WINTER/CLEANOUT PART 2

 

Well, okay, it's mostly winter. The snow is gone now (thank Grok for that), but it was perty intense while it lasted. Winter, though, lasts for quite a bit more than early March up here. Temps are supposed to top out at twenty on Sunday morning next and three to five is forecasted a little later.

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The dogs are good little plows. We got a little over twenty inches.

The dogs didn't plow this, though. I had a couple of days of rewiring scheduled for the next few days. The cellar was quite toasty compared to the fourteen degrees and fifty MPH winds outside. This was the easy part.

This had been dug out as a path to the shop when we got six inches. I thought I'd get a head start. Right.

Poor little birnahurnahurnads had to dig down for water. Of course it was ice. The stump below the bath is a little under two feet tall..

Once I dug my way to the feeder (after this was taken), I filled the emergency feeder (the green one). This was a very busy place for the next week.

Marley, being an Akita, LOVES the snow and stays out in it as long as it's sunny.

Took me almost four hours to dig out, including a path to the shop. The stepladder was used to get over the stockade fence the morning after; the gate wouldn't budge against the snow. Good thing I had it inside and not out in the shop.

My back was singing me songs after this, but the snow lasted almost two weeks, so I'm glad I dug it out.

The battle rages in the white stuff.

The best of the East after a tussle. Chinese shitzoo and Japanese Akita rest for a bit of a truce.

Happy little showoff 'cuting.' 'Cuting' is the active form of 'cute.'

A LITTLE WINTER, A LITTLE BIT OF CLEANOUT

 

Part One

 

I know I promised kitchen improvements, and they are coming. Slower than I'd like. But we finally had a visit from Old Man Winter, which was good timing for me. I took my two weeks' vacation in the beginning of February, concentrating on shoring the floors and rewiring as much of the rest of the house as possible. Then we got snow. The biggest snow since the blizzard of 2015. It was okay, I was working in the cellar. that will be in the second part of this post, hopefully tomorrow.

 

 

Twenty inches. Started wet, then came from the east.

Yews were unhappy. They are still suffering from the 2015 snow.

 

 

Good thing I brought in a TON of firewood; I saw this coming.

 

 

This is what a writer's desk looks like. I got a bit of that done the first day. It started at seven a.m. and I went tout to shovel a path to the cellar bulkhead and shop when it was six inches deep. We were expecting eight. I needn't have bothered.

 

The mousetrap is for my giant pup Speckle. She'll eat anything made of wood or plastic on the table. Being eighteen feet tall, she can reach these items easily. She has a penchant for DVDs from Netflix. Or the library. There are mousetraps all over the house. Most are not set, but this one was in response to her eating "The Wolf of Wall Street," a library loaner since replaced by yours truly. Good flick, too. At least I got to watch it before she ate it.

 

 

Just before the snow, we had a stretch of nice fifty degree weather. I decided to try to clean out my tractor shed, the last major building I haven't touched or cleaned out. Not in this pic.

 

I'd been shoving all my non-firewood take-home scrap from my job into the tractor shed, and now it was time to burn that which was useless...

 

 

...and clean out, sort, and stack the 400 year old heart pine. God, what a lot of junk. The old farmers saved everything. Note the trash bags.

 

Lucky me. A huge pile of newspapers three feet deep. I TOLE you they saved everything.

It took me hours to dig out less than a third of the papers and load them into trash bags for recycling. That allowed me to see the sill plate of this timber-framed structure and also to build in some racks for my best heart pine. Soon you will see some of the things I'm doing with it.

All the papers date from 1957 to 1960. Many of the Sunday magazines were in great shape. Here Jean Seberg (rowr!) is made up to be Joan of Arc.

 

Apparently newsworthy...

 

Was this supposed to be a pun? No, there really was an article about cheesecake, despite the cheesecake photo of someone that looks a lot like Mary Tyler Moore (though she was likely younger than this in 1957). She did have great legs, though.

 

MTM died within a few days of me finding this. I had a big crush on her when I was a kid, one of the few non-blondes in my catalogue of TV beauties. Lizzie Montgomery, Barbara Eden, Goldie Hawn..

Like I say, prolly not her, but a close match. No cred for the photo, either.

 

I rewarded myself on the night of the Big Snow with Chicken and Potatoes. Comfort foot on a bright snowy night.

 

Next: Part Two, More Snow Pics and The Cellar