New Life in the Woods

It got up to 98 degrees in Grants Pass today. I think it was a little cooler up at the cabin, but not much! It was a bit cloudy or hazy until today and the picture you see here is of a Sunbow I caught on Tuesday. There must have been a lot of small ice crystals or small droplets of water high in the atmosphere that day. Ok, I admit, I enhanced the picture a bit on my computer to bring out the colors. You can see the unenhanced version and all my other recent pictures on my Flickr site.

But I haven’t just been taking pictures! Yesterday, since it was already getting hotter, I spent most of the day working on the spring box system.This picture shows a much clearer view (than my previous pictures) of the spring pump house and the reservoir tank. What are these for? If you recall the cinder block spring box I wrote about recently, that is just the initial collection point for the spring water. From there it gets fed by gravity down to the plastic holding tank, and, when it reaches a high enough level, a switch turns on the pump that pumps it all up to the main water tanks far above, up near the main house.

As you can see here, it wasn’t just the spring box that was silted up. A lot of the fine silt and clays from the spring box had made it down to the reservoir tank and had collected there for years maybe. So, since I knew it was going to be a hot day yesterday, I went down and cleaned it out. It was not an easy job! Thank goodness I have lost weight since I moved up here, or I might never have fit inside. See, there was no drain on the tank and it had about 6 inches of muck with another 6 inches on water on top of that. The only way to clean it was to get inside and scoop it out a little at a time.

At first I tried a milk jug with the top cut off, but it wasn’t rigid enough to scrape the mud off the bottom. Then I found a plastic pitcher that held about 2 quarts and used that. I had to lift all that mud and water out a bit at a time, but I did it! It took hours. The hardest part was kneeling down in there for so many hours. As most of you know, I haven’t liked kneeling much since I started having knee problems as a teen, but the latest operation seems to have mostly fixed that problem, so it was just losing circulation that forced me to stand up every so often. I won’t even mention the mosquitoes…. Actually, there was a light breeze that kept most of them at bay and they seemed to lose track of me when I was inside the tank, so no problem.

I even wiped down the inside with a sponge and some bleach cleaner, rinsed it out once, and wiped it down again. It is not pristine, but it is definitely in much better shape. Once I reconnect the (repaired) spring box to it and fill it with water again, I will “shock clorinate” the whole thing (probably starting at the spring box end) to make sure I have killed any remaining bacteria in this part of the system. Then, once I turn on the pump, assuming that still works (see the crack in the pump housing?), the chlorinated water will flow through the rest of the system, disinfecting that too. Actually, this reservoir tank makes a good spot to disinfect the system from time to time on a regular basis.

Today I had to go down to Medford to get an emission test done on my car so I could get it registered. It is not called a “smog test” here, it is much less involved, and it only costs $10 (as opposed to $50 in Berkeley). I got that done, swung by a glass shop in Rogue River to apply for an apprentice job there on the way back, and then got my car registered (finally!) in Grants Pass. They didn’t even look at the car! I was a little disappointed, since I had been trying to fix the signal lights for weeks (and finally did the other day). All they wanted was the paperwork. But now I have pretty, new Oregon plates with the basic tree motif, which makes me feel a lot more secure driving around. It also makes me feel more like I am “here” now. I kept feeling like people would see me in my car and think: “Oh god, another Californian. We’re being invaded!” Now I don’t have to worry about that. Maybe, later this Summer, I’ll even try to fix up the car a bit so they don’t think: “Oh god, what a piece of trash!”

Oh, and I finally got a few rows of vegetables planted this evening (once it had cooled off a bit). I planted peas, carrots, and lettuce. In a few days I’ll do another planting. Actually, today was probably the worst time to plant since we are expecting several days of record temperatures, but I had to get it started. Planting more rows in rotation will mean staggered harvests and so, even if this first planting gets hit by the heat, I will have vegetables over a longer period of time (in other words, I won’t have to can or freeze everything at the same time).

Anyway, it is started. Tomorrow I’ll go back to working on the spring box, digging out behind it and figuring out a new design (there are spare cinder blocks at the main house I can use) that should help keep it from silting up again next Winter when the rains start again. You can expect (as always) more pictures of the gruesome work ahead.