New and eggciting!

I've been a bad blogger. Like so many others I read, the late summer beauty and weather has taken me captive and kept me away from my computer keyboard. My outdoor hobby's have rendered me completely blog blocked! I am here now though with a few updates and announcements.

First... I am extremely giddy with excitement over our newest addition to our family. In 2 weeks, I will be picking up our new.... Silver Laced Cochin henS. Thats right, I said 2. Its nicer to introduce both at the same time. I will be sure to show you pictures!

Image by keltickelton via Flickr

Also, we are very excited to have had found some time to get back into our hiking hobby. We have in fact updated our gear and begun an extensive training regimen preparing us to do the Davis Path and to hike the Franconia Ridge. We will be spending night(s) out there and enjoying the air. I have been a rather large pig and stuffed my body with food non stop since the day I quit smoking so my body needs some time to recover and shed the baggage. Last weekend we hiked Cardigan Mountain by way of the "Holt Trail" which is a bit more difficult than the other trails up.


My husband and friend on our descent.


A picture on our way up.


Harry (dave) and I doing the "trail Ninja" pose.

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The Brady Kids To to the Mine

Recently Dave and I have gotten back into a outdoor activity that we have always enjoyed, we have started hiking together. We are planning some big hikes up a few mountains this month so we have been training for it by walking as much as possible. I really think hiking is the only form of exercise that I can do without getting bored. Before I know it, an hour or 2 have gone by.

When we first purchased the land at Shmoopywood, some of the neighbors had told us about the abandoned mica mine at the top of our mountain. I have always wanted to go up there but I was afraid to go alone. There is an old abandoned road on the other side of the river and today we decided to walk up that road and see if it leads us to the mica mine!

The road was fairly steep for the entire trip. It was great though as there was not too much overgrowth. We did not have to blaze a new path just walk up the road. It took about an hour to get to the top and then the road just ended! We were so bummed. We decided to take an alternate route down the mountain. We spied a small logging road off in the distance and after about 20 feet of walking that, we ran into the old mica mine!


We found an old truck!

Some sort of bucket

The steering wheel has long since been taken or eroded but the steering column remains!

A building with a door (cool hinges) we think it may have been the privy!

I dont know what kind of rock this is, it was like marble.

This bottle was discovered half buried! There is some bleach left in the bottle! We took it home and did some research, its a 1951 Clorox Bleach bottle. We also got a can of pipe tobacco.


After a thorough exploration and a promise to return we headed back down the mountain. We did make a short stop to admire a log cabin in the woods that has been abandoned.

I love these walks we have been taking, it helps me get in shape plus I feel like I am getting to know him and my surroundings much better. We saw countless moose and deer prints as well as scat. We chatted and laughed and we even worked up a good solid sweat!
I challenge you to have yourselves a walk around your neighborhood, woods, town and see what you can find that you had not seen before!

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Hola! Yes Hello!

Image by jcbwalsh via Flickr

Greetings from New Hampshire! I have been gone it seems like forever but now I am back! We had a vacation while some family visited us from the south so we got to do all the fun touristy things that you don’t really ever do because you live someplace. We got to go to the Polar Caves which is something we have been talking about doing for quite some time now. One of my favorite things to do in the summer is visit a local petting zoo, which we did with the kids, it was great fun! It really made me wish I had goats of my own though! Someday I will, you mark my words.

The dogs are doing great, I have decided to take a little break from Great Dane rescue for a while. I just have had such a crazy year this year and feel like I need to give my family, friends and myself a little bit more attention than I have been. IN order to do that, I had to let something very important go so it has been really hard dealing with that. My dogs are well though. We had Django’s ultrasound/Doppler/echo today and it actually went better than expected so thank God for that.

The chickens are big! Its hard to tell but I think that all of them are laying now. We get about 7 or 8 eggs every day with only 10 hens I think that is pretty good! Our 4 Black star lay DAILY and the other 6 probably only lay every other day. I think the day that I get 10 eggs in one day will be amazing!! We have been letting them free-range a lot more lately. They love it and it has definitely made their eggs tastier and more bright orange! The only bad thing is, they are new layers so we don’t know when OR WHERE they are going to lay. I found an egg in the lawn the other day. The dogs ate that one! I am hopeful that they will all start to lay in nest boxes though and then we can free range more often!

So that’s really it for us, I hope all is well with you. I am sure there will be more updates coming! Including the saga of the trail cam!
:D

So i leave you with a picture of my daughter and my cousin enjoying the baby goats.

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Turkey ? Do you see Turkey?

OH! I know its been a while but we have been on vacation, technically I am still on vacation but I had to share these pictures with you, my blog friends.

Over the last week we have been free ranging the chickens. They are LOVING life and today they found the compost pile behind our house. This afternoon they were scratching in the compost pile and I peeked out to check on them and this is what we found!!




I was surprised, Ted let them pass through, he gets all pissy over the cats and other birds in the neighborhood but with the turkeys he was like oh I dont see youuuuu lol There were about 12-15 turkeys varying in age and size.
It looks to me like one of the turkeys kind of had a problem with ted too ;)

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Water Filtration System

Hey all, this is a nice informative post by Harry/Dave. When it comes to engineering and how things work, I have the attention span of a chicken. Dave understands this (loves me anyway) and puts together these informative posts so that I understand better!! - Lisa

The latest addition to our off-grid cabin. I’m SUPER happy that we finally have a decent water filter for the camp. This item has been on the “wish” list for a long time but for some very strange reason we just never followed through until now. In all likelihood it’s the upfront cost that makes it such a shocker, however if you think about it… You really do need clean water 24x7 and for a family of 4 you need A LOT of clean water for drinking and cooking. So, having said all that, here is our recently arrived Berkey water filter.

Some specifics about this model. First, and this is a huge advantage… it's gravity fed and does not require ANY energy to operate, simply fill the top and pour from the bottom spout.



Since I tend to always go with worst case, I ended up with the Crown model which is their largest available. *editors note: this is a nice way for him to say he over engineers things!* As it comes, out of the box with 2 filters, it should produce about 6-7 gallons per hour. It has the ability to be expanded however to 8 filters… I think the output would be somewhere in the 25 gallon per hour range… Too much for what we need currently but when all was said and done… having all that extra capacity (minus the cost of the filters) really was not that different from the smaller models. The cartridges are pretty expensive but they do have the ability to be cleaned and reused so this to was important. So, as $$$ allows, we will pick up another set or two of filters and that will either provide for many years of operation and spares OR it would provide the capacity for cleaning large amounts of water very quickly. At this time I will be leaving it disassembled so I can’t give you any real world examples of performance, but I can tell you that from the look and feel of the materials, they are all top notch and I would recommend it for anyone looking for a stationary (yet movable) water filter that is both gravity and zero energy with pretty high output.

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