Another 3 weeks have passed in a blur and I am coming up for air or at least to post another chalk mark on the web. The first picture is a burning slash pile with pruned grape vines, corn stalks, pine needles from the pine tree I cut down early in the winter to get better satellite TV reception, (The rest is in the wood shed,) bark from the firewood I have been spliting and many other things. Today was perfect for burning since it snowed lightly all day.
In the evenings I have been reading
The Big Burn by Tim Eagan.
It is the story of the 1910 fire that destroyed millions of acres of timber in Idaho, Washington and Montana. Reading it is both pleasure and homework. Congress included funding for the grant that was approved in 2008 to build the Crossroads on the Columbia Digital Archive in their 2010 budget. I wrote the grant to help our struggling museums and to backup 22,000 pages of their material in an archive that can be researched on the Internet. The money won't be ready till early next year, but the paperwork has started piling up already. So that is in store for the winter.
Also in store for the winter is a full woodshed, boxes of apples, 20 quarts of cider, 60
pounds of fresh pears, a jar of dried pears, 7 gallons of Simmer Cider and a huge steaming pile of goat manure; all products of efforts in the past 3 weeks. Overseeing the whole operation has been our new cat, Tagger (Short for Tag Along). He started tagging along after me just before the Barter Fair and has now become the joker in just about every event on the place.
Our neighbors Don and Alice Worley hosted the annual cider crush at Downriver Orchards last weekend. I brought several boxes of our apples, an apple pie and some of last year's Simmer Cider. Both seemed to be very-much appreciated, though with enough Simmer Cider, everything is appreciated. I brought home
26 gallons of cider, mostly pressed on my ancient cider press, the first one built at the American Village Institute in Marcus circa 1978. Tagger inspected the operation as I siphoned it into containers for the freezer. 14 gallons of cider has been cooking down to 7 gallons of Simmer Cider on the wood heat stove all week. Today it was sweet enough to make wine and went into a carboy alongside the grape wines in the office.
In other forays into history, we interviewed another couple survivors of the greatest generation in the past two weeks. Spending just a few hours with these folks is very rewarding. It is a shame to compress their lives into just one interview, but there are so many we have not talked to yet. I hope to find more time for that soon. Thinking about how to make the output match the input, I have been reading some very good books. Besides
The Big Burn, I read
The Rainbow Chasers, a history of a few years in the lives of the Archibald McDonald family that homesteaded near here and then in Canada and we went to a talk by Jack Nisbet and bought a copy of his book
The Collector, about the life of David Douglas - famous for Douglas Firs and many other plants that changed the world.
On the business front, Cheryl and I printed another 100 copies of the Road Atlas of Bonner County (where the economy still seems to be moving.) I completed a study of Water Trail Websites and learned a lot about the world of kayak and canoe paddlers. I hope to be building a website for a water trail in Pend Oreille County next year. A new edition of the Road Atlas of Ferry County is ready to be printed on a refurbished printer. Speaking of refurbished, the family finances have taken an upswing thanks my father's generous distribution of life insurance money that my mother left to us. So Cheryl and I are getting our cars ready for winter and getting some not regular enough medical checkups.
The voters have spoken our language this month defeating another wacko anti-tax initiative by Tim Eiman, giving homosexuals some human rights and stopping the imposition of ATVs on the Curlew Valley rail trail. Of course most of the action on those issues was decided in other parts of the State.
That's more than enough information for now. We'll be seeing most of you at Thanksgiving.