The... What? Is Leaking?

Around 8:30 last night LB comes up to me and says: "that thing over the stove is leaking".

Me: ”The thing... what?"

LB: "That thing over the stove - you know - the thing."

Me: "The vent hood?"

LB: "... sure".

I followed LB into the kitchen to find, sure enough, it was.

This would seem somewhat perplexing, given that there is no water run anywhere in the house higher than the kitchen and bathroom sinks, both on the first floor, both lower than the stove vent hood.

But: It started raining at about 11:30 or so yesterday morning, and continued until some time into the wee hours of this morning. There was occasional thunder and lightening, but the real player in yesterday's weather was the wind and rain. The continuous rain paired itself with an unusual East by Northeasterly wind that gusted more or less constantly throughout the day and night, striking the backside of the house where the kitchen sits.

The kitchen itself, as it stands, is not original to the house. Rather, it is relatively modern, a late 1940's remodel initiated by my grandparents, with some updating of appliances since. That 1940's work has held up remarkably well, all things considered, over the last 70 years or so. Still, events like this make one realize that one does not know what one does not know.

The vent hood feeds into a galvanized duct that goes up into the soffit above the cabinets. I believe that it then travels across, thru the soffit, over to the chimney in the wall. And when I investigated the bit of ductwork I can see in the cabinet above the hood, I found that to be the location of the leak.

The chimney that it goes into is one of four in the house - three original and one added later - and is the only original chimney that still rises above the roof, coming out from the fireplace in the basement (which I suspect was originally used for cooking) and traveling up the back wall of the house. In short, it faced the brunt of last night's wind and rain.

My best guess is that the volume of rain, and gusting of wind, was such that it created an unusual bit of air movement in the chimney, moving some rain back down the chimney and throwing it down the vent. I say best guess because in eight years of living here, and a lifetime of being in and around the house semi-regularly, I have never seen this before.

It's all subsided now. It's still windy this morning, but the rain appears to have mostly let up. Our as-yet still unnamed vernal ponds have returned at greater than usual size, and the wind blew over the garbage can. The dogs discovered this first and thoughtfully addressed it by distributing the contents of the can all over the driveway (there may have been the occasional utterance of foul language as I cleaned that up). But it is another of the periodic reminders that, although we are certainly not pioneers out here, with our electricity and running water and such, the weather continues to have surprises to throw at us.

Time to Mow

Spring has fully sprung, and the rainy season has been out in full force. These April showers do, of course, bring...

Well, I don't know, there are already flowers blooming here - they don't wait for May, so I'm not sure that saying was coined by someone living in the upper Midwest. But what it does bring is the dawn of mowing season.

To be clear, MLW does the bulk of the mowing and seems to enjoy it. What's more, LB is primed to be learning this task as well. This is not about to become a screed about how annoying it is to care for the lawn.

The other thing that Spring brings is the annual realization that I need to get a battery charger, though this would negatively affect what has now become the traditional harbinger of mowing season: the announcement that the mower will not start.

Of course the challenge is that the only time I ever need a battery charger is at the start of mowing season. This means that the only time I ever think about getting a battery charger is at the start of mowing season. And, since we typically need it now, to get the lawn mowed, I've borrowed devices to get the job done in the moment.

And then, of course, forgotten until the following spring.

I am not ahead of the game this year. The mower has already failed to start. But I think, this time, that perhaps I will risk that tradition and actually get a damn battery charger.

Derilects

One of the more striking things about rural Illinois is the number of abandoned buildings. This includes buildings on properties that are otherwise clearly in active use - the old, empty barns tumbling down alongside newer, occupied machine sheds and similar types of buildings, to be sure. But also included in that list of unoccupied and unloved structures in the scenery are more personal places, like old schoolhouses and homes.

In some cases a place may just be clearly empty, but otherwise in good repair. It may be a home that you drive by regularly, across multiple times of day and night, and simply never see a vehicle in the drive, never a light on in the window, perhaps the care of the grounds isn't routinely attended to. These places seem to simply be waiting, hoping for new occupants to arrive and reinvigorate them.

In other cases, you will find former homes in various stages of tumbledown, sometimes at its earliest stage, where an enterprising homeowner might have the opportunity to pull it back from the abyss. Other times it's clear the building is beyond all hope.

In many ways these abandoned places simply reflect changes in the way people live, and in the way we move about. Fewer people live in rural areas now than they used to, and our small towns used to be part of the major thoroughfares for travel. Highways used to wend their way through rural towns, often directly through the downtown business district. The interstates have usurped that role, and often now people from other places recognize a small town by name only if it appears on a highway exit sign. Even then, what they know of the town itself may be limited to the gas stations, restaurants, and hotels that appear around the exit.

But while these decaying structures often just sit and embrace entropy, there are cases where property owners reclaim the space for other things. It might be hard to believe, but this lot, not terribly far from home, used to hold a small house and a couple of outbuildings:

I remember the house well from growing up out here - the bus went past it every day. It was nothing special - painted white, a story and a half, and perhaps 1000 square feet of floorplan. It was no architectural treasure, and likely no one will mourn its loss, myself included. Since taking the picture the piles of earth have been smoothed out, and the space is indistinguishable from the farmland that used to surround it. It will likely soon host a crop of corn or beans.

Ultimately, it seems likely that this is what will continue to occur out in these parts - this very rural area will become much more so, with homes themselves ever further and fewer between.

Spring Rain

Spring appears to be well and truly sprung here on the prairie, and that in multiple ways. The birds have returned, of course, and temperatures are coming up to a reliable level that precludes the need for much more than a sweatshirt or light jacket. And it's raining.

Oh yes, it's been raining.

Yesterday we had temperatures in the mid 50's with clear skies and sunshine, and I broke out my bike for a 14-ish mile ride. When the spring weather presents with a day that is:

A) Warm enough for a comfortable ride; 
2) Still enough to make the ride a workout without being torture; and 
iii) Not raining

...You have to jump on the opportunity.

Contrary to what people sometimes picture, the prairie isn't truly flat - this isn't Nebraska, after all - there are real contours to the land that can be seen from any vantage point, and can absolutely be felt when one is on a bicycle. But while this is true, it's flat enough that periods of heavy rain do result in opportunistic ponds and lakes forming in the fields, and one comes to realize why the ditches alongside the road are so deep out here.

Something I did not realize, however, is that these ponds, which are called Vernal Pools (tip of the hat to Midwestern Plant Girl at midwesternplants.org) also serve as homes for some species of frogs. But I realized as I was doing a late-night dog outing last night that I was hearing frogs out in the middle distance. We are a good mile and a half from the nearest creek (or "crick"), and while we can sometimes hear the bullfrogs on a still night, that seems more a late spring or summer phenomenon.

It's a nice reminder of the variety of wildlife around us out here. Because we are surrounded with agriculture, it can become easy to feel that there isn't any truly wild space around us (hence my fascination with the area in and around Melugin Grove). But there are periodic reminders beyond the raccoons that we are surrounded in wildlife, some of it of a much more pleasant variety.

Emergency Repairs

Earlier this week we had a pretty severe thunderstorm. Rain, thunder, and lightening, yes, but mostly lots of wind. At times, the blowing was hard enough that we could feel the house tremble even while laying in bed.

Somewhere in there we heard a slam that we assumed was the door in the old barn slamming open (it has a tendency to do that). But when I got up in the morning it was clear that something else had occurred. Out the window of the laundry room I saw the eve vent laying in the yard.

What this means, aside from the fact that the wind managed to rip a fairly tightly secured piece of siding material off the side of the house, is that we now had a gaping hole in the north side of the house.

I've had to learn over the years to leave alone - not start - things that I don't have the time to finish around the house. It's key to not letting myself get extremely frustrated about unfinished projects. Still, we had a hole in the side of our home, and spring is approaching. While the landlocked critters probably can't get up that high - it's a tall house - spring approacheth, and the birds have already begun to return.

I had no choice but to leave it for the first day - there was simply no open time in my schedule. This meant that, when I finally did get the stepladder lined up with the scuttle hole and climb my way up into the attic, it was with some trepidation.

In a lot of big, old, Victorian era homes the attic is functionally a third floor. In our homestead there is room to stand up in the attic, and one gets the impression that there may have been a thought, in the original design, that one could have made a small room up there if it was ever needed. In my grandparent's time there was a wooden ladder built-in against the wall and up to the scuttle hole. I don't know who put it there - whether it was part of the original construction, with that thought of using the extra space as an additional worker's bedroom (the scuttle hole is in the back, worker's stairwell), or whether it was just a later addition by someone who was just tired of hauling a stepladder up and down the back stairs. Having done that very task myself multiple times, I can see how one might get to that point.

While it one can see how it could have been a small living space, at the moment it's just a home for insulation and duct work. And, fortunately, it did not appear to become an inopportune home for anything else.

As usual, all my tools are in the basement, so any repair or work in the attic inevitably involves multiple trips up and down two flights of stairs, one stepladder, and pulling oneself up or down through a scuttle hole. I was fortunate to start my repair trip with a bit of daylight outside, but it was still dark enough to require a flashlight. Improbably, the opening in the wall seems to look smaller up close than it does from the ground.

I thought I'd have to patch the hole with a bit of plywood (I don't have a ladder that goes high enough to work from the outside and, besides, the outside is really, you know, high), but I was fortunate enough to be able to fish the old vent out thru the hole from the inside...

...and of course, promptly dropped it.

Out the scuttle hole, down the stepladder, down the steps, out the back door, pick up the vent, back in the door, back up the steps, up the stepladder, through the scuttle hole...

Oh - but I did stop along the way and pick up some string so I could secure the damn thing and refrain from multiple trips. Forty-six years of dropping things can ultimately teach you a thing or two.

A little bit of work with the drill and some wood screws, some careful application of silicon sealant to prevent leaks around the edges, and we have a decent, if temporary, repair.

It all serves as an additional reminder that the wind out here isn't just playing, as well as a testament to the house for continuing to stand against it 150+ years on.

Doorways...

One of the joys and delights of living in a 155-year old house is being able to routinely delight in the craftsmanship of a bygone era.

Of course, one of the struggles is that the very craftsmanship you are delighting in is, in fact, 155 years old and, as such, is prone to breaking.

This can be true on many fronts, of course, but of particular focus over the past couple of weeks has been doorknobs, and one door in particular - the one to LB's bedroom.

Most of the doors in the house have similar hardware - a mortise lock with white porcelain doorknobs and escutcheons). This style of lock means that every door on the main two floors has a door with both a sash lock and a deadbolt in it, the deadbolt operated by an old fashioned skeleton key. Every door - including the closets, the bathroom door, the laundry room door, etc.

Every door has a deadbolt in it, but only a handful of them actually work. In most cases this appears to be due to seizure secondary to age, the overactive paintbrush work of prior generations, or perhaps a combination of both.

LB has one of the two front bedroooms in the house. During my grandparents' occupation of the house, and likely for quite some time before, these rooms were not occupied by people. Rather, they held a vast array of generational cast-off stuff - things that, apparently, were unwanted but considered too nice to be thrown away. By my childhood they were not frequently opened and entered, except by occasional exploring waifs.

One might have expected this relative lack of use to result in the door hardware being less harshly used and, as such, perhaps better suited to withstanding a few years of exposure to the exuberance of youth. Alas, this does not seem to have been the a case. LB's doorknob had worked loose to the point that the jiggling of the handle would prevent the sash lock from catching reliably. I made one attempt, early on, to address this by retightening all of the various and sundry screws and attachments related to the handle (not all of whom seemed to be present and accounted for), but the success of this was short lived. Ultimately it was clear I was going to have to take things apart and effect a more complete repair.

Taking things apart is often a frightening proposition in a house of this age - it has a tendency to open a can of worms well beyond expectation.

In the case of LB's door, disassembling the doorknob revealed a harsher life for this door than I'd originally predicted.

The number of gouges and striations in the area of the iron handle plates suggested that the door handle had been adjusted, and readjusted, multiple times over the past century and a half. It also made it clear why it was so hard to tighten it back down - there was virtually no wood left in which a screw could take purchase.

This wouldn't be a problem with a cylinder latch set - in that case, the two sides of the latching and handle mechanism screw to each other through the door. But the mortise lock is a large rectangular block of metal directly in the door - there's no going through it without potentially destroying the latching mechanism.

My solution, for now, was to head off to the hardware store (they say I "saved big money", but I'm never sure if I should actually believe them) and get dowel and wood filler, as well as additional screws. I used the dowel to fill the deeper, still intact holes, and the wood filler to bring everything back to more or less even with the door surface. Then I let the material dry and cure.

The guidelines on the product said to give it at least two hours to properly cure, so to be safe, I gave it a week. Plus, you know, there's nothing more entertaining than listening to your teenager struggle with trying to open and close a door without a handle for several days. Also - it's remotely possible that I got a little busy...

In putting the handle back together, I discovered a couple of additional interesting features about the handle itself. Most of the handles in the house use a system in which backing plates go against the door, are covered by a porcelain escutcheon, which is held on by a threaded brass cylinder that screws into the backing plate. The handle on LB's door looks like this too, but it was hiding a secret. The backing plate on the inside was different - it wasn't threaded like the others, with a smaller inside lip, and the brass cylinder had been cut down so that it would fit into the new opening.

The cutting down of the brass cylinder could not be accidental, and one suspects that this is the result of a previous generation needing to replace the backing plate, and being unable to find a part that matched exactly. And, given that the room was virtually never entered, exactly was probably felt to be unimportant.

For our situation, exactly was the thing that was needed. I scavenged the backing plates off of the closet in my office - the door to that is never shut, as it is a pass-thru for electronics cables, and a previous tenant had already scavenged the mortise lock from it anyway. This seemed to do the trick, mostly. However, I found that the porcelain escutcheon would no longer fit on the inside with the scavenged backing plate. I have multiple escutcheons, and tried them all, but to no avail. In deference to the teenager's week of suffering, I deferred painting the wood filler for later, went ahead and put it together without the escutcheon, which is functional, albeit less attractive.

Shortly after making this decision I noticed that one of my ancestors had made the same decision previously, just across the hall.

This makes me feel a bit better, though I'd like it all to go together correctly. Still, at least the offspring now has a functioning door behind which one can pretend there is no one else in the house...

These aren't the first door problems we have had, and they aren't the only door issues that my ancestors have faced. We have doors where the screws in the hinges have worked loose - sometimes to a significant degree (the downside to pine as a building material), and a couple of doorknobs have been replaced by completely different handle sets. The door into the basement was clearly a struggle for someone:

The set on the inside is loose, as you can see, and will not tighten (I would not be surprised to find a very similar situation inside there as with LB's door). And on the basement side of the door:

The repairs required an additional wood plate, and it appears that a decision was made to caulk or epoxy the escutcheon against the wood, likely because it would not screw tight.

I haven't gotten to the epoxy point yet, but I can see how one might get there...

Climate Zones

One of the interesting, if not endearing, aspects of living in a 155 year old house is the array of climates one can experience moving across the building. The progression of climate change has caused considerable temperature variations this winter, with temperatures ranging from well below freezing (typical for this time of year) up to the 60's. That variability has been good for our LP Gas bill, but the variability makes the temperature differences in the house more apparent when it gets cold, as was the case this past week. For most of the week we would bask in tropical temperatures in the kitchen and dining room, and periodically make forays into the chilly, autumn climes of the living room. Any time spent there typically involves sweatshirts and blankets, and a lot of entertainment was sought via iPads, since the TV resides in the living room (thanks Steve Jobs!).

This all flipped on its head Friday morning, when I walked downstairs into the kitchen to make coffee, only to be embraced by normal winter house temps (we keep the thermostat set at 63). To be honest, having not donned a sweatshirt prior to this journey I would have sworn it was colder than that, but a check of the thermometer in the kitchen said otherwise.

This may seem like over-dramatization, but I assure you it's not. At times we can see a nearly 30-point difference in temperature from one side of the house to the other - temperatures in the high 50's in the living room, and hovering around 80° in the kitchen and dining room. A day later the entire situation can change.

Mostly this has to do with two separate factors. The largest component to this feature of our 1800's house is the direction of the wind. The living room - where the thermostat resides - is on the northwest corner of the house. When it is being struck by a strong, persistent, prevailing, northwest winter wind, the temperature in the room drops below the thermostat setting, and it's often the case that, while these conditions continue, it is not possible for the furnace to catch up and heat the room to the shut-off point. As a result, the furnace runs the entire time, and rooms that aren't being pelted by nature's malevolent majesty see a dramatic rise in temperature.

The second component is that the dining room and kitchen are on the south side of the house, in the direct sunlight. In this house of windows that can make a significant difference in daytime temperature on its own, without the wind as a factor. The dining room in particular has a large picture window (which replaced the original bay window on the home). That window offers unfiltered access to sunlight for three-quarters of each day, and offers a lot of heat gain. On such days the dining room is almost certainly the warmest room in the house.

None of this is to complain - this is a reality of living in a 150~ish year old home. My Grandma Marie spent a lot of her time in the kitchen, as I recall, and I suspect this was in part because the prevailing west wind made that eastern room more comfortable the other areas of the house. In our own old country house across the field a search for my mother in winter would often find her sitting atop the furnace registers, reading a book. I learned to emulate this myself, though often with comic books rather than novels. It's a pleasant enough activity right up to the point that you realize it is indeed possible for your buttocks to fall asleep...

And - to be clear - we don't simply allow this phenomenon to persist. When it becomes clear that the furnace is unable to catch up in the living room I will turn the thermostat down so that it will stop super-heating the rest of the house. Then we relocate to other rooms - one of the lovely things to a big, drafty old house is that there is always another pleasant space, away from that draft, to curl up and relax.

Going to School

As I am sure I've mentioned here before, the time that I've spent living in this house, and in researching family history, often finds me living in the mid-late 1800's in my head. While things are changing around us, there remain cues to help accentuate that. In addition to the homes and barns that continue to stand, if one looks closely one can still find the remnants of the old one-room schoolhouses.

Schoolhouse on Shaw Road, West of West Brooklyn

These are harder to find than the old homes and barns, and one suspects this is largely because their period of use ended longer ago. Many, though not all, of the old homes (like ours) continue to serve as residences, modernized to the degree felt necessary by the occupants. And while many of the old barns are now tumbling down, this is a more recent phenomenon, brought on, one suspects, by more recent changes in the types of agriculture and volume of machinery used in modern farming. When I was young there were still small livestock operations in the area - one of them literally next door to the Homestead - but these are rare now, many pastures plowed to make more cropland. And when I was young much of the farm machinery would fit into an old barn, though this was already changing then. Morton "Machine" sheds, offering large open spaces for massive equipment had already begun to pop up, often built right next to the aging barns.

Unless someone found a new or different use for an old schoolhouse - as a shed, perhaps or, in the case of the old schoolhouse down the road from us, as a home - it seems they were more likely to be abandoned earlier.

People lived here when I was little, albeit without all of the vehicles in the yard

---

These two shots are from the schoolhouse at Shaws, near the intersection with Inlet Road

These relics are not only rare, but are increasingly so. When I was little - perhaps 10 or 11 years of age - I remember coming across an old schoolhouse in a tumble-down state about three miles away from our home then, and about four from our current house. This was one of a series of ever-widening bicycle rides, and when I came across the building I did not know what it was at first. Until, with all the wisdom of a pre-adolescent, I went inside.

The floor had fallen through in many places, the earth beneath clearly visible. The walls were still standing, if at something less than right angles, but none of the windows had an unbroken pane of glass in them. All of this was, of course, fascinating to the younger me, but I knew what type of building I was in when I saw the large, broken chalkboard on the back wall.

It was probably in this discovery that I first really realized that the things around us in the countryside were old, and that people really had come before us, lived here in ways that weren't the same as we did now. I'd been aware that the buildings around me were older than I was, to be certain, but everything was older than I was. Living in homes with limestone or brick basements and what we'd now think of as antique furniture (but was then simply a remnant of previous inhabitants) was simply par for the course. It wasn't perhaps until this moment that I had a sense of the history of the place, a sense that history itself was something that actually happened around us rather than in a book to other people and in other places.

I went back to that old schoolhouse multiple times, taking a friend with me at least once. It was less of a play location - the missing sections of floor making that challenging - than a spot for mediation and reflection. When we moved back to the Homestead the location was one of the first destinations for my biking forays.

The building is gone now. It's difficult to sort out where in the landscape it ever was, so complete is its erasure. This is not surprising - in addition to being an attractive nuisance, it's state of disrepair would have made it otherwise useless, and it was occupying space that could have been otherwise cultivated. What is more surprising, I suppose, is that the other examples here still remain.

---

I suppose I should qualify - I have no records, no historical documentation to support my contention that these are old schoolhouses. For the building down the road, I have oral history. For the others, it's a architectural recognition. I could be mistaken, but the buildings certainly look the part.

Old Soldiers...

A little ahead of Christmas this year we had a chunk fall out of the fir tree next to our back door.

Given that we live on a hill in the open prairie this sort of thing happens. A couple of years after we moved in an old Maple situated between the house and the barn fell, and I am forever cleaning up limbs from windfall.

This tree stands directly outside my home office. It's been a persistent piece of the scenery from that room since I was a child, sneaking into that room against my grandmother's wishes, playing with my uncle's train set and wondering over all of the other "ancient" toys. It's a regular friend when I gaze out the window when I'm working.

It looks to me - based entirely on my complete lack of expertise on trees - like the original hunk that came out is part of a larger splintering along the trunk, and that this is the next piece to come down. More is still hanging in the tree and will probably need to be cut out if the tree is to be kept from simply splitting in half.

Given that complete lack of expertise, my thoughts probably shouldn't be the last call on that one...

The Fog

Today has been almost entirely cloaked in fog.

Early in the day it was cloudy, but otherwise clear. As the day progressed, the fog gathered and encroached, closing us in. It was warm for early January - above freezing in to be sure. Still, lack of visibility prevented any thought of venturing out.

When I was younger I always thought of fog as a thing of stillness - low lying clouds that wrapped around, laying against the earth. No wind was welcome, as one would assume that it would move any cloud coverage away.

Either my childhood experience was lacking, or my memory was poor. The plains of Illinois beg to differ on this point, providing dense cloud cover in the face of considerable prevailing winds. It is possible to be unable to see where you are going, and yet to be struggling against a headwind or treacherous cross wind.

The Midwest is a place of weather. Other regions and latitudes offer consistency, predictability, in one direction or the other. Here, each day offers the interest and excitement of variability. Have you ever seen freezing fog? It's an amazing thing that the Midwest has to offer you.

It's possible, in this weather, to feel locked in. Certainly Stephen King has had that experience. But it also offers an opportunity to exercise flexibility - to pivot with what Mother Nature has to offer. A day like this presents a good opportunity to stay inside with family and relax. Curl up with a good book, tv show, or iPad and enjoy.

Out in the Cold

I said last time that I delight in the midwestern winter, even when I'm entering it after a week in the tropics.

Fortunately, life out at the Homestead offers plenty of opportunities to spend that time outside in the snow. On our first full day back from vacation there were a handful of activities that I tackled, all part and parcel of time on the prairie.

Since we missed the first snow of the season I hadn't thought yet about picking up salt for the sidewalk. This fact was provided as a near miss at a painful reminder as I felt my feet move out from under me when I took my first steps out the back door. It was added to the list of things to pick up as I ran my errands.

But when I returned from those my primary chore - which I'd frankly left a bit for want of time to address it - was upon me. A little longer ago than I care to admit MLW sent me a text to let me know that a rather large section of the fir tree next to the back door had broken off and fallen to the sidewalk.

One of the things I've had to teach myself about living out here is that it is often better to leave a project - at least one that isn't an emergency - to a time when one can handle it properly. As it stands, with the declining daylight hours I typically leave in darkness, and in darkness I return... The limb had fallen near the sidewalk, but it wasn't in the way of anything, and it was too large for me to simply pull over to the brush pile; it would need to be cut up. But this meant that I'd be working on it in the snow.

Given the size of the limb, and in the interest of efficiency and practicality, I made a suggestion to MLW:

E: Hey, you know, what do you think about just using that fallen limb as our Christmas tree this year?

MLW: ...

E: Hey honey - I said I thought maybe we could use that fallen limb as our Christmas tree.

MLW: Yeah - I heard you the first time.

It appears she was, shall we say, less than interested in that option.

So I gathered up some of my yard weaponry and prepared for battle.

I used my implements of destruction and was able to get it into small pieces fairly quickly. I keep thinking that I should get a chainsaw - there are enough downed limbs and weed trees to justify such a tool. But there is something especially satisfying about taking apart a limb like this with an axe. A few well-aimed swings can separate things into manageable pieces, and it's hard not to feel like you've accomplished something when you're done.

Once cut up, though, the pieces still had to be hauled off to the brush pile. Given that Freyja was hanging about and "helping", I tried to elicit her assistance:

E: Hey Freyja, you like to haul wood about. How about you carry these on over to the brush pile.

F: ...

E: Really - come on - you're big and strong. It'll be a good workout for you.

F: ...

So, yeah, disappointed for the second time of the afternoon, I hauled it all off for future burning.

Anytime I do something like this, outside, in the wintery weather, it reminds me how quickly one warms up if one is actively working in the cold. I started up bundled up against the cold, but before I got halfway through I was loosening buttons and unzipping things to get relief from the heat. It's mother nature's little gift.

Home and Away

This was my view yesterday morning:

...And this was the view out my window today:

Thanks to a delightful invitation by MLW's Aunt and Uncle we spent the last week at the Paradise Village resort in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. A delightful time was had by all. Over the course of our week in the tropics we went scuba diving (LB) and snorkeling (MLW and myself), swimming and boogie-boarding on the beach, kayaking, swimming, hottubbing, receiving massages, and partaking of many drinks and lovely dinners with family - including one such dinner on a pirate ship. It was a wonderful opportunity for a truly unforgettable experience.

We left temperatures in the 70's and 80's to return to an Illinois draped in snow. For some this might be a let-down. Our midwestern state had temps in the 40's, with nary a snowflake to be seen when we left, and we were entering it from a tropical paradise.

For me, though, as truly delightful as Mexico was (and it was), I also delight in the midwestern winter. The first snows of winter always make me smile and, while I'll admit to being a little frustrated with the way the weather slowed our trip home - the bus struggled with snow and traffic on the way back from O'Hare to Rockford - once I was on my own, navigating along country roads, each progressively more snow covered than the next - I was in a little bit of heaven.

It's wonderful to get away, and this vacation was particularly special. And it's wonderful to come home again as well.

Where Have All the Railroads Gone?

Several enduring recollections of my childhood involve railroads. Mendota has always been a crossroads, some of those roads paved, others laid with track. In that fashion, many of those memories simply involve having to sit and wait as the train goes by - the quiet groan as the lights come on at the crossing and the gate comes down, the brief hope that it's an Amtrak train which will quickly pass, its dozen or fewer cars flying by at high speed; this followed by the darkening realization that no, it's a freight train, with too many cars to count, and that this will be a long wait.

But other memories involve playing along those railroad lines. Yes, I realize that statement sounds like something a frustrated parent might off-handedly say to a troublesome child, but it's true. In my childhood the countryside here was cross-crossed with rail lines, many defunct or at least in such low use that one virtually never saw a train. These lines offered walkways through the countryside that were often very different from traveling on the roadways. While the roads were open, with long sight lines offering view of fields, fields, and more fields, the rail lines were typically lined with trees. Those trees were scrub growth - no one had planted them - but they offered a break from the former prairie, and opportunity to feel that one was out in the woods. A similar opportunity was offered by stream beds, but that held the problem of dealing with water and water-loving insects, while the railways were relatively bug free. Indeed, where there was water there was also a bridge to walk across, high above, butterflies in the stomach as one focused on making sure each footfall landed on a railroad tie rather than on the open space in-between. (As I've said before, it's a wonder we didn't die...)

Many of these are gone. If they seemed defunct in the 1970's they have simply vanished now. If you know where they were you can still see evidence of them - sometimes seeing the raised bed on either side of a roadway or the remainders of the trestle supports in a stream bed, cut down when the bridge was removed, but too much trouble to pull up.

It's an old joke that country folks provide directions with references to things that are gone - "you turn left where the old oak tree used to be, go down about a half mile, and take a right where they pulled up the railroad tracks..." Like many such things, it has its origins in a grain of truth. I think about these old rail lines often, typically as I drive past the places they used to be. There's enough evidence in the lay of the landscape to see what was there if one knows what one is looking for, and that is enough to trigger those memories.

I realize, as I think about such things that my memory of them is really quite limited. I have vivid memories of a few miles of these rail lines at best, and that in non-continuous sections. I know very little about where they went and what they were for. Fortunately, the internet has some things to offer in that regard: The Illinois State Library has scanned in a series of Illinois railroad maps going back to the late 1800's. These can be viewed on the site, which offers a viewer that allows you to zoom in, or downloaded in a size that allows you to zoom in on your own device (a better option for mobile devices).

What I see here is that the lines that I'm most familiar with - both of which are now gone - are designated as BN-L and MILW-G on the map from 1970. The BN-L line ran between Sterling and Paw Paw, right through West Brooklyn and Compton. My recollection of it was primarily of the tracks crossing 251 just at the south end of Compton. You can still see the remnants of it going east into Compton, including the grain elevator that was undoubtedly a cargo stop. The route is circled here:

This article from the American History and Geneology Project suggests that line was once called the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy line, and offers a little invective as to railroad decisions as well:

The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy is the only road running through Compton. For a time it was expected the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul would extend its north and south branch through Compton, but for reasons best known to railroads, it ran a mile to the east and established the Roxbury station and built an elevator.

It appears likely that the invective is actually directed at the other line I'm referring to, designated as MILW-G on the map, and circled here:

I've circled Compton and "Roxburg" in dark green. The "burg" in this instead of "bury", as in the article, appears to be an error on the map. Modern maps - inlcuding Apple and Google Maps - refer to this area as Roxbury. And, indeed, there is an old grain elevator at this spot as well (see the arrrow):

All of this a reminder that there was once a vibrant railroad network through this area, with old grain elevators and empty, flat grassways serving as the palimpsest of a former time. At times it feels like a loss, things gone to the vagaries of time. In many ways, though, I feel fortunate. I was born in an era of transition, giving me the opportunity to have seen, and still recall what was, and to see what it will all become. While not precisely the same window of opportunity as my grandparents - born in the nineteen-teens they would have viewed the rise of the automobile, the airplane, and the telephone - I've had the opportunity to walk the tracks laid in their childhood, to play in the barns they used and their parents and grandparents built, and yet to see what comes next.

New Approach

As mentioned briefly a day or two ago, it's time for wrapping the front door again. This because the wisdom of siting your house at the top of a hill and pointing your front doors in the direction of the prevailing wind on the open prairie is something perhaps better understood from the perspective of a settler making a statement in 1861 than from that of a homeowner in 2016 who must face an LP gas bill... but I digress.

In previous years I've put rigid foam insulation across the entirely of the inside of the front doors. Our approach this year is different. This year the plan is to sandwich the foam insulation in-between the storm doors and the front doors. This will, hopefully, give us something approaching the the insulating capacity of covering the entire doorway without the ugliness of it all.

We have been re-using the same foam panels over the past few years. I was able to modify one of the panels to fit in the door opening. This was a bit more challenging than one might think. While it was easy enough to cut a single panel to fit in the space - ideal because it decreases the number of seams or weak points for air to leak thru - getting it into the opening between the double-doors was another thing. The space they offer when open isn't quite as big as the space I needed to fill. This left me with three potential options:

1. Cut the panel and make it from two separate pieces.
2. Take one or both of the doors off the hinges; or
3. Try to gently bend the panel and hope that it doesn't break.

I went with option #3. Two separate pieces offers an entire additional cut through which wind can blow, so that was a no go. As for the hinges, well... when anything 155 years old is continuing to operate as designed, trying to take it apart and put it back together seems... inadvisable.

Long story short, I was able to gently coax it into place. A little bit of trimming was needed to get it all to drop where it needed to be, but it's in there as a single panel. Add in a bit of Frog Tape (which is gentle on the ancient paint), and we were ready to go:

I put the silver side to the inside, and the white, painted side to the outside. This should look more like a regular door from the outside, and perhaps the silver will reflect some light back into the hall. The windows are frosted, so you can't see much of the lettering through them.

Now it's just a waiting game. As the weather gets colder and the winds pick up we'll see how this measures up to the more complete wrapping of the past. I don't expect it to be quite as good, but if it's close I'll be content with the trade off of having the doors visible and the whole thing less claustrophobic than in the past.

November Wind

The curtains are drawn tonight against an angry western November wind. It's the first time this season, which has been oddly, pleasantly warm and calm.

The first time, but not the last, to be certain.

It also starts this season's test of the slow, but semi-steady improvements we've made. Last season these were windows, this season insulated curtains are in place. And we'll be trying out a hopefully more visually appealing approach to our front door insulation approach this year. After all, things didn't always work so well last year.

Solar Roof?

This week Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space X, announced a new product developed in conjunction with SolarCity - a new type of solar shingles designed to visually replicate the appearance of traditional roofing materials.

At first blush it might seem odd to bring this up here, on this site dedicated to living in and (very slowly) restoring a family home built in 1861. Indeed, I went back and forth between whether to put this here, or on my more science and technology oriented site. But this seemed the right place.

While our goal is to maintain and restore this old family home, it has never been with the intention of living a 19th-century lifestyle. We've been working our way through the replacement of the original windows, and with the help of the fine folks at Triple Service, have installed air conditioning and, more recently, a modern iron filtering system for the water supply. And, given that the house was originally built without either electricity or indoor plumbing, I hold that these modifications are consistent with the approach prior generations have taken to the Homestead.

All of which makes this new product very interesting to me. The prospect of using alternative energy sources - either solar or wind - has been something I've wanted to incorporate in the long-term picture for our home from the beginning. This is true both from the standpoint of being a person who is interested in these technological solutions for their own sake, and for the benefit they stand to offer to the environment. It's also true from the perspective of a person who owns a large, 155-year old home who must contend with the utility bills that home generates.

In addition, owing to our rural location, we are low on the list for restoration during power outages. In the seven years that we've been living at the homestead we've encountered at least one outage each year, and several of those have been for multiple days at a time. Because we have forced air heat and get our water from a well with an electric pump, a power outage also means a heat and water outage. This is a reality of where we live, of course - on the open prairie, in an area with high enough winds to justify a wind farm - but that makes it a reality it's which one must contend. Being in the position of generating some or all of one's own power becomes a very attractive option under these circumstances. If one can do that in a fashion that also complements the appearance of our vintage home, as opposed to looking like a modern-era tack-on, so much the better.

Another, very relevant detail is the quality and durability of the roofing material itself. Because of our location in the wind farm the traditional asphalt shingles that are used here struggle to maintain their protective position in the face of the gust. The descriptions of this material suggests that it is considerably more durable than traditional roofing.

This is all early days, of course. The product is not yet available, and there's been no announcement of pricing, though the stated goal is to make the cost competitive to the cost of traditional roofing plus utilities. Still, I think our Homestead would look quite nice with the Slate Tile panels on it. If the folks at Tesla and SolarCity are looking for a location which would provide a real-world, four-season, high-wind test site for their product I'm certain arrangements could be made...

Burdock

If you have spent any time exploring unmanicured areas in northern Illinois you have undoubtedly encountered Burdock.

The Wikipedia entry for Burdock describes its role as a food item in Asian countries and as the inspiration for Velcro, which is all well and good. What Wikipedia fails to do is to accurately describe this plant as a hateful, invasive weed that is designed to wreak havoc on the coat of medium to long-furred canines passing by.

It's slightly possible that I have not been as diligent as I could have been at trimming around the old barn. One consequence of this oversight seems to be that of allowing a burgeoning colony of Burdock to grow in and around that area. What's more, if I wasn't aware of my lawn care failings of my own accord, Rosie, our border collie/Australian shepherd mix has been helpfully making me aware.

I need to do some further research here, but based upon our recent experiences, it seems quite possible that border collies and Australian shepherds were selectively bred as Burdock seed distribution devices.

Sometimes you can catch the seed pods shortly after they have attached, at which point they can be removed fairly easily. However, miss a day or two of grooming, or fail to detect the presence of one of these things during a grooming session, and it can work it's way into a mat of fur that seems to require divine intervention (or scissors) to remove.

It appears that it could certainly be worse than we have it here, as a quick google image search confirms. Still, this fact does not prevent this plant's placement on my "I wonder if extinction is always a bad thing" list.

Fourmile Grove Cemetery

Tucked off a little side road east of Welland is the Fourmile Grove Cemetery. This one is a little different than some of the others I have featured here in that it is a little harder to turn up online. I come across this particular location not by online research, but by riding past it on a bike outing a while back.

The reason for the name is somewhat hard to sort out. My best guess - and it is a guess - is that the name reflects the distance of the cemetery from the tiny town of Meriden Illinois. There is a creek in the distance, and the remnants of a grove, though it's difficult to see at the site itself. While there are large old trees there, the immediately surrounding territory is farmland.

This site is being maintained - it's mowed regularly, and apparently has a section of the property maintained as a bit of prairie.

But several of the graves are slowly being consumed by the earth, and others appear to already be subsumed.

Review of the site from findagrave.com lists several graves that I did not - could not - see while I was there. This makes me wonder further how many additional graves there may be, covered, at the other Melugin Grove Cemetery.

This is a lovely site, and it was a lovely ride to get there. Aside from that, for me this was a bit of a bust. With my current information at least, no one at Fourmile Grove appears to be a relative.

Rotties and Woodpiles

In the back yard we have an old concrete slab that used to serve as a floor for a garage no longer present. On that slab we keep a Coleman fireplace for the occasional fire and, not coincidentally, a pile of firewood.

Over the years I have periodically walked past the wood pile to find it in disarray, pieces knocked to the side, bits fallen down. My typical strategy has been to look at this and (at best) sigh, and reassemble the pile. I've always assumed that this was the result of a dog jumping on, or perhaps into, the pile in pursuit of a mouse or similar prey, my wood-stacking abilities not sufficient to construct a pile with the integrity to withstand the errant canine snout poking it in just the right spot.

I had no idea.

This afternoon I discovered mice in my tool bucket (f&@king things). I wanted to dump out the bucket to separate the vermin from my wrenches and other sundry implements of destruction, but I was at a loss as to where to dump it. The driveway and garage floor weren't options, as I had no specific idea as to what was in the bottom of the bucket beneath the mice, but I knew there was a good likelihood that at least some of it was sharp. And I certainly didn't want to dump the mice anywhere near the house.

LB suggested I dump it on the slab, out back. I pronounced this a brilliant idea, and we set off towards making it so.

As soon as the bucket was upended the mice skittered. We'd counted at least three babies and one mother when we viewed it from the top. Once dumped there were at least five juveniles that scurried out along with mom, and most headed straight for - you've likely guessed it already: the woodpile.

All of this happened under the watchful eye of Freyja, our Rottweiler mix. She immediately began sniffing about at, and sticking her nose into, the woodpile.

I have personally long had a bias towards breeds that fall into what one traditionally thinks of as part of the herding group - border collies, cattle dogs, shepherds, and the like. I like those breeds because they are bright, capable animals who work with you rather than just obediently follow. Lots of owners want a lovable dufus, but I am not one of them. Casting them in with that lot, my attitude towards Rottweilers was the same as I held towards most other breeds: disinterest.

Again: no idea.

While Freyja is smaller than a full-bred Rottie, her head is much too big to poke in between the logs, which one would expect to ultimately stymie her attempts at mouse hunting.

One, perhaps, did not expect the problem-solving that followed:

Apparently, when you are a Rottweiler and you cannot get your (huge) head in-between the logs you just remove the logs in a canine game of Jenga until you can.

And she did - she steps away at the end with a mouse in her mouth.

...and left me, once again, to re-stack the woodpile.

Fisk Cemetary

One of the more delightful parts of doing geneology research is that it takes me to wonderfully peaceful locations like the other Melugin Grove cemetery and, today, Fisk cemetery.

The countryside here is peppered with these little cemetaries, some of them tiny, some of them large. Typically there are gravestones at an array of ages, some legible and, for the older graveyards, many not. Some time spent online will find that some of these sites (though not all) have at least partial rosters to give you an idea of who is interned there. I recently re-discovered findagrave.com, which is a low cost way to find a considerable amount of information both about where to find ancestors, as well as adding to what you know about them - I've found, for example, a few additional family members a couple of generation back, within the information available on the site.

It also meant that I knew - or at least had a pretty good idea - what I would find by traveling to and exploring Fisk cemetery. Central to that trip today was the grave for my Great-great-great grandfather and grandmother: Smith H. ”Prairie" Johnson and Ziba (Tompkins) Johnson.

These two people fall in the same generation as John Foulk, the builder of our house. And as with that generation on the other side of my mother's side of the family (if you can parse that sentence) things start to get sketchy when one tries to go further back. Written records get harder to find, making a record of these grave sites much more important. Thanks to my uncle's family tree research the Johnson side of the family can be tracked further back, but the same is not true for the Foulks and the Comptons, among others. There the work is more involved.

I do know from this that I want to know more about these folks - what occurs that causes a man to get the nickname "Prairie" in the first place? And what is the derivation of the name "Ziba"? Is it short for Elizabeth? Because Ziba is the only version of that name I come across. And she was born in 1809 and died in 1873. It doesn't seem like folks from back then were terribly interested in keeping enduring written records as a part of their priorities while coping with life on the prairie. Wolves, coyotes, panthers, growing enough food to survive - they may have had other things on their minds.

Also present at the Fisk Cemetary is Calvin Johnson and his family.

Calvin and Mary (Williams) Johnson would be, by my estimation, my Great-great Uncle and Aunt, respectively. As is true of many living in the turn of the century they experienced tragedy with respect to building their family. They lost all of their children early - one at 3 months (Jennie), another at three years (Lafayette). The third and first-born, Eugene, lived to 23 years of age. He did better than his siblings, but all three were outlived by their parents.

This is not, of course, an uncommon story for the times. Still, it illustrates the reality - and the pain - of the era.

The folks three generations back - John and Martha Foulk, Smith and Ziba Johnson, John and Nancy Compton - come to Illinois from the East. The Foulks came by way of Pennsylvania, with a stopover in Ohio; the Johnsons came out from Vermont and New York. We can see from the gravestones they were here, but finding more on them has been challenging.