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 and go shoot pictures in the low, bright sunlight. I did, and we had a lovely time. But some of the best shots were right at our house. I walked around later and shot pictures of the shoop, the garden, and other artifacts buried in snow. I’ll post them when I get a chance; I’d still like to get a picture of Dexter buried under the snow. He looks like a big white lump.

I apologize that I have not posted frequently. That is my life.

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 don’t burn this season will be that much less I’ll need to get next summer, saving time for all the important playing I need to do in the high country when the snow is gone. Maybe that’s a subject for another post.

Back to the wood. How much do we need? We’ve had an extraordinarily cold and snowy pre-Christmas season: There’s already about two feet on the ground at home, and we’ve already had a blizzard warning and a predicted –26 wind chill temperature—both before Thanksgiving. We have nine people, two dogs, two cats, and assorted arthropods living in a house that’s about 2100 square feet. The house is situated on a mountainside facing northeast in close to the wettest area in the state (and consequently the cloudiest) Because of the ridge behind the house, we get precious little sunshine in the winter; sunset’s at around 3:30. Last Saturday, dawn didn’t break until 10:30 am. I timed it. (It might have been a little earlier, but that was the first flare of sunlight I saw between the trees.)

So back to the wood. Really. Since we heat entirely with wood, do we keep the stove roaring night and day, wrapped in blankets and huddled by the fire in wretched misery? Nah. Jessica’s in bare feet most days. If the weather rises much above freezing, we can heat most of the downstairs just by baking something in the oven. And now, one week in to December, I have just begun to use the second row of firewood in our woodshed. Yahoo! And the best part is, our house is plenty cozy all the time. I don’t like being cold.

All this because we built with Structural Insulated Panels. I’m tellin’ ya, I’m sold on them things. I’ll never build with anything else if I can avoid it. And our heating bill? Oh, a gallon of chain saw gas every now and then, the occasional maintenace on the saw, and a few summertime trips up the hill, with the kids jouncing in the trailer behind the Jeep.

…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 cloud, and you can see the mist above the river.

The snow has melted back a little since this picture was taken, but winter is on its way. I love this time of year.

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 turns into a Forest Service road leading into our rather expansive back yard, on opening day of hunting season we might get forty or even fifty cars a day up our road—so many that we stop glancing out the window at every one that passes. That’s a habit our forebears had when cars were newfangled contraptions: glancing out the window at every passing car. It’s a habit I still haven’t broken after two and a half years of living up here. Cars past our house are so rare—I count maybe five a day during non-hunting season—that it might just be somebody coming up to visit.

Because it’s a road less traveled, this is where Emma first learned how to drive: stop and go, up and down, gaining confidence without worrying about traffic because up here, there is no traffic. (Yeah, I know, she has to learn; we’ll practice in town next spring.) This is where Abby learned to ride her bike and where Katie perfected the art. Down in the dip there is a culvert through which our creek runs when it’s in the mood; the kids and I have been back and forth through that culvert lots of times when it wasn’t. I’ve practiced driving by moonlight on this road (though not for very long). Just off to the left there is where Katie spotted a bear and two cubs last year.

What about the orange trees in this shot? Those are tamaracks, the only conifers I know of that turn colors in the fall and drop their needles. The mist comes standard with the season (cool, huh?). The cliffs you can faintly see back there are so thickly wrapped in trees and brush that I feel confident there are places back there no human—not even an Indian—has ever set foot. Emma wants to climb those cliffs next year. Uh huh.

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, listening to Twenty Years After (the sequel to The Three Musketeers) from Librivox.org. It wasn’t until I stopped at a house along the river to pick up our order from Azure* that I happened to glance down at the odometer. Gasp— 200,027 miles already! I snapped a picture right away. The light was low, which is why the image seems jerky and the SRS light looks so bright. It’s not.

(The perpetually burning bulb of the Supplemental Restraint System light presumably warns me that should I ever choose to hit another deer, the airbag won’t stop me. The light stays lit because I’d have to drive 90 minutes one way and spend $82.50 for a Honda mechanic to even look at it. No thanks. I rarely notice the light  anymore, except when I take pictures of my odometer; besides, for me, “SRS” stands for “Silent Ridge Studio,” my art website.)

Dexter’s doing remarkably well for a car his age, especially since his recent surgeries. I changed his highly filthy air filter at General Conference time (a good time to perform regular maintenance in spring and fall) and his gas mileage is admirable once again. How admirable? I don’t know; last time I measured it was 38.9 MPG, but that was before I changed the air filter. We had to have the World’s Squeakiest Ball Joint replaced—it was growing intolerable even for us—and Dexter was realigned, so that the steering wheel no longer looks like you are turning when you’re driving straight. I only wish that he weren’t painted pull-me-over red. But, that’s what you get with a used car.

I expect the day will come when Dexter will be driven mostly by the kids. I also expect that one day I will need to replace the engine, as I’ve heard you can do with these cars. And I expect, if he’s well taken care of, that one day I will be crowing about his 300,000th birthday.

*Azure is a cost-effective place to buy bulk food (important for a brood our size) and spices.

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 complexity). So when I pulled up this picture from last month’s elderberry harvest (and this is only half of it) and thought how my morning swig of elderberry juice & honey has seemed to keep all this season’s sniffles away, I thought, Is it real, or is it Placebo-x?

I don’t know whether a few daily tablespoons of elderberry juice really does keep a cold away. Maybe it’s all in my head. I don’t even like the taste of it (too sweet. Blech. I don’t really go for sweet things). All I know is, it seems to work. The kids bring home all kinds of bugs from school, but I take elderberry juice and I don’t get sick. That’s a trade I’m willing to make. This medicine is insanely cheap; it does the job; and in taking it, I’m not supporting any inane pharmaceutical commercials (not that I see them anyway). And that’s worth it to me, placebo or not.

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 in this house, we burned about four cord(s). Last year we didn’t even have winter, but between September and June we went through five.

Not having had an average winter since we built this house, I am reluctant to estimate how much wood we burn in an average winter; but I’ve amassed about 7.5 cord(s) this year and am hoping that will be more than enough for even a tough winter. Since this picture was snapped a couple of weeks ago, I’ve moved three-quarters of the wood shown outside of the shed into the lee of the shed on the left, and covered it with two tarps. Jess says there’s a lonely tarp down at the garden that I can use to cover the wood that remains outside, and that way if we have a really rough winter we’ll still have plenty of dry fuel ready to go.

All that remains is to hope for a really rough winter.

I also include a picture of the World’s Ugliest Wood Shed here so that those of you with shabby building skills will feel better about yourselves after seeing the picture. (Thanks and apologies to those who helped build it; the ugliness is utterly and completely my fault.) It does the job, and for now that’s all I ask. You may not get another glimpse of the WUWS until next spring, when it will be a heap of rubble in preparation for a Real Wood Shed. It’ll look a lot like the bike shed.

PS. How’s the Dvorak keyboard method coming, you say? Pretty fast, I’d say. My fingers still get confused with the QWERTY fingering (I’m still using the QWERTY keyboard, since I don’t have any other; I just don’t look at the keys). But I’ve typed this post in about half the time of the one where I first mentioned it.

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 part of the squeegee tore off by the time I got to window #3.

The stuff-on-a-pole gimcrack set also included a rectangular floor-mop thingy about nine inches across, and I thunk I’d try it for window washin’ this year. It worked like a charm, plowing through those old fly specks so well I forgot they were there. I pulled a window-cleaner recipe off the Internet, and maybe that was partially responsible for my success:

2 T dish soap
4 T Pine Sol
6 T ammonia
2 gallons hot water

It was a beautiful thing.

Next year, though, I’ll try to find a wider squeegee. A 9” squeegee will leave a few tracks on a window that’s 7’ wide.