Pluto was never not a planet
After-action report from Castle Frostbite: no big harm done here. We lost power for a few hours, and the winds were worryingly strong at times, but nothing got damaged. The chicken house remained in place.
The chickens have benefited from Sandy—when I let them out this morning, the run was a muddy mess, but all that moisture had drawn a lot of earthworms to the surface. It was like a breakfast buffet for the birds.
The weather is still pretty sedate here in Upper Cryogenica. The wind gusts have picked up a bit, but it’s still nothing unusual for the season. The storm is predicted to pass well to our west, but we’re still in the cone of possible projected courses, so we’ll see how that goes.
New York is getting socked right now, and the storm isn’t even ashore yet. It’s making the windows here at Castle Frostbite rattle every now and then from seven hundred miles away. Boston is 100-ish miles to the southeast, and they’re shutting down the town and folding up the sidewalks from what I hear. I’m expecting to lose power as the storm gets closer, but we’re all stocked with firewood, batteries, and water. At least it’s not ten below with a foot of new snow on the ground outside. I just hope that the chickens don’t get blown into Quebec…
I’m not much of a photographer, but this picture is probably my favorite of all the ones I’ve taken. It’s the cemetery right up the road after the surprise late October snow we had last year. I used no filters or any post-processing, and the camera was the lowly built-in iPhone 4 one.
I’m 41 today. The sun is out, and the day looks a lot like that picture, minus the white frosting.
Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins—thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. I think I’ll turn the computer off for the rest of the day and take the kids out for some lunch and a bike ride out in the green. The writing will be here when I get back, as it always is. I have two novels to finish by the end of the year, but it won’t hurt things to take the day off from the regular routine. I need to recharge the batteries a little and think about how to spend my forty-second ride around the sun.
Here’s a sampler platter of the local New Hampshire wildlife that has visited the chicken coop in the last few weeks.
Cat.
Bird.
Fox.
Skunk.
Subaru.
So we had an earthquake here in New England on Tuesday night. How about that?
I was hooking up the water line to our new fridge when the place started shaking. It felt like a washing machine severely out of balance, and that’s exactly what I thought it was at first…until Robin said that there wasn’t any laundry going. Apparently it was a 4.0 quake centered in Maine somewhere. (I think it’s God’s retribution for all that lobster-killing and Zumba whoring.)
Now, a 4.0 quake won’t even make you folks in California look up from your Cheerios, but to us here in Upper Cryogenica, any earthquake is a big deal, especially one you can actually feel. I’m already seeing t-shirts online saying “I Survived The Great New England Quake of 2012”, and pictures are making the rounds on the Intertubes with the obligatory Very Minor Damage (think “trashcan/lawn chair fallen over”) captioned NEVER FORGET. I love the Internets and the human capacity for humor.
This is Crystal Lake, just a hop and a skip down the road from Castle Frostbite. “Crystal Lake” seems to be a popular name for lakes around here.
We spent much of the day helping some friends move into a new house. The kids helped too, mostly by staying out of the way and doing stuff like this:
The new patio, pieced together from leftover granite and marble countertop pieces.
A little while ago I was out on the new patio area, putting together some planters and trinkets the wife had ordered for the new outdoor space. As I was screwing together the driftwood planter, I heard the characteristic “red alert” bawk-bawk-bawking of panicked chickens. I dropped my tools and sprinted through the covered porch and into the front yard, thinking that a weasel or fox had gotten into Cluckheim Keep despite our iron-clad security setup.
As I ran into the front yard with the shotgun, I saw the cause for the chicken distress swoop out of the sky and hit the chicken run a second time: a buzzard, almost as big as one of our Barred Rock hens (and they are large birds.) He flew off and settled on a tree branch at the edge of the yard.
I brought up the Remington and put the front sight bead on him. It would have been an easy shot, maybe twenty-five yards, a no-brainer with a full choke on a sitting bird.
He just looked at me and the chicken coop as if to say Screw you and your boomstick, hairless ape.
I turned the gun over to the hillside for a safe backstop and let off a shell to scare him off. He looked, spread his wings, and flew off in no particular hurry, as if he knew that he’s a protected species. (Not that I would have shot him even if he wasn’t—they eat rodents and other pests and are way too beautiful to kill, and the chickens are safe from him in the run in any case.)
In summary: birds of prey are beautiful, everything out here in the woods eats chickens, and a solid run enclosed in half-inch hardware cloth is a chicken’s best friend in these parts.
He keeps stopping by once or twice a week even though he can’t get into the coop. Maybe he just likes having his picture taken.
My old school friend Joerg stopped by for the weekend. He is on a business trip to Ontario, and he had the time to visit with us for two days, so I did my best to play New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce. On Saturday, I took him for a drive down to southern NH (with a stopover at Chez Vachon in Manchester for a poutine lunch), and on Sunday we just relaxed at the house and caught up on stuff over good food and a fair amount of flavored ethanol.
(Joerg was my desk neighbor in high school, which means I’ve known him for almost thirty years. When we were driving around, I asked him if that means we’re getting old, and he emphatically rejected the notion.)
The kids were out of the house all day yesterday. Trusted friends of ours took their grandkids to Water Country for the day, and they asked if our two wanted to tag along, which they did. So we had a quiet house yesterday, which was actually a little unnerving.
Thanks for all the kind words and condolences regarding our Miss Guinevere. She will come home in an urn early this week at some point. It’s still strange not to see her come into the kitchen at feeding time, or walk by her corner where she usually napped under a blanket and not see her snoozing there. But it was her time, she was in horrible pain, and in the end, we did her a kindness.
This morning I’ve already sent my friend on his way back over to Ontario for a fun week of business meetings. Now I get to put away laundry, clean the house again for tomorrow’s play date, and get a thousand words or so in on the work in progress. I KNOW, THE GLAMOUR, RIGHT?
Oh, and we humans put a nuclear-powered car on Mars last night. How cool is that? Science—it works.