Come From Away

Not much going on today. . .

Bought four new tires for the van on Monday ($480 ) and tools to sharpen my chainsaw. Hamish was over today to give me some pointers and we sharpened our saws together. K meant to take a picture as we happen to have almost identical saws. She thought this was very funny, but somehow we escaped.

Tomorrow will be a huge day of cutting wood and I am looking forward to working hard and feeling tired. . . Friday will be a day of tossing wood into the basement and stacking it up down there.

The fence is still also an ongoing project and I am plugging away on it. Little D and I did a little bit of work in it today. We changed two boards and added some nails in places where for some reason there was only one nail on each side of the board. Although this is enough to hold the boards on, they tend to warp because they are not being held in place flat against the posts. The next part of the fence work will be the worst part: scraping loose paint and then a quick coat of white.

I’ve been re-using the old boards that I take of the fence by trimming off the rotten ends. I used some of this wood to make a sort of fence in the basement to stop the bucked up firewood from bouncing against the furnace and to make a sort of guard that protects the pipe from the oil tank to the furnace (a necessary adjustment in my mind). Whatever boards are left are going to be used to build some nesting boxes in the barns for the chickens. Hopefully this will encourage them to lay in a more “standard” location. Right now, they lay their eggs in a number of places around the barn. It’s kind of fun having an easter egg hunt every day, but sometimes it would be nice to just walk in and grab the eggs.

Hamish brought us another chicken today. “Gimpy” is missing half a wing on the left side and was being picked on by his other birds. We are hoping that she will fare better in our barn as the chickens have a lot more room than in his converted outhouse. If all goes well, we may end up with the other four that he has as he wants to “get out of the chicken business, right now.”

I guess there were a few things happening today after all!

Strangely enough, people here still talk in miles when giving directions and such.

The 70 mile yard sale is just that: a yard sale that just goes on and on and on. They publish a booklet for the sale that announces “official” yard sale sites, but many others just take advantage of it and put a sign by the road. “Big D” had his picture in the booklet as did his whole class from school.

People drive at 70 kph on the high way and jam on their brakes at a moments notice to turn up some one’s drive way to get a deal on something. It’s really not fun if you are trying to actually get somewhere.

The neighbour has a beauty of a pickup that I checked out, but am still undecided. Since it is still in his front yard with a for sale sign on it, I figure I can wait a while. It’s a red (repainted with spray paint) Ford F150, 1987, fully automatic. It seems to be in surprisingly good shape. Someone has replaced the floor in the cabin and battery charge gauge requires a knock on the dash (a la Fonzy) to get tit to kick in. He’s asking $1000 for it. . .

K went out early with our little B to see if there was any good stuff and returned with an old fashion wash stand. I had given her a pitcher and wash basin the week before and they look beautiful together.

We also picked up two old dining room chairs. They are painted a bold blue and they may be repainted. We had a couple of chairs break on us and have been living with shuffling chairs for every meal, so it’s nice to just sit down to dinner now…

Hi Uncle Frank,

Can you come pick me up? I am just outside of the town of Launching on the Corner of Launching and Launching.
(As always, click to see larger image)

I have heard people talk about different plants being male or female and that for some to produce fruit, you need to have them planted near each other so that one can pollinate the other. Apparently, you can tell with tomatoes by the fruit they produce. See if you can guess which of these is male.

We got our wood delivered today. A huge logging truck with a claw on the top to load/unload the truck arrived and dropped it next to the driveway.

We know that we will need about 8 cords of wood to heat for the entire winter. Since we ran out of wood at the end of last year and had to run the oil furnace, we bought a couple of extra cords. Given the price of oil these days, we want to ensure that we can heat exclusively with wood for the whole winter this year.

11 cords of wood = $825
Pretty good for heating our place for 1+ seasons!

Now all I have to do is cut it all into 2.5 foot long pieces, split the bigger pieces, throw it into the basement and stack it all up! The kids are already excited about tossing it down the shoot. Somehow, I have instilled into them the pleasure of wood stacking