welcome friends

dear friends here and there,

my two most trusted literary advisors, alice peck and dan minock, each suggested indepently that i should create a blog. this came in part from my comment that i am tired of the things i have written in the past few years and want to write some new material. so i am planning to post something short every week, or perhaps more often if there's something worth writing about.

i've thought of updates on life at frog bog (where is the mink now?), comments on aristotle's Ethics (philosophy class readings), entries in sallie minor's journals of 1910-12 (i'm transcribing these written by an obscure cousin in rural virginia), some unpublished travel notes (israel, sweden), the ice harvesting festival at the kensington farm center (who knew what a big enterprise ice harvesting was?), and whatever else comes to mind.

i do not want it to be the equivalent of a chirstmas card letter. however, i will start with the scene here at home.

there's about 6 inches of snow on the ground and among the many birds at the feeder is a red-bellied woodpecker, an individual who we can easily recognize. he crashed into the long windows in our 'new room' in december of '06 and landed head first deep in the snow and didn't move. i went out to rescue him and in pulling the bird out, i pulled off some of his tail feathers. he was alive but stunned. judy rushed him in to bird rescue in ann arbor, where they kept him most of the day and sent him back to us before nightfall in a brown paper bag held with a clothespin--the official best way, they say. we released him and he flew off fast into the woods. so now when we see a red-bellied woodpecker without much of a tail, we know exactly who he is. today he is drumming hard on the electric pole, establishing his territory and hoping to atract a mate. a sure sign of spring approaching.

we've had three power outages in the past week, due to high winds and falling ash trees, victims of the emerald ash borer. no electricity means no heat but the wood stove, no lights (ok, lots of candles), no water (there's snow to melt, ice on the pond but no ice saw), no electric stove so no cooking (though i can boil water and cook rice on the top of the wood stove), no tv (i'm hooked on "in treatment"), no cd player (my spoken swedish lessons) and of course, worst of all, no internet, no e-mail. we do have one of those crank radios so we can listen to npr.

the wood stove works well enough if it isn't too bitter cold and the outage doesn't last too long (13 hours the most so far) and the wood is dry and burning well (not always the case). and now there's a new problem: the ground is so saturated with all the snow and rain we've had that the septic system is flooded, so waste water can't drain out fast enough. therefore, while we have plenty of water and at the moment the power to pump it out of the well, we can't use too much of it. quick showers, limited toilet flushes and dishwashing, no washing machine (i tried a load of laundry and flooded the basement).

what all this points out so clearly is how dependent we've become on both these necessities and these frills and how unprepared we really are for michigan in the winter.

enough for now. i hope you'll come back to the blog and send comments. yrs, as always, julia