Careful with that axe, Eugene (Ummagumma)

The little bit of wood that I had left at my rental house has been cut in half and is now small enough to fit in my tiny stove, by the same kindly neighbour to whom I both sold and donated wood in the fall. Good karma – gotta love it.

Though the wood is now short enough to fit inside, the thick chunks don't burn very well in my stove. My Tiny Stove is fussy, I am learning. It is nowhere near as trouble-free as the giant air-tight wood stove I've been using for the past 3 years in my rental house.

And this means that for the first time since probably Girl Guide camp (at the age of 9), I have been using a hatchet to make the thick chunks into little sticks that burn more readily.

I am not particularly skilled with a hatchet. I have a bad shoulder and a tendency to close my eyes. My hand-eye coordination is good in general, but I find it doesn't work when my eyes are closed.

Today, at the suggestion of one of my landmates, I stepped up from the hatchet to the axe. "You can use two hands with the axe," she said "It goes faster."

I grinned sheepishly and replied, "I use two hands with the hatchet." 

But the axe really is less work. And now all of the wood I've brought up from my rental home is in little sticks. 

And my landmates only laughed at me once or twice.

And I don't hold that against them because, well, it was a hatchet job.

Waste Not, Want Not

This has been a hellish winter to try to heat with wood. It's been cold and rainy and snowy and windy and miserable; trying to keep a house warm with a wood stove this winter was a challenging task.

And it's ongoing. With nippy "spring" nights and mornings still happening here, it feels like everyone I talk with around here is lamenting their lack of wood.

I smugly bought 6 cords last fall. So much wood, I thought, that I blithely sold a little bit to a chilly neighbour waiting on a delivery of firewood back in October. When he ran out of wood again a little later, I gave him some more, this time asking no payment – "If I run out in the spring, you can get my back with some of that wood you're getting delivered."

Here it is, spring, he's totally out of wood and I'm almost out!

Fortunately, it's staying far enough above zero that my rented house is in no danger of the pipes freezing.

I've moved to the tiny house, which came with 8 feed bags of wood (mostly lumber scraps and kindling).

Which I have burned.

Plus about 5 feed bags full of lumber scraps that my Pops donated to the cause.

All burned.

And so, today, I found myself crouching down to scavenge at the spot where the wood gets dumped here at my rented house each fall. I filled 3 feed bags with sticks and bits of bark that were deemed too small to bother with in past years as the wood was being stacked. Worthless bits of scrap turned precious, and happily just the right size to fit into my Tiny Stove.

As I gathered them up, I thought of generations past who no doubt gathered up and burned every single morsel of fuel they could. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder twisting hay into sticks to stave off the cold of the Long Winter. And of Dublin waifs following the carts delivering coal and peat in the hopes a piece or two would fall.

And I suspect that I'll be back here to pick up the pieces I deemed too small to bother with today. Let no scrap be wasted.

Cats iz analog: 18 fun things you can do without electricity

I'm currently living in my Wholehearted House without a power system. I still have some battery-powered devices and an off-site, fully-wired office, so I haven't exactly broken up with electricity. One of my jobs is quite high-tech, I love social media and the ability to phone, Skype or Facetime with people who are far away. And I don't think any of that is going to change.

I thought about getting a big solar power generation system set up for my Tiny Home with an inverter and everything so I could use the trailer's existing AC system. But, I think I'm now leaning towards simply reducing my electricity consumption to what I can derive from a small solar panel, which I will hook up to one 12-volt battery (which I can also arrange with friends to periodically recharge on the grid, if the sun continues its cruel abandonment of Nova Scotia). The battery will charge the trailer's existing DC electrical system and hopefully provide enough power for a cellphone signal amplifier and occasional charges for my phone and for a rechargeable lantern.

So far, I've been quite surprised about the extent to which I'm not missing having power. I have a wood stove for heat, a propane stove for cooking and a propane fridge - though frankly at this time of year I don't even have the fridge turned on. I should stick a thermometer in there to see how cold it is, but the fact that the little bit of low-risk food I have in there is maintaining its quality is reassurance enough for now. I have a battery-powered head lamp for manoeuvring when I wake up in the pre-dawn darkness. My water is carried by hand, not pumped. My house is up off the ground, so I don't need a sump pump. I don't have running hot water, so no hot water heater is required.

It's amazing how, with some shared infrastructure, I should be able to access everything I need without having to OWN very much.

And I'm re-discovering that there are very pleasant things to do without electricity. Here are a few:

The might hunter stalks The Red Dot.

1. Play with the cat (Salinger is a frisky under 1-year-old who can spend literally hours being entertained with The Red Dot (laser pointer) or the stick with the pompom on an elastic string)
2. Enjoy the wonders of a MacBook Pro's long-lasting battery for writing blog posts, letters, stories, etc, (without interruptions from the Internet)
3. Play guitar
4. Sing
5. Continually monitor and frequently tend the fire in the wood stove
6. Do yoga
7. Play solitaire, you know, with a deck of cards
8. Do jigsaw puzzles
9. Cuddle, pet, brush and generally fuss over the cat
10. Stare at the fire and think
11. Make love (I'm flying solo these days, but you don't have to)
12. Nap
13. Read
14. Have visits with friends, possibly involving a game of cards, Scrabble or backgammon – or a discussion that is not resolved by recourse to Wikipedia
15. Make lists
16. Make things (i.e.: crochet, knit, sew by hand, hook rugs)
17. Look for the cat (I have been stunned to find that Salinger can successfully hide in 232 square feet! He has foxed me at least twice already, squeezing in to spaces I never dreamed he could fit into.)
18. Sleep

If all of these things sound incredibly relaxing that's because they are. I've always loved Earth Hour and now there are a whole lot more of them in my life.

Do you ever deliberately take a break from electricity? What do you do when the power goes out? What powered activities are stressing you out? What powered activities do you think you could or couldn't give up? I'm curious to know, so please comment below.

Tiny Home Living: The first few days...

The first few days in Wholehearted House have been fully alive and wholehearted – and not exactly easy.

Transitions are often hard. Humans don't usually take kindly to change. And this change has been accompanied by more than a few tears.
And by rain.
Rain.
Rain.
More rain.
Followed by sleet mixed with snow.
Followed by rain.
And this morning, snow.

The wintry Tiny Home in April.

Four days of it, going on five. Heavy and miserable. The ground is sodden, the brook swollen.

If this were a novel, the weather could be a device to show my grief for my recently-ended relationship, or to show the washing away of my old life as I make a clean slate of it, and then the eventual freezing of my heart. But this is not a novel. This is real life. And although I feel grief and also feel parts of my old life washing away, the rain has just been rain: a cold, wet, windy, incessant, annoying pain in the ass. And my heart is not even the tiniest bit cold or frozen.

Despite the rain, I am here and Salinger is here and we are finding ourselves pretty well-suited, overall. Sure, Sal hid under the fridge with all the wires for the first day, but that's pretty typical cat behaviour. I've since closed that area off with cardboard and tape (which is pretty typical human behaviour).

I've shed a few tears and felt rather fragile. I have let myself have those feelings and they are passing off. 

And I've received countless kindnesses: hugs, visits and a cooked supper with cider and cookies from my various landmates. My massage therapist (also a good friend) called me up when I completely forgot about my massage on Sunday morning, rescheduled it for an hour later and let me cry on her shoulder when I got there. I've had many Facebook messages and countless offers of places to have hot showers. I live in a profoundly embracing, generous neighbourhood and feel surrounded by good and caring friends.

And, I have the fortune of being able to make my move slowly. Right now, it's pretty minimal in here. I have my bed, two comfy chairs and 6 folding chairs in the Tiny House. I have a few bits of food, my cutlery, some knives and a cutting board, some tea towels and a set of fire irons.

I have my old place until May 31 so I have lots of time to continue to use it as an office and as a place to recharge my laptop and phone and to weed out all of my things. One of my big typesetting projects got put to bed a couple of days ago, so I will have more time to invest in my move. I am looking forward to embracing this life more and more fully. And always with a whole heart.

The Move: Part 5 (In which I actually start to move my stuff and myself, but it's far from over...)

We had a wicked spring storm yesterday in Nova Scotia. Howling winds and quite a lot of snow – hard to say exactly how much as the earth was scoured bare in places with 2-foot-high drifts in others.

I'm preparing to move my living quarters to Wholehearted House this weekend – for 2 reasons

1. My cat is coming
2. I have firewood at the Tiny House and I am almost out of wood at the big, old house where I have been renting

My cat
Yes, I have a cat. He arrived as a stray last fall at the home of a dear friend who felt sorry for the poor, half-starved kitty, but knew he couldn't afford to keep two cats.

Well, I'm a cat person who's been a long time without a cat. And, this cat was orange. I have never had an orange kitty - black cats, brown tabbies and a white cat with grey splotches - I've always wanted an orange one.

I can't have a cat where I rent because my landlord is allergic, so my friend agreed to foster this little waif, with me covering food, litter and vet expenses. Knowing I had a cat to house was one of the things that motivated me to find a home of my own.

I named my cat Salinger, after the great J.D. and I've had lots of visits to bond with the little fellow. He's gone from a tiny mite to a strapping man-cat in the past 6 months. He's been neutered and wormed and vaccinated. He's cuddly and snugly and smart - although with an unfortunate tendency to try to eat things he oughtn't. Curiosity has almost killed this cat a couple of times.

Now, my friend has to move next week and rather than make Salinger move twice, I've decided to step up my move into the tiny house. 

I got my bed and armchair up there on Monday ahead of the storm and I'll be going to pick Salinger up from his foster-poppa on Saturday and Sal and I will move in to Wholehearted House together. 

We hope the kind friend who saved Salinger's life will be able to come visit soon.

Woodpile Wisdom: 6 things I learned about woodpiles this winter

This was the first winter that I was in charge of my own woodpile. With my housemate turned into a mostly absentee landlord, ordering, stacking and burning the wood was down to me.

"Get six cords," my housemate told me.

"Six?" I thought. "Isn't that a lot?" And when it arrived, I thought it even louder: "SIX?!?! That's a lot of wood! I'll never burn all that! Surely we didn't burn six cords last winter!"

But I gamely stacked it all, with a little help from my friends.

The woodpile in all its glory last September/October.

Then I covered it with plastic sheeting and felt smugly ready for winter. 

What followed was the hardest, snowiest, coldest winter I had seen since I moved home in 2010 (which admittedly, is not a very long time – but it's also been the hardest, snowiest, coldest winter that people who have been here all along have seen since the early 90s).

Here is the woodpile now:

The ravaged March woodpile.

I learned many things about woodpiles this winter. Here is some of my accrued wisdom. I hope you will find it helpful.

1. Always shovel the snow away from your woodpile. It may seem like a lot of work, but it's worth it. Also, if your plastic sheeting reaches the ground, keep it free of snow or it will freeze to the ground and trap your wood.
2. You can't burn wood that is frozen into the ground. (See point #1)
3. If you are covering the pile with plastic sheeting or a tarp, do not leave gaps between the stacks, at least not at the top of the stacks. Ventilation is all well and good, but at the top of the pile, gaps must be bridged by the plastic/tarp and those bridges trap will trap snow, which will melt into water, that will turn to ice. It weighs the plastic down into the gaps, pulling the plastic off of the top of the pile from the edges in. 
4. Make your woodpile small enough that you can reach to clean snow off of the top. By the time I realized my well-ventilated pile was trapping snow and losing plastic coverage, there wasn't much I could do about it because my arms were too short to clear the centre of the pile.
5. Build strategically to shed snow – like a pyramid, high in the centre and sloping down to the outsides. 
6. Always get more than you think you need! With the bitterly cold temperatures this winter, I have been very glad to have all 6 of those cords! Thanks for the good advice, roomie!

Today, the temperature hit a high of +4 and I gladly went out and tried to sort out the woodpile. Some of it is still frozen to the ground, but I freed the trapped plastic sheeting and covered the side of the pile that was bare in the picture above. A couple of sunny days and it should all be dry and good to go. And that's good, because I'm expecting a few more chilly days before spring.

Body Wisdom (Worktoomuch? Well, you'd better cut down a little then)

Body Wisdom

I have some challenges in the area of body wisdom. It's never really been a strong suit.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to climb higher, run faster, eat more sugar and stay awake later than was good for me.

Once I became an adult, the main things I tended to overdo were food, booze and work.

Getting older took care of overdoing the booze (well, mostly anyway), the food is a work in progress (more on that later) and the last thing to come to the table is work.

Worktoomuch? Well, you better cut down a little then.

It's easy for me to overdo working. For one thing, they pay me to work and just like anyone else, I need money to survive. For another thing, work sits in positive semantic space in our culture. When I work hard, I'm rewarded with approval as well as money. I once told a boss, "I come for the paycheque, but I stay for the praise". And finally, as a freelancer, there is a temptation to "Never Say No". If you say no, you might not be asked the next time.

I do a lot of digital typesetting of financial reports. And that means I have a "busy season". A lot of companies have their year-end on December 31 and therefore, a regulatory deadline to file their annual report by March 31. Which means that February and March can be very, very busy months for me.

Sometimes I work 10-, 12-, 14-, 17-hour days for 40 or 50 days in a row. I don't work much the rest of the year and so, it seems like a fair trade.

This year, though, my body is telling me working that much is not good idea.

Overloaded!

A few weeks ago, I had a rough couple of weeks personally. Someone very close to me had a life-threatening illness (much better now, thank you) and the relationship I had been in for the past two-and-a-half years broke up.

That, in combination with 10- and 14-hour work days, using the trackpad on my laptop with my (dominant) left hand, was enough to make all of the muscles in my left shoulder seize up.

I didn't even notice at first. (See above where I say body wisdom is not one of my strong suits). It wasn't until I had a shower and the water felt funny on my left shoulder that I realized that all of the skin on that shoulder was numb.

It's the strangest feeling and one that I've never had before.

Treatment

I hoped it would just go away on its own. I gave it a couple of days, went for an already-scheduled massage, but instead of getting better, it got worse, with the numbness radiating down my left arm into my hand. I did a little Google diagnosis (adding a new word to my vocabulary: Parasthesia) and briefly flirted with the idea that this was a sign of MS or a severe anxiety disorder, before deciding that the simplest answer was probably the most likely: stress > tight muscles > pinched nerve > numbness.

I booked an appointment with my osteopath.

The osteopathy treatment helped, though the prediction that the numbness would go away in "a few days" has not come true. I'm due to go back for another osteo appointment tomorrow. In the meantime, the numbness has been joined by a "nerve itch" in my left earlobe and on the left side of my neck. It's a horrible sensation, an itch that is INSIDE the tissues, so that scratching does not offer any relief.

Slowing down

Last week, I turned down 4 new jobs. A couple of years ago, I would have taken at least some of them and added a few hours on to my already-long days. The trouble is that I've already committed to typesetting about 500 pages in the next three weeks. Along with doing work as needed for my non-financial clients.

How will I get through this?

• I bought a mouse so I can use my right hand for more tasks and rest my left
• Work at my awesome ergonomic desk (Because it was so cold upstairs, I had been working downstairs by the woodstove,with my arm at an unhealthy angle)
• Take frequent breaks
• Put heat on my shoulder several times a day
• Continue going for massage and osteopathy as often as possible/necessary
• Try to get more sleep (not always easy with that nerve itch which woke me up at 2:30 this morning *shudder*)
• Try to stay positive – know that this will heal given time and the end of the "Annual Report Season"
• Start making plans now to avoid this sort of injury next year (with my expenses decreasing thanks to my new tiny home, I should be able to work less)