Lettuce

Yes, lettuce, growing in our garden that didn't produce very much. Although our first crop was not very successful, when the local gardening columnists told us it was time to plant that second lettuce crop in September, Cheryl tried again. (Cotoneaster growing in from the left)

The above is a closeup of one of the two survivors in the main garden area. The other green leafy plants closer to the camera are cilantro, planted at the same time.


These cilantro were planted in the front, near the rhubarb and are also looking pretty healthy after a few days under the snow.




We have a lot to learn about gardening in our little climate. These plants may all get more light in the winter than in summer, due to the deciduous trees losing their leaves.

what's left of our White Christmas

Several days of 40-50 degree weather and a violent wind and rain storm last night, and this is just about all that's left of our snow. You can see water in the background as the mountain drains the snow and rain.


Here is one of those sun flare shots photographers sometimes do on purpose. It just happened. This is looking down the driveway, where the water in the first photo is draining down to the road and beyond to the little stream.


Next is a shot of the little stream, recently formally named The Big Branch of Reems Creek. During last year's drought it carried barely a trickle of water and you had to be on top of it to hear it. Today with all the rocks it splashes over, the neighborhood sounds more like Niagara Falls.



Just as a reminder, this was a photo Cheryl took on Saturday from the same spot (zoomed in on the branch that crosses the stream in the above photo).

Our house in the setting sun. The cove setting that creates dramatic lighting like this provides us with good protection from the worst of the winds.

24 hours on the driveway

Yesterday we had clear skies and temperatures in the mid to upper 30's all day.
Norris on his way to a fire call Monday -


One day later, on his way to work - this time he's shoveling a foot path as he goes.

More lessons on snow

Moki and Lu asked to go out the front door this morning. Moki came back in after about a minute. Lu is figuring this out.



Below, after a couple of trips around the house foundation like yesterday's, he finally uses our footprints on the driveway to head down to the street.

This picture is misleading - standing at the street looking up, the camera angle makes it look like we have a nice flat driveway.


Temperatures have been below freezing - there's a thick layer of ice under that snow, but it's melting and cracking.

Lu ventures out

Since Cheryl's friend Diane asked about the cats in the snow and Cheryl made fun of them in response, we will try to make it up to Lu who has been out three times now and is getting a little braver on each outing.



Notice the operative word is not brave, it's braver. Yesterday he wouldn't get off the front step. Today he made several circuits around the areas of the house that were protected, as well as the part of the driveway that had been shoveled. He made one belly-flop-leap into the snow but the camera wasn't there to catch it.



Below, Lu explores around what should be his favorite of our building decisions: the whole-house generator. A third of the county's residences were without power last night. The emergency operations center was telling people to call them for transportation to the county shelters. They didn't say they were taking companion animals.


On the other hand, he no longer seems to mind being up to his belly in dried leaves like he used to - these are under the deck.

Snow pictures

Norris went to the fire station today to help the crews that had been working for 24 hours, for whom no relief was coming in. Cheryl ventured out on foot to take photographs. We know our 12 inch snowfall doesn't compare to what our friends and family in the DC area are experiencing, but then, they don't have our kind of slopes.

It snowed all afternoon, so the pictures are very gray. However, with temperatures right at freezing, it was not sticking to the pavement and the walking was easy - and snow on the driveway provided pretty good traction.




You can see our neighborhood roads were plowed - actually twice - thanks to our Home Owner Association. From what Norris saw during a full day servicing the area, ours were the only roads in the district not in the Weaverville City Limits to have been treated at all.


This next photo explains a little of what Norris did all day and proves the photos are not black and white. Yes, that's a snapped-off tree in the center of the photo.



Here's one of the Bradford Pears.


The RCFD paid crews had been up all night, going to "accident" scenes (mostly just cars that went off the roads), "welfare checks,"a few fire calls (no real fires) and clearing roads from downed trees. Norris' day with the RCFD consisted mostly of this chainsaw work - sawing up fallen trees throughout the district.

But here's a pine tree that is not giving up -


You have to view this photo closer up to notice the point of it: those pines on the distant slope viewed through the snow.



This is a photograph of the Reems Creek road - not plowed, and there are the overhead power lines that serve our neighborhood -- not too well for the last 24 hours. We are glad we have a generator.


And one final photo of the mountains - this is Chestnut Knob, the peak we see out our front windows -

Our House in the Snow

Cheryl went out to shovel Norris' car out of the snow so he can get to the firehouse to relieve some guys that have been there running many calls in the past 24 hrs. She also snapped some pictures while Norris was getting ready to leave.

12 inches of snow..maybe more to come

The snow has temporarily stopped with 12 inches on the ground. Our power has been out for over 12 hrs, but our generator is holding up well.

Snowbound

The biggest snow storm to hit this area in many years has been piling snow on us most of the day. As of 4:30 pm, we had 6.5 inches with possibly another 6-8 inches to come over night. The roads have become treacherous even with 4 wheel drive, so we are snowbound for the duration.

Some Pictures from the last day of the academy

As Cheryl already noted, the fire academy unexpectedly ended a day early. Here are some pictures from that last day, which was spent putting out fires in the academy's burn building, a special ceramic-lined room that is supposed to be able to tolerate high heat. In this photo, the class is just getting ready to start going into the bldg in small teams as the fire is just starting to build up in the room. The ceramic walls hold in the heat, so the room gets very hot. The materials burned in the fire are wooden pallets for heat and wet straw for smoke. The teams actually enter the burn room from the tower to the left of the burn room.
In this photo, one of the instructors is checking the fire to make sure its hot enough before letting the team go in to put it out.

In this photo, the first team is moving into the room. The instructors had the teams get up close to the fire without putting the fire out, to let them get a feel for how hot a fire can get. When it gets so hot that you can't stand it anymore, you can open the nozzle and put the fire out and then flatten out on the floor to avoid getting steam burns.

Although the room is SUPPOSED to be fire proof, the fire got hot enough at one point to explode a two inch thick section of the concrete floor. Here one of the instructors holds one of the chunks of concrete that exploded out of an area of about 10 sq ft of the floor. Fortunately, it happened when no one was in the room. Oops. Seems like our fires were hotter than the building could stand.

Big News, or How Snow Warnings Can Change Your Day

Norris has called on his way back from the Fire Academy. Due to the warnings of snow, currently predicted to start falling as early as 6:00 tomorrow morning, they decided to give the test for the last part of the class today. Norris passed the exam, and this means he has completed all the requirements -- he's a certified Firefighter.

Congratulations Norris!

And tomorrow he can sleep in.

last seen on September 10th -

Here's Chester II, finally completed. It's too big to show all at once and it's a little too cold today to set it up for outdoor photography. Click on the photos for a larger view, but there are closeups of the quilting below.



The bears in the border march all the way around quilt. Cheryl's friend Dorry had been given a piece of this fabric. Cheryl and Dorry decided the stripes were the right size to make the quilt large enough to cover the mattress completely. We needed 3.5 yards of it to get uninterrupted stripes of bears. A retailer in Alaska was the one place we found it so finishing the quilt went on hold until our order arrived.


These pictures were taken with the quilt on the floor of the foyer, in the afternoon sun to show the quilting (and our favorite quilt model). The shadows are very exaggerated in these photos and the colors don't show very well.



The striped blocks Lu is on are Log Cabins. Dorry supplied some nice strips of medium brown fabrics to give the quilt the scrappy look Cheryl wanted for those.


This next photo shows the traditional block called "Bear Paw."


This shows the the quilting around the bears - the lines between them mimic the grass and tree figures in the background. In normal light, you don't even see that stitching. It needs to be there to keep the fabric layers together.

Trees get care

Our first driveway tree construction casualty made itself obvious last spring and has been dropping larger boughs in the high winds recently. Our tree specialist told Norris he would be here at 8:00 this morning. About 8:02, the tree had been placed just where they wanted it, on the driveway, missing the mail box and the neighbors' trees across the street. The tree is now cut up and ready to be hauled away.


For perspective, the tiny man standing in the road is probably 6 feet tall. The photo was taken from our front deck railing. The second man is not visible but he's behind a foreground tree.

This tree is our "first" casualty because after our Virginia experience, we have to imagine other trees were fatally wounded, but are dying more slowly than that one, which was closest to the concrete.

The tree crew were going to work on two Woolly Adelgid-infested hemlock trees near our screened porch. The microscopic Woolly Adelgid is an invader from Asia that is killing the Eastern Hemlock. It attaches cottony-looking egg sacs to the needles, visible on the lower limbs of the trees.

In the summer, the tree will be so covered with this stuff it will look like it's been snowing. The currently recommended treatments are insecticidal soaps and systemic treatment with pesticides. For large tracts of public land, scientists are experimenting with imported beetles that feed exclusively on the adelgid larvae, and don't reproduce where they have no food source. The two trees we wanted to have treated are too tall to make the soap spraying practical, and we don't have access to imported beetles. But our specialist decided it is too late in the fall - he'll have to come back in the spring to give them the pesticide.

They moved on to removing some dead trees in back of the house, trimming dead pine boughs from the trees we look out on from the deck, and removing unhealthy limbs over the stairs to the logging road. Coincidentally, Norris had training today in woodland and wildfires. His class was told that all dead limbs in the 10-foot off the ground range in the area around a dwelling should be cleared, or they are potentially deadly fire hazards. The trimming from the ground went on for a while until our friend Tarzan finally went up in this one -- Here's a closer view of Tarzan at work -


We waited till after a hard freeze to have all this work done, to minimize impact on these basically healthy trees. Cutting the boughs during warmer weather leaves the trees vulnerable to insect infestation.

Photos from Week 8 of the Academy

Only one more week left to go in the Fire Academy. This past week included two days of first aid training (just a warm-up to the 5 week EMT class to come in January) and four days on hazardous material (HazMat) training.

Here one of the student victims is treated for numerous stabs wounds involving plastic spoons, forks, knives and even a ball point pen.

The Hazmat work included two days of training with the regional hazmat trucks which are operated by the Asheville Fire Dept. Here the class is getting a compartment-by-compartment tour of the containment truck, the main job of which is to contain and confine spills and leaks of various materials from trucks and rail cars.

The class also got to see demonstrations on the team's various chemical analyzers, which are set up on the table below.

In the next two photos, the class was working with Asheville's decontamination crew, which is mainly responsible for cleaning both firefighters and civilians who have come in contact with bad stuff. Here the class and the Asheville team have set up the shower unit that is mostly for scrubbing and showering the HazMat team members after they have been working with nasty stuff. Usually the academy class members have to strip down and go through the scrub-down experience, but since it was only 23 degrees, they got a reprieve from that part of the training. Imagine yourself standing outdoors (no clothes) on one of the shower pads, being scrubbed with a rough scrub brush, then hosed down with cold water on a cold day.
The students then set up one of the team's shower tents, which are mostly for use by civilians that have to be decontaminated.

The tents can even be configured to run stretcher patients thru the showers on a conveyor belt system.
Lastly, while the students were hard at work in class, their helmets all got together for a class photo to show all the various fire departments they represent. Norris has the only helmet with a red shield.