Fishing - Opening Day!

jambaloney here!

when i was a kid - i would always wait eagerly for opening day of the fishing season. it would change depending on species and location... opening day on the Framboise river is April 15th - i was ready, here is my license - i ALWAYS have a fishing license - my dad used to say that they'll take your gear, boat and vehicle if you don't - that was in Quebec, mind you ;-)


here is the rest of the gear - rod, knapsack with lures etc, jacket, hip waders, water and a bucket for the catch:


off i go down the road to the river...


and when i look back, there is the manor...


it was a frosty morning, you can see the effect of frost on the rocks in the mud - water expands when it freezes and then contracts when it thaws leaving these spaces around the rocks that then "sink in" to the ground. it's pretty cool!


the river's edge - spectacular morning!!!!


the canoe has been waiting patiently for this day since last fall...


so in the water and off we go!!

as i paddle out and away, i look back at home - the manor is the white dot in the middle of the red circle..


there is some beautiful rugged shore - it is early in the year the shore isn't green yet..


in a bay around the corner, i found this clay deposit in two feet of water...


perfect for making an outdoor cob oven that kymber has always wanted, i'll be back!!


next i am off the the place where two small rivers empty into the Framboise..


it is a bright sunny day!!


up the river i go..


it is breathtakingly clean and crisp!

it's all about having a good selection of lures - this is my trout kit.. - small lures i fish on light spinning gear with 4 lb test line...


kymber's breakfast:


and mine!!


the morning was amazing and the fish delicious - there is nothing like fresh caught trout. i am proud to be able to go get food and feed my woman ;-))

cheers all!

lost in the land of spring!

we are definitely having a normal and proper spring this year - it has been beautiful and soul-reviving! last year, we had such an abnormal winter, spring and summer - but not this year - this year has been a normal winter...and so far...a normal spring!!! today our temp was 13C (about 60F)...very awesome temps for this time of year!

and we are so far ahead of the game this year! last year was all about everything that could go wrong during the winter - DID! and then during spring we were scrambling to get the raised beds built, filled with dirt and seaweed, same for all of the tires, scrambling to get seeds started, etc. - and this year we are able to take our time and enjoy! we are feeling decadent to say the least!

we have a bazillion seeds started on the plastic-wrapped porch, there are a bazillion more that need to be started and will be over the next few weeks, we are sun-burnt and loving it - jambaloney was naked today shoveling compost and dirt into the potatoe tires (for your imaginative envisionings - picture a well-built, very muscled, gorgeous, bearded guy with a pirate bandana on his head, black rubber boots up to the knees and absolutely nothing else!!!! bahahahhaah!!! i sure did love watch him shoveling 24 tires like that!) - i was not naked as it is still a little cool for me - i wore some underwear and a little tank top! i raked the compost and dirt into the tires as he shoveled them. i also watered the 24 tires with seaweed tea that has been soaking in the hot sun for days.

we did some laundry and hung it out to dry, made our breakfast, dinner and prepped for supper - and now we are calling it a day! i think a nap is in our future.

i hope you all had a wonderful day like we had - ooooooh! thank you spring for going back to normal! thank you sky for being so blue! thank you sun for shining so brightly! thank you Lord for bringing us here!

my gardening prowess - bahahahah!, egg cartons and tempura

ta-da!

i present the proof of my gardening prowess - a couple of spinach seeds have germinated - woohoo! okay, that's not such a big deal but it is to me! check them out:



i have a pile of little seeds coming up - they seem to really like the salad containers!



they'll soon be moved here so that i can start even more seeds:



by moving them from under the grow light in to the little greenhouses, you can start the hardening off process. they will stay in their little salad containers for a few more days and then i will transplant them into cardboard pots. during the day, i will open the plastic that wraps the greenhouses and close them up at night. during the day, we will open the windows on both ends of the porch to let in some fresh air - it sure gets hot out there on a sunny day! eventually i will remove the potted seedlings from the little plastic greenhouses and put them on several tables that we have out on the porch. after a few days of that, the seedlings will then be moved outside during the day. and that will be their cycle until it is time to put them in the ground. i can't wait. but will have to for at least a month and a half!

are you tired of paying for jiffy pellets to start your seeds in every year? a few years ago - i was too! then i found all kinds of nifty things that people were doing - such as using egg cartons for starting their seeds. save up all of your egg cartons from the grocery store:



and voila! fill them with a mix of manure and sifted dirt. these babies are soaking in seaweed compost water - sure is smelly!




plant your seeds just as you would in a jiffy pellet. you can fit 3 of these egg carton seeders to a baggy if you use the baggy method. or if you use salad containers, like i do, they fit together just as well as the jiffy pellets!

and yesterday's lunch - tempura! oh i love tempura!



the pic is blurry and it doesn't show how delicious this really was! we did shrimp, onion, mushroom and sweet potatoe - yummeh!

teehee - Stephen got his package!

Stephen got his package yesterday...and wrote the sweetest post about it here - please check it out! His Little Bit is just so cute! we sooo enjoyed sending off this package - and there are a few more in the mail for some of our other blogging friends.

it feels nice to have such wonderful friends. we are ending a busy day filled with seed-starting, setting up 2 new composters, reading, spring-maintenance of ALLLLLL of the fishing gear (fishing season opens up on April 15!!!) and lots and lots of hottubbing! and now sitting down and reading Stephen's beautiful post - ahhhh...do days really get better than this???

Helga and Mrs. S. - i look forward to hearing about when your packages arrive. Sue - have you received your package from Humble Wife yet?

we love having internet friends. it is really fun.

but thank you for such a beautiful post, Stephen. there really is a reason why i call him our/my dear sweet one!

Operation Jackposts

jambaloney here!

i mentioned a while ago in a post that we had foundation issues and ended it with a picture of a jackpost in a box. well, we needed the jackpost big-time! have a look at the rot at the bottom of this "beam":


that beam was holding up a good portion of load bearing wall between the living room and computer room/study/storage room. it is even LESS supported that the portion of the wall i fixed with lumber and shims. i realized it needed to be addressed immediately!! this was the overall situation - that 4x4 at the back sits on the concrete and is the only stable part of the wall!!



here is the savior/jackpost again:


i needed a concrete footing - good to have scraps handy!!

and here is the jackpost footing - i attached a block of a 2x4 to the metal plate to give some friction and cushion when tightening:


here it is, ready for the post:


here is the post in place before tightening, notice how the beam is waaaay off!!

you want to make sure it is dead-level all around...


before you screw in the plate to the sill and tighten the bolt:


worked so well, i quickly installed one on the other side - i feel a LOT better about the foundation now!!


over the next few weeks i tightened them a bit to compensate for settling until they were rock solid. by early february i was satisfied.

the jackposts are temporary in the sense that i want to replace the entire support system for the floor. but for the time being, we will be able to rely on these posts to keep us "above the water line" for a while.

cheers all!!!

some of my favourite books - 4

this beautiful set of Collier's Encyclopedia, printed 1978, has many stories to tell (please don't anyone notice the dust or dirt on the floor. the string you see is one of our cats many entertainments - he likes to play with string and elastic bands!!!).

i was 11, soon to be 12, and had already owned my own library card for 6 and a bit years (when i was 3, 4 and 5 my mother let me take out books on her card). anyway, one fun day when my dad was working afternoon-shift in the pit (coalmine), a man knocked on our front door (always a sign that it is a stranger AND an out-of-towner as everyone in small towns in cape breton ALWAYS use the back door and NEVER knock!). the man turned out to be an encyclopedia salesman from the mainland. he was dressed in a fancy suit and tie and had this shiny, black case on wheels!!! THIS to me was so exciting as i often went to the library to use their encyclopedias to do schoolwork - i don't think it ever occurred to me that you could own your own set?!?!?!

the man opened up the shiny, black case and i was instantly in love! my mother nervously listened to his presentation, while i soaked in every word. he let me touch those beautiful encyclopedias and let me look up all kinds of things. the thing that fascinated me the most was that at the start of every new letter - you were given the equivalent letter from several other languages! once i owned these babies, i copied out every letter, and their corresponding equivalents and started teaching myself Semitic, Latin, Russian, Greek and German. these were the days when i first realized i had such an interest in linguistics!



anyway, my mother knew of my serious and deep interest - she was the one who taught me to read at age 3 and i was reading her Stephen King books and Harlequin Romances by the age of 7!!! she also knew the price of the set - $1,000 - or in back-then terms - waaaay too freakin expensive for a coalminer with a wife and 4 kids to feed. the nice salesman left after leaving his card with my mother (something else i had never seen before - imagine? people carrying around business cards?!?!!?

my father came home that night at 10:30. i was allowed to stay up to tell him about the encyclopedias. he rolled his eyes the whole time listening and eating his supper - he and all of the other coalminers always looked like Jared Leto with the permanent ring of black around their eyes! but he did listen. and asked my mother what she thought. she thought that i needed them as i was a very good student and would get much use out of the encyclopedias. my father then struck a bargain with me. i could have the encyclopedias - but i would have to pay for them. i had just started babysitting for a variety of neighbours and on a good week - i could earn $20!!! my father said that i would have to pay him $5 every week. he had already taught me about holding on to some money so that i would have money during dry weeks - but now he made me promise that i would always have $15 set aside in order to pay him every week. i promised.

the next day he called the Credit Union to see if he could get a loan - something he had only ever done 2 times before - both times he got a $500 loan because the pit was on strike. because he cashed his checque there every week for years, and had already established that he would pay back on loans, they gave him the loan pronto. they gave him a very low rate of return as well as a low monthly payment - my father put every extra cent that he made towards that loan and paid it off in just over a year. about a week later, the salesman returned with my encyclopedia set. the set came with a junky pressboard shelf stand that my father put together and my mother set up in the back wall of the living room - i wish i had a picture to show you!

i spent the next several years paying my father $5 a week - i never missed a single payment! that really taught me about having bills and debts and i will always thank him for that. needless to say, i also spent the next several years reading every single entry in all 25 books. i also poured through the index looking for interesting things to re-read. the books were printed in 1978 and already 3 years old when i got them - but none of that has ever mattered to me - i still love them! when i finished basic training in the military and was stationed in Kingston, ON for trades training - i saved up the money to have the encyclopedias shipped to me by train. i have carted those books around my whole adult life!

most people already think jambaloney and i are a little "strange" - but this next bit will surely prove it! we like reading together and we like reading to each other. we would sit out in the hottub at our place in the city and read the Bible to each other! but one of our favourite things to do on a sunny, beautiful summer day - is to lay out in the grass or down at the river each loaded up with a few encyclopedias, skimming through them until we find an interesting entry and then read it to each other. sometimes the entries are so outdated that we scream with laughter. sometimes the entries are just dead wrong. and sometimes the entries make us think. our favourite entries are the ones that get us laughing. like the one below - i must say that it is one of our all-time favourites!



last but not least, when i was doing my first tour of Alert, my friend Bella used to do a weekly "funnies tree". basically she would cut the funnies out of newspapers, photocopy them, colour them and then re-write the "funny" to be about someone in Alert. she would post the "funnies tree" in our common room and everyone would wait every friday for her to post it - we all loved the funnies tree. i saved a bunch of the funnies in a photo album as they still delight me to this day. here is my personal favourite:



bahahahahahaha! and yes - i took the encyclopedias to Alert!

a beautiful day, the most awesome seed-starting tray! seedlings and lunch

it's a beautiful April day - woohoo! if you notice in the pic above, our stream, Strachans Stream, is very low. our water table is also very low right now - our naturally-occurring pond is almost empty and it is normally 4ft full!!!

in the below pic, i present the first 2 Framboise Manor Flowers of 2012. take a bow, little flowers!



next up - the most awesome seed-starting tray known to man! built by jambaloney's Mom and Step-Dad and used by them for many years. they gave it to us a few years ago while we were still living in the city. the thing weighs about 3 million pounds but we shipped it here because we love it!

it lives on our plastic-wrapped porch and you guessed it - we wrapped IT in plastic, too, for the cold nights that we are still having. the other night it was about -2C outside, about 1C on the porch and 5C inside the seed starter. this baby is gonna work like a charm out on the porch!






and here it is wrapped in plastic. jambaloney stapled plastic on three sides and then made a nifty drop down plastic sheet that we then bungy cord all together.




during the past few days it has been in the high 20C's on the porch - wow - it really heats up on a sunny day. good thing we put 2 doors at each end of the porch in order to open the windows and/or the doors when necessary. it sure tricks you being out on the porch, though - you step outside and it is only 4 or 5 or 6C!!!

and here it is proudly displaying it's seedlings. i started a bunch of herbs, asparagus, celery, broccoli, lettuces, etc. in past years, i have used plastic baggies for greenhouses. but since we have moved to the Manor, we have been saving all of our salad containers or any other clear plastic containers for greenhouses. i think that they are gonna work out just jim-dandy!



and last but not least, i know that i have been lax in updating our recipe blog. i promise to get around to it soon. jambaloney and i had been working since early morning and at 10:30 decided to stop and make "leftover" salad - a salad made from whatever is left in the fridge that needs to be eaten up or else thrown away - something we try NEVER to do!



once we finished making our "leftover" salads, jambaloney said i should take a picture as our "leftover" salad looks better than most salads in a restaurant. i always like for food to look pretty and special - even if it is only liver and mashed potatoes, i will still pick some flowers for the side of the plate or make a pretty arrangement with sage leaves and blueberries - bahahahah!



the one above is jambaloney's. his has baby romaine, tomatoes, red onion, lemon chunks, sprouts, chopped hot peppers, leftover chicken, leftover vermicelli and a sprinkle of parsley.



mine has baby romaine, tomatoe, sprouts, lemon chunks, leftover vermicelli and leftover shrimp - yummeh! i make a dressing with lime juice, crushed garlic, a dollop of honey, a dollop of vinegar (with the mother), a dollop of fish sauce and a few splashes of sriracha hot chili sauce - man does that dressing have bite and near knock you off your feet. jambaloney adds crushed chilis to his portion of the dressing but that's only because he's nuts - bahahahaha!

he's outside right now building some new shelving for the kitchen - woohoo! it's a little too windy for me right now although it was wind-free all morning while we were doing our jobs and chores. i think i will check in on a few of my blogs before straining my home-made beef broth and putting into containers to freeze.

i hope that you are all having a lovely day!