Wind, Cold, Storage Places, and… Antics

This week Dave gave us a bit of an assignment.  Childhood Antics.  With wind storms pressing and a forecast of actual cold weather within the week, the Procrastinator General had no time to monkey around with scanning photos of when the girls were little and silly, they’re still silly but have technically left childhood.  

All week, while dealing with getting all the outside work to a spot where we could run inside and batten down the hatches, I thought of the assignment but pretty much had resigned myself to a lame offering or just a plain pass on this week’s challenge.  Oh, I forgot, I won last week.  I forgot to come and tell you Clever Reader, but then I usually tell in a new post and since I … oh never mind, its getting windy again and Dirt just called to see how we were, as his school just lost power again.  So on with today’s business while I’ve got internet.

See the damage from this week’s wind storm!  No, really we didn’t have much damage up around the house, past storms and hot house needs have pretty much seen to it that we don’t get too much excitement in the compound area.   But we are all waiting for the big cottonwood I call Burt’s tree to go down and boy that will be some news! 

And since I have all these to put away…

And the hot house really needs to be emptied, like a month ago…

I haven’t strayed too far a field to where I could find some real evidence of the wind storm.  And unlike our city cousins, we did not lose power.   This time.  So nose to grindstone and an assignment plauging my brain.

We’ve been preping, as in insulating, a new spot, an old shed actually,  for plant and cucurbit (squash and pumpkin) storage.  I’ll try and give you the short story version.   Just to let you know Clever Reader, I am typing to the background music of Bet’s new Trans-Siberian Orchestra cd, that and the visual out the window of leaves whipping around outside and trees across the pond touching their toes is making me write frantically!  Anywho where was I, oh yeah…

We’ve run out of room in the well house where we store most of our root cellar sort of stuff, heck we ran out of room in there ages ago.   The last few places we have tried to overwinter the tender plants have proven poor to down right ruinous, so we have turned our sites on the old dog house.

It used to be the chicken coop a long while ago, then pigs and chickens shared the area, then the dogs made a fortunate move to here (their former housing ended up being crushed by a silver maple only a month or so after they were moved – downed by an ice storm).  But it wasn’t fairing well for the digging dogs, so Bet took it over this summer as a brooding house.  No, not for a place for her to go and be dark and moody, it’s for her chicks, poults and ducks.  Around here things rarely get abandoned or tossed, they just get a new job.

A lot of chicks, poults and all, got their start in life in here this summer.  They come here after they hatch out in the hatching tray at the bottom of Bet’s new cabinet incubator.  She found however, that it could have stood to be a bit more heat retentive.  Well, actually her dad made that discovery from the electric bill.   So it needed to be insulated.

And since she wasn’t going to be doing any big hatching (if any) during the winter months, we hatched the plan of multi uses – storing the tender perennials during the winter after the last batch of chicks are out, then moving the plants out to the greenhouse just in time to start spring chicks brooding.  Blame it on Alton Brown, but we have come to despise uni-taskers of all sorts.

With an abundance of wool, a great insulator, and armed with two big wide (ten feet) rolls of heavy black plastic, we stapled and stuffed our little hearts out so that I could get the extra harvest items, mostly the winter cucurbits and garlic, and the tender plants: fuchsias, geranium, lotus, brugs, verbena, (oh I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone), into storage.

Any way that pretty much tells the scramble we performed this week with the pressure of bad weather upon us.  Since October tenth or so,  I’ve been covering up the squash with blankets at night while they have been hopefully ripening and curing on the south side of the house in lovely day time temperatures.  But they really needed to be inside long ago and definitely now that really cold weather is coming.

And so the corner begins to fill and dogs and cats get in the way,

Of a lot of things.

And my mind is frantically thinking of “childhood antics”.  I could have used the shot of Bet wearing kittens like she has since toddlerhood.  But I shot it at a bad angle and it won’t fit the header, and childhood? sort of a stretch at this point.

Ah… my subject.  The little kitten that refuses to go away, all she wants to do is play with every squash and pumpkin I put in.  But that shot won’t work.  Let me just do one more job and then I’ll take her picture while she batts around the curly ques on the pumpkin stem.

Only now that I have squatted and assumed the serious picture taker stance she has stopped.

No amount of coaxing is getting her to resume her play.

And in fact she finally leaves.  Well there you have it my Clever Reader,  childhood antics in spades!  It was the same with the girls really, it was why I loved having my dad’s Pentax with the mighty zoom lens, I could steal a shot of them being silly and they were barely aware of me.  Someday soon I will get a digital replacement.  For now I limp along with the pocket camera, but it serves me well, not sure I can work all day with an extra five pounds of camera and lens perched round my neck.  

I am sure that my more serious photographer friends:   Dave, Fishing_Guy,  Mac, and Gail’s Man  have found far more suitable shots to fill their headers with childhood antics than I.  Sorry Dave.  Really I am.  But technically you didn’t say whose childhood and just ask your girls, everyone knows that a kitten is a baby cat and, if it is a baby, then surely it has a childhood. 

Well off to finish my work and get the plants in the other end of the shed.  Thanks for leavin’ me a loop hole Dave!  See you soon Clever Reader!