Cold cold cold

Posted on 01/27/2012 by Jenny

It has been a chilly week. Most mornings have still been done around -10 F. No more problems with the baseboard heat for which we are grateful.

We have been trying to sheep herd on Saturdays but the weather in Wasilla has been worse than Anchorage. Tomorrow may be as cold as -20 F at the sheep facility. Herding stops at -10 F. Not safe for the lungs of the sheep or dogs to exert themselves in those temps. Bing questions my judgement around -6 F, Kate quits at 0. Last winter I would herd at -10 F, this winter I get wussy at 0 and have a tough time getting motivated to work.

Anyway, tomorrow’s forecast is -20 F. I think we’ll stay in town, break our fast at Whitespot, hit the gym, and perhaps buy me a longer Skhoop. A Skhoop is an insulated skirt, like a coat for your lower half. I am at about 5 months now, and skirts seem to be the only comfy clothing I can find right now. But it’s frikkin’ frigid out there. My existing Skhoops aren’t long enough to keep me comfy.

We may also do some more book weeding so check our books available list in a couple days and shout if you want something.

Chickens were bitching until they got their corn tonight. The second heat lamp is doing its job holding the cold at bay. Need to scrape some snow off their ‘sun roof’ as the weight is causing bowing between joists. Also need to replace their backup heated water bowl. After 6 winters it’s failed. Hens are still laying despite the cold. How amazing – the Chantecler is truly an impressive chicken!

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PaperBackSwap

Posted on 01/23/2012 by Jenny

Scott and I have been thinning out our books. Not an easy task. We’ve gone through 7 shelves so far, and have pulled about 100 for discard. We’re not getting rid of anything we really love. Much of what is going is duplicates, readily available through the library, obsolete to our current interests, or just not that interesting.

Why thin books you ask? Our shelves are double stacked and double deep. We can’t remember what we do and don’t have, and can’t remember where we put the books that we are interested in reading at any particular moment. Kinda dumb. Plus we’ve got an unknown number of bankers boxes loaded with books on shelves in the house and in the garage. It’s not that we have too many books, but we don’t have enough shelf space for what we have and thats just not going to change.

So.

We’ve passed some on to friends. We’ve posted the remainder to our PaperBackSwap.com accounts. Quite a few books have gone away that way. Not familiar with PBS? Oh my. Basically you post books you are relinquishing, someone else says ‘Hey – I want that’. You get a credit for sending the book, and can then use that credit to request a book that you want from anyone on PBS. Keen, huh?

After a couple weeks we’ll take our remaining discards down to Title Wave, and get book credit there.

In the meantime – if you are family/friends take a look at our PBS lists. Email us if you want a book we have listed, we’ll give it to you.
Jenny’s: http://www.paperbackswap.com/book/members_books.php?m=ckZNM05peXhibm89

Scott’s: http://www.paperbackswap.com/book/members_books.php?m=aGVDVG4xTGQ4Kzg9

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Dog Brag Wall

Posted on 01/22/2012 by Jenny

We’ve been working on rearranging the house for Elizabeth Katherine’s arrival. Part of that includes finding permanent locations for stuff that’s been living in boxes or scattered around.

This week I gathered all of Kate and Bings ribbons (Rally and Herding for both, plus Conformation for Kate).

It was really fun putting the ribbons in order and remembering the individual shows and the friends we saw at each.

Scott installed a spare curtain rod across the top of the wall. I strung Kates simple conformation ribbons onto a bit of string to hang vertically. Then we strung the rosettes across the rod, with the simple conformation ribbons hanging vertically by Kates brag photos. The vertical ribbons stretch another foot or two beyond what you can see in the photo. Bing’s ribbons are right of center, Kates left of center. Two of her three Best of Breeds are smack in the middle.

It was a fun project that inched us closer to being ready for EKA.

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Diapers, a lot of diapers

Posted on 01/21/2012 by Jenny

We got edu-ma-cated on diapers Saturday. We visited Arctic Baby Bottoms after sheep herding, out in Wasilla.

I remember cloth diapers as being unsophisticated and a little tricky. But we’d been doing our research and we knew they’d come a long ways since broad swaths of cloths and ducky safety pins.

We want to do cloth diapers to save money in the long run (average disposable diaper cost is about double average cloth cost over diaper period of the baby), save on trash runs (we don’t take trash service and don’t intend to, hence quantity of trash produced is of concern), and prefer EKA to know when she’s wet so she’ll be easier to potty train (planning ahead big time)

Plus the new cloth diapers are, frankly, pretty cool.

I’ll post details later, but suffice it to say we came out much wiser, and made up our minds about a few things. Thirsties brand, made in the US, with hemp liners, look like the way to go. We’ll supplement with rectangular trifolds placed in covers to keep the costs under control.

If we can get a stash of 2 weeks of cloth diapers, there is a company in Anchorage that will wash our nasty nappies for only $15 per week. Oh yeah baby! A weeks worth to have on hand, a weeks worth to be out getting laundered. That’s a lot of nappies

Take a look at their site – it’s pretty neat.

http://www.arcticbabybottoms.com

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Heat Restored

Posted on 01/18/2012 by Jenny

Yeah – we have heat!

The pipes are thawed and we dodged a bullet. No ruptures, breaks, or other bad things. The furnace is merrily warming our abode, hot water is circulating with nary a gurgle, all is well at the Midtown Ranch.

Collected 6 eggs from the hens (we hadn’t collected for a couple days). They were mugging for corn. Although it was -10 F outside with four hens, two heat lamps, a thick layer of shavings the coop was 32 F with the small hen door open when I tucked them in tonight. We learned in our first chicken winter back in 2005 that keeping the coop much warmer than 32 led to respiratory problems, feather plucking and vicious fighting. When it is much above freezing in the coop the chickens won’t go outside. Birds that won’t go out don’t eat or drink enough, fight incessantly, and fail to get fresh air. All kinds of problems. They basically sit on their feathered butts and gripe, bitch, and moan. So 32 inside sounds rough but it is really a kindness. We keep Chanteclers and Chantecler mixes. The white Chanteclers were designed for these temperatures by Canadian Brother Wilfred who set out to design the ideal Canadian dual purpose bird. Our girls are Partridges, developed by a different Canadian (drawing a blank on his name). He wanted to call his bird the Albertan but presumably because of the Chanteclers wild popularity his lovely birds were dubbed Partridge Chanteclers instead.

Anyway – our girls were designed for the cold and as long as the coop isn’t over warm they’ll go in and out all day, and lay right thru the winter.

Tonight they got corn and extra thanks for their lovely brown eggs. I made cookies with a couple of their eggs after dinner this evening.

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Cold weather woes

Posted on 01/17/2012 by Jenny

So it’s been kind of chilly lately. Most mornings have been -10 F.

This morning the house was chilly too. 55 F.

Hmm. Didn’t bode well for the furnace.

We placed a call to Central Plumbing and Heating and got on their wait list. Fortunately they were able to see us same day. Unfortunately they couldn’t give us a specific time. We’d had the furnace and baseboard heating system serviced by Central last September. At the time they didn’t believe the system needed to be bled. We speculated (before Central arrived) that the problem was an airlock preventing water flow in the baseboard heat.

The nice man from Central arrived in the afternoon. He did a great job explaining what and why he was testing for each component, educated us a little more about our system (disturbingly – ‘they don’t make that widget anymore, when it breaks we’ll have to reconfigure the system’). We soaked up as much as we could.

Regrettably the diagnosis was frozen pipes in the crawlspace. John was kind enough to slip into the crawlspace and help us identify several likely spots to check for frozen pipes. Some time ago we’d blocked a 3″ diameter hole. Our plug had worked loose giving our frigid weather almost direct access to the baseboard pipe. Could be a problem, you think?

John discussed our options with us. Central doesn’t do frozen pipes. They referred us to Libby Thawing.

We hauled space heaters down into the crawl space, pointed them at the likely spots, and crossed our fingers that we don’t have busted pipes.

We called Libby Thawing and got on their wait list. Libby’s list is very long, they were unable to give us a time estimate for when it would be our turn.

We do like living in Alaska very much. This is a hassle, but that’s all. We are able to keep the living space at a reasonable temperature. If pipes are busted we’ll deal. Grand scheme of things this is minor.

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A piano

Posted on 01/07/2012 by Jenny

So we’re obviously terrible at updating the web page on any kind of regular basis.

Lots of changes coming for 2012. Should be exciting. More about that later.

We bought a piano from a good friend. We had a piano briefly when I was a child and I remember learning to play ‘I Have Some Good Tobacco’ and other simple tunes. Mom was taking a theory class at Sonoma State, I think, and it was a rental to help her with class. I loved that piano, and have wanted one for many years. We’ve never had the money/space/knowledge/excuse/whatever at the right time.

We’ve seen many pianos over the years at the local thrift shops. I’ve been keeping my eyes open recently since we knew we’d be rearranging the house to make room for baby and I was hoping that ‘a well rounded individual needs music lessons’ could be sufficient justification to get a piano. When we saw Robin over Christmas she mentioned she’d listed the piano on Craigslist in preparation for her move this summer.  Perfect!

I remember when she bought it, and was there when they moved it into their basement. Very scary. There were a few moments as it was being carried downstairs that death and dismemberment were imminent. Sheer strength of will and bulging man muscles carried the day.

We’ll be hiring professional movers (after the snow melts) to transport the beasty to our home. I’ve researched a couple of piano technicians and have several leads on local moving companies with piano moving experience.

It’s a Lesage upright, from 1978. Manufactured in Canada and lovely to look at. It may take us until the snow melts to make enough space for it <grin>.

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Technology

Posted on 05/04/2011 by Jenny

The mail/web server suffered a catastrophic failure. We’re in the process of getting the site back up.

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