January 19, 2007
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Getting Stuff Done
The wood seller didn’t call Wednesday night as his wife had promised. His daughter called Thursday morning. I ordered two cords of green birch and dry spruce — which means that they are cutting live birch trees or salvaging those that have been bulldozed for building sites, and are salvaging beetle-killed spruce trees. Our first cord has been promised for Jan. 24, the second one around the end of the month.
Doug thinks we have enough wood to last, but none of it is easily accessible and some is too long for the stove. He will have to dig around in the snow to find stray pieces from the edges of the woodpile. If we use all that up, there are some downed trees he can cut up with the bow saw.
The wood seller won’t take a check or credit card, so I had to go to the credit union and withdraw cash. There was nothing unexpected in that. Wherever possible, people around here deal in cash. I had books to return to the library anyway, have been consuming them at a rate of more than one a day, so Doug and I went to Willow yesterday.
We loaded the hatch with jugs and buckets, and stopped at the spring on the way back. Heavy traffic there, someone getting water when we pulled up, someone else with just one jug who slipped in and filled hers while Doug was carrying two of ours up the trail, and someone else who was waiting when we pulled away.
I got a picture of Flat Maddie at the waterhole. I had captured one at Kashwitna Lake, even though overcast sky spoiled the view of Mount McKinley. After the water stop, we stopped at the local camper park and got her picture with a flat moose. Maddie wanted an Alaskan adventure, but it wasn’t as interesting as it might have been at another time of year or if the weather had been sunnier this month.
Doug did all the work on the water run. I’m still feeling shaky and weak, but other that and the hives, which are getting better, I’m feeling well. The hives were the last straw for me, motivating me to clean up my diet and cut out the allergenic-addictive crap I’d been eating. Actually, the thing that caused the hives was a new allergy for me: sage. It was in the stuffing for our Christmas turkey, which I shouldn’t have eaten anyway because it was made from wheat bread. To add to the effect of that, when the stuffing was gone I was sprinkling sage on my warmed-over turkey meals. I hadn’t had hives since I was a kid, when it was oranges that caused them. Oh, well….
Happy, happy, joy, joy.
Comments (3)
ah day the to day stuff…. thats what adventures are made of
What is a flat Moose?
It must be tough to have to deal with so many diet and allergy issues… and to be allergic to sage, thats a drag, I love sage. I grow a Pinapple sage on my window sill that I eat often with so many things,, Yummy.
I hope you have a good weekend and that you are feeling better and back to yourself soon.
i remember those days well of going to the spring and getting water..filling jugs and containers and the 200 gal tank for the critters. We had a similar situation in what you described with people coming and going and waiting… if we were lucky, we would get there when someone had a large amount to get was done and we were done before too many interruptions. Our spring was a social gathering of the area of the regular folks…
i also remember those days of hunting for firewood when we got low or almost out… going out in the woods to chain up trees and drag them back.. or collecting smaller ones that were no problem to cut up but they burned way too fast… i remember the feet of snow to uncover those beauties that would keep us warm… and the frozen fingers and toes when we got done cutting… no matter how much we plan and cut for the heat, we would run dangerously low at times… and then the big storms rolled in! lol…
Glad you are feeling a bit better…sorry about the new allergy! that really is a bummer… maybe too much over a long period of time? Maybe after the cleansing you will be able to handle occassional use of sage…
Try to stay warm!
^^^ said everything I was going to.. But I have good memories of the water hole.. an artesian spring that gave the purest water for miles around… There were times when it was very social meeting neighbors that I didn’t even know about..
Stay warm sweetie..
Dance On!