You and Me and the Mountain

* This time, Karol's writing the post, with Charlotte providing input (mostly telling me to delete some of the pictures (I started with 70...)). Been thinking about shit to write about all week, so hopefully it's not complete and total garbage (maybe just complete or total, I'd rather it not be both). Last week's post title was a nod to Tom Waits, this time it's Maps and Atlases. Might as well listen to both, yo *

D34 (Monday, October 3^rd)

Another morning, another picture

This was the day we finally decided to try making broth. First time making broth for me, pretty exciting! Some time after breakfast, we put the whole chicken into this big pot, covered it with water, and set it to boiling (by which I mean we put the heat on high and forgot about it while we worked - it ended up overflowing until Ed graciously lowered the heat all the way.  Yes I cleaned it up later. It was not pleasant).

Here's the chicken in the water, woohoo...

The work for the day was basically land clearing. This whole area near the workshop had to be cleared, including some invasive hickory trees. Behind me are raised planter boxes, and beyond those is the orchard with a bunch of apple trees. That's where there are the most problematic hickory trees.

Before we started

I went back inside after the chicken had boiled for an hour to pull meat off - it was cooked enough for us to use in soup later (whenever we felt like making the actual soup).

This is all the meat I managed to scrape off

Charlotte did a wonderful job clearing in my absence. We had some mothafuckin whatever, I don't remember, for lunch and then I came back out with Charlotte to help finish the weeds clipping.

Clear as crystale

On to the hickory! Gotta get them young, cause it'd be a pain in the ass for Richard to have to go in there with a chainsaw. If they get too big for the heavy duty clippers, though, you gotta. We started near the grove:

This is around the time I decided to use some of the trees for carving - they're so straight!

This was our view to the left, we moved toward it to get some of the hickory on this side of the mountain.

Heavy duty clippers meet their match

This is basically when we stopped. The clippers barely got through that thick tree that's lying over, still attached - I had to go back in from the other side 'cause I couldn't just cut straight through. I definitely wanted that tree to use for a spoon, it was the thickest I found which meant that it gave me the most room for error while still being likely to produce a decent cooking spoon/spatula/utensilar monstrosity.

Some choice hickory trees

When we came back inside, we stopped the broth bubbling - it kept going with just the bones for another two hours after lunch. It was easy enough to just boil a whole chicken, but it reminded me of some like worst cooks show on tv where a woman just boiled some chicken parts cause she didn't know what the fuck she was doing. NOT US, YO. Except this is around the time I realized I didn't salt the broth at all... Talking to Richard, he said that was better because they had found that it was better to leave the salting until the very end. Salt to taste, kind of thing. Plus, if you salt things early, like in a soup, then everything in the soup absorbs the salt and you end up having to add more salt or whatever (I hope this is right and that I didn't just misunderstand - it certainly made me feel better so whatever). Anyway the broth worked out just fine so whatever. Look at the pictures.

Bones and yuck.

Anyway later that night we had pasta with butter, sage, and parmesan for dinner. We made dough for more bread before I made some wonderful popcorn to eat while watching Uncanny.

POPCOOOOOOORN

The problem was... I used over twice as much oil (coconut) than I was meant to... it was a little weird that it tasted like coconut oil but hey whatever the taste was fine. When we deep fried coconut oil the other day for the chips it smelled like popcorn so whatever.

Except not whatever. We went to bed eventually and I had some weird dream... Something to do with some kind of special powers. It was like I was dealing with two types of grass or something, there was thicker and thinner but it was also the difference between straw and hay and eventually I was lightheaded and thought it was just that one of those weren't good for me or something. I slowly rolled over and over these possibilities until I realized I was rolling around in bed and that what was happening was that my stomach was flipping a shit. So I got up eventually and went to the bathroom. Luckily I didn't throw up, but I shat my brains out, as Charlotte said. It was 2:15 when I went back to bed. My stomach has always been very sensitive but it was no real surprise with all of that oil, holy shit.

Charlotte didn't feel a thing, though... [cue Twilight Zone theme]

d35 (Tuesday, October 4^th)

No these are not bags of piss, they're vacuum-sealed bags of chicken broth, silly!

The next morning we finally strained the broth and put it in those bags pictured above (vacuum sealers are pretty cool, though I was very mistrusting at first - I mean, how the hell is it gonna know when to stop sucking and start sealing? Holy shit don't suck up all my broth, damn you!). This was the day we were going to dig out around the spring house (little hut built around a natural spring that they draw water from). It needed attention after however many years of rain and who knows what else. Richard thought it would take us at least two days, possibly three, so we were kind of anxious to get started and make as much progress as we could.

Spring house! Not like an analog to a summer house, unless you mean for salamanders.

Behind the spring house was like a foot of dirt and mud and tons of rocks. The big problem was that surface water was getting into the spring. You absolutely would not want surface water in your drinking water if you were in a city (I mean holy shit imagine everything on the streets going into your mouth), but it wasn't as terrible way out on top of a mountain. As Richard said, some of the worst you might get is some deer poop... still not great, but better than like chemicals and garbage and probably vomit and some diarrhea and old piss or whatever. I don't know, what's on the streets where you live?

Big log behind the spring house

We made some good progress before lunch. We ate in the Kubota:

That's what I look like when I eat lunch with a girl in pigtails.

Bread lunch! Also fruit and cookies

We drove the Kubota back to ask Richard how far out we were to go and whether to move some of these huge rocks (some the size of like three heads). He had mentioned not to touch some of the rocks in the surrounding wall because it might mess with the spring itself. After we returned with him, he pointed out about how far we were to go, what to move and what rocks to leave. He said he thought that some bear(s) must have been by there looking for bugs under the big rocks that used to form a natural barrier on the left side of the spring house, since some of these rocks were randomly strewn about 10 feet down the hill. We got right to work and considered our work done a couple of hours later:

Water now flows around the spring on the right side, though there are leaks in the ground there.

Up the hill from the spring, I moved the big log and we used it to form a barrier. I also made a small trench.

Now you can walk all around the spring house! Boy were we tired though.

We're pretty proud of how it came out, and that it didn't take two days. There was less work than Richard thought there would be, but we really went to town too. Except we were nowhere near town, but on a mountain. With beautiful landscapes and really old buildings from back... like, before computers or whatever. Probably before there was color.

Old house site, near the spring. Pretty sure this is where old man Wilmoth lived, I have to get my facts straight.

We made a delicious pizza and devoured it for dinner. I failed at dough and Charlotte got mad cause she had done so many other things while I pretty much stared into space and did nothing really useful until I tried to stretch the dough to put on the peel to prebake. It came out just fine though so there's that.

Pepperoni and caramelized onions on top of mozzarella and homemade alfredo sauce.

36 (Wednesday, October 5^th)

This was the day my care package arrived from my parents! Among other things like stupid old mail, we got food! My mom packed some packaged soups and ramen-y things apparently with the thought that we would use them on the road or as emergency food (which is perfect because I saw them and that's what I immediately thought). She included this soup that Charlotte tried once and enjoyed the shit out of before she even found out it came out of a little packet like that. Charlotte doesn't like soup, or eat very much of it, so that was a big thing.

Charlotte's favorite, spinach something soup!

MORE SUNFLOWER SEEDS YEEESSSS

This was the day Richard and Marcia were leaving to go to Charlottesville, almost two and a half hours away in Virginia, because Richard apparently had a doctor's appointment made for him at 7 Thursday morning. They were leaving at 2 in the afternoon (or 14:00 if you can figure out how to subtract 12) and had told us to sand and prime this new-ish (wasn't here a year ago) railing that was by now obviously rusted.

Look, the hay is still there!

The apple tree on the left is on that dates back to the time of Thomas Jefferson. It's one of the most valuable trees on their property - grafted on some time ago. It's a very important piece of history and the Laskas hope to have it documented that the tree grows on their land. We had to be very careful not to get spray paint on it because petroleum derivatives are very harmful to plants. Spoiler alert, that's pretty much impossible with spray paint unless you wanna wrap the whole tree in plastic or something. So we just sanded both railings but never ended up using much of the primer. We'd have to wait for liquid paint we could brush on. After lunch instead I started carving a little bit!

Green hickory smells like watermelon, it's really bizarre.

They left a little after 14 and gave us the dogs to watch for the next day and a half. Marcia showed us how to feed them, namely who gets what and in what order.

Deke is like the captain but also doesn't realize he's adorable.

Gill really likes the porch and being behind this table

Jack enjoys love and scrunching his face against your leg

Can you tell how much I want a dog yet?

After lunch the dogs slept for a little and eventually I took these three out for a longer walk while Charlotte watched Scout, the other Australian Shepherd (that's what Gill is), while she ambled around the parking area near the retreat.

For dinner we made pasta and used some of the store-bought pesto they had here. My god the pesto we made with Lorette in Maine was like 300 times better. This was only my third experience with pesto (the second being that pee--I mean pea pesto in Maine) and I don't think I ever want non-homemade pesto. That's it, holy shit it's just too easy to make and too delicious when you get to choose exactly what it tastes like.

The day passed calmly and we turned the lights on at dusk as usual.

This view never gets old. Also this is proof that the lights change colors.

We took the dogs out again around 8 and we saw Gill snatch something up from under the front of our car. Charlotte was about to try to take whatever it was out of his mouth until she said she saw tiny feet!

Gill chewed on this mouse's head for a while before apparently devouring it whole - I found no remains

After we brought them back in, we watched the second 300, Rise of an Empire (see the reference now from up above?) which I feel like could have probably ended better but it was still enjoyable. I think I liked the first 300 more.

Right as we were going to sleep, Scout was whining and groaning (she often does, she's getting really old and sadly less and less capable), which often means she wants to get up and/or go out, so I took her out right around midnight. She walked around in what I thought was discomfort for about half an hour, sometimes wandering far enough away that I had to steer her back toward the retreat, but eventually I just guided her back inside. She sat down and must have been so tired that she fell asleep within 30 seconds. Then we all slept.

37 (Thursaday (typo but I like it so shut up) October 6^th)

Obviously I think this looks beautiful, Charlotte laughed and said it's just bread.

We spent the morning lazily, and the dogs pretty much followed suit:

If you so much as look at Jack his tail wags. Deke doesn't quite get it.

We attempted spray priming the rail around 11, but quickly realized that there was literally no way to protect the tree from the spray paint which wafted through the air and around any barrier we tried to use (large pieces of insulation and then a tarp that Charlotte held up in front of the tree). We gave up and went back inside until it was time to take the dogs out again.

Scout on her mid-morning walkabout

I brought the dogs inside after their longish walk and eventually switched places with Charlotte while she went inside to do something like prepare lunch or whatever. I just kinda sat whittling a little.

Tiny bit of practice making feather sticks (thanks John!)

Richard and Marcia ended up getting back unexpectedly early since the doctors changed their minds about what they were going to do to Richard's body (yeah I guess that makes it sound like they're frankensteiny or whatever, but aren't doctors a little scary with what they do to people? Especially surgeons, I mean they cut you open and chop you up and stir around your insides or whatever.), so the dogs' stint with us was cut short. Marcia picked them up and left us delicious pear flavored beer (Bold Rock Pear Cider). We ended up having one of those later on. But before that, BYOS!

BYOS: Build Your Own Soup

This was the first soup I ever made! We made the broth from scratch and then cooked all the other shit for it. We, at Marcia's suggestion, sauteed the vegetables (carrots, onions, and celery) in some butter before adding the chicken to heat it up, made some rice separately and combined it all together in whatever proportions we wanted in a bowl. I salted it kind of a lot because I like salt (hey salt sister (yeah you (in Seattle))) but there was also no salt in anything else so it probably wasn't actually that much. Whatever, I don't know if I'm even actually self conscious about the amount of salt I eat.

Anyway. BYOS is what I came up with and am obviously stupidly proud of. It also made me think of another thing it stood for, Bring Your Own Spoon. So then I was like okay well here's a great party idea for when we're settled (probably first in Nevada): I'd invite a bunch of people over, tell them to bring their own spoons, have the parts of the soup all on the stove or whatever, and then just have them assemble the soup themselves! If you want, fuck it, just eat some chicken and rice with/without vegetables! Have the broth in a cup for all I care, don't have soup at all, whatever! Valerie also suggested that it would be cool if I gathered people together a week before or something for everyone to carve their own spoons. Then it would be extra special :] So anyway, keep that in mind and await your invitation to our first BYOS party! Just please don't bring shit.

38 days on Friday, October 7^th

Well it rained a bunch Friday. That was whatever. Ed graciously came inside to let me know he was going to change the oil on the generator and asked whether I wanted to come. It was then that I realized I somehow mixed up the wood burning stove with the generator and thought, "Why the fuck would you have oil in a wood burning stove...?" Well it's a diesel generator, not a wood burning whatever.

Diesel generator guts

Diesel fuel tank conveniently located near the generator!

After puttering around with Ed for a while, I went back up to find that Charlotte was talking to Valerie on the phone! That was really nice, it was great to talk to her again, sure do miss her. She definitely needs to make sure she goes to our first BYOS party. Anyway, eventually we made dinner cause we're dependent on food for survival! We made some tiny breads, cored them, and stuffed them before shoving them back into the oven for a bit. I also fried (read: burned) the little bit of leftover rice we had with an egg and some sesame seeds, and heated up brown sugar carrots from the night before. Charlotte said the rice was like cereal... as in really hard. Yeah it kinda hurt my jaw to eat. It was probably cause the stainless steel pan I used heats up a lot but also because I've never fried such a tiny amount of rice before. I eat a fuckload. Especially rice, cause omg rice, you know? Especially fried in butter with sesame seeds and soy sauce and an egg...

Mozzarella, caramelized onions, and pepperoni in the bread balls.

Also food is fucking delicious if you do it right.

After dinner I went out to do some more work on my fork-in-the-making. It turned into a prefork because it was too thin for a spoon and I was really only practicing carving anyway so who gives a shit right? Well me, cause now I'm really invested in it and don't want it to come out shitty. I asked Ed for some proper tools and a hacksaw, as Richard suggested, for the tines.

Yay tools! I really wanna own a rasp.

Cause how am I gonna just use a Mora knife? Well I'm not. Unless you mean how else am I gonna cut my fingers real bad cause that's what I did. I cut my pinky first, just a jab, really, because I was stupidly trying to carve toward myself. I even knew it was a terrible idea while I was doing it, but it was the best way to work on the section I was trying to work on (the edge of the handle/where the tines start). Well I obviously didn't learn my lesson because I cut myself again, even as I held a paper towel over my pinky to stop the bleeding there. The first cut was not the deepest (cause then I would have learned) and I actually got worried about how deep the cut on my pointer finger was (and both cuts were on the knuckles, the pinky was on the bend right before my nail, and the index finger was cut in the middle of my finger). I don't really know why I didn't take pictures, though I'm pretty sure I did Saturday except for some reason I don't have that picture. I ended up taking some Monday, but whatever. I'm dumb, you get the point. The pointer finger bled a lot and immediately and blah blah it was fine.

39 days as of Saturday, October 8^th

I thought that I forgot to take the morning pictures on Saturday, but it turns out my phone actually just named them incorrectly (it names them MMDDYYHHMM, so it should have been 1008160931 or whatever time it was, but instead it chose August 14 and also decided that's when those files were created) which is really weird and makes me worry about the integrity of all of my other files on this piece of shit. Too bad phones are prohibitively expensive, especially when you're homeless. Well then. Here's what Saturday looked like:

Gray and rainy.

So we stayed in bed for a while. We broke fast late, it ended up basically just being lunch and we had a delicious meal:

Avocado, cream cheese, honey mustard, bacon sandwiches

Charlotte played around with the mountain dulcimer or as she likes to call it, the bowed psaltery. She found a tuner they have here, but it immediately stopped working (batteries died) so she was just like there's an app for that, right? And yes, there was. It's also a metronome. So basically it's like throw away things you have in your house cause your smartphone is better than most of them (except maybe a blender). After tuning, Charlotte worked on playing Ode to Joy and Over The Rainbow. I didn't know the name of the first one but I immediately recognized both, so that's cool. Here's a picture she took of the instrument:

25 strings - take that, Jason!

After a while we started watching The Lobster which is a pretty ridiculous movie. Halfway through, I started some dinner (just fried some rice with the rest of the chicken, left some plain white rice to eat alongside it):

I guess we eat a lot of rice. Carb city up in here.

40^th day - Sunday, October 9^th

Boy was it windy Saturday into and including all of Sunday. Holy shit, windy as fuck. It was sunny at least, so we got to go for a walk (getting kind of cooped up in the retreat). After that, I puttered around just reading through this little book they have:

I kinda want this book actually

Charlotte caramelized the rest of the apples we had and we made whipped cream with vanilla beans!

Finally baked sandwich bread!

Charlotte wanted to make sandwich bread for the longest time, so we used this recipe out of a book they have up here. It called for some flavorless oil which we don't really have up here (just coconut oil and olive oil) and we were both like we love olive oil, this'll be fine. Well, it wasn't. Holy fucking christ it was terrible. We suffered through most of it but now we have about an inch left that I think we're just gonna let rot. Maybe we'll feed it to the chickens tomorrow morning if I can think to do that.

Anyway, here's some pictures from our nice walk!

Don't worry, your screen isn't dirty. I'm pretty sure that's a hawk.

Milkweed!

I have no idea what this is but it doesn't look like it belongs here.

I don't know, the tiniest watermelon..?

It's the Great Deku Tree!

One of several large, old trees that are dead around the property.

This actually reminds me of something Richard talked about when I WWOOFed here years ago. There were a bunch of these (several?) hundred-year-old trees around the property, all just growing and shit like trees do. At some point a decade or so ago, several of them just up and died. It was almost like a mass exodus or something. Richard told us that to him, that was one of the biggest signs of global warming - that these ancient trees just couldn't handle the climate anymore. Pretty sad, pretty big wake up call (I'm sure this kind of thing is happening all around the world). This is one of the big, obvious reasons I want to work for Tesla.

This looks like a murder scene

There are still some old trees around! The entire mountain area is pretty nicely forested.

I think that tree is my favorite so far. I was surprised by its pretty color!

After we got back I started looking some stuff up about the CompTIA A+ certification thing partially because it would be good just to have a certificate (mostly because it requires me to know a bunch of stuff that I really want to know). I'm gonna use it as kind of like a study guide, hopefully I won't need to buy any study books, but that's what got me thinking about it (trying to get our Amazon order up to $50 for free shipping). After that, we decided to drink the rest of the boxed wine. We got pretty drunk (there was a bunch of wine left, as it turned out) so here are too many pictures of dinner!

This picture is misleading - I don't give a shit about hot sauce. I put that shit on NOTHING. EVER.
It does remind me of Larry from work though. I miss you, Larry!

Yep, pepperoni and marinara on unfortunately bad bread.

Charlotte fried these and apparently put only three slits (one on the other side) on this hot dog.

Then we passed out for like three hours. We stayed up until 1 while I chose pictures for the post and started writing some of it. I did this mostly to the tune of The Mars Volta (Bedlam in Goliath, which unfortunately is missing two tracks in my collection, possibly cause that stupid western digital hard drive I had been using while we lived in new jersey (no I'm not gonna capitalize it) bricked several times, unfortunately while I was trying to transfer files onto another hard drive). We went to bed not feeling too bad about how late it was cause we had a really long nap beforehand.


So eventually we plan to add a page to the blog where I take screenshots of Google's creepy location tracking, so as to show our path through the states. I might want to document things like miles and gas usage there too. I guess it would probably be good to do an About page, cause if anyone were to start reading they might just be like what the fuck is happening who are these weirdo hippies please help take me away.

I was also thinking that it would be cool if we did some kind of thing where we answer random questions you guys might have (I'd probably send an email to friends/subscribers) - like an ask us anything, though maybe it's a little early for that since we've only been on the road for a little over a month. Does that sound at all interesting or should I shut up until I have some better ideas?


Sorry, I didn't edit this post at all, I really just wanted to get it up by Tuesday (cause it would be nice to have some kind of schedule going here for once). Also, I'd rather it feel like I'm just telling the story of how our week went, and I can't really edit myself when I speak. I might stutter a bunch especially when I'm particularly excited and maybe stumbled over a sentence like three times before I get it right, but luckily that doesn't come through in a blog post :]



Thanks for reading!