The New Wood Shed

We've been spending a lot of time around the wood shed that Christopher is building. It's an 8'x12' pole structure he's erected on the house side of the garage. First Chris augered five four foot deep holes into our slag landfill and sank treated 4"x4" poles. Then he pulled nails out of some 1"x12" cedar boards (ouch, splinters!) our neighbor Gilbert gave us and created a roof. On Friday, our buddy Jim Coe will put tar paper and shingles on it (we have five bundles of of leftover shingles that have been sitting under a plastic table cloth for two years). We're not sure how much wall to put up, since we want air
to move around the firewood.

We put some skids on the dirt floor, and we're piling wood on top of that. Before this year we always piled up our wood outside the door and put tarps over it. Then the tarps got snowed on and critters moved into the pile to spend the winter beneath the tarp. I'm so sick of that blue-tarp blue color I can't stand to look at it. Chris thinks we'll be able to fit four cords of wood in the new shed; we've already got about that much lying around on the ground. We use wood to heat the back part of our house. For the rest of the house, we just got $1300 worth of fuel oil put into our tanks. Ouch!

(See also the blog about my book... http://screenporchlit.blogspot.com/)

Squash Monsters

What is up with these winter squash this year? I planted a lot of things in my garden: tomatoes (42 plants), eggplant (lavender, oriental, and miniature), beets, brussels sprouts, beans, parsley, carrots, kale, mustard greens, peppers (jalapeno, hot banana, sweet banana, green, etc.). I planted all that and more (peas, broccoli raab, lettuces), but all I can see is squash plants. The squash plants climb all over all my other plants. They climb up and accost the climbing beans. They weigh down my tomato plants and block the sun. One patch of three squash plants has sent vines out into the neighbor’s lawn, twenty-five feet. Depicted here are Carnival and Buttercup varieties, but I don’t even recognize some of the squash plants in my garden. I swear, I didn’t plant anything like the hard round yellows or the long ridged pale greens or the watermelon shaped ones or the beige pumpkin-shaped ones. When I tear off the squash branches, the green tomatoes look very impressive, so I have hopes that some will survive the onslaught. The worst news is that I’ve cooked three squashes from the garden, two buttercup and one carnival, and there was very little flavor in any of these. Hmmm. What is going on? A white kitten recently disappeared in the neighborhood. And I haven’t heard any frogs or crickets anywhere near the garden. Maybe these squash have strange and sinister plans for the future.

Buying Land Around Here

I spend way too much time looking at maps like these, plat maps of my neighborhood. Looking at plat maps gives me the feeling I’m playing Monopoly, and in Monopoly, of course, I buy all the properties. This morning I went to a State of Michigan auction for tax foreclosed properties. I bid on two adjacent properties and acquired ownership of one. The property I got is a third of an acre, and it butts up against the Lustron property we own. It was once a horse pasture so it is nicely fenced; my niece Kellee, who lives in the Lustron, thought she might like to have goats and honey bees there.

Two complications of note: One person on the other side of the room bid against me at the auction, on both properties, and afterwards I tracked the gal down and took a closer look, and, turned out, it was my brother Tom’s first wife, Chrissy. Shoot, I said, we could have made a deal beforehand if we’d talked. She could have let my purchase of the first parcel go uncontested, saving me $1100 and I could have not contested the second one and saved her $750. Turns out Chrissy’s mother lives on the north side of the old horse pasture (the Lustron is on the south.)
Also, as a side note, Chrissy now races a school bus at Galesburg Speedway; she won her last race and became the first woman to ever win the school bus race there. Her yellow bus is parked on the property she just purchased, and on the side is painted, “Save your drama for your mama.”

The other complication is the garage. There is a garage on the property, a good sized one, that seems as though it should go with the house in front of it—I mean, the driveway leads to the garage, which we now own. When Chris told the house owner (Tim) that we’d bought the property that included the garage, he seemed angry, said he’d wanted to buy it. Probably he didn’t know about the auction. Seems like we ought to sell him the portion of land under the garage, but attached to the garage is the horse barn, which Kellee wants to use for goats. And neither Kellee nor Chris are feeling bad for the guy with no garage; they say it’s ours, we bought it. And yet, we’ve all got to live in the neighborhood.