Well, winter came back… again. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take. I know, I know, I don’t have many choices, do I? I would just like to be able to go for a walk without being thigh deep in crunchy snow. It’s the worst kind - granular and crusted over. It seems like you’d be able to walk on it and then you fall through. J thought we should have left with our snowshoes on but I wasn’t (and am still not) convinced. It’s one of those days where you’d hit a spot easily on them and still slide through so you have to pull out your snowshoe too. And, we have tonnes of little trees etc for a snowshoe to get caught in. Extra fun! The hardest for me is that so much of what usually helps just didn’t. I cleaned out the goats, which was ok because I got to it early enough. The chickens and ducks though! Sheesh. The manure was frozen so solid there was no way I was getting it out. I have been procrastinating adding bedding because I know what it’s going to mean if I just add more on top (a much bigger job when it thaws). But, it was so manky in there, I just couldn’t leave it any longer. So, I covered up the frozen, gross mess with new bedding and left, feeling resigned to a tougher job in the thaw.
After that, I definitely still needed to recharge so I thought to take the dogs on a walk which is usually an easy recharge for me. But not this time, not even a bit. Because the snow is so tough to manage right now, I often opt for the logging road. People have been up and down it to get firewood, to dump garbage (sad but true), and for snowmobiling. The snowmobiling, however, is so off putting. I’m sorry if you’re a snowmobiler and you love it. For the people who have chosen to live in the middle of nowhere, the sound of your wailing two stroke engine is far from soothing. After that I had no choice, I threw myself into baking. That helped some but I just feel so stuck right now -and yes, I do understand that might be a metaphor for other things :) . It’s just one of those times where you put a bunch of irons in the fire and see what materializes. It’s just tough to juggle all of them. The good side of that is that I’ve been creating. I have seeds started (though brutally leggy thanks to the low light), I’m getting caught up on spinning (very important given that I have a huge amount of Icelandic likely to arrive here next month), and painting/mixed media art making (here’s a piece in progress:) So all in all, I can’t really complain. I do have good things going on and if the worst is that winter appears to be never ending well… I can manage. |
AuthorI'm a 40-something writer and smallholder living in the wilds of BC with my family, our small herd of Nigerian Dwarf Goats, chickens, ducks, dogs, and cats. Archives
August 2017
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