Ice-out 2010

It's been a while since I updated this blog. We escaped to warmer places this winter, and now are back at the island, isolated with an early ice-out. For company we have the newly returned (and loud) Canada geese, a pair of flighty wood ducks, and the usual suspects at the birdfeeders: chickadees, nuthatches, four kinds of woodpeckers, juncos, and goldfinches. The yellow color is returning to the goldfinches, a little at a time.

Ice-out is about three weeks early this year. We arrived back from New Zealand on March 11th, expecting to have two solid weeks for the annual hauling of heavy items over the strong, late-winter ice. But on our return we discovered that the snow had already melted and the temperatures were warming up earlier than usual. We had to hustle to get everything done. Fortunately, Gary's cousin from Wisconsin came just in the nick of time to help. He and Gary hauled bags of cement, a couple pallets of paving bricks, a couple pallets of fire brick, a full propane tank, and enough lumber over the ice to get Gary going on his 2010 projects. The John Deere tractor made the hauling a bit easier, but it also left deep mud ruts on the island roads and a trail of mud over the ice.

A few days after Gary's last drive over the ice via tractor, the ice around the shoreline of the island looked like this. We now have a moat between us and the solid ice that remains in the middle of the lake. For a while we were able to come and go via a plank that Gary balanced on a cinder block in the water, one end on the cinder block, the other on solid ice. We wore tall rubber boots to walk out to the plank without getting our feet wet. But during this past week the edge of the ice has thinned and weakened, making our moat too wide and deep to cross.  

We're happy to be isolated out here. We have plenty to do and plenty to eat, and as long as neither of us gets sick we're fine (knock on wood). We have a freezer and pantry full of food, and although we've already run out of fresh milk, we have a good supply of powdered milk that will get us through until we can get to the grocery store again. It's interesting to find out what you miss most when you can't run out and buy anything you want. For us it's the luxuries: coffee creamer, ice cream, candy (which we both love too much). We never get so hard-up -- at least not yet -- that we have to resort to eating moldy flour or anything like that. It's pretty cushy:  we have unlimited amounts of power from the sun, fresh water from the well, the aforementioned food, even satellite Internet and satellite TV.

With no place to go and no one to visit, it's a great time to get projects done that we'd otherwise put off. In my case, it's spring cleaning and my annual purge of bad purchasing decisions (mostly, I see, from IKEA. Note to self: stop buying junk at IKEA.). I'll have a boatload/carload to bring to Goodwill after ice-out. Gary, meanwhile, is doing maintenance on the cabins and has also started building our new gas-fired kiln. We figure we have about another 10 days of ice to go, and then normal life will resume when we can come and go by boat. We're not in any hurry!