Red Sky at Dawning …

January 24, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

I’m not sure there is any weather on the way but the sunrise this morning was beyond compare. Sometimes a photo can’t do justice to the scene. It is COLD. The kind of cold that makes your face hurt as soon as you open the door. The dogs stay out just long enough to do what they have to do. It is so still the only thing you can hear is you electric meter running. When you walk the snow crunches beneath your feet. This is winter, it seems like I haven’t seen it for sometime. It feels restorative to me this year – quiet, restful. In another month we will be gearing up for spring and be thankful for this time of rest.

Change

January 23, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.
Zhuangzi

There is a special town meeting tonight in Rowe about plans moving forward regarding the school. I am going. I need to be surrounded by townspeople to understand how they are feeling about the whole thing. I will be living there soon enough so any decisions that are made will effect me.

Change is always difficult for everyone, especially when it is sudden. The loss of the elementary school was a shock and a blow to the people of Rowe. The remains of the building are still there 7 months after the fire. Every time I drive by it I just wish it was gone. There is something to be said for it still being there though. It means that everyone has had time to go through their stages of grief if they needed to. The wound isn’t so raw. I think it has given us all more time to think about what the town needs as opposed to a knee jerk reaction to the loss.

I think that is something we are seeing far too much of these days, that knee jerk reaction to our problems. There is no foresight. No one thinks about how anything is going to affect us 15 to 20 years down the line. You see it with gun control, energy policy, climate change. Events are reacted to rather than analyzed. Do something to fix it right now without thought about what that means in the future. Just look like you’re getting something done.

I’d like to see thoughtful consideration given to what the town needs. Put the needs before the wants. Look at it from the perspective of 5, 10, 30 years from now. Rowe is the kind of place where properties are handed down for generations so forethought is needed. It’s easy to feel like you have lost all control due to the actions of others when it comes to the future of our kids, I know I do a lot of the time. I just hope because this town is truly run as a democracy that every issue is taken into consideration and everyone will feel a need to vote on their future.

Brrrrrr . . .

January 22, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

This photograph was taken on July 19, 2012. It was a hot, humid day and I was spending it moving this pot of flowers around to keep it in the shade. It was too hot to plant it in the new perennial garden until the sun went down so I just kept moving it and watering. The bees loved it. They would follow it on its trips around the yard.

Don’t get me wrong I like winter. I love it when it is so cold out the snow crunches under your feet. I love the winter activities. I love having fires both inside and out (burn season started the 15th). What I don’t like is the temperature dropping to 8 degrees and the wind blowing that fine snow in 30 mph gusts. Not fun. You can’t even dress for that.

So today I’ll look through my photographs of gardens past and peruse the seed catalogs one more time and dream about it being May.

Yahtzee!

January 21, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 3 Comments

Last October I was cleaning out a desk drawer at the house and found 5 old dice. I had a flood of memories surrounding them. My mother was an avid game player. She would wait for us to get home from school to play some sort of game with her. All the games I ever played with her involved dice or cards but the game I remember playing the most was Yahtzee. We would play it every day.

Bill is not a game player. The only time he will play is when we are camping and there is absolutely nothing else to do. He won’t play Yahtzee with me because he feels there is no chance of winning. This past weekend daughter Cait came up to Rowe for a visit. I begged her to play Yahtzee with me but she said she won’t either because she feels there is no chance of winning.

Sister Sue and I play often. We seem to be pretty even in our scores, one or the other always having some run of luck. It has become a mini obsession actually. We play whenever I am there. We play when there is a spare moment or two – morning, afternoon, evening. We play while we’re eating dinner. It’s kind of a mindless game. I can talk about anything else while we play. I find myself with spare moments throwing the dice three times as I walk by them on the table to see what I come up with.

I’ve always thought of this game as an almost total game of chance. You can’t control what you throw only how you score it. I think the difference between those of us who are obsessed with it and those who rarely play is whether we play it safe or are willing to take a risk. I risk it all with every throw, I’m always going for the Yahtzee.

I think you need to look at life the same way. You need to take risks. There are so many little choices every day. You should keep rolling those dice and come up with a great score.

Outbuilding

January 18, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

out·build·ing – (outbldng)

n. A building separate from but associated with a main building.

There are a few outbuildings on Fort Pelham Farm. Some were there when we arrived in 1967, some were put up after we got there. The interesting part about some of these buildings is the reason they are there. The buildings in the photograph were built by my father to house a Chase Sawmill that he purchased in the early ’70’s from Gerald Truesdell.

My father has always been a tinkerer and collector of large machinery – especially if it could be run on steam. His big dream was to own a locomotive and have tracks running around the property – it didn’t happen. Along those lines though he amassed collection of very large machines. I remember it starting with the sawmill. He built the original building to house it and set it up to run with the diesel power unit that came with it. It took a while to work the bugs out of it. I remember on one of the first runs the carriage running off of its tracks and firing through the building wall – he kept it open for a while after that. He ran it quite often and did it all by himself.

Shortly after getting the mill he purchased a small steam engine to power it. I remember him buying a boiler that had once been in a laundry in Shelburne Falls. I was working at Lamson & Goodnow at the time and spent the better part of a morning upstairs in one of the buildings there watching the riggers pull it out of the roof of a building across the river. I think I was really wondering how he was going to get that huge thing into his mill. I can’t recall if this particular piece of equipment was put in by riggers or if he managed to get it in himself.

One of the amazing things about my Dad was his ability to move huge, heavy things by himself. He was a master of block and tackle. He worked on this project for a long time, fabricating the things he needed to get this steam engine running. This all was happening during the Carter years when there was a huge interest in renewable energy and he got a grant to help pay for some of the materials he needed. When he decided to do something there wasn’t anything that was going to get in his way. The mill was glorious to watch run on steam once he had it set up. The only real sound was the saw blade cutting through the wood.

He built the building that is currently there after snow collapsed the original one. The boards on the outside were ones he sawed himself as well as the ones on the garage. The mill currently sits idle but with a little effort it will be running again only with a diesel power unit this time. We look forward to cutting some of our own boards for use in other projects around the place. There is a lot to be said for having this capability. Just being able to replace siding on this outbuilding from your own woodlot is a win. Not to mention the satisfaction of knowing that everything you’ve used has come from your property.

1978 Running the Mill

It’s That Time of the Year

January 17, 2013January 17, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

Many people are getting their seed catalogs out and pouring through them this time of year. It’s good to do a little planning and have your seeds ready to go whether you need to start your tomatoes in the house, are sowing some seed in your hot or cold frame or are just thinking about what will go where in the garden this year.

I’m a planner, it’s one of my favorite parts. I plan what I’m going to plant and where it’s going to go in the garden this year. I plan what plants will be next to the others keeping companion planting in mind. I plan different designs because I hate how boring it is to look at a garden with plants in rows. I pour over the charts I’ve kept in past years to make sure I don’t plant the tomatoes and potatoes in the same place year after year.

I work on an order with High Mowing Organic Seeds that I continue to change week after week from October on, waiting until the last minute to place it. I read their website for all the info I can gather about the new seeds I want to try growing. There are always the tried and true to grow like last year’s Gold Rush yellow snap bean. I cannot say enough about this bean, it was prolific. I started picking beans in July and picked them until frost. They weren’t those tough, tasteless beans either. They were tender and tasty until the very end. I lost count of how many pints I canned but I know Sue and I complained towards the end of the season every time we picked enough beans to can once more. Of course now I’m glad I did.

The other plant I grew this year and introduced to everyone I knew was Joan Rutabagas. I grow them every year and was a little in awe at how few people had never tried rutabagas (probably because they are my favorite vegetable). They require a fairly long growing season but are very cold hardy so they weren’t dug until well into October. I fed them to everyone.

Every year I pick one or two new plants to try. Some work out very well like the Gold Rush beans. Some don’t
but I feel like I haven’t given it a real chance unless I plant it a couple of years in a row. Each growing season is so different. Here’s the problem, every year there are more and more things I want to plant but I don’t have the space to plant them all. I have to cut down my list of seeds.

Sad, sad.

There are currently 27 items in my cart. I probably should get rid of half.

What it really makes me do is plan a new garden in another spot on the property. It’s always some nice piece of lawn that Bill has worked on for years. He’s not going to like this.

The Story of Chester, Part One

January 16, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

Chester came to us in a rather round about way. Yes, we adopted him but we didn’t go to a shelter or read about him in the paper. We took him because Nadia ( in the photograph) couldn’t keep him anymore. I asked her to tell me about Chester so it could be the beginning of his story.

Nadia picked up Oreo (his name then) on June 24, 2011 after seeing his photograph in a Craigslist listing for northern VT. The people that had him were about to move and couldn’t take him with them. When Nadia called them they told her they were leaving that day and they were just going to leave him at the house they were moving out of.

They were abandoning him.

Nadia arrived at their house as they were leaving with their Uhaul. She brought him home to live with her and her then boyfriend. She loved him, he was her baby. How could you not?

I first heard about this puppy in July. Daughter Amanda and her boyfriend, Yusuf were wondering about the wisdom of getting a puppy when you’re starting college in the fall. Nadia is Yusuf’s sister. Towards the middle of August I got a text from Amanda telling me that Oreo needed a forever home and did I know anyone that would take him?

Nadia had had a falling out with her boyfriend and came to stay with Amanda and Yusuf with the pup in tow. At some point she decided she was going back but couldn’t bring the dog and wanted to make sure he went to a good home. She really didn’t want to let go but I think she was trying to protect him from an abusive situation, I don’t know, we haven’t talked about it.

Amanda sent me this photograph on her phone with the message, “Isn’t he cute?”.

Sigh.

On August 13 we went boating with Amanda and Nadia who brought Oreo so we could meet him. That night Bill and I talked about how much we like this dog. He was the perfect size and was very sweet but . . . we had two other dogs, did we really want to contribute to the madness we already had?

On August 19th we brought him home.

I’ve had dogs for over 30 years, only one other did I rescue and I lived to regret it. I believe that every animal comes to us for a reason, they have a job to do although we are never privy to what that is. Chester moved through two lives before he came to us. I honestly think he came to Nadia to force her onto another path.

He still loves Nadia. She came to dinner for Thanksgiving this year. Chester was pretty excited about all of the company in the house and all of the potential ball throwers that were gathered in one spot so he didn’t really notice Nadia right away. When he did he practically leaped into her lap wagging his tail in a frantic, crazy way and licked her face. He was soooooo happy to see her.

It always amazes me that they remember so much. I think we dismiss them too readily, we don’t give them credit for how deeply they feel things. People write them off as “just” a dog. I think in some respects they carry around as much baggage as we do but they are much more willing to move on and away from the ills that have befallen them in the past. In some respects they are quite simple, if you love them they will love you back. I have found that just loving a dog can help change a lot of bad things. I think we can all learn a lesson from this behavior. Live for right now, the past made you somewhat who you are but the present can be what you make of it – let the crap go.

What you can do with a little flour and fresh eggs

January 15, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 4 Comments

My sister has quite the flock of chickens that are just beginning to lay eggs (note the rooster in the back over seeing his girls). Last week she brought up some eggs and since then I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with the motherload of eggs like she will be seeing in the coming weeks. You see, she has 26 very healthy hens. That’s a lot of eggs. Once they are all laying it could be up to 2 dozen a DAY. Hmmmm, what to do with that wonderful fresh egg bounty?

Make omelets, quiche, pudding, angelfood cake? Fry them, scramble them, poach them – aahh, Eggs Benedict. Eat them at every meal, sell them, give them away. The list goes on but how about something a little different?

Saturday I decided to try something new. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. Pasta, specifically ravioli, I was determined to make my own. I scoured the internet and watched way too much Diners, Driveins and Dives in preparation for this new gastronomic adventure. I bought a pasta machine and ravioli mold (all very on sale) as well as a bag of Perfect Pasta Flour from King Arthur. Then she brought up those eggs and I was ready.

After all of that prep I ended up using the recipe on the bag of flour (how can you go wrong with a recipe from King Arthur Flour?). Three cups of flour, four large eggs, very little water. Sue’s eggs are small so I used 5 eggs. Put it all into the mixer with the dough hook and let it mix. Well, for a couple minutes anyway. The dough is so dense that it really requires hand kneading, so I divided it in half and did so. Let it rest for 30 minutes then shape into anything you want.

Now I have to tell you that this didn’t really look like it was going to make much pasta – I had 4 dozen meatballs just waiting to be turned into filling. Sister Sue wanted to be part of this adventure and entered the kitchen in time to help – good thing because this is a 2 man job (they don’t tell you that anywhere). I started rolling out the dough a little at a time and was AMAZED at how pliable a dough this is. Stretches like crazy, does not fall apart. After the first dozen raviolis were made we decided to cut the meatballs in half since the first batch looked more like Chinese dumplings instead of the intended Italian pasta. Perfection!

We made 3 dozen raviolis. I also have a pasta cutter attachment with the pasta machine so we made linguini and then spaghetti. I had no where to dry it so we made piles to freeze. We had a delicious meal with a homemade sauce and put everything else in the freezer. It takes only 4 minutes to cook fresh linguine, the ravioli took 5 minutes and was amazingly good.

The question remains, what are we going to do with all of those eggs because this is what we made with only 5!

Chasing Balls in the Snow

January 14, 2013January 14, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

There is a lot of snow in Rowe, even with the January thaw we’ve been having. Chester has had to retool his tennis ball games because of it. His new game is to hunt for the ball once it disappears into the snowy white unknown. When we toss the ball he keeps his eyes on where he thinks it’s going to land and runs out to find it.

He will root around in the snow until he comes up with the ball.

Then he gleefully returns it and waits for the next toss. He never tires of this game. I’ve seen him go outdoors by himself with a tennis ball, drop it into a snowbank and dig and dig until he “finds” it. If he loses a ball he will stay out looking for it for hours and will not take a new ball. You throw him another one and he ignores it.

Bill may have changed the game a little for him yesterday by accident. He was tossing the ball and with his last toss it landed in the snow on top of the garage roof. Chester looked for that ball for a good 3 hours. Bill tried the substitution but it was a no go. That dog actually came into the house to warm up and went out again to look for that ball. Poor Chester. It looks like an OCD to me.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Illunimation

January 11, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

Christmas Eve always mean fire of some sort to me. Set the table with candles, huge fire in the fireplace, warmth, family, friends, food, bliss.

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