Tag Archives: homestead

Winter

The holiday season brought with it winter weather. From freezing temps and water lines to snow to hurricane force wind and rain back to freezing again. There has been some sun in there as well, but weather is dominate this year.

A murder of crows:

With so many gray dark days I haven’t had as much power as I would of liked. But mostly the big storm was just a windy event that took out our internet satellite tria.. the dish was ok.. and that took a few days to get replaced. We had a few small water leaks where it shouldn’t be issues too. Still have a couple of those.

Solar Power is wonderful to have though. So many people here and across the state were without power for days on end. We were warm (wood) and had lights and phone and internet and directv most of the time 🙂 Being off the grid does have its advantages.

Dad is not going to get full range of motion back into his left shoulder. The pain is getting less and they are planning a vacation to white sandy beach for a week here soon. So that is good. Meanwhile, I really need to plan the Michigan trip for the summer now. With all the news of airline mergers and prices going up, I don’t know whether to wait or book soon??

I have been archiving and jacketing dozens of live Bruce Cockburn shows that have been sitting here waiting for that for a couple of years!

I also got the Ion Cassette Tape to PC and the Ion turntable to PC. I have only used the cassette to PC so far.. finding out that many of the cassettes I wanted to get onto cd are just too far gone to be worth the time. I fear how the albums may sound!? But it’s a project that I have wanted to deal with for many years.
Hopefully by spring it will be done and new space will appear in this small house 🙂 [not done yet!]
Then I will tackle the vhs to dvd tapes that I want to keep and get rid of or store somewhere out of the house the rest.

Went to Eureka last week and we saw Cloverfield. A monster movie.
Doesn’t really live up to all the hype and yes it has all been done one way or another before…yet it was gripping edge of your seat 90 minutes of ..”What is that!?” Great monster.. 🙂

NYEve-part 2

So that is about it for this year. Many of our summer projects didn’t get completed, blame it on the heat (way too many days over 100 degrees) or on my recovering from the tonsillectomy and then bunion surgery, or just not enough time.
This past week Russel has been on school break with the kids, and for the first time since school started some stuff is getting done.

I am still unpacking, yesterday I opened a box that I hadn’t looked in for at least 17-18 years!! Old newspapers, letters from people whose faces I can’t even bring up! (yikes that is scary) and some art that now that I have a home I can finally maybe get framed and put up. Any way there is a lot of that sort of thing, books, crystals, rocks, shells, wonderful little things, but still no real room for them.

In early November, Russel and I went to a Bat Mitzvah for one of his Aikido students. I had never been to a (Southern Humboldt style) Jewish celebration before and it was just lovely! The songs and humor and loving friends gathering was really heart felt. I only knew a couple of people there and it just didn’t matter.

Did I say that around Thanksgiving I was so frustrated with this house not becoming ‘homey’ and pleasing to my eye, I looked into Feng Shui. Read a lot of books and got some good guidance. Although I also learned that to really use Feng Shui I must study a bit more than I want to, and that as with Astrology, there are many ways to look at it and divine it. So I took what I could use, and hope to one day dig into it a bit deeper….. when I have the time!!

I also connected finally with my neices again. Hope to learn a lot more about them in 2007.

As this year draws to a close I am thank full that we are healthy, have a wonderful home and land to support us, and are truly blessed with our lives.

As to 2007, we hope to finish all the projects we started last year, mainly the water system to electric pump, we need to paint the whole house, there is always a ton of work to do clearing the land (fire breaks) and we hope to do a better veggie garden this year. I got out the seed catalogs yesterday!

We also are planning a trip to Michigan to see my Dad and Sue, and the rest of the family. This is already stressing me out a bit. It will be sometime in August/early Sept. Have to wait to see if friends TR and Terry are coming out to visit and when, we also have to see if Reggae on the River is happening at all..what a mess that is ..I will post more about that later… and if it is happening, in what form and will Mateel Aikido do a booth? If they don’t that leaves a good block of time to do the Michigan trip, and is what I am hope for.

Ok, that’s it for now…to the few of you who come here…
Happy NEW Year!!

Fall in the air

Well September went by in a blur. First off there was bunion surgery on the 7th.. this wasn’t too bad as far as surgeries go. I was off my foot entirely for a week or more, then I used a huge boot type support to hobble around.. unfortunately a blister was created that I didn’t know about until the bandages were changed a week later.. dealing with the blister has been just as painful as dealing with the surgical site! Any way, I am into Uggs type foot gear now and can drive and move about. Good thing as tons of to do stuff is piling up.

My birthday was September 11, and we lost a good friend on that day this year. Bob Wansick died from a heart attack, he went quick, and it was sudden. He will be sorely missed. There was a memorial on the 23rd.. a wonderful celebration of his life. His wife Diana, and his son and family are neighbors here on the creek road. I hope that all the ‘lets get togethers’ are actually gotten together. Time is short and you never know when the last time might be.

The laundry room is finally enclosed. What an ordeal. The storm door from Home Depot was more than a p-i-t-a to install/frame. But we like it.. it has 3/4 light and storm and roll-away screen. We’ll see how well it does keeping the rain out. The machines will be delivered on Tuesday… gonna be great although will take some getting used to. Having to do laundry daily and not all at once will be very different. Also, with the light and sun getting shorter, I guess I will have to run the generator for each load.

The water system hasn’t been switched to the new system yet. Russel will be working on that all winter I believe. He does have wood for this year bucked, split and stacked, and almost everything for next year. We try to stay a year ahead so we have really dry wood to burn. We had our first light rain this week so we could actually start a fire in the wood stove. Felt just wonderful!

I called my best friend Tom in Florida too. He just went through an agonizing month of rehab with several more to go, following a shoulder surgery to reattach some muscle and ligaments. Seems a full recovery is possible, but painful getting there. I am hoping that he and his woman Terry can make it out our way next year. It has been well over 20 years since Tom and I have seen each other.. funny how some relationships survive the time and distance with almost no effort. He writes just wonderful letters, when he writes. And we have a connection like no other. It gives me something to look forward too.. something outside the paradise I live in and the sweet life I have compared to so many others.

Bruce Cockburn is coming back my way again! I have tickets for the show at the Mystic Theater in Petaluma on November 9. I am taking 3 girlfriends to this one!! It should be lots of fun. It is something to look forward too!!

As the year rolls on, and all the holidays spring up, time will get even more short. I have lots of plans to work more on the computer, learn more programs, do more with what I already know and all that. I also need to still unpack, sort and decorate this house. Lots of stuff still in storage and infrastructure not in place to house everything I want to have out. So I figure that will be an ongoing project of mine.. a little every day or week depending on the other stuff that has to be done.

If you have bothered to read to here: Happy Fall !! Everyone. Enjoy the change of the seasons, slow down and hug the ones you love. Take time to enjoy the life you have and the ones you love, you never know what’s around the bend!

And life moves on…

So after 2 weeks of being totally down, I could finally do a little work, not much.

The site I had been working on really wanted to go live by June 3 and we made that date! There is still much work to do on the site, but it was together enough for her to start telling people at the annual Summer Arts and Music Festival.

Go visit Seinensilk.com and see what I have been up too! (check out her gallery!)
This is Margriet at Summer Arts Fair:

As part of the moving from the town house to the land full time, it meant selling my 1971 VW bus. Well, selling is the wrong word, I practically gave this one away to another lover the VW bus world:

It was a end to an era, sort of sad. I used to live in my bus, travel, go places …but once I got here, that life style seem to end for me. Even leaving the town house after 16 years was also an end… lots of new beginnings though, and no regrets.

I will miss the town garden though, it takes care of itself now, and I can’t really have that type of planting here. All we have going now is the veggie garden with a few poppies and a few plants in pots I brought out. The sun here is like a blast furnace lots of days, so lush we won’t ever be, especially with having to pump our own water.

So this is where we are now.. made all the dead lines we had, and now we are unpacking, sorting, storing, and moving stuff from the shed to the house and back to the shed.. lots going to thrift store. Many things have been packed for many years, and we need to make room in the stoage shed for the stuff from town that we want to keep.

I have a feeling this type of thing will be on-going all summer, making this place really home. Getting some art up and textiles on the walls. We will get satellite TV soon and satellite internet by fall. I am still overwhelmed, not fully healed, and antsy to be done with it all, but hey living in paradise makes up for it.

Buck just outside our bathroom window. He had his whole crew with him that day..5 of ’em just laying around chewing their cuds. 🙂

Tonsillectomy May 9

I am finally going to do this. Months of sore throat and pain and tonsil stones and I believe toxins entering my body. Wish me well and a fast recovery. I won’t be able to talk for awhile, and the pain I hear is just dreadful.

Nothing like having a full plate, I am in the middle of a website build, with at least many hours to go. We are in the last phases of moving from the little town house to here… Russel may have to do the rest by himself, as I may be down for anywhere from 10 days to a month (yikes!).

Russel is at the end of the school year with spring fever kids and lots of demonstrations to get together. His Aikido teacher, Frank Doran Sensei will be here for a weekend training May 20-21, which is always fun, but lots to prepare for as well.

And it went from rain rain rain 2 weeks ago, to 90’s last week…mud to dust just like that. We haven’t got the garden in, but the beds are mostly ready.

We took some big trees that were dying out and the back yard is full of timber and debris. Russel has started the firewood cutting, but there is a ton to do. And so many other things here, boxes are starting to pile up, water system needs work.. the list is endless.

So for the few of you who come here, that’s what I have been up too. I hope when I recover from this surgery and Russel is done with school and we are out of the town house, that all our energy and time will be here, either on the homestead or for me, on the web doing all the things I said i wanted to do last year.

Oh, and my camera is in the shop..in New Jersey of all places, at MackCamera, who i had an extended warranty with. It had developed dead pixels in the center of the ccd and it was very hard to even photoshop them out.

Oh, and Bruce Cockburn has a new cd [Life Short Call Now ] coming out in July and he starts touring in June…we have tickets for the Kate Wolf Festival June 25, more on that later.

Getting anywhere from here…

Well in case you don’t know, southern Humboldt and most of northern California were hit with a series of very heavy rain and wind storms starting mid-December. After a week of rain we were all like, “Wow the rivers and creeks are really running high, it’s so cool to see water finally.”

A week later, there was no way to get here or out of here..every main-major road was blocked by some kind of slide, slip-out or flood. The Confusion Hill slide is still moving and road closures south on 101 are constant. The bluffs between Garberville and Redway keep dropping muck and rocks on the road there so that road is also closed half the time… still 3 weeks later.

That doesn’t even cover the roads we all live on, many of them are still sliding, including the one we live on. It has a major slide behind us, and a slide and a slip-out between us and the county paved road. So far it has remained passable, although very narrow with a 300 foot drop to the creek on the slip-out side. We keep the truck on the county road side and my 4 Runner here at the house. That way if it totally goes, at least we can shuttle supplies in and out.

Others have had it far worse, several homes have been pushed off their foundations. Some of the roads are so bad that people are shuttling 2 or 3 times and sometimes walking across long stretches of slides. It is hard hauling food, laundry and propane tanks that way.

In the midst of the major storm Redway and surrounding area had no grid power for days, some places for a week. Garberville lost its water pump so the town was asked to use sparingly. You never knew just when or if the roads leading in or out town would go… so keeping gas and food supplies up is now my mind set, don’t let anything get low, go into town only when it isn’t raining, as the ground is so far beyond saturated that any rain now is run off and damaging already unstable hillsides.

One very bright light in all this was our beloved Estelle Fennell, at KMUD who kept us updated hourly for days. You can also check out some of the weather related pictures at the MUD, just go to their picture gallery.

As for us, we had wood and were warm, we had water, we had off the grid solar power (only had to generator charge the batteries 4x so far this winter!), we only had a couple of leaks in our storage shed. We were lucky. We are still shuttling our cars and it’s a hassle, but hopefully our road will get shored up good enough to make it through the winter, with a major fix when the rains have stopped (I hope).

More to come later, as I play catch up with the blog, and start considering new blogging software so I can turn comments back on and not be spammed to death.

Giving Thanks

I wanted to take a moment to ‘not bitch’ or complain about my life.
It seems every where on the planet people are being hammered. It’s getting mighty cold in Pakistan where 1000s are homeless after the earthquake. The whole gulf coast is flattened by Katrina and Wilma and 1000s of families there have lost everything as well. Between the floods and now snow and record cold on the east coast with the cost of heating oil rising, how are many to live? I have read about $500 a month heating bills alone. There are many people doing without… heat, light, food, meds….many with out a home at all.

I try to help in my small ways… send food here, donate clothes, send money..but it is not even a drop in the bucket of wealth… meanwhile the talking heads report that ‘black friday’ shopping was good and up and that more people where using their credit cards…geez, and the stock market almost hit 11.

So with all that, my little world is just wonderful. Yes the gas prices effect us too, and the cost of food and everything else that finally makes its way to the north coast is way overpriced. We won’t be doing any Christmas shopping or buying of anything that isn’t necessary..no frills this year.

But in a few hours I will be back at home, in the hills, with wood heat (wood cut from our land), our solar panels, even in a cloudy day, making enough juice to keep the lights and dvd player on. I have a solid structure around me, I won’t be cold or live in the dark, we can eat a lot of rice, pasta, and beans. We can conserve the amount of propane we use (refrigerator, camp cook stove, water heater), and the amount of driving we do. We are doing well compared to many on the planet and for that I am very thankful.

The more independent we (as a planet) become of the ‘oil’ industry the better. It is a hard thing to do for sure and we (us) are not there yet either, but we are working toward that goal. And we are working toward a goal of more self reliance, it is hard work, but the feeling of security it brings far out weighs the work.

Now, if only I can turn off the ‘I want’ ‘I need’, ohhh ‘I really want that’.
And focus on the big picture of our little lives, then maybe when the shit really flies we will be in a position to help others who have not prepared as well.
And we still have a long way to go. More on that later.

I love my life. I am a fortunate being. I am thankful and grateful.

Many blessing to who ever you are that come here and read my ramblings.

CockburnProject Update

Even with the limited amount of time I have here, I did manage to update the Cockburn Project last week. Bruce is on a solo tour promoting his latest cd, Speechless which is an instrumental.

I missed the one show I could have maybe gotten too, last weekend in San Fransisco. It’s just so damn far down there and Russel had no time and ….. well any way I am truly bummed as the reports from both the Humans list and BC-Live have been wonderful.
I hope he comes this way again in the summer, like maybe he will do the Kate Wolf Festival this year??

What else is new? Not much. Same old same old. I am starting to take things from the town/office house to the land on each trip.. small steps. My computer is acting a bit ‘different’ lately and so I hope to take the CPU into the guys who built it for a tune-up before I haul it all out to the house. So that won’t happen for a month of so any way.

Russel finally installed a real gate (we had had a very heavy chain gate) on the bottom of the driveway. This will be so much easier coming and going now, not having to deal with heavy, wet, muddy, rusty chain… yipee!!

Still having pressure pump/switch/bladder tank problems. Now R thinks that we need to replace the bladder tank as it isn’t working as it should. We’ll see.

We are getting a bit of rain, not nearly as much as we should this time of year, and it is also warmer than usual. I sure hope the rains come here.

And at least, for those in California who may read this… Arnold was defeated!!!

On My Beat

Living in the hills of southern Humboldt