There's good news and . . .

The good news is that after an insufferable winter we've had moderating temperatures for the past couple of weeks. The snow pack is intact except for south facing slopes, where some bare ground is starting to show, but not nearly as deep as it once was. The last big storm we had was, as the weatherbots say, largely a rain event here. It snowed in ski country though, so everybody is happy. We got three inches of snow overnight, but that's trivial, and it's already melting.

The bad news is what comes next -- which has already started to show up actually. That would be mud. After a winter to remember, we're headed for an epic mud season. My waterfall is gushing, which is picturesque. But three separate rogue streams have formed that are crossing my driveway as sheets. I'm not going to get stuck in the snow again, but bogging down in the mud would be even worse.

It's impossible to keep it out of the house no matter what discipline one adopts. It sucks at your boots and well, it's just gross. Still, this is the last trial we must cross before the good stuff happens.

Then again there could still be another 2 foot blizzard .. .

Bozo the Attorney

I don't know why they call Connecticut the Nutmeg State. I'm positive we produce no nutmeg. Lately, our best-known product seems to be horrific crime stories.

Shortly after I acquired my foothold here in Windham County, the state executed Michael Ross, who had terrorized the farmland out here many years ago. In about a month, the state will inflict the trial of Joshua Komisarjevsky on us. Last year, his accomplice in the notorious Cheshire home invasion, Steven Hayes, was sentenced to death. If you aren't already familiar with the details of the crime, I suggest you not take the trouble to find out. I won't give any links but you can use your favorite commercial search engine if you must. I will mention a couple of details in this post, so if you really don't want to know, stop reading.

Hayes's attorney played it pretty straight. He didn't have a lot to work with, so he did end up asking a couple of off-the-wall questions at trial, but he had to do something to earn his fee. JK's legal team, however, is weirdly creative.

One of his lawyers violated a gag order by holding a press conference on the courthouse steps during the Hayes trial, to announce that yes, his client had tied an 11 year old girl to her bed, photographed her genitalia with this cell phone, doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. But, he did not anally rape her, in spite of where they found his semen. Well okay then. Sorry I misjudged the man.

Now, in pretrial motions, JK's counsel have tried to get the judge replaced, accusing him of being injudicious, intemperate, and biased. They lost the motion, so now they will face the same judge who they have called all sorts of names. That ought to help. They also petitioned that the normal seating arrangements be changed so that the defense sits near the jury. Apparently they believe the jurors will be reluctant to snuff a guy who they have sat close to. Since their client is a sadistic psychopath, I'm sure the jurors will enjoy looking into his cold dead eyes.

But the oddest behavior of the defense is that they have attacked the sole survivor of the crime, Dr. William Petit. Among various snide comments, they have asked that he be barred from the trial. They lost that one too. I presume they are trying to establish grounds for appeal, and I suppose they feel they have to do something. But all this just compounds the crime.

And that brings us to the actual point of this post. Both defendants offered to plead guilty in exchange for life. And that would be the hardest possible time since they would both -- but especially JK -- have to be isolated, since putting them in the prison population would indeed be a death sentence. The state turned them down because they're determined to give them both the needle. They can't even take a guilty plea with the defendants taking a chance in the sentencing phase, since state law doesn't allow for death following a guilty plea.

That means we need two trials, the second largely a re-run of the first, although presumably there will be more emphasis on the specific actions of JK this time. A trial means an assault on the jurors on court personnel, first of all, many of whom were traumatized and needed counseling following the Hayes trial. It also inflicts pain on the larger community that will be subjected to a filtered, but still sickening narrative of the crime. In order to kill these guys, the entire community is forced to wallow in their depravity and the agony they have inflicted, for months, so as to ritually turn it back against them.

Some people view this as somehow restoring order, or making the community whole in some way. I do not agree. I think it drags us down. We know these men are evil. I prefer to be better.

New neighbors

A big group of deer -- I've counted 8 individuals visible at one time, and I'm sure there are more -- has started hanging out in the woods just outside my front window. I've taken several pictures of the group, but they're too indistinct among the trees to be worth showing you. This one, however, strolled right across my front lawn. The snow has crusted over, which is why she's floating on top -- for the most part, their travel is very labored in our deep snow pack.

In fact I'm looking at one right now that has fallen behind the group and is badly bogged down, struggling to get out of what must be a deep drift.

I've never seen them in such a large group before. My hypothesis is that they aggregate under these conditions so they can break the snow for each other -- and indeed they tend to travel single file. They keep rooting around in the snow so they must be finding something to eat but it can't be a lot.

The space below my lawn is a hemlock grove, which I've read that they favor. I guess I'm lucky to own a deer park but I won't feel so lucky come planting season. We'll have a much harder time getting along then.

Biomass Energy

I had people over recently and they actually did remark, "Wow, it's so warm in here!" I replied, "That's because I have a Vermont Castings Defiant model parlor furnace." The stove has the date 1975 imprinted on an interior piece. Vermont Castings has since been bought by a foreign company (Scandinavian, I think). They still make a model called the Defiant, which looks superficially similar, but is completely different inside.

I don't know why they changed it -- this one works just fine. It is indeed defiant, of the cold. It heats my whole house, although tonight we will meet the biggest challenge yet, that serious arctic air and temperatures well below 0 Fahrenheit. I can't be here during the day tomorrow either, so I'll also see how well the house can hold on to heat while the fire is banked.

Most people out here burn wood because, well, why not, there's plenty of it. But wood heat is no answer to our bigger problems as a society. Where there are a lot of wood stoves in a concentrated area, the pollution is unacceptable. (They had big problems in Aspen, but they deserve it.) It obviously won't work for the vast majority of people, who live in cities. And it was the demand for fuel, not timber, that left New England deforested 100 years ago. For a sustainable yield, you need more than 10 acres per household, and that doesn't work for very many folks.

Also, it's a lot of work, which not everyone has the time or physical capacity to perform. Somebody has to be around much of the day.

It's a rewarding hobby for me, saves on what would otherwise be one or another form of fossil fuel and a gym membership, and let's me make use of dead fall and dying trees that would otherwise go to waste. But we need to find other ways to save the world.

&^%$#Winter Wonderland!

If you're a weather channel junkie, you already know that last Wednesday Connecticut experienced its deepest snowfall in recorded history. (At least that's what the guy on teevee said, I'm not sure I believe it.) I was right in the sweet spot, with more than 30 inches. I know that wouldn't impress folks in Montana or Buffalo, but that just means that anybody who lives in those places is nuts.

I thought I was being real clever by getting a snowplow for my tractor, but no. It turns out that my little tractor can't handle two and a half feet of ice crystals. After getting stuck 19 times, I broke down and called my neighbor who has a big old International Harvester truck. He got stuck. We managed to dig him out, then he got stuck again and we wound up calling a third neighbor and pulling him out with a bobcat. By this morning, my driveway was again barely passable because of blowing snow and another inch we got overnight, so I spent an hour on the tractor cleaning up. (Yeah, I have a long driveway, about 3/8ths of a mile.)

Until today, there were basically no tracks in the snow. When there's deep snow, I understand, the deer hang out in evergreen groves where most of it doesn't hit the ground. The rest of the creatures have gone to their dens, it seems. It's been absolutely silent. Not even any birds, as a matter of fact.

Maybe it's beautiful but -- I have to wade through snow above my knees to get into my barn or anywhere I might want to go that isn't on a road. That means there's a lot I just can't do. What I have done is spend half my time moving mountains of snow around.

I'll be better adapated by next winter. I'll have a woodshed (right now I have to excavate for firewood), I'll build a plowable turnaround at the top of the driveway, I'll have a more powerful snow removal option including maybe a snowthrower, I'll know enough to get a jump on deep snowfalls by plowing wide after there's a foot or snow on the ground, maybe I'll get cross country skis. But no matter what, this will be a pain in the ass.

The woods in winter

This photo doesn't really tell the tale because you have nothing to give you size and perspective. These are actually pretty big trees, but you wouldn't know it. Anyway this is a hemlock grove near my house, and you see a beech tree in the center and the trunk of a tall oak to its right. It helps a lot to view the photo full size. And yes, that's a mylar balloon snagged in the beech tree. Civilization will track you down wherever you go . . .

It snowed overnight. When I stepped out in the morning, this critter, and maybe some of its friends, had left tracks all over the place. Note that it drags its tail through the snow. Anybody have an idea what it is? The prints are maybe 2 1/2" or 3" long.

Trees

I felled two big oaks today. Both were about 30 inches in diameter, bigger than my saw bar, which you aren't really supposed to do but just between us . . . They went down right where I told them to, and mighty impressively too with considerable collateral damage. I didn't really want to do it, but I need to get the woods a little farther back from my house and they were problem number 1.

They were both just behind an old stone wall that runs along the edge of the area we cleared for the house. I had not noticed until today that the remnants of a barbed wire fence were nailed to one of them. I have already figured out that somebody used this land for pasture up until maybe 60 years ago, and that confirms it. You can tell the forest beyond the stone wall is older growth. I doubt it's original growth -- they say there's none really left in Connecticut -- but I don't know how you would tell. It's deep, dark oak forest with hemlock groves, dominated by monstrous trees, with mossy rocks and carcasses of a yet earlier generation of trees underfoot. I can often hear what sound like large creatures moving about in it that I cannot see.

By the way the woods you see in the banner are the younger growth. I'll take a picture of the old growth tomorrow maybe (there will be snow on the ground) so you can see the difference.