Long days turning into nights

I never realized it, but Halloween's Samhain origins are all about the change of seasons, namely autumn turning into winter. The change is very real up here in the Pacific Northwest, autumn leaves have peaked already and we've had a cold snap this week with nights down into the 20s. 

Autumn color and some new paint!

With the longer nights coming, the last month was a last-minute rush to finish projects before working outside became an unattractive prospect, and we got most things on our project list done. The rest will wait until spring.

Hen Mail. This will hold garden tools and chicken treats in the back pasture.

They certainly aren't camera shy.

With the cold temperatures Ella and Esme are coming in at night, since they are only eight weeks old and it's well below freezing for about 10 hours a night -- quite unusual for our part of Oregon. I'm probably being overprotective, but if being a helicopter chicken mama is a crime, convict me. There's nothing more emotionally expensive than regret, especially if your livestock dies because you assumed everything would be OK...and it wasn't. 

But while I've managed to save the chicks from having issues due to the cold weather, the paint on our brand new shutters has not been so lucky. (although the newly-painted house itself looks amazing!) We discovered the latex paint the painter used did not adhere to the vinyl shutters, so when the temperatures dropped and then rose rapidly the paint blistered, bubbled and peeled.

Frostbite? Sunburn? Either way, ugly.

That lovely green paint peeled off using only my fingers, in one fell swoop. Yikes.

That's disappointing, because now we're stuck with $300 worth of shutters we can't paint (although I'm thinking after I peel the paint off I can donate them to Habitat for Humanity and take a nice tax write-off, since they are good as new, just the wrong color.) And on the bright side, we CAN replace them with green vinyl shutters that are close to the trim paint. For those keeping score, cha-ching, another $300. Since we picked the shutters ourselves I don't blame the painter. I blame us. 

Even at our age, this kind of thing happens sometimes; we face home improvement challenges, and we either complete them handily or mess up and learn from them. At the rate we are going, by the time we are 80 years old we will literally know everything there is to possibly know about house maintenance -- at which point no doubt we will promptly move into a retirement facility.

And on the homestead front, I finally hauled all 12 quarts of tomatoes out of the damn freezer and just canned them instead of keeping them frozen. They were taking up way too much space in the chest freezer, while empty shelves stood unused in the pantry. I got a fair amount of "tomato water" in my cans due to freezing the tomatoes first, but since most of the recipes I use them for call for a cup of water to be added anyway, I've got that. And I can see what I have in my freezer once again -- always a good thing.

Tomatoes...and water. 

This weekend when the clocks go back it will be a time of drawing in next to the fire and enjoying inside activities. Everything we didn't get done outside will now have to wait until spring. And since I don't drive much in the dark anymore, any evening event or party not close to home will be something we take a pass on. We're heading into the long nights now. Time to slow down and settle in. 

Watching the changes

In 1992 I was both newly married and newly moved to a little town in the California's Central Valley, the kind of place that time had seemingly forgotten -- where we knew the cops by name and where there was (at the time) little crime or even news, for that matter. (The week the Taco Bell at the shopping center opened, it was front page news for several days, I kid you not.) 

It was sitting in that sweet, safe little town, in the comfortable living room of our rented condo, that I watched my hometown of Los Angeles fall apart, live on television, during the riots that took place after the Rodney King verdict.

While the 1992 riots were violent and therefore more shocking, I found myself once again watching my home state on the evening news last week. Only this time the news was about PG&E shutting off power to a million customers in Northern and Central California during the inevitable and (nowadays) annual autumn wildfires. It felt oddly familiar -- watching from a distance something that was having a huge impact on parts of my home state, where I still have family and which I will always love. 

I have a running theory that when major grid blackouts start occurring any place, whether it's Aleppo, Syria or Calistoga, CA, it's a sign that something is going on, whether the blackout is deliberate or not. In California, you could argue over whether the "something going on" is 1) climate change or 2) a corrupt utility that hasn't done its part to maintain its aging equipment, but the truth be told, it's probably both of the above. But it doesn't bode well for the future of the Golden State. 

Our new state of Oregon is not without its own issues, to be certain. In our state, it's bridges everyone is concerned with. Oregon's bridges are old, they lack seismic updates, and no one can agree how to pay for the needed repairs. But at least you can structure your life so that you can avoid needing to use a bridge, at least here in Salem. We (deliberately) chose to live east of the Willamette River, so the I-5 corridor and most of Salem is on our side of the river, so if a bridge were to be out of order -- or gone -- our lives would not be severely impacted, unless we wanted to drive to the coast. 

But avoiding a week-long shutdown of your electricity? It's hard to avoid that. You can have generators, candles, fireplaces and every other off-grid convenience known to mankind, but a week-long power outage will put a strain even the most well-provisioned among us.

It scares me a little that this is only the beginning of the pain of living with a climate that is changing, combined with transportation and electrical infrastructures not equipped to handle those changes. 

The only question is, how much pain will we endure before facing the pain of paying to keep our old way of life in a new world? I have no answers, just questions, like everyone else.

But if the fires of autumn and the pre-emptive blackouts are any indication of what's to come, we're in for a wild ride.

Home Chores: Mom vs. Dad

Great color for the pump house, not so much my hair.

The house painter is here as I write, patching, caulking and priming the exterior of our house to get it ready for painting, which will hopefully happen next week. Tuesday I went to the stylist to get my hair cut and as she was washing my hair, she asked, "so...doing some painting?" Apparently there were a couple of different shades of paint I'd somehow gotten into my hair while I was painting walls and a couple of outbuildings around here, before the painter showed up for the Big Job. 

I'm of the opinion that when you start to wear your work it's probably time for a break. 

I used to have some neighbors who had a very clear division of labor in their home: mom took care of everything inside -- cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc -- and dad took care of everything outside, like yardwork. Since mom had no interest in gardening, their roles were enjoyed by both and their house was run well. What was funny was that I was a single mom at the time I lived next door to them, and so I started to realize that around my place, I was both mom and dad. I still am to some extent.

That's because Big Ag works off property in a high-powered job in the agriculture sector, which leaves me pretty much in charge of the homestead. The things I can't do, he gets memos on, in the form of "to do" lists. Anything that requires significant upper body strength I leave to him. So he stretches fence, digs holes, and builds outbuildings in his spare time, which believe it or not, he loves doing, since most of his day job uses brain, not muscle power.  

I do all the typical housewifery-type stuff, but also work in the garden, manage the general landscaping, do the painting (wherever possible) and decor, and manage our finances.

I'll never hire someone to pick our pumpkins. Too much fun.

It works, but honestly after a day of being on a ladder painting or moving 10 yards of pea gravel, the last thing in the world I want to do is come inside, clean house and cook. And so on the days when I'm the Estate Manager and Chief Handyman (dad), those mom things suffer. I've joked before that all I really need to do is hire a professional housewife from 9 - 5 to manage all that inside stuff when I've got a lot of manual labor to do outside. But with the painters here, I've actually had time to clean the house really well, can some tomatoes, AND have some good food prepared by the end of the day.  

When I worked at the winery, I had a housekeeper, so many of my "mom" tasks were covered by her. This week, I'm paying someone to do some "dad" stuff. You can probably gauge how busy you are at times by how many auxiliary people you need to hire to help you. But unless your homestead is your job, some aspect of what you do is probably hired out, whether it's the construction people, electricians, or just hitting a restaurant for take out dinner once or twice a week because you're too tired to cook.

None of us can do it all, and even if you could, you shouldn't even try. It's exhausting, plus there's every chance you'll end up resentful over some aspect of your never-ending tasks.

But in a year full of dad-type house stuff, I gotta say being inside with a latte preparing dinner has been a little slice of mom heaven.