Update on Life

There isn't much of anything terribly interesting happening in my life right now. I recently turned 31, having noticed that the adages about time passing more quickly as you get older and how birthdays just don't hold a lot of significance anymore when you get a lot of them under your belt, woohoo I guess. Not that I mind getting older. It has it's gifts as well as it's down-side. The three decades I've spent on this earth have helped me grow, mellowed me out and given me a deeper sense of what really matters. I just hope that I can maintain the grace to keep on growing throughout my life and not be some crusty old bastard who thinks he knows everything and is immune to new ideas in his old age.

I love the Forester but am still acclimating to the way it drives. Handles well like the Impreza but the transmission is geared differently and there isn't as much play in the gears. The Impreza's gearing was spaced a pretty evenly. Every upshift ensured that it would bring the tachometer down 500 rpm. The Forester seems to have random/odd spacing. 1st to 2nd brings it down 500, 2nd to 3rd brings it down 700, 3rd to 4th brings it down 800, 4th to 5th brings it down 1,000.

Life has tossed me another lesson about learning when it is appropriate to keep trying and when one's effort is wasted and it would be better to pack it in and move on to more fruitful pursuits. In short, I've given up on the idea of fixing my house up and reconditioning it. It just needs way too much major work to be worth it and I am sick of living in a hovel which is badly designed and highly inefficient, always having something breaking down. My intention at this point is to live in it and keep it functioning as a home for a couple years or so while I amass money and resources, then I will completely rebuild it from the ground up, including the pouring of a proper floating slab for it to rest on. I am thankful for what I have currently but I don't perceive that this place will meet my needs indefinitely in it's current state. I have a rough draft for a new home design in my head but have yet to put it down on paper. Maybe I'll post it when I get it worked out.

Regardless of having given up on the house refurbishing I don't intend to sell or give up my location as one really can't ask for a better place: on a dead-end road yet close to the main road, babbling brooks on the property, babbling creek nearby, facing south, lots of space, huge conservation easement surrounding my property, central to 3 major towns without being close enough for urban life to disrupt the rural microcosm, clean ground water, decent neighbors, abundant wildlife and mature fruit trees. One really can't complain about having such treasures.

The Divine Quest For A Better Walrus-Flavored Panopticon...

...is apropos of nothing but I thought it amusing and had a compulsive need to use it as the title of this post. There is nothing terribly deep to share right now, just a general life update.

Winter has been wearing on my nerves but it won't be around for much longer. I noticed that my metabolism is slowing down a bit and my 32-waist jeans were getting tight. So I resurrected my exercise regimen: lifting weights and a lot of late-night hikes with Pepper. My jeans fit again, might even go down an inch or two within a month, already feeling better, more positive and more energetic but whenever I am pushing myself hard and gaining muscle/strength, I start coming down with random insomnia. Have lost count of the amount of times I find myself bumbling around the house at 3 a.m. busy but not accomplishing much. Maybe it is the blood-flow to the brain? My head is flooded with ideas for my home/property in the coming warm-weather months.

I'll be using part of my tax return to purchase a sawmill conversion kit for my chainsaw so that I can put some of the large yellow pines on my property to use as lumber for fixing up my home. This will be the year when I wade right into the thick of hardcore demolition on the interior and remodeling. The most tedious part will be in jacking up the back half of it, slowly, carefully so as not to damage the building or have it come apart at the joints where the additions are attached, I'll be needing to purchase several more large bottle jacks to serve in this effort. Maybe easier said than done. While tearing crumbling, old drywall off the back wall of the living room a few months ago I found out that this place actually used to be two separate cabins which had the living room built as a connecting part between the two, having found remnants of exterior tar shingles underneath the drywall. Good Lord, this place was built by crazy people (no, really... there is back-story told by locals to support this). Aside from that I am harvesting as much firewood as possible right now so that I don't have to mess around with it during summer, when I plan on being busy with gardening and home-building concerns.

After several years of self-imposed isolation I'm gradually slipping back into the dating pool. As rough as the last relationship was, it made me stronger, more secure in who I am and I feel like I learned definitively what is and is not right for my life. The last few years have helped me to clear my head and develop a better direction for my life. I've done a lot of self-examination and cut out a lot of what was not good for me or those around me. For those of you not in the know about such things, it's a bit difficult for a gay guy like me to meet others of the same ilk in an area like this but regardless, there seem to be a few seemingly nice, available gents and mutual interest from some of them. We'll see where this leads. Whichever way I go, I'm taking it slow and not diving into anything too quick.

Blog Update

Woke up at 4:05 am, brain started churning & chattering with ideas for the coming year, wouldn't let me settle down enough to get back to sleep. So here I am editing my blog format in the wee hours of the morning, organizing the links in the column to the right, with Pepper sighing and huffing occasionally behind me because he doesn't like it when I pay more attention to the computer than to him. In the interest of keeping this post from becoming another rambling, self-indulgent & introspective jumble, it is time to toss up more pictures.

This is what has taken up a large amount of my time between rain storms and other projects. Down-side: lots of hard work felling, chunking, splitting, hauling & stacking. Up-side: boy did it ever keep me in shape, it was free and saves me a load of money without needing to switch to Geico!

I finally got around to reconditioning, painting & putting new seals in the old Scandia 100 wood stove. I am very proud of how it turned out. Interesting story (at least to me): I found this stove for free on the side of the road almost a decade ago while riding with my parents in their van. It appeared to be a rusty, pitted old chunk of scrap-metal, with the reliefs barely visible under all the corrosion and my folks thought I was being ridiculous because I lived in an apartment with oil heat at the time and would never foreseeably need a wood stove. Regardless, they humored me and my Dad helped me to load it into the van. It moved everywhere with me and went into storage for a while. When I bought the cottage it seemed like it would be far more efficient than the cheaply-made "smoke-dragon" that came with the place. Upon further research, this model of stove is a bit hard to come by because it helped with the demise of a Taiwanese subsidiary of the Franklin Stove Company. Apparently this subsidiary was shut down due to a large lawsuit brought by Jøtul because of trademark/design infringements. This model is a direct knock-off of a Jøtul "Black Bear" 118. Hey, if you are going to copy something, may as well copy the best, right? It is relatively efficient, burning up to six hours with a full load of hardwood and a healthy bed of coals still there after 10 hours if the damper is set correctly. By coincidence, it was also manufactured in the year of my birth.

Lovely reliefs of pastoral/woodland scenes & critters.



I am very proud of how it turned out, being my first stove-overhaul project ever.

Now it heats my whole house quite comfortably and I do 90% of my cooking on it during the colder months. It saves me several thousand dollars a year on propane.



But OH! and OW! Wood stoves are not all wine, roses and romantic firelight. They bite hard when you aren't careful with them! This is what happens when one is attempting to adjust some of the internal buffer plates before checking to see if it is cooled enough to work on with bare hands & arms.




Thanks to my friend Murph for snapping this pic. Because I burn a fair amount of pine, I have to do this 2-3 times a year. *This tempts me to put on a top hat and black coat tails & sing in a Cockney accent: "Prevent a house fire, schtep in toim, prevent a house fire, schtep in toim! Never need a reason, never need a roim, prevent a house fire schtep in toim!" I dare not dance on this particular roof though. (5 bonus points if you get the reference)

While we are on the subject of singing... on the TENTH day of Christmas (or Thanksgiving?) my true love gave to me, in addition to a bunch of livestock & indentured servants performing various acts like milking, leaping, swimming and perching in fruit trees, TEN TURKEYS PECKING, among the blueberry bushes out in my side yard. They have become so commonplace around here, sometimes as little as a couple or as many as five dozen. They are attracted to the bags of shavings I've been spreading around under the trees as mulch. The shavings come from the animal cages at work so they are loaded with various seeds and food pellets.

A fuzzy, uninvited guest who ended up in my bathroom. It was a little surprising to get out of the shower, glancing once and thinking it was just a large moth, then again and realizing what it really was. He made a hell of a high-pitched racket when I trapped him in a coffee can and turned him loose in a tree outside.



Another uninvited house-guest who somehow got inside over the summer. My cats had him (or her?) trapped behind the wood rack so I caught him and hustled him outdoors too. My sister, and now I, have started calling them "Dreaded Angii" ("Dreaded Angus" as the singular form). She says because they remind her of angry little Scottish men when they are scolding you from up in the trees.



And while we're on the subject, this was yet ANOTHER guest who almost became lunch for my cats. I'm not sure if it's a mole, vole or shrew.



My dog loves corn, but only if it's husked, he seems to enjoy stripping the husks, then eating them.  Reasonable substitute for hunting critters I guess.



Asian Praying Mantis hanging out on the windowsill on the front of the bird-room at work.



In my neighbor's tree: made me do a double-take, thinking it was real at first.



An incredibly effective home-brew directional wifi antenna which I made out of a coaxial connector, a length of coaxial cable, a tuna can, a small copper wire antenna, a discarded metal primestar dish I found behind the wood shed when I bought the place, and picture-hanging wire. I am very proud of this project too. Connected to the router, it gives a very strong signal no matter where I am in my yard, connected to my wireless card via a home-made pig-tail adapter, it can pick up networks from a quarter mile down the road.

This is the trailer which came with the property (I didn't live in this one, it was used primarily for storage).

The town had a bug up their arse about it and ordered me to have it removed, so some good friends of mine threw a "Trailer-Tear-Down Party". Here is one pic of the high-jinks which ensued. I'll post a video of the actual act of tipping it over at some point.

So classy! After a long day of demolition, a couple of beers around the camp-fire are in order. The toilet came from the trailer.

Pondiferousness

Ever since I was a preteen one of my dreams has been to have my own natural, earth-bottom pond. It does not help that I've worked in a profession which involves instructing people on how to properly build garden ponds. Ergo, after all these years of living vicariously through other folks' pond projects, one of the selling points of my property was the fact that it had a stream which flows almost year-round through a deep ditch. Stream + ditch = potential pond! All work & no play makes me a dull boy. Like many others I need artistic projects to balance out the drudgery of the practical work which I do to the house & yard, so a pond was a perfect outlet.

Getting right into the project (with thanks to Matt for taking the picture). This is probably the least flattering pic I will ever dare to post here.

The current view from my front kitchen window.

Fresh dam that would do any beaver proud. There was already a small pond about 1/4 the size of this one. I expanded it dramatically by backfilling in the ditch with tightly shovel-compressed layers of rock & brick rubble, heavy clay mud and logs/branches. I created the spillway out of old slate roofing shingles I had laying around and will presently be planting the top and front of it with gracefully arching swamp grasses, irises, wild blueberries and other water-loving marginal plants. Once established, the root systems will penetrate deeply into the structure and help to hold it together after the branches & logs have rotted away within.

It is approximately 700-900 gallons.

There is a saying regarding frogs in professions involving the pond industry. "If you build it, they will come." (I think that phrase was originally used in the movie Field of Dreams.) This fellow is one of a dozen who are frequently found relaxing and watching for bugs from the edge of the water.

The frogs are extremely tame, often allowing people to approach to within two feet of them. While building their pond, I laid down a chimney brick I was using as a line guide for the spillway and when I turned around thirty seconds later this little guy was perched on it.

Putting Down Roots

It has been a little while since I last posted here. My world has been busy. Springtime has brought mud season... many days of standing outside in knee-high "sh*t-kicker" boots .... rooting around with a shovel, trying to muck out ditches which have long since been filled in with silt; working a large chainsaw to fell more trees and make next year's firewood while clearing land for gardening (and hopefully making it less likely that said trees will fall on my house). Did I mention that the power lines to my house no longer consist of separate leads with some sections of bare copper threating to start a fire if the 3" gap between them were ever bridged? Many thanks to one of my roommates (a former lineman) who helped to make this possible.

Some of my friends haven't heard from me for months. I hope they don't think I've forgotten about them. May they understand that I am busy building something for myself and others. It is where I find the most peace.

Some days I stumble around the yard, dragging brush and thinking about the past as I pile it up, piling up the past and putting it away again in the back of my mind. I go for long walks in the woods with my dog, trying to draw a line from there to here. Heh, it's been a wild ride. I didn't even realize it, but I'm standing taller and putting down roots. In the middle of rough times, a long-time dream happened simply by yielding to the gentler path and learning how to put the Ego back in His cage (Ok, so he still reaches out from between the bars and takes swipes at others, I'm not perfect).

My late ex doesn't pop into my head much anymore. He is still there, sometimes smiling and laughing (those are my favorite memories of him), sometimes I see him being angry, hurtful and vindictive. Sometimes I see myself being angry, hurtful and vindictive. Sometimes when I am wandering off the trail and my mind is blank, I look up and see him and/or other people from my past, standing there and looking happy, sometimes showing me where to go. I feel like I could reach out and touch them, but they disappear as fast as they came. The human mind is a strange thing. I wish I understood mine more.

These experiences all came from somewhere, went somewhere, are currently going somewhere. Worrying excessively about the future and replaying the dark parts of the past is counterproductive though it seems like human nature to do so. Still trying to keep the past in perspective, examine it, learn from it, put it away and let it build a solid foundation for what is to come. Easier said than done sometimes.

Have I become calmer and wiser over the years? One likes to think so but is not yet fully convinced. I am now almost 30 and feel like it has been only a week since I was a teenager. Should I start planning to affect a mid-life crisis in a few more years so people don't think I am abnormal? No, I think it is sufficient to keep them convinced that I sit on a bit of controlled madness.

2 More Blessings To Count!

Despite the fact that I live way out in the sticks, high-speed internet is now available thanks to one of my roommates calling up and schmoozing the local cable-company folks. (Have I stated how envious I am of people who have the ability to politely finagle things out of others in such a way that all parties are satisfied with the arrangement!?) This was the same cable company who gave me a pretty firm "no" several times (due to the fact that my house is so far from the main tap). After Matt spoke to them, they came and strung almost a thousand feet of RJ11 cable from the trunk line out on the main road and regardless of the distance, there is excellent signal strength. I don't know how he convinced them, but I am extremely grateful for it.

So that huge ice storm we had back in early January caused ice to build up on the electrical lines and rip them right out of the house. The linemen came by and fixed them but the electric company sent a letter a couple weeks later telling me that they fixed it this time so that I would not be inconvenienced, but they would not fix it again because the lines were unsafe and I needed to update the entrance. This is due to the fact that it is the extremely outdated separate-lead arrangement: 2 separate wires, bare in some spots, no ground wire, strung over numerous poles and weaving through 400 feet of large white pines (another random disconnect waiting to happen once of of those trees decides to fall or drop a large branch, as large white pines are known to do frequently). In the process of having the cable strung, my roommate also looked into getting the electrical lines re-strung to my house and as it turns out, the electric company has been wanting to do this for years and will be covering the cost of the entire arrangement all the way from the road to the meter base! I thought I was going to have to pay over a thousand bucks to buy a pole and have it set in my yard! Now I don't have to kiss my tax return goodbye!

What A Difference A Door Makes....

....when you insulate it... that is... an unused & ill-fitting steel outside door within a crooked frame in one's bedroom. After stapling a couple layers of cardboard & plastic over the entire outer frame I no longer feel a 15-degree difference when walking from the center room into the bedroom and the ever-present chilly breeze blowing across my face when trying to sleep at night... is not there to wake me up anymore. Interestingly enough I slept better last night. Coincidence? :-p

I still feel a bit overwhelmed by the length of the to-do list of things to fix on this old cottage/cabin, but it is slowly becoming more manageable as I triage it in my head and plug away at the most urgent tasks. It also helps that I have an old friend who is extremely handy with all things home-repair-related moving in as my sublet.

WOOO-HOOOOOO!!!!!!

I AM NOW MARRIED!!!.......



........to a 30-year mortgage that is!

That's right folks, I am now officially a home-owner!!!!

I've finally fulfilled my dream of purchasing a fixer-upper cottage in the country and boy do I ever have my work cut out for me! There are some who would consider the place borderline condemnable, but I've seen far worse homes brought back from the brink of disuse and demolition. The elderly couple who lived in it haven't been able to take care of it for a while and I am facing a lot of repairs.

The current challenge is in getting all of the old stuff they didn't want out of the house and distributed where it can be re-used and/or recycled. But not everything they left behind is total junk.... among some of the useful and/or saleable objects they left behind are: an old singer sewing machine table (the kind operated with a foot tredle, I'm definitely keeping it), an old wood xylophone I found behind the dresser, a large electric pottery kiln (selling it), a late 70s (or early 80s?) model trailer mobile home that was left on the property, and a bazillion different useful tools and whatnot. I will be deconstructing the trailer and using the materials to fix up the main house. People keep telling me that I should scrap the main house and fix up the trailer instead... but I like older homes that have character and history in them. Besides, the main house stands to last longer than the trailer if it is repaired properly.

Time to break out the tools, dig in my heels and put down roots where I have been planted! I am excited to say the least!

Pictures of the good and the bad are forthcoming within the next week. I am intending to keep a working photographic chronicle of the fixing-up process my new home!

My apologies to all of those who have written to me and are awaiting replies. I've been extraordinarily busy and my phone line is not turned on yet, thus the only access I have to the internet is when I occasionally have the time to come into cafes or libraries with wifi.

What I See and Do Lately

A beauteous and detailed cross-stitch that my coworker & friend D made over the winter. She chose a wonderful frame and matting color to showcase it as well.

Detailed view of said cross-stitch.

My friend P and I went out and visited the old covered railroad bridges again (previously mentioned in this post). This gives a good perspective on the size of the entrance to the bridge, large enough for an old steam-engine train with a stack to pass through. (P, I blurred your face because I forgot to ask your permission to post your image).

Close-up of the texture of a favia (aka: pineapple or moon) brain coral at work.

Close-up of a sun polyp coral at work.

So I could proceed to whine about my car having broken down... as in TOTALED because the wiring harness decided to have a complete meltdown, fusing to the frame and melting through the floorboard in some spots. It all happened while I was driving and caused a scene that will make an amusing story in a few months (or years), but I am too annoyed to find it humorous right now. It was only a 2001 Ford Focus and it had just 71,000 miles on it. I was good to that car; keeping up on repairs & maintenance. My plan was to run it another couple of years to further enjoy the "cinderella period" (when a car is paid off but not yielding major troubles yet) before needing to trade up to another vehicle, but I guess this was not meant to be. I feel torn because I really want to get another Focus and support Ford (it's one of the few American car companies with fairly progressive, inclusive initiatives in place in it's facilities), but I am also very soured by this experience as well as the Focus' general track record on the Consumer Reports website.

On the GOOD NEWS front it looks like I will be a home owner soon! Nothing further to say yet because the deal is not cinched and the current owners are still waiting to get into another residence, but it is looking more hopeful than it was a few weeks ago!

Alive and Busy

Yeah, I'm still alive and still very busy! I'm in the process of purchasing a home in Cornish, NH... The last place I was looking at in Acworth was in need of too much work and asking price was not worth it after the counter-offers from other interested parties, yet it must have been worth it to someone because of their high counter-offer. C'est la vie! The place I am looking at now has a bit less acreage than I originally wanted and the house is a bit shabby, in need of extensive work, but it is still in fair condition and the selling price is extremely low. The folks currently occupying it are a nice elderly couple who can not live alone for much longer and need to unload the property quickly. I have finally been approved for a mortgage loan and I am still waiting to hear back from the property appraisers. Keeping my fingers crossed (again).

Bouncing Off The Walls

I love my parents and all, but keep in mind that I've been living in my own home for over a decade now, and staying with them (it seems for the duration of winter) is driving me stir-crazy. This is not due to any transgression or shortcoming on their part. I'm simply ridiculously independent and feeling some major withdrawal from not having my own home environment to micromanage and a lack of an easily-available internet connection. The up-side: cheap rent and living expenses for now, which is enabling me to save up for a down payment on a home even faster than before, and I get plenty of exercise hiking all my familiar childhood trails.

There is a popular book that I am in the middle of reading (on the advice of a coworker) - The Saint, The Surfer, and The CEO; a decent read so far, but parts of it feel like a pre-scripted interaction within an Amway presentation, with people planted in the audience. Regardless, there are some interesting theories put into the book and I shouldn't discount it on the basis of it's mechanically contrived feeling. One of the concepts put forth in the book is that within the complexity of life, circumstances and teachers are sent our way repeatedly until we learn what they were sent to teach. I can not truthfully disagree in this case. It has felt for some time like the people and circumstances in my life are there to teach me to stop being so headstrong and independent, learning to be more socially passive and take help and acts of kindness instead of being the one who always gives them. My other lesson seems to be in the areas of patience and tolerance... Being a bit of a social introvert, I have a strong aversion to people who talk a lot while not expressing anything useful or meaningful, suddenly it seems like I am being surrounded with them everywhere I go, babbling non-stop and sometimes trying to engage me in conversation. I have to keep reminding myself that they do it because they want approval and camaraderie, seeking a connection just like any other human being. I just need to step back and patiently allow them to come into their own and hopefully outgrow the tendency toward verbal incontinence.

I was playing around with google maps a few weeks ago and stumbled across a woodland lake I had never seen before...

...and only a stone's throw away from one of my favorite hiking trails. It was in a section of the woods which I thought I had known like the back of my hand while growing up. Obviously I didn't know the woods as well as I thought, so I decided to go out and find it. After traversing the trail to where I figured was the nearest point, I guessed which direction the lake would be in and I bushwhacked through about a half mile of underbrush and ended up right on the shore...

...on further exploration around the entire perimeter of what turned out to be more of a large pond, I found a well-marked ATV trail leading from the other side of the lake onto a neighbor's property about a quarter mile away, but I also found something else interesting...

...on the shore of the pond was an old, decrepit sugaring house that looked like it was on the verge of falling down...

...note the large collecting tank for the sap...

...there were faint traces of an old (and long since grown-in) road leading to the structure and miscellaneous bottles & rusted out equipment lying around. I wish I knew the history of this structure: the conversations that may have taken place, the people who worked in it. If it was a family business... I am hoping to talk with the neighbor who presumably owns this property and ask about it.

More Miscellaneous Pictures:

Weird anthropomorphic stump aquarium ornament at work

My feline children resting comfortably

My former roommate brought 'Spud' for a visit at my workplace and she dressed him up in one of the small dog costumes.



I'll wrap this up with a cutesy-amusing video of 'Ozzy', a Brussels Griffon owned by one of my coworkers, reacting strangely to having winter paw-wear put on him.

Falling Madly In Love

And I've decided that the object of my affection happens to be a she in this case. Don't be too surprised by this fact, but do check out her amenities (which can be viewed here and here.)

She is totally my style: petite, into all the same things that I'm into... existing deep in the woods, living off the land, off the grid lifestyle, probably likes dogs & cats, and wouldn't mind having a large garden some day.

I'm checking out financing/mortgage options tomorrow ;-). Wish me luck!