Just when I'd put the mittens away...

You can always tell when it's the height of spring in Gambier. Today, for instance: the daffodils have been up for a week and are in full glorious bloom in the woods. The Munchkin's climber and slide are out in the yard, and play-sand has made its way onto the shopping list. The crocuses are long gone, with only their little variegated leaves as a clue to where they once were. The hyacinths are up, and the ones on the south side of the house have bloomed. I've hung my clothesline. The white star magnolia is in bloom, and the pink is ready to go at any moment.

It is 29F outside.

This cold snap should ease up soon, but I've heard calls for freezes over the weekend, too, so every evening I've been going out and giving the snap pea vines a little insulation in the form of, believe it or not, packing material. My in-laws sent the Munchkin some Winnie-the-Pooh M&Ms for his Easter basket, and the company they bought them from used a fairly ludicrous volume of bubble wrap and one of those large inflatable pads to line the box. Honestly, you'd think they were sending a Ming vase.

Whatever the environmental headache it causes in the making, this stuff makes awesome insulation for the peas. Each vine got a bit of bubble wrap, then was covered with either the box or the big inflat-a-thingy. This was especially handy, since some of the older vines had already started climbing up the lace curtain I'm using as a makeshift trellis.

I didn't get out to cover the peas that first night (34, they said. Feh), and one of the vines looks to already have some damage, but hopefully nothing lethal. The leeks aren't out of the ground yet, so I think they should still be fine, and I am sure the watercress can handle the cold.

Indoors, there are four parsley sprouts up, and three fresno chiles. I was planning on starting the cucumbers and king pao hybrid peppers this week, but they may end up taking a back seat to thesis-writing, house-cleaning, and prepping for the Munchkin's birthday. Still, I'm just itching for this last cold spell to end, so I can open the house windows, air out the place, and get back out into the garden for longer than a few minutes at a time.

One thousand words

I have been working on the same blog post for nearly two weeks now. Over the past few months, I have started down some sort of pseudo-homesteading path, and was feeling the need to articulate why I feel compelled to do so. Words don't seem to be adequate to explain it, though. One of my favorite homesteading bloggers, Jenna Wogenrich, summed it up by saying "It’s the honesty of knowing what I do everyday directly helps keep me alive." That doesn't quite work for me, since (given our local zoning laws) I am unlikely to start raising livestock any time soon, and the hot peppers and Brussels sprouts I'm planning for the garden are hardly what you'd call staples. Still, in that statement she gets to the immediacy of baking your own bread, growing your own veggies, being connected to the sources of your food, living a more self-sufficient - and yet, oddly, more connected - life. In her case that includes raising her own chickens; in mine, it involves a growing friendship with the farmers who raise the chickens, cows, and lambs we eat.

Food is obviously a big part of this impulse, but it isn't the whole thing. Professionally (if you can call "perpetual grad student" a profession), I pretty much live inside my own head. In our classes, we have endless debates about the finest semantic points, and what seem to be simple declarative sentences get dissected and analyzed until they have lost all meaning. There are days when this sort of work is fun, when the academic exercises feel like tricky mystery plots to solve. Then there are other times, when I feel like, if I don't get out of my brain and do something constructive, I'll explode. Writing filled that purpose for a while, and might yet again, but right now it's too tied up with all that theory. I swear I used to be able to write, but grad school has made it a paralyzing process. The homesteader's life, where the product of your work is concrete, practical, and immediately tangible, is becoming a much-needed respite from that, and one which may very well allow me to continue all that theorizing without going stark staring mad.

Which is all to say that, suddenly, it seems a little pointless to spend so much time attempting to intellectualize what is, at it's core, not an intellectual thing. Instead, I think this sums it up nicely: Who knows - maybe thinking in terms of pictures rather than words will help me keep this site from becoming a complete ghost town.

Sacrifices for the cause

I have sustained a clothesline-related injury.

When we moved into our house, there were two rusty t-posts for a clothesline in our side yard. They were pretty damned ugly, so when we needed to regrade the ground around the house, and that necessitated digging up one of them, I was thrilled to bits. Joe and I dragged the damn thing (which was incredibly heavy - the concrete that had been holding it in the ground was still attached) out to the barn, and as far as I know it is still there lo these many years later, waiting for us to come up with some sort of more permanent disposal solution.

The second post was a bit more problematic. It is flanked by Rose of Sharon, and to dig it up would almost undoubtedly involve killing them. Plus, we'd have to re-enact the whole cross-yard drag, and as we are now both 7 years older than we were the first time, neither Joe nor I are exactly eager to do so. Instead, I had planned to camouflage it, using it as a trellis of sorts for clematis or another flowering vine.

Meanwhile, the Munchkin produces piles of dirty diapers each week, and having a clothesline has started looking pretty good, from both a green-living and a cost-cutting point of view. The website Flex Your Power writes:

Clothes dryers are typically one of the most expensive home appliances to operate, accounting for about 6% of total electricity usage. Unlike other appliances, clothes dryers don't vary much from model to model in the amount of energy used and are not required to display EnergyGuide labels. However, that doesn't mean that the amount of energy used by clothes dryers isn't important.

It typically costs 30 to 40 cents to dry a load of laundry in an electric dryer and approximately 15 to 20 cents in a gas dryer.

I'd like to hook up a meter so I could get a more specific accounting of how much energy our dryer uses, but that's a starting point at least.

So, off to GR Smith, our fantastic local hardware store. The supply list was as follows:

100' clothesline	$6.99
2 pulleys	$8.98
clothespins	$3.79
hook to hang the line from our house's siding	$6.99
total	$26.75

Not bad, right?

This is where things start to go haywire.

First, I discover that the eye hooks on the existing post are closed too tightly and rusted in place, so I cannot hook the pulley over it. OK, no biggie - I will just look the clothesline over the horizontal pipe for now, and pick up a new bolt next time I am out. I loop the clothesline over the pipe, and pull the clothesline across to the house. I attach the siding hook, hang the second pulley off it, and then pull the line taut and knot it. It is a thing of beauty, my clothesline.

I run inside to get the load of sheets I just washed. The Munchkin is happily riding on my back this whole time, and seems rather interested in the proceedings. I hang the four pillowcases on the line. A little sag, but nothing major. Then I hang the first sheet.

Well crap.

The entire clothesline has now sagged halfway down to the ground. Each subsequent sheet makes matters worse. No worries, I think - I can just tighten the line to take up some of the slack. I pull on the line, planning to re-knot it.

As the Munchkin would say, "POP"

The strip of siding holding the hook pops out in rather dramatic fashion, causing the hook (which I am kinda-sorta holding) to go flying off into the grass, gouging the living daylights out of my finger, although I do not notice it yet.

The problem is clear. Although those siding hooks are fantastic at holding things like plants - things that only pull down. The problem with a clothesline is that it also pulls out. I clearly need to screw a hook into the side of the house. It is the only way to hold the weight of the line. Also, the "line tightener" gadget that I had passed up the first time is looking like a good investment, since tugging and re-tying is pretty tricky with a clothesline over your head. A prop for the middle of the line also looks like a pretty good idea, since we're talking about almost 50' of line, and some sag is inevitable.

So, I gather the sheets and take them back inside, before heading back to the hardware store. This is when I notice my finger. Or, rather, I notice the blood that seems to be getting all over my nice clean damp sheets. Muttering to myself, I shove them in the laundry and run them through a quick cold wash while I head back to Smith's.

On the second trip, I buy:

wall screw, rated for 120'	$1.79
bolt hook for post	$.99
line tightener	$3.49
prop (for middle of line)	$7.99
total	$14.26

The Munchkin dozed off en route to the store, and stayed out throughout the trip, so after getting him into bed, I set out to complete the job. The sheets (bloodstain-free) are presently blowing in the breeze. I'll be able to re-use the siding hooks, so in total the clothesline cost me $34.02+tax, two trips to the store, a bandaid, a little blood, and an extra washer cycle. Nonetheless, it should pay for itself in roughly 120 uses. Even if I only use it for sheets and diapers, it'll take less than a year.