Some may have stayed home this weekend, citing gas prices and rising costs, but most assuredly the people in Washington, NH did not.  They drove back and forth constantly on Half Moon Pond, slowing down to take a look at the latest crazy thing the LARC household is doing.  We'd been at it for more than a week by the time Monday rolled around, and though the blueberries had arrived safely on Wednesday, we had yet to put one plant in the ground.  The field we spent so much time making beautiful now looked as if a giant gopher had made its home there.  "Boy!" one passerby commented through his open window as he drove by, "you guys are serious about this orchard thing!"

So here we are, on our way to being a pick-your own orchard:

Excavator for five days: $1259

360 holes to dig: daunting

75 bags of peat moss: $800

black flies: annoying

4 loads of fill: $800

360 blueberry bushes to de-flower: tedious

360 holes to fill back in with peat moss and rockless soil: even more tedious 

kid with ear infection: exhausting

Finally putting fruit in your fruit orchard:

Priceless. 

The Barn Project, coupled with the up and coming Blueberry Vacation, caused me to have to call our financial advisor to move some money around.  I hate doing this during the day, especially when my office mate is present.  The fact is that we are land rich, and the other fact is that two parents and a grandfather have died, gone to heaven, and left us their earthly goods, but we're not rolling in dough.  If we were, I wouldn't have to call the financial advisor.

Anyway, to assuage any fears my co-worker might have had that I belong to some millionaire club or something, after I hung up the phone I muttered under my breath "I'm spending money like I had it."

My office mate, however, hadn't been listening,  and this comment reached him from some far place out in left field.  Also, he is from Louisiana.

"Is that some kind of New England expression?" he asked in his slow southern drawl.

"Uh, no, I don't think so.."  I said.

"Well...how does a fish spend money?  It doesn't have pockets."

He thought I said I was spending money like a haddock. 

"Well, you know," I said, thinking quickly, " they don't need pockets because they spend money for the halibut."

Predictably it went downhill from there.

The barn, aka the garage, aka the shed, or whatever you'd choose to call it, which extends as a kind of funky, antique add-on to our old, old house, has been in disrepair for some years.  We've not ignored it, exactly, but it's not the sort of repair project that we could get truly excited about-- after all, it's just a barn. Also, the barn is chock full of stuff left over from years and years of collection (what do we do with this?  -I dunno, let's put it in the barn) some of which, just to defend ourselves for a moment, isn't even our detritus. 

Last year though, Lionel finally made the leap from the potential (yeah, we should do something about that) to the actual (hey, I found somebody to work on the barn!) and we were set to clean out the detritus in a moment's notice, so that we could finally rest easy under the roof.  The contractor said he'd be there in September.  Of course, he lied.

So we spent all of last winter nervously eyeing our barn roof and the ever accumulating snow, listening to reports of roof collapses with growing trepidation, until spring came and the snow melted and the contractor, that slippery eel, told us for sure he'd come in May.  Luckily for us, we found another contractor who said he could start that week.   

So now we're in the midst of Barn Renovation, which as I feared started out as a simple project, shoring up the front of the building (and incidentally building a new bay for Daisy) and has now morphed and traveled its way to the back of the building.  The good news is that this has been forcing us to, if not actually deal with the detritus in the barn, to schlepp it around.

Which is how we found one entire corner of the barn to be propped up with haphazardly stacked cement blocks, in a true display of Swamp Yankee ingenuity.  That's right, the entire weight of the barn, the entire fate of the barn, rests on five skewed cement blocks.

Sometimes, it really is better not to know. 

In a few weeks time, I'll be on vacation.  We're not going anywhere exotic or doing anything especially recreational, but we are renting an excavator , so it will still be fun for me.  If all goes well, by the end of that week we'll have planted 350 blueberry bushes.  At some point in the near future after that, the "fence guy" will come to enclose our plants with wire mesh, supposedly high enough to repel moose and deer, although the man admitted that once (only once) a bear went crashing through the wiring. 

But right now, on these early spring days, we watch the growing grass and we realize that sometime soon we're going to have to mow it.  That wouldn't be so bad if the winter and spring run off hadn't managed to grow a bountiful crop of hand-sized rocks, scattered throughout our previously rock-free field.  Rocks and mowers don't get along altogether well.  

So prior to our Blueberry Getaway, we're trying to prepare by picking rocks out of our field.  Is there anything more boring than picking rocks?

The answer is no.  There is not.

Yesterday was my 34th birthday.  Imagine that.

I've always enjoyed my birthdays, playing it up a bit so people know to congratulate me or even give me a present (I love presents), but this year, what with the Bundle o' Joy turning the Big 1 herself and then coming down with a fever which climbed to 103.6 and maybe just the general fact that after 34 of the things I've finally figured out they're really not that exciting, I forgot all about my birthday. 

So Happy Belated Birthday to Me!  And I hope everyone survived Earth Day as well.  At 38, it's getting a little crinkly round the edges , too. 

It's kind of like fly-fishing, in a way.

Our hand pump broke.  So our no-electricity-all-hand-powered operation (save for the propane used to finish the syrup and to light the house at night) became even more hand-powered; armed with a kitchen pot, we scooped out gallons and gallons of sap and fed it into carriers which we then transported, over the battened down snow paths, to the collector.  Then we climbed a ladder one handed, 5 gallons or so in the other, and poured that into our 35 gallon collector.

Tending the fire became harder as the season went on.  We broke into the wood we'd split last year which we never had time to stack.  It wasn't dry.  So we went back to our old method of chopping it to slivers, placing it on the sides of the barrel stove bonfire-like, quickly removing it when it caught on fire, and otherwise baking it to dry.  This supposed we'd gotten enough of a fire going to throw out this much heat.  Eyeing the nice, old pine boards we use to stack wood in the basement, we hauled a few down to the sugar house and chopped these up, too.  "Doesn't this feel like we're burning the furniture to stay warm?" Lionel asked once.  "Shut up," I said, "and make me more."

It's like fishing in that you can spend long hours of the day outside, in one place, doing nothing (except waving a stick or tending a fire) waiting for something to happen.  You know there's fish there, under the roiling water.  You know there's syrup, hiding under the foam.  The foam itself reminds me of the La Poile on a hot day, where it collects in the eddies and trout hide under its surface.  If you place your fly just right you can fool them.

When I'm not tending the fire, chopping the wood, running to get more sap, I scoop the foam out.  It's a down-time activity.

Last year's sugar season we made 3.88 gallons of the stuff, still more than we can eat in a year.  I was eight months pregnant at the time, and in the manner of all jaded nay-saying parents, my colleagues informed me gleefully that I wouldn't be doing this for a while.   This year, albeit with the sacrifices of my mother and my aunt and a few other baby-sitters, and a rotating shift on the weekdays between Lionel and myself, we've made six and a half, more than we've ever made.  You'd think my friends would know by now that I never take no for an answer.

Now the season is over, the snow (still two feet deep in places) is finally melting, the daffodils and tulips are coming up, and we're turning our attention to other things.  Mud season is nigh upon us.  There's little left to do with the sugaring operation save clean the pan and the equipment, label the product, and dream about next year.   Maybe next year we'll catch the big old fish who hides in the shallows, just out of reach of our lines.  Maybe we'll play our cards right and finally prove to ourselves that our little 2-by-4 pan needs an upgrade, a real sugar house , and running water.  You never know.

In anticipation of the weather, I took the week off.  In past years, the last week in March has been the ideal  sugaring time, mixing the below freezing nighttime temperatures with the above freezing daytime temperatures which bring out the best in Acer saccharum .

In related news, this just in : New Hampshire has now broken the 100 year snow fall record.  A few more inches and we can inch into second place and if we're lucky, we'll break the all time record high of 122 inches, set back in the winter of 1873-74.   This is snowfall measured in our fair Capitol of Concord, mind you.  We here in Washington long ago broke the 100 inch mark.  When we put the lines up three weeks ago, we strung them above last year's mark (done with a ladder), and that was after a week of intense melting. Now the lines are above my head.  But I went to dig a hole to set another barrel down, and dug down three feet before I hit ground.  I'm grateful for the normal winter, but we've really had enough snow.

The week hasn't been in vain, though.  Yesterday we boiled down and containered up a gallon and a quarter of sweet Grade A Fancy.  Through no fault of anyone's the season is late, or perhaps it is just on time like the days of old.  We've only been doing this for four years, it turns out, and like all years the weather gods defy reason, wisdom, and the best laid plans of mice and men.

NOAA, by the way, still can't get it right .  But we're used to that by now. 

Last year, we bought a Prius.  We were both taken by the idea of saving gas on our long commutes, and since because of where I live both public transportation and pedal power are unfeasible, the alternative is working from home (which I do occasionally) or lowering the gas intake. So a Prius it is.

The Prius is quite the space-age car, with a central touch-screen console full of neat features, automatic air conditioning, and a newfangled type key which just has to be on your person in order to unlock or start the car.  I grew up with manual transmission and for a time refused to drive a car with power windows, so this leap was huge for me.  I figured though, that being the technical guru at both my home and my work I could figure out a piddling car.

When I got in it though, I could not, for the life of me, get it to turn on and get into gear.  With a pang of fear I thought perhaps I was getting old, perhaps technology was finally passing me by, but I did manage to finally figure it out and since then, except from occasionally forgetting how to turn off our "traditional" car, things have been fine.

The Network Administrator is down in Maryland for the week, so my time promises to be in high demand.  I was pretty sure I had everything under control though, so I was surprised to receive a phone call at 6:30 in the morning.  

"Hi, it's Jim!" the Network Administrator said, "I've got a problem."

"What?" I said, groggily staring at my coffee pot and wondering what I had missed.  A backup tape?  An installation?

"Well, I rented a Prius, and I can't figure out how to put it into Drive."

So you see, it's not just me.

After some false starts, during which at one point he told me he'd managed to put it into Reverse but in reality had merely put it into Neutral and then coasted backward down the hill, we managed to get the car to agree that Drive was a useful thing and he went on his merry way.  The trick, my would-be Prius fans, is that without the small, almost invisible READY light, you're not going anywhere.  To get the small READY light, you merely have to step on the brake, but you have to do it in the right sequence before you turn the car on.  

It's all in the manual, of course.  Which neither of us read.  We're too technical for that.  

We drilled holes into trees yesterday evening.  The sap is running.

Winter, however, is far from over.  Even hardened New Englanders like my mother are longing for bare ground, and the archivists all claim that this is the most snow we've gotten in nigh unto 100 years.  Roofs are collapsing everywhere , though admittedly most of these roofs are on top of "box stores" which take the word "box" seriously but don't take into account their actual location, which calls for more of a "house" shaped roof.  All these warnings have caused a minor roof race, with less than stellar results and often causing other problems .

It's all very amusing.

Except that I am getting tired of trying to get out of my driveway, and after that is accomplished, following my fellow commuters down increasingly snowed in roads, a majority of the time through some sort of precipitation.  Today's flavor will be rain, followed by an entree of ice.

March has certainly blown in. 

One of New England's distinguishing features this time of year, aside from mile-high mounds of crusty, dirty snow mounding up above our heads as we drive down the road, is the disheveled state of our roads.  Mostly this is due to our insistence upon tar as a road surface, which, not being as flexible or as natural as gravel, gives in to the repeated thawings and freezings and acnes the road in bumps, ridges and holes.  This time of year, travel becomes the art of avoiding the ignominy of bottoming out your car while still traveling fast enough to get to your destination in time.  Signs crop up saying "Frost Heaves" or, on rare occasions, "Bump," usually helpfully positioned a few feet after the fact as if to say: "That's what you just hit."

My commute in the morning follows most of these unfortunate roads.  A commuter going in the opposite direction, whom I encounter every day, clearly needs his front shocks replaced: as I recognize his car by the crazy font end nod he does as he meanders past me.  I also follow people who haven't gotten the knack of driving in Frost Heave season, braking randomly before the bumps, swerving mightily all over the road.  This is all par for the course in New England this time of year.

So my contempt naturally came pouring out when I saw this headline: Road Troubles in Bedford .   Apparently the New Jerseyites who moved to Bedford thinking it was a quaint New England village haven't been here long enough to realize that this New England feature isn't about to change just because they call it in the the local news organization.

Is it really northern migration that is causing the outcry, or is it something more sinister, something more insidious, a silent national crumbling of that which we all take for granted: our roads, our bridges, our water supplies ? 

It makes sense that our national infrastructure is crumbling; there simply isn't the manpower or the money to do the necessary work to fix it, to modernize it, or even to patch it.  The manpower and the money are being sent over seas, to conquer and westernize a third world country.  Meanwhile we believe the glittery movie images of our homeland; the long shining highways and the ever-resilient cities, and close our eyes to the obvious.  It's a fragile system we have here.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, we still manage to get from point A to point B with relative ease, when the town of Lempster bothers to plow, anyway.  We're in the midst of the first real winter we've had in three or four years, and while the constant frozen precipitation gets tiresome after a time, it only makes the anticipation of seeing bare ground that much more enjoyable.  Whether or not the state of the roads is due to a lack of time, money and resources or simply a state of mind, it reminds me that I still live in New Hampshire, land of the Wandering Frost Heave. 

The first Primary in the Nation is long over, but all is not love and peace in the LARC household; for though we are both Democrats, dedicated to overthrowing the evil tyranny of the conservative far right, we cannot agree on a candidate.  And apparently, we're not alone .

Not that the strife of other households matter to us any when we're in the throes of one of our many--unintended--political cat fights.  Lionel's passion for Barack Obama's inspiring rhetoric combined with my coldly logical Hillary Clinton realism makes for high seas on the relatively calm waters of Half Moon Pond.  This has never happened to us before.  Why can't we agree?  

Maybe it's cabin fever.  

Sugaring season is nigh upon us, though, and we're once again uniting and eyeing the neighbors' untapped lines, waiting for the right moment to string up our own.  It's been a real winter this year, though rainy of late, and we're hoping for a satisfying season.  While we're out enjoying the melting snow, the Democrats will rage on about the role of superdelegates and who is better than who.  In the end it doesn't matter--one of them will be the President of the United States.  Given the vitriol with which it is clear we Democrats can spit at each other, the Republicans don't stand a chance. 

Part of the job of the Help Desk is to gather as much information as possible on a problem, then, if the problem can't be solved by the first level, send it on to the appropriate person.  That's how it would work in a perfect world, anyway, if the Help Desk first level (i.e. me) wasn't also doing fifteen other things.  In reality, I glance at tickets and make a split second decision as to whether it should go to me or to one of the programmers.  That's usually an easy call.  The hard part is trying to figure out which set of programmers it should go to, as we've got a bunch of different systems.  I'll generally make the best educated guess that I can, and let my fellow on-call IT personnel bounce it around for themselves.  Half the time, they don't know what the user wants, either.

That's because most of these tickets say something like: "I'm having trouble with my report.  Is there something wrong with the system?"

What report?  Which system??

So in my ongoing effort to Educate the Users I sent out a cute little email entitled "TMI and the Help Desk," which gently explained that in the case of the Help Desk, there was no such thing as Too Much Information.  I gave specific examples of information which might be useful to impart.  I made sure that it wasn't too technical, wasn't too dry, wasn't too long, and sent it off.  And for a while, maybe for two hours or so, it seemed to work; for instance one woman who never leaves her name, calls from anyone's phone but her own and leaves me cryptic messages like: "I can't get to the gracky, bye," actually called me up and left me her name and her extension.   So I was hopeful that perhaps we were making progress.

Two days later I receive a reply on this email, get up, and start banging my head on the wall.

Underneath the subject line entitled "Re: TMI and the Help Desk" is the single sentence:

"What if you forget your signon?" 

What signon??  To which system?!? 

The weekend flew by, as weekends will do.  This weekend flew even faster since we went down to the Cape to visit one of Lionel's old friends, a person he hadn't seen for five years and I'd only met once five years ago and that at our wedding. 

Now that we Have Kids, our relationship with traveling, not to mention our relationships with other people, has changed.  We deliberately don't bring the world for the Bundle o' Joy, knowing that most if not all of what we bring she won't use.  But there's still some vital items, such as food, and things to prepare and eat the food with, which need to come with us.  Then we had to pack the dog and his belongings; and finally there was our stuff.

Still, we only left an hour later than we'd planned.

The friend has since married and had daughter, with another one on the way.  The interactions between the four of us flowed well and was friendly enough, but when I and the other woman were alone the conversation was forced and the silences somehow telling; she kept trying to engage me in girl talk and I don't even know what that is.

I muddle my way through the confusing twists and turns of a conversation which ranged from pregnancy, breastfeeding, being a working mother, and specific brands to shop for, but I don't think I fooled her.  She's an urbanite from New York City, and I'm a country bumpkin.  Had we had a little more in common, say if I knew where the cute little shop was on 44th and West, or she had occasionally gone fishing with her Dad while growing up, maybe we could have hit it off.   But when the unrepentant Tomboy meets up with the feminine ideal, the only thing which keeps the conversation going  is the fact that we're both in our thirties and have grown up a little bit.

Conversely, I hit it off with Lionel's friend immediately.  Late into the night we had a roaring conversation on politics and our life's philosophies, the type of conversation which knows no gender bounds.   The moral of the story is that there are friends that you have because they appeal to you, and there are the friends that you have which you make because you have to.  Everyone is friendly in the end.

And now they're gone.

Hillary Clinton's "unexpected" win in New Hampshire will keep the news media talking for a week, either about how she managed to pull it off or, in a few quiet voices, about how they managed to get it so wrong.  The media ever likes a good story, of course.  It would be boring if the front runner remained the front runner the whole way through.  Also, some media outlets, like Fox News, hate Clinton so bad they'll make stuff up, like their obviously imagined "exit polls" which gave Obama a healthy 13 point lead.  As my friend Mike Pride says, the only thing that really counts, in the end, are the votes. 

The reality of the ballot always takes us by surprise somewhat.  We still vote with paper and pencil here in Washington.  The format isn't confusing but sometimes you have to slow down and read the thing because, contrary to popular media belief, there are many more candidates on the ballot than just the top moneyed four.  There were, in fact, a whopping 21.

I didn't see the Republican ballot first hand but apparently their's had the same number.  We were watching the painfully slow results come in last night and noticed that a man named Vermin Supreme had slipped his way onto the ballot, garnering 36 votes.  

It takes all kinds of voters in New Hampshire.