For people as dirty as we think we are, we go through no small amount of the foamy stuff, and the latent chemist in me was curious enough to take a plunge into soapmaking.  I mean, if you screw it up, it can explode in a glorious toxic flume!  You can …
We took in a stray, a sweet little tabby with its tail chomped off, and set her up all nice and cozy as a barn cat in our shop teeming with mice and chipmunks, both of which she’s done a fine job dispatching and snacking.  The one breed of critter she didn’t …
Have I mentioned we’re raising pigs again?  This time doing it our way, rotating their pasture and letting them till up vast swaths of our new and erstwhile untouched, unkempt land?  Have I mentioned this results in lean, fast, noisy fuckers, who pile mud atop the fence when out of space, and use …
We never set out to be goat farmers, never really.  They were more or less dropped at our feet, or on our land, through a series of negotiations and musical-goat-swapping with neighbors up the hill. We’ve been rotationally grazing them through a tangle of net fencing, and recently, with the garden …
We got a little overexcited at the apple orchard, which left me with a bushel and a peck of apples, which, in modern measurements, translates to a Half a Metric Cubic Shitload.  This meant a lot of applesauce, because our Squirrel, now 2, subsists on the stuff. It was, sadly, more than …
When we first started courting, we’d drive to VT on weekends in the bumpy truck, every weekend, and back to NYC on Sunday nights for work work work. One such weekend, we decided to spend a day fishing from the fold-up canoe. She Doggie wasn’t a natural swimmer by any …
What you see here is a standard conical pint glass, about six inches high and about three inches in diameter across the mouth. It is inverted over some as-yet unidentified insect which is STANDING THE FUCK UP and RAPPING ITS ANTENNAE against the side in a plea for me to …
Typing these words hurts me, and I’m not speaking in metaphors or about my feelings. The tips of my fingers, with every letter pressed, hurt. Ow. Hurt. Ow. I could go on, but that’d be masochism. Ow. One winter day of my unforgiving childhood, I was asked to help my …
I need to talk about mice. I know. Rodents are part of living in the woods. I get it. I’m not one of those shrieking-with-a-broomstick sort of ladies when it comes to mice. As an advocate for woodland critters generally, I can’t express too big of a problem with them. …
Two days before closing camp for our big winter trip, I was bestowed an early Christmas gift in the form of a quart of whey, leftover from a cheese-making adventure. My friend said it was tasty when drunk straight-up with a little maple syrup, and I don’t know about you, …
