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<item><title><![CDATA[Life on Raspberry Island: The View on April 3, 20100]]></title>
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<description><![CDATA[We're back in business! We got the pontoon and two of our three docks in the water on April 3rd, about three weeks ahead of schedule this spring. Unbelievable! This usually doesn't happen until the third weekend of April, so we're getting a whole extra month of spring this year.Now we're busy doing the spring cleaning stuff: organizing, tidying, getting ready to garden, getting ready to have some guests out. Yahoooo!!!&Acirc;&nbsp; We survived another ice-out, and it was a great one!]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:01:00 -0700</pubDate>
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<item><title><![CDATA[Life on Raspberry Island: The View on April 2, 20100]]></title>
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<description><![CDATA[Once the ice started cracking up, it melted quickly. I took this photo of the sunset the evening of April 2. It was such a refreshing sight to see water again!]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 04 Apr 2010 15:53:00 -0700</pubDate>
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<item><title><![CDATA[Life on Raspberry Island: The View on April 1, 20100]]></title>
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<description><![CDATA[On April 1st, we normally are still able to walk over ice to get to shore. This year on this date, the ice on the lake had softened to the point where it was cracking to pieces in the wind. I stood on the shore that afternoon and watched and  listened to the ice break up. As the ice floes bumped into each other, the edges disintegrated in a shower of icicles, making a hissing, rattly sound. Here's a close-up of the icicles, beautifully clear and clean, and shaped like long crystals..]]></description>
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<pubDate>Sun, 04 Apr 2010 15:50:00 -0700</pubDate>
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<item><title><![CDATA[Life on Raspberry Island: Watching the ice melt0]]></title>
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<description><![CDATA[It's Day 8 of being &amp;quot;stuck&amp;quot; on the island for ice-out. The temperature this afternoon is a sunny 57 and a west/northwest wind is pushing the ice around. We came close to breaking the record for an early ice out (March 31, set in 2000). We'll miss it, but only by a few days. The character of the ice has changed from blotchy gray and white to all gray. It looks more like slush than ice. Serendipitously, a crack has opened from the south end of our island to the home of our nearest neighbors, Kathy &amp;amp;amp; Lowell. Perfect! We're tempted to canoe over for a visit, but the crack in the ice keeps opening and closing depending on the wind, so we'll wait a few more days. We don't want to go and then not be able to get back, which has happened before.The ducks have come back -- mallards, canvasbacks, wood ducks -- and  the goldfinches are getting brighter every day, in patches.There's such freedom in not being able to go anywhere.We're both getting things done to give us a jump on spring: maintenance, spring cleaning, repairs. We're also having some fun, like our Saturday night sauna, during which we sat out on the dock overlooking our front yard (an empty, icy, gray Sandy Lake). I asked Gary what we'd do if someone happened by at that moment. He replied that with the bad ice, we'd be a lot more surprised to see them than they'd be to see us, perched on the dock in our pink Finnish sauna suits as we were. Our&Acirc;&nbsp; supply of dry milk is getting low, and we're running out of fresh vegetables. But we still have canned stewed tomatoes, frozen broccoli, and a handful of carrots and parsnips. We're confident we'll be off the island in a few days -- maybe tomorrow? But only if we absolutely have to go...]]></description>
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<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:36:00 -0700</pubDate>
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<item><title><![CDATA[Life on Raspberry Island: Ice-out 20100]]></title>
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<description><![CDATA[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.&Acirc;&nbsp;&Acirc;&nbsp; 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:&Acirc;&nbsp; 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!]]></description>
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<pubDate>Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:19:00 -0700</pubDate>
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