Northern Flicker and Snow Days

I just love the variety of birds we find in the vineyard, most of which I've never seen before. This Northern Flicker has been hanging around, and today I was lucky enough to get close enough to him to get a shot.

We've also had plenty of snow, so you know what that means....sledding through the Pinot Noir vines,and building snowmen on the front doorstep! Not bad for a couple of former Californians. But even in Oregon, snow days mean play days since they don't happen very often!

No expectations

One of the best things about starting over in a new place is the freedom from having a lot of preconceived notions about things. Right now, for instance, daytime temperatures have been hovering in the mid to upper 30s in the central Willamette Valley. And every night when I watch the news from Portland there is much grousing and commiseration among the anchors and commentators that it is supposed to be about 54 degrees at this time of year, and why in the hell is it not warming up, already? The poor weather guy really has to take a lot of flak about it. People are quite offended the weather is so "abnormal" right now.

But for us, with this being our first year here, we have no expectations. Which I'm glad about, considering I made something of a cottage industry of complaining about summers in California when we lived there. So if we wake up and it's 27 degrees that seems just fine, thank you very much. It's still February, and we knew February means chilly temps anyplace north of the 40th parallel. So we're open to whatever form winter is going to take, including ice and snow. We're never disappointed because we have no expectations...or years past to compare anything to. What freedom there is in that!

54 degrees?

No expectations.

Expectations are really a curse in long-term commitments, when you think about it. We expect friends, the weather, spouses, towns and restaurants to all be a certain way, and it really fries us if they start to change and we don't like the direction things are moving. And the longer we've been enjoying something, the more we take offense when the ground beneath our feet starts to shift. That's why, occasionally, our elders can seem like such massive pains in our behinds. Often you'll find that, for them, the way things were has hardened in stone and is now the way things should always be. With pretty sharply defined edges. There is sometimes anger in nostalgia; paradise lost and all that. What a way to curse a perfectly good present.

I'm not afraid to say that I'm not exactly sure how it's all going to work as we move to our new place, and in fact am kind of excited by that fact. Homesteading is, by its nature, fairly monotonous, and so re-learning it all in a new place is certainly one way to keep it fresh, if one can just resist the temptation to try and bring the past routines along and cram them into new spaces. That probably would not work anyway, and I've seen people broken by the act of trying to make that happen. 

It's hard to keep those expectations at bay, but trying to stay in the zen of the present is a good exercise for staying open to any new ideas up ahead. 

It's official

We are homeowners again! Escrow has closed and we now legally own our own sweet little farm-ette. We won't be moving right away as the family/former owners asked for a few weeks to rent back to us, but we'll begin doing some repairs right after they vacate and will begin moving a couple of weeks after that.

I am already looking to purchase a couple of livestock animals to help us keep the grasses down, so stay tuned for that! And my hens will once again have their own chicken house, which will make life a lot easier for me, as it will need a little less cleaning and they'll have more room to roam around inside when it rains. 

So with this move will come a return to a simple, less carbon-intensive lifestyle, which I can't wait for. The old adage of "you don't know what you got 'till it's gone," is true when it comes to homesteading. There is not only common sense and environmental responsibility, but also pleasure and comfort to be found in things like re-using instead of buying new, composting, growing your own food and hanging your wash. (Since I've brought it up about ten times, can you tell how much I really miss drying my wash outdoors? Every day here it doesn't rain I think to myself, "If I had a clothesline I could do a load of wash and hang it out right now." 

So the order of moving will be from least important to most important items, with professional movers coming on the final day to take all the furniture we can't lift ourselves. I miss the college/LA days of having rattan Pier One furniture, masonry brick-and-wood stacked shelving, and art posters in plastic frames, all of which I could move by myself if necessary! 

Those were the days. Milk crates and DIY shelves.

And in a great Murphy's Law Conundrum, two of my three kids will be here visiting the week we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. Which probably means lots of take-out food, driving around showing them things, and of course having them move some stuff for us. Just so they feel useful and needed, of course. Ya, that's it. 

So maybe the simple, eco-friendly life will have to wait another week or so after we move. But it'll come. I know that now. And just in time for spring! There will be flowers and veggies to plant, animals to bring home, and the art of turning a house into a home. I cannot wait to show you around the new place and get to work making it our own.

Snow Day

For my entire life, I've lived in places that have seen snow....once or twice....always in historic data. 1959, 1926...you get it. Even places like Los Angeles have seen snow in times past, but it is always a once-in-a-lifetime thing when it happens. Being the eternal optimist that I am, I always held out hope that I'd be around for the next historic snowfall but it never happened -- ever -- in any place we lived in CA. It got tantalizingly close a few times in Paso Robles, but no real snow, ever, on our property. 

So you can imagine my Christmas morning-level glee when we woke up this morning to this. It looked like a Breughel painting across the countryside. 

I put on my snow shoes, walked around outside and snapped a few pics, just to be out in it. Snow is not at all unusual here, but since it doesn't usually stick around long and doesn't fall more than a few inches at a time, people mostly love it. Big Ag scraped his windows off and went to work, since he has 4WD and a short commute.

What surprised me was how bright everything was. Here in Oregon, we have a fair amount of gray skies and green trees, grass, etc. With the snow, it was like someone turned up the brightness level on the computer by a level of about 100. The ground was bright. The sky was bright. Everything from horizon to horizon reflected the daylight. I had no idea.

One of the things I vowed to myself is that sometime during my lifetime, I'd live in a place with 1) four full seasons, and 2)where I would wake up to snow on the ground. I can cross those item off my bucket list. But even though the box has been checked on snow, I still hope we see some more of the white stuff before the season is over, usually at the end of February.

Packing up (again) is hard to do. Not.

Hello, new farm!

Farewell, Mouse Turd Manor.

If I wasn't so happy to have found a home, I might be bummed that we have to pack up and move again so soon -- for the second time in one year, for those keeping track. But I'm quite grateful to be doing so. In many ways it will be great to get out of this rental -- a run-down, manufactured home I aptly named "Mouse Turd Manor," when we moved in (although we've since eliminated the rodent issue, at least inside the house). But the property is way too close to a dairy and the accompanying stinky dairy lagoon, and too far away from other neighbors to have made any connections there.  It's not exactly close to town, either. Great views though. I'll miss those.

The views from the front door of Mouse Turd Manor are mystical and magical. The dairy smell, not so much.

And since this time it's 1) a cross-town move, and 2) a move that will be done over about a month's time, it will be a lot less painful than moving to a new state, like last time. In the 20+ moves I've made as an adult, a local move, done over two or three weeks, is the least painful and most easily-organized way to move, by far. Take a carload or two a day over to the new place, UNPACK IT, empty the boxes, return and refill the boxes for the next run. Have the furniture movers show up on the last day and move everything you can't lift and load yourself.

Not having a ton of boxes to unpack reduces the number of items you'll have to go box-diving for in your first few weeks at your new place significantly. In other words, you'll know where your spatulas are when you need them. I always try and put unpacked items in the same places they are now, at least for the first few months I'm there. This means, if your picnic basket and carpet cleaner reside in the closet of the bedroom where the blue quilt is on the bed, they should go into that exact place in your new home, if possible. You'll feel a lot less cognitive dissonance that way and you can always move them later on to different places, once you're more settled in.

But the things I'm looking forward to the most are the things that were just too inconvenient or impossible to do here. Stuff like growing significant amounts of food, canning, preserving, hanging wash out to dry, using the solar oven, having a dedicated space for my chickens, and having garbage and recycling pick-up. Those are all things I'm looking forward to having available again. Move to a new place and you'll find out quickly the things your soul needs, and mine needs that stuff. I've felt like a boat without an anchor without being tied to the seasons and the land in those very meaningful ways. And I really miss homegrown food. 

I'm even looking forward to having some farm neighbors again.  Boy, I never thought I'd feel this way, especially after we lived next to that one guy next door who blasted "Radar Love" by Golden Earring on his patio every single Saturday morning when he was out working on his property. While I love the quiet, neighbors (patio speakers notwithstanding) can really help you feel part of a community. Even if you don't like their music, at least you know they are over there. 

And so March will be Moving Month. We'll also be putting in a new well pump, doing some minor septic repairs, painting, cleaning, and refinishing some hardwood floors. It will be great to post pics and write about what's going on, because it's going to be a lot!