100% un-fooled-around with

Bill took these photos two nights ago as a storm approached near sunset. The entire world turned orange.

I cowered in the living room with the storm radio. Gotta love the midwest in the spring.

I like piles of wood.

It was a lovely day for chopping down trees. We removed this mulberry, which was pushing up the foundation of our garage.


Side note - isn't our garage h.o.t.??

We also chopped up this black locust as, apparently black locust leaves are poisonous to chickens and this tree happened to have the bad luck of living near our future chicken pen.



Despite the thorns growing from the branches, twigs and trunk of this tree, we are quiet enamored with black locust and plan to do whatever we can to help them grow in non-chicken areas of our property. Locust burns hot in our wood stove and this good-sized tree is only 20-25 years old.

This sort of wood pile (we have 6 scattered around), I'm not so in love with:

Sugar spent her day smelling the flowers:

Our radishes are growing!


And some random knitting...fingerless gloves from super soft alpaca my mom picked up at Rhinebeck:


Now, we are off for pizza. Later!

Persistent Organic Pollutants

Persistent Organic Pollutants (or POPs) are organic compounds that don't degrade in the environment....such as PCBs, DDT and walnut shells.

One of our major accomplishments during dumpster week was the removal of 6.3 tons of black walnut shells that squirrels have been leaving in our garage and woodshed. We estimate this to be the accumulation of approximately 3 months of squirrel litter.


These shells fell from a drop ceiling we removed. That was fun.

The squirrels of our garage clearly had different eating styles. The one bite method:


Two nibbles:


A few three-hole wonders:

And the batman:

An unrelated, but seriously cute picture of Sugar:

Things I didn't do

I've had the flu, which sucks. So I haven't been doing much around the house, but we have had some progress. Our garage door was caved in on the top, which was great for the raccoons, but not so great for us.

So, we got a new one! The day after this was installed we saw confused smammal tracks in the snow leading up to the door.

We're up to about 30 gallons of maple sap. Our plan is to boil it down in two weeks.

We had some help from back east two weekends ago. Scraping paint:

Standing around in the basement, doing man things:

And installing a new thermostat. This is the wicked cool old one. Notice it is set to 60 degrees. That's normal and probably why I got the flu.

We now have lots of mercury to play with if anyone has any experiments in mind.

And the new, programmable thermostat!!! Modeled by Bill in his new glasses: