Powerball Dreams

As anyone in the United States with a pulse was likely aware, last Wednesday's Powerball payout rose to1.5 billion dollars.

Suffice it to say that I, like most of us, did not win that lottery. Dammit.

(Excuse me for a moment while I collect myself)...

Of course, as most of use learn somewhere along the way, the odds of winning any lottery of that sort are infinitesimal. And still, many of us buy a ticket when the jackpots get big.

For me, the purchase of that lottery ticket is a small price of entry into a period of several days of delightful fantasy - the what-ifs that go along with having an obscene amount of income. My rough, back of the envelope calculations put the annuity payout option at somewhere around $30 million a year after taxes. After giving it due consideration I thought: I could live on that.

It's probably been a decade or more since I last purchased a lottery ticket, and what surprised me a bit this time around was the nature of things about which I fantasized. In younger days my lottery purchases gave license to extensive mental debates about which exotic cars to purchase - Porsche or Ferrari? Would a Lamborghini Diablo be a reasonable daily driver? I could just toss the grocery bags on the passenger seat...

This time around it was the house, almost exclusively. All of the needed updates to the kitchen, the addition of a bathroom or two, adding on an attached garage, restoring the old barn, and on and on. Given the size of that jackpot, I allowed myself to play with the idea of lifting the house and replacing the old, porous foundation with something a bit more water-tight. And, while we were at it, why not convert everything to solar and wind power?

Discussing this with LB actually led to an extensive debate, in particular about that attached garage. She was concerned that it might change the character of the old girl too significantly, and then things went, well, a little awry. By the end of the discussion we agreed that perhaps we should install an underground parking garage that attached to the basement. But while we were able to compromise on that point, we could not agree on how to enter said garage. LB was arguing for the simplicity of a ramp, but I was angling for a car elevator hidden in the driveway, activated only after a gate closed and blocked the view from the road.

Because then I'd be one step closer to being Tony Stark.

I'd like to argue to argue that this change in perspective reflects growth, a development of maturity.

I'd like to argue that.

Ugh!

Last year I set up rigid foam insulation to cover the coffin doors that make up the west-facing front door of the house. It's my recollection that this worked nicely throughout the winter, with just a tiny bit of maintenance required.

This winter has been different.

It's been a mild winter, all told, but the winds tonight are something special. I'm not sure what is more special - the sounds of the tape tearing away from the wall as the wind pushes the insulation away from the doors, or the frigid winter air forcing its way into the house.

It makes me wonder - under what circumstances were these doors, facing the direction of the prevailing wind, considered a good idea?

First Snow

The first snow of 2016 came last yesterday. We had not a light dusting, but rather enjoyed a few inches of the white stuff - enough to cover the huge fir tree outside my office window with clumps of snow.

What starts out as a simple, clean blanket of white when it falls typically becomes a series of drifts and valleys, as the prevailing wind winds its way around the house, outbuildings, and trees. Its all a lovely sight, particularly from the warmth of the house.

This has been an odd season, as anyone living in the region can report. Today's single digit high stands in sharp contrast against the (relatively) balmy temperatures of just a few days ago. My entire life here in the Midwest people - mostly farmers - have been heard to say "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute - it'll change". This seems to be more true as time goes on, with the specter of of climate change looming.

Though it's our first snow for the year, it's not the first touch of winter weather for the season. Just ahead of the end of the year - on both Christmas Eve-eve, which I wrote about here a couple of weeks ago, and in the week between - freezing rain caused us to lose power. The first event was brief - an overnight occurrence. The second was nearly two full days. Power outages of multiple days at a time are an occurrence we are somewhat familiar with out here. I want to say that we've had at least one a winter since we moved here, though looking through actual records suggests it's more sporadic than that, and not isolated to winter.

ComEd will, if you ask, send texts reporting power outages in your home (in case you weren't aware of it, I guess), and then send updates on their progress in restoring service. This communication from them is somewhat of a mixed bag. While you are sitting in the dark of your home, snuggling for warmth under a blanket, listening to the high winds whip their way past the window, you can receive a helpful text that says:

Outage to area [your address] analyzed. Probable cause: severe weather.

This, of course, is slightly less helpful than one might hope. And it's then often followed by predictions of a day and time at which your power will be restored. Those restoration targets appear to be based on an algorithm that uses hope and imagination as its primary variables. ComEd does not employ the Jobsian principle of under-promising and over-delivering.

Now, to be entirely fair, every time the power goes down the linemen are out, actively working, often in awful conditions, to restore power. And I'm quite sure they aren't responsible for that reporting algorithm.

Wind Toll

They sacrificed themselves in service of our stuff... 

The winds the night before the night before Christmas - or, if you like, Christmas Eve-Eve - were severe, and resulted in multiple power outages over the course of the night and well into the following day. This is not unusual, of course - I've written here about our struggles with the wind several times before.

While the power certainly does not go out each time the wind blows, outages seem to be a more common occurrence out here than in a city or town. This can be particularly problematic for us because, while we love living in a house from the 1800's, we have no intention of living like people in the 1800's. We have our fair share of modern electronic devices and, as a rule, they don't generally appreciate abrupt changes in power delivery.

Key to the general health of those items is the use of a surge protector, we have all been led to believe for the past twenty years or more. For me, however, this has always been an intellectual understanding only. I have dutifully plugged my devices into a variety of power strips over the years, but I've never had occasion to actually see them as more than just an outlet extender or fancy extension cord. In honesty, I've wondered on more than on occasion whether the "surge protection" part of the power strip wasn't just marketing.

How many times the power went out over the course of the night, and of the following morning, is unclear. What was clear, however, is that they took with them two power strips and a fuse.

The soldiers in the picture gave up their lives in service of our electronics. As best I can tell, the delicate devices all seem to be functioning as expected, despite their rough treatment. Apparently it's not just marketing after all.

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For the record, on our computers we have not only surge protectors, but battery backup units. These connect to the computers via USB and, when the power goes out, keep the computers running long enough to initiate a controlled, automatic standard shutdown. This helps prevent the damage or corruption of hard drives that can occur with an unexpected shutdown.

Time for Wrapping...

They are a pretty thing. But pretty things aren't always good for you... 

Like many people around this time of year I have a ritual that involves wrapping things. But, in my case, instead of gifts, I'm wrapping windows and doors.

This isn't new, of course, I've written about it here before. I'm a little behind schedule this year (though being behind schedule on this task may actually be an annual occurrence). The freakishly warm weather this December has made it easy to put off the task, though high winds and temps in the 20's at night the past couple of days have fully illustrated my negligence. I am pleased to say that, with the addition of the new windows I have six fewer items to wrap up.

The most important area to address - and the thing I will likely tackle first - is the front doors. The formal "coffin doors" that present as the front entrance to the home are, like so many of the windows, original equipment. They are a lovely thing, as far as it goes, but they leak air like a sieve. In addition, the past couple of seasons have been hard on the side glass as well, requiring things to be covered and taped up, and the tape's adhesive has a limited shelf life.

This means that, for the sake of our comfort and our gas bill, we won't get to see these guys from now until the spring. Still, that's far better than the alternative. For the first couple of years that we lived here, before we started using the rooms upstairs, we simply closed off the entire central hallway for the entire winter.

Update - managed to get the two panels actually facing the same direction this time around!  And there's Jack, peeking from behind the bannister.  

Aid and Comfort

The uninitiated may not recognize it, but this is a rodent utopia... 

This past summer I wrote about having a mouse in my car. That episode ended with a declaration of victory, as I gloated over the body of my enemy.

I may have won the battle, but the war appears not to be over.

When the fields come down the mice (and the shrews and the deer and...) evacuate and look for new shelter. What became clear, upon examination, is that we were offering that shelter in our garage - in effect, giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Aid and comfort, in this case, in the form of clutter and bird seed.

This intrusion was detected in a fashion that presented a sense of deja vu strong enough to make me wonder if I really was in The Matrix, given that it involved detecting entry into a bag of pistachios. Again. A bag that LB and I had been eating out of just a few minutes before.

It wasn't a large hole this time, but rather a couple of smaller holes in the side of the bag towards the bottom. These were small enough that I tried to convince myself that it was from throwing the bag in the back of the car with other items, that it was simply torn up a bit. But then I pulled a bag out of the back of the car and found the edge of it had been chewed on. It was just a little bit, mind you, but clearly chewed on, and I knew...

Pulling everything out of the hatch of the car and checking the spare tire compartment under the floor revealed that the enemy had established a base in my territory, and they were clearly recruiting new soldiers - there were babies, which had fallen out of the nest as I was moving things around. No quarter had been asked, and so none was given - green recruits or not, I showed no mercy. Of course, while the offspring had been vulnerable and revealed, the parents were still nowhere to be found.

Then, a few days later, it became clear that at least one of them had died somewhere in the car. I say "somewhere", because wherever it was, I was not able to locate it. Based upon how much worse it got when one activated the ventilation system, however, one suspects that it was somewhere in the vents. Needless to say, we took several trips with the windows always down at least a little bit. In November.

The weekend after Thanksgiving LB and I tackled the problem by cleaning out the garage and setting traps in both cars. The garage part of the project itself was long overdue, and involved removal of a couple of very large bags of birdseed - the 20# variety - neither of which appeared to have an unshelled sunflower seed left in them. We also, as noted before, cleared out an extensive amount of the clutter that had been gathered over the course of the spring and summer. This, again, reflecting one of the difficulties with being a part-time homesteader: I've wanted to clean the garage out for some time, but it just hasn't been something I've been able to prioritize. For every trade off like that there is a price to pay.

Before starting the cleanup of the garage LB and I traveled to a hated large big-box store to gather additional weaponry (traps) and set them up in both cars. We actually caught our first mouse, in MLW's car, before we had finished cleaning the garage. In the week or so that has followed we have managed to take out six additional mice. For those keeping score, we've caught six of the seven on snap traps, and one on glue traps. Two of the snap traps - part of the additional supplies we'd gathered - are an apparently new design by Victor, the folks that make the traditional wood snap trap that you likely picture any time you hear the word "mousetrap". It's made of plastic rather than wood, and has a little bait well that the mouse has to push his evil little nose into. Lifting the lid on the well triggers the snap. I was skeptical, but the big-box store didn't have any wood traps, so I bought them.

They work very well. They are actually easier to set - you just pull the snap arm back, there's no fiddling with hooking the restraining bar on the bait doohickey. Also, it appears that, most of the time the mouse is actually unable to get at the bait, which means that it doesn't have to be refilled nearly as often.

Unfortunately, my early success with this new weaponry made me complacent. I'd taken out seven of them between the two cars, and each time required a resetting, and sometimes re-baiting of traps, and so it became easy to set the traps aside to deal with later. Lack of mousey evidence gave a sense of confidence.

And then, the day before yesterday there was a pile of nesting material on the floor of my car, having apparently fallen down from the inside of the dashboard. The battle is not the war, and the war, clearly, must be waged further.

This left me wondering: should I have put the heads of the previous mice on spikes as a warning to others?

But that seems impractical...

The Differences

The Differences

We’ve been living in our Homestead for over six years now, and, given that it was my Grandmother’s home, I’ve been around it in one way or another for my entire life. I like to think I know this place pretty well.

I think the house enjoys proving me wrong.

Since I was young I recognized that door surrounds and kick panels on the back rooms of the house were plain, flat boards while those in the front rooms were intricate, multi-piece affairs. I’ve always understood this - in conjunction with the steep back staircase - as a part of the divided nature of the house - the back portion intended for the workers, the front for the owners and their guests.

The flat, simple woodwork around this (poorly hung) kitchen door is consistent with what can be found throughout the back side of the house, both upstairs and down...

...While this door, in the dining room, shows what the woodwork looks like in the front of the house. Well, in most of the front of the house...

Living here has shown us there is more.

We realized fairly early on in our stay that the windows on the back of the house were different than those on the front - six-pane divided lights per sash versus dual panes. When we started looking at replacing windows we also learned that the windows downstairs are taller than the ones upstairs.

The original front windows on the house have two divided panes per sash - one suspects that this was part of being a show-piece, and that those were the largest panes of glass they could get at the time; that they'd have gone with single panes per sash if they could have.

The back windows in the house have six-panel divided lights on top and bottom.  The bottom sash in this picture is not original to the house.

This week, for the first time ever I realized that the wood surrounding the windows and doors in the living room are different than anywhere else in the house. While all of the rooms at the front of the home have intricate, multi-level surrounds, the ones in that particular room are more intricate, and deeper than those in the rest of the home. They bevel out, instead of in, and stand a good 3" proud of the wall.

45 years of life in and around this house, and I’d never taken notice of that difference before. We discovered this hanging curtains, realizing that the brackets that came with the curtain were not long enough to stick out from the side of the window surrounds.

This is a door in the living room - note the way the surround builds out all the way to the outside edge...

...And it's not an optical illusion - the edge really does come out that far, standing outside the edge of the door framing.  The windows in this room all share this feature as well.

This closeup of the dining room door shows that, while it is also built out in a somewhat ornate fashion, it does not continue to radiate outward beyond the edge of the frame.

These are little things, I suppose, in the long run. To my mind, however, they illustrate some of the key differences in how people thought about their homes in the 1800’s as compared to today. Modern construction is often dictated by standard materials, while older buildings allowed for greater variability in design, relying upon the carpenter’s skills to make everything work. You can see the results of that in these old houses when you get behind the walls and into the attics and basements, where you will find boards cut at creative angles and joined in a fashion that clearly was determined on the spot.

There are also differences in how they planned to use the homes from modern day. It’s clear that the living room was intended to be a space for formal entertaining. In addition to the intricate woodwork around the windows and doors, this room is the only room in the house that has decorative wood paneling below the windows. The door to enter this room is right next to the formal staircase in the front entryway of the home.

The living room is the only place in the house where the window surrounds descend all the way to the floor, and where there is paneling below the window.  (The heating vents were (clearly) added later, with an eye towards practicality rather than attractiveness.  The house did not originally have central heating).

One imagines that John Foulk, in putting all of this together, pictured himself entertaining guests in this formal room, it presenting as a luxurious formal area providing comfort and visual interest; and - let’s be honest - making a statement about the level of success of its owner. And there was a community here. The church down road was built to serve the spiritual needs of the German-speaking settlers in the area, it’s stained-glass windows testifying to this still with script indicating “In Geftistet Von”[1] (donated by) followed by the person’s name.

Living in the house, seeing it, one wonders how much any of that actually happened in John Foulk’s time here. The bulk of the wood in the house is soft pine, and those formal steps look pristine, as if they were rarely trodden, while the steep, back stairwell shows the bevels and grooves from many a footfall. One suspects these decorative elements were put into place for the show, and then left to sit for those prospective guests, despite the fact they rarely actually came.

This is a component of our culture that still lingers, though it seems to finally be fading. How many of us within Generation X grew up in homes with at least one formal room that had to be there - “for guests” - which we were allowed maybe - maybe - to look at, but not to enter or touch? I am certain I am not the only person who grew up in fear of accidentally using the “good” towels to dry my hands (thanks Mom).

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1. I am well aware this may not be spelled correctly. Google Translate didn’t like it, and I remember looking it up years ago, as a teenager, in my English-German dictionary. I’m reproducing it here from memory, which may well be, at best, a little cloudy.  ↩

Windows on Life

We had our second set of new windows installed this summer, this time in LB’s room. Some of the old frames were left against our garage, waiting for me to put them… well… somewhere.

The wind (which has become a character in and of itself out here) was particularly brutal on Wednesday night (11/11/15). Combined with the rain it reached a level that ultimately caused me to actually pull off to the side of the highway on my way home from Rockford. It was not surprising, then, when I came out in the morning to see that some of the window frames had blown over and were laying in the grass.

One of the more challenging realities of being a “Part-Time Homesteader”[1] is that I’ve had to learn to quickly assess things that need to address and mentally set them aside if I don’t have time to deal with them in the moment. This means leaving things be when I’d really rather just take care of them. But - in this example - I was leaving for work with little margin for error with respect to travel time, and (as is often the case) it was still dark. For a while the need to do this bothered me - and I’m still frustrated when I see the things that I’ve not yet been able to address.

So I was finally able to address it this afternoon. Work gloves let me make fairly short work of the broken glass, and I actually broke out the Shop Vac and vacuumed the grass in hopes of avoiding the dogs opening themselves up on an errant shard.

This was the first opportunity I’d had to look closely at the windows, and what I realized was: the windows were in worse shape than I’d thought.

The example in this picture shows quite clearly that, at some point, an ancestor used metal brackets to keep one of the windows together. The difficulties that we have with these windows, and their ancient nature, aren’t new - previous generations have also had to deal with them. The window appears to be missing anything resembling glazing putty from the bottom of the panes as well, though that might have been knocked loose when they were removed (though I suspect not).

We had considered using these old windows as part of cold frames for growing vegetables through the winter, but the realization that the paint coating them is almost certainly thick with lead suggested that was not the finest of plans. So: for now they sit in the basement, broken, with uncertain futures ahead of them.

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1. “Part-time Homesteader” - what I mean here is that, while it would be great to be in a position to make my entire life and livelihood on the property we have, raising critters and crops thru subsistence farming, the reality is that I have to work to make it all possible. I don’t really regret that - I love what I do - but it very much puts me in two different worlds.  ↩

Autumn is Brief... In the Wind Farm

Autumn is probably my favorite time of year. 

I firmly believe that each season has something to offer, whether it's the budding and blossoming of spring, the outdoors activities that summer invites, or the beauty of a fresh snowfall. But Autumn has its own special nature, with the delight of the harvest, the shift in weather to crisp air that invites you to pull out that old jacket or sweater, and, of course, the beautiful array of colors that comes with the changing of the leaves. 

Here that part lasts about 12 seconds. Or so it seems. 

The naked trees you see are maples - the one in front, with Calamity sitting under it, keeping an eye on me, is relatively small.  The one further back is quite huge.  Anything tree-sized (as opposed to bush-sized) you see in the picture that seems to have anything on it is a pine or fir tree.

As we've detailed here before, our Homestead is nestled in a wind farm, and for good reason. But what this means for autumn colors is that, as the leaves change and begin to lose their hold on the branches from which they sprang forth, the wind rapidly whisks them away to become a carpet of red, brown, and orange across the lawn. One must avail oneself of the opportunity to view the trees in their autumn splendor as soon as one notices them changing, for that opportunity will be brief. 

A carpet of leaves.  But I'm not raking them - no sir!

There is an upside to this phenomenon, however. While the wind - and the number of windy days increases considerably in the spring and fall - denudes our trees too soon for my taste, it does offer the simple courtesy of cleaning up its mess. The first fall that we lived out here we went to the trouble of raking up the leaves. But the yard is big, and we weren't able to get to them all. 

After one particularly windy day I looked out across the yard and realized: the leaves, the ones that we hadn't raked, were gone. 

Haven't raked up a leaf since.

When Your Invisible Fence Disappears...

When we arrived home Wednesday evening I pulled up to the garage door and hit the opener. As the door slowly rolled open I heard it: the telltale sound of the alarm on the invisible fence transmitter, indicating that there was a break somewhere in the fence. 

This is a more familiar sound than one might expect. 

The invisible fence is, overall, a wonderful thing. It was far easier to put in, as well as being less expensive, than a traditional fence. Its also much more reliable  as a means for keeping the dogs in the yard than traditional fencing, not having gates to be left open or spaces for the determined canine to work her way through. And, when there is a fault in the fence, it lets you know. 

But when it goes down, when that alarm sounds, it means it's time for a search. 

Our property is relatively small as rural spots go - a little over two acres. But the invisible fence circles the entire perimeter, which gives a lot of territory to cover. Fortunately, this particular break offered an opportunity to narrow down the area of focus. My cousin, who owns the farm land on three of the four sides of us, had plowed that afternoon. This meant it was likely that he'd accidentally clipped the fence wire with his plow. This had happened before, this past spring, and it seemed too coincidental for these two events to be unrelated. 

When this had happened before I'd gotten lucky. I walked along the edge of the field and came across the wires, sticking up out of the ground, clearly cut. Of course, that time I'd discovered it in the daylight. This time I was getting home at 8 in the evening, and the sun had long since set. Still, I grabbed a flashlight, put the dogs in their pen, and started walking the edge of the field. 

My cousin saw me doing this and drove up alongside with the tractor. He asked if I was looking for something, and I explained the situation. "Well shit" he said "I'm sorry about that". He helped me look for a while, but it was clear that we weren't going to find it in the dark. It's hard enough to tell, from looking and memory, where exactly the fencing wire runs. And each time my cousin plows or plants the landscape changes slightly, changing the landmarks in subtle ways. 

One might wonder: why is he plowing close enough to the edge of the property to hit the invisible fence?  And the answer is that the fence installer (yours truly) did not have the foresight to consider farm activity when he put the wiring in, instead opting for going out as far out to the edge of the yard as seemed possible. I didn't allow for a safety margin in that respect, and so the fencing is vulnerable to any mishaps with respect to plow placement. At some point I will likely need to re-run sections of the wiring to correct for that error - something that occurred to me multiple times as I was searching for the break - but for now I simply wanted to get it all back up and working. 

Even in the daylight it's hard to fiind things along here...

I gave up for the evening and took the morning off of work the following day to undertake my search in light of day. After multiple passes, even in daylight, turned up nothing, it occurred to me that I was not actually 100% sure where the line ran, and so could not be sure that I was actually looking in the right places for a break. It was time for some problem-solving - I am a man of science, after all. 

I started by digging a series of small trenches perpendicular to the fence in order to uncover the wiring (in the process of which, I managed to cut the wire myself on one occasion). I spaced these out in positions across the edge of the yard so I could extrapolate the position of the wire between them. Then I put down stakes and garden fence posts, and ran string between them to determine the line that the wiring was following. 

I felt pretty darn clever about doing all of this and, indeed, it made it clear that I wasn't always looking in the right place. In some cases, the wiring was several inches, and sometimes up to a foot or more away from where I'd been searching. And, of course, now that I knew where the wiring should be I could focus my search in the correct area which, of course, yielded... 

...Nothing. I still could not find the break. 

During all of this activity a colleague had texted me with an article about using an RF Choke and a handheld AM Radio to locate the break. The gist of this is that additional device causes the fence to emit a signal even though it's broken, and the radio reads the signal. In places where the fence is broken, the signal changes or stops. Amazon turned out to have a pre-made version of this available, so I ordered it up and planned to address it over the weekend. Given that we've had to address this issue more than once over the past couple of years, it made sense to have something on hand to more quickly detect the breaks. 

Wire Break Locator kit as it comes in the box

The kit that came contained, ostensibly, everything needed to find a break in the line. Unfortunately, the little transistor radio that it included - which looked to have cost approximately $0.23 to make - worked for about 30 seconds after I opened it. This send me on a different search. 

It really isn't terribly surprising, in this day and age, but it is fiendishly difficult to find a store that carries handheld AM/FM radios any longer. Indeed, part of the reason that I had ordered the complete kit through Amazon was that the original article my colleague had sent suggested that the reader "run down to Radio Shack" to pick up the parts needed - and Radio Shack has been gone for a little while now...

No place in town seemed to have radios, so I took a shot at Wal-Mart in Peru. I generally regard entering a Wal-Mart as an event equally as pleasurable as having a root canal performed, but I was desperate to get this project up and running. And, it turned out, the hated big-box store did actually have two different options for portable radios. The one I picked looked slightly more robust than the one that had come in the kit - perhaps costing up to $0.27 to build - so I also picked up some batteries and tried it out in the parking lot to make sure it worked before I headed for home. 

Neither of the radio options at Wal-Mart had an external speaker, so I had to go with headphones.  Does anyone else besides me remember that Memorex used to be an audio casette tape company? 

This is the setup you walk the fence using.  The handle telescopes, and the radio is attached to the end of it with zip ties.  Not very fancy, but it is effective.  Unfortunately, the headphones weren't quite long enough for me to fully extend the handle and still use them, and while I'm certain I have a headphone extension cord somewhere, I absolutely could not find it (of course), so I spent a lot of time hunched over while I was searching.

From there it worked like a charm. The kit put out a signal that the radio picked up, and I was able to find and repair the breaks - there were two of them fairly close to one another on the north side of the property. The repairs themselves, once you find them, are really pretty easy to perform, and there are few things as satisfying as plugging in the transmitter and NOT hearing the alarm going off any longer. 

Plus the dogs were happy because they could now run free.

Once you actually find the break it's a pretty simple repair.

Ever Changing Scenery

It's hard to tell in the picture, but the bales are big, nearly waist high.  

Every fall, when they take the living fence down they aren't yet finished with the corn. The ears are gone, sucked up through the teeth of a giant combine and spit back out into the back of a slightly less giant truck, but the remnants of the stalks and husks remain.

In most cases they are simply left there to be plowed into the soil in preparation for the next season. Here, however, something different happens, and use is made of those leftovers. It offers yet another (albeit brief) change in the scenery, a part of the joy of living out here. And, though I am just a spectator, it makes me feel good to see additional use made of the corn plant, makes it seem somehow more productive and useful.

Don't Be Afraid of Making Bread

We love our rural homestead.  Our country home provides sanctuary from our busy, high-tech & stressful lives.  In the six years we have lived here we have learned to become more self-sufficient.  We can't just run to a corner store to get what we need.  

While living in Rockford we became accustom to tasty, crusty bread by La Brea bakery found in several of Rockford's grocery stores.  There are also several local bakeries that turn out soft on the inside & crusty outside breads, Mary's Market being one.

Moving to the country limited our access to our favorite breads, which is no small thing to our family.  A crusty bread completes a meal, like homemade spaghetti sauce or freshly made soup.  I have never considered myself a baker & have avoided baking breads or pie crusts. A month or so ago I made a curried zucchini soup that needed a great crusty bread to complete it. So I was left with two choices:  1)  Settle on a soft lesser bread.  2) Try my hand at baking bread.   

I choose to brave the bread baking world to make sure my soup had an complimentary partner.  I found a Rosemary bread recipe on-line. 

I also had to give myself a swift kick in the butt.  My Mum worked hard to teach me the kitchen basics & over the years I've built upon those skills.  At a very young age I watched my Scottish Grandma make a family shortbread recipe as well as meat pie crust.  My Ukrainian grandmother was always busy in the kitchen making a variety of pierogi, cabbage rolls & other Ukrainian favs.  Some of these family foods I have made, some are on my things to learn list.

Bread making was not on my learn list, but why?  I've learned to do so much, why sell myself short & deprive myself & my family of homemade bread?  There was no good reason other than I was afraid to fail. 

Rosemary Boule made with fresh rosemary from our garden.  In the background is my Emile Henry ceramic Dutch oven, which makes a great crusty bread.  I never knew a dutch oven could be used for bread making. 

A lovely vegetable soup, curried zucchini soup.

http://southernfood.about.com/od/soupandstew/r/bl60804c.htm

While looking for the original bread recipe, I tripped across a wonderful bread making book. 

My first Kindle cookbook.  In my effort to de clutter my house I have dramatically diminished my cookbook collection.  There is a learning curve to Kindle cookbook use, but worth it.  Yes, there is a hardcover version too.

This book makes bread making easy & accessible to everyone.  It doesn't matter if you are a novice cook or have a crazy schedule.  The authors have created recipes that require no kneading  & can sit in the fridge for 2 weeks.  That means you have dough ready to pull out, shape, rest &  bake.  Mix the ingredients in a dough bucket, sit on kitchen counter to rise for 2 hours & put in the fridge.  

When you want to bake a loaf, pull out & cut a grapefruit size, quickly shape & let rest according to the directions.  Then follow directions for baking to get your fresh artisanal bread.  During rising, resting & baking go about your every day routine.  

A fridge of bread doughs, a bucket of master recipe & a bowl of honey wheat dough.  I'm willing to give up some fridge space for fresh bread. 

The smell of fresh baked bread makes a home cozy, friendly & balanced.  The smell just makes one feel right.  With my husband's crazy schedule, that homemade bread brings him peace.  Tuna salad on fresh rye bread or honey wheat for his work lunch makes his day just a bit better.

Aunt Jean & her daughter Jesse, shared their love of Penzeys spices.  I have used their caraway seeds & lovely cinnamon to enhance my breads.  Finding higher quality ingredients makes a better end product.

Thanks to Jim & Julia, my in-laws, I have access to Amish made butter.  Just takes the bread to a new level. 

Butter crock to keep butter fresh & soft.  Also a linen bread bag to keep bread crusty on the outside. 

Baked rye while I canned some dilly beans from my garden. 

We are known for our tech savvy in this home, known for our iPhones & iPads.  Known for our love of movies & tv shows like Marvel, Sci-Fi, historical dramas & fantasy.  What would amaze most people at how often they could come to our house & find us chatting in the kitchen with no electronic devices.  We are gathered there because that's where I'm finishing bread or some canning.  Getting back to the basics has helped us slow down & connect as a family.  We use the dining room often to chat, play games or music while enjoying some new freshly made cocktail.

If I can do it so can you;) 

Puttering around my kitchen helps calms my mind & reinvigorates my soul.  Love to be next to my husband as we work on dinner together.  Love to pass down to my daughter what I've learned from the generations before.   When I stand back & look at my table full of newly canned vegetables & fresh bread, I take great comfort & joy knowing that I am simply continuing the traditions this house has seen so many times before.  That I am just another lady of the house bringing her own touch to this 154 year old legacy.

Reflections

With the passing of my 45th year I find myself reflecting on life on the Homestead.

When MLW asked me if I wanted to go out somewhere for a birthday dinner I gave it a bit of thought and said "no - I'm thinking pizza, in". While I enjoy a nice meal out, frankly few things seemed more attractive than spending a relaxing evening at home.

This was the thought when we first made the decision to buy the homestead - that it would be our vacation proxy, our place to relax and get away from the world. Still, the opportunity presented itself at an inconvenient time - LB was deep into competitive gymnastics, and we hadn't really had an the time to set aside the type of nest egg we would have preferred before taking on this type of project. In fact, in the year or so before the opportunity presented itself, we - or perhaps I - had actually reconciled to the idea that we'd be staying for the long-term in the little 1950's era pre-fab home we had in the suburbs of Rockford.

Moving was a romantic notion and, frankly, didn't make a lot of logistical sense. We were still heavily connected to Rockford with my work and LB's gymnastics. And for a while, early on, with the economic downturn making things hard on everyone, all around, including us, it wasn't clear that it would work out.

But it did.

Looking back, reflecting on those times, we almost didn't take the chance, take the risk. MLW fought for it, serving as she so often does to help me look past the practical to the magic of what can be. As I delight in taking refuge in our little Homestead I'm glad she did.

Harvest Time

Harvest Time

One of the hallmarks of living in the upper(ish) Midwest is that one gets to see the seasons change in earnest. In farm country that change is punctuated by the onset of harvest time.

The agriculture has a significant effect on the appearance of the landscape. I've talked here about our enjoyment in having a living fence of corn around the property; throughout the spring and summer the crops grow and change, first emerging, getting taller, and finally changing color from the dark greens of their midlife to the golden hues of fall. Here, at least, the crops begin that change ahead of the trees. It's a dynamic, ever-changing scene.

With harvest it changes again. The harvest itself is a flurry of human activity on land that has been peacefully solitary for months. Trucks, tractors, and combines appear - some of the latter nowadays with components wider than the roads which they travel between fields. They are there for a brief time, then they - and the crops - are gone.

And so the landscape is different again, now open, revealing vistas that had been hidden for months.

The Yard War

Somehow, yesterday, the first day of Labor Day weekend, became a yard work day. And by yard work I mean that MLW worked in the garden while I marched about the yard attacking things with bladed weapons.

I don’t believe I would have ever really thought of an ax and machete as yard work tools, but it’s a reality out here. There are, of course the trees that are nothing but tall weeds, but there are also some varieties of herbaceous plants that, when not attended to early enough, grow tall and thick enough that a weed-whacker simply cannot take them down.

The primary offender there is Lambsquarters[1]. This extremely common plant likes to grow up against buildings and in unattended, disturbed ground. Left to its own devices the base of the plant can get as big as a baby’s wrist.

Hence the machete.

LB was also spending part of her holiday weekend fighting the good fight against invaders. She’s been tasked with clearing the uninvited trees away from alongside the old barn. Armed with a tree saw and a branch cutter she managed to tackle and remove a 12’ Chinese Mulberry, almost entirely on her own. Few things make a father’s heart swell with pride more than seeing his 13-year old daughter dragging a huge section of tree across the yard by herself.

Taken from a distance - As the teenage years have come on, it has become ever more difficult to capture the elusive LB in her native habitat.  One must use subterfuge and trickery if one is to be successful.

By the end of the day we all made several trips to the burn pile - the place where all the yard waste (that is not either compostable or good for firewood) goes to meet its fiery doom. Our pile this year is big - it stands over 5’ high and is a good 10’ in diameter. And this pile is just what we’ve done over the course of this summer - last year’s pile was burned this spring. It seems, no matter how many of our opponents we take out, they have more to send in.

This has all been gathered over the course of just this summer.  It will make for an impressive fire come late fall or early spring.

And so The Yard War goes on.

---

1. The University of Illinois maintains a Weed Science website that is an excellent resource if one is interested in identifying what the the things growing, uninvited, actually are. It includes a description of the type of plants (e.g. broadleafs or grasses) to help narrow down the search; and most of the plants have pictures across the lifespan of the plant - seedlings, juveniles, mature adults, flowering, etc. - to allow one to correctly identify the plant in any part of its growing season. It’s how I came to learn, for example, that the blue flowers growing on stems in the ditches all over the region are chicory, the root of which can be used to make a coffee substitute. Fans of American western movies and books will recognize it as something that cowboys brew up at the campfire. Given how easily it grows, one can see why one might try to find a use for it.  ↩

Just Because You Can Do A Thing...

The canoe doesn't overwhelm the car at *all*. No sir, not at all. 

As discussed a few weeks ago, we are in the habit of using our cars in the place of the traditional pickup truck. This generally works quite nicely, but it seems only fair to mention the exceptions when they occur.

Before we moved out to the Homestead we lived in Rockford which, among other things, offers a number of park-related recreational activities. To capitalize on this, some fourteen years ago or so I bought a canoe. I enjoy canoeing, enjoy the different perspective one gets on the landscape from the water, and the fact that the wildlife will often tolerate the presence of a person in a canoe for far longer than they will a hiker or biker on land. I adventured with this canoe many times on the waterways in the Rockford region - at Pierce Lake at Rock Cut State Park, as well as trips on the Kishwaukee River, the Sugar River, and even made at least one passage down the Rock River.

Sadly, my canoe hasn't seen water for several years. I'd like to blame this on our move to the Homestead - after all, waterways wide enough to accommodate a 15'7"canoe are a rare commodity on the prairie. However, the last of those trips occurred well before we moved. If I'm being honest, the overwhelming majority of my canoe trips occurred during the times that we owned either a pickup truck or an SUV.

It's not that one cannot carry a canoe on a compact car - this is a task I've done multiple times in the past, carrying rented boats on the roof of my old Honda Civic Si. But this canoe, well...

It's possible that I did not us the wisest of judgement when I selected this particular canoe. And by "selected" I mean bought on a whim at Sam's Club.

One look at it will tell you that it is a pretty nice conveyance. It's got three seats, the middle of which contains a cooler. It's got three cup holders molded into the side of the center seat. It's got a dry well for storing your wallet and phone safely on the trip. It's made of resin, so it's extremely durable.

One look will tell you these things. One attempt to lift it will demonstrate the problem. It's far too heavy and awkward for one person - or at least one me - to lift overhead in a fashion that gets it safely on to a vehicle. They make canoes of this size that a single person can easily lift and carry. This is not one of those, and those are not priced to be impulse buys at a large warehouse store.

When I purchased this behemoth I owned an old Toyota pickup with a rack on the bed. It was a simple matter to lean one end of the canoe up on the back portion of the rack, and slide the whole deal across until it rested securely on the rack. It was simple because a: there was no sheet metal in the way to hit; and b: I didn't really care all that much if I scratched the truck. It was much more challenging putting it on the roof of a vehicle when one cares about the appearance of said vehicle.

Because of this, the only relationship the canoe has had with water since coming to the Homestead was to act as a partial roof blocking rain over the dog pen.

My Dad, perhaps recognizing this, suggested we bring the canoe up to their place on the lake in Wisconsin. On first blush this feels a little akin to sending your beloved dog out to stay on "a farm", but on second blush it makes perfect sense; it puts the canoe somewhere it can actually be used.

But we had to get it up there.

We have a roof rack for the Hondas. We have tow hooks to use as tie-down points. This is all relatively straightforward. The challenge, of course, was getting the beast on to the top of the car.

With the help of LB we tackled getting it up on the roof. LB is young, but strong, and the canoe is really more awkward than heavy. Or so I told myself.

It's possible I was wrong.

Ultimately, getting the canoe on the roof took three tries and the help of a stepladder for balance.

The first try was aborted.

The second try dropped the canoe down the side of the car. This resulted a sizeable scar down the driver's side D-pillar and, perhaps, a tiny bit of swearing.

Of course, in retrospect I should have started with the stepladder and perhaps skipped the swearing.

Things would be so much easier in life if one could perhaps do less learning from mistakes...

Weeds

I have cleared back these steps multiple times over the past six years... 

The American Midwest is well known for its agricultural fertility. Settlers came here from the east looking to find land they could use to feed their families and, with some luck, make their fortunes. My own ancestors - John Foulk, Joel Compton - came here from parts east themselves, from Pennsylvania and from New York State, respectively, to take advantage of the bounty of that fertility in one way or another.

Something that rarely gets mentioned, however, is the fact that soil that is good for growing crops is actually good for growing pretty much everything.

A weed, by definition, is just a plant that is growing in a place you don't want it to be. The soil on and around our property is rich, black earth, and it provides host opportunity for a vast array of plants. One of the realities we've come to face is the fact that two acres of space is an awful lot to keep track of when it comes to weed abatement.

Both Marnie and I have an interest in gardening that precedes our time at the homestead. Hers, as befits a marvelous cook, has been focused towards growing vegetables and other food-stuffs. Mine has always been oriented towards growing native plants. This latter interest has led me over the years to studying and understanding what the uninvited plants around us are, so I can understand if they can stay (e.g. If native) or if they should go (if not).

Having a property this size has provided, shall we say, an ample laboratory for study of those uninvited guests. While I am philosophically opposed to the wholesale eradication of weeds using chemicals (such as Roundup), I can understand, after several years of a losing battle, how one arrives at the perspective that a scorched earth approach is the way to go.

Part of the struggle is that the property, while cared for by family, was unoccupied for several years before we moved in; and the fact that my grandmother, who lived here alone for much of my life, was not able due to age and Alzheimer's, to keep up with it in the years before her passing. Which is not to say that she and others did not try. I can honestly verify from my own efforts that it's a huge hill to climb.

Our difficulties are with some of the more common elements that gardeners struggle with throughout the Midwest, in rural, suburban, and urban settings alike. Bindweed or Creeping Jenny and the various and sundry types of thistle are among our frustrations, and we have a crop of burdock that, were it really as useful as its Wikipedia page suggests, could make us wealthy.

Still, as frustrating as those plants are, they are not our greatest challenge.

It's the trees.

The %#&$ing trees...

Now to be clear, a well-placed tree is a beautiful thing, particularly out here in the country. A well-placed tree provides shelter from the wind, provides shade, perhaps provides fruit. A well-placed tree is a wonderful accent to the home.

A poorly placed tree is a thing of evil.

What we are struggling with is volunteers that have taken root either along the sides of buildings, or within other bushes, or in marginal locations that we weren't able to attend to before they'd gotten started in earnest. The offenders are primarily (though not exclusively) of three different species: Maple, White Mulberry, and Eunymous bushes.

While we have managed to keep up with them around the house and the garage, it's been a struggle to do so with respect to the bushes and the outbuildings. Our old barn is surrounded on two sides by the interlopers, and we have volunteers creeping around the corner of our Morton Shed. While it's not awful to have a tree growing near a building, the ones growing directly beside them threaten to crack and damage footings, and eventually grow to have branches rubbing against the shingles. In the case of the old barn these branches also likely provide a route of access into the loft for our mortal enemies, the Raccoons.

We have several stands of old bushes on the property as well. These are generally either Honeysuckle bushes or Lilacs, both of which have the distinction of growing up in multiple relatively small stems or trunks directly from the ground. This leaves all sorts of space for seeds to take purchase, and several of them now foster Mulberry saplings, as well as a couple of other volunteers I've now seen on multiple occasions, but which I cannot name. While the struggle around the buildings is simply managing the larger trees that have grown up there over time, getting interlopers out of the middle of a bush is a special torture that involves many, many scratches and scrapes, and many, many swear words.

I think that eventually we'll get ahead of them, though we may have to hire some help to get it done. But it's disheartening to clear out one bush, for example - an activity that can realistically take most of an afternoon - only to walk up to another and find it also full of invaders. And one knows that, if one cleans out that bush the next weekend, and another bush the following, one will find that the first bush has re-grown it's invaders.

Ugh.

The Living Fence

Along the driveway.  

Every spring a miraculous event happens - heavy machinery runs all along our yard and, within a few weeks, evidence of our new summer fence begins to display itself.

Most years we are surrounded entirely by field corn growing over six feet tall on three sides of us. This has the pleasant effect of enhancing our privacy out here on the homestead. We are surrounded by a wall of green on three sides, hiding us away in our refuge. It's also a familiar sight - as I've mentioned many times before, I grew up across the field from here, and we were there, as here, often surrounded by the corn.

Privacy, such as it is, is a key benefit to life out on the homestead. Having your own little space in the country affords something very different with respect to the opportunity to connect with nature, with the surroundings, and with one's self.

We lived in the Greater Rockford Area for over 15 years. Though often maligned, Rockford offers quite a lot for people who want to be in the out of doors. The Rockford Park Systemis an active, thriving, entity, with parks throughout Winnebago county in a wide variety of locations, offering a huge array of experiences. There are river walks, a pretty decent recreational bike trail system, dog parks, large wooded areas. In addition, Rock Cut State Park is at the north end of Rockford, with hiking and biking trails, picnic areas, Pierce Lake. There's something for virtually everyone who wants to get outside to do. I spent a lot of my own time in these places - especially Rock Cut.

Having your own space out here is different, and in a very specific way. There's no way, on our two little acres, to replicate the variety of experiences that a state park can offer. Thinking about it always makes me think of something someone - my brother-in-law, I believe - once said:

you aren't living in the country if you can't pee off your back porch without being seen.

All of those park facilities are wonderful and, for the most part, very popular. And that's the rub: A hike at Rock Cut is a wonderful thing, but it is always the case that, even if one is alone at the moment, there may well be another person to encounter over the next rise, or around the next turn of the trail. You are never truly alone.

Here you are, to the degree that you choose to be. When I lay in my hammock I am hearing the birds singing, the dogs moving about, not Bitter Betty next door yelling at her grandson, not the guy who recently put glass packs on his 84 Ford pickup line trying them out by running up and down the street.

All of this is true when the corn isn't there - when it comes down in a few weeks we will still have that privacy. But it's enhanced at the moment, a welcome shift that says now, more than any other time, this space is for you and you alone.

Rabbits

It's an awful picture, but this was about as close as I could get with the phone...  Which is probably a good thing, as far as rabbits go.  

A few weeks ago I saw,for the first time in the six years that we have been living here, a rabbit in our yard.

It is one of the more curious things (though perhaps not unrelated), for all the challenges we have had with raccoons, there are a handful of other, common critters, that we have virtually never seen in the yard. Rabbits are among them, along with squirrels of both the ground and tree-living varieties.

It's not that they don't live out here in the country. When I am riding around the countryside I see plenty of all three, and I don't have to ride far to see them. There are squirrels at the next house and stand of trees to our north, and rabbits routinely sighted just at the next corner. Ground squirrels routinely make their brave dashes out of the ditch and across the road all over the place - though why they so often choose to do that just as a car is coming has always been beyond me. Perhaps they are sitting in the tall grass with a buddy, drinking a beer, the buddy saying "bet ya won't do it..."

Of course, anyone who has lived with any or all of these critters can tell you each can cause their own problems. Rabbits burrow and eat things from the garden. Squirrels tease your dogs (poor little puppies) and steal from the bird feeders. If you grow sunflowers they will steal the heads off of those as well. Ground squirrels will leave your yard pockmarked with openings just waiting for you to twist an ankle.

Regardless, it's good to see the rabbits. It suggests a bit of balance returning to the yard. They have so far been staying behind, or at least within running distance of, the invisible fence line, so while the dogs are aware of them, they haven't caught one so far.

Of course, a little over a week ago I saw a fox trotting along the side of the field, disappearing behind the shed. The shed, behind which the rabbits appear to be living.

Mouse in My Car

I went to get into my car Thursday evening, and was greeted by this sight: a hole chewed into the side of the bag of pistachios that I had sitting on the front seat.

The array of bag shrapnel scattered around the container is the giveaway that this wasn’t just an accidental tear in the paper. I didn’t simply rip the bag moving other item in and out around it. It was a mouse[1].

Or at least some sort of rodent, since many of them share the same chewing-thru-stuff approach. Mice are a common evil out here - common and evil enough that I once spent several minutes watching, enjoying, and taking video of one of our cats essentially torturing a mouse. I wanted to be able to enjoy it again and again and…

Mice in the barn, mice in the shed, mice in the house, these are common, if frustrating, occurrences. Mouse in your car - particularly a car that is routinely used - not so much. It’s not unheard of, mind you, but when it happens, in my experience, it’s usually somewhere in the partially-covered semi-exterior regions of the vehicle: the engine compartment. Several years ago our Chevy HHR had mice nesting in the engine air filter. Still, inside the passenger compartment is not a typical thing.

This leaves one pondering as to the how and the why[2]. Have the mice living here suddenly encountered a huge evolutionary advance, making them believe themselves capable of operating motor vehicles? Does this particular mouse have someplace to be, and he’s gambling that, by some stroke of fate, I’ll happen to drive to that place? Is this some sort of vengeance play by the local mouse consortium to pay me back for taking and posting that Cat and Mouse video?

Thursday is garbage day, and I take the garbage in to be taken away either Wednesday evenings or Thursday mornings, and I had done so this week. One of our two 50-gallon garbage cans has a hole in the bottom of it. Occam’s Razor would suggest that this, and not some sudden advance in mouse sentience or a plot by rodent yakuza, is the more likely cause[3].

It's possible this soldier is too wounded to carry on.

And, of course, I take the garbage cans in my car.

It didn’t take me long to sort out the likely cause, but that was really only half the battle. The more important question was what to do about it. I spend a lot of time in the car and, while one might think it nice to have some company, I’d rather not argue with a rodent about what to listen to on the radio. Oh, and also: mice are destructive, unpleasant creatures to live with.

I could have put down poison - we have bait boxes in the house for this very purpose. My fear, though, was that this little dude would eat the poison but then crawl up into some deep, dark recess under the dash and die, leaving me to dig him out of there or endure the wretched stench of dead mouse for weeks on end (if you haven’t ever experienced it, believe me when I say you would be amazed at how much, and how badly, such a tiny little thing can stink). So instead I decided to go with a mousetrap - the good, old fashioned spring and snap style Victory mousetrap. As soon as I got home that evening I baited one with a tantalizing bit of peanut butter and set it in the passenger seat foot well.

I got up the following morning with much hope and anticipation, particularly since I was going to be in the car for much of the day with appointments in disparate locations. I was, shall we say, disappointed.

The trap was completely denuded of peanut butter. And completely unsprung.

Needing to get places, I simply re-baited the trap and put it back in the foot well and headed out. I really didn’t expect the mouse to come out and take the bait while I was driving, but I was hopeful that he’d perhaps venture forth for a snack while I was in one appointment or the other.

What I did not anticipate was the extremely disconcerting experience of a tiny, dark shape darting across the passenger foot well while I was driving. Only happened a couple of times, thank goodness, but, well, ewww.

After each stop of the day I came out to look at the trap and see, only to find it untouched, unsprung. That is, until the last stop of the day, at which it was again completely denuded of peanut butter and completely unsprung.

Reasoning that this was, perhaps a trap that was not quite sensitive enough, I pulled out a couple more of them and placed them in the car, one in the passenger foot well, one in the back seat, and went in for the night.

I'd like to say that, as an elightened, and purportedly well educated human being, I take no pleasure in his demise.  I'd like to say that, but I can't.

My cries of victory could be heard far and wide the following morning! The triumphant hero, I left with an imaginary ticker-tape parade, held in my honor, playing in my head. And the mouse, that awful foe, well, he went home on his shield.

---

1. Mouse - singular - appears here throughout. In my head it’s just one, lone, rogue mouse[4]. It must be. Any other consideration is, frankly, too worrisome to contemplate.  ↩

2. Ok, not really so much on the why.  ↩

3. That Occam guy is really just no fun.  ↩