We’ll have to make do with our patchy snow and mud. In the mean time, not to rub it in or anything, we’re grateful to have a root cellar.

I was at the tax man’s the other day and saw his copy of the Wall Street Journal. The front-page, above-the-fold picture was of a couple of folks in a barren supermarket, picking up what they could get of what was left. It was just a few forlorn lemons, as I recall. I hear that back east the weather is so bad, people are burning all their books by Al Gore to keep warm.

In the meantime, we have our own grocery store at home.

This is an old picture of our root cellar. Now it’s so crammed with supplies that we have step up on the shelves and pick our way back like spelunkers to get to the dishwashing soap, say, or the condensed milk, which are on the back shelves. My orders are to go pick up 25 5-gallon buckets next week to store more of the staples up and out of the way. Okay.

It’s a nice feeling. Once our propane tank is refilled, we should have all we need to survive for up to four months should we be cut off from the outside world. Power, hot water, food, popcorn, and everything. Provided nothing breaks that I can’t fix, and my daughters learn to take shorter showers.

I hate to keep braying about this, but I don’t hate it so much that I won’t keep doing it. This is (Ta-daaa!) our first all-homemade meal. At least that I can recall.

Milk: neighbor’s cow. (I won’t be getting a milk cow anytime soon.)
Waffles: homemade from wheat we ground, oats from our storage, and various & sundry elements from Jessica’s apothecary.
Butter: homemade as detailed yesterday.
Syrup: homemade maple (from a bottle). This is Emma’s dish; mine has homemade apple syrup from the apples we pressed last fall.
Eggies: (not shown) home grown.

Yahoo!

Virtually all of our meals are made from scratch at home. The chief barrier to further gloating about all-homemade meals is those two culprits, butter and sour cream. They were always store bought (actually I guess what we call “butter” is actually Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, or Coconut Oil, or Motor Oil, or something. So that alone sets me at the edges of the Pre-Fab Food As Chemistry Set camp). But now that we’re scooping better than half a gallon off our raw milk every week, those two culprits shall FALL! And in my spare time perhaps I’ll have the generosity to document other all-homemade meals going forward.

I mentioned this morning’s homemade triumph to Jessica in the midst of the A.M. Rush and she whipped out her camera for a shot—which I promptly copied to the computer so as to commemorate for today’s post. (There will be no post for tomorrow; I’m off that day. Jessica has something special planned for my 40th birthday.)

The power cables had corroded through at the battery terminals, and the car wouldn’t move.

If I’d known what I know now, I would have taken a cab to the local auto parts store and bought new battery terminal connectors. $15 Canadian and a cab ride, and the part is fixed. As it was, we had to rent a car and stay an extra day. There are worse places to be stranded, but the stress and additional expense could have been avoided. So now I’ll teach you the little I know.

Corrosion builds up on your car battery terminals unless you remove it. Here are the terminals on my Jeep’s battery. You can buy little felt rings that keep corrosion down, but all you have to do to clear existing corrosion is use a little baking soda and water.

Pour a couple of teaspoons of baking soda right on the terminal.

Add a quart or two of warmish water. You’ll immediately see the baking soda fizz as it removes the corrosion, and you just keep pouring the water on until it’s gone. This removes the gunk and the baking soda.

Here’s one terminal partially cleaned; I’m putting water on the other one. The blue stuff is what’s left after the baking soda fizzes, and I afterwards rinsed it off.

It would probably be well to take the connectors off and clean them up good, but you know me– I won’t have time till I’m 80. Or stranded somewhere.

If you have other ideas on keeping battery terminals clean, I’d love to hear them. I’m always eager to learn.

Jessica took this shot out of our front window the other morning (or maybe Emma did; she’s into photography). You can see the snow has already moved into the high country, including the cliffs and long rocky slopes of Wanderer’s Peak. (That’s my mountain; but I let others visit it when they want to.) You can also see the line of mist that’s suspended above the river; most fall mornings it’s settled down into the channel, but not today.

There’s an old ditty that says

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight;
Red sky in morning, sailors take warning.

That’s because a red sunset indicates a westerly wind, bringing calm weather; while a red sunrise indicates atmospheric winds moving east to west, usually presaging stormy weather. Snow is predicted for tomorrow. Let it come! We’re ready.

There is a scripture that says, “If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.” That is sure true. After a summer of hard work, our harvest is in, our outside stuff is secure,* and we have twice as much firewood as we had last year. That’s a good feeling. It must be one reason I love fall more than any other season (but only while I’m in it; the other seasons are pretty terrific too for their own reasons). Fall always produces a feeling of snugness, the delightful sensation of readiness for the long dark winter ahead.

Every now and again I re-read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book The Long Winter. It always gives me pause. Would I be ready for such terrible conditions as they passed through? You can never know exactly until you encounter it; but I think we’re prepareder this year than we’ve ever been.

I hope to say the same next year as well. Yahoo!

*Except for the greenhouse. Hm. Have to do that Saturday, sometime in between going deer hunting with John and fixing Dexter’s hood and fender, some six months after the Flying Deer incident (finally!).

Well, a couple of months back Jess and I were driving into town, admiring the elderberry bushes heavily laden with the tiny light-blue berries. Next time we were out together we threw a pair of kitchen shears and a couple of smallish boxes in the back of the Jeep. We drove along a back road and while nobody was looking hopped out and snipped off bunches of berries, stuffed them in our boxes, and drove nonchalantly on our way.

(Who knows, maybe there’s a federal law that prohibits people from harvesting the endangered wild elderberry. If there is, don’t tell anyone.)

Then we brought them home to de-branch them. Elderberries grow in flocks of up to (I’d guess) four hundred tiny berries, all on one drooping branch. You have to kind of roll them off with your fingers, and capture them in a bowl. Then Jessica washed them, boiled them, added honey and I don’t know what all, and—of course—canned them.

Now that flu season has struck, we decided deliberately not to inoculate ourselves against the H1N1 or any other seasonal flu. Our kids go to public schools every day and do their utmost to infect themselves with whatever hot new pathogens the other kids are handing out. And yet—nobody’s gotten sick.

We blame the elderberry syrup.

Jess gives us a tablespoon full or so every morning with our breakfast. It’s not my favorite (the honey makes it pretty sweet, and I’m not a big fan of sweet), but I gulp it down and move on to the entrée. Same with the kids-a-roo. Nobody’s been sick since school started. (Well, I guess Becca did stay home one day.) What else to blame? Except for the syrup we haven’t changed our diet, and we didn’t get shots.

I’m not saying that natural remedies are a cure-all. But something is working. Maybe it was the clandestine hijacking of innocent elderberries (which would have gone to waste if we hadn’t helped out; nobody else ever seemed to harvest any). Maybe it’s the placebo effect; but who cares, if it’s working?

Didja recognize that? If not, my friend, it’s time to go back and read the United States Constitution. In fact, I think our nation would be quite a different place nowadays if more people (especially in Washington) were familiar with that document. I think some people may read my title and think, Yeah man, rights! Of the people, dude! It appears that some people think a “right” is anything the government will pay for.

But I digress.

The phrase above is from the Second Amendment of the Constitution, and I take it literally. These are two of my most valuable tools, hung above the back door—within our reach when necessary, but away from curious hands. In my neck of the woods, being armed is an essential part of our security. On top is my 30.06, on the bottom is my 12-gauge shotgun with a short (18”) barrel. (On the right is my hunting knife.) I have over 200 rounds of shotgun shells and a healthy supply of shells for the rifle.

Last Friday night I called all the kids around and took the rifle down. The bolt was open, the safety engaged, and the gun always properly handled; but I let each of them take a turn holding it and looking through the scope. I want them to respect guns, but not fear them. That way their curiosity is not aroused, and they do not even seem to notice these hanging above the back door.

This picture may disturb some of you, but that might be because your nearest law enforcement is not an hour away. It might be because you don’t have bears and cougars (and now wolves) in your neighborhood. It might even be because you believe “the government will keep us safe.” I don’t believe that; I believe in the Constitution.

The fact is that this country of ours would not exist if some yokels like me did not keep a gun in the house.

We call them “minutemen.”

Anyhoo, here’s a batch of apple cider processing on the wood stove. Jess has two pressure canners and you can’t fit both of them on the stove if you’re also trying to heat up the next batch o’cider. So when Jess was gone one evening I put the cider-heating pot on the wood stove. It worked brilliantly until I shifted the pot and the cider splashed out onto the hot metal, filling our home with the lovely aroma of burning apple juice. And it left baked-on spill marks on the metal which are still there, yuck.

Jess was smarter. She put the canner on the stove, instead of the pot o’cider. The canner has a sealed lid and only contains water, which don’t stink if it’s spilled. The canner starts boiling quicker than it does on the stove. So we’ll be doing this next year. If I can get the charred cider off before then.

The other night I tried to light the kerosene lamp we have on the shelf above our wood stove. It wouldn’t light. I checked the wick: trimmed. Okay. I checked the kerosene: gone! Well, who knew. Kerosene evaporates. The last time I used the lamp was last winter. So the lesson is, use the lamp while you have it full.

So for fun the other night I filled the lamp, soaked the wick, re-threaded it up through the cheap Victorian-esque metal parts (I ended up wrestling it through with a pair of pliers), lit the lamp, and set it on the table. It worked pretty well. Jess has a candle in a baby-food jar to help illuminate Jacob, who’s on the floor next to her in his walk-around bin. Jacob (who’s nine months old this week) is a very aerobic eater; he likes to bounce up and down while looking around while holding his mouth open for Mama’s fork. So she needs a light. But with his own candle, it worked out pretty well. This is about a two-second exposure to let the dark scene light up, so some of the kids are looking rather posed. But we ate our whole meal thus. It’s good practice for when the power goes out: the generator does not power the dining room circuit.

I asked Jess how many of these emergency candles she had. “Oh, about 150,” she said. She found ‘em on sale at the dollar store. So as long as we don’t break the baby-food jars, we’re good for a long period without lights.

You can see our Western Family Spread and our milk jug are not of our own making. (On sale, store-bought milk is half the price of raw milk, and we’re always in the mood for a bargain. So our “butter” and sour cream are store-bought.) And I think the potatoes are from the store. But everything else on this table is from our garden or food storage. The quart jars you see here have been washed and are sitting in the pantry, awaiting their turn to be filled with apple cider next week.

The snow dumps off the roof in back and fills up the cutaway area behind the house, as you can deduce by looking at the first picture above. It gets pretty full by late winter. in fact, last year I had to get up on top of the little roof next to where I’m putting my hands in this shot, and shovel roof snow off of it. So in the wintertime I have to go out every evening and get firewood. Since the back of the house is piled up with snow, this involves slipping and sliding on the path behind the house, getting beyond the back corner there, where the porch light does not reach, filling the tote by feel (since I can’t see and we’re sadly lacking in streetlights), and stumbling back along the snowy path to the house.

So here’s my remedy:

I built a little wood shed onto the back porch. This is actually where the garbage cans resided last year; but last Saturday I extended the shed area and put a little roof on it, for the garbage cans and recycle bin to live in. Then Emma and I approximately a week’s worth of firewood where the garbage used to live. Every Saturday, during the day, I’ll trundle back and forth from the wood shed at the side of the house to fill the little one at the bck of the house. That way on the dark winter nights I only have to fill the woodbox from the back porch—or have the kids do it.

We’ll see how it works when the snow starts to fly.