More snow and very cold

It's cold. The high today may have been as much as 10 F here on the farm. The low last night was -7 F.

That's too cold for hens, dogs, and babies, so the hens have a heat lamp, the dogs only go out for short spells, and the baby doesn't go out at all except to a car that is already warmed up thoroughly.

The sheep just get an extra bale of hay and are fine with that. They don't even come in the barn at night, although they have an entrance and can do just that. They don't seem to mind how cold it gets. They do come in the barn for snow sometimes, and always for rain.

The Rover, which is supposed to plow the snow, is giving starter trouble. Part of the problem is the newly rebuilt and "tight" engine, which is hard to turn over when cold even with a good starter motor. I'm looking into getting a new one, but the replacements for the old Lucas "Prince of Darkness" motors are expensive, probably around $300.

Given that it will warm up to 40 F on Tuesday, and give rain, I'm not too worried. No new big snowstorms are forecast. Indeed, we haven't had a real nor'easter all winter, a typical El Nino year. Yesterday it snowed all day but only managed a few inches. I eventually got the Rover started and running today with a heat lamp, a magnetic block heater, and a jump from the Nissan, and plowed this small snowfall in a few minutes.

Inside all possible sources of heat are on, electric baseboards, the oil furnace, and the wood stove. It's nice and cosy. I don't like burning oil, and indeed try to burn very little of it under most circumstances, but I like frozen pipes even less than I like burning oil. I'm letting the old bathroom sink run a little to protect against freezing, and keep checking the temperature in the new crawl space under the extension, but that is steady at around 44 F.

Postscript: The well pump did eventually freeze during this cold spell, because the bulb that is supposed to keep it warm popped. That night it was -17 F, according to Aimee's car's dashboard temperature read-out. The well pump thawed after a half hour of an electrical heater. I'm going to fit a second bulb holder in there.

Here's your "moment of Zen", little Edana trying to make a phone call.

There and back again

We're just back home from an eight day trip to Virginia to see the in-laws. It was almost a nine day trip, thanks to American Airlines, but that's another story, the only hero of which is the Washington DC National Airport authority, who thought to provide a small sanctuary for parents of screaming babies in the form of a privacy room for nursing mothers, wherein we all took a nap and retreated from the madding holiday airport crowd. There was also an heroic American Airlines clerk called Sterling that finally ended our limbo by overriding a glitchy computer system -- after two other clerks had failed.

We were in the DC airport from eleven am through nine pm. By my count there were six departure delays involved, caused by one broken plane and one late plane, plus the aforementioned computer glitch. We even climbed onto the bus to go to the plane once, to be turfed off again.

We'd like to say we're not flying this FUBAR airline anymore, but it is the only one that goes from Bangor to DC.

I told Aimee that the whole episode was a deliberate plot on her part to get me to stay up and see in the New Year for once! I'm usually in bed by nine pm, even on New Year's Eve. When you live in a different time zone, on a different continent than the one where you were born and raised, it's hard to draw a line where one solar year ends and another begins.

The purpose of the visit was of course for the kid to see her uncles and aunts and grandparents. This was duly achieved, as were a number of home improvement projects. So I shouldn't, and won't, complain. But I'm quietly ecstatic to be home. It was the best of luxury after our poor tired cranky kid was finally put to bed, past midnight on New Year's Eve, and after a nice shower in my own bathroom, to sleep in my own bed. Today I got up and did my own chores in my own dooryard, and was a very happy man. I don't know what is such fun about feeding sheep and moving snow and firewood, but to me, it's infinitely preferable to traveling.

I also had a number of car and truck repairs to begin this morning, the partial result of a comedy of errors that took place the night we left. I had loaded our ancient Camry with all the luggage, but once wife and baby were also duly loaded, the headlights wouldn't come on, even after changing the fuse We switched the luggage to the Matrix and took that to the airport, but not before backing the Camry into the pick-up and smashing the bumper cover. Not a great way to start a trip. Additionally, I'd managed to back the truck into a tree at the daycare place, smashing a lamp unit, which was ordered and arrived while we were away. Then there's the small matter of our "new" but slightly broken Honda Insight hybrid, but that interesting wee beastie can wait for a post all of its own.

For today, after feeding sheep and moving the snow that had fallen while we were away and digging out the firewood pile so we could switch off the oil furnace (we don't allow our house-sitter to run the wood stove, for fire safety reasons), I switched out the lamp unit on the truck and got that vehicle working legally again. The Camry, whose engine had been running all this time to warm up the icy snow that was attached to it, had meanwhile somehow fixed its own headlights. Go figure, but they now work. I'm going to check the wiring diagram to see if there's a headlight relay and switch that out for a new unit, if there is one. That's the best explanation, other than a faulty switch unit. But I was happy to have this vehicle serviceable again too.

Tonight, we will celebrate with family homemade pizza night.

There now follows an interlude of a couple weeks before the semester in which my attendance at work is not strictly required, but after the New Year's weekend is over I'm going to go in anyway, just for the pleasure of it. Several colleagues and I have a new building to move into, for research and teaching, essentially a purpose-built sustainable energy demonstration laboratory, and am greatly looking forward to moving in, as well as rationalizing, repairing, and sorting all my teaching demonstrators and research and other equipment before the new semester.

I have high hopes for this new building. Essentially I want to make it the cool, go-to-place for sustainable energy information in Maine and even New England, and am very excited about the prospects.

There'll be more, much more, on this new era in my professional life later, here and on my teaching and research blog.

Cold again: only 5 F this morning

A taxonomy of cold weather clothing, by increments, while feeding the sheep and doing other farm work each morning:

At freezing (32 F), we can walk out in our comfy no-one's-coming-to-see-us-today clothes, sweat shirt and sweat pants and Crocs, without injury, except that we may get a little bit of hay or chickie-shit on us. The main thing to worry about is mud. Substitute wellies for Crocs, and you're all set.

At moderately cool temperatures (20-32 F), we need to put on a coat. I use a double-layered heavy fleece coat made by a Canadian company. I bought it years ago in Canada, and it has lasted well. But the mud is frozen, so you can wear your Crocs if you have thick socks. Except that your wife will yell at you because she worries your worn-out old Crocs will slip on the ice. I tend to think my smooth-soled Crocs stick to the ice better than my boots, but no-one believes me. Take your gloves and hat, but you may take them off later if you don't need them.

Between 10 and 20F, it's too cold for Crocs, and becoming too cold for sweats, even with a coat. I wear felt-lined thermal "Pac" boots, in this case made by LaCrosse, a Canadian company that knows how to keep feet warm. They're expensive, but there's really no adequate substitute. You'll also need to change to warmer clothes if you mean to stay out for more than five minutes. If it's just a night check, and the snow is plowed, I can run out in my sweats and Crocs and run back in without harm, but if it's a longer job, I first change to insulated bib overalls. Gloves and hat are also required for longer jobs. You can take your gloves off for a short length of time to do more delicate jobs, like fixing wiring on the trailer, or tightening a bolt. But not for long. Fingers will get cold fast.

Below 10 F, insulated overalls are a must for just about any length of time, especially if the wind is blowing. Warm socks too. We use thermal liners with thick wool oversocks in our felt-lined boots. Gloves stay on nearly all the time, as does the hat. Fingers will now stick to bare metal, so best keep your gloves on, even when handling tools. I have liner gloves I can wear under my main gloves, which allows me to take the main gloves off for a few minutes to do finer fingery types of work. But for the most part, if it's this cold, I just don't do those kinds of jobs outside until it warms up.

Between -10 F and  0 F, we wear our gloves and hat and insulated overalls and felt boots and double layer of socks. We may add a long sleeved, thicker undershirt, and switch to our warmer pair of gloves, which are made by Carhartt, another good brand name for cold weather stuff. All these clothes are cotton or cotton blend, except for the hat, which is wool, and the insulation in the overalls and gloves, which is usually a fiber-based product. In this kind of cold, cotton clothes are fine, if they're thick and strong and designed for the cold. The old outdoor activity adage not to wear cotton no longer applies.

Between -20 and -10 F, we may switch to a fur-lined "mad bomber" hat, as well as a pair of insulated coveralls instead of bib overalls. We keep our inside clothes -- sweat pants and sweat shirt -- on underneath.

Below -20 F it's best not to go out if you can help it, but the sheep will still need to be fed, so you must. I just wear all of the stuff above, but stay out for only as long as I need and come right back in. If I'm working and there's no wind, its fine. If I'm not moving much and there's a wind, you get cold fast. I have a pair of long bright red cotton "combination" underwear that I can add to stay out just a little longer. But it's very easy to freeze skin, especially your fingers, ear lobes, cheeks and nose. I've had frostbite and can recognize the feeling, so I try not to get it again.

It's always nice to come back in to a warm house when it's this cold outside. Our house has multiple and redundant heating systems for safety in case of power cuts, so we're never really cold inside. We usually use the wood stove and a little electrical heat and that's enough especially with good quality hardwood, but if it gets really cold, we can just crank up an oversized oil furnace, and be toasty in minutes.

Here's how to rock this kinda style:

No power, no heat. (But it doesn't matter.)

The same fast, heavy rainstorm that caused flash floods on Long Island has knocked our power out. Not great timing, considering that my wife is pregnant and due any time now, and that I have an elderly relative that has had a medical emergency and taken to hospital in Great Britain, meaning I need to be able to get email and phone.

No worries, though. Many years ago I made provision for this kind of thing by investing in a 3,250 watt propane emergency generator. I went out this morning and started the generator and hooked it up safely, and we have power to most of the house.

It's a pull-start genny, and so harder to get going than our old electrical start, but it makes two pole 110/220v power, and so we can run anything we want to run in the house, even the dryer, welder or automotive lift, all of which are 220v.

Call me nuts, or a "prepper", but I can imagine needing to use the welder or auto lift one day, if I need to weld something on a car, truck or tractor and the power has been out for days.

We're unlikely to use the dryer. We'd normally use the laundry line or clothes horse and the heat from the woodstove.

Unfortunately, we can't use the woodstove right now. That's because I took the chimney apart yesterday. Luckily, it isn't yet cold this fall.

(That's right: it's fall already in Maine. Our statistical first frost is August 27th, and there are already some red maple leaves on some of our trees.)

I already had it on my list to sweep and inspect the chimney, a regular home safety chore prior to winter. I also had a good 48 inch chimney section, salvaged from the garage (after I sold the old wood furnace we no longer needed now the multi-year house insulation project was complete), with which I might make repairs, if need be.

Long ago this chimney was compromised by a poor installation job, thanks to an unethical local contractor, and an unresponsive and irresponsible manufacturing company. You can read the full sad story here. The damage was only to the outer layers of insulation and metal cladding. The inner liner of stainless steel was fine.

I solved the problem by wrapping the compromised chimney sections in two extra layers of galvanized steel. But every year, I inspect the compromised sections to make sure they are still usable.

This is what I found this year:

 

There are three compromised 48 inch sections like this. You can see that the connecting collar has become separated from the shaft of the chimney section, exposing the insulation.

Obviously this chimney is now completely unserviceable. I doubt it was ever dangerous, though, thanks to my earlier, ad hoc repair. The second and third additional layers of steel would have held the whole thing together and prevented dangerous heat reaching the fabric of the house.

But I think it's time for a new chimney. Especially with a baby on the way, we need a safe woodstove.

Accordingly I sourced chimney parts from a different manufacturer that would fit what is left of our original chimney. It took me a bit of luck and driving around but I found sufficient sections of suitable chimney to complete the repair in Bangor yesterday. Today I'll fit them carefully. 

Then I may package the broken chimney and send it UPS with a note to the original manufacturer. They've been bought out by a new company and may now be more responsible. Aimee is good at notes like that, and has often won refunds when I'd given up. Maybe she'd like to write it. We could even circulate the note and pictures on FaceBook. That might spur them into providing satisfaction.

In other news, Aimee made red cabbage kraut. Here's the kraut pot, with the weights that hold down the solid cabbage and keep it under the brine:

 

Five red cabbages made around two gallons of kraut. Tasty, and healthy too.

Uplifting thoughts and other Sunday photos

 

Here, waiting to be serviced and painted on saw horses in the dooryard, is my latest home enhancement project -- an automotive lift. 

When they see it, everyone will want one. It's the latest home decor accessory!

Our friends are all on FaceBook posting about their vacations and road trips and other expensive distractions. One friend in particular is pretty happy about her new secondhand sailboat, which I admit, is getting just a teensy weensy bit annoying. 

But I'm not jealous. No, not at all. I have my lift that I've always wanted!

(I expect I'm also considered a little weird, but never mind. You can take the man out of the servicing hangers and workshops, but you can't take the servicing hangers and workshops out of the man.)

This is the kind of lift they have in the regular workshops and dealerships. In fact it used to be in one of the "recon" bays at the main Toyota dealership in southern Maine.

We got it for me to work on vehicles more conveniently and safely.

It took a little matrimonial convincing, but Aimee went along with the notion after a while, mostly because she worries when I work on cars and trucks and farm equipment on jack stands in the yard, which is made of relatively soft gravel, and therefore not well suited to lifting equipment. I have to lay down plywood boards to make it safe, and even then it isn't great. I pay close attention to balancing the vehicles just right on the jack stands, and often add blocks or the spare wheel or leave the floor jack (AKA "trolley jack" in English-English) under the vehicle to give me some back-up or a minute of extra time while I exit the danger zone. But guys are killed or injured every year in Maine in this kind of operation. 

Aimee even came with me, seven month's pregnant, on the "Downeast Dickering"-style road trip all the way to southern Maine to pick it up. We made a day of it and had Thai food and shopped for secondhand baby stuff too. She did say that she wouldn't have come if it hadn't been for the baby stuff, but I was glad to have her there. 

A man needs his wife around when he is about to meets some huge lifetime goal, like owning his own automotive lift.

Seriously, this lift is a serious investment for us. It's also a lot easier to work on a vehicle when it's several feet up in the air. There are some jobs that can only safely be done with that kind of height and control. 

Proper rust protection is one such job. We now have four useful working vehicles that are currently not at all rusty. Three of them are even modern enough and safe enough for a kid to ride in. 

This is a Womerlippi family first, and largely due to the small inheritance I got this spring. In years gone by, we could only afford to have one really nice vehicle, which Aimee always drove, while I had a series of junkers going all the way back to my trusty 1975 VW van, the one with half a million miles on it that I drove from 1992 through about 2004 or 2005. Now we have nice vehicles, I want to protect that investment, without spending money at the dealership if I can possibly help it.

(The fourth vehicle is the Land Rover, which is in a special class of it's own, my survival truck. That vehicle will still be in functional condition when all the others are long gone to the scrapyard.)

Here are the lift arms that will extend under the vehicles.

And here, still under wraps and being kept wet so as to more properly cure the concrete, is the nineteen by twelve foot concrete pad I poured Wednesday, on which I'll place the lift later this week. Concrete takes a full week to achieve the kind of cure needed for drilling the solid anchor bolts that will secure the lift, and should be kept as wet as possible during that time. The small cement mixer standing there is a red herring. Not willing to compromise on safety, I ordered "proper" three-quarters stone, 3,500 PSI-rated concrete from a regular truck. I used five yards, which is a lot of carbon emissions, concrete being a major source of carbon, but expect to earn that back easily in lifecycle vehicle emissions through better rust protection. (The average vehicle requires twenty percent of lifecycle carbon emissions in manufacture.)

You can also see the new back door to the workshop that I put in Monday, preparatory for making a functional workspace out of the rear area. I didn't want to be always walking around the side of the shop, especially with heavy tools and parts.

The whole project, when all is said and done, will have cost about $1,500, including $500 in concrete and $750 for the lift. I think this is easily affordable compared to the cost of service at ships that have lifts and at dealerships, and also taking into account the loss of value we see in vehicles around here due to rust.

This will be an open-air workspace, at least for now. Any building large enough to cover the new lift will have to be at least eleven feet tall at the eaves, and would be pretty ugly in this spot, I think, making a crowded kind of compound. Aimee suggested we might build one one day, perhaps next summer, but I didn't much like the idea. I may change my mind one day, but I figured that three seasons of lift-use availability was fine by me, at least for now. I can plan out service schedules to avoid winter jobs. If we do get a need for an emergency repair, there's always my regular workshop, which has more space in any case now I tore out the wood furnace.

Talking of which, here is said furnace, now up for sale on Maine Craigslist and waiting in the dooryard for some lucky buyer to come get it. This is not the time of year to sell a furnace, so I expect we'll keep it there until fall. Always aware of appearances (not!), to make it prettier, I made it into Maine "yahd ahrt" by temporarily adding Aimee's house plant collection, also up for grabs since she is spring-cleaning our house, ready for house guests and the baby, and these no longer fit with her pans for decor. Call or email if you want them.

 

In other news, I finally found time yesterday morning to set out the tomato cages. Not a moment too soon, since some of the tomato plants are already two feet high. With so many projects ongoing, we haven't made much time for gardening, and in fact were forced to undertake a major weed eradication exercise the other day, to bring everything back under some semblance of horticultural control.

I weeded the tomato rows as I fitted the cages, listening to Weekend Edition on the radio. It went well enough, and I'm sure the plants liked listening to Scott Simon as much as I do.

Finally, Ginnie Guinea, who we now realize may be a male, is still hanging out, and still called Ginnie, despite her/his sex change.

He/she seems to be a fairly reliable soul, as birds go. He/she comes by the barn each morning to get a handout of layer pellets, then buggers off happily to peck for ticks and other bugs all around the dooryard. The dogs haven't had a tick on them since she arrived, but since they are covered in Top Spot chemical anyway, and since we no longer take them on walks in the woods because it's now too hot and buggy and because we are so busy, we really don't know if all Ginnie's work has actually made a difference.

 

Still it's good to know he/she is on the job. Fine by us if he/she stays, as long as she keeps pecking up ticks! Especially with a kid on the way, ticks are particularly unwelcome. Lyme disease is a killer.

Slight reprieve -- get ready for another!

The thermometer -- we had to buy a new one because all the others had quit -- didn't lift much above zero the last few days, dropping down to -10 or -15 F overnight, and life was a little harder than it needed to be, mostly because the crawl spaces got too cold and so the pipes were threatened, but also because of vehicular and equipment difficulties.

After I discovered a spot at the bottom of the bathroom wall, right next to the toilet, that was frozen solid at 22 degrees F -- inside the house! -- I got busy yesterday with banking plastic and lath, chiseling away the ice from the foundation, putting up new plastic, and then shoveling the snow back for weight and insulation.

It took the rest of the day to drive out the cold from the inside of the house, but by bedtime the cold spot was above freezing and climbing. Today I did the same to another spot that was making one of our food cupboards cold. Aimee was upset that she couldn't pour her honey, poor puss.

The problem was the new building, where I hadn't yet detailed the join to the old. I'd put up insulation board but not plastic like I usually do, and the cold air was still coming in behind the board. Should have known, but I was in a hurry when I did it -- late one night at the end of term. All fixed now, but not without some worry over the pipes.

Another problem was the Land Rover's starter. The bendix drive had quit working, probably because of some ice. The Land Rover is our all-weather human-and-animal emergency vehicle. It has to start. Not starting is not an option.

So I suited up in my best cold weather gear, lay on me poor old back under the truck, and dropped the starter. It took around thirty minutes, for a two-bolt-and-a-wire job that would have taken ten in summer. Then I thawed the grumpy old starter out under the kitchen wood stove, a process that took a long time. There was still hoar frost on it after an hour, even though it's over 120 degrees under the stove. Once thawed, I lubricated it with a little brake fluid, which is still a light oil at temperatures well below zero, refitted it, and got a start.

One down, one to go. But the tractor wouldn't start at all, not even running on kerosene instead of diesel, not even being jumped by the Land Rover's sturdy one-wire genny, so I had Aimee pick up an engine heater on her shopping trip today, the kind that goes in the bottom radiator hose. I'll fit it tomorrow. It's supposed to get sunny and above freezing for the first time in a long time, so it shouldn't be such a difficult job to do.

The chickadees, Maine's state bird, are very busy at the feeder, their lifeline. They've eaten two quarts of sunflower seeds since Monday. They come to the windowsill to "drink" snow to wash the sunflower seeds down, then go back for more, all day long, never mind if it's negative 15 or 50 above.

Here's the chickadee feeder. We fill this thing up every few days, but it all gets eaten very quickly.

The chickies also like to hang in the lilac tree, lots of them fluttering in and out, even though it's still frozen up with ice. Look closely to see one! There were about ten in there when I took the picture, but there's no way to take a shot of ten tiny birds in a very big tree and hope to see anything.

At the other end of the front lawn wild turkeys are gathering to eat apples from our neighbor's tree and to eat grit and sand off the road. They don't seem to mind the cold much either, but they're a lot easier to see, even in the tree. (There are four in this picture.)

Saturday dawned a little warmer. It's 15 F out there right now this afternoon, positively tropical. With another storm forecast for Sunday into Monday, this time supposed to be snow to mix to rain, I wanted to get the house ready. Ice from the big ice storm is still all over all the roofs, now in the form of ice dams, and it's held the snow back. Normally a lot of it would shed. I got busy with the roof rake, pulling as much of the weight of the snow down as I could. It was a good workout. I also opened the attic door and cranked the oil furnace, to help break the ice off of there.

 

Here's the back of the house, with all the equipment storage. You can see that it's all pretty well smothered. I pulled the snow off the garage and the new roof too, not nearly as bad in terms of ice dams, but enough weight that it needed to be moved.

Here's the worst spot, a big ice dam that has taken away the guttering, and a big mess of ice that has come down the main roof gully to the porch roof. This mess probably weights 300 pounds, which the roof can handle now the rest of the weight is gone. But, like the ice dams, it's frozen fast to the roof. I'm hoping the either the sun tomorrow or the rain is warm enough that we can get rid of this, perhaps with some salt to help out. I may have to put the roof edge heater wires back up there, to stop this from happening. I still have a box full of them that used to be on the porch roof, before it was covered with metal roofing.

Could be worse. No great damage or losses so far, touch-wood!

The cold begins

It's probably about 11 or 12 degrees F outside right now, which is not that cold for around here, but cold enough that we can begin to get the idea. Winter is here. Friday night is supposed to be around zero F.

I already plowed snow once, too. Another sign.

The new extension, as yet unused and unheated, is acting as a bit of a heat sink, but not as bad as I thought it might. When we finally finish the unending finish work, and finally can afford to buy some furniture to go in it, then we'll probably also add a small electrical heater in the far corner, to take the chill off and even out the cold gradient.

I'd rather not do this, of course. Running an electrical heater much of the winter can be expensive. But the shape of the house is all wrong for that. If our house had properly designed, instead of being built in stages over 114 years, we'd have made it as square as possible and put an efficient wood stove right smack in the middle of the square. But back when it was first built, it appears the main house was built first and the kitchen added as an extension. Part of the intent with the original kitchen design was probably to provide a place to cook in summer that was cooler than the rest of the house. It's essentially a separate wing. Now we've added another separate wing. The wood stove is not really in a central position, and so you either heat the kitchen to 85 degrees to get the corners up to a comfortable 68, or you add a little boost. We use little electrical baseboard-type heaters to take the chill off in the corners, and I don't have one yet for the extension. I need to pick one up, which means a run to town, something I won't have time for until school gets out Friday.

The sheep are feeling the cold a little too, but what they want isn't heat but more food. They've been going through two bales a day on the coldest days, which is too much, plus about half a scoop of oats mixed with a little sweet feed each. New hay comes Thursday, organized through the Unity College Woodsman club because we're too busy to get it and because the truck is on the fritz still. The sheep will be more economical to feed once we get them out of their mating season and back into the barn. They'll eat a little less, and waste less hay because feeding will be centralized.

I'm pretty toasty right now, though, with a cup of hot coffee, and the oil heater running. The woodstove had died down overnight, and I knew I needed to run the furnace a little to test it out -- it get used very little -- so this was a good opportunity. And it might be a good day for oatmeal. Or maybe pancakes. High carbs. That's what we need.

Winter hasn't changed much for country folk over the centuries. The antidote to cold is still to burn things, inside and out.

Pish. And more pish.

The weather has been, as we say in the RAF Mountain Rescue, "honking." Like a wet weekend in Keswick, except I can't forget about work and go have a nice cream tea, or better yet, a pint.

So, we went driving around yesterday while the rain fell, and gathered up stuff we will need, eventually. I have all the electrical first and second fix materials in, as well as some plumbing stuff and heater duct for the old oil furnace, which we'll hook up, although likely not use.

The truck alternator seems well fixed, so there's that to be grateful for.

Yesterday afternoon, tired of waiting for the rain to end or at least die down, I slowly and carefully maneuvered the very heavy sliding glass patio door out of the garage, using the old garden trailer for a dolly or what Americans would call a "hand-truck," and on to the subfloor decking.

I was hoping to get some help for this job, but managed it on my own, going very slowly for fear of damaging the $450 unit.

Once it was out waiting on the subfloor decking, I may as well fit it, so I did, even though it was still siling it down.

Then, an early start this morning and the rough frames began to go in. By the end of the afternoon, we'd done a whole 39-foot wall, and half an 18-foot one, including a couple of completed window holes. This is the south wall, so there are four large windows and the patio door, to allow the sunshine to heat the room during the winter months.

Here's the chief builder and bottle-washer, reflected in that heavy old patio door, with a sheep in the background on the other side of the door.

In case you were wondering, we do have drawings. They're not full plans, just outline sketches and projections, done on the drawing board with t-square and triangle, just like they taught us at school in Sheffield.

They're not required by the town planners -- all we needed for the building permit was a sketch showing the measurements to the property line. The only things that will be inspected will be the septic and our plumbing. But I need them to explain to myself what the building should look like when I get done.

Otherwise it could turn out just about any old way it wanted!

 

Although my subfloor was supposedly guaranteed for 100 days of rain, it has warped. We've had around eight or nine inches of rain total in the last few days, enough to warp the subfloor and my brain. The sheep are like walking, soggy wet off-grey sponges.

Luckily, the damage is in what will be the utility closet, easily fixed.

New generator

Regular readers will know that I've been worried about our aging home back-up generator since the most recent power cut. This happened during the last-but-one snow storm, not a particularly big storm by Maine standards.

The power was out for nearly eight hours, and although I'd slept through most of it while sick with the flu, Aimee had been at work, and I wanted her to come home to a hot shower and a warm, well-lit house. But the tired old generator only ran for forty minutes, then cut out. The reason was most likely overheating due to a worn engine, and indeed the next time I tried to start the genny, I got blue smoke, not a good sign.

We need a working genny around here, not just for our own comfort, but to pump water for our livestock in a power cut.

I had been prevaricating between getting a new unit or rebuilding the old, or some combination, most likely buying a new one, rebuilding the old one, then selling it on.

After some thought, I resolved to partially rebuild the engine, and sent away for the piston rings I needed to do so. I was sort of looking forward to puttering on this all weekend, but by the time the rings came Friday, another storm was forecast for late Saturday, and it made no sense to strip down the generator just at the moment when we could easily need it, even if it was running poorly. I'd also received notation of our tax rebate from the IRS "Where's my rebate" site, and so had the money for a new one.

I decided to just go get one. It required a little work to talk Aimee into it. She wasn't happy about the expense, but I think this winter's various adventures have shown the need.

But which one to buy? I wanted a generator with a propane engine because propane engines typically run quieter and cleaner than gas or diesel. We also have a lot of problems with gas spoilage in carburetor engines around here. We have a lot of farm and yard equipment that only needs to run a few times a year and the gas spoils, or the fuel hoses decay on the smaller carburetors. You want an emergency generator to work when you need it.

Propane keeps for years. We've had the same propane tanks on the current generator for four or five years. It always starts, and never needs a carburetor strip-and-clean job. Most of our other motors require this at least once a year, usually due to resin in the gas that gums up orifices and jets. But the con is, the propane generator itself is more expensive.

I almost bought a gas genny. I'd been shopping online ever since I saw the blue smoke. I knew I could get a mid-size propane generator from Home Depot for about $900, which seemed a lot, while a gas-fueled unit of the same wattage output would only be about $600. But then I noticed a Generac 3,250 W propane generator at the Waterville Home Depot for $609.

The only difficulty was that it was pull-start. When we're away from the farm, we get a farm-sitter, often a student, often female, and even the most self-reliant student might have trouble with a pull-start engine.

But, as we discovered this year, if we're away and there's a power cut, usually other bad things begin to cascade. Most recently it was the oil furnace, and we had to return home early in any case. And our old generator had to be wired directly to the breaker panel each time it was needed to power the house, so it wasn't exactly user-friendly. I decided I could live with a pull-start, as long as it had 220 volts and so could power both sides of our breaker panel.

I'd use the savings to buy and set up a proper 220 volt generator socket, and make it a lot easier for someone other than myself to connect the generator to the house. The new model at 3,250 W would have almost the same wattage output as our old one at 3,500 W, so we'd have to turn off some devices in the house while we used it, but through the new connection it could deliver more of that power, and run all our farm food freezers and the main fridge at the same time and handle the water pump too.

I'd been able to get a lot of use out of the old Generac unit, which had the same GN 220 engine as the new, and so I was also brand-loyal.

Here's the new genny after assembly, which took about half an hour. It's easy to move around.

As you can see, it's a lot easier to move around than our old one. The old one was supposed to be permanently installed outside, and we certainly did that at the Bale House, but it would get covered in snow and rained on and dirty, and so here at the farm where we didn't need it to run off-grid systems on a fairly frequent basis, I always kept it indoors and just manhandled it outside when I needed to. It's heavy, and so this wasn't very efficient, and would have been another barrier to having Aimee or a house-sitter operate the unit in an emergency.

The big white box on the top of the old unit contained the receptacles. You'd take a 110V plug, plug it into one of the receptacles, and wire that directly to a breaker on the breaker panel (having first turned off the main breaker). Not that easy to do, especially in the dark with just a flashlight, and the most you could get was 10 amps because there were 10 amp GFCI breakers fitted to the receptacles on the receptacle box. That meant that you couldn't run a fridge or freezer and the water pump at the same time.

Here's the new disconnect socket I wired in yesterday. Much better, and it can take up to 30 amps. This is not easy home wiring, because it uses large gauge cable that is hard to manipulate, but if you persevere, you can get it done.

The new genny started a little hard, but that's normal for a new pull-start engine. I expect it will settle in, and I'll figure out what the particular "knack" is too. I didn't much like the way it scooted along on its wheels while I was pulling on the starter, but I think I can figure that out too. The only remaining problem is to pick up a new two-gang breaker for the genny. The old one I had on the shelf turned out to be a dud. I also need a different plug. The Home Depot "Associate" inadvertently sold me the wrong one, although he swore blind it was the standard item for a generator's 220 V outlet.

I'm not sure what Home Depot "Associates" are "associated" with. Although some of them are knowledgeable, others of them clearly need to be re-associated with some trade-training programs and a few good textbooks in mechanics and construction.

Another sign of the decline of western civilization. And the durn generator itself, although a major American brand and probably American-designed, is actually made in China. But what can you do?

When Margaret Thatcher and to a lesser extent Ronald Reagan's economic reforms reduced funding for the kind of "socialist" trade training and engineering educations available at places like the UK's then-magnificent RAF Halton, and similar vo-tech colleges all around the USA, I'm not sure they realized just how delinquent we'd become in terms of the engineering literacy of the average person in such a short space of time.

When I was a kid in Sheffield, almost every other kid's dad I knew had some kind of solid trade.

Now we're all occupying cubicles in call centers, shifting each other's bad credit around, and knowledgeable hardware store "Associates" are few and far between.

Next time I'll take my durn jackknife and cut the durn plug out of the stupid blister pack right there in the store, and try it on the display model generator, just to be sure. And I won't listen to no so-called Associate if he or she tells me otherwise.

But I think all will be well enough with the new genny. It's a compromise, with the pull-start and the Chinese manufacture, but it's backed by an American warranty and a good brand name that has worked well for us before.

So, if today's so-called "Blizzard Warning" doesn't turn out to be a storm in a teacup, as it currently seems to be, and if we do sooner or later get a down tree on our spur line again, we ought to be a good deal happier and less worried than we have been the last few times.

A cold week

Photo: Aimee helping our chickadees survive the cold. These birds are part of the infamous 47%, but they don't cost that much to maintain.

The weather in this part of Maine has been pretty cold since the beginning of the week, thanks to a big bulge of Canadian air.

Heating systems need to work and work well when it's this cold.

Our Post Office lady was complaining yesterday of frozen pipes. Not good. This is an elderly lady, probably around 65 years old or more. I don't know if she has a husband and have never asked, but I feel badly for her if she has to battle frozen pipes with or without a partner.

There have also been a lot of nasty house fires reported on the news. One family of five lost four to the flames in a town just across the Penobscot River from here. The only survivor was the mother. I have no idea what that kind of loss could do to a person, and don't wish to find out, so I've been checking smoke alarm batteries even more regularly than usual.

Another farm lost its barn and chickens to a heat lamp fire. Our chickens might like some heat, but I'm afraid they will have to suffer through without. I'm not risking a barn fire. When the lambs come, they will have to have heat lamps, but we'll check and double check them several times a day.

Another good reason to delay lambing in Maine until April -- to minimize the risk of barn fire from heat lamps.

We've been using oil heat ourselves to heat the Womerlippi farmhouse, which is a pretty good sign of a cold snap. We don't use much of it -- the sight gauge on our oil tank has barely budged since the last time we put any oil in three years ago -- but it helps to keep us sane when we know we can leave the house to go to work and the pipes won't freeze. We continue to use our wood stove and the electrical baseboard heater in our living room, to minimize the oil use and thus the greenhouse gas emissions, but the furnace will come on if the temperature in the house drops below 62 degrees F. And if we come home from work and the house is at 62 degrees F because the fire in the wood stove has died down, we can use the oil furnace to heat everything back up a little faster.

I dislike our central heating system. Not only does it burn oil, but it's also a forced air system, and in a house with two dogs and two cats and a wood stove, that makes for a lot of dust. It's also noisy. So it was with relief that, as the cold snap began to moderate yesterday, I turned it all off, and we've done without since.

In years gone by, we'd have used the large outside wood-fired furnace in the garage, also a forced air system, whenever it was this cold out, but I haven't wanted to use that since the new chimney was found damaged from corrosion two years ago -- the result of crappy work from a local contractor and crappy materials from a national-level supplier.

I never got around to repairing the garage chimney, mostly because this huge machine uses too much wood. It does a great job of heating the house even when it's cold outside, and runs for much longer than the kitchen wood stove without needing to be filled, but it doesn't really help protect the pipes very much, since the air registers are in the wrong place for that, and it doubles or triples our firewood consumption for the year.

We began instead leaving a small electrical heater on much of the time when the weather was cold last year or the year before, and realized after a while that the extra electricity bill from that, around three or four hundred dollars a year, was much less than the six or seven hundred dollars of firewood the large furnace would blow through, even if it was only used for the coldest weather. This electrical heater, which is now a higher quality 115 volt, American-construction baseboard type, since the several Chinese-made oil-filled heaters we previously tried have all failed, sits next to the living room couch where we normally sit. This couch is fully thirty feet and around a corner from the kitchen wood stove. The baseboard puts the heat exactly where we need it, for about a hundred dollars a month if left on all the time.

We'll reuse that outdoor furnace in one or the other of the new buildings we have planned.

Another difficulty has been knowing exactly how cold it is outside. I managed to break our outside thermometer somehow, and replaced it with a cheap hardware store dial thermometer. Some time afterwards I realized that the new thermometer wasn't reading the right temperature, so I went back to the hardware store for another one, and installed them side by side, just to see if I was correct.

 

This confused me even more, since the replacement thermometer read a few degrees differently than the old one, but was still incorrect. It took me a while to figure this out. When the photo above was taken, the actual outside temperature was closer to zero degrees F. You really need to know what the temperature is outside, so you can know when to turn heating systems on or off to protect pipes.

Last year Aimee was sent to the hardware store for greenhouse thermometers and returned with these small electronic ones, so I went out to salvage these, and installed one in our kitchen window. It seems to be working. 

It didn't help any, in this game of Maine winter survival, that late last year I switched out our hot water tank for a tankless heater. The hot water tank, which used to live in the basement, was a supply of heat to the pipes down there. The tankless heater doesn't provide any heat unless the hot water taps are running, and so it doesn't protect the pipes at all when we're not here. I put a heat lamp down there instead, on a thermostatic socket adapter. When the heat lamp is plugged in to the switch, it comes on at 35 degrees F, and doesn't go out until 45 degrees. The socket adapter is less than ideal in this sense, because you can't control the temperature at which it turns on or off, but it adds protection. I also added a good deal of insulation and sealed up a lot of cracks in our basement, making it much warmer in the area where the pipes are.

All this, just because I changed the kind of hot water heater we were using! 

You really need to be on the game, technologically speaking, to survive a Maine winter comfortably. But even then there's an element of luck. Any of these carefully maintained and serviced systems could fail at any time, indeed, as our furnace failed earlier this winter, and cause a fire or frozen pipes.

I feel sorry for our Post Office lady with frozen pipes, and for the people that are having house fires.

But it's kind of fun to sit here in the warmth and read these old diary entries about all the effort we've put into to making this old farmhouse stay warm over the years.

Here's a selection:

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "cold."

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "furnace."

Great Farm Diary entries with the word "snow."

Stayin' warm?

(This post mirrored from the Sustainability Blog)

It's the depths of a Maine winter, and despite continued climate change and what was initially expected to be an El Niño year, we're having proper Maine winter weather. The warming trend expected in the southern Pacific in the early fall never quite panned out and SST temperatures there are right about average now.

As a partial result, we've had a solid week of cold Canadian air. It's warmed up quite a bit out there just now, a brief slug of warmer air having penetrated north as a Rossby wave passes, and the outside temperature is just below freezing. But the Canadian or more correctly polar air will return today and we'll be back in the teens and below for another week.

Minus ten to plus ten degrees F is, to say the least, pretty cold for an Englishman, even a fat one. But I long ago learned to deal with it, and even thrive.

How do we stay warm and well in such cold weather without contributing greatly to climate emissions?

Two important factors: Dogs and logs.

The science of logs is very interesting to me, especially this time of year when we depend on it a good deal. The Womerlippis heat primarily with wood, much of which we cut off our own land. This year we began the winter with about three cords on hand, most of which was ash and bird cherry, cut from the southerly end of our smallholding, that had been seasoned for two years. About a cord of ash was only one-year old, the remains of a single large ash tree tree that overlooked this year's garden expansion and had to go.

This would have been enough firewood, had we had a La Niña winter more like last year's. But the cold weather meant we burned more than we planned, and so I shopped around for an extra cord of dry firewood. A young lad in the town came by on New Year's Eve with a truck and a buddy and dropped a cord of mixed hardwood right into my firewood crib. (The very prompt delivery was, I surmised, due to a need for cash for some New year's carousing.) This was wood that had been cut and stored in tree length for two years, and so it is seasoned, but not nearly as bone dry as the Womerlippi logs that were cut and split and covered for one to two years.

Accordingly, some judicial mixing and matching of logs is called for. The off-farm logs can be burned whenever the house is too warm, or when the outside temperatures are moderate. The Womerlippi logs are saved for when the house needs to be warmed up, or when it's very cold outside. So far the coldest it's been at the farm was -5 F. It can get a lot colder than that around here. When it does, we have a back-up, a forced air oil furnace that can be fired up at the touch of a tiny button. This furnace, at 175,000 BTU/hr, dates back to the original pre-retrofit farmhouse, and is about double the capacity required for the house at its current level of air-sealing and insulation, so it heats everything up very quickly indeed. But we try not to use it, preferring to live on BTUs that are part of the contemporary carbon cycle, not the Cretacean one. 

This is a life trick that a lot of people are going to need to learn, one way or another, if we're to avoid a climate that is more like that of the Cretaceous. You don't need a wood stove. You could build a passive house like Unity College's own Terra Haus, or the Unity House. Or you could use a pellet boiler like the ones in our college library or Thomashow labs. Even a moderate retrofit of a regular oil-burning home can reduce your oil consumption enough to help meet emissions reduction targets.

But the wood stove is my favorite approach because of the nice radiant quality of the heat.

It helps in this emissions reduction project that our particular wood stove is a well-designed Norski model with the modern afterburner or secondary combustion set-up. Not only does the presence of a secondary combustion chamber reduce particulate and other emissions, it also saves firewood. The detailed retrofit work that we've invested in year after year also pays off. The house is literally cocooned in insulation. We haven't used more than a few gallons of heat oil a year for many years. Our last delivery was three years ago, and then only a hundred gallons. 

We do use the oil furnace when we leave the house and animals in the hands of a sitter, and most recently managed to fry an igniter during a power outage, requiring a diagnosis-and-repair process. Following that, I ran the unit for a few days, partly because I wanted to make sure it was working safely again, partly because we were having a cold snap and Aimee wanted me to do so. But I could only put up with the noisy thing for a few days and was glad of the excuse to turn it off yesterday when the temperatures warmed up a bit.

So, we're back to the logs. We used less than fifty gallons of oil this winter. I don't intend to use any more if I can help it.

As for the dogs, well, it's our winter break, and they get a lot of attention. In particular, they get nice long walks in the snow in the deep empty woods behind our house. There's about two thousand acres of empty Maine woodlands and wetlands back there, and in the winter, when the wetlands are frozen, it's all very much more accessible than in the summer when the bugs deter. I enjoy these walks, and appreciate the recovery of fitness and a regular sleep pattern that accompanies the exercise. If I didn't have as much work to do as I do, I'd take a good long walk with my dogs every day.

Here's some pictures that Aimee took that capture the mood of these winter hikes with the dogs.

Flame, a rescued Australian shepherd from Louisiana, has taken to the snow like a duck to water.

Ernie, an English Shepherd, and the official Womerlippi farm sheepdog, is her constant companion.

Sometimes we need to use snowshoes. 

Here's what happened to my second-best set of snowshoes just the other day! But because the snow was set up well, I was able to finish the hike easily with the fragment of snow shoe that remained attached. 

And yes, duct-tape does make a good repair material for snowshoes. If you're cheap, like I am.

So that, dear readers, is how we stay warm in the depths of a Maine winter, without adding too much to climate emissions, or to consumerism.

In the bleak midwinter...

We had a few days after the end of term and before our regular road trip to Virginia to see Aimee's parents, and during that time I went over and over my to-do list of pre trip preparations, so our house-sitter Marsha would have an easy time of things. I checked over all the household systems again and again, brought down feed for the sheep, filled all the water containers, and generally obsessed compulsively in order that we might have a good trip without worries. Aimee did much the same, and in the end we left poor Marsha with a veritable dissertation of instructions, running to three pages, single- spaced, with email addenda.

It was all for nothing. A storm blew up a day and a half after we left which cut power to the house. Marsha was asleep at the time and so didn't notice. When she awoke, the oil furnace was out and wouldn't re-start, leaving an eight-foot 115 V baseboard heater next to the living room windows as the only heat in the house. She emailed to us down in Virginia, and waited, the house getting colder, for us to respond.

Eventually we did of course check our email, by which time it was 55 degrees F in the house, and certainly cold enough outside to freeze pipes. We called right away and, after running through some furnace trouble-shooting procedures over the phone unsuccessfully, gave instead verbal instructions for using the wood stove.

Wood stoves are tricky, and unless you've used one before, indeed, unless you've had lots of practice in using one, you may not be able to make it work for you very easily, which is why we have our house-sitters use the oil furnace instead. It's one less thing for us to worry about while we're away.

But needs must. I walked Marsha through the lighting process, step-by-step, and gave tips on what to expect from each shape, size and type of log. There followed a few anxious hours during which we waited to make sure she was getting the hang of it. We were pleased to see that she managed quite well and when we next called back, the house was up to 65 degrees F. We breathed a big sigh of relief. The pipes at least were saved.

There was also the small matter of one or another of the ewes having somehow walked off with one of the two water tank heaters accidentally attached, cutting heat to one of the two water tubs. The tank heater was nowhere to be found, the sheep having hidden it carefully in the snow. This meant the sheep would run out of water in  a day or two.

Then we saw the weather reports: giant winter storm "Euclid" was barreling across the southern states with torrential rain and tornadoes and would become a nor'easter if it followed the predicted trajectory. (Apparently winter storms have names now, just like hurricanes. I'm not sure this is a necessary elaboration.)

That was enough for us, on top of the furnace and animal woes. Christmas would have to be cut short this year.

Aimee's family were good enough to reprogram their entire holiday, and so we had Christmas dinner and present-opening on Christmas Eve, and by 8.30 am on Christmas Day Aimee and I were back in the Camry heading for points north, Euclid thundering along about 24 hours behind us.

We had good weather for driving ahead of the storm, and slowed only by fog in Virginia, had our own Christmas dinner in a south Indian restaurant somewhere north of Hartford, Connecticut, and bedded down comfortably in a Baymont Inn for the night. By 1pm the next day we were home.

At home things were fine. Marsha had it up to a toasty 68 F in the house, and the stove was burning brightly. She gets the official 2012 Learned to Use a Wood Stove in the Shortest Time Award. But then being cold concentrates the mind, I find. You'll do anything to get warm again.

We quickly sorted the animals and a supply of firewood for the coming storm. The tank heater had resurfaced and Martha reconnected it, so all we had to do was top off the tubs. I then repeated the immediate fault diagnosis for the furnace, resetting the programmable thermostat, then pressing the red reset button on the primary control, all to no avail.

What was wrong with the furnace? This is admittedly an older unit, circa 1987, but it sees so little use that we assume it needs little maintenance. It hasn't been run for more than a few tens of hours a year since we got (mostly) done with our giant insulation and air sealing project a few years ago. In that time we've burned only about 70 gallons of oil. The house is now so well insulated, we can keep it nicely warm with the wood stove and a small electrical heater, and so the only time we use the oil furnace is when we have a house-sitter, or when the wood stove goes out while we're away for the day, and we want to rewarm the house quickly.

The next day, as so-called Euclid was raging all around us, I went online and pulled the various manuals and perused the DIY blogs and videos to get good information to run through a deeper inspection/fault diagnosis process. I'd never worked on a furnace before, and wanted to learn as much as I could from the experience.

I removed the whole burner unit and took it upstairs to my workbench to get a better look at things. Back in the basement with a flashlight, the first thing I noticed was that the small anteroom to the combustion chamber where the burner tube sits was filthy, full of soot and debris, so I vacuumed that out with the shop vac, recovering a good two pounds of soot and burned dust. I examined the main filter and fuel pump screen and found both to be dirty. I pulled the burner nozzle and decided to change that too.

That was as much as I could get done because the heating firm with the parts store is, of course, several miles away and the storm would hit overnight. Hoping to salvage a little Christmas spirit, I made mince pies and fed the wood stove and gave the sheep extra hay. Aimee started a jigsaw puzzle and we watched TV in the warm as the storm blew up.

The next day we had a winter wonderland in the dooryard.

Only about eight inches of snow, not such a large storm really, but some blowing and drifting had piled up larger drifts here and there. The sheep were nice and warm in the barn, but to judge by the layer of snow on their backs, some had even slept outside! Sheep don't really care too much about storms.

I did experience that signature Maine moment where you try to open your front door but can't because of a snow drift, but the town plow had been up the road and so we weren't by any stretch of the imagination "snowed in." I got busy with the Kubota tractor and soon had the driveway clear and the various vehicles shoveled off.

The firewood pile is getting low, and so we'll need to get a little more in, but what we have is nice and dry, good quality ash from our own land. There's another three rows behind this one, enough to take us through February. I'll find another cord of dry somewhere on Uncle Henry's or Maine Craig's List.

I used the Land Rover to get to the parts store, but even that wasn't really necessary. The roads were fairly clear by 10 am.

I bought a new filter, screen nozzle and main gasket and came back and fitted them and put the whole thing back together and bled the system, but it still wouldn't light. Back to the parts store again with the electrode/nozzle unit, to have the electrodes checked. They were fine, so I bought home a new primary control. That didn't do the trick either. Finally, after checking for spark across the springs, I realized the igniter transformer was fried. And of course, thinking back, that should perhaps have been the first thing I checked, because, well, there was a power cut, followed by (I found out later from the parts guy) a power surge as the power came back on. More than enough to fry a 25 year-old transformer that's been kept in a damp basement.

One last quick trip to the parts store, a last flurry of parts-fitting and wiring, and the machine fired up. It burned a little wild to begin, of course, because the combustion chamber was filled with unburned fuel, but soon settled down.

I don't mind that I bought all those extra parts. If you think about it, now we have a fully-serviced oil furnace, with brand new wiring and electronics. Not a moment too soon, because it's supposed to get down to - 10 degrees F next week at night (- 24 degrees Celsius).

The furnace should now be good for several more years of use. Indeed, I think the only thing that will kill this old system is the rust. the basement is damp and the sheet metal housing is rusting.

What would be nice now would be to get a secondhand unit from a retrofit job somewhere with a dryer basement and switch out all the rusty panels.

I think we dealt with all these emergencies rather well, even if I do say so myself. Thinking ahead, we had good back-up plans for home heat, and, of course, a sturdy and clever lass for a house sitter who could rise to the occasion. We kept up with the weather forecast and so were able to dodge the storm. And we had good skills to fall back on for fixing the furnace.

All's well that ends well.

Just another winter on the farm.

Chris­ti­na Ros­set­ti, 1872, 

In the Bleak Midwinter

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.