Hi friends,
It's been a few weeks since I've been on to update this blog. In that time, I have put in any spare minute possible working on my Off-Grid Book. While "Unplugged" is a memoir about my experiences, I've been getting a lot of feedback about how there wasn't any "how-to" information in it. I took the hint. Bob and I have been working on "Solar Blessed--Building the Off-Grid Home," for the past few months. Since that time, we have put in anywhere from eight hours to sixteen hours a day, with the majority of our time near the sixteen-hour range. Of course, this isn't without some pain. My upper back and arms, after spending hours bent over a computer, are strained to the point that for the past two weeks I have been in pain and had a constant headache. It's so bad, I actually had to visit my massage therapist friend. Might I say, massage therapy is "AWESOME." I'm not over all my pain, but for one day, I felt like a normal person again.
Despite all the work on the new book, I was still able to take a few minutes of time and put in some lettuce seed and collect the maple sap from the trees we tapped last month. We strained out the bugs, leaves and twigs and set it on the wood stove to boil down. After burning the first batch, we resolved to make sure the second batch came out. When it got down to a certain point, we set the kitchen timer in fifteen-minute intervals. After three days, we had the sap boiled down enough to call it syrup. Wow!!! It was great!!! Nothing at the store compares. Next year, we will start earlier collecting the sap. Since it boils down from a 50-to-1 ratio, I would like a little more than just a baby food jar.
Just a side note, the deer actually pulled one of my buckets off the tree and chewed on it.
Take care,
Hillary
