Snow day

Yesterday was more fun than your average Monday. We got our first official snow day of the year.

Hallelujah!

Snow cancellations are a part of life in the northern tier of American states, and the Canadian provinces. When snow comes in regular, more or less predictable storms, every three to four weeks, a foot or several at a time, and then needs to be moved before regular life can proceed, you don't want extraneous people on the road. You certainly don't want schoolkids and students trying to get to school in their school buses and private jalopies in the dark and snow at 6.30 am, which is when the school buses and the high school students have to get moving in this part of Maine, but also when the plows and salt spreaders have to work the hardest.

And when the schools close, Unity College also closes. Mostly to avoid death and injury in road accidents from students, faculty, and staff trying to hard too get to work.

Which accidents are after all fairly inevitable, if you think about it.

You can see the results of a snow day policy fairly quickly in reduced accidents. It's a very sensible policy, and has the particular psychological benefit of making adults who work in education, state government, and other sectors where workplaces close for snow, feel like happy schoolchildren for a day, because, well, we don't have to go to work that day.

Our first snow day didn't get called until the late morning, which was a bit of a pain. That meant we had to struggle through the storm to get to school, then struggle back home again later. No benefit to driving safety from this snow day.

But we did get the afternoon off. Not entirely, because I spent about five hours of the afternoon and evening grading. But I was able to concentrate on the grading and get it done properly, for which I was grateful.

And I was able to get my tractor out and move all the snow in our driveway and barn access, a vital chore, but one that requires daylight.

The sheep were all pretty stoic about the snow. The outside ewes, the ones in with the ram, hung out in their little shelter or just slept in the snow, emerging with several inches on their backs to eat hay when I went to feed. The barren ewes with last year's ewe-lambs stayed in the barn and ate lots of hay, twice as much as usual.

They must have been bored, poor lambs.

The hens and rooster, for the most part also stayed in the barn, although one enterprising hen came out and dodged around the tractor while I was plowing, looking for bits of grit in the snow. Cheryl Roethlisburger Crow, the rooster, was subdued for once. There's one benefit to the snow -- it shuts the durn rooster up!

The dogs came out to play a little, and Haggis got rolled in the snow, making a doggy-snow-angel, which made him deliriously happy, and so he ran up and down the driveway just for the fun of it.

Back at college, before we left, the first and second-year students had reverted to their childhoods, which after all is not so far back, and were sledding on bits of cardboard, stolen meal trays, trash can lids, and snowboards down the small sled hill next to the main dorm.

I wasn't up for too much of this larking about, except to give Haggis his roll in the snow. I was way too sore for playing in the snow.

And therein lies a winter's tale...

Sunday evening, as the storm was getting going, while it was still a cold miserable rain, I was struggling to get back from the statewide search and rescue quarterly in Bangor, which had me crossing the Mount Harris pass between Dixmont and Jackson (900 feet above sea level), when I started to slide on the way up the mountain. This doesn't happen often, but I quickly threw the truck into four wheel drive and continued at a more subdued pace.

When I got to the top, I saw a half-dozen cars pulled over and a truck in the ditch. I too pulled over, to see what was wrong. As I was doing this, another four-wheel drive truck passed me and lost control, sliding right away into the front of the truck already in the ditch. I got out to see if anyone was injured, but as I was crossing the road I discovered how slick it was -- I fell flat on my butt.

To begin, I couldn't even stand, and had to crawl to the shoulder to stand up. The road was beautifully covered in three eights of an inch of hard, wet black ice: really, really slick. It was obvious that we were not going down that pass. Bruised and tender, I started working my way back through the row of waiting vehicles to tell them what was up, and several drivers turned around to take the western route, through Unity, which is not nearly as high. You need studded tires to handle slick black ice like that, especially on a steep hill, even with four wheel drive.

A few cars, oblivious, sped past me as I was doubling back, including a couple of neighbors. I hope they didn't try the pass.

I didn't feel like going forty miles around to get home, so I doubled back then took the eastern route over dirt roads and through Jackson village, a fifteen-mile, thirty-minute detour. The dirt roads were bad too, but a four wheel drive truck can handle mud.

Driving the long way back home, hurt, on the bouncy dirt roads was pretty poor fun, but sitting down to do grading Sunday evening was pure misery. Not only were the papers pretty bad, which always makes me upset, but my back was whip-lashed and very stiff and sore. Three Aleve tablets reduced the pain sufficient to get a good night's sleep, but I was still fairly upset about it this morning, and so extra happy to get home early.

Then, to cap it all, I'd forgotten to move my tractor into the barn before the ice storm, and so had a very cold bum after my hour's work moving snow yesterday.

Insult to injury.

Eventually I got wise and chipped the ice off with a hammer, but not before the numb-butt effect took hold.

Is a numb bum better than a sore bum? A silly question. Any Mainer can tell you, what you need to last the winter nicely is a warm dry bum, preferably unbruised.

That tractor is now safely in the barn, where it will stay all winter when it's not being used. I run it on kerosene in the winter, to make sure it will start, and keep it in the barn.

Now we're out of propane, and there's been more snow. Aimee will not be a happy camper this morning when she finds out, especially if she doesn't get a hot shower. With the Camry out of action until the part arrives, we'll need to drive to work together in the truck today, and then come home early so I can get propane and plow snow again.

Oh well. It's winter. Time to struggle a little again. Can't be helped.

You get used to it, and quickly begin to remember all your precautions, like never running out of gas, keeping firewood well-covered, shoveling, plowing and moving snow when you can, or putting the tractor away every time.

Keeping it under control and civilized.

Snow days make life a lot easier. If I couldn't have that extra time, I'd be doing a lot of plowing and other chores in the dark, and we'd have a lot more accidents around here.

As for my slight accident, well, I dislike driving in the dark at the best of times, but driving in the dark with a sore butt and whiplash over dirt roads in freezing rain, that I can really do without.

I hope I don't let that happen again this winter.

Snow chaos -- someplace else

We don't do snow chaos in Maine. Snow is a fact of life here. So it's always amusing to look down on the lower 47, or the poor old yUKe, whenever we see headlines like "Snow chaos stalls Capital," or the like.

Today's Guardian was no disappointment in that regard. Several inches have fallen in London, which gets hardly any snow in a normal year. Eight inches generally doesn't stop anything in Maine. It takes twelve or fourteen to get a snow day. We might get a delayed start to the school day if it all dumps in the early morning. But we have a massive public and private infrastructure to deal with all this white stuff.

The budget of Jackson Town, pop 900 or less, for instance, is more than 50% snow removal and sand and salt purchase. The town keeps several guys to drive massive plow trucks with massive sand spreaders, and we can have all our roads clear of an eight-inch snow fall in a couple hours, this despite the fact that we have a couple hundred miles of town roads. I expect there are towns of several thousand in rural England that don't have half the endowment of money, men and materials we keep on hand for this job.

I say men. This is definitely a man thing. I can count the number of women I've seen driving snow removal equipment in Maine on one hand. There must be a gene on the Y chromosome that codes for the snow moving instinct.

It's a macho thing, believe me. Aimee says that any woman you see driving a plow truck is most likely to be single, because if she got married the [stupid] husband would take it over.

Then there's the private equipment. Any "real" man worth his salt in Maine has some kind of snow-moving equipment, even if it's just a 4 by 4 truck with a "toy" plow. Snow blowers are the cheapest way to go. For me, our '73 Kubota 4 by 4 compact tractor does all I need and more. Although it takes more time than neighbor Hamilton's Dodge 4 by 4 plow truck with the full size blade, it can actually bucket lift snow up high, or from one place to another, which is needed as the stuff piles up.

What this means is, Maine can get one, one-and-a-half, two, even three feet snowstorms five, six or seven times a year, but it generally only takes a couple hours of daylight to open up the roads and get everyone moving again. Even so, we still close the schools and the college. It's not worth the trouble and danger of the drive, and when I was the college official who had to call the snow day, I would always think of the poor old tires on the poor old college students cars and trucks, and err on the side of safety.

Besides, we need the rest after moving all that snow. A snow day is a restful, peaceful blessing. Pure white Zen.

So all these Londoners should take it easy. They'll be back to slaving away soon enough.

A slight problem...

We had another snowstorm Monday, and got another snow day off work as a result. Accordingly we had a nice day taking it in turns to work on college paperwork and lounge around the house playing with Roo. I knew at some point I'd have to go out to move snow, but with the storm lingering into the late afternoon, and forecast to continue to spin much of the evening and night time, there wasn't much point in getting out there earlier.

I'd just taken a shower and was changing to my evening "comfy" clothes of sweatpants and sweatshirt when a commotion occured and Aimee burst into the bedroom holding Roo.

"The snow plow is stuck in the driveway", she said. "Again!" she might have added, since this is not the first nor likely the last time that this particular problem has occurred. Accordingly I pulled a set of insulated coveralls over my sweats and went out like a good husband to see what had happened.

Our driveway is actually a turning circle at the end of a town road. The road belongs to the town, the circle to us. Accordingly, the town plow doesn't actually have to plow our driveway, and perhaps shouldn't, but the truck does have to be turned around, so the drivers often go all the way around the circle for their own convenience. This is good for us, since it reduces the scale of our plowing chore by about two thirds, so we like those times when the circle gets plowed. At other times, with less accommodating drivers, the truck does a three-point turn at the junction with the town road. If the driver attempts to plow the circle, but doesn't know where the road is supposed to be, he can get well and truly stuck. But he can also get stuck doing a three point turn in a narrow road, so "pick your poison."

This time, the truck was stuck pretty much on top of one of my five feet tall snowbanks, having tried to drive straight over it. I found the hapless plow truck driver and neighbor Ham standing around scratching their heads about what to do.

Then ensued one of those Chinese fire drills, wherein five different guys each puts forward some notion of how to fix things, and each one is fervently tried, to no avail.

I wasn't much help myself. Although it was obvious that a smaller more maneuverable piece of snow-moving equipment would be needed to dig the bigger truck out, the cold had penetrated to the starter motors of both the Land Rover and the Kubota tractor. Both were frozen. At least, that's the best guess. The Rover's symptoms were clearer to diagnose -- the motor spinning without engaging the "Bendix" drive. That has happened before.

The tractor just clicked, a symptom that can be caused by anything from a seized engine through a dead battery to a ruined starter solenoid, of a jammed flywheel gear.

Either way, the upshot was I wouldn't be moving any of the snowbanks myself. Hamilton plowed with his old Dodge plow truck, while the plow truck drivers and I dug and then dug some more, stopping periodically to try to rock the truck in forward and reverse out of its snowbank. A second and third town plow arrived, meaning we now had five plow trucks on scene, plus my own Frontier which was just in the way. Eventually we'd moved all the snow that could be moved, and the big truck was still stuck. Some maneuvering of these vehicles was then required to get a second full-sized plow truck in place, with two strong chains, the proper amount of motive force was applied, and the first truck eventually popped out of its snowbank.

The town plow guys were then good enough to plow all my snow before leaving. I went inside for a well-earned dinner of fish pie, which I'd made earlier. I also ordered some additional block heaters online for both the tractor and the Rover. The tractor has one, but I'd lost the cable. I ordered an identical new one to get the cable. For the Rover, I ordered a magnetic heater to clamp directly to the starter motor.

Despite all the unexpected help I had moving snow this time, we were still pretty much snowed in the next day, with no Land Rover and no tractor to help. I began shoveling but was pleased when Hamilton came by and plowed the worst of the snow away with the Dodge. That was Tuesday morning. One of the two block heaters arrived Wednesday. Today, Thursday, we have eight more inches of snow before daylight, so I must go out with a power cord and fire up the block heater and try to get the Rover started and move snow.

I'm happy that I fitted the new heater in place last night, since I won't have to roll on my back in the snow at five am to do that today.

And so it goes. Winter. Another six weeks, says the groundhog.

Bloody old groundhog.

Snowstorm pending, so an early walk

Haggis and I decided to get a walk in before the snowstorm hits. Aimee and I have a snow day from work, and the storm, a big one by all accounts, was scheduled to hit hard around 9am, although we've had preludes in the form of light snow and spin drift all night.

A little light stuff is no impediment to a walk around here. The deep new powder we will have by this afternoon will certainly slow you down, so sooner was going to be better than later.

Being sociable fellows, we invited Mary-dog on our walk. Mary demurred to begin, but I insisted. She did get off the couch, but hesitated again at the door. Again, I insisted. Mary, a former bear-hunting dog that was kept outside, is perfectly happy to piddle and poop in the house if you don't make her go out.

Once outside, Mary balked at the walk. I kept calling her, but she wouldn't come. She didn't like the 10 F weather, the nasty cold wind, the new snow and the spin-drift, which admittedly was all a good deal worse at her height than mine.

But Haggis and I had a good heart-pumping stomp along the snowmobile trail.

I'm not fond of snowmobiles per se, nor any noisy smelly machine that gets between you and seeing, hearing, and feeling the outdoors, unless it's a Land Rover, or the chainsaw that gets me my winter firewood.

But Aimee and I have lived on the edge of the same snowmobile trail now for over eight years, and we've learned to live with it and even appreciate it.

(We've only been in this house for just under six years, but this trail goes straight to our other house in Monroe.)

The reason is, the snowmobile club grooms the trail, and the packed snow allows you to walk for miles in the woods without skis or snowshoes.

We're perfectly content to both ski and snowshoe our way around, but neither are ideal in Maine conditions. Ski trails here need to be groomed to work properly -- the untreated snow pack is generally either too deep and soft to ski easily, or too hard. As for snoeshoes, they only work well in the early spring after the snow pack has consolidated. There's about a three-four week window each spring where you can snowshoe anywhere you want, as fast as you like, on deep, hard snow pack.

(Sometimes, when conditions are just right, there might even be a week when you can hike anywhere you like on really hard snow, mountaineer's neve snow, really, but that's a little rarer an event. When it occurs, the feeling is a bit like walking on air, and after a whole winter of post-holing, you feel like running around on top of the snow!)

The rest of the winter, snowshoes are better than hiking, but still clunky and uncomfortable and slightly unnatural. Like clown feet.

So the snowmobiles are unpleasant, but their trail is a boon.

Haggis enjoyed his walk. He always does. He's very pleasant to hike with.

Mary refused to come and instead stood outside the front door and howled until Aimee let her back in, and then headed straight back for the couch.

What a wuss! And doesn't she look guilty in this picture?

These Maine woods we live in are mostly second growth agricultural land that was part of the 2,000 acre Great Farm of Israel Thorndike. The biggest ash grove we have used to be called the Hundred Acre Hayfield. These days it's a hundred acres of 90% white ash, all no more than twenty years old -- a great firewood resource. But there are places where the tree cover is more diverse, and individual trees are older, with the ground showing the hummocks left by former fallen trees, and you can guess that although the wood was perhaps harvested, the primeval forest was never cleared.

Haggis and I usually like to hike to the first such place (pictured), about two thirds of a mile there and the same back. The ground is too steep for the plow, and there's a small seasonal brook with a wetland just below, and so this is essentially wilderness. The forest cover is more diverse by far than above on the Hundred Acre Hayfield, and the trees are on the whole larger.

I think it's an acquired taste, to properly appreciate the Maine forest, especially this cut-over or cleared land, and especially in winter snowstorms. The colors are fairly monochrome. We may as well be seeing the world in black-and-white, like an old photo, or on an old black and white TV.

I was watching a PBS show last night on the Klamath country in Oregon, a place I've visited where the redwood and Douglas fir trees can be tens of feet around, and the country is always green and lush: a rain forest. I was happy to see it all on the TV again, and I wouldn't mind another visit one day.

But I was content enough today to take my exercise with my one good dog, in the deep snow, in the deep Maine woods behind my own house.

Oregon can wait. It's not going anywhere.

Digging out

We received what looked like about twenty inches of snow Tuesday, the Great Blizzard of '15 according to the TV weathermen. It was hard to tell exactly how much because of the drifting. Here's our dooryard after my neighbor Ham and I had already plowed away the worst of the snow. You can see that the house is drifted in again, although not as deeply as a couple of years ago.

We had to push pretty hard to open that front door. I can easily imagine that sooner or later we'll get so much snow, we won't be able to open that door, which opens outwards, at all, and will have to exit by a different door. All it would take would be for the drift on the right to relocate a bit to the left.

 

Here's Aimee's little car drifted in pretty well. I'm glad we bought a black one and not a white.

The snow, light and fluffy, driven by a powerful wind, drifted in through the Rover's sliding glass windows, making for that ice cave look when I opened the door. Even so, it was a lot nicer sitting in the warm cab of the Land Rover than on the cold seat of the tractor. The inside of the Rover can get wet. After all, it sat uncovered in a junkyard for about ten years.

The new plow did a great job, despite the lightness of the truck, the light construction of the plow, and the depth of the snow. All in all, I'm pretty pleased with this device, which came from Home Depot, but was made by a Canadian firm. I guess Canadians know their snow.

Even so, the Rover and tractor both got stuck once before the job was done. There was a lot of snow.

One important consideration when plowing is that you have to clear out the mail box pretty good, or our mail lady just drives on by.

The plow blade is hinged and tilts up when it encounters an immovable pile of snow or ice, reducing the impact to the frame, and allowing you to pile snow higher with multiple sweeps.

The garage was well hidden.

This is after I cleared most of the snow away with the tractor. I always leave a foot or two to be cleared by hand because the garage's sliding metal door will bend if I hit it with the loader.

Sh**ty little lambie sits out silly snow storm

We had to bring one of Nellie's new lambs in for a bath. The orange-yellow poop that lambs have while still at the teat sometimes sticks to their fleece. Most mothers will clean it up, but not our Nellie, I guess. Shameless! This lamb had a fairly big old slab of pure lamb-merde encrusted to her leg.

A little soapy water and she was ready to go. Mom was glad to have her back, but says can we use scented dish soap next time?

In other news, we had a fairly big dump of wet spring snow yesterday, seen here on Aimee's beloved Camry.

Yes, there is a car under that snow drift.

We got one last snow day for the year, making six or seven total, plus 14 inches by Aimee's reckoning. I have to say it may have been more like a foot and a half of snow because she was measuring on the picnic table, and there was a stiff breeze throughout the storm which would have blown some of the snow away from the table.

It took an hour with the tractor yesterday and two hours today to move all the snow out of the way. We were on our own for this one. The town plow only just showed up, 30 hours after the storm began. But neighbor Ham plowed out to the road sometime during the night, so we were only snowed in temporarily. The power flickered off and on quite a few times and we know that 3,500 homes in the county to the south went without power for a day or so, but despite some flickering, we have power still. It probably helped a great deal that the line crew cleared the Great Farm's power distribution line where it comes through the woods, widening the corridor and taking out hundreds of trees that were crowding the line.

Now it's 40 F out there and getting warmer in the sun, and I expect much of this new snow will melt today or tomorrow, and what is left will be rained on Tuesday, so we expect to be back to spring-like conditions by the middle of the week.

Luckily, no more lambs appear to have been born. I say "appear." We may not know for sure. I greatly dislike late spring snow storms because a ewe may decide to drop her lambs off in a snowbank somewhere. The lambs can't dry off and if not found right away may die of hypothermia. We then find one or more dead lambs after the snow melts.

So we've been extra careful to get out every few hours and observe the ewes, including in the dead of night. Night checks are a drag, but it helps I have an aging bladder and have to get up anyway, while Aimee generally stays up late, and so can check before she comes to bed.

I think Tillie will be next to give birth. She's huge, her teats are swollen, and the lambs seem to have shifted in her belly. Mollie, on the other hand, has a bright pink vulva, so she may be getting ready too.

Of the two year-and-a-half-old ewes who will give birth for the first time this year, and whose P-names I can never remember (Poppy and Penelope?) only the white one is obviously "showing."

This year is "R," and Aimee has decided on "Roxy" and "Rhea." The first ram lamb we see is likely to be "Rivet."

I thought of that one, and am quite proud of myself. I might see how "Rigger" goes down too, whether or not I can get the wifely approval, and then we'll have a series going in honor of RAF technical lingo.

When we get to "S" next year, we can have "Sooty" and "Sumpy" (RAF slang for engine-bashers). Especially if they're black lambs.

Something to look forward to.

Warmer, and the sun returning

We're into the racing days, and over the hump. It will be equinox in five week's time, and each day the sun climbs a little higher and stays a little longer in the sky.

More importantly, the jet stream is predicted this week to flatten out and retreat into Canada for the first time this year, which will give us much warmer air for much longer. It's snowing out there right now, but warm, wet snow, not cold, dry snow.

(I think you have to live here for a while to appreciate such fine distinctions!)

Yesterday at the college a slow thaw set in for much of the day and the ice in the parking lots, assisted by salt, was melting fast and making a slushy mess.

But you've no idea how much nicer it is to see water in the liquid rather than the solid state.

Winter isn't over by a long chalk. But it is abating, and becoming more manageable. During the recent cold weather, for instance, we had to use the oil furnace quite a bit.

Now we can keep the house pretty cosy with the wood stove at one end and an electrical heater at the other.

Of course, this all comes with downsides. There isn't much chance of a snow day this week, so we'll have five full days' work.

Water from melting snow banks has penetrated the shed, and threatens to keep things wet in there for a while.

And the driveway will be a muddy mess when those snowbanks begin to melt for real. Generally snow melt around here is a gradual process driven by sunshine, but accelerated by rainstorms that come in March and April. If we were to get a muddy rainstorm before the snowbanks are reduced by the sun, we would probably be in pretty bad shape for a while. They can be moved further out of the way, but right now that would be difficult since all that wet stuff over the weekend has set up like concrete, and our 12 horse, compact Kubota can't easily move that kind of snow.

But anyone in Maine who has time and a big enough front-end loader is busy moving snow as far out of the way as they can, getting ready for the thaw. Last night on the TV news they gave out a warning about snow crews working to truck snow out of city streets and away from freeway on- and off-ramps.

Getting ready for the thaw. Or more snow. Another two-footer between now and April is not at all out of the question.

Today is a night lecture, so I get some time to do farm chores during the daylight, see how the land lies, and possibly even take the dogs on a decent walk. Hopefully a snowmobile has been by on the trail and packed it down.

The last time I looked, the trail was still covered in deep stuff.

Snow work

We had another foot of snow on Wednesday night and Thursday. We were both busy at work, and the snow didn't fall fast enough to close roads or college. (The nice thing about a snow day is, you get extra time to move snow.) As a result, we had to leave it all until Saturday morning. Aimee's little car was still buried, and so she took the truck all day to go shopping and to go clean off her desk at the college, leaving me to sort it all!

No matter. As I mentioned before, somewhat to Aimee's chagrin, and not without somewhat snarky comment, possibly snow removal is still a man's world in Maine.

It certainly seems to be so at the Womerlippi farm. Empirically so, I would say.

Not that I'm complaining.

Because, sexist thoughts aside, it was nice to get out. The sun was bright, the snow lovely, and the tractor, as always, shifted several times more than it's own weight in snow in a matter of minutes, leaving us nice tidy piles and plenty of room to work in the dooryard.

A "dooryard," by the way, pronounced "door yahhhd," is the term Mainers use for what Yorkshire and other English folk call a farmyard. Ours comprises functionally the various spaces between the garage, mailbox, barn and greenhouse. I say functionally because that's the area that gets used for dooryard chores: splitting wood, fixing cars and machinery, shearing sheep, moving grain, fodder, and water. I get ninety percent of my annual exercise in the dooryard.

There's a tractor's eye-view of our dooryard, looking tidy and fit for the work week. Dad always used to say, whenever we went as a family on a drive in the country, that we'd finish up lost, in a farmyard or churchyard.

Jewel the ewe-l has dropped her lambs in the womb and "made a bag." Her belly is dragging in the snow, poor girl. Looks like two, or maybe three. I hope not three. Could be any day, but last year she did this early too, and it was weeks before she actually gave birth.

We also have two new hens, courtesy of Ed and Amy. Rhode Island Reds. They're settling in with the usual pecking order adjustment. Hens are such fascists.

We'll keep you posted.

PS: Here's Guardian article about how, in Iceland since their collapse, women are increasingly those running the country, while men are less influential because they are blamed for the collapse.

See? If they'd just stuck to what they know: Moving snow.

Surprise on the snowmobile trail

Here's what our farmyard looks like after the most recent snow storm and clean up. I generally plow the snow up into these big banks with the tractor's front-end loader, but two of the banks visible in this photo are already too high for the loader. I had to start pushing the snow in the other direction.

Surrounded as we are by fields and woods, we're not likely to run out of places to put snow. But it is getting inconvenient to mover. I have to move it further than normal. The old system that has worked every other winter is no longer working.

We've had a lot of snow this year.

I went for two walks with the dogs today. The first was uneventful. The second, just before dusk, came with two surprises.

The first surprise was these tracks, which took me a minute to identify. When I got to the big apple tree at the start of the snowmobile trail, it was obvious that someone had been knocking the apples that remained down to eat them. But who?

Then I figured it out. We've been seeing wild turkeys lately, wandering around the various dooryards here on the Great Farm.

The prints of turkey feathers in the snow proved it. They must have been jumping up into the tree to knock the apples off.

The next surprise, of which I have no pictures, came later on the second walk, when I spotted Haggis "pointing" like a silly old pointer dog at something in the deep snow off to the side of the trail. He was very intent on whatever-it-was, all concentration and quivering nose.

But all the stupid human could see was an old dry oak leaf, and then just a little behind that, the kind of hole made in powder snow when some snow falls off a tree.

But right then, as I craned to see what was in the hole, a grouse flew out! And directly, too, no running start. It just leaped out of the hole like some kind of missile out of a tube!

Made me jump.

I expect it might also have been a ptarmigan, because I certainly didn't see it well enough to know.

But I sure figured out what Haggis had been staring at.

Topsy turvy world

The British Isles are once again almost entirely covered in snow, creating chaos and disorder, as well as making school children inordinately happy to be let off school unexpectedly.

I like snow days too. You can't beat that feeling of utter relief and unexpected freedom, to be let off school, or in my case to not have to go to work and teach, and then you get to play in the snow! Awesome.

I tried to find this year's satellite picture of the now-white sceptered isles again to post a link, but couldn't. No matter. You've seen it before.

The UK government has ordered an audit of snow clearing capability -- a day late and a dollar short. And UK farmers have been permitted to get out on the rural roads with their off-road only pink diesel (which we have over here too) and clear snow with loaders and skid steers and the like. We do that stuff too. Just last year I had to rescue Jackson Town's number two plow truck from our own front lawn with our tiny Kubota tractor.

That was fun for me. The tractor liked it too.

Meanwhile the temperature in the yUKe has been down in the low negative twenties (Celsius) in some spots, which is around the low single negative digits on the Fahrenheit scale.

So even a Mainer would agree that's cold.

But not very cold. Just an ordinary kind of cold.

Really cold in this part of Maine is negative 20 or 25 Fahrenheit, which is -28 to -31 Celsius.

But meanwhile we expect our first "real" snowstorm soon. So far we've just had an inch or two of slush or a dusting of spindrift.

I doubt very much that, even were we to get a couple-three feet of snow this weekend, which is a medium big snowstorm in Maine, we'd see any particular headline news about it. That sort of thing happens most winters. Snow in Maine tends to come in big nor'easter storms, which occur every two to three weeks, maybe four to six storms per season. A nor'easter could dump anything from six inches to four or even five feet, but eighteen or twenty four inches is perfectly normal and may happen three or four times a year.

I'm not saying the UK has it easy. If you don't have the equipment, and you're not used to it, snow can be very difficult.

I'm just talking about snow.

Moving snow, again

We had a snow, slush, and ice storm last night. No big deal, but with five inches of new wet, but very clean and white snow, icy trees, and sparkling air, it was pretty out this morning, especially on the high ground between here and the town of Brooks, Maine, where all the ice was heavy and glistening on the trees.

And warm. Above freezing almost as soon as the sun came up.

So it wasn't so terribly unpleasant to have to plow all that snow out of the way.

As reported earlier, it's taking longer to move snow with the tractor, because I have to go further to find a snow pile small enough that I can reach over it with the loader. This means making a lot of three point turns in our dooryard.

As you can see, the tractor can pick up a couple-three wheelbarrow's worth of snow at a time, especially when it's wet like it was today and so sticks together well.

If I had a full-size tractor, with a more powerful engine and a wider loader (and a modern, cushioned tractor seat), this job would go faster. I'd get one with a backhoe, too, so I could grub up stumps, to landscape around the farm and make new gardens and the like.

That purchase is probably going to have to wait a while. I don't think Aimee would agree that we have money for a second tractor, even if it would save me from a numb bum.

I needed to dig a pathway over to the oil tank filler. We are down to a quarter tank and need to get it filled. The tanker truck driver probably won't want wade through four feet of snow to do that job. I dug a snow trench instead.

That was enough exercise for a morning. We'll wait for a couple of snowmobiles to go by on the trail, and then walk to dogs this afternoon.

This tank hasn't been filled in three years because we use it so little. I expect the oil truck driver has forgotten where the filler cap is.

It's our Pittsburgh Steelers versus the Green Bay Packers in the Superbowl tonight. Two working class teams. Should be a good game. Aimee bought in extra chips and avocado pears (for guacamole).

If the Steelers lose, better not try to talk to Aimee for a day or three.

According to the Internet, 100,000,000 Americans will watch the game.

More importantly, between them they will consume 8,000,000 pounds of avocados during an average Superbowl.

It didn't say anything about how many chips or how much beer.

Cold Comfort Farm

Here's the interesting sight that greeted me this morning: The local plow truck had been around last night, for which we are grateful, but had plowed a nice "roadway" across our lawn, instead of on the actual road, and had left a five foot deep pile of snow between the roadway and the mailbox to boot.

I'm not complaining, though.

I'm grateful the town plow is willing to try to navigate our driveway at all.

We live on the edge of what was once a school bus turnaround. We own the turnaround, so we shouldn't ordinarily expect it to be plowed by the town's plow at all, but it's very difficult, especially after a heavy snow, for the plow truck driver to do a three-point turn on the part of the road that actually belongs to the town, and a lot easier for him to just keep driving around the turnaround, our driveway.

So every winter, most of the time, our driveway is plowed for free. Win-win, though -- the town plow truck therefore must take less time to do the part of the road that belongs to the town, which makes the overall job of plowing marginally cheaper for everyone else in the town, since the driver is paid by the hour.

But every once in a while some problem occurs. Last year I awoke one day to find a plow truck stuck in the middle of our lawn, and had to help dig it out with our tractor before the driver could get on his way.

Yesterday's deep snow lay unplowed all day until quite late in the evening. Then, while watching telly, I heard and saw the lights of the plow truck by our mailbox.

I wondered what had happened, but as the lights and noise went away, shrugged my shoulders and went back to the TV.

This morning it was pretty clear: The driver had tried to plow our lawn again, instead of the road, and as a result had gotten jimmied up in front of the mail box and had to back up and try again to make the turn.

So I had to get busy with the Kubota and plow away and put the road where it was supposed to be, fifteen feet further to the east, as well as move that big pile of snow in front of the mailbox. Here's a shot of the Kubota with its nose buried in the snow. Such a powerful little tractor. They don't make them like that anymore.

This all took a little while, and as a result my bum was pretty cold by the time I got done. This Kubota has the old type painted metal seat. They don't make them like that anymore, either, and for good reason.

I wear insulated coveralls for this job, but today they were not quite up to it.

I also found my left hand was getting pretty numb with the insulated work gloves. I have an old frostbite injury to my left pinky, which feels the cold pretty badly.

So I went inside for my Dachstein mitts. I have two pairs of these old fashioned oiled wool mountaineering mittens left over from my RAF Mountain Rescue days. My hand recovered it's feeling right away.

What I really need is a Dachstein mitt for the bum.

Mary-dog was quite dismayed to see the snow. She knew she had to empty her bladder this morning, but couldn't find anywhere to do it that wasn't up to her nose in snow.

Poor cold puppy.

After about two seconds of this, she was asking to be let back in the house.

What a wuss she is. Southern dog.

Forecast is -7 F tonight (-22 C), and -14 tomorrow night (-25 C). But it's always a few degrees colder here at 527 feet above sea level than the forecast says it will be.

Luckily, when it's that cold, it usually doesn't snow around here.

Otherwise I'd have to plow snow again and my bum would be really cold then.

Slower daze and first snow

We're now on Thanksgiving Break, a holiday that in previous years would have been a kind of mid-term, but because of this year's advanced end-of-term, on December 13th, becomes a kind of pre-end-of-term holiday. There will only be a week and a half of classes left after the break.

Accordingly, this isn't a complete holiday, since I have a stack of grading and a list of committee-work must-dos, but I decided that could all wait until so-called "Black Friday" just so I could feel the benefit. This is probably akin to not putting on your warmest winter coat until January, until it really gets cold, and something that was drilled into me as a child living in Yorkshire. The benefit you feel may be mostly in your head. But it's warm and cosy here in my den, with my cup of coffee and laptop, and I'm happy and grateful to not have to think about work until Friday.

There's also a vast list of pre-winter must-dos for the house and farm, but I'm whittling that down slowly. Items on this list include finding winter tires for all the vehicles, picking up the equipment from the dooryard and taking down the hot-wire fences and moving them out of the way of the various snowplows and other winter machinery, putting the tank heaters in the sheeps' water, "banking" up the kitchen crawl space, putting the hoophouse "to bed", and putting most of the garden machinery in said hoophouse, getting in the five gallons of kerosene that the tractor uses each winter, and so on.

All are jobs required to keep us safe and the sheep fed and things moving around here.

And not a moment too soon. Winter is clearly here. The sun is now about as low in the sky as it's going to get, the "racing days" have long stopped racing, and we have only about nine hours' daylight. It gets full light at seven and you can work outside in full light until about four in the afternoon. On a gloomy day, there's less than that.

We're forecast a wet and windy rainstorm for tomorrow, but it's snowing out there right now. The snow is mostly that thin windy stuff you get whenever the sky isn't that serious about snowing, but with a stiff breeze to spin it along nicely, it certainly counts as "inclement".

I'm glad I was able to get the snow tires sorted on Aimee's Camry already.

That was a chore. Tire operations around here get very busy when snow tire season comes about. For various reasons (a long story), I had to take the Camry to two tire places on Sunday, waiting an hour at the first one, and five hours at the second, with an hour's drive in between. Essentially, I lost a whole day of my vacation to this job. Sometimes I think that Aimee weighs the benefits of marriage in terms of not having to get her own snow tires, along with freedom from a long list of other such unpleasant chores.

She did make me a nice pie while all this was happening, so at least I came home to a warm house full of enticing pie-y smells. My warm cosy feeling didn't last that long, though. After a nice dinner, I made the mistake of looking at the weather forecast. Thirty mile-an-hour winds and 12 degrees F! Ouch. That much cold and wind wasn't expected for a few weeks. I was quickly out back with insulation board, wooden battens, and a cordless screwdriver, banking up the crawl space so the kitchen pipes wouldn't freeze. Luckily this job is a good deal easier now that the extension is built. There's only about ten running feet of wall to be banked, not the twenty-four feet there were before, and there's a nice big beam there now, all along the wall, to accept the screws for the battens.

As for the rest of the snow tire chore, there remained the Escort, my trusty, rusty old battle-wagon, now nicknamed the "Super Duty" Escort on the grounds of all the heavy lifting it's had to do since the truck's transmission was burned up. The beads on the Escort's snow tires were damaged by one of our local mechanics last year, totally trashing about $200 worth of very expensive synthetic rubber. I should have know better than to take it to this particular shop, a chaos of dirt and grease, with hoses flying and OSHA violations by the minute and second, but I was trying to save time and money. Had I been thinking when I first saw the damage, I should have said something and asked for compensation, and I certainly would have said something if it was one of the chain operations in Bangor, but it doesn't do to be too pushy with people you actually know, and the guy in question has helped me out with one or two things before. I had to decide to just "eat" the damage.

How much I have to eat is the question. I'm trying to decide between 1) a work-about, jerry-rigged kind of fix involving lots of bead sealer and some gasket cement, 2) getting new snow tires, and 3) just relying on the Land Rover whenever it snows.

Using the Land Rover would be fine except for the fact that it is slightly more expensive in gas, and I'd need to worry about road salt. Last year was of course the first year in which the Rover was an winter driving option for us, and a fine option it was too whenever there was more than a few inches of snow on the road. But it's a bit of a waste of money and precious Land Rover road life if there isn't that much snow, especially if that means there's lots of road salt about. I know that eventually I'll need to strip this old vehicle down to nothing and put in a new frame and bulkhead, but I want to make the current frame last a few years yet, hopefully into my own retirement, when I'd have all the time in the world to do the job properly. I'd much rather wear out the Escort, which will have to be scrapped come June in any case, as it probably can't pass inspection again.

Anyway, dear reader, by the time you have gotten this far down my tedious accounting of all these winter preparations, you should either a) be bored to tears, or b) be aware that winter is serious business around here, or c) both. It doesn't matter much, since in any case what I have to do now is go out in the spin-drift and feed the hungry sheep.

Winter is here, whether we're ready or not!

Grades and snow, snow and grades

It's the weekend before midterm grades are due, and we've been grading away.

Grading is of course "marking" in British, although it's probably not what it used to be. After many years of allowing exams and papers to be submitted electronically, but doing most of the grading on paper, I now have experimental online exams and grading for one of my classes. The college expects us to switch to largely online grading throughout the curriculum.

This innovation certainly seems like it saves work. My midterm exam grading took only about two or thre hours per section, instead of the normal five to ten, and required no paper whatsoever.

It will be interesting to see if the students learn as much. One purpose of grading, indeed, probably the best purpose, is to teach. Students learn as much if not more from their own mistakes and from instructor comments on exams and papers than from the classroom discussions.

I use a green pen for grading, and I explain to the students that all that green scrawl on their papers is part of what they're paying for at college: the corrections that will help them learn how to produce workplace-ready professional product.

We'll have to wait and see if computer corrections are as personalized and as effective as green scrawl.

As a partial consequence of the online revolution, Aimee and I both got done with our grading by Saturday afternoon. This, even though I walked the dogs twice and cleaned up the snotty snow and ice in the dooryard in the morning. I have to say, I really didn't feel the loss of the weekend the way I normally would before grades are due, and I got my chores done too.

I even made a large crock pot meal of spicy pulled pork, from last year's pig. This, with our own mashed potatoes and some of the corn Aimee put up, will be today's Sunday supper, and last into the work week.

Yum.

The weather has been snotty lately, snow and rain, rain and sleet, cloud and snow and fog and rain. Eventually the jet stream will meander north of us and we'll be off the snow track and break into spring. The maple sap is running, one of the first signs of spring around here, as witnessed by the level in the farmer's white plastic collecting tub at the bottom of Ward Hill road. The thermometer is hovering around 33-35 degrees F, barely enough to keep the snow from melting. Next week it will be 35-37, the week after that 38-40 and so on, and by the time March is done, so will be winter, more or less.

I'm looking forward to it.

There's always the chance of an April snowstorm, but that kind of snow doesn't last long.

Lambs will come soon. This year's lamb letter is "T".

Should be an easy year for names.

One, of course, will have to be "Tango," after the RAF Leeming Mountain Rescue Team VHF radio call sign.

Submit all suggestions to the wife of the house. She's in charge of naming lambs.

Snow day!

Checking my email before going in to work today, there was the following message which I was half-expecting. Not daring to hope, really.

"To employees and students,

Due to the hazardous weather outlook for later on today, the college will be closed Wednesday December 9.

Travel safely, if you travel,

XXX"

Yea. Snow days are the best. And reasonable. A fairly substantial blizzard is bearing down on New England having dropped several inches to a foot of snow on the mid-west. There are some high winds associated with this thing. Not enough to cause a crisis in Maine, but enough to make you change your plans if you're a sensible person. No job of work you have to get to is worth dying on the side of the road in a snowbank, or getting hit by a plow truck.

It's almost the end of term here, less than a week of regular classes to go, and so the light at the end of the tunnel is visible. But still, we're bone weary and need rest and could also use an extra day or bit of one to catch up on farm projects and housework. The snow is not expected till the afternoon.

The barn is roofed, just in time, and we have a snow day, so time to do a few things around here before the snow actually hits.

An example; Our neighbors called yesterday to ask us to take down some stock fence that impedes snow removal. The only reason the fence is still up is because I've been exerting my remaining energy on the weekends getting the roof on the barn we're building at the college.

Another: The tractor is out of diesel. Can't move snow easily without that.

And then, I think I will wait out the blizzard lying on the couch and reading not a serious book, but a novel.

Snow blues -- elsewhere for a change!

When you live in a snowy place you look out to see how others manage when their conditions begin to approximate yours. I'm not sure why. Morbid curiosity, perhaps. Last year's arctic oscillation proved interesting in this respect, with a great volume of snow dumped on mid-Atlantic states (that do get snow regularly, but not usually that much), and on the whole island of Great Britain, which was quite beautifully covered in snow from head (John o' Groats) to foot (Land's End) for the first time in living memory.

Britain's early snow this weekend was illustrated by the Guardian today, including a series of pictures from some old haunts of mine, including a pub on top of the North Yorkshire Moors where my old RAF Mountain Rescue Team would sometimes drink beer and sing songs till dawn, some kind of reenactment of a Yorkshiremen's Valhalla.

Hard to imagine from where I sit today that we could pack fifteen from our team and twenty-five from the Cleveland Team (we called them the "Bonington beards" because so many were hirsute, like their namesake) and raise the rafters like that. But we did.

Those were the days.

(And for this, I get a pension?)

One such night, shorter than some, saw us safely wrapped in our "green slug" RAF-issue sleeping bags by two or three in the morning, after multiple rounds of brew and chorus, not too shabby a craic.

At seven or so I stumbled out of my bag in a fresh gale to find our duty cook, young Eugene O'Grady (of great fame and splendor whose spirited rendition of Danny Boy in a London Irish accent would have the entire team rolling in fits of laughter by the end of the first chorus), struggling to hold onto the roof pole of his standard NATO 12 x 12 green canvas cook shack with one hand, while trying manfully to fry compo-ration sausages with the other.

That was all very interesting at the time, but what was really interesting was that the entire inside of the tent, and indeed of the tent I'd slept in, had I noticed while getting up, was covered in an inch of rime ice, brought down with the winds straight from Svalbard and points north.

So I know first-hand what winter can bring to the Lion Inn above Hutton le Hole. Other than a lock-in with no possibility of police intervention.

Aimee, by the way, loves those old British place names like Hutton le Hole. She thinks they're hilarious. I find them more serious, indicative of previous failed struggles. Like any good fan of Robin Hood and Saxon freedoms, I blame the Norman Invasion for such inanities. That out-of-place le is a dead giveaway. Most of the area around Hutton was "ethnically cleansed" by William the Conqueror in retribution for northern resistance to the 1066 invasion. If the nasty buggers, the root and branch of Britain's aristocracy, had only stayed in perfidious bloody France where they belong, all conceivable wrongs would undoubtedly be righted and Britain would be a class-free society and I would never have abandoned it to come to America and get my rightful education. A thousand years of tribulation, and the Tories can still win power with an Old Etonian like Cameron? I'm sure he's of Anglo-Norman ancestry. He can't possibly be a proper Scottish Cameron.

But I digress. Back to Eugene and the sausages.

There was no breakfast that day. The wind and ice forbade it. Instead we did what the best-trained British military units have always been able to do smartly in the face of adversity. We retreated, to use a hated Norman-ism, post-haste. Like Napolean from Moscow, in perfect disarray. Abandoning our erstwhile landlord and friends at the pub to their silly weather, we struck camp in ten minutes flat, just before camp struck us, rolled our tents into giant snowballs, eight men needed to throw each one into the back of the four-ton truck, and our four Land Rovers then followed the said four-ton, four-wheel drive, military truck down the moors roads like little unhappy ducklings after their mother duck.

By the time we got to the Vale of York a thousand feet lower, the sun was shining, it was a warm sunny Sunday afternoon, the snow had melted, and we wondered why the hell we'd run away so quickly.

Ah, the memories. Wonder how well I'd do clearing the snow on the Great Farm after six hours of drinking and singing and three hours of sleep these days.

I think it would probably kill me dead.

Some of my regular UK farm blogs are also worried about the snow.

Life at the End of the Road has to take pigs to the butchers Monday, in what may be a blizzard. I'm sympathetic. Trucking pigs anywhere is stressful enough, but having to take them across the Highlands in a blizzard is adding insult to injury, even if you are driving a Land Rover and pulling a proper trailer. And, like it is here in Maine, apparently there's only one day you can take them!

We're lucky that our butchers have always been able to work with us when we've had difficulties.

While Stonehead was up to his thighs already by Friday, with several days snow more to go.

Remember, if in doubt, follow Monty Python's advice, and the traditions of RAF Leeming Mountain Rescue, and Robin Hood and all good Saxon bandits, and the entire nation of France, for that matter,

Run away, run away!

A long walk on hard snow

Today was a fine and warm and pleasant early spring day, and a good day to go for a big hike. The nights have been cold, the days warmer, and the snow has set up well, so that although it is still several feet deep in places, and a least a foot in most places, you can walk on top of it.

Spring snow is the best hiking.

After a relatively successful earlier walk demonstrated that conditions were good, Haggis and I decided on an expedition to the Howes Pond basin. We started out on a snowshoe trail, which was firm and pleasant, but soon realized we could hike anywhere we wanted.

The snow and ice covers all the wet spots and underbrush, and so is in some ways easier walking than in summer. This first shot is of the pond, which is shallow, a lead in the ice which we crossed on a snow-bridge. The next shot is of the old beaver lodge, which seems disused. We chatted later with the landowner who said he had had some beavers trapped close by a while ago because they were flooding the road.

Then there's a shot of Haggis running the snow shoe trail.

Finally, mud season is here, and the roads get sticky in the afternoon or in the rain which comes every few days. This mud will stay with us until the ice that is below the surface melts, allowing the water to actually go somewhere. This is what a dirt road looks like in Maine in mud season. Click on the image to get the full effect. This, and the snow and ice, is why we drive four-wheel drive vehicles. Aimee and I used to have to drive three miles of a dirt road like this to get in and out when we lived at the Bale House. Here at the "New House" which is actually 109 years old this year, we only have a quarter mile of mud to get through before we reach blacktop, and that's not so bad because it's steep and drains well. The ruts in this mud were only about nine inches deep at the most.

This was a good walk, and I even managed to buy a third of a cord of very nice dry firewood from the landowner, who logs this forest lightly for fuel and sells it. I was glad to get it because my pile was almost out. With that La Nina, it's been a cold snowy winter, and I used quite a bit more than I thought I would.

Now, after walking three miles and stacking firewood, I'm nicely tired.

New pac boots on new snow

It's Thanksgiving Day in America. I'm thankful for warm feet.

My old pac boots blew out. They developed a crack in the rubber, and so whenever the snow was slushy, the felt liners would get wet, and my feet would get cold.

This was no fun for me. Since I have to go out every day to tend the sheep, I prefer to have dry feet.

The old boots came from LL Bean and so we took them back to the store and received partial credit of $51. But I didn't like the looks, nor the price, of the replacement LL Bean snow boots. At $210, they were expensive, and they weren't even what I think of as proper snow-pacs. All futuristic-looking black plastic, they might not have looked out-of-place under a Darth Vader costume.

So we went online and discovered that although the LaCrosse company has also switched to fancy new boot types that look like they come out of the "Transformers" movie, they still sell their old-style classic Snow-Pac.

At $110, these were good value. I've had a previous pair of LaCrosse snow pacs, and they work great.

With the serious winters we get up here, you have to take boots pretty seriously if you want to be safe and comfortable.

Warm feet are happy feet.

I gave my $51 LL Bean store credit card to Aimee. She'll spend it.

The snow arrived early Wednesday morning, and it blew pretty well until afternoon. As soon as it stopped I went out with my new boots to start up the tractor and plow.

Then I took some pictures with my forty-dollar camera. I had to switch to the "macro" setting to snap the new boots, and I left it there for a shot of a layer that was happily laying until I disturbed her with the camera, and this ewe-nose.

Tillie, our number one sheep, wanted to get in on the camera action.

Ice climbing, sort of

I expect that more than a few of my former colleagues from the RAF, despite middle age or retirement, still climb ice and snow, or climb alpine and mountaineering routes that include ice and snow.

Those of us that settled down to other kinds of lives have different challenges. I find interesting physical challenges in farming, construction and renewable energy work, and sometimes the things I do even have recognizably similar kinds of physical challenges as the work I used to do as a military mountaineer and mountain rescue troop.

Our porch roof was pretty slick to begin this morning after a cool night with a dusting of new snow. I discovered this after I had stepped out onto it quite confidently, expecting the same kind of footing as yesterday. I beat a careful retreat and advanced again throwing ice-melt crystals before me like some swami with rose petals. That allowed me to walk without skidding off the roof.

If I had skidded off, the consequences may not have been too bad, assuming I hit one of the deeper spots. But I didn't care to risk it.

Then the last of the ice, by now honeycombed with holes from the ice melt crystals I put down last thing yesterday, was chipped off a bit at a time. Only a little roofing came with it. This roofing will need to be replaced this spring now, whether I like it or not. This latest ice dam problem, and my attempts to fix it, has done too much damage.

Then a trench had to be shoveled for the ladder along the front of the porch where the snow was deep. The roof was too slick, still, to do the work from on top, so I decided to work from the ladder.

After that the ice-melt cable could be attached with the clips provided. This was easy enough to do, although I soaked two pairs of gloves through and got cold wet hands doing it.

The ladder was fun. It had to be pounded down into the snow to remain at all stable. At one point I was half-way up and the thing slid sideways and broke a gutter attachment.

Another job to do in the spring.

But a broken gutter, plus a replacement roof that we knew we had to replace at some point anyway, is better than a porch collapsed under several tons of snow and ice.

And I needed the exercise. And next time the snow falls, I can prevent an ice dam just by plugging in the cable.

Long weakened and winter frost and snow

Last winter in our dooryard...


We have a four day weekend, of which, in the normal way of holidays in my occupation, I will get 2.5 days for home projects, and 1.5 days for school projects.

Today we'll work on cars in the morning -- that maddening clunk in the Ford, and the coolant exchange for the Toyota. In the afternoon it's off to school to give a talk at a student climate action conference.

Sunday will be official finish-up-the-Bale-House day. The job isn't quite done, of course, but by the end of Sunday everything will be done that only I could do -- the electrical work, the plumbing, the heavy drywall/insulation project, the most disgusting cleaning jobs. It wasn't reasonable to expect the new occupant to do such a lot of work, and especially heavy duty filth removal, even if that person is getting the place rent free. And some of the jobs required specific skills and knowledge most folk don't have.

But what is left is just a little painting and light carpentry for trim, some lighter cleaning. Reasonable jobs to leave for the new occupant to contribute some work.

Hooray for official finish-up-the-Bale-House day!

Monday is finalize-the-ex-servicemens-journal day. That will be an indoor job, and even quite relaxing.

Tuesday is a cell-phone tower climb to set an anemometer to measure the wind for a possible community wind project.

So I am so looking forward to my four-day weekend! Nothing like a good rest.

Sarcasm aside, I already feel better -- nothing, actually, like a good night's sleep followed by the nice feeling that I don't have to go anywhere except stumble out to my workshop this morning.

And we can listen to Car Talk while fixing cars, always a good arrangement.

So I'm not too ticked off about my non-holiday. The really relaxing holiday for us is Christmas and New Years when we visit Aimee's parents in Virginia, and I have absolutely nothing to do, not even a wood stove to feed. I'm often bored by this lack of work, but I make up for it by sleeping about fifteen hours a day!

Then we come back to deep winter in Maine, which is always a nice rest.

The northern hemisphere has tilted away from the sun enough for us to really feel it. The days are much shorter. Snow was forecast for the western mountains and northern Maine last night. We had First Frost on Monday morning here on the Great Farm, although it didn't kill the dregs of the tomato plants yet.

That was quite late for First Frost. Climate change.

But winter is a-coming, and with it the good long rest that comes from almost all outdoor work being canceled for the season. That means about a third of my total work, and all of my exercise, so I usually have to ski and snowshoe to make up for that, but it gets me down to an ordinary kind of 40-45 hour, 5-day work week, which is much better than the 7-day, 60-80 work week that is my norm the other three seasons of the year.

So roll on winter!

When we were kids, at church or in school assembly, we sang the old Anglican hymn, In the Bleak Midwinter by Rossetti,

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 incarnate,
Jesus Christ.

Of course, we never got winters like that in Sheffield. Back in the early 1800s, they did, before the Little Ice Age ended. But we certainly get winters like the one described in that first verse here in Maine.

Every year, almost without exception.

Wonder if I can find time to move some of that farm stuff in our dooryard this weekend.

Need to get ready for winter....