Here’s the view out our living room window following the storm I bragged about the other day. (You can see how low the sun is in the winter at our latitude; this was shot at about noon.) It was a Saturday (I think) and my wife suggested I get the kids out of the house …

That’s how much snow we got yesterday. Yahoo! I understand New York City got a lot of snow last week, and bully for them; but when the winter gets nasty I’d rather be in the country. There is an indescribable snugness in being snowed in to your own forest cabin that I’m not sure I’d …

I came across this picture from last September or so when Emma was filling the wood shed and it reminded me of my informal goal to use only 4 cords of wood this year. If the winter demands it, we’ll use more; we have plenty, and I do not like being cold. But anything we …

These Buff Orpington chickens have had a long and happy life, and have given us many an egg for our breakfasts. One day soon they will also give us their bodies to become soup, just like the chicken I had in my soup not one hour ago. (That’s how it is, if you eat meat. …

…so to speak. I mean it as a metaphor for an approaching storm; in this case, the heavy, silent storms of winter. This is Wanderer’s Peak as seen from our living room last week. We’re happy to see the snow settling down its flanks. Seetheca, the little mountain in the foreground, has a cap of …

Here you have it, the John Denver song in real life, but exceptin’ we don’t live in West Virginia. This is the country road that takes me home every night. Our driveway is about three quarters of a mile up ahead. Except for hunting season (right now), our road is pretty quiet. Because this road …

As Dexter approached 200,000 miles, I kept a close eye on his odometer so that I could pull over and snap a picture just at the momentous moment. Unfortunately I was completely inattentive at the time, and that rare alignment of the Five Zeros came and went while I buzzed along my World’s Prettiest Commute, …

Do placebos really work against illness? And if they do, who really cares if they’re a placebo? I’ve been reading a Nancy Drew book to Abby and Katie every night; last night we finished The Secret of Mirror Bay. The question posed above sounds like a question for Ms. Drew (avoiding all questions of equivalent …

Is the plural of cord cord or cords? If you know, let me know. Meanwhile, a cord is a tight stack of firewood that is 4’x4’x8’, or 128 cubic feet. Growing up in southern Idaho, we’d burn about six cord(s) a year to keep the house tolerably warm. The first year Jess and I were …

Last year Jess bought an expensive set of stuff-on-a-pole gimcracks— window squeegee, light bulb changer, that kind of thing. I tried using the squeegee on the window exteriors last year, and it wasn’t pretty. The fly specks had been drying there all summer, and they were impervious to all my window-cleaning efforts; and the sponge …