Oh the weather outside....

...is creepy. We are currently in a high risk area for tornadoes today. This means there is a 30% chance there will be a tornado within 25 miles of any given location within the high risk area. We are also warned that there may be 50 mph winds outside of the main storm and hail.

Fortunately, we are prepared. We've got water and blankets and flashlights, batteries, storm radios... in the basement and all the animals are locked  up for the day. Last week Bill also cleaned out the garage, so our cars are actually in it for the first time since we moved in. This, we hope, protects them from hail and falling branches.
 

Also last week, Bill replaced a very broken pane in a living room window.

All the storm windows are shut, the kerosene lamps are full of oil and we are snuggled in for an afternoon of game playing and weather alert listening.

Winter Prep

It has been getting colder at night and we've all be preparing for the long winter. Wool socks have been washed:

Corrie and Sugar Pie are practicing snuggling for body warmth:

And squirrels are stashing walnuts in our woodshed:

In trees:

And on fence posts:

Totally secure. This must be a very trusting squirrel.

Frosty Fall Morning

Lots of work was done around here this week, and I was going to tell you all about the wood hauling, garage cleaning and beer making (and smoke detector battery changing - change your batteries when you change  your clocks!), but when I went out to wake up the animals this morning everything was frosty and foggy. I thought you'd like to see that more than you'd like to see piles of wood, or de-walnut-shell-ified garage floors.

Martha, being dignified:

Rose has recently decided that people aren't all that bad and she'll now eat grain from  my hand, chew on my coat, and stare at me as if to say "why is there no grain in your hand?"

Kaylee started climbing on the straw bales again this week. Her ability to reliably climb was the last sign we were waiting to see for her full recovery. She's still a bit smaller than Saffron, but watching her jump on top of the Barn Mountain warms my heart.

Group shot! Everyone says "Good Morning."

"Now, feed us grain, Woman!"

The Missing "s" Game. AKA, the post with an anti-lisp and no understanding of plurals.

(The "s" key is no longer working on my keyboard, so I'm pasting it in this intro for your information. I may leave it out a bunch in the post below because it is slowing me down. If a word doesn't make sense, check to see if it is missing an "s." I know you can do it! I've seen how some of you text.)

I learned in Herpetology that if you drop a frog into really hot water, it will realize omething i wrong and jump out, but if you drop it into temperate water which you lowly heat up, you can boil the frog and it won't realize it i dying. Along thee line but in revere, Bill and I often pend many night hivering before we realize it i time to turn on the heat. But, ometimes in Autumn we take a trip and come back to coldness, giving u a clear indication that it i time to make fire. Thi wa one of thoe year. There i a firing burning a I hare the photo with you.

Thi pat weekend we went to Rhinebeck for the NY heep and Wool Fetival. It i the firt year where I've known lot of fetival-goer and had a great time meeting o many lovely, happy knitter.

Of coure, I bought tuff too.

There i ome ock yarn in there and a few kein of heavier-weight longwool for hat. (Now that miing "s" i uddenly noticeable, eh?)

My firt top wa at Into the Whirled for pinning fiber. When I wa holding it all in my hand, thi pound felt like a lot, but now that I'm far away from a purchaing opportunity, it doe't eem like enough.

I alo picked up a fancy pindle. I've been practicing on a "tudent pindle" which i large and brutish. My new one i a Bosworth made of Red Cedar. 17g/.6 ounce. In ampling, I can tell that it i more refined and allow me to pin much finer yarn. I like it. It make me feel more dainty.

It wa a good trip!

Chili and chickens (and goats)

I'm not a very good food blogger and always worry I make things look far less appetizing than they are...but here's what we've been eating this week - local chili:

It's totally time for chili. The beef was purchased directly from the farmer the tomatoes and peppers are from our garden. Bill made the bread and the beer is a home brew. Yummo.

These pumpkins have been dedicated to the highest purpose to which a squash can aspire - pumpkin ale. We bottled it this week and just have to wait a bit while it carbonates. Waiting!!!

This is Minion, the youngest chick we have. He was odd and unexpected and is still totally attached to his mom even though they should really being going their separate ways by now. Basically, he's a big baby.

On the other side of that coin are the Patooties (as in Cutie Patooties), a pair of chickens that were raised by a turkey along with their sister Duck (who clearly has identity issues). The turkey hen is not convinced that her babies are big enough to be on their own yet and is still trying to mother them. The Patooties rather think they are sheep, though, and spend most of their day in the pasture.

The goats are doing well:

Whenever I see these kittens playing or cuddling together it makes me unreasonably happy that we could keep them together. When we went to the Humane Society we knew we wanted "up to two kittens" and  chose these guys because they were the only siblings. I mean, all the kittens were adorable and any that we brought home would have been wonderful, but these guys tug at my heart strings. I'm sure they don't remember, but they had a tough go early in life and whenever I think I of the long, cold night they spent together abandoned outside Animal Control, and the illnesses they battled through as result, I am so glad they still have each other for snuggling. And biting. And squirrel watching.

26-Year-Old Me would never believe this post

One of the side effects of having a farm and only one income is that we travel way less than we did when we had two incomes and zero farms. This is to be expected - and here's the part where the 26 year-old version of me gets skeptical - I don't mind it. I actually rather dig it.

For the first few years of farm ownership (when we had two incomes but were working on our plan to give up one of them), this bothered me a bit and I grudgingly thought about how we used to travel and how we weren't doing that anymore. Consider:

We spent my 29th birthday in St. John snorkeling, drinking rum, and enjoying a tropical paradise even as a plethora of spring break hooligans invaded the campground, including a young gentleman who chose to make monkey noises whenever he laughed. Very loud monkey noises all through the night.

We spent my 30th birthday in New Zealand being amazed at volcanoes, glaciers and wine. In between those birthdays we were fortunate to take two additional short vacations (Vegas and Iceland) and visit with our families in NY. Plus, we lived in DC at the time, so every day held opportunities for local tourism. Except for eating fabulous food, my most fond emotional attachment to living in DC was having the responsibility-free lifestyle and ability to travel to new places.

After my 30th birthday, we took our life in a different direction, and a year later I was shoveling poop out of a barn in Indiana. I don't know if I realized at the time that the barn would eventually hold turkeys...or that I would find turkeys to be a giant pain in the butt...or that I would ever utter the sentence I whispered to Bill earlier this week.

Are you ready?

Bill left work early one day and stopped at the cheese store, a beer store and a cupcakery and brought home these delights.

We spent the evening eating, playing games, and tending to the animals. As we walked out in the twilight to put the farm to bed for the evening, I told Bill I had a delightful evening and it felt like a vacation - just the simple joy in having a couple of extra hours together and sharing food that we don't have often, made the whole day feel special. Also, I was really, really pleased that we could have a vacation where I dressed in pajama pants for dinner and didn't need to interact with TSA.

I realized that I didn't miss the opportunities to travel at all. (That's not to say that I wouldn't take a free trip to Rome if anyone out there wants to offer...)

I think it takes practice and mindfulness to find honest joy and contentment in the really simple things, and to be pleased with where you are and not just where you wish you were. I am so very, very fortunate to know many people who have cultivated this sort of outlook and I thank them for their influence on me (surround yourself with happy people!).

It may look like it was just a few hunks of cheese and some cupcakes, but really, it was a revelation.

Is this really a job?

On Monday and Wednesday of this week, I spent nearly the whole day splitting wood. Check it.

Monday morning:

Monday evening:

Wednesday evening.

A few things to note:
1) Some of this is cherry, so it smells FANTASTIC
2) Yes, I do periodically stand in the woodshed admiring the growing pile
3) We have an electric splitter, so I'm probably not as badass as you're thinking, but it was still a ton of work with much wheelbarrowing involved.

Splitting this wood - all of which is from trees that fell on our land as the result of storms - provided me with a clear example of why we're doing what we're doing. I was confident when I quit my job of our choice to live this sort of life, but it could seem a bit odd to others. There are not a lot of 2013 examples or cultural norms of a woman having no job and no children (it's rather the antithesis of "having it all" by the common current definition). So, I was pleased to realize how directly all this wood splitting could be used to explain the choices we've made.

We (Bill and I...and Sugar Pie and the cats) have a need to keep our house warm during the winter. It's one of those basic requirements that even Thoreau, the king of simplicity, would call a "necessity of life." Previously, I would work at a job that paid me money that I would then exchange for heating fuel in order to meet this need. It was a very fossil-fuel intense process. A car transported me to work, where I sat at a computer for most of the day and earned a paycheck that allowed me to purchase propane gas to be blown throughout my house using a furnace fueled by coal-powered electricity.


An alternative way to provide the heat we need during a cold Indiana winter (and the method that was used when our house was built), is by burning local wood. Now, instead of spending my day earning money to buy propane to heat my house, I spent my time providing heating fuel in a more direct fashion - one that also makes much less use of fossil fuels (the chainsaw and log splitter, and even some of the person-energy rely on fossil fuels in some way, but I am confident it is far less than the previous method). So, even though Childless Woman who Earns No Money is not often considered a job or even a productive choice to make, I think of the work I do here as an employment of sorts - one that meets the needs of my household while making fewer demands on community resources and our environment. It is a weird, but totally viable way to spend a week day.

On a less philosophical note...Kaylee wants you to know that she is feeling better and cavorting around the field at will.

Clara wants you to know that she is still the cutest thing in the barnyard.

Bill and I went apple picking for our anniversary yesterday...

...and added this photo to our collection of arm-length snapshots.