Talking to Strangers

For awhile now our family has been signed up as hosts on the Warmshowers website, a place where touring cyclists can connect with families willing to host them. Some day, we hope to take off a-touring on the tandems again and maybe we'll get to experience the other side of the deal, staying with a local person or family somewhere on the road. But for now, we get to live vicariously by hosting touring cyclists and hearing a little bit about their journeys and plans. Since our town sits squarely on two major cycle touring routes (Canada to Mexico and coast to coast), we've gotten a fair number of emails from the warmshowers website. But because our town is also extremely cyclist-friendly, many of the cyclists end up having more than one host family to choose from here (isn't that cool? I love our town!).

In any case, last month we got to host two different coast-to-coast cyclists. One is an Englishman living in the Netherlands who according to his blog has now made it to Nebraska in the 35 days since he arrived here from the coast. And the other is Ryan, pictured above with his cool touring setup who is heading back to his home state of North Carolina. Along the way he is raising awareness and money for the Wounded Warrior Project. For people who love cycling as much as we do, it was both inspiring and a little jealousy-inducing to get to hear about all of his plans for his cross-country journey. More than anything, it has definitely nudged us toward making plans for more cycle touring next year with the kids. I've been following Ryan's blog as he makes his way across the country.
More than anything, I'm always grateful for an opportunity to connect with truly amazing people doing incredible things. If you watch the news, or even become inundated with the inevitable flashing ads and links as you try to connect to your email you might begin to think that the entire earth is populated with people like Jon and Kate feuding about whatever they feud about, or killers who stalk young women at Universities, or greedy executives trying to shoot down any possibility of health care coverage for everyone. It's always good to be reminded of the essential fact that there are many many good and wonderful people on this earth, all around us, even if we don't know them. And a simple website like Warmshowers that can connect one of these people seeking shelter for the night with another person who has shelter to offer shows us that our basic humanity is indeed where it should be and that we can continue to reach out to others and not shrink back into our own little shells.

When our first guest was going to arrive, the kids were a little nervous. Why were we inviting a stranger to stay in our home? But as they have gotten to know these adventurers, it's also been a great way to show them that "stranger danger" isn't always the best approach to life. Sometimes it IS good to talk to strangers, or even invite them in.

Thank Heavens For My Freezer

This time of the year is NUTS. In centuries past, I'm sure folks just had the harvest to worry about (and it meant a lot more to them as well without the supermarkets a few blocks away). The original school year was designed so that kids were not going back to classes until after harvest time, but it seems that most school districts around the country keep creeping the back-to-school date ever earlier. It seems like that shouldn't matter to us homeschoolers (hey, I could be cracking the whip over my enslaved children and no one would even know! but shhhhhh... don't tell anyone) but it does because every other thing in the universe is tied to the school schedule - dance classes, robotics challenge, etc. all starts when the schools do. Sigh. What's a harvesting urban farmer to do?

Thank heavens for that big freezer we bought a few years ago. So far I've taken stuff and just thrown it into gallon bags in the freezer to be dealt with later. Wayne already dried an entire batch of our freestone plums in the food dryer, and I think I can pack away the apples in our cool basement until I'm ready to start making applesauce in earnest.

The other day I noticed an entire hazelnut orchard lying fallow with nuts falling everywhere, so now I'm wondering if I can squeeze some hazelnut gleaning time in this week. The photo above is all stuff I picked in one afternoon from the garden. NUTS I tell you! Nuts is what I'll be in another couple of weeks.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

From the Connecticut State Legislature. I'd like to think I'd see something different in my own state's House while they're voting on a budget bill (for Pete's sake!) but given what comes out in the budgets, maybe not.....


see more Fail Blog

Nature's Cruel Joke

Out the bedroom window at night, the crickets sing the melancholy song of summer's ending. We spent our last lazy afternoon at the pool today, and will leave for possibly the last camping trip tomorrow. Just as the warm weather lingers and you want to be out grasping every last bit of summer's glory, your garden goes nuts and there's picking and preserving to be done.

A week or so ago, we were going plum crazy, with our yellow plum tree laden with little golden beauties. They aren't freestones so they don't dry well, just good for eating and jam. Fortunately my mom was visiting and helped me can some plum jam for the winter. Now the purple plum tree is bending down and I need to get picking those because we can dry those in the food dehydrator for wintertime snacking.

The Tomato Forest has been busy, I've picked 50 lbs of tomatoes so far and there's no stopping it. Fortunately, we have freezer space so I'm just throwing them all into gallon freezer bags and I will deal with them later when it's drizzly and yukky outside and I can stand to be in the kitchen all day. These variegated heirloom beauties were too gorgeous to make into a sauce though, so they became part of this 20-mile breakfast.



Everything on the plate comes from less than 20 miles away. Chard and tomatoes from garden, eggs from chickens, goat's milk from our local connection, feta cheese from the farmer's market, and sausage from a locally and humanely raised pig. Beautiful, sustainable, and YUM. P.S. I've eaten so much chard I think my eyes are turning green!

The Partying Onions Unmasked

Hey, so remember those funny little flowering "onions" that looked like they were wearing party hats, that I posted about before? I accidentally dug one up the other day and found at the bottome of all of that stem and flower was really a big ol' bulb of extremely tasty garlic! So the "onions" have been unmasked as the marauding garlic that they really are. Which is cool because I love garlic and we have these things all over the place. I just cooked some up with some of the last of our pork chops and a ton of peppers sauteed with some wine and olive oil... yummmmm....

On the docket for this week: making pesto with some fresh basil from a friend.

Keeping Our Local Businesses Around

I've been meaning to pass on this link to the 3/50 Project for awhile. It's a very simple concept - just remembering to patronize our local businesses, keep them around, and keep our money helping out our local economies. What businesses in your area could you not live without?

For me, it's our little corner grocery store/cafe, our great local bike stores, and the local bookstore down the road that stocks stuff you don't see on the endcaps in Borders. A couple of years ago we lost our awesome local video store. We could walk down there in the evening and the folks that worked there knew every movie ever made. You could ask them "Hey, you remember that movie, the one that had Edward Norton and that other guy ...you know, the one who played Capote...and Norton talks to himself in a mirror?" and they'd pull out 25th Hour and that would be the movie you were thinking of. Well, it's gone because I guess too many folks went to Hollywood video so now that's all we've got left around here.

So if you don't want your favorite coffee shop or bookstore or whatever going the way of my video store, make sure you go there, even to buy a bagel or a paperback every now and then.

Have Bike, Will Travel (With Pig)

Asa was over at a friend's house yesterday and was going to stay for a sleepover. She called to ask if I could bring over a sleeping bag and her toothbrush and pajamas. Sure, no problem. Slip the clothes and toothbrush into my bike bag and bungee-cord the sleeping bag on top.

I was ready to head up the driveway when the request came to add the pig. Arnold the Snoring Pig to be exact. Unzip the pannier, stuff the pig in one (fortunately not snoring), and away I was going when...

Another call, they needed cookie sheets for making pizzas, could I bring some over? Sure. Unzip the other pannier and slide the cookie sheets in. Ring, ring...could I bring two pillows and a birthday present in a bag? A towel because they're having a squirt gun fight too. And maybe some dry clothes...I'm starting to wonder if I should just give up and take the car. After all, I have two errands to run on the way over and I'm starting to look like I'm taking a world tour instead of a cross-town trip.

But I didn't have to, it all fit and barely. A few bungee cords go a long way, as well as those convenient zip-out panniers. When I got everything unloaded and kissed the wet daughter and wrapped her in the towel, I turned and headed for home with a much lighter bike.

Oh Give Me A Home, Where the Bicyclists Roam...

We just got back from our Washington trip yesterday (more on that later), but one thing I did while we were visiting my sis and BIL in Bellevue was to take a little bike ride down memory lane. At least it would've been down memory lane if anything there looked even vaguely like I remembered it.

Of course, I didn't expect Redmond to look like my first memories of the place. In 1988 when I arrived at the Microsoft campus on my first day of work (OMG, could that really have been 21 years ago this month?????), there were four buildings. Yep, four. Surrounded by a whole lot of trees (that's number four with the red arrow on the map above, now buried in the middle of the campus). Across the street was this place with a shingle hanging outside that said "Little Bit O' Heaven", you could go there and fish in a creek that they stocked with trout. No kidding! Bill Gates had a party for all of the new hires that month at his house, in his living room. It was a small place, back then. Fast forward to now, as I'm bicycling through the campus I see signs for Building 127. Holy Cow.

But the good news is that City of Redmond has been adding some bike commuting options lately (or should I say finally). Part of my ride was along the new commuter bike path that parallels Hwy 520, connecting Redmond to the Microsoft campus. When I used to commute by bike, I had to take a circuitous route through town, risking my life daily on streets with no bike lanes, hostile drivers, and big tire-eating grates, so it was no wonder that even on Bike to Work Day, I never saw another bike commuter on my journey. Now though with the addition of the bike path, bike commuters were fairly numerous on my evening ride, which is great news for this traffic-overloaded area in general, and I think in general illustrates the principle of "build it and they will come" when it comes to creating safe commuting options for cyclists.

On the minus side of the equation, the city is still extremely lacking in actual bike lanes on any surface streets, so once you leave the relative safety of the bike path, you're stuck fighting for sidewalk space with the pedestrians, or lane space with the aggressive rush-hour drivers. So clearly what's needed for real encouragement of the average bike commuter is not only to build paths but to connect them with work/shopping/home via bike lanes on major through streets. It's good to see Redmond taking a first step toward bike connectivity, but when the freeway is topped by large signs promising four new freeway lanes to the tune of $86.1 million dollars, it would be nice if even a fraction of that went toward greater bike connectivity. After all, building more freeway lanes won't reduce traffic, but building bike paths does.

Tomato Forest

We haven't planted tomatoes in the garden this year. No, we've planted a veritable tomato forest. We had the idea that since we use a lot of tomato sauce throughout the year, it would be a good idea to just plant bunches of tomatoes and then can a whole ton of sauce, pasta sauce, salsa, etc.

It sounded like a good idea at the time.

Now, looking at the tomato forest, I have to admit I'm a bit daunted by the entire prospect. I've talked with a couple of friends about having "Food Preservation Fridays". As soon as harvesting time starts, maybe we'll have all of the kids over to play in the back yard with the sprinkler and trampoline and us moms can go down to the basement kitchen where its cool and just take turns canning like crazy. It sounds like a lot more fun than trying to do it all myself, while running the three-ring circus of kids, pets, and household stuff. That's the idea anyway, I'll let you know how it works out once the forest starts bearing fruit.

AAA To Extend Roadside Assistance to Cyclists in Oregon

Our local newspaper carried this story a few days back, about how AAA will now be extending its Roadside Assistance services to members on bikes. I think this is really exciting news and I'm going to optimistically take it as more evidence of that bicycle tipping point thing I was mentioning recently. As AAA members, our family is ecstatic to know that if we're out on our bikes somewhere on a back road and we get a mechanical problem that we can't fix, we can call up AAA and get a ride home. This is especially invaluable when we've got the kids on the tandems, a situation that's much more difficult than just being a lone stranded cyclist (especially when the kiddos get tired, or hungry, or you really don't feel like flagging down just anyone to give you a lift back with the kids along.)

To be honest though, I was really disappointed to read the responses from local cyclists that they printed along within the article. I'm going to hope that these comments were taken out of context or something, but I think sometimes people get so focused on narrow goals (stop everyone from driving cars, protect the environment) that they can lose sight of the fact that we (as in the human race) rarely do anything in one giant leap. Even that famous leap for mankind on the moon was preceded by unmanned flights, flights that orbited earth, and many many other smaller steps. So yeah, if a cyclist gets stranded it doesn't make much environmental sense to send a big diesel towtruck out to rescue them. But what if the very presence of that diesel towtruck means that 500 more people feel comfortable enough to get out on their bicycles, knowing that if they DO break down by the side of the road they will have assistance? And what if those 500 people are part of a tipping process that then snowballs into their friends and their co-workers and their relatives feeling like the roads are safe enough now to cycle on? Then the presence of that towtruck and its gallon or two of gas might just start to seem kind of trivial.

I said as much in a letter to the editor that was published. I had to hack it down to 250 words to meet the guidelines for print, but here it is in its entirety:

As an avid cyclist and AAA member, I was extremely happy to hear that AAA will now be extending its services to cyclists. I was disappointed though to read the lukewarm response from area cyclists quoted in the article. If we truly want cycling to move out of the arena of the specialist hardcore commuters and road racers, then regular people need to feel comfortable getting out on their bikes. Having to know how to fix their own broken spokes or a frayed brake cable while stranded at the side of the road could be an obstacle to many new would-be cyclists. After all, car drivers don’t need to know how to mend a fan belt with duct tape from their fanny pack, they simply call a tow truck and get their car to a garage. Extending the same kind of service to cyclists could bring many new riders to Oregon’s roads.

I can especially see the availability of AAA as a boon to cycle touring, a form of eco-friendly travel that Oregon businesses and Chambers of Commerce are working to promote in our area. Perhaps some cyclists have never biked past the point that a simple phone call home was enough to get a ride back, but I can tell you that when something goes wrong with your bike a hundred or a thousand miles from home and you’ve got a couple of tired and hungry kids on the backs of your touring tandems and all your gear in a trailer behind you, the AAA truck (big diesel or not) would be a very welcome sight.

Between our road bikes, triathlon bikes, commuting bikes, kids’ bikes and tandems, our family puts on more than a few two-wheeled miles on Oregon’s roads. We’ll be grateful to have AAA’s assistance should we ever need it. Anything that promotes cycling is AAA-OK in my book. So hats off to AAA for jumping in to support Oregon’s cyclists.

Tipping Points

I just finished reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Ironically, the book has been out since 2002 and I've had a couple of people recommend it to me over the years, but in the last few weeks several people have said I should read it. I guess I hit a tipping point of friend recommendations and so I went and checked it out from the library.

The book itself is excellent reading, and covers a wide variety of subjects from fashion trends to crimewaves to cigarette addiction. For anyone interested in taking sustainable actions and helping them to become trends in the general populace, I think The Tipping Point has a lot to say as well. As you know, I've posted updates occasionally here on the number of cyclists that I see on my evening commute. Well, I seem to have reached some sort of tipping point there because the other night there were simply too many to count. Just as one was zooming by in one direction, another was passing or going by in another. I had to think "did I already count the lady in the red hat?" and when it gets to that point really, what's the point of counting? I lost it somewhere after 65, which I think means the number of cyclists in my commute has gone from "a few" to "a lot" to "too numerous to count individuals". In other words, it's a trend that has tipped.

It seems as if the initial spike in gas prices (you all remember when gas was over $4 a gallon, right?) set the trend in motion, and it was given a boost by the economic crisis. Once there is a critical mass of cyclists on the road, then people who might otherwise feel it's "too dangerous" to cycle begin to feel that it's a safe and reasonable thing to do. Or perhaps they see another parent toting their kids, or another businessman in a suit, or another person who is older than they are riding a bicycle and they realize that they can do it too. Whatever the numerous causes, at least in my town it has tipped and there are cyclists zipping here, there, and everywhere. I think the urban gardens are approaching that tipping point here as well. Last summer I had a few to choose from to take photos of for this blog, and now they're simply everywhere - in front of expensive homes and apartment blocks and duplexes, at least in my end of town. Now when the truly suburban lawns start getting torn up in subdivisions with CC&Rs, then I'll say for sure that urban gardening has truly tipped.

In the meanwhile, if you're already tired of your fluffy summer reads, let me be one of perhaps the many friends who will recommend that you read The Tipping Point.

The Chard That Ate New York and the Onions in Party Hats

It's that time of year, when the garden just explodes with produce. Our rainbow chard plants are approaching four feet tall! As you can see here, just eight gigantic leaves supplied our family's veggie needs for dinner and weighed almost two pounds. I remember when we moved here our neighbors grew these amazing plants like this and I wondered how they did it. The first few years my chards and spinaches were just puny little things, but little by little as I mulched more and composted more and learned about cover crops and all of that stuff, our yields have gotten better and better and now it is I that has The Chard That Ate New York (cue corny B-movie music...)

To celebrate our bounteous harvest, our flowering onions have all decided to put on party hats for the occasion. It just cracked me up to see them all wearing their cute little hats. I have to admit that as proficient as I have become at growing chard, I'm still pretty clueless about the onions. They keep cropping up, and I keep not knowing what to do with them and when to harvest them. One of these days I'll figure that out too. The great thing about gardening is that you can really just keep muddling along and as you gain experience things just fall into place a little at a time. For now, the onions have gone to seed and are just sitting there looking festive. By next year, they may be gracing our hamburgers.

One more thing to celebrate this week is Food Independence Day, where we can show our patriotism by eating locally sourced meats, fruits, grains, and veggies. I know that our 4th of July steaks grew up eating the grass of our own valley, and that the lettuce on our burgers comes from 10 yards away. What better way to remain independent than to support our local farmers, ranchers, butchers, dairy farmers, and markets, eating American food!

Front Yard Gardens Explode All Over Town

Our town is just bursting with gardens, many of them new conversions of yards and previously unused strips of bare land. It's inspiring to see the many ways people have found to grow their veggies in their landscaping. I'm seeing gardens in front of rentals, duplexes, and apartment buildings too. Here's just a few photos to inspire!

These curbside veggie boxes are already bursting with salad makings:


Growing your own food is both patriotic AND stylish in this flag-bearing garden with nice block walls:


These duplex-dwellers aren't missing out on the opportunity to grow some veggies on their lawn:


An eclectic garden full of onions, borage, and greens, mulched with straw paths:


And this beauty, nicely landscaped with flowers, paths, and a raised veggie bed in the middle of what was probably once a boring old lawn:

Couldn't Have Said It Better

It's very seldom that I wholeheartedly agree with Michael Moore. Sensationalist journalism of any kind sort of makes me grit my teeth, and I've only gotten a few pages into a couple of his books before turning them face down. He has some potent stuff to say, but the hype it's wrapped up in generally makes it unpalatable to me.

That being said, I agree 100% with everything he says in this article about shutting down GM. Doesn't it just make you see red that Japan and Europe have terrific high speed rail (and have for decades) and we have.... NOTHING. This fall, we got on a Eurostar bullet train in Florence and arrived in Rome less than 2 hours later, traveling in comfort and style, completely on time and for a very reasonable price. The fact that we can't do that here in "technologically advanced" America simply boggles the mind. Boggles it completely.



I'm forwarding this to my congressman, my president, my mayor, my neighbor, what the heck. We need to demand that OUR money is invested in ways that will bring US a better future with real transportation options for everyone.

Words of Wisdom

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
- John W. Gardner

I thought of this quote as I biked to work last night. My bike count reached a new all-time high of 64. Basically, in any direction that I looked, I saw cyclists. Some of them parents toting kids on tag-a-longs or trailers, some of them workers returning home with messenger bags and ties, some college students, some kids on BMX bikes, but everywhere bicycles going this way and that.

To my left and right, new front and side-lawn gardens were popping up right and left. I'll try and add some photos soon of all the new creative food-growing landscaping I'm seeing. Clotheslines (or "solar clothes dryers" as right-to-dry activists are now creatively calling them) are flapping in the breeze, and neighbors sit on newly constructed front porches or stand by their garden fence talking. All of these people in ways small and large are taking the insoluble problems we now face and turning them into challenges to be met. Sure, it's a challenge to hang out your clothes when you could just throw them into the dryer in 1/8 of the time (though I would argue that the smell of line-dried laundry more than makes up for that one!) or to get out your helmet and rain jacket and bike off to work. The great thing is that almost everything that benefits the planet really benefits us even more. We get more exercise, more fresh air, we eat better, we know more of our neighbors when we engage in sustainable living. We're not saving the earth, we're saving ourselves.

Blast From the Solar Past

Just thought I'd share this little gem. It's a poster I made in 1978 when I was twelve, apparently for a contest sponsored by our local utility company. This was in the wake of Jimmy Carter's speech of 1977 in which he announced his intent to begin a wave of solar energy, including a goal to "use solar energy in more than two and one-half million houses." Ah, we were so enthusiastically naive back then, believing that this was the road we'd be traveling down - a path toward a future of renewable energy. Carter laid it all out in that speech, which is well worth reading in its entirety. Conservation, reductions in consumption, strategic oil reserves, reduction in dependence on foreign oil. But less than a few years later it was all derailed with the disastrous consequences we're seeing today.

We have a new chance to take a walk down this path toward sustainability. Will our leaders hold the course this time? I hope our own children's posters and dreams have a better chance of coming true.

Ride of Silence Reminder

Just a reminder that the annual Ride of Silence is this Wednesday all across the U.S. and in many other countries as well. You can find rides in your area at: http://www.rideofsilence.org/

DATE: May 20, 2009
TIME: 7:00 pm
WHERE: Hundreds of locations world wide
Join cyclists worldwide in a silent slow-paced ride (max. 12 mph/20 kph) in honor of those who have been injured or killed while cycling on public roadways.

All Time High Bike Count

When I biked in to work tonight I passed 60 cyclists in 2.5 miles, or a bit over 2 per block. That's a new record for my unofficial commuter bike count at 5:15 on Monday evenings. The warm weather is partially responsible, but I noticed that even on rainer darker evenings this spring there were more commuter cyclists than in previous years. With so many cyclists on the road, it actually makes it safer for all of us, since cars have to be aware of the bikes and vice versa. It's so cool to wait at a traffic light with 2, 3, 4, or more other cyclists.

In other news, I've been meaning to post updates on gardening, cycling, and our new sunroom, our new chickens, etc. forever but life is so crazy right now! Between the new dog, the new chickens, building the sunroom, the cat that became partially paralyzed last week, the other cat that had some kind of bad reaction (to poison oak maybe?) it's just been nuts around here. I'm posting way late at night, but most nights I'm just too darned tired.

In any case, this news was too good to pass up on passing on. Envision a future with more and more bikes!

Wow, A Politician Says The Magic Words

Check this out, Oregon Governor Kulongoski says the magic words - we must reduce consumption. These are words guaranteed to make any politician unpopular in these tough economic times, especially in a state where the unemployment rate is 2nd worse in the entire nation.

Kudos to Governor Ted for speaking out. Even if I don't always agree with all of his politics, these are things that need to be said. Every parent knows that we can't always say the things that make our kids happy. Sometimes we have to be the bearers of bad news: no, you can't buy that, you don't have any allowance money left. No, I'm not going to give you more money just because you already spent yours. Well guess what, us earthlings have used up our earth allowance of consumables, and we shouldn't be borrowing more from our future and our children's futures. Those in positions of power and responsibility need to be like the good but tough parents, saying the hard things and helping people wake up and take responsibility for living within our energy means.

Swine Flu: As If We Needed One More Reason To Buy Local & Organic

As if there weren't enough reasons to buy local, humanely-raised, sustainably-farmed, locally-butchered organic meats, now there's the swine flu. Evolved from a strain that emerged in 1998 on factory farms in the U.S. and forged in the pathetic conditions of over-crowded, immune-stressed hogs shipped across the country from farm to slaughterhouse, we now have a highly-transmissable and dangerous flu jumping to humans.

For more reading on this subject, Wired Science has an article about the evolution of the latest swine flu from its 1998 origins, and the Humane Society's Factory Farming Campaign has more information as well.

What can we do to prevent future outbreaks? Either don't eat meat, or refuse to eat factory-farmed meat. Seek out local sources for meat, milk, and eggs. Look your food and food-producers in the eye and see the conditions in which they live. What's good for them is good for us. Remember that being green isn't just about saving the Earth, it's about saving us humans on it too.