Past Tense

The camera is full of stuff that happened a few days ago (or more than a few) and it's past time to get caught up.

I dyed a lot of our Cotswold yarn for our booth at the Finger Lakes Fiber Festival .

The festival went very well with nice weather and happy crowds.  Everyone loved the shawl my friend Amy made from some of my roving.  It's the LaLa Shawl we're going to do as a guild group-knit project and will exhibit them all next year at the 2012 festival.

Andy spent a lot of time explaining the features of the skein winder and swift that he made.  He had a lot of interest but no firm orders.....yet.



The bees are doing very well.  Many have adopted the hive with no qualms.

The majority of them have decided to remain in the tree, and in fact the little darlings actually pushed the steel wool out of the cracks we had jammed it in and made openings of the size that pleases them.  So I guess we have a bee tree.  The fall flowers have been blooming like crazy and providing them with fast and easy fixin's to make honey.  You can literally smell it around the tree. 



While we had a stretch of good weather we went to the woods and cut a lot of trees to go toward our winter firewood. We have wood-fired boilers for both the house and our two shops and between those two boilers we use about 60 facecord.  In a perfect world we'd have cut these last fall and let them season a year.  We used to do that, but got behind one year and can't seem to catch up.  The good news is that ash is one of the few species that will still burn and give off good BTUs when green and we have tons of it.  Many of the trees seem to be affected by Ash Decline and are dying, so it's not like we're cutting viable young growth. 

These are on the edge of the woods and surrounded by sprangly undergrowth that makes working with a chainsaw more dangerous than necessary.  I go along In Case Of Accidents.  He jokes that if going for help isn't likely to do any good, I can at least stay with him till he stops twitching.  Eeesh.  Funny, but not.   Unexpected things can happen and having another person along when he's cutting is a smart thing he always does.   Here Andy is starting to swamp out the area around this cluster of ash so he can work more safely.

He cut better than 20 trees in about an hour and a half.  Here's one just getting under motion.  Later he'll go back and pull them out with the big winch on the back of the tractor, drag them into the field where he can work more easily and cut the limb wood to length and block and split the trunk wood.

And while waiting for him to add more fuel to his chainsaw I found this at my feet.

A downy turkey feather.  We have a lot of them around, travelling in flocks through the tall grass looking for grasshoppers and in the woods for beech nuts and acorns and anything they can scratch up from the ground.  







"And that's the way it was."

And if you know who said that every night you're at least as old as I am :-)