The adventure goes on …
Our Adventures
It’s been a bright, blue-skied day, with the temperature hovering around 0°C, and only a slight breeze (in spite of continued warnings of cold outflow winds) – a perfect day for a walk through our woods. We have a couple inches of snow on the ground from two days ago, not enough to make walking difficult, but it makes a perfect layer in which to observe animal tracks.
Originally, when I started out with the idea for this journal entry, I was going to tell about our concepts for microhydro on our site, but … water froze and became ice, and the story developed of its own accord.
It seems to me that I can’t remember a day in the past month when it hasn’t rained. What is this – global warming, or global wetting?
I’ve been a little more active on the “social media” scene these past couple of months, and this had led to a few old friends contacting us and asking the question “Just where exactly are you living now?”
We purchased a bunch of lights for the cabin last spring, but then we got busy, and of course the days got longer and sunnier, so who needed lights anyways?
A couple weeks ago, we picked up a new propeller for the Awen while we were in Campbell River. Now, we finally have everything ready to put the new prop in place.
Today is Samhain, or as most people know it, Halloween. What better way to spend a Halloween afternoon than on a hike through the damp fall woods, battling through spiderwebs and hunting weird mushrooms.
When we purchased our property, we knew that it had a history of human use – hand logging and pioneer homesteading around the turn of the century, then more recently, clear-cut logging. So we expected weeds. Weeds and humans go hand-in-hand. Some weeds, such as ivy, can be just plain irritating. Other weeds, such as dandelions, are good edible species.
Our yard has been taken over by ruffed grouse, or “yard chickens”, as Ken calls them.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve talked to a lot of people who thought that our crazy scheme of going OTG and developing a “permaculture homestead” was a really good idea. But when asked whether or not they would consider doing a similar thing, they would always end up saying no, followed by a list of excuses (my kids …, my parents …, my job …, my social needs …, my lack of money …). I’ve always figured that the reason why I’m out here and the rest of the world is in there (the box, that is) is because I’m a doer, and not a dreamer. But maybe the real reason is because I’m a Gen Xer (short for being a member of Generation X).