Today it had finally cleared up enough for me to consider venturing outside for a quick stroll on the streets of Keene.  I was halfway through my walk when the skies opened up again, which was too bad because I'd brought neither coat nor umbrella and had no change of clothes.  On the plus side, I had not worn a white shirt to work today.

It was actually quite pleasant, walking in the warm humid rain, but not what I would normally have preferred, if we did not now live in New Seattle.  It's so bad that Project Laundry List has declared a Clothesline Emergency, apparently urging their followers not to give up hope of clean, dry clothes without resorting to the evils of electric dryers.  They even ask that before you resort to your dryer, to go to the laundromat and use their dryers instead.  Why?  Because they use gas.

Oh yeah?  Well, what if your dryer runs on wind power?  Take that on your wet laundry and stuff it, Project Laundry List!

Anyway, there's more worthy emergencies out there than clotheslines.  There's the StrawBerry Emergency, in which my strawberries are being eaten by slugs.  There's the Onion Emergency, in which our onions are drowning in water. There's the Chicken Emergency, because chickens don't like rain, and most importantly there's the Vitamin D Deficiency Emergency, which is making the likes of me very very grumpy.

Not even the rainbow I saw today could cheer me up.  It hung low and heavy just above the town, cleary weighed down by too much water and unable, even to form it's traditional half-circle. 

We could really use some sun, now.  Really really.

Just in time for the big day, I caught a cold.  Lionel offered to let me sleep in and I wearily agreed, thinking, in the back of my brain, that I'd get up anyway and score some pancakes in the process.  But I slept the sleep of the dead and woke up groggy headed around 9, several hours after the Bundle had gotten up with her Dad.  Also, it turned out that we didn't have any eggs.

We had some friends over for part of the day, which was pleasant, and then we put the Bundle to bed and I zonked out again.  But the Bundle and I did finally get to make our presentation, meager though it was; a card featuring Mickey Mouse which the Bundle had picked out several days before at a huge chain store the other day which I agreed to buy for her, and a coupon for a "Fun Day" scratched out by her and me.

Lionel is understandably wary of days set aside specifically to honor Moms and Dads, on the one hand thinking that if you honor thy mother and father thou shalt do it all the time, not just on one day, and on the other thinking that honoring one for something one chose to do is silly and pointless.  So it's hard for me to express the gratitude I feel on days such as this, but here it is:  There's no one else in the world I would have liked to have a child with.  Indeed, the only reason I have one is because of Lionel, because of who he is and what he stands for.  His idea of fatherhood makes me want to work on being a good mother, and that's all that the Bundle can really ask for in either of us. 

So Happy Father's Day, my love.  Thanks for being the Bundle's father.  And thanks for being you so I can be her mother too.

We were spoiled earlier in the season, when a drought descended upon us in the form of weeks and weeks of bright, sunny, springtime weather.  Now we're in a stormy weather pattern which allows the sun tantalizing outings here and there and then pours buckets of water on top of us for days.  We're less affected physically by the forecast than we used to, but mentally days on end of clouds and fog are draining.

The chickens, no longer cute and fuzzy, are eating up their weight in grass, bugs and grain.  To make them move, we periodically move their grain bucket and their water, foricng them to explore the great outdoors and eat down our lawn in their perpetual search for sustenance. 

The garlic is scaping up, the chamomile is starting to flower, the strawberries are still green but rapidly becoming fruit.  The peas are growing up, the tomatoes are in the ground, the onion are bulbing.  Cucumbers, broccoli, cabbage and carrots are in the ground; corn and beans we haven't planted yet.   

In between raindrops and my day job, somehow we'll get all the firewood in. 

Apparently, DTV has arrived and disrupted the lives of millions of Americans who now  can't access their favorite channels.  We may or may not have TV--I don't know.  We haven't turned it on for months.  Maybe we will someday, if we have a rainy day in which there's nothing else to do. 

The great state of New Hampshire has always prided itself on its Yankee contrariness, its image as one of the last bastions of personal liberty, and yet, it took a Democratic (read: Socialist) majority in the NH House, Senate and governorship to grant marriage rights to same sex couples, recognizing that you can't have life. liberty and the pursuit of happiness if you are discriminating against a portion of the population because of your religious beliefs.

On the other hand, I shouldn't be so surprised.  Even our Democratic leaders are enamored of the idea of Live Free or Die, even if they interpret it a little differently than their Republican colleagues.  I guess I haven't decided whether this revolutionary law which even the most progressive state in the Nation, California, hasn't been able to hold onto is the result of a true change of heart here in the Granite State, or if it is entirely in keeping with our Yankee character.

In other news, Elaine and Edward Brown have finally agreed that they should be represented by lawyers in their upcoming trial.  However, they do so in the belief that they are not the people named in the indictment.  Why?  Because the indictment spells their names with all capital letters, while they spell their names with both upper and lower case letters.  New Hampshire seems to attract ideologues like this, with the result that in the same week that we were the most celebrated Progressive State in the Nation, eLaiNE and EDwaRd brOWn had to pop their heads in too and make us look crazy.  Ah, New Hampshire.  If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.  It'll change.

Things had been going swimmingly with the chickens until Thursday, when a steady cold rain had descended upon us.  Around 5 I went to check on the chicks and noticed the heat lamp had gone out.  We replaced it with a 150 watt bulb but it wasn't the same.  Scrambling, we located a neighbor with a spare bulb, which also promptly blew out.  Not knowing what else to do, we brought the whole brooder inside for the night, where they stayed until the next day.

We solved the problem with the lamp and brought the brooder back outside, no mean feat.

Today we were going t plant our tomatoes, which have grown leggy of late and really need to get in the ground, but tonight's temperatures are supposed to plunge down to the 30s, an observation of NOAA's we're not sure we believe, given their history.  Still, ideally the temperatures don't go below 50 once our tomatoes are out.

There's ideal and then there's reality, of course.  We only have limited time periods in which to do things, given my other job, the one that brings in money.  So we'll end up compromising and planting the beans and the corn instead, hoping that the night time temperatures will be stable by the time they pop up and that the soil temperature isn't too substandard for them to germinate, and that our tomatoes won't grow so potbound that they'll fail. 

There's certainly plenty to do, more work than there are people, and that's not counting the household chores.  Ironically, we're so busy trying to grow our own food that we haven't had time to go shopping, hence there's no food in the house, forcing Lionel to go foraging in our back field last night in search of young milkweed shoots.  Last week, it was nettles, and the week before, brook trout and fiddleheads.

So far, the farm hasn't run away from us so fast that we're unable to catch up.  But it's certainly taken off, and now we're just along for the ride.

Apparently, chickens arrive by U.S. Postal service, early in the morning, in a cardboard box marked "chickens" in case the peeping doesn't clue you in.  They arrived on Thursday, but we'd discovered that the brooder box Lionel had built (even though he built it to spec) could not contain the enthusiasm of the heat lamp, which blasted out 120 degrees before melting the thermometer.  We were aiming for a balmy 95.  Modifications were needed, or a smaller lightbulb.  On Saturday we hunted around for materials to raise the light and also, incidentally, be fireproof, when we came upon a bunch of old New Hampshire License plates.

Everything we build, no matter how originally gorgeous, must eventually have the Swamp Yankee trademark.  Laughing, we plastered license plates around the new raised platform, making what looks less like a chicken brooder and more like a chicken roaster complete with chimney.

We went to pick up our new chicks at our neighbor's on Saturday, who had agreed to hold ours along with his until we got the light straightened out.  They weren't around.  After a bit of shuffling about and then getting followed by two horses we decided to come back.  So yesterday we finally picked up our 25 Cornish Rock chicks, peep peep peeping in the car.

Last night was their first night in the new brooder.  If the cold, the wind, the dog, or random predators didn't get them, we're on our way to having us some mighty fine Kentucky Fried Chicken in eight weeks time.

Went to see Star Trek this weekend.  As one who in my youth had a Starfleet Academy bumper sticker placed prominently on my car, who read scores and scores of fan fiction, who dissed the Next Generation when it first came out but then grew to love it too, I must say I was delighted with the reboot of the characters and at the same time completely dismayed by the storyline (don't look if you haven't seen the movie yet!)

The neat thing about fiction is that it's fiction, and really can go where no one has gone before, especially science fiction, which places itself in the future where new realms of physics and mathematics are discovered and things which just seem like movie gimmicks can be explained by vague, complicated formulas.

I've had a few days to think about it and come out of my funk, and I've decided that this new frontier the Star Trek franchise has taken us on is a good thing.  It means we can have more Trek in the years to come, with better actors playing the same lovable characters, and maybe, newer, longer, more practical uniforms for the female crew members.  It could happen.  It's Star Trek.  Anything can happen in Star Trek.

The Republican Party and its sharp turn to the right (a turn not precipitated by any road sign or detour--they just went right into the ditch and stayed there) has been, oddly enough, their mainstay for the past decade.  It was a truly odd jump to power, I always thought.   With the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and their message spreading "news" conglomerate Fox spreading hate and fear and general vitriol towards anything remotely progressive, anything backed by scientific research, anything that didn't pander directly to their increasingly ignorant, yet small, base, you'd think the moderate Republican would've jumped ship way before now.

Their excuse?  It's a "Two Party System."  As if you have to choose one team and stay there even if you hate half your team-mates and they hate you, simply because you're "fiscally conservative" in a way that Democrats aren't?

The thing is, my moderate, pseudo-Republican friends, and my conservative, pseudo-Democratic pals, is that there are, in fact, now enough of you to band together and make up your own party.  Do it now, while your nominal party affiliation is under so much scrutiny, trying vainly to "remake" itself while still holding on to its fundamentally hateful base.  The American voter is, for the most part, not progressive, not conservative.  They stand for the right to choose, the right to be, and the right to keep their money in the US. It's only a two-party system because you've made it so.  If there was ever a time to change the political landscape of the U.S., the time is now.  It's time for the reasonable, educated, progressive Republican to join forces and move us out of the Newt Gingrich era.

Small green leaves are poking out of previously bare branches. The magnolia, tulips and forsythia are blooming.  The ostrich fern is desperately trying to beat the likes of fiddlehead hunters like us, the asparagus is poking up, the onions are in the ground, the peas are coming up too.  Oh, and the motorcycle is out of storage.  Spring is here!

Since the shake up of the forces at work, patterns have re-asserted themselves.  I am pretty much doing what I was doing before, only now I'm being paid to do it.  The difference is that since my boss, in the infinite wisdom of the manager, decided that to make a public announcement would be embarrassing to my re-assigned (read: demoted) co-worker.  Instead, she's been quietly telling people as she happens to remember.  "Congratulations!" a co-worker will whisper to me, a month after the fact.  So far, I've managed to thank them and not make the blunder of asking, "For what?"

In the real world there's pig viruses gone rampant to worry about, the Republican Party's attempt to put lipstick on said sick pig, Souter's imminentt retirement to the backwater of NH, and ongoing background noise, chattering about some sort of recession.  This time of year, when things seems so full of potential, these things just don't get my cynical ire up.  It's all dandelions and black flies here at the LARC household. 

My Frenemy, the Concord Monitor, recently put out an online front-page plea for Letters to the Editor.  I can see why; the latest gem is an editorial entitled "Jeans are practical" apparently in response to a sincerely held belief that jeans were immoral, or something to that effect.  I'd know more, but the link is broken.  Everyone who used to write intelligent discourse got disgusted with the LTE format and have since hied off and created their own blogs, where they can publish in peace without being censored and without having a cutesy or provocative title attached to it by a bored and barely educated copy editor.

But some of my friends have abandoned their blogs in favor of Twitter or Facebook.  These services provide one with more conversation than the blog format, to be sure, and isn't as time-consuming as an IM or a chat forum.  But the one-liner texting format doesn't work for me.  Half of it isn't in English, and the other half only makes sense if you know exactly what is on the other person's mind.   Anyway, my cell phone isn't even capable of texting.  Take that!

Basically, I'm a hermit at heart.  If you want to come visit me, that's fine.  Just don't talk too much, okay?

Probably about a year or so ago my company got with the times and had a key card system installed so that only authorized people could come in the building.  Previous to that we'd occasionally have people come in and wander around convinced there was a dentist in the office, or a lawyer or an accountant.  Fortunately we'd never had an issue with someone who had actual criminal intent, but it was only a matter of time. 

I was all for the key card system, but since it involved a central database which required being on one of our servers and the entire system was connected to our network, I kind of wish IT had been a little more involved in the setup when the electricians came to install the system.  Still, the system was working, in a klugy kind of way, until one day when it didn't. 

When things don't work, people come to me.  Even if I wasn't the one who installed it.

Okay, I said, give me the number of the company, after the electricians, who, as electricians, are excellent at their jobs, but as computer technicians, leave something to be desired.  The electrician did.  A few hours later my day finally freed up enough to call the company, Napco, only to find out they would not let me speak with their support team because I was not an electrician.

Okay.  So we called the electricians back, and asked them to call the company and explain the situation, fully expecting that once we got past the introductions and NapCo had their computer guy on the line, that reasonable heads would prevail and let the two computer people talk directly to each other.  But when the support technician got on the phone, he flatly refused to talk to anyone but the electrician.

"Fine," I said, "Put us on speaker phone."  The electician did, and suddenly the computer technician, like it or not, was talking to me.

"Okay," I said, "I have an 'Unable to located the agent database' error.  What should I do?"

Silence.

After a few moments, the electrician cleared his throat, and repeated my question.  Only after the officially authorized person repeated the question did the NapCo technician answer the question. And so we went on like that, question after question, until we finally got the problem solved.

"Thanks for you help," I said, slightly sarcastically, which my new English-to-English translator duly repeated.

"Thank you for choosing NapCo," the man responded, and hung up before we burst out laughing.

NapCo.  So secure, we won't talk to you.  We don't care if our product sucks.  Go away.  Thanks for choosing NapCo.

It was a good, long, hard sugaring season but now it's April.  The wood frogs are out.  The snow is almost gone.  The grass is getting greener and the daffodils are about to bloom.  We're definitely due for one more snow storm.

Today we raked out old grass and dead wood left over from last year and detritus from the ice storm .  We began to saw up and chop the summer's supply of wood, so that we can get caught up enough to start storing it up for next winter. The tomatoes and peppers are stating to sprout in their little jiffy pots, and the asparagus and strawberry beds were given some attention.  It's spring again in New Hampshire.

We're all out, being industrious in the early spring, because we know in a few weeks the black flies will come out and make our lives hell.  But for now it seems all so easy.  So easy that we're blithely embarking on our new project; meat chickens.  Stay tuned.

Last week I sent out an email to the entire company letting them know the syrup would soon be on sale, and immediately got a slew of emails back reserving quarts or pints of specific grades.  One person wanted to buy a gallon off of us.  Now I'm in the process of negotiating with people who got there too late; 2 pints for the price of a quart?  Medium amber instead of Dark?  Our demand has outstripped our supply. 

In other news; last week, after about a year of being the Network Administrator, I was promoted.  It's nice to be promoted to a job you're already doing, since there's not much that's going to change save your salary and your title.  The former Network Administrator has been re-assigned the title Network Technician, relegating him to the things he is good at and leaving me free to make the whole operation a lot more efficient.

To celebrate, we secured another bottle of 1995 Krug, wondering, in the back of our minds, what might happen to the precious bottle this time .

The sugaring, at this point, has almost come to an end.  Basically we're boiling down the pan until we run out of sap, and then we'll run the contents of the pan off into a large pot and finish it all off on the propane burner while we clean the pan, pop the taps, clean the barrels, and shut up the sugar house for another year.  

So last night we settled down by the fire, fed it lazily, didn't worry about getting a boil, and drank our champagne.  Normally we write down our impressions on a piece of paper and then stuff it into the bottle for safe keeping, but instead we wrote them down in charcoal on the wall of the sugar house; our plywood, rickety, cute little sugar house .

The sugaring this year went smoothly and easily and we've made more than we ever did.  We're feeling a little cramped in our quarters though, a little limited by our set up.  This may be the last year in our little sugar house with our little 2 by 4 pan and our ridiculous little stove.  Next year, we might expand.

And that will give us all sorts of new things to worry about.  Here's to the future.

We were feeling pretty proud of ourselves; this year our sugar wood had been split early in the summer and was beautifully dry, we organized our time so that we could maximize the sap, we put in another line, bringing our total to more than 70 taps, and so far we've made 6 gallons of various grades of A.  It's promising to be a good year.

But this weekend, the last weekend in March--always the largest weekend in terms of sap production-- we began to run into problems. Because the beautifully dry wood we'd stacked up and left to dry all summer had had placed over it a not-so beautiful, old blue tarp which apparently was not opposed to letting a little moisture in here and there.  We've been lucky weather wise, stacking up the wood to bake in the warm March sun, but today it is still cloudy and last night we were already playing Musical Wood.  

I hate it when the whole production grinds to a halt simply because of the weather .

Fortunately there's a big pile of slab in our orchard left over from a milling project last summer, dry as a bone.  Also heavy as hell.  But we'll drag it down to the sugar house, crack it up, and feed it to our fire so that we can move that hydrometer up to the finish line.  We're nothing if not stubborn.

As I was leaving work on Thursday a co-worker, upon wishing me a good weekend, told me to "go make steam".  At forty to one, steam is certainly the biggest product we make; too bad we can't bottle that.

On the other hand, we did bottle up a gallon and a half on Thursday night, and are on course for another gallon and a half or so this weekend.  Friday morning saw us leveling our haphazardly placed evaporator after it sank into the mud again, repairing a frozen pipe (below freezing is good for sap production but wreaks havoc on equipment) and constructing a more permanent finishing station.

Tax season definitely comes at the wrong time for us.  I normally do our taxes (with substantial help from TurboTax, since just looking at a tax form makes my eyes water) but this year's are all about expenses and depreciation and farms and such and... I don't even want to talk about it.  But it does mean that I have to cart all of our receipts and my vague understanding of IRS code to an accountant, who will most likely laugh and say "this is easy!"  I do that today.  While I'm out I'll go get propane canisters for the lanterns, new battery packs for the walkie talkies, new carrying containers for the sap.  Sugaring is never far from our minds.

A few days ago I was stringing another line in the bright morning March sun.  The sap was flowing as I was trying to attach the lines and I was getting soaked.  Suddenly I heard light wings above me and saw two pileated woodpeckers right above my head.  They are huge and ancient, dinosaurs.  They come back every year this time of year and perch in our old sugar bush.  They perched for a while, calmly, and I stared up at them.  Finally I went back to work and they flew off to find a more quiet tree.  It's those moments, the fleeting moments where blue sky meets red feathers on a gray tree, that are the most precious.  And maybe that's what it really all boils down to.