Showing posts with label homesteading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homesteading. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

RIP Mr. Potatohead

Okay, to be truthful, this potato was always going to be sacrificed. I just thought it would be dinner, not compost.

This was my third try at baking potatoes in the ashes of the wood-stove. The first two were great, honest. This potato is hard as a rock and weighs next to nothing, just like a charcoal briquette.

I like the idea of baking potatoes while simultaneously heating the house and heating water. Wood stoves are great that way.

But let me be clear about this: Just because it's buried in ashes in the wood stove and you aren't paying for gas or electricity to bake it doesn't mean you can forget that it's there.

Sunday, August 14, 2016

The thrivalist life - progress report

When Anaheim peppers go red
Somewhat over four years ago I self-published a short (56 page) eBook entitled The Thrivalist: Beyond Survival in 2012. It's not a hot seller, but it got nice reviews from my friends. As one person put it, "This is not a survivalist handbook, with instructions on how to survive the next tsunami, two-day power outage, or bank failure. The author makes a distinction between survivalism -- gritting your teeth to endure an emergency til things are all well again -- and thrivalism -- living the good life every day in as self-reliant a way as possible for your situation."  (Thank you Laura!)

I don't just write it, I live that lifestyle.  I do it not because I think there's going to be an apocalypse or any particular Bad Thing beyond the tough things that have always happened (flood, drought, blizzard) where I live, but because I actually prefer the lifestyle.

 I always have.

I'm one of those people who, as a kid, was thrilled with stories of explorers and pioneers, of disaster victims who made it through. I didn't care if it was fact or fiction, or whether it was the past (the farther back the better) or the future. I was fascinated by those who would boldly go where no one had gone before and who planned on staying there and living the good life.

I yearned to live that way. I experimented here and there, trying out various ways of doing things. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that I was building up to the kind of lifestyle I thought I could only dream about. It was even later when I decided that there was nothing stopping me from going whole hog with it if I really wanted to. I wouldn't be the first, after all.  But you know...

It would be a lot of work to just jump in.

Hence the gradual introduction of the various self-reliance practices over time at a pace that suited me. A very gradual pace. So gradual, in fact, that I didn't realize how far I had come until I took stock today.

For instance:
Off the grid and on solar for electricity. No utility bill – yay!
Solar hot water heating in the summer and even sometimes in the winter.
Composting toilet (home-made, not store-bought). I never have liked the idea of a big tank for holding sewage.

Gray water & rain catchment for irrigation .
Wood heat for the house in the winter and for water heating in the winter.

Propane: as little as possible.  I use it now only for cooking in the summer (not needed often, see below) because I cook on the wood stove in the winter. I've learned how to bake loaves of sourdough bread on top of a wood stove!
Mostly raw food diet. Much healthier way to eat, energy saving, too. Plus if I really want cooked food I can enjoy someone else's cooking in a restaurant in town (and someone else's dish washing!)

Garden… well. Maybe I shouldn't go there. This year I planted too much of the wrong stuff – why did I plant anything that requires processing to eat? And zucchini? What was I thinking? There's a glut of zucchini in the world. Fortunately my horses like zucchini. Anaheim chili peppers? Why? I probably will let them all go to red and then dry them. But my tomatoes are doing well, as are the potatoes, which I can store till winter when I want to cook since there's a heat source happening anyway. If I can figure out how to properly store potatoes for that long. The asparagus, which is now quite a few years old, gives me more than I want in the spring. The ants enjoyed the strawberries more than I did. Apples: Finally I got some on the trees this year! Four trees and a big total of three apples that I can see. Garlic: I failed to get it out of the ground in time, so the cloves will grow another year. Ditto for horseradish. My citrus tree (maybe a lemon, maybe a grapefruit) is growing like gangbusters. I started it from a seed. Who knows if/when I'll see fruit.
Plastering my straw bale house. Ummm. You'd be amazed how many people nag me to finish plastering.  Well. I did move the cement mixer closer to the house. That counts for something, doesn't it?
No refrigeration. Yes, it's true, and this is a biggie. For nearly three years I have not powered up my refrigerator, yet I've been able to keep foods cool that need keeping cool. And that's big because for over three years I have not had to have propane delivered. My huge, ancient (1940s model) propane fridge just isn't efficient enough for me to want to burn that much fuel to keep food cold. I'm getting a new (to me) smaller, more air-tight fridge delivered tomorrow. I'll hook it up to the gas line but I don't know if I'll ever turn it on.  It'll still work better to keep my food cool than the leaky old one will.

I could do more. I'm far from self-sufficient. But the end of the world as we know it hasn't arrived yet. I have the leisure to do whatever I want – or not do it. I have time to mess around with possibilities, and to learn as I go, and to enjoy the process because I don't have to do any of it! 

Sure, many of my experiments have failed, but I keep at it – not because I have to but because it's fun. And while it's more labor intensive to live this way,  the trade-off is it costs less to provide myself with what I need to live comfortably. It means a lot to me that I can work less to earn a buck and have the time to work on my own stuff.

Accidentally vegan

If you aren't going to use a fridge to keep foods cold, you have to be careful about your food choices. Cooked/processed foods, dairy and meats don't keep unless they're down below 40°, a temperature I can maintain in the winter but not in the summer. Fresh foods (fruits and veggies) can do fine with that if they're chilled overnight (are you wondering yet how I do that?)

Not keeping prepared foods, dairy, or meat at hand, I wind up eating vegan a lot. Since a vegan diet is not mandatory for my purposes, I don't mind it at all, especially since there are so many great vegan recipes out there these days.

Last week I cooked potatoes. Sometimes I go on a potato-only diet, but that's another story. Today I realized I had 4 leftover whole ones that I wasn't really that enthusiastic about eating plain., so I whipped up a tasty potato salad. It's accidentally vegan. Here's what I put in the dressing. Note: I like things tangy.

Vegan potato salad
  • Salt
  • Ground pepper
  • Olive oil
  • Parsley
  • Green onions (chopped)
  • Dijon mustard
  • Apple cider vinegar
  • Land of Enchantment spice mix (yummy - but chopped garlic or garlic powder will do if you don't have any LOE)
  • A few pounds of cooked potatoes (I leave peels on but you do what you want)
Dice the potatoes and cover with the dressing, mixing lightly to get all surfaces coated. Let it sit half an hour for the dressing to sink in.  Eat.

Swamp cooler: chilling foods without a fridge
Warning:  This is something that works best in lower humidity

Evaporative coolers (swamp coolers) are a real thing. While I've never actually bothered with a thermometer, I can tell you that my swamp cooler system can cool objects lower than the lowest air temperature overnight if the air is dry enough to evaporate liquid from the surface.

Why pay money for propane or use electricity if you can use air to do the work?

Here in the arid southwest swamp coolers work just great, whatever the scale. At its most basic, you put your beer bottles in a bucket of water and keep it out of the sun. The beer won't get cold but it will be cooler than the air, because the water surface evaporates  Any time liquid evaporates it removes latent heat from the surface of that liquid. It's what happens when you sweat.  Sweating works best when it's not humid and the same is true with swamp coolers.

Taken one step further, a metal bucket that is in a pan of an inch or two of water will keep the objects inside the bucket cooler than if the whole thing was sitting in a dry pan. And if you put a moist cloth over that bucket, making sure the edges are in the water so that the cloth stays moist, the contents of the bucket get even cooler because there will be more surface area for evaporation and the metal bucket will not insulate whatever's in it from the cooling effect.

Voila!

You do need to be disciplined about this, but then most of this thrivalist stuff calls for some discipline. You have to remember to set up your cooling system once the sun goes down and the air temperature starts dropping, and then you have to get up in the morning and get your food into the fridge before the sun rises and starts warming everything up.

I also cool jugs of water this way and put them into the fridge to create thermal mass. In the summer my system works even when nighttime temperatures don't drop as far as I want. In the winter, of course, it works really well.  

But remember, kids:  this kind of primitive swamp cooling is only cool enough for living foods (whole raw fruits and veggies). Don't be stupid about it. Food poisoning isn't fun, especially if you've got a composting toilet to deal with.



Monday, May 23, 2016

Photos: Around the ranch

Last week it rained 3/10". That brings the precipitation up to nearly an inch since the first of the year, meaning it's dry, dry, dry. It also means when it rains that the soil turns to snotty clay-mud. I had been out of town that day when I came home to 'running the slick', as I think of it. The two mile of unimproved two-track from the county road to my property is always a challenge when there's been even the slightest bit of rain (snow's not quite as bad until it starts melting). So nearly a third of an inch of rain was quite enough to make my pulse rate rise, because I just do not like having to walk home in the mud (something I've done quite often enough, thank you very much).

I know where all the places are that cause trouble. The ones where I have to drive slow or risk spinning out. The ones where I have to be moving along at a good clip or I'll sink in. And then there's the spots where nothing works, and last week I did a bit of slip-and-slide. I managed to not get stuck and only had another minor slide after that. By the time I got to my gate I was feeling pretty proud of myself.

Until I saw a mass of wire trailing behind my car.

For all the cattle fencing out here in the West, you'd think cows would stay where they're supposed stay, but they don't. They're always seeing better graze on the other side of the fence, and they rarely meet a fence that they can't get through if they really want to. Consequently there often will be long strands of barbed wire curled into a coil or a wad of crumpled field fencing out in the middle of a pasture, the result of a cow going through a fence and taking the fence with her.

I must have slid over one of those wads, which hitched a ride on the drive shaft of my car.

 


I didn't even look at it till today. Partly because I was busy, partly because I knew that even using bolt cutters I was going to end up in a bad temper working the wire off. It was a trial, let me tell you. Trackers are little cars with not a lot of clearance underneath - better than a sedan, mind you, but not like a truck. There wasn't much room to maneuver plus there was dried mud in just enough places to fall into my eyes and ears whenever an arm or shoulder bumped up against it.

Stuff like this is pretty normal for out here in the middle of nowhere. A person has to be able to handle little things by herself or else she should live in a city where help is just minutes away. But she doesn't have to like it.

Is there an emoji for a snarly face?  If so, imagine it inserted here.  I don't do emoji.

Here's a photo of PJ Kitty (Papa J) in the alpenglow a couple nights ago. Makes me feel better just looking at him.



And here's a sunset photo from the next night. The delicate silhouette of the juniper against the flaming sky gets to me.




Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Take that, you elk you!

I used to like elk a lot more than I do now. 

I've had no beef with them (so to speak) for 20 winters. They haven't bothered me much (we did have a brief battle over just who had rights to my apple trees, but that's done and over with) and so I leave them alone. I don't hunt them or eat them.

Not anymore. No more Ms. Nice Gal.

This winter for the first time a crowd of cow elk decided to hop over the 5' tall horse panel fencing that surrounds my compound and help themselves to the horse hay. Once they start that kind of a thing, they won't stop if there's any chance of even one more mouthful of the fruits of somebody else's labor. 

The culprits scouting out the crime scene
(photo taken in low light before sunrise, that's why so blurry)
(Oh, and the bent horse fence is from a tree falling on it, not from elk)
I don't have a hay barn. Ever since I got my first horse back in the mid-1970s I've lusted for a big barn with lots of hay storage, a barn I could park a truck in or a flatbed trailer if I wanted to get it out of the rain or snow. A place for horses to get out of extreme weather if they wanted.  Other gals might look longingly at ads for Manolo Blahnik strappy torture heels, but me, I lust for a barn. 

I guess I've been lucky all these years. The elk have never bothered the hay before. Sometimes I'd stack it and leave it without the tarp. I got spoiled, I guess.

Not any more, that's for sure. 

After the first raid on the hay, I became diligent about covering it at night.  But the elk just rooted under the bottom edges of the tarp even though I had liberally bungee corded it down.

Then I leaned wood pallets over the sides of the stack. The elk just knocked the pallets over or pushed them aside, whatever was easiest. In the process, they stomped on the pallets and broke a bunch of slats. The stack was at the end of the horse trailer, under the bull nose. Those blankety-blank elk had no problem walking underneath to get at the hay from that side, too.

The pallet in the lower right was tossed there by the elk.
When the toll on the hay got too high, I decided to get serious. I use the area under the bull nose to store things that I don't want getting wet (no barn for that, right?). I decided to block that space in, to give up on unloading the hay from the pickup (no sacrifice there), and instead to back the truck with the hay into the space between the horse trailer and the big utility truck that I've been meaning to get rid of for some time but never have since it's full of junk stuff I need to go through before rehoming.

Which I did. Back the truck up, I mean - certainly not go through the boxes and boxes in the truck. Why rush it? The boxes have been in there for 20 years, they can wait a little longer. So the next step was to block off access to the back of the pickup, to the underneath of the bull nose, and, well, to everywhere I could think of that an elk could sneak through.

It took me half a day to get it all set up, but last night the elk were unable to get into the hay. YAY! It's a trial for me to get to the hay, too, but oh well. 

The pickup backed in and blocked in.
Installment being inspected by Joe.

Pallets around the bull nose, tarp inside to discourage elk from reaching over

Entry to the fortress, blocked off at night of course.
Yes, yes, I know it's a hokey job. But it's temporary, okay? Any day now I'll get a barn.








Tuesday, October 13, 2015

About Cows

by Lif Strand (c) 1996, 2015

Until I made personal acquaintance with one, I never had anything against cows. I mean, aside from the nasty smell of dairy farms and feed lots - the memory of which I tend to push to the back of my head (especially when in grocery stores) - what’s to dislike about cows?

You see a few black and white bossies munching on green, grassy hillsides and you've got to smile. And who can resist the big Guernsey doe-eyes? As for the vast range land of the West, dotted with Herefords, Angus, or better yet, longhorns - why that’s practically an icon of our mighty country. 

So, until 1996, I thought cows were pretty much OK. Until then I might have even harbored a thought or two about fresh milk in the morning, home-grown steaks, a few calves out in the back 40. I had never had to deal with cows up close and personal, you see.

Then I met Fraulein.

It was our friend C's fault (initial only, to protect the guilty). Retired from ranching, widowed and bored, he’d been hanging out at the dude ranch where I was employed as head wrangler. This high-end management position entailed about 10 hours a day of scooping manure; feeding and grooming and tacking up the dude string; taking uncoordinated, unfit and complaining dude riders on one hour trail rides; and carrying plate scrapings and coffee grounds from the lodge to the chickens. What C found entertaining in all this escaped me, but he spent a lot of time hanging around, making unhelpful comments and generally getting in the way. 

One of his most unhelpful comments involved the superior qualities of ice cream made from fresh, unpasteurized, unhomonogized milk. This comment marked the beginning of the end of my heretofore pleasant and uneventful relationship with cows.

C’s parents had a milk cow when he and his siblings were growing up. Later, C’s wife also had one. While she was into making cheeses, C’s specialty with fresh, raw milk was butter, making it just the way he used to as a kid. C had fond memories of this butter making, and so - even though he himself did not drink milk, and even though he lived alone and thus consumed little butter - he decided it would be a great idea for him to own a milk cow. He also thought it would be a great idea for me to help him find this cow. Over my protestations of no cow husbandry or dairy experience, I found myself using up one of my rare days off for The Great Cow Hunt on the Rio Grande.

My vote for making a few exploratory phone calls first was quickly vetoed, so we headed east and north with no plan that C was willing to share. While we parked and moseyed up to the Lemitar Livestock Auction building, our first stop, I ventured to ask why C thought there’d be any dairy cows at this auction in the middle of beef country. I was informed that there were quite a few commercial dairy farms south of Albuquerque, their lush pastures irrigated by the muddy Rio Grande. C was sure that there’d not only be Jerseys or Guernseys, but they’d be good milk producing cows that would be in calf as well. It defied any logic I could come up with that any dairyman in his right mind would take such a beast to auction, but we were spared further discussion by the discovery that the one dairy cow at the auction had already been sold. I guess arriving 2 hours late for the auction hadn't been such a good idea, but the rickety old trailer C pulled behind his tiny Toyota pickup weaved whenever he drove faster than 35 mph.  The 125 mile drive from his place to the auction a wee bit longer than we’d planned, and hotter, too, because it turned out the air conditioner was broken. 

Never mind, we were in time for the auction's noon break, so we ate in the air-conditioned lunch room and moved on.

C’s newly revised plan involved driving further north to Belen, where he was sure he would find the dairy he’d sold his wife’s cow to 6 years prior. Barring success with that, he’d just stop at the first dairy farm we came to and pick up a cow. Four or five farms and several sweaty and miserable hours later, this approach did not seem like such a good one. If there’d been doors to slam in our faces, our noses would’ve been pretty flat. I was ready to call the whole thing a bust but C convinced me to stop at one more dairy farm, just north of Socorro. If there was no cow here for C he promised we’d get some dinner and go home. C perked up considerably as we pulled into the yard (coincidentally just across the freeway from the Lemitar Livestock Auction of many hours ago). He now recalled that this dairy was, in fact, the one where he’d sold his wife’s cow.

Although the owner apologized for not remembering that particular cow, he did miraculously agree to sell a cow to us. I was skeptical of the whole deal, especially when I saw what the cowman picked out. Like I said, I don’t have any cow experience, but somewhere in the dusty corridors of my memory I recalled that a milk cow should be broad in the pelvis, have 4 even sized udders and good feet. Josephine (the cowman swore that he knew the names of all 300 of his cows) was presented to C as an excellent choice.

She wasn’t exactly pedigreed, the cowman admitted, but it looked to him like she might have some Jersey and some Guernsey in her. He did not point out the thin and flabby udders, nor the small size of her bag, which was quite small compared to those grotesquely distended ones of all the other cows. If milk had ever been in those udders, it was a long time ago. It seemed to me that perhaps these were not good signs. But then Josephine proved to not be pregnant. She was rejected, in spite of her very good feet.

C agreed to the cowman’s second choice, Fraulein, who proved somewhat difficult to catch. I held back comment, wondering how C, with his bum ankle and one lung, was going to handle clever Fraulein in the future. As the temperature had not dropped from the mid 90s all day and I was overheated, short-tempered and hungry, I contented myself with hanging out in the shade of the milking barn while the two men took a great long time to work Fraulein towards an aisle leading to a cattle chute. Of course, I had to sympathize with Fraulein , because I could not imagine that the pregnancy checking process, involving a shoulder length plastic glove for the dairyman and much fecal matter on the part of the cow, was anything Fraulein was looking forward to.

An hour or so later, Fraulein was in the rickety trailer and we were on our way home. C was $75 poorer than he’d have been if he’d purchased Josephine. True, Fraulein anatomy was an improvement over Josephine's, but besides the fact that she was hard to catch there was no calf in her either. This was a minor point that C had tossed aside with a wave of his hand. He had also tossed aside a few questions of mine that I thought were quite pertinent, such as did C have a milking stanchion? (No.) A cow halter? (Why would he need one?) Milking buckets? (Pots from the kitchen worked fine.) What about the fact that Fraulein had never been hand milked before? (No problem). Hmmm.

It was much cooler when we got back to C's place, probably since it hadn’t been daylight for many hours. Miraculously the cow hadn’t suffered any physical damage from the trip even though the trailer had shed a few parts along the way as a consequence of her jumping around so much in the back. She was mightily miserable as we shooed her into a small pen next to C's barn, since she was well overdue for her afternoon milking.

I wondered how C was going to deal with this poor tempered beast in the dark (no electricity in the barn), but this wasn’t going to be a problem for him since since he was planning on heading straight to bed. I looked doubtfully at Fraulein's milk-engorged bag, listened to her groans, and recalled all the stories I’d read as a kid about having to milk that cow on time no matter whether or not Lassie was barking or Fury was whinnying about the danger coming down the road.

And then I made a fatal mistake. I said, brilliantly, I'd milk her myself. After all, I reasoned, how hard could it be? I’d seen it done on TV a zillion times. And I was sure I’d read about it in a book sometime or other.

I won't go into the gory details here. I did relieve some of the cow's discomfort but it wasn't pleasant for either of us. Just let me say that a cow that has only ever lived her life in a commercial dairy has no idea how to be a cow. She’s been milked by milking machine since day one. To put it bluntly, it toughens those teats right up. Fraulein had never had anything as soft as her own calf’s mouth sucking at her much less an inexperienced human hand weakly squeezing and yanking at her swollen and painful teats (only one hand because the other was occupied elsewise).

A cow’s way of expressing displeasure is first indicated by a thrashing tail, said tail generally also holding a quantity of manure like a brush holds paint. Cow manure is similar to paint, too, in that it is mostly liquid and it will color the object that it is applied to. I realized that evening that I much preferred the smell of paint to manure. I furthermore realized that holding a penlight in one’s mouth may lead to unwanted foreign objects entering the mouth. It’s not a memory I like to dwell on.

A cow’s next way of expressing displeasure is the use of her hind feet. You’ve no doubt heard the term cow-kick. A regular kick is one by the hind foot aimed backwards. A cow-kick is one that goes forward, perhaps with a bit of English to the side. It hurts when it connects with a human body part, say a hand that's holding a milk pail. When a cow cow-kicks the milk pail (or in this case, the old coffee percolator I stumbled across in the tack room) it is knocked over, spilling the contents. The loss of the few ounces of milk that had actually accumulated hardly mattered since nobody was going to drink milk that had dead bugs and cobwebs floating in it anyway. It did bother me to discover that milk turns out to be quite sticky when it soaks the knees of your jeans.

A third way a cow expresses displeasure is by leaving the scene. The rope I had looped over Fraulein's neck and fashioned into a crude halter was for roping and was therefore quite stiff. Thus it simply shook loose when Fraulein tossed her head. Even if it had stayed on, I couldn’t have prevented her from walking off, not without having the end of the rope tied securely to something like a freeway support piller. I only wonder why she didn’t do that first thing.

Did I mention cow drool? Did I neglect to note how cow piss splashes as it hits the ground? Never mind.

Here is the horror of it all: I escaped to the dude ranch and left C to the tender mercies of the cow. But then, after just a week or two, he drove up hauling the damn beast in his rickety trailer. He was donating Fraulein to the ranch, he said. The owner actually fell for it when C explained how the guests would enjoy fresh milk right out of the cow, how kids could learn how to milk, how he could demonstrate butter making. 

“But who will milk the cow every day?” the owner asked.

The two of them turned to me. 

“She can milk the cow,” C said, with a grin. “She’s good at it.”

And that, my friends, is why I don’t like cows.

Monday, April 16, 2012

San Augustin Water Grab: A Battle Won But Not the War

A Battle Won But Not the War
Cathie R. Eisen
Walking Water Consulting
PO Box 133
Nogal, New Mexico
April 8, 2012

Across the southern states a battle is raging for our most precious resource. The value of water has reached a premium, and it will only increase with time. As the cities and counties of the west continue to grow, so does the need for new water sources to support their ever increasing demands. While the quest for oil is on the forefront of everyone's mind, dollar for dollar, water is by far more valuable. We can live without oil if necessary, but we must have water to survive. During the past few years, several applications have been submitted to the State Engineers Office in New Mexico for the purpose of tapping into the deeper aquifers, waters which were previously deemed unusable and were until now unprotected from such requests. One by one, they have been protested and denied. This is not the end of the effort. Future legislation will support these requests as our cities continue to grow along with the residential demand for additional supplies; water for sanitary and domestic water use is and always will be a priority to developers and communities. The health and welfare of the masses could easily trump the livelihood of the rural ranchers. They are few, rural residents are many.   More at Glenwood Gazette... 

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Wood Stove Comfort

Copyright © Lif Strand 2011

I’ve just come in from feeding the horses and splitting some wood.  Yesterday it snowed briefly and never got above 48°.  I built my first fire in the wood stove.  I used wood that had been sitting stacked next to the stove since this past spring when I let the last fire die out, so it was plenty dry and fast to ignite.

The wood stove is my only source of heat in the house.  I hooked up a propane wall heater a while back but when I tried it, it leaked and no matter how many times I reconnected everything I couldn’t get it to stop leaking.  So wood still remains my heat source. 

Trust me – wood heating is a lot of work.  I’m a lazy person.  The two don’t go together all that well if the person in question expects to stay warm when it’s blowing and freezing outside. 

It occasionally freezes inside my house, too.  As a result I have no house plants, just those potted herbs, veggies and flowers that I’ve brought inside to keep them going a while longer.  They only last till the night I insufficiently stoke the wood stove before retiring, or when I go away and just let the house get as cold as it is going to get.

Lest you worry, the cats and dogs all have fur coats and deal with the occasional frostiness inside my house just fine.  I don’t.  Trust me on another thing:  If you’re sitting around a blustery winter evening reading, you need a wood stove to keep you warm.  Quilts, furs, fleece and down won’t keep your fingers, your nose or your toes warm enough.

Thing is, there’s so much work associated with wood heat.  Oh sure, you can get yourself  a paycheck from a 9-5 job and just buy split wood, get it delivered and stacked - but my boss is me, and I don’t get paid enough by me to spend money on the multiple cords of wood I need to get through the cold season. 

My best intentions are to cut early and the wood will be dry by the time I need it.   I choose trees on my own place that have been hit by bark beetles or are just fading away because of drought – I not only get wood for the stove but also provide a better environment for the remaining trees while making my land more wildfire resistant.  My best intentions rarely ever pan out. 

Remember my boss?  She just doesn’t ever seem to give me a break.  Work, work, work – I wear out the lettering on my keyboard keys all the time (good thing I’m a touch typist).  Typing does not = a stack of wood.

And there are so many other reasons for not going out there and cutting wood – don’t want to do it when it’s hot, can’t do it during fire season, and when it starts raining, I don’t want to do it then either.  Right now, October, is a good time of year for cutting wood, though it won’t all be as dry as it might be before I really need it in winter.  I really should be out there with the chain saw today – but I think I’ll take it into town instead and get it tuned up and sharpened.  I’ll cut wood another day.  Probably, like last year, in the dead of winter.  Hey, logs pull down the hill much easier on snow!

Even if I cave in and buy wood (it could happen!), that’s not all there is to a wood stove.  There’s splitting the wood, carrying it in every day (twice a day if it’s really cold), cleaning out the ashes regularly, sweeping up all the wood debris and dirt that falls off the logs, climbing up onto the roof every so often and banging on the stovepipe to knock the creosote off the walls and of course, stoking the fire regularly enough that all the work yields a warm house in the dead of winter.

And yes, it’s worth it.  There’s something about the heat from a wood stove that is very different from any other heat.  It’s as if it reaches out to something in my very being and touches my core with comfort and security, not just physical warmth.  When it’s snowing and blowing outside and there’s a cheery blaze in the wood stove, enough logs in the burn chamber to last the night and a stack of wood nearby to build the fire up again in the morning, when I turn out the lights and see the yellow flickering light cast by the flames through the vents in the door and I feel that warmth on my skin all the way to my bones, I know all’s right with my world.
 
Baseboard heaters just don’t do that for me.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Living My Life: High Summer

copyright (c) 2011 Lif Strand

Part 2 of the series.  Go to Part 1
There’s summer, with day after day of clear blue skies, white hot sun beating down, so dry that you don’t even sweat because any moisture you produce evaporates before it can bead up. Every afternoon you bless the shadows that are finally cast, shade that feels cool in comparison to earlier in the day, even though it’s still in the high 80s in the shadow. All that wind from spring is gone and you wish it back, you welcome the slightest stirring of air to provide some relief from the searing heat.

That’s summer. And then there’s high summer, when we have rain. The brown grass turns a verdant green, a riot of flowers are heavy with pollen, lush fruit ripens and bends the stalk. That’s now.

I’m sitting in my car, engine off, waiting for my friend to meet me so we can car pool to town. Everyone car pools around here – or at least the women do – partly to save gas money and partly because most people prefer to have company when they drove a lot. I don’t – I do some of my best thinking while driving – but the gas savings is still important, and my friend generally prefers company when she drives.

It’s pouring rain. The sky is blue in two directions, black in the other two plus overhead. It could only be the Southwest in monsoon season - July, August or September - when sometimes it rains on a cow’s left horn but not on the right.

Living at the end of a long dirt two-track means extreme planning for at least two seasons:  High summer (now, the rainy season) and dead of winter (January through March, when there’s the most likelihood of snow and ice). Our soil here has a high clay content – slick snot when it’s wet. It’s amusing to see the tracks of vehicles that have gone before you, leaving the wandering tracks across the road like a drunk driver's, maybe even with the bonus of a gouged rut in a ditch where the car or truck slid off the crown. It’s entertaining – until it happens to you.

So you plan. You avoid driving when it’s actively raining and for a good half hour or more after. You watch weather reports so you can get out and back while the road is still a road and not an amusement park slide. You make sure you’ve got enough supplies to last at least a week, preferably two, in case of flooding when the road can be bad for days in a row. In the winter you get out while the road’s still frozen, come in after dark when it freezes up again.


The thunder is moving on; rain now just a light shower. I wouldn’t risk driving the two miles home from here right now if that’s where I was headed even though the road surface doesn’t look all that bad. I know that’s deceptive, and that within just a few feet the tire treads would be packed and the rubber coated half an inch or more with clay. I can see from here the first spot where I’d be sweating it, a very slight curve around a juniper tree – just enough for me and others to slide off the edge. It happened so often I finally took a chainsaw to the offending branches, but it’s still not a straight shot.

There are a few other spots after that – one place where there’s a slight bump, another couple areas where water pools a foot deep, creating an additional twelve inches of mush at the bottom. All fixable if I owned the road, untouchable as BLM property unless I jumped through some expensive hoops and put myself in a position of public liability. No thanks. I’ll risk the drive as is.

In spite of all the planning, the four wheel drive, the mud tires, I still get stuck every so often.  I never know until I turn off the engine if I'll make it home if I try at the wrong time.  Last week I had two close calls driving in with a load of hay. The road at those places looks like a tank battle took place – and it was a battle of sorts; my skill vs. the mud pit. That time I got out, but it was very close.

You’d think that going home would be easier since it’s downhill, but when I get truly and deeply stuck, it’s always in the downhill direction. That's why I always carry a tarp for the hay – not just to protect the load from rain but from cows, too, if the truck has to be abandoned.  And that’s why I always carry rubber boots and a rain coat.  Even though I'm usually not a happy camper when I first start the hike back, my boots picking up the same clay that the tires would have and making them dead weights as I slog through the muck, by the time I've gone a little ways I'm at peace again with the world.  I love high summer.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Living My Life: It's a tough job but somebody's got to do it

July 17, 2011

There’s really only one thing anyone wants to read about: Something about themselves or that could be about themselves, or something that’s going to help them live their lives – which really is still about themselves. We’re a selfish bunch, we humans – but all living beings are. It’s the only way to ensure survival of the species.

What I’m here to tell you about is how I live my life. Everyone’s life is fascinating in the hands of a good storyteller, but some of us live different enough lives that no matter who the storyteller is or how she tells it, the story carries itself.

So here I am, a mature woman (sorry, I may never grow up enough to be a senior), raised conventionally, who turned out… different. The reasons aren’t really important now. (That’s one of the great things about having sufficient years under the belt – you start looking at the big picture and realize the small stuff is just that. You finally get to focus on what’s important and best of all, because you’re old enough, there’s no one around to tell you to pay attention to all those pesky details).

But I digress – I tend to wax philosophical but I’ll try to cut that down to a minimum. What I’m trying to say here is that my life nowadays is different enough that it might actually be meaningful - or at least entertaining - for others.

How different could it be, you might well ask. Here’s a partial list. You decide.

  • I’ve lived in a straw bale cabin for about 13 years. That is, a house made of straw bales and not much else. None of that plaster stuff covering the straw, so wind tends to blow through. Birds nest in the walls and a resident four foot (and growing) bull snake keeps the chick population under control. My house does have a roof (it leaks), and doors and windows though, and someday I guess I’ll get around to the plastering. I love my little place (700 square feet and no interior walls) - snakes, bugs, birds, wind and all.
  • I have no heat other than a wood stove. Sometimes in the winter if it’s really, really cold and I’m too lazy to get up during the night, it freezes indoors. Potted plants don’t do well in my house and it can get annoying when I don't have anything liquid to brush my teeth with in the morning, but somehow these winter issues feel more like challenges than problems.
  • I don’t have real indoor plumbing, unless you include a hose poked through a wall with a garden spray nozzle delivery system as indoor plumbing. For years I heated water on my wood stove (or propane kitchen stove), but this year I made a solar hot water system and it works great when the sun’s shining. My shower involves a big pot holding suitable temperature water and a quart-sized ladle to get the water on my body. It works just fine, and I suppose someday I’ll fix it, but I'm in no hurry to fix what ain’t broke.
  • No indoor toilet. No outhouse, either. The old chamber pot system works just fine. I compost the results.
  • Off the grid – the nearest electrical lines are a mile away. Solar power has its drawbacks, but the great benefit is no monthly utility bill, and for a low-income person, that’s great.
  • No cell phone service. Maybe that’ s not such a big deal – after all, plenty of people live in little hollows where there’s no service. But I’m happy there’s no service.
  • Nearest neighbor is a mile and a half away. And that’s too close in my opinion.
  • Nearest store is 30 miles away. Almost far enough.
  • I live in the Southwest, so when it rains it pours. My little valley floods periodically and I can't leave for a few days. That's like vacation time for me.
  • I’ve been self employed almost all my adult life. From house painter to dude ranch wrangler to technical writer, I’ve somehow avoided 9-5 jobs almost the whole 4 1/2 decades since I left my childhood home. I don’t always have a lot of money, or even enough money, but that means I improvise. I do as much of the building and repair work by myself as I can. As for the rest – does it really matter if it gets done?
  • I care for six horses now – down from a lifetime high of around 50 at one point in my past. There’s no shoer nearby these days, so I deal with horse feet myself. There’s no vet nearby, so I treat the horses myself. And if needed, when the time comes I move a horse (or dog or cat) on to the next plane myself with my trusty .38. It’s a hard job, but it’s an ultimate act of love.
  • I have little to no social life. After my husband died suddenly over ten years ago, I’ve lived alone. I found I don’t need a man in my life. I’m not helpless. I’m free to become a hermit if I want or do anything in the world I want to do. I love it.

So there you go. I little strange, but perhaps stranger even is how much satisfaction I get from living my chosen lifestyle.

I dream of even greater independence – I’d like to fully raise my own food, for instance – and I’ve been working towards that it seems forever. I’m in no rush, though - it’s the journey towards self-sufficiency that holds the fascination for me. I’m not so very good at all of it, but in the end, who cares? I don’t want to wait for perfection to do what I want in life.

Next: High Summer