Keeping a roof over our heads and our bellies full

Last weekend, Jordan and I took some extra time off from our town jobs to work on the house.  We got a ton of work done!  As we were finishing the sanding, Jordan noticed this sawdust-covered bat between the logs.

It seems like we haven't quite evicted the bats like we thought we had!

After we finished sanding, we used the air compressor to blow off the majority of the sand and sawdust, then we had to wash the house.  As the house is down to bare wood, this seemed to go against our gut instinct to protect the house; we had to mist the logs with the hose, spray on the Log Wash solution, wait five minutes, then spray the house with the hose again.  Just after we had gotten the sandblasting done, I had sprayed the back corner of the house with the hose, and it took four days to dry - we thought washing it would lead to the same results, but luckily the logs dried within 36 hours with no discolouration.

The male half of Team House Washing, with the backpack sprayer

Once the logs were dry, we started filling the checks and then we took the leap and started chinking as well.  It's easier than we thought it would be, and it actually looks pretty good!

It turns out that the chinking is pretty much a one-person job, so Jordan has taken over these last few days and has gotten quite a bit done.  The weather has done a complete reversal on us: after two months of almost no rain, it has now rained every day since Monday.  We've tarped the back deck and are almost done the two walls along that portion of the deck, and the weather was decent the other day so Jordan did the wall with the big window, as that would be difficult to tarp. We'll likely keep that pattern, and work on the exposed walls on nice days while saving the deck-facing walls for rainy days.

While Jordan was working on the house, I took turns either helping him or working in the kitchen.  Over the weekend, I made:

1 dozen pumpkin muffins;

7 250mL (small) jars of pickled beets, and 2 jars of "cloves carrots" (sliced carrots in the brine I had left over from the beets);

5 small and 4 extra-small (125mL) jars of saskatoon jam; 12 small and 5 pint jars of pickled carrots;

and, half a large freezer bag of peas.

The beet recipe is Mom's top-secret recipe from when we were kids; the saskatoon jam recipe is here; and the pickled carrot recipe came from a book titled Put 'em up! by Sherri Brooks Vinton.  The peas were simply blanched, dried, then packed into a bag (I used a straw to suck out as much air as I could) then popped into the freezer. The beets, carrots, peas and saskatoons all came from our property; the fresh dill and fresh garlic were purchased from a local farm at the farmer's market. Jordan helped with the canning too: he pulled and cleaned the beets, shelled the peas, and provided moral support as I laboured in the kitchen.

Our canning equipment consists of an enamel steamer pot (one where the insert is as tall as the pot, so we can't use that pot alone to can anything bigger than the tiny 125mL jars), a large stock pot, and a circular cooling rack. I discovered two different configurations I can use while canning: putting the cake rack in the enamel pot, and the enamel insert in the stock pot, allows me to have two canners on the go; and by using the stock pot and insert, I could can 5 small jars, put the cake rack on top, and put 4 extra small jars on top, which allowed me to can the whole batch of saskatoon jam in one pot.

I have enough saskatoon berries left that I can make another batch of jam.

And, completely off-topic, I found the following book at the library:

Chickens are the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus Rex, as evidenced by a study analyzing collagen from soft tissues in a T. Rex skeleton.  This study proved that the T. Rex is closer related to chickens and jungle fowl than it is to alligators and crocodiles. That's awesome :D  (That study is behind a paywall for the majority of you, dear readers, unless you click the link using a computer at a public library (you might get access) or a university (you will likely get access).  Here are some links with more info: "Evolutionary history of the chicken," "T. Rex is cousin to modern-day chickens.")

We have more company this weekend, and there's no telling what trouble we'll get in to...