Oregon City, Oregon - Week 42 - October  12- October 18, 2020

Once again it seems like we only do activities associated with wood - either cutting, stacking, burning, or clearing.

And, yes we did finish stacking all of our wood.....and found some lovely mushrooms in amongst the logs we needed to cut/split/stack.

Burn season in Clackamas County started up again!!!!!!!!!!!!!  My goal for the week was to finish up taking all the filbert trees out of Sector 2....and some additional wood debris as a result of the big windstoms.

This dead stump had the audacity to lose its upper parts and ruined my clean ground. 

Here you can see that my "limb dropping" wasn't very accurate, and I got the ATV instead.

But at the end of the day at the end of the week all (can there ever be a totality in "all"...don't think so) I had all the debris up to the burn pile. 

Also.....I found this big metal thing in the middle of West Creek.  When I first stumbled upon it it was covered with ivy and when I pounded on it, there was clanging.  I thought it was an upside down water tub.  Here it is without ivy.

First I had to dig around it, which was hard because I'm standing in the middle of an oozing spring and as I shoveled, water seeped into my footsteps.  I got a chain hook in the middle where there was a hole and with the ATV, tipped it over.

Here's the "left behind" in the creek.

With my trusty chain, winch, and ATV, I pulled the antique (maybe washing machine tub) out of the stream bed and up.  It was the hardest thing (in the woods) I've done so far.

School is going well.  The fourth graders learned about heat transfer, and we had a lab where we documented rising and lowering temperatures in cups of cold or hot water which were put into pans of room temperature water.  And - here are our data to prove it!

Ruby learned about time and calendars and days of the week and so on---

One of our activities was to talk about birthdays and how old one is.  So, Ruby got her own Mug Cake with five candles.

Holland, in an outdoor class on animal husbandry, learned how to feed a chicken.

Dad learned he needs to be more careful when he takes off his hearing aids.......and not leave the tiny plastic cushions in his ear canal.....they don't come out with a q-tip.  He needed professional help.

We celebrated Whitney's birthday with a gnocchi soup (made by Warren) and a delicious birthday cake.....made by "you know who'.

Next week there will be more reports of brush burning, as I have the goal to finish Sector 1