Screaming blue drums with openings designed by space aliens!

Out at our place I find that we have to jury-rig things a lot. That is, figure out a way to make stuff work. (Or is it jerry-rig? Or rerry-jig? Depends who you ask, I guess.) Making do makes for a lot of ugly stuff, but maybe that’s the reason homesteaders build their hodge-podge empires way out in the country, so that nobody can look down their noses at you as they cruise by in their expensive Snooty Cars. As for us, we can’t afford most of the stuff we do, so we make do.

Case in point: These lovely electric blue 55-gallon drums. One of them used to hold jalapeno peppers; the other, olive oil. What are we doing with them? Why, whacking their tops off and filling them full of chicken feed, of course!

Chicken feed comes in mouse-friendly woven sacks that weigh as much as a Volkswagen and don’t keep anything out as well as they keep the seed in. That includes not only mice but moisture, mold, and anything else calculated to waste your chicken-feed money. You need something else to keep the feed in, even if it’s ugly.

Viola. (=Joke. It’s a literary friend’s corruption of the French. Voila.)

A local outfit uses these drums for food ingredients, then sells them to local yokels for $5 each. Hey, a bargain! But the openings are two inches wide on  top,  and I have absolutely no idea how to wrench them open. Never seen caps like these; they look like they were designed by space aliens. How to get the drums open? Hmm, how ‘bout power tools?

I sawed the top four inches or so off of both drums last Saturday and left them out in the vague hope that they’d get washed out by the rain. No dice. The vinagery smell has diminished, but rain doesn’t wash out congealed olive oil. My solution? Well, maybe I’ll dump the oil out on the slash pile in the hopes that will help the wet wood ignite. (I’ve been meaining to burn that slash pile for several weeks. I’ll report on my success in this endeavor next week, if I survive.) Then wash out with soap, if the poultry’s water line  ever thaws out. Then reattach the lids with a cheap door hinge, and fill with chicken feed. Note to self: dry barrels out before filling with feed. Oh, and get the barrels into a dry location before filling. That would be splendid: trying to wrestle a screaming blue headless drum weighing 240 lbs. into the shoop. Yippee. I think I’ll try lighting a bonfire with congealed oil first.

(If you’re wondering, I never did discipline Honey last night. Child 1 had a band concert at the high school, we got home at twilight, the ducks were already put to bed, I had to help Beautiful with the squalling baby and toddler [they both have colds right now] while she made dinner, and well, we never got the dog down for her duck lessons. That will have to happen Saturday. If it does then. Meanwhile Beautiful has stood up sections of OSB at the low sections of duck fence; the other sections already have a “moat” in the snow around them which she and Child 1 dug a couple of weeks ago. Hope she has time today to show Honey right from wrong.)

The bear was an interesting escapade. Something bigger than a raccoon or skunk had been getting into our trash for weeks last summer (we had moved in on April 30th). There were scrapes and punctures on our garbage can lids, but we had other things to tend to until the morning when, through our open windows, I heard frantic quacking down at the shoop. I bolted out of bed and called Hank (we didn’t have Honey yet). As we ran down to the shoop I heard something big crashing away in the brush. I sent Hank after it and went down to see the damage. When I opened the shoop door I gasped (a family weakness but I don’t do it very often): The entire back wall of the shoop was gone! It was all daylight and trees instead of a half wall. Well, I’d tacked up the bottom half of the back wall using roofing nails, which are short and smooth, because they were what I had at hand and I didn’t want to go searching for something substantial. (Impatience with inanimate objects is a critical weakness which I am now working on.) I found bear prints along two walls of the shoop, which told me he had been investigating the duck smell, put his front paws up on that half wall, and pulled it down, because those short nails did not hold it firm. I think he also stepped on those pointy nails once the wall was down, and that’s when the quacking started. The pain in his feet and our running down the hill toward him is what scared him off. Not one duck was missing.

Last fall, two bears were shot near our road. We haven’t seen a trace of live bear since. Though we do have bear feet! That’s another entry.

One aspect of homesteading is having to do lots of things for yourself that you used to pay others to do for you. It’s part of self-reliance. You feel great about learning to do things yourself, and you save money. Plus, the pool expands of things you know.

Sometimes you do pay in discomfort. Saturday it was about 33 degrees outside and a light rain was falling. I was out changing the oil and oil filters in my Jeep and Beautiful’s vehicle, a Ford Expedition large enough to haul everybody, and here I was under the cars on the wet ice, picking up the wrong wrench 17 times in a row. Changing oil is a messy job, and we put enough miles on our vehicles that we have to make sure to do it punctually. Next, to learn how to change the fuel filters. I don’t think that’s been done on our vehicles in a while.

Since we moved up here I’ve learned a lot. Using a chain saw well and splitting firewood accurately, like what’s-his-name in The Man from Snowy River (each stroke splits a piece, rather than making three or ten whacks before the wood breaks), I’ve been working on these for a while. Other things have come as we’ve built and progressed. I have a better idea about running a backhoe or felling a tree, but those take practice. Care and feeding of firearms is coming, thanks to a neighbor. I have my ham license and have purchased a radio (it’s in the budget, of course). Beautiful lets me make whole-wheat bread for the family (she says she’s a bread dud, though she cooks everything else like a dream). Electrical and plumbing I can do well enough to be dangerous. Gardening and animal husbandry we’re still working on. Live and learn. That’s life.

In a hurry as always. I’ll have time to set up this blog tomorrow. I went long at lunch because I was up at the meat place getting our pig-in-boxes for the freezer, which I realized during the drive would not carry us through till next year because it’ll take our pigs longer than that to mature. Now I have to leave in 13.5 minutes to get home and clean the chimney while there’s still daylight, because we woke up this morning to a cold house full of smoke. Hey, that’s life in the woods.

I have five guidelines for this blog.
1- Be completely honest. This does not include being a lout, which is most people’s excuse.
2- Don’t hide my religion, which is as much a part of my daily life as my hands.
3- Write every day for 15 minutes or less, for four months before deciding whether it’s worth the effort.
4- No locally-identifiable proper nouns except my name.
5- Open until I have more experience blogging and know what #5 should be.

Its purpose is to detail our lives in the woods, and to share our experience as we go along. We are not survivalists; we live on the grid, and I go to a 9-to-5 job in town every day. But we’re out of debt and living toward a dream I’ve had since I was a boy. The only remaining parts are to work from home and to pay off the house. Maybe this is a good time to launch this blog since a lot of people are trying to live more frugally, and it’s already a way of life for me and Beautiful (wife. See rule 4 above). If we can do it, so can anybody who’s willling to pay the price.

Well, that has to be enough for today. Not quite fifteen minutes, but my employment calls.

3.12.09

Wow, did that ever make a difference! Turned out all I needed to do was clean the chimney, which I haven’t done since we installed it 17 months ago. Also I’ve had to burn my firewood reserves this season (coming up this summer: a bigger woodshed) and much of that was wet or green.

Cleaning the chimney was no big deal. I checked out a 6″ wire brush and 20′ worth of threaded fiberglass rods from the local fire department (free), climbed up into the valley of the roof where the snow has accumulated (for better footing), unscrewed the chimney cap, and cleaned thoroughly clear down to the stove. Then I went into the house and vacuumed up all the gunk using a shop vac.

We heat our house entirely with that wood stove. 2100 square feet, two stories, five bedrooms, three baths (yeah, I know. It’s compact), etc etc, and it’s usually so toasty Beautiful doesn’t even wear socks. But the fire was burning feebly of late and the house was cold. The stove just needed air, and cleaning the chimney did the trick. We placed the stove according to instructions I found at woodheat.org –a great site for information on the subject. Annual cost of heating our home: about $50. That’s for chain saw gas and maintenance.

I told you in the beginning I’d be honest. I don’t intend to brag about these things; I’m just telling you what we’ve done. We’re just folks. If we can do it, anybody can who really wants to. But we did plan our home and land this way, and we’re working hard to bring it about. There are no sweeter fruits than of one’s own labors.

I’m Doug, married about 14 years to Beautiful, with seven children (all ours). About three years ago we found property on a forested mountainside, and have started from scratch to establish our own homestead. We designed our home and built as much of it as two novices can (from septic tank through wood trim, but that’s another entry). We’re coming up on our first anniversary in our home and have established a yard, garden, wood shed, and duck flock. This blog will track our progress as we move into spring in the mountains, with our children, dogs, cats, ducks, garden, and carpenter ants.