To The Surbiton Manor Born

  It is the bleak midwinter, but the sun is coming back, and planning a garden sounds like a fantastic thing to do. Dropping the names of the plants on the beds brought clear pictures of warm days and productive beds. Green. Humidity. Sweat. The baking sun.  Accordingly, I spent some time on it this afternoon and ordered the seeds to make most of it happen. It's not a cheap thing, and maybe we can try to do a better job this year of saving seeds for next year. But it isn't horrible. And it should take at least a $100 bill out of the groceries next year.  For the time being, we seem to have broken out of the deep freeze. The snowman of a couple of weeks ago is a little the worse for wear. But another snowstorm is on tap for next Tuesday. There's a long way to go until we start the greenhouse in the first week of May (having learned a valuable lesson about the weakling plants that come out of a greenhouse started in February last year). 

So said Alfred Wainwright in A Coast to Coast Walk.  The light is returning. We are past the solstice. From here on out, things get brighter, and it will be time to begin planning and budgeting for the garden in earnest.  I think that this qualifies as the deepest part of winter. We've been under winter storm warnings of one kind or another all week. Witness what has happened to my poor snowman. He was blown over in the 45 mph. gusts (above). Remember when he was first brought to life? I picture his little, spindly sunflower-stalk arms swinging in wild circles as he struggles to keep his balance.  I shall soon be testing Wainwright's maxim regarding clothing. The solar panels need another cleaning, something that I will not say that I don't dread. Right now there is a Wind Chill Advisory until tomorrow at noon. FEMA is calling out dangerously cold windchills, and a ground blizzard. Wednesday & Thursday's 8" of snow are now being whipped across roads, causing ic

As we near the winter solstice, the bitter winter has locked things down. It snowed almost all of last week. Kiki even got a snow day from the teaching job.  Temperatures are expected to plunge into the sub-zeros for the coming week. But it doesn't mean that we stop the planning and the plotting. This isn't great for the solar panels, which are struggling as it is because of the lack of sunlight. Snow disables them. You wouldn't necessarily know it from looking at the useless Enphase "Enlighten" software which stops reporting at the slightest indication of a chill. With or without the reporting, it's worth the effort to clear the snow off of the things. I believe I've mentioned before the kind of upper body workout that this entails. Absolutely everything happens over your head and the business end of the roof rake thingy is tiny and very, very far away at the end of a pole. Chin up and all that sort of thing, though.  I just came in from chopping a bunch

  It's a slow Sunday at Steepmeadow. December has cooled off the projects. The overriding worry now is whether or not we will have enough wood to make a serious dent in our heating bill. I'm also worried about dying crab fisheries and how best to keep the walks safe so you don't fall down without salting the local lakes in the process. And, of course, the never-ending worry about the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow Airport . In the interest of planning a canoe camping trip to the Quetico wilderness in Canada next summer with my kid, I'm reading a book to learn more about it. The only problem is that Kevin Callan's A Paddlers Guide to Quetico and Beyond  is a bit on the dull side. I roped off a face cord of our wood to carefully log (see what I did there) how much we are using. Looking at the dwindling piles, I'm starting to think that two cords was woefully short. I'm starting to think that next year we'll want three or even four. November's pow

Preparation is part of self-sufficiency.  I often say to my friends that disaster preparation is not necessarily about " the end of the world as we know it ," nuclear disasters, civil war, etc. Just in the past couple of weeks there have been two incidents that make it clear that it is better to have a few supplies on hand and be prepared for small emergencies than not: An attack on a power substation in North Carolina, and a boil water alert just down the road in Maplewood. The North Carolina incident is the more concerning of the two. Apparently, it just took two gun attacks (and there are plenty of guns and ammunition floating around) to put some 45,000 people into the dark. CNN noted today : 03:32  - Source:  CNN CNN  —  Residents of a North Carolina county are entering a third day without lights or heating, after a suspected attack on electric substations resulted in a widespread outage that blanketed the county in darkness, shuttered schools and businesses and prompted

Zipper enjoying the heat from the fireplace It is cold. Darkness falls early. Snow cloaks the land. Things at Steepmeadow have slowed considerably.  We have turned our eyes inward, and the biggest green progress has been in heating.  The new fireplace is wildly successful. We received our energy bill for November, and we hadn't used any more gas than we used in October, or September for that matter.  While we had to buy the smallest fireplace insert on the market, and it is only officially rated to heat 1,200 feet, we've had no trouble heating 1,600. At least until the temperature drops into the single digits. At that point, we supplement with electric space heaters. On the downside, we seem to be burning through the two cords a little faster than we'd predicted. We're going to start balancing our burning with our furnace use a little bit in the interest of making it last. Next year, we'll buy at least three cords of wood. This seems to be the way with all of our at