Dadburn it’s cold! 4°, howling wind and swirling snow devils. Occasionally the sun emerges, and then it’s completely blinding, at least for my blue eyes.

The main reason the girls and I went to town yesterday was to buy sunflower seeds for the birds—it just seemed a really bad time to run out. We filled feeders after dark last night, and the bird action this morning has been wild! They’ve already eaten a third of what we put out.

Today looks like a good day to send out an email recruiting this year’s beach-goers. Maybe I’ll put on some Jimmy Buffett, make something with coconut, and look at beach pictures…

I sold a goat this morning—Katie—and got $200 for her. I felt quite satisfied to have gotten my money back out of her, not to mention the many gallons of milk she has given us over the past several years, and then ED reminded me that I only paid $50 for her! So I guess I came out looking pretty good on that one, which is highly unusual in the farming business. She is going to do much better at her new home. The folks that bought her are the kind who really baby their goats—feed them grain, trim hooves weekly (I wish I would do that), keep fabulous quality hay around—and Katie needs that. We’re trying to breed for hardiness and easy keeping qualities, not to mention the ability to produce plentiful milk on minimal grain input, and Katie doesn’t work well under those conditions. We have kept both her daughter and her grandaughter, Carina and Cookie, and they do extremely well here; both are fat and sassy. So now we’re down to eight goats, and they’re awfully nice ones.

We’re having a bit of a blizzard tonight. It rained all day, but they’re calling for four to six inches of snow tonight. The girls and I made a run to Marshall this afternoon to stock up on the important stuff, like movies and sugar-free chocolate syrup. So now we’re set. DH is back in Hendersonville, and is very sorry to be missing the second major snow of the year. What a wimpy winter!

DH last night brought home some gorgeous oyster mushrooms that he found growing on a poplar stump at the front door of a friend’s cabin. We sauteed them and ate them on our steaks last night. Unfortunately, I seem to have had a bad reaction, and ended up writhing in agony all night, so now I’m way out of it. Strange, though—-we all ate the mushrooms, and only I got sick. DH thinks he may have had a little tummy ache, but that could just be the “Oh God, not the stomach crud!” reaction. The girls—fine. So maybe it wasn’t that—who knows? I’ve eaten an awful lot of oyster mushrooms, with nary a reaction. The good news is—I lost two pounds! (I know—that’s sick.)

DH is splitting enormous oak logs and bringing in big, beautiful wedges of wood. We’re due to have some funky weather this weekend, so we’ll be glad for the wood. Actually, I broke down and called a guy and bought a load of wood—$50 for a pickup load of locust and cherry. It should be delivered tomorrow, and we’ll see how it looks, and maybe get another load. DH can’t cut it, haul it, split it, and stack it for that price!

It was a balmy 26° this morning, and my fires do not want to get going. It’s so much easier to build a good hot fire when the weather is cold and dry. I wonder why that is?

DH is coming home tonight—yay! I miss him, but the girls really, really miss him. They’re funny—-they don’t like things to get out of their normal pattern. DH and I have been talking about having J* come up for a night or two while we all go stay at the inn. I mean, luxury accomodations—but the girls keep talking about it as if it’s a punishment. “Mom, how long before we have to go stay at Grandaddy’s inn?” Sheesh!

A funny thing happened last night. I’ve been doing this low carb diet in a totally half-assed manner—you know, just don’t eat sugar or grains, but no counting carbs, or anything so drastic as that. Well, Tuesday was my weigh-in, and I hadn’t lost a pound, to my enormous dismay, so I decided over the last couple of days that it was time to get serious. I started an account at FitDay—which I love—and found out that on a good day I was eating about twice as many grams of carbohydrates as I should be, and too few calories, strangely enough. I decided that , at least for the first two weeks of induction, I need to be eating a lot more meat. Which was stressing me out a little, because it’s a long drive to a grocery store with a poor selection of overpriced meat. So there I am last night, stressing out over how I’m going to make this work, when we see headlights coming up the driveway. I go out to see who it is, and it’s a couple of guys in a little refrigerated truck, and they ask if I would like to buy some meat! Weird, or what? I bought a case of steaks for a lot less money than they would’ve been at Ingles! So hopefully that’ll get us through til we butcher Bronwen.

The worst thing about not having lost any weight is that I’ve been exercising like crazy—walking every day and lifting wights a few days a week. Frustrating. My goal is to lose 40 lbs by my 40th birthday, which is June 18th.

OK—gotta go clean the house so DH doesn’t think we’re total slobs when he’s gone.

It’s 14° and snowing stingy, bitter little snowflakes. The house is quite cozy, however, thanks to DH’s firewood. The heatstove is full of locust, and the cookstove is burning locust and cherry. Last night before bed I put a mammoth locust log in the heatstove, and when I got up this morning there was a fantastic bed of glowing red coals; all I had to do to get the fire going was throw in a few logs and it took right off! That’s the best; I don’t love the whole build-the-fire-from-the-ground-up routine.

It’s so nice to have the stoves going, besides the obvious heat. It’s almost like having a creature in the room with me: they need my attention off and on throughout the day, and they make friendly little noises—pops and crackles, and a whining sound as the water boils out of the ends of the logs. It’s a nice way to heat, too—I like the unevenness of the heat—there are warmer and cooler spots through the house, and we all pause periodically during the day to lean against the stove and really warm ourselves all the way through. Sometimes the girls sit on the woodstove when they get up in the morning or after a bath, but that’s not going to happen today—the stove’s too hot.

We don’t heat the back of the house at night–none of us mind it cold in the bedrooms, and the living room is so much warmer the next morning. Though last night with DH gone I really appreciated the river rocks we keep in the wood cookstove oven. ED gave me two in my bed—one for my feet and one against the small of my back. She and Bernard had two in their bed, also; I heard one of them hit the floor during the night (one of the rocks, not one of the girls). The girls are in a pile under the down comforter like puppies this morning.

It’s actually kind of nice to see the return of winter weather.

A week ago the temperature got up to 70°—-the temperature right now is 4°. My body does not in any way feel prepared to deal with this kind of cold!

DH is headed to my dad’s inn to work; he’s going to work all day today, spend the night tonight, and then work all day again tomorrow. The girls and I are going to have a little slumber party—it’s funny how much it changes things to have one person gone for the night. I think we’re going to borrow Charlie’s Angels 2 from D*’s—-we did the same thing with the first Charlie’s Angels, and really enjoyed it, but DH hasn’t been remotely interested in either of them.

Ahhh—the sun–finally!–is coming in the living room windows; the room instantly heats up.

My baby girl turned 9 today! Good grief, how did that happen? Seems like DH was just now shoveling the snow off the driveway so the midwife could get in! (We were snowed in until the day I went into labor.)

Bernard is a fabulous gal—I am truly honored to know her. We were going to go ice skating today for her birthday, but there seems to be no public skate on Sundays (I found out yesterday), and so we went roller skating instead. What a blast! I haven’t done that since about 8th grade, and boy, did it show! This was the first time for ED and Bernard, and when ED got her skates on and started moving around, she came to me and said, “This seems so dangerous!” Which was my sentiment exactly at that particular moment. But after a while we were doing ok, you know, just holding our own. DH and M* were both pretty good, and J* and E* were great, of course. I think we need more practice, so we are going to try to go more often. Plus there aren’t many things that, for better or worse, transport me back to 8th grade in quite that way

So, Bernard, my sweetie—this is your last year in single digits. Not sure how I feel about that…

Does anyone else find this as scary and absurd as I do? I’m sorry, but there is something wrong with this picture:

So why don’t farmers just buy non-GE seed? North Dakota farmer Rodney

Nelson says there is actually very little conventional seed left to buy

anymore because seed dealers don’t make nearly as much money from them.

Monsanto charges technology use fees ranging from 6.25 dollars per bag for

soy to an average of 230 dollars for cotton — more than three times the

cost of conventional cotton seed. The company argues these fees are

necessary to recoup its research investment.

The other problem is that some non-GE seed is now contaminated by

Monsanto’s patented genes, Nelson said. Monsanto sued Nelson and his family in

1999 for patent infringement, charging they had saved Roundup Ready soybean

seeds on their 8,000-acre farm. Two years of legal hell ensued, Nelson said. The

matter ended with an out of court settlement that he is forbidden to talk about.

“We won, but we feel forever tainted.”

The report contains a number of similar individual stories that often end

in bankruptcy for the farmer. Even if a farmer decides to stop using Monsanto

seeds, the GE plants self-seed and some will spring up of their own accord the

following year. These unwanted “volunteers” can keep popping up for five or more

years after a farmer stops using the patented seeds. Under U.S. patent law, a

farmer commits an offense even if they unknowingly plant Monsanto’s seeds

without purchasing them from the company. Other countries have similar laws. In

the well-known case of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, pollen from a

neighbour’s GE canola fields and seeds that blew off trucks on their way to a

processing plant ended up contaminating his fields with Monsanto’s

genetics. The trial court ruled that no matter how the GE plants got there,

Schmeiser had infringed on Monsanto’s legal rights when he harvested and

sold his crop. After a six-year legal battle, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled

that while Schmeiser had technically infringed on Monsanto’s patent, he did

not have to pay any penalties. Schmeiser, who spoke at last year’s World

Social Forum in India, says it cost 400,000 dollars to defend himself.

“Monsanto should held legally responsible for the contamination,” he said.

Another North Dakota farmer, Tom Wiley, explains the situation this way:

“Farmers are being sued for having GMOs on their property that they did not

buy, do not want, will not use and cannot sell.”

Monsanto ”Seed Police” Scrutinise Farmers

Here are some seed companies that do not sell GE seeds—please support them!

Bountiful Gardens

Johnny’s Selected Seeds

Seeds of Change

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange