Weeeeed?

The caterpillar of the Monarch butterfly is a lot easier to photograph than its parent. There were two of them on what is left of this common milkweed plant in the hayfield. After I took this, I transferred them onto another milkweed nearby which had a few remaining leaves. Milkweed is the only thing that Monarch caterpillars can eat, so it is a desirable plant for people who want to encourage butterflies to their gardens, but it is considered a weed by farmers as it is poisonous to sheep.

Identifying all the wild flowers we're seeing is sometimes easy, sometimes hard. I was surprised to see Golden Rod growing all over the place - it's generally seen as a weed here, rather than as a desirable cottage garden flower, as in the UK.

I found this flower last night - initially thinking it was a thistle, but then on close inspection realised that it was an aster. I think it is a New England Aster. The Wikipedia article mentions that this is another wild flower that was taken back to Europe as a garden plant.

On the other hand, the Canadian Thistle seems always to be considered a weed, although I rather like both its flowers and its seed-heads. The butterflies love them too.
The bright red berries of this plant caught my eye this when out for my morning constitutional with the dog (who, by the way, has been waking us up repeatedly during the night ever since I wrote about how good he is at night-time). Its delicate lilac flowers look like those on potatoes, so I presumed that, like the potato, it would be a North American plant. Wrong again - it is Bittersweet Nightshade, which is European and poisonous and highly invasive. It does have some uses in herbal medicine though, so it's not a completely hopeless case.

Roads, old and new

This is the view of Prince Edward County that you get as you approach from the Glenora Ferry, a 10-minute trip that takes you from the mainland to the county. We all went to Kingston on Monday to register with the provincial health insurance plan (you have to be here for three months before being eligible for it). As we were going to be out of the house for a few hours we took the puppy with us. This meant that we didn't need to rush back, so instead of heading back along Highway 401 (a very boring dual carriageway) we decided to take the old road, Highway 33, marketed as the Loyalist Parkway. It runs alongside the lake most of the way from Kingston and then along into the County. Although it takes a bit longer, the route is far preferable to the 401 alternative.

I've had a particular request for an updated picture of the puppy, so here he is. This is the 'Where's my treat then? Look I'm sitting down and everything.' pose. He is now house-trained and usually wakes us up to go out between 5-6am, which I hope will get later as the mornings get darker. He's still chewing anything he can get hold of with his needle-sharp puppy teeth - will be glad when he finally gets his adult set. He lives on the ground floor and doesn't venture up or down stairs (yet). I must admit that it's quite heart-warming to see how pleased he is to see you in the morning - his whole body wags!

I went to Deseronto last night to talk to the Archives Board about priorities for the next few months for the archives. I was handed the keys to the room in the library that serves as the current archives and, as the meeting ended, I met the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor of the town. The latter looked at me and said 'I was expecting somebody older'. So that's nice - I still look too young to be an archivist. Thought I'd moved on from that! So I start work there next week - I suggested that I would do one day a week and they seemed happy with that. I drove back as the sun was setting - more lovely views of Lakes Ontario and Consecon. The drive takes the same length of time as my commute into Manchester did, but the contrast in terms of traffic and scenery couldn't be greater.

The very fat caterpillar

Spotted this huge green caterpillar on our walk up to the field with the dog this afternoon. It is about the size of a cigar and was moving very quickly. Mike discovered that it's a Waved Sphinx moth (or will be, next year), and it was heading off, having feasted on our trees, to find somewhere to pupate.

We now have six vegetable plots dug over and sown with buckwheat. There are seedlings appearing on the plots I sowed first, but whether they are buckwheat plants or something less desirable I can't yet tell.

Quackgrass

OK, so the grass in the barnyard that I naively thought was just an extra-strong, butch Canadian version of ordinary grass - isn't. Anyone who's had to deal with couch grass would have recognised it straight away, except that here the preferred term seems to be quackgrass and it is defined by the provincial government as "one of the most difficult weeds to control".

I'd never had to deal with couch grass before, so didn't realise that was what it was until tipped off by my aunt. So, far from being a native Canadian type of grass, this stuff is, like me, a European interloper. Quackgrass seems a ridiculous name for such an invasive and pesky plant, but perhaps it is a corruption of 'quickgrass', which is one of its other names. Actually I think the most appropriate of its many names is devil's grass. I'm fairly sure that sinful gardeners would spent their time in Hell dealing with an infinitely large field of the stuff.

Rain

Well it's early afternoon and at last we've had some decent rain showers. According to our weather system 9.6mm has fallen so far today. This translates into a gain of 3 inches of rainwater in our cistern.

Yes, sorry about the mixing and matching of measurements - we've got a home-made measuring stick marked in inches for the cistern (fewer lines to draw than if we'd marked it up in centimetres), but have attempted to modernise by measuring everything to do with the weather station in metric units. I think we come from a generation which is completely confused about systems of measurement and Canada seems to be just as confused as the UK, but often in the opposite direction. It doesn't help when they call Imperial units 'English'. I've had to stick a small concordance table of oven temperatures in °F and °C in one of the kitchen cupboards, which I check frequently, as this oven is calibrated in Fahrenheit and I'd got used to Celsius in England. On the other hand I do quite like having the road signs in kilometres, as subconsciously you read them as miles and journeys seem to go more quickly (which is necessary when the speed limit is only 50mph, sorry, 80kph, most of the time).

Since we put the weather station up on 6 August and until today we'd only had 7.6mm of rain - about one third of an inch - in nearly three weeks. And there hadn't been much before we started measuring it either. Our lawn is completely brown and a lot of the trees are beginning to show signs of stress - the poplars are losing their leaves rapidly and the leaves on some of the smaller ash trees are turning brown. The rain is particularly welcome as on Tuesday evening I sowed some of the buckwheat seed in the two vegetable plots that we'd created by then, so this might give it a fighting chance of germinating.

A Rake's Progress

It's been a frenetic few days in the barnyard. The tree surgeons came on Friday and Mike helped them carve up the poplars into manoeuvrable chunks which can then be split into logs for the fires. They also cut down the branches of the ash tree that were resting on the roof at the back of the house. This has had the added benefit of preventing the squirrels from getting on to the roof and into our roofspace (for the moment anyway).

The rotary tiller attachment for the tractor turned up in the afternoon and we spent an hour or two getting it fixed on during Saturday before we could start using it. I'm glad Mike's got a background of working with machinery because I wouldn't have had a clue how to fix it all together. My role on these occasions is solely as moral support, or more likely, irritatingly curious bystander.

Once the thing was fixed on, Mike used it to till Barnyard Two. It was pretty effective - tearing the grassy soil up into big lumps. Lots of stones came to the surface and we removed the biggest ones. Before tilling the area looked like the grassy strip on the right of the photo.

Yesterday I was finally able to do some of the work myself. I started by clearing more stones from the western end of the yard. I persuaded the children to help me and they picked stones with me for half an hour, pretending that we were a pioneer family. Then they realised that being a pioneer family wouldn't actually have been much fun and they went off to play Top Trumps instead.

When I'd cleared the biggest stones I marked out the boundaries of my first vegetable plot, an area ten feet wide and 15 feet deep, and proceeded to rake it clear of big clumps of grass and more stones. The grass roots are long single strands, rather like thick noodles in size. The rotary tiller has left many of these in the soil so I had to pull them gently out by hand as my experience in the front garden has shown that the grass will re-sprout from these roots very readily. I spent about five hours raking, de-stoning and de-rooting the area yesterday and I think it's now ready to be seeded. My plan is to sow buckwheat as a green manure (I ordered two kilos of seed last week) in the vegetable plots. I might be cutting it a bit fine, as it will be killed by the first frost, but it is supposed to be very quick to grow so I'm hoping it will work. The soil is so fine that leaving it bare seems like a really bad idea.


The picture shows the finished plot, although I know that it actually doesn't look very different from the 'before' picture. Even this one plot is twice the size of the raised beds I had for growing vegetables in the old house. There will be eight vegetable plots in all in this part of the barnyard - and by the time I've cleared all eight I expect to be super-fit and as thin as my rake.

Timber!

Charlie the tree climber and his mate came this morning and took down the two poplar trees ('widowmakers' as Charlie called them). Bill will turn up tomorrow to cut the trunk into smaller pieces, which will eventually end up in our woodburner. Someone finally came to take our hay bales away this morning too. There were 40 of them in all.

We're getting obsessive about watching the weather radar and calculating how soon it will be before we get rain and how long it might last. At the moment we're down to nine inches of water in our cistern, which is effectively only four inches if you take off the width of the outlet pipe. Both wells are dry so I'll be trying to learn how to do a rain-dance soon.

Water works

Thought I'd better post an update on our smelly water situation. Here's a picture of the solution to the problem. The white unit is our filter, which takes out any solid particles in the water. Next to it, on the left, is the reverse osmosis unit, which subjects the water to high pressure and forces out the dissolved solids which make the water hard. It's been two weeks since the system was installed and it has taken that long for the hot water tank to finally be free of the old water and the sludge that had built up in the bottom of it. So now we've got lovely clear, non-smelly water and there are no excuses for the children not to have a bath. Well, apart from the ongoing lack-of-water scenario, that is.

One thing that has helped us conserve water a bit is our new washing machine. You can't tell from the picture, but it is huge. It holds at least twice as much washing as our old machine in the UK, so I'm having to run it half as often. I know it's a very dull and mundane thing to get enthusiastic about, and this may be a reflection of how quiet my life is now, but I actually look forward to doing the laundry so that I can use it - it's got neat little sound effects, whizzy lights and a countdown feature which make it seem quite space-age. There's a matching tumble dryer too, but I haven't used that yet and hope I won't have to for some time.

Thanks to the voltage difference we've had to buy loads of electrical devices on moving here. In time we'll be able to preserve our house as a museum of the Canadian home in the year 2007.

...and I'll give you the key

Well OK, it's not quite a combine harvester, but our mini-tractor arrived today and Mike's already tested it out on the grass of Barnyard One, the route into the woods behind the big barn and the grass around the house The thing on the back is a heavy-duty rotary cutter which is suitable for cutting down rough grass. There's a lawn mower attachment underneath the tractor for shorter grass. So basically what he achieved in a week or two with the strimmer in the barnyard has taken about 20 minutes with the tractor and its attachments. That's impressive.

We'll be getting a rotary tiller attachment to go on the back too, but they didn't have it ready to deliver today. The same was the case with the snow blower attachment, but I'm rather hoping we won't need that in the next few weeks. It's a relief to finally have the grass cut - we've been in the house nearly seven weeks without having the tool for the job. The lack of rain, while problematic for our water supply, has at least stopped the grass from growing too much (although there were some pretty beefy weeds).

Black and white

The children met our nearest neighbours this evening, chatting over the garden fence. There seemed to be a mutual fascination. I have designs on the waste products of these creatures for my vegetable patch and plan to negotiate with their owner, Janice, about that. Actually I'm running low on milk too, come to think of it...

No prizes...

... for guessing the name of this frog.

Yes, you've guessed it: Lithobates clamitans. It was having a nap on the inner side of the barn door this morning when Mike went out there. Quite nice to see a live frog for a change: the dog has developed an uncanny instinct for finding dried up dead frogs and using them as puppy chews. I've only just got over a phobia of dead insects and now I'm having to get used to extracting dessicated frogs from the dog's mouth. Urgh.

Trees

I continue to be impressed by Mike's ability to turn his hand to new skills. Today was his first go at using the chainsaw that he bought last week. It's been fairly overcast, so not quite as hot as it has been of late. He started off by removing a dead bough from the Silver Birch in the front garden, then progressed to cutting down some of the dead Eastern Juniper (aka Red Cedar) trees in the barnyard (I'm assuming that they were killed by the cows that used to be housed there). He's made a good start on our wood supply for the winter. I love the colour of the freshly-cut red cedar logs - they look a bit like cartoon depictions of legs of ham.

The tree-climber member of the tree surgeon's team which will be cutting down the poplars came round earlier and they'll probably be bringing those down later in the week, so that will give us even more wood, although poplar doesn't burn particularly well, so it might be better to leave that for a while to season. My new bible, John Seymour's New Complete Self-sufficiency: The Classic Guide for Realists and Dreamers agrees with most other sources that ash is the best wood for burning. There's an ash coppice up by the pond, so we're well set up in that respect. According to John, if you cut the trees down at a diameter of nine inches, they'll regrow and be ready to cut down again in 12 years' time. Sounds ideal to me - then you don't feel like you're destroying something.

Veins and vines

Managed to get a photo of a Monarch at last yesterday evening, on our walk up to the hay field. Apart from its size, the main difference between it and a Viceroy is the lack of a black vein cutting across the lower wing on the Monarch.

We also noticed that the wild grapes (Vitus riparia) are swelling well in the hedgerows around the field. The hedges are mostly Blackthorn and there are lots of sloe berries forming on them. So I've started looking up recipes for sloe gin and sloe jelly. Apparently the wild grapes can be used for wine and jelly, but I'm not sure there will be enough of them for the former. The early missionary settlers round here used them for communion wine when they ran out of the stuff they'd brought with them from France, so it might be worth a try...

POSTSCRIPT: I was wrong about the hedges - the tree with black berries is Common or European Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), which is (a)invasive and (b)a killer of native trees. Nice...

Weather watching

Today's fairly substantial job was to put up our weather station. As we're planning to generate our own energy from the wind and the sun, it is going to be useful to have some record of the amount of both that we can expect here. Mike decided that we should put the anemometer as high up as possible, so we had a 30 foot pole to put up. We started by digging a big hole at the back of the small barn, then attached the anemometer to the top of the pole and the weather station a bit further down. The pole was very heavy, but Mike managed to get it into place and then attached it to the edge of the barn roof with two brackets. We concreted the base of the pole into its hole and the entire edifice seems pretty sturdy now.

The weather station transmits information to a data logger which is attached to my PC and downloads every 15 minutes. It's really neat - measuring sunlight, wind speed and direction, amount of rainfall (I wish!), temperature, humidity, UV, well, you name it really. You can get various views and reports of the data, with the ability to upload it to a website. The main weather display is a bit lurid (and looks like it hasn't been updated since about 1995) but it gives you a useful summary of the current conditions.

P.S. Finally got the upload sorted out - you can see the weather we're having at the Weather Underground site.

P.P.S. And now there's a weather station sticker on the blog too. I love this stuff - such a geek!

Beside the lakeside

The last two days have been really hot and humid, so yesterday evening we decided to head for the beach. North Beach is our nearest Provincial Park, 10 minutes' drive away. We got there at 5pm and I suppose there may have been a total of 50 people on the beach, which is a natural sandbar about a mile in length. The water of Lake Ontario was really warm (which was not the case a month ago, when we first visited the park and only the kids braved the water), so we all went for a swim.

You have to pay to get into the park ($11.00 per vehicle per day), but you can get a seasonal pass for $80 (about £10 each for our family), which represents good value and ensures that we go there regularly! We couldn't get over how quiet the beach was - contrasting it with any sandy beach on an August evening in the UK when the temperature is hitting 28°C (82°F). We also realised that we'd never all been swimming off a beach at the same time before: in the UK one of us always ended up sitting on the beach because we'd be worried about people nicking our car keys/money/phones. We had no such worries last night and it was really liberating. The only strange thing is that you're swimming in fresh water, when the lake is so big that it feels like you're at the seaside.

Opportunities blossom

Last Wednesday I had an interview for the post of part-time archivist at Deseronto, a small town about 40 minutes' drive from our house. The town's previous archivist had been based in the library, looking after various deposited collections and he retired in March. The town council is anxious to make proper provision for its municipal archives (indeed, is required by law to do so), which had not previously been part of the archivist's responsibility. They are currently held in a very dirty vault in the basement of the Town Hall (which was once a bank) and nobody really knows what's down there.


Today one of the (five!) Town Councillors rang me up to offer me the job (assuming my references are acceptable). I had been a bit unsure about whether to even apply for the post, but now that I've seen the place and the sorry state of things there, I can't turn it down. It'll be a challenge!

I've noticed that many of the people who live here have more than one job (a bit like Local Hero or Northern Exposure). Well this will bring my number of current jobs up to three, so I feel like I'm integrating nicely. This will be my first local job though - which I think will be a good thing, as I will be working with and getting to know people who actually live here. There is a slight danger that I'm now taking on too much, so I'll need to be very careful about allocating my time, but we'll see how things go.

Signs of High Summer

We've been seeing lots of Monarch butterflies in the garden - but they never stay still long enough for me to take a picture of them. Those are the ones with an amazing migration journey to Mexico and back every year. The picture is of a smaller butterfly which mimics the Monarch almost perfectly in its colouring but, unlike the Monarch, consented to sit still for a few seconds so that I could take its picture. It's called a Viceroy.

The other insect we've been hearing but haven't yet spotted is called a Dog-Day Cicada or Harvest Fly. The male's song is an incredibly loud and fairly high-pitched shrill buzz which sounds like it's coming from a power cable or electricity sub-station. Apparently they live under ground for 2-3 years and then emerge to mate before dying off. They're not the same as the ones that all emerge at the same time every 17 years, so these ones can be heard every summer.

We're running low on water again, although today we're having the new water cleaning system installed, so at least the water we have will be clearer and less stinky than it was before. Then we'll have to improve the actual supply - perhaps by drilling down a bit further in the existing well. Our neighbours told us that their well is 35 feet deep, so perhaps we should try and aim for something similar. It's a bit frustrating when you can see the lake in front of the house, there are frogs gambolling about in our pond a couple of hundred metres behind the house and we yet have to ration water use indoors. I keeping thinking about Jean de Florette, but trust that our water situation never gets quite as bad as his did. In the short term we will just have to hope for some decent rain in the next week or two.

Another frog on the blog

There were two Northern Leopard Frogs hopping around the garden the morning after I wrote the entry about frogs. Managed to get some photos without attracting the dog's attention to the frogs too much - he's grabbing anything he sees in his mouth and I didn't want to see the frogs being dismembered!

Rrrrrbit

This little chap is a Gray Tree Frog. It was snoozing on our back door this afternoon. We've noticed loads of frogs: around the pond, where you'd expect to see them, but also in the fields and around the house. Most of them are Northern Leopard Frogs. Apparently in this area we can apply for a Commercial Frog Licence to harvest the northern leopard frogs and sell them as bait to fishermen.

But I don't think I'll be doing that.

Oh, and remember the bat problem that we originally thought was a squirrel problem? Turns out it is a bat and squirrel problem - Mike saw a squirrel going into the roof space yesterday. So the wildlife removal expert who was sure that squirrels and bats would never share the space turns out to be slightly less expert than I thought.

Screen test

I've never made home videos of the children, and here I am, posting a very amateur 40 second home video of my dog on the web. Oh dear - am I turning into the sort of person who values pets over family? Or is it simply that my digital camera and the Internet make it incredibly easy to do this kind of thing now, which it wouldn't have been when the kids were tiny? Or perhaps it's more that I don't think Toby will ever reproach me for doing this...

P.S. In case you were wondering, the big concrete cylinder behind the dog is our well.

Grass again

Walked up to the hayfield this afternoon to see how the guys had done. They were baling the hay on Sunday and we counted 38 bales standing in the field today. In the barnyard, Mike has almost finished clearing the long grass from the largest of the three enclosures (Barnyard One), which we estimate to be around a third of an acre. Which is about the size of four standard UK allotments, if I've got my measurements right (gulp). Next step will be to decide how we're going to divide up the space and bring it into cultivation.

In between looking after the puppy, making meals and washing up I spent much of the weekend taking it in turns with Mike to read the last Harry Potter book. The kids weren't particularly interested, although I have read all the earlier books to them. Think this one might be one that they have to read for themselves when they're a bit older. I knew I'd have to finish it on Sunday or I'd be unable to do anything approaching work until I had.

Got a dog licence for Toby yesterday. For our $20 we got the licence itself, which lasts until the end of March, and a metal dog tag (yes, literally) with the number of the beast on it - 660 in this case. We also registered him with a vet in Trenton. We haven't managed to register the humans with a doctor yet though.

I had a bit of crisis of confidence about this blog the other day. I remembered those horrible round-robin Christmas newsletters that some people send out - the ones that tell you how wonderfully people you've often never heard of are doing in whatever they turn their hands to - and I wondered if by writing this blog I was doing the same sort of thing. I resolved my crisis by deciding that mostly I'm writing this blog for myself and those people I think might be interested - I'm not actually forcing anyone to read it if they don't want to. But that's the same for all blogs and bloggers, I suppose. I've just noticed that the spell-checker built into Blogger doesn't recognise the words blog, Blogger or bloggers. How strange.

The Promised Puppy

One of the deals we made with the children about emigrating was that we would be able to get a dog in Canada. Or was that one of the deals I made with Mike? Anyway, he spotted an advert from a dog rescue centre this morning for eight-week-old German shepherd/labrador puppies. They just happen to be two of his favourite breeds of dog, and I was keen to get a rescue dog and not particularly enthusiastic about getting a pure-bred one.

We drove up to the rescue centre, which was north of Madoc, about an hour and a half away. There was another couple there who had already chosen one of the eight puppies. Alsatiadors? Labrasheps? They were all mostly black, with small amounts of tan. It seemed as though it was going to be impossible to choose, but then Mike picked up one with white paws and a white chin, who snuggled into his arms in a really placid way (and who seemed less inclined to chew everyone's fingers than his siblings). So we chose him.

On the way home he sat in the cardboard box we'd brought with us really quietly. Occasionally he whimpered a bit, but would quieten down if I stroked him. We discussed what we were going to call him. I suggested Tetley, as it was a Tetley tea box, but we all ended up agreeing on Toby instead. And here he is:



We've made up a little bed in a box in the mud room for the time being and he's flat out asleep in there at the moment. I think it's going to be an interesting few weeks.

Neighbours

Last night one of our new neighbours offered us some irises that his wife had been dividing. I said 'Yes, please'. Then this afternoon I spent an hour or two clearing weeds and overgrown perenniels to make space in the front garden for them. That made room for twelve, with about 30 small iris plants remaining in the carrier bags, unplanted, and making me feel inadequate and somehow ungrateful.

So I decided to start planting them along the edge of the front garden. As I did so, another set of neighbours spotted me and turned up to introduce themselves. They live in the next property along (number 97 where we are number 59 - the numbering is something to do with building lots which I don't yet understand) and are also British ex-pats, but they moved to Canada in 1965 (Québec originally). They've only lived in this area for 18 months and seemed amazed (jealous, even) that we'd managed to pick this area to settle in - "You've really lucked out" was the phrase used. I think that means moving here is a good thing...

It was interesting that their accents became increasingly English during the hour or so that we talked to them: to begin with I wouldn't have identified them as being originally British. Joan did pronounce tomato as 'tomaydo' towards the end of the conversation, so I wonder how long it'll take me before I do that. At the moment I think 'never', but that might change.

Once they'd gone I got on with planting the remaining irises, behind the house this time. The soil under the fence at the front of the barnyard proved to be wonderfully rich, soft and easy to work (courtesy of the cows that used to live there), so in the end I got them all planted and now feel that I've done my neighbourly duty (although the stiff muscles in my back disagree). If the soil in the rest of the barnyard is of the same quality as that stuff then I'll be an extremely happy gardener.

Good news and bad news

The bad news this morning was that the robins' nest had fallen off the light and there was no sign of the baby robins. Child #1 was a bit sad (so was I), but it did give her a chance to get a close up look at a (partially de-constructed) birdsnest (complete with mites, yuk).

The good news was that the rocket seeds I planted on Monday morning in the flower bed in the front garden had germinated this morning. It seems to be hard to buy anything apart from Romaine lettuce here, so getting a range of leaves in the ground seems like a good plan.

I bought a load of bird seed designed to be revolting to squirrels (they're coated with chilli powder). Our squirrels seem to be completely unaware that they're not supposed to like chilli...

Cutting things down

Yesterday the first of our hay was cut by a couple of cattle farmers who were keen to take it off our hands. They used to cut the hay for Jerry, the previous owner, too. They reckon they'll get 40 bales off the field - and they're going to pay us for the privilege, which is great. First they had to cut their way to the hayfield, as the path up there had become very overgrown and their hay cutter was 14 feet wide.In the end they only had time to cut a first swathe around the edge of the field yesterday. In the evening we had a family expedition up there and walked around the field for the first time. It was a lovely warm evening and we had to keep pinching ourselves as we walked - does this really belong to us? Of course the answer to that is 'no' - we're just looking after it for a while. But, all the same, it still seems amazing, after our 100 metre square back garden in England. Child #1 spotted a cricket in the cut hay and then I noticed a praying mantis just nearby (which proved impossible to get into focus!).
 :

The other visitor yesterday was a tree surgeon who is going to trim the branches of the ash tree which are resting on the roof at the back of the house. He's also going to cut down two lovely poplars which are entangled with our power lines. It's a shame, but we will be able to burn the wood so at least they won't go to waste.

Fire and water

This morning was focused on utilities. Mike talked to a man about improving our smelly water, while I chatted to the chimney sweeps. What we thought was going to be a straight-forward job of sweeping the two chimneys turned into a several-thousand dollar bill as we discovered that neither chimney met current regulations. The chief sweep refused to touch such badly-put-together items. So the steel flue for the woodburning stove is going to be replaced and the stove itself re-seated on a hearth-stone that is the proper size. In the living room we're having the chimney lined with a new flue and a new wood-burning fireplace fitted. Ho hum.

Getting the water fixed is going to be pricey too, but that really needs doing - at the moment the kids are really objecting to having a bath as the smell of hydrogen sulphide from the water is so strong (and the water is grey!). Bubble bath helps a bit, but the resulting combination of smells is almost as bad as just the hydrogen sulphide. The new system should get rid of the smell as well as the lime and iron. In the future we will be able divert the reject water (which would otherwise go into the septic tank) through a grey water system which will fill the toilet cisterns and can be used for watering the garden.

More new arrivals

We noticed this nest when we looked around the property in April. It's on the spotlights above the garage doors. This must be the second brood - there are at least two baby American Robins whose heads you can sometimes see wobbling about as they wait for food. You can just see the mouth of one of the chicks in this picture.

Unpacking heat

We met the guys and the container at the Trenton air force base, where we had to complete the documentation for customs. It was all very relaxed and friendly - as usual we were teased about the amount of snow we can expect here in the winter. Obviously the English inability to cope with snow is famous world-wide. At the moment I'm looking forward it, but by the time it arrives I might have changed my mind.

We drove back with the lorry following us. It then took the men forty minutes to actually get the truck up our drive. Once they got it in, they were very quick at unloading and had finished in a couple of hours, which was very impressive considering the heat and humidity they were working in. I spent the whole afternoon unpacking the kitchen boxes and trying to find space for all the stuff in a kitchen which has fewer cupboards than our old one. So the kitchen is pretty much straight now, but the rest of the house is full of boxes still.

We had our tea sitting at the kitchen table, which was absolutely delightful after a fortnight of eating off plastic plates on our laps. As we've put the dining room dresser next to the table in the same layout as it was in Manchester, it felt rather as though we and the furniture had all been picked up from the old house and dropped down into the new one. I'm sitting at the table now - it's a lot easier to type than it was being crouched on the floor! It still seems amazing to me that all our possessions made their way here at all.

Shortly after the men left we had an almighty thunderstorm, which dropped the temperature down nicely for the evening. By 8.00pm I was completely exhausted and went to bed - before the children! They were watching Doctor Who, which is showing a couple of months behind the ones in UK, which is handy as they missed lots of episodes of the latest series.

Furry friends

As soon as we moved in we became aware that we had former tenants still in residence. At night as we went to bed we could hear scuttering noises in the roof space. We thought that it was probably squirrels and we called in a wildlife expert yesterday to investigate for us. He went up into the loft and I waited anxiously to find out whether they'd made a complete mess up there. He couldn't actually see any evidence of them, but could hear something. He went up to the hole in the soffit on the west side of the roof and couldn't see any evidence of squirrels or racoons or birds, but decided that it was possibly bats, living in the space between the side of the house and the aluminium siding. He told me that we can't do anything about them at the moment (if it was bats), as they would have baby bats there and it isn't considered to be good practice to disturb them at this stage (although they're not officially protected here in the same way as bats are in the UK). He recommended that I watch the gaps at dusk to see they were bats.

So I did, and they were. As the sun set I saw them leaving from a gap in the eaves. I'm actually quite relieved that it's bats - they're not damaging the loft space and somehow the idea of bats is less disturbing than squirrels. The wildlife guy will come back later in the season, once the babies are able to fly, and put in a one-way door that will let them leave but not come back. I hope they'll just take up residence in one of the barns instead. Looks like they are the imaginatively-named Big Brown Bat.

Oh, and the wildlife guy's name is Hunter.

Home nearly here

Heard today that our container should turn up on Monday. Thank goodness - fed up of sitting on the floor and eating off plastic plates! I gave in and bought some wine glasses last week because I couldn't bear drinking out of plastic cups any longer. Our beds arrived on Tuesday, so we don't have to sleep on mattresses on the floor any more, which is a great improvement. Bought duvets and pillows yesterday. Child #2 had set his heart on orange bed linen (he's going through a bit of an orange phase at the moment) which I thought might prove tricky, but Sears had a lurid Harley Davidson set which fitted the bill perfectly.Mike is getting on well with clearing the farm yard of grass, although it will take several weeks to get the whole thing clear. On Tuesday he started looking at tractors. I was given A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by a friend at the conference in Kingston, so I was able to tell him a bit about John Deere.

We've still got issues with water, although there was rain yesterday which should help a bit, and there's been more today, which is typical, as I've put two loads of washing on the line.

We treated ourselves to a meal out last night. It felt slightly surreal as Wimbledon was playing on the TVs in the restaurant.

Tomorrow our new fridge should arrive, which will be a big help, as we've been coping with the tiny one that was left in the house up to now, which isn't really fit for the needs of a family of four in a warm summer.

26 June 2007

I forgot to mention the weirdest thing that was left in the house. The kids think it’s horrible, and I did too, at first, but I’m beginning to feel quite fond of it, though I prefer the little robin that my aunt gave us as a leaving present.

There were a few instruction books left in the house too, which have revealed that the previous owners were called Jerry and Mary. The wood-burning stove only dates from 2004, so that’s fairly new. A farmer we spoke to yesterday reckons the house has been empty for a couple of years, although there was a tenant in here when we looked round it in April.

I can’t believe that we’ve only been in the house for 48 hours. Seems like we’ve been pretty busy most of that time – mainly discovering things that need fixing. The biggest problem we’ve had was to do with the water. When we moved in on Sunday afternoon the hot water stank of hydrogen sulphide and we were running out of water in our back-up cistern, so we got the pump guy to come round today and he spent three hours here putting in a new pump. It’s been quite an education for me, learning about plumbing from one’s own water supply. It is our first real bit of self-sufficiency, even though the system was already in place, so probably doesn’t count.

The pump guy’s mate had switched the supply over to the cistern last week, as the pump was struggling to get water from the well, but we had nearly run out of water in the cistern. This is just a huge square plastic container in the basement, about three metres square, which is fed from the rain water which falls on the house. The pump can either run off the well or off the cistern. Wells can run dry here (and there’s been little rain for several weeks (in contrast to the UK!)), so the cistern acts as a backup, and also has softer water than the well. The old pump dated from 1989, and was fairly knackered, so was probably due for replacement. It’s such a relief to have a water supply again – we’d been being incredibly mean with the water yesterday and this morning, which wasn’t much fun. I was trying to plan meals that didn’t involve boiling water.

The temperature hit 30 celsius today, so Mike and the pump guy were in the best place, as the basement stays nice and cool. We found some spare louvre doors down there today, and a whole load of Mary’s glass bottles and bottle-tops which may well come in useful next year if I end up pickling anything. Mike spent the morning with his new petrol-driven strimmer, clearing some of the grass from the fenced area next to the small barn. He’d started yesterday with a rechargeable electric strimmer, but it wasn’t making much of an impression, so he’s gone for the more industrial version and is making some headway with that.

I phoned my Dad last night and heard from my aunt and mother-in-law today. The phone connection is fine – hard to believe that they’re so far away. The only thing I keep forgetting is the time difference. We also had a call from the estate agents in Manchester yesterday – to tell us that someone has put in an offer on our house there. Hurrah! So we’ve accepted it and are hoping that will progress quickly. This house needs a new kitchen and bathroom, and the sale of the Sale house would come in handy for that.

P.S. Turns out that the high speed internet connection was a mirage, so we're back on dialup and today is our first day of connectivity. Only 482 emails to catch up on. Will try and post a more up-to-date update soon...