Also some of this is junk wood. I got a few lengths of cottonwood from a neighbor, which splits easily but burns indifferently and leaves a ton of ash. I also blocked up a fallen birch behind the treehouse, and I can’t use much of that. I should learn not to burn birch around here unless I felled it myself, 20 minutes ago. It rots fast. I dropped one piece on the railroad-tie stairs leading down to  the garden and it burst like an egg. When it dries, the birch will be okay. It will burn fast and hot, like cardboard.

But a lot of this is good wood. The middle section is mostly that lodgepole pine I dropped this spring, and there’s lots of fir and tamarack from around the property. If I can ever get my trailer hitch figured out I’d like to head up into the hills this summer and bring some more down. Oh well, I’ll do that when I have time. (Joke. Funny. Laugh.)

More than heat, more even than security, this woodpile is my entertainment. Some people get their thrills from video games or cooking or watching the idiot box. For me, this is my fun and games. Nothing beats a good sharp chain saw sinking down through a log, or the satisfaction of a big hulking block of wood jumping in half under my splitting maul. It’s hard to beat the feeling of security I feel watching my firewood dry out and crack in the summer sun, or smell it settle into the dry woodshed in the fall. And there’s just no better feeling than to go out to hang laundry and find that one third of your Great Wall of Firewood has fallen over.

That happened last Saturday. Cool, huh? I’m still learning.

(I’m posting today because I’ll be out on Friday. Jess and I are taking the kids to the coast.)

chipmunk (chip’ munk) n. Any of several small striped terrestrial squirrels of the genera Tamias and Eutamias; has cheek pouches and a light and dark stripe running down the body.

That’s for everybody else, even ourselves before this year. Kids at the campground, hikers in the woods; city kids sighting one on TV. Here’s how it goes at our house:

chipmunk (chip’ munk) n. Any of several bazillion small greenhouse & garden-dwelling pests of the genera Voracious and Devious; has a mouth with a small striped body attached.

Jess first noticed them when her cucumber plants started disappearing in the greenhouse. Mice? Squirrels? Openings are too small for skunks or coons. Small planting cups were spilled on the shelves. Her kale plants started disappearing. She sprayed her plants with cayenne pepper, but a daily deluge of rain washed it off the outdoor plants without affecting the culprits. Alarmed, she set out rat poison in the greenhouse and started keeping watch.

Then she noticed a family of chipmunks that had moved in to the woodpile behind the greenhouse. She started seeing chipmunks inside the greenhouse, and when she found that some of the tomato plants she had raised from seed nibbled through the stem, that was it. She called out the artillery.

She doesn’t like firing my .357 magnum, so she posted me as sniper. The little buggers would stand up on top of the wood pile and wait for me to fire. I emptied the revolver of six .38 shells and hit —none. Or if I did hit any, they were quickly replaced by another rodent, sitting atop the woodpile with his paws in his ears, calling “Nyah nyah nyah.”

Neighbor Tim heard all the ruckus and came up with his .22. (That’s a much better rodent gun, but we can’t afford anything right now. That’s why losing our garden plants is a big deal.) I felt better when Tim spent the rest of the evening and part of the next morning up at our garden and hit —two.

Jessica’s plan worked better. She filled a 5-gallon bucket half full of water, sprinkling birdseed on top so that it looked solid. Then she leaned a piece of scrap wood up as a ramp to the bucket, and smeared the wood with peanut butter and birdseed. The rodents climb up the ramp, fall in and drown. That works lots better, and peanut butter is cheaper than bullets.

Oh, the cute little chipmunks! That’s how we felt until they started eating our food supply. They can be as cute as they want—elsewhere. They won’t starve; the woods are full of chipmunk food. There’s no reason to eat the people food when we can hardly afford to feed ourselves; and you can’t reason with rodents.

And that’s just the commercials.

Meanwhile, we’ve had to discontinue our internet connection via Verizon Wireless. It worked fine to start with, but we lost the signal for a day or two and when I was finally able to reconnect my connection was sssssssssslllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooowwwww, even slower than our dial up. And that’s saying something. (How slow is our dial up? You could eat dinner while a page was loading.)

So we’ve succombed to satellite internet by WildBlue. (They gave us a better deal than their competitor.)It’s the only option for us out here. Satellite is a unique technology: it seems to be nearly universally despised (cost, speed, unreliability), but out here nearly universally used. Now I know why.

And as for all the ickiness I so gleefully condemned above? Isn’t the Internet more slimy than television? Three answers: 1) Not possible. 2) We strictly govern our kids’ use, Jess only uses Gmail and Facebook, and I never have time for Internet anyway. 3) We use NetNanny.

FOLLOW the HARROWING SAGA of the FLUKINGIJIGiGJER’S CHICKENS as they RAISE SEVEN CHICKS to ADULTHOOD. WILL THEY SURVIVE? WHAT about the FLOCK of BIZARRE DUCKS SPOTTED among PEACEFUL NEIGHBORHOOD HENS? WHY did the HENS SUDDENLY START LAYING EGGS? LEARN the SHOCKING TRUTH about the MISSING ROOSTER! WHY have the FLUCKNJIGJERGERS SNATCHED the POND AWAY from their PEACE-LOVING DUCKS? And WHERE HAVE THE BANTIES GONE? FIND OUT on CHICKEN NEWS TONIGHT!!

1 ) I’m replacing the original tirade that occupied this spot with the following: 99% of television is a puerile and corrosive waste of time.* Hence the mocking tone.

2) Will the chicks survive? No. Two have died; the other five are flourishing. They’re now about the size of (oh, I don’t know, what’s that big?) a small squash and have moved out to the chicken hotel.

3) The bizarre ducks are Indian Runners; I believe I’ve addressed them in a previous post. They have to be seen to appreciate their comic construction; but they were free, and they’re supposed to be terrific layers.

4) We have no idea, but we’re gathering about nine eggs a day now. I love eggs.

5) The rooster was gentle with people but very aggressive with the hens. They would have feathers torn out every time he mounted them. This disturbed Jessica (also the hens) and we found a new home for him.

6) See here. The boat was replaced with a plastic 55-gallon drum, sliced in half lengthwise and filled with water.

&) We Craigslisted the banty rooster and his sister, which hatched last fall. When their new owners came for them at work, the two chickens got away in the parking lot. Hopefully no one was recording us running around the parking lot (hmm, maybe we’re on YouTube right now). This escapade involved my telling a co-worker, “Chuck, there is a chicken in your engine.”

The escapees were eventually apprehended.

*Unfortunately, 1% is hard to hit. This reduces the chance that the 1% of television that does not fit this description is the portion that you like to watch.

Will the contents of this picture feed our family of nine for the next year? Probably not. For one thing, I don’t like the taste of tires. I meant, once everything’s growing, will it produce enough food to last us through until the next harvest? Probably not. But it’s a good start.

On the far left are the fruit trees: various varieties of apple, pear and plum. Between them grow sunflowers and chamomile. On the left you can also just make out one of the two raised beds Jess built (yes, I know she’s amazing) to contain five kinds of squash (spaghetti, zephyr, “little dumplings,” zucchini, and crookneck); pumpkins; and edible gourd. Then come the regular raised beds, that are already 80% planted and will grow green beans (under the white fabric), arugula, beets, kale, cabbage (red and purple), onions (purple and yellow), endive, carrots (2 varieties), lettuce (3 varieites), swiss chard (2 varieities), green onions, radishes, spinach, and snap peas. Then comes the greenhouse, containing leeks, tomatoes (3 varieties), broccoli, celery, cucumbers (3 varieties), collard greens, chinese cabbage, bok choi, watermelon, cantaloupe, and various types of peppers (cayenne, jalapeno, banana, Hungarian wax, and green [2 varieties]). The tires contain potatoes; the idea is to drop tires successively around each plant to contain the dirt we add as they grow.

Missing from this shot, as far as home food production goes, are all the poultry; the horseradish and asparagus in the far left corner of the garden; the berry patches—blue, straw, and rasp; the herb garden and rhubarb cages*; the vegetable contents of the greenhouse; apples, elderberry, huckleberry, and grapes from neighboring lands (we pay for the grapes); our overflowing root cellar; and the deer I’ll shoot this fall. The herb bed contains marjoram, basil (2 varieties), sage, dill, parsley, garlic, thyme, chives, cilantro, and oregano.

And Jess has done virtually all of this.

*Once it gets going, rhubarb needs cages. Not to climb one, like tomatoes or beans, but to protect innocent passers by from getting swallowed up in the rhubarb jungle. We have five (count ‘em) rhubarb plants. You’ve been warned.

I like Fiaaaaah. It heats our house for free. It gets rid of wildfire fuel lying around on the ground. And I like playing with it. (Don’t tell anyone.)

The weather was dry enough last Saturday that I could finally start burning the big slash pile down by the greenhouse. It’s been moldering there for the better part of three years; in fact, it’s the last remnant of the pile o’logs left there when our land was thinned of timber. The logs are long gone and we’ve been dying to use that area. We want to smooth that area out, throw down some grass seed, and build a fire pit, but the slash pile remained, and it’s hard to landscape when you have a stack o’sticks four feet high and twenty feet long.

But the pile started with one match. The flames crackled encouragingly, growing bigger and bigger, burning despite a sprinkling of rain, and I merrily dragged sticks and dead saplings from hither and yon and threw them on. How nice to get all that dead stuff off the land before the new spring growth comes in. Clean it up! There’s still a lot out there, but we’ll need something for our summertime bonfires.

Then I spied the boat.

This boat had served our ducks well, for a while, as a duck pond. It came from the dump so it was free, and filling an old boat with water was easier than digging a duck pond into our rocky soil. But then I accidentally broke the back out, and the ducks got bored with it, and the whole interior turned algae-green. Then the water line froze up so we couldn’t refill it, and the remaining water grew a sickly greenish brown (when it wasn’t frozen), and the chickens started eating it. It’s a little hard to see, but toward the back (near Emma, who’s throwing a stick into the flames) you can see places where the chickens have peck the styrofoam out. Why? Only a chicken knows. They’ve also stopped laying, so maybe there’s a correlation. Maybe they’re all plugged up with styrofoam.

It was time to lose the boat. Rather than lash our old boat-cum-duck pond it atop the BGF for transport to the dump, I decided to immolate it. Goodbye, boat. You’ve served the duckies well, or you did for a while. Then you became ugly. You were never so beautiful as when you fed the flames. Your column of smoke was black and 100 feet high, I’d guess, but you’re gone now. So’s the slash pile, hallelujah.

But we’re not thinking about that here. We’re thinking about sweet little baby chicks, with a tiny soft “peep-peep-peep”s and their pale yellow fuzz so delicate you can’t tell when you brush it with your fingers. Great big splayed feet? Check. Little bright eyes and frowning chicken beak? Check. Tiny little wing feathers snuggled into the fluff? Check. Healthy and bright-eyed? Non-check. Jess reported this afternoon that one of the birds is ill, standing there with its eyes closed and head down. Sad! But I don’t how to nurse a sick chick. I don’t know if you can.

Currently they’re housed in this cat-carrier box Jess found at the free pile, with a light bulb plugged in for heat. She took one of the chicks down to the poultry yard yesterday to see what would happen. Chick: “PEEEEEEEP peep peep peep peep! Where did you go?” while running around frantically. Hens eyed it with their suspicious little eyes. (None of them is feeling broody, and we were told they might try to kill a chick they didn’t hatch.) Rooster leapt backwards, exclaiming “Great Scott! What is THAT!” in roosterese. Jess brought the chick back up to the house. We’ll keep them in the laundry room for six weeks, until the weather is warmer and drier and the chicks have more feathers to keep them warm. Then maybe they’ll be big enough to defend themselves.

Cats will stay in the kitchen meanwhile. If you don’t have mice, what’s the use of cats in country? Besides eating expensive cat food, scratching all available wood trim, and throwing up everywhere, I mean. The other night we heard an owl hoot outsdie. “Hoo hoo HOO hoo HOOOO.” Straight out of the movies. Jess said, “So-and-so’s cat was gotten by an owl the other day.” I said, “Well, we can only hope.” We’d rather have pets that lay eggs. By next year, anyway.

Our dogs will stop at nothing!!!! to destroy Jessica’s plantings. Flowerbed? Dig it up. New lawn? Dig it up. Newer lawn? Refuse to play anywhere else; chase each other relentlessly for eight hours a day until the grass seed is ground to powder. Fence? What fence? Doggie repellent? That’s for city dogs. Flowerbeds strewn with rose branches bearing vicious thorns? What’s one punctured paw pad–I have 19 more!

Jess’ response this year was to build a compound in the front lawn. She took my sledgehammer and pounded steel stakes around the perimeter. She wrapped a double layer of our garden fencing around the stakes. She fastened the fence to the ground with stones. She made sure the dogs couldn’t come up the steep cutaway in front and slip under the fence; and she gave them a little gap to pass by in front so they wouldn’t have to try to jump over it.

Then she scraped up the hard soil with a rake, scattered seed, and added lots of manure. You can even see some of the pine shavings she threw down in an effort to soften the ground. Recent rains have kept it moist; now all we need is a bit more warmth for a while. She’s added abundant seed; she’s bought a 25-pound sack from the local feed store and put a quarter of it down inside this compound. (This is in addition to the grass seed I planted last fall.)

So far, her fence is working. There’s no sign of green grass yet, but it’s early. Her plan is to plant half the lawn at a time, and move the compound over to the north side when grass on the south half is well established. It might take a few months, but that’s better than nothing. Between the energetic dogs, the hard ground, and the poor mountain soil, the grass has a hard time. But with much protection and even more manure, it may grow.

Now we have to deal with the birds. They’re eating the grass seed.