Old McRobin Had a Farm

Summer is in full swing and I've literally got cucumbers coming out my ears! Thankfully, it's not zucchini and so our neighbors don't mind taking a few here and there. My secret weapon on the cucumber front is Mackenzie, whose garden box is overflowing with produce. He's got the greenest thumb in the family, and is keeping us in cucumbers and swiss chard. But this week my hubby's tomatoes are coming on and they are so amazingly good that for the first time in my life I am enjoying eating raw tomatoes. I'd also like to try making sun-dried tomatoes this year, because we use them in pasta salad and Mackenzie really likes eggs whipped up with sun-dried-tomato pesto.
With the addition of the new kittens, we're up to eighteen animals now around here! We'll be giving away at least two of the kittens, but still....and we went to the fair last night and oohed and aaahed over the goats as usual. We would love to keep goats, but inside the city limits it's not allowed. Now we could have the biggest, meanest, barkingest dog in town - 125 pounds of snarling menace. That's allowed. But not a cute little floppy-eared harmless 90 pound goat. It makes me wonder how and why our laws get written. We keep joking that we're going to have to buy a real farm someday anyways, just so Asa can keep all of her animals on it. Then we can have a little cottage somewhere on the farm and split our time between town and country. Since we only live one mile from the city limits and 10 acre zoning areas, it could even be within walking or biking range.

On the biking front, my hubby is getting a Bike Friday Pocket Lama for his birthday. He's been limping along on a cruddy Trek around-town bike forever (11 years if I remember right) and it's about time he got a really nice ride. To some men that might mean a little red convertible, but thank heavens I married a guy to whom that means a cool folding bike! While we were over at Bike Friday, I checked out their new super-fast folding Tikit This thing literally folks up in about 5 seconds, and is a terrific solution for bike commuters who also have to maneuver their rides into busses, subways, or trains. If you don't believe me, check out the video!

Never Thought I'd Say This But....

...I'm going to recommend a Reality TV Show. Wow, this is really a first. However, ABC's reality show "Wife Swap" has a local environmentalist/unschooler/and just plain cool person on this week. She was Asa's violin teacher for years and if any environmentalist could walk into an overconsuming American's home (let alone one who thinks junk food is "more nutritious" and has 5 cars, all of them SUVs and big trucks) and handle it with grace and aplomb, it's Melanie. We watched it tonight and my kids were really jazzed to see the show and were cheering her on (as she installs a bidet and forbids them to use toilet paper and asks them to sell an SUV, LOL) and we were all happy that the producers seemed to play it pretty even-handedly and let the people speak for themselves. The other mom was, well, just not very nice. At all. And not very happy. And prefers her dogs to interacting with other people, including her husband and son. So their situations really did speak for themselves.

I thought Melanie and her partner Rob and son Skye did an excellent job of repeatedly bringing up the reasons for their lifestyle choices in a mostly respectful manner. On many stations it airs on Wednesday night, so heads up if you want to catch a little bit of environmentalism invading ABC's prime time!

The Power of Change

The kids and I went on a walk next to a big park by the river here. Halfway up the trail we heard this screeching from the top of a tree. When we came out on top of the little butte, we saw this: an eagle's nest, and the screeching was from a baby eagle inside! There is a pair of nesting bald eagles, less than a mile from downtown in our city.

Sometimes as an environmentalist, it is easy to become hopeless, but when I was looking at that eagle's nest it got me thinking about how things can change. Many people worked together to protect the bald eagle and bring it back from the endangered brink of extinction. And now today we can hear baby bald eagles practically on our doorstep and see their parents soaring over the playground at a local park on their way to catching fish in the river.

Grow Don't Mow

One thing I love about my town is how it's okay to be unconventional. Certainly there are areas where perfect suburban lawns stretch identically to the curb, bordered by bark and carefully pruned shrubs (I remember driving up to one such location when we were house-hunting, and telling our real-estate agent to just drive away! I couldn't see myself living there). But there are lots of funky, fun parts of town where people feel free to get creative with their gardens. Many of them have lovely perennial beds, arbors spilling over with purple wisteria blossoms, and friendly patios and porches. But others have taken front-yard gardening to new heights with productive vegetable beds, even growing gorgeous cucumbers in the space betweeen sidewalk and curb.

















Here's a front yard with rows of corn and blueberry plants. An amazing amount of produce can be grown in the space that a current front lawn takes up. I recently read an article about how the city I live in has enough farmland to completely support the produce needs of our own population. But really, we wouldn't need all that farmland for produce if people make use of the space they already have available to them. Of course, with grocery-store prices still artificially low for trucked-in food, due to still-low gas prices, people will not want to uproot their lawns for food production. But I'm betting by the time we see an explosion in food prices as gasoline doubles or triples in cost, "Grow Don't Mow" will become a new mantra for many.

















This is one of my favorite local house-front gardens. They've planted tall bean trellises in such a way that it forms an outdoor room in front of their house. It's really gorgeous - they have a picnic table inside this wonderful bean-enclosed green room. What a clever idea!

















And some people even go so far as to giving away their curb-side produce for free. Talk about community-building and sharing. Isn't this awesome! Combine this with the insane number of fruit trees that are abundantly producing this year (and all the fruit rotting on the ground around the city, which is sad to see) and so many more people could be eating healthy, home-grown produce.
















Since we live in an area of the city where deer wander boldly into our front lawns, the grow-don't-mow approach doesn't work well for the front of our house, and I'm restricted to growing perennials that the deer don't touch, plus a few assorted herbs that they don't seem to care for (fennel, chives, parseley, mint) and save our food-growing for the fenced-in back yard. So I love to wander and look at what other people down in the deer-free parts of the city are doing.

102 and No Air Conditioning

Though our local paper said people without air conditioning were "suffering" and "miserable", we were amazingly comfortable in yesterday's heat. In years past, 97 has been about the cut-off for air conditioning use, and we've turned it on for the few days it's climbed above that number each summer. But this year we're employing even more heat-beating strategies and I wasn't even tempted to turn the heat pump on yesterday! The town I grew up in regularly saw summer temperatures in the nineties and hundreds and we never had air conditioning, so I'm mostly using the same concepts I grew up with to beat the heat:

- We bought honeycomb insulated blinds for more of our windows this winter, with plans to install even more of them this year.

- At night, we open the blinds and all of the windows and let the cooler air wash through the house.

- In the early morning, I open up all of the doors as well and really chill it down as best as we can.

- As soon as the temperature starts rising outside, the house gets buttoned up tight and the blinds get closed. We try to be vigilant about not leaving doors open when people go in or out.

- We've changed over to "siesta schedule" where we get all of our outdoor chores (laundry, gardening) done in the cooler morning and evening hours, as well as outdoor play time for the kids. From about 2 - 5 we come in and head down to the nice cool basement to watch a movie or play games. Then we're outside until 10:00 at night, enjoying the nice temperatures.

- Alternative to indoor siesta is head to pool or lake or river!

- When it starts cooling down in the evening and we head outdoors, we open up the house again.

- Deciduous trees on the south and east sides of the house provide much cooler temperatures. The west is our only bugaboo with one big west-facing window that's not shaded by a tree (the neighbor's house is too close for us to plant one there. But we put some good shades on it this year and that has helped a lot.

Though the temperature outside was 102, our house never climbed above 83 (upstairs) 78 (main floor) and a wonderful 64 in the basement! By evening, it was cool enough to sleep upstairs. Nice!

The Neighborhood Ambassador

So we planted too much lettuce. Way too much lettuce. My hubby ended up taking out about half of it, and then what do you do with a sink full of lettuce (and a few earwigs)? Have a Great Lettuce Giveaway, of course! Miss A. volunteered to take lettuce to everyone in the neighborhood, so I washed and bagged and she headed out on runs to the various neighbors' houses. All in all, she delivered about six or seven lettuce bundles (hey, at least it wasn't zucchini, all right?).

That's one thing I really value about her, she knows how to reach out to other people. In that way, she's a lot like her dad. I've noticed that he always remembers people's names, and makes a habit of using their name in conversation, even if it is just the person at the hotel reservations desk in Dallas, Texas, I'll hear him say "Okay, thanks for helping me David". It's one of the things I really like about him and wish I could do better (well, I wish peoples' names would just stick in my head for starters. I once, famously, forgot my own manager's name at work and we had worked together for over six years at that point). But when it comes to maintaining neighborhood relationships, no one tops Miss A. We had a Solstice campfire (not big enough to really call it a bonfire), and she walked around inviting the neighbors. And I'm not just talking about kids, she'll walk over to houses with only adults and invite them over. She knows all the adults by name, and is more than happy to talk with them. As a result, we had neighbors come to our Solstice gathering that I hadn't seen in awhile and had the opportunity to catch up with what they're doing now.

I think when discussions turn to sustainability that building and maintaining community is often not given the attention that it deserves. Sure, it's all the rage to think about forming an intentional community. And some of them do get formed and some of them are succesful in the long-term, which is terrific. But beyond that, for those of us who are not going to uproot and move to a created community, nurturing the relationships with the people who live close to us is important, and something we don't often take the time for. Sometimes it takes a kid to remind us of the importance of reaching out to others. Of not being embarassed to go knocking on doors. Even to hand out bunches of lettuce.

Gleaning Time

When I was a kid, my mom was not shy about approaching people. Oftentimes, this was to my teenage mortification as she would actually talk to the person in front of us in the grocery line while I just wanted to curl up and fade away. But she was also not afraid to ask other people things that most people would not. Like "I see you've got a plum tree that no one is picking. Would you mind if we picked some of your plums?" I grew up in a big agricultural valley, so a bountiful harvest of fruits grew there that often fell to the ground, and my mom was not going to let that go to waste. We come from a long line of pioneer spirits (not to mention Depression-era survivors), and there's nothing more egregious than wasting anything, especially if it's edible. So we once gleaned 200 pounds of peaches from an orchard that had already been picked. And I once discovered containers of plums (from that unpicked tree) in our freezer, a decade after they'd been cut up and placed in old plastic margarine tubs for cold storage.

So when our new neighbors didn't look like they were going to pick the amazing harvest of cherries on the tree in their front yard, I didn't think twice about asking them if we could pick. And pick we have. And pick, and pick, and pick. I've put up about 12 quarts of cherries so far, and we've barely touched the tree. I only have a smallish ladder and the top 2/3 of the tree is quite literally going to the birds, but we've got cherries galore and they are simply gorgeous. So today I'm thankful for my thrifty German and Scottish ancestors, and for my forward-thinking mom who set such a good example (even if it embarassed me at the time) of not letting something go to waste when a simple question might yield a bounty.

Speaking of Lost Arts

On the subject of knowledge-keepers is our neighbor Steve. On sunny days, instead of the roar of a riding lawn-mower from the field behind our fence is the steady swish, swish, swish of his scythe. It's really impressive how fast he can mow down a pretty large area with this device. But there's more to it than just learning how to swing it. Scythe blades need to be sharp to be effective, and sharpening them correctly is an art unto itself. Most of us these days don't have to know how to keep a really good edge on a blade. Unless we compete in lumberjack competitions or are top-knotch chefs, chances are the art of honing a blade has been lost on us. It's interesting how many words and phrases in our common vernacular still come from this skill. "Sharp", "keen" or "well-honed" as descriptors all come to us courtesy of the ancient need to know how to keep one's blade with a good cutting edge.

Though not as commonly used for cutting vegetation as it was in former years, the scythe remains a part of our cultural mythos in phrases like "You reap what you sow" and of course the Grim Reaper. Most of us are familiar with the image of the Reaper and his soul-harvesting scythe. Apparently, the earliest reference to this ghoulish guy in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from Longfellow in 1839: "There is a Reaper whose name is Death, and, with his sickle keen...". From Longfellow to Billy and Mandy, the "Grim Reaper" has only apparently borne that name for a few decades (though "Grim Death" goes back a few centuries more). Death had also long been associated with the turning of the year to autumn (time of harvest) and then to winter, so it made sense that death came in the form of a "reaper" who harvested souls. It's interesting how much the cycles of the land were intertwined with the human life cycle and its mythology and imagery.

Just in doing a little research on scything, I also came across some pages on scything competitions. Who knew such a thing existed? It seems that there are more than a few people dedicated to passing on the knowledge of how to cut something down without first pouring fossil fuel into an engine behind the blades. Steve assures me that almost everything one might want to know about scything can be found at ScytheConnection.com which seems like a great resource for a resurgence of this not-quite-lost art.

Knowledge-Keepers

My husband and I were talking the other day about how much knowledge has been lost in the last generation or two, knowledge that probably took hundreds of years to originally accumulate and was routinely passed down until just recently. He wants to try canning some stuff from our garden this summer and said that his mom knew how to can, but neither he nor any of his siblings ever learned. I've been more fortunate in my upbringing. Sometimes I feel like I grew up in two different centuries. There was the century where we gardened, picked, and gleaned much of our fruits, vegetables, and nuts, canned, froze, and dried them, bought eggs and milk from neighbors (at one point in my childhood, our milk even came in glass bottles delivered to our door), and my mom and grandma sewed, knitted, and darned socks; and then there was the century where I played guitar in a punk rock band and ate at Pizza Hut. Because I lived close to my grandparents and because my parents and grandparents carried on traditions passed on to them, I have a lot more knowledge of the essential basics of sustainable living than most people my age.

It's not just knowledge about specific techniques (like canning or sewing) that get passed on though, it's an entire human database of details that encompass a way of life that used to be much more in touch with the land, the seasons, the sun, and the rain, and all things that grow or live on the earth. Our new neighbors just moved into the house next door. They seem like very nice people, but the first thing they did was to chop down the huge and beautiful Japanese Maple on the south side of the house, take out the large and flourishing grapevine on the arbor over the windows, and trim all of the lower branches off of the cherry tree in the front yard which is completely laden with cherries. I'm not kidding when I say there must've been a gallon or two of not-quite-ripe cherries just on the branches they whacked off, lying there on the ground. It's enough to make a gleaner cry!

Now, no one in my family would ever even think about cutting down deciduous trees on the south side of a house, nor would they take out a mature fruit-bearing vine, nor would they trim a tree harshly while it is fruiting (and not just for the loss of the fruit, but for the health of the tree). These things just seem wrong to me, but I had to stop my inner rant long enough to examine why something that seems so obviously insane to me does not even bother my new neighbors (who, again, seem like very nice people). I think it is because for most people of my generation, the knowledge of the seasons, the light, the heat, the fruit, the shade and the sun have been lost. They probably don't know that their house will be ten degrees hotter than ours this summer because they've taken out the trees and vines that would've shaded their windows. I can already hear their heat pump running on the day it reached 90, but the interior of our house was still a cool 71 degrees with no heat pump or air conditioning. They will probably go down to the grocery store and buy grapes or cherries while fruit from their own trees lies fallow and the grapevines that shaded their windows get added to the brush heap.

At some point in the future our society will be unable to continue cooling houses with gas or electric power when a shade tree would suffice. I grew up in an area where it routinely reached 100 F in the summers and we never had an air conditioner. I remember opening all the doors and windows in the house overnight, and then in the morning pulling all the shades on windows that got sun, and buttoning the house up to keep the cool air inside. That's how our house now is cooled all summer long, and on the hottest nights we'll be sleeping in the basement. In the winter, I often open up our garage door on sunny days and let the south sun bake the cement garage floor. At night, it radiates the warmth back up into the garage, providing a warm room as added insulation between our living areas and the outside of the house. Eventually, we hope to add a greenhouse room on our south side to make the passive solar process much more efficient, but my makeshift garage heat-sink does quite well in the meantime.

I think a time may be coming when keepers of such knowledge are needed. Those of us who are remembering, re-learning, or improving on ancient knowledge will be as essential to our culture's survival as the tribal storytellers were to theirs. And since much of this knowledge is specific to a certain area, it will be vital to local communities to have people who have accumulated local knowledge for years or even generations. As I stood there dumbfounded when my neighbors described all of their "improvements" to their landscape, I didn't know how to say any of this in a way that might be useful and not come off as criticizing their decisions. So I stayed silent. But maybe there will be a time when this 3rd-generation Oregonian and great-granddaughter of a woman who was born in a sod house on the prairies of South Dakotah will be able to share something of use.

Climbing Back Into My Happy Bubble

Thanks to those of you who commented on my last post, it really helped to hear I'm not alone going through these feelings! I know I read an article a couple of years ago about how the suicide rate is higher among those who consider themselves environmentalists, and I believe it. It is easy to get sucked down into hopelessness, to be overwhelmed by fear or anger, to lose sight of the things that are truly important: family, friends, beauty around us, living in this moment. And I really don't want to become that kind of environmentalist. You know, the doom-and-gloomer who turns all but the most dedicated tree-huggers completely off by preaching, ranting, and railing at the current scenario or at what other people are doing. For one thing, I know that with as much as we do try to do, we're still having a huge impact on the earth. We still drive a car, though so much less than we used to, we haven't given it up. Haven't moved off the grid, haven't eaten a 100 mile diet (though we've eaten plenty of 100 mile meals, and trying to do more all the time.) So I don't feel like I can really be pointing fingers, and I know that's not the path I want to take anyways.

So here and now, I'm going to try to climb back into that happy bubble. After all, the positive energy we put out also has an effect, I really believe that. So I weeded in the garden today and fed the weeds to the chickens, who like to peck through them. I went by our farmer's market and got fresh local strawberries, honey, carrots, and picked some lettuce from our garden for supper. We biked on our tandems to the park and picnicked with friends in the evening hours. Life is good here in the happy bubble

Reconciling Discouragement With Hope

For some reason, it has been really hard for me to write about sustainability since we got back from Southern California a couple of weeks ago. I guess it was just so disheartening being in the land of 12-lane freeways and drive-thru everything, my little happy bubble got popped for awhile. It's easy, when you live where I do, to believe that most people are interested in and striving for sustainability, that people really do think about the consequences of their actions, that change is starting to happen. And perhaps it is, still. I know things have to start at the grassroots level, and I know that every little bit helps and as those little bits join together, real change can happen.

The irony, of course, is not lost on me. We went to Southern California to do the whole Disney thing. The kids love it, I love it, my mom has just retired and hasn't been to Disneyland since I was ten, so she has really been looking forward to going there with the kids. And we totally had a blast. It's almost blasphemy around here to admit that you like Disneyland, but despite the fact that it is a wholly commercialized mecca, I still check my sense of reality at the gate every single time and have a great time. So we were there to soak up the total commercial experience, I don't know why it would be so shocking to encounter everything that goes with that.

I guess it's strange to think how far outside the mainstream norm your everyday life is. We went by a McDonald's one day for lack of time and opportunity to find a different restaurant. Got a meal to go and went down to the beach to eat. I was just shocked when we were done by how much garbage there was left over. Big plastic clamshells from the salads and napkins and boxes and plastic forks and all. And of course not even any recycling to put it in to mitigate even a fraction of it. Taking that big bag of stuff and throwing it in a trashcan felt so awful. It was about as much garbage as our family generates in a week - seriously! And then thinking of that multiplied by all the fast food meals sold in an hour in this country, well, I felt like crying.

So right now I'm trying not to feel hopeless, trying to get back into that happy bubble and do what I know I need to do: change the things I can, work towards bringing change to the world around me, walk on the path I want to be walking on.

Connecting the Dots

The people we buy our goat's milk from let us come out for a visit since the baby goats have been arriving. Of course, the kids jumped at the chance to go out and see the little goats, and it was great to have the opportunity to meet the goats who supply our wonderful milk. I feel so lucky that we made this connection, more or less by an accidental encounter of a friend of ours. The milk from these goats is really a huge step above what we can get in the store, the taste is really amazing and also it's raw and not homogenized and all of that, and to have a connection directly between what you're eating and the people and animals who produce it is something that's somehow greater than I can express. It's such a simple thing, a pattern of connectedness that's much older than our present society, which is perhaps why it feels so right.

The little kids (of the goat variety, not human) ran around and played king of the haystack, and Miss A. had a great time picking up each and every one of them. The farm is at a beautiful place on the river, so peaceful and lovely in the spring sunshine. The kids (human, not goat) engaged in that timeless activity: throwing rocks in the water while I soaked up the late afternoon light. As the day drew to a close and we headed home, I mused that at least for our kids (the human ones, not the goats), food is not an abstraction. We grow it, we buy it from the farmers and beekeepers at the farmer's market, we pick the eggs up from our chickens, and now we get to see and appreciate the goats whose milk graces our table. Food, animals, human connections, it's all a part of re-connecting the dots of an integrated community food web. Just as a side bonus, it's more sustainable and a healthy way to eat and live as well.

It's That Time Again

The new little chickies are out mingling for a couple of hours a day in the big chickens' pen, but in order to let them have this bit of freedom one of us has to hang out down there with them to make sure they don't, well, fly the coop. So it's about time to get out the scissors and clip their wings. I have such mixed feelings about doing this, especially after the way some of our last chickens were killed by a dog. I know that if their wings hadn't been clipped, they could've flown up into the trees (I know this for sure because I saw two dogs chasing wild turkeys on our property and even the big ol' Tom turkey managed to hoist his body up into a tree in time to not be eaten).

I also hate taking away the freedom of flight that must be a wonderful part of being a bird. Maybe I think about this kind of thing way too much, but it makes me sad to remove their ability to lift above the earth just when they're discovering it for the first time. And I know that once I remove that from them, they won't even remember they have it. Our older chickens have molted and grown back their flight feathers, but they never fly anymore. I don't think know that they can.

On the other hand, we live in an urban environment, and it's a blessing at all to have the chickens. I don't want to aggravate the neighbors with chickens flying in to decimate their vegetable gardens, and I know that we're lucky to be able to keep them here at all since many other cities don't allow people to have chickens. So I'll go out with the scissors and feel a bit sad as I remove their flight feathers, and then probably feel relieved that I don't have to babysit the chickens and they can at least roam freely within their large pen.

Bicycling Ride of Silence, May 16

On May 16 at 7:00 pm in locations all over the United States and in several other countries, a Ride of Silence will be held in honor of those who have been injured or killed while cycling on public roadways.

I am planning to do this ride, probably with the kids. I think it's a good idea to bring attention to this issue during Bike Safety Month (May). As someone who puts a couple thousand miles a year on various bicycles the issue of cyclist safety is never far from my mind, especially after the death of a local triathlete in May of last year in a collision with a truck on a commonly-ridden cycling route.

More information is available at the http://www.rideofsilence.org/

Now THIS Is An SUV

A friend of mine said that the other day she was biking home on her tandem (after dropping her daughter off at a class) and several people commented on her empty back seat. I have had this experience too, when I am around town with the tandem stoker's seat unoccupied. An editorial in a local newspaper said something recently like "We've noticed that there are lots of people riding around town without a person on the back of the tandem. What's up with that?" So, just out of curiousity, when was the last time somebody said to you "Hey, I noticed you drove here with three empty seats. Where are your passengers?" (which, now that I think about it, is a much more relevant question!)I think bicycles have reached the point in many people's minds of purely being recreational vehicles: something you take out when you need exercise, go ride, and put back away.

Bicycles are transportation too! Especially for those of us with kids who don't feel comfortable with them riding on busy streets behind or ahead of us. It would only take one distracted swerve in front of a fast-moving truck, or a failure to notice the car pulling out of the driveway for a catastrophe to occur. On the tandem, we're all riding on my line, and at least I have some control over that.

And on that note, I'm not sure how current this is, but this legislation just came to my attention from the League of American Bicyclists Bike Advocacy Center. It is seeking to amend the IRS tax code to extend the transportation fringe benefit to bicycle commuters. It might seem like a small thing, but it's really about time that bicycles are reintroduced into the public consciousness as the vehicles that they are. When I used to commute to work on my bike in the city of Redmond, Wa (suburb of Seattle and the self proclaimed "Bicycling Capitol of the Northwest" - hah!) I would rarely see another cyclist on the roads. No surprise as much of my commute was on streets with no bike lanes, sharing the road with drivers who were either unused to cyclists, or openly antagonistic (that .05 nanoseconds it takes to go around a bicycle can really put a dent in your commute, can't it). But I hear that Seattle is going to increase their bike lanes by 800%, from a paltry 25 miles to over 200. According to the article I read, the plan "anticipates a huge increase in recreational and commuting bicyclists" which can be nothing but good news for health, environment, and of course the looming spectre of climate change.

So for those of us riding on the original sport utility vehicles, hopefully the winds of change are blowing our way (at our backs of course).

Teenage Chickens

Our baby chicks are now teenagers, with most of their adult feathers and a few of their fluffy baby feathers still sprouting out here and there. They look gangly and awkward, and they have attitudes, just like human teens. Cleopatra (not pictured here, but she has black "eyeliner" around each eye) is emerging as the leader of the flock, pecking me whenever I get too close and challenging everyone else to regular "chicken jousts" (where they run at each other and then flap up in a fury of wings). Sapphire, my daughter A's Blue Andalusian (the greyish blue one on the left) is the sweetheart of the bunch, and Bingo (the creamy colored one) and Ra (all black) seem to be the group's brightest bulbs.

They're starting to fly around a bit, which makes things interesting when I'm trying to put food into their feeder and not have fledglings flapping around the garage. Their chicken instincts are solidly in place, a recent visit by an overflying raven caused them all to freeze in mid-peck for at least a minute until the threat was gone. All in all, they're endless entertainment as they grow and change.

Forest Reborn

When we bought the 1/3 acre adjoining our house, the man who owned it (a building contractor) had stored a bunch of his leftover stuff out there. Buckets, hoses, boards with rusting nails, pipes, all covered by a thick carpet of ivy that was climbing high up the tree trunks and choking the smaller trees. The kids couldn't play out there, it was too dangerous, and anyways you couldn't really run around without getting tangled up in the ivy. Every year I dreaded the winter season when the leaves would retreat from trees and bushes, slowly revealing all of the junk on the ground out there (normally from our windows, you see nothing but a view of glorious green), and the view of the junkyard would stay until spring's leaves covered it back up again.

Last year, my husband took on the herculean task of removing all of the garbage. Gigantic piles of stuff were hauled away, and he cut the ivy down from the trees. I pulled a lot of it out by hand (until, despite precautions, I got my annual case of Horrifyingly Awful Poison Oak), and this year of course we raked leaves over as much as we could.


This spring, a transformation is taking place. Wildflowers are popping up everywhere. Fawn lillies (Erythronium) are covering the ground, and we even have two trillium! Since trillium seeds can take seven years to germinate, making them hard to get going on your own, this is pretty exciting. Down by the creek, whole phalanxes of camas bulbs are sprouting, and I'm excited to see what turns up next on our little bit of forest that is coming back to life.

Tired of the Solar Run-around

Twice now we have committed fully to buying a solar system and twice it has not ended up on our roof. This last time, we actually had the panels in our basement, waiting to go up. Both times, we've been stymied by the lack of professionalism in the solar industry. Why is it that when we wanted to look into getting a new heat pump, we call the heat pump specialists in town, they set up an appointment, the guy shows up precisely at the time he says he will, takes a look at our system, gives us a run-down on what we need, and a bid with a solid date we can have the new system in place; yet when you start delving into the world of "alternative" energy, when you commit many thousands of dollars to a solar system, the guys from the solar company don't give you a straightforward bid, can't commit to a date, and never return your phone calls (the first time, six months went by without a phone call).

If you ask me, alternative energy will never gain credibility until the people working in the field stop running on rainbow time and start acting like professionals. Now I'm all for stopping to smell the roses and carpe diem and getting all Thich Nhat Han in the moment, but for heaven's sake not when someone is trying to depend on you to be reliable, straightforward, honest, and hardworking.

Right now, I'm just very very frustrated, and I still have no solar panels on my roof. We are researching the whole do-it-yourself angle, but then of course you don't get many of the monetary kickbacks from the utility (conveniently, their "approved" people have to put it in and certify it in order to get the monetary credits). We can definitely get a solar hot water gizmo on the roof by ourselves for cheap enough that it doesn't matter, but the solar PV is another story. My next research project will be looking into wind power.

Just Me and My Peeps

I have to smile whenever I hear someone use the word "peeps" these days (as slang for friends) because that's what I've always called our baby chicks. I had this wonderful idea to get out one of our Easter basket, pile all of our peeps into it, and take a cute photo with the kids on the lawn. Unfortunately, the peeps had other ideas and they all popped out of the basket, and ran around the lawn with subsequent pandemonium ensuing as we tried to gather them all back up (the little boogers are fast already!) But we did manage to take this photo while each holding one of them. I have no idea how those professional photographers get pictures of babies with bunnies and cute little fluffy chicks. Maybe drug them? I don't know, maybe our chicks are more active than the standard photographic fare, but it was fun anyhow.

How to Get Energy Efficient in a Hurry

Thankfully my family watched a movie in the basement the other night. And also thankfully my husband fell asleep downstairs and I wisely decided to not disturb him to come up to bed. I say thankfully because that was the night our hot water heater decided to give up the ghost and start leaking gobs of rusty water all over the place. My light-sleeping hubby managed to get up and turn off the water, mop everything up (albeit with some nice bath towels that are now destined for the dustbin), and avert a total disaster. But now we need a new hot water heater.

For years, we've been looking longingly at the tankless or on-demand systems. We first encountered them in Tanzania over a decade ago and wondered why we'd never seen anything so smart in the USA. Over here, we apparently think it's a good idea to keep warming gigantic tanks of water and expend electricity to keep them warm even when no one is using them. Eventually, we saw some gas on-demand heaters come out, but our house isn't hooked up to gas and we don't really want to do so. Now they have electric tankless water heaters that will manage enough water volume for a whole house, so that's what we're researching today. It's not an expenditure we were planning on making right now, but since opportunity has presented itself, it's a good time to get more energy efficient. Many of the new heaters will also work well with a solar hot water system when we eventually get one, so that's a big bonus as well.

Not Much Cuter Than New Chicks

We got our new layer chicks this week, and there's not too many things cuter on this earth than holding a new little baby puffball in your hands. We all got to pick out a couple, so we have Aracaunas, Black Sexlinks, a Blue Andalusian and a Brown Leghorn. Should be an interesting mix of chickens! The peepers are out in the garage for now with a heat light, and I need to get our old chicken tractor back from a friend to use when they get bigger, until they're ready to join the older ladies in the coop.

I'm glad that the chicks arrived at our Feed-n-Seed store, because it's been a dark week otherwise. We had to put our beloved 14 year old dog Sabre to sleep this week. Even as old and gimpy as he was at the end, he always got up in the morning and evening to check the chickens with me. He was a shepherd through and through, and his working dog ethic never failed. Even after our other chickens were attacked by the neighbor's dog, they were never afraid of Sabre. He was a gentle and sweet soul, and we will really miss him. I've been having a pretty hard week of it, and posted some on my other blog about all of that. My husband gave me Sabre in the first year after we met, so he's been with us for our entire married life, and the kids have known him through their whole lives too. He went everywhere and did everything with us, so there's a pretty big hole in our lives right now. I know it will get easier with time.

In other good news, stay tuned for some possibly exciting news about our solar panels!

Being Fit and Energy Consumption

We had a guy from the local Heating company over last week to look at our heat pump. We're considering getting it replaced with a more efficient (and quieter!) model at some point, and wanted him to evaluate our whole system and how it was working for the house. We did get some great information about new energy efficient models of heat pumps and air circulators, and we'll be putting that on the list of things we'd like to upgrade when time/money becomes available to do so (also on the list: solar panels, solar greenhouse, rainwater storage system... the list goes on).

The heating guy told us something interesting though, while he was here. We talked about our current heat pump usage and mentioned that we keep our thermostat set at 58 - 60 degrees and he said that we could only really do that because we are all very fit and healthy people in this family. Because we all exercise regularly, our metabolisms run at a fairly high rate, keeping us warmer than more sedentary humans. When we do something sedentary like watching a movie together in the evenings, we bundle under the blankets and keep warm that way.

It's always interesting to me how everything goes in circles. We eat healthy, which makes it possible for us to have lots of energy. Because we have lots of energy, we can lead very active lifestyles. Because we have sustainability as a goal, we tend to bicycle and walk a lot, and we garden and work outside as well. This in turn makes us healthier, more resistant to disease, and even allows us to keep our thermostat lower, which saves us money and furthers our goals of sustainability and using our resources wisely. It all comes around.

So here's to a daily walk or bike ride, keep those (internal human) fires burning!

Feels Like Spring: Time for Big Plans

We've had unseasonably warm weather here, and spring fever is setting in. The seed catalogs have arrived, I've got new bulbs in the ground, my husband built up our garden boxes so they can be deeper for this year's garden, and I've got about half of the massive leaf pile moved off of our second garden space. We're also hoping to build a solar greenhouse addition on to the front of our house this year, giving us some indoor gardening and seed-starting space, some passive solar heating, and an entryway/solarium to enjoy on those cold winter days.

In the next six weeks, we should also be getting some baby chicks to fill out our flock again, and the kids are very excited about that. Now the sun is shining and it's time to go muck out the chicken coop (one of my least favorite jobs) and move some more leaves.

When Values Collide

The other day was beautifully sunny and almost warm (if you didn't stand in the shade too long). The kids wanted to go to the park with some friends. However, their friends couldn't make it unless we drove (some had parents who were busy, others don't have a car and didn't want to bike). My kids didn't mind biking, but really wanted their friends there and didn't really want to hang out at the park without them. Thus begins yet another dilemma where the values of sustainability and meeting my kids needs and desires collide. There are many such times: when my son wants that new cool Lego set, or there's a great exhibit at the science museum a hundred miles away, a toy that can only be found in The Big Box Store That Shall Not be Named, or a desire for red licorice, a food containing almost nothing but artificially colored high fructose corn syrup.

Recently, on a discussion list, a parent-to-be was detailing their plans for living sustainably on a farm with their (future) kids, raising dairy goats and creating wooden toys that their children would delight in playing with. I was swept with a feeling of nostalgia because I remember clearly our own dreams and how neatly they played out in the imagination and planning, yet how incredibly complex they are to implement in reality. One of the great gifts that children bring to your life is the knowledge that most of what you thought was absolute is, in fact, malleable.

When we were pregnant with our first child, we lived on four acres of beautiful land in Washington state. In my mind, the kids would romp around our acreage and play with natural toys and make tree forts while I blissfully smiled over them while weeding in my organic garden or writing. Except that when the kids came along, we discovered that they had different plans for us.

Our kids are extremely gregarious. They're extremely active. They wanted to be part of groups and do activities. Where we were living was very isolated. To get to any other homeschoolers we had to drive 10 - 25 miles. The roads weren't safe for bicycling with kids and no one cycled there. I started being the mom driving the car all day, and my sustainable dream went up in smoke. I had barely any time to garden. The last year we lived there, I had put 20,000 miles on my car just driving 40 or 50 miles most days to take the kids places. Sure, we could've held the kids hostage on the organic farm, but that's not the unschooling lifestyle we had chosen, it's about helping our kids explore the world and explore their passions. So we picked up and moved. We now live right in a city, something I thought I would not be doing (I'm a born and bred country girl), but we can walk and bike everywhere. The kids are busier than ever, visiting their unschooling friends, being active in all the things they love to do. We managed to find a house with a semi-forested lot next door that was undeveloped, so we have a small bit of our dream, but we can't have the horses and goats I envisioned.

The bottom line is that for us, all of our dreams and passions in our family are important, not just those of the adults. That means finding balance between the kids needs and our values, between the kids activities and time for things we want to do, between busy time and quiet time, nutritious foods and red licorice. And yes, I drove the van to the park that day, but then bicycled to work myself that evening. It's all about the balance.

Now That's An Omelette

Since we're down to only two chickens, I've had to use storebought eggs a lot more this year. While I always use free-ranging organic eggs, after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, I'm not under any impression that they are actually from real free-ranging chickens (as in running around outside, as opposed to simply not being in tightly confined cages). They used to seem just fine, and compared to the anemic, pale and flabby regular white eggs from abused and confined chickens, they're definitely a remarkable step up. But they're still nothing like eggs from our own chickens.

Today I had a few eggs from our own chickens to make this omelette with and wow, look at the color! I wish I'd taken a photo of one from the store eggs because it's so strikingly different. And you can hardly get the yolks from our chicken eggs to collapse, they're so firm you have to poke them repeatedly with a fork. Chickens fed on grass (like our little lawnmowers) have the highest levels of Omega-3s in their eggs, so I'm not surprised our eggs are so lovely. By comparison, the regular mass-produced, production agriculture chicken egg that most Americans buy has an Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acid ratio of 20:1. Professional dietitians recommend a ratio of 1:1 and definitely no higher than 4:1, Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acids. Now that's scary: 20:1!!

These days, with so few chickens, I usually save the eggs from our own ladies for the kids to eat, and do my best to get local eggs (which are hard to find and much in demand) or the "free-range Omega-3" eggs from the store for us adults. Still, I'm really looking forward to the day when we have a big flock of layers again and plentiful beautiful yellow eggs for all of us.

First Time Playing Tag

I've been tagged by Jenny at Ironwood Farm. I'm supposed to list six weird things about me, then tag six people. This is going to be tough, because anyone who knows me knows that my life so far has been far from normal. You know, narrowing all those oddities down to only six might take some serious thought. Here goes:

1. I once lived in a beer vat

2. I have a legendary ability to endure pain (so much so that I worried I wouldn't know when I was going into labor with my first child, as it turned out it was a very founded worry)

3. My mother has sung on stage in a chicken suit. My dad has worn a pink tutu in public and danced to "Glow Little Glowworm". My grandma once ran out of gas dressed like a bunny rabbit. (I come from a theatre family and long line of nutcases!)

4. I still have the tattoo from my days as the guitar playing, mohawk-wearing frontwoman for a punk rock band

5. I can see in the dark (I was once pulled over for driving at night with no lights on, and I was still wearing my sunglasses) and can hear bats, flourescent lights, and other high-pitched noises.

6. I can bend all of my fingers at the top knuckle only.

I'm going to tag: Karen, Doc, Cheryl, Wendy, Danielle, and Christy

How to Support Alternative Transportation Even if You Drive

There are times when many of us drive cars, even those who are very dedicated to non-fossil fuel transportation. Our cities, schedules, lives are not set up to run at the pace in which all of society existed before fossil fuels. This makes it difficult to, say, get from a class on one end of town to an activity on the other end in 15 minutes.

And then there are those people who have no intent of getting around in any other way but a car, but are starting to become aware of fossil fuels issues. Climate change is becoming a heavily discussed topic, thanks in no small part to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Meanwhile, many people who would like to walk or bicycle to work, or take their kids to school in this manner, do not feel that it is safe to do so.

So for all of us who may find themselves in a large, fuel-driven, fast-moving hunk of metal, here's some things you can do to still make your community pedestrian and bicycle friendly:

1. Stop at crosswalks for pedestrians. In my state at least, this is defined as any intersection, whether it has a marked crosswalk or not. Many drivers don't know this. However, even when standing with my kids, even at a marked crosswalk, even in a $#%! school crossing zone, at least 75% of the cars zoom on through the crosswalk without slowing down or stopping.

2. If a pedestrian is crossing the street, don't nudge your car forward on their heels. This feels intimidating and downright frightening to pedestrians, and really folks it's not going to get you to your meeting any quicker. Leave home earlier if time is such a big issue that the five nanoseconds you gain from putting a young child's life in danger is that important to you.

3. Give cyclists plenty of room. Many people say they would be more inclined to bicycle for transportation if they felt safer on the roads. Cars crowding cyclists is a recipe for disaster.

4. Remember that a cyclist in most places is entitled to take up a full lane of traffic. We don't often do that, prefering to be as courteous to drivers as we can. Please give us the same courtesy: if you have to wait behind us for a few seconds in a stretch of road where it's too narrow to get past safely, remember that you could be (legally) waiting behind us the entire time. It is our right to the road, same as yours.

Taking the time to be courteous and safe with pedestrians and cyclists encourages more people to make use of these transportation methods. Really, I wish everyone who could do so was required to walk or bike at least one trip a week. I think if they took the time to see the world from the perspective of a small body relative to large hurtling chunks of metal, they would be safer and more courteous drivers. If for some reason you can't walk or bike, make sure that the streets and sidewalks are safe for those who do.

Chicken Heroics

I was working in the yard yesterday and had let the ladies out to wander around (they're especially happy when I'm raking on the big leaf pile, because they get to poke around for the bugs I stir up.) After awhile, one of them went back in to the nest box to lay, and the other accompanied her in as she often does. Ten minutes later, I had a worried-looking hen (don't ask me how I knew) at my heels, trying to get my attention. As I turned around, she headed back toward the coop, looking over her shoulder in what I swear was a "follow me" expression. So I followed her back down, where she promptly jumped up into the nest box beside her companion and lay her beak on her friend's back.

I could hear that the other chicken was making some odd sounds every thirty seconds or so, and it seemed as if she was having trouble getting an egg out, so I trooped back up to the house and Googled (I swear) "Chicken egg stuck". That's when I discovered that this is an actual condition called being "egg bound." I had no idea as none of our hens ever had trouble when they started laying (when, apparently, this is much more common). One website mentioned that if chickens are really cold this can be more common, and since the temperature here has been well below freezing, that might've been it. Unfortunately, I also discovered that being egg bound is a serious condition that often results in death. I don't think I could stand it if another chicken died this year, so I was willing to go to heroic lengths to help this one out.

The "surefire cure" recommended on various websites was to give the chicken a warm bath. Now, that's easier said than done and since this is our fiestiest chicken, I had my doubts as to the feasibility of such an endeavor, but when I picked her up she came agreeably enough and we went up to the house and into the bathroom. Ten minutes in a warm bath didn't produce any eggs, but the chicken seemed like she was in a lot less distress at least. There were some funny moments as she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, trying to figure out where the other chicken was.

According to the chicken experts, I was also supposed to...um... lube up the "vent" area (they actually recommend KY jelly) to facilitate slipperiness and egg expulsion. Here's where I started to feel a bit James Herriot-ish, since I recall he always had a hand up some animal or another. But, being the urban farmwife that I now am, I gave it a try. Fortunately, I could feel the egg right there, so I had a hunch that she'd be okay.

By this time it was getting dark and almost time for me to head to work. My husband didn't want to try carrying the chicken back down (I'm sure he was having flashbacks to the last time he tried to catch a chicken, an act that provided much amusement for the entire neighborhood). But she was far too wet to take out in such cold. The answer? A hair dryer. I never use one, so I had to dig around awhile to find it, but eventually we were blow-drying the chicken (oh I wish I had a photo of this), and could return her to the coop, warm and at least more comfortable.

Within an hour, she'd laid the egg and all's well that ends well. The things that most impressed me from this little escapade were the sweet way that Dingbat (one of our hens) came and got my attention to go help her friend, and how sweet our fiesty little Hera was as I tried to help her. Also, my continuing education as a keeper of chickens and perhaps even Hairdresser to the Poultry World.

A River (of Leaves) Runs Through It

The premise is this: take 1/3 acre of property, formerly covered with junk and invasive ivy, one gigantic leaf pile (10 large dump truck loads of leaves), spread leaves evenly over property, hopefully killing or at least weakening ivy and blackberries and enriching the soil. Some of this area will be our second garden, and some will just be fun areas for the kids to romp around in down by the creek, and maybe I'll plant a couple of fruit trees in the sunnier spots. I've been doing an hour or two a day on the leaf pile every day this week since the weather has been balmy. I'm starting to make at least a small dent in it, I've probably moved at least one to two dump truck loads by hand so far, and my hands have the callouses to prove it!

This photo is taken from the top of the leaf pile, showing the river of leaves flowing outward and down the slope. It reminds me a bit of Lava Butte, over by Bend, Oregon. From the top of the butte, you can see the lava flows spiraling outwards just as if they flowed out yesterday.

The CPC Catalog

When I get catalogs in the mail, I've learned that the absolute best thing for me to do with them is put them straight into the recycling bin (actually, the best is to keep trying to get off the mailing lists, but second best is recycling them). Otherwise, if I start leafing through them, I invariably see something that ten minutes ago I didn't know that I absolutely needed to have. It's the same reason I rarely go to malls, department stores, or big box stores. Who needs to see all that stuff you don't have and probably shouldn't buy?

The kids, unfortunately, have become catalog addicts. Before these bits of mind-sucking consumerism can even make it from counter to recycling, they are flipping the pages relentlessly, only to pause momentarily to utter that chilling phrase: "I want that." The same thing happened when we were on vacation and we watched TV that you couldn't fast forward through the commercials. Every 15 minutes, a chorus of "I want that" would issue forth from the small beings on the hotel bed.

Now, I'm not opposed to the kids getting things that they want and love. Like any unschooling parent, I support their inquisitiveness, their joy in play, and their need to learn what they like and don't like, what lasts and doesn't last, through their own experiences. As an environmentalist though, I have to admit that this is one of those places where values clash. The thought of buying more and more and more new Stuff, undoubtably manufactured in China from the cheapest possible, least-renewable materials by underpayed workers in sweatshop conditions, and then shipped thousands of oil-fueled miles across the ocean sets my treehugging teeth on edge.

One way that I've been able to embrace these two halves of my value system is that we've given the kids their own money to spend. We don't in any way control their money, and they can use it to make a purchase of something they'll love and cherish and play with for years and years, or something that will fall apart the instant it's out of the box. Over the years, they have done some of each of those things.

The kids do, however, ask my opinion, and they know full well my Scale of Toy Quality. On one end are toys with "Sticking Power": the ability to be enjoyed for a long time, the ability to keep engaging one's brain or heart or relationships. Toys that fall under here have been well-loved stuffed animals, Legos, games, puzzles, yo-yos, musical instruments, dolls, and more. On the other end of the scale from Sticking Power is CPC. For those who aren't offended by the occasional colorful word, that stands for Cheap Plastic Crap (or, since my kids abhor curse words, unlike their sailor-mouth mother, "Cheap Plastic Crud). CPC does nicely for short. We've all seen (and dreaded) these toys - they fall apart instantly, they have insufferably small pieces that get lost almost as quickly, or they simply have limited play power and are quickly tired of and relegated to the dregs of the toy bin with a couple of old thrift-store-purchased Happy Meal toys.

Well, today was one of those Dreaded Days, the day when the Oriental Trading Company catalog (a.k.a. Penultimate Catalog of CPC) arrived. The kids leafed through it with the usual oohs and aahs over the five dozen rubber ducks with assorted accessories, and the flashing spiky plastic ball keychain thingamabobbies, but as time goes by, the oohs and aahs are often followed by "But I'm saving my money for that game I really want". It's nice to know that, even though we've never banned the kinds of toys that I personally abhor, they're able to find their way to their own understanding of what matters to them. That doesn't mean we'll never see another "made in China" label, but I think that the chances are ever-increasing that the objects that are brought into our house are things that the kids will love and cherish.

You Don't Need a Weatherman

Although An Inconvenient Truth came out awhile ago, it seems that the effect is still rippling out in impacts small and large. In several different conversations this week, people have mentioned the movie in the context of things they are doing differently. With the November elections just barely behind us, and the presidential contenders just starting to ramp up, it feels like the weather is finally changing across the USA - you can almost feel the wind blowing from another direction. Here's hoping it's a strong and steady wind, one that will bring real and lasting change.

I sometimes think about all of the little things that we can do, things that are not so very difficult and seem like a drop in the bucket. But if every person chose to do them, the impact would be huge. We've seen this with changes that are already happening. Recycling is a frequently quoted example. It took awhile to get the ball rolling, but now enough people are doing it to make a real difference. If everyone took one car-free day a week, gas consumption and emissions would drop dramatically. Or made a commitment to buy one food locally that they now purchase from a regular store. Or turned their thermostat down two degrees, a barely noticeable amount, took one minute less in the shower, turned off lights they weren't using, installed compact flourescents or energy-saving blinds.

In 2007, I have some very broad goals in mind for sustainability, and some very specific things too. Some of my specifics are:

- One car-free day a week (or more) in the winter, two or more in the summer.
- Drive 500 fewer gas-fueled miles than last year (this has been a goal of mine - that I've met! - for the last few years)
- Join a CSA
- Shop at the Farmer's market every Tuesday in the summer
- Get another set of chicks in the spring, so we can have more home-grown eggs again
- Find a local source for cow's milk
- Glean more fruits and nuts in the fall
- Start canning again this fall
- Another degree down on the thermostat (we've gone from 67 five years ago to 60 now)
- Bring disposable gloves in the car for picking up garbage at beaches and campsites

As we all make New Year's resolutions this time of year, I hope we are all thinking of not just goals for ourselves and our families, but for our planet and its diminishing resources as well.

Persnickety Chickens and the Law of One Million

When I was a new mother, a more seasoned mom once warned me about the "Law of One Million", which says that if you do something for your kids once, like buying them a lollipop in the grocery store checkout line, they will then ask you to do the same thing about one million more times. Her point was think about what you do, because you may be doomed to repeat it (or at least be asked to).

Apparently, the Law of One Million also applies to chickens. I think I have solved my chicken mystery (the little ladies not wanting to go into their coop at night). I, myself, created this particular monster. One night, it was not quite dark, but I had someplace to go so I wanted them to go in just a bit early. So I did the sensible thing (if you discount the Law of One Million), I bribed them with some cracked corn. Now, they have come to see cracked corn in the evening (as well as the morning) as their rightful due, and are refusing to come in unless I once again show them the goodies. They are as stubborn as a toddler holding their breath until they turn blue in the face, waiting out there in the absolute darkness for the corn that they are sure will come.

I've had to introduce them to the concept of Tough Love. In other words, no more bedtime corn. Eventually, they got the point and they are done being persnickety (don't you just love that word? It's the kind of word my grandma would've used). And next time, I will remember the Law of One Million as it applies to avian brains.

Christmas Lite

My husband had the wonderful idea of spending Christmas in a cabin. My sister and brother-in-law, and my mom also rented cabins in a snowy state park, and we had a very cozy Christmas together. We brought some games to play in the evenings, and on Christmas Eve we made felt ornaments together. In the morning, we unwrapped presents from each other, and then went on a hike at this amazing rock in the middle of the desert (I posted photos on my other blog). The kids played on the bunk beds in the cabin, threw snowballs and made snow angels outside, and we all had a fun time.

Nothing Better Than a Good Thrift Store Haul

I went into my favorite thrift store needing to find snow clothes for my biggest kid, the one who, it seems, grows about three inches a day. Nothing makes my day more than being able to find everything I need without ever having to walk into a mall! So check this out: Snow boots, an awesome jacket, ski bibs, and two fleece shirts, all for $27 - less than what one pair of boots would cost new. And all without anything new being added to the planet. So thriftiness and sustainability and the fun of finding a bargain all came together today.

A Car-Free Day

Today was simply beautiful. After a week of freezing weather, it warmed up just enough to feel quite comfortable, and the skies were sunny with big puffy clouds. I biked down to work this morning, and then this afternoon when the kids and I went to go meet our goat milk guy and pick up the milk, we decided to take the tandem/tagalong contraption. Our pickup spot is conveniently just off of the bike path that goes along the creek, so it's a nice ride and we saw lots of ducks, some heron, and nutria on the way.

It is amazing though how much more complicated it is to bike with the kids. First of all, the weather's been so cold and wet that we haven't all biked together in a while. So there's the finding of gloves and helmets and jackets, and panniers, and getting all organized. Then biking with the kids is not terribly speedy, so it takes us half an hour or so to get there, and the same coming back. Something that would take 30 minutes total in a car ends up taking us almost 2 hours. It really makes me appreciate the total convenience that a car gives us to just jump up and go somewhere quickly. On the other hand, if we went in the car, we would've missed the sunshine, the smell of the grass, the herons and wildlife and the fun conversation along the way.

I think one of my goals for the New Year will be a minimum of one car-free day a week. In the summer, we often go days or even a week or more without using the car, but it will be much more challenging in the winter months. Still, a good thing to pursue I think. And then on the days when we do run off somewhere in the car, we'll appreciate it all the more.

The Impact of One Choice

I looked at my big half-gallon mason jar of goat's milk in the refrigerator this morning and contemplated all the ramifications of this one small choice we made in finding a local dairy to buy it from.

Previously, the only way we could buy goat's milk at the store was in one-quart cartons. That meant for every gallon of milk our family drank, four containers went into the recycling bin. Sure, recycling is better than throwing them away, but it still takes a non-negligible amount of resources to truck them to the recycling center and actually recycle them into something else. Now, we have mason jars that we return to the goat farmer to be re-used each time. This also means that somewhere in a factory, they do not need to make four more cartons every week and ship them to the large dairy (in gas-burning trucks on interstates) to be used. Somewhere there is a tree that won't be cut down this year to make our paper milk cartons.

Somewhere, there is a truck that won't need to haul four more milk cartons from California to Oregon. There are gallons of fuel that won't be spent in simply getting my milk from the dairy to my home. There is a big homogenizing machine that won't be fired up to heat my milk up to high temperatures, thus killing all the beneficial antibodies in it as well as any harmful bacteria. Because my milk will come to me within a day of coming out of the goat, we can drink it raw.

There is a local farmer who meets me face-to-face and takes my dollar bills directly from my hand. There is a person-to-person connection being made, and money being kept in our local economy. There is a goat farm somewhere that isn't being turned into a subdivision, a dairy that isn't being subsumed by a large conglomerate. There is land that isn't being turned into pavement and Chem-lawns.

The implications of this one decision spiral outwards in myriad ways that I can't even imagine. My farmer is probably buying hay from a local hay farmer, or growing it himself. The CO2 emissions saved in every step of the long chain in this one small decision are undoubtably higher than I would even guess. Having recently seen An Inconvenient Truth, the repercussions of my decision do not seem trivial to me.

Puzzling Chickens

My chickens are acting weird. They're laying eggs outdoors and refusing to come in at night, preferring to sit out in the freezing cold. I have checked the coop for pests, vermin, mites, and anything else I can think of. I changed all the bedding. What are they afraid of? What is going through their tiny avian brains? If anyone has ever experienced this phenomenon with chickens before, I'd love to know it. The guys at the Feed-n-Seed store (normally my source of fowl information) were mystified. It was cold enough last night to freeze the water in their coop, yet they stubbornly sat outside until I bribed them with some corn.

The Great Chicken Mystery is looking for a solution...

Thinking Globally, Buying Locally

I'm so excited, we finally found another local source of goat's milk. Wow, it tastes so much better than the boxed stuff from the store, is raw, fresh, and not trucked 600 miles to get here. One by one, we're changing the foods we eat from factory/far away to organic, fresh, and local. Just in the last two years we've moved to local eggs (our own chickens), meat, veggies from our garden and the farmer's market, and now milk. Now if I could just figure out a way to grow bananas, chocolate, matte' and coffee, we'd be totally self-sustaining! Maybe our greenhouse...

I wish there was some handy web calculator for how much CO2 you're able to reduce by substituting a local alternative for your foods. I'm sure it's amazing!

Phew! Raking Leaves is Hard Work

Just kidding, I did not rake that entire pile of leaves! Our city has a leaf pickup program, which means all you have to do is rake your leaves into the street and the city comes around and collects them. My only complaint about the program is that it creates a serious hazard for cyclists (the leaves being almost as slippery as an oil slick once they get wet.)

The cool part is that if you want you can have them come and dump whole trucks of leaves on your property. We've gotten about six truckloads delivered so far, and I think we will have plenty of leaves for mulching this year! I'm hoping that maybe if we spread them over the areas we've been trying to pull the oh-so-invasive ivy out of that maybe it will help keep it from sprouting back up in the spring.

I didn't get around to planting a cover crop early enough this fall, so we're going to mulch the garden beds pretty heavily too. I've also used the leaves successfully in my perennial beds out front to keep the spring weeds at bay. And the leaves that are leftover have rendered our regular leaf-dumping area into some of the most fertile crumbly soil on our whole property (which tends toward clay to start with). This summer, we're planning on putting in a deer fence and turning that into the corn patch.

Wishing for a Toxic Chemical Ban

I know this doesn't sit well with everyone, but I sincerely wish that all theatres and public places on the face of the earth would ban cologne. I sat through our daughter's ballet performance last night with my nose itching, eyes watering, knowing that I'd suffer worsening symptoms including a massive headache if I didn't pop a Benadryl as soon as I got home. I know that people just love to smell all flowery or whatever, but for some of us, the ingredients in these scents are horrible allergens to be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, in a tightly packed theatre, avoiding is almost impossible.

Personally, I never understood the need to have people up to twenty feet away be able to smell you coming. I think what happens is that once people start wearing perfume, they stop smelling it. Therefore when they apply what must seem like a reasonable amount, it's overwhelming to the rest of us who don't wear any at all. Kind of like those stores that regular people can walk into, the ones with aisles of scented laundry detergent, another aisle of Glade scented air fresheners, and another aisle of aromatic candles and potpourri. To those of us who spend most of our lives avoiding these artificial fragrances, it's an almost gagging experience.

I've got another performance to sit through tonight and I'd like to really be able to enjoy it. So I'm hoping for a nice bland-smelling person in front of me, not a bouquet of toxic ingredients.

Back in the Saddle Again

After one solid month of experiencing your basic American way of life (sitting too much, driving too much), my foot is finally feeling good enough to use a little bit. So I managed to run today for a short while. Even better, I can bike for transportation again. I biked to work tonight and realized how very much I have missed this. The streets that cyclists use are largely quiet and dark, and in our town have traffic modifications such as selective entry areas that keep them from being heavily used by cars As a funny side note, I kept ending up on these non-car-friendly streets when I was driving, because I'm more used to getting around town on a bike. They are very frustrating to car drivers, but I'm still glad they're there because they make biking around town so much easier!

It's true that the American way of life is so bad for your body. I couldn't believe how much worse it felt to just be sitting all the time (my foot began to ache after even a short time standing.) After just a week of this, my back started hurting, I won't go into details but my entire digestive system changed its operating procedures, even my vision (which is normally great) started giving me headaches from staring and screens and books for so long. It's no wonder we are a nation of people popping pills for back pain, pills for stomach upset, pills for reflux and heartburn, using laxatives and hemorrhoid cream to cure all the ills of a sedentary lifestyle. It's hard to believe, but people willingly choose to live like this, choose to feel like this!

The good news is that it doesn't take much to rid your body of all of these plagues. I'm not exercising at anything near the level I was before getting injured. I still can't swim without using a floatie for my legs (I can't kick), and I can bicycle a bit, on flats and around town. I did manage to run one mile yesterday without foot pain, so I have hope for that as well. But just the minimal amount of movement I am now able to do has banished most of my sedentary symptoms. More than anything, I'm happy not to be dependent on a vehicle for even a short trip to the store. It was really eye-opening not to be able to even stroll down to the corner market, and made me appreciate the wonders of my body's basic abilities even more.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I just finished reading this book and, as with all great non-fiction, am champing at the bit to discuss it with people I know. Of my friends in real life, they're all on the waiting list at the library for the book (I was too, but got too impatient to wait). So I'm going to have to pass my copy around and have more patience while they read it before we can talk about it. The Crunchy Unschoolers list promises to discuss in a week or two after everyone's finished reading.

More than anything, reading this book has doubled my own personal conviction to make this a year in which to focus on developing local sources for as many of our foodstuffs as possible. The figures in the book describing how much of our nation's fuel consumption goes to transporting food around the country is definitely a big impetus to go even farther in changing our food buying habits. We already have eggs from the henhouse, and pork and beef from a local, very small, grass-pasturing farm. We can get goat's milk in season locally. I need to find a local source for raw cow's milk though, and make it a weekly commitment to get to the Farmer's market, as well as ordering a CSA box for next season. We're also hoping to expand our garden next year, adding a corn and cucumber plot up in the front of the house in addition to the raised beds in back. We can do more summer and fall gleaning as well. I found a good source for walnuts and hazelnuts this year, but we've already eaten most of the ones we got. Apples, blackberries, and pears are easy to find as well, so I need to get out my canning apron and go to town next fall.

If anyone else out there is wondering how much difference there is between big centralized organic and small local farms, this book is a must-read!