Posts Tagged "House"

The temperature fluctuates widely here, just a day ago, temps were -17, today +2 or 3 degrees and raining. Great fluctuations for maple syrup… hope the tree isn’t getting confused! No where near spring here yet. What works well though with all our rain is our new ditch (AKA graded lawn), the ditch is pronounced enough that water easily runs into it and eventually off the end of the property (or into the ground – as long as its not into our basement). That whole drainage issue seems to be 100% resolved. Even with these melts I haven’t had to empty the dehumidifier, brilliant! This summer will be the real full length test and we’ll see how it does in the hot humid rainy weather. I expect the dehumidifier will be running but hopefully...

 Let me define, urban composting is as I define it, putting compostable stuff to a great big green bin that the municipality takes away which is part of your taxes. 1) I’m kinda against the separation of compostable material and non compostable material. Why? We end up with a GREAT compost pile, but we also end up with a garbage pile which has plastic bags and such which compost that much more slowly because there is no combined compostable material.  Basically I think it harms what would otherwise be a better rate of decomposition for things like bags, metals, plastics (yes they do all componst eventually). Instead we keep out the compostable material and slow the process of their own decomposition. Now.. there are smarter people then I creating...

 This year we had a white Christmas which was excellent (see pic). We got it a few days before Christmas. I’ve had lots of opportunity to get out on my lawn tractor and push snow around. I love using my gas powered tools! I always enjoyed shoveling snow. Its a fresh experience every time, fresh cold air, different snow to move, different obstacles to get around, different types of snow, different times of day. Even better if its snowing out WHILE pushing the snow around. Its just a relaxing sort of thing yet it burns a few calories too. I’ve eaten SO much already, mostly sugar :/ Too much.   Today, Boxing day as I write this, is going to be a lazy day where I just stoke the fire – though I should do a load of firewood. Mostly for my...

The benefits of cooking with cast iron are many. I should create a new ‘healthy living’ tag I think. One of the choices I made way back was to start using cast iron. Well the first choice was to see if I could live with cast iron cooking. The whole seasoning thing was scary and even with seasoning if done right, would it still be as non stick as non stick cookware? Enough so that it wasn’t completely annoying to cook with?     NOTE: I may have blogged on this before… but its worthy of another post!    After probably 5 years or more of cooking with it, I think we have it down and its basically as non stick as our little frying pan. Part of the key is to season it probably once a year anyways.    First, here...

Its a grey rainy day today, but we are in a warm dry house. Its amazing really every time I take a second to think about what we have. We are SO very blessed and wealthy here in Canada. Once I think about that, then my thoughts turn to whether we really should be able to afford a big house like this. 100 years ago, you probably built the house yourself and whatever you put into it was paid for with one of your cows or your blood sweat and tears. Now we just go to a bank and ask for $150k and promise that will give them bits of money over the next 35 years. I’m not sure that really benefits any of us? Hard to say, I mean we wouldn’t have an amazing house without the bank basically renting it to us but we wouldn’t have debt either, at least no...