Car Problems

Those of you who know us will be aware that our car is no spring chicken. Some of you even doubted the wisdom of us trying to take this car off Prince Edward Island.  We don't think anyone is surprised to see a blog entry titled Car Problems, but this situation actually had nothing to do with the car breaking down...

Taken yesterday morning, that rainbow ends right on our car. That is some sick, backwards foreshadowing of what kind of luck we'd have with our car that day.

Last night we went to a church supper with our hosts. We took separate vehicles and on the way home, we managed to miss the turn-off for the dirt road that leads to Bluemoon. Our hosts had been driving a few km behind us and had no way of knowing that we had missed the road. They continued on to home.

We realized within a few minutes that we had gone too far and we turned around to go back. We found the correct turn off and started down the dirt road. It was about 7:45pm, very dark, and had been raining for the past few days. Emily was driving, and was doing her best to avoid the hundreds of potholes in the road She hugged the right shoulder to avoid a particularly deep pothole...without realizing that there was no shoulder. Moragh tried to warn her but it was too late, and the car slid down into what was not the shoulder of the road but a deep, water-filled and very muddy ditch. Trying to steer back onto the road was absolutely useless and the car gently came to a stop with the right wheel almost entirely submerged and the left wheel just barely touching the ground. With some effort due to the extreme angle, we crawled out of the car to assess the situation.

1) Neither one of us had a cell phone.

2) We wouldn't have had reception anyway.

3) We were in the middle of nowhere with no houses in sight.

4) It was pitch dark and raining.

5) Was Betty freaking out, wondering where we were?

6) Bears.

We tried to sort the rational thoughts (how far away is help if we really need it?) from the irrational (we won't see a black bear in the dark until it's right on top of us) and make a plan. Moragh quickly took charge as Emily was feeling very stupid and guilty for having essentially driven the car off the road (and was maybe a little bit scared in the dark). In the summertime, Moragh routinely sets up pulley systems to haul canoes in freezing cold rivers, and thought that maybe a similar pulley system would be enough to help haul the car out of the muck. It was a brave and optimistic plan, and she tried for probably close to an hour to set it up, but the fatal flaw was that she had no rope. What she did have was a slack line. People who understand slack lining are already giggling, but for those of you who don't get it yet, a slack line is by definition a rope that never gets taut. It's a length of dynamic webbing that will, when stretched, just keep getting springier. So no matter how much she pulled on it, the force would not be translated into moving the car. Never ever. So after a very frustrating hour, we decided to call that whole plan off and walk out to the road to find help.

We went to the first house we saw with lights on, and found two young couples sitting in their living room waiting to watch The Walking Dead. Before you could say "car stuck in mud" the two men had their coats on and were digging out chains and talking about whose pick-up would be best for the job. We called Betty and let her know we were safe, and then the gentlemen gave us a lift down to our car and hauled us out (with considerable effort). They were our heroes that night, and we gave them each a beer before they left as thanks. Here's to you, Johnny and Mark!

TL;DR - car got stuck in muddy ditch, in the dark in the middle of nowhere with no cell phones, friendly locals pulled us out, no harm done to car, the end.

Bluemoon

maaaaaaaaaaaah

We are now living on our first ever goat farm! Here at Bluemoon there are also two pigs (fairly young still) and a large garden and plenty of property, along with some wonderful people and house-pets. We arrived here (here being 20 min outside Antigonish) last Friday night and will be staying until about the 16th/17th of November.

Home sweet home for the next little while is a pioneer cabin built by our hosts and a score of wwoofers. It is a one room cabin with a set of handmade bunk beds, some desks and chairs, a shelf unit, and a toilet and sink in the corner. The inside has been decorated and is full of charming objects that really make it feel like home (unicorn touch lamp, Korean figurines, tea cups, rugs, etc). We'll post some interior pictures soon!

The goats live next door to our cabin in a small barn that has been very well adapted for goat needs...namely, their love of hopping and climbing. We wake up every morning to the sound of the goats trotting up and down the ramps to get out the window. Their pasture is large and full of things for them to climb on, but they often escape the enclosure out of pure curiosity. They generally travel around as a quintet and come check on what we're doing throughout the day.

Marney the goat, taking her turn on the milking table.

The first thing we did when we arrived here was help Betty (our host) with evening chores. This includes feeding and milking the goats, and feeding the pigs. The goats get a small helping of feed and their two mangers get filled with hay. The pigs get food scraps (they eat as well as we do!) along with some feed mixed with fresh goats' milk.

the death-ray stare.

Sidebar: we weren't expecting the goats to be as big as they are. The pictures make them look smaller than they appear when they are right next to you. They're bigger than Shetland ponies. When they walk in the barn, it sounds as big as a person coming up behind you. And they're freaky. Sideways pupils? Why?

Our first big job here was to muck out the goat barn.  Betty warned us that the smell might be overpowering, but goat poop's got nothing on the chicken poop that Emily is already quite used to.We only gagged a few times. But there was just so much of it... The worst part was that when we would take a load of poop off the floor and go dump it in the compost piles, by the time we got back the goats would have returned to investigate and left us little fresh poops on the floor. Argh.

Poop removed!

The floor looked pretty great when we were done though. We sprinkled lime for odor and moisture control and then covered it with a layer of wood shavings.

The goats seemed to approve.

It's gon' getcha.

But they're still freaky.

All of the goats here are female, and all of them are pregnant, due to give birth in late January/early February. Except this one in the picture to the left. She was supposed to be preggers but apparently buck-o didn't do his job properly...this picture was taken from the cab of the truck as we drove her back to the neighbour's farm for a little more quality time with the bf.

Other than goats, our efforts have mostly been focused on getting the firewood prepared for the winter. Betty has many large piles of split wood that need to be collected and stacked properly inside a lean-to for winter storage. It's a job we have discovered that we really enjoy - there is a Zen-like state that is possible to achieve as you put a woodpile together. Very relaxing.

It's a work in progress.











I'll end with some pictures of the house-pets here - we always love meeting new house-pets :)

This is Two-toes, guess how he got his name.

Zeta the rottweiler and Bam-bam the chihuahua/dachshund cross, fighting over Moragh,

Visits, Visits Everywhere

We managed to meet many new people during our short stay in Cape Breton (there is no better place to meet people than a market in Cape Breton, write that down). We even attended a community forum on local food and gained some perspective on issues faced by rural communities in the area (which we hope to elaborate on in a future post when we have the time to sit down and gather our thoughts). We left the Cape with a handful of emails, lots of friends and memories of the beautiful area where we lived for such a short time.

Deb and Dennis Hayward's beautiful home on the Rankinville Road.

Extensive and well kept gardens run by Deb.

We love Deb and Dennis and their sense of humour and perspectives in life.

This is Terron Dodd's home near Whycocomagh, where he makes gorgeous wooden spoons.

Terron's house came as a log house kit, like large scale Lincoln Logs.

On our last day in Mabou, we went for a walk while our car was being repaired (yes, we have some stuff to fix on our car, who is surprised, no one is surprised).

Sarah gets it. SO MANY CHESTNUTS, Emily was in heaven.

...most of these are for Sarah's benefit. Rankins :) but closed for the season :(

We enjoyed the Gaelic culture so much. And Emily almost had Moragh convinced that "fiddlestitches" was the real expression, not "fiddlesticks".

Mabou har...bour..? water with a bridge - hah

The Mull (not the mall like it sounds), where we had a delicious lunch on Friday.

That about wraps up our time in Cape Breton. Of course, we have not uploaded even half of the pictures we took. Maybe over Christmas or afterwards we will have the time and internet connection to do a picture dump on Facebook. But for now, we have (with some sadness) left Wild Roots and Inverness county behind and are looking forward to our time in Ohio, just outside Antigonish. :)

We made it, safe and sound, to Antigonish last evening after a nice drive that turned a little hairy on the back roads after dark BUT that's beside the point - we are really enjoying it here at Bluemoon already. Before we get into the stuff going on here though, we have a few more things to share from our time at Wild Roots.

Beer! We made beer. Well, kind of - we bottled beer made from a kit that Thom started a couple of weeks ago. It was a cream ale. Smelled delicious. It has to sit for another couple of weeks before it gets drunk (drank? drinked? whatever) so we didn't get to taste it but we did get to try a stout and a red ale that Thom had made earlier in the year and they were top notch.

About a week ago, Moragh and I noticed a large object on the counter that was covered with a pillowcase. It had been there our entire stay and we finally gave in to curiosity and peeked underneath. We found a rancid smelling ceramic bucket full of some fluid with chunky mold floating on top. There was a large maple syrup jug half-submerged in the centre. Horrified, we replaced the pillowcase and never spoke of it again. With some relief, we learned a few days ago that it was a completely normal step in the process of fermenting green beans in a delicious brine.

After scooping the mold out, we got to stick our hands down in the nasty smelling brine and pull out the beans. We sorted the soft ones from the firm and put the firm ones in jars, along with some fermented garlic cloves and fermented chilies. We know we're not really selling it, but these beans are the BEST. We ate them with every meal. 

We also made kraut! Sauerkraut from cabbage. We harvested all the cabbages in the garden for this endeavor....slugs and all.

We shaved the cabbages down on a bladed contraption similar to a washboard. It sliced them into very thin strips perfect for kraut, and took very little effort. You can see it sitting in the cooler beside Emily looking crazy.

We dumped the cabbage strips into an extremely large cistern to ferment.

We added rock salt, cloves, and peppercorns for flavour. Approximately 50 lbs of cabbage went into that bucket, squished down as tightly as we could. And that's it. The cabbage releases its own water and the salt does the rest. A month later, you have yummy kraut to eat on EVERYTHING.



And then we found some interesting stuff in the woods.

Strange place to park your car.

Old school Canada Dry ginger-ale bottle!

And, the fabled, long lost mass grave of shoes.

Moragh wanted to keep this.

But then we found the bigger version.

...time to break this into two posts. :D

Transition Time

Today is moving day! We will be in Antigonish by the end of the day. Our car is having some minor repairs done (we have a list of things we could fix, one part at a time) this morning, then we're having lunch and visiting some friends for the last time and then we'll be off! We're told there's internet at our next spot, but who knows how reliable or fast it is so this may not get updated again for a while. Just so you know. Still have some activities to report on from Wild Roots (beer making, kraut, fermented beans, crazy stuff we found in the woods) but it's going to have to wait! We'll leave you with probably the coolest treasure we found here: a fossilized TREE. For realsies.

Emily cleaned it off recently and it looks much nicer but still SO COOL.

The Hardest Job

While Thom and Jane and Felix were gone to Halifax, Moragh and I worked on completing a list of odd jobs that they had left for us (see previous posts). One of the jobs Thom had mentioned was a "dream" of his to pave the paths in his greenhouse with flat stones from the brook. The difficult part would be getting the stones up to the greenhouse, with the only access to the brook being a narrow, steep footpath through the trees. Of course, this kind of challenge seemed like great fun to us and so we decided to commit ourselves to the task.

lovely, but heavy as sin

This is an exemplary pile of rocks pulled from the brook. We had about eight or nine of these piles to move. The first step was to bring the rock piles to a location close to the footpath. We did this mostly by tossing the rocks along the bank one at a time. Once they were gathered, the rest of the job was simply to get them along the footpath and up the hill. 

hard to tell but that hill goes up at about 80 degrees

 However, the rocks were mostly too wide to fit into any sort of bucket or basket we had available, and if we were to carry them by hand, we would have been taking them up one by one because they were so heavy.  Clearly, we needed a better system.

What we really wanted was a pulley to haul the rocks up the side of the hill with minimal effort, but we had no pulley or means to make one. What we settled on was burlap bags to carry the rocks in, and what came to be known as the rock’n slip’n slide.  

NB: way less fun than a real slip n slide

Basically, we put plastic and tarps down along the path and dragged the bags full of rocks along the “slide” one at a time. We would move all six bags along the slide and pile them at the opposite end before moving the plastic along to the next part of the path.

"easy" flat section

this was one of the worst spots to get over

Morale was high in the beginning, but after two hours of pulling extremely heavy bags through the forest, we were approaching slight despair.

We had both been clobbered in the leg by the rock bags more than once, and had our toes crushed when the bag unexpectedly got set down. Our arms were scratched up from raspberry thorns and tree branches, and of all things, our FINGERS were aching from gripping the burlap so tightly.

Moragh at the bottom of the second part of the hill.

Things turned around when we reached the bottom of the hill. We looked up at the steep slope we had left to conquer, and back at the evil bags of rocks. Hill. Rocks. Hill. Rocks. And we just started laughing. We kind of lost it. And because our muscles were so tired already, we had to collapse for a minute and just wait out the giggles like crazy people. Ever laugh and lose muscle control, say, on the stairs? This was so much worse.

looking up the last section of hill.

Long story short, we did eventually get our sanity back and the rocks are now piled by the greenhouse. We managed not to really hurt ourselves either, a few bruises and scrapes notwithstanding. 

Moral of the story: this is how hard we were working when no one was watching. Next time, we'll wait for an audience. :P

Happy Halloween!

Hope everyone had a fun Halloween! We expect some of you are now recovering from sugar comas, or maybe still riding the high :) we've seen some pretty great costumes over the past couple of days, both in person and on Facebook, and we decided last minute that we'd get in on the action...

 Our first matching costumes. How sweet. But we really don't know what we ended up being (the vests were just too good to leave in the Halloween bin). Are we creepy rednecks? Goth truckers? Or is this just how we dress...

Anyway, we had a great time last night at a party hosted by L'Arche ("an International Federation dedicated to the creation and growth of homes, programs, and support networks with people who have intellectual disabilities" - Wikipedia, go read about it). Our hosts here are involved with some programs at L'Arche, as are many of the young people in the community. The party was an easy mix of L'Arche assistants, staff, and participants, and everyone's costumes were way better than ours (ours weren't hard to beat but there were some seriously awesome ones there). The decorations were perfect, the food was creepy (fingers, eyeballs, bloody something or others, etc), the games were fun, and the people wonderful. We had a lot of good laughs and good conversations and a good dose of Halloween spirit.

Plus, we found a salamander.

That's a tea light for size ref.

After L'Arche we came home and ate Screme Eggs and had some pear cider and watched TV (Community for us, Man on a Ledge for our hosts) as the rain poured down outside. It was, in all, a very relaxing Halloween.

Please comment and let us know what you think our costumes were!

We also carved squash. Emily's is left, Moragh's is right.