A Winter Wonderland?

So, it is a classic method of discussing winter, in my circle, by taking a picture of deck furniture slowly disappearing under its load of white stuff.Well, I do have a deck. But I don't have any deck furniture on it. AND... currently I can't really get to where I'd be able to take a telling photo anyhow.

 But I did feel that we seem to have had enough of a snowload so far this season that I ought to record it in some way. So yesterday I took a couple of pictures. Then for some reason I didn't get around to uploading them. And in the night we had even more snow. (This is well post-'December Ice Storm'. This is just boring old snow.) But there's enough of a change from yesterday to today that I thought I should try to duplicate the shots.

  This first picture is out my kitchen window. Yesterday's load of snow, sitting on top of a plant pot, and on top of the deck bench box.

  By this morning, the heights had increased somewhat. In fact, the snow cap on the bench box (which is only the height of a comfortable sitting surface) is now about as high as my breastbone. And the deck is the same level as the floor in my flat. (Actually the snow depth on the deck looks to be easily thigh deep everywhere!)

 The next angle is the deck railing outside the kitchen, where a previous photo showed my friend Squirrel, eating walnuts. Obviously, if Squirrel had been by recently, we'd know it!

Today...

   the snow is even deeper, and had formed even more of a wall along the one rail.

 But in the living room, the deep window well between the sloping sections of roof is rapidly disappearing!
Yesterday, it was impressively deep:

But you can still see the backyard trees beyond. By today I was hard put to replicate the angle and still show the level of snow so you could tell where it was.

(HINT: look *above* the shelf with the coloured glass!)

It's definitely getting deep out there...

 v

Clean-Up Crew

NOT the door into summer!

A Change is as Good as...

So, like many people, I'm sure, we've always found that we expand to fill any given space, and that there's never enough of it, or we're never using it as well as we're sure we must be able.When we first moved to Wareham, the place seemed huge. Well...large, anyway. And since that first moment, there has never been enough space, ever again! We're always highly envious of people who seem to have room when they need it.

 In Not-Winter we manage better, and are able to spill outwards when we have people by. It's much trickier in poor weather. And often requires some upheavalling. (new word?)

 So, because it was Boat Burning time again, and we had invited a dozen or so friends, we tried to maximize our space by shifting things around. And then sitting there a day later, in weary contemplation of putting things back, we got to musing. Again.

Over the years Darrell, like the camel in the tent, has gradually been moving bits of his office upstairs.The attractive-in-summer back room on the ground floor, is not so attractive in winter. Unless you're a joint of meat! There might have also been a social component; he spends a lot of time at his desk. There's research, communications, business, and computer games. I think back then we wondered if we'd ever see each other!
 But as there has been more and more research and writing, and design and program coordination sneaking into his day, he's also needed more and more books and papers. So there has been much running up and down of stairs after one thing or another. And then small libraries of materials just started to accumulate around him. And when changes in the world of technology demanded he get a faster computer, but wouldn't allow him to keep everything he needed on one computer, or programs he needed to use weren't compatible well, then there was another machine in the space. And extra hard drives to hold vast research info. And when no-one printed slides anymore, a gadget to allow him to transfer all his existing body of photographic work to digital, and so on and so on...

 For a while he has cast covetous eyes on the space off our kitchen, that was once my office, and since then has been our pantry and occasional guest room. Once again I bleated 'but I'd need a pantry space!' (since otherwise there's a heck of a lot of kitchen overflow and a sizable library of historic cookery books, with nowhere to go.)
 And this time we actually decided to see what that might require, and how we could make it happen.

So, this is the view towards Darrell's office corner, after moving much furniture around for Boat. Originally, the couch had run across behind Darrell's desk, and the room had been casually subdivided into a living area, and a dining area, with the wood stove in the middle. We confess to being slaves to watching some TV during dinner, so the idea of moving the audio visual equipment to the far wall has crossed our minds already. The couch got moved into a position that would work with that, to see if we'd still end up with a room we could live with. (And move around in without crashing into things!)

To begin creating a pantry space, the antique plate dresser was moved away from the wall and rotated to form a boundary of the new butler's pantry. The loom has been taken down, and will move out to the new weaving shed, where it will have the company of my 45" counterbalance, and a table loom and an inkle loom. Shelves have been created on the walls, as well as on the back of the plate dresser.

This is the plate dresser in its new position, and emptied and refilled.With even a bit of organization! (Note, my laptop isn't normally taking up dining room space. It wasn't till this winter that I suddenly decided it was more comfortable working on it, rather than at my desk in the mostly unheated studio!)

Here's the pantry space, mostly finished. There's still some sorting and organizing to happen, but I'm getting the hang of it.

And while there's still a ways to go, one of the most recent steps has been to move the antique buffet to where Darrell's desk had been. Now we have to go through all those boxes of tapes and decide if there's any there we want to keep, do some repair on wall and floor in that corner, and contemplate the next moves of the puzzle. It's not quick, but it's certainly been interesting!

A Place For Everything

                                                                And everything in its place...

Up-Helly-Aa 2012

The final installment?

If we're to trust the Mayans, that is.

Mmmmmm, toasty!

                                                 The happiness of a wood-stove.

The Shape of Things To Come

From a casual comment that a neat idea would be to build a 'weaving shed', where I could keep and use my looms, and free up some space in my office/studio for its intended sewing use, has come this:

The bare bones of a shed. Not started when planned, exactly, but with haste before winter sets in.

Since we've had another short gasp of milder and drier weather, Darrell has hustled to put this structure together. He figures if he can get walls and roof up enough to keep the elements out, he'll be able to continue working on the inside. The whole thing is planned along the lines of our Wendy house. (The roof of which is visible just beyond the shed. ) Essentially the building is constructed like a deck, on blocks. Though this building will be designed to be a bit more weatherproof, with insulation.
 We do use the Wendy house in winter, for hardier/adventurous guests, and with a little heater it's not too bad. But that's for sleeping. If I'm trying to work with textiles and my hands, I may need a slightly more temperate climate.

 Then, on Friday, we had a slight hiccup in the process. Driving home from a production meeting Thursday evening, I passed through small blizzards, and we woke up to this!

 Fortunately that was a brief interlude this time, and it got dry and mild again. (Mind you, there's still snow on our upstairs deck...) But if Darrell can get the walls and roof in place, it will be more protected for the next occurrence. The large opening on the front will be fitted with sliding glass doors, for maximum light, some solar gain, and for air in summer. The door to go in on this near end is also mostly glass. And a second door at the carport end, which may not even be used much, is solid. But we have a door, and we have somewhere to install it, so why not?

The Rainy Season

The level of our pond always goes down in the summer, and in fall we anxiously await it filling again with the autumn rains. One season it dropped perilously low, and didn't fill deep enough before it froze. We lost most of the 'big' fish that year.

 Since we introduced some koi to the pond a few years ago, which have been happily thriving and multiplying, and have a fairly happy eco-system out there, with frogs, toads, and turtles, crayfish and clams, as well as several species of fish, we are even more alert to the health of the pond. So it was reassuring to see the level start to rise, though I don't think we expected it to rebound quite so quickly.

In the top picture, taken as we went into the Thanksgiving weekend, the red arrow shows our 'depth gauge', a piece of steel that Darrell planted in the deep section of the pond. I think it registers about 5 feet deep. It's only visible in the summer. 

This picture was taken two weeks later. Not only has the gauge stick vanished under the surface, the entire boundary of the pond has expanded to cover most of the 'summer beach'. So, that's a bunch of water that's come out of the skies in the last fortnight. The fish should be happy, since with a good depth, the water won't freeze all the way down.

What our fish breathe during the winter is more of a mystery...

The Changing Skyline of Wareham

So, we've known for quite some time that there were going to more wind towers going in, north of where we had already been watching them and admiring them for several years. We hadn't realized exactly where they'd be. For quite a while now, we've received the occasional piece of informational mail, telling us about upcoming meetings, or showing grid maps for the Melancthon Wind Project. And there's been mention of Phase the next, and the one after. But the maps are vague, and the meetings at awkward times or locations.

Last fall a new series of towers looked to be going in somewhat south of us. At least we assumed that to be the case. Two fields, along a stretch of back road that I drive, appeared to be being cleared in some kind of large gravel parking lot, or too-wide laneway. Darrell eventually pronounced them to be accessways for wind tower sites. And yes, this spring they started working towards erecting the towers. At the same time men came and started doing odd roadwork at the end of our road. Darrell inquired, and discovered they were temporarily widening the intersection so that the sections of tower could be moved around corners. All of a sudden, any number of hints of road and ditch work seemed suspicious.

I tried to find some information online, and kept coming up with dead ends. An eventual news story finally led to info about the original power authority building the Melancthon Wind Farm being sold to some other power authority, and then the chase began. Eventually I tracked down current info; the trick is that if you don't know the name of the project, or the name of the company, it makes it very hard to track down on the internet. (Well, quickly, anyway.) It's entirely possible that there will be other projects going in to the north and northwest of us, but thus far I haven't found the information. Anyway, the 'local' one has a couple of sections, the bit below us, which I'd been driving by, another section immediately south of us, which also includes one down our road, and a third phase, which runs up the county road at the end of ours. All are part of the Plateau Wind Farm. When I found that website, I also found a handful of interesting documents. Some show tower placement, and set back info. Others contain interesting info on the area.

 And once they started erecting the towers, it's happened very quickly. There was a long stretch of huge bits of towers arriving at the sites, and I kept passing long involved transport vehicles carrying the mammoth sections. Road corners have all been chewed up and widened; some roads have had their pavement temporarily stolen; stretches of road have been blocked when the people moving the equipment have miscalculated the required space anyway.
 On one trip down to the Theatre, I passed about four or five different trucks all carrying a single propellor or vane for the wind towers. On the ground, on the back of a truck, one gets the sense of size. Once the towers are up they seem delicate and tall and airy.

 But I'm realizing just how much my eye is being deceived by the scale. The grouping of three towards the end of out road, and just to the north, are really only two towers on our side of the county road, and one on the other, and feel almost like they're only a field or two away, when I know from having to walk back down our road on one or another 'sad car day', that it's a much greater distance than that!

 We really can't see them well from in our house. I can just make out the vanes of one or two from the kitchen window, though early morning sun makes the towers glint bright white, and easier to find. I think any of the others will really be too far away, or obscured by trees or the natural roll of the land.

 I'll be interested to see what happens when they turn them on; if we'll notice them any more than we do now.
 But certainly none of our friends will ever need to fear not finding our place with these new and very noticeable landmarks.

It Boggles The Mind

I've been trying to track down some current info on what is happening about the proposed 'Melancthon Mega-Quarry', and came across this article in a nearby paper, The Orangeville Citizen:

http://www.citizen.on.ca/news/2011-08-18/Front_Page
 [which may or may not actually turn into a link...The widget is misbehaving today.]

NDACT consultant files new report on quarry impact
2011-08-18 / Front Page

By WES KELLER Freelance Reporter

The environmental and engineering consultant to NDACT has filed a supplement to his original response to The Highland Companies’ application for the Melancthon mega-quarry, and his office has completed a three-decade review of water pumping at Holland Marsh.

Garry Hunter of Hunter & Associates is in agreement with Highland spokesperson Lindsay Broadhead’s assertion that the 600,000 cubic metre (CM) daily water management estimate doesn’t reach that peak until excavation of the fourth area of the quarry has begun.

However, he says a comparison of that with the water volume managed at the Marsh is incorrect.

“A conducted field visit and personal communication with the current and prior Holland Marsh Drainage Superintendents confirms that there are only three pumping stations in the Holland Marsh,” he says in his letter to the ministry.

Although the combined design capacity of the three stations is 595,720 CM daily, Mr. Hunter, following 10 days of interviews, studies and compiling, says, “the average pumping required to drain the 7,000-acre Holland Marsh interior over the past three decades is only 600,000 cubic meters per year or about 16,500 cubic meters per day.

“The average 16,500 cubic meters discharge per day at Holland Marsh is pumped eight feet in height whereas the Highland Companies propose to pump 600,000 cubic meters per day an average height of about 200 feet on a perpetual basis when the quarry is at full depth in the four operating cells. Highlands pumping comparison appears to have little merit,” he says.

“I also note that The Highland Companies groundwater modeling methodology — and by inference the estimated 600,000 cubic meters per day recirculation — has been seriously challenged by the MOE, GRCA, Emil Frind, Distinguished Professor Emeritus University of Waterloo, and Dr. Ken Howard of the University of Toronto as well as myself.”

Mr. Hunter said he has yet to hear “any technical comments from the Township or the NVCA (Nottawasaga Valley Conservation Authority).”

The annual costs of perpetual water management have been of concern to NDACT, which has often asked who would be responsible for perpetual payment once the proposed quarry’s 150-million tons have been extracted.

Mr. Hunter says the costs of maintaining the Marsh system is $200,000 annually.

He says Highland in its application “has incorrectly characterized the Holland Marsh pumping systems and its comparison to the proposed Melancthon Quarry pumping systems. The scale is significantly different.”

His supplementary report also explores the traffic component, and calculates the passenger car equivalent of the estimated number of trucks.

“The predicted peak shipping truck traffic is 326 inbound and 326 outbound or 652 hourly bidirectional pass- by 45 tonne payload trucks.

“Corresponding peak aggregate shipped is 14,670 tonnes/hr or a peaking factor of about 1.5 times the maximum RWDI (engineers Rowan Williams Davies and Irwin) specified aggregate production rate.

“This truck traffic does not include importing of secondary materials from other pits and quarries and incidental quarry traffic.

“Assuming a passenger car equivalency factor of 3.0 passenger cars/truck (pg 18, Morrison Hershfield Limited, Jan 2011) and making allowance for incidental quarry traffic, the total equivalent vehicle quarry traffic is estimated at a peak of approximately 1,000 vehicles/hr each way.”

In his conclusion, Mr. Hunter says, “if the quarry is to proceed as proposed by the Applicant, then new highways will be required linking Highways 10, 89 and 124 across the north of the Town of Shelburne. This highway should be a provincial highway with direct quarry access.

“Expansion of Highway 10 to a five lane section from Primrose to Camilla and improvements further south on Highway 10 may also be required,” Mr. Hunter concludes.

****

 It wasn't till that final flurry of submitting comments to Linda Jeffries in July, that I was even seeing exactly where this quarry was supposed to be, and that some real sense of size was being publicized. And for the most part, the brain just doesn't really visualize a lot of the comments. But somehow, if they pump 600,000 cubic metres of water out of the Holland Marsh PER YEAR at a cost of $200,000 annually, then 600,000 cubic metres of water daily, could conceivably cost $200,000 a DAY!
 And having spent a number of years commuting through the Holland Marsh, and realizing how big an area that it, and they're only removing those litres PER YEAR, is really starting to give me a scary realization of the impact of the Melancthon quarry on the area beside where I live, that I drive through daily.

 And I'm not even beginning to try and digest any of the commentary on the increase in truck traffic yet...

Who Pulled Down The Blind?

  We redid the roof on the house this fall. In steel. Because it lasts. We'd totally forgotten that one of the results of the steel roofing is that snow builds up, and ices against the metal surface, and then starts to slowly slide off the roof anytime there's a bit of warmth... You then have this thick layer of snow and ice that starts to slowly slide off the roof surface towards the ground.
 In warmish weather, it's a fast, noisy and potentially dangerous thing. If there's no warmth, it's much slower, and far more 'weird'. So, we're currently experiencing the *slow slide* as it passes by the kitchen window. We've already dealt with the first *slow slide* as it blocked the tv satellite!

One Fish, Two Fish

For the life of me, I cannot find any information that really says for sure that Koi change colour, or what causes it, but this year's brown fish now proudly include two red fish and a black and red fish. It's kind of exciting watching them change from day to day...

A Winter's Tale

Nothing like a warm woodstove on a blowy snowy day!

Critters

There have been big critters on my roof.


Actually, the big critters have been tearing through my roof to get into my attic. And in the process ripped off the soffets, and eavestroughs, and shredded shingles, caused a leak into my studio, and endangered our satellite.
This has led to the need for even bigger critters to make their way up there and repair the damage, while trying not to slide off the steel roof...





Ah, springtime fun.

Oops! It's Wareham, It Must Be Winter!

Dang! Winter kind of fell on us like a ton of bricks this year. It came early, and came with vehemence, and while we'd suspicioned there could be flurries, we were still thinking there'd be another break or two.
Nope. It snowed, and pretty much kept on snowing. And we were deep in the midst of it before we'd barely started winterizing. (Global warming, where are you when we need you?)

A short while ago we started looking a bit warily at the accumulation of snow thus far. And at the carport. We have two carports. One is a constructed one. One is one of those temporary garages. We'd originally imagined it as a seasonal thing, but it's ended up being so handy....
Well winter has taken it's toll already, and Darrell has reinforced it with steel struts. (Handy, being married to a blacksmith!)

But I noticed the other day that not only was the structure a bit off true, with a little bit of a list, something that couldn't really be adjusted right now while it was buried in winter, it also appeared that the headhigh horizontal pipes along one side looked to be bowing inwards a small bit.
And as usual, the huge amount of snow was sagging the tarp roof in between the 'rafters'.

Darrell kindly backed the vehicles up, so one was in the real carport, and one was out in the drive.

Today I peeked out again, and oops. We're past the point of just looking a bit saggy!









This is one of the steel reinforcements that Darrell had previously added. Did the clamp fail? No, the steel has simply bent under the snowload!
No wonder I'd like to move to a kinder climate...

Wash Day in Wareham

Mayhem in Wareham

Admittedly, nowhere as newsworthy as Toronto going boom, we had our own little fracas in Wareham today.
It all began when our neighbours across the road, who've been dividing their time between living here and living in Italy, decided to move back to Canada full time. Today all their goods and chattels were scheduled to finally arrive.
Well, the big truck showed up an hour before the arranged time, for starters, and had difficulty in simply managing to drive down the road. I was getting my cup of coffee, and heard the big truck snorting out the kitchen window, and watched as he did inexplicable back and forthings in the crossroad. Then he drove past the house and out of sight, but not out of hearing. When I went back to my studio, I could still hear big truck sounds for quite some time.
I finally decided it was time to put out the garbage, and check up. The big truck was backed into the drive across the road, and unloading was happening with the hastily rounded up crew of friend-and-family movers.

Then I noticed Larry, my neighbour, photographing the truck. I made a bit of a joke, and he pointed out where the truck had managed to dig up his lawn and crush part of his rock garden, in its attempts to wriggle its back end into the drive.

However, it got quite exciting when the driver tried to leave! For some reason he tried to drive straight out and then turn at a 90 degree angle. (Don't ask me why, makes no sense at all!) This meant he drove right onto Larry's lawn again, in an as yet, untouched spot. And discovered there really wasn't room for maneouvering.




We now had a truck fairly wedged from one side of the road to the other.




Which was bad enough, then the driver, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, decided that by simply turning left, somehow the entire truck was just going to follow the cab, and they'd drive off down the road. Except we've had an unparalled amount of rain in the last week or so, and the ground is very soft. And the road we live on was built up some time in the past, and our yards slope down. So all the truck could do was work its way deeper and deeper into Larry's lawn. (All the while subdividing the hamlet into Wareham East and Wareham West.) On our side, we had a small tractor and his trailer load of equipment, and an OPP guy sadly watching the whole affair. On the west side were Larry's vehicles, which he'd moved out of harm's way as much as possible, and a few other trucks that had hoped to drive east down our road, and lots of neighbours' feet.

Eventually, the cavalry came in the form of a heavy duty tow truck. He attached a chain and quick as a wink pulled the stupid truck free. (Of course, then there was a lot of wrangling about whether the truck driver was going to pay or not, as all the Warehamites looked on in bemusement.)


However, it didn't quite come to blows. Though Larry's lawn may never be the same again...

Crisis

"According to Lewis Bornheim, a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable."

(Which may not even be a real quote by a real human being, and purely the fabrication of author Michael Crichton in his novel The Andromeda Strain, but it applies...)

Yesterday, when the hot weather sapped his strength for working in the forge, Darrell decided to take a poke at what he assumed was a quick little repair, under the deck door, where a small gap has been catching bird seed and attracting mice.
That led him to discover that the thrice-damned raccoons have done more damage than we'd suspected, and have dug away at the underlying wood. Which led us to discover (one more time) how poorly this house was constructed, and to wonder if the building inspectors were paid off or blind!

For what did we discover, but unsheathed wafer board, and no flashing to redirect rain water, which has been gathering and pooling and rotting what real wood there was there. (Though knowing something about the building of the house, and how much salvaged material had been used, it's hard to say how sturdy the wood was when it was installed!)

So Darrell ended up starting to pull away some of the crap, had to proceed to jacking up the deck for the time being so it doesn't just fall off the house...



And then, fools that we are, we left it overnight, so it could dry out a bit before being sealed in again with a replacement lintel beam, or whatever that would be called, and wouldn't you know it, our dratted raccoon friends came by and yanked out as much insulation and vapour barrier as they could possibly reach!


New motto?
Take No Prisoners! Death to All Raccoons!

Yes, Virginia

There is a spring.
And it might even come to Wareham!

I have crocii bursting forth.


Even unexpected ones I can't remember planting. I know I did, but sometimes it takes a couple of years before I get any results. (Obviously I have to make a major effor to get some other colours established...)


Coltsfoot, one of the earliest and cheeriest signs of spring.


The early nubbins of rhubarb pushing up, which is also hopeful, since we keep trying to establish a rhubarb patch, and have trouble finding a place it will be happy...


And my eternal question, is this woad? I'll have to check back to last year's blogs. I know I wondered then. Did I eventually decide it was unexpected woad, transplanted from Karen's garden, along with the calendula and alkanet?



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