After a few weeks of mild weather, today dawned chill and rainy. I stayed inside for a while, but then had to just go “look at” the goat house. About 8 hours later, I had cleared several hundred square feet of thick old blackberry brambles. That’s the sort of thing we do for excitement out here, you see. Now I’m satisfyingly exhausted and enjoying fresh banana bread (Teri) and oatmeal cookies (me). The whole reddish area in this picture was a tangled net of blackberry vines, mostly dead ones. It was about as tall as me, and to get the scale of it, you have to know that the white square is a bathtub that was hidden in there. (background mosaic-ed out to preserve neighbor’s privacy) Yesterday, I created and placed the roof beams for the goats’ house. They’re the only part of the structure made of purchased materials (aside from some screws) . I want it to be really, really solid in case one of the 30 foot limbs from the tree above the house falls. You can tell I did more work on it – there’s another empty beer container resting on the beam.

More-or-less chronologically… I’ll start you off with a wildlife photo (and I promise, it gets prettier as you progress through the post)…a spider wrapping up a buzzing fly: Letting the spiders live happily in some corners helps with the flies…but the really scary looking ones get put outside. While we’re on the topic of food…we finally tried cooking something on the woodstove, and frankly it worked much better than our electric stove: Here’s a scary/lucky sort of thing; this is a fuel line with a big split in it…a split that was sealed up by a giant icicle! I went to replace the line and when I splashed warm water on the icicle, gasoline started spewing out. Moral of the story: do not wait till your car is in her mid-30s to replace all the fuel lines. Last night I tried making Challah bread from a bread machine recipe…well, it was yummy, and pretty, but I’ve got a lot of R&D to do before it remotely resembles a proper Brooklyn bakery loaf: Our silly red monster truck got a fun drive up the logging roads today. She’s so at home up there: Eugene’s lights twinkled in the distance: And to the North East, the rising moon appeared to be occluded by a cloud…but actually it was starting to eclipse already: These last two eclipse photos were take about two hours later, from our orchard, as the moon began to reappear. Full disclosure: the darker photo is a composite of two bracketed exposures; my digital cameras don’t have the range of Kodachrome…sigh…

3-day weekend! Pretty much finished two websites that I’ve been doing on evenings-n-weekends, ahhhhhh. In between bouts of coding I cleared several hundred square feet of old blackberry cane and continued to work on this gorgeous mansion: I know, still looks like a ragged pile of garbage, but it’s a damn sturdy and shaping up nicely pile of garbage. Pretty much literally; everything here is repurposed/recycled/used. These shipping pallets account for an astonishing percentage of the hardwood we cut in the U.S. – estimates from around Y2K ran to millions of board-feet every year; over 40% of our domestic hardwoods. Joined properly, they are a ready-made complex frame that can accept any type of sheathing, treatment, paint, etc., but gazillions (ish) end up in landfills. Many of the screws used to be part of a gigantic loftbed-garden-closet-bookshelf thing that took up a whole room in Brooklyn for years. The nails came in a bucket of “building crap” from Craigslist Free. And really, trust me – it’s gonna be cute when it’s done. I’m already plotting out a workshop for myself, based on a 6-pallet floor. That would enable us to use the current workshop/junk storage area as an aux living space, office, etc. It’s just too nice to be filled up with my sawdust and greasy tools. OK, you come here for pretty pictures…here’s some of today’s programming from the wacky nature show that is our life here: Beautiful! And here’s something even prettier – Teri visiting the goat house construction site:

It may not look like much yet, but it’ll be sturdy and cozy for a couple of goats, coming this spring: Here’s the gate to goatland…this will take a bit of work too: * Oh, the title…it’s meant to mean “The goat house rises”, but freetranslation.com may have betrayed me. The goats we’re planning on are half Oberhasli, which is a Swiss breed. The Swiss people are predominantly German speakers…yeah, it’s a stretch. But German is fun for making enormous compound words!

Gods I love the weather out here. Found this little beauty behind the house today: Spent a little time brainstorming about the goat stable…the primary construction material will be shipping pallets, plus a few stout, rough-split poles I originally collected for firewood. Here’s about half of what I figure I’ll need (more scrounging to do!): The fencing is mostly in good shape, but about 100′ of it droops beneath a thick mat of blackberry. I’ve already spent hours clearing it, but there’s a full day of work just getting the rest of it off the fence: Finally, to cap off this random little post, a backlit photo of one of last year’s hot peppers:

Thanks to everyone who emailed, commented, and phoned us after we lost Ceili. It really helped in a tough time. She led a long, happy, adventurous life, leaving her mark on more than half of the States and spending her last year in this paradise we now inhabit, so as my own selfish “miss my dog” feelings fade there’s mostly just happy memories and funny stories. On Feb 4th, we completed our first trip around the sun here. Even though it was cold, it was exciting seeing the land exactly as we found it last year and knowing what’s to come. I know we haven’t been posting much. Even here, where the ground never freezes and the locals think 3″ of snow is a major event, things slow down in the winter, but now we’re being teased by 60 degree days and the appearance of flowers, and it’s time to get outside and get busy. The garden will be expanded; we aim to be producing most of our own food within the next couple of years, and greenhouse experiments have me convinced that we can start seeds in there very soon now. But even bigger news – we’ve been talking about dairy goats for a long time, and we’re finally about to act on that. In a month or two we expect to bring home a pair of does, probably a cross of Nigerian Dwarf and Oberhasli, and in a year or less we hope to be making our own cheese, butter, etc. There’s a nice fenced area with shade and a hose waiting, and among this year’s seed order will be alfalfa and oats, to be used both as cover crops and to provide some of the goat’s feed. Goat-house construction and fence reinforcement will be the big weekend projects now. Our visit to a neighbor’s goat farm last weekend was very exciting; beautiful animals with TONS of personality and intelligence. Some nuzzle you and want to be scritched just like dogs, some are more introverted, and all are fun to watch. One happy surprise: the females don’t just smell less than the males, they really don’t have any objectionable odor at all (neither do the males, most of the time, but when they start feeling romantic they urinate on their heads and chests, much like the way Jersey boys use cologne, except less stinky and without the terrible dance music) The birds are singing, the satellite service isn’t constantly blanking out from thick cloud cover, we’re running around in T-shirts, and the mud in the fields is no longer at a life-threatening depth. Posts should be picking up (Teri has a backlog due to some trouble with the combination of Macintosh-wordpress-satellite), and we have big plans not only for our land and lives, but for this blog. Stay tuned, and we’ll try to make sure that the pretty pictures and happy posts outnumber the obituaries.

I can’t bring myself to write a post yet. Here’s this, since I expect most of our readers have met her. Apologies to dialup users, for whom this video will take 30 minutes or so to preload.