Mother's Day

Mother's Day in our Homestead makes me think about my mother, of course, and it also brings me to think about family and lineage and all that entails.

Many generations of family lived here in the homestead, and that's been nearly a continual thing since the 1940's. My Grandparents moved in to the homestead in that era, and left their stamp on the place. Going back through records and pictures we came across this picture of my Grandmother - Marie (Foulk) Johnson:

It's in a little folding paper frame, and on the facing cover she had written "Oodles of Love - Marie".

I suspect the picture comes from a time period before she lived in this house - she grew up in a house just down the road. But I love the tiny window it offers into her personality. I had the good fortune to spend a great deal of time with Grandma Marie growing up, and I have very fond memories of her - cooking in the kitchen, working in the garden, talking about family and family history, and chasing away the cats - the many farm cats that she professed to hate - who were perpetually trying to get into the house. She'd swipe at the cats with her feet or broom and shout ”Here now!" (though "here" was pronounced "hair" for this particular task).

When frustrated she never swore, but would utter oaths in German - I remember heil ich Miona and ach du Lieber Strosak. She didn't speak German - as I understand it, her generation was encouraged to learn English, perhaps to better assimilate, perhaps so that adults could speak freely without being overheard by children, perhaps a bit of both.

I am blessed that I got to know her very well, and this due to a clearly strong relationship between her and my own mother, who grew up in this very house.

This is a picture of my mother and her brother, Mom striking a jaunty pose, he looking dapper in his uniform, just outside the back porch at the bell post.

We lived for several years in a house a mile across the field from this one. I have enduring memories of my mother talking with hers on the phone - our wall-mounted kitchen phone, with the cord (that had to be twenty feet long if it was an inch) stretching across the room, ear piece cradled on her neck - while preparing breakfast, writing checks, or what have you. I always knew, if I'd heard the start of the conversation, that it was Grandma that my Mom was talking to, because the call would start out with Mom saying "Ma'am? Sam here".

In fact, I have a received memory - one I don't recall directly, but retain from the story being told again and again - of my mother catching fire (briefly) while on the phone with her mother while working in the kitchen, and my toddler-age response being "telephone hot, mama"...

These memories are often on tap, and I firmly believe they remain stronger still with the surrounding homestead to help keep them in focus. On this Mother's Day I find them in sharp focus, and that makes me very happy. My mother did a fantastic job raising us, and the close relationship between her and her mother was a wonderful model to see.

Thanks Mom - I Love You!

Damp

The past week, and the entirety of this weekend (thus far) has been rainy and cool. This is part of spring in this section of the country, of course, but it gets old. It also illustrates one of the limitations of country life: Most of the year, in both sun and snow, there is something attractive about spending time outside. But this type of weather is really just... Damp. The ground is saturated, the moisture clings to you when you are outside. It's not inviting.

Of course, the glass-half-full way of looking at this is to consider it an opportunity to enjoy some quiet time, alone or with family, reading, writing, or catching up on episodes of favorite shows. Our old house offers spaces for each of those activities. With the multiple rooms and amount of space in the home, there's room to gather if you like, but also multiple spaces offering a quiet, secluded nook if that's what you prefer.

The struggle comes when what one would prefer is a space to move around and do something more active. Because of its 19th century design, the house is big, but holds many rooms within that space. There are larger rooms on the main floor, but once furniture is in place there's not a great deal of room for continuous movement (e.g. For something like a martial arts form).

This isn't, of course, much of an issue after a couple of days of rain. After a week of it, though, it is something one becomes more aware of.

Orchard Update

Last summer we planted some fruit trees - a cherry, pear, and cold-hardy peach - to join our loan apple tree on the property. Planting new trees is sometimes a hit or miss proposition. We seem to have been fortunate with this trio:

All three trees seem to have made their way through the winter (I was a little worried about the peach tree), and two of the three are flowering. This suggests the potential for a little fruit this season.

Orchard under way!

Melugin Grove Cemetary

My journey down the road of researching family geneology comes in fits and starts. It occurs when I have some free time (often a rare commodity) or when I see or hear something that sparks my interest.

At a family gathering a few weeks ago my uncle mentioned a small cemetery in Melugin Grove, hidden behind some trees. This piqued my interest and so, a few days later, when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to see if I could find it.

It was easier to find than I expected, aided in part by the fact that it's early spring, and the trees that would typically hide it were still bare.

As I suspect is true of all places, there are many small regions in the area that carry obscure, nearly forgotten place names that were probably more sensible and useful when travel was done on foot or via horse. When you are moving through the countryside at four to eight miles an hour it makes sense to give distinct names to locations that are a few miles apart. A trip from Shaws to Melugin Grove - about 9 miles - would have been a two-hour walk or ride, perhaps trimmed to an hour if your horse was willing.

We lose that now, when the same trip takes about 10 minutes. Rather than learning about the landscape and making note of it to tell where we are, it becomes a thing to move through, an obstacle to endure, or perhaps to enjoy briefly as scenery, but not much else.

Melugin's Grove (pronounced "Ma-lew-jin", according to my uncle, who I suspect is right, this being an area about which he knows a great deal, rather than a variation of "Mulligan", which is how I've always pronounced it) is of interest to the Homestead because it's the place name given to the area just outside the town and area of Compton, Illinois. And Joel Compton was my Great-Great-Great (or "3rd Great" in the parlance of Ancestry.Com) Grandfather on my mother's side.

So this meant the cemetery might yield some interesting things:

Joel Compton has always been sort of a minor mystical figure in my mind. The Village of Compton is, and always has been, a relatively tiny place - a little over 400 people at its peak in 1900, considerably fewer in current day. Regardless, it's a bit of something to have a place named after an ancestor and, for me, that abstract fact was the only real information I had on Joel Compton. A gravestone is, however, a solid, tangible thing, making his existence somehow more real.

Also present were grave sites of several of his family members, and others, including my Great-Great Grandparents on my mother's side, Benjamin F Johnson and Arilla (Compton) Johnson:

It's a sign of the era that Benjamin's marker has his full name, and Arilla's says "Arilla His Wife"

There are lots of these cemetaries in the area - larger ones, like the ones you find on the outskirts of town, and smaller ones, little municipal cemetaries like Melugin Grove. There are also private cemetaries in local churchyards, and sometimes family plots, often with a dozen or two grave sites, or sometimes fewer, moldering away on small back roads. At Melugin Grove Cemetery I found these specific sites on my first pass through, and saw many other family names that are familiar - some because I know them from living in the region, but some because I believe I have seen them in the family tree. I'll be back here later on, when I've had a chance to look back through those records and see who else I can find.

Spring Birds

One of the delights of life out on the Homestead is the veritable orgy of birdsong in early Spring. This recording was made yesterday morning, standing in the back yard with an iPhone in the air (you can hear the spring winds in this in addition to the birds).

Joining the array of LBB's and Cardinals that remain year round are the Mourning Doves, Robins, and one of my favorites, the Red Wing Blackbird.

In addition to the delight of the birdsong itself, the sudden preponderance of avian activity whips both the dogs and the cat into a frenzy of activity. Outdoors the herding dogs make great efforts to "guide" the flocks of birds from tree to tree, while indoors Malcolm the cat sprints from window to window (and we have a lot of windows) in an effort to see and, one strongly suspects, in hopes of catching an errant bird that might, somehow, wander in through the glass.

Spring Snow

When I awoke this morning this was the view out the window at the top of the back steps:

This is the latest I have ever seen snow on the ground in this area. Occasionally we'll see bits of wintry mix - snow intermingled with rain - in early spring, but this is unusual. It doesn't usually stick.

It won't last, of course. The mist in the distance is the snow sublimating away in the morning sun, and open patches are already appearing in the field to the south. The high today is projected at 50°, so everything that isn't in northern shade will likely be gone by midday.

Still, it's like winter is hanging on with one last, desperate attempt to remain, to be remembered.

Non-Deprivation

One of the assumptions that might be made about living in the middle of nowhere is that it's a harsh, simple life. Limited entertainment, limited options, etc. This was true when I was growing up out here. Televisual entertainment was limited to three, or sometimes four or five, channels. Where we were at in Northern Illinois we could get the three major networks out of Rockford - ABC, CBS, and NBC. Occasionally we would get a couple of additional channels - 9 out of Chicago 9 - WGN - which carried the Cubs games, I guess, but more importantly carried The Bozo Show - and channel 32, which featured Son of Svengoolie, among other televisual delights.

If this sounds like I'm trying to make something big out of something pretty limited, you're right. It was what we had.

What made access to those far away channels even worse was that they made us aware of exotic possibilities in far away lands - the Old Chicago amusement park, shopping at Insurance Liquidators, or buying carpet from Empire. There was always the promise of things I could have, if only I lived in a more urban, more cosmopolitan location.

A delightful reality of the modern age is that most of those limitations have been eliminated. Want something? Order it from Amazon - it will be here within a couple of days.

Yes - things are different now. This very evening I'm playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombie with LB and her cousins. They started out on the XBox One and then moved on to the iPads so that we could play a cooperative game together. Delightful.

The upshot of all this? It's no longer the major sacrifice it once was to live out in the country. It's true that our home is still well off the beaten track. Still, with the Internet in its various forms, and delivery services being what they are now, it's not a life where the trade off for peace and quiet is deprivation (we can even get a pizza delivered out here). Rather, you can access the things you want and the big city - if it really seems necessary - is an hour down the road (Rockford) or an hour and a half away (Chicago) by rail.

Return to Normalcy

As has been hinted at before, I've reluctantly been party to allowing an animal of the feline persuasion take up residence in our house. What has not been mentioned formally here, is that we now also have a part-time inside canine companion as well.

Let's get something out of the way here: I love animals.

I cannot remember a time in my life when, the opportunity being present, I have not had either a dog or cat as a part of the household. As a child growing up in the country my earliest memories were of a dog - a male dog - named Gladys (thanks Mom), who was my constant companion as I ran around the yard engaged in different outside adventures. There were a series of different farm dogs over the course of my youth and, when we lived in situations where dogs were not an option, typically there were cats.

And this is not to suggest that the cats were merely dog substitutes. We've had a lot of personality in our feline companions, with cats that would fetch, cats that would walk on leash (hiking with a cat on a leash brings much apparent amusement to others you encounter on the trails, I can personally verify; more amusement still when said cat gets startled by something and jumps, claws out, to cling to your leg... But I digress). Our current cat compadre is no exception, frequently, suddenly, running at speeds of 90 mph from one location to another in the house for reasons that are clear to no one except, maybe, himself.

My reluctance has little to do with the animals themselves, and more to do with their potential affect on the home itself. As I've likely mentioned here before, buildings of this era were typically constructed with the materials locally available. The upshot of this, in our case, is that much of the wood in the house, including the floors, is soft pine.

It's lovely stuff, taken from a big picture perspective. It takes both paint and stain beautifully; it feels wonderful under bare feet, both warm and pleasantly textured. The problem is in the operative term "soft". The wood in these floors has a Moh's Hardness rating slightly above that of modeling clay. Have a rock in the tread of your shoe? Now you have pits at regular intervals across the floor. Slide a chair out from the table on to the floor? That action has now been recorded for generations of enduring posterity. God forbid one sits in an office chair with wheels and actually rolls back and forth along this material.

And so our companion animals, it turns out, have claws. The upside with our feline friends is that they are retractable. The canine ones, not so much. Allow a dog to go marching along the floor - especially an 80 LB Rottweiller mix who wants to engage in bounding play with a certain feline - and you end up with fascinating cross-hatch patterns in the grain that will likely entertain future generations for hours as they try to puzzle out their origin. Or so I imagine.

...Ahem...

Fortunately, it turns out that there are potential solutions for this sort of issue. MLW researched and turned up...

...drumroll please...

Dog socks.

So here you have a product designed with exactly our problem in mind. They completely cover the dog's claws, up to and including the dewclaws, and as a bonus also have traction areas on them to help the dog better gain purchase on the slippery floor (much to the cat's dismay). And, as an additional bonus, you get to watch the dog struggle with the irritation and embarrassment of having socks on.

Ultimately this solves a couple of problems for us. Aside from the floor issues, two of our three dogs are completely comfortable outside virtually all of the time (fear not - they have shelter available outside and we do bring them in when it's beastly cold), but the third - the Rottweiler mix - has shorter hair, and doesn't seem to have the traditional Rottweiler undercoat (a result, no doubt of the mix, which seems likely to be Boxer) that purebred examples have. Her temperament also makes her much more suitable to extended stays inside. Our high energy herding dogs spend most of each day and night on patrol about the yard, while this one is perfectly content to patrol her dog bed for hours at a time.

What does this all mean? For the moment, at least, it means that we've got a way to have this critter inside, along with our new feline friend, without worrying about the utter destruction of the house. Which means life seems a little more normal for us.

Out of the Woods

For a large portion of the past three weeks or so I've been home sick with one ailment or another. When cold and flu season rears its ugly head apparently it can take anyone down, even if he's had a flu shot...

I was finally feeling up to moving about at the end of this week, and fate put me in Rockford with an afternoon largely untethered, so I headed out to Rock Cut State Park. With temps in the 40's for the past couple of days the hiking trails offered an... interesting mix of surfaces for the hiking boot to address. It turns out that the combination of ice and snow plus dirt in temperatures above freezing may not be the ideal recipe for traction.

Fortunately, I only fell on my ass once, and that event did not appear to occur in front of people.

I've made reference to Rock Cut here a couple of times. For a person who spends time in Rockford IL, and is looking for a bit of woodsy nature to take the edge off, it's a reliable port. Taking the opportunity to work one's way back into the deeper part of the woods during a melt does not disappoint, even with the risk of an occasional slip and fall.

I sent the picture above to MLW a few seconds after I took it. She asked if it was a picture from Walden, and I thought, more or less, yes. Rock Cut is not remote - there are few parts of the park in which one cannot hear traffic on nearby streets, even when one seems to be deep in the woods. But then neither was Thoreau's site at Walden Pond. He was within just a few miles of his own home and, if memory serves, living on land owned by a friend. It wasn't an exercise in harsh survivalism, just in retreat to nature.

It illustrates to me the differences that context can make. I've watched the snow and ice melt here at the homestead over the past few days, and mostly what it makes me think of is the mud with which we will be, and are, contending. At home it's a problem to be dealt with. Walking through through the trees at Rock Cut its an inconvenience to be tolerated, and this despite the fact that I'm much less likely to slip and fall at home.

Our homestead is a beautiful place most of the year - we have trees, and open space, and privacy. Still, one of the things the prairie offers very little of is anything that one might truly refer to as woods. There are stands of trees that one can see if one looks off in the distance. However, these are often narrow patches a couple of hundred yards wide, framing a stream of one sort or another - not the sort of thing that allows one to feel truly lost and removed from all else. Besides that, these are typically private property, most notably not mine and, oddly, not everyone is enamored with the idea of strangers marching around on their land.

There are actually similar options in the area. Just south of Mendota is a small, wooded park called Snyder's Grove. This was the site of many scout trips and picnics in my youth. The Little Vermillion River runs through it, and the park has hiking trails. The travel time to this location from my home is similar to the time that it used to take me to wind my way through the traffic and stop lights of greater Rockford to get to Rock Cut. And, of course, given all of that, how many times have I gone there in the nearly seven years that we've lived at the homestead?

That's right: zero

Now is the Winter of My Discontent

It's not a popular position to take, but I really enjoy winter.

The first real snowfall of the season always makes me smile, and I'm more than happy to make the trade off of cold temperatures for fun in the snow.

The key word here, in case it's not clear, is: SNOW

Of course, this is a commodity of which we've had precious little this year. Of course, this is in part because we've had weeks of temperatures in the 40's, a fact that it's hard to complain about, even if it does mean that my cross-country skis sit, dusty, lonely, and unused, in the rafters of the garage.

All of which would be fine if it weren't 14° outside as I write this on a Friday night, working towards a low of -4°, with 20 mph winds coming out of the northwest. The deal, as I see it, is that we deal with the cold, and then we get to play in the snow. Clearly, Mother Nature has reneged on the deal.

Do you think I can get her to renegotiate our contract?

---

Update

Today, a couple of days after I wrote this, we are in the middle of a snowstorm. This would seem to be a counter to my complaints. But the high temp on order. For tomorrow is 34°, and 38° for the day after. By Thursday next they are calling for temps in the 40's.

Snow today means nothing if it won't stay. Under these circumstances, it's nothing but fluffy rain.

Dirty

Early on in the text of one of the homesteading books we own (The Self-Sufficiency Handbook: A Complete Guide to Greener Living by Alan and Gill Bridgewater) is a warning that country living is typically a dirty thing. By "dirty" here they are referring to literal dirt ("Mud, mud, and more mud!"), and they are so very correct.

As I write this we are experiencing a pseudo-spring here in northern Illinois. Temperatures the past couple of days have seen highs in the 40's (F), lows in the 20's, and that looks to be something that will be sustained yet for the next couple of days. The temperature itself makes one think about the possibility of doing things outside.

That is, until one actually goes outside.

The terrain during one of these partial thaws is somewhat interesting, from an academic perspective. It's warm enough outside that one ventures out in flannel or a sweatshirt - sans jacket - for short periods of time. The snow from a few weeks before has melted, but not entirely - it's spared in those areas where it had drifted into especially thick piles, or where there is not sustained sunlight sufficient to cause it to yield. Where it remains it is changed - no longer the bright, stark landscape covering and conquering what is below, it instead now begins to incorporate that landscape, presenting in shades of gray.

Meanwhile, the ground itself has begun to thaw, but only at the top layer. This leaves a semi-liquid layer of topsoil floating on a solid substrate. It slides and squishes beneath the feet in a fashion that would feel familiar to anyone who has ever had the joy of mucking out an animal stall.

This weather presents what is likely the only time of year that I find myself envying, if slightly, the town- and city-dwellers. The proportion of concrete to soil in town means that one is only really experiencing the upsides of the warm weather, and can ignore the niggling frustration of the mud by simply avoiding it.

Sudden Cat Toy

As I walk up the steep back steps of our old homestead, as I mount the first landing and turn to make my way up the second, shorter flight, I find myself face to face with a sudden cat toy.

When we moved out to the Homestead we had four animals in our entrouage - two cats and two dogs - all of significant advanced age. Three of the four, though beloved, struggled to retain their bodily fluids, choosing (or, rather, not) instead to share them with us throughout the home. Often this occurred in unexpected and intimate places, it becoming not uncommon to find the need to change bedding before going to sleep, a laundry basket now reeked of something more than the human sweat of the day.

The fourth member of the coterie didn't seem to have this problem, surprisingly enough. He, struggling with Canine Cognitive Disfunction, simply could no longer remember his name, and wandered throughout the house following the other dog, often appearing slightly surprised at each location, though they were not new to him.

After these companions moved on I announced, as the man of the house, the king of the castle, that there would be no more inside animals.

As did Henry VIII, I have discovered that, king or not, there is still a parliament to contend with. I have been outvoted. And so there is a cat toy, suddenly there, at the top of the steps.

Powerball Dreams

As anyone in the United States with a pulse was likely aware, last Wednesday's Powerball payout rose to1.5 billion dollars.

Suffice it to say that I, like most of us, did not win that lottery. Dammit.

(Excuse me for a moment while I collect myself)...

Of course, as most of use learn somewhere along the way, the odds of winning any lottery of that sort are infinitesimal. And still, many of us buy a ticket when the jackpots get big.

For me, the purchase of that lottery ticket is a small price of entry into a period of several days of delightful fantasy - the what-ifs that go along with having an obscene amount of income. My rough, back of the envelope calculations put the annuity payout option at somewhere around $30 million a year after taxes. After giving it due consideration I thought: I could live on that.

It's probably been a decade or more since I last purchased a lottery ticket, and what surprised me a bit this time around was the nature of things about which I fantasized. In younger days my lottery purchases gave license to extensive mental debates about which exotic cars to purchase - Porsche or Ferrari? Would a Lamborghini Diablo be a reasonable daily driver? I could just toss the grocery bags on the passenger seat...

This time around it was the house, almost exclusively. All of the needed updates to the kitchen, the addition of a bathroom or two, adding on an attached garage, restoring the old barn, and on and on. Given the size of that jackpot, I allowed myself to play with the idea of lifting the house and replacing the old, porous foundation with something a bit more water-tight. And, while we were at it, why not convert everything to solar and wind power?

Discussing this with LB actually led to an extensive debate, in particular about that attached garage. She was concerned that it might change the character of the old girl too significantly, and then things went, well, a little awry. By the end of the discussion we agreed that perhaps we should install an underground parking garage that attached to the basement. But while we were able to compromise on that point, we could not agree on how to enter said garage. LB was arguing for the simplicity of a ramp, but I was angling for a car elevator hidden in the driveway, activated only after a gate closed and blocked the view from the road.

Because then I'd be one step closer to being Tony Stark.

I'd like to argue to argue that this change in perspective reflects growth, a development of maturity.

I'd like to argue that.

Ugh!

Last year I set up rigid foam insulation to cover the coffin doors that make up the west-facing front door of the house. It's my recollection that this worked nicely throughout the winter, with just a tiny bit of maintenance required.

This winter has been different.

It's been a mild winter, all told, but the winds tonight are something special. I'm not sure what is more special - the sounds of the tape tearing away from the wall as the wind pushes the insulation away from the doors, or the frigid winter air forcing its way into the house.

It makes me wonder - under what circumstances were these doors, facing the direction of the prevailing wind, considered a good idea?

First Snow

The first snow of 2016 came last yesterday. We had not a light dusting, but rather enjoyed a few inches of the white stuff - enough to cover the huge fir tree outside my office window with clumps of snow.

What starts out as a simple, clean blanket of white when it falls typically becomes a series of drifts and valleys, as the prevailing wind winds its way around the house, outbuildings, and trees. Its all a lovely sight, particularly from the warmth of the house.

This has been an odd season, as anyone living in the region can report. Today's single digit high stands in sharp contrast against the (relatively) balmy temperatures of just a few days ago. My entire life here in the Midwest people - mostly farmers - have been heard to say "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute - it'll change". This seems to be more true as time goes on, with the specter of of climate change looming.

Though it's our first snow for the year, it's not the first touch of winter weather for the season. Just ahead of the end of the year - on both Christmas Eve-eve, which I wrote about here a couple of weeks ago, and in the week between - freezing rain caused us to lose power. The first event was brief - an overnight occurrence. The second was nearly two full days. Power outages of multiple days at a time are an occurrence we are somewhat familiar with out here. I want to say that we've had at least one a winter since we moved here, though looking through actual records suggests it's more sporadic than that, and not isolated to winter.

ComEd will, if you ask, send texts reporting power outages in your home (in case you weren't aware of it, I guess), and then send updates on their progress in restoring service. This communication from them is somewhat of a mixed bag. While you are sitting in the dark of your home, snuggling for warmth under a blanket, listening to the high winds whip their way past the window, you can receive a helpful text that says:

Outage to area [your address] analyzed. Probable cause: severe weather.

This, of course, is slightly less helpful than one might hope. And it's then often followed by predictions of a day and time at which your power will be restored. Those restoration targets appear to be based on an algorithm that uses hope and imagination as its primary variables. ComEd does not employ the Jobsian principle of under-promising and over-delivering.

Now, to be entirely fair, every time the power goes down the linemen are out, actively working, often in awful conditions, to restore power. And I'm quite sure they aren't responsible for that reporting algorithm.

Wind Toll

They sacrificed themselves in service of our stuff... 

The winds the night before the night before Christmas - or, if you like, Christmas Eve-Eve - were severe, and resulted in multiple power outages over the course of the night and well into the following day. This is not unusual, of course - I've written here about our struggles with the wind several times before.

While the power certainly does not go out each time the wind blows, outages seem to be a more common occurrence out here than in a city or town. This can be particularly problematic for us because, while we love living in a house from the 1800's, we have no intention of living like people in the 1800's. We have our fair share of modern electronic devices and, as a rule, they don't generally appreciate abrupt changes in power delivery.

Key to the general health of those items is the use of a surge protector, we have all been led to believe for the past twenty years or more. For me, however, this has always been an intellectual understanding only. I have dutifully plugged my devices into a variety of power strips over the years, but I've never had occasion to actually see them as more than just an outlet extender or fancy extension cord. In honesty, I've wondered on more than on occasion whether the "surge protection" part of the power strip wasn't just marketing.

How many times the power went out over the course of the night, and of the following morning, is unclear. What was clear, however, is that they took with them two power strips and a fuse.

The soldiers in the picture gave up their lives in service of our electronics. As best I can tell, the delicate devices all seem to be functioning as expected, despite their rough treatment. Apparently it's not just marketing after all.

---

For the record, on our computers we have not only surge protectors, but battery backup units. These connect to the computers via USB and, when the power goes out, keep the computers running long enough to initiate a controlled, automatic standard shutdown. This helps prevent the damage or corruption of hard drives that can occur with an unexpected shutdown.

Time for Wrapping...

They are a pretty thing. But pretty things aren't always good for you... 

Like many people around this time of year I have a ritual that involves wrapping things. But, in my case, instead of gifts, I'm wrapping windows and doors.

This isn't new, of course, I've written about it here before. I'm a little behind schedule this year (though being behind schedule on this task may actually be an annual occurrence). The freakishly warm weather this December has made it easy to put off the task, though high winds and temps in the 20's at night the past couple of days have fully illustrated my negligence. I am pleased to say that, with the addition of the new windows I have six fewer items to wrap up.

The most important area to address - and the thing I will likely tackle first - is the front doors. The formal "coffin doors" that present as the front entrance to the home are, like so many of the windows, original equipment. They are a lovely thing, as far as it goes, but they leak air like a sieve. In addition, the past couple of seasons have been hard on the side glass as well, requiring things to be covered and taped up, and the tape's adhesive has a limited shelf life.

This means that, for the sake of our comfort and our gas bill, we won't get to see these guys from now until the spring. Still, that's far better than the alternative. For the first couple of years that we lived here, before we started using the rooms upstairs, we simply closed off the entire central hallway for the entire winter.

Update - managed to get the two panels actually facing the same direction this time around!  And there's Jack, peeking from behind the bannister.  

Aid and Comfort

The uninitiated may not recognize it, but this is a rodent utopia... 

This past summer I wrote about having a mouse in my car. That episode ended with a declaration of victory, as I gloated over the body of my enemy.

I may have won the battle, but the war appears not to be over.

When the fields come down the mice (and the shrews and the deer and...) evacuate and look for new shelter. What became clear, upon examination, is that we were offering that shelter in our garage - in effect, giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Aid and comfort, in this case, in the form of clutter and bird seed.

This intrusion was detected in a fashion that presented a sense of deja vu strong enough to make me wonder if I really was in The Matrix, given that it involved detecting entry into a bag of pistachios. Again. A bag that LB and I had been eating out of just a few minutes before.

It wasn't a large hole this time, but rather a couple of smaller holes in the side of the bag towards the bottom. These were small enough that I tried to convince myself that it was from throwing the bag in the back of the car with other items, that it was simply torn up a bit. But then I pulled a bag out of the back of the car and found the edge of it had been chewed on. It was just a little bit, mind you, but clearly chewed on, and I knew...

Pulling everything out of the hatch of the car and checking the spare tire compartment under the floor revealed that the enemy had established a base in my territory, and they were clearly recruiting new soldiers - there were babies, which had fallen out of the nest as I was moving things around. No quarter had been asked, and so none was given - green recruits or not, I showed no mercy. Of course, while the offspring had been vulnerable and revealed, the parents were still nowhere to be found.

Then, a few days later, it became clear that at least one of them had died somewhere in the car. I say "somewhere", because wherever it was, I was not able to locate it. Based upon how much worse it got when one activated the ventilation system, however, one suspects that it was somewhere in the vents. Needless to say, we took several trips with the windows always down at least a little bit. In November.

The weekend after Thanksgiving LB and I tackled the problem by cleaning out the garage and setting traps in both cars. The garage part of the project itself was long overdue, and involved removal of a couple of very large bags of birdseed - the 20# variety - neither of which appeared to have an unshelled sunflower seed left in them. We also, as noted before, cleared out an extensive amount of the clutter that had been gathered over the course of the spring and summer. This, again, reflecting one of the difficulties with being a part-time homesteader: I've wanted to clean the garage out for some time, but it just hasn't been something I've been able to prioritize. For every trade off like that there is a price to pay.

Before starting the cleanup of the garage LB and I traveled to a hated large big-box store to gather additional weaponry (traps) and set them up in both cars. We actually caught our first mouse, in MLW's car, before we had finished cleaning the garage. In the week or so that has followed we have managed to take out six additional mice. For those keeping score, we've caught six of the seven on snap traps, and one on glue traps. Two of the snap traps - part of the additional supplies we'd gathered - are an apparently new design by Victor, the folks that make the traditional wood snap trap that you likely picture any time you hear the word "mousetrap". It's made of plastic rather than wood, and has a little bait well that the mouse has to push his evil little nose into. Lifting the lid on the well triggers the snap. I was skeptical, but the big-box store didn't have any wood traps, so I bought them.

They work very well. They are actually easier to set - you just pull the snap arm back, there's no fiddling with hooking the restraining bar on the bait doohickey. Also, it appears that, most of the time the mouse is actually unable to get at the bait, which means that it doesn't have to be refilled nearly as often.

Unfortunately, my early success with this new weaponry made me complacent. I'd taken out seven of them between the two cars, and each time required a resetting, and sometimes re-baiting of traps, and so it became easy to set the traps aside to deal with later. Lack of mousey evidence gave a sense of confidence.

And then, the day before yesterday there was a pile of nesting material on the floor of my car, having apparently fallen down from the inside of the dashboard. The battle is not the war, and the war, clearly, must be waged further.

This left me wondering: should I have put the heads of the previous mice on spikes as a warning to others?

But that seems impractical...

The Differences

The Differences

We’ve been living in our Homestead for over six years now, and, given that it was my Grandmother’s home, I’ve been around it in one way or another for my entire life. I like to think I know this place pretty well.

I think the house enjoys proving me wrong.

Since I was young I recognized that door surrounds and kick panels on the back rooms of the house were plain, flat boards while those in the front rooms were intricate, multi-piece affairs. I’ve always understood this - in conjunction with the steep back staircase - as a part of the divided nature of the house - the back portion intended for the workers, the front for the owners and their guests.

The flat, simple woodwork around this (poorly hung) kitchen door is consistent with what can be found throughout the back side of the house, both upstairs and down...

...While this door, in the dining room, shows what the woodwork looks like in the front of the house. Well, in most of the front of the house...

Living here has shown us there is more.

We realized fairly early on in our stay that the windows on the back of the house were different than those on the front - six-pane divided lights per sash versus dual panes. When we started looking at replacing windows we also learned that the windows downstairs are taller than the ones upstairs.

The original front windows on the house have two divided panes per sash - one suspects that this was part of being a show-piece, and that those were the largest panes of glass they could get at the time; that they'd have gone with single panes per sash if they could have.

The back windows in the house have six-panel divided lights on top and bottom.  The bottom sash in this picture is not original to the house.

This week, for the first time ever I realized that the wood surrounding the windows and doors in the living room are different than anywhere else in the house. While all of the rooms at the front of the home have intricate, multi-level surrounds, the ones in that particular room are more intricate, and deeper than those in the rest of the home. They bevel out, instead of in, and stand a good 3" proud of the wall.

45 years of life in and around this house, and I’d never taken notice of that difference before. We discovered this hanging curtains, realizing that the brackets that came with the curtain were not long enough to stick out from the side of the window surrounds.

This is a door in the living room - note the way the surround builds out all the way to the outside edge...

...And it's not an optical illusion - the edge really does come out that far, standing outside the edge of the door framing.  The windows in this room all share this feature as well.

This closeup of the dining room door shows that, while it is also built out in a somewhat ornate fashion, it does not continue to radiate outward beyond the edge of the frame.

These are little things, I suppose, in the long run. To my mind, however, they illustrate some of the key differences in how people thought about their homes in the 1800’s as compared to today. Modern construction is often dictated by standard materials, while older buildings allowed for greater variability in design, relying upon the carpenter’s skills to make everything work. You can see the results of that in these old houses when you get behind the walls and into the attics and basements, where you will find boards cut at creative angles and joined in a fashion that clearly was determined on the spot.

There are also differences in how they planned to use the homes from modern day. It’s clear that the living room was intended to be a space for formal entertaining. In addition to the intricate woodwork around the windows and doors, this room is the only room in the house that has decorative wood paneling below the windows. The door to enter this room is right next to the formal staircase in the front entryway of the home.

The living room is the only place in the house where the window surrounds descend all the way to the floor, and where there is paneling below the window.  (The heating vents were (clearly) added later, with an eye towards practicality rather than attractiveness.  The house did not originally have central heating).

One imagines that John Foulk, in putting all of this together, pictured himself entertaining guests in this formal room, it presenting as a luxurious formal area providing comfort and visual interest; and - let’s be honest - making a statement about the level of success of its owner. And there was a community here. The church down road was built to serve the spiritual needs of the German-speaking settlers in the area, it’s stained-glass windows testifying to this still with script indicating “In Geftistet Von”[1] (donated by) followed by the person’s name.

Living in the house, seeing it, one wonders how much any of that actually happened in John Foulk’s time here. The bulk of the wood in the house is soft pine, and those formal steps look pristine, as if they were rarely trodden, while the steep, back stairwell shows the bevels and grooves from many a footfall. One suspects these decorative elements were put into place for the show, and then left to sit for those prospective guests, despite the fact they rarely actually came.

This is a component of our culture that still lingers, though it seems to finally be fading. How many of us within Generation X grew up in homes with at least one formal room that had to be there - “for guests” - which we were allowed maybe - maybe - to look at, but not to enter or touch? I am certain I am not the only person who grew up in fear of accidentally using the “good” towels to dry my hands (thanks Mom).

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1. I am well aware this may not be spelled correctly. Google Translate didn’t like it, and I remember looking it up years ago, as a teenager, in my English-German dictionary. I’m reproducing it here from memory, which may well be, at best, a little cloudy.  ↩

Windows on Life

We had our second set of new windows installed this summer, this time in LB’s room. Some of the old frames were left against our garage, waiting for me to put them… well… somewhere.

The wind (which has become a character in and of itself out here) was particularly brutal on Wednesday night (11/11/15). Combined with the rain it reached a level that ultimately caused me to actually pull off to the side of the highway on my way home from Rockford. It was not surprising, then, when I came out in the morning to see that some of the window frames had blown over and were laying in the grass.

One of the more challenging realities of being a “Part-Time Homesteader”[1] is that I’ve had to learn to quickly assess things that need to address and mentally set them aside if I don’t have time to deal with them in the moment. This means leaving things be when I’d really rather just take care of them. But - in this example - I was leaving for work with little margin for error with respect to travel time, and (as is often the case) it was still dark. For a while the need to do this bothered me - and I’m still frustrated when I see the things that I’ve not yet been able to address.

So I was finally able to address it this afternoon. Work gloves let me make fairly short work of the broken glass, and I actually broke out the Shop Vac and vacuumed the grass in hopes of avoiding the dogs opening themselves up on an errant shard.

This was the first opportunity I’d had to look closely at the windows, and what I realized was: the windows were in worse shape than I’d thought.

The example in this picture shows quite clearly that, at some point, an ancestor used metal brackets to keep one of the windows together. The difficulties that we have with these windows, and their ancient nature, aren’t new - previous generations have also had to deal with them. The window appears to be missing anything resembling glazing putty from the bottom of the panes as well, though that might have been knocked loose when they were removed (though I suspect not).

We had considered using these old windows as part of cold frames for growing vegetables through the winter, but the realization that the paint coating them is almost certainly thick with lead suggested that was not the finest of plans. So: for now they sit in the basement, broken, with uncertain futures ahead of them.

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1. “Part-time Homesteader” - what I mean here is that, while it would be great to be in a position to make my entire life and livelihood on the property we have, raising critters and crops thru subsistence farming, the reality is that I have to work to make it all possible. I don’t really regret that - I love what I do - but it very much puts me in two different worlds.  ↩