Planting, Building and Finding water...

So here we are, already into June and time has been flying by so fast I can hardly believe it. Life is so busy here that there's really no time to look at clocks or calendars... Time is not irrelevant, but here, more than ever,it seems to be another bizarre fabrication of our insane society.

We go to sleep when it's dark and wake when the light begins to return and the rooster crows. There's no tv or internet to keep our brains busy, so we do real life stuff,(ie:chores :) -and listen to cbc radio2, (the local stations are like audio junk food, all ads and crap music with absolutely no real substance whatsoever...)

We have 30 meat chicks on the go, potatoes are planted, and we found a spring! We've been boiling lake water and carrying drinking water in, so this development is very exciting to us. It's up-hill from the cabin, and not too far away, so it should be relatively simple to set up a gravity line to a reservoir closer to where we are...

I was talking to our closest neighbors recently, they were kind enough to invite us to dinner last week, and they are interested in doing a sort of co-operative gardening project, they have land and we have workers. This is perfect for us, as we are living on virgin land that needs so much work, and they are on land that's been farmed for generations... And I have lots of seed potatoes left to plant, so YAY!

Our meat chicks are getting a deluxe hexagonal log dwelling, the bugs have been decimating the spruce trees and if we don't use the wood one way or another it will just rot into the ground. The other day we found an ancient spruce tree fallen, too big to get my arms around, it had bug damage at the core and just snapped right off at ground level. Still good for firewood, but what a waste of lumber...

I really wish I could post some pictures, but I haven't quite figured that out yet...
Soon, I promise!



Thanks for reading my meandering thoughts, it's nice to think that someone is listening!

♥ ♥ ♥Renee J.♥ ♥ ♥

How we save $ on and conserve nutrients in hot rice cereal...

We used to buy Bobs Red Mill rice poridge at $5.49/7.50g. It's a great product and I would buy it again, but I got this great grain grinder on sale for around $15. at Princess Auto... Now, we buy a 2kg bag of long grain brown rice and run it through the grinder once or twice. 750 grams of that rice costs us about 1.50, well worth the time and energy spent grinding. 2kgs of the pre-ground stuff would cost $14.64, so the grinder paid for it's self after 2 bags of rice... Also, because the rice is ground immediately before cooking, it has higher nutrients than if it sat on a shelf for who knows how long waiting to be bought...

Undacovamutha*Renee Janet

Still Plugging Away At It Tho...

This week we put a "new" window in the cabin, we'd scavenged it from an old mobile home last year and all the window trim and paint were on hand from past projects. We're getting really good at doing stuff like that for free, and it's more than a little gratifying to be able to use things we saved or collected over the years... I wish I could post photos, I would show the daffodil yellow wall and crisp white window trim, it is stunning.

Undacovamutha*Renee Janet

Mothers Day is a GREAT idea! I choose Sunday...

THIS IS A TEST!

Here I am, sitting on the dock at the lake, trying to figure out this mobile blogger thingie. I tried to post a photo yesterday, but it showed my secret mobile blogging email addy... SO, I changed it and here we are again. Fingers are crossed!

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Sent via Bell Email

We are here...

We are finally all moved and settled, living off-grid in that one room cabin on the lake... Eagles calling to each other wake us early in the morning, along with the crows of Foghorn, our American Leghorn rooster, the latest addition to our small flock. Loons are going off at all hours of the day and night, and the other morning we saw two of them doing what must have been some sort of mating ritual, they were almost running on the water with their wings, like windup toys, going around and around the lake tirelessly for at least 15 minutes, very strange indeed.



We've built a henhouse, set up a laundry shed with a generator, washer and propane dryer. Six people make a lot of dirty laundry in a hurry, so that was a real priority for me after a few trips to the laundrymat in town with a dozen loads to do. A bathtub will be installed as soon as I can find a big old clawfoot tub for cheap or free...



A garden is going in as we speak, sunchokes(jerusalem artichokes), oregano, potatoes, salad stuff, and lots of flowers are on the go, the kids have started some sunflowers, beans and birdhouse gourds on a window and they are increasingly excited to see their plants growing and stretching out towards the light...

We have no internet connection but I am learning to use my mobile phone for email and will soon work my way through the stacks of unanswered mail, my sincere appologies go out to all who've been neglected over these last few months.

Update: still moving...

We ended up having to move again in November, after,(among countless other issues...), the cozy little place in the woods turned out to be a rodent infested mold factory. Once winter really hit, the upstairs was too hot for us, while the downstairs was cold and damp because the wood stove was upstairs, and heat rises. I had some fans set up to circulate the warm air better, but eventually it started to smell strongly of mold down there, and the mice in the walls were keeping us up at night. I'll never understand how such tiny little critters can make so much noise...

So we moved to this other place, closer to town, on a great piece of land with a river in the backyard... The house is smaller again, but there are a couple of outbuildings to store our stuff that doesn't fit in the house, and I'm finding it much easier to keep the place clean without most of our furniture and books in the way. There's also a fireplace here, a new experience for us, rather like a campfire in the living room... I've been doing a good portion of our cooking on the open fire, because I left our super nice gas stove at our old house for my brother and his woman when I thought we were going to have somewhere to live with a stove in it, (stupid move on my part for sure...) and the two second hand electric stoves I tried to buy didn't work out.
(Story and pictures to follow at a later date.)

We were hoping to be here for at least the summer, but the place was for sale and it sold, so we need to have another plan by the end of April. I want to build a yurt, cord wood, or dugout home, or buy a converted bus... but I'm not exactly sure where or how yet, and I'll have to get rid of most of my/our stuff, and I have no money. Details, details...Palace Yurt by Little Foot yurts at the 2008 evolve festival in Antigonish County

Cordwood building and close-up of inside wall, in Ship Harbour Nova Scotia

Hello again!

These heathens do grow like bad weeds...

Hello all! To be online again after such an extended absence is a major relief. It was the first time since '97 I've had no internet for more than a month... We were so poor all summer that we had to let the phone and internet go. I have become so very good at being frugal, my new motto is, "If it's free, it's for me!". Also, somehow it seems like the less money and fewer ingredients I have, the better my cooking gets. Not sure how it happened, but more on that later for sure...

We moved away from our house in Havre Boucher, where we lived for the last 8 years, (my Grandmothers old place and one of my most memorable childhood homes). It's in an old acadian fishing village in northeastern Nova Scotia, my ancestors have lived there at least since the early 1800s and likely long before that too, so I do have plenty of family and acquaintances in and around the community but very few real friends, sadly there was hardly even anyone to say bye to when we left. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Now they're having this big RC church sex scandal there because one brave soul finally exposed the abuse he suffered at the hands of the late Father Alan MacDonald, who was a well respected local priest in the 70s. I think that the shit hasn't even started to hit the fan yet, there were a LOT of altar boys this predator came into contact with who are still messed up, the stories have been circulating for years, but nothing was ever done by the church or lawmakers, despite having been informed of at least some of the incidents, up until now. We shall see. I don't understand how money could ever compensate for a ruined life anyway, all this energy should be put into preventing anything remotely like this from happening to any innocent child ever again. You might say,"at least he wasn't after the little girls too", but plenty of them were molested by the dentist in Antigonish while they were under the gas getting fillings they didn't need... Nothing was ever said or done about that either. Can you imagine trying to measure such things in dollars?

We spent most of the summer in a one room cabin on a lake, seriously considering the possibility of relocating there permanently, but being the main dish washer/laundry person and cook in the family, with so many people to look after, I decided that we do need running water and electricity. So after managing to sell that uninsulated albatross of a house we were in, (albeit for way less than its worth, but to a family member and for enough to cover most if not all of my debts, no worries or complaints here :), we are now house sitting this wonderful cozy little house in the woods.

There's a woodstove here, which is another requirement for any place I'm to live in. There is also an oil furnace, but I haven't yet called the oil company to fill the tank, and that must be done before winter, it's on the list... We've been heating the place with free wood so far, since the beginning of September, (well dried scraps from local sawmills are free for the taking as are wind-falls and driftwood...)

This place is well-insulated enough that when I light a fire, it actually gets warm in the house, a completely new experience for me. There's a shed in the yard for my laying hens, an old fashioned claw foot bathtub, beautiful wood floors and walls and a huge screened in deck. Things are definitely looking up.