Snow.... wonderful snow!

We woke this morning to over 8 inches of snow and it was still snowing! This is North Carolina we don't get storms like this. The kids and I loved it... Neil... not so much. This is the most snow we have seen since we left Maine in 2003.

Out in the barn I found all the animals crammed in the barn. I am sure they were confused since we had over 60 degree weather all this past week and now more snow then most of them had ever seen. Chores took a bit extra time since I had to lug water and shovel snow off of the hay bales.

Back in the house we warmed up by the fire and spent the afternoon cleaning up the house.


Tonight I finished knitting up a pair of Mary Jane shoes for Mckayla's Cabbage Patch doll. She is so thrilled will the doll clothes I am making. I have a que of knitting projects I want to get done and a doll's dress is up there on the list.

Turkey season has arrived

Well, here it is, the weekend before Thanksgiving. The push to get the remainder of this year's turkeys sold has begun. I had two gentlemen come by the farm this morning to purchase a breeding pair each. Those were my last two hens for sale. I have one hen left that will be retained here on the farm as a breeder since I lost one of our hens this year.

One of the guys ended up also purchasing the four Brown Leghorn chickens that I mistakenly was sold this past spring. They just started laying so he was pleased to get them. I even threw in a Brown Leghorn rooster to boot. One less I have to process here!

Neil and his Dad got the exterior wall to the bedroom sided with cedar siding to match the rest of the house on that end. So, the French door removal project is pretty much done. Then Neil got most of the lawn mowed for the final time this season. Looks nice and tidy now.

Kid's Rooms

I have spent the past two days rearranging the kids bedrooms.

When we moved here the kids chose to share one bedroom and use the second bedroom as their playroom. Now after two years they have decided that they would like their own spaces instead. Evan is to move into the current playroom and McKayla will stay in her current room. It was a bit of work to get Evan's loft bed disassembled and moved, after that the rest of the furniture moved pretty fast. Then the toys needed to be sorted with some to go in each room.

Then today I started painting McKayla's room. She chose to have a pink room (no surprise). It took a few start and stops over the day but I got about 2/3 of the room painted. The room is so bright and cheery now. It is so nice to have some color finally in our all white house that I feel inspired to get the living room painted too!

Odd jobs done.

As warm as yesterday was... today was cold. Even with the chilly temps Neil got a few odds and ends done around the farm today.

One of the many things I wanted to make easier for this coming winter was watering the livestock. In the heat of the summer I don't mind walking around with the garden hose filling watering troughs but when the temps are below freezing it is no fun any more. So, on Friday when I was at Southern States picking up the weeks livestock feed I also purchased a 70 gallon stock tank for the cows water. This morning Neil put it behind the barn where I wanted it to go. We got the automatic watering device hooked up to it and instantly the curious cows came over to see what it was all about. I was a little nervous that the tank might be too tall for them to comfortably drink out of... being miniature cows and all... but they demonstrated right away that it was no problem at all. One step closer to water independence!

The other odd thing Neil got done today was to install the cat door in the house. I have been leaving the door from our bedroom to the deck open most days the past few weeks so the cats could come and go. With temps often below 50 degrees during the day it is now too cold to be doing that. Neil got the kitty door in and I showed Jet how it worked. I figure he will be the first to figure it all out and Fringe will have to learn from him. Meanwhile, no more cold breezes in the bedroom!

Pumpkin Carving

Fall has truly set in here (as much as Fall is in NC). The weather has been getting cooler and cooler the past few weeks. I have been donning a fleece jacket when out doing chores even. Inside the house has been maintaining a comfortable temp up until a few days ago when it started getting cool enough that I had to start wearing my slippers around the house and wearing long sleeve shirts more often then not.

We don't use our central heat. The house is set up for propane but we don't even keep a tank here. Instead we have a wood stove that heats the house. With the front hall project still unfinished we had stacks of boxes in front of the wood stove. Today I decided I needed to fire it up for the season. I moved all the "stuff" from the front of the wood stove, cleaned out the old ashes and wiped all the dust off from it. It was so nice to get that first fire started. It didn't take long to chase away the cool damp air in the house. This evening we are nice and toasty.

After the house started to warm back up the kids and I set about carving our Halloween pumpkins. I cut the lids into them and the kids did all the seed scraping by themselves. Evan, at 6 years old, carved out his own scary monster design. McKayla, at only 4 years old, carved out the eyes and nose and drew on a mouth that I then cut out for her. She then drew on whiskers to create her dog pumpkin. I went pretty simple this year and carved out a kitty cat face. We all had a fun time!

Evan with his scary monster pumpkin.

McKayla with her doggy pumpkin (before whiskers).

Monster, Mommy's Kitty Cat Pumpkin and Doggy.

Everything is green

I spent most of the afternoon mowing the front lawns today. Neil was home from work today as he had a Dr's appointment this morning in Durham. After he returned home he got the weed whacker out and trimmed up around the house flower beds. Once all done everything looks so nice. This Fall is so dramatically different from last year. Everything is green and lush this year while last year with our severe drought it was all dried up and brown. It is so pleasant around the farm this time of year. I love to sit out on the deck in the late afternoons soaking in the view.

Neil was industrious after the yard work was done and continued work in the front hall/closets by installing the new can lights. He hopes to get it all dry walled this coming weekend.

The woodstove is in!

We finally have heat! Neil and his dad (who was up here for the holiday weekend) got our new wood stove installed today. It was a bit more of a chore then Neil thought it was going to be. We had planned on installing the stove in our fireplace opening and running the smokestack that comes off the top of the stove straight up the flue. Unfortunately, due to the built in smoke chase in the brick chimney everything didn't line up. Neil ended up with a hammer breaking out the bricks at the back of the chimney so the stove could get pushed back into the opening another 6-7 inches. Once that was done both of them had to go up on the roof to drop the new Zero clearance chimney liners down the old brick chimney. Finally, Neil framed in the smoke stack, installed the chimney cap and mortared it all in place to divert the rain. But by late afternoon we had a fire burning in the wood stove! Yeah!

Preparing to be warm...

Work continues under the house to get more of the floor insulated before it gets too cold outside. It is working pretty well to have me outside cutting the insulation and then sending it into Neil to install. We worked on it for almost two hours until Neil's knees couldn't take much more.

Before Neil crawled out from under the house he took a bit longer and installed the whole house water filter onto the water line. It will be nice to be able to drink water right from the tap finally. We give our Bria water pitcher a real work out around here!

Neil was going to start construction on the hay feeder for the alpacas this afternoon but when we uncovered his table saw the table was completly rusted. Some steel-wool and WD-40 got the worst of it off but by that time it was getting dim and we needed to get cleaned up for a road trip to see about a wood stove that Neil saw in a store in Greensboro, NC yesterday. It was marked as $198.oo. Neil called this morning to confirm the price and to see if they had them in stock before we drove the hour and a half down to get it. We were assured that everything was fine.

We left the house about 4:30pm and arrived just after 6pm to look at the stove. It was excextly what we wanted for our living room. It was a small stove so it would fit snugly into our current fireplace opening, it had a good EPA rating, took 18" logs, had a 6" top mounted smoke pipe and had a glass front so we could enjoy the fire... and it was within our budget! Neil found a clerk and asked to have one brought up to the front so we could buy it. The clerk looked at the SKU# on the tag and said "Oh, this is the wrong tag. Let me go look up the right SKU# for this." Right away Neil and I knew it wasn't going to be good. He came back and said that this stove was a special order stove and it would take 2-3 weeks to get one here... and it was actually $699! What?!

Neil asked to see the manager. When the manager got there Neil told him that he had specifically called earlier to confirm the price of this stove, as the price did seem "to good to be true" to us, and that when told it was right and that there were plenty in stock that we drove 3 hours round trip to come get it. The manager was great! He apoligized for their mistake and said that if we wanted to take the floor model (that had some minor scratches on the glass door) that he could offer it to us for $450. Neil and I discussed it and as it truly was the perfect stove for us and other comp models we had researched were well over $1000 we opted to dig deep into the budget and get it anyway. So, while the stock guys where loading it up for us I milled around the store a bit. I found a great little solar shed light for the goat barn for $40 and the kids picked up a little toy a piece. When we were at the register paying for our items the manager said, "I am going to give you an additional %20 off the full retail value on the stove and your other item as well. Oh, and the toys are on the house too!" WOW! Now this was a manager that respected that his staff messed up and wanted to make it right for us! So, that $699 stove ended up costing us less then $350!

This is a photo from the manufacturer's web site. Interestingly, the stove is listed on their site at $899.50!

There were seven eggs this morning!

House improvements.

Neil and I worked for a while on installing the insulation under the house today. We have no basement so under the house consists of a crawl space of about 3-4 feet high depending on which side of the house you are on. Which makes working under there for any length of time a miserable job. To make matters worse, since the house was built in the 40’s, the spaces between the joists are not the standard width of today’s insulation. We had to cut additional 5 inch wide strips to fill the spaces completely. It made for slow going.

After a few hours of insulating we moved on to a smaller project, one that we could finish in a short period of time. Our little goat barn only had one door into it and that door opens into the pasture. That meant that during the day when the goats were out grazing they could not go back into their barn because I always need to have that door closed so the donkeys and cows don’t go inside and eat the goat’s pellets. So, my solution was to create a smaller door that was goat sized that only the goats could use to come and go from the barn at their leisure. Neil whipped up a great sliding door to one side of the existing door. It works great and now the goats have access to their barn all day if they want to. Yeah! Another project off the to-do list!

Butchered two roosters today too.

We had two eggs today.

A day spent indoors.

I woke up early this morning and spent some time on the computer before the kids woke up.

Neil got up and started his day and headed outside to work on a number of projects he has going on. He got the crushed rock all spread under the deck (it looks great BTW), he mowed more of the pasture for a while, pulled out the fence posts closest to our trailer neighbors where our future fruit orchard will be and just did some more needed cleaning up.

My plan for dinner is Beef Stew. I figured I would throw it all in the crock-pot and let it stew all day. That took me about 30 minutes to put together since I floured and browned the meat and then sautéed the onions before adding them to the pot along with potatoes, carrots, spices, broth and some red wine.

After I cleaned up the kitchen I realized I was still in my jammies and was quite comfortable. I looked around the house at all the boxes still piled up... most of them in the room across from the dining area that we intend to be the kids play room. I made the decision that I was going stay inside and do some much needed organizing and rearranging. It took most of the day but I managed to reduce the boxes in the playroom to be stacked in just one corner. I cleaned what remained of the room and then began moving to kids toys from their bedroom into the playroom. I also unpacked some of the kid’s toys/books that I previously had no room for. Both the playroom and the kid’s bedroom look so much better now. The kids love the playroom, especially McKayla as it is much brighter then their bedroom and so close to the kitchen where I spend most of my time. Both of them played most of the evening in there. Made me feel really good for taking the time to set it up for them.

The other thing that I squeezed into my afternoon was to put the ingredients into the bread machine for a sourdough wheat bread to go along with the beef stew for dinner. It will be the first time I use the sourdough starter I started last week when we were up here at the farm long enough to stir and feed it everyday like you need to when first starting out. I kept it in the fridge while we were back in SC but yesterday I took it out to warm up knowing I wanted to use it today.

Dinner Results: Beef Stew was wonderful! Sourdough wheat bread was heavy and dense but very tasty and went great with the stew. Will try to get a higher loft next time. Neil commented that it didn't have much "sour" taste to it. I told him it takes time to develop in the starter and it should get better with age and use.