Fall Is Here

October has arrived, along with the Bug-of-the-Month, the Japanese beetle.  Thousands of them spent the first week of the month crawling up the sunny sides of the house, trying to get inside.  A certain number were successful at that, but a few minutes with the vacuum cleaner took care of them.

We had to pick buckets of green tomatoes before an early freeze, and have been waiting for them to ripen enough to can.  They finally got to the point where we could work with them, so Mom and I have spent several days canning and drying tomatoes. 

Mom's salsa, which I've already sampled--it's great!

Cherry (left) and grape (right) tomatoes ready for the dehydrator

We thought this crab apple looked like an old man smoking a cigar.

Mom's crab apple jelly, which also tastes terrific!

 We still have a few things to take care of.  I just finished dehydrating some Roma tomatoes and we want to experiment with dehydrating some apple slices:

There are plenty of apples to share with the barn people.

 And Dick next door traded a box full of his good potatoes and a couple butternut squash for a couple of loads of manure.  We certainly had enough to spare!

Indian summer is over, now and the colder weather is setting in.  Time to put in hay (we used over 200 bales last year!) and make sure all the hatches are battened, so to speak.  It's a busy time of year but one that I really love.  Getting everything set up so that everyone is warm and dry for the winter makes me feel all warm and maternal.  It's one of my favorite pastimes.
So we've been busy but happy Little Old Ladies in the Big Woods!

Images from the last post

Hmmmm.  For some reason, the images in my last post weren't viewable.  Since several people have asked me to try it again, I'm going to try to post just the photos, in the order in which they appear in the original post.  If we still can't see them, I don't know what else to do, but I suspect people will somehow go on to live perfectly happy lives without them...  Here goes:

Hadjo gets a new sweatshirt, Al gets a little more peace of mind.

Hey, check this out--I actually started and finished a project in the same afternoon!  Bella, I'm embarrassed to admit, is a bit of a bully at feeding time and has been harassing poor Al Capony while he's minding his own business in his stall.  It seems the 5-foot stock panel between them isn't tall enough to keep Ms. Giraffe Neck out of trouble, so I had to make an extension.  I used 1.5" PVC pipe, which is lightweight but strong enough to stand up to her curiosity.  It won't hold up to a determined assault, but she's pretty good at respecting visual barriers so it has worked like a charm so far.



I may look a little drunk in this picture, but I assure you I wasn't.



Seems to do the trick.

Now everyone can eat in peace.

Hadjo knows he's supposed to stay on the other side of the gate,

But he hates it when I talk nice to the horses!

Yesterday Hadjo's new sweatshirt came, finally!  The temperatures have been hovering between 55 and 65, so my little wiener dog has been shivering for a couple weeks.  His old sweater finally disintegrated and it's been a real challenge finding a new one that fits him.  This one is--ahem--a bit tight, but will keep him warm enough to get through the fall weather.  Now that I know this company's size range, I'll order him a slightly larger sweater for the winter months.

I feel so much better!

 

This property protected by Hadjo T. Dog.

Better get back to work.  It's been raining for the last 7 days straight, so I've been working on the little 9x8 foot bedroom that will house my office and the smaller loom.  The bottom of each wall is painted now; next I'll put up the wallpaper I bought five years ago for the office I never finished in North Carolina.  Maybe I'll have better luck with this one!

Odds and Ends

Here are a few miscellaneous pictures and the occasional odd thought bouncing around inside my head:

Fall has arrived!

Any other person, walking down our road:  "Gosh, those trees sure are pretty!"

Me, walking down the same road:  "Oh no, oh no!!!  Winter's almost here!!!  I don't have the stupid milk house down yet!!  I don't have the west barn wall reinforced!!  I need to put in a supply of shavings and straw!!  There's no pump in the barn well yet!!  We never got a wood stove or a generator...etc, etc"

Sigh.

A couple views of a strange-looking cloud floating by

According to the TV commercials, I'm supposed to tell my doctor to prescribe me the latest drug.  I'm also supposed to tell him what allergies I have and if I have a history of bleeding ulcers.   Then, I need to tell him about the other drugs I'm taking.  Apparently, my doctor is a total moron who should not be allowed to practice medicine.  I should start seeing my television for all my medical care instead.

Everyone here is on a diet lately:

Sasha checks her weight

 So I've started walking with Hadjo a little at a time.  The vet said to start out slow,  let him set the pace according to what's comfortable for his poor knees.  We have gone 1/4 mile so far.  He prefers to walk himself, though:

A pit bull pulling on a leash that's held together with tape.  Not reassuring to strangers.

And he's gotten to where I can just drop the leash altogether and he'll take himself inside:

The pasture is looking a little ratty so late in the year, but the Barn People are still getting plenty of snack time in.  As a matter of fact, they are putting in way more time there now than they did all summer--the frosts and the one freeze we had pretty much killed off the damned bugs.  Most of them, anyhow...

Aaaaaah!!  I didn't get that hayloft closed up over the summer!!

Whatcha doin', Mom?  Got grain?

I just trimmed Bella's bangs and she's irritated because she thinks she looks stupid.

I realized the other day that we could probably eliminate the entire national debt and balance the budget if we just declared a 6-month moratorium on personal injury and class-action lawsuits...

The apple tree is so full of ripe apples now that it's broken off a large branch.  Bad management on our part, but we were distracted by other things.

LOTS of apples!

They are baking apples, not eating apples--they're a little small and pretty tart, but really good.  So far I've picked 2 bins full.  We'll preserve some and pack several bins in straw to give to the Barn People over the winter.  They'll like that.

Well, time to go do something before winter gets here.

Back to Work

It's been a couple weeks again since I last posted.  As happens in late summer around here, the weather has been swinging rapidly between hot/humid and cold/windy; when that happens, I live in perpetual flare-up and spend lots of time in bed.  I think we're finally done with summer, though, and hopefully I'll acclimate quickly to the steadily cooling temps.  This is my very favorite time of year, and I'm looking forward to being able to work and play outside without having to deal with millions of insects.

Last weekend was the 10th anniversary of 9/11.  How could so much time have passed so quickly?!  Tony came up to visit for a couple of days and while he was here he helped us raise the old flag pole that had been broken off about a foot above ground (probably by a snowplow).  Thank God he was here--this was one of those projects I had thought would only take an hour or two; turned out the pole is made of cast iron and was a royal pain in the ass to drill and to set upright! 

Tony makes sure the pole is plumb

He got it done, though, and we were able to fly the flag at half-mast on Sunday.



Our flag flies for Patriot Day

 It was nice to see Tony again--we really miss having him drop by every afternoon on his way home from work.  We also miss having him come running when something scary is going on.  Thanks for making the trip, bro!

Over the weekend I watched some of the television programming related to the 9/11 memorial, parts of which opened on Sunday.  At first, I was annoyed to hear they were building another World Trade Center, but when I found out it was going up on the periphery of Ground Zero I felt better.  The actual site of the original twin towers is being left untouched, a very big deal when you consider that the business community considers this to be some of the most valuable real estate on the planet.  The "footprint" of each tower has been turned into a waterfall memorial, with the names of each person who died in the attacks engraved into the surrounding walls.  In between is a memorial museum and they are building a new transit station that has been oriented in such a way that on every September 11th at 10:38 a.m. (the time the second tower collapsed) a shaft of sunlight will shine down the middle of the station.  Very cool.  Also, very American--business as usual on one hand, respect for the fallen and a fitting tribute on the other.  It would be nice if the corporate community would operate with that kind of empathy on a regular basis.  We can always hope for that, I suppose.  While we're at it, let's hope and pray that a day will come when innocent people don't have to pay the price for the religious intolerance, xenophobic arrogance and plain old greed of a few.  That's just my humble opinion, of course...

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.