Half a sheep.

Arrived from the sheep farmer. There'd been some confusion about whether or not we wanted it so he'd shrink wrapped it for retail sale. We

Half a sheep.

Arrived from the sheep farmer. There'd been some confusion about whether or not we wanted it so he'd shrink wrapped it for retail sale. We reassembled it as best our knowledge of sheep anatomy allowed.

Since the parts were labelled for retail we were able to see that it's markedly cheaper to buy in bulk and that's just comparing the price of parts that are sold over the counter. Buy half the sheep and half of all sorts of bonus bits come along too; kidney, liver, neatly cleaved head, one eyeball!

Absolutely terrifying.

Highway 89 is a twisty two lane road near here. There's lots of fast moving truck traffic on it and it's one of those roads with no clear edges, everyone drives down the middle for fear of going off into a snow filled ditch. It's often closed due to white outs but this evening it was open, visibility was poor due to blowing snow and there was close to a foot of snow on the road.

As I rounded a bend, a truck came the other way sweeping a wave of snow over my car and creating one of those white outs that seems to last forever. As the snow cleared something logic says is inevitable but which one always hopes to avoid became apparent; I was on a head on collision course with another car. I don't know which of us was on the wrong side of the road, perhaps both of us, but I steered right, the misery of perhaps being stuck looming less large than the fear of death. A wheel went into the ditch and I fish tailed a bit, something one sees happen to people most days but I kept going.

Since I'm here I know that I didn't hit the other vehicle, it was close though, close enough to make the remaining few miles of seeing nothing ahead, looking sideways and judging placement by the roadside electrical paraphenalia, dry mouthed.

Guilty Pleasures

It is January. We don't do much bloggable stuff in January. You've kind of seen it all already. It gets cold, things freeze, we unfreeze them, it gets cold and things freeze again. I wish I had cool knitting to report like Ellen on The Blithe Traveller, but my elimentary knitting is nothing to write home about.

So, just for the hell of it, these are some of my guilty pleasures. Things I know I should have grown out of many years ago, but I just can't get enough of.

Degrassi: The Next Generation. This is a recently acquired vice. I do remember one season of the old Degrassi being on American television when I was about 12, but it was so shocking that it was quickly pulled. These kids are just so cute, especially the little lesbian ones.

Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. I grew up watching this show. I still have old taped episodes, one of which is labelled "Dr. Quinn and Sully do it." My idea of the perfect relationship was formed by watching the do-gooder pure-of-heart woman gently tame the brooding wild-man with a battered, but still-beating heart. All he needed was someone to show him love.... Good Lord, I have to stop watching that show. Look where it got me!

Slim-Jims. That goes for all heavily processed not-quite-meat products, actually. The more mechanically separated chiken fat they contain, the better. What can I say? Culinary excellence exists in some of the most unexpected places.

Bodice Rippers. Somewhat related to Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, only with much more sex. They must be Regency era or earlier, however. And I really prefer the ones that don't go in for historical accuracy. Just show me some heaving bosoms, keep the details on the throbbing members to a minimum, and we'll get along fine.

Country Music of the 90s. In my mind, this is the best that country music ever was. It still had enough of the old cowboy twang, but it had grown up and gotten a little more, well... listenable. This was just before country became Pop West.

Heartland. Warning--this site gives you music if you have your speakers turned on. See a trend here? I'm a big fan of one-dimensional characters. Add a splash of campness, and I'm all over it.

Rodeos. This one is truly a guilty pleasure. Many horse people object to rodeos, especially horse people of the English saddle persuasion. Horses and other animals are injured at rodeos. Horses are also injured jumping, doing dressage, trail riding, eventing, foxhunting, and pulling carriages, so I'm not sure where the ethical lines can be drawn. Horse people are very eager to say "my sport is okay, your sport is abuse" to each other. I'm still up in the air on this one. In the meantime, I'll keep admiring the athleticism and sportsmanship of horse and rider at the rodeo.

So, I know you all have some guilty pleasures of your own. Tell me about them!

Yes, it's been a steep learning curve.

We pretty much have the problem of getting water to the barn solved but still there are problems with the joint between the hydrant and the heated part of the hose freezing. What I do is to check this first and, if it's frozen, put the hairdryer on it while doing the barn chores.



That's a fine idea if you pay attention to the other end of the hose. One day this week I failed to do that so, when the tap end melted, the free end thrashed and blasted water into the light switch. The next day Anna reported that the lights didn't work. I assumed that a fuse had blown but it turns out that the lights aren't wired through the fuse box. I wish I'd known that when I carefully removed the fuses before tapping into the circuit for the bathtub heater.



In this case I heated up the outside of the switch until the icy glaze over the screws melted.



Then I was able to remove the cover and heat the inside of the switch. A trickle of water ran out and then it was all back to working.




Valuable lessons, there. Firstly, don't trust inherited wiring. Secondly, a hairdryer is critical to the operation of a barn. Most importantly, look where your nozzle is pointed before sending water through it.

Yes, we thought a shovel would help.

How naive we were. There hasn't been a lot of snow this week, none to speak of really and yet I've spent the morning clearing the driveway, the laneway and the neighbour's driveway of the little that fell or drifted in off the fields.


This is a plough coming down our street, the pile of snow on the right is one I've built keeping access to our mailbox clear. Having a pile like that adds excitement to pulling out on to the street.


Seen from closer the plough is a fearsome machine. There are fleets of them out all over the county all winter which, I suppose, accounts for our property taxes.

Those piles of snow mark the other side of the walkway I've dug to the barn, it runs along the line of trees then turns at ninety degrees and goes down the hill

more mounds of snow along the path.

I suppose it would be possible to shovel the snow, Mennonites manage somehow, but I can't imagine having a job and finding the time to do it by hand.

Interview

These questions came from Rob at Iunkshuk Adventure. Please go to read his interview--much more interesting than mine!

If anybody else would care to join in the fun, here are your instructions:1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. (I get to pose the questions).3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions and let me know when you have posted it, so I can link it.4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

1. I moved from South Africa via the UK to Canada and have found the obvious and more subtle differences. You moved from the USA. What differences struck you initially and even now?

At first it was hard to know if the differences were USA/Canada, East/West, or small town/big city. I think the primary differences that I noticed actually came down to the last two. I had lived in small towns in the West and Midwest for most of my life before I moved to the "upper beaches" in Toronto. To be honest, the differences that struck me were not good ones. The first, most obvious one, is the rudeness of people in Toronto. That's not because it is Canadian, that is because it is a big city in the eastern portion of North America. I'm sure New York, or Buffalo, or Boston, would all be the same. I'm soft-spoken and essentially a timid person, when it comes to relating to my fellow human beings. (Horses and chickens are another story!) That seems to draw the vultures from the clouds in Toronto. The second big difference was the physical violence always present in the city. I'd been to Jo'burg, Gaza, the West Bank, and the docks in Aberdeen at midnight, and managed never to be physically assaulted. Then I moved to Toronto. Most of Canada would object to being judged on the basis of Toronto though, so I'll expand some more in the next question. I'd love to go to Alberta or Saskatchewan and compare them to the American West and Midwest. I think regionalism is actually more important than country boundaries, at least when it comes to Canada and the US.

And I don't mean to say that it is all bad. I went to Pride in Toronto and was AMAZED at the number of people there, who were willing to say "I'm gay." The gay bars back in the West have bullet-proof glass in their windows, if they have windows, for good reason. Matthew Shepherd died in the town where I went to grad school. Fred Phelps holds an annual rally on that day, in that town, to celebrate Matthew's "descent into hell." A CSU fraternity made a float making fun of Matthew's death for the homecoming parade. That would be unacceptable in Toronto. Even if someone thought it, the overall culture is such that it would be poorly received.

Toronto has more diversity than any place I've ever been. It may be ghettoized, but hey, at least it is there. Cooking good food in Toronto is easy. Colorado... not so much. You have to search long and hard for things like coconut milk or lemongrass. And forgot about canned testicles... er, sorry, litchies.

2. I know that you lived in Toronto before Going Country and leaving it all behind for Upper Appalachia. What was the motivation to go rural and how has the experience measured up?

I'd been working as a stablehand at a fancy horse farm north of the city for a year when we started thinking about moving out of the city and getting a farm ourselves. Jim was ready for a change, the kids had vanished, and I, frankly, hated Toronto. I'd be out at the barn where I worked, watching the horses and the wildlife, feeling the seasons change, feeling connected to the earth in a primal way that I hadn't ever experienced in the city, and then I'd drive home, battle my way through the 401 and down Victoria Park, and feel all of the hostility and the inhumanity come down on me. Due to Jim's divorce he had to sell the house anyway, so it seemed like a good time to change our lives completely, and get away from the city that had so much pain associated with it.

The experience has been so much harder, and so much more fulfilling than I thought it would be. I look back on our blog and shake my head in wonder at how little we knew, and how ill-prepared we were to deal with what we had gotten ourselves into. We were, quite literally, babes in the woods. We actually moved to the country, to the Snow Belt, to the highest point in Ontario, with the intention of shovelling the driveway. We've gotten a lot tougher, physically and emotionally, from the experience. It has been a steep learning curve, and we still have plenty more to learn, but every second has been worth it. Now, ask me that in February, when we have drifts over our heads and we're still looking at three more months of winter, and I may have another answer!

In spite of the difficulties, it has been so rewarding. I love the people out here. I've made amazing friends through work. The people in the country have a casual acceptance of eccentricity that allows everyone to just be who they want to be. The neighbours like to dress up in quasi-historical costumes and walk in parades. And everyone is okay with that. Some male friends of mine, with a 30 year age difference between them, got married, and held their wedding reception at the gay campground/dance hall/trailer park, and everyone is okay with that. One of them is a prominent figure in the community, and is well respected by everyone. You can't go anywhere with him without famers, construction workers, artists, and businessmen stopping him for a chat. And they're all okay with him. Monique (Jim's profoundly autistic and retarded daughter) makes strange noises, emits strange odours, and makes strange movements, and everyone is okay with her, even acomodating to her. Our neighbours really like her, and bring toys and things for her. Okay, so they get them from the dump, but it is a very nice gesture anyway! It's just very easy to live here, when it comes to inter-personal things. Maybe because it is so damn hard to live here, otherwise, and no one has the energy to bother themselves about the lifestyles of others. It's a live and let live kind of society, and that is so refreshing.

3. Who was the most influential person in your life or perhaps a role model?

Aside from the obvious (hi Mom!), Dr. and Mrs. Sturges, high school history teachers of mine. I had Mrs. Sturges for Western Civ. in tenth grade. Tenth grade was a pretty tough year for me. Constant fights at home, not because I was out being wild like most teenagers, but because I sat in my room and did... nothing. All day. I read Nietszche and Edward Abbey, burned insence and wrote bad teenage poetry. My mom decided to drag me to parent/teacher conferences in order to cut down on the he said/she said aspect of her return and lecture to me. Mrs. Sturges reviewed my grades, my class performance, and then turned to me. "You're getting C's. C's are average. Do you think you're an average student?" I shrugged. Of course I was average. Far below average, in fact. "Anna," she looked me right in the eye, "you are NOT average." That has stuck with me for 15 years. By the time I had gotten to senior year, I was in Dr. Sturges' AP European History class. He made history come alive for me. They weren't just names and dates and strange sounding places. They were stories, with real characters, and real motivations, and they were fascinating. Majoring in history in college led to a job in the college archives, and, a long way down the road, led to where I work now. I would not be who I am today if not for those two people.

4. What's your favourite inspirational saying or your life mantra?

I'm a quote junkie, but right now the most fitting one seems to be "There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us." I know there are many more profound statements, but it is January, and the cold is slowing down my synapses.

5. Other than blogs, what website is a must visit visit each day?

The Homesteading Today forums. Two years ago, I would have said the Guardian Talk, but I guess my priorities, and my tolerance for vitriol, have changed.

So, there's my five questions. Leave me a comment if you want to pass this along, and I'll interview you, with five different (or maybe similar, because Rob did a really good job of coming up with them!) quetions.

It's been cold this week.

Only because I'm not getting up early to go downtown did I miss a new record on the VW thermometer (once it read -32.5). The neighbours, as usual, went to Texas for the winter leaving the heat on in their house. Something went awry though as a pipe burst flooding the place. Their son was there today looking at the devastation and trying to persuade the insurance company that there was grounds for a claim.

The hose in our barn froze repeatedly but the standpipe still works. In the worst case buckets of water have to be carried ten feet, a great improvement on last year's need to schlep wine bottles full of water down the hill.

We may be frozen but we continue to eat spectacularly well. This salmon was privately imported from Alaska

and cooked minimally.

It was wonderful. Shame the airfare is such that we're not likely to get frequent visits from the even-more-frozen-than-here north.

It tiz beautiful, like a screensaver.

Said Servane's francophone friend, Christine, as she looked out of the window. It was a sunny morning with light snow.

We decided to ride, or at least to take turns walking on Austin. The idea being that donkey could be lead behind Austin, to give him some practise at being well mannered. It didn't quite work. Christine took off regally,

but donkey didn't quite fall into line and so there was a strange parade around the paddock, Austin and rider, donkey with puller and sometimes pusher, Dixie.

Silly. Fun though:

Hey, Dana.

Yes, Sid is still alive. And huge. And usually at the barn.

He and Adventure Kitty hunt as a pack. They're after squirrels but I haven't seen them catch one.

This, remember, was a tiny, timid, people friendly cat in the city. He's gone half feral, something like ourselves.

One of Anna's Christmas gifts was The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (http://www.rivercottage.net/). Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall seems to be a Prince Charles type toff with a taste for things "green". A lot of what he advocates, eat local, avoid factory animals, makes sense to us but he goes fabulously over the type in lauding the better flavour of locally coppice grown charcoal over foreign imports. One imagines a tasting party at which chinless connoisseurs spit out pieces of pulled pork before expounding on the provenance of the charcoal used to barbecue it.

Anyway, on the weekend we gave one of his recipes, citrus braised lamb shanks, a go, starting with seeking out a local sheep farmer and driving to his farm to collect animal pieces. Total meat cost for this amazing meal was $17.73. It's a bit of work though.

Shanks browning, mirepoix sweating, stock reducing:

ingredients blended on the stove top:

into the oven for a couple of hours:


Excellent, really an exciting blend of flavours. Even the baked beet, an accidental choice of vegetable enhanced the mix (Jim, sent to buy turnips for making leftover goose stew, came back with this special kind of red turnips... beets! They didn't work for the stew, but complemented the lamb beautifully). A feast for two


and, if you don't mind overlooking the cooked state of the bones, something for the dog
and then, of course, a delicious mash of stock components for the chickens:

Everything reused and we still have a jug of lamb stock. Local food, minimal wastage, true to the spirit of the cookbook. Shame about the petrol used in fetching the lamb and us living so far from France. Once you consider the food miles on the wine, dinner here can rarely be truly green.

Bothered about chickens.

Tammy, the farrier, came by causing a frenzy of excitement among the chickens. Horse hoof trimmings are something else we didn't expect them to eat. Fortunately, both the horses and Tammy are used to having chickens underfoot and mostly avoid stepping on them. Tammy's not from a privileged background. She told how, after her father couldn't pay the electric bill, they'd had to cope without running water; the well pump being the critical electric appliance in rural houses. I hope this was in summer as peeing out back in winter in Canada is dangerous to one's valuable bits. I thought the better of asking for more detail than she offered. Talk of living cheaply brought us on to chickens, Tammy feeds hers for just six weeks, a cost of three or four dollars to put one on the table, "not just cheaper but better eating" she said.

Later, having finally, after six months, erased the smell of wet dead chicken feathers from our memories, we ate a backyard chicken. One we'd plucked on the washing line. It wasn't as meaty as a store bought bird:



But it was, indeed, better eating. It tasted, not of some sauce, but actually of chicken. This was a meat bird so it hadn't had a long life grazing and eating bugs, those birds barely move because they're too heavy for their legs, they pretty much eat only the grains from the feed mill. I find it a worrisome thought that a bird that is free range only in the sense that the door's open, it could wander out if it could propel itself, can taste so much better than commercial birds. Feed mill grains are cheap enough, it's not a pleasant thought that a commercial chicken eats something so much cheaper, and presumably nastier, that it's still cost effective to deliver it even after paying for all the drugs and chemicals needed to keep the thing alive in a crowded cage.

Christmas dog has gone now.

Cruikshank and family came to collect Sandy today. They'd survived the trip from India via Moscow on Aeroflop and seemed in good spirits, if knackered. If being surrounded by cats and a strange dog had distressed Sandy she showed no sign of it. This is an assortment of relaxed cats and dogs in late December.

Charlie now seems lonely, having another dog around here suited him well.

Local lunacy.

This car sits in a driveway near here. It looks something like a police car.


The more so for having flashing lights on the top and a mannequin in a cap and glasses at the wheel.

It's not though, it's just eccentricity, something to push down the driveway each morning and to push back each evening. One wonders how this could be legal. Isn't it impersonation of a police officer?