Rambling

This morning arrived with a beautiful sunrise. The temperature was 10C, but the thermal mass of the landscape has not yet cooled, making for a very pleasant morning coffee on the back porch.

This morning Attila picked more jalapeño peppers, diced them with some onion, which I transformed into a batch of canned Cowboy Candy. When I first canned Cowboy Candy I thought Attila would like it, he does not. I thought I would not like it, I do. I use the brine to make my salad dressing, and the peppers and onions on my pizza.

No brine from our canned goods goes to waste. Attila uses pickled pepper juice, and pickle juice, to make his salad dressing… and he has been known to just drink it.

I continue to enjoy our garden tomatoes every morning in a toasted tomato and onion sandwich. As long as the beefsteak and Sicilian saucer tomatoes continue to come in from the garden, I will be enjoying these sandwiches at least once a day. Today it will be twice, as Attila has requested bacon and tomato sandwiches for supper. We have restricted ourselves to eating processed meats no more than once a month, and since we didn’t have any in August, Attila wants to enjoy two meals of toasted bacon and tomato sandwiches in September.

The garden harvest usually generates one canning session every day or two, small batches, but they add up over time. The steam canner makes small batch canning a breeze. We were concerned that we were running out of jars, but Attila rummaged through the pantry in the basement and found two empty cases of 500 ml jars, yay! We still have one more binge canning project on our list, which is applesauce. We just might have to purchase more jars this year, we do every year it seems. So far we have only lost one jar, the rim cracked, not bad, one in hundreds of jars.

Attila continues to work on touching up the paint on the exterior siding. He is about a third of the way across the front of the house. The paint is peeling where there are layers of old paint. This touch up allows the paint to be applied to the exposed wood, where the underlying old paint has peeled. There has been no peeling where the our new paint was applied to raw wood, many years ago.

The other project Attila is tackling is to split all the wood from our two felled ash trees. It has been hot in the sun the past few months, which slows that project down, but he has made good progress, and I am optimistic that he will get all the logs split and piled before the snow flies. We are keeping all the split wood for our wood stove, which we will only use if the power goes down in the winter time, or if the temperature drops so low that the electric furnace kicks in. The electric furnace is a power hog, the installer called it “the toaster”. Our electricity consumption more than doubles when it is engaged. So if it gets cold enough to need the electric furnace, we will be supplementing our heating with the wood stove.

We have been renovating and updating the infrastructure of this house since 2010. The last of those big and expensive projects are rising to the top of our to do list. The roof will need to be stripped of its layers of shingles, and a metal roof installed. The back porch will need to be extended, the decking and the back door replaced, and eventually the exterior walls will need to be insulated. The current decking on the back porch consists of short pieces of hardwood flooring, cobbled together. We deemed this relatively unsafe, and the first year after purchasing the property, we installed sheets of plywood over the hardwood planks. It is very sturdy now, but not exactly aesthetically pleasing. There were no railings on the back porch, so we used the cast iron railings from the front porch. The front porch was solid concrete and was removed around 2012, when we dug up the perimeter of the basement to install drainage tile and waterproof the concrete blocks.

If we have a long and beautiful autumn, Attila might be able to squeeze in another project, replacing the back door. This is the last area where the winter wind whistles through the cracks and crannies. Time will tell.

Just to note that yesterday Attila and I bumped into a video from Toronto, that featured one of the kindest men on the planet. He created a non-profit company, that isn’t geared toward providing employment for friends and family, or for personal attention, or even for long term investment. He hopes what he is doing becomes redundant. Check him out at tinytinyhomes.ca. He is a shining star of his generation.

Here is a link to the video about his project.

Worldly

Weather

Partly Cloudy
21°C
Date: 11:00 AM EDT Tuesday 3 September 2024
Condition: Partly Cloudy
Pressure: 102.8 kPa
Tendency: Rising
Temperature: 20.6°C
Dew point: 12.7°C
Humidity: 61%
Wind: WSW 14 km/h
Humidex: 23
Visibility: 24 km

Quote

“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.”
Annie Lennox
1954 –