And Now for something completely different – Video Blog #1

I have been basically sitting on my hind end all day feeling sorry for myself that my vacation is over. I hate that I have to wait another 6 months or so until I get to do the things that I love to do… you know, sleeping in etc. SO in protest of Monday, I have done nothing all day long. Then I decided that I wanted to blog. I love blogging but sometimes I just have trouble with content.

I headed outside with my camera and hoped for inspiration. Then, suddenly, it came to me! A video blog! Well, I guess I thought that maybe trying something different around here would be kind of fun? I dont know how many people are really reading me anyway so I am not shy or embarrassed about having my voice heard. Its actually what I do for a living! lol  So I thought I would start off with a tour of the chicken area. In this tour you get to meet all the girls (and the rooster) plus you meet Frankenstein and Noah. Django could not be reached for comment (he is napping).

There are 10, but they are 10-20 seconds each. The first video, the one that showed the front of the chicken yard was corrupt so we start off with “this is the rest of the chicken yard” lol sorry.

The New pen

The old pen

Inside the coop

 

 

 

 

 

So that our backyard chicken habitat and 2 of 3 Great Danes. Feel free to post comments or whatever if you think that this post sucks or if you loved it :)

 

L

A tour of S-wood!

We haven't done this in a while.. then again, we haven't done anything new up there in a while either. But I promised Linda from HERE that I would post a walk about for her. Since we didnt go anywhere except to retrieve our eaten trail camera, I thought I would stick close to the house and show you as much as I can.

I want to explain however, our Shmoopywood is VERY wooded. Like it gets dark 2 hours earlier on our lot than anywhere else kind of wooded ;) The lot was logged many years ago but they logged for pine so its all hardwood. In fact, we have the biggest birch tree D and I have ever seen!

So without further babbling from me, here is our happy place:


So here I am standing about 3/4 of the way up the driveway looking down towards the road. You can see that it is so steep at one point the driveway disappears! I Love it but it makes it VERY difficult to get up the driveway with 2 inches of snow on it, and it stinks to carry stuff up.



I have not moved but I have turned around towards the house so you can see how high up it is still. The Outbuilding on the right is the previous S-wood. It will someday be a coop or a goat house, I think. You can see the party van in the front, this is the best way for us to get 2 kids, 2 danes, 2 adults and all our crap to the cabin.



Now I am standing to the right of the "goat house" in front of what used to be grass but now it is a huge bungle (its a word) of raspberry and blackberry bushes. Our entire lot is LOADED with blackberries. I cannot wait to harvest and make them into preserves and jelly!


Here is the raspberries as proof



Now we are stepping inside of the basement of shmoopywood (dont mind the mess) THis is also known as man-town. We unloaded the Party van into it earlier this day so its still in a bit of disarray.


We are headed up the stairs to the main living area. On the right you can see some of our food stores, on the left we have saw ;) (remember our woodworking with Harry sessions?)


Now we have ascended the stairs and taken a slight right, and this is the living room of S-wood (no walls and all!)


I have taken a slight left and this is the dining area as well as the 2nd bedroom (with a tiny little great dane... who knew he could get that small) THe dane is penned because the other dane was out. They are separated at all times due to aggression (another post).


A little more to the right (you can still see the hutch) is our only walled room thus far. The royal bathroom!!


when you came up those stairs from Man town, you would be facing our kitchen.


this is Girl Town - or my screened porch!



Coming out of screened porch and taking a left will lead you to the stream where we used to get ALL of our water supply for the potty and for washing.


The somewhat less beaten path to the stream. Now that we have water storage in the basement we have to make less frequent trips to the stream!


Standing at the stream looking back at shmoopywood.


And lastly... halfway across the path to the stream stands the biggest Birch tree we have ever seen.....

There are about 7 unseen acres here, but when I tell you its wooded, I mean machete and compass wooded ;)

ANd that concludes the tour :) Hope you enjoyed it!

Sasquatch

I realize it seems that we are constantly floundering and failing at what we are attempting right now. Its okay though, we would rather fail right now than when it counts and so this is our whole point. We are trying to learn stuff that we dont know. We are struggling to become more self sufficient and less reliant on other people for our own survival. We are trying to shrink our footprint on the planet and do things the "right way". There is alot of good that comes out of this, and it is alot of fun too. There are also parts of it that are not fun. Growing and raising your own food (like my dying garden and my mensa chickens) is alot of fun but its not enough. Our garden is totally failing because of the rain. I think we had something like 23 days of rain out of 30 and to be honest I think that is stretching the stats. I think we had like 2 days of sun and the rest of the days rained. Slugs have completely denuded our potato plants and the radishes failed for the same reason. I actually replanted the radishes though and I am hopeful it will work.

In an effort to learn about the less fun part of self sufficiency and in effort to shrink that giant footprint, we will be considering ways to provide our own meat as well. We are talking about raising meat birds and we are talking about different critters that are indigenous to our little corner of the world. As much as I hate to think about it, a really big problem in this world is the current mistreatment of animals and the methane those animals create. Raising my own animals I would know they were humanely treated and I would know they lived a good life. Also.... I have ALWAYS wanted to know what wanders around in our woods at night (or in the day) so I got a trail camera. We set it up last weekend and Dave picked it up today to see what we got.



Something set off the camera but as you can see, it was fast like lightening. Either that or... its bigfoot... It could be bigfoot... or we have alot to learn! Chances are good whatever set the camera off crossed the path and therefore was history by the time the camera woke up and took the shot. We left it up there for another week. If I get another weeks worth of blank shots, then the camera needs to be moved. Perhaps the train goes across ways or maybe there is no trail lol. We shall see!!!

Mensa Chickens

I have thought that my chickens are exceptional really the whole time we have had them. When they spill their water, or when they fill their feeder with litter, I am always defending them. No matter what Dave says I am all "no our chickens are geniuses, you don't need to do that". Between you and I though? I am really starting to wonder. Dave created these great roosts that fold up. They are specifically made for 6 chickens, 3 on the top, 3 on the bottom. Then on the other side of the coop there are other roosts for the other 5 chickens. Its not hard to figure out. It became obvious to me fairly early in the whole roost game that things were not going to go the way *I* had planned them. Now what am I going to do? See, it all started when I realized that the chickens actually vie for the top roost next to our man Ted who has quickly become the most important member of the flock. Every night I would sneak out there and watch very quietly as they hopped on and off their roosts, very interesting to see how they decide who gets to stay where.

Ever notice how I tend to get off topic alot? My point of this entire update is that over the last few months, that ONE roost on the top has become THE MOST important place on the planet for them. So important in fact that tonight when I snuck out there to see them sleeping (with my camera) I found this:

Do you see the one in the middle that has her wing kinda up in so she can fit? That's 5 chickens in the same space that was made for only 3! My extremely smart and terribly over thinking husband designed this so that 3 Hens belong on the top and 3 full sized hens belong on the bottom on the bottom... Instead we have 5 on top and 1 on the bottom? The other 5 are indeed BRILLIANT as they are behind me spread evenly on the one level perch comfortably sleeping.... My chickens are NOT exceptional.

Mother Nature is Patriotic!

**Please update your bookmarks to http://shmoopywood.greenpress.com**


We had a weekend up at S-wood and what a great weekend we had!! You see, here in New Hampshire, it has been raining since... well... I can't really remember when it started but I know its been WEEKS since we had a sunshiney day! THis weekend was sunny and gorgeous with the 'occasional interuption' from mother nature who felt as though she would like to exibit her patriotism and do some fireworks of her own.
Here is our flag which proudly hangs on the front of Swood when we are there, and in the background you can see Mom Nature's show coming over the mountain.

Also, while we were there soaking up some rays, Django was helping me Map our way home (around the 4th of July traffic)


After Django showed me the way home, I got to take a walk with my camera around our land. We are on the side of a "hill/mountain" in the north country so our land is not flat.
Here I am stand at the highest elevation of our lot (hmmm maybe 1800 feet??) on our land line (see the tree in the foreground is marked, thats how we do it in these parts) and looking straight down into what I call the "ravine" its funny because the lot has like "waves" that go long ways down the land and at the same time they are tilting up as well. I love our place. Someday this is gonna be where our goats play.



This slime was near where I was standing and I had to take a picture of it so I could research and see what it was!! very interesting stuff!


I can't wait go go and read what all of you all did this weekend! Whatever it was, I hope it was safe and happy!

Wordless Wednesday (late)

Loosey Goosie

***note*** Please note that I moved shmoopywood to greenpress and it can be seen by going to http://shmoopywood.greenpress.com Please update your links!!

Dave and I took a few days off from work to celebrate my birthday as well as get some things done. As you have seen in the last few weeks, Dave and I have finished the pen and the coop enclosures, we have a latch on the door that fits securely. Unfortunately it fits SO securely right now that we need a brick to smack the latch open.

Its been raining here in New Hampshire for what seems like weeks but we headed out early Thursday morning to go look at van's. A van may not sound like the greenest vehicle we could drive but because we cannot currently fit both dogs and kids in one vehicle, we often find ourselves taking 2 cars/trucks to the cabin which is by far less green than taking ONE van. Again, not the point of my story. So we head out around 10am and we are gone a long time. We even had lunch! We had to come back to pick up the title to the car we were trading in and I happened to look out the back door and noticed that Ted looked weird. There is sometimes an optical illusion where the chickens appear to be outside their pen but really arent. Well Ted looked closer than normal, what really freaked me out was that ALL of my chickens looked closer. It took a second only to realize that the chickens were out, and they had been out a long time. Parts of our woods are dug up! We figure they were out most of the day. Anyway, I had to chicken wrangle, with some creative thinking and some bread I managed to get all them to WALK into their pen except for one. Large Marge took some time to convince but eventually i caught her and told her she needed to stay in her pen so she didnt end up Hawk Brunch.

Thankfully the new chickens didnt get out (there are now officially 4 new chickens but I am thinking this may be a story for another time lol)

My best guess is that I (or dave but probably not dave and more likely I) probably didnt feel like beating the latch with a brick and just lightly latched it. This means that it did not take much to open the door. My chickens are geniuses (except marge who continually lays on the floor) and it did not take them long to go out of the door.

Of Lessons Learned

I am going to tell you a story. Currently this story has no end, because its an ongoing story but I will be sure to fill you in as things move along.

I will begin my story with explaining that I am learning alot about myself in the process of becoming more "self sufficient". One of the things I have learned is that I am pretty strong, but I am extremely stubborn. I do not necessarily jump into things but I engross myself completely in the research and when I think I "got it" then I go for it. Last weekend is an example of that.

Since beginning the chicken thing, I have done nothing but read about chickens, look at pictures of chickens and as you know, write about chickens. There are some pretty cool chickens out there. I have a short list of all the chickens that I would like to someday own. Last weekend there was a swap in my local area. A chicken swap is a meeting of many chicken people who have different kinds of chicken products, chickens, hatching eggs, eating eggs etc. You can buy/sell/trade whatever chicken related item you want to. I had met a few chicken people online and one of them offered me a chicken that I had always wanted. She is 9/10 weeks old and "beautiful". This chicken is a breed that I did not know much about, but it is mostly a "show" bird. I have a coop full of practical birds ranging from egg machine to dual purpose. I somehow convinced myself that this bird would make a fine addition. I did some research on the person offering and found that she had swapped with MANY people in the forum and was reputable... or so I thought.

Anyway long story short, I picked up the chicken and brought her home. It was not long before I realized that there was something seriously wrong with the chicken. She wouldn't walk. When she did try to walk she was crossing her legs over each other and stepping on her own feet. She was also shaking her head alot. Dave and I finally discovered (over the next 2 days) that she was in fact INFESTED with northern poultry mites. I mean INFESTED with bugs guys. Not only was she probably anemic from blood loss (hey those dots on her feathers aren't dirt, they are blood spots), but she was never let out of her cage, was kept confined, malnutritioned and probably never learned to walk in the first place. We have her segregated in a great dane crate, by herself. We have dusted her with Diotomaceous (sp?) Earth and started giving her polyvisol vitamins and watching her carefully.

As I sat at the table late on saturday night, with my head down, worried about the state of my chickens (incidentally, they had to be dusted too for safety). My husband looked at me and said "read the paragraph that states what our blog is about... It's about learning and this is us learning". This reminds me why I love him and it reminds me that my failure may teach someone else a lesson. Of the lessons easily learned from my mistakes, please remember to practice biosecurity with your poultry and do your research. I could have very easily infected my entire flock. These mites can take down younger chickens if gone unnoticed.

We do not know if Phyllis Diller the chicken is going to live or not, we dont even know if she will ever learn to walk or recover from her malnutrition, but if she does, we will find her another home. We have alot of love to give, but I have learned my lesson and will stick to my own flock, regenerating my flock within my flock by having babies and nurturing my core flock only.

I will keep you updated on the little chicken.

this is her on saturday, see her legs?

Even a perfect plan is subject to Armageddon

We had it all worked out perfectly. Dave was going to grab Frankenstein and head up to S-wood early, unload some things, fire up the stove and warm up the house so that we could have a longer weekend. Rather than going up on Saturday morning when the sun was out and having the entire day to warm up the house. It takes a good 5 hours to warm up the house via wood stove to a comfortable level and you really do not want to do that overnight. I got my phone call at 4pm stating that he was getting off the highway and will be there shortly (we do not have cell connection nearer to the cabin).
All was planned and going as scheduled...
until...

My phone rings again at 4:40pm
"We have a problem"
My first instinct is that something happened to the house, or the dog, or dave. I soon find out, I am somewhat correct about the house.
Apparently the house is infested, i mean infested with Mosquitoes. Now keep in mind, we were up there for the day 2 weeks ago but we have since had some unseasonably warm weather. Hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes INSIDE our house that has no electricity or running water for that matter.

We are baffled but mostly we are concerned about how to handle this situation.
Nature may take its course and the skeeters may die off, but what does that mean for the spring? We could use a toxic bug bomb but what repercussions are there for our "green" house as well as the family and the dogs?

So Shmoopywood is now quarantined until we can figure out... what to do with the end of the world infestation.

How much wood would a wood chuck chuck...

Earlier this week I mentioned the wood... Ahhh the wood... my nemesis . You see the wood is basically what is left over from when we cleared space for shmoopywood. The area where we built was already partially cleared, in fact, the wood that was taken when they created the driveway (pre-us) was milled and used to build the neighbor's floor. We kept as much hard wood as we could standing, which in the end is probably going to be a problem for us because with the house winding up being bigger (due to builder error) the trees are quite close to the house. Ah but I digress... we had them drop the trees with every intention of cutting and splitting what was dropped to keep us warm in the winter. The whole truth is we got out there right away and limbed the trees and took the brush away and we even cut the trees into manageable sized logs but that is where it ended. Good intentions my friends.... good intentions.

It is amazing how much work that is involved with building your own home, especially when its just us two, so the winter snuck up on us and then came the spring and when the 5 feet of snow that dropped in our lot melted, there were the logs... still.

I mentioned that I got a very romantic gift of a wood splitter, that too was covered with snow. Now that they are both unveiled and Dave is busy with building the railing, I finally got around to some splitting. Not having the forethought to take the picture BEFORE i split the wood, you cannot really tell that i made it about 75% of the way through before I took this picture. Here is my very sexy and very reddish splitter. Thats right girls, captain romance is all mine as well ;)



This gives you a better idea of how much wood I have split... Ahh the wood...




edited to add: I was just reminded by captain romance himself that the log splitter was MUCH more romantic than the ax and maul I got the year before. The boy has a point.

Update fun fun fun

It gets harder and harder to come back to work on Monday after I have spent all that time being happy and free... but alas, here I am updating you on how things went!

We got up to Shmoopywood on Friday evening and really when you get to camp on Friday's, the only thing there is to do is unpack and have yourself a Coors light (or 5). That is precisely what we did. The sky was completely LIT UP with stars Friday evening and we spent a great deal of time gazing at shooting stars and watching satellites go by. We are only about 80 miles from our other house and the difference in the sky is amazing, without light pollution you can even see the milky way. We had great weather all weekend with only one thunderstorm on Saturday late night so we had plenty of time to get stuff done.

Dave spent most of Saturday notching beams for the railing and carrying them up and down stairs to make sure the fit was right. This is a picture of the morning on on Saturday. By the end of the day, we were able to set the 10 foot beam at the top of the stairs. Side note: carrying a 16 foot beam up the side of the mountain is not easy but its much easier than carrying a cast iron bathtub.




We ended Saturday much in the same way we ended Friday, with some beers only not without the star gazing due to lack of sky ;0)

This is the way it looked by the end of day on Sunday. You can see the 10 foot beam kind of hides underneath that plywood we have resting against it. I should be a better photographer and move stuff but it was hot and I was tired ;). The handrails are fitted nicely into the notches that Dave worked so hard at. The bottom beam is still not cut but you can imagine what that will look like with a foot lobbed off the top.

Here is a picture of one of the corners where the handrail's are snugly fitted into the notches that Dave created, the second rail isn't in this picture but you can clearly see the notch that it is intended to fit into

We spend alot of time working when we are up there but we have also started to know people in our community. It has been an amazing experience but I will reserve the details for another post ;)

this and that

First I wanted to thank everyone on the compliments regarding the new format for the blog, I was playing around with it on Monday instead of working and this is what I got out of the deal ;) I did however, manage to delete my entire blogroll and wanted to state that if you were linked, or link to us, I want to reciprocate. Please let me know if you have been left out, its not personal. Lets face it, my memory is not what it used to be so I may have forgotten one or two. Thanks for the heads up!

So this weekend we are leaving on Friday night. We have the kids and the dogs but have great intentions of working on the rest of the railing for the loft. So many things to do and so little time is starting to wear a bit I think on my brain function.

On top of having to complete the gorgeous railing, we have some basic living items to take care of. Last year, Dave and I used the trees that were cut for the placement of the house and pretty much cut them all into more manageable pieces. The intention there was to split it all and stack it for use in the wood stove. *it was mainly pine* For my birthday my loving husband got me a log splitter (captain romance!) and off I went splitting wood. Well unfortunately the seasons changed and the snow arrived unfortunately burying a pile of wood at the base of the driveway that was already split, and the log splitter that is up behind the house. So this weekend, my kids and I are going to haul the wood from the driveway, stack it and finish splitting the rest of the already seasoned wood from last year. I dont have any fascinating pictures of them, they are after all, just piles of wood to most people, but to me... they mean using the cabin all winter long... once again... PRICELESS!

Dave has a post he is working on as well to show the modifications of our little solar battery charging set up. Its neat! Otherwise, I fear this is a boring update. So I will tell you a little story...

Back story: Our first summer at Shmoopywood was spent in a 10 x 20 hunting cabin while we planned our future home. Once the snow fell, we discovered that not only did we have 2 adults, 2 children, and a great dane (only one at the time), but we had been housing mice. I am an animal lover so at first it was humane removal. I researched have a heart traps and these cute little sachet's that contained herbs that were pleasant enough smelling to me, but apparently repulsive to mice. As time went on it became evident that these little guys were not going to be stopped with conventional weapons. They became bolder, running across our pillows at night while we slept, chewing into our mouse-proof storage containers and even eating my toothbrush holder, the bristles and pooping on the rest. suddenly it was an all out war. I would leave the cabin on sundays and set 10 traps and come back on friday to find all tripped and no mice but mouse crap right there next to the trap. The little *(&#@( would eat the cheese and crap and run away.

I will leave you now, with a picture of our most recent discovery. I apologize for the poor quality of the picture but I am proud of it anyway because it was taken from VERY far away. This "little" guy is I believe a "Coopers Hawk" and I also think his recent arrival has helped abate our mouse problem. I am happy to say that Shmoopywood is mouse free in 2008 ;)
I love nature.

Potty Wood

We really have been focused in the last year on making things more comfortable at shmoopywood cabin. Trust me, we have come a LONG way from the air mattress in a 10 x 20 uninsulated hunting cabin with 2 great danes and a wood stove at -6 temperatures. I wasnt even going to mention the thawing out of the pottywood with a portable coleman hand warmer heater and luke warm water ;). We still have a ways to go though because we are still using the pottywood facilities as we have yet to plumb the "big house".

Here is our current facilities in the form of potty wood, which i mentioned before is just a toilet in a shed on top of our already in place septic system. We use the facilities, and we fill the tank of the toilet with water that we have hauled from the stream and stored in an empty trash barrel. It functions like a real live toilet and is comfortable unless you are dealing with bees, spiders, mice, frozen toilet or opposite: the sun beating down on the outhouse and heating it up to about a buck fifty.