Garden Magic

It's no wonder that ancient peoples celebrated this season with ritual, song, and dance. There's something very magical about everything sprouting up from the earth, fresh and green (unless it's one of the ten million weeds in my garden, the magic wears off slightly when I contemplate them.)

This week we've eaten the first leaves of lettuce from our garden in sandwiches and salads, and nothing is better than that. And all of our newly-planted seeds are enjoying the combination of rain and sunshine that our days have been alternating between, so everything is growing wildly in our garden beds. Each day brings a new seed sprouting, and soon it will be time to have what the kids call our "garden feast"!
In one fell swoop, I finished weeding our new fenced garden and planted it all. Corn, cucumbers, beets, spinach, pole beans, peppers, tomatoes, basil, cilantro, melons and pumpkins - now that's an exciting menu! It's nice to have the space to do the bigger things like pumpkins that are harder in the raised beds. Can't wait to see the little sprouts... On the downside, hubby accidentally threw away my baggies of "old plant pods" (i.e. the seeds I saved from last year's beans, peas, and edameme) so I can't see how my first seed-saving project went. I'll have to try again this year and do a better job of labeling my baggy.

A cop might do a double-take at our pantry as well, with several baggies full of fresh herb on the shelves. But that would be Asa's tea project. She's harvesting our spearmint, peppermint, and the lemon-balm that grows wild around here and making her own tea. It makes a very tasty cup, especially in the evening hours.

Thoughtful Words from a Former Soldier

My tableside book for the past couple of weeks has been Farley Mowat's And No Birds Sang. If you're not familiar with Farley Mowat's writing, you may have seen some of the movies made from his works, like Never Cry Wolf and The Snow Walker, and if you haven't read any of his books, head straight to the bookstore or library and get thy hands on a copy (or two, or three) because he's simply wonderful.

In stark contrast to his lovely nature prose, And No Birds Sang is a testament to his experiences in the depths of the hell of war (in this case, World War II). By turns funny and heart-wrenching, he shows all aspects of a young man's experiences with going to war. But what really moved me was the last page, and because it is so very relevant to what is going on today, I want to type it all in here:

Let it be said then that I wrote this book in the absolute conviction that there never has been, nor ever can be a "good" or worthwhile war. Mine was one of the better ones (as such calamities are measured), but still, a bloody awful thing it was. So awful that through three decades I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cotton-wool of protective forgetfulness, and would have been well content to leave them buried so forever...but could not, because the Old Lie — temporarily discredited by the Vietnam debacle — is once more gaining credence; a whisper which soon may become another strident shout urging us on to mayhem

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!

Spawned in Hell long before Homer sanctified it, and goading men to madness and destruction ever since, that Old Lie has to be put down!

If there must be a specific purpose to such a book as mine...let this be it.

Speaking of Sunflowers, Here's A Great Project

Firstly, I am beyond thrilled that author Sharon Lovejoy stopped by to visit my blog, and commented on the Sunflower House post. She has written a book called Sunflower Houses, and is the author of one of the greatest books on gardening with kids: ROOTS, SHOOTS, BUCKETS &BOOTS. We've enjoyed this book as a family, and it contains all kinds of fun and whimsical gardening projects to do with your kids. It looks like she has a whole lot of other great books out that I'll need to check out as well!

Also check out The Great Sunflower Project, which will send you free sunflower seeds in return for your help in counting bees. Since bees are not only important pollinators but also struggling right now with various environmental interferences and the Colony Collapse Disorder, anything we can do to help them out (like planting beneficial flowers and tracking them) is a good thing. We've already signed up and gotten our bee-observer data sheets. The kids are excited to be helping keep an eye on our little pollinating friends.

Häagen-Dazs is also contributing to doing good things for honeybees, since many of their ingredients are honeybee dependent. So if you're looking for a good excuse to eat Häagen-Dazs ice cream, go visit their Help the Honeybees site

I also got a couple packages of Territorial Seed's Honey Bee Flower Mix seeds and I'm planting those all around the outside of our new vegetable garden space in the hopes of attracting even more bees to our garden area. I was happy to note that my lavender is being visited regularly by good numbers of honeybees and these cute orange-bottomed bumblebees. We used to have a beekeeper in our neighborhood and once we saw a whole swarm that had left his hive come over our house. I figure they settled somewhere in the woods near us, so we probably have a good concentration of honeybees in the area, for which I'm very grateful!

Fun With Sunflowers

I've always wanted to build a sunflower house with the kids, but with so little flat land in our yard (actually no flat land whatsoever), it hasn't seemed very feasible. But this year we cleared out this little area way up in the corner of our yard and it's pretty flat up there, so I marked out an area and we planted a sunflower house! You can find instructions to make one at several places on the internet, but here's one article. We decided to alternate taller and shorter varieties of sunflower, with the tall ones being the kind with good eating seeds, and the shorter ones being the pretty crimson ones. We planted vining sweet peas around the edges, and we can make trellises out of string across the top for a roof if they climb high enough up the sunflowers. I'll hopefully have more photos to share as it grows!

I also spent most of today getting that entire new garden spot trowelled into rows and mounds and planted pole beans, tomatoes, chard, beets, pumpkins, melons, and a small herb garden there! All of the seeds we planted in the back in the last week or so are sprouting already, so I can't wait for the new front garden to take root as well! We ate our first salad from our garden tonight, since one of the lettuces survived being uprooted by the cats and is quite large and lovely. Yummm! Here's to a summer of even more fresh veggies, and a shady sunflower house to enjoy them in.

New Garden Space!!

My hubby fenced off this great new garden space up front. We've had the raised beds in the backyard since he built them last year, and they gave us a great veggie garden last summer. But this new space will be easier to do the big stuff in, like corn, pumpkins, cucumbers, melons, etc. I just planted the first row - pole beans along the fence so they can climb. Exciting!

A Canvassing We Will Go

Though it was approximately a million and one degrees outside, Miss Asa and I went doorknocking for Obama the other evening. Now this is something I've never done in my adult life. I guess there hasn't been a candidate in recent memory that I was all that excited about. The Democrats have been so wishy-washy in my lifetime (except for Carter, who I wholeheartedly loved, but I was ten at the time, and Gore who didn't grow his cojones until after the election was over) that I just couldn't muster up the energy to go out and canvas for them.

But Mr. Obama is different and we were excited to go and help get out the vote, make sure people have turned in their ballots and help this election go along. We're all excited to see how things go today. I don't think there's any doubt that Obama will lead here in our town (at least not judging by the unofficial lawn sign pool), but of course we're all still crossing our fingers about the rest of his Democratic nomination journey.

Reminder: Ride of Silence, May 21

Once again, it's time for the Ride of Silence, at 7:00 pm on May 21 in many cities and towns around the world. This is a great way to take part in both remembering those cyclists who have been killed or injured by motorists, and to raise awareness of cycling in a very respectful way. Last year's ride here in our town was very moving. Many of the cyclists here rode with signs or t-shirts remembering friends and loved ones killed on bicycles.

Here's more information from the Ride of Silence website:

On May 21, 2008, at 7:00 PM, the Ride of Silence? will begin in North America and roll across the globe. Cyclists will take to the roads in a silent procession to honor cyclists who have been killed or injured while cycling on public roadways. Although cyclists have a legal right to share the road with motorists, the motoring public often isn't aware of these rights, and sometimes not aware of the cyclists themselves.

In 2003, Chris Phelan organized the first Ride Of Silence in Dallas after endurance cyclist Larry Schwartz was hit by the mirror of a passing bus and was killed. (Read the full history here...)

The Ride Of Silence is a free ride that asks its cyclists to ride no faster than 12 mph and remain silent during the ride. There is no brochure, no sponsors, no registration fees and no t-shirt. The ride, which is held during Bike Safety month, aims to raise the awareness of motorists, police and city officials that cyclists have a legal right to the public roadways. The ride is also a chance to show respect for those who have been killed or injured.

The Best Kind of Traffic Jam.

So the other day I got caught in a traffic jam.... at the doorway of my local bike shop. There were so many bikes going in and out that I just had to stand there for a minute and wait. How's that for a silver lining to the whole oil crisis??? Finally, our bike stores will be doing the kind of business they could only dream about years ago as they were getting edged out all across America. The bike shop guys said they've been just crazy busy for the last few weeks, with people walking in left and right to buy commuter bicycles. Yeah!

And both in real life and online in internet communities, I keep hearing about all the changes people are making in their driving habits. From sticking their kids on the school bus to running all of their errands on one day of the week to walking to the grocery store, it appears that almost $4.00 a gallon was the magic number to get people to actually change their habits. It does leave me scratching my head a bit as to why these things couldn't have been changed before we got into a crisis situation. I wonder what it is that makes people resistant to change for the good of all, but accepting of it when it comes to their own personal agendas. If you could figure that one out, the environmental movement could sure use to bottle it. But since I'd like to feel optimistic about something right now, it's that change is finally happening. Here's to the snowball effect!

The Magic Machine

So what if I had a machine I could market. Say you have a garden plot. My magic machine weeds it, then tills it up, then fertilizes it. It doesn't use fossil fuels, is economical, and as a by-product it produces.... eggs! Hubby fenced off our new garden plot yesterday and we've been putting the chickens in there every afternoon. They go to town eating the weeds, scratching it all up and fertilizing like crazy. I can't wait to start planting!

By the way, the only thing funnier than running around trying to round up your chickens to get them into the darned garden plot (my wonderful plan of throwing food scraps in there didn't work because the dingbats just walked around outside the fence, ignoring the enormous entrance by which they could get access to the food scraps!) is watching your kid carrying a chicken under each arm! These gals are way too tame.

Foresight

Without any undue commentary, I wanted to post the words of another politician from many years ago who had the temerity and the foresight to ask our nation to conserve, to use our resources wisely, to invest in the infrastructure for public transit and alternative energies. Let's hope Mr. Obama doesn't suffer the same fate that Jimmy Carter did, a president of integrity and action whose career as president was way too short.

Here are Mr. Carter's words from 1977. They ring as true (or actually much truer) today than they did back then:

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Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.

We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.

Two days from now, I will present my energy proposals to the Congress. Its members will be my partners and they have already given me a great deal of valuable advice. Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.

The most important thing about these proposals is that the alternative may be a national catastrophe. Further delay can affect our strength and our power as a nation.

Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war" -- except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy.

I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines are gone, and our homes are warm again. But our energy problem is worse tonight than it was in 1973 or a few weeks ago in the dead of winter. It is worse because more waste has occurred, and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. And it will get worse every day until we act.

The oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out. In spite of increased effort, domestic production has been dropping steadily at about six percent a year. Imports have doubled in the last five years. Our nation's independence of economic and political action is becoming increasingly constrained. Unless profound changes are made to lower oil consumption, we now believe that early in the 1980s the world will be demanding more oil that it can produce.

The world now uses about 60 million barrels of oil a day and demand increases each year about 5 percent. This means that just to stay even we need the production of a new Texas every year, an Alaskan North Slope every nine months, or a new Saudi Arabia every three years. Obviously, this cannot continue.

We must look back in history to understand our energy problem. Twice in the last several hundred years there has been a transition in the way people use energy.

The first was about 200 years ago, away from wood -- which had provided about 90 percent of all fuel -- to coal, which was more efficient. This change became the basis of the Industrial Revolution.

The second change took place in this century, with the growing use of oil and natural gas. They were more convenient and cheaper than coal, and the supply seemed to be almost without limit. They made possible the age of automobile and airplane travel. Nearly everyone who is alive today grew up during this age and we have never known anything different.

Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

The world has not prepared for the future. During the 1950s, people used twice as much oil as during the 1940s. During the 1960s, we used twice as much as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history.

World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s by 5 percent a year as it has in the past, we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.

I know that many of you have suspected that some supplies of oil and gas are being withheld. You may be right, but suspicions about oil companies cannot change the fact that we are running out of petroleum.

All of us have heard about the large oil fields on Alaska's North Slope. In a few years when the North Slope is producing fully, its total output will be just about equal to two years' increase in our nation's energy demand.

Each new inventory of world oil reserves has been more disturbing than the last. World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But some time in the 1980s it can't go up much more. Demand will overtake production. We have no choice about that.

But we do have a choice about how we will spend the next few years. Each American uses the energy equivalent of 60 barrels of oil per person each year. Ours is the most wasteful nation on earth. We waste more energy than we import. With about the same standard of living, we use twice as much energy per person as do other countries like Germany, Japan and Sweden.

One choice is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.

Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three-quarters of them would continue to carry only one person -- the driver -- while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our houses, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.

We can continue using scarce oil and natural to generate electricity, and continue wasting two-thirds of their fuel value in the process.

If we do not act, then by 1985 we will be using 33 percent more energy than we do today.

We can't substantially increase our domestic production, so we would need to import twice as much oil as we do now. Supplies will be uncertain. The cost will keep going up. Six years ago, we paid $3.7 billion for imported oil. Last year we spent $37 billion -- nearly ten times as much -- and this year we may spend over $45 billion.

Unless we act, we will spend more than $550 billion for imported oil by 1985 -- more than $2,500 a year for every man, woman, and child in America. Along with that money we will continue losing American jobs and becoming increasingly vulnerable to supply interruptions.

Now we have a choice. But if we wait, we will live in fear of embargoes. We could endanger our freedom as a sovereign nation to act in foreign affairs. Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil -- from any country, at any acceptable price.

If we wait, and do not act, then our factories will not be able to keep our people on the job with reduced supplies of fuel. Too few of our utilities will have switched to coal, our most abundant energy source.

We will not be ready to keep our transportation system running with smaller, more efficient cars and a better network of buses, trains and public transportation.

We will feel mounting pressure to plunder the environment. We will have a crash program to build more nuclear plants, strip-mine and burn more coal, and drill more offshore wells than we will need if we begin to conserve now. Inflation will soar, production will go down, people will lose their jobs. Intense competition will build up among nations and among the different regions within our own country.

If we fail to act soon, we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions.

But we still have another choice. We can begin to prepare right now. We can decide to act while there is time.

That is the concept of the energy policy we will present on Wednesday. Our national energy plan is based on ten fundamental principles.

The first principle is that we can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.

The second principle is that healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

The third principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems -- wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.

The fourth principle is that we must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.

The fifth principle is that we must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.

The sixth principle, and the cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.

The seventh principle is that prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.

The eighth principle is that government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.

The ninth principle is that we must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can't continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.

The tenth principle is that we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.

These ten principles have guided the development of the policy I would describe to you and the Congress on Wednesday.

Our energy plan will also include a number of specific goals, to measure our progress toward a stable energy system.

These are the goals we set for 1985:

--Reduce the annual growth rate in our energy demand to less than two percent.

--Reduce gasoline consumption by ten percent below its current level.

--Cut in half the portion of United States oil which is imported, from a potential level of 16 million barrels to six million barrels a day.

--Establish a strategic petroleum reserve of one billion barrels, more than six months' supply.

--Increase our coal production by about two thirds to more than 1 billion tons a year.

--Insulate 90 percent of American homes and all new buildings.

--Use solar energy in more than two and one-half million houses.

We will monitor our progress toward these goals year by year. Our plan will call for stricter conservation measures if we fall behind.

I cant tell you that these measures will be easy, nor will they be popular. But I think most of you realize that a policy which does not ask for changes or sacrifices would not be an effective policy.

This plan is essential to protect our jobs, our environment, our standard of living, and our future.

Whether this plan truly makes a difference will be decided not here in Washington, but in every town and every factory, in every home an don every highway and every farm.

I believe this can be a positive challenge. There is something especially American in the kinds of changes we have to make. We have been proud, through our history of being efficient people.

We have been proud of our leadership in the world. Now we have a chance again to give the world a positive example.

And we have been proud of our vision of the future. We have always wanted to give our children and grandchildren a world richer in possibilities than we've had. They are the ones we must provide for now. They are the ones who will suffer most if we don't act.

I've given you some of the principles of the plan.

I am sure each of you will find something you don't like about the specifics of our proposal. It will demand that we make sacrifices and changes in our lives. To some degree, the sacrifices will be painful -- but so is any meaningful sacrifice. It will lead to some higher costs, and to some greater inconveniences for everyone.

But the sacrifices will be gradual, realistic and necessary. Above all, they will be fair. No one will gain an unfair advantage through this plan. No one will be asked to bear an unfair burden. We will monitor the accuracy of data from the oil and natural gas companies, so that we will know their true production, supplies, reserves, and profits.

The citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.

We can be sure that all the special interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that affects them directly. They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or unfair, or harmful to the country. If they succeed, then the burden on the ordinary citizen, who is not organized into an interest group, would be crushing.

There should be only one test for this program: whether it will help our country.

Other generation of Americans have faced and mastered great challenges. I have faith that meeting this challenge will make our own lives even richer. If you will join me so that we can work together with patriotism and courage, we will again prove that our great nation can lead the world into an age of peace, independence and freedom.

Thank You Mr. Obama For Doing the Right Thing

As a politician, the hardest thing in the world must be telling people what they don't want to hear. That's the only logical reasoning I can think of at all for Senator Clinton to be calling for a gas tax "holiday" to help people continue driving more miles over the summer. Or as she puts it "I'm the only candidate who will provide immediate relief at the pump, with a plan." The kinds of plans I'd like to see do not include cutting gas prices to give consumers an illusory ability to continue our current transportation debacle. Hey, here's a neat idea... how about we invest those gas taxes on something useful, like say Mass Transit??? Something that would actually really benefit all of those low-income folks when the price of gas inevitably continues to climb and they're all left with no way to get to work whatsoever??

We need "immediate relief at the pump" in this country like we need a hole in the head. When is it going to sink in that high gas prices are the new normal??People are going to have to stop driving, fuel is running out. Peak oil has come and gone and gas prices are never going to go back down, not ever. I think the best possible thing that could happen right now is for gas prices to stay high and people to start getting a clue that this is it and start adjusting their behavior accordingly. Driving less, spending less at big stores, it's all going to happen all across this country and it's what should happen and needs to happen. We don't need to stimulate an economy that is going to fail anyways because it is based on the false principle that infinite growth can occur in a system with finite resource. We will need to reinvent ourselves as a non-growth based economy and the sooner we start envisioning that, the better. Is it going to be painful, you betcha. For some people much more than for others but every single person is going to feel it. It's the unfortunate end result of our delusional policies of the last couple centuries.

All of which is why I respect Barack Obama even more, for calling it like it is. For calling it like it is, in a hotly contested election year, no less. How many politicians would have the cojones to do something like that? To say, as he did, "The easiest thing in the world for a politician to do is tell you exactly what you want to hear." People want to hear that gas prices will go down, that this is a temporary thing, that their government can somehow fix it. It's just not fixable. One reason I am voting for Obama is my belief that in the very hard times to come, he will be a person of integrity who will call on Americans to do the things we need to do in order to help save our country and our world. He has already uttered the "C" word - Conserve - and I would love to see a leader in the White House who will bring back the notion that it is patriotic to conserve our resources, not spend them with wanton disregard to their future utility.

Fun With Animals

So, the big disadvantage to having four cats turns out to be trying to keep them from using your newly planted raised beds as giant kitty litter boxes (sigh). Also, we must have a nest of baby snakes around here somewhere (like maybe under that giant brush pile on our property) because the kittens keep finding them. Fortunately, they don't really know what to do with them and none of the snakes have seemed to be injured, so I've just returned them to under the brush pile as I find them. We should have a great crop of insect-eating garden snakes this year!

Overwhelmed

There's so many things I'd like to write about here, they are popping into my head on a regular basis all day. It seems that the wheels are finally so far into motion that ordinary folks are starting to sit up and take notice. Global warming is a dinner table word, the "R" word (recession) has finally been said (and dark mutters of the "D" word - Depression - have been spoken in the press), food rationing is in place in many major stores, our local Costco is only allowing purchase of one bag of rice, and gas is topping $4 a gallon. Although the writing has been on the wall in gigantic graffiti-sized letters, it seems as if it's finally being read.

I remember writing on a message board a couple of years ago that I thought the government should boost gas to $4 a gallon and immediately invest the difference (at that point, about $1.50 a gallon) in public transportation and bicycle and pedestrian support. I was immediately shouted down, with folks exclaiming that $4 per gallon for gas would ruin ordinary families, that they couldn't afford their commutes, etc. etc. and I said we would see those prices soon anyways, why not use it now and offset everyone's future pain. Well guess what, gas is now approaching (or over, in some places) $4 a gallon and we are NO CLOSER to solutions for the average American. Now that people are actually trying to ride the bus, the subway, their bikes, etc. the infrastructure is either not in place (in many towns, public transport is too expensive, too infrequent, too sporadic, or non-existant) or it is not adequate to the increasing demand. In Atlanta last weekend, we almost couldn't board the subway that we needed to use to get to the airport because it was literally stuffed with people. I had the same experience in D.C. a few weeks back (in this photo above, not even taken at the peak of rush hour). Since I don't live in either city, I'm not sure if this represents an increase in ridership or if these subways have been this crowded for a long time, but either way it seems clear that an increase in available public transport is a necessity.

Leaving On a Jet Plane

So here I am on my urban farm sustainability blog writing to tell you that my family and I will be climbing on a gigantic fuel-sucking monster to fly across the country so that my kids can run robots around on tables in the Georgia Dome. When you put it like that, it sounds kind of absurd from an environmental standpoint, yet therein lies the rub and one of the stickiest parts of being an environmentalist: how far do you push your values on your kids? Sure, we could tell them that we refuse to go - just because their robotics team made it to the World Festival is no reason to be wasteful of resources. But could you really imagine doing that? Me neither. So off we go.

As with so many day-to-day decisions, we have to balance what is right for our principles vs. what is right for our children. In many ways, our values become second nature for our kids, the "HTF" (a phrase that my mom developed in days of water rationing for "Hold the Flush", and turn lights off when they leave the room. They hang up laundry, vegetable garden, gather chicken eggs, walk and bike around town. But while I will cheerily suit up in my Goretex gear and pedal off to work in a downpour, I don't ever force the kids to bike in inclement weather. Yep, we drive. Of course, we are usually carpooling and try to minimize car miles and maximize the usage when we do take a gas-powered vehicle, but there are many times when having my daughter make it to a dance recital with hair, make-up, and costume intact trumps my tree-hugging values. And this weekend is one of those times, for sure.

So we're off for five days of fun at the World Robotics Festival. Blue skies are in the making as the weather in Atlanta promises to be lovely, and I'm sure the kids will have one of the most memorable experiences of their young lives.

A Good Reason To Get That Garden In Soon

This op-ed by Paul Krugman at the NY Times about the world food crisis is one more step on the Highway to Scareyville that it looks like we're traveling down these days. It's funny that more people out there can't see how much the carpet is unraveling beneath their feet. In any case, one more reason to get that garden going this spring! It's been rainy all week, but hubby and I took advantage of a bit of a dry spell yesterday and got our new compost bin set up and half of our raised beds planted.

The Beauty of Instinct

Not too long ago, we had a very cold and blustery day around here. It was so windy, the gate to the chicken coop blew shut, and when I went to put the chickens up for the night, only five of them were in the coop. So I went out to look around the bigger enclosure and couldn't see them at all. Now, if you know how much like pets these chickens are, you can imagine my terror in thinking that several of them had been eaten by one of the local raccoons or killed by another dog or some other such terrible fate. I went back up to the house for a flashlight and took a closer look around the pen, when I finally spotted them.

There's an oil barrel up against the back wall of the chicken coop, and all five of the chickens had somehow managed to wedge themselves into the space between the barrel and the wall. They were stacked on top of each other, and this space is about the only place in the enclosure with a roof over it, so they were even mostly dry from the rain. When I picked up each of the hens to carry them back to the coop, they were dry and toasty warm from being all stacked up like that. The funny thing about chickens is that when it's dark, they shut down like little robots that have been switched off. I couldn't even get them to walk up into the coop, so I had to stuff them through the coop door one at a time. Once in the light of the coop, they finally woke up enough to flap up to their perch.

I've noticed some other instinctual things about the chickens, like how they're all silent and still on their perch when I go to close the coop up at night, but as soon as the door is closed and they're secure, they all hop down from the perch and go to get some food or water. But until that moment of safety, they all remain perfectly still, you wouldn't even know there were chickens in the building at all from the quietness within.

Now I know chickens are almost as dumb as the boards they perch on. If they're out in the big enclosure and one of them goes back into the little pen, they often can't figure out how to get back out again. The door is, of course, in the same position it's always been in, but they don't seem to remember. They'll pace all around the cage with an expression like "how did that other chicken get out there?". But they have their instincts, and those instincts are pretty good at preserving them in many circumstances.

People, on the other hand, have lots of brains - tons and tons of grey matter that lets them think about all kinds of interesting stuff. But our instincts for self-preservation and benefiting our flock are just about zero. It seems like every day there's another news article that shows that what the "extremeists" have been saying all along (about the energy crisis, global warming, blah blah blah) is probably going to look like a picnic compared to what's really going to go down. Wheat shortages, rainforest mowed over for biofuels, ice melting and sea levels rising, gas prices soaring, jobs diminishing, the "recession" that no one wants to call a recession looming over everyone's heads. A woman (who commutes 90 miles a day) interviewed in an article about rising gas prices says she'll have to cut back on her Starbucks to save money for gas, politicians continue to talk about biofuels as if they'll save us, no one at all mentions the big "C" word - Conservation.

We're headed for the abyss, and unlike a sensible chicken we still fail to do the right thing.

Bumpersticker of the week

Obama Rally, Day In Photos

In line at about 2:30 in the afternoon, the line already stretches many blocks down the road. We're about 150 feet from the main doors though. Lawn chairs and conversation a must, the kids can run around and play and thank god it's not raining!






















The doors open at 6:30 and we got good seats in the first tier up from the floor. The Pit will be packed tonight!

















Mac Court, aka "The Pit" is one of the loudest basketball venues on earth. I think it was louder this night! Mackenzie really really wanted to see Barack Obama speak, even though he had to wear ear plugs and put his hands over his ears during the loudest bits...






An all-women's a capella choir rehearses in the basement before taking the stage (they were awesome!)
The Pit is packed! To the rafters. At capacity of 9,000 + 3,000 that couldn't get in at the door. That's about 10% of our town's population, turning out to see Obama



















The Man himself. Well worth the 7+ hour wait. As dynamic as he is on TV or video, he's 10 times that in person. Can't he just be president now??? Here's where I wish I had a better distance lens, though.

The Empire Has No Clothes - A Peace Rally in Pictures

Sunday's Peace Rally to mark the 5th anniversary of the Iraq War. You can visit my Flickr site for better resolution images.

Absolutely Brilliant Cycling Awareness Ad

This is well worth taking a moment to check out:

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

Definitely food for thought, and raising awareness of this issue is a great thing.

Word of the Day: Ciclovia

Ciclovia is a Spanish term that literally means "bike path" but has come to be used to denote events (either one-time or recurring) where city streets are closed to all but non-vehicular traffic. Walkers, cyclists, unicyclists, wheelchairs, skateboards, rollerskates, etc. are allowed during these times, but cars are not. Bogata, Columbia has one of the biggest and longest-running events (over 25 years) with 2 million people attending (30% of citizens) on Sundays on over 70 miles of carfree streets!

Very few US cities have such events. Some, like Portland Oregon have one-day events like the Portland Bridge Pedal. El Paso, Texas is one of the few U.S. cities that have held a regular weekly event. But this week in our town, a group of people is getting together to organize such an event here. I'm hoping to be able to attend the organizational meeting (yes, in all my spare time, hah!) It's such a great idea, and the street here in town that they're thinking about holding it on is one of the worst in our city for cycling. Almost every route through town here has at least one good cycling option except for this one street. It has no bike lane, bad pavement, and lots of businesses whose driveways intersect the already-heavily-used sidewalks. So there's no real place for cyclists to go. A cyclovia-type event would not only be great for the whole city, but would also draw attention to the need for safe cycling routes on this street.

In any case, as a word junkie I just like the word "ciclovia" - it calls up in my mind the words "cycle" (of course) but also the Latin word for road, and the current usage of via as "by way of" or "by the means of". It also brings to mind the French word "vie" for "life".

It All Adds Up

Not too long ago, we started looking over our energy bills for the past year. One year ago, we had a renter in our basement apartment (a 650 sq foot "mother-in-law" unit). This has been our first opportunity to compare our current energy bills from those of the same season when we had the apartment rented. What we discovered was pretty darn interesting. Our utility bill is half of what it was when we had our renter living downstairs. Yep, four people in a 1670 sq foot house upstairs use about the same amount of energy as one person in the apartment downstairs. I've always been a mite suspicious of those carbon footprint calculators on the web (although I think they're a great tool for raising awareness), because they typically make assumptions about our energy use based on our house and number of people living here. This is the first time I've had solid proof that energy-efficient everyday living practices can make a huge difference in how much energy we use.

The things we do are pretty simple - our house gets great natural light during the day, so we don't use interior lighting in daylight hours. At night, we turn off lights as soon as we leave a room. We turn off and/or unplug appliances that we aren't using. We try to use energy wisely (like making an entire pot of tea instead of once cup at a time). We hang clothes out to dry instead of using the clothes dryer, and open the dishwasher before it enters the drying cycle. Our clothes washer is an efficient front-loader that does a ton of laundry in one batch. We conserve water in other ways, like turning the shower on halfway instead of on full, and we set our thermostat to 58 in the winter (using a heat pump) and don't use air conditioning in the summer. Probably our biggest energy drain is our chest freezer, but that gives us the ability to buy local organic pastured meats, and store all of the berries and other fruits and veggies we grow and glean during the summer.

None of these things are particularly difficult or odious. We don't really feel deprived. We aren't living in left-field, or god forbid not showering to save water. Patchouli never enters our house and none of us particularly likes granola. But the little things do add up. Every year we try to add a few more of them to our pile of little sustainability stones. This last year we bought honeycomb blinds for many of the windows, especially the ones that get a lot of sun in the summer. Next year we'll try to add some more to the other windows. We're hoping that a homemade solar hot water heater is in the works for us sometime soon. We implemented the garage clothes-drying racks this winter which drastically reduced the amount we use the clothes dryer in this wet season. We changed out even more bulbs to CFLs. Incidentally, all of the light in the photo at the top of this post comes from two flourescents that are our main indoor lighting. We've changed them only once since we moved in eight years ago, now that's what I call efficient!

I'm excited to learn that all of our little efforts add up. I have friends, both on-line and in real life who are living the ultimate energy efficient lifestyles in off-the-grid or Net Zero homes. Right now, that's not in the cards for us, but it's great to know that making these smaller efforts can have a huge impact on our energy usage, and thus on our carbon footprint and overall environmental impact. I like to think that if regular ol' folks knew what a difference they could make (a family of four using less energy than one person!), they might be inspired to implement a few more changes themselves.

Go Lance! New Commuter Bike Shop in Austin

Not content with inspiring thousands of competitive cyclists around the world, Lance Armstrong is opening what sounds like the world's coolest bike store in Austin, Texas. It's going to be focused on bike commuters, aim at being friendly and non-intimidating, and have a cafe and showers and locker rooms for bike commuters who want to store their bikes there during the day.

"Armstrong, who still remembers being a trifle intimidated when he walked into a bike shop as a kid, wants to make sure that doesn't happen to customers here. He said he'd rather encourage rookies to start riding than sell a faster bike to a veteran cyclist. "

Full story here.

When Environmental Sustainability Goes Awry

To the two young hippies next to me in the DVD section of the library: I appreciate that you're interested in environmental sustainability. I don't mind seeing your dreadlocks, your piercings, your fair-trade hemp clothing, and your environmental stickers on your bags. And I appreciate that you might think it is saving the planet to not use water to bathe. But I think that's taking things a bit too far. Seriously, rancourous rancidity is not camouflaged by dousing oneself in patchouli (not to mention, some of us are allergic to that odiferous stuff). If you noticed people backing away from you, it was not a political or a moral statement they were making, it was self-protection.

Reducing Garbage, Part 1

A while back, someone on a list I'm on asked for tips on reducing garbage. I've been meaning to write about it for awhile, and every now and then a new idea pops into my head and I jot it down somewhere. It's amazing how little garbage you can produce, once you really become aware of what you throw away and start working on reducing it. We get the smallest can that our garbage company gives out, and we've shared it with our renter and the family across the street and had room left over. One thing you can start doing is becoming aware of what you're throwing away. You don't have to dig through the trash, but just look at it when you toss something else in and think about whether that thing could be eliminated, substituted, recycled, or composted. I'm sure this is far from a comprehensive list, but here's a few ideas at least...

1) Compost: One of the first steps you can take is to stop throwing away food scraps. Compost piles can range from big wire-enclosed areas, to small portable worm bins. Turning your food scraps into gardening soil is a great first step at garbage reduction. Resources for Composting and Worm Bins abound on the internet, and in many cases in your local community. There's even a worm bin specifically designed to turn your pet waste into usable compost, thus keeping it out of the landfill as well.

2) Return to Cloth: Perhaps the easiest thing to remove from your garbage is anything disposable - napkins, paper towels, baby wipes, kleenex, diapers, etc. These used to be the main culprits, but the past few years have seen a veritable explosion in the disposable market, with everything from bibs to facial washcloths, to Swiffer mops being produced just to be used once and thrown away. One of the easiest ways to stop throwing this kind of stuff in the trash is simply to stop buying it. Once I stopped buying paper napkins, I had to have something else in place to use. I started adding to my small supply of cloth napkins (and actually I used washcloths for awhile until I had a big enough stash). I found that if I had a roll of paper towels or a paper napkin handy, it was easy to reach for them. Without them around, you simply don't use them. I do keep a roll of paper towels in the garage for use in times of desperate measures (the cat just barfed on the carpet, that kind of thing), but I haven't bought a new roll since we moved into this house 8 years ago, so they last a long time that way. Cloth diapers, handkerchiefs, washcloths, mop covers, napkins, and bibs are long-lasting and relatively easy to toss in the washing machine (even the diapers weren't as icky and intimidating as I thought they'd be before having babies).

3) Look For Less Packaging: Often we don't have the option of buying something with less packaging - it seems like you need a pair of gardening shears and an expert safe-cracker just to get into the packaging for your basic CD these days. But often we have an option to buy something with less packaging or substitute something reusable. Rechargeable batteries for instance, not only save you from having to dispose of toxic batteries, but also all the packaging that they come in. Buying meat locally means that it comes straight from the butcher wrapped in white paper, instead of resting on styrofoam trays. Buying produce locally avoids those nasty plastic clamshells that are becoming popular in places like Trader Joe's, and if you can swing it to get stuff like milk and eggs from a local source, you can also eliminate egg and milk cartons from your garbage stream and re-use glass bottles instead. Even if you don't have a direct source, there are still local dairies that use and re-use glass bottles (usually with a deposit).

4) Borrow, Barter, Buy Used: If you need to buy something, you can think about whether or not it's something you can borrow, or barter for, or buy used first. Not buying stuff new eliminates packaging, transportation, and possibly having to deal with the remains of whatever you've bought. If you think about it, there's usually no reason for every person on the block to have a hedge trimmer, or a particular best-selling book, or even a pickup truck. Sharing with neighbors or friends is a bonus to all (including the environment). Our chicken tractor is on its way to the 3rd family we've lent it to. Our power-washer has made the rounds of every deck and fence in the neighborhood, and we've borrowed our neighbor's truck or trailer when we needed to haul something. Our daughter is clothed entirely in wonderful hand-me-downs from the neighbor girl down the street, and the clothes keep right on flowing from her to a smaller friend a few blocks away. Thinking outside the box when it comes to consumer goods is also a great way to boost your budget, while reducing your impact on your garbage can and the earth.

Bits and Blurbs

If we ever end up needing a really great commuter car, here's one, the Aptera, I've got my eye on:

I just read an article about it and they said that in track tests it has been exceeding their expectations, topping out around 300 mpg in some cases! Message to Detroit, hello! Is anyone listening???

And I have to say, I'm pretty excited about yesterday's primaries here in the U.S. (though in Orygun, we won't be voting until May. May!). I'm pretty strongly in the Obama camp, largely on account of his stances on the war and his environmental scorecard from the League of Conservation Voters (highest among all the Dems). It doesn't hurt at all that he is inspiring hope for the first time in a long time among people disenfranchised from our current political system:

Good Things Happening In My Home Town

One of the things I love most about my town is the fact that so many people here are awake and involved, working for change on all fronts - peace, sustainability, community, transportation. One glance at the "What's Happening" pages in our weekly newspaper shows the wealth of avenues we have here to become involved. From conferences on human rights to the annual Bicycling and Walking Summit to the "Clearcutting the Climate Conference, you literally have a whole handful of things to choose from in any given week to get involved in issues that really matter to our planet and community.

This week I saw an article in a local running newsletter about the Eugene Marathon "going green". Employing everything from a solar-powered finish line to Master Recyclers, the marathon here is planning on being as environmentally sensitive as possible. As a runner and athlete myself, I think it's great that people are thinking not just of their own experience in the lovely outdoors, but of the environment that they're running through as well.

Bringing Back the Aesthetic of the Useful

Ordinary Days: Clothesline

One of the most common objections I hear to implementing more energy-efficient solutions in our everyday lives is that people don't like the way they look. Standing at a solar panel display at a home and garden show, you could hear people talking with one another about how solar hot water would be nice, but who wants such an ugly thing on their roof? Neighborhoods in many parts of the USA have CC&Rs prohibiting hanging out one's laundry, and vegetable gardens in the front yard are equally forbidden. Right now, our country is caught in the last thralls of the Aesthetic of the Useless.

This aesthetic can be seen everywhere from the starving fashion models on the cover of magazines (in countries where food is scarce, thinness is hardly to be valued - only in a culture of plenty can we exalt in emaciation) to the sterility of the bark mulched and shrubbed subdivision landscapes, devoid of any biological diversity let alone food-growing potential. I think a sea change is blowing in, but people will hold tightly to their last public displays of uselessness.

Myself, I'm finding that the more I live around people who value utility, the more aesthetic I see in this kind of lifestyle. After all, how many fabulous photographs of clothes dryers do you see? Meanwhile, Flickr has entire groups dedicated to beautiful pictures of nothing more than drying laundry.

Benvinguts a Sant Andreu
Originally uploaded by TalkingTree

In the caption for this stunning image, the photographer tells us that "Nearly everyone in Barcelona, if not all of Spain, hangs their clothes to dry from balconies and roof tops."

Meanwhile, photographer g. s. george shows us an image of well-utilized urban space in Venice:

Clothesline City II
Originally uploaded by g. s. george

And homeowners Stan and Priti Cox in Salina, Kansas have transformed their suburban front lawn into an edible paradise, paving the way for other homeowners to embrace the aesthetic of the practical in this Edible Estates project. In returning to more sustainable lifestyles, we might shy away from making such bold moves, worrying about "what the neighbors will think". I've had people ask me whether my neighbors mind my chickens roaming the front yard, or my wintertime laundry solution of hanging clothes in the open doors of our south-facing garage. But often, it just takes a few "early adopters" to turn the tide in the other direction from where things are currently headed. So go ahead, hang that laundry, grow those tomatoes!

Peering Into 2008

Jim Kunstler (author of The Long Emergency) has got his 2008 predictions out there, and it's worth a read if only for his hysterically funny descriptions of what is really a very unfunny situation - the state of the world as we know it heading into this coming year.

For those of us who have known this is coming for a very long time, there's no satisfaction in the "I told you so"s that will be ringing out as the oil prices rise and the ice caps melt. For every time I've been told my views are "extremist" or "hysterical environmentalist", I've always known in my heart that what I really was was a realist in a land of dreamers. Yet what can we do, but do the things that we can do to the best of our abilities, and hold onto love and happiness and all of the positive things that we can.

Our family watched a movie last night, an old Disney flick called Miracle of the White Stallions, about the saving of the Lipizzaner horses during the last dark days of WWII. Any time I see or read something about WWII, the parallels always hit me. I wish I was better at remembering movie dialogue, there was one place in the movie where they were discussing the impending fall of the Reich, and how they had gotten to such a place where Hitler was allowed to dictate whether or not they could play music by Mendellsohn. The quote was something like "Don't be too hard on the people. It didn't come all at once. A little at a time, these things were eroded away, and everyone said "that's not so bad".

I'm looking toward the caucuses on our East coast with hopefulness today, but the hope is that we can at least start turning around the eroding of freedoms and the warlike countenance that has pervaded my nation's identity in the last regime. For the rest - the peak oil and the ice caps and the rainforests and all of that, I'll be planting my gardens and crossing those fingers, hoping that the coming crises will bring out the best in people, not just the worst.

The Environmental Impact of Feminism

On a discussion board I frequent, there is currently a largely civilized debate about the value of what used to be called "women's work". Since nowadays, either partner can choose to be a stay at home spouse, that phrase has gone by the wayside. But the reality of the situation is that this work, that of the "homemaker" is largely devalued by society. Some people have put forth that a person with no children, or children old enough to be in school have no business even staying at home, and that such people are not paying their own way in life.

This has been going around and around in my brain all day, and even though it doesn't really apply to me (homeschooling/unschooling is more than a full-time job!), it got me thinking of not just the economic value of such work (replacing everything I do would probably cost a fortune, even if one could find someone with the diverse skills of chicken midwifery, robotics coach, and violin tutor, LOL), but of the environmental value and impact of this work.

Now before I say another word, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am in no way advocating for some return to the June Cleaverism of yesteryear. I don't think a societally enforced imprisonment of women in the household with an apron and a copy of Betty Crocker is the answer. And I fully understand that for many families in this era of haves and have-nots, having both parents work is a financial necessity (and that of course is a whole 'nother topic, on the Walmartization of the workforce where so many people are not paid a living wage). But I do think it's imperative that we look at the true value of this work, and the repercussions that abound when homemaking is farmed out to the likes of McDonalds, Eggo Waffles, and Swiffer.

I was shifting some stuff around in the freezer today, and looking at the neat packages of frozen blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and cherries that fill half of the shelves. They stand next to the meat I picked up from the butcher (a local 1/3 pasture-raised organic beef), and the baggies of pancakes and waffles that I make up ahead of time so the kids can have healthy easy breakfast on days when we have little time. This is one small microcosm of the environmental value of a homemaker.

If I hadn't taken the kids to the berry patches and roadside fields and fruit stands this summer to get local organic foods to fill our freezer, we'd be buying more fruits trucked to a plant, packaged, and trucked to our local supermarket. If my husband or I didn't have the time to find and build a relationship with the local people who supply our raw milk and organic meat, pick it up when needed, and then thaw and prepare nutritious meals for the family, we'd be driving through a McDonald's like so many Americans on the go. I did that once last year, when we were on vacation and I was completely staggered by the sheer amount of waste products generated by one fast-food meal. And that doesn't count all the trucking and non-sustainable agriculture that went into producing that meal. Likewise, if I wasn't cooking nutritious sprouted whole-grain wafffles and pancakes with our own organic eggs and raw milk, I might be opening a pack of Eggos for the kids before we rushed out the door to get to our respective jobs and school. I won't bother typing in the ingredient list, but suffice it to say that they barely resemble food and I can't even imagine the environmental impact (let alone the healthcare and economic impact) of so many of the nation's food choices being such pre-packaged dreck.

Of course, we shouldn't ignore transportation. Although I'd like to think that most two-income families go merrily carpooling out the door, this isn't the case for most in America. Our old neighbors were a prime example - both parents and the teenage child left the house in three separate cars each morning, bound for three separate places, all less than five miles from each other. But their hectic schedules were too overwhelming to coordinate, so three cars it was. And for two-working parent families, it might be completely necessary for either parent to have to drive kids to after-school activities or daycare.

There are many more incidental environmental impacts. As the hours spent on the job by members of the workforce creep up steadily, less and less time is available for simple household tasks. Thus something like the time it takes to wring out and clean a mop becomes so stupendously valuable that products like Swiffer hit the marketplace with a bang. It seems there is nothing out there that can't be made disposable. Diapers have been around for a long time, but now you can simply throw your baby's bibs away without having to take the time to wash them. Facial washcloths - who knew that they made them disposable? After all, taking the time to throw in four or five more washcloths to your laundry could be the straw that broke the overworked camel's back. And not only fast-food meals are served on disposable dinnerware. People are sometimes so time-crunched that paper plates and plastic forks are used for regular family dinners to save time on washing dishes.

All of these seemingly disparate things don't cause us to blink our eyes when taken one at a time. These things you might look at separately and say "what's the big deal, if someone wants to use a Swiffer instead of cleaning a mop?" but when you take them together, when you take them on a national scale, it's clear that the environmental impact of the absence of homemakers in so many families becomes huge. And there's no easy answer or quick turnaround (though the rising prices of fuel in a post-peak economy may turn around the Swiffers, multiple cars, fast food and such all on its own). As such things no longer seem "cheap and easy", the work of a homemaker becoms much more apparently valuable in a monetary sense.

So what can be done to jump-start this change? For one thing, think about the homemakers you know and make sure that when you talk to them you do not disparage their role, even inadvertantly. They are valuable, not just to their families, but to our society and to the earth itself. They play perhaps the most important job on the planet. If you hear someone else act dismissively to someone with a homemaking role, bring the issue to discussion. It's often a very quiet discrimination against people who are "just" housewives or homemakers or "just a stay-at-home mom". It seems that official job titles working out of the home carry so much more prestige and importance, and anything we can do to reverse this trend will be better for our communities, our society, and our environment.

A Blogging First

For the first time ever, I'm going to duplicate a post across all three of my blogs. Usually, I keep them pretty separate, figuring that people reading my Ironmom blog might not be all that interested in my vegetable-growing and chicken-farming adventures. Or that people interested in my family's unschooling days might not care what kind of swim workout I'm using these days. But this one post cuts across all lines of interest in my life. It's about homeschooling my kids and the amazing things we get to do, it's about alternative energy, and it's about teamwork and fostering a positive approach to competition. And I'm so proud, I'm not just going to post a link, I'm putting the whole thing right here as well:

So, my kids' robotics team, the Solar Dragons, went to the regional tournament last weekend. I knew that they were very well prepared, their robot was solid, they had put in a lot of time perfecting their programs, their runs on the challenge table, their research project and presentation, and I knew that they were operating as an exceptional team with respect for each other and for the other teams. What I didn't even imagine in my wildest dreams is that they would WIN THE WHOLE TOURNAMENT! Yep, that's it. They really did it!

First of all, their runs on the robot table went very well. They practiced their approach so many times that there was no fumbling or nervousness at the table, just a smooth running of all the things they needed to do (remove and replace attachments, add cargo, aim robot, select program, run robot). They had decided that they would all run their programs at the table, but according to Lego competition rules, only two of them could be at the table at any given time, so they took a tag-team approach. They helped each other out, and as each kid was done with their turn, they tagged the next.

They also faced three panels of judges. One teamwork panel that asked them questions about how they worked as a team (my favorite moments, when they asked things like "who is your team leader" and the kids said "we operate by consensus", LOL.) One panel was technical judging, where they had the kids run their programs and asked them about their programs and robot design, and a third panel evaluated their research project (they had five minutes to do a presentation, and another five minutes of Q&A - they actually knew their stuff so well, the panel ran out of questions to ask them!). When we saw the research projects of some of the other groups of kids, I knew that our kids would do really well. Many kids from school teams had used their classrooms or part of their school building for the energy audit. While this was probably technically admissible, I think the real goal from Lego FIRST League in setting this as a project for this year was to get the kids out and interacting with the community. Since our team really did choose a big and complex public building to audit, and researched extensively on alternative energy solutions, I knew they'd wow the judges (and they did!).

I am proudest of the fact that they scored a perfect 100 on teamwork. I know they're a great group of kids and they have worked so well together and have had so much fun together, it really showed. Whenever they've made a team decision, it has almost always been unamimous. I think it also really speaks volumes that we have two pairs of siblings on the team (not always the easiest to work with your own family members!) and that the kids come from different educational venues (two different schools plus some homeschoolers). They also got the highest score on their research presentation, something they've put so much time and effort into (see my previous post for a description of what they did). The got the 2nd highest score on the robot table as well, garnering 195 points with their seven mission programs.

So without further ado, here's some pics of these magnificent kids in action!

Here's the table setup in the main competition hall. Two teams compete against each other in timed table runs.



Their first run at the table, Claire and Asa work together to send the robot out on a mission to plant trees.



Time for their technical presentation. Whoops, I forgot to bring the folder with printouts of their programming. Good thing I'm a trained runner!




Waiting for their turn.



Mackenzie and Daniel get the power lines in place, the rest of the team waits behind for their turn to be tagged.




Waiting outside the presentation judging room. It was cold enough to snow and the poor kids were shivering. They're holding the photos for their research presentation.




Presenting to the panel of judges.



We were all so impressed with this kid, Thomas. His entire team backed out, but he came and competed all by himself!



We can't believe it, we won the whole thing!