Whenever I tell people that we boil off our own sap to make maple syrup, the response is almost always: “That is SO cool!” I don’t say it, but my thought is usually “Yes, yes it is very cool. And very BORING!”

Having the excuse to sit still in front of a hot fire and relish the chance to do very little is quite enjoyable for the first two hours or so. After that it’s just a bit tedious. Not as tedious as the hour and a half that it took me yesterday to get a fire started, but tedious nonetheless. I blame the rain. But then again, I’m certainly no Boy Scout either.

That all said, our house looks so festive surrounded by trees with buckets hanging off, and the boys are having a magical time getting up and running outside to check the taps in their pajamas to see how much has accumulated overnight. Plus, with all that time of sitting around and waiting I got to read a good chunk of The Beekeeper’s Bible that I’ve been wading through over the last month or so. It’s just that sometimes, there’s a little bit of monotony in the magic. I’m sure Shaun White and Chloe Kim had to endure a lot of monotony for those few minutes on the podium last week. C’est la vie.

Truly, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it. It’s just that next year we’ll have to (A) come up with a way to appreciate the block of time and enjoy it for what it is (much like what Hygge is to winter) and (B) find a way to build a much more efficient evaporator. I remember hearing at one point that an evaporator that burns off at 10 gallons an hour is slow, and we’re about half that. Sooooooo, yeah. We’ll have to work on that.

Meanwhile, I had to take the buckets off the tree in the goat yard. They were enjoying it a little too much.

I moved it to a tree way in the corner of our lot that I didn’t even know belonged to us. I still wouldn’t have known it if it weren’t for the fact that my neighbor stopped by for a bit while we were burning off yesterday morning. He pointed to the sugar maple that straddles the property line and said “You know, that one is on your property too.” I think he liked the syrup we gave him last year.

I’m estimating that we should have another week to go of the sap run. Hopefully we’ll come up with something to make watching sap boil a little less like watching paint dry. And after that it’s time to start – gulp – Kid Watch 2018! Flora’s due in late March (the day before Easter, conveniently. Wasn’t I just talking about this?), so it’s time to start getting the kidding kit together and watching for signs of labor. I didn’t say nothing exciting ever happens around here, did I?