New Life in the Woods

I’m happy to say that it seems like I have turned a corner of sorts personally. For my first few months up here I was aching almost all the time. All that work cutting wood and then tossing it, carrying it, splitting it, stacking it, moving it again, not to mention all the work on the cabin really took its toll. I probably spent 2-3 days recovering from each big job before tackling another one. Of course, there was always more wood to carry inside, or water to carry, etc., so my arms, legs and back never really stopped aching.

The last couple of weeks, however, I have been feeling much better. My arms aren’t hurting all the time anymore, despite all the work digging in the garden. My right leg, which wasted away during my knee infection and surgery a couple years ago, is finally looking more filled out, pretty much the same as my left leg in fact. I am wearing pants that I haven’t worn since about 1995. I am still not totally thin, but I have definitely lost a lot of weight. Makes me wish I had kept a scale to find out how much I’ve lost. Hehe

Of course, I still have ups and downs psychologically, and I still beat myself up more than I should. It is not easy being out of work or being alone so much, but I am keeping busy and coping pretty well I think. I watch a ton of PBS (one of three channels I get here, the others being mostly useless drivel) and I sometimes watch movies I’ve downloaded to my PC. I also read a lot, mostly re-reading old books, but also reading about the plants and animals in this area, organic gardening, and other subjects I find on the Net.

Part of that has been because I have been too exhausted to do a lot outside. Today, however, I worked all afternoon in the garden area, took a break, and went back out to do more. I am tired and my muscles do hurt a bit, but nothing like before. I know I won’t be disabled by aches and pains tomorrow and that’s a big change. It has taken a long time to recover from years sitting behind a desk and/or sitting at my computer at home, but I’m getting there!

Well, since the last time I posted, I mostly gave up on the Spring box/pump problems for the time being… but that’s because it has been raining almost every day since then. It is very unusual for rains to come this late in the Spring here, but I’m not complaining! Meanwhile, I extended the hose carrying water down from the Spring box, bypassing the plastic reservoir tank, so the hose reaches the low point in the driveway. That way I can fill up my water containers at the road and not have to carry them up from the stream at the bottom of the ravine. That will make watering the garden a bit easier until I either fix the spring pump and pipes or find another solution.

Meanwhile, a few days ago I saw what I am pretty sure was a Gray Fox on the driveway just below the construction trailer and the hidden passage. This picture is one I downloaded from the Web, since I didn’t have my camera with me, but it is a good match for the little fellow I saw. I went back with my camera and saw him again, but he was gone in a flash, before I could take a picture, and I haven’t seen him since.

Back at the cabin, most of the birds have stopped visiting my bird feeders, but I tried a new mixture in my Hummingbird feeder yesterday and they have been buzzing my back deck all day long! At least two of them have been staging dog fights over the feeder, seemingly fighting for territory. But one of them (shown here) is female and the other one seems to be a young male, possibly her offspring or mate, so I am not sure what’s going on. You can see the little male on my Flickr site.

Meanwhile, the wild strawberries and blackberries are starting to bear fruit, poison oak is leafing out everywhere, ticks and mosquitoes are becoming a real nuisance, and I found this unusual plant out in the woods the other day. I believe this is a parasitic plant — one without its own chlorophyl — but a plant nonetheless. It just lives off other plants, somewhat like a fungi, but from living plants instead of decaying plant matter. This one is probably called “Broom Rape” or “Ground Cone” but I am not totally sure. I thought it was very pretty and quite unusual, although I have since found at least one other parasitic plant in the woods.

I continue to work on expanding the garden, repairs around the cabin, and my job search, when I can motivate myself. I am definitely not starving yet and I am enjoying it here — the woods are more beautiful than ever — but it sure would be nice to have a regular income. Something will turn up.

Well, I finally got water to flow down from the spring box to the reservoir tank. That’s the good news. I had to replace the hose leading down to the reservoir tank with another one that I found out in the woods. There’s tons of black plastic irrigation pipe out in the woods all over the place. I think it is the remnants of someone’s old, um, “herb” gardening effort. Some is 1/2″ and some 3/4″ and the latter was the perfect size to splice onto the existing pipe just below the spring box. So, that done, the water flowed well and the reservoir started to fill up nicely. I left it overnight and checked it again the next morning and that was when I found more problems.

If you checked out my Flickr site recently, you probably saw this photo. It shows the pump inside the pump house. If you look closely you can see a big crack in the case where the pipes enter and leave the pump. I suspect that happened when water froze inside the pump during one of the last several Winters. But the problem I found the next morning was that water was leaking from the pipe where it joins to the pump, so that’s shot too. I had been hoping that the cracked case wasn’t important, that it might have happened because the pump house settled over the years to the left (as you view the picture), and the outer case might not be essential to the function of the pump. Now I think that both the pipe and the pump burst from freezing water.

So, the idea of getting the spring box functioning again might be kaput for now. Actually, there is another pump up at the main house that I might be able to use, but I think the input/output pipe diameters are different and I am not sure the other pump is powerful enough. I’ll look into that when I find time. At the very least, I’ll have to fix those pipes leading from the reservoir tank, so maybe I can install an adapter to the other pump.

This is important because I have been worrying about how to keep my garden watered and I finally planted the rest of the area I had previously prepared today. So far I have been filling up 4 gallon containers down at the stream, carrying them to the car, driving up to the garden area by the main house, carrying them to the garden from the driveway, filling up a watering can, and watering the garden by hand. I used four of these water containers to water and plant the remainder of the garden today, so it will be a big chore to keep it all watered from here on out.

In the picture, the three dark rows are the initial rows I planted last week. I used old pine needles from the forest to mulch those rows during the heat wave last week. For the new rows I found a bunch of old saw dust to use for mulch. There’s piles of it out in the woods where some big trees were cut, probably by Mark, last year. The mulch worked though! I have little pea seedlings, carrots, and lettuce peeking through the mulch already. Today I planted more of each of those plus beans, spinach, beets, onions, chives, and garlic.

I am reluctant to use the water from the main water tanks because it costs $65 to fill it up and I need that water for showers, toilet, washing dishes, and cooking. So, it would be a big help to have that spring box and pump working, especially since I want to expand the garden area a lot more. I have tomato, pepper, and eggplant seedlings started at the cabin, just starting to poke up through the dirt in the little pots on my kitchen counter. I’d also like to plant plant corn, potatoes, and maybe some squash. All of that will take a lot more room and a lot more watering.

Meanwhile, now that the little plants are starting to poke up above the soil, I need to get going on some fencing around the garden area to keep deer and other critters out. There’s plenty of old fence material that I dug out of the woods a couple weeks ago, but I need to contrive something for fence posts and figure out some way to anchor them. Luckily there are tons of small Fir trees that have fallen over in the woods in back of the garden area, so I just have to drag them to the garden, cut off all the branches and cut them to the needed lengths… and then figure out how to anchor them. But that won’t keep out all the pests, as you can see from the picture here. I have found giant slugs (not Banana slugs, like my college mascot from Santa Cruz, but slugs nonetheless) and snails in the woods. I may have to set out some beer traps for these but I’ll worry about that when I find them in the garden. Birds might be an issue too, but I’ll worry about that later too.

So, I’m excited about the plants coming up and my little seedlings at the cabin, but worried about the water and pests. It’s all good though. The vegetables should taste really good after all the work I’ve put into the garden!

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.

I have gradually been identifying some of the other trees in the area and there have been some nice surprises. The trees I had previously identified were a couple varieties of Oak, Madrone, Big Leafed Maple (which can be “tapped” to make syrup/sugar), Douglas Fir, and White Pine. There were a few trees that I couldn’t easily identify, however, especially in Winter. With Spring new leaves have emerged and, in a few cases blossoms.

To begin with, there were a number of relatively small trees around the cabin, some no more than shrubs, but they had a lot of brown catkins hanging down. Catkins are a slim cylindrical flower clusters that hang down from the plant. In this slightly blurry picture you can see the tan shape hanging down near the middle. That feature made these trees fairly distinctive. I finally found a picture in one of my books that matches them perfectly.

It turns out that they are California Hazel trees and the cabin is surrounded with them! In fact, they are all along the driveway here and there too. A lot of them are young, so they probably won’t produce nuts, but a bunch of them near the cabin are old enough! So, I may be able to get a nice crop of hazelnuts this Summer with any luck, if I can beat the squirrels to them.

Then, while I was working on the garden and clearing the area around it, I found this pitiful little tree. It had been smashed at one point by a falling branch or something and the boughs were wrapped with electrical tape and wire (all gone now) to hold them together. You can see the dark areas where the main trunk branches where the tape used to be. I am pretty sure this is an Apple tree! So I might get apples later this Summer.

I kept wanting to say that these were Dogwoods, but I was also convinced that those trees were a particularly East Coast phenomenon. I had missed Dogwoods as something from my childhood in Maryland (our driveway was lined with them) and never expected to see them out here. I finally found a tree identification database on the web called What Tree is That? which led me to the proper identification. It turns out that there are Dogwood trees out here and they are called Pacific Dogwoods. And that’s what I have. There are a bunch of them in the ravine below the cabin and to either side of it. They are quite pretty and they also have fruit that is edible (supposedly), although not too tasty evidently.

So, at some point this Summer or Fall, I should have Acorns (if I want to go to the trouble of processing them to make them edible), Hazelnuts, Apples, Blackberries, and lots of vegetables from my garden. There are probably lots of other edible berries and nuts around too that I haven’t identified yet… but the current list might keep me busy enough.

I have another post coming up with pictures of all the new wildflowers I have seen recently. I will also get around to putting all the pictures up on my Flickr site soon too (I promise), so you can see all the ones I didn’t include here.

While I have been working up at the garden, I have found a number of interesting creatures hiding here and there around the main house. The little fellow here is similar to the many lizards that live just outside the front entrance of the cabin. I found one of them on the front porch the other day. They seem to be everywhere. They love the sun but they are very vigilant so whenever I go outside I hear rustling noises as they scurry under cover.

This one may be a different species or perhaps the adult mother of the little fellow I found, since they were in close proximity. She seemed to have a different strategy of avoiding capture though. She would scurry away when first exposed but then would freeze in plain sight. But she was so well camouflaged that I would lose sight of her after walking a couple steps away, so I guess it was a good strategy!

This fellow looks a lot like what I would call a coral snake, but I believe he is a young Western Mountain Snake, if I remember the name I looked up correctly. One of the telling factors in the identification was that these snakes eat lizards, and I found this one just inches away from both of the lizards above. There was at least one other lizard in the area too, so it must have been good hunting grounds.

This snake is a little blurry here and I haven’t identified it yet, but the orange band around the head is striking. I found him under a piece of plywood about 50 feet away. There were a lot of holes burrowed into the ground, so maybe he hunts mice or something. Both snakes were very intent on finding a place to hide quickly, even though this guy was pretty well camouflaged.

But, if you don’t like creepy crawlies, you might appreciate this more. I believe this is a House Finch. A couple of them started showing up a few weeks ago and quickly became regular visitors. I like the dark red crown on these birds. They are otherwise a rather dull brown, but their head dress saves them from banality. Since I put up two bird feeders, the Juncos generally claim the other larger one and the Finches seem to like this one.

Well over a month ago I thought I saw a Hummingbird fly past my front window and pause there, but I couldn’t believe there would be one this far North when the weather was still so cool. During the next couple weeks I thought I saw it again and heard buzzing sounds like very fast moving wings. But then I saw that the Juncos could hover a bit when they were challenging each other for a perch on the bird feeder and their wings buzzed a bit when they did this, so I wasn’t really sure.

Well, as you can see, I found an old hummingbird feeder up at the main house, cleaned it up, and put it out on my deck. And I do indeed have hummingbirds! In fact, about a week ago, shortly after putting up the feeder I went out on the deck and one of them “buzzed” me because I was standing next to their feeder. He flew off to a branch not far off and watched me until I retreated inside and then came to feed. Despite that brave act, they are very aware of nearby movement and I had to hide inside, wait for the “buzz” sound of their wings, and take this picture from hiding.

There are lots more pictures and I will be putting them up on my Flickr site soon. I’ll let you know when they are up, of course.

Remember this picture of the garden area back in February? Well, it looks a bit different now. I started working on it last weekend. You can see in the picture that there were some metal fence posts with wire and fencing strung between them. I’m not sure what that was for, unless it was some sort of vinyard setup. There were two layers of galvanized fencing strung horizontally between the posts. Whatever was growing there has long since dried up and blown away. Anyway, I spent an afternoon taking that apart and searching the woods around the area for more of the old galvanized fencing that used to surround the garden. I have recovered a lot of it, but some is still buried or has young trees growing through it.

As you know, I’ve been working on a variety of related projects. But I have managed to turn over a fair amount of ground. This picture shows the garden area as of this afternoon. Trees to the West shade the garden from mid-afternoon, so the garden won’t get a ton of sun, but hopefully it will be enough. You can see that I plan to expand the existing garden area quite a bit, but it is slow work doing it all manually. Each shovel full of dirt I turn over takes several cuts to separate it from the grass roots around it, then I have to cut up the clump of dirt to break it up and cut the roots into pieces, about 5 slices one way and then again in the other direction. It is a lot of arm work!

Finally, by late afternoon, I got the area turned over down to the border of the strip of flowers to the South of the garden. I am actually surprised I got that much done today (see the darker overturned earth) considering all the digging I did on the spring box yesterday. I was pretty tired by the time I finished, but I seem to have turned a corner such that I no longer get nearly disabled by working hard for a few hours. I know that sounds pitiful, but remember that I had been sitting behind a desk for many years. I am definitely feeling better these days.

Yes, it took me all week to get just this little bit done, but I have a talent for procrastinating.

As I was planning this out I realized I was going to need a garden rake. Mari had given me a leaf rake, but that won’t do much with soil, or help work mulch and/or additives like Lime into the soil. There was an old garden rake head (the handle broken off) in the construction trailer, but I didn’t have a spare handle and there didn’t seem to be any easy way to get the stub of the old handle out of the rake. Still I hate to waste stuff….

On Monday I decided it was time to build the foot peddled wood lathe that I mentioned to a few of you as a project I really wanted to try. For those of you who don’t know, a wood lathe is a way to spin a piece of wood while scraping it with a chisel or wood file (or sand paper) to shape it into a handle, or banister post, or chair leg, or whatever. I read about this in one of the Firefox books and wanted to try it. I had been fretting about the lack of lumber to build something that would stand alone somewhere under the cabin, but then I realized that the distance from the cabin to the post of the porch was about right for a tool handle so I decided to go for it!

Well, as you can see I came up with a satisfactory design, except for one thing. You need something (a “fence”) to rest the chisel against or else the spinning wood keeps pushing it away. Problem is that this fence should be adjustable, and my head started spinning with various plans to make an adjustable fence that would be rigid enough to rest the chisel against and apply a fair amount of force.

In the end I realized I was procrastinating and just hand-fashioned a rough handle from the top end of a Fir tree, as you can see here. By the time I had drilled and chiseled out the old stub of a handle from the rake head and fitted the new handle to it (and rasped it, filed it, sanded it, etc.) it was getting dark… so that was Monday. Hehe

Tuesday I cut some more firewood and did some other chores and then raked the leaves away from the garden area. Since then I have turned over a little more ground each day, but (as I mentioned above) it has been slow work. This picture shows the garden extended through the area where the old metal fence posts were down to the border of the flower bed to the South. I got a lot more done today than previously. Obviously there is a lot more to do yet!

On my way down to the cabin today I detoured to the little shale rock quarry along the driveway to check out the stream bed there. The main spring and the spring box is downhill from this, but there is a “seep” that occurs just above the quarry and peters out half-way past it. I was wondering if maybe I could make a new spring box up there and move the pump, etc., up there. It would be a much shorter distance to pump water from there if it could work, and, perhaps more importantly, a much shorter distance uphill.

As you can see, there is some water flow there, but not a lot. You might also notice that I had made a little earthen/gravel dam a day earlier but it didn’t work. The water just flowed under it or sank into the ground. But what was more disturbing was that I saw something like an oil slick near the dam and that made me remember that I had seen something similar down by the spring box the day before. Then I remembered that Susan told me that a previous tenant had tested the water from the Spring area and found that it was not potable but she didn’t seem to remember why.

Now… I am seeing oily films on the water and thinking shale… oil shale? If you look closely at the rock in the quarry, you see that a lot of it has a dark, if not black, color. On the surface it all looks tan or brown/rusty. When you pick it up it crumbles and the insides of much of it has this dark, black color. So, now I am wondering if getting the spring pump working is such a good idea. It would feed that water into my main water supply. Can you filter oil out of your drinking water? Would it gum up the filters every few days? I guess I have to get this water tested. Bleh.

Most importantly, can I create my own refinery and start selling gas? Only time will tell.

Well, it has been a busy week. I’ve been trying to get the space for the garden ready for planting. It is difficult work since the space hasn’t been used for years and the grass, weeds, and tree roots have made significant in-roads. Still, the soil isn’t as bad as I’d feared. But I’ll post about that later.

Today’s project was to work on the spring pump. I have been worrying more and more about how I was going to keep the garden watered. It turns out Summers here are mostly dry, just like in California. There is a hose connection near the water tanks (just above the garden area) but I have to conserve my water supply. Currently, it costs $65 to fill the water tank. If I stretch the water supply out so I only refill the tank once a month, I get precious few showers out of that tank! How was I going to keep my garden growing?

The solution was to figure out and repair the spring box and pump. I’d have to pay more for electricity when it is working, but it will provide me with a more-or-less continuous water supply and it should still cost much less than $65 a month, even with many more showers!

You might remember this blurry, dark picture (from early February) of the pump house and tank next to it. I have walked around this installation several times but have never been able to figure it out… until now. You see, the idea of a spring pump is to collect water near the spring behind a brick wall and then pump that water up to a tank somewhere. Ok, here was a little house with a pump inside and a tank next to it, but the tank was downstream from the pump, not above it, near the spring and it was not made of brick. There was no brick wall in sight. In fact, why was there a plastic water tank here, when the water should be pumped up to the main tank far uphill?

Today I finally found the cinder block spring water collection tank that collects the water further up stream… and it was a mess! When I finally cleared all the gravel and mud off the plywood top, this is what I saw. The small piece of plywood was left there to cover the monster I found when I opened the box the first time… until I could get back with my camera.

This guy was living the easy life in the this old spring tank! He was fat and sassy from the crickets that had also made a home there. Sorry for yet another blurry picture, but my camera is strictly autofocus, so I never know what it will focus on (anything in the foreground can leave the object of interest blurry in the background). This was the best of about 7 pictures I took. This is also the biggest lizard I have found so far, so I decided to name him “Son of Godzilla.” He was a nasty looking brute and I had no idea whether he would bite (or would be poisonous) so I prodded him out with a twig to another home in the stream bank. I still haven’t identified his species but he was impressive

Anyway, after a couple hours I managed to clear out the old spring collection tank. It is clear down to the clay layer below the cinder blocks but still not filling up much, which is fine for now. I think I may have to clear all the dirt and gravel from behind it as well.

You can see here where the water is backing up behind it. It is supposed to seep down behind it and through cracks between the cinder blocks near the bottom. I cleared out some of the dirt and gravel from behind it but not all. Right now the water is flowing down to the right of the box, around the outside, and only a little is flowing in through the cracks at the bottom. In fact, the whole thing is supposed to be full of gravel to help filter the water and protect the outflow pipe, just not gravel and muddy clay, which clogs the pipe leading out. I will probably have to get some advice on what to do next. At the very least it will require some screens over the outflow pipe, new gravel, and I will probably have to dig out the area behind it and clear those cracks at the bottom to allow water in.

So, how does the whole system work? The water flows by gravity from the cinder block collection tank down to the plastic holding tank. When that fills up, a sensor inside turns on the pump in the pump house and that pumps the water up to the main tank far above, near the garden and the main house. I still need to refill the cinder block tank with gravel and maybe sand, add some screens, etc., and clear out the area behind it. Then I need to get the water flowing down to that plastic collection tank. Finally, I will see if the pump still works. The plastic housing around the pump is cracked. I think the pump house has settled over time, putting stress on the pipe between the plastic collection tank and the pump itself. Hopefully that hasn’t broken any seals and the pump will still work, but it will be a little while before I find out.

It was a good day’s work. I got more ground turned over in the garden in the morning and made a good start on figuring out the spring pump system this afternoon. Once I get this part of it figured out I will clean out the reservoir tank next to the pump (which has a thick layer of mud at the bottom) and then it will be time to see if the pump still works. I repaired the wiring to it way back in January, but it has been sitting idle with the circuit breakers off for ages (as well as the other problems I mentioned) so I am hoping for some good luck there.

Tomorrow I may go buy some seeds and start the garden (choosing to be optimistic about the water supply). Mari sent me some “seed money” so I can get going with it. I’ll be doing some web page work for her in return. There is still a lot of work to do on the garden itself, but I can start planting the first section while I keep expanding it. Keep an eye out for another post soon about the garden with pictures showing my progress.

As predicted, it snowed the very next morning after that hail last Saturday. Of course, it was about 40 degrees outside, so it had all melted by afternoon. The last few days have been off-and-on rain. Monday and Tuesday were particularly heavy rain days. Today there were only sprinkles.

It did clear up a bit the last few days and I got out and swept the stove pipe of all the accumulated soot and cinders. Today I went up and patched up the roof around the stove pipe where there has been a persistent leak whenever it rains.

I also went out and ground up some of the charcoal left over from my fires this Winter. It is supposed to make great garden fertilizer. While digging in my compost pile for bits of charcoal, I found this interesting little creature. A quick search on the web turned up pictures that seem to match pretty closely: a Five-lined Skink. The Wikipedia page says they are native to the Eastern U.S., but perhaps it is a closely related species.

In other news, I didn’t get a second interview for that State job with Senior and Disability Services, so I’ll just have to keep looking! Something will turn up. You can find a bunch more snow and Spring pictures along with all my other recent photos, as usual, at my Flickr site here.

Last Monday we had a cold snap and some hail fell for about 20 minutes. Then it got warmer again, culminating in a very warm day on Thursday when it got up to about 65 degrees. Now, a couple days later, were back to hail again! Where have I heard this before? “If you ever don’t like the weather around here, just wait a bit and it will change.”

That was especially true today. It got cold again last night. Then, after about an hour of hail at noon (shown above), the sun came out and things warmed up to about 45 degrees. Around 4 p.m. the clouds rolled in again and hail started falling once more (shown in this picture, falling pretty heavy — look for the white streaks), finally becoming rain after a while. Lastly, about an hour ago, it started snowing! Of course, it is still above freezing outside so none of it stuck and the snow has since stopped.

But it is supposed to “rain” for the next several days, possibly through Thursday, so I was out this morning cutting more wood, just in case. At the very least, it will probably stay cold for most of this week and might get down to freezing. Makes me glad I haven’t actually planted a garden yet, but I plan to risk it later this week when things warm up.

I continue to work on the cabin here and there and other projects. No word yet from that interview I had with the State. I am betting I will hear something one way or the other this week though and I continue to look for other positions that I can apply for. I hope to have some good news to share before long.