I have been meeting with our building contractor to iron out the last few details. They should be able to start building just after July 4. I have also hired a contractor who is going to prepare the building site, cut down a couple large trees that are too close to the site; and improve a couple places in the road for the large trucks trucks that will be delivering various items, such as two 1000 gallon cement tanks (water and septic), building materials, cement, etc. Hopefully he can start next week. I also finally got the building permit. (Short sentence, long painful story.)
Most days I am still trimming trees and clearing undergrowth. Sometimes it seems like I work and work but it doesn't look like I've done anything. Then suddenly one day, it all looks different. I can feel those 15 pounds I put on in Illinois dissolving in my sweat. All that good, fattening, Midwest food.
JB wanted me to check out the possibility of moving our building site about 100 ft south to where there are less trees to block our view. But in the time I've been here, I've noticed that the wind really sweeps up and over the ridge there - no trees, no wind break either. So the original site it is.
Laundry is fun up here. For my small items, I have a manual, bucket washing machine which my brother suggested. It is a 5 gallon bucket with a lid. I cut a small hole in the middle of the lid into which the handle of a plunger fits. Pour in water, add soap and clothes. Push the plunger up and down vigorously. Viola! Clean clothes! For larger items I go to the laundromat. That's something I haven't done in decades. At least there is electricity and free wifi there, so I always take my laptop.
JB calls every morning when he get to work at 7:00 am his time, 5:00 am my time. Half the time I fall asleep after his call. One such morning I was awakened by what I thought were chipmunks scrambling over the water jugs just outside the end of the trailer where I sleep. I peeked out the curtain and was almost face to face with a bear trying to get at the water! I yelled at him and he took off up the slope. I was able to grab my camera in time to snap a few shots (see above photo). He came back a few days later with the same results. I guess they are waking up now. The adventure continues. . .
Now: June 7, 2011
I am late posting this morning as I could not get on the internet at 5:00 am. We have a wireless card for our computers and a signal booster, but occasionally the signal just is not strong enough.
I left for Down There at 8:30 am and was back by 3:00 pm. The best part of the trip was that I saw two bears, one as I was going down and the other as I was coming back up. The first was just a big, black blur as he ran across the road in front of me going up the mountain. I spotted the second one as I came around a corner and he was was running up the road. Just a little brown buy, probably a yearling, who kept running in front of me for several yards before plunging down into the woods. Larry said he had seen a few bears in the past couple weeks, but for me, it is now official. They are awake.
All the bears up here are Black Bears. That does not describe their actual color as they come in all shades - blond, red, brown, black. . .
Getting home is never the end of my chore as now I get to put everything away and vacuum seal any meat that is going into the freezer, or dry bulk foods that need dividing into smaller packets. We buy large quantities (God Bless Costco!) as I always try to have at least six months worth of food in the house. I have been vacuum sealing my freezer meat for years as there is never any freezer burn and it lasts months longer. Now that I am buying so much of everything, I also vacuum seal cereal, flour, snacks, etc. Some in 1/2 gallon jars and some in bags. For long term food storage, it's the best tool I have.
We do a load of wash on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so JB hung out the laundry while I was gone. We schedule it this way as we fill the cistern for about 30 minutes after each wash. Our well pump is set up to automatically fill when the float gets down to a certain level, however our inverter cannot run both the well and cistern pumps at the same time. That's another story for "Then". For now we just manually turn on the well pump as needed.
I have a dryer, but I have never used it. We have a clothes line in the house which runs across the living room to the dining area that we use in cold and/or wet weather. We have another line outside which I use as often as possible. There is nothing you can put in your dryer to make laundry smell as good as it does from drying outside.
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