I Like It a Little Less

For breakfast, I fried a pork chop and scrambled some eggs. Diced a few potatoes, dropped them into hot duck fat and left them there until they crisped up nice. Kimchi. I cut the chop four ways, served everything into the wooden burl bowls Penny carved a while back. Stuck one of her wooden spoons into each bowl, set them around the table. We eat most of our meals out of those bowls now. We joke that when we move to the new land, we’re not taking any plates. Just those bowls. Just those spoons. Actually, we might not be joking.

It’s not true that I’d rip your throat out for a green salad. You knew that, right? For one, it wouldn’t be very nice of me. For another, it’s real hard eating salad with a wooden spoon, though I guess maybe I should start practicing. For yet another, I got my kimchi, my lacto-fermented green beans, my hateful beets, all those potatoes. I got applesauce and blueberries and currants and even a couple more bags of frozen peas. Dried kale, dried celery leaves, dried chanterelles, dried onions. Garlic. Today we start drying off Pip in preparation for late May freshening, so no fresh milk for a good while. But that’s ok: We froze something like 50-quarts of cream. We’ll drink that. No one’s suffering, here. We’ve got our wooden bowls and our wooden spoons and wood for the fire and almost more food than we know what to do with.

For the first time ever, I deleted a comment. It didn’t add anything to the conversation; it was just name-calling, one commenter to another. Unnecessary. I think it’s great that I have readers who don’t always see eye-to-eye with me or with one another. Actually, I think it’s a huge compliment to us all. We talk about polarizing issues, in a polarized world, in a medium that encourages polarization. And yet I rarely see unpleasantries. Maybe we’re not always annihilating one another with kindness, but we’re doing pretty good. Let’s keep it up.

This space is probably going to slow down a bit in the coming months. We have a house to build. A barn. Some sort of workshop. We’ve done it before, we know what to expect, although part of what we expect is the unexpected, the “known unknowns” inherent to any project of this scope. They’ve been getting me up early, all those known unknowns. I sleep like a stone until 4:30 or so, then rise with my head full of uncertainty. I start the fires, drink my coffee, dice the morning potatoes, wait for first light so I can do chores.

It will be good to actually start working, but first we need the snow to melt and the frost to come out of the ground. We are still collecting materials – last night, I crammed 400-square feet of salvaged maple flooring into the poor Subaru. We still need a front door, but that’s about it. I am keeping careful track of expenses, and I will be happy to share those, if anyone’s interested. We have about $30k to spend, maybe $35k if we stretch it a bit. We can’t really go over budget. Well, we can, but then we’d be in debt. So as far as we’re concerned, we can’t. Thus far, the only expense that’s looking as if it will be greater than anticipated is our lumber budget; I’d hoped to cut and saw logs all winter, but the snow pack has made this unfeasible. So we’ll be buying in more lumber than we’d like. Fortunately, lumber’s pretty cheap. Fortunately, I came in low on our window budget, even if I had to drive to western Massachusetts twice to retrieve used units. Even if all the windows don’t quite match. I came in low on the chimney budget, too, got the flooring for less than I’d figured. But things are going to come up. I know that all too well.

Penny says if too many things come up, we’ll just pitch a wall tent and live in that for the winter. The boys like that idea very much. I like it a little less.