Crop Circles

Not much happened over the last couple of weeks that was interesting enough to write about--right up to Tuesday, when the starter fell out of my truck and was hanging by its wires, sparking up a storm.  Sigh.  A nice guy at the Ogema One Stop was kind enough to look underneath the truck while I was trying to start it--he popped upright really quick once he saw what was happening down there!  Thankfully, Janette's busy social schedule (teehee) was just then experiencing a momentary lull and she was able to help me tow the truck to a part of the parking lot where it wasn't in the way (that was a real "America's Funniest Home Videos" winner) and then pick me up and take me home.  As is the case with everything here, it was very expensive to tow the truck to Medford (No one nearby works on diesel trucks.  Of course.) and to get the starter fixed, but Old Blue (Janette calls it "Homer") is back in the driveway and running just fine now.

Work is still progressing at a snail's pace on tearing down the milk house, but I've finally gotten to the point where I'm ready to pull the skeleton down.  I'm able to see now that the barn roof beneath the roof of the milk house is completely shingled, which we didn't know before.  That's a relief, since it would have been expensive to get it shingled before winter.  Now I just have to get the courage to chain up a corner of the structure and pull it down.  This makes me very nervous.  What if half the barn goes with it?  What if it smashes the cement casing of the well?  I'll just have to shield the well as best I can and be very careful.  Stay tuned...

The last picture of the barn well?

 We now have a bullseye painted on the back yard:

This was not put in place by aliens and is not here to provide a target for passing jets.  Actually, now that I think of it jets don't actually pass by here much.  It's much quieter than it was in NC, where we were right on the Charlotte Douglas flight path.  But I digress (who, me?)... The circles delineate the placement of our future raised beds, for Mom's Indian Medicine Wheel garden.  The idea is to position 12 beds with their inner ends on the larger of the two circles (The tomato bed is the first.  It's on the western end of the circle); a 12-sided (Dodecahedron?  That's the word that popped into my head just now, but my mind doesn't work like everyone else's...) three-tiered bed in the middle will hold our strawberries and lingonberries, with "The Lady," as Mom calls the incredibly heavy water fountain we dragged up here from NC on the top tier.  If we ever get it finished, it will be beautiful and functional--we're planning aisles between each bed and between each circle that are wide enough to allow wheelchair access so we should be able to grow a good garden for many years without  a lot of back-breaking work.  The area between the east end of the garden and the barnyard fence will hold our corn, grains and things like squashes and potatoes:

Most of this empty space will hold food crops too. 

We also have a great crop of asparagus (well, I don't know if you can use "great" and "asparagus" in the same sentence...) that came with the property.  We didn't do anything with it this year except to dump horse manure over it last fall, but that seems to have done the trick.  I guess I'm going to learn to love asparagus...




You'll have to click and magnify to see it, but the ferny-looking stuff to the left of the walnut tree is asparagus.

 When we are finally done (we hope to have it all set up in time for next spring), there should be very little mowing to do in the back yard (yippee!) and we should be well on our way to being self-sufficient.

The tomatoes are finally starting to ripen--we got them in quite late in the season.  That's not a bad thing, though, as it will be pleasantly cool when they finally do and we have to spend hours canning them up.  I'm not a fan of canning, but it makes for a wonderful feeling when you are done, and there are all those jewel-like jars on the pantry shelves.  It's very comforting to have something "put by," as they used to say.  We are in the process of filling the shelves again:

We have a spare cat in the pantry in case we need one.

That's about all that's going on right now.  I think it's enough for the time being.

Cool weather finally has returned to the Northwoods, with temps in the 70s and humidity in the 40s.  That sure was a relief!  Work has progressed at an incredibly slow pace while it's been hot.  My energy and stamina decrease as the heat and humidity rise, so getting the old milk house torn down could have probably been accomplished more efficiently by a passing glacier.  But most of the old rough-sawn wood siding is off now. 

 If you have a house that's over 60 years old and wonder what your insulation looks like, click on this next picture and check out the magnified image:

How embarrassing--our insulation is down around our ankles

Then, there's the hideous finding of several billion dead ladybugs.  If you want a visual on the national debt, substitute a dollar for each bug:

Eww.

There is still so much that needs to be done to make the barnyard safe for the animals; there are piles of crap everywhere just begging for a horse to run in and break or sever something:

And all those tires!  I still find this hard to believe, but there actually is no public access landfill in Price county, and none of the trash services here accept used tires.  There are more than 30 of them littering the property.  Most of the locals suggest burying them but I'm not equipped to dig such a large hole (we just got a quote for $450 to have that hole dug and the leftover dirt graded around the barn to drain rain water away from the foundation.  That isn't happening anytime soon.) and don't like the idea anyhow.   Oh, well.  I'll just concentrate on getting the milk house down and that particular mess cleaned up and see what kind of time I have left after that.  As for the animals, they seem to be ignoring the mountains of dangerous stuff so far.  With horses, you're always just a few minutes away from a major accident--they're incredibly good at injuring themselves--but ours seem to have some unusual sense (or luck).  So far.  We may not be able to get the milk house rebuilt before winter sets in but at least it won't fall on some unsuspecting 4-legged (or 2-legged!) creature.  I do hope, though, to have a new building up and a pump in the well before the cold season sets in so I don't have to drag jugs of water across the yard all winter again.

With limited physical resources, as I've said before, things happen painfully slowly.  But they do happen.  I just have to hang on to that thought.  For now, I think I'll have a beer.

Thunder Follows Lightning

How sad.  Mom went out to the hen house yesterday and found that Thunder had passed away, too.  They were never far away from each other in life, and now they are together under the daylilies beside their Northwoods home.  We don't have a picture of Thunder, but I wanted to note her passing anyhow.  I'm glad they are reunited, on the prowl for mousies and crickets in the endless fields of tall grass in Cat Heaven.

We Say Goodbye to Another Old Friend

The only picture of Lightning we could find.  It's blurry, but then she was rarely still in the old days

One stormy afternoon seventeen years ago, in Mom's first Cheesehead incarnation, a tiny black and white kitten popped out of the tall grass surrounding the Viroqua property, mewing pitifully.  Being who they were, Mom and Norma immediately raced to provide sustenance to the poor thing before the storm moved in.  The kitten waited until they had moved off and sniffed at the plate of food, but took off into the grass without touching it.  "It must be too scared to eat," they thought, but it reappeared a few minutes later along with another kitten that looked just like it.  Both babies proceeded to demolish the food in the dish, and from that day on they were a part of the South Asbury Road menagerie, de-mousing the barn and prowling the neighborhood under the names Thunder and Lightning.  Lightning had a white blaze on her face that really did look like a lightning bolt; Thunder actually looked a lot like Adolph Hitler, but they were found during a storm, after all and I guess "Hitler and Lightning" just didn't sound right...

At any rate, after a good long run we had to say good bye to Lightning this past week.  She died peacefully in her sleep and was buried beside the old hen house where Thunder still lives.  It was a very sad day for both of us, but especially for Mom, as Lightning was one of the last links to the happy times in Viroqua.  Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.