House-Bound

Nick is much slower these days, but his appetite? Going strong!

We attended a rare social gathering last Saturday, which was fun, but of course mingling with the masses comes at a cost: Mason picked up a cold (not the flu, we think). So we have been hunkered down in the house for the past few days. It's not all bad. There's been lots of reading, writing, cooking and even some drawing. (I'm trying out a new winter hobby.)

But then today? The skies turned blue and we hit 56 degrees! I spent five hours shoveling leaf mulch about the yard. I was in just a T-shirt (and pants, of course) at one point.

But the cold is coming back. ... Send me a photo of something you want me to try to draw, will ya?

Wood Worries

Every couple days, we move more wood from the piles to the porch.

Our activities for the past few days have focused on staying warm, which means many hours lingering and reading in the loft, but also hours tending to the wood stove, restocking the woodpile on the front porch and wondering if we cut enough wood to make it to spring. All we can really do is wait and see. If we run short, plenty of dead stuff is lying around our 5 acres. It won’t burn as nicely as the red oak that warms us now, but it’ll do.

After this pile is gone, we have just four left. Gulp.

This winter isn’t colder than those past, but it seems we’ve had a longer stretch of particularly cold days. The wood stove finally got a break yesterday, when we hit a sunny 46 and we let the stove go cold while we headed out into our woods to start the Great Firewood Hunt for Winter 2018-2019. We took down a 75-footer; we thought it was oak, but now we're not certain. But it's a hardwood, so come next winter, it'll burn nicely! But today, we’re back inside by the fire. We hit a high of 35 before noon and now, just a few hours later, it’s 29 and snowing.

The 75-foot tree we felled yesterday fell off its stump but then got hung up in other trees. That's Mason contemplating how we we're going to get it down to the ground. We ended up tying a steel cable to it and another big tree to the right and used a "come-along" to tighten the cable, eventually clearing the tangled tree and bringing it crashing down to the forest floor. We then spent nearly three hours cutting it all up. Yes, we're sore today.

So far our road repairs and new gravel are holding up nicely.

MacBook, How We Love Thee

I spend a lot of time in this chair, under that blanket.
Evening entertainment provided by "The Sopranos" DVDs.
Mason's usually back there on that stool, reading on the smartphone
about the latest most awful thing that man in D.C. has done. 

We have joyfully rejoined the righteous clan of MacBook owners, and as a result of the luxury expenditure, I have made a pledge to update this blog more often. You notice I call it a pledge and not a resolution, because I’m posting this one week later than planned. Ahem.

It’s not as if I’ve been swamped, either. This is winter, after all, when Flat Top productivity grinds to a halt, with its feet up in front of the wood stove, which has been burning nonstop for several weeks now. The Arctic blast has us holed up like rabbits in a winter warren. We’re finally catching up on our New Yorker magazines, knocking out a few books. (I recommend “Dreams From My Father,” by Obama — the contrast between his thoughtful explorations and those of today’s president are almost too painful to bear.) We spend most afternoons up in the loft, where it can almost feel like a warm summer day, especially if I’ve turned on the oven for a slow, low burn on a Dutch oven full of meat for Mason.

We have left the mountain only once in the past two weeks, and left the house only to walk Nick and restock the front porch woodpile. This has been an unseasonably long stretch of cold here, and the larger woodpiles out in the yard are disappearing so quickly that we’re starting to wonder whether we have enough stockpiled to get us through the season.

Our beloved Nick, and his door obsession. 

Nick remains our sole, desperately needed object of distraction. Unfortunately, his rapidly deteriorating state has added some level of drama to the interaction. Twice in the past two weeks, we’ve been in the kitchen when we’ve heard a ruckus and turned to see his back legs dangling off the loft.  We raced to his rescue, and have temporarily added a piece of lumber to prevent a three-peat. He also has developed a dementia of sorts; if he’s not napping upstairs, he’s at one of the doors, pawing it politely to be let out. But often, when we open the door, he walks to the door’s hinges and can’t figure how to get out. We play this game at least a dozen times a day.

A sneak peek of the stair project.

Over our evening beers, we contemplate upcoming projects. First up is Mason’s truck, which decided to die on us in town after we had it loaded with lumber, groceries and Christmas goodies. The lumber is for finishing the deck stair project, which has been on hold simply because there’s no reason to work out there when it’s 30 degrees. And the winter’s chill has us plotting to upgrade the back door to a properly insulated door, rather than the interior French doors we used because, when we got here seven years ago, we may not have really known what we were doing.

Do we know what we’re doing now, you wonder? Yeah, we wonder, too.