November 29, 2009  

    Lynn and I went on a tour of gardens with water features on September 26 in Francestown (next town east).  Eight residents opened their gardens to show how they incorporated ponds, streams, waterfalls, and fountains.  The most useful thing we learned  was that you don't have to edge the pond with stones to hide the liner.  Instead you can cover the liner with grass right down into the water, which looks very natural (see picture from tour).  I'll do that with our pond in the spring, using moss instead of grass.
    Lynn has been painting the exterior window frames yellow.  It blends with the brown house much better than the previous white or brown (which disappears).
    This fall I taught the home-schoolers group three math lessons on counting.  The idea was to present counting problems that have no standard approach; the student has to play around and find patterns. 
    The fall Barnstormers (men's chorus) weekend was October 2-4.  I rode with John Stafford and his wife Nancy down to York, Pennsylvania for the rehearsals and performance.  We sang the same songs as for the summer weekend, and we practiced two songs that we will sing in the spring.  The performance was in a church where the members made the stained windows themselves (pictures 1 and 2).  I went with John and Nancy to the Cracker Barrel Restaurant for dinner one evening.
    I've been cutting up  cord wood from trees the ice storm brought down last December.  Here's a sequence of pictures showing the steps in getting wood from the other side of the brook: (step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4).
    The guest house now has a sheet-rock ceiling painted pine color.  There's ten inches of insulation above the ceiling.  I also installed a propane heater that runs off a 20-pound tank located outside.  Here are the stages of progress.
    Sarah and Steve arrived with the kids on October 9th and stayed overnight in the guest house.  Matt and Crystal arrived the next day with their kids, and Addy and River had a good time playing together. 
     The first snowfall of the season was October 15—about a half-inch that melted after 24 hours.
     The church took down a tree, and I bought the cord wood, not knowing what kind of tree it was.  It turned out to be elm, which is impossible to split.  I hired a professional to do it with his hydraulic splitter, and it took him an agonizing two hours.  You can see the mess resulting from splitting elm.
    Every couple of years our beavers get bored and build a second dam upstream from the main dam.  A raging river removed it last time.  They've just rebuilt it.  Because it's  is closer to the house than the main dam, we can hear it make quite a noise after a heavy rain.  On the other side of the brook is the "beaver's workshop" where they fell trees and build lodges.  I'm not too happy when they kill trees on our side of the brook; here they've girdled a large tree.  Oh well, firewood for next season!
    On November 13th River was three years old, and we celebrated her birthday the next day.  Here's a page of pictures.
    This year Lynn and I celebrated Thanksgiving with just the two of us.  It was a nice, quiet day to be thankful and enjoy a beautiful traditional meal—turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, broccoli, and pumpkin pie.
    The Souhegan Valley Chorus work crew was back together at Tim Hageman's barn November 28th.  We made a grove of birch, a sleigh, and a snowman for the Christmas show coming up.  Here's a page of pictures.
    We pass a pond on the way to Milford that some fire department occasionally uses to practice using its hoses.  This time the sun was just right to backlight the plume.
    Every other Thursday I go to lunch with Peter Dreyer and Bill Ford (our Stammtisch).  Recently I got a menu with a misprint offering a cup of  "Soul & Salad."
    We've discovered Macoun apples—sweet, tart, and crisp.  It's an unusually dark red.
    Ever since we moved to Greenfield we've been getting spikes growing out of our ice cubes.  I finally found an explanation on-line:  As an ice film forms over the top of the ice cube it leaves a small hole just before it's complete.  The cooling water beneath expands slightly, pushing water up through the hole, and it freezes around the edge of the hole.  As more water pushes up it forms an ice tube with water in the center.  When the freezing is complete, it forms the ice spike. For this all to happen, the water has to be pretty pure, and the temperature of the freezer has to be just right.  Evidently we have the right conditions here (we use spring water).

Features: Picture of the month.   Cartoon of the month.

Quotes: "lexicographer. n.   a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words." — Samuel Johnson

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