A Nice Day

I've never been very good at writing a blog post the day of...or having a blog post ready for a specific day.  Most of mine seem to be last minute, for the day before, and probably by the time most people read it,  it happened two days before.

So this blog post was about yesterday (Friday).  We've had a week or so of cold weather.  I kind of cringe when I say cold, because it is nothing like what a lot of others have experienced, but it's been unusually cold for us, with records broken in our province.  I think the coldest we got was -14C with the windchill overnight.  I know, that's not even below zero for you Fahrenheit people.  But that's really cold for us, believe me...or not!  It didn't even get above freezing during the day, and it was mostly sunny, but the wind was wicked.  Yesterday was one of the warmer days, and there wasn't much wind, so it was really quite pleasant.

Of course I haven't been able to do any gardening this week, as the ground is frozen solid, but we have been outside for part of the day doing other things.

Since we have a bit of snow predicted for Sunday, and then snow or rain on Monday, and rain for the rest of the week, we wanted to get the rest of that wood split and brought in before it got wet.  Larry had been out in the morning to cut the rest of it up, and I wandered out there in the afternoon to split it.  As I passed the north garden, Larry was finishing off dumping piles of the half rotted wood chips/horse manure mix on the last section.  Normally we could never do that in the winter.  The ground there gets quite wet, and even if it freezes,  it doesn't freeze deep enough to stop the tractor from making huge mucky ruts.  This week it did, so we took advantage of it.  So nice that even the driving back and forth to the manure pile didn't churn the ground into a muddy mess.

I got the rest of the wood split, and then decided to do a bit of exploring in the 'Hole'. The Hole is the area between the front and the back hayfield.  That area is called the Hole, because there is a hole there, dah! that stays full of water most of the year.  It is run-off and spring fed.  The water supply for our house originally came from there.  The is a large galvanized water tank buried in the blackberries, and there used to be remnants of a power line to run the pump.  The water seeps away in tiny creek that flows through the field next door, and into their pond.  From there it eventually it runs into Nathan Creek (where we often walk along the dyke with the dogs) and into the Fraser River. See the map on the right.

It was warm and protected where I was, so I had a bit of a wander around.  When we were younger and full of energy, we used to keep this area relatively cleaned up, but now it is rather overgrown with blackberries and underbrush.  Since there are no leaves, it's easier to see a way through.  About 10 years ago David constructed quite a set of ramps and bridges and jumps to try to kill himself on ride his mountain bike on.  I went out to watch him once, and that was enough for me, it was too scary.  A lot of the ramps bridges are still there, I got brave and walked on one, and it wasn't rotten enough to collapse underneath me.

There are remnants of the rainforest this whole area used to be.  That log is four feet in diameter, and it is just on the other side of it that Calli got stuck the other day.

It was so peaceful and quiet, I was out there by myself.  A couple of Stellar's Jays were squawking in the trees, and a woodpecker was pounding away on a tree branch. Okay, I guess it wasn't quite that quiet.

Then the logger appeared.  He didn't see me at first, and I could tell that he was wondering where I was. He said there was some wood he wanted to cut further up the trail.

 I wandered back and checked out the piles he had dumped.  It will be my job to spread them. Some of it could have been done with the tractor, but there is a row of rhubarb growing up the middle of that section, and I didn't want him to drive on it.

The work keeps piling up.