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yess i have a charger now
Oct. 31st, 2019 12:58 amvia https://ift.tt/32ZeUMo
back online!
This morning after doing a small assortment of farm work I took a walk through the woods on the other side of the stream from the yurt.
There’s a nice level bit of ground there, in the woods, pleasant and lovely, and would be suitable to build a sugar shack or small house of some kind on. I scouted it out, and thought about it. You could get equipment in there, if you wanted to dig a foundation or use a tractor-mounted auger to dig down to put in poles for a pole-built structure– a ways down, the stream goes through a culvert under the farm road, and you could get something in there, though you’d have to take trees down. Most of the trees are small, though; it’d be a fine time to do a bit of careful forestry, and make that a deliberate planting. It’d also be a great place for a mushroom-cultivation operation, in deep shade and near water like that.
But you couldn’t get power over there, really; it’s pushing it to even get it as far as the yurt was, and to cross the stream with some kind of extension cord, well. You’d be lucky to power a lightbulb without tripping a breaker, at that distance.
I continued my walk and went up through the woods, across the level bit of the farm we call the “gravel bank”, and over to the big level area where we have the compost piles. VM had mentioned seeing a boar skull there, and I followed the directions he’d said and sure enough, right there in the grass, I found a skull it was easy to tell had belonged to Peanut Butter, the boar on duty from probably, mm, 2016-2018. Last year it was determined that he’d outlived his purpose, since the sows weren’t pregnant, and so he was despatched, neatly and respectfully, and his remains interred in the compost heap. But the coyotes can’t let that sort of thing go, and clearly at least his head had gotten dragged out at some point.
I looked about two feet farther and found his lower jaw, as well. There’s no other individual it could be; he was enormous, as pigs keep growing their whole lives, and had noticeable tusks, and this skull had those. So I collected the skull and jaw, and brought them back to the house.
[image description: a large pig skull with curving tusks, sitting on the steps of a house]
We had a lovely lunch to celebrate the end of the season. Tonight was the last Wednesday CSA pickup of the season. Saturday’s really the last pickup, but Saturday’s always a smaller day. One of the two apprentices has already gone, and the other’s only working a half-day Friday, then leaving; today was a particular part-timer’s last day as well. So we had a lovely pie, baked by VM, and assorted other treats, and sat around reminiscing, and such.
After lunch my mother and father came over. Dad’s always concerned about leaving a mess, places– the property I grew up on had been rather badly disrespected by previous generations, and he spent my entire childhood picking garbage out of places. Right by the house, there had clearly once been a structure that had burned, and they’d just bulldozed the remnants into the woods and left it to rot, so there was broken glass, mattress springs, pounds and pounds of nails, and assorted other hazardous trash, so I could never play over there. (Farmsister, conversely, has many fond memories of playing over there; she’s 5 years younger than me, and I think by the time she was playing alone in the woods Dad had it mostly cleaned up. I just wasn’t really allowed over there. She doesn’t remember that.)
So Mom and Dad and I went and sifted the yurt ashes, finding the metal bits and piling them for later trash collection, and salvage, and such. Dad spent the time pounding nails out of burnt bits of wood, taking apart the few remaining bits of the platform beams, and sifting out bolts and things.
I found the remains of a few things I recognized. Part of a pair of pants. A rolled-up towel. And books, two books– one was a borrowed one that’s going to be expensive to replace, and the other was my bullet journal, which was the longest time I’ve ever kept a bullet journal going. Alas. I kept the soggy mass of burnt pages, in a box, and I’ll throw it out later, I just wanted to leaf through and see if I could find anything amusing still written there.
I recognized a number of fragmentary objects. My computer chargers, both of them. The interior of my battery pack. The base of the awesome vintage Coleman water cooler I’d been using for drinking water. Bits of candle lanterns. The tips of stick lighters, two of the three I’d had.
[image description: a hunk of grungy metal, covered in dirt but recognizable as the power brick of a charger for an Apple laptop]
We salvaged a number of S-hooks, and a few clamps who hadn’t lost the temper in their springs. One plastic clamp, that had clearly fallen off the edge of the platform before the whole conflagration started, was also intact.
It was super depressing, and I said so, and my mother said you know, you’ve been very upbeat about all of this but you know you’re allowed to be sad, right? And I did manage not to cry then, I’m proud of myself. I’m not– I mean, I’m sad, I’m really sad, but I’m not finding it particularly tempting to dwell on it. Sometimes wallowing in a tragedy feels good in a hurty kind of way, and helps you process, you know? but I’m not getting that from this, I think I’d just get sucked into dwelling on whatever I lost, and be more upset. It’s all right, I’ll make something better and move on, and I’m sad but I’m not going to roll around in it. It just isn’t that tempting to roll around in, it seems more like it’d be the shitty ouchy kind of hurt than the good press-on-it-to-get-it-out kind.
In the end, spending time in that site, I started thinking that actually I think I’d rather build the tiny house right where the yurt had been. I don’t think I want to go back farther into the woods. VM agreed that a rope bridge could be fun to build, and to make a little mushroom grove over there could really be a treat, but having the sugar shack accessible from the road on a stretch that never gets too muddy/frozen/snowy to use, and having the building able to have power and possibly plumbing (!) laid down, would be far more convenient. If we were more deliberate about the trees, maybe cut down the one big one that’s pretty damaged, there’d be less shade on the house but we could landscape the whole area, maybe move some of the perennial stuff (rhubarb, etc) over there near the building, maybe make the parking areas for the various tractor equipment more deliberate and less haphazard and just nicer all around.
And if there was plumbing, there could be a bathroom the apprentices could use there, instead of going all the way back to the house to shower in the bathroom everyone there has to share. I don’t think we could get a sceptic system in that spot, but we could retain the composting toilet concept and just have a gray water sump thingy instead, that’s not beyond possibility. I’d really, really, really like having access to a shower out there, instead of having to go all the way to the house.
Anyway. Lots of thinking.
In other news, we got the big tractor unstuck. I say “we”, but really, BIL just called the conventional farmer who does the huge cornfields across the street, and asked if he happened to have a moment to come by with one of his big double-wheel tractors. The farmer was free, as it happened, because the corn hasn’t dried down enough to harvest, and so within ten minutes he was there with a truly enormous John Deere, and had pulled the 806 out of the muck-up-to-its-axels in literally the amount of time it took to get the tow chain connected. He was scornful of BIL’s offer to give him money for the assist, and horrified that he and my sister had given themselves blisters trying to dig out by hand. He said, “Next time, you just call me, don’t even get out the shovels, that’s just crazy.”
(The 806 is a late-60s-vintage International Harvester with weighted wheels, and a gross weight of around 10,000 pounds. Which is huge– but if you’re a conventional corn operation, you’ve probably got several tractors at least twice that size. Which this guy did, so.)
We’re trying to decide if we could give him a Thanksgiving turkey, or if he’d turn that down too. It’s a huge weight off everyone’s mind; that tractor was stuck for a solid week, and it is the only piece of equipment on the farm capable of doing various important tasks (like turning the compost or moving the hens’ eggmobile), and every day it sat in that muck it was pulling itself in deeper.
And then, in the late afternoon, several packages arrived, including a new Kindle from Farmsister to me, so I could keep reading to Farmkid, and a box from Dude, in which I’d asked him to put my laptop charger and any bras he could find, since I had only one left here. “Maybe,” Farmkid said slyly, as I retrieved the box, “he sent you a surprise too?”
“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t expect so; it’d be nice if he’d sent along some kind of consolation gift, but I know he is not the sort of person who’d think of what to send. He did not, in fact, but there was a scrap of paper upon which he’d drawn a heart and signed his name, which Farmkid thought was quite sweet, and so did I. I was delighted to plug in my computer, to be sure.
The final thing of interest that happened is that BIL decided that he needs to get a backhoe in order to repair the drainage in the livestock barn, and also do a large number of other tasks that need doing around the farm (including redo the water to the greenhouses and while at it, possibly dig a trench to lay power and perhaps water out to the site where the yurt was, while one is digging, y’know?) and my father decided that he’d always wanted a backhoe and has a few but not quite enough projects around his house to justify it (and nowhere to store it if he did), and so what’s going to happen is that he’s going to buy one and store it at the farm. So that solves that problem, and also opens up some potential avenues for the potential tiny house construction project.
Also my eldest nephew is obsessed with tiny houses and has been talking about almost nothing else ever since it was mentioned in conjunction with the yurt needing replacement, so.
I just want it to be something that’s fun for other people, and probably a thing that I’m not really in charge of, y’know? Anyway. So that’s the haps, in yet another ridiculously long post.
back online!
This morning after doing a small assortment of farm work I took a walk through the woods on the other side of the stream from the yurt.
There’s a nice level bit of ground there, in the woods, pleasant and lovely, and would be suitable to build a sugar shack or small house of some kind on. I scouted it out, and thought about it. You could get equipment in there, if you wanted to dig a foundation or use a tractor-mounted auger to dig down to put in poles for a pole-built structure– a ways down, the stream goes through a culvert under the farm road, and you could get something in there, though you’d have to take trees down. Most of the trees are small, though; it’d be a fine time to do a bit of careful forestry, and make that a deliberate planting. It’d also be a great place for a mushroom-cultivation operation, in deep shade and near water like that.
But you couldn’t get power over there, really; it’s pushing it to even get it as far as the yurt was, and to cross the stream with some kind of extension cord, well. You’d be lucky to power a lightbulb without tripping a breaker, at that distance.
I continued my walk and went up through the woods, across the level bit of the farm we call the “gravel bank”, and over to the big level area where we have the compost piles. VM had mentioned seeing a boar skull there, and I followed the directions he’d said and sure enough, right there in the grass, I found a skull it was easy to tell had belonged to Peanut Butter, the boar on duty from probably, mm, 2016-2018. Last year it was determined that he’d outlived his purpose, since the sows weren’t pregnant, and so he was despatched, neatly and respectfully, and his remains interred in the compost heap. But the coyotes can’t let that sort of thing go, and clearly at least his head had gotten dragged out at some point.
I looked about two feet farther and found his lower jaw, as well. There’s no other individual it could be; he was enormous, as pigs keep growing their whole lives, and had noticeable tusks, and this skull had those. So I collected the skull and jaw, and brought them back to the house.
[image description: a large pig skull with curving tusks, sitting on the steps of a house]
We had a lovely lunch to celebrate the end of the season. Tonight was the last Wednesday CSA pickup of the season. Saturday’s really the last pickup, but Saturday’s always a smaller day. One of the two apprentices has already gone, and the other’s only working a half-day Friday, then leaving; today was a particular part-timer’s last day as well. So we had a lovely pie, baked by VM, and assorted other treats, and sat around reminiscing, and such.
After lunch my mother and father came over. Dad’s always concerned about leaving a mess, places– the property I grew up on had been rather badly disrespected by previous generations, and he spent my entire childhood picking garbage out of places. Right by the house, there had clearly once been a structure that had burned, and they’d just bulldozed the remnants into the woods and left it to rot, so there was broken glass, mattress springs, pounds and pounds of nails, and assorted other hazardous trash, so I could never play over there. (Farmsister, conversely, has many fond memories of playing over there; she’s 5 years younger than me, and I think by the time she was playing alone in the woods Dad had it mostly cleaned up. I just wasn’t really allowed over there. She doesn’t remember that.)
So Mom and Dad and I went and sifted the yurt ashes, finding the metal bits and piling them for later trash collection, and salvage, and such. Dad spent the time pounding nails out of burnt bits of wood, taking apart the few remaining bits of the platform beams, and sifting out bolts and things.
I found the remains of a few things I recognized. Part of a pair of pants. A rolled-up towel. And books, two books– one was a borrowed one that’s going to be expensive to replace, and the other was my bullet journal, which was the longest time I’ve ever kept a bullet journal going. Alas. I kept the soggy mass of burnt pages, in a box, and I’ll throw it out later, I just wanted to leaf through and see if I could find anything amusing still written there.
I recognized a number of fragmentary objects. My computer chargers, both of them. The interior of my battery pack. The base of the awesome vintage Coleman water cooler I’d been using for drinking water. Bits of candle lanterns. The tips of stick lighters, two of the three I’d had.
[image description: a hunk of grungy metal, covered in dirt but recognizable as the power brick of a charger for an Apple laptop]
We salvaged a number of S-hooks, and a few clamps who hadn’t lost the temper in their springs. One plastic clamp, that had clearly fallen off the edge of the platform before the whole conflagration started, was also intact.
It was super depressing, and I said so, and my mother said you know, you’ve been very upbeat about all of this but you know you’re allowed to be sad, right? And I did manage not to cry then, I’m proud of myself. I’m not– I mean, I’m sad, I’m really sad, but I’m not finding it particularly tempting to dwell on it. Sometimes wallowing in a tragedy feels good in a hurty kind of way, and helps you process, you know? but I’m not getting that from this, I think I’d just get sucked into dwelling on whatever I lost, and be more upset. It’s all right, I’ll make something better and move on, and I’m sad but I’m not going to roll around in it. It just isn’t that tempting to roll around in, it seems more like it’d be the shitty ouchy kind of hurt than the good press-on-it-to-get-it-out kind.
In the end, spending time in that site, I started thinking that actually I think I’d rather build the tiny house right where the yurt had been. I don’t think I want to go back farther into the woods. VM agreed that a rope bridge could be fun to build, and to make a little mushroom grove over there could really be a treat, but having the sugar shack accessible from the road on a stretch that never gets too muddy/frozen/snowy to use, and having the building able to have power and possibly plumbing (!) laid down, would be far more convenient. If we were more deliberate about the trees, maybe cut down the one big one that’s pretty damaged, there’d be less shade on the house but we could landscape the whole area, maybe move some of the perennial stuff (rhubarb, etc) over there near the building, maybe make the parking areas for the various tractor equipment more deliberate and less haphazard and just nicer all around.
And if there was plumbing, there could be a bathroom the apprentices could use there, instead of going all the way back to the house to shower in the bathroom everyone there has to share. I don’t think we could get a sceptic system in that spot, but we could retain the composting toilet concept and just have a gray water sump thingy instead, that’s not beyond possibility. I’d really, really, really like having access to a shower out there, instead of having to go all the way to the house.
Anyway. Lots of thinking.
In other news, we got the big tractor unstuck. I say “we”, but really, BIL just called the conventional farmer who does the huge cornfields across the street, and asked if he happened to have a moment to come by with one of his big double-wheel tractors. The farmer was free, as it happened, because the corn hasn’t dried down enough to harvest, and so within ten minutes he was there with a truly enormous John Deere, and had pulled the 806 out of the muck-up-to-its-axels in literally the amount of time it took to get the tow chain connected. He was scornful of BIL’s offer to give him money for the assist, and horrified that he and my sister had given themselves blisters trying to dig out by hand. He said, “Next time, you just call me, don’t even get out the shovels, that’s just crazy.”
(The 806 is a late-60s-vintage International Harvester with weighted wheels, and a gross weight of around 10,000 pounds. Which is huge– but if you’re a conventional corn operation, you’ve probably got several tractors at least twice that size. Which this guy did, so.)
We’re trying to decide if we could give him a Thanksgiving turkey, or if he’d turn that down too. It’s a huge weight off everyone’s mind; that tractor was stuck for a solid week, and it is the only piece of equipment on the farm capable of doing various important tasks (like turning the compost or moving the hens’ eggmobile), and every day it sat in that muck it was pulling itself in deeper.
And then, in the late afternoon, several packages arrived, including a new Kindle from Farmsister to me, so I could keep reading to Farmkid, and a box from Dude, in which I’d asked him to put my laptop charger and any bras he could find, since I had only one left here. “Maybe,” Farmkid said slyly, as I retrieved the box, “he sent you a surprise too?”
“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t expect so; it’d be nice if he’d sent along some kind of consolation gift, but I know he is not the sort of person who’d think of what to send. He did not, in fact, but there was a scrap of paper upon which he’d drawn a heart and signed his name, which Farmkid thought was quite sweet, and so did I. I was delighted to plug in my computer, to be sure.
The final thing of interest that happened is that BIL decided that he needs to get a backhoe in order to repair the drainage in the livestock barn, and also do a large number of other tasks that need doing around the farm (including redo the water to the greenhouses and while at it, possibly dig a trench to lay power and perhaps water out to the site where the yurt was, while one is digging, y’know?) and my father decided that he’d always wanted a backhoe and has a few but not quite enough projects around his house to justify it (and nowhere to store it if he did), and so what’s going to happen is that he’s going to buy one and store it at the farm. So that solves that problem, and also opens up some potential avenues for the potential tiny house construction project.
Also my eldest nephew is obsessed with tiny houses and has been talking about almost nothing else ever since it was mentioned in conjunction with the yurt needing replacement, so.
I just want it to be something that’s fun for other people, and probably a thing that I’m not really in charge of, y’know? Anyway. So that’s the haps, in yet another ridiculously long post.
