jabel

I’m back to work after taking last week off–and I’m delaying dealing with all of these messages by writing this post. So what did I do?

• I made good progress on the chair I’m refinishing. I used a couple of rounds of citristrip, which worked well on the old paint. That was followed by hours of scraping, basically. It’s not done, but it’s in pretty good shape at this point. It needs some final sanding before I re-paint it.
• The three of us went to Madison, IN. Pictures taken by Darcy here.
• Spring is green smoothie season at the Abel house, and that kicked off last week. I’ve started using some wild violet leaves for a portion of the greens. And I’ve started adding some beet powder to help control my blood pressure.
• I harvested a couple of cups of lilac flowers to make lilac simple syrup. I’ll probably do another round in the next day or so.
• I rearranged by books. After many, many years of separating fiction and nonfiction, I decided to just smoosh them all together. (Poetry still gets shelved separately; I’m not sure why.) Needless to say, this is big news. There’s some grumbling and jostling on the shelves as the new neighbors get acquainted.

From this interview, via Sarah Hendren

1. An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land.

2. An informed and conscientious submission to nature.

3. The wish to have and to belong to a place of one’s own, as the only secure source of sustenance and independence.

4. A persuasion in favor of economic democracy; a preference for enough over too much.

5. Fear and contempt of waste of every kind, and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion.

6. A preference for saving rather than spending.

7. An assumption of the need for a subsistence or household economy.

8. An acknowledged need for neighbors, and a willingness to be a good neighbor.

9. A living sense of the need for continuity of family and community life.

10. Respect for work, and (as self-respect) for good work.

11. A lively suspicion of anything new, contradicting the ethos of consumerism and the cult of celebrity.

So how’s climate change going for y’all?

On Wednesday, April 2nd, a big storm rolled through the area. Thankfully, we were spared the worst of it. Many, many people–including folks in the area–were not so lucky.

We went to the basement when the tornado warning was issued for our area at around 11pm. While we were down there, we found a few leaks. One was in the wall:

And, bizarrely, one was flowing like a water feature up from the floor:

We were able to put a bucket under the wall leak but there were also some prolific leaks in the back of the basement. A neighbor said his rain gauge measured 4.5" inches of rain over the course of that night, so there was a great deal of water flowing into our basement.

Near the end of the tornado warning, our power went out–which means the sump pump stopped running. Once the warning ended, I started bailing out the sump pit and continued doing so until 2am, when the rain substantially stopped. I wouldn’t even want to guess how many gallons of water I took upstairs to the kitchen drain. (All drains in the basement just empty back into the sump pit!) The power came back on about ten minutes after I stopped bailing.

Rachel then spent the next couple of hours sweeping the remaining water into the sump pit and using the shop vac on our water feature in the floor until it finally stopped flowing. The good news is that neither the furnace nor the water heater suffered any damage.

The next day, Rachel and I felt like we had hangovers. But we bought a generator, which will help us make sure we can run the sump pump (and anything else) the next time the power goes out. We looked at battery backup systems for the sump pump but the generator will serve that need for the time being. We also have a plan for patching the leaks once we manage to get two dry days in a row.

We’re increasingly thinking in terms of preparation, in case weather unpredictability increases due to climate change. We’ve never had a generator before, because it seemed mostly unnecessary. Now it feels judicious to make the investment. We’ll see.