Cabin Trip - May 2017

My husband and I made a trip to the cabin in May.  I just have not had a chance to post the photos until now.  The end of May was very busy for us.   The trip started for us as many seem to do, with rain forecast for nearly every day we planned to be up there.  It was sunny when we started out, but by the time the mountains came into view, we could begin to see the clouds were building. However, it remained dry for the drive up there.  We had great views of sunny fields where the hay was being gathered and the next crops were being planted.  This year there is going to be a lot of corn planted.  I could see acres of it.

This trip up, the rain came mostly at night.  It did not just rain, it poured torrential downpours for hours.  Then, by morning, the storms cleared out, leaving everything dripping wet and fresh.  It was a relief to see the rain.  Although the storms could be scary, we were happy to see it rain.  Last year, the summer was dry and there was a forest fire nearby.  We were fortunate that the cabins in our area survived.  For now, the streams are full and roaring and the vegetation is lush.  I hope it will stay that way.

The moist conditions have spawned a lot of mushrooms and fungi.  There is some type of fungi growing on a tree up near the spring box.  It is hard to judge the size of the fungi in a photo, but the largest of these mushrooms is about the size of a dinner plate.  I think it has at least doubled in size since we were up there in April.  You can see that the top mushroom is starting to show some rot due to it holding water in the depression in the center.  However, the upper mushroom is sheltering the lower two and they are continuing to grow larger.

Since there is so much moisture up there at the moment moss is also growing.  The large rock in the photo is covered with moss.  I don't remember it having that much on it in some time.  When my brother and I were children, we used to pretend this rock was a canoe.  We would spend hours on imaginary adventures canoeing on the river.  I always enjoy seeing it when we drive up.  It brings back many good memories.  It also lets me know that the cabin is just around the bend in the road.  It is a welcome sight after a long drive.

We took a walk down to the old house and back up through the woods.  The rhododendrons were blooming.  I am glad we were able to be up here while they were out.  The blossoms do not last long. Speaking of blossoms, there was a tree blooming at the edge of our yard.  It had thousands of blossoms on it and they fell all over the yard.  There were so many that by the end of the week it looked like that part of the yard was covered with snow.  After looking it up when I came home, it appears that the tree is a black locust.  I don't think I had seen that tree in bloom before.

Some of our trip was spent helping a family member with some work.  After that, we started on this years project, which is replacing the floor upstairs.  We thought that we were pretty much finished with cabin upgrades, but then we found that the underlayment upstairs was crumbling.  It is possible that someone upstairs could step on it and step right through it and through the brand new wood slat ceiling we had installed downstairs.  So we hauled up some plywood and got to work.  We did not get too far, because my husband strained some muscles in his hand.  We had to leave it for another trip.  I hope we will be able to complete the floor this year.  It will take multiple trips to finish up there.  Other than the floor, I think we are going to leave the upstairs alone.  We have spent years working on the cabin.  We need some relax time.  Yes, I know, famous last words.  I had to laugh the other day.  I was listening to the radio and a caller was saying he was going to his beach house.  The radio host said he was envious.  The caller told him not to be because all he ever did there was work on the house.  I know exactly what he means.

Now that I am home again, I hope to have some new blog posts on a more regular basis.  I have some updates on some of my long term projects.  They are taking a long time to complete, but at least progress is being made.  Check back Thursday for the latest on one of the projects.    

 

An Object Lesson in Crafting - Spiral Coil Bowl

Six hours for spirals.

I know many women crafters.  Everyone of them has a UFO story.  No, not flying saucers.  In crafting, a UFO is an unfinished object.  The object may be unfinished because at some stage it looks as if it will not turn out they way the crafter hoped, or another project may have captured the crafter's attention so the first project was set aside to for "when I get around to it."  However, many projects are not completed because the item is taking so much longer to create than the crafter had thought it would.  It can be difficult to determine at the start just how much time a project will take to complete.  Sometimes projects look simple, but are deceptively time consuming.  Today I am blogging about such a project.  Hopefully, readers can learn something about estimating the time a project will take from this.

It all started when I saw a small bowl made out of paper on Pintrest.  The blog post said it was a good way to recycle magazines.  It looked simple enough.  I thought I could make one.  I did some internet searches to find some instructions on how to make spiral paper art.  There are many methods for making the craft.  During my search, I came across a blog post on someone's spiral paper art frame.  I wish I had saved the link because her post on this was both informative and humorous.  Her project was also a much more child friendly project.  Basically, she said that the project took hours and days longer than she expected.  Since she figured she was not going to talk you out of trying the craft, she went on to describe her technique, which used tape to secure the spirals.  She was probably right.  I should have walked away from this project, but I did not.  This project has becomes the project that has eaten up hours of my time with the end nowhere in sight.  I think if I had started estimating the time from the start, I would have taken her advice.

There were a number of different methods for doing this type of project on the internet.  Taping the spirals, using basic papier mache' techniques, and hot glue to name a few.  I also tried to recycle a magazine as part of the project.  Well, I have recycled most of one magazine.  I think I will take the rest of the magazines to the library because I don't see my making more than one of these bowls.  Anyway, I tried a couple of different methods of construction to see which worked best for me.  More about that below.

Before you begin a project, you need to decide how much mess you can tolerate on a project because that will factor into the time equation.  Some methods of construction can be quicker, but may entail a lot of mess.  Some methods are slower, but aren't as much of a mess.  Cleanup factors into time as well.  I tried the tape method because that seemed like it would be quick.  I did not like the result.  Tape was showing on the parts of the project that would be visible.  I tried a regular papier mache' method.  Trying to spiral the paper left it, my work surface, and me covered in sticky flour paste.  Finally I tried a modified method where I smoothed glue onto the spiral with the tip of a skewer.  That worked well, added the strength of the glue to the card stock, and kept mess to a minimum.  It was not as fast as the other two, but I think that overall, it looked better than the tape without as much mess as the flour paste.  It just takes longer.  I also found that coiling the paper into a spiral in advance helped make it easier to create the spiral when you were dealing with the glue.

To start with, the spirals are made of paper, but quilling paper was too thin at 1/8 inch.  I felt that I needed each spiral to be about a quarter inch deep to have enough strength to hold up to several levels of spirals glued on top of each other.  And regular magazine paper was a little flimsy.  I decided to try making the spirals out of card stock.  I cut 12 x 12 inch card stock from  coordinating colors into 1/2 inch (12.7 mm) strips.  I tried to cut three sheets of card stock at once with a craft knife and ruler (Using scissors did not make as even a cut), but three sheets at a time did not work very well.  It worked much better using only two sheets at a time.  Turns out that it took about eighteen minutes to cut the strips.  Eighteen minutes netted me 24 strips per sheet, so 48 in one cutting.  It takes two strips to make a coil about 7/8 of an inch wide.  I also cut half inch strips of magazine pages and folded them as well.  The flimsy magazine paper coiled much easier than the card stock, but you had to pay more attention to the fold because the paper tended to slide.

I folded each strip of card stock in half then rolled each strip into a spiral. Again, I did not ask myself how long was this going to take.  I never have measured how long it takes to coil an individual spiral.  What I can tell you that five sheets worth of 1/2 inch (12.7 mm) strips took about six hours.  I started making the coils when my husband and I watched television in the evening.  Once the spiral is started, you can basically make the spiral by feel.

Then I started gluing the spirals together.  Just so you know, you have to keep an eye on the spirals to make sure that they are not stealthily spinning outward into a cone on the other side while you are rolling them at this point.   I would spread glue on about a four inch section of the  folded card stock, roll that into a spiral, then add a few more inches of glue and roll some more.  I found that if I did more than a few inches at a time of the glue that I was covered in it when the paper whipped around.  Once I had the card stock glued down, I added  a strip of the magazine paper, then another strip of card stock.  It was slow going at first, but I picked up speed as I went along.  Speed is a relative term however.  Now that I have my method down, I can create spirals at the blazing rate of six per hour.  You read that correctly, at the rate of one every ten minutes.  The photo shows some rows of coiled spirals.  That is another six hours worth of work, on top of the six hours that it took me to coil the spirals in the first place.

The base of the bowl is a slightly different story.  I started making the base from 2 inch (50.8 mm) magazine strips.  Rather than folding them in half as I did the card stock, I folded them in half, opened out to the full width, then folded each end into the center.  Opened out the paper, smeared the strip glue, and refolded the paper.  That way, both the top and bottom had smooth edges.  The card stock, only folded in half, has one side that has smooth edges, and one side that shows the raw edge of the paper.  I coiled the paper around and around gluing each piece to the next until I reached about the size of the base that I wanted for my bowl.  Then I started working with the spirals to see how many I would need to go once around the base.  I wanted stripes of color to spiral around the base.  Turns out that my base was already to large, so I decided that rather than make the stripes wider, I would use one color twice.  After I had the base the right size, I gave the whole thing a couple of coats of Modge Podge to completely seal it.  One thing I did find is that the colors of the magazines get a little muddy when the glue soaks in.  The spiral of colors looks nice, but it might have been more colorful if I had used card stock instead.

Once my base was complete, I started to hot glue the spirals around the base.  This is the first set of 12x 12 sheets made into spirals and glued onto the base.  It only took about twenty minutes to glue them on.  The bowl is nowhere near finished.  At this point, I am at least thirteen hours in on this project.  I have cut and made the initial coil on  a second set of card stock papers.   Of course, this project is being done in my "spare time."  Eventually, the bowl will becomes a vase.  Each layer is going to be set slightly inward so that it will not be as wide as the base.  So, it may take three or four more sets of coils to get it looking like I want it.  I want it to be tall enough that you will be able to really notice the spiral of colorful stripes going around it.  This project is going to take a while. 

If I had taken the time to estimate how long it was going to take to make a coil, and how many coils I expected it to take to complete the project, I would have understood just how long the project was going to take.  I did not, because I thought it was going to be a very simple project.  Now I know better.  This project is so simple that it would be something you could do with a child, but I think a child would know better.  She (or he) would get bored with it and walk away.  

Cabin - Food and Cooking Part 2

In the last post I was blogging about some of my cooking strategies for the cabin.  It is not much of a vacation if you spend a lot of it in the kitchen.  I try to cook once and use leftovers to make other meals.  The previous blog post was about using smoked chicken.  In between those chicken recipes I served other meals so it would not seem like we were eating so much chicken.  I was also blogging about how to scale up the menus in case we had guests for dinner or were invited to a pot luck.  Today I am blogging about the meals served in between the chicken meals.

A day or so after I smoked the chicken, we cooked a London Broil (a.k.a. flank steak) on the grill. It was covered with a dry rub for beef before grilling.   I bring a large London Broil, much larger than we can eat.  Usually two or three slices each is enough.  If we are inviting people for dinner, there is always plenty left over.  Along with the steak we generally have some bread that was cooked on the grill before the steak was cooked.  I also serve a salad called Mississippi Cornbread Salad.  Altogether, it makes an attractive, delicious meal.  There will be plenty of leftovers from the steak and salad to use for future meals.

We actually cook the bread on the grill.  A few years ago, making pizza on the grill became popular.  We had to try it, and it does work.  That was the impetus for us to experiment with making bread on the grill.  My husband really enjoys making and cooking the bread.  He uses a basic Italian bread recipe.  After the bread has risen according to directions, he flattens the loaf out to a half-inch (12.7 mm) thick round disk.  We found that cooking the bread on a tray that is used to grill vegetables works better than just cooking it on the grill itself.  The bread browns more uniformly.  Once the bread is browned on one side, he flips it over and browns the other.  He checks the temperature of the bread with an instant read thermometer to make sure it is completely cooked through. The bread is done when the temperature is between 200 and 210 degrees Fahrenheit (93.33 to 98.88 Celsius).   It has a smokey flavor to it.  Usually, we have half the loaf for dinner and use the rest for sandwiches the next day.

There are plenty of recipes online for the salad under its title name and also under the search words Cornbread Salad or Southern Cornbread Salad.  It is somewhat of a regional food.  I use a recipe I found in a magazine a few years ago, more or less.  I add or subtract ingredients, depending on what I have on hand.  It is also a stacked salad, so if placed in a clear bowl, it can be very attractive if you are looking for a fancy looking food to take to a potluck.  I have posted a link to a recipe that is pretty much identical to the one I use here:  http://www.midwestliving.com/recipe/mississippi-corn-bread-salad/

The Mississippi Cornbread Salad is great if you are feeding a crowd.  However, I find that the recipe goes a long way on its own.  I usually only make half a recipe, and we can eat it as a salad for four days sometimes as a side for dinner, sometimes for lunch.  The cornbread salad is actually a full meal in itself.  I am actually thinking about scaling down to making a quarter recipe when it is just the two of us.  If I were going to downsize to a quarter recipe, I might save half the corn and pinto beans and put it in the pot of chili too.  The more vegetables the merrier. 

If I am only using half the cornbread that has to be cooked for the salad, I save the rest and serve it on a different night with some chili.  If chili is not on the menu for the next day, I will wrap the cornbread and put it in the freezer and thaw it when I plan to use it.  I always like to find ways I can cook once and have something at dinners two or three times.  If I were going to downsize to a quarter recipe of the cornbread salad, I might save some of the corn and pinto beans and put it in the pot of chili too.  The more vegetables the merrier.

The rest of the flank steak gets the leftover treatment as well.  A fairly large London Broil might actually give us another night of steak dinner if we were eating by ourselves.  After that second dinner, the leftovers can be thinly sliced and served on a flour burrito wrapper with some fried onions and peppers to make steak fahitas.  The cornbread salad is a great side dish for this recipe also.   So once again, a little cooking has gone a long way.

I did not take photos of the meals while they were cooking this last trip.  I am sure that I have posted photos of the steak and bread cooking in other blog posts, but I am unable to find the pictures in my computer.  I could spend hours going through the thumbnail pictures trying to find them.  I have looked, but at the moment they are not coming into view.  I am sorry that I don't have photos today.

So to wrap this up, a little menu planning can help you spend more of your vacation time on vacation rather than being chief cook and bottle washer.  Using leftovers in creative ways can make it seem as if you have had many different types of meals rather than eating the same thing over and over.  Another benefit of cooking in this manner also helps keep the cost of food from going over budget.  All in all, it is a win all the way around.

Next blog post is going to be about the craft project that I have been working on for quite some time.  It will be a project that I haven't shown before. It has taken a lot of time to get it to a point where I have had something to show for my work.  Sometimes the prep work for a project is much more work than I anticipated.

Cabin - Food and Cooking

Smoked turkey tostadas/nachos.

I've been remiss in posting again.  Things have just been too hectic and something had to give.  In my case it has been working on my crafting and blogging.  I do have some crafts that are coming along and I will be blogging about them soon.  In the mean time, I wanted to put up another post about life at the cabin.  It is about cooking at the cabin.  A vacation is not really a vacation if you spend a lot of time cooking. Over the years I have tried various strategies to provide nutritious, flavorful meals while at the cabin.  Perhaps readers will profit from those experiences.  This might take a couple of blog posts to cover thoroughly.  I don't want to try to cram it all in one post. 

We have electricity at our cabin, which is fortunate because it gives us more options for cooking.  I do not have a regular stove there.  I have a wood fired cook stove.  It is wonderful in cold weather because we can heat the house and also put on a savory stew that can sit on the furthest metal plate on the stove and cook all day.  The problem with cooking up there comes in when the weather starts to warm up.  When the cast iron stove heats up, it stays warm for a long time.  By the afternoon, the heat can roast you right out of the cabin.  I can still cook, using an electric frying pan, our Coleman stove, microwave, toaster oven, roaster oven, or grill.  However, the cooking situation is less than ideal.  The Coleman stove has to be used out on the porch due to problems with carbon monoxide.  Also, it leaves a black residue on the bottom of your pots.  When you set the pot down it gets black soot all over everything and it is really hard to clean off.  The toaster oven and microwave are small and are usually used for heating things rather than cooking things from scratch.  The roaster oven works okay, but it functions best when you can cook long and slow.   The grill is great as long as it is not raining.  With those options, plus all the cooking time, it is necessary to find some way to balance what I can cook with all the other factors of making food.  I guess the good news is that once we upgraded the electricity we can operate the toaster oven and the microwave at the same time.  That greatly sped up meal production.

Meal planning goes beyond just having a menu for us.  I also have to plan for such contingencies as being invited to a pot luck with our friends or spontaneously inviting someone over for dinner.  My menus need to be able to scale up or turn into something I can take along if necessary.  I really don't have the option of running to a store if I need something.   If I need something that I could buy at a convenience store, it is a trip of about 45 minutes each way.  If it is an ingredient that could only be purchased at a grocery store, the trip is about an hour and a half each way.  Usually, unless it is something really critical, if we ran out or did not bring it we do without it.  Menu planning is essential.  When I make my list for what to pack for the trip it not only includes what meal for what day, but every single ingredient that goes into that meal.  I find that if I do not do this, I always leave something out.  Then that meal turns into whatever else I can make with those ingredients that are available.  Sometimes "chef surprise" turns out well, sometimes not.

Packing the food is another issue.  We have a finite amount of space available in our vehicle.  Since we have been working for ages on repairing and upgrading this cabin, we are also packing building materials, a compressor, and tools.  If we are going up for several days, have to make sure what I am preparing can fit into a couple of coolers.  I try to plan foods so that leftovers from one meal can be integrated into another meal.  It just adds another layer of complexity to menu planning.

An example of blending one menu into another would be smoked chicken.   I told my husband that I was planning on bringing up chicken breasts to smoke on the grill.  I freeze the chicken for transport and thaw it in the refrigerator.  When they are ready we smoke them.  I had to laugh on our last trip to the cabin.  The chicken breasts were so large that we almost could not fit all of them on the grill.  My husband said, "When you said you were bringing chicken breasts, I thought you meant you were bringing two of them."  Well, here's a hint, if you are going to spend forty-five minutes watching a grill, cook more than two at a time.  You can freeze them after they are cooked or turn them into other meals a day or two later.  The first night we had smoked chicken, sweet potatoes (cooked in the microwave) and some asparagus.  Lunch the next day was a toasted, buttered English Muffin with a fried egg, asparagus, and some bacon.  For dinner the next night we added some of the smoked chicken to a meal we generally call "turkey tostadas" (more on that in a minute) and we had plans for a meal later in the week for corn cakes with barbecue chicken and coleslaw.  So for about an hour of cooking I had three meals worth of the food that took the longest to cook.  The other meals are also very quick and easy to make, which is also a  big help.

We usually make the turkey toastadas  (Recipe below.) with smoked turkey.  In fact, I had brought some smoked turkey from home for a meal the night before I smoked the chicken.  We had almost enough left over for another meal.  By throwing in some of the smoked chicken, it became another meal.  The difference in flavor between turkey and chicken was different enough that it did not even seem like eating the same meal a second night.  Years ago, when we started making turkey toastadas, we actually made our own corn tortillas from Masa Harina.  Those days are long gone.  So are the days of purchasing and heating corn tortillas.  We like to maximize our time.  These days we use tortilla chips.  I use Mission brand because they are much lower sodium than some of the other brands.  So I guess the dish should now be called turkey nachos???  Anyway, the recipes for the turkey tostadas and corn meal cakes are below.  A single can of tomato sauce will work well for two people with a barely any leftover.  If you need to scale the recipe up for company or for leftovers, add more cans of tomato sauce (a can for every two people) and more cumin.  Add a little cumin at a time.  You will know when enough is enough.  I don't add a lot of salt to my food, so you might need to add some extra at the table.  Just remember that the tortilla chips also have salt on them.  Some ingredients need to be measured, but most of the ingredients are done to what looks right for the number of people.

The corn cakes are even easier.  (Recipe below)  Top your corn cakes with some smoked chicken mixed with enough bottled barbecue sauce to coat the chicken.   Place the barbecued chicken on top of the corn cakes.  Top the chicken with your favorite coleslaw recipe.  I usually make my coleslaw fresh, but many people would want to purchase coleslaw to make the meal even quicker.  Dinner is ready.    The meals are simple, but bring a lot of nutrition to the table as well as being tasty.

Between these meals, I served other meals just so that we would have a break from chicken.   These meals are also worthy of blogging about, but I will save them for the next post to keep this one from going too long. 

Turkey Tostadas:  1 - 8 oz. can (or more cans as needed), 1 onion chopped and divided, 1 or more cloves of  garlic (to your taste), salt about a quarter teaspoonful or more to taste, one-fourth teaspoon of cumin (scale up slowly if adding more tomato sauce), smoked turkey or chicken - enough for two people (add more as needed),  torn lettuce, chopped tomato, shredded cheese (chedder, monterey jack, pepper jack, or any taco blend of cheeses), sour cream, and salsa.

Fry three fourths of the onion.  Save some raw onion to top the nachos.  When the onions are translucent, add the garlic, cook thirty seconds, then add the tomato sauce, salt, and cumin.  Stir until well heated.  Add the smoked poultry.  Heat through. 

Put some tortilla chips on your plate.  Top with the smoked poultry/tomato mixture.  Top that with lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese, sour cream and salsa.  Dinner is served.

Corn Cakes and Barbecue Chicken:  (This meal serves two with minimal leftovers.  Scale up as needed.)  1 box of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix.  1 egg, 2/3 cups of milk 2 T. butter-melted, 1 can of yellow corn-drained, 1 pint of coleslaw, smoked chicken for 2 people, barbecue sauce. 

Mix the muffin mix, egg, milk, butter, and drained corn.  Fry as you would a pancake.

Mix the smoked poultry and barbecue sauce to taste.

Put the corn cakes on a plate.  Top with the barbecue coated chicken.  Top all of that with coleslaw.  Dinner is served.

Check back for the next blog post on cabin cooking strategies.

Road Trip Photos April 2017

The base of the dam.

Last blog post I said I would post some more photos from our latest road trip today.  We really worked hard while we were up at the cabin.  After four days of working on splitting and stacking wood, laying rock on the road, raking the yard, cleaning the cabin and painting we decided that we needed to take a day off.  We decided to take a road trip to see what we could see.  Since it was raining, I did not want to take an expensive camera with us.  These photos were snapped on my phone.  The quality of the photos is not great.

My husband and I have made the drive from our cabin to my mother's home for years.  Every time we made the trip we drove by a sign that said there was  the Lynchburg dam in one direction and a state fish hatchery in the other direction.  This time we decided that we would go take a look at the dam.  Why?  Because it was there and we had never seen it.  You never know in advance what you will see when you decide to take a different route.  There are so many things in the world that we pass by as we go about our business.  There is always something new around the next corner if we take the time to look.

Driftwood folk art.

Our trip took us about six miles through the National Forest.  For the most part, it looked just like our neck of the woods; in other words trees, rocks, streams and ridges.  The trees were mostly still bare here, so we had a good look at the woods without a lot of undergrowth.  The road was well maintained although there were a few bumpy spots.  However, I would say that the gravel road going to the dam is better maintained than the road leading to our cabin. 

On the way to the dam we came upon a one lane bridge.  There were a few fishermen on the bridge.  Some of them were fishing.  Others were just standing there talking.  They had to move close to the sides in order for us to get across the bridge.  They did not seem to happy about that.  In our section of the forest, if you pass someone or see someone camping, people wave to each other.  We waved to the people as we went by.  They just stared at us and did not wave back.  It is strange that there was such a difference in behavior in such a relatively short distance from our cabin.  Other than the fishermen, we only saw maybe three other cars in the forest.  It was a chilly, rainy, misty day and I think a lot of people decided that it was a good day to stay home. 

The edge of the burn area.

The road we took finally dead ended at the dam.  It is not a large dam compared to the dam I saw in Maryland, ( I have only seen two other dams, so I don't have a lot of reference for this.) but the reservoir that is behind the dam is huge.  Since few trees had leafed out yet, we were able to get a good look at the lake.  Once the leaves are out, some of those spectacular views will be obscured.  I am glad that we decided to go there while we could still see so much of the lake.   It is a very beautiful place. 

There were a few signs on the side of the building next to the dam.  One of them said the dam had received an award for being one of the best maintained dams in the country.  Another sign said to ring the bell on the other side of the building to call the caretaker.  I expected that it would be some type of mechanical buzzer.  When we went around the building, we found that it was a large brass bell.  We did not call the caretaker, but I expect that he or she might live in the house next to the building.  I am sure that you could hear that bell for quite a long way.  Speaking of signs, there were multiple signs saying that no dogs were allowed.  Also signs saying that there was no swimming or wading, but fishing was allowed with a permit.

There were four john boats in the water.  There was no information on rentals, so I do not know if they were for rent or for dam personnel to go out and check on things.  I guess I could check online if we wanted to see about boating there this summer.  I don't think it is a good idea to get very close to a dam but you could go quite a ways in the other direction.  

Then, there was a surprise.  I am a folk artist.  I love folk art: art made by people for their own pleasure.  And here, at this dam, sitting on a table was a beautiful piece of folk art.  Someone had made a small tableau of a boathouse and some boats tied up to pilings.  It was made of wood and metal on a base of driftwood.  Most likely the driftwood was from this very lake.  I snapped a picture for the blog. It was an unexpected pleasure.

We  could have walked out along the walkway across the top of the dam.  However, the rain was picking up so we decided that we would head on to our next destination rather than get soaking wet and cold.  So we came, we snapped pictures, and we left.  Now that we know what is there, we may come back again some day.

Our next destination was to the Mount Pleasant hiking area.  We were not planning on hiking in the rain.  We went because there was a forest fire there last year.  It was a big fire covering thousands of acres.  At Mount Pleasant firefighters made a final stand to put out the fire before it started burning homes.  This area is about two and a half miles from our cabin by road, but only about a mile as the crow flies.  There was a tremendous effort by firefighters to save the homes in this area.  The road through the Mount Pleasant area was the fire break.  They made a thirteen hundred yard fire break line to turn back the fire.  The area is all plowed up where they bulldozed in roads so they could get into the burn area.

We only went in a short ways into the fire area.  This was where the fire was finally put out.  Here, mostly the undergrowth was burned, but you could see where the trees were singed.  I expect that many of the trees at the edge of the fire will survive, but a lot of them are going to fall down.  It was almost surreal to see that on one side of the road trees are black and burned while everything on the other side of the road looks completely normal. 

I was almost in tears when I saw how close the fire came to one home.  It was stopped only yards away.  I know that everyone with cabins near ours was watching the fire line on the internet, feeling completely helpless while watching the fire come closer and closer.  A mile away in not very far when you are talking about wildfire.  It is very painful when you think that something you love so much can be gone in a matter of minutes.

We did not go very far into the area, so we did not see the worst of the burned areas.  The road is very torn up there.  The ride was just bone jarring.  Also, we had read that trees in the area would be falling for quite some time.  We turned around as soon as we could find a place wide enough.  Even, the edge of the burned area was a dismal sight.

Anyway, that was our side trip.  I have a few more pictures, that I will share in my next blog post.  Check back on Sunday.

Cabin Trip - First One for 2017

Trees were beginning to leaf out on the way up.

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks.  Several days of that we were staying at the cabin.  This is our first trip up this year.  I have a lot of photos from the trip.  It may take a couple of blog posts to get the best photos on the blog.  I took a lot of them. 

Trees bare at higher elevations.

When we left, it was mid-April and the trees were just beginning to leaf out.  Down here in Mechanicsville, the leaves were coming out.  The Dogwoods had bloomed and were loosing there blossoms.  As we drove further inland, and higher in elevation, the trees were just beginning to put out leaves, and everything was a beautiful spring green.   At the elevation of the cabin, few trees had put out leaves yet.  The apple trees had blossomed though.  I think we will be having a year with a bumper crop of apples.  All the apple trees were so covered with blossoms that the trees were sagging. 

Apple tree in blossom.

At the cabin, you could watch Spring come in by the day.  The Dogwoods put out leaves and blossoms.  The Maple leaves were coming in with their early red-orange leaves.  Next the Birch started to leaf out.  The ground cover under the trees came in so quickly that you could almost see it grow.  On arrival, the undergrowth was completely under the leaf cover.  Things went from a few flowers here and there to small flowers and green leaves everywhere in just a day or two. Spring comes in quickly at the higher elevations.  The growing season is short and the plants want to make use of every second of it.

Trees had leafed out by the time we left.  An old barn.

We still need to split a lot of wood.

Opening up the cabin for the year is a lot of work.  Although everything was tidy and clean when we left, we came back to all the dead bugs that had somehow managed to find a way into the house.  They all had to be cleaned up.  That is a normal part of cabin maintenance.  The annoying part was the bugs that were not dead.  All the cabins up there have a problem with lady bugs.  Although many people think of them as "cute", I will never think of them that way again.  Lady bugs live through the winter.  There were lady bugs everywhere.  They could crawl into impossibly small cracks to get away from you.  I went around the cabin three and four times a day for three days sucking up lady bugs with the vacuum cleaner.  I would take the canister outside and dump it after each foray around the cabin.  The lady bugs even survive the vacuum cleaner.  By the fourth day, I had the cabin pretty much clear of lady bugs.  (Fact: lady bugs are not a native species.  They were introduced into this country in 1916 from Asia for pest control  They eat aphids.)

The first trip up each year is also a time when there is a lot of yard cleanup.  We have big Maple trees and the high winds from the winter storms mean that the yard has branches and sticks all over it.  The winds mostly scour the leaves off the yard, but it still needs a good raking.  Leaves gather in little depressions throughout the yard.  When you look at the yard, it does not seem to be in too bad a condition, but once you start raking you end up with a couple of tarps full of leaves.  Until the rain started half way through our stay, the ground was very dry.  I was raking up a lot of dust.  Up there, the rainfall is about three inches below average for the year.

Maintaining the road is a work in progress.

This year, the cleanup was much more than usual.  Last fall, we found that one of the large Birch trees was completely dead at the top.  This tree was just feet from our shed and only a short distance from our back porch.  We had to call in a tree company to take it down.  They came up to the cabin this winter.  We had them drop the tree and cut it into fourteen inch lengths so that the wood would fit into the wood cook stove. (The cook stove has a much narrower opening that a heating stove; only four inches wide and fourteen inches long.)  Their company did not split wood.  They did not really want to do the cleanup either, so we ended up just having them drop the tree and we took care of the rest of it ourselves.  (Someday I will make a blog post just on the problems of trying to get workmen to come out to a place that is in the middle of nowhere.  There are a number of stories on this.)

Anyway, the tree was huge.  I measured one of the pieces of log and it was twenty inches in diameter.  That was not even the largest piece.  My husband split them using wedges and some heavy wood mauls.  They were so heavy that he had to at least be split in half before we could move them. He split wood, I helped get the wood up onto the chopping block, so he could split it.  Then we stacked the split wood.  There was no way to split it all this trip, some of it is stacked, waiting for splitting on some other trip.  At the rate we burn wood up there, I think this wood will last us a couple of years.

Aside from stacking wood, we also had to clean up all the debris.  The tree contract was just to drop the tree and haul the branches back into the woods.  They did do some of the larger branches, but there was a lot of the (relatively) smaller sticks left around.  We hauled all that stuff up from the lower level, up the hill, and over the side at the back end of the property.  I would have liked to have burned it, but there were high winds gusting twenty to thirty miles per hour every day.  It was not a time to have any type of fire going outdoors.  

We also did some other work while we were up there.  My husband painted the eves of the house and the trim on the windows.  The harsh weather up there really takes its toll on paint and wood.  It feels as if something always needs painting or repairing.

 While he was painting, I worked on the road.  The road is a story on its own.  A dirt road needs to be maintained, or it turns into deep ruts.  This is especially true of a road on the side of a mountain.  Tires can dig deep ruts if the road is wet, especially on the steep slope at the bottom that is covered with grass.  Rain water running down the road turns those ruts into gullies.  Pretty soon you have deep ruts that make for a bone jarring ride up the road. 

My mother used to maintain the road.  Now I do it.  I started digging gravel from the stream, bringing it up by the bucketful from the stream bed, up to the first level of land, then up the rock steps to the cabin yard where I dumped the bucket into a wheel barrow.  When the barrow was full, I trundled it uphill to the road, then down the road to where I needed to put gravel.  However, the gravel was small and it eventually sunk right into the mud.  I needed larger rock.  I eventually decided that all the work of digging gravel was a waste of time and energy and started buying bags of rocks.  (By that time, I estimate I had dug at least twelve hundred pounds of rock from the stream.) 

Without looking back in the cabin log to find the exact time that I started putting rock on the road, I can say with certainty that I have been buying rock for more than five years.  I did not bring bags of rocks every trip, but a conservative estimate would be at least six bags of rocks on a minimum of three trips each year; some years it was more than that.  Rock is sold by the cubic yard, but I find it more meaningful to think of it in pounds.  Each of those bags weighs about fifty pounds.  I am estimating at least 4500 pounds of rock on the road plus the rock I hauled from the stream.  I have finally reached a point where I can a the difference in the road.  The first few years I was just filling in the latest ruts.  I have put enough rock on the road that it is starting to become a hard surface in some places.

My husband always wondered why in the world I just did not order a truckload of rock.  Two reasons, one of which is the problem of getting anyone to come out that far.  The other is that I did not want a giant pile of rock sitting on the edge of the property waiting for me to haul it down the road.  A truckload of rock is a lot of rock.  Furthermore, paying someone to fix a road is pretty expensive.  If I had someone do the work it would be one more strain on the cabin budget.  I am content to fill in the road a few hundred pounds at a time.

Well, this post is getting long.  I will be blogging more on our cabin trip and a side trip on the next blog post.  Check back on Thursday for more photos from the road.

Star and Leaf Quilt Part 6

I haven't been posting as often this year.  I am working on things, but progress is very slow.  I am in the throws of spring cleaning so my work time on projects is greatly diminished for the moment.  Sooner or later things will pick up again.  Hand quilting a large quilt  does not go quickly either, so for every few hours of work time I have only a little bit of progress to show for it.

Last blog post I showed that I had created some stencils to use for quilting.  I have started implementing those in the quilting now.  It is all an experiment.  I quilted the main leaf and probably should have left it at that if I wanted the quilt finished any time soon.  I decided that there was just too much negative space and decided to fill it in with a few small quilted maple leaves and spirals.  The spirals helped fill the space, but also represent the helicopter-like seeds that spiral down when the trees drop their seeds each year. Although it is harder to see it in the photo, the orange really stands out against the brown fabric when viewing it in person.

I had originally quilted in some connecting lines between the maple leaves.  However, it made the block look over-quilted compared to the star block.  I removed those lines.  The block looks better.  However, while removing them I also ripped out one of the stitches of the maple leaf, so one of those will have to be done over.  It won't take that long.  I will be finishing that up tonight.  Things are moving along with the quilt.  I am about a third of the way finished with the blocks.  I hope to have it finished before too long. 

I am also working on a couple of other projects which I will be blogging about shortly.  I am one step closer to getting started on the Flamenco Dancer doll.  I have most of the materials gathered for the  armature.  I will be experimenting with some new techniques for this doll.  It will be the largest doll I have ever made.  More on that in coming blog posts.  I am also working on another project that is more or less a papier mache' project.  It is a fun project, but it takes up much more time than you would ever think.  More on that in a few blog posts.