Two Tonka's bite the dust and a hot tub rises!!!

(pk)

We returned from a sad trip to Minnesota on September 14th. Our dear friend Neil Larson passed away after a seven week battle with cancer. Jon and I attended his 'Celebration of Life'. We spent a week in the Twin Cities - spent time with dear friends, visited the Science Museum of Minnesota, the MN Landscape Arboretum, and the 'Water Park of America'. Our friend Annie had running water and electricity - the kids were thrilled! They often took baths twice a day. I felt as if I was using too much water and skipped the shower some days ;-) The Twin Cities were home for Jon the first 35 years of his life and home for me in the seven years prior to our CA move in 1997. This trip the whole place felt really busy - we both missed our hard working though slower pace of life back in Homer.

We were delighted to come home and find that Autumn is fast approaching - the drive from Anchorage was filled with amazing vistas that had changed dramatically in just a week!! Yellow was everywhere, the Fireweed leaves were deep red, the hillsides were FULL of color. It was a wonderful drive.

Before we left, we dug holes for the four support posts for the joists of the Snorkel Hot Tub that we hoped to put together soon!. On our first day back Jon cut the support posts off level and attached the cross beam and laid out the chime joists.

In the photo you can see some of our chickens. This morning Jon and I decided to put together the tub - the instruction manual said that two people working together should take about four hours.

The morning started with Isabel finding her present from the tooth fairy. Her first baby tooth was pulled last night by her dad!! 7:15 am Isabel started to talk to Xander about her tooth fairy gift, an Armadillo puppet and $2.00. Jon and I were quickly called in to witness. The tooth fairy was unable to find the toy baby ferret the five year old is really after :-( We all got up and headed downstairs, hit the toilet, and headed outside for a 'camp shower' with the water warmed from our kettles on the woodstove. We use a dishpan to mix the warm/hot rainwater with cold rainwater from the rain barrels outside, dip into the dishpan with small plastic dishes to get our bodies wet, soap up, and then rinse. The kids still think this is awfully cold and, as usual, they hurried inside. Jon and I take if a bit more leisurely and with warm water Jon will even shave. To wash the entire family takes less than one gallon of water!! I actually did my shower one morning with less than 3 cups of water!! Once were cleaned, dried, and dressed it was time for dishes (I did those) while Jon made popovers and organic pork sausage for breakfast! Yummy! I headed out to dump the toilet buckets. We had lots of compost from the kitchen because our old fridge quit working while we were gone and things in the fridge has spoiled.

I hiked the buckets full of urine, feces, and kitchen compost up the hill past the chicken coop to the compost bins we built a few weeks ago. I created a nest in top using the shovel (this shovel is ONLY used for this purpose) and dumped in the two buckets. I have toilet bowl brush and container of Dr. Bronners Lavender soap up by the compost bins and I use this to wash and then rinse the buckets. Once they are cleaned and I have dumped the water used ON THE COMPOST PILE I covered up my nest with some straw to stop any bad smells and get a good Carbon to Nitrogen ratio for my composting. My next stop was the sawdust pile to fill the buckets with sawdust and bring them back into the bathroom in the house. Here are the compost bins when we built them (upper left) and the toilet with the sawdust bucket next to it (below). Once these basic chores were done I also washed the old refridgerator so it was ready for storage in the cabin. We picked up the new one, thankfully we had already planned on purchasing a larger propane fridge and had ordered it four weeks ago, in Anchorage on the day we left for MN. A bit lower down is a photo of both fridges - tomorrow we hope to get the Danby (old one) out of the way.

It was shortly before 11:00 when Jon and I loaded the first trip of hot tub supplies from the shed into the Suburban (our van was 'totaled' and Jon's uncle Kutch gave us his old Suburban) and drove it down the hill. We started by putting the two pieces of the bottom together using three dowels and the rubber mallet then turning it over and nailing down two short pieces of wood to the bottom to help hold it while we put up the staves. The staves are the sides of the cedar tub - we managed to get them in place using the recommended masking tape around the top to all the staves to help hold them in place. Now we put together the three copper bands that circle the tub. Now began the hard part circling the tub with a rubber mallet pounding on the copper band on each stave while one of us tightened the bands using the wrench. Both jobs were hard work! We kept the staves nicely in line at the top. This took a long time we worked around each band up to six times. We had unexpected human visitors about this time. They were out for a family moose hunt. Mike and Vicki live about 1.5 miles away and they have two small children as well. One was asleep on his mom's back in a backpack. When they left it was time for lunch. Jon made a quick salmon salad served with cheese and bread I had baked yesterday. Back out for round two - installed the stove, fence to guard the stove, benches, aluminum top and wooden cover. During this process the kids started to play 'baby'. A game they invented that involves pushing each other down the hill in the toy Tonka trucks and often with disastrous results. Xander ended up under the Suburban with just his head sticking out and held in place by part of the bumper. I had to call Jon out of the tub to help me extricate him. He was fine - just scared and a little scraped up. This came after my cautioning about playing 'baby' with the Suburban parked down by the back door. After this mess we put on a video and finished the tub while they watched!!!

After the tub was altogether we vacuumed the inside and laid towels all around the inside and poured in buckets of rain water. We do not have enough water on hand to fill the tub right now, and the first filling in this type of tub often seeps right out. We had leaking on the seams that seemed slow and reasonable to me (and tipical according to the instruction book). We did a great job tightening the bands!! We got the towel suggestion from our visitors (they also have a snorkel stove hot tub) - they keep the staves a bit wetter to allow them to swell without having to fill up the entire tub. We used 1.5 of our rain barrels tonight. We have a total of six. After today two are full and two are half full. The other two need to be cleaned and ready for the rain that we hope is coming!! The rain will really help the tub to swell. Our other option is putting the rain barrels into the 'green beast' and driving to Red Canyon on our road to use our Honda pump to fill them up - making trips until we get the 400 gallons we need to fill the tub. Wowza!!

Anyway, we started clean up around 7:30 pm, loading the Suburban with items to run back up to the shed. The kids had long since finished the movie and were feeling pretty strung out. Isabel wanted to play Princess Mononoke with a screw driver as her sword. I said "no such luck this is too sharp for you to use as a toy" and she was very unhappy. Xander had found his wooden toy sword and put his 'Ice Age 2' underwear on top of his head as a helmet and was running around the yard. It was time to go in to cook dinner and get them in bed. On my way up to the shed I noticed the Suburban was having a hard time getting up the hill and then I heard the crunching sound. It was pretty much a done deal so I kept on going to get clear of the wreckage of the two Tonka toys - one had a real metal dump bed, we had just purchased it at Fred Meyers for $32.00. BUMMER. The kids were now totally flipped out. Jon and I were tired and worn out. It had been a long day. As I have been blogging whileJon made Mac & Cheese for the kids, fed them, brushed their teeth, and put them to bed. Now I am heading out with the headlamp to make sure the chickens are all roosting and the lock them safely in the coop for the night. I will put up some photos of the completed tub in the morning!! Turns out Jon also put the chicken away for the night! More later!!