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.

Erosion

We have encountered a few "challenges" or as my old annoying boss would call them "opportunities".
Among other things our big challenge is erosion.

When we dug for the foundation, nestled in the side of our mountain along side a babbling brook (shown on the left after the rains yesterday) that we intended on using for our hand washing, dish washing and sanitary purposes, about 100 feet from the 800 foot well that was dug prior to our purchase we discovered an underground stream. We had to bring extra drainage into the foundation plans to avoid water problems. We were really surprised by this discovery because the previous owners had dug the well 800 feet to hit water, what a surprise to us that only 10 feet down, we had a spring! Trucked in earth, rocks, sand and a house built on a fairly steep grade it would only seem logical that eventually this problem would arise. I think denial kept us from considering the problem because we had so much to do already! Well *sigh* this weekend we had torrential downpours and can no longer avoid this issue. Not only is the area around the house deteriorating but our driveway is washing away. The driveway is 400 or so feet long and straight up the mountain. It was very well done with a drainage ditch along side and redirected to the stream that feeds into the Baker river overflow at the dam. Blackberry bushes that I love so much for jam and birds, have grown dangerously close and with strong winds, debris have gotten tangled in the bushes causing a dam of its own and thereby washing out one of the most crucial parts of the driveway.

Dave and I spent much of our pre-breakfast hour digging, redirecting and redamming that area and I think we are okay -other than really sore muscles, but the question remains how best to collect the water coming off the roof and save it for watering or the aforementioned needs. We have a "tank" and gutters have been considered but being an ex-property manager in the northeast, I also know that gutters can cause more problems! Any ideas would be welcomed and appreciated! Perhaps some sort of removable system that would enable us to safeguard the house from ice dams in the winter but collect the water in the other seasons. (even though the white mountains really only have 2 seasons, winter and summer lol)






This is a picture of the wooded side of our house and it illustrates the 'overhang' that was created when the foundation was poured sideways (another long story) in order to preserve the floor plan we had created. under this overhang it is difficult to see, but there is alot of run off and it is causing some erosion which can be seen along the wall area.























Here is a rather sad and understated picture of how the driveway is falling away from the strong rains and the run off from the house and mountain.









And here, if you can possibly tear your eyes away from the incredibly cute, smiling 200 pound, 40mph doggy, is a shot of the erosion on the other side of the house.





And here, is a picture of yours truly and Dave enjoying the birds singing down the sun on friday evening.