Summer Update

In which we retrench, regroup, and start moving again

Dear Everybody,

It doesn’t feel like much has happened, until I look at the spring update. Now I’m not even sure where to start.

Well, the house is still here, Cricket and I are intact, and Godzilla hasn’t emerged from the Pacific. So there’s that.

Twenty years ago (in March) I was just on the verge of escaping after being snowed in for a month. The truck did indeed start, I was able to go get my packages, I enjoyed about two days of freedom… and then I was snowed in for nearly another week.

By April, however, it was all done with. A week or so of moderate weather, and we launched straight into midsummer: hot and dry. I have to assume that “spring” exists here, but this is the second year in a row it hasn’t shown up. Still, it was preferable to the endless rains of last year, and I got the opportunity to really open the house up and air it out.

Which is how I came downstairs one afternoon, after Cricket showed up in my bedroom with her tail the size of a Mission burrito, and opened the back hall door, only to come face to face with two dogs in the kitchen.

My first thought, after almost breaking the pneumatic closer by slamming the door shut, was “is anyone with them?” I got a stout stick and determined that no, the two dogs were wandering without supervision, and had just sauntered in through the open kitchen door. They were benign, and turned friendly after I cut up a little cheese; that allowed me to read the tag on the harness one of them wore, and leave a voice mail message to the effect of “I have your dogs, please call me.” Then I sealed up the crawlspace (where Artie lives) and kept an eye on them.

I had to coax them away from the road, and finally locked them in the workroom so they’d stay put. I was collecting blankets and water to keep them comfortable when the phone rang. Their owners had been searching the entire ridge for four hours, and were desperately grateful to be reunited. So that worked out. They came, we chatted, they gave the Accord a jump (the battery had died while I was snowed in), and I got a phone number for a possible handyman. Not a bad outcome.

As dusk was falling I came back to the house, wondering whether Cricket had taken refuge under the house with Artie. And at that moment, as I came to the parking area, I looked up—and saw that the William’s Pride apple, the tallest non-forest tree in the yard, had a new fruit on it. A small furry black fruit, on the highest possible twig. Bad Things Were Happening, she said, and she had to find A Safe Place.

It took some doing to coax Cricket down, mostly because she had fallen into the fugue state cats retreat to in times of stress. But with regular reminders that she was coming down, and some fancy footwork to find a path through the branches, she made it to the ground again and came in. I didn’t see Artie until breakfast the next day.

It was shortly afterward that I discovered that the living room had black mold in it. Somewhere. I sealed it off and wracked my brain as to what could possibly be bringing in enough moisture to feed mold growth. I did another circuit of the house, and this time I looked up—and spotted the sides of the upstairs bedroom dormer, at the front of the house. The roofers hadn’t replaced the wall shingles on the dormer, and the rain coming off the dormer poured right onto the main roof and splashed on those shingles. They were in rough shape, and water getting behind the shingles and into the wall….. would end up in Fa’s room (the office), and the living room wall. Two places I had a mold problem. Bingo!

I talked to Conrad, called the roofers who had done the outbuildings last summer, and in very short order we had someone up on a ladder ripping out the old rotted shingles and replacing them with T-111. Gutters followed the next week, to provide a more permanent fix. Problem solved!

…except the roofer said there was no rot and no water intrusion behind the shingles. They were indeed in bad shape, and it could have been a problem in a few years, so it was good to get that taken care of. But it wasn’t the source of the mold.

I think a couple of us came to the same conclusion a week or two later, and when Conrad came up I asked for his help to take the moving blankets off the windows and put them outside. He assisted me in removing the casement window next to the woodstove, and fastening a box fan there. Then I put another in the door to the hall, turned them on, and have left them running ever since. (It’s been about six weeks.)

The moving blankets went straight into a contractor’s bag and got sealed up, and the situation improved markedly. Our best guess is that the living room, being warmer, allowed the condensation on the windows, plus the lint in the quilted moving blankets, to grow mold while the blankets in cold rooms were fine (they were on every window and most of the doors to keep the drafts manageable in the winter). A stroke of very bad luck, since I don’t tolerate even traces of black mold toxin, and many things that had been in that room got contaminated. One of them was a set of sheets that had been in a laundry basket, after drying on the clothes horse in the living room when it was still habitable; I didn’t realize the risk, aired them, and put them on the bed. Five days later I stripped them off again, having gotten horribly ill. It’s a neurotoxin very similar to black widow venom, and the resulting muscle spasms disrupted my digestion and tore muscles in my back which took a couple of weeks to heal. I’ve been more cautious since.

My poor car suffered from being left out all winter. I parked it with a cracked radiator in December, and didn’t figure out how to get that repaired before the snow descended. So it wasn’t a great shock that the battery went flat. Nor, really, that the engine ran rough after getting a jump start. The parking brake freezing up did throw me a bit; I hadn’t expected to park it for months, so I engaged the brake and it rusted onto the drum. And when I came out two days after the jump start and running it for nearly a half hour, the battery was so flat it didn’t even turn on the dome light. Not encouraging.

I did a warranty exchange on the battery, changed it out, got in, turned the key—and the dash went dead. Visions of mice eating car wiring danced in my head. In despair, I brought the mechanic who fixed the Ranger up here, and he diagnosed it: the battery clamps both need to be replaced. Then he whanged on the back brake (harder than I had) and managed to free it up at last. I took it for a test drive, blew away the cobwebs, and the idle problems vanished. So it’s down to changing out battery clamps and the radiator (of course), and I might have my car back at last.

I cleared even more of the workroom, and on one freshly cleaned bench I installed my tax-return treat: a new drill press (on clearance) and a little belt sander for sharpening tools. I tested the bench grinder I bought at the Rickreall flea market, and it works; I plan on mounting it to something stable and replacing its grinding wheels, then it’ll be another arrow in my quiver. I recently splurged on a woodworker’s bench, also on sale, which is waiting to be assembled. And I discovered that the new non-metallic roofs allow the wireless signal to propagate into the workroom, so I can listen to podcasts, watch Twitch, or even stream in there. Very exciting, as I continue to turn it into a workspace.

I got the garden planted, though it was late; I’m hardly alone there, and nature itself took a long time to get going after the late snows. The uniformly warm, sunny weather has let most things catch up, though. We just got our first significant rain over the last two days, and it was sorely needed. But the garlic is nearly ready to harvest, I have a bunch of Napa cabbage breathing down my neck (I need to go to Salem for kimchi ingredients), and everything else is growing visibly from day to day.

Want to help out? Toss a couple bucks at the garden fund on my ko-fi!

I re-framed one of the garden beds to try out a new design, cleared a space between the garden and the garage, and tackled the space in front of the workroom where the old cold frames had been. It’s a good space for cold frames, I admit, with full southern exposure and a nice dark wall to reflect the warmth… but the old rotten wooden frames were still there, with the shattered remains of the glass that covered them, old woven-poly feed bags, broken pots, rocks, stubborn weeds, and a bunch of miscellaneous trash. It took a long afternoon to clear it, and another to amend and plant it, but I hope it will give my tomatoes and herbs a longer season than they would have at the foot of the garden.

The wildlife has been even as abundant as ever. I was in the garden one day and counted a full dozen swallowtails visiting the Dame’s rocket flowers. They have been joined by the usual Parnassus, mountain whites, and great spangled fritillaries; I expect California sisters and tortoiseshells any time now. The air is full of birdsong, including the highly creative song sparrows, my beloved Swainson’s thrush, and a bold red-winged blackbird which has claimed the pond this year.

Not all of the wildlife has been good: I try to make a point of catching the yellowjacket queens when they show up in May, to stave off the annoyance of hornets everywhere later. Usually this place gets one or two, and I have a fair shot at avoiding any nests entirely. This year I caught fourteen over ten weeks. With those sorts of numbers I am under no illusions that I caught them all—you can’t bait for queens, you have to catch them manually—so I’m bracing for a bad time when the apples start ripening.

Many projects are poised for movement. I ordered Jenny’s shed the other day, and we’re waiting on an installation date. I’m waiting on a bid from a contractor for the driveway bridge. I have a list of stove installers to call about the woodstove chimney. I have collected all of the parts needed to fix my car, and Kathyrn Jane is working on scheduling a time her son can come up and lend me a hand with those repairs. I called the county, and the culvert has been put on their repair project list. I’ve caught up on the backlog of personal upkeep and maintenance from when I was sick over the winter and spring, and I have a fresh to-do list. The office has been airing for nearly two months; the next step is to haul everything outside, sort through it, and reclaim that space. And I need to tap Rue to come cut some fallen trees, so that I can start building my firewood stores for winter.

It’s been one year since I moved into this house, and it’s been pretty rough at times. But improvements keep accumulating, infrastructure is being repaired, and I’m continuing to learn and adapt. Here’s hoping the next year is easier and rewarding.

I’ll check in at the Fall Equinox in late September. Remember to check out the link to the Google photo album, and if you want to touch base, you know where to find me. Take care!