Slow Windy Day - March 8, 2022 @goldenoakfarm

Being a 4th generation packrat, I keep everything. I have albums of all the seeds I’ve grown. They are filed by year the packet was emptied and alphabetically by plant. I keep the pot markers from any plants I’ve bought also and tape them to small sheets of paper to keep them in place. This hadn’t been done since 2020 and there was a pile of them on my desk.

As I’d had a bad night Tuesday night, I wasn’t moving too fast. I was trying to get the last of the mess I’d made doing the Garden records put away. My cleaning helper was coming and we needed the room in the office. So this was one of the things I got done, in addition to putting away the rest of the paper mess and getting out the tools we’d need.

She hadn’t shown up by 8:30 so I checked e-mail. She was under the weather and not coming. As I’d had a lot of things I’d hoped to do, this was probably just as well. I wasn’t feeling too good myself.

It had been very windy in the night and continued that way during the day. All the birdfeeders had blown down and we left them down until the wind stops. It was a mostly sunny day and I didn’t need the stoves until it got dark after 6PM.

I checked the seedlings and lots of the onions were up. I transplanted some that had several in a hole into holes where none had come up. I had to clean another tray to move them into, as the ones not up still needed a cover on them. Nothing from the arnica yet.

So I spent a quiet day, interrupted by the telephone repair person. My phone, and then my internet, had been getting progressively worse over the last 2 weeks. The phone stopped letting calls through over the weekend. This was effective for all the spam calls that come in, but also for anyone trying to reach me.

Off and on during the day the bell on the kitchen phone would softly chime, but the one in the stairwell never did. They both should have. He showed up around noon and it turns out that when we built in 1983, we ran 2 phone lines in the trench for water and electric. Each line had 2 sets of wires, a primary and a backup, one blue, one orange. At some point since then, in the line actually in use, the primary had failed and the secondary set of wires was in use. They had failed.

So he had to get the 2nd wire and hook it into the box. Except for some reason it was a foot shorter than the original wire. So we got a new box installed too. This was supposed to fix the intermittent internet connection, eliminate the static on the phone, and allow calls to come in. Well, I got 2 out of 3, as the internet went down an hour after he left. We got it back up again, but who knows for how long.

Now I have 1 backup set of wires left. When those go, it will mean trenching the front pasture, again, and laying new ones. I’m not looking forward to that expense and aggravation, not to mention the ruin of the pasture.

On Wednesday my cleaning helper is planning on coming and I will have my general helper too. We are going to tackle cleaning the cellar and trying to find the transition strips.