Good Days

After 4 straight rainy days, the weather has broken and the sun came out. The creek has been overflowing its banks and there's been nothing but standing water outside our door. It's mostly drained off now, but the ground is saturated and walking around anywhere is an exercise in keeping your boots on. Don't fall or you'll make a nice mud angel.

The batteries in the solar system got topped off for the first time in days. My generator is on the fritz (won't start) and it's been too muddy to get the vehicles down to the house so they have to be parked out on the county road. I'm sure that pleases the sheriff to no end. He gets excitable whenever he sees a strange vehicle in the county, but I suppose by this point we're no longer "strange". Or if we're still strange, we're at least a familiar strange. Don't worry, folks. I'm going to do a complete pictorial and walkthrough of the solar setup so far here pretty soon. I know several of you are interested. Hopefully nobody will spot any design flaws that are soon to be electrocuting me to death.

The tarp on my workshop doesn't hold water so we're going to have to invest in some real walls. Or at least plywood. If it's good enough for the house then it's good enough for the workshop. We're fully moved into the cabin now, only using the RV for a refrigerator, shower, and occasional cookstove when we have something that isn't feasible to cook on the woodstove. About 2am each night the fire has died down to the point that it's cold enough to wake us up and I have to go down and throw a couple more logs on. That usually holds us until about 7am, which is time to get up anyhow. Past few days though we've had a bit of a sleep-in as we don't want to get out from under the wool blankets. We're in for a spell of warmer weather though so it should get better.

We're adjusting pretty well now. We have a good dinner most nights, then some cocoa and we sit and watch our new show on one of the laptops. We like "Tales from the Green Valley" which arrived middle of last week. I understand there's a couple of whole seasons in the series and I'm looking forward to them all. I only wish they had a recipe book to go along with it. That simple farm food is right up our alley! To get some of that today is considered "artisanal" or gourmet, but back in the day it was normal peasant food. How times have changed! The rich people eat peasant food and the poor people now eat processed corn. I think we can flip that around easily enough in our own household.

The week starts tomorrow and there's a ton of work to do. My truck needs repairs, the generator needs repairs, and I need to churn out three raised beds this week to be on schedule for March. That's planting time around here and I'm determined to get things going for spring. I think one of the steel panels on the roof is loose too. As I'm laying in bed here up in the loft typing this entry out, I can hear it banging in the wind. I'm not looking forward to a trip up the ladder to the roof. That's not a pleasant excursion in the wind, but if I go when it's not windy then I won't be able to find the loose one. Ah well. Challenges to be overcome.

These are good days, praise the Lord. We're blessed.