Here it is, the 9th of February, and I still haven’t gotten around to the annual February rant?  Fortunately the shortest month of the year happens to be twice as long actual time-wise, so I still have plenty of time.

I guess I’ve been busy, although doing what I don’t know, other than trying to be two or three people at once as usual, not withstanding the 20% paycut.  Take this actual conversation I just had with a user in my capacity as Help Desk wilst I was deep in the midst of trying to troubleshoot an actual, real-live data issue in my capacity as Database Administrator:

“Hi,” the user said, in a voice the exact copy of Diane Rehm.  Rhem’s show on NPR is full of informative, interesting narrative the likes of which I will never hear because her voice sends immediate shivers down my spine.  So my user has one strike against her already, but then she starts off, in true User fashion, telling me how she can’t get into her email because she was using the password she normally uses for some other application.

“It’s not locked out,” I say, “ can you try again?”

“It just keeps bringing me back,” she says.

“Is the caps lock on?” I say.

“I don’t remember if I have caps in my password or not,” she says, not actually answering my question but revealing a lot more in terms of her intellectual capacity.

“Okay.  Log all the way out and I’ll reset your password for you.”

I reset her password and tell her the new one.

“It still doesn’t let me in,” she informs me.

“Did you try the password I just reset it to?”

“No.. okay, I’ll try that one.  Hey, that worked.”

 A little while later she called back and said she still couldn’t get into her email.  It turns out she couldn’t remember her userid either, which combines her first initial with her last name, and which she types in every single day. 

Maybe February is getting to her, too.

A colleague was fired at work on Friday.

I knew before everyone else because I had to do the dirty work; removing access, shutting down pcs, disabling and changing passwords, monitoring key ports of entry, etc.  But none of us were surprised; or rather, the situation had been going on for so long that we were pleasantly surprised in a "it's about time" kind of way.

Even though we're one man down and some of us are still on furlough, the boss just improved morale in the department by 200% just by getting rid of the obvious dead weight.  And since he wasn't doing any work anyway, none of us will really notice the difference, except we'll feel lighter.

Onward.  Upward.

No wonder right wing rednecks think we liberals are such pansies.  The party we generally fall into is so full of open minded, gently raised, intellectual philosophers that not only can they not agree totally on anything, but they genuinely believe that 59 is the new 40.  Not only that, but the normally flaming liberal Commonwealth of Massachussetts was somehow duped into voting for "change," by voting for the same party that got us into this big mess in the first place.  Wow.  I guess we are a bunch of pansies.

At least we're a pretty bunch of pansies, right?

Speaking of right-wing conspiracies (we were, right?) can someone please try to dissuade me that the huge massive swings in the stock market were not political statements by the ridiculously wealthy?  Tuesday, the stock market sky rockets because health insurance company stocks rise because of the imminent election of a Republican Senator. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday the stock markets slide when Obama threatens more regulation on banks.  Shouldn't that announcement make a wary public happy and made the stocks go up??

Oh, that's right.  Ordinary middle class Americans are too busy being overworked at their underpaid jobs to do anything more than watch helplessly as their 401Ks melt away.  Only the wealthy have the leisure to day trade.  And now that the conservative Supreme Court has given the go ahead to the Republican party to donate as much of our 401Ks as they want to the political campaign of their choice, they probably think they have it in the bag, right?

After all, Democrats will always go quietly into that good night.  Just threaten a filibuster.  See?  That worked. 

Here's a nice Donkey bouquet, made just for you.

Last night it got down to around 5 degrees Farenheit, and today's high is about 18.  There's about two or three feet of snow covering the ground right now and the lakes are frozen.  Frequently, commutes to or from work become hazardous.  The wood furnace is constantly competing with the cold outdoors to keep our house warm.  We wear mittens, boots and coats to go outside.  Inside, we frequently wear sweaters and slippers.

Welcome to January in New England.  Ho hum.  Par for the course.

A would-be neighbor of ours, who lives down in Maryland somewhere and comes up to our part of the world on weekends and Holidays to partake in the clean cold air and bask in the gentle country paradise, frequently wanders over our lawn or to our front door and proceeds to monologue for hours.  After all, he's on vacation, right?  All the time in the world, right?  And these people he's talking to, whom he clearly interrupted in some task (oh, say, mowing the lawn, doing the laundry, or cutting down trees for firewood), well, they have all the time in the world too, right?  After all, he's on vacation.  Anyway, yesterday he chose his usual bad timing to come strolling up our driveway while I was struggling with a shoeless child and a bag of groceries.  Oblivious, he started right in.  "Beautiful snow, isn't it?"  he said.

"It snowed?" I said.  I hadn't noticed.  Apparently it had.  An inch or so.  Nothing to write home about.

In fact, Lionel and I are enjoying the winter and the cold.  It's a welcome break from the hustle-bustle of spring summer and fall, and its a bittersweet reminder that it may not be around for much longer.  Or not predictably, anyway.  When we start getting Georgia's weather due to climate change, we'll forget things like ice safety and warm clothing and succumb, like our down South friends, to natural selection.  Maybe global climate change isn't so bad after all.  Maybe its the great equalizer. 

All in all, 2009 wasn't a bad year for the LARC's aside from the economic difficulty of being less than fully employed.  Fortunately right before the furlough news came the news that I was promoted--so my downward slide into middle class poverty wasn't as pronounced as some of my colleagues. 

Our garden was expanded by leaps and bounds and failed in spectacular fashion too.  But on Christmas Day the meal consisted of a Moroccan chicken dish, potato latkes, and peas and carrots, all of which were grown right here on LARC property, and bottles of excellent Merlot which, though the grapes were from California, was crushed and fermented in our basement.

We made tons of maple syrup and made the big leap of building a real sugar house--but didn't have the funds to purchase the all-important pan and arch.  So the hokey system will live on another year--albeit under better cover.

What will 2010 bring besides more diaper changes?  The aforementioned pan and arch, more work in the orchard, an expanded chicken adventure, hopes for a better garden, and hopefully good news on the employment front.  Out with the first decade of the new century.  In with the second.  Even years have always been better years for me anyway.

Twas the day before Christmas
and all through the rooms,
scurried the LARCS with buckets and brooms...

Every year we promise ourselves that we will clean and shine and polish everything before the company comes, and every year the day before and sometimes the morning of become a whirlwind of stuffing things which don't belong where they're being stuffed because we ran out of time.

Oh well.

Anyway.  Merry Christmas everybody! 

So we don't quite fit the model of the typical American dream family.  First and foremost, we don't have the white picket fence, we don't keep up with the Joneses, and the gender roles here are all topsy-turvy and interchangeable and it's sometimes hard for our neighbors to tell who is who (no, really.  Just the other day I was dressed to the nines in my outdoor plowing gear, and our neighbor had to look me closely in the eye and still couldn't tell until I opened my mouth and said hi.)

Anyway, what I'm trying to say, in my roundabout, do-I-have-to? fashion is: we're pregnant again.  19 weeks, to be exact.  Congratulations! You're the first, outside of the family, to know.  I've even successfully (so far) kept it from my co-workers, since it became clear during my last pregnancy that they just weren't mature enough to handle such news.  I guess I'll have to tell them eventually, but I'm savoring the still-human feeling, and hoping, in the back of my brain, that if I wait until the damn thing is at least half over they won't be able to throw stereotypes on my behavior without realizing that they hadn't done it before when they didn't know I was pregnant.  It's a vain hope, I know.

 In any case, now that I've made my announcement, I'll do as I did before, which is to behave on this blog as if I am a normal human being, and complain in this blog whenever other people decide differently.

Happy Holidays, everyone.  Have a drink on me.  I can't, so you might as well have two.

It snowed last night.

The day before that it was windy and in the 50s.  The day before that, New England experienced record winds, record rains, and record temperatures all in one day.  Tell me man-made climate change isn't real.

But anyway, it snowed last night.  The Bundle, who has insisted to me that it can't be winter until it snows, put her face up to the sky and smiled.  Before going into the house for the night, she insisted on eating some.  "It tastes like ice cream!" she said.

We've put the garden away and the wood is in the basement and the house is buttoned up, but we still have blind spots we ignore until the snow forces us to move; the motorcycle is still out in the drive hoping for its last ride of the season, unwilling to admit that the last ride was a few weeks ago.  Our barn, which we use as an open-faced garage, has the tools of summer scattered about so that it is impossible to tuck away the tractor and the two cars; both necessary before I have to plow.  We never cut down the forsythia or the pussy willow.  There's always next year.

Its possible, after a few snowfalls, to forget about these tasks until spring uncovers the mess.  Winter is calming that way.

Yesterday we actually ventured out to do our part to shore up the economy, even though I am still furloughed and money is tight.  We're feeling more confident, I guess.  If this snow actually sticks, we'll have ourselves a Merry Little White Christmas. 

The impending orchard has been a topic of serious discussion of late, as we ponder our next step; should we plant the apples next year?  Or should we build the little shop?  Remember, I said, we also are purchasing our evaporator (a considerable expense in itself).  Oh yes, Lionel said, I forgot.  In that case, maybe we should postpone the store for the following year.  That's the year, if all goes well, that the pick-your-own will finally be open.

It was a heated but friendly discussion, there at the dinner table, and naturally the last remaining participant of dinner wanted to join in too.  So suddenly from left field came the voice of reason from the Bundle O' Joy:  "Or," said our two and half year old, "maybe we should bring down the wagon for the sugar wood and push the snow off to the corner, I don't want it to be too high, and then we should get some sap."

About a sensible a plan as the one we were trying to devise, to be sure.

With Lionel in two shoes and new, light-weight, steel toed boots, the LARC household is once again fully staffed and rearing to go.  Only its November.

Normally this time of year brings with it snowfall which melts in the morning, frosty windows, glassy ice on the edges of the ponds, but this year the weather has been balmy; 60's and sunny.  We've gotten all our wood in, and we're starting on next year's (a virtual rarity), we've got a new sugar house and its wood in a new wood shed, and I've taken advantage of the clear woods and warm days to go hunting for Christmas trees.

It turns out that all of our land is surrounded by other people's land with beautiful, gorgeous fir balsams just aching to be brought to my house, if only they were just this side of the stone wall.  All the potential open spots we own are covered by white pine or blackberry briars, neither of which fit my criteria for indoor December habitation.

This very point was brought up the other day when we we discussing what we might do with the area currently occupied by a red pine plantation, which we've been carefully nurturing over the years (it's our mini redwood forest) but came to the conclusion, after last year's ice storm, that as a plantation it was planted, and planted things are meant to be harvested.  Lionel was discussing putting cider apples there, but I intervened.  "A Christmas Tree farm," I said.  I've been lobbying for a Christmas Tree Farm for years.  Surprisingly, he tentatively agreed that this would be a good use of the space.  So watch out, world.  Big House Farms is expanding at supernova rates.  With any luck, we'll suck you all in, too.

While Fox News has been concentrating on turning the Fort Hood massacre into the next great Muslim attack against Americans, the rest of the world of news media has merely reported the ongoing investigation, responsibly staying away from conclusion, and also incidentally, covering the other workplace violence attack which happened the next day (Fox was so busy investigating what kind of traditional Muslim attire Major Hassan was wearing a few weeks ago that they apparently failed to notice that a redneck American in his own traditional dress had just blown away a bunch of colleagues as well). 

While the rest of the news media has been trying to find different perspectives on the health care debate, Fox has repeatedly kept up the same three headlines (note the word LIBERAL in the link, just in case you didn't know that MoveOn was a liberal organization).  Message:  Run for your lives:  Big Brother is Coming!!

We all know that Fox is nothing but the trashy mouth piece of the increasingly right wing conservative Republican machine.  Everyone knows that.  Even conservatives know that.  That's why they watch it.  The funny part is that they get indignant when people actually say it.  So tell me this isn't funny:

Fox didn't think so.  They've got no sense of humor.

Just to spite us, it snowed all day yesterday and through the night.  Most of it disappeared on contact with the still warm ground, but this morning there's a carpet of fine dusty powder. 

It'll melt.  But we still have 8 cords or so to bring in the house and not many hours to do it.

In any event, we're scramblin like squirrels to build a nest for the winter, and while some pieces, like the wood, are going slowly, others have beens atisfactorily simple, like installing sliding glass doors that don't leak and actually lock, taking the mental and then physical leap of cutting off our greenhouse for the winter, saving us heat and propane, and in general modernizing our old, leaky, quaint, New England brick farm house.

In the back of our minds, we're hoping if we tighten up the house enough we won't need to bring in the rest of the wood.  On the other hand, if it's already snowing in the middle of October, maybe we'd better buckle down for a cold, long winter.  We're not squirrels and can't predict the weather.

The Bundle and I recently came back from  a trip to San Diego (a trip originally all three of us were to go on), leaving Lionel to his own devices, ice, elevated feet and numerous distractions to keep him sane.  The trip was to participate in the wedding of an old high school friend.  She was the Best Person at my own wedding and she returned the favor, right down to letting me choose my own dress-- a nice gesture in theory, except she forgot that when we were in high school I relied on her fashion sense to get myself dressed and presentable in the mornings, and frequently borrowed her old prom dresses to go to formal affairs, having no idea what to wear on my own.  Anyway, a dress was found, altered, and sent to San Diego along with myself and my daughter, and we came back to the cold October weather just after the peak of leaf-peeping season.

Still, the days warm up enough that coats are no longer necessary, and the remaining garden tasks-- harvesting carrots, planting garlic, spreading manure, have been accomplished in the warm fall sun.   The leaves are now bright yellow, still smling brightly at us before they all fall.  We're doing other things, too, now that we've matured enough to really live in this old house of ours; replacing sliders that have failed to keep the winter in and were installed backwards in any case to begin with, splitting poplar wood for the fireplace so that we can have warm nights by a crackling fire, and in general putting it all to bed before the big freeze comes and we hibernate for the next 4 months.  Or at least until sugar season.

Hi there folks, yes I'm still here!

"Time" is one of those things that increasingly becomes a luxury, or rather, "free time": that time in which you are not eating, talking with your spouse, paying bills, washing dishes, laundry and children, cleaning up after an old, frail dog, chasing after a young, spritely cat, reading Sesame Stree dictionaries with a curious 2.5 year old, chopping, splitting, stacking wood, putting said wood in the furnace, weeding, harvesting, pruning the various projects, and overseeing the construction of your new sugar house.  A little time, all by yourself, to do whatever it is that strikes your fancy.

These days, sleep has struck my fancy.

Anyway, we were going along all busy like, doing our fall dance before the frosts came, Lionel running the chainsaw day in and day out, trying to get in the wood for the winter, myself splitting and stacking the wood and trying to get the harvests in in between my day job, when it all came to a screeching, crashing halt.  Lionel had a chainsaw accident.

I wasn't, when all was said and done, all that surprised.  It's a dangerous, scary, incredibly useful instrument he wields when he goes out to do this work, and the dangers don't just come from the whirling saw.  There's tree limbs coming loose from on high or entire trees coming down unexpectedly or in the wrong direction, not to mention the rocky New England ground apt to turn ankles or bruise shins.  But even so, I wasn't expecting my Wednesday evening trip to the emergency room, nor was I expecting to spend the rest of my short days trying to pull together the harvest, the wood, the laundry, etc, in addition to fetching water, pills, ice, pillows, making dinner for all and somehow do all the other things that I normally do in addition.

Lionel, by the way, is mostly fine, and completely embarassed, since in the end, all the damage is confined to his left big toe and the tendon which normally holds it on.   And yes, my well meaning friends, he knows all about steel toed boots.  When you've been using a chainsaw for more than thirty years, some of your initial safety precautions go out the window in favor of comfort and agility-- steel toed boots are heavy and clumsy and hard to wear when you've got bad arches.  You have to weigh your options in the real world.  You take all sorts of chances when you run a farm.  Some are financial, some are physical.  Sometimes you have bad luck.

Although it is "just" a toe it turns out that toes are important for balance and walking, and in their delicate makeup leave little room for error.  So Lionel's laid up, on crutches, hoping that what is left of the tendon stays attached to the bone so he's not in for more reconstructive surgery.  Fortunately, all the wood is cut up and I split the last of it this weekend.  Fortunately, we're almost ready to put the garden to bed.  It certainly could have been worse.  But I'm exhausted, all the same.  When you're used to teaming up its hard to suddenly pull the cart alone.

For the past two or three weeks we were waking up to the sound of demented crowing from our second flock of chickens.  This flock, Rosemonts, were livelier than the White Rocks, and ate more grass, bugs and worms than the first flock, which we liked.  What we didn't really like was the fact that some of them never grew out of the Cornish Hen stage, and some of them decided to start crowing.

Anyway, they've crowed their last cockadoodle, and we're swimming in homegrown chicken.  The chicken project we can deem a success.

Just to dampen our enthusiasm a little bit, I went to start the tractor to move the coop closer to the hose and discovered it didn't.  Start, that is.  Anydboy have some draft horses?