October 2013

 October arrived, and we were still living in that tiny crowded camper out in the driveway.  The nights were starting to dip below freezing, and we started using the propane furnace.  Well, one morning, the furnace sprung a gas leak, and it blew up as Linc sat at the computer.  There was a big ball of flame, lots of yelling and confused running around, and then flames licking up the walls inside, followed by more yelling, and beating out the flames.  It was over pretty quickly, with no real damage, but from then on, no heat in the camper.

 Cooking breakfast in the summer kitchen was no longer that much fun either.  It's hard to see, but there's a bit of snow on the ground in the back of this picture, and while the stove gives off some heat, it's still outside in the wind, and after awhile you just get tired of being cold all day long!

 So, we renewed our efforts to finish the inside of the cabin.  Jeanne applied marble tile to the new countertop,

 We used some limewash to decorate the east wall of the loft, built a bed frame, built shelving out of some 1x6 tongue and groove cedar a friend had given us,

 Built a dining/office nook downstairs, and forced the first neighborhood visitors to sit down and see if it was large enough for a future dinner party of four.  Barely!

 Based on an idea Jeanne saw in a library book on cabinetry, Linc made seven cabinets that drop down from the ceiling joist space, with the shelves sized to fit quart and half gallon canning jars.  Yay, we finally have a place to put those jars and jars of pear sauce, tomato sauce, ketchup, and salsa we've been canning all fall!

 And then the big day came.  We're moved in and warm, and wow does it feel good to be back in out of the cold!  Here's Jeanne in the dining/office nook, herbal medicine cabinet to the right, new larger chest freezer (running at refrigerator temperature with a remote bulb tstat), custom bulk food storage cabinet behind it, filing cabinet in foreground.  Overhead are the folded up canning jar cabinets.

 Here's a view of the west side with the old wood cookstove back in service keeping us warm, cooking hot meals, heating water.  We now have a sink!  But the greywater drain isn't hooked up to a mulch basin yet, so we're still carrying the dishwater out to the compost piles every day.  No hot water yet, other than that heated on the stove, but we've bought the supplies to install a hot water heat exchanger in the wood stove firebox, so soon....

 Here's our new (used, $60) miniature clothes washer.  It runs off of the solar electric system just fine.  Only handles about half of what a normal clothes washer would, but works a bit better than the old 1926 Maytag ringer-washer that we'd been using before.  Our water filtration system shows here, a 5 micron particle filter, a charcoal cartridge filter, then a UV sterilization light canister.  When the 1100 gallon cistern that's buried up the hill gets low, we hook a hose up to the irrigation system and pump water through this system and up to the tank.  Takes about a day to refill the cistern, and then we've got water for drinking, bathing, laundry, and for goats and chickens for another two to three months.

 This year's pumpkin and winter squash harvest.  Not our best ever, but not too bad either.  Squash bugs had their way in the garden this year...

 With frost predicted, we harvested all of the remaining tomatoes, and piled them on the counters to ripen.  Within a week or so, we had enough ripe to make several more quarts of tomato sauce.

 With the emergency of getting back in the cabin resolved, Linc went up the road and spent a day helping Eric and Cooper build an earth ship house using tires filled with compacted soil for the walls.  Eric has worked out an ingenious system for doing this that involves a few custom made tools and an old skid steer.

 Next, we spent a morning helping friends down in the vally pick wine grapes, and watched the de-stemming machine do it's thing.

 Back at our farm, we invited the community over to process apples into cider using our antique grinder/press.  The majority of the group worked on cutting out the wormy parts (above), while two of us worked the machine (below).

 And then, one day, an enormous semi truck came driving up into our field, right through the prairie dog town, his trailer full of 10" diameter piping, part of an NRCS fundshared project to replace the leaking, 6000' long irrigation ditch that serves this property with a buried pipeline.

 A shot of the contractor beginning to unload pipe. 

 One afternoon, I (Linc) bicycled a few miles up the valley to a neighbor's remote mountain home (an old school bus) to borrow his tractor.  Driving the ancient, puttering, diesel machine back down the dirt mountain road, with the mountain scenery slowly passing by, I experienced this timeless feeling of intense gratitude for where we live.