What you see is part of the reason we did not go out to the woods last weekend, despite the nearly unbearable feelings of absence afflicting me.

Someone doesn’t mind the snow though. He even managed to find a stick.

Missouri calendar:

• Mink begin breeding.

#2 Son thinks I’m being premature by labeling Flike as the “best dog ever.” He says that Flike is still young and may . . . whatever. Also, he points out that we’ve had a string of fine dogs, and maybe Flike won’t measure up. I don’t see how this is possible, but I suppose I’ll have to stop saying that Flike is the best dog ever. At least for now.

If you haven’t already noticed for yourselves, Hal over at Ranch Ramblins is back to posting after a year and a half hiatus. Head over there and say howdy.

The latest edition of the Festival of the Trees is now up at treeblog. Once again Ash has delivered a diverse and interesting collection of posts from around the world related to the love and nurturing of trees and forests.

And remember, when the time comes that you want to host the Festival, just let me or Dave or Jade know. We’ll give you all the help you need.

So far this year is not shaping up well in terms of visits to our woods. We’ve only been out once! (Of course, this does work well with my scheme of using the wall calendar to prove that we don’t visit often enuf.) Between weather and the conspiring nature of the rest of our life, we just haven’t had the opportunity or a handy weekend. Maybe it’s getting to be time to take off in the middle of the week.

They tell me there is a sporting event of some significance today.

Missouri calendar:

• Male cardinals begin territorial singing.
• Canada geese search for mates.

This is a random photo taken in a random yard in a random town along a random highway somewhere between suburbia and Roundrock. (Or maybe it isn’t.)

Believe it or not, this is the second lawn dragon I have seen in my rambles about west central Missouri. I neglected to take a photo of the first, and now, though I’ve made several attempts, I haven’t been able to find it again.

Anyway, someday I’d like to have a statue like this rising from the lake in my woods. I don’t suppose it would be a dragon but rather a sea serpent. And I’m not sure I like the looks of the one in the photo so much. It relies too much on paint to give it definition. I think I’d like something with a more open frame, perhaps something welded. That would look nice. Maybe with red glass eyes that would catch the light. Perhaps I should take up welding. (I’ll bet Good Neighbor Brian has all of the tools.) I’ve seen some sculptures made from car bumpers, like this horse, but that seems a bit massive for my taste.

And placement would be problematic. Not only would such a heavy sculpture need a solid base on which to rest, but I’d have to get it out in the lake somehow. I foresee a crane in my future. And then there’s the problem with the fluctuating level of the lake. I could set the undulating statue parts to look best when the lake is at full pool, but for most of the year, it would have its bases exposed. Or I could set it lower to correct for this, but then when the lake is full, much of it would be underwater.

Dragons and sea serpents are not easy beasts to manage.

Missouri calendar:

• American goldfinches begin molting into bright breeding plumage.

A cooking casualty. A fire fatality. A crucible crisis. A shame of the flame. A bad turn of the burn.

We’ve been using the fire ring near the cabin a bit more lately. I’m fretful about fires in forests, so I’m always reluctant to light one myself, even well contained in the ring, but visitors and weather have encouraged me lately, and we’ve had more in the last two months than we probably had in the last two years.

When my friend Todd built an addition on the back of his garage, he had a lot of material he wanted to get rid of. (Some of it is now at the bottom of my lake.) Among Todd’s castoffs were many of these manufactured paving blocks. You can see how we assembled them into our fire ring below.

You’ll also see if you look closely that we’ve put some of the blocks into the fire (rather, we’ve built the fire on and around bricks within the ring). There’s a reason for this. If you look at about 1 o’clock on the ring, you can see a stack of the blocks higher than the rest of the ring. and beside that is our grill. The grill rests on that stack, stretches over the flames (of a smaller fire), and rests its other end on a corresponding stack of blocks near the center of the ring.

When we have these larger fires, we either leave the inner blocks where they are, or we use the shovel to push them aside. And so they get heated and mishandled, and sometimes they break.

Most of the blocks we use in and around the ring are thicker than the broken one you see above. Only the top layer of the ring uses the thinner blocks. None of these thicker blocks has broken yet.

Our intent is to remove the fire ring the next time we go out (we keep saying that, but we never do it) because I’m going to have a load of gravel delivered that will be spread over the area to make it more flat. (One way to ruin an otherwise fine weekend in the woods would be to stumble on the rough Ozark ground and fall into the fire.) So we’ll remove the ring, and when the gravel is all smoothed and lovely, we’ll put it back in place. But not the same place. I plan to move it a foot or two closer to the road and a foot or two farther from the tall trees to the north of it. That way I’ll be able to rest more easily when we have a fire because it will be surrounded by more gravel. I’m always thinking.

Missouri calendar:

• Great horned owls begin nesting this week.

Part of my Roundrock Land Ethic (remember my Roundrock Land Ethic?) is to foster habitat for the kinds of wild things that lived in my part of Missouri before I and humans like me came along. The house you see above is a recent effort to honor my ethic.

Of course a place like my forest, with plenty of standing dead timber, is full of opportunities for cavity nesters, but even so, I’m happy to give them one more potential nest. This nest box serves a couple of other functions as well though.

The box is made of recycled plastic. That gives me some warm fuzzies, though I hope that bluebirds will tolerate this artificial material over natural wood. We should be finding out soon since nesting season will begin in a couple of months, and a successful mating pair can bring off up to three broods in a year if circumstances are good.

I chose carefully where I wanted to place this house; unfortunately, I didn’t get to put it where I had intended. My southern property line is a half mile long. I have two neighbors to the south. One of them, along the half of that line that is fenced, has been doing a lot of work clearing the avenue that runs along the fence. He hardly ever drives along, though I did see a pickup go hurrying over the rough ground once, and there have been a few times when we’ve seen fresh tire tracks in the tall grass. Nonetheless, it’s his open access area, and he can do with it whatever he wants. Also nonetheless, I want to let him know I am paying attention, and one of the ways to do that is to show that I am doing work along there as well. I have cut conspicuous branches from trees on my side of the fence that hang over on his side of the fence. The fresh saw marks on the trees are visible to all who pass, and since there are plenty of these kinds of branches, I can leave fresh signs of my vigilance every time I pass.

Another idea I had was to hang a new birdhouse on one of the fence posts along the open avenue so anyone passing couldn’t miss it. There are several open spots along the fence that would work perfectly, and with that plan in mind, Libby and I (and Queequeg and Flike) headed out from the Cabin at the End of the Road on our last trip to Roundrock with all of the equipment we needed to set this plan in motion.

Here is the back of the birdhouse. You can see that I added a couple of U-bolts to be the fastener:

When I was at the hardware store buying these, I carried them over to the area (at the absolute opposite end of the big box store) where the fence posts were. I oh-so-sensibly slipped them over a post to ensure I had the right size. They worked just fine. There were only two flaws in my clever plan.

The first was that I failed to take into account the curve of the bolt. Because of its shape, some of its length is kept inside the box. I realized this once I was home, late the evening before we were to make our trip to the woods. To compensate, I drilled the holes in the back of the box at angles, thus allowing some of the curve of the U to be inside the wall rather than all the way inside the box.

The second flaw in my plan was that the posts that hold the fence along half of my southern property line are just slightly wider than the ones now sold at the hardware store. This, of course, we didn’t discover until we were deep in the forest and at the fence. Muscle it as I might, I could not make the bolts fit. Not with a birdhouse still attached.

Thus my plan of putting the house in a place where my busy neighbor to the south can see it was thwarted. (Yes, of course I could have returned to the hardware store after returning to suburbia, or even in the small town near our woods, to get longer bolts, but we were already in the forest and I was determined to hang the house.)

As I said above, only half of my southern property line is fenced. The other rambles over hill and valley through the trackless forest. However, in a past effort to show good faith at where I approximate the line to run, I have slammed a couple dozen posts in the ground, and I knew that a couple of these were in relatively open areas that I understand bluebirds favor for their nesting sites.

And so Libby and I (and Queequeg and Flike) continued our march along the southern line to find one of these slimmer posts. The one we used is fairly close to the Old Man of the Forest, which is a lovely bit of the forest that I don’t mind having another reason to visit more frequently. It’s not as open as I’d like, but my new handsaw and I can work to correct that.

And the best part of this whole adventure is that I could still get myself another birdhouse and longer U bolts and then hang it where I had intended originally.

Missouri calendar:

• Danger — spring fire season begins if there is no snow and lasts until the greening of spring.

Missouri calendar:

• Chickadees begin to sing — the first bird song of the new year.

The winter snows that came at the turn of the year took their toll on the old shelter tarp out at Roundrock. (From what I can gather from news reports, the area was blanketed with thick snow again last week.) When we were last out to the woods (too long ago, alas) we found the tarp mostly on the ground, with a melting slab of ice resting on the back part.

With the new cabin nearby, the tarp had grown superfluous, at least in that part of the forest. With no other immediate plans for it, we decided to take it down and put it away until it might be pressed into service again.

Long-time readers will recall that I’ve had a succession of tarps over the years, all coming to torn and shredded ends. I think I’ve used them up fully before retiring them, and this tarp is about the same. The weight of the snow had caused one of the grommets to rip out. That will make it difficult to hang as a shelter again since the rip is along the ridge line, but there are likely other uses for such a versatile, waterproof chunk of fabric.

We folded the tarp loosely and put it on the floor in the cabin. It was still wet, and I wanted it to dry before we folded it more fully to be put away (though where?). Until we put some actual furniture in the cabin, I guess it’s going to serve as a well-built tool shed (which is a problem since I think it would be quite easy to let the cabin become a tool shed rather than a relaxing retreat).

I’ll probably use the fence posts from the tarp set up in the pine plantation to fortify their defenses against the maurading deer. Reduce, reuse, recycle. It’s the American Way!

Missouri calendar:

• Groundhog Day – Legend says if he sees his shadow we’ll have six more weeks of winter; no shadow means an early spring.

Libby claims that we go out to Roundrock every weekend. This is a scurrilous and baseless accusation, and in response to it, I drove a nail into one of the studs in the Cabin at the End of the Road.

It hurts just a little bit to drive a nail into the wood of our sparkling new cabin. The one you see above is the fourth one I’ve driven. The first was to hang a decoration on the outside of the cabin in the back. The decoration looks nice there, and the pain of driving that nail is mitigated. I’m pretty sure I’ve shown a photo of it, but if not, let me know. The other two were for hanging a broom and dustpan for sweeping out the cabin. These were the first things we purchased on the day we visited the completed cabin. After the initial clean up of the building debris, the inside of the cabin has not gotten very dirty, but I do sweep off the porch at the end of each visit. (Somehow peanut shells accumulate there.)

And so this fourth nail.

Back before the days when I started writing this humble blog, I would write lengthy accounts of our trips to the woods in my paper journal. (I began doing the same here, but that made for some lengthy posts.) I had some notion that I would someday use some of these archives for something — I don’t know what — but now those accounts are spread over some dozen notebooks with very little to catalog them. Finding anything in particular among those hundreds of entries is virtually impossible, but I could fairly easily find a record of the dates of our past visits. And with that data I’m sure I could disprove Libby’s false claim of our weekly visits. But that would only work for the days before I took up blogging.

And thus this fourth nail.

I will use it to help me collect reliable data on the frequency of our visits. And then we’ll see, won’t we? How will I do this? By the means you see below:

Yes, an old-fashioned, low-tech, paper calendar. Sometimes the old ways are still the best ways. Now, each time we visit, we will mark the calendar to show we were there. Simple, eloquent, indisputable. It was even worth driving a nail into the pristine cabin to achieve this end.

So far, the calendar only has one day marked: the 17th of January. Based on Libby’s false assertion, that should have been the third dated marked on the calendar since, by then, there had been three weekends in the month. As you see, there are five weekends in January of 2010. At best, we will have marked the calendar for two of them.

Every weekend! Bah!

(Yes, a Border Collie calendar. #2 Son gave me that as a gift. He gave another to Libby featuring Pomeranians, but so far I don’t think she’s using it to catalog any mistaken notions of mine.)

My Missouri Natural Events Calendar tells me that I be able to find harbinger of spring blooming in my forest this month.

Missouri calendar:

• Cedar waxwings flock to feed on cedar berries and other fruit.
• Groundhogs breed through March.

Let’s go straight to something interesting for once. The Festival of the Trees was featured on Nature Blogs Network this week. Go to the link and read the informative and sometimes humorous interview with the three coordinators of the Festival. (Then hurry back here.)

Did I ever mention how nice it is to come to the end of a long walk in the woods and see what you see in the photo above? With luck and some dry weather, I hope to be out there today. It will probably be too cold to walk the property line — a chore we try to do every winter just to see what’s going on with our neighbors — but there are other chores we can get to, including cutting up some of the trees that had to be knocked down to build the cabin. With fire season coming, I don’t like the idea of having that much slash so close to the cabin. Come by and help if you’re in the neighborhood.

And speaking of the Festival of the Trees, the newest edition, number 44, should pop up at treeblog tomorrow. This will be the second time Ash has hosted the Festival, and it should be a good time, so be sure to visit and leave a comment.

You can follow the Festival of the Trees on Facebook, Twitter, and Identica. And if you go to the coordinating blog, you can see a list of all of the past hosts. Plenty of arboreal goodness there for your cruising and musing.

We have had some clear days recently — despite all of my grousing here — with skies that are blue and a sun that actually shines, but the temps have been too cool to get out and enjoy the days. February is often the coldest, most weather-laden month of the winter around here, so there may still be plenty of cloud before the silver lining is apparent.

Still no solution to that mystery book discovery I mentioned this week.

Remember way back when Blogger seemed to hate me and I couldn’t leave comments on so many interesting and informative blogs? It appears that I’m heading into another season of that. Lately I’ve been leaving comments on blogs only to return later and not find my comments there. It’s possible that whatever I had to say was so pathetic or obvious or lame or off the mark that the blog owner decided to show some mercy and delete my comment, but it seems to be happening a lot lately. Regardless, I’m still visiting your blog as much as ever.

I’m not one for washing cars. Apart from my inherent laziness, I think cars can become a shameful vanity, and the volumes of water needed to wash one are wasteful to my mind and ethic. Nonetheless, even I will wash a car (or truck) when the dirt gets caked on thickly enuf, as I noted last week on the Prolechariot. Only I wasn’t the one to wash it; Libby was. Nor did she personally wash it. She took it to one of those wash places where the truck rides on a rail system through a bay full of soap and spray and plenty of noise. She specified that she did not want the wax at the end of the wash, yet when she got home after the endeavor, she found small drops of wax on the clean surface of the truck. But they weren’t wax. They were actually only droplets of water, frozen in the cold on the drive home.

And here is the answer to yesterday’s mystery photo. Libby had set some candles to burning on the stove at the house in suburbia and then turned her back on them (for a couple hours it looks like.) When I got home, I found the mess you see below. (It cleaned up easily.)

Missouri calendar:

• The Missouri Natural Events Calendar is blank for today.

Any guesses as to what this might be?

It’s not out at Roundrock. Rather, it is somewhere back in suburbia.

I’ll give you the answer tomorrow.

Missouri calendar:

• Full moon: the side facing us is lit by the sun.