Celestial Miracle

When the moon is in the seventh house,
And the electrician aligns with Nova Scotia Power,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And the Yana and Peter Homeshow will get a service upgrade.

I guess we just needed to wait for the right celestial event. I had given up hoping that I would be able to fire a larger kiln before I went back to work this spring. But yesterday, on St. Patrick's Day, I had the luck of the Irish and it actually happened!


It all happened.
Power upgraded to 200 amps. Check
Power to garage upgraded to 100 amps. Check
Final Electrical Inspection on the house complete. Check. (That took only 3 years)
New 60 amp plug added to the garage. Check
Filled in the hole in the driveway.
Figure out if kiln we bought off Kijiji last year actually works. It does!


I'm doing a bisque firing today, and we will see if the automatic kiln sitter will shut it off at the right time. It took me an hour to load the kiln this morning. It held everything on the shelves waiting to be fired and is still only 2/3 full. I only have 1 1/2 shelves for it, so I was improvising with using the shelves for the small kiln too. It was like solving a spacial geometry problem trying to get the right combination of posts and pots to be able to fit it all in and still see the witness cone through the peep hole. I guess I need to order some proper shelves.

Chainsaw Massacre

In Spring, a young man's thoughts turn to chainsaws. The other one celebrated sending in his (hopefully final) draft of his proposal by cutting down some trees in the back yard. Mostly they were poplar and butternut that were shading my berry patch and fruit trees. Every year we plan to get rid of them, and every year we don't and then wonder why the peach tree keeps dying and the raspberries don't ripen. This is the first home reno work we have done since the dreaded ditch. (Which is still waiting for the electrical inspector coming on Wednesday, yeah right) We both are feeling the effects of work this Monday morning.
In addition to electricity, we are getting water in Habitant. Soon, we will have all the mod cons. These diggers have been working their way along the highway for two weeks and they are in front of our house this morning. This is the first stage of getting municipal water. They are putting the main line in first and then will come back and connect all the laterals to the houses. It should be finished by August, so we have a whole summer of dust and delays to look forward to, all so we can have water when the power goes off.

We Have Good Friends

Today is Wednesday, which means it is weekly cancel the power upgrade day. (Oh, and Ash Wednesday as it turns out.) The first three times our electrician couldn't book off his regular job to come on a week day. Last week it was cancelled because the inspector couldn't come. Today Nova Scotia power cancelled because we got snow last night and they are busy reconnecting power to customers in Windsor.
But in anticipation that it might really happen this time (ha) we dug a trench last weekend to bury the new service from the house to the garage. Most people would not attempt to dig a 40 foot trench by hand. Most people would not attempt to do it in winter either, but I think we all agree that we are not like most people.
We must be OK people though, because we managed to coerce 5 friends to help us dig. We began Saturday morning at 8:30, and paused long enough to give the boys an egg and bacon burrito for breakfast.
Then we paused long enough to rent a demolition hammer once we realized that picks were not going to make it through the foot of frozen ground on top. Then more pausing as they excavated a 500 lb rock from the trench. I kept thinking this was an excellent history and archaeology experience and we should have organized students to come help. History because this must be what it was like to dig trenches for World War 1. Archaeology because excavating that rock without large machinery must be what it was like to build the pyramids. Fulcrums and levers.
We also found a layer of thick ash about two feet down all the way along. I wondered if this was a brush clearing fire when the land was originally cleared for farming or from when the Acadians were deported in 1755. We also found a layer of burned glass and what looked like cinemoid in one spot about a foot down. Did the New England Planters have cinemoid?
They dug all morning while I made fish chowder to feed them lunch. After lunch I joined them and we accomplished 3/4 of the required length by beer o'clock. Now I know what the phrase "Colder than a well diggers ass" means.
Sunday morning Peter and I finished off the digging and buried the conduit.

Lessons learned:
1. Dig trenches in summer.
2. Hire a back hoe.

Thank you to Andrew, Peter, Peter, Tony and George.

Happy Birthday Peter

It is a beautiful sunny day, and it is my sweeties birthday. Which we both forgot until we were up a few hours and he looked at the date on the computer.
So, as tradition dictates, I am making an Angel Food cake. I don't much like Angel Food cake, and I used to think it was because it came out of a box, so one year I tried making it from scratch just to see if it was better. It was exactly the same, so now I just make it out of the box. It takes 5 minutes, and that is only because I always have to wash the dust out of the bundt pan and the mixer bowl.
You know how the directions say immediately invert the pan on the neck of a bottle to cool? My bundt pan has too narrow a neck to do this, there is no bottle narrow enough to fit. Every year I forget this until I take the cake out of the oven, and then I have to hunt around for various objects in my kitchen that might work. This year it was the knob on the butter dish that worked.

Peter got three tonnes of sand for his birthday. Not terribly romantic, but it will help to bury the power cable that runs to the garage when we get the power upgrade. Which, yet again was postponed until next Wednesday. That makes the fifth time it has been postponed by our electrician, if anyone is counting. If anyone ever wonders why it takes us so long to renovate the house, this would be one example of a delay that is not our fault.
The delay has not been all bad. The temperature has warmed up to freezing, which will make digging easier. Sometimes we are very lucky.

Like last weekend for example, we went and got a new snow blower. Notice I didn't say buy. We stole it out of my father's shed as he can't use it anymore so he decided this year to get the local plow operator to clear his drive instead. Our last snow blower died during the last snowstorm, and we were lucky enough to get the new one the day before the next snowfall. Lucky. Thanks Dad.