Lift off!

We have lift off, folks. I was going to do it last weekend, but the damn snOMG 2105 screwed all that up. And I was freaking out because I didn't want to plant seed trays only to have them reach -3 Fahrenheit in an un-insulated shed, but I didn't want to keep the lights on 24/7 to keep the trays warm enough..... duh. Idiot. We're not living in it yet, but we (more or less) have a HEATED HOUSE. Idiot.

So this weekend.... I planted (what will be) our garden.

I feel so very (overly) organized this year. I used a planner and planned both the back garden with raised beds and the meadow garden with rows. I calculated the numbers of each plant that I want. I tried to put friends with each other and keep plant enemies separated. I incorporated pollinator and pest attracting flowers in the plans. I got soaker hoses for the blueberries (they have been in my car for a week now, and will continue to rattle around in there most likely until our first drought-like conditions, thankyouverymuch). I am prepared. I hope I don't fuck it up.

Planning his own garden. Or world domination. Or just destroying a new notebook we (thought we'd) hid

Supplies!

Almost...

Ta da!!!

(almost) wordless.

So happy to be living somewhere with weather again.

(almost) wordless.

I love living somewhere with weather again!

Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

*please note I never liked Mr Rogers, I do not condone the watching of said show, and he creeped me out as a kid. That said, dude had a damn good catch phrase!

October is officially my favorite month in my new adopted home state. It has its rainy moments (and fabulous thunderstorms!), but it's also got beautiful glorious clear sunshine with no oppressive heat or humidity at times - when being out in the sun is hot and being in the shade is cold. Like it should be! When jeans and flip flops is perfect attire, and you can never decide between a light long sleeved shirt, or a short sleeved one...

And October carries fabulous reminders of why I moved here (harvest season!), and why I love to stay (it's beautiful!)...

And October brings on that feeling of fall and with fall comes nostalgia...something I borderline OD on in general, and pair that with the fact that I arrived and set the Stoneyhaw adventure into full swing in October, and you've got a fatal combination culminating in...

...PICTURES!

Classified as 'invasive'. Not this little guy. The flower is maybe an inch in diameter... in the leaves on the ground among the blueberry bushes...

Post exercise.

"I am cute. Give me food."

New Stoneyhaw residents as of today - Dominiques! Finally!

One of the Hampies.

Upper (or 'big') Meadow - if we can get the irrigation thing sorted out, the garden will make up part of it next year.

More of the upper meadow.

Lower (or 'small') meadow as seen from the big one. Future home of goats.

Golf ball. Egg.

We carved a pumpkin. Woot.

Damn idiot chicken on the outhouse. Err, deer blind.

Henrietta.

Poetry

I have written about my darling grandmother here before. She who used to tell me stories about flowers and flower fairies, and who used to take me on walks in the country... she can tell which bird is singing by their song, and spends more on bird feed than people feed at her house (this is not a confirmed fact, but I'm pretty sure it's true).

She also writes poetry. Or verse, rather. If you feel inclined to make the distinction.

After reading my 'Second Spring' post, she sent me this verse she wrote back in the Fall of 1961. I think it captures the feeling of Autumn perfectly, and I am so very happy that she sent it to me. I love it. And I'm the girl no one really could ever get to read poetry. (I love you Grammy!)

Summer is stolen!
I hear the cry
Of blue jays screaming against the sky.
"Thief! Thief! Thief! Thief!"
Summer is stolen and each green leaf
Has been slashed with scarlet
And drips with gold.
Summer is stolen!
The tale is told.
 
Summer is stolen,
The birds take flight
To follow the chase in the autumn night.
And now the thief has
What he's after--
Summer's green and summer's laughter.

- Marilyn Fais

Autumn, 1961

Water. The Saga. Part 2: Hot might be nice, too.

For a while after my water got plumbed, I managed to have hot running water, too. Seriously. Once I got the man* to get the heater lit properly the first time, we were off to the races. And it WAS one of those annoying instances where he seemingly did the exact things I did, it just decided to stay lit for him. Sniff.

And then all hell broke loose. After I managed to get the water to stay running in general, my hot water went kaput one day. I went around back, only to find that the pressure relief valve had blown and the water heater was draining out onto the pilot light assembly. Oh joy.

Tough to see as I took these pictures with my phone, but you get the general idea. Hopefully. That's as big as that pic gets.

 I went and rummaged through the tools in the shed only to find that the largest wrench I had (OK, other than the 48" wrench we use for the well) didn't begin to fit around the valve. So vice grips it was. Not the nicest on the palms, but oh well. You work with what you got.

Finally I got the damn thing off.

Unfortunately for me, I had only closed the shut off valve to the water heater as illustrated in the manual. The water system has been monkeyed around with so many times that who the hell know what that actually turned off, as this happened:

Oops!

 Thankfully, the water heater is located less than a foot away from the main water inlet, so I shut of the water and the flow immediately stopped. Whew.

So. Old valve in hand, off I went to Lowe's thinking that a new one would be pretty easy to get. A pressure relief valve is on every water heater made, how hard could it be?

Really effing hard.

First of all, Airstream doesn't use the industry standard ANYTHING. I found this out while trying to get a waste pipe fitting so I could empty the tanks, and it was the case here again. A PRV in a 1/2 inch size is practically impossible. And then the BTU and PSI settings were both significantly lower than what you might find on your water heater at home. Why? Because my water heater is 10 gallons, and is heated by a relatively small propane flame.

When you look at it that way, it makes sense. When you're trying to replace a part, you want to kill someone.

It was going to take Airstream over a week to order me one in, and it wouldn't be exactly right.

So I went from store to store until, at my wit's end, I planted myself on a stool at the last plumbing contractor supply store in Burlington hoping that they would hook me up with SOMETHING. They did.  The extremely nice guy that works there decided it was absolutely fine to sell me a PRV rated far and above the BTU and PSI I needed, and he got me a coupler to put on it so the 3/4-inch valve would fit my 1/2 inch pipe. Whoa. Concept. (was that really so hard, other guys? hmmm?!?!)

I also have to interject the fact that I'm blond, kinda busty, female, not a contractor myself, have a foul mouth and am not easily intimated. In the south. In a contractor supply store. Covered in mud, thanks to my driveway. I left stunned and speechless guys with their asses hanging out of their pants in my wake. I'm not convinced I didn't thoroughly scare a few of them also. Oh. And I drive a pretty urban car with fantastic redneck mud tires. Only on the front.

The old, the new, the ugly tool.

 A couple of strips of teflon tape, a few falls in the mud, and a cup of coffee later, I had the new valve on.

Shiny! And if you look closely, you can see that the flame is lit and going.

 I got the flame lit, the hatch closed, went inside, and an hour later had no hot running water. I tried off and on for 2 days to get the damn thing to stay going, but it just wouldn't do it. This happened to coincide with a rather large puddle in the middle of the bathroom floor (unrelated to the afore-mentioned spewing of the water heater), the crumbling and deteriorating of said floor, the driveway being impassable for the umpteenth time, and a massive freak out on my part, so I ditched. I packed up and went to said man's house for a week.

I got home that next weekend, thought I'd give lighting it a shot - and it stayed lit. I had tried drying out the pilot light assembly, cleaning it, I even got in there with ether, and everything before I left, to no avail. I guess I just couldn't get it all the way dried out and it needed to sit for a week before it was good to go again.

Almost as if nothing ever happened.... almost....

Regardless of why, I am hoping - hoping!! - that this particular part of the water saga is behind me. Especially since I've got two more going on parallel to this one and I'd like to end up with fewer things to try to get fixed - not more!

Only time will tell, I suppose.

*really I'm being nice to him by not dedicating a whole post to his awesomeness and listing all of the amazing fixit stuff that he does for me, but it's killing me. Really. A testament to how much I want to keep him, this whole NOT writing about him thing.....

Getting Ready to Spring

Pun intended. Ish. Really it's the best I can do at the moment...

While the water saga continues, I'm still managing to make a bit of progress towards having SOMETHING in the ground this spring. My soil will not be as fortified as I'd like, I may or may not be ready for chickens, I won't be putting in any fruit trees, and I only have one grapevine (and haven't figured out yet where I want to put him). BUT. If for no other outcome than to find out what I can and cannot kill easily, things will be put in dirt, given as much sun as possible, and watered.

So what am I up to this week? Other than being sick and hanging out with a sick six year old for a greater part of the week, the following:

• planning, planning, plotting, scheming, planning

I bought a binder, and have been plotting out indoor planting times, outdoor planting times, and contemplating where I'm going to plant the 60+ kinds of seeds that for some reason I bought. To my credit I edited down, but still. That's how many I *had* to have. Te reassuring thing is all of the accounts of first-time gardener's, hobby farmers, homesteaders, etc, all have over-ordering and over-planting of seeds in common their first year, so feeling like that's ok. I figure anything that survives this year's turmoil and lack of preparedness will be a keeper.

• panicking

(holy shit I don't have room for all this, I don't have beds prepared for ANY of this, I haven't figured out a water system yet, I'm going to have to BUY dirt, there are still too many god damn trees where my garden's gonna be, I have no idea what I'm doing, I need a job, what if NOTHING grows, holy shit holy shit holy shit)

• preparing

Maybe I should get something rigged up to start seeds. Outdoors is pretty much not gonna happen, so I tackled organizing and setting up grow lights in the shed. Yay! One thing done! 

• panicking

(I can't plug in the grow lights, as I don't have a power strip. Will the soil stay warm enough in the uninsulated shed? holy shit holy shit holy shit. Why is it 75 degrees in here in this shed on the ONE day I decided to get stuff done? It was 29 degrees last night. Damn Carolina weather! holy shit holy shit holy shit)

---

And there you have it. I have to say - with the weather being cold and blah, it's tough to get outside to do the stuff that needs to be done, and there's only so much you can do from inside an Airstream with no internet connection. And then the weather turns warm for a day or two and your brain goes sixty million miles an hour in a frenzy to try to cram as much into the day as possible until you realize the day has passed and you've gotten a minute portion of what you wanted to do done, and and and.....

As my extremely level-headed man keeps telling me, winter's tough, and this winter in particular has been brutal. But all will work out in the end and spring will spring and once it has sprung I plan on being panicked for entirely different reasons. 

This cilantro plant is a freak of nature. It has been covered in ice multiple times and has endured temps in the teens  several nights in a row. Yet it still is putting out new growth. Holy buckets of freakshowness. 

Water. The Saga. Part 1: Cold. Running. (I don't ask for much!)

OK. You get home, you walk in the door, you wash your hands.

You wake up in the middle of the night. You go pee. You flush the toilet.

You eat dinner and remember (this time) to presoak the lasagna pan in hot water before it gets really stuck on there and never comes off again.

Sound familiar?

You lucky bastard.

As you may or may not know/remember - when we moved on to this property we had lakefront, a pond (or two, depending on your criteria), and an old well. Now I have electricity and running water. Kinda.

The well guys were awesome - they were the same guys that we had come out to measure the depth of the well when we failed to do so(or at least we thought we failed. We didn't think that my father would be off by 90ft). They came out, dug a trench, broke their trencher on tree roots, fixed it, installed the pump, tank, well cover & outdoor hydrant, hooked up the camper and got the whole system running in a day. Just the two of them. They even managed to get their trucks and trailer out of the driveway successfully.  (a feat, to be sure).

The Beast heading down the hill through the trees to clear the way to the well for the trencher.

Trench. Whoa.

The hookup.

I waited until they left to dance a jig and turn all the water on and off for no apparent reason.

This bliss lasted until the first hard freeze (a few days later).

Gratuitous 'everything's frozen' picture.

To be fair to Melvin (my dear tin can) - he's getting old and quirky and the winter this year has been worse than usual. I am also new to the trials and tribulations (and joys!) of camper living, and my learning curve in terms of winterizing while living in the thing full time has been slow and bloody.

It started with my noticing that the bath tub would have water coming up out of the drain in the morning. That was slightly baffling, but could always be remedied by the emptying of the tanks - even if they barely had anything in them. When I woke up in the morning and water didn't come out of the faucets, I knew I had to do something to remedy the situation.

Thankfully the water freezing and my figuring out that the back flowing tub was because the waste line was freezing happened within a day of each other, so I could fix both issues at the same time by installing a pipe warmer. (and do everything they say NOT to, just to keep the record straight).

The shortest length I could find was 6', and the one rule I wasn't going to break was the whole 'don't attempt to shorten the cord' one, so I just snaked it up the water intake, hopped it over the bumper, and ran it along the waste line. Insulate the whole thing, and you're done. As are your freezing problems.

This is NOT good.

There had been a pipe warmer of sorts put in here eons ago. Yes, I forgot about it. (It was corroded anyway...)

New pipe warmer snaking up the naked intake pipe. And, as specified in the installation instructions, NOT touching the ground.

Broke the rules and laid the pipe warmer along the waste pipe. Justification: we're not running blackwater (no gasses really to speak of) and the pipe is thicker than the specs say the warmer can handle anyway, so *hopefully* no fear of anything bad. (So far so good. Fingers crossed). The big orange thing is the thermostat which will kick it on and off automatically when needed. Unless the tape doesn't hold. Crap. I have to remember to check.

I even got the cord to go out the same hole as the electric cord used to plug the camper in. The Virgo in me is ecstatic.

Fiberglass insulation layer.

Plastic over the fiberglass insulating material, per installation instructions (for once).

Original foam and plastic insulation put on by the well guys put back on by me, blatantly ignoring the installation instructions' insistence that the fiberglass insulation NOT get compressed. Justification: if it freezes again, I'll freak - more is better! Besides, I wrapped the fiberglass loosely...

My beautiful insulation job on the waste line. Hehe.

Lest you think all of my problems are solved - I still have a water heater that's on the fritz, a mysterious puddle on the bathroom floor, and the (as of yet future) appearance of a hero to fix it all. (I have the hero. He just hasn't gotten out here yet) Hurray!!!

Winter Continues

...and winter continues. It's amazing that it's hitting me so hard, but wow. I have lived in places with 'seasons' and some of those places had REAL winter (CT, MN, you know who you are....), but coastal California just managed to sap the notion of seasons right out of me. And then I got to North Carolina and good grief this winter we're getting slammed.

But productivity also continues....slow as it may be, and slower though it may seem....

Granddaddy's shed is coming down....almost finished now...


Most of the shed wood was too rotten to keep, and it got 'repurposed' as heat.


I got iced in.


What do I do when I'm iced in? Make pasta, evidently.


Zora also remains productive in her capacity as guard dog. She lets me know someone's here by exuberantly showing them in.

Merry Holidays.

We've got a theme going on here. My newly adopted home state is having weather issues.

I came out to the eastern part of the state for Christmas. We had a lovely time - smaller kids definitely lend an air of magic to the holidays. The whole starry eyes full of wonder and whatnot. I was feeling pretty blue without my family here (especially since my mom just left to go back to Canada... *sniff*), and all of that totally went out the window when I spent the day surrounded by kids opening their wrapped piles of loot.

Zora helped with the Christmas explosion process by making sure the wrapping paper was properly shredded

And then I woke up this morning to 6 inches of snow and giant dog flakes coming down. By lunchtime there was a foot. As I wasn't planning on going anywhere anyway, I actually got to enjoy playing in the snow. Snowball fights, snow angels, traipsing down the road that's become silent with its lack of fields, and muffled with the snow....made my weekend.

This is what a cotton field looks like from across the street


No. Rural eastern North Carolina is not equipped with snowplows. Which is kind of awesome on a Sunday after Christmas.


This was Zora's first foray into a land of snow. She LOVED it.


Traipsing off down the road.

Great Gobs of Winter Wonderland

Holy Buckets.

It seems like everytime I turn around someone is assuring me that "this isn't normal" in regards to the current weather conditions (whatever they may be) in my newly adopted home state of North Carolina. When we arrive in September there was a good 2-3 week span of temps in the mid-90's. We've had temps in the teens every morning for the past almost 2 weeks now.... it has snowed 3 times, and my drive into town this morning started with driving down my frozen driveway and then negotiating roads with a layer of slush and water and ice all slopped together. Not to diss my new neighbors and fellow NC citizens, but hello none of you can drive on this shit! (I'm not the best, but dude. Slow down.)

On the other hand, it sure is pretty and it sure is exciting. Everything on the farm is coated in a thin layer of ice, and if it would stop raining long enough, I'm sure it would be a sparkly pretty landscape. I suppose a white christmas is not totally out of the realm of possibility this year? I just hope the roads stay clear enough for the 3 hour drive to where I was planning on spending it.....

And I will leave you, lone reader, with this thought: cross your fingers this coming tuesday. Rumor has it the tin can might be getting running water!

Where does the glass end and the ice begin?


Poor Esmeralda....so cold....


Oddly christmasy.


The glorified puddle is SO trying to be a skating rink...


So shiny.


Our safety inspector. She isn't sure how she feels about all this white stuff invading her territory.


Here's hoping a thick icing is good for 50yr old blueberry bushes....


The plants are confused.


More plant-related confusion - since the cold snap, my cilantro has been thriving. I don't get it.