Well, you guys have been asking about this, so here’s the news on my book. Tentatively entitled “Rain,” it explores the world of a slave whom we first glimpse as it lies dying in the desert, six weeks before the Biblical Flood.
The slave has no name, no will—not even a gender. It only has one …

I had to get on the roof.
When I get sick to my stomach I get really sick. Violently sick. It’s icky. And the timing was rather poor for the violently-icky illness I had over the holiday, because our chimbley was clogged* and I had to get on the roof to fix it. Until I could …

A short illustrative story withal: Once upon a time we were tooling up the highway amidst the mountains of British Columbia, on our way to Canada’s beautiful Banff National Park. Just after sunset we stopped the car to let the kids run around and throw rocks in the river. We almost didn’t get going again. …

So the new issue of Backwoods Home Magazine is starting to show up in mailboxes nationwide, with a little writeup by Yours Truly. It’s not on the website yet, but check at your library. I’d love to hear your reaction, both positive and negative.* If the horde shows up with tomatoes and rocks, I’m ruined! …

Here I am putting insulation on the chicken coop roof. (The long gimcrack in the foreground is the feeder.)With my ravishing good looks in coveralls and high-fashion cap, I’m ready for the cover of Vogue.
I heard once that ducks are cold-tolerant because they’re descended from wild ducks that live in cold wildlands; and chickens are …

From left: Katie, Natalie (sorry about your head, Nat), Becca, and Abby string popcorn for the tree
Well as you might have guessed, I took a few days off of work last week for the Thanksgiving holiday (as you might have done too). My parents were visiting for the last time before they leave for their …

Well, the glass is finally on the greenhouse. Yahoo! All I have to do now is finish wrapping it with plastic sheeting to keep the snow out of it. You can see that we’ve put our bikes and various other summer paraphernalia in there to keep them out of the snow; but later on this …

Remember the flying deer? Let’s see, that was in May, and this being November it was high time to get Dexter The Battered Red Honda in for some surgery. I got a new fender and hood from a wrecking yard a month ago, and they’ve just been leaning on the wood pile awaiting my pleasure; …

Yes, it’s true; you can freeze milk. We do it every time we buy it, since we go through so much (about four gallons a week) and we’re so far from the grocery store. Local cow’s milk is prohibitively expensive ($4 a gallon!), and we’re not willing to spring for a goat we’d have to …

Jessica met me on the stairs last night carrying a fresh load of laundry up. She held out Jacob’s freshly-washed baby blanket and said, “Feel this!” With my keen sense of the obvious, I said that it felt soft and fuzzy. She said, “It’s way soft and fuzzy! And clean! It seems like since we …