boy howdy its cold

woke up to 7* outside, a toasty 49* in the cabin and 39* degrees in the bedroom. But thats ok, because I am living in the living room right now, all close to the stove. Makes it easier to chunk a stick of hickory on ever so often during the night.
They are calling for snow!!! Yippeee! it will make critter tracking so much the better. Now if I didn't have orders to fill, I could spend the whole day tracking.
This evening, just in case it does snow, I brought in extra firewood so it can stay dry, and drug home a sassafrass limb and a poplar limb, sawed and split them for "fire briskers" it takes that in this weather, just your regular old perk along fire don't get it.

so here is Rose, a mule all jacked up and happy because of the snow!(this is a video clip, which you have to click on, it opens picassa, then you have to click on it to get it to play)

blogphotos

survival assitance criteria?

and wet and the rescue pup is in the laundry room. We plumped her up, but now parvo has her back down again.
I once put a rooster in intensive care in the laundry room. He had part of his skin removed by a dog in the village. Why, did I do that then, when right now there are 5 roosters out in the hen yard that need putting in the freezer?

Because that rooster was special, he was courteous, interesting and interested. This puppy that was dumped in our hollow was also one of many. When you live on a cut-through road, you see alot of mangey, malnourished dumped out pups of undefined breeding….but this one- she has those same traits….courteous, loyal and interested in learning new things. Are those legitimate criteria for survival assitance efforts?

chicken snipers

and cold this morning. The first awe of the day was early, after feeding the chickens. I wandered down the drive and startled up two red tail hawks, who were standing on the road just over the edge of the sun line made by the eastern hill.
Perhaps they were a pair, because though it seems early, hawks are well on their way to creating next years birds by february, or maybe they were just snipers, laying low, watching for the first pullets that fly over and out of the chicken pen each morning.

about this blog

Meanwhile, back in the holler,

....there are critters to photograph, trees to admire, tiny remnants of a once wild hilly corner of tennessee to glimpse from under the choking honeysuckle and other smotherations of this century.

.... There are snatches of time to consider the past, as it reflects up from old mule shoes and remains of log structures. From this faded snapshot of the manmade and natural worlds before fossil fuel, we can ponder and piddle with the remains, and look for something useful, magic or healing. We can load it into a machine, in words and text and throw it out to other machines as an offering to our digital day....hopefully, it might inspire us to go back outside.