It's May Already?

May?  It's approaching the middle of MAY?  Seems like just yesterday we moved into The Log House, but it's been 4 1/2 months already.   And yet, I'm still as goofy happy about it as ever. 

The progress on the house is now just a bunch of little finish work.  Well, I say "little", but every new door knob sends me into a squealing squealer of squealingness.  We have doors on the downstairs bathroom and the kids' room/spare 'oom and the artic entry is in process of having its walls and ceiling finished.... see?

 

That brown is just the primer, but it's a lovely chocolate color in person, and I don't mind lookin' at it while waiting for the boards to be applied!

 

 

What else have we been up to this last wee while?   Well, a little of this:

 

 

Bob and Jim enveloped in a cloud of sweet steam from the evaporator, boiling down sap into maple syrup.

 

 

 and a little of that....

 



The menfolk splitting wood for next winter.  Already.

and cuteness....

 

  KITTENS!!!  Yes, we have two sweet kittens now -- who love to climb The Boy like he's there just for that reason.  And he loves it.

I can't get a very good angle of the arctic entry to show you the work as it goes on, but I'll squish myself into a corner and try to get some good shots as the board walls go up and the floor goes down.

'Tis the Season..

... of Easter eggs and maple sap!

Here's what we've been up to the past few weeks:

The Boy's good friend moved far far away last fall, but came to visit us for Spring Break!  

And we put the friend right to work collecting sap.

And then The Husband put me to work.  

The syrup season started out as a dud.  We thought we were never going to be able to get into the woods to tap, as the snow was ridiculously deep.  Then, the snow started to recede SLOWLY, but the temps didn't get high enough for the sap to run.  And when the temps did rise, they rocketed up.  Ugh.  But, we ended up with a respectable amount.  Good news, syrup-lovers.

We also had a wonderful Easter celebration.

We dyed eggs.  

We made birds' nest cookies.  Super-simple, btw and for once in my life, not a Pinterest fail.

We had a lovely Easter dinner with family and friends.

 And the children were spoiled with THREE Easter egg hunts!   One at church, one after Easter dinner at our house, and one at the grandparents'.

Friends, family and candy.  They are very happy bairns.

Some work actually did happen up at The Log House too.   Just not really photo-worthy.  Bob and his father cleared the basement of its assorted... um.. stored items ... and then sealed the concrete floor.  Totally important, just not very visually impressive.   But, stay tuned, intrepid log-gawkers --   big changes are in the works!

Cousins! Cousins! Everywhere!

We had an influx of temporary agricultural workers from the South last week.

By which I mean two sets of cousins came to visit and help haul sap in from the sugarbush.

Bob's sister and family visited from Merry-land for nearly a week to celebrate Easter ... and then spent late afternoon on Sunday filling up the sap holding tanks.

The Girl and her first cousins hunt for Easter eggs

While I was busy with the Easter egg hunt, The Hubs, his sister The Troll, B.I.L. Rrrrrrick and Nephew#1 trudged out to the sugarbush to empty the rapidly overflowing sap buckets into the transport pails and bring them back to the sugarhouse.  Unfortunately, it started to rain between truckloads 1 and 2.  They were troopers, though, and brought it all in.

*spoiler alert*

reminder of the plot of The Maple Movie

(subtitled)  The sap's journey:

  Tree->galvanized bucket-> 5 gallon pail -> holding tank -> 

evaporator -> syrup -> filter -> bottle

FIL Jim furiously boiled the sap on Sunday and Monday and pulled off gallons of delightfully golden sweet Maple Syrup.  On Monday, the family spent the day bottling

(Syrup photography courtesy of the BIL Rrrrrick)

Then the cold weather swooped back in to halt sap flow just in time for Bob's cousin Sean and his two Seanlets to arrive from Virginia Beach.

Fortunately, the temps inched back up through the week and by Friday there was enough sap in the buckets to collect.

The Girl and her second cousin Rubydoo discover a very! full! sap bucket!!

Sean and the Seanlets empty sap buckets into the 5-gallon pails to transport the sap back to the sugarhouse.

Sweet maple-y goodness.  Mmmmm....  

I love it when cousins come to visit.  

Especially when they do the work that The Hubs usually makes me do.  

BWWWAAAHAHAHAHAHAAA!  

(anyone else want to come visit?)

Spring Woods

Steam's Up!

YAY!  

The kids went up to The Lake with Bob today to collect sap.  In the balmy 42 F weather, the sap was a-runnin'!   So much so, that they fired up the evaporator.

Steam's Up!

Drip, thunk

As soon as our lovely sweet sap started to drip two weeks ago, the weather turned COLD again and those drips turned into sapsicles.  So no sweet sounds, just the occasional THUNK of a frozen sapsicle falling off into a bucket.

*sigh*

I'm pretty sure that we had a return of winter weather because we have family coming up from the South next week who were praying for an extension of the syrup season so they could help with whole maple-y process!   Thanks, guys.

So, in the meantime, we did a little of this:

But -- never fear!   Temps are on their way back up and the snow is melting away again.  Yesterday, The Hubs and his father (who is FINALLY back from Florida, the no-good-dirty-retirement-enjoying-guy) collected about 75 gallons of sap!   Today, the kids are helping him haul in the rest of the buckets, since the school district cashed in an unused snow day for an extra day of vacation.

Lucky ducks.

Relax to the sweet sounds of...

... the slow drip of maple sap.

This has been the adult contemporary stylings of Mr. Maple T. Ree on WSAP TV:  The North Woods straight to you!


.

Oh my.

You know it's been crazy warm when the ICE IS OUT IN MID-MARCH!!!!!

I know that some lakes at higher elevations in the Adirondacks still have some ice, but it's melting fast in Paul Smiths too....  

Plus, do you know what else is gone, much to Bob's dismay?    No, 'dismay' is too mild....   horror?  soul-crushing reality?     ....   the sap stopped running.  If there's no more syrup season this year... and it looks like this might be it...  then we have made a grand total of like 6 gallons of syrup.

I may have to take The Husband to therapy.

March

It's March 13 and it smells like May.   You know:  you go outside and it's unexpectedly warm and it just smells warmer... like when you drive south in the winter and get out of the car for a long-awaited rest break and the temp is 20 degrees warmer than the last pee stop?     Hello?  Am I the only one here?

Moving on.

I can now throw laundry from the first floor bathroom down the chute into the basement!

 

And in other news:

STEAM'S UP!!!!

The Last Sap of the Season

Although many (most?) North Country maple producers are long since done with the season, our sugarbush is just now throwing in the towel.  The elevation makes it a bit colder, longer, which shifts the timing of our sugaring season.  Bob is boiling the last of the sap down into maple syrup today.  Sunday, we -- me, Bob, my mother and Baby M -- went up to The Lake to grab the last run of sap.  The snow is melting fast and it was warm enough for us to eschew coats.