Here's our front lawn and mailbox after the recent storm and snow clearing efforts.
Yes, that snowbank is five feet high.
It took about three hours hard labor to get out from under all that snow. The garage was drifted in up to my shoulders, and there was a lot of snow between the driveway and our firewood pile. I felt glad that I'd bought some in the other week, and so had some on hand.
It's best to get the snow moved when you can, because you never know when you will get more, or worse, a thaw. We will get the latter starting tomorrow. It's supposed to be up to 46 F. Luckily, there won't be much rain.
Unlikely that all this snow will melt, but some of it will. Then what doesn't melt, will re-freeze, making it very much more difficult to move.
Apologies for not posting recently. I was having camera difficulty, and busy with the holiday visiting.
One of the best things about winter in Maine is the clear cold sky we get much of the time, mostly in January and February, but also in December sometimes. The Canadian high pressure systems that dominate our weather about half the time may bring cold, but they also bring clear, deep blue skies and abundant sunshine.
Yesterday and the day before were like that. It was the weekend after Final Exams at college and we had grading, but Aimee also wanted to visit her beech tree study plots out in the woods behind the house, while I wanted to get our Christmas tree.
This meant that Mary-dog and Haggis both got a good walk with Aimee, while Haggis got two, because he came, as he always does, with me to find the tree.
The annual Womerlippi Christmas tree is an occasion for ritual. It always follows the same ten important steps:
The husband announces he's off to get the tree.
The wife groans and complains "not again!"
The husband must then say "Only a little one."
The husband then takes Haggis the dog out, with a saw or some other tool, disappears into the deep forest for a very long time, where he finds a suitable tree, cuts it, and drags it into the garage to trim. The tree must be malformed, lopsided, and at least two feet longer than the ceiling height of the house.
The tree, suitably trimmed, covered in snow and dead leaves, is erected in the house. The top must be bent over by the ceiling. The wife must look at it and shake her head theatrically. The husband drags the tree back out, trims enough off the base to make it fit, and brings it back in.
Now the tree is really deformed.
The husband must now be unable to find the ornaments, even though he put them away last year. Then ensues the ritual 'hunt for the ornament box."
Finding the ornaments and lights, the husband trims the tree.
The husband lights the tree and stands back, rapt, to admire his handiwork.
The wife inspects the husband's handiwork, and smiles just a little tiny bit.
This important ritual, apart from the Removal of the Tree procedure scheduled for Twelfth Night, is now complete for another year.
This year I failed utterly to complete the ritual as it should have been done. The tree was not big enough. It fit in the room the first time!
Better luck next year.
In other important news, the winter solstice occurs tomorrow around 7pm Maine time.
It's always a good feeling, when you live in a northern place, to see the days begin to get longer again. The coldest weather is still to come, but the sunshine and blue skies we begin to get more and more after the solstice make up for the colder temperatures.
(Youtube embed from Ed Arnold or "Breakdubber", playing The Mist Covered Mountains of Home on the small pipes.)
Aimee was away this morning doing the weekly shopping, so I hooked up my computer to the speakers and listened to some BBC Radio shows while cleaning up around here, and plastering the bathroom. You can now get pretty much every show there is on all the various BBC Radio stations streamed online, a boon for ex-pats. One of these days we'll be able to get BBC iPlayer too, possibly for paying the license fee.
The day that happens, I'll be glad to drop our current satellite service, with four hundred channels of absolutely nothing worth watching, and send my money to the Beeb. British folks at home who complain about the license fee? It's a bargain. In this country you need to pay hundreds for cable or satellite service, to just get a handful of shows you might like, out of thousands you don't.
So I like the BBC Radio. But Aimee thinks it's silly.
She was out, so today, I listened to a new show out of BBC Radio Scotland, hosted by Barbara Dickson, called Scotland on Song. A nice accompaniment to scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees.
(It needed it very badly, having been neglected since our last vacation. And I wore my carpenters knee pads, because my knees are still sore from my spills the other week.)
The show made me quite homesick for the north country of England, where I come from, as well as the Highlands of Scotland where I lived for a few years while in the RAF and just after demob.
Once upon a time, I was a British traditional music singer. This was nothing fancy, nor was it the more "stagey" performance art of a kind done here in America by folk musicians. It was just what you did. We all were singers, in the Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue Service. It's hard for Americans to imagine this subculture, military folksingers, of all things, but we were, and good at it too. We spent long hours driving all over the country in our Land Rover and Bedford truck convoys, and more long hours in quiet rural pubs, and so we sang songs in male voice harmony to entertain ourselves.
The tradition was inherited from the rural and coastal people the service mixed with in the villages, as well as from the British rambler's fraternity, and it was all jumbled in with the folk music revival of the 1960s and 1970s. By the time I became part of this tradition in the RAF, it was forty years old already, but the songs in some cases were much older and would have been sung in those very same ancient pubs by fishermen, farmers, drovers and even soldiers in times past.
My family sang songs too, when I was a kid, to while away the time on driving vacations to Scotland. Mostly we sang Scottish traditionals and old favorites like Loch Lomond, that my father probably learned from my grandfather.
There were many popular lines of songs for the RAF MR Teams. Climbing and rambling songs were old standards: The Climber's Clementine and Ewan McColl's The Manchester Rambler, which I always loved, my grandfather having been part of the Kinder Trespass. We also sang several Ewan McColl songs, including Shoals of Herring. Other favorites included Scottish music of Jacobite or nationalist vein, including the entirety ofthe Corries' work (Peggy Gordon, The Rose of Alladale, and a dozen or two bloodthirsty rebel rants), and a good deal of the Dubliners' too. (Black Velvet Band, The Leaving of Liverpool, etc.)
Paradoxically, we didn't draw the line at Irish nationalist songs like We're off to Dublin in the Green, although they were never favorites, nor the proto-feminist Maids When You're Young Never Wed an Old Man, another odd choice but very popular.
That one, I sing a verse or two of to Aimee whenever she flaunts her more youthful age at me!
Some of the really traditional pieces we sang were Burns songs, or collected by Burns, and we could all recite several of these, as well as some poetry, if only the Ode to a Haggis or Scots Wha Hae.
One song I will never forget and haunts me still, because it is so beautiful was Show me Airigh, from the Poolewe area of the northern Highlands, which sounds traditional but is actually quite young, written by a local gamekeeper from those parts in the nineteen-fifties or sixties, and then given to the teams, probably the Kinloss Team, at some piss-up or ceilidh or another. I first heard it while drinking cheap whisky in a bothy in Easter Ross, a suitable location.
Funny thing is, I learned this hunter's song long before I ever came to America and learned to hunt deer. But, a lilting song, it needs a soft, lilting west coast accent, with the soft 's" sound, to sound right.
Give to me a rifle and set me on the trail High hills before me, the early sunshine pale Rising o`er the maiden and reflecting on Firemore High on the hillside the royal rivals roar.
Chorus:
Show me Airigh `n Eilean, below me Loch Maree, Leave me to my solitude and let me wander free To climb the rocky mountains and search the glen below For a fine ten pointer or a royal `o`.
Take me where the falcon and the wild eagle soar One mile north from the bothy at Carnmore. On lofty Beinn a Chaisgein I will stalk the royal stag And thrill to the call of the wild grey lag.
Over heather moorland a wandering I will go Slioch in the distance beneath a vale of snow Forever standing guard over bonny Loch Maree Home of the wild deer so beautiful and free.
Take me where I faintly see the distant Isle of Lewis Show me all this world and there`s one place I would choose To represent the beauty of my homeland fair The Loch Maree islands from the heights of Ardlair.
When the light is fading and the day is wearing through You`ll find me heading west to the village of Poolewe Farewell to bonny Kernsary my wandering footsteps guide Through the pale woods of Inveran by the riverside.
Another Scottish song that still has the power to make me weep is The Mist Covered Mountains. The tune is above, in the YouTube embed at the top of this post.
The words, well suited for any homesick northern British person, are below:
Chorus Oh ro soon shall I see them; Oh he ro see them oh see them. Oh ro soon shall I see them the mist covered mountains of home.
There shall I visit the place of my birth And they'll give me a welcome the warmest on earth All so loving and kind full of music and mirth, In the sweet sounding language of home.
There shall I gaze on the mountains again, On the fields and the woods and the burns and the glens, Away 'mong the corries beyond human ken In the haunts of the deer I will roam
Hail to the mountains with summits of blue, To the glens with their meadows of sunshine and dew. To the women and men ever constant and true, Ever ready to welcome one home.
I miss this music. But my time for it may come again. With retirement one day not so very far off, and possibly enough money to spend more time in Britain, I think I shall want to sing again. I will certainly want to hike those hills again.
All I ask out of life at this point, is that I get some more time to spend in these northern and highland places before I go. I'm fifty years old next year, and getting fat and grizzled and gray around the edges and very curmudgeon-ish, and although I love my wife and this small farm, sometimes I just want to take a walk through the dusk of the British countryside to a pub and sing some songs and drink some beer. Americans left all those traditions behind long ago, and even those folks who are musicians here are very, well, professional at it.
The idea that just a bunch of ordinary folks in a pub, a rugby team or a rescue team or a choir or folk club, or just some people, would just sing for the love of it, well, that doesn't happen here.
Our dog Haggis might like that, too. He'd be allowed in a British pub, and folks would fuss over him. He's not allowed anywhere here except for walks and the vets!
And you never know, it might grow on Aimee. Perhaps not the singing, but the walking and pubs and green countryside.
A few years ago I took her to Martindale, one of the quietest spots in the north, and a favorite place of mine for scenery and Norse history. She loved it, and I think began to see what it's all about.
It's hard to imagine staying in Britain, though. We both love the fact that we own this place, these few precious acres, which would be expensive in Britain, probably out of our reach.
But the other thing is, this Maine land grows stuff. It's productive. We have meat and fleece and yarn, vegetables and fruits in abundance, but above all, we have fuel just for the taking.
The reason Englishmen came to New England in the first place was for the fish and the forest trees. The reason this Englishman will stay is because here he can own his own part of the forest, and use the trees to keep him warm in his old age, as well as grow food, and hunt deer.
We're too practical to leave all that behind for the Highlands and what Sir Frank Fraser Darling called their "wet desert."
Here's a snap I took yesterday of one of our local Amish "schoolbus" adaptions. This one, a "four door" model made of plywood and two by fours and plastic over a cart chassis, was spotted in a very gloomy snowstorm, just ready to turn right on the busy highway from Knox to Unity.
Spotted just in time, I might add.
After it made the turn, several modern four-wheel drive vehicles barreling through the snow on said highway were of course forced to slow to a one-horsepower pace quite abruptly. We've become used to such things in Unity, but I was glad I saw the horse prints in the snow before I saw the vehicle itself, and doubly glad I was driving the four-wheel drive truck, not one of the cars. Had I been coming down Ward Hill in a car without snow tires and not seen this contraption until the last minute, I might have been faced with a choice of the ditch or hitting the thing.
Having been around the Amish on and off for many years now, I long ago lost any propensity to romanticize their way of life. They do some very smart things, and some very silly things, for the sake of religious doctrine. Sending kids off to school in blinding snowstorms in rickety old horse carts might be admirable fortitude and independence from the military-industrial complex, if done only on quiet back roads!
It's only a matter of time on Route 137, I'm afraid to say.
There's a whole industry of romanticizing the Amish in America, with knick-knacks and "Belva Plain" novels and other tat sold by "English" businesses, although sometimes the Amish are themselves involved. I'm immune to this stuff, and so is Aimee, although we do buy Amish and Mennonite food stuffs when the prices are not inflated by tourists. Rarely do the romanticizers and profiteers mention the mounting road deaths that the Amish suffer in their attempts to live their old-fashioned lifestyle side-by-side with the "English."
In other news, we just had about 8 inches of rain Sunday and Monday and the basement flooded, but then the jet stream took a very rare meander to the northwest, and a tongue of very cold Canadian air slopped over the mid-west and licked all the way down into Maine.
It was only supposed to get to 10 F (-12 C) last night, but when I looked at the outside thermometer this morning it was 0 F (- 17 C).
I thought it was a little snappy when I stepped out to let Haggis piddle.
Actually, what was the dead giveaway was that the trees were popping. They only do that when it gets below zero.
That means it was pretty cold in the house this morning, about 58 F, because I haven't been running the oil heat. Instead, cheap bugger that I am, I'm running some trash wood though the outside wood furnace. This was almost my downfall, since when I ran the tap for my morning coffee water, it ran very slowly to begin, a good sign of icing. The kitchen pipes live in a crawl space that has it's own small hot air duct from the oil furnace, just for the sake of the pipes. They're also routed right under the wood stove, and the floor isn't insulated at all. When the wood stove is flat out, that floor is 80 - 90 F inside, and easily 50-60 F underneath, so as long as the stove is running, the pipes can't freeze.
If in doubt that the wood stove will keep running hot enough overnight, or if you leave for any length of time, you turn on the oil heat.
But I only turn the oil heat on when I'm expecting very cold weather overnight. I wasn't expecting such very cold weather last night.
I have the stove cranked now, as well as the outside furnace and the little electrical heater that sits by my armchair. We'll be fine. But I'll be more careful next time.
Last news is, we're done with the semester Friday. I got done teaching the day before yesterday and am walking around in the drifty rosy glow that comes of having had a nice nap Tuesday afternoon, ten hours' sleep Tuesday night and nine hours' sleep Wednesday night.
How much easier and pleasant it is, to work an 8am to 5pm shift, than a 5am to 3.30pm one?
(5am, or sometimes 4am is when I generally start work if I'm teaching classes at 8am. I get my correspondence out of the way before I leave the house, get to my classroom by 7am, or 7.30am, and then do an hour of prep.)
Who knew? I've got 8am classes next semester too, but only three days a week, not five.
We spent yesterday in the truck, more or less. But I still managed to put my back and knees out again.
Let me explain.
There's a big road trip that happens each fall to get our ram back to his home farm. For several years now we've used a ram from a small farm like ours over in the western mountains of Maine. It's a two-hour drive there, two hours back.
But the occupant of our Bale House needed a new generator. We took the old, rather expensive one away several years ago after the former occupants tried their best to destroy it. I repaired it and got it running, and bought a cheaper more throw-away one for the Bale House. But that was stolen. So we weren't going to buy another. Whoever was using the Bale House would have to either buy their own or do without.
After struggling for several months to do without, the current occupant decided she wanted a genny, and I agreed to go pick one out and get it for her if she would pay. So before we could drive to the mountains with the ram, we needed to drive to Sam's Club in Bangor, Maine to get the genny. And we needed to do that anyway since I needed studded snow tires for the Ford and I like to get those from Sam's Club, where we have a business account.
I didn't want to buy a full set of four because the Ford has 135,000 miles on it. Who knows how long it will last? I still have some studded snow tires in the basement left over from the Mazda. You can get around pretty well with snow tires on your drive wheels. You don't need them on the other two wheels. But to do this, you have to bring in the wheels. If you bring in the car you have to get four, which would have been another $180.
So Friday evening I pulled the Ford into the garage, jacked it up with the floor jack, pulled the front wheels, put jack stands under the car, and threw the two wheels in the back of the truck.
Saturday morning we rose early and fed animals and climbed in the trucks and drove to Bangor. We dropped off the wheels at the tire shop, picked up the genny and a few other things, then went to the supermarket to drop Aimee off to get some groceries. Then I drove over to Home Despot to get a gas can for genny gas, some small engine oil, and a new light/fan unit for our own bathroom.
I then wanted coffee, so stopped by Starbucks. Finally, with about fifteen minutes to go before picking Aimee back up at the supermarket, I went to gas-up the truck and fill the new gas can for the new generator. As I switched from the truck to the gas can I absent-mindedly laid the gas cap on the ground. I forgot to replace the gas cap on the truck, and ran over it while driving away. So then we had to go the VIP auto parts to get a new gas cap for the truck. Which didn't fit to begin and thus required an ad-hoc alteration to the gas cap surround, which itself is ad-hoc since I rebuilt the truck bed. This crude alteration was achieved with an iron bar I happened to have left over from some random wind research job, while Aimee looked on in mild amusement.
So then we picked up the wheels and the two take-off tires, and drove home. Aimee unloaded the groceries while I fitted the Ford wheels back on, and then moved the car out of the garage to make way for the new genny.
My next job was to get the sheep crate put on the back of the truck. The sheep crate was covered in, and laying in, a snow drift. OK. Right. I pulled it out of the drift with the tractor. But not before I put my back out trying to lift the stupid thing.
(Regular readers will remember last weekend's whiplash incident.)
Then we he had to load the ram. He weighs about two hundred pounds and was not willing to help very much, but he didn't fight very much either. I probably overdid the ropes securing his crate to the truck, but you can never be too careful transporting livestock. Lifting a two-hundred pound struggling ram into a crate on the back of a truck didn't do much for my back, either.
Then we motored over to the Farmington, Maine region, Aimee listening to her favorite Saturday radio shows, me driving. It wasn't an unpleasant outing, and we dropped the ram off on time with little fuss. We did however, forget the meat. We "pay" for the services of this ram with a few pounds of lamb and pork from our stash in the freezer, which is substantial at this time of year and so the terms of this trade are good for us, but also good for the other farmers who prefer to sell live animals than slaughter them, and don't keep pigs at all. We made an arrangement o transfer the meat at a later date, convenient to both families, and went on our merry way, stopping for hot cocoa and donuts in Farmington.
We then drove back, getting home at around 4pm having spent all day from 7am to 4pm, more or less, in the truck. Aimee is not always the most patient person for big messy days like this, but she kept her cool, and we got the whole job done without incident: snow tires, genny, groceries, and ram-removal. I did, however, slip on the snow in the driveway carrying the firewood in for the wood-stove once we made it home.
It's not always that such a huge to-do list of big ticket jobs gets done without incident around here, and things could have been a heck of a lot worse. The ram might have escaped his crate in downtown Farmington, for instance. Giving father-in-law Dick another topic for his satirical wood carvings, no doubt. A study in black walnut of Mick chasing Nattick through the campus of the University of Maine at Farmington?
The possibilities are endless.
I do now have a sore back, and a sore knee. But I was pleased it all went off rather well.
Today we have a big mid-western storm barreling in, snow first, then rain, and lots of it. With a foot of snow on the ground it's going to flood around here, and then be difficult getting around. The tenant wants the genny pretty badly, but she'll have to come get it herself! I need to spend the morning doing farm chores I didn't get done yesterday, and I need to get them done before the storm hits, and then there's a Steeler's game that starts at 1pm, just as the storm begins.
I guess this generator is not going to get delivered today.
Here's your first Womerlippi Farm winter postcard.
First, Nattick and his ewes in the snow. They don't mind the weather at all.
We finished up with a little more than a foot of snow, not a big deal really, but a decent start.
The propane is restored after Aimee and I took part of the day off. I got to work and got the hot water and cook stove working again. Aimee had a hot shower this morning -- the water in the hot tank hadn't yet cooled down. Here's Haggis out for a walk today.
Finally, look at all the whitetail deer tracks under this old apple tree. Before the deer realized we had dogs, they used to wander all around our dooryard and the neighbors, eating the apples. Now the sheep get all the apples that fall on our land, and quite a few of the ones on the neighbors' land, but neighbor Hamilton keeps this tree clear of the long grass just to attract deer.
Lastly, you can see the snowed up barnyard.
Two more papers to grade, put the chickens to bed and I'm done for the 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.
Aimee has been complaining now for some weeks that the Camry is giving her starting problems. The first time she complained, I went out the next day and started the car and could find nothing wrong. This happened a couple more times.
Aimee said she thought the problem was occurring when the car was parked on the lawn instead of the driveway, intimating that damp grass and humidity in general might have something to do with it. This made sense. I've had any number of cars that had distributor cap problems that acted up like this, the problems going away once the engine was warm. I tried a couple of first stage diagnostic tests, such as spraying the engine with a mist of water and looking for the sparks that would mean there were ground leaks in the HT wires, to no avail.
Aimee is enough of a scientist to understand that diagnosis of intermittent problems requires time and patience and the good luck to have the problem occur when you have time, daylight, and other conditions are ripe. And the check engine light wasn't on, so there would be no computer diagnostic code to pull, even if I were to wire up my handy-dandy code-puller thingy.
Put simply, the car just wasn't helping at all with the diagnostic process. Poor starting and an intermittent idle can be caused by at least half a dozen common engine problems.
But the problem became less and less intermittent as the winter drew closer and my lovely wife more and more impatient with me. The problem became sufficiently consistent that almost each morning she would have trouble getting the car to idle until it was warmed up. It might even stall while being driven if the throttle was closed before the engine warmed up properly. I tried it myself a couple times and realized that the Camry could idle OK if the engine happened to catch before the throttle was touched. If you so much as tickled the throttle lever before the engine was fully warm, you would stall out.
So I set aside weekend time to diagnose it and read the Haynes manual, and the online user group list serves to determine what the problem was likely to be, narrowing it down by a process of study and elimination, without even looking at the car.
I also warned Aimee that we might find a problem that couldn't be fixed right away and so lose the use of the car for a time. Picking a weekend would give me more time, to be sure, but perhaps not enough.
We'll come back to this last point later.
This was of course all waaay too slow for Aimee's taste. She wanted her beloved Camry fixed, and fixed now! But the allotted Saturday came along and I ran the proper tests, in the right order, and everything fell into place like clockwork, albeit not on the proper wifely schedule.
The book suggested both the coolant temperature sensor or the idle air control valve could cause the symptoms we were seeing. But there were far more list serve posts on idle air control valve, and the symptoms more completely matched what we were seeing. At some point in the conversations with Aimee I had suggested the "cold start valve," an item of equipment that most fuel injected cars have. I'm still not sure if the Camry has one, but the idle air control valve has a similar kind of role, enriching the mixture for starting and also setting the starting idle speed a little higher than normal operating idle speed. So cold start valve was a good guess. The list serves confirmed it.
I can't sing the praises of these Internet Age innovations high enough. The user list serves, which can be found for almost every make and model of car, give backyard mechanics like me access to the kinds of specialized make-and-model specific knowledge that we used to have for older type cars. Take the old style British Leyland Mini, for example. When I was a kid, and an enthusiast for this great little car, there was all kinds of lore available to amateur Mini mechanics. Likewise when I came to the states and worked for the first time on popular American engines such as the old Ford "slant six" truck engine. Air-cooled Volkswagons were of course by far the best car for this kind of thing, the most accessible vehicles ever made from an amateur point of view.
But then computerized cars and trucks came along in the 1980s and 1990s and threatened to make the backyard mechanic obsolete. But these days, if you combine the online list serves with the availability of cheap code pullers, the position of the backyard mechanic is more or less restored, and possibly even better positioned than before. Of course, you have to be able to use a computer, so lots of older backyard mechanics were made obsolete, and you still hear that now-spurious compliant "I just can't understand these things any more."
But actually, "it ain't necessarily so."
The first test for a failed idle air control valve on the Camry is to short out two of the computer test plug connections to operate the valve out-of-sequence, and listen to see if the idle rises. I couldn't hear anything much in the engine note, so I asked Aimee to watch the tachometer, then, just to make sure, I asked her to short out the contacts while I watched the tacho. There was a tiny "blip" in the idle of less than 30 rpm, when a rise of a couple hundred rpm is normal.
So the valve failed the first test. Good going.
The second test is to check the resistance across the plug connection contacts of the idle air control valve. Like most solenoids, this resistance is supposed to be in the low tens of ohms. Try as I might, bent over and as low as I could, even using a flashlight, I couldn't actually see the contacts and operate the test leads at the same time.
The Haynes book is typically obtuse on this kind of thing. They just give the bare bones of each procedure and let the amateur mechanics figure it out, causing, I expect, no end of frustration and probably millions of dollars of damage and added repair bills to automobiles annually. I expect the dealers' technicians use an old connector for this, to bring the contacts that need to be tested out from within the confines of the engine compartment. But I already had enough data to go on with the first test, so I disconnected the throttle body from the engine and took it to my workbench to run the test.
This was, of course, the moment I had been trying to avoid, the point of no return. More of which later, but back to the plot.
The solenoid was showing the proper resistance of around 21 ohms.
But of course the book didn't tell you that this meant nothing much at all if the valve was stuck.
And by the time I had the whole thing on the bench I could see it was a fairly simple matter to dismantle it and see if it was or was not working. Which I did and found the valve stuck in the half-way position with a little of the kind of black sludge that builds up in fuel/air passageways. The photo above shows the idle air valve chamber dismantled, with the valve itself a tiny half-cylinder, just visible if you click on the photo to enlarge it, stuck half-way across the passageway. I was able to free the mechanics of the valve up, but, using a spare twelve volt battery I keep handy and charged up for such things, I couldn't get the solenoid to work. The coil must have burned up trying to operate the stuck valve.
So this was pretty good, I thought. Makes perfect sense, when you think about it. All aspects of data and theory lined up. Very scientific. I thought Aimee would be pleased. An almost certain diagnosis. Very little chance that any other item could be to blame.
I went shopping for the part.
Calling first the nearest Autozone ($150) then the dealer ($250), then looking on eBay for a salvaged unit ($35), I settled on having a new one shipped from an eBay vendor for $80, with free shipping, which turned out to be only a little more expensive than the secondhand one when shipping was taken into account.
Then I went to put everything back together so Aimee might use the car. And this is where my husbandly flag started to fall back down the mast a little.
I was pretty happy at this point. And why not? My guess was that I was at least $400 ahead over what a dealer might have charged us to fix this problem, never mind what might easily have been repeated trips to Brewer, Maine, where the dealership is located. I was definitely ahead on time and money.
And I doubt a non-dealer mechanic would have been able to diagnose such a tricky problem successfully at all. Using a private, non-dealership shop probably wasn't even an option.
This happy diagnosis was confirmed yet further when, having reassembled the whole thing again to the throttle body, and having refitted the throttle body to the engine, the car idled at 2,000 rpm.
If you think about it, this confirms the diagnosis yet further because now the idle air valve is still stuck, but stuck in the cold start position.
So I took it all apart again and set the valve to the opposite position. This time it wouldn't idle at all. Brilliant! Even more confirmation.
I was now 99% sure that I could get this car fixed completely for $80. Indeed the only thing that might reasonably go wrong would be that the new part could arrive broken or be the wrong part.
But then I made my mistake. I couldn't see the point of tinkering further to find a sweet spot in the valve setting where the car might just about run safely, when we have a spare vehicle, and the part would be here by Wednesday. I went and explained the whole thing to Aimee. I told her that she could have her choice of 1) driving the truck for a few days (I even offered to go gas up the truck) or 2) having me fiddle with the setting of the stuck cold start valve to try to find a point at which the car would idle, and continuing to drive the Camry. I explained that the Camry was now more likely to act up on her because my work to free the valve up meant that the symptoms would be even less consistent than previously. I recommended the truck, on the grounds that she would be pretty mad if stranded by the Camry.
All perfectly logical.
She agreed, but not before complaining that she wouldn't be able to drive her beloved Camry. And it was obvious that my certainty of diagnosis, which to me meant almost absolute certainty of success, as well as saved money, meant very little to her.
She was, shall we say, far less satisfied with the results of my labors than I expected her to be.
You can please some of the people some of the time.
I think this might be the difference between a scientist and an applied scientist.
Or between a wifely view of automotive misfortune and a husbandly one.
And it just goes to show you that the old American rural adage, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," has very high value even in this era of computerized cars.
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.
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!
Photo: Today's celebratory breakfast, otherwise know as cardiac-emergency-on-a-plate. See below for provenance.
In UK slang (of 25 years ago or more), that phrase (doing sweet Fanny Adams) means doing nothing much at all. Which isn't quite true. We've both been doing things. But we've been doing them at our pace and more or less on our schedule, with large bouts of rest and proper amounts of exercise.
And I am getting over that cold.
So things are in much better shape than they were. We're getting it "sorted," and will be happy enough to go back to work and finish up the semester.
Funnily enough, and speaking of UK slang, my lovely and very American wife asked me yesterday when I came back from my job delivering the meat to the Womerlippi Farm pig club members, whether I'd "got the pigs sorted."
Hah! She's becoming British-ised.
(The reverse of Americanized, spelled with an "s" instead of a "z," of course.)
Funny, that. I wonder where she picked that up? That useful truncated phrase, "sorted" (for "sorted out") was not actually part of the internal lexicon of UK slang I bought with me to America in 1986. I picked it up myself since then, from TV or from visits home. And now Aimee has picked it up from somewhere too, most likely me.
Imitation is the sincerest from of flattery. But now I've written that, we'll know if Aimee reads this because she'll never use it again. She's that kind of stubborn.
So what have we done since our vacation started?
Saturday, as reported below, was largely rest. Sunday saw me drive over to the Bale House to investigate problems with the solar power system. The new occupant had reported difficulties over the last week or so. It took me some dithering with a multimeter to narrow down the problem, and indeed, I went back again on Tuesday before I had it completely isolated, but it was definitely the Cobra 1000 watt inverter, which we installed as part of the general repair after the much higher quality Trace 600 watt inverter was fried because the former occupants disconnected the ground wire.
I had managed to soak this new inverter thoroughly with water during the plumbing repairs, and so I wasn't surprised to see it quit on us. Either the soaking, or the fact that we've been using it to run a small 110 volt pump that draws quite a bit of power, resulted in the control system developing an intermittent fault. When you turn the inverter on now, nine times out of ten or so, it goes to directly to the low voltage override, even when there's a decent battery charge. Of course, I had to prove to myself that the batteries were not actually providing low voltage, which took a full day of sun.
I ordered a new inverter, another Cobra, a bit more powerful at 1500 watts, but I won't throw the old one away until I've taken it apart and looked for water damage or a loose connection.
So that was what I did on Saturday and yesterday morning, which is to trace and solve electrical and electronic faults at the Bale House, including the failed phone line. You wouldn't think that a primitive, off-grid, home in the woods would require that much technology, but it does, for the simple reason that all the power supply equipment, and all the phone equipment and the phone line until you reach the connection on the telephone pole on the road a thousand feet away, well, it all belongs to us, not the power company or phone company.
So we have to fix it if it breaks.
I can't actually remember what I did Monday. Brain fart. Senior moment. Put me in the Aberdare General next to me old mum.
Now I remember. I bought two new tires and an oil change for for Aimee's Camry. Took all day, too, to get the work done. But it was raining, so it didn't matter much.
Tuesday afternoon was the great annual Womerlippi farm pork product distribution day. I motored in the pouring rain over to Maple Lane Butchers in Charleston, Maine, where I picked up a full Ford Escort wagon-load of assorted pork and smoked pork product. Then I motored back to Jackson, where I stuffed the first pig, all seventy pounds or so, into our own freezer. The second and third pigs then went to the other pig club members in Unity and Freedom. Of course, they didn't drive themselves.
The great annual North Waldo pig tour.
(Don't you love all the wonderfully utopian names of villages and towns in Waldo County, Maine: Unity, Hope, Freedom, Liberty, Union, and my personal favorite, Albion. The reason we have such great names is because the Maine frontier was settled by "Liberty Men," Jeffersonian Republicans, many of whom fought in the Revolutionary War. They bought land from, but hated, the great proprietors such as Israel Thorndike, who made the original Great Farm.)
The pig club members were pretty happy to get their pork.
I was a little disappointed in the quantities: the three pigs came in at 166, 173, and 177 pounds, respectively, which is a good weight for lean pork, but produced much less total dressed weight than last year's four 200 and 210 pounders, for what seemed like about the same amount of feed. And I don't mind eating fattier chops. I quite like them, if they're properly done. But we started a month later, with smaller piglets to boot, and although it seemed like we gave them plenty of feed, we probably fed less total because there were only three and not four pigs and because we fed them for a month less. The numbers will tell all, when I do the receipts in March, for the taxes.
But, slight disappointment aside, the reward for all this piggery pokery was, of course, pork chop and mashed potato and pickled red kraut for dinner. Sehr gut, danke.
And now, today, our own bacon and eggs and tomatoes for breakfast. I haven't had any bacon for four months, since we ran out.
Once you've tasted your own, you'll never go back to store-bought.
Today's job is to trace a clunk in the Camry's suspension, seeming audible only to the female of the species, as well as to pick up our Thanksgiving turkey from our 16-year old Amish farmer.
And I mean weakened, not weekend. I know the difference, too.
I was exhausted this morning, after the first eleven weeks of the semester came to a close and we made it to our second midterm holiday. This one is for a full week plus two weekends, and unlike the previous four day October midterm holiday, I've manage to protect myself against big work projects, and Aimee seems to be in pretty good shape too.
Which is good, because I'm very tired.
Yesterday we had a SAR call-out for the Unity College team, which was more exciting than office work, for sure, but it came at the end of a period that had seen me do a lot of office work, and not get too much exercise, so to drive to the other end of Maine and bushwack around in the woods and bogs and then drive back cold and wet was pretty hard.
To cap it all I've got another Unity College cold. Not a really bad one, but not much fun either.
So I slept for a good seven hours last night, which wasn't enough. And then today I took another two-hour nap, and woke up very groggy.
By the mid afternoon I was starting to feel myself again.
But rather than get into any big jobs around the farm, which in any case I would have plenty of time to do next week, I just wandered around and said hi to all the critters and took pictures.
Except that durn rooster, Cheryl Roethlisburger Crow. I took pictures of him, but after he attacked me, I wasn't going to say hi to him.
But I did take his picture.
He likes to stand in high places and crow at us. Here he is on one of the pens in the barn. Maybe we should make him a platform on the barn roof.
Haggis and I went to get a gallon of milk. It's funny how he loves to stare out of the window while being driven. Going down to our local store is a fun treat for him.
The sheep were going in and out of the barn to eat hay, through the two doors they now have on the north side. They do seem happy with the overall effect.
Aimee really does hate having her picture taken, doesn't she? But I had finally gotten the battery on my replacement camera charged up. I needed to take a photo of something interesting.
And her mum and dad will log onto GFD and get a laugh out of their daughter being camera shy as always.
For a while there I thought I had wasted $20 on a secondhand digital camera. It came with a dead lithium battery and no battery charger. The need for a charger was unexpected, because this is the third Sony camera I've had, all from the same model line, all secondhand, and the previous two used AA batteries. But this replacement has a bespoke unit that needs a special charger. But, of course, a cheap Chinese knock-off charger was soon found online for only $7 and it worked fine.
Only problem I can see: I have a whole clutch of rechargeable AAs now, and nothing much that I can do with them.
It took a couple hours to charge up the battery, and another hour of tinkering to figure out why the pictures wouldn't download -- memory card failures, is my best guess, because it worked fine using the newest such card.
Finally we had it all working, except that for some reason we can't erase pictures from the computer. They have to be erased from the camera menu.
I expect if I were to get a brand new memory card, this problem would also go away.
I don't have much luck with cameras. Because I keep this blog, and because I'm always looking for interesting pictures for college classes in energy and energy efficiency and rural life skills, I tend to carry it with me everywhere. The first Sony camera I had fell out of my pocket into the sheep's water bucket. The second one was poached when I spilled hot coffee on it in the truck because I lost my temper because some local codger was tootling along on the first day of hunting season, looking for his dream buck (dream on, granddad -- or actually leave the road to hunt!) and so like a teenager I floored the truck to pass him at an intersection, and spilled the java on the camera.
So, on Aimee's sage advice, I only buy secondhand units, and, my own contribution to the scheme, I always get the same model so I have replacement parts and hardware such as all those memory cards.
So far so good. Three cameras, less than $100. If I'd bought three new ones, that might have been $1,000.
How long do you think this one will last? The pool is on the left.
That very British phrase, "getting it sorted," or just "sort it," applies to this recent GFD entry.
We've been enjoying brilliant weather thanks to an "omega block." This is a very stable weather pattern for us because the jet stream gets, essentially, stuck.
It's hard to stalk a deer, or even get in to your tree stand quietly, if every step puts out 45 decibels!
But I'm a farmer, not a hunter. Good working weather any time of the year is bliss, but especially this time of year when we need it most but are least expecting it.
The good weather, combined with a relatively moderate workload now and for the next couple of weeks for both the Womerlippi professors, has meant we've been able to do the pig/sheep transition chores easily in the hour or so of daylight after this last week of work, and on Saturday afternoon.
The transition chore switches the use of the main pen of the barn from a pig sty to a sheep shelter, and requires us to 1) get the pigs off to the butchers, 2) remove about a ton and a half of already-begun-to-rot bedding and manure from the pig sty to the compost area, 3) dry and sweep the pig sty (usually it doesn't dry nearly as easily because we get rain and therefore humidity in the fall), 4) repair any damage (pigs being pigs), and 5) put in bedding as well as feeding and watering hardware for the sheep.
This dual-use space works well and has done so for three full cycles now, although the transition doesn't always go as smoothly as it did this year because of our college workload. The farm is set up to require only twenty minutes work morning and evening, with major routines like pig butchering and compost-making occurring at intervals on the weekends or holidays. But we get weekend schoolwork too, and so if, for instance, pig-butcher-transport day occurred on the same day as a midterm grading project, things would not work out well.
This year we refined this system by adding a new door so the sheep no longer have to traipse through the compost area to get into their new shelter. That was yesterday afternoon's job, right after Open House at Unity College in the morning.
So I spent the morning shaking parents' hands and explaining what job prospects little Johnny might have, assuming he could get through four years of college science, and then to start my afternoon I fired up my number two chainsaw and cut a big hole in the side of my barn, re-enacting a scene from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
This was an interesting experience for me because to get the chainsaw cuts to align well with the studs of the barn, and to not weaken any studs, I cut from the inside out, and so the barn filled up with blue two-cycle engine smoke. Then I sistered in some cripples and a header. By then I needed a nap. (Talking to 17 year olds is tiring.)
After the nap, I made a dutch door, fitted it, and then let in the sheep.
They seemed quite pleased with the remodeling.
Today we'll fix the tractor which has sprung a coolant leak, and then use it to mix the wet manure from outside the barn with the drier stuff from inside, so that both compost faster. Moisture is important for making compost. Too wet and you get stinky anaerobic decomposition, too dry and you don't get decomposition at all.
We may also take poor old Tootsie to the butchers, if they have time to "do" her. We made this decision while driving to school yesterday, although we gave it some thought. We think this would very likely be her last winter. She's just old. And although otherwise sound, she's been barren now for several years, and now lame for five weeks. If she's going to stay lame, she'll not eat well, and things will go downhill from there. Better to take her now, and have it be an easy end, than to let her die of some dread sheep disease that lasts for days in the winter or spring cold.
And if she does get a disease, she can't be eaten, which is a waste.
We have three retired ewes like her, but the other two aren't lame, and it's good to have an older ewe around who knows "what's what," to keep everyone else sensible. Older ewes have a calming effect.
In any case, we wouldn't have freezer space for all that meat. Best to spread them out over time, while we "bring on" replacement matriarchs.
Sad, but sensible. And a necessary part of running a farm.
My American students and the employees of Unity College have been wondering why I'm walking around at work with a cheap paper poppy on my sweater.
But I got tired of the American hyper-politicized ridiculousness about service and Remembrance and decided that, durn it, I'm British, I always was British, I always will be British, even if I chose to live in New England not Old, and I would have to have my own, private (if necessary), good old-fashioned British-style Remembrance Day.
Here in the States it's become purely offensive to me how the entrenched the political posturing about "supporting our troops" has become. And how far removed from the simple sentiment of being grateful for service and sacrifice made by others in your name. Stupidity reins on the left and the right, and in the middle the great mass of Americans seem as if they could care less.
How many British people wear a British Legion poppy this time of year? I'm not sure, but it's probably a very large majority, a massive consensus that cuts across party lines and social, religious, and ethnic classes.
Why do the British wear their poppies? To remember the 3-4 million servicemen of the home islands and former colonies who gave their lives in World War I and II, and to celebrate the service given by everyone who has ever served in the British armed services.
Without which we might easily still be a vassal state of Nazi Germany, or we might easily have been overwhelmed by a Soviet attack, without which the Falkland Islanders would have been forced to become Argentine citizens and probably second- or third-class ones at that, without which Northern Ireland would probably have been reduced to rubble, and without which there would be no possibility of a democratic Iraq or Afghanistan at all.
For myself, I gave what in the end will probably be about ten percent of my life to the Royal Air Force, and particularly the Mountain Rescue Service, and lost only my immaturity, my virginity, which I was desperate to lose anyway, some belly fat (which somehow has now returned to me), and most of both ACL knee ligaments in the process. Out of this bargain, I gained the confidence necessary to pursue advanced studies and work on the most difficult problems in the world, as well as the more mundane but invaluable ability to make or fix just about anything I want to.
It was a good deal and I'll never regret it.
Although I would like those ligaments back one day.
Interesting. A comment on the blog post the other day comes from a Bea Elliot, a vegetarian detractor of meat-eating. Here it is:
Bea Elliott said...
The human body does not "need" meat to thrive. We can do fine on a plant base diet. These animals - Or rather these small babies that are about to die are being killed for the taste of their flesh alone... Perhaps it's about time you examined your compassionate soul and spared the innocent from your gluttony?
November 8, 2010 5:23 PM
And my response:
Bea, you make four points, near as I can see, of which I agree with two. The remainder reveal some difficulties with your understanding of agriculture.
1) I agree, there's no need for humans to eat meat. What we need are proteins and lipids.
2) We can get by just fine on a balance of the proteins and fats found in some plants.
3) These animals are about to die, to feed us and five other families, about fifteen people. Including several children. These are not heavy meat-eating families. All of us in the pig club buy local food and wholefoods and base our diets largely on that. The Womerlippis tend to eat what we grow in the farm. My wife is vegetarian, so her diet is more restricted -- she has to buy more food than I do. [Explanation, not in my original response: Aimee uses more "convenience" foods and commercially prepared foods than I do, because my preferred diet, with a little meat included, can mostly be grown on our farm.] I eat meat perhaps five meals a week. I don't think this adds up to gluttony, and if you do think so, you are not making careful distinctions, nor are you attacking the most problematic sources of animal cruelty -- particularly industrial farming systems.
4) The main reason we grow livestock is to make use of plants unpalatable to humans, and to fertilize our vegetable gardens. Animals are needed to complete the nitrogen and other cycles to grow plant foods. The two go together. Here in Maine, at 527 feet above sea level, livestock agriculture is the most viable land use. It's also interwoven in our case with the need for compost for our vegetable garden, and in general in Maine, manure is the primary source of fertilizer on many farms. There are plant-based ways to complete these cycles, cover crops and the like, but none are as effective as manure cycling systems. Other key elements also work well, so, for instance our free range hens eat all the slugs that otherwise hurt our plants. But that means one of them occasionally ends up in the pot, like for instance the time a few blogs ago when a hawk tore a whole in one of our hens.
So in general, in northern climate agriculture, and for at least 6,000 years, my British Isles farming ancestors used animals and plants together in ecological combination. This is, to my mind, the definition of the word "sustainable."
Old photo: (Camera still buggered.) These pigs are a lot easier to handle when they're only this size.
Our general lack of capital, and need to make do with what we have around the farm, has frequently caused exceptional amounts of extra, otherwise unnecessary, work and yesterday was a case in point.
I spent about four hours making a lash-up rig to safely load our three gilts in a trailer for transfer to the slaughterhouse on Tuesday.
We've done this before, of course, but it's never gone that easy. What we need is a sturdy metal livestock trailer. But that would cost upwards of $2,000 which we've never had to spend on one. If I had that kind of extra money lying around, I'd always have several other things to spend it on first.
So we make do.
We've tried transporting them in the pick-up truck bed with the truck cap on, but those caps are pretty flimsy, and strong pigs can put much more pressure on it than seems safe. We've built crates and winched the crates with pigs on board into the truck bed, having determined that loading them via a ramp doesn't work. We learned to put tops on the crates after one pig escaped by rocking his crate until it tipped over. Crates with tops work but it's stressful, to say the least, for man and pig.
We have built our own livestock trailer out of wood and sheet plastic on a second-hand trailer chassis, and that worked very well for lambs, but I twisted the chassis while backing it into the barn, which led to tire blow-outs on the road, and so we never got to try it on the pigs. Luckily the blow-outs happened after the livestock were dropped off.
Now we use that old trailer around the farm only, so as not to have to buy new tires every twenty miles.
The best year was last year, when, after a good deal of difficulty with a crate, we borrowed a sturdy trailer from the slaughterhouse. That worked well. There's still the problem of loading them, but experience has shown that pigs given time to get used to a trailer will go in and out of it just fine, especially if that's where their food is delivered for a few days prior to their slaughterhouse date.
This year I have the loan of another sturdy trailer, only not quite as tall, in return for the promise of ten pounds of pork. Last year's had no top, but it was tall. This year I was able to fit the old truck cap to the top of the borrowed trailer. Then I maneuvered the trailer into the barn and organized temporary rigs to hold it firmly in place, and prevent it from rocking on its wheels, so the pigs can go in and out as they please.
I plan to feed them in the trailer for the next few days to build up their confidence in the thing.
Tuesday afternoon, I hope to lure them into the trailer with a good feed and then sneak around the back, slam the tailgate on them, and off we'll all go to bacon-land. Evil pig-betrayer that I am.
Hopefully all goes well. Wish me luck.
Ordinarily I feel pretty sorry for myself this time of year because I don't have a nice livestock trailer, even a little one like the one seen regularly on Life at the End of the Road.
But reading my regular round of farm blogs this morning, I came across this monstrous episode of difficulty for another pig farmer, Stonehead near Aberdeen in Scotland.
British firearms regulations prevent him from owning a gun. Read the terrible tale of how much extra effort, pain for the animal, and danger, was caused by this situation. I'm no great Second Amendment advocate, and I certainly think automatic firearms sales should be controlled, but it seems to me that every farmer needs a gun to keep his animals safe and to put them down when they get injured.
So, I may not have the money for a nice livestock trailer, but at least I do have my trusty 30-30 caliber rifle hanging safely on its (child-proof, locked-down) rack on the wall of my den, to use in cases like this. That, perversely, made me feel better after my four hour's work yesterday.
Still, reading yet another of my regular blogs gave me another idea. Colour it Green Diary butchered their own pig. They didn't slaughter it. British regulations prevent that. But they got it back cut only into sides, and then butchered and cured it themselves. Here in Maine, we could do the whole process ourselves. Experience has proved that shooting our own animals is much easier on the animal than taking them to the slaughterhouse. And we could process our own pork. We'd need a scalding tub of sufficient size for a whole pig, a scalding table, and a small smoker, but we'd be allowed to do it all, here in Maine. We regularly process sheep at home, whenever circumstances prevent their being taken to the butchers.
But I like the service we get from the butchers. Particularly I like the vacuum-packing/flash freezing process, which makes certain that the meat is very high quality and keeps for a long time. I just found an old package of pork sausage in the bottom of our freezer and ate it. The fat in the sausage had gone a little rancid, but this was after two whole years! Ordinarily, meat wrapped in butcher paper is good for a year, that's all. And the butchers do a great job of smoking and making sausage.
And I'm pretty sure if we explained all this to our pig club members, they'd agree, and want the full packaging service too.
One day, most likely in my retirement, with careful husbandry of finances, I will have a proper set-up: a purpose concrete-and-stone pig sty with a large, sturdily fenced run suitable for a half dozen active porkers, additional woodland runs with electric fencing so pigs get to root the way a pig should, a concrete pad for making compost out of pig bedding without losing nutrients to run-off, chutes from the pigs' sty and a loading ramp specially designed to back a trailer onto, and a proper metal livestock trailer that requires only a swift spray with a hose, and, of course, a "proper farmers" long-wheel-base, diesel, Land Rover to pull said trailer.
Oh, the pork we'll raise then! We'll feed the world. Or that part of it that eats pigs, at least.
I've been spending time with the sheep, watching their feeding habits. There are inherent trade-offs between winter confinement needs and summer grazing in any livestock operation, and our operation is not made easier to figure out by being of such tiny scale.
This is the very tail end of the grazing season here in Maine. The sheep are more and more confined to two paddocks. The non-breeding half of the flock, this year's ewe lambs and the three retired ewes, are in the North Paddock. The four breeding ewes and the ram are in the Back Forty. They only get moved on occasion, particularly to eat apples, of which a few remain on a handful of our many trees.
It would be better for the grass to have them all in one small spot, a sacrifice area, close by their winter shelter which is the barn, but we don't have the fences for that yet, nor the money to buy them yet, and I haven't seen a huge need to provide them sooner rather than later.
In any case we need to have these two groups, not one. We prefer not to breed yearling ewe-lambs. We notice that they don't fill out fully until the fall of their second year, and so although they can be bred the fall of their first year, we don't allow this. This means we need more space than we otherwise would each fall. We would either need two sacrifice areas, and two substantial winter shelters, or we have to accept some damage to one of our paddocks.
The grass has long stopped growing in all our paddocks, and any graze that can be used is highly unlikely to recover before spring, so if the sheep find grass at all, it has to be from an area they overlooked before. They spend considerable amounts of time wandering their paddocks looking for such areas. And the graze gets reduced to a very thin layer indeed.
High pressure. Not optimal.
We don't allow this to happen in the spring. Then, with the ram gone and lambs coming, we do confine them yet further to the North Paddock, allowing the Back Forty to grow a thick sward before it gets used again. And I do notice they finish up a lot of weeds and previously unpalatable plants this time of the year. But still, it bothers me that this, our largest paddock, gets so much hammer.
Since this area has a lot of deciduous trees and legumes, fertility doesn't seem to be a huge problem yet. It grows back fairly well each year. But it won't do so forever.
If I had a few extra hundred dollars to spend on fences, I would, but at this point in our married life, a few hundred dollars would go towards an additional trip to Britain to see my ailing mother in hospital, not the fences. The fences will have to wait.
Hay, on the other hand, is abundant this year in Maine, if of uneven quality as always. The other day, I counted just under 200 bales in our barn. But I also sorted it by quality, and have been experimenting with feeding the different kinds to see how best to use it.
We have about 20 bales of thick brown stemmy stuff that the sheep will eat only if there's nothing else to eat. That stuff is getting used for pig bedding. If there's any left this winter it will be used for sheep bedding. But we'll need some eating hay to go with it.
We have 120 bales of two-year old hay that they will eat fairly happily.
The 30 bales I just bought last week from one of our local Amishmen don't seem to interest them very much at all so far. There's a lot of red-top in there, which I'm guessing is why. We'll have to mix this in with better stuff.
Finally, I just used the last of about 20 bales of this year's hay from a different Amish farm that I thought were put up too soon. And they probably were shaved pretty close, in terms of moisture content. I expected them to mold. But they were also packed very tight, which seems to compensate a little, and so they haven't molded yet.
And the sheep are eating this very much more eagerly than any other kind.
These are 80 pound bales. They cost more than any other hay we've bought this year, at $3 a bale, but we get 20 pounds more, and it all gets eaten.
So I plan to go back to that farm and get another 30 or 40 bales. One bale of middle quality hay feeds our flock for a day in winter. The way we feed, what the sheep don't eat becomes bedding, which is piled up as deep bedding and becomes compost. We expect, and need, some waste of fodder to make bedding. This isn't a waste of money because straw is hard to come by and expensive in our region.
There has to be some bedding hay and some eating hay given each day, so if I get a few more of these very high quality 80 pound bales, I'll be able to make best use of any lower quality bales remaining by mixing the two.
What a lot of thought, and finessing of variables, particularly nutrition, soil fertility, cost, breeding, bedding and manure management, has to go into the care of a tiny flock of sheep!
The "Womerlippi Farm" is actually a homestead or smallholding where most of the food is grown for our own consumption and that of our friends and family. We raise Corriedale/Romney-cross sheep, feeder pigs in season, and Golden Comet, Aruacuna, Black Laced Wyandotte, Brahma, and Buff Orpington hens. We have wooded pasture, old apple trees, and a large kitchen garden. We build and maintain our own energy-efficient buildings, service and fix our own vehicles and farm equipment, and generally live a thoroughly self-reliant lifestyle. Our farm goals are less economic and more psychological/spiritual and lifestyle oriented. We like an independent, quiet home life with a lot of interaction with animals and the earth. Farming, building and energy-related engineering were also part of our education work at the former Unity College. Having said all that, we're practical people and grow a lot of pretty solid food and fiber. We're also happy to sell you some eggs or yarn or lambs.
PS: "Womerlippi" is a combination of our last names, "Womersley" and "Phillippi." The one is broad Yorkshire, the other Greek, although Aimee's ancestry and home culture is Pennsylvania Dutch/Shenandoah Valley Church of the Brethren. When Aimee and I married, she didn't take my name. She said she "wasn't trading up."
Why is this "A Great Farm Diary?"
Because the setting for the events recorded here is the "Great Farm" of Jackson, Maine, that's why. (Not because this is such a great farm, although we like it.)
Started by privateer and financier Israel Thorndike in 1806 as a vacation home, the famous Great Farm of Jackson was an agricultural showcase for this area of Maine, and Thorndike used it as such, an advertisement for his private land office business, as he disposed of the famous Waldo Patent, in which he was a part owner. Land purchasers could work off their mortgages as laborers on the Great Farm. Most deeds in Waldo County trace back to Israel Thorndike.
Thorndike, born to a family of modest means, went to sea to make his fortune. He captained a privateering vessel during the Revolutionary War, and tweaked the nose of the great Royal Navy more than once. He then settled to a life as a financier, merchant, and captain of industry in Boston. He remains listed as one of the fifty richest Americans of all time. He was the author, with Eldridge Gerry, of the first recorded gerrymander, and so his name went down in history for that peculiarly undemocratic deed too.
He was, in short, a rich, arrogant, unrequited arse, whose primary redeeming feature was impressive ambition. If you are such a person, you should feel ashamed. My work in academia has introduced me to many such wealthy people, and frankly, I'm tired of them. The world doesn't revolve around you and your silly ideas of what is important. Grow up.
Our own much smaller farm sits on a few acres of the original 2,000 that Thorndike developed as an agricultural showcase. As he was a famous Federalist, while Aimee and I are obvious neo-Jeffersonians, of sorts, I doubt he'd be pleased with what we've done with the place. But we don't give a rat's wotsit. As I said, we like it this way.
Read the very last posts in the archive for more details, or use search terms like Israel Thorndike or "Great Farm history" in the Google Blogger search engine (above, on the left).
How this Diary is Arranged:
From Mick:
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive below, click on the link provided, and read backwards from there to get it all in chronological order.
To find out what is happening right now, read the first post first.
Purchasing Womerlippi Farm produce in season can be done by email arrangement, and/or by shopping at the Marsh River Coop in Brooks.
We sell yarn, fleece, lamb, and livestock for meat or breeding.
The yarn is Bartlett Yarn's 4-ply, a medium-thick yarn, in natural gray and brown, as well as natural dyes. It is soft and bulky, and makes nice old-fashioned knitwear. You can buy it for $7.50 a skein by emailing womersleymick8984@gmail.com. We ship priority mail, minimum four skeins at a time. The shipping is extra. We also have raw white and brown (natural colored) fleece in large quantities each spring, unwashed, untreated. Email us at mwomersley@unity.edu and name your price. Expect to pay shipping or pick up in person. Coming to the farm itself without prior appointment is not recommended. We have a child. We also have a dog who bites. We like that he bites, because we have a child we want to protect. If you come unexpectedly to the farm, stay behind any temporary hot-wire gate or fence, or park in the driveway, until someone comes. We'll know you're there because the dog will tell us. Loudly. Annoyingly. They will wake us or our kid, if we are asleep. We will be mad about this.
If no-one comes, we're not home. Go Away.
If you are yet more foolish and try to get out of your car and/or cross a gate or fence, expect to get bitten by a shepherd dog, rammed by a ram, or chewed out by a shepherd.
