Snow scenes around the farm 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.

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.

If it ain't broke....

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.

Did Aimee really want me to fix the Camry?

A very good question.

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.

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 cat for a hat

I've heard of a bearskin hat and a coonskin hat, but never seen a catskin hat, complete with cat still in the skin.

Disclaimer: No cats were harmed in the production of this blog post.

(One was, however, slightly annoyed.)

Doing Sweet Fanny Adams

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.

Thanksgiving, in PA Dutch.

Veilen danke.