: it is an example of living the simple life w/o the hustle/bustle of city life with all of it's crime, traffic congestion, loud neighbors, liberal public schools, etc. Am I right? Or am I reading too much into what you blog?

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  3. To Rambling Housewife: Our cabinets were already in place when we bought the house. Apparently the housebuilder (whom I understand to be kind of a wacky fellow) milled pine from trees on our property and built the cabinets from that wood... which sounds very earthy and impressive until we realized he'd left all the slash piles unburned, which fostered insects and disease, which spread to healthy pines, resulting in a lot of sick pines. We had to do some selective logging a couple years back (broke our hearts) because we had so many dead and dying trees. Our woods are thinner but healthier now.

    To Politically Incorrect: Thanks for the warm fuzzies! Many call our life simple. We don't have crime, traffic congestion, loud neighbors, and we homeschool so we don't have to worry about the terrible (which it is) local school district. But we also work sometimes brutally hard in what is often very nasty weather. We deal with livestock escaping or getting sick or (as will happen this upcoming Monday) the mechanics of butchering, not a pretty site but a necessary one. We lose garden crops due to deer or grasshoppers or (ahem) neglect. We also live close to the poverty level, so it's not all roses and daisies (those grow wild around here, BTW, grin). Would we exchange this life for our old life in the city? No possible way!

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  4. Your chicken that likes the "high ground" is probably the first to sound the alarm when some preditor is afoot.

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  5. We are tramping through knee deep snow down here in NE. Gimme some of that global warming!

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  6. Oh how I miss these posts. It's nice how much you get to know someone through a blog.

    Merry Christmas,
    A.jones

    P.S. I hope OD comes home this year.

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