Category: Home Fires

Wow.  I knew it would be wet here in the winter but I didn’t expect to be greeted with record rain.  The average rainfall here for Oct and November combined is 9″.  This year we saw 19″, and the bucket on my deck says maybe a bit more in my yard.

Along with the rain we have also had several windstorms.  Wind here is a little more to be concerned about than I am used to.  Being a rural location with lots of tree and an all aerial distribution we have seen more than our share of power outages.  Including last night’s, I think we are at 6 outages this fall for a total of almost 100 hours.  Needless to say, I have invested in some technology.

Speaking of trees, we haven’t had any personal bad luck yet but there was one near miss.  We left the house to go to the village store a few weeks ago and when I came back an hour later I found this in the spot I had my truck parked.

Near miss for the truck but there was one casualty.

The makes the second barbecue I have owned that had a tree dent the lid.  What are the odds of that?

We are now past Zero day.  11 days past as of the date of this post.  So what does that mean and what happens now?

First, I will not be setting a new date.  The clock will continue to run until Zero Day actually arrives.  The date was originally picked as a wild guess two years ago.  As a guess it was pretty good, and there is a very good chance it will turn out fairly accurate.  Things are in motion on this front, I’ll update you in a few days.

We have already completed a lot of preparation for Zero Day.  We have been eliminating two decades of accumulated “maybe we can use this someday” stuff.  The tenants are out and the new place is vacant and ready for us.  Power is on, cell phone is bought.

Thanks to a creased drivers door my 13 year old truck has been replaced.  “Not worth fixing,” the insurance company says, “here’s a cheque”.  It’s not a new truck, but newer with half the mileage.  I also found a 12 step program for boats…sort of.  Our cabin burnt down if a forest fire last summer that also destroyed two boats.  Two more have been gifted to the kids.  The last two I will take with me.

Now, if only Greece, and the UK, and Russia, and the oil patch slowdown, and all the other crap that is creating havoc would settle down.

 

Related Post Mi Casa

 

 

Time for a pool update.  After the end of round two I still lead the playoff draft by 11 points and have three players remaining.  The most anyone else has is four player.  Most years this would be a lock on a first place finish but not this year.  There have been some scary point getting nights by my fellow pool members.  A couple of nights with the wrong scores and I will loss the lead.  Fingers crossed.

The start of round three finds me in 6th place in the bracket challenge.  I told you I had to brag while I could.  However…with the 3rd rounds picked now in I can retake first place if I guessed correctly.

Stay tuned.

 

Last year I bought an antique Morris chair for my wife as a birthday present. Great chair, terrible cushions.  We decided that the chair would look great with leather upholstery.  Off we go to the local purveyor of hides and find an awesome full hide of distressed leather.  It looked perfect.

Next, how do you actually upholster with leather?  I have redone a few pieces before, a 1930’s sofa, a couple of wing back chairs, a tub chair (my best result to date).  All these were done with some type of fabric.  Although we didn’t know exactly how to do this we did know that our sewing machine would not be up to the task.  So the next purchase was a new sewing machine.  We choose the Ultrafeed LSZ-1 from Sailrite.  Great machine.  Lots of power.

At this point there was a long, loooong stall.  Corners.  How do we do the corners. Many options and various difficulty levels.  Any mistake in cutting or sewing would rapidly become a several hundred dollar oops.  Final after many weeks we found a new way.  Lace the cushions instead of sewing them.  So here we go…

I was just reading the latest newsletter from a greenhouse we stopped by this spring.

Pests and Pestilence

I have one addition to the pest category that is new for us at Wheelbarrel.  Three large otters surprised me early one morning coming down through the roses heading for the pond I presume.  In fact I don’t know who was the most surprised.  Me or them.

We had lost all our fish in the ornamental pond the week before and had the plants all tipped and generally messed with.  We had assumed that the raccoons had finally got them.  The otter sighting put a different perspective on things though.

I knew we had racoons, but otters in the fish pond?  There’s something a prairie boy like me never expected!!

 

 

Wow, right on the heels of the report that globally May was the warmest on record, June at home has been been recorded as the second wettest on record, with over 3 times the average rainfall.  Last Sunday alone we received as much in one day as we normally do in month.  The record was in 1942, not long after the Dirty 30’s ended.  No surprise to me we are now getting another very wet year, perhaps our third in a row by my memory, right after coming out of a 20 year dry spell.

I’m certainly no meteorologist and know next to nothing about weather predictions, or historical trends, or anything scientific.  I do however subscribe to the cyclical nature of weather that comes out of folk lore.  Our ancestor’s understanding of weather patterns came from generations of casual observation, not decades of instrumented measurements.  There is much ado about global warming – or not, man’s influence on the atmosphere – or not, and the impending doom we have wrought upon ourselves – or not depending on who you listen to.

I believe that the earth has had many different stages and environments, and that cause and effect play a huge role in how it changes.  I also believe that the earth balances itself out in the long term.  By long term, I mean loooong term.  Hundreds of thousands of years.  It has a huge feedback loop.

The issue with environment change it not whether man has broken the earth, only whether we have crapped in our own backyard enough to make it no fun to live here anymore.  The earth will be fine.  You however may be really uncomfortable.

Way back when I was a kid my dad had a 1960 Dodge Dart Pioneer.  A big, brown, rusting, beautiful thing that sat unmoved on the driveway for several years.  It was one of our favorite places to play.  When it wasn’t a car it was a rocket ship, a pirate ship,  and an awesome make shift sauna for a ten year old on a hot summer day.

When my older brother got his driver’s license he convinced my dad to get the beast working again.  I remember dad sitting at the kitchen table sewing a new headliner.  I also remember the desiccated mice we found removing the old one.  I watched as my dad tried his hand at fiber glassing as he attempted to repair the rusting fenders with a bit of resin and cloth.

After they finally got it running it became my brother’s regular ride.  His contribution to the effort was to install a state of the art…8 track.  I can’t remember how many times I got a ride in that car and the same Petula Clark tape was sticking out of the deck.  I loved her then and I love her now.  A Petula song suddenly appearing in my music stream can brighten up a day like almost nothing else.

The old Dodge was the first in a series of beaters my dad had in a fleet that ultimately grew to four vehicles.  As the father of five boys he was smart enough to not own one worth more than $3000 until after the last of us had moved out.  Each of those cars have their own memories.  No doubt each have stories still secret about something my brothers or I did in and with each of them.  In my turn I had lots of great times in the 1971 Impala.  The body repairs we had to do to it only hinted at how much fun I had in that car. At 95 mph it just floated down the highway, windows down, heading to the lake.   Most of my best stories are still untold, known only to the few involved in each particular antic.

So as I watched my own kids wrecking my cars and backyard modding their own first cars I smile.  I put on the mad dad face when they bang up my car, or get another ticket but that part of the dad job.  Inside, after I get over the fact the my brand new truck has a door that won’t close anymore, I am laughing inside.  Been there done that.  One day my kids will think back to their own stories and smile too.