Winding down

My vacation is down to just a weekend now. I'm a little verklempt. Monday morning is going to hurt. But I don't care – I have a couple more days to sleep in, putter about, bake. It's good. (Today, it's good. Ask me Monday and you'll hear whining.)

Got the kitchen roughed in. We gained a five-foot counter with six drawers and two cupboards, and a baker's rack to hold big old lard cans and gallon jars full of staples. Opened the space up, too. I was disappointed to find that none of my salvaged upper cabinets would work, so I guess I'll do a couple of sets of open shelves. Em and Richard gave us the new counter. It's a nice one, maple, I think. Half of my Craig's List cupboards are solid wood with panel doors, but in awkward sizes. The rest are 1970s wood-grain contact paper over particle board. Gah. I'll keep looking for some decent cabinets to replace the baker's rack. It's a work in progress, you know.

Earl doesn't like the new kitchen arrangement. He keeps catching sight of his reflection in the black fridge, and barking like crazy. Idiot.

So the kitchen will be better. Tomorrow I'll slither around in the crawl space and run water to the ice maker, then see what kind of open shelves I can throw together, and try to find everything a home and put the pantry back together (I dumped everything nonessential there while moving kitchen furniture). Or maybe I'll sit on my butt and read and eat chocolate-chip-and-oatmeal cookies. Who can say.

I can hear C. talking to Smokey in the bathroom. He's back there permanently since one or more of his offspring tried to rip his throat out. They all have little nicks and scabs from little squabbles – no big deal – but Smoke had a big gash on each side of his throat. We trimmed the fuzz away from his wounds and slathered on Neosporin. We have some farm antibiotics if the situation becomes desperate, but the rabbit gut is a delicately balanced thing and it's better to leave it be. I like Smokey. He's a good boy, quite housebroken and friendly, and I'm happy to have him back. C. brought Marty over to spend few days with Smokes, since he was being picked on, and while he's friendly and sweet, he's a terrible pig. Litterbox? What's that? I'd go in to pee, and feel like I was curling – broom in hand, sweeping furiously toward my goal. I'm old, and I'm in a hurry! So now Smokey is lone lord o' the loo, Marty is back home with the group and his brother Plumb Bob is in a cage until he can stop being a bully.

The big animals are fine. They have the run of the barn, snowy pasture and garden, and come over and greet me when I feed the chickens. Or maybe they're lobbying for treats. They have 16 bales of grass hay left, and that should last about four months – I think we'll make it to spring. I should start making fodder for them to stretch the hay supply. But I'll probably read and eat cookies.

OK. I have to go stay up late now. I'm on vacation!

I'm an idiot

But I'm OK with that.

I've got the kitchen deconstructed, the china cabinet moved out and a big stretch cleared for the fridge and some cabinets from Craig's List. There is stuff everywhere. So it must be time to bake cookies, right? Yup. Hey, I needed chocolate. I suppose it would have been smarter to buzz up to the One-Stop and buy some. Hadn't thought of that till now. Anyway, the house smells great, and I'm sitting here with a plate of cookies and a glass of fresh cow's milk.

C. is outside sawing wood up into stove lengths. Soon I'll suit up and trudge out there and haul it in.

Then I'll get her to help me push the giant black fridge over to the north wall. I haven't moved the water line for the ice maker yet, in case we decide the new spot is a bad idea. It looks good on the graph paper, but you can't be sure until you see it for real. For me, anyway. I like to move furniture, and figure out the most comfortable, efficient layout for a room. It makes C. nervous, though. She fears change. I keep telling her that change is how things get better. "Or worse," she replies darkly.

I spent the whole afternoon yesterday getting supplies in Deer Park. A gallon of milk from Rose, who keeps cows, six dozen eggs from Charlotte, whose chickens actually lay through the winter. A depth gauge for the chain saw, gas for the Subie ($25 for a full tank!), air for tires, groceries, cracked corn for the birds, yada, yada. The fridge is full again. Pay day is a wonderful thing.

I'm heading out to get the wood in before dark. It's 18 degrees out. Have to find my Sponge Bob toque.

Here's to a good year!

Now the cold comes

So we've had a couple of snowy days, and today a wicked cold wind moved in. Brrrrrr.

I've been sitting on my butt reading and slurping tea since Christmas. Today I decided to get a few things done, starting with the chicken-yard roof, which collapsed overnight under the snow and ice. It's set up like a circus tent with heavy wires running up to a center pole, and chicken wire and bird netting draped over that. The wires popped loose on the west half, and C. helped me stretch them back into place.

C. went inside and banged the snow loose. At least now the birds can booble around in the fresh air without worrying about hawks or owls. They decided it was too cold for boobling, though, and went in to bed early.

That was it for outside work on this cold day (supposed to get down to zero tonight).

I've decided to work on improving the kitchen, something we've been thinking about for a long time. Basically, there's a nine-foot-long island of three cabinets with sink and dishwasher. The wall space is taken up with our giant fridge, our vintage pink stove (also huge), our big countertop microwave/convection oven and two old wheeled cabinets from a home-ec classroom. And an old china cabinet from the church near our Ancestral Home. Our baking is done on an eight-foot stretch of 1890s-era cupboard on the back side of the island, so any time you are baking and need the fridge or sink or stove you have to walk all the way around the island. Every time I bake something I get all pissed off. (And I like to bake. It leads to eating baked goods.) So the plan is to move the china cabinet out into the dining room, which means moving the shelf of craft-supplies-that-must-not-freeze out of there. So I'm making a tall cupboard from a stack of scrounged upper kitchen cabinets in a corner of the dining room for the art supplies. That's Step 1. (They will be so ugly that I am confident C. will be driven to paint them. Step 2.) Moving the china cabinet and contents (mostly canned and dried food) is Step 3. Thinking about all this has made me tired. Better find another book and put the kettle on.

I made another experimental chocolate-and-peanut-butter thing, but bought puffed rice instead of crispy rice so it's soggy instead of crispy. Idiot! But it's chocolatey and peanut-buttery, and tolerable with tea. And I'm experimenting with herbed dough in the bread machine, hoping to come up with rolls that are delicious under the broiler with bubbly cheese. (That's not hard, as anything, probably even cardboard, is delicious with bubbly cheese.) I used fresh basil from the plants C. brought in from the garden, and some crumbled dried tomatoes.

We're broke until payday, Wednesday, so we're making do with whatever is in the cupboards – lots of canned goods, not so much butter, eggs and milk.

C. is obsessed with gathering tiny, tiny guinea feathers from the chicken house. I think it's weird, unlike my obsessions, which are brilliant and compelling.

The feathers are kind of cool, actually, with their tiny polka dots.

Snow day

We got over three inches today. I braved the roads to Spokane for C.'s favorite kind of beer (Labatts, in case you want to send us a few cases:) and here are some miscellaneous snow photos, including a minor wreck on Highway 2 and Westmoreland Road. Yes, I know they're not great, but I was driving!

Recovering from Christmas

It's warm in here, and quiet. The kids were all up for the Christmas thing yesterday, and we overdosed on Telli's fudge and took turns opening presents. It was good. Everyone was here, and everyone was gracious – even about their weird, handmade, grandma presents. We have a nice bunch of people in our family.

Of course I rushed around and made presents madly in the two days preceding the event. In posh years C. and I make and buy presents. In tight years, we make everything. Those poor children. :) We're all just lucky the kids are past the age of requiring fancy electronics or sports gear now that we have a giant house payment and animals to support.

So C. made K. a philosopher's scarf, grey and black wool fashioned into a rude-gesture motif. It was cool. I made KC a Man Necklace from parts ripped from a car at the junkyard. C. made Em a felted anatomical heart pin with beaded arteries and veins. I made R. a fishing charm out of a vintage brass lure. I cleaned up and waxed some old tin ceiling tiles for folks to hang on the wall. And C. made me a Flat Earl floor cloth that looks just like Earl laying frog-legged on the floor. It's awesome.

It's always fun to see what the kids get each other, and the thought they put into the presents. No, they don't make the presents, but that's OK.

There was apple pie and baklava and fudge and soup. And fake mustaches and general silliness. It was good.

We're worn out. And I have a hell of a mess to clean up on the dining room table where craft supplies have been dragged out, and failed experiments are piled up. Like the 22 shells I tried to drill for more Man Jewelry (don't try it without a drill press!) and the buttons sticky with expired epoxy. Maybe I'll tackle that tomorrow.

I'm working up to consuming more fudge.

Playing catch up

Merry Christmas!

Haven't posted for ages. What has happened over the last three weeks? C. dug up all the sun chokes, and they're packed in sand in the hall. Um… Em and Richard came up and hauled firewood several times. I went to work. Oh, yeah, the rabbits chewed a water supply line and flooded their room, and had to be moved in the middle of the night to our bathroom, where they stayed for a week. And what a week! Cheeky little bastards. But after we dried out the rabbit room, we put Smokey in first and now he is the Rabbit MAN. No more beatings from his uppity sons. Or his uppity daughter. He seems happy to be with his fellows, but I miss him a little. So our bathroom is now rabbit-free, and litter-box free, and rabbit-den free. AND LEAK FREE, because I poked my head up into the attic, mapped the leaks, traced them to cracks or popped nails on the roof and patched them. We've only had minor rains, but it's holding so far. Huzzah! And tonight, just a little while ago, there came a booming crash. Now part of the bathroom is ceiling-free. A whole section of sheetrock, tired of being dripped on, came right down. How weird is that? And the roofer showed up. That's pretty weird, too. He put some magical sticky rubber stuff on the leaking drainpipe in my studio, and measured and contemplated the extremely porous drain by the back door. He also suggested we put another dry well in the west dog yard to take the load off the main dry well, wherever they put it in 1936.

Here are some misc. photos, including Earl being froggy, and the bathroom former ceiling.