Friday, November 16, 2018

Almost Thanksgiving already

Man, this year sure has gone by fast!  T-day is next week!  We just have a little bit of snow on the ground in places.  There is a lot of bare ground now.  Sunshine is in the forecast from now until Thursday, when there is a slight chance of a little snow shower.  The forest service road is icy in a couple of places.  I had the studded snow tires put on Wednesday, but when I went down today, the truck still slid a bit in a couple of places, and I was going slowly.  Luckily it's only a couple of short sections that have ice, the rest is pretty bare. 

We got the puddle/pond filled in with gravel!  It is sooo nice to drive through there without having to go through water, which would be there now, if it wasn't filled in.  The neighbors pitched in and helped pay for it, too, which was nice.  Now when we have hipcampers next spring, they can get to our place with no problem, in any kind of vehicle. 

Today I put some plastic up around the top section of the hayshed where the plywood didn't quite reach the top, and also put a couple of tarps over the two openings so when it does snow and blow, the whole shed won't get covered in a layer of snow in there.  That will also keep it from being a wind tunnel in there whenever the wind blows.  My dream is to have a real barn one of these days!   Next project is to rebuild the west wall in the animal part of the shed so there is more room in there for the horse.   Since my husband seems to slide backwards down our driveway every year and take out a portion of the fence, tomorrow we are going to take the whole fence down and move it back behind the line of trees so that doesn't happen any more.  My poor truck is looking pretty beat up. 

My weaving is improving little by little.  For the rest of the month I need to focus on getting 9 Christmas ornament bears needle felted for a couple of orders I have for them.  Then it's back to weaving and spinning cashmere!

My thoughts and prayers go out to the people and animals in the path of the wildfires burning in California.  Seems every year CA either gets mudslides and floods, or more often than not, forest and wild fires!  It makes me think we have to do some more thinning around our place so if/when we get a forest fire out here, we will survive it!  We've done a bunch of thinning, but the trees have grown quite a bit in the 5 years since the first area was thinned, and there are some more trees that need to come out in that area.  Since we are supposed to have a drier, milder winter this year, I think we should be doing that all winter so we are prepared for next summer.  All the surrounding land is thickly forested, so we need to have a good buffer zone around our perimeter to counteract that if we do have a fire up here.

If you would like to see lots of pictures of the goings on around the farm, please check out my Instagram feed @cashmereannie.  I have over 1000 pictures on there now. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans reading this!