Apr 30 2011

Life in Manitoba

by andrew

Here’s a much abbreviated a snapshot of my adventurous past week from which I am thoroughly enjoying the reprieve of Sabbath.

We got back to the homestead-waiting-to-happen from an excellent time in Winnipeg on tues and in addition to all the fun stuff I’m working on for Clvr the following productivity ensued (in somewhat no particular order):

  • emptied our black tank into the new 25 gal holding / tote tank on wheels we picked up in Winnipeg and drug that out into the pasture to dump into the sewage pit I dug with Bennah the week before. “And you shall have a place outside the camp, where you shall go out, and you shall have a sharp implement among your equipment, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and turn and cover your excrement.” (Deu 23:13-14)
  • covered the poop pit with a hood from an old red chevy truck so that animals in the pasture don’t fall in and break a leg or something. “And when a man opens a pit, or if a man digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls in it, the owner of the pit is to repay, he is to give silver to their owner, and the dead beast is his.” (Exo 21:34-35)
  • took my two sons of thunder for a couple mile hike around the property (yes that’s the poop pit bottom left):

image

  • started researching immigration / residency more thoroughly
  • walked out and flagged what will become our roughly 1/4 mile driveway so that we can hire a loader to come out and knock the right trees down to make a path and build it up.
  • several rides on the quad (ATV)
  • Reayah made friends with the horse by devising a bribe that involved an apple
  • i used a roll of white duct tape patching up our awning from driving through hail and wind damage
  • filled up our 40 gal water tank again since the weekend was going to bring freezing temps and pointless hook up to the hose when that happens. temps were supposed to hover around 30 F / -2 C which would have been fine but it got much colder and the pipe from tank to pump froze anyway. thankful for a warm house to come hang out in with our cousins.
  • lost power last night… and somehow “get propane” never made it from my mental list to my written list and we ran out a couple hours before the power died. fabulous. no heat and just in time for a freak blizzard and 20 F / -7 C. what an amateur move… just so happy to be here and distracted by everything going on that I didn’t really take much thought to the fact that it’s already almost 3 weeks since we filled one of the tanks. SO. gave myself a bit of an unintentional adventure in the middle of the blizzard night to hunt down other tanks on the property. even the tanks from our cousins’ camper were pretty much empty but their grill had a full, albeit smaller tank that should get us through tonight at least to where we can maybe make it into town tomorrow if the highway opens up (yep, currently closed).

  • ok time to take the kids out into the blizzard for 5 minutes to get their crazies out and sap their energy for the rest of the evening where burgers and The Prince of Egypt are on the agenda.

Parked

The deck is actually at least 2 feet off the ground…. but where did the ground go?