Timely Reads

Just finished two interesting books that are available in our local library system.

Because I Love You -The Silent Shadow of Child Sexual Abuse by Joyce Allan is a memoir documenting the authors' search to understand her own sexual abuse by her father and his extensive abuse of so many others, including her own children years later. Her journey to restore some sense of normalacy to her life involved decades of interviews with family members, employers, and follow up leads suggested by others in the search to uncover and understand the extent of child sexual abuse by her father.

The other book currently on the NY Times Best Seller list is A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard. In 1991 when Jaycee was just eleven years old she was abducted on her way to school and for the next eighteen years she describes how she copped with the physical/mental control by her abductors. Jaycee endured sexual abuse, isolation, boredom, pregnancy and the loss of those milestone events in our lives from elementary school through adulthood.

Both books are excellent reads, especially as the events at Penn State currently unfold.

... another 'trinity'?

Yesterday, I took a break from raking and stacking my leaves to rake and stack my parent's leaves. I tarped, stacked, soaked and tramped down 16 piles of yard leaves into a compact 6x6x6 foot pile of leaves that will rot down into finished compost, which can be used to amend their garden soil.

Of course with the repetitive raking and leaf stacking process I had time to reflect on the three piles that were generated.

I think the captions will illustrate where my thinking wandered off to this time.

...click on the photo and you will obtain a full screen view which may be easier to read.

Once A Pond after more Time

The electrical lines have been run and the rain water drain pipes connecting barn and house run off to the pond have been connected. A pump & scimmer circulate water several hours a day.

A short video looking east across the pond.

The fish spend most of their time at the pond's deep end.

Another video clip from the other side of the pond.

Once A POND of TIME!

Each fall we bring our fish in for the winter. The problem is that some of these fish are getting too large, so I decided to construct a pond where they can over winter as well as add another demension to our landscape.

Yee-WOH!

What a lot of work.

Below is a photo dialogue of the construction to date.

Over the past year I have been redigging and enlarging a smaller pond that did NOT work.

This pond is 40'(l) x 18'(w) x 1.5-4'(d).

The line represents the expected water level. The pond was first cover with a protective underlayer and then a thick, heavy rubber liner that had to be tugged into place.

Field stones were collected to line the pond. The stones will protect the liner from UV light and will provide a biofriendlier pond environment. To date 45 wheel barrow loads of field stones were hand loaded from a hedge row 0.3 miles away. Each load was dumped, rinsed, reloaded and then at the pond - hand placed to create a solid layer of stones.

This was alot of work!

Over 200 ft of 4" drain pipe in the hand dug ditch will channel rain water from the house and barn to the pond. A morning view of the pond.

An evening view.

I love the reflections!

An electrical line, a pump and further landscaping will need to be added to complete the job.

... and add the fish to their new home!

... Picking Up PawPaws, Put'em In a Basket

We have two PawPaw fruit trees (Asimina triloba - http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/) in our back yard and this year we had a bumper crop of these lumpy, fat fruits. A ripe pawpaw has a 'bananna/custard' flavor. We have been eating fresh pawpaws and spitting out the large seeds. Not wanting to let the fruit spoil, I decided this morning to look up a bananna bread receipe and make a couple of loaves of pawpaw bread, substituting the pawpaws for banannas.

It smells and tastes good!

The childhood song below was my first introduction to pawpaws.

Maybe it is familar to you too.

Where, oh where is dear little Susie?
Where, oh where is dear little Susie?
Where, oh where is dear little Susie?
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch!

Common boys, let's go find her.
Common boy, let's go find her.
Common boys, let's go find her.
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch!

Pickin’ up paw-paws, put ‘em in her pocket.
Pickin’ up paw-paws, put ‘em in her pocket.
Pickin’ up paw-paws, put ‘em in her pocket.
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch!

Aging ... the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play...

Jason baked a birthday a chocolate cake for my 65th last weekend.

The cake theme emphasized my never ending interest in composting worms.

Rainy Day Forgery

We've been repairing the log barn eves trough this past week. Transporting the water from the barn eves trough to the wood shed roof required bending the eves trough to diagonally run onto the shed roof. Since we needed a bracket to anchor the eves trough to the shed, Jason cobbled together a forge using scrap plumbing materials, an orphaned air matress pump and the buttom section of our old bread maker from the scrap metal pile. The coal and pieces of iron were both found in one of the abandon dumps in the greater Marbletown area.

Below is a little photo essay of the process.

The unbraced eves trough

The coal

The forge

Putting a bend in the bracket

Hardening the steel

The installed bracket now holds the eves trough in place

... of course it would have been the consumption oriented American thing to go make another purchase at the big box store.