Fast Forward

The first Summer (2006) and Winter (2006-2007) were challenging months for us, which my wife Sue is writing about in a book we hope to have published within the next year. In hind-sight Sue and I were glad the first year in our house tested us because we no longer take the basic necessities of life for granted. I think we also have learned to really value the process of tending to life's basic needs. For example, we actually enjoy cutting brush, preparing the garden, harvesting the fruits, cleaning and cutting vegetables for meals. After a hard day's work dinner tastes so much better and we love the fact that many of our meals now come from plants we grow.

I may have mentioned it in an earlier posting, but some time ago Sue and I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and we loved it! Sue and I were motivated by this book to become "locavores" - what we cannot produce ourselves we attempt to purchase as close to home as possible. After we were able to get fully settled Sue and I began looking around our community for local farms who sold their produce by farm stands or via phone orders. It turned ou there were more farms doing this than we imagined. In fact, several local organizations joined together and annually publish a guide map of the farms in Whatcom County, WA identifying what items they grow and sell. It also and provides location and contact information. We go to a local Blueberry Farm to do you-pick for about $1.25 a pound - this year Sue has frozen about 50 lbs. of blueberries. Our own strawberry crop, this year, netted us over 9 quarts of frozen berries - not to mention the amount we gave away to neighbors or ate fresh ourselves.

At present our garden harvest is winding down and I'm spending a good deal of my time building up a supply of firewood for heating our home this Fall and Winter. We hired a couple of professional loggers to fell two very large multi-trunked broad leaf maple trees, which were growing on a steep slope just east of our home. Both trees were slowly dying and there was a good deal of standing dead sections, which we wanted to use for firewood. I had the loggers fell the trees and buck them up into 45 inch-long logs, which I will latter cut and split up. This will take some time. I'm working on the dead portions first because I can use them for firewood right away. Well, have to go, its about time to go out and cut some firewood.

Frozen pipes - December 2006

When I lived in town I never really had to worry much about our home's water pipes freezing. If the power went out it was most often back on in a matter of a few hours. What's more power outages were pretty infrequent. Not so out here in the foothills. We've had the power off eight or nine times in the past three years. And instead of being off for only a few minutes or hours we've been without electrical power for 38 hours on one occasion and 52 hours on another. Years ago I had experienced frozen water pipes when I lived in a mobile home. That year I learned about heat tape, which one wraps around your pipes and is plugged into a receptacle, often located under the mobile home near the crawl space access. But that presupposes you've got electrical power. Out in the foothills I learned how to unfreeze frozen pipes.

After a northeaster had knocked out our power we soon had no water and no way to protect our water system. [We did have a gen-tran system installed at the pump house but we did not yet have a generator]. Naturally the pump house froze. Once the power was back on I called Gary, our contractor, and he talked me through solving the problem. Our system was complicated by the fact that we had a water meter in our line. The cold had popped out the freeze plug so just thawing the pipes would not get the water flowing. The good news was there were no obvious cracks or ruptures in the pipes in the pump house. The first thing Gary had me do was to remove the water meter and replace it with a spare he had left in the pump house. Next I plugged in a space heater and turned in on to let it run for several hours. I set the heater so it would blow warm air on the pipes and the nearby wall to get the pipes and surrounding area warm. I also turned the power off to the water pump during the warming period. At home we turned on our electric furnace and let it heat up the house in hopes of unfreezing any pipes that were frozen under the house.

After several hours I went back out to the pump house and turned the power on to the pump. At first nothing happened. Several anxious minutes went by, then I noticed the arrow on the water pressure gauge start to move, just a little. After a few more minutes the arrow started to bounce a bit and then all of a sudden I heard ice breaking - I jumped a little and then realized the pipes were still intact and the pressure gauge was rising. I quickly returned to the house to let Sue know and to see how the water situation was there. To my relief the water was flowing just fine, no apparent breaks had occurred in the pipes under our home.

As a result of this learning opportunity we now have a nice generator for back up electrical power. We had a gen-tran installed at our shop, to serve the shop and the house. We also had a wall mounted thermostatically controlled heater installed in the pump house. Sue and I found we could cope because we had good friends to call upon for assistance.