More progress, troubles, and the next week

We are working on the connection between the house and the barn. We moved some solar powered lights from the front, where they don't do much good, to the back. In midwinter, I won't kill myself heading out to the ponies in the dark. J is building an arch out of the cuttings from our trees. It has taken a little playing around, some false starts, and pounding a form into the ground, but it's looking really nice, i think!

And in other news, a rat-bastard, s.o.b., evil, weaselly, hunchbacked, even-i-don't-have-enough-swear-words piece of crap god-damned skunk or fox or raccoon dug under the chicken coop and slaughtered our baby chicks. It was a creepy, 'unnatural' act. Eight had their hearts eaten, and were sucked dry of blood. One was a bag of skin and bones, and one was missing. All the little corpses were 'buried' in a hole, with one of the nest boxes dragged over them. The wanton destruction and waste is specifically enraging, in a way that I barely have words for. We buried their little bodies, and stood over them a while, feeling sorry for not doing a better job; for not taking better care; for not seeing it coming. And I feel, somehow, like I really, truly recognize evil for the first time. If the creature showed up in front of me this minute, I would wring it's neck with glee. And then bury it next to my wasted chicks. And then I would probably feel awful. Because I wasted it. And it wouldn't help. And it wouldn't change anything. All the little live things, with their hearts eaten out, and their blood drained, and all their little peeps silenced forever, just when they were learning what the Sun was about. I am just sick and heartbroken and keep feeling their weight in my hands, as I moved them out of one hole and into another.

And we thought hard about our vacation, which begins tomorrow. But we couldn't stop the carnage, even when we were here. so we will go, and maybe heal up a little before we come home. We are off to go hiking in Goblin Valley, Capitol Reef, Grand Gulch and Valley of the Gods. Red rock loosens the muscles at the back of my eyes, and the person I am in the desert is a different person, with access to a part of me that's usually asleep. Sometimes a change is as good as a rest. I hope it's true this time.

Location:BWF

Opening up...

Sometimes, even though you really love trees, you have just too, too many trees. Squirrely planted far too many willows, far too close together. Today, our famous tree man came to take half of them out.

There was a moment, as he was taking them down, when I thought, 'oh no, what have we done?' But now that I've gotten a little used to it, I thin it's good. The remaining trees will fill in, and we have an opportunity to underplant with fruit trees, berry bushes, and a perrenial border, which would have been impossible in the deep shade the willows cast.

And, in the house, it's no longer so dark, even though it was cloudy much of the day today (will it EVER stop raining?!).

Check another item off the list. The trees have been thinned. Off to vacation, then on to the next item on the list!

Ditch Meeting

Today was the annual ditch meeting, in which any troubles with the irrigation ditch are brought up, discussed, and hopefully, decisions are made. This marks our first full year as part of this community, in a pretty profound way. We seem to be two of only eight people who care about what happens to the irrigation ditch that serves something like 100 families. But last year, there were only seven, so things are looking up!

Actually, that's not completely true. I'm sure there are lots of other people who care about the ditch, who use the ditch, who want the water to come to their fields, pastures and lawns, but just don't want to be involved with actually doing the work that makes that happen. Not even the work of coming out one Thursday per year for less than an hour.

I think that's interesting. What do you think would happen if the ditch suddenly disappeared? Yeah, me too.

It's so easy to take for granted that "someone else will do it" and "it's someone else's job" and "i'm busier than other people", and a thousand other excuses that all really mean "nobody else is as important as me", and somehow simultaneously "nothing I do really matters". I've been guilty of this myself, that's how I know! But the older I get, the more I realize that every little piece, every tiny little thing, matters enormously, if only because it's a little push in the right direction. As it says on a despair poster, "it only takes one harmless flake to unleash an avalanche of destruction".

But enough philosophy. The ditches are in good shape this year, and there will be plenty of water, which isn't always true. I think I finally understand what an inverted siphon is---at least I have a picture in my head, although I have yet to work out the physics to my satisfaction. And I know that the ones that Squirrelly put in on this property were never going to work in a million years. But at least I know what he was TRYing to do, and that's a comfort. I'm also developing a richer understanding of the whole system of head gates, flapper valves, boxes and culverts that makes the whole thing possible. It's a little shocking that the whole system was dug by hand more than a hundred years ago, and we're still using it today, albeit with tractors to help dig out the cattails... Last year, we remarked that we couldn't believe that it's still all done by hand---that we have to walk a mile up the road to drop a head gate and a bunch of 2x4's, and then trudge through a neighbor's yard, 4 houses down to drop another gate, and then drop our own once we've taken our share so Bill and Nancy can get theirs. This year, I don't know. I'm looking forward to it---to late nights under the stars, watching the water come down the ditch, and hoping the skunks have moved out of the culvert. It takes as long as it takes, and it can't be rushed. It's a meditation of gravity and water and time. Of nature doing her own thing, shaped and steered by man, but running under rules that have been in place since... Well... Very nearly (but not exactly), the beginning of time.

Of course, by August, I'll be complaining about it! But that's human nature, and by September or October, it will come to an end, and I'll be glad. Until spring...

I'm sure spring is coming...

I'm so sure of it, in fact, that I started spring 'starts' today. Roughly 400 plants---peppers, tomatoes, onions, eggplant, all kinds of goodness!

It's the first chance to really use the 'greenhouse', which is more sort of an over-windowed potting shed, really. We didn't use it last year because we were just entirely too busy to have a garden of any size. It makes a lovely place to work in the rain, and call people on the phone, while spooning starting medium into large numbers of small pots.



Friday, we had the tenure party for John, and managed to completely surprise him---so much so that he is still sort of trying to figure out what happened! The look on his face, when Brad's talk turned from pictures of birds into a slide of John, with the title 'Tenure!' was priceless, and now he won't trust any of us ever again! ;)

Yesterday, it was actually sunny and warm, for what felt like the first time in months. We made our semi-annual trip to Honeyville in the morning, loading up on all the staples, and today J is making bagels---hooray!

I caught a better picture of the willow fence around the raised beds:





And one of the path from the barn to the back porch:





Still a fair amount of work to do to get the porch set up for summertime. Sure would be nice if the sun would come out and stay for a few days! The sump pump has been running for almost a week, and the south lawn is completely underwater!

The little chicks have moved outside, to the west half of the 'chicken taj mahal', and all 20 birds are starting to get used to each other. As a special surprise for us, three of the new chicks have feathered feet, which looks particularly hilarious when they are small!

This week is finals week, and we have dean candidates coming as well, but that means the big wind-down is coming. Thank goodness!

Oh! I see sun! I'm going to go weed the asparagus bed right quick...

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Location:BWF

Ris-oat-to

It worked!

So earlier, I posted about falling behind on the oats, so that we now have 25 pounds of rolled oats from Honeyville, and a decided lack of recipes to cook them in.

So then I was thinking of things to do with rolled oats. Probably J's favorite thing that I make is risotto. I make that for him when he's tired, or discouraged, or when he's done something amazing. So it's a little bit nerve-wracking to mess with a good thing.

But he's nearly speechless. He keeps saying, 'you know, it's like, rargh!' so here's what I did...

The basic risotto recipe is to soften the aromatics, add the rice and toast it, add acid to break the outer covering on the grain, and then add small amounts of fluid, one cup at a time, until the rice can't absorb any more. Because you don't know how much broth this is, you adjust the fats and seasonings at the end, to give you the mouth feel and flavor you are after.

I started with that concept, but adjusted it to suit the different grain. Because rolled oats are already 'broken', I added acid (homemade white wine and canned tomatoes) in two steps, with the oats in between, instead of adding oats at the beginning. I wasn't sure how to know when they were toasted enough, so I guessed, when they started to smell good! Then at the end of the long process of adding broth (which took less broth than normal), I added some diced sausage, to pump up the salty flavor, and adjust the salt and 'toothiness'. I added a little butter to enhance the creaminess. I could have done both of these at once by adding Parmesan cheese, but I didn't have any.

So that gives me a recipe:

Risoatto
1 onion
4 celery stalks
3 carrots
3 smallish bay leaves
6 dried sage leaves
1 t dried rosemary
1 glass dry white wine
1 pint canned tomatoes
1 pint stock, mixed with about 6 cups of water and juice from the tomatoes

Sauté the vegetables and herbs in butter over medium heat until a fond forms on the bottom of the pan. Deglaze with wine. Cook until dry. Add oats, and pan-toast until fragrant. Add tomatoes. Cook until dry.

Begin stirring constantly and adding broth mixture one ladle at a time, then cooking until, when you drag a wooden spoon along the bottom, you see the bottom for a moment before the risoatto falls in. Continue until the oats are saturated, or, when tasted, they have the consistency you would like.

Adjust fats and seasonings (add butter, cheese, sausage and/or salt and pepper to taste).

I am not aware of anyone else who has ever made this exact thing. Fun! And delicious!

Testing...

Just found out the emailer wasn't working on the ol' blog. Please shoot me an email if you get this, and want to be on the mailing list!

Bus to Work Challenge!

Ok. The worst of an appallingly busy year is over. Time to start re-instating the things we really believe in. (Not to mention getting the most out of our compensation from the University!). We are fortunate to have bus passes as part of our paychecks. This serves the University well, when we actually decide to use them to get to work---fewer parking spaces means less ongoing expense.

In general, J and I do pretty well. Even in this year of excess meetings, late nights, unpredictable schedules, and learning our new environment, we only drove the horse truck to work once. Other times, we worked it out so we went in together, and one of us took the bus home.

But starting next week, J is on sabbatical for 15 months. Which gives us a lot of freedom for testing things out. So the plan is to take the bus to work from here on out. We had already cut our driving from ~100 miles per week to ~75 miles, by moving out here (while we go to work more days the ponies used to be farther. This is probably an underestimate of our prior driving...). So now, we'll cut down even further, perhaps even to 15 miles per week!

The bus stop is about a mile from our house, and we have a transfer downtown. Depending on whether we make the really tight connection, or leave a little earlier, the trip takes 40-50 minutes. Just the perfect amount of time to read the paper, catch up on blogs, or relax with an audiobook!

Since January, I've been keeping track of 'one-star' and 'two-star' days. These are days when either I or both of us don't get in the car at all! I'm looking forward to seeing those numbers really climb!

Lazy Sunday...

Our projects for the day...

1) make beef jerky for our backpacking trip. This turned out to make a discouragingly small amount of jerky. Or maybe it's just really, really dense!

2) J dragged the arena, twice. We've had so much rain that we haven't been able to drag for a while. But the miracle is that it's wonderful to ride in, even in early spring, even after unprecedented rainfall!

3) J finished the willow branch fence around the raised beds, and I finally moved all the flagstone from the rock pile, and made a path out of them, where the grass gets entirely too much traffic:



4) I moved the rest of the rock pile, and put them around the greenhouse, so they will be handy the next time I'm filling containers, and I. The meantime, they'll look nice.

5) I taught a lesson, and J and I both rode our horses.

6) I took down the old hose rack (which didn't work), and made room for the new hose holder, and organized the trash area in the barn, so we will take it out more often.

7) along the way, the broken water trough got emptied out, and I was able to test the fit of the new design of the solar heated water trough holder---it fits perfectly! And now we can use that broken trough elsewhere.

7) Wash the dogs.

8) we are now relaxing with Radiolab on KUER, getting our dopamine fix!

Just a typical day here on the ol' homestead!


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Location:Home

And down comes the cowboy!

Today, we took down the cowboy. See, we had a big, brick cowboy over the mantle, with unfortunate Dorf-like proportions. Since it's been raining since... Forever... It seemed like a good project. It took much less time than expected---only an hour---because, as it turns out, the 400 pound brick cowboy was just glued to the drywall! Squirrelly!!!!!

Also today, two new discoveries. Why, oh why, have I never sprinkled Garam masala on popcorn before?!

And, British flapjacks. Fundamentally rice krispie treats, made with oats:

1 stick butter
1/2 cup brown sugar. (or 1/2 cup white+1 T molasses, if you happen to have used up all your brown sugar!)
1/4 cup honey
2.5 cups oats

Mix the first three in a saucepan on medium-low heat until a smooth sauce.
Take off heat, stir in oats.
Pour into a greased 9-inch metal cake pan.
Bake at 350 for 25 min or til browned.

Wowza! That's a good oats recipe!

Oats, etc.

About twice a year, we make the trek to Honeyville grain's retail store in Brigham City. It's a tiny little store in the front part of a warehouse-style strip mall. And it's a little...unusual. Although it seems nearly normal to us now.

When you walk into the store, the first thing you notice is that the carts are not normal shopping carts. They are more like something you would find at your local home improvement warehouse. The second thing you notice is that everything comes in big---really big--- packages! 50 pounds is the standard bag size for most things. Some things, like pasta, can be bought 15 or 25 pounds at a time, but all the grains and flours come in somewhat overwhelming quantities. They also have freeze-dried foodstuffs, like asparagus (wonderful!) or mushrooms (eh.) or berries (how did I ever get along without these!). And all in vast quantities designed for... You guessed it... Mormon food storage.

So this is interesting to me, because there are two ways of thinking about food storage. One is to think that you are going to buy a year's worth of food, packaged to remain shelf stable for 25 years, and then go ahead and buy food like the rest of the population. The second way of thinking about it is that you have a year's worth of inventory, and you are going to store the things you use all the time, and then use them until they are gone. All the time, you are rotating stock, keeping the shelves full. While we are neither Mormon, nor in possession of a year's supply of food, what we have figured out is that we can take advantage of the whole infrastructure, to lower our food costs, improve our diets, and help support the local economy.

So typical purchases at Honeyville include:

50 pounds of all purpose white flour.
50 pounds of hard red wheat
50 pounds of soft white wheat
25 pounds of sugar
10-15 pounds of dried pasta
2-3 very large cans of dried berries
2-3 very large cans of dried vegetables
10 pounds of popping corn
5-10 pounds of dried beans
5 pounds of sea salt

And 50 pound of oats...

Which brings me to oats. I keep John in granola, at a fraction of the cost of box cereal, keep myself in baked or boiled oatmeal, keep us both in oatmeal cookies, and generally work my way through 50 pounds of oats, 6 cups at a time. This year, because I was so busy, I didn't keep up, and find myself with about half a bag left, and it's just about time for our periodic visit. So of course, I started looking around for things to do with oats. And as I was thinking about it, I realized there's an added bonus to thinking about this. Not only are oats a whole grain, and not only are they packed with vitamins like niacin, which we should probably all eat more of, but they also have several other wonderful advantages, if you are pondering resilience.

First, they grow practically anywhere, dry, wet, hot, cold, whatever. They are the most indestructible of common grains. Second, they contain a natural preservative, so they can just be rolled and stored, unlike wheat, which goes rancid if you try that. THAT means they are the easiest grain to harvest and store in small quantities. Third, they have collateral benefits (unlike corn), in that oat straw makes great bedding for animals, such as...let me think...chickens and horses! Fourth, people, horses, chickens, and dogs can all eat oats straight off the stalk, making them good for all the creatures on a small farm.

Taking the obvious next step, I went looking for other things to make from oats (because if there was any grain that we had any hope of figuring out how to grow, it would be oats!). And I find very little. Which is interesting. Because oats might not have much gluten, (so won't make good bread), but neither does rice! And it's easy to find great rice recipes. I did find a recipe for an oat pilaf, that turned out to be delicious. So now I am both on the hunt for oat recipes, and also shifting into major experimentation mode. It's time to start treating cooking like it's research. What to do with a low-gluten starchy whole grains? well, we'll find out! But I've got some ideas I'm working on... If it makes pilaf, it will make ris-oat-o. Get it? Risotto, ris-oat-o? Ha! I should do stand-up!

You know you're done when...

Lunch talk for the Kiwanis Club today. Because the computer hookup wasn't working, and it was a small group, I just sat down to talk with them instead. They had asked me to come and update them on what we've been doing in the planetarium, and we had a wide-ranging conversation about dark matter, black holes, making color photos from a series of grayscale ones, Technicolor film, and so on. I generally think that my job, at these events, is to be sparkly---unicorns and double rainbows, all the way. So I sparkled about HST, and I told jokes about dark matter, and I was witty about black holes.

But then they asked me about climate change.

They should not have done that.

Because they are wrong.

Their whole belief system is founded around an incorrect understanding of basic physics, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of time.

And for the first time ever, I didn't hedge. And I wasn't polite. And I didn't pull my punches. And of course, no one was convinced. Because data doesn't matter. And 28,000 separate lines of investigation that agree don't matter. Shifting coffee plantations, migration patterns, ice cover, times of bloom, mass extinctions, wildfires, glacial retreats, just don't matter. What matters is that they don't WANT it to be true. Too bad. Nature doesn't care what you want. I failed to sparkle. And there were no unicorns, and definitely not any rainbows.

So I know I'm burnt out. Because I couldn't even let the Kiwanis Club wrap themselves in soothing lies that make them feel better. And for the last two weeks, we've been doing climate change in my environmental physics class, and even I can't find any rainbows.

But I'm sure if I take a vacation, I'll find a unicorn around here somewhere.

On the way back...

So much to tell you! So many pictures to post! But I'm still so tired!

To use a complicated physics analogy about electrons in an atom, I usually wander around in my 3rd or 4th excited state, with plenty of energy for everyone. For several days after Science Olympiad, I was wandering around in my ground state, barely able to keep myself together. This week, I'm bouncing between ground and first excited states---I can see how someday I might actually WANT to do something at work, but it's not happening yet! Unfortunately, these are the couple of weeks focusing in on the physics of climate change in my Environmental Physics class. This means I'm spending all my time reading about mass extinctions and melting glaciers and wondering what I'm doing that's of any value at all.

But! We have ten new chicks on the farm, and are averaging 6 eggs a day from the old flock. We are hatching (hah!) a new plan for 'chicken boarding'. Since we can't sell our eggs, we are thinking that we should board chickens for people at a flat monthly fee, and then they can have the eggs from one chicken (about 15 per month), since they are boarding one chicken with us! Is that not awesome? Don't you want to do it too? How much would you pay for us to keep your chicken for you?

In other random news, J has been crafting the most marvelous willow stick fence around the raised beds---pictures coming soon...

We have finished the tack room, to our neighbor's specifications---there's a little fridge in there! I've beaten the sewing machine into submission, and crafted a holder for my knitting needles. I've also knitted 2 hats, 1 pair of mittens, and a pair of slippers. I hope to impose on my friend K soon, and go to her house to do some felting.

The old house is sold! Our old mortgage is paid off, and we even had a little extra to roll over into the new mortgage. A friend advised us to incorporate the farm, and that helped us out a LOT with our taxes, so that got rolled over too. We are now working on a plan to pay off the current mortgage in five years. It will be a push, but imagine having it paid off completely, by the time we are 45! We are excited to make as many early payments as possible, and fold all our extra money in as soon as we can----git 'er done is our new motto! We are anxious and uneasy, and this is our last remaining debt. It would be nice to see a '1' turn into a '0'.

This past year, we did so well on feeding ourselves, from our own efforts, that it's not even funny. We are coming to the end of some things in the cupboard, but the higher food prices have just... Passed us by. We haven't really noticed, and are getting ready to start planting seed starts. Soon, spring will actually be here, and we can get things in the ground. Meanwhile, we are looking for new oat recipes, and eating a lot of pickles... ;)

Much else has happened, and I'll gradually get caught up here. So much is going on that my boss at work was speechless in my annual review---and that's just work! For now, I'll just make a quick list of goals for the year:

1) pay 1/5 of the mortgage as extra payments on the house this year.
2) source all of our own food locally, except oils and spices.
3) start chicken boarding.
4) teach T her flying changes.
5) drive our household energy usage down by 50%, so we can plan for solar panels.