Well, it is finally cold. Yes it has been cold enough but not North Dakota dead of winter cold so far, not until last night. Yesterday was fairly warm out so I did the usual and just threw a log on the fire and turned it down all the way so there would be a few coals in the morning with which to start the fire with, a few sticks and a puff or two from me always gets a nice blaze going in about 25 seconds and the only thing I notice is the fact that the floor is a little cold for a few minutes. That has been the case. Last night I went to bed about three hours earlier than I usually do so that log I put on at nine PM didn’t keep the good hot fire going all night long as it would have if I had put it on at midnight. I woke up at six and was plenty warm until my feet hit the floor! It was too dark to read the thermometer but I lit a match to see because I knew something was very wrong, which is usually the case when it is 10 degrees inside. I stirred the fire up really fast and put the sticks on the coals and grabbed all of the perishable food I have and took it right back to bed with me. I don’t mind cold from time to time but this was a bit much and I don’t like frozen potatoes. So I got to sleep in, or lay there reading the morning Bible passages (after it started getting light) packed in my sleeping bag with potato sacks and other vegetables. What a life. Today was the usual day where Henderson’s come down so as soon as I was done reading and ready to head out I went outside to leave when I realized it wasn’t just the house that was cold. Every thermometer I have read a little different but it was close enough to -30 with a nice breeze, I guess it was -50 below zero with wind chill, or so they say. I knew that there was no chance I was going to get the diesel car started and for sure the fuel would be Jell-O so I tried the gas car but it would hardly even turn over at all so I knew that was out of the question, when I checked to see how thick the oil was I noticed it might as well have been grease and that the antifreeze was solid ice too. I hope I don’t have a cracked block on my $7,000 high performance aluminum engine. So plan B was to see how hopeless the diesel was going to be. That at least has synthetic oil in it but the antifreeze was just as solid in that and the fuel was pretty soupy. I park it in the garage over the pit with the wood stove so I lit a fire with sticks and kept it roaring while I mixed up a brew for the fuel tank. Four gallons of diesel, and after trying to pour the solid Jell-O like diesel anti jell additive which didn’t work, I added a gallon of premium gasoline (meant to go in the other car) and poured it all in. Then I grabbed a supply of sticks from the tree I just cut down and a seed catalog and had a productive hour sitting under the car in the pit hand feeding the fire and reading the seed catalog. You would be surprised how many of my blog articles are written down there while keeping an eye on the fire. I can’t imagine why more people here don’t have pits and fires under their equipment for winter starting. It works so well. After an hour I turned on the heater in the car and warmed the inside up as well, then it started perfectly and since the transmission was also pre warmed I was able to back out of the garage right into the big snowdrift that had blown in overnight. Three feet of snow is a lot when you don’t have momentum to carry you through so I got stuck. I have lots of getting stuck stories that might be fun for people to read that I’ll have to write about someday. Anyway, it wasn’t bad and I just pulled back into the garage and by this time I was very late so I just tried blasting through with all of the blasting force I could muster from an antique heavyweight German diesel. Hitler would have been proud, I made it and I shouldn’t have worried because it is almost impossible to be later than Paul Henderson. That’s our inside joke by the way, that is no longer inside.
So I spent a wonderful day talking deep subjects from guns to women confronting their husbands and a short study and discussion on a portion of Colossians. We even sang for a while which was a nice piece of the day and then off to Yoder’s for the weekly basic life skills seminar on DVD that I am enjoying so much. I am not one that particularly likes a lot of the main stream Christian stuff but this is quite good and I am getting a ton of benefit from it, from confirming old ideas to really pricking my conscience to change some major areas in my life. Sometimes even going beyond the pricking and taking hot pokers, making very plain areas where I need to do some changes as well as let God be the boss instead of being the humanist that I tend to want to be.
I am getting things ready to head to Aberdeen South Dakota for the annual Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Winter Conference next weekend. I talked the Henderson’s into going and now I don’t know whether I am dragging them or whether they are dragging me this time but we all plan on going! I always enjoy the conference, there is a trade show that I always get a lot of good ideas from and there are lots of good informational meetings and workshops to attend that cover all kinds of aspects of sustainable agriculture, small farming, marketing, crop production, seed saving and they always have a seed exchange which is nice. The best part of the whole thing though would have to be the contacts I always make there. In the big business world I hear that it is often who you know that gets you places and it must be similar for farming because I have gained so much from meeting other people and have gotten further than I ever could from it. There are a lot of good like minded people around here that attend that I would have never known even existed otherwise. I hear that a few more guys from the home school crowd will be coming this year so it ought to be good.
Other than that life has been consisting of drawing up the farm plans for the coming year. I hear everyone else around is doing their taxes, which is usually what I end up doing for several members of the family every year. Except this year! I don’t even have to do taxes for myself which is really great. Kyle and I are working on planning the projects we are hoping to accomplish together this summer from building a pair of methane generators to building a well drilling rig and putting in several wells for irrigating. I think I am going to have a busy summer!