Friday, July 9th
What heatwave! But we've started working on the house again and I have a lot of things to tell you.
I recently realized that I missed going for a drive, I used the car strictly to get to work and run errands. Now that we have the Toyota running on veggie oil, we went down to Rimouski to visit with family and for my birthday, we followed Tommy Emmanuel on the road for 3 days: Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec city. If you've never heard from this extraordinary guitar player, you have to take a look at this video of Classical gas on youtube to understand. And that will give you only the faintest idea of the joyful experience that a live concert actually is!!!
Followingthe visit of our earthship by Sandra Renelique in December and the earthquake in Haiti, I've become involved in the construction of a school in Grand-Goave. A website will be online soon so we can follow the progress of her wonderful initiative: Green School Haiti.
While awaiting to see if I have to go there myself, ALain and I got into spring cleaning mode and reorganized the space to make things more confortable for working. We had to prepare the shelter to house the 2 young volunteers that we expect in August. At the beginning of the month, Jonathan will arrive from France to spend 3 weeks and around the 14th, we'll be joined by Maxim from Abitibi. We'd like to work on the lime plasters while they're around; it's a lot easier to complete a whole section of wall in a day with 4 people. That means we have to do the test patches for the recipe and the color swatches after that but before they get here.
If you remember, last year, I drew plans to build the first kitchen counter, but we had to put everything on hold. This year, it's a go: the future planter is empty and the base of the wall is done. We assembled the maple boards and we already have many hours of sanding under our belt even with the scorching weather. We're proud of our staircase, but I think the countertop will be even nicer because the bigger surface makes the veins in the wood more obvious. We often get asked where we got the wood because it's so different from the maple we're all used to seeing. It's simple, we salvaged it from the ditch on the side of our driveway where it had been left to bake in the sun and rot in the rain and snow for a couple of years before we bought the land. It was still sound enough to be milled, the pieces then chosen and assembled... but it was no piece of cake and without ALain's uncle Jacques, we couldn't have done it!
Let's talk food for a bit: There's only one Meyer lemon left in the tree, the others were all turned into lemonade or pudding. They were huge and juicy, very different from "thousand-miles-travelled/store-bought" lemons. Another juicy and plentiful fruit this year: strawberries. We visited our family's farmer and picked 16 liters(quarts), fresh from the field. We froze 6 liters to mix with some of the applesauce this fall, canned 4 liters of pink pepper/strawberry compote and dried two large cookie sheets in the sun. It was the fisrt time I'd tried that and it worked out great. It'll be real nice in our granola this coming winter and I'll make more in the future. ALain plans to make a solar food drier that we can use for tomatoes, apples, etc. Also, we ate the first raspberries this wednesday, 10 days ahead of the last 2 years and the blackberries are going for a record crop this year; more experiments with the sun drying to look forward to.
All thaat sun is wonderful, but I'm starting to worry about the spring that feeds the potable water cistern. It's early July and it's down to a trickle, as if we're at the end of August. The tomato plants also need more water from the sky... even the river is extremely low and the warm: 30C(86F) yesterday afternoon.
More news and pictures soon, I promise!