Where’s Al Gore when you need to blame him for something?

In the past six weeks it’s become a running gag here at the Gulch: We can have two uninterrupted weeks of gorgeous weather, and then Landlady and/or Ian will come up for a weekend and winter will return.

I’m shivering in the Lair, burning wood for the second morning in a row. Yesterday was the first time since…the last together weekend. Today, at least, the temp’s supposed to struggle back into the fifties and maybe the wind will be less than gale force.

By the end of winter I’m long since acclimated. If the outdoor temp’s in the thirties at wake-up time there’s no sense burning valuable fuel to warm things up. Put on another layer and wait for the sun to do it for you; it’s free, and I’m thoroughly sick of cutting wood. But all those endless mornings in the teens or below were nearly forgotten, and happily so. Now I’m remembering them, and not so happy about it.

Still, I’ll take my blessings where I can find them. Cold temps are usually accompanied by flawless blue sky, and the electrical system is loving it. Saturday while the bread was rising I pulled apart the box of insulation that has covered the batteries all winter. Knocked away the remnants of one aborted mouse nest. Pushed the button that starts the equalization charge.

An equalization charge was a new concept to me when I started to learn about solar power. It pours obscene amounts of power into the batteries, and in effect boils the electrolyte. This is supposed to knock the sulfate layer off the plates and get it back into solution. Short-term, this is hard on the batteries but doing it every so often is essential to their long-term life. It’s kind of like heavy exercise. Once the cycle is done, which takes several hours, you pull off the caps and top off the electrolyte with distilled water. Then you really want another cloudless day, because of course pouring water into your electrolyte dilutes it a bit and a day’s full charge brings things back to snuff. The “equalization” part means that at the end of a treatment the electrolyte in all the cells should read pretty much the same specific gravity, and to test that you need a cheap hydrometer available at any auto parts store.

In amongst the bacchanalia we got a little work done. Landlady’s barn is a continual disgrace because everything gets dumped there. If it weren’t for Landlady’s periodic barn-cleanings it would be as packed as a crazy hoarder’s apartment and impossible to navigate. So we backed the Jeep’s trailer into the breezeway and proceeded to sort through piles’o’stuff until we had four piles: Your stuff, my stuff, Landlady’s stuff, the landfill’s stuff. Continue this until the trailer won’t hold another particle. Empty the trailer at the landfill, then cart the other piles somewhere else: Anywhere but the barn.

In the process, I made a nice little score. Banging around the barn for years was this unidentified hammock bag filled with…something. Nobody else wanted it and it narrowly avoided going to the dump, but it just looked like it ought to be useful for something, y’know? So I put it on my pile.

Some sort of cargo parachute, I guess. Don’t know what T wanted it for, but it’s sixteen feet across and I know what I’m going to do with it.

I covered part of the chicken yard with landscape fabric for weather shelter. It works, sort of, but it’s too heavy and snow keeps pulling it down through the strands of baling twine. So I’m going to replace it with this light nylon chute and see if that works better. It’s very stoutly made and should survive the wind. We’ll see if it survives the UV.