Somehow the very idea of work get the stink eye ––  golly, we wouldn't even wish it on our animal friends. The same animal buddies whose stalwart character and skills we've selected for across hundreds of generations.

But did any of us evolve all these years find our joy while melting into the upholstery?  Add a bag of chips and a winning Lotto ticket, et voilá!  The American Dream nirvana!

I don't mean to rant. Or actually I do. I just don't want to glaze anyone's eyes for them. Save the anesthetized stare for the third season of whatever's streaming today. Grrr.

What kind of malarkey are we putting on toast?

I'm not above it, truly. Work can suck.

Carriage horses sometimes die of heat exhaustion. Racehorses twist an elegant ankle and are seen no more on green pastures. 

But can a person deny a horse the joy of running? The snarfling satisfaction of a well-fetched stick? The sweaty pleasure of that last log split and stacked? 

His reserved "hello" morphs into a grinning, winking welcome. "Oh! If only..." he always ends up sighing. Charming Aunt P makes conquests left and right. 

​I know she had the quarryman and his crew move and readjust rocks over and over and over again until she had her flagstone patio just the way she liked. It's to her credit that the quarryman made it beautiful and remembers her fondly.

​You have to listen to them or learn to live with some half-assed, unbalanced construct. 

What can be more beautiful than an elegant old stone wall?  ​Running mostly straight, like a seam across a landscape -- ooh, ahh.

This is the longest stretch in his adult life that my favorite skipper has spent away from sailboats. 

For decades, we schedule our year around various regattas. We've missed weddings and birthdays because of our sailing calendar. As I remember, we'd been together for five years before taking a trip that was NOT related to sailing.  

Because of regattas, we've traveled to Italy and Sardinia and Greece and all over South America. And North America. Hawaii even. The year the Flying Scot North American championship was held in Texas, we planned a summer adventure that took us looping out West.  All for competition at the mercy of wind. 

Racing on the bounding main –– it's a sport, a calling, a joy. It's the bones of our life together. 

Then along comes the Covid-19 Pandemic, leaving us high and dry.

​Which is how we've managed to finish the Woodbee in a matter of months. 

When last we left the build, the 600-square-foot structure was dried in, with a pair of walls and a loft accessible by pull-down ladder. Jeff and I had put down flooring, slathered paint on everything that held still, and set the wood stove into place.

When we arrived in late April, the list of to-dos was not inconsiderable: walls, plumbing, electricity, kitchen, bathroom...

And a drumroll, please....

You know how it goes. Everything peaceful and chill.

Maybe the iPod is playing the soundtrack from Hamilton. Perhaps you're watching Rabbit TV (a limited lineup, but endlessly entertaining).  Maybe you're cooking on the newly functional propane stove. Anyway, it's relaxed.

When EEEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEE!

The noise is designed to either wake you from a sound sleep or possibly drive you in-freaking-sane.

​ Whichever. It works.  

Okay, you you press the reset button. Two minutes later –– just as the old heart-rate is returning to normal –– EEEEEEEEE!  and EEEEEEEEEEE!

My handsome gallant saves us, holding a thumb over the button repeatedly. It becomes clear that the damn 10-years-guaranteed, never-needs-batteries, save-your-life-and-required-by-law has gone rogue. It will not stop alerting us.

It EEEEEEEs in the bathroom. It EEEEEEEEs outdoors.

Jeff eventually puts it into the van, so it could, as he said, "Simmer down."

All during dinner, an errant wind gave us brief hope, and then, faintly, EEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEE.

Dishes done (in a sink! with running hot and cold water! cabin life is better and better!), Jeff betakes himself off and the next thing I notice is that he's taken out the 50-year-old .22 his father gave him.

Whatcha doing? I ask.

He points, and I hear a faint EEEEEEing across the field.  He's put the damn thing into a tree. I admire the dispatch with which he handles tech troubles. 

A clean through-and-through, and by golly the thing has stopped EEEEEEEing.  

​The test button suggests that it's still working, but I'm taking it back to the local hardware store where we bought it.

​I don't mind explaining why.

Mr. Linton has been fishing pretty regularly, though because of last summer's red tide, he can't bring anything home. Social distancing is easy on the water. 

And naturally, he has a lot of boat-work to fill his days on shore.  

The two 2.4 Meter boats (one fresh, one experienced) are slowly coming into alignment. Jeff's re-rigged the older boat so that it's indistinguishable from the newer one. Fresh paint, fresh lines, carbon-fiber bits and bobs. He orders stuff on-line and obsessively checks delivery times.  He splices lines while watching Bosch in the evenings.

Given that many of our upcoming regattas have been cancelled, he seems content.

And me, I'm always looking forward to a chunk of time in which to write but as it happens, I've been distracted by real life. It's hard to make up a story more exciting than the news right now.  

So instead, I'm doing a lot of reading (check out my goodreads shelf for the bookwormy details).

​And making stuff.

We're avoiding the grocery store –– taco Tuesday involved some freezer-burned ground beef that I might normally have donated to the fishes, but it tasted fine with the fresh greens from the garden –– and keeping our IRL social distance from the world. I've become a big fan of FaceTime right now for actual social interaction. Yay internet!

I'm hoping to settle into whatever this new normal is and get back to my keyboard sometime soon, but in the the meanwhile, as they say in one of my favorite movies, "Rule #32: Enjoy the little things."

Wishing you safety and kindness from here...

Ah, mulch.

Mulch is the collective noun for material that evolves into actual soil. It's organic material (leaves! bark! wood-chips!) that gets defined by function: it's used to protect tender plants, and add good stuff to the soil.  By etymology, it comes from a word for "soft."

​Wood chips are my preferred mulch at the Farm.

It's super-neat-o how it works: you apply a layer of wood chips around the base of your plant.

​It smothers weeds and –– rather faster than you might imagine –– the mulch turns into rich, light soil in a sweet ring around around young fruit trees and asparagus. 

The mulch provides extra insulation over the winter, and gives emerging plants a little additional opportunity to stay safe in the chancy spring weather. ​

Where else to pitch coffee grounds and carrot peelings and used chicken bedding from the neighbors' coop?

​Where else to pile grass clippings and weeds?

I took an actual composing class a few years ago. I'm not an expert, though I am a believer.  Long story short: a smart gardener just keeps heaping stuff onto the compost pile, turning it from time to time, and using the finished, good-looking stuff from the bottom of the pile to improve the soil under the plants.

Lucky for my trees, a friend had an enormous pile of chipped tree –– the remains of a big ole maple –– to share for mulching purposes.

Truckload by squatting truckload, we've conveyed chips to the farm over the past couple of years. I used square yards of it to coddle my young trees and the asparagus.  A few chips made it into the compost heap, along with mule-loads of grass clippings and eggshells. 

Alas, all good things come to an end.  Even the remains of a big ole maple. 

With chips thin on the ground that autumn, I toted a couple of bales of straw to the farm to bed things down for the winter.  

Always an experiment.  

​I figured straw was a better option than hay.

The terms are used interchangeably by some: after all, both are some sort of dry vegetation that come packaged in bale form and are used in animal husbandry.  

But straw (like the plastic ones we now think of first), is generally the hollow, dry, stalk of an oat or wheat plant. The middle of the plant. Hay, meanwhile, is the tops of various grasses and plants ––  cut green and allowed to dry. Hay might include clover, timothy, broom, alfalfa, and any manner of meadow plants.

Naturally, hay is full of flower-heads. Any gardener will tell you, the point of flowers is seed. So if you aim to smother weeds (and weeds are just plants growing where you don't want them to grow), you do NOT want to spread flower-heads around.

Ipso dipso facto macto, you'd think straw would be a pretty solid choice to protect plants and not compete with the resources at root...

Surprise surprise surprise.

​The wheat straw made a miraculous rise from the cold soil this spring.

Wheat is a lovely crop. I am not knocking wheat. I'm good with gluten, and I admire wheaten gold waving on an autumn field.  

​But as a crop, it's not a good match for the Would Be Farm. Or a good mulch. I'm guessing it will continue to pop up around my daffodils and plum trees for years. Probably not enough, however, for even a single loaf of artisanal, hand-ground-grain bread.

I vowed not to be caught chipless again.  I've been checking Craig's List a little too regularly. So far, none of the chippers are just right for our needs.  

In the parlance of our friend Curt, the going rate for a pickup truck-load of dark brown landscaper's friend is a pizza and a half.  ​

​I'd rather have the pizza and make my own dang chips, but as Mumsie used to say, if wishes were horses, and horses could fly, there'd be nothing but horses in the sky... 

As some visitors have noticed, I have been away from the keyboard. Thank you for coming back after the long, not-planned hiatus.

Turns out that when you have a wedge of time to work on a dried-in (squeeeee!) building, you make use of every waking moment to work on said dried-in (squeeeee!) building.

And what about that "building"?  Is it a cabin? A camp? A cottage?

We're going to try calling it the Woodbee.  Maybe a twee moniker option, but there is sits, a 600-square-foot building in the midst of the Would-Be Farm. The Woodbee. Buzz buzz.

I'll return to other topics of interest: Mr. Linton's fishing and sailing adventures, for instance, and what books I am currently reading, but not quite yet...