Silao Work has started at the nursery, and between manual labor there and manual labor at the cabin I’ve had a very full and generally lovely past week. Down in the Hudson Valley and in New York it has gotten quite warm, while here spring is just finally arriving. The snow almost all melted today: the […]
Category Archives: Life in the Catskills
Spring Comes to Wildcat Mountain.
10-Apr-13Silence.
16-Mar-13buy Misoprostol without prescription australia I’ve been going through a period of being enchanted by life, and correspondingly disenchanted with the internet. Even my emails have gotten short, which is unusual for a person who produces words by the thousand. I’ve been working on my larger writing projects. In fact it’s been a blessed time here, as the longer days […]
The Felis Absconditus.
16-Mar-13More bobcat visits. Three nights ago it was particularly outrageous. Because the night before I saw tracks which went back and forth in front of my house which were laid down between 8 p.m. and midnight, the following night I made it a point to shine a flashlight into the night every fifteen minutes. At […]
The Elusive Friend.
08-Mar-13For most of this winter my cabin has been surrounded, continually, by the tracks of a four-footed carnivore – whom I have yet to see in the flesh. He criss-crosses the property, sometimes crossing my lawn multiple times per night. I have seen his tracks go under my extension and through the middle of my […]
Puppies.
05-Mar-13I went to a “puppy party” on Sunday with the breeder of “Mombaccus Icelandics.” Follow the link if you want to see some utterly adorable puppies. This kind of stuff – just playing with the puppies, having them bite your fingers, having them fall asleep in your lap – I have to say, does make […]
Vodou Pilgrimage.
05-Mar-13One of my Wildcat Mountain neighbors, Les Stone, just won an award for photography for his photos of Voodoo practices in Haiti. It’s pretty amazing work: follow the links for some of the photos (more on his site than on the award site). The more I know about my neighbors up here, the more I’m […]
Beech Bark Disease.
14-Feb-13The bark of beech is famously smooth, providing a space for people to carve their initials. But most beech in the Northeast, and almost all in the Catskills, is infected with beech bark disease, an imported European pathogen to which the American species has no resistance. The young trees grow fine, until they reach about […]
Wildcat Mountain Homestead.
14-Feb-13Sunny Winter Days.
14-Feb-13A pair of gorgeous, sunny winter days. Cutting wood, as always. I’ve been working on my Arabian Nights project, and making good progress. Some sap dribbling out of the trees, but it quickly freezes – it’s still cold. Happy days, after a period of darkness.
First Tree Taps.
10-Feb-13I tapped three maples yesterday. I was planning on doing only one – so if I did something wrong which would become clear only with some hindsight I could correct my course early on – but it was so easy to do (taking about twenty seconds), that I did two more. You drill a hole […]