Warmed up tonight, walked the dogs

Chrissy got a teaching/subbing deal at a school near my work so we carpooled today. We got home and it had warmed up enough to take the dogs out on a bit of a walk. They have to get all bundled up though or else Gunnar and Squirrel get cold paws and start whining for home.
Snorri doesn't seem to mind much as long as she has a ball to chase/attack.
Not my most manly moment, but I sewed the one piece pajama like thing for Squirrel.
-28 F


Snorri trying to get Chrissy to kick the soccer ball, Squirrel just trying to stay upright.


Gunnar with a hostile ice beard and the look of "let me in the house already!"

effortlessly beautiful

A friend of ours is showing me how to make furniture out of birch. I haven't taken any photos yet of the process (next time- as I plan to make more), but I did feel compelled to take a photo of the wood shavings. They just looked so pretty laying in a pile on the floor. I'll take a photo of the small table I'm making when I'm finished. It' really awesome working with the wood. It's taught me a lot. It's very forgiving. There's also something about it that's..... seductive I guess you might say.
Chrissy

Cold starts, frozen everything and hard, slow work.

Its been cold lately. We're right in the midst of a "no end in sight" cold snap that has made everything outside a chore. Yesterday, Chrissy and I were itching to do some sort of physical work after being indoors in excess so we headed out to our property to split and stack some firewood. We brought along some cotton balls soaked with Vaseline so we could get an instant fire going as soon as we got there. It felt like it was probably in the -20 to -25 range out there which meant we had to keep starting up the truck every two hours or so since we don't have any electric yet. We got a good hot fire going and got to work. I was going to get some photos of the progress we made with the stacking, but the camera got too cold and couldn't muster up the power to turn on. I took a few photos when we first got there though..



Chrissy warming up by the burn barrel below the garage pad.



Looking South from below the garage pad. about 40 feet ahead is where we'll be building our house. Still need some site work on that portion.


Our garage pad, or part of it. Wood hauling sled in the foreground and one of the woodpiles we're in the process of moving in the background. We're thinking the garage is going to be 26' x 36' with two garage doors and a small shop on the end. We'll be living in this building for a bit while we build our house.


Our driveway looking North from the garage pad. I was standing just off to the left of the driveway which is why it looks like there is a log in the way. It meanders straight ahead and then takes a right up the hill pretty steep.
The birch tree laying out straight on the right is one we cut for Chrissy to use for some table legs. Shes been peeling logs at home lately.

We split wood for a while, which is really easy when its this cold. The logs just burst apart when the maul connects. Every bit of water in the wood is frozen and just waiting to fly apart. Then our friend Matt came up and we started the process of moving the previously seen woodpile over out of the way so we can start construction in its place in the spring.
Fortunately this will be the last time we need to move this wood before it takes a short trip to the stove. We still have 2 or 3 cords of wood that are cut into rounds and stacked that we'll try and split before the winters up as well as a fair amount of brush that we need to burn up while we have all this snow. The summertime wont allow any burning of brush and we don't want to just bury it.

Got up this morning and it was cold. -42 is what its reading at the house. We haven't even tried to start the truck, when its this cold it burns gas so fast and everything just feels like its about to break. We're just hanging out at home drinking coffee and watching videos.
The chicken coop has been holding out the cold pretty well. Our construction has proved effective. A week at -30 or colder was what I was fearing the most, but so far so good. We have 2 lights in there providing heat, a 250 watt infrared and an 80 watt red tint flood light. I had to wrap an old sleeping bag around the front door area of it to close up some of the small gaps, but other than that its been doing great.


The thermometer on the left the outside temperature. The one on the right is our wireless indoor and chicken coop thermometer. -43 outside, +40.8 in the coop.