Wind, power, and wood oven class.

Another long night of heavy winds which seems to be more and more common. We get a lot of good cover from our trees, but that doesn't protect power lines elsewhere. We lost power for around eight hours last night which is very inconvenient. Fortunately other than needing to throw out most of what is in the fridge, it's just that, an inconvenience. Sadly part of that inconvenience is not having our white noise machine that helps the kid sleep, so we had a long night.

Before that though, I went to an interesting class last night at the River Valley Market Co-Op that I'd intended to talk about today, so that's going to be below the cut.

Windy Spring

High winds aren't new to our area, in fact they're fairly common up in the hills. What is new to us is how much they're affecting us. I know our sample size is only 5 years, but in that time usually the pine forest around us has made a big difference in protecting us from bad winds. Lately the winds have been causing a lot of problems, and today illustrated some of them very well. The Lady of the House woke up last night wondering what the noise was, and eventually I made sure it really was just the wind, not a fire. This morning first thing that greeted me was the results of that wind storm, as you can see above.

Bracing for cold amid snow.

It's continued snowing on and off for the past few days. The kid and the dog love it, the rest of us, not so thrilled. The up side about the snow is that if it's snowing it's not bitter cold. That's going to be changing shortly. We're expecting temperatures to drop into single digits over the weekend. Fortunately we're going to be home, but I'm concerned about the animals that are outside with highs in the singles, and lows in the negative double digits.

Confusion in the dark.

This morning was interesting. I'm feeling more than a bit under the weather physically. It doesn't help that it's the Solstice so it was the longest night of the year, and it's raining, and cold. Anyhow, it comes down to I wasn't entirely with it this morning when I went out to do farm chores. As I'm taking care of the rabbits in the hutches in the woods I'm hearing turkey contact calls, and I'm confused. No matter how much I look around I can't see the turkey. After a moment of not putting two and two together, I look up. It's a little easier to see than in the photo, but dead center of the frame there's a turkey. Well, I guess the turkeys have changed their roosting spot.

Down a chicken due to our previous visitor.

Remember our not so benign visitor that we were concerned about, well, an overly adventurous chicken experienced why we were worried about it the hard way from what we can tell. On the up side we only lost one of the chickens which is a lot better than our previous predator experience where all chickens died at once. That said, this is most certainly not the end of the season of predators being a major threat. In fact, as breeding or birthing season comes up for the various predators in the area the concerns about depredation are going to increase not decrease. After all, foxes, owls, and weasels do have babies to feed. To that end we're going to just need to try to keep the chickens out of the woods. In this case a couple chickens decided to fly out of their run and explore in the snow. I wonder if they were startled out of the run given that there's nothing out there that's really worth going out to get at. Especially not where I found the one live, and one dead chicken.