Zachary and I have re-committed ourselves to the kitchen remodel again the past couple days. Unfortunately we had slacked off the last few weeks and not much progress was being made. A couple minutes swinging the hammer revealed some layers that haven't seen daylight in decades.
Maggie is unfazed by the destruction.
We removed the plaster and lathe from the east wall. Cute wallpaper, huh?
We pulled up the old vinyl and plywood and found red vinyl tile covered with small staples. Goody. We have all the staples out now and most of the red tile has been pulled up. Under the tile is tar paper that is also sometimes stubborn to peel up. Under that is hardwood. That is staying put. Whatever we decide for the new floor will go over the top. The old hardwood is too damaged and patched to be refinished.
December is drawing to a close on the farm. Weather has been interesting, with record snowfall for the month in our area of the state with the total at 44.3 inches. With some rain and a couple melting days in between, the snow depth is not as high. The temperatures has been milder the past week, which is nice around the farm. That means less stress worrying over frozen water pipes and fountains for the animals.
I have been off from work since Christmas and I don't have to go back to the office until after the New Year. I have been enjoying the time off. I get to be a full-time farmer with Z. Hopefully he is not sick of me yet. :-)
Queequeg is hunting Christmas dinner through the window.
As you may know or not know, Zachary and I like to cook. You will often find us watching Food Network, getting all sorts of crazy ideas for food. We like to experiment in the kitchen, but today we followed our chef heroes.
So for lunch today we had:
Pan Seared Steak
Baked Mashed Potatoes
Chocolate Chip Cookies
This was much more of "fancy" lunch than we usually have, but it's nice to treat ourselves once and a while. Best cooking show to watch: Good Eats with Alton Brown. The man is a cooking genius.
Today we brought a tree home. This year it is a Balsam. I'll post another picture of the tree once it is decorated.
I have always felt a little guilty about using a real tree at Christmas time. Cutting down a tree just for a couple weeks decoration... but the smell and tradition always convinces me otherwise. A few months ago, I found on article in This Old House that reaches out the guilty "treehugger" in me. It describes how you can buy a live tree in the fall and prepare it for it's X-mas debut, and then preserve it until it can be planted. The article can be found here. Living in Wisconsin, it would require more planning/preparation on our part, but I would think it would be a neat tradition to start. Maybe next year... remind me about October to start thinking about it. :-)
Taken after about 9 inches of new snow fell on Tuesday.
Yes, we are alive. I am slightly embarrassed that I have not posted since Thanksgiving. :-) Oh well...
Anyway, things are going well around the farm. Winter has truly arrived. We've been getting a inch or two of snow every few days and it is starting to build up a bit. The temperature has also dropped. Last night the low was -1F. Brrr. With the below freezing temps at night, we keep our milking herd in the barn at night. We put bedding in their stalls for comfort and feed them indoors at night in exchange for using their body heat to keep the barn warm enough to prevent the water pipes from freezing. They still go outside during the day for exercise and for more food.
The past week I have been trying to prevent a massive file loss on my iPod. I have been using my 80GB iPod as a portable hard drive for a while now, to free up some space on our computer and to easy access to my freelance graphics files. Long story short, the iPod went corrupt from being disconnected improperly from the computer and it held about 17GB of my files hostage. To fix my iPod, I needed to reformat and restore through iTunes. But before I do that, I had to get my graphics files from it. I tried several extraction softwares, but I wasn't getting anywhere. Somehow on Friday night, my iPod allowed me to access the my files and I could start copying the files to my computer hard drive. I soon realized it would not be that easy. I had corrupt files scattered within my good ones and it would not allow me to copy all of them. So I had to make some hard decisions, saving ones I could and abandoning others. I ended up with about 2.5GB recovered and the rest either I could not recover or decided I could live without. Last night I pressed the reformat button and nuked my iPod... :-(
Moral of the story: Have a Backup operational for your computer files!
Zachary and I have re-committed ourselves to the kitchen remodel again the past couple days. Unfortunately we had slacked off the last few weeks and not much progress was being made. A couple minutes swinging the hammer revealed some layers that haven't seen daylight in decades. Maggie is unfazed by the destruction.
We removed the plaster and lathe from the east wall. Cute wallpaper, huh?
We pulled up the old vinyl and plywood and found red vinyl tile covered with small staples. Goody. We have all the staples out now and most of the red tile has been pulled up. Under the tile is tar paper that is also sometimes stubborn to peel up. Under that is hardwood. That is staying put. Whatever we decide for the new floor will go over the top. The old hardwood is too damaged and patched to be refinished.
