Busy busy!

Sorry for the recent lack of posts.  I recently took two trips down to Vancouver (for union-related meetings) and I feel like my time at home has involved more damage control than farm planning.  Our roof/walls have been leaking, so I've been rigging up systems to capture the water and try to minimize further damage using milk jugs, funnels, hoses, the rest of my 20 gauge jewellery wire (*sniffle*) and one round potato chip container.

We currently have three of these diversion systems in place, catching anywhere between nothing and four litres in 12 hours.  And the icing on the cake: it's not only leaking inside, it's leaking outside too.

This week we'll be calling some roofing and insulating companies to try and determine what's causing this, and how to fix it without breaking the bank.  We're pretty sure it's not actually leaking through the roof (which is tin), but is condensation collecting in the roof and running back into the house.  While I was  home between trips, I went up on the roof and excavated the vents we installed last summer from  underneath 2' of snow, and that has helped a bit.  It looked like we didn't have too much melting on the roof aside from above the fireplace chimney, so we're not losing extreme amounts of heat.  This brightened my mood a bit, as I had visions of soaked, frozen insulation in my head.

Up until last weekend, we had pans of water on the fireplace to try and raise the humidity, which was consistently around 24%.  I took the pans off, and we've been up to 43% - I'm confused about why this is happening (as I'm inclined to think that evaporating water would increase the humidity, much as having a hot shower does, but we've experienced the opposite...) but so long as the humidity is up and the leaking is down, I'm not going to argue.  It's been an unseasonably warm week, with highs up to +4  and lows around -3 - maybe that has something to do with it?  We'll monitor this and hopefully figure it out.  On the bright side, we had the road properly plowed just before the weather warmed up, so it's been melting and freezing fairly close to the road surface, which means we don't have rutted slush to deal with once the temperature drops again :)

Every so often, I get the itch to be making something for form, instead of for function.  I enjoy creating, and playing around with any of the hobbies I seem to pick up and put down too often (such as making jewellery, sewing, building things out of wood, and collage).  There hasn't been much 'creating' going on before today, but I spent all day yesterday running around in town and cleaning the house specifically so I could spend today in in my craft room (which I call the "crap room", as it will soon be full of random crap and I won't be able to find anything - that's what usually happens, anyway).  I was able to pretty-up a corkboard I got at Value Village for 99 cents with some paint and fabric, make bootie extenders for Doodle (as his booties are very short, more like shoes then the legging-style he had before), and continue dismantling one of my favourite shirts to turn it into a pattern.

Clockwise from to left: The corkboard before; the corkboard after; halfway done reverse-engineering my shirt; Zim modelling Doodle's bootie extenders.

Looking forward, we have an appointment with Jillian from Beyond the Market this week to figure out how to get started with farming.  With both of us working full time (and Jordan technically gets overtime each week), I am not sure what resources are available to us, or if we will be able to get everything going on evenings and weekends alone.  Our big-picture plan is to have one of us stop working off-farm and be fully dedicated to farming when it gets off the ground, hopefully in the next 3 to 5 years.  But in order for it to start making money so one of us can stay home, we have to get started, and that's where Jillian comes in :)  Jillian also organized another farming session this coming week, and we're hoping to attend that as well.