There is probably a nap in my future

 Kind of wondering just how the S.O. is going to react after he's up and realizes the time showing on the clock radio is about 90 minutes fast. I got up thinking it was a little after 6, came downstairs, went through my normal first-thing-in-the-morning routine, and then after I was thoroughly awake discovered it was actually 4:45. Realizing I was up almost two hours earlier than normal did not thrill me. The power was out for maybe 7 hours last night, and obviously the clock radio no longer saves the time as accurately as it once did.

The power actually went out multiple times yesterday. It had gone out sometime during the night, came back on before I got up, was on for most of the morning, went  out again, then back for a few hours, and then gone again right about the time I normally crawl into bed to read for awhile. Heavy, wet snow and winds gusting up to 45 mph had the REA linemen working pretty much nonstop. We talked to one of them who said trees were toppling a lot faster than they could keep up with them all. He came through our yard twice checking for limbs touching the line. Never heard a chainsaw running, though, which surprised me. There is a section of power line that has never had a brush cutting crew go through it. It went from being open  field in the 1970s to thick trees, spruce and birch that's now pushing 40 years in age and growing a lot taller than the line, without ever seeing an REA crew, at least not doing routine tree trimming in decent weather. 

I am curious as to how much damage the snow did. I heard trees snapping each time I stepped outside yesterday.  There are a couple trees down close to the driveway -- a decent sized birch for sure and maybe a small black cherry. The yard is littered with pieces of apple trees. The lilacs got flattened, but they should spring back once the weight is off them. The S.O. said he noticed limbs down in the orchard, too, when he walked up to the 5th wheel to retrieve a battery-powered lantern.

How long the slush will sit on the ground is debatable. The temperatures are supposed to climb out of the 30s by the end of the week so some of it will melt. Every time we get snow in October there will be people claiming it's too early or it's not normal. Pshaw. I can recall slogging through snow trick-or-treating in Ishpeming in the 1950s. There was a reason so many parents opted for the basic ghost costume -- it's easy to wear a sheet over a snowsuit. The big question with October snow isn't why is it here but will it stick? Will we see bare ground again this fall or is this snow going to wait until May to melt?

Having visions of Fimbulvetr

Looking out the window this morning all I can think is "Christ on crutch, is it ever going to stop snowing?" I'm feeling like we're trapped in a fantasy/horror story I once read about a person who ends mentally stuck inside a snow globe forever. In terms of total inches, it's not actually that bad yet -- our record snow total is about 430 inches for one winter and we're only up to around 150 -- but it has gotten to the point where it's causing problems for us. The S.O. is running out space to shove it out of the way with the plow truck. The driveway is getting narrower and narrower -- I want to order something online but can't because I know perfectly well that at the moment if the UPS truck came in here he wouldn't be able to turn around to get out again. The snowbanks are creeping too far in, and the turnaround has definitely shrunk.

We should order another cord of firewood, but it's the same deal. If the guy we bought the last cord from came in now with his dump trailer, he'd have a horrible time trying to get turned around to get out again. Backing out from our place is not an option when it would require reversing for about 800 feet and negotiating a couple of curves. Not dramatic curves, granted, but still not fun to do when the snowbanks are closing in and if you're off by just a couple inches you're going to get stuck. (We're not going to freeze if we don't have wood delivered. We do have a propane furnace as a back-up, but don't like using it.)

The thing that kind of worries me is this is only the middle of February. What's going to happen in March? March is when we get the spring storms where snowfall gets measured in feet, not inches, and the stuff that falls tend to be slush instead of fluff. Maybe I should be stocking the freezer and prepping for us being basically snowed in for awhile. I know that between the use of the plow truck, an ATV with a plow on it, a snow thrower, and the Yooper scooper we will always be able to get our driveway open eventually, but we could end up with multiple days where it's not possible to get into town. 

I am really missing the county road commission this winter. They stopped doing private driveways a few years ago, but this is the first winter where not having that grader come in occasionally is actually an issue.

Photo is of the S.O. plowing a couple weeks ago. We've gotten a lot more snow since then.

Gardening

Potato plant

I finally managed to get into the garden to do some serious weeding yesterday. I started off by pulling the remaining radishes -- they're going to seed so it's time to remove them -- and then went looking for the cucumber plants. The weeds had gotten tall enough to pretty much hide the vines, but turned out they are there, growing fairly vigorously, and starting to bloom. I may actually get enough cukes to make pickles without having to resort to buying some from the fruit stand this year.

It would be nice -- last year the chipmunks wiped out most of the plants just as they started to sprout, and the year before that I think it was drought. Or maybe poor soil. We have one area in the garden where it seems like no matter what we do to it -- compost worked in, commercial fertilizer, treatments to correct the pH, you name it -- nothing wants to grow particularly well. I'm thinking seriously about marking that space off, planting clover there, and letting it stay fallow for a couple years.

I also finally got my baby rhubarb plants set out. Last summer I saved a lot of rhubarb seeds just for the heck of it. You know, almost no one grows rhubarb from seed. The usual method is to divide up an existing clump. That's how all of our rhubarb wound up where it is. We either transplanted existing rhubarb or bought live plants. But when one of the rhubarb plants bloomed last year, I decided to let it go all the way. Usually we cut the flower stalks off, the theory being that you always want the plant to put its energy into its roots and not into seeding, but last year I ignored the nascent stalks, let them flower and seeds form, and then bagged a bunch of the seeds.

Back in May, I planted about a dozen seeds in peat pots with two seeds to a pot. Of all the stuff I started from seed, the rhubarb took the longest to sprout and had the lowest germination rate: only two pots had any seedlings appear. In contrast, when I started zucchini, the rate was 6 out of 6. This helps explain why although the rhubarb plants will have a gazillion seeds, all of which look like they'd travel on the wind pretty good, a person doesn't look around and see our yard being taken over by rhubarb the way oregano and chives have overrun everything (every time we mow the lawn by the Woman Cave I find myself craving Italian food).

Oregano in bloom. Bees love it.

In any case, there was an empty space in our row of rhubarb so yesterday I planted the two little tiny baby rhubarb plants in that area. Rain was predicted so I figured it would be good to get them in the ground before it rained, not after. I put a marker by each so we won't accidentally smother them when we mulch around the other plants. Now all I have to do is hope they survive. Because we have both kinds of rhubarb in the garden -- red and green -- and both kinds flowered, I'm a little curious to see what the plants end up being. With cross pollination, either is possible.

Rhubarb seeds

The rhubarb, incidentally, is our one gardening success story. Back when the S.O. was young, the rhubarb was in the orchard, and that's where it stayed for many years. It seemed to be fading into nothingness there, though, so we tried moving it a couple times. It did a little better, but not by much. Finally, maybe 10 years or so ago, we moved it to its present location. It loves it there. We went from feeling lucky if we got enough to bake one pie to having enough of a surplus that I can give quite a bit away and still have a dozen quarts or more of frozen rhubarb stashed for use throughout the year. If the rest of the garden ever did as well as the rhubarb does, I'd be a happy camper.

The Chipmunk Wars have begun

I managed to finish planting the vegetable garden yesterday. For a change, I'd calculated things close to perfectly -- no wasted space and no seed packets left sitting there unopened. So what's the first thing I see after I stand up to look around? A chipmunk. He was sitting on the pump house roof, no doubt scouting the garden and figuring out where to dig first.

The little furry bastards did a number on the garden last year. They dug seeds up before they could sprout, they started harvesting potatoes long before we could, and in general had me thinking dark thoughts about importing weasels. This year I'm firing the first volley -- I invested in a canister of something called Critter Ridder, a mix of various natural ingredients that will supposedly discourage varmints from eating anything that's been dusted with it. As far as I can tell, it's basically a mix of hot peppers. It felt like I was seasoning the soil as I wandered up and down the rows liberally dusting everything with a hot pepper mix. Now the only question is whether or not it will work.

I am moderately hopeful that the chipmunks won't be as much of a nuisance this year. I'm not seeing as many around so maybe weasels did wipe out a bunch over the winter. I hope so. Last summer was the first year they'd ever been a problem. In fact, until last summer I'd never noticed any in the garden at all. They'd always seemed perfectly happy subsisting on stuff that fell outside the fence, like spruce cones and chokecherries. Somehow I'd never pictured them as being interested in potatoes. Live and learn.

I have a vague sense of being slightly late on finishing up planting stuff, but considering that we had a late frost it's just as well that the beans didn't go into the ground until yesterday. Our growing season is so short even in a good year that just about everything that goes into the garden now comes in seed packets that promise less than 2 months from planting to harvest. Either that, or it's a root vegetable like carrots and parsnips. I do have tomato plants in the garden, but I also know that when it gets to be late summer I'm going to end up picking most of them green and letting them ripen in the house. It actually amazes me that people (myself included) are willing to put so much time and effort into gardening, both vegetables and flowers, when we're lucky if we get to enjoy three full months of stuff growing and blooming.

The Mud Season has arrived

According to the Weather Bug's 10-day forecast, we're looking at highs in the upper 40s and even mid-50s this week. Lovely. The Mud Season has arrived, that lovely time of year when the driveway is super sloppy but the snowbanks are still too high on either side to allow me to avoid the puddles and muck when I stroll from the house up to the Woman Cave and back again. Time to dig out the rubber boots and hope I manage to avoid the worst of the sink holes. There's nothing quite like stepping on what looks like reasonably solid ground and feeling your foot sinking into knee-deep mud.

If the Weather Bug's forecast wasn't enough to let me know Spring Break-Up is here, the County Road Commission's sign down by the highway is. Seasonal load limits are now in effect: there will be no logging trucks on the Herman Road for a few weeks.

I don't think this will be a particularly sloppy Mud Season compared to some. I don't anticipate things getting so nasty we end up parking out on the county road to avoid getting stuck in our own driveway. Then again, you never know. There are a couple spots that can be deceiving. There's a little knoll between the house and the gate that has been known to eat cars. It's the last spot to thaw out because it's on the north side of a hill. The rest of the driveway will be back to looking totally normal, not even damp spots showing anymore, and that knoll will finally wake up and decide to snare a vehicle or two. It'll look perfectly solid and then the bottom drops out and whatever you're driving is sitting there with mud seeping up over the axles. That hasn't happened in a few years -- the S.O. spent a fair amount of time and money building that section of the driveway up -- but I always get the feeling that knoll is just biding its time.

Major heat wave

Keweenaw Bay, 2014

When I came stumbling downstairs a few minutes ago, it was not quite 18 below outside. Just glanced over at the indoor/outdoor thermometer and it's reading a mere minus 12 and climbing. If it's climbing a degree every two minutes, by the time the sun comes up, it'll be bikini weather.

It has been a warmer than usual winter. I haven't seen it dip below minus 20 at all (yet), and we've had more "thaws" than is typical for the U.P. The local ice fishermen are unhappy because Keweenaw Bay is slow in freezing over. Thin ice has started forming a couple times, but then a strong north wind comes along, breaks it up, and pushes it ashore. This is definitely going to be one of those years where the ice fishermen will be lucky to get in any fishing at all. They had a couple good years; it's time for a winter where all they can do is stand on the shoreline and think bitter thoughts about the money they wasted by building a new fishing shack over the summer or investing in a new canvas shelter. .

The S.O. goes ice fishing with a friend, but he's not a fanatic about it. But then he's not a fanatic about fishing in general. He buys a license every year, but it doesn't get used much even in the summer. If we had to live off the fish he's caught, we'd starve to death pretty quickly.

Useless advice

We have a weather app on the laptop. Every so often a red triangle with an exclamation point appears to let us know there's an alert of some sort. Some of those advisories make sense. You know, if we're in Missouri or some other part of the country prone to tornadoes, I'd like to know that severe thunderstorms with the possibility of tornadoes are moving into the area. 

On the other hand, exactly what is the point of a "winter weather advisory?" If you live in one of the northern states, e.g., Michigan, and it gets to be the time of year where temperatures routinely drop below freezing, do you really need to be warned that winter weather is possible? Winter on the calendar may not officially begin until late December, but everyone knows winter in reality has already begun. This is, after all, the land of "nine months of winter and three months of rough snowmobiling." Do we really need to be told snow is possible? Snow's been possible for over a month. And if I want confirmation that winter weather is coming, all I have to do is look out the window. There's this white, fluffy stuff covering everything. It looks suspiciously like snow. Gee, if there's snow, I guess I should worry that winter weather is possible -- because without the weather app telling me, how else would I know what that white stuff on the ground means or that it's time to dig out the mittens and scarves?

The converse of this useless advice, of course, falls in July and August, especially down South, where the weather service feels obliged to dole out "heat advisories." Does anyone in Texas or Mississippi really need to be reminded that during the summer months it can get Hot outside?

Too many people

The S.O. and I went out scrounging for firewood yesterday. Gleaning is legal in Michigan, which means you can paw through the slash left after a commercial logging job. There are always logs (or pieces of logs) that were too twisted, too small, or too short to make it on to the logging truck. I know that it's getting more and more common for nothing to be left after a logging job -- what's too small or twisted for saw logs or pulp goes into a chipper and ends up as biomass -- but it's not happening every time. Yet. In any case, we had noticed the first time we drove the Nestoria Road this spring that there'd been winter logging along it and a few good-sized piles of slash left behind. We figured we'd take a closer look once the mud dried up some.

Well, the mud has dried, sort of, so yesterday we headed out with the pickup, a chainsaw, the two-man logging tongs, and a small axe. The first pile of slash we checked out was a disappointment -- way too much softwood, almost no hardwood -- but the second one looked good. We managed to get a decent load of mixed oak, maple, and yellow birch in not much time at all. And that was despite the heavy traffic on the road. It was unreal.

How bad was it? In the approximately 45 minutes we were there, three vehicles squeezed past our parked truck. Three! On the Nestoria Road. What the heck are that many people doing driving a one-lane seasonal dirt road in the middle of nowhere? It used to be that when we drove that road we never saw another car. Now it's a case of every time we go that way, we end up meeting someone or getting stuck in someone's dust. It is getting much too crowded around here. Pretty soon we'll be dealing with traffic jams.

We're going to need a baler

It is amazing just how fast grass can grow when there's a little bit of rain. A few days ago I was telling the S.O. "Don't mow yet; the forget-me-nots are still blooming." I never want to cut the grass until the forget-me-nots have had a chance to reseed. Then we had a couple wet days. Now I'm wondering how lucrative the hay market might be this year.

On the positive side, when it does stop raining and we can fire up the mowers, we're going to get a lot of mulch for the garden.We have baggers for both mowers so most grass clippings end up as compost. It does make a difference -- we have lousy soil for gardening. It's glacial till, sand and gravel, so although it drains really well it's not particularly fertile.

We have been getting a fair amount of rain this week, which is good. It was a dry Spring; I know from working in the garden that we needed a thorough, prolonged soaking rain. Not sure just what the total rainfall has been in the past 72 hours, but each time we've checked our rain gauge it's been up around at least an inch. Not Texas level rains for sure, but definitely more than a drizzle.

Speaking of Texas, I've noticed as I've listened to NPR that the dread phrase "climate change" is being spoken out loud again. For years scientists have been saying that climate change would lead to what are euphemistically referred to as "extreme weather events." That's another way of saying summers will get hotter, winters could get colder, and when it rains, it won't just rain -- it'll make you start thinking owning an ark might be a good idea.

My personal, purely anecdotal, and totally unscientific observation when it comes to rain locally is that over the past few years we seem to be experiencing more storms that remind me of monsoons --  rain coming down in sheets, truly intense rain that dumps multiple inches of water in a remarkably short time -- and less of what I'd think of as a typical U.P. rainy day, which is cold and drizzly and nasty but not especially dramatic. You know, the type of rain where you're stuck inside all day because it's too cold and wet to do yard work but then when you check the rain gauge it turns out that in 24 hours barely enough rain actually fell to cover the bottom of the gauge. Yesterday the rain was coming down in sheets, really hard intense rain, and, yep, it was measurable in inches. Definitely not typical for this part of the world. It used to be we'd get one or two storms like that per summer; now it seems to happen almost every time it rains.

In other water-related news we finally called the Health Department to set up an appointment for them to come check the water quality on the new well, the one we weren't supposed to use until they'd run the tests to make sure the water was safe to drink. You know, the well we had drilled last August and have been using water from ever since. The Health Department guy was here Tuesday, took samples, verified that the well was indeed more than the required distance from the drain field for the septic tank, and said we'd get a letter in a few days with the results of the tests. He also said we'd hear from them fast if they found something nasty. Well, the phone hasn't run and there's been nothing in the mail yet so I guess we can assume the water we've been drinking for the past 10 months isn't swarming with fecal coliform bacteria. Not that we ever thought it might be. We're in the middle of nowhere at one of the higher elevations in the state. Everyone knows that in water supplies just as in life shit never flows uphill. 

Coldest morning so far this year

Got up this morning and noticed it's 24 below zero outside. I think that's the coldest temperature we've seen so far this winter. It's not bad, especially when I'm observing it from the comfort of a warm living room with a hot cup of coffee in my hand. I have written before about the joys of living up here on the tundra, reminisced about residing in the Shoebox (aka a 12 x 60 mobile home) while relying on a homemade woodburning box stove. That's the stove that currently heats the Woman Cave when I decide to do some sewing. It does a pretty decent job of keeping the Cave warm, but back when the Cave was the back porch to that mobile home? Not so much.

In any case, if this is the coldest it gets this winter, things have been pretty mild. The week the Younger Daughter was born we were in a cold snap that had featured subzero temperatures for weeks on end. I think it was 30 below in the middle of the day when she finally decided to emerge. I went a full three weeks past my original due date. We started joking that the kid had heard the weather forecasts and decided to wait for Spring. The doctor ordered x-rays (this was back in the days before routine sonograms) and decided he'd guessed wrong on the projected arrival. When the kid emerged, however, she was 21 inches long, weighed almost 9 pounds, had a full head of hair and some really long talons fingernails, which were all pretty clear signs that, yeah, she'd spent more than the usual amount of time in the womb. The upper end of the "average" range for length of newborns in developed nations is 20 inches.

I'm not sure just how long that particular cold snap lasted, but I do recall going through amazing amounts of propane. We hadn't been able to get a bulk tank (neither dealer had one available when we set up the Shoebox that fall) and it seemed like the delivery guy was there every other day with a fresh 100-lb cylinder. It was before we built the back porch so the gas furnace was our only heat source. After we disassembled the Shoebox in 2006, it became clear why it was impossible to heat: the insulation in the walls was barely an inch thick and was not stapled in place. It was just loose batts with no backing paper stuffed between the studs. With nothing to hold it up, it probably started settling as soon as the aluminum siding went up over it at the factory in Indiana. There were gaps several feet high at the top of the walls when we pulled the paneling off. I guess the most amazing thing is that we managed to keep the interior as warm as we did back in the '70s.

The S.O. was reminiscing about the Shoebox the other day. He remembered that the first year we were in it. It got delivered and set up late enough in the fall that he didn't have time to get skirting on it. Instead, we bought a bunch of straw bales and stacked them around the exterior, Looking back and remembering what other winters were like, that may have been the warmest winter we ever spent in the trailer, probably because we didn't lose much heat through the floor.

And then, of course, there was the winter of 1993-94. I was working at Michigan Tech. We had day after day of subzero weather. We had a block heater for the car, not that it helped the battery at all. There was many a morning when I'd have to start the car (a '73 Scamp) using a battery charger. I'd be scraping frost off the inside of the windshield most of the 40+ miles to campus. The car had a decent heater, but when it's 40 below it takes awhile to get things warm. At noon, the parking lot would be full of people going out on their lunch breaks to start their cars to run them for awhile in the hopes the car would start again at quitting time. It was an adventure. In retrospect, I was insane.

So why am I reminiscing about cold, cold winters this morning? I don't know. After all, this is pretty typical February weather. It's often the month when we get the coldest temperatures, just like March is the month for really heavy snows. Maybe I've seen one too many climate change denial posts -- "the planet can't be getting warmer; we still have winter!" -- or maybe I'm just feeling relieved I don't have to go out into that frigid air if I don't want to.

Cleo has the right idea

The only way she could get closer to the wood stove would be to sprawl right under it. The weather forecast for today is Nasty -- subzero with winds gusting up to 45 mph -- so I don't think either the S.O. or I will be venturing outdoors very much.

I spent most of yesterday down at the museum. I'm trying to get my mess cleaned up so things will be in decent shape when we leave for Missouri. That way the other volunteers won't have anything to worry about or explain away the clutter if a school group or some other organization decides they'd like a tour. I've got three boxes of stuff that I hauled down from the attic left to catalog and about a dozen rolled up maps and blueprints, all stacked on a table in the exhibit area. One box should be fast and easy -- it's small, and it's artifacts. The other two will probably get shuffled to a less conspicuous location. They're packed full of documents, most of which appear to be related to Bernard Lambert's research for his book on Bishop Baraga, Shepherd of the Wilderness (currently out of print, but available from the Baraga County Historical Museum for a mere $15 plus $4 for shipping if anyone's interested; I've found so many copies of the book since I started emptying the attic that we now have at least half a dozen extras). Lambert's papers are going to be a challenge -- hard to classify, but I really dislike the idea of doing an entry in the finding aid that would just say "Miscellaneous research notes" when it looks like they'll fill several document boxes.

What's left in the attic. The pile extends back about 15 feet, maybe a little more,
and includes at least one large steamer trunk. None of the boxes are
labeled, or, if they are, I've discovered the labels rarely match the contents. When
I first started emptying the attic, I thought it would take several years
 to sort and catalog. I haven't revised that estimate much, although
 it is going a little faster than anticipated.
. 

The attic itself is far from empty. I figure I'm maybe at the halfway point, which is moderately amazing considering just how full it was packed. The section shown in the photo is probably the most secure part of the storage area. Although that OSB isn't nailed down it is at least OSB. The first section I emptied did not have a floor, just miscellaneous weirdness like old bulletin boards laid across the joists or nothing at all -- I found a few boxes sitting between the joists directly on the drywall of the ceiling below. The museum was lucky that drywall never started pulling loose.

Coolest thing I've found in the attic recently? A lovely illustrated looking like it's never been read 1885 edition of A Cotter's Saturday Night by Robert Burns, which I wish we didn't have to sell but we probably will. It doesn't really fit into the scope of our museum, so it'll end up with the other used books in the gift shop this summer as well as included with our used books listings on Amazon.com.

In any case, I'll probably be back down at the museum again tomorrow if driving conditions settle down. If it's still windy, though, I'll stay home. Thanks to the wind whipping off the lake yesterday, it was pretty much a total whiteout in Baraga. Pulling out on to a highway frequented by logging trucks can be rather harrowing when your visibility is limited to barely 100 feet. It doesn't help your peace of mind much when you notice there are idiots running around in that mess with their lights off, like the asshat in the jeep who insisted on tailgating me most of the way to Family Dollar. Then again, there's something about driving an SUV that makes people seem to think they're invulnerable. . . but that's a subject for a separate post. Right now it's time to throw another log on the fire.

Speaking of trains

The S.O. has decided it would be nice to be able to see trains from the house again. He's decided one of his summer projects in 2015 will be creating an opening through the overgrown cow pasture that will allow us to see the CN freight trains from our living room. Of course, once that opening is created, he's going to have to keep hacking at it with the brush blade on our gas-powered weed eater. The photo shows what the prospective opening looks like now.

Most of the brush between us and the tracks is speckled alder, a species that is remarkably adept at springing back from brush cutting. It's a pioneering species -- up here on the tundra it moves into abandoned farm fields with remarkable speed. When it comes to reproducing, speckled alder covers all the bases: it has both male and female flowers on the same plant so it can self-pollinate; the seeds are lightweight and spread easily; it will send up suckers from its roots; and it will root opportunistically if a branch touches the ground. It's actually a great plant for the environment -- it is a nitrogen producer so it enriches the soil -- but it can drive you mildly crazy when you try to keep it cut back.

For some reason, I'm having visions of the grandsons being handed weed whips and brush hooks every time they come to visit for the next few years. Either that or we need to start renting goats.

Summer is officially over

The driveway plowing bill for the 2014-2015 season was in the mail yesterday. Can this be far behind?

Even more depressing than the sight of the bill was the letter enclosed with it. The County Road Commissioners voted at their July meeting to discontinue the driveway plowing program. This coming winter will be the last one where I can do the dashing out to snap photos of the grader in our front yard; starting in 2015 we're going to have to keep our 600 feet of driveway open ourselves. Not a happy thought -- we can do it if it's a normal winter, but if we get one of those storms that dumps 3 or 4 feet of white stuff in a day? Well, let's just say we'll be happy we own snowshoes.