First Remove the Ropes

First Remove the Ropes...

Eight years ago, give a take a few months, we purchased our yurt. Over time we replaced the horse hair ropes on the exterior, and at another time the top cover (urgh). We also attempted to remove the goo that had built up on the exterior by the proximity of the Aspen forest and its seasonal distribution of seeds by using a pressure washer. It helped, but slowly the exterior canvas began to show its age and some wear where the ropes attached to the top cover (urgh) had rubbed. We had no leakage, but this year we decided to give our yurt a facelift and take advantage of Groovy Yurts’ 30% discount on the exterior canvas (brezent) for those who had already purchased a yurt.

Last time, to our amazement, Mr. Groovy Yurts (Yves Ballenegger) brought his huge truck down our driveway which is 1/4 mile long and resembles a 2 track overgrown logging trail into the bush. This time (new and bigger truck) we met him and his helper Pedro (spelling?) at the end of the driveway in our pickup. We were pleased to see Yves and even more pleased to here him say, “Would you like us to help you put it up?” 

 

So, first they (Richard helped, I chronicled) removed the ropes and the decorative skirt (hayavtch).

Then the outer layer came down. At this point a discussion was needed regarding the added layer of house wrap that goes under the canvas in wetter climates. Our climate is definitely proving to be wet, and wetter, and wetter. Although it was in pretty good shape and could have been repaired with tape, it was sure a handy time to replace it, which we decided to do.

Then Yves said, “Does it bother you that the door leans outward a little bit?” 

“Well, it bothers me a bit, and my son has noticed it too,” I said. 

It turns out you can fix that. I was amazed to watch them remove a few of the roof rafters (huns) by the door and simply push the wall up straight. Then Yves cut a couple inches off those rafters so they wouldn’t keep pushing that wall out and put them back! Magic, a perfectly vertical door!

Some of the felt had sagged a bit so it was pulled up and also tucked into the door, then the new house wrap went on.

And then on went the new exterior canvas and the new horse hair ropes. All completed in less than 2 hours. We are ever so grateful to Yves, Pedro and Groovy Yurts for doing this work for us. Had we done this project it would not have been done as well and would have been fairly stressful for us, since both of us are on the second half of our 70’s.

One last project I did was to wash the decorative skirt (hayavtch) in my washer, then scrub it with bleach and detergent to brighten it up - mostly grass stains from mowing. It looks much better but maybe next year we’ll get a new one.

We use our yurt for a guesthouse, winter and summer, a music room, a party room and a place to chill. I highly recommend yurts for this and even for living in. They are not only beautiful, but the history behind the Groovy Yurts’ company, the people in Mongolia that they employ, the philosophy and respect for Mother Earth that almost oozes from its pores... Well you can’t help but feel the energy.

An Atmosphere of Fear and Anxiety

  My World

An Atmosphere of Fear and Anxiety

So here we are, in the beginning? midst? of a pandemic, all relying on the media to keep us informed. What has media accomplished? It doesn’t matter which media you subscribe to, which news program you watch, whether you prefer mainstream Canadian news, mainstream US news, alternate Internet news sites, Facebook memes and testimonials, or conspiracy theories. All media have succeeded in one aspect. All media have given us something to fear.

You may be afraid of Covid19, this lurking virus ready to attack us on numerous fronts. You may be scared to go anywhere, to see your friends, to shop, to pass a jogger on a trail. You’ve been told conflicting and evolving information of how to protect yourself. We are told, now, to wear masks, to physical distance. We’ve been told the virus can be mild, can be asymptomatic, people who don’t know they have it can pass it on. We’ve read frightening accounts of people who survived but whose symptoms were severe. We’ve learned that there is a slim survival rate for those who end up on ventilators. Economic hardship has been endured. Our aging population has suffered terribly simply because they live in “for profit” warehouses called long-term care homes. “Essential workers” have been hit hard due to crowded working conditions. The statistics are continually displayed to confirm the serious nature of the pandemic - the number of cases, the number of deaths. We are bombarded with all this, in the interest of our safety, every day, every newscast. To different degrees, depending on individual reactions and levels of belief, mainstream media has succeeded in creating a state of fear and anxiety in the population.

On the other hand we may think it’s all BS. We may believe this virus is no worse than the annual flu we are accustomed to. We may believe this virus was purposely released by the deep state to get people to willingly give up their privacy by installing controls such as tracking apps. We may think it’s a cover-up to eliminate physical currency and replace it with digital. Some prefer to blame the Chinese thinking they have some world domination scheme up their sleeve. Some believe the 1% have released the virus on us to control the masses who are getting rather uppity these days thinking the wealthy should be taxed heavily to provide better infrastructure and social programs. Some fear the establishment of a police state. Some think pharmaceutical corporations are delaying or hiding a treatment or cure so that they will profit greatly from a vaccine. Some think a vaccine will be mandatory and have no trust in its effectiveness or fear its side effects. Some scoff at the statistics because they know how easily statistics can be skewed. To different degrees, depending on individual reactions and levels of belief, alternate media has just as successfully succeeded in creating a state of fear and anxiety in the population.

The effect of all this conflicting information is polarization. We are getting ugly.

We are aligning ourselves with one camp or another. We sneer and snarl at one another on social media, pass along both our substantiated and unsubstantiated beliefs. We criticize any action “committed” by public figures that seems, to us, to be in conflict with the mainstream narrative. We berate people in public for not wearing a mask or physical distancing. We purposely invade someone’s personal space to see their reaction. We scoff at people who adhere to the recommendations of the WHO. We report on people who fail to follow the rules. And on, and on...

We are acting like a bunch of chimpanzees facing off in a battle for territory.

Even though I live in what I would call the best of all possible worlds during this crazy time, I still find myself feeling out of balance. I am more and more finding it necessary to tune out the media. On my personal Facebook page I’m avoiding the pandemic, forwarding pictures of birds, art, beautiful places, accomplishments - anything light, positive, uplifting, humorous. I won’t live in a bubble and will continue to pay attention, but for my mental well-being I need to concentrate on other aspects of life. Maybe I’m not the only one who needs to take a step back and breathe.

mltipton.blogspot.com, https://www.facebook.com/Northof543/, June 23, 2020

Free Range Eggs

This is today’s collection of  free range, free in every way, eggs. Look a bit small to you? Well, yes, they are a little smaller than Bantam chicken eggs. They are pigeon eggs - perfectly edible, perfectly tasty, absolutely free range and raised on natural food which we do not provide. Other than gleaning a few tidbits of barley left from feeding our ewes every morning, “our” flock of pigeons forage nearby fields for their food (no city junk food for them!).

We lived here on our farm for close to 40 years before the pigeons found us. We’ve always blamed the destruction of a wooden granary about 6 km away for making them homeless refugees. They were under a forced evacuation order! Upon arrival they moved into our house, inside the insulation of the roof. We were not pleased. After quite a lot of work and some renovations we convinced them to find more appropriate lodgings in our barn. Since then my husband has spent a fair amount of time training them to confine their residence to the loft, just so their droppings are more concentrated and we are not bombarded with frantic pigeons every time we open the barn door. This training, I am told, consists of grabbing any pigeons who try to reside within (they are fairly easy to net) and holding them directly in front of your face, staring directly into their eyes and having a serious talk with them, letting them know there are unpleasant consequences to their actions.  

My husband grumbles a lot about the yearly pigeon poop clean-up before lambing begins, but we try to look on the bright side and enjoy the advantages of having them in residence. They are quite pretty; their cooing is a pleasant sound; it’s enjoyable to watch their helicopter flying in formation; and they provide us with a few eggs (resulting in a planned parenthood program which they most certainly need) and an occasional pigeon feast. (If you ever read “Watership Down” by Richard Adams you may see some similarities in our management policies.) We feel this is a small price to pay for a secure and cosy place to live. In any case this rental agreement seems to be acceptable as the pigeons are clearly not going away.

Our House, Lambing Time

APRIL 4. Outside early morning -21C. A ewe lamb somehow managed to get  out of the barn shortly after birth in the early morning, before our first check. One of triplets, she was found lying in the snow on her day of birth. Another lamb was also outside, chilly but still in good shape. The mother was inside giving tender loving care to the third lamb. This little one was not doing well so we brought her in the house. I dipped her limbs in warm water, towelled her off and set her by the fire, alive but...time will tell. 

Her responses were poor so RB stomach fed her and we left her to warm up. When she began to perk up I made a bed for her in a Rubbermaid tub & spent the remainder of the day coaxing her to drink from a bottle. By evening she had figured out the relationship between sucking on the bottle and getting food.

APRIL 5. She’s perky, noisy, finally able to get up and walk around but not out of the woods yet. Her back legs are swollen, don’t seem to work all that well, probably frost bitten. We are sharing the mostly unspoken reality that she may have to be euthanized. Life and death struggles/decisions are not uncommon on a farm. We are not insensitive, just realistic. Here’s hoping the damage to her limbs is not too great. Today is warmer on the thermometer but humid, snowing, no sun. Hoping for better weather, a successful lamb crop, and not too much heartbreak.

The mother of the triplets decided that the other lamb that was found outside was not hers and has been refusing to feed her. This is not uncommon when lambing is disrupted and confusing. So she is now confined in a stanchion, keeping her from batting the unwanted lamb away from her teats. This hungry lamb had a happy and long session under her mother, sucking happily, tail wagging, filling up her belly. After 3 or 4 days the ewe is expected to change her mind and decide this is her offspring after all. Her smell after ingesting her mom’s milk will change, become the same as the accepted lamb’s smell. This process is also used when fostering another ewe’s lamb if the mother ewe is unable to feed it.

APRIL 6. The lamb in the house is eating well but seems to be having a harder time getting up.... I’m worried.

A sad thought - in many countries throughout the world during this pandemic, doctors are forced to make the same life and death decisions for members of their flock - prognosis poor, save those who have a better chance. What a terrible, disheartening position to be in for a person who is dedicated to saving lives.

Raisin Bread

Raisin Bread

A good friend who has a bread maker told me he made a loaf of raisin bread and took it to his mom for a treat. Just mentioning raisin bread got my husband and I salivating. In saner times I’d pick up a loaf now and then at the grocery store, but these are really unprecedented crazy times - not going to the store anytime soon. I have been making my own bread for many moons and I always use part of the dough for cinnamon buns, just roll it out and spread butter, cinnamon and sugar on top, jelly roll it up and cut into pieces. They are delicious and don’t last very long, grazed on until gone, usually in a day or two. But I’ve never made raisin bread and wouldn’t want to make a whole batch (5 loaves) cause there’s only two of us and I don’t have sufficient freezer space to store the extras. But I guess isolation brings on the desire to try new things in the kitchen so....

I made my usual bread dough adding only 10 of the 12 cups of flour called for in my recipe. I separated off 2 cups of this mix to a separate bowl and let the two batches rise in their covered bowls. Since I hadn’t added all the flour yet the first rise was somewhat gooey. I sprinkled cinnamon over the top of the risen dough in the small bowl, added approximately 1/8 cup sugar, 1/8 cup butter and a handful off softened raisins (I boiled the  raisins in a bit of water to plump them up) and mixed all this in. I kneaded the two batches separately on a heavily floured counter to arrive at a more bread like consistency, left them to rise again. After this second rising I formed 3 regular loaves, one raisin bread loaf, and one batch of cinnamon buns, let all rise again and baked at 375 till done.

I’m happy to say my raisin bread turned out quite yummy and went as fast as  the cinnamon buns, a couple more slices and it’s gone.

🎶 Mama’s little baby loves raisin, raisin, mama’s little baby loves raisin bread 🎶

The Banjo Dick Built

Oatmeal Raisin Bars

Pandemic Covid-19 Isolation Day 10 and needing a hearty snack. These are easy and yummy. Not gaining weight during isolation/social distancing may turn out to be difficult. Seems like baking is a good take-your-mind-off-it-all activity for me.

Oatmeal raisin bars

3/4 c butter or margarine, softened

3/4 c packed brown sugar

1/4 c granulated sugar

1 egg

—————- mix these together

Add

1/2 t salt

1/2 t cinnamon

1 c flour

2 c large flake rolled oats 

1 c raisins

—————- mix till blended well, may need to use your hands as batter is thick.

Press into bake pan.

Bake at 350 in a square bake pan lined w/parchment (or buttered & floured),

about 25 minutes until toothpick come out w/ a few moist crumbs. 

Take care, over-baking will make them hard.

Cool in the pan, lift out and cut into squares.

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Lambing to starts April 1st, counting the days. Waiting impatiently for the snow to melt, the geese to return, and the pussy willows to lure the bees from their hive.