Life Is Good

What a difference a year makes, in some things at least

2010-10-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

We'd already had at least one big snowstorm this time last October, but this year's fall is looking to be on the mild side, if the squirrels, prairie dogs and national weather service can be believed. (The latter has issued a forecast that the fall is likely to have above normal temps, the former two haven't packed on the ounces in the astonishing way they did last fall.)

So no frosts yet -- peppers, raspberries and tomatoes still ripening, basil chugging along, though the whiteflies are getting to it. We got a satisfying amount of food out of the yard this summer and I'm happy with how much I've preserved, either as jams, jellies and pickles, or dehydrated and then vacuum sealed in jars, or in the freezers, which are full to bursting.

It's been a frustrating year and a few weeks on the health front; I really haven't gotten back to normal and wonder if I ever will. I have stretches of normal energy and activity, thank god, and sometimes they outnumber the cruddy days, so we still had a fun summer with a 100th birthday celebration for Great Grandma Shirley in Pennsylvania, a trip to Grandma Judith's Iowa farm, our annual Buckhorn Retreat in the mountains with our fellow Unitarians and tubing on the Poudre River in town. Steve's leapt in to do numerous projects with the kids, from fishing outings with Willow to building toys and structures with Harrison.

The latest health theory, which feels right to me, from my naturopath, is that the virus I picked up last fall went deep into my liver and is hanging out there, flaring up whenever I push myself too much or get too stressed. I can feel it there actually when it flares up, which it's doing again this week. We're on a third set of supplements to try to knock it back. In my search to feel well, I've undertaken a series of rolfing/structural integration bodywork with a highly recommended practitioner in town. She's also an energy worker and has combined the two modalities on me, which has been fascinating. I'm not, by nature, super attuned to energies and more subtle modalities, though I'd like to be. Experiencing emotional releases during some of this work has been eye-opening, to say the least.

I remain hopeful that I can kick this virus and return to a more stable level of health, so that I can experience the impending wonders of peri-menopause with a bit more ease. (I'm reading a fascinating book by master herbalist Susun Weed about menopause as the death of the maiden/mother stage and the flowering of the wise woman/crone. I can't say I feel in the least bit like I'm ready for the crone title, but I do like the idea of becoming a Wise Woman.)

Medieval fair fun

2010-06-20T12:08:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was the first day of the Colorado Medieval Festival, an annual weekend that we look forward to every year. Harry, in particular this year, counted down the weeks to it. We had a lovely time at the fair. Harry was knighted, and got to practice his courtly bows as he returned a lost play sword to another young knight; Willow got to discover that her shyness is abating as she was called up on stage to assist a magician/comedian with his act. We visited with various vendors and craftspeople, listened to lovely a cappella performances and picnicked on the shore of the county park lake.

The only thing to mar this lovely experience happened today, as we were getting ready to head out to a movie that Steve wanted to see, "The Secret of Kells." *Just* as I was walking out the door, I saw that Harry's beloved fox tail, one of two purchases he had been saving for over several months, was shredded to bits on the bedroom floor. It seems Sunny had gotten on top of Harry's dresser via the bed and dragged it out of a not quite closed top drawer. He was devastated as only an 8-year-old who had "totally bonded" to his new tail could be. Steve, bless him, is willingly driving back to the Fair right now to see if the vendor might still have some tails in stock, and we're hoping to make the evening showing of Kells when he returns. What a wonderful father he is!

Some beautiful kids in their medieval garb.

A picnic of bread and cheese on the banks of the lake.

This is Harry, showing appropriate respect for his new dagger. The ill-fated fox tail is at his waist.

Willow's debut as a magician's assistant. She really enjoyed herself!

Local color.

Garden photos from the beginning of June

2010-06-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

I uploaded these to Facebook, but thought I'd post em here as well. I'm thrilled with how well my starts grew and that this entire garden, with the exception of two cuke plants, was grown from seed. Even adding seven beds this year (well, four beds are in the general area of a sprawly corn patch we had last year, but now they're raised and sided and amended more thoroughly), I still want more space to plant. We'll see what I'm saying come harvest and preservation time!
A new sideyard tomato and leek bed.

Zen crept under the bird netting, got bored waiting for thieving robins, and decided to take a bath.

The seedlings that didn't find a place in the beds! Some gardening friends have asked to adopt, so they'll get a home after all.

Suburb fresh eggs!

These are homemade versions of Earthboxes, the self-watering, self-fertilizing containers that are supposed to multiply yields dramatically. I've planted peppers in these two and cukes in a third and will compare yields to the plants in my raised beds.

Sprrrringtime in the Rrrrrrrockies!

2010-03-25T09:21:00.001-07:00

(With a fond nod to an African Gray Parrot in the old bird show at the San Diego Wild Animal Park who used to trill the song...)

Late March and all is well here. The sun is strong and melts the snows more quickly, which is how you can tell it's spring as opposed to winter. ;) Actually the days have warmed up considerably and I've been in shorts a few times (school kids on the playground were begging the monitors for sunglasses to protect them from the glare, but I just ignored them.)

I'm also discovering that I can plant cool-season seeds now and their seedlings do just fine under the snow, as do pansies in flower, so my gardening jones is fed. Steve's helping me dig and build new beds and I'm picking up up a truckload of mushroom compost the first week in April, so I'm a happy farmer girl. I'm tending onion sprouts (an experiment -- I know onion sets are inexpensive and a big head start on the season, but I wanted to see if I could grow them from seeds), as well as tomatoes, broccoli and peppers sprouts, and I have a few pots of cantaloupe seeds clustered by the woodstove to jumpstart germination. Willow has planted a bunch of flower seeds in pots, for she wants a flower garden this year. And I have about 30 new strawberry plants that I potted up from bare root and they are already flowering! I'll put them in one of the new beds in another week or two. Oh, and I have seed potatoes ready to plant and I've been cleaning up the raspberry patch and replanting emerging shoots that are coming up in the walkway, so the patch is expanding, for free! Even though the snows continue and so will the frosts for another six weeks, you really can start gardening/farming anyway.

Nexus is still chugging along, despite the economy, which is good. Steve is courting his creative muse and really enjoying the projects she suggests to him. He has build a small letter press from scratch, and a light exposure box to create plates and has been immersed in creating his own letter-press artwork. He's also found an antique letterpress in need of much rehabilitation that he's going to buy. He's working up quirky art to sell on Etsy, either as prints or t-shirts.

Willow seems to be sticking with her new name and she's had her own creative blossoming, with new styles and medium for her artwork, as well as venturing into animation and continuing her creative writing. Harry's found a new homeschooled friend in town who plays on the same Lego-inspired online building game and they talk on the phone or on Skype as they play together. We've had many fun playdates with best friend Luke, another unschooler, and even hit a parkday down with the Boulder unschooling group (where Harry left his boots, ensuring that we will need to return soon to retrieve them from the Mom who picked them up for us.)

Harry and Steve went to the local homeschool group's tour of the engineering department at Colo State University here in town, where the dean of the school asked how many 50-pound kids would it take to equal the 150,000 pounds of pressure a piece of equipment was exerting on a segment of concrete in the materials lab, then told the homeschooler who correctly answered that he was wrong and gave a botched answer himself. He undoubtedly was thinking the equipment was exerting a different pressure than it was, but there was no opportunity to correct him as he barrelled on in his talk. How many times does that happen in a classroom every day, I wonder? We all make mistakes, of course, but the authority figure who brooks no questioning is not conducive to unfettered learning.

In other domestic news (that is my world, pretty much, at the moment), the chickens are laying really well, which is a relief to me. I was afraid they'd slow down dramatically and I'd have to either carry them as noisy lawn ornaments for the next five years or consider culling them. We got our kitty spayed yesterday, and she's napping on my lap as I type. She lost her purr for about half a day, but she's feeling better now. What an absolute love she is.

I'll update with photos of the garden as we finish the beds and get more planted. Happy Spring!

Looking forward to our utility bills

2010-02-08T08:21:00.001-08:00

Steve and I wait with avid curiosity for each month's utility bill. Since we (the marital we, of course) installed the wood stove in early November, we've been running it every day, with gleaned wood from Craigslist, windfelled trees in the neighborhood and scrap wood from our friendly lumber and millwork shop.

The woodstove keeps the upper story of the house at a reasonable 61-70 daytime degrees depending on the outside temperature (-10 to 45 degrees has been the range this winter) and the upper room in which it resides gets downright toasty.

Our first gas and electric bill was a big disappointment at $150, but closer inspection indicated that the company had only estimated our useage. The following month was $80, as they had to essentially credit us for overestimating, and in January, despite the average temperature being six degrees lower than last year, we used 50 percent less gas and 15 percent less electricity for a total bill of $112.

As the winter has progressed, I've gradually ratcheted down the nighttime thermostat, which is now at 55 degrees and is really quite tolerable, as long as you spend the first hour or two of the day in the upper room while the woodstove does its thing.

Steve figures that the vast piles of beetle-kill pine in the mountains will be a source of free firewood for several years to come, with pallets and lumberscraps to fill in the BTU gap. Eventually, we may find it hard to scrounge free wood, but I think we will have paid off the investement in the stove by then and will still be coming out ahead of the cost of heating. Not to mention the lovely heat the stove gives off, which makes the depths of winter feel cozy and charming, instead of chilly and frightening. And Maddie's had much fewer nosebleeds since we stopped running the furnace heat so much.

All in all, I think it's been one of the most successful changes we've made to the house. (I love the chickens, but we've spent more on them than we've gotten in eggs, even at $5 a dozen from the free-rangers at our dairy. But as they are half-pets, half-sustainability exercise, I will always cut them slack.)

Adventures in health care

2010-02-08T07:02:00.000-08:00

I am very, very happy to report that I've finally discovered what's been making me sick lo these many months and I'm feeling dramatically better. I think I really did start out with a virus that wouldn't go away, and which the acupuncturist helped clear (I should write to him and let him know, as he fired me several weeks ago and sent me back to Western medicine. I'm sure he'd like to know the final outcome and that he did likely play a role in my improving.)

At some point, possibly aggravated by some bitter chinese herbs I was drinking at bedtime, I developed a pretty good case of acid reflux, the symptoms of which I either minimized or mis-attributed -- some felt like anxiety, some felt like the cough and lung inflammation of the earlier virus.

After $600 of blood work, lung x-rays, EKGs, lung function tests and urinalyses at the friendly, affordable urgent care place and a cardiologist consult ($280 for 10 minutes with the nurse and 10 minutes with the nice young cardiologist-- nothing like having your doctor looking like a college student to make you feel middle aged), I finally decided to go to a family practitioner, who listened interestedly, suggested I might have GERD and asked if I'd be willing to take an acid inhibitor for 10 days and see if I felt better. At home that evening I was utterly chagrinned to notice how obvious the symptoms were, once she'd suggested it.

So, I'm back to walking for exercise and more vigorous housecleaning and building up my stamina and if the roads would stay clear I'd start biking to errands again. The bed's propped up on several volumes of the encyclopedia I thought that we were least likely to reference until alternate blocking can be arranged, and I'll have to research and test out the best diet for me (apparently triggers can be different for everyone and will have to be tested once I'm off the meds).

I find it interesting that the urgent care clinic folks, apparently trained to eliminate the worst case scenarios first, uncovered a heart arhythmia (increasingly common in people as the decades accrete and harmless in and of itself, but potentially dangerous if heart disease is present) that they wanted to pursue with thousands of dollars of cardio stress tests just to be sure it was benign. Had I not found relief with the GERD avenue, I would have pursued the tests, but without health insurance or a family history of early heart disease or alarming cholesterol readings, I can't justify the expense.

I see, in my experience, several contributors to the high cost of health-care in our country. When we first moved here, I actually called this doctor's office to get an appointment and after hearing we were self-pay, the scheduler directed me to the urgent care clinic. Having been rebuffed as a new patient at another recommended doctor's office after being asked only two questions -- who referred you and who's your insurance provider -- I was beginning to think that physicians were unwilling to see self-pay clients. So I ended up getting treatment from the urgent care place, which worked fairly well, except for the worst-case-scenario glasses they wear, which ended up costing me a lot of money. If I'd had health insurance, I'm sure I'd have gone forward with the expensive cardio tests and found out I'm just fine, at a cost to the system of thousands of dollars.

I also spent hundreds of dollars at the acupuncturist, which probably helped but I can't swear to it (the only absolute example of the effectiveness of acupuncture I've had is the clearing up of my prolapse in Harry's pregnancy; that was dramatic and irrefutable and it's what draws me back to Chinese medicine when I can't find solutions in Western medicine, for better or for worse.)

All in all, an expensive but interesting experience and I'm tremendously grateful to feel mostly well again.

Facebook killed the blog

2010-01-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

The story of a New Year, compounded by the idea of a New Decade, has me energized to pick up old projects and new. Facebook, for all its intriguing tidbits, leaves me hungry for more substantial news from family and friends, I notice.

Looking back, the fall seems like a huge washout for me. Between the snows and cold that began in October and never looked back, and the virus I picked up about the same time as the first snow, I had a season of enforced rest -- gardens under snow, immune system under attack. I still have the virus, but I'm getting better about not over-reaching with my activities and when I do overreach, the setbacks are less unpleasant. I hope to kick it completely in the next month or so. I notice a pronounced improvement with the acupuncture and Chinese herbs (It was also tremendously helpful to hear from the acupuncturist that other people have the same virus this fall. The physician's assistant who could only suggest a lung x-ray and heart tests was freaking me out.)

In the meanwhile, I can putter about and organize closets, start some flowers under grow lights and do various projects and games with the kids. Maddie's on a math kick, at the moment, Harry's working on spelling and the kids have both been having fun with codes and secret messages. Maddie's planning submissions for an art contest the city is having. We're attending this cool acrobatic dance performance later this month, so there's still plenty to do, should the weather continue to be frigid.

We had a lovely visit to Fallbrook just after Christmas, it was wonderful to lounge at my folk's house and take advantage of the sun and their hospitality, with some trips to the zoo, Legoland and the resort pool to which they belong. We got to visit with a few of the folks we miss, but not enough. I kept crashing after outings and having to sleep the next day to fend off feeling cruddy. It was tough tearing ourselves away from the 70-degree weather, but we had a fun return ride, listening to Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series and staying at a hotel with pool in Provo. And it felt right to get home and fire up the woodstove again. What a game-changer that stove has been, turning winter from scary to cozy!

The chickens have been taking the winter weather with much more aplomb than I (but what's new? Maddie's New Year's resolution was to be more like a cat. I could stand to be more like pretty much any animal, taking what comes with aplomb and saving one's energy for when it's actually useful.) I moved them into the garage for a couple of sub-zero nights but they're back in their coop, regrowing feathers from their molt and generally on their way to handsome hen-ness once again. And they've started laying some eggs again!

Maddie wants her own room for her birthday, so much rearranging and decluttering to do, which is a perfect New Year Project. I'm inspired to do some painting and other nesting projects, which I'll take slowly but am looking forward to (what I really want to do is tear out kitchen counters and backsplash, which are way overdue for replacement, but I'll have to see if Steve is up for it -- it's more work than I can take on at the moment, not to mention my lack of skillset.)

Hope all of you are feeling energized and happy and looking forward to the year. I have a completely unsupported and mysterious sense of optimism about 2010 -- all that I read points to an economy under massive and irreversable strain, but like the Aughts, the decade in macro may have been horribly traumatic, but in the personal, we had a wonderful time raising kids and expanding ourselves through our own learning. So 2010 could well be a wonderful year for us, regardless of what happens in the story of the world at large. I hope it is for everyone.

I'm dreaming of a white birthday....

2009-10-10T15:46:00.001-07:00

Here's what we did on Steve's birthday today:

Animal comings and goings...

2009-09-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

We've had an animal-intensive time of late, starting with the squirrel babies we accidentally separated from their mother with a roof hole-patching (two we successfully reunited, two we are hand rearing), and an unexpectedly quick milk goat acquisition (we're actually just the co-milkers, as it were, our friend Rosemary traded her five Boer (meat) goats for two yearling milk goats this week, and we've agreed to share feed costs and milk production, once they kid, which may be mid-winter if their time with a buck over the last week was productive. If not, Rosemary will have them bred again).

This morning, Steve took one of our two rats in to the campus veterinary school to be put down -- Remy's tumor had grown larger than she was, and while she was still alert, eating and seemingly undistressed, the tumor had just grown too large.

And while we've found a foster home for the squirrels, I'm hesitant about giving them over just yet. We'll see how Harry is taking all this.

But we have some exciting weekend getaways planned, first a UU Church camp in the mountains this weekend, then mountain lake camping with some fellow unschoolers next weekend, and raising baby squirrels doesn't fit into those all that well.

Here's some pics that I've already posted to facebook of the various critters.

Long summer, no posts!

2009-08-14T11:37:00.000-07:00

We've been surprisingly busy for unscheduled folks, but all is well and we've been having a great time. I'll wade through the photos on our digital cameras and post them next, but for now, a quick recap:

Late June we headed back east and did a whirlwind tour of DC (Smithsonian museums, Washington Monument, White House, National Zoo) before heading to Great Grandma Shirley's 99th birthday party on July 3. Wonderful to see her again, and Jack, Jennifer, Alison, Sarah, Ava, Nick, Ellen, Jeff, Becky, Jay and Warren too. What a fun houseful of cousins!

We came home and got to see JeffBeckyJayWarren the following weekend -- so cool to have family to bike and tube down the Poudre River with. Pics to come.

Then visits from Grandpa Russell and Uncle Ray (they were driving bulls around the Midwest and stopped in for the night) and my folks came for a great visit as well, with a 9th birthday party for Owen capping it off.

That was followed by a weekend camping in the gorgeous mountains here with a couple of families in our neighborhood, then the New West Fest over the weekend -- saw the headliner, Melissa Etheridge (hey, she's thoroughly middle-aged! How did that happen?! Makes me afraid to look in the mirror...), and wandered around downtown in the dark, goggling at the carny rides (which seemed too frightening to the kids to try at night, but the next day they rode the giant revolving swings several times, shrieking and whooping the whole time. I was much quieter, preferring to spend my energy focusing on the horizon until I could get off the damn spinning thing...)

Back to work for Steve, who has not only Nexus' next edition heating up, but who is also designing a dozen or two new toys for this outfit , everything from sewing boards to puzzles to bookends. An interesting new sideline for him.

I've been, yes, tending the gardens, harvesting and processing carrots, onions, potatoes, tomatillos, chard, raspberries (okay, we're just eating those out-of-hand, haven't managed to actually preserve any yet), shredded zucchini and pureed beets (mmmm red devil cake is sooo good), learning how to make enchilada sauce with the tomatillos that are coming in, and generally expanding my homestead-y skillset. We now make our own butter from the cream skimmed off the top of our raw milk. I made my first soup stock from a chicken carcass (no, not one of ours. They're doing fine and laying mightily.) And I made my first batch ever of custard with some extra milk -- ohhhh, that was heavenly.

Steve scored a brand-new, 14-year-old Jotul woodstove (sat in someone's garage with the tags still on it all that time) on Craigslist for $700, and he's now scouting free wood there too and waiting for the next break in his Nexus schedule to install it. Next post-deadline project is to install the woodstove, which should be able to heat the top half of the house very well.

Crops are coming in at the farm, some better than others. Maddie and I picked 10 pounds of beautiful Swiss Chard this week, which I blanched and froze for winter soups, and we also froze several batches of basil in olive oil for later pestos.

Heading back out there today to do battle with the fearsome weeds that have to be wrestled mightily out of the soil. Makes me *very* glad I'm doing raised bed and mulched gardens at home, where I hardly have to weed at all....

Paul Hawken's commencement speech

2009-06-05T07:05:00.000-07:00

The full text is here Actually, I don't know if this is the full text, but it's where I found the speech. It moved me enormously, but I won't rhapsodize too much. Here it is (and don't forget to visit Maddie's blog (link's on the right sidebar), she's been quite prolific of late. She's doing a much better job of updating the world on our doings than I am.)

The Unforgettable Commencement Address by Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3, 2009

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.

But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food, but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit.. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

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Gardens grow

2009-05-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

Between helping out with Home Grown Foods, organizing homeschooling physics field trips, working at our friend Rosemary's mini-farm in her co-op garden (I'm a field laborer now! From journalism to massage therapy to working in the fields, what an interesting career path I've taken :P ) and taking care of our own back 40, it's been a busy six weeks or so.

Steve's in Pennsylvania right now, for Grandpa Jack's 70th birthday celebration (that's a video of him paddling to shore from the sailboat, where he spent the night Friday night, taken by his brother). We miss him, Harry especially, but we've been keeping busy while he's been gone, visiting all the baby animals on Rosemary's little farm (kittens, kids, a lamb and a piglet), digging up perennial flowers and herbs from a homeschooling friend's garden and building an herb garden in the backyard.

Here's some photos of life on the homestead, as of this morning...

One corn patch is in the foreground, covered with straw, then there's the strawberry and greens beds, another corn bed where we're planting the four sisters (corn, beans, squash and bee balm) and our raised no-dig bed behind it.

Here's the 36-foot long bed, outfitted for plastic row cover in case of frost, or these days, hail, with our winter greens going to seed (I'm going to collect the mustard seed, in case it will be useful for pickling cucumbers.)

These are the raspberries on the upper level, and you can see below them a trench of potatoes that are just starting to sprout above the surface.

At the other end of the raised bed are the potatoes I planted under the protection of the hoop in March. They're ready to be partially buried again and start forming tubers on the buried half of the vegetation.

Some tomatoes and rhubarb in the upper corner of the yard....

And our chicken run, with the four laying hens inside and one of the pullets (almost ready to lay!) wandering in freedom next to them. The pullets don't eat the garden greens yet, so they're free to wander. They're not quite as big as the hens yet, so I"m putting off that fateful day of flock integration a bit longer. I've tried it once already, and it wasn't pretty. Much pecking, flapping and squawking. That, by the way is Hawk, a.k.a. survivor chicken. You can barely tell she was grabbed by a fox and stuffed under a woodpile!

Here's our big strawberry bed, which we covered with plastic starting in February. It's giving us a bowl of berries a day now, though it's a pitched battle between us and the robins. Theres' a second smaller bed on the level above it that's still setting fruit.

Here's a view of the south side of our yard. You can see the new herb spiral (closeups to follow), a trashcan full of last night's rain, and in the foreground, tomatoes, basil and chives and one of our greens beds.

Here's another south side view, with the chicken coop under the deck, the herb garden again, and you can see our solar heat collector, that big triangle sticking out of the south side of our house. I think it would be more efficient with some new, more translucent paneling, it's on our list of things to do.

Steve's bed of snappeas and greens is looking good.

And here's some closeups of the herb spiral I built yesterday, with rocks from around the yard and herbs from my friend's garden and from the nursery.

In the front yard, our south-side berm of raspberries and pear trees is doing well...

In the foreground is an elderberry bush, and on the other side of the mulched berm are some serviceberries, part of our edible perennial landscaping out front (yes, those are onions on the berm, between the sticks of bare-root raspberries. I ran out of room for onions in the backyard!)

And finally, my big digging project of early spring, the permaculture-inspired berm to retain water. Under that pile of dirt and bark mulch is an 18-inch deep trench filled with more mulch, which will hold moisture for the raspberries planted above, and the whole thing should keep water from running off our slanted front yard. After we finished it, I realized that I really should have bermed up by the sidewalk in front of the house, as most of the water retention benefits flow downhill underground from the berm, but I'm going to plant perennial flowers in the strip between the berm and the road, so they should be happy and well watered, at least! Oh, and in the driveway you see how we've been spending the occasional hot days we get -- in the purple canoe at the nearby fishing ponds.

Oh, and I can't forget that other growing project we've been working on...

eta: we just got our first egg from our buff orpington pullet! She laid this afternoon without much fanfare, so now we're up to 5 layers! Our poor americauna might be a bit behind the laying curve, what with having to heal up from those fox bites...

Mourning a chicken, nursing a chicken, cursing a fox

2009-04-14T08:30:00.001-07:00

It was a rough weekend at the S&S homestead, starting at 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning.

That's when I was awakened by a strangled squawk. I lay in bed for another half a minute wondering what exactly I had just heard, until a frantic racket sent me flying out onto the deck shrieking. I won't go into the gory details, but after waking Steve up, we searched the backyard with a flashlight (note to self: must buy more and better flashlights) we found the body of Luna, one of our four-month old Americaunas. In the garage (I left the back door open on a day full of gardening, an Easter egg hunt with one neighbor family and a BBQ at another family's house that went late into the evening), the other Americauna was missing. Our Buff Orpington pullet was huddled safely in the pen.

After another search of the yard, we retreated inside to comfort Maddie who had woken and was distraught. I was particularly upset that Luna's death had been all for naught, as the fox had dropped her and fled, and I considered taking her out to the marsh preserve a mile away where neighbors told us a fox kits every year, but Steve thought we shouldn't give them a taste for chickens.

As we were laying in bed, we suddenly heard another chicken racketing. "Oh my god, it's back and it's got another one," I thought. Steve ran out this time, I couldn't face another tragedy. He came back in with Hawk, our missing Americauna.

Our best guess is, the fox grabbed Hawk and she fell unconscious, as I think chickens may be prone to do under great stress. She took her to the back of the yard and stuffed her under a woodpile (Steve stood on the woodpile and he was looking over the fence in our first frantic survey of the yard and heard not a peep from Hawk under his feet, so she was probably still unconscious, but safely protected from his weight, I might add, by the structure of the pile), then the fox went back for Luna, who put up more of a fight and sent me flying out onto the deck, which caused the fox to drop her in the yard and flee. Then, sometime later, Hawk came to in shock and disress and began calling for her flock.

We got her in and wrapped up warm, daubed some betadine on the puncture wound we could see on her back, and set her in a box in the bathroom to stay warm. In the morning, she was still looking alert and Steve did a more thorough inspection, found two more puncture wounds on the underside and washed and disinfected those. I'd gotten on the Backyard Chickens forum at 3:30 in the morning and asked about wound care and had gotten some great advice, which we followed. I wanted to take Hawk into the veterinary school's teaching hospital Saturday morning after Steve found the additional bites, but they were going to charge a weekend fee of $95 right off the bat, so we decided to see how she'd do on her own.

After two days in a dark box, she was ready to be interacting, calling softly when we left her room. We brought in Minimax, our young Buff Orp and her sole remaining flockmate, and they cozied up together on the wire shelf over the bathtub that Steve had rigged as a perch. At first Max really wanted to groom Hawk's dissarrayed feathers over the wound, but we kept pushing her away and she stopped trying after a while.

They sat together for half a day on the shelving, then I came in to check on them and nearly bowled them over with the door -- they'd begun wandering the bathroom. So into the garage pen they went. Hawk's eating and drinking (and pooping, had some lovely bathroom cleanup to do), and they've mostly sat quietly together in the straw. Max has been a good companion.

Meanwhile, we had a ceremony to bury Luna, whom we lost under a nearly full moon on Good Friday night. We buried her next to the compost pile Sunday evening. Yesterday morning, I noticed a small hole had been dug over her grave, and attributed it to Sunny nosing around there. This morning, Steve said, "You were right that the fox would keep coming back." He'd found a significant hole dug into Luna's grave, and when he probed to see how deep it went, he found only her empty shroud. Somehow, I felt much better knowing that her death hadn't been for naught, that she had fed some fox kits after all.

Several people have suggested we get a gun a shoot the fox. I would never do that, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is, I'd just have to shoot the next one, and the next one and the next one, until we had a plague of rabbits, mice and voles in our neck of town.

We'll keep a sharp eye out for signs of the fox trying to get to our other girls, but I think they're well protected. We're closing off Sunny's dog door out of the garage at night now, and the girls in the coop under the deck are protected by wire dug under the ground and in an L shape out from the fence.

It's been a rough and painful lesson to learn for me, an opportunity, as unwanted as it may be, for the kids to begin to learn how to process grief, and a meal for a handful of hungry kits.

Another couple of stunning youtube videos....

2009-04-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

The first one is fascinating, the second is jaw-dropping...
Dolphins

Elephant

The elephant one is so unbelievable, that I went and googled it after posting. Here's an article that explains what's happening in it...

A couple of videos that I thought were lovely

2009-03-30T08:07:00.001-07:00

that a friend passed on this morning.

Where the Hell is Matt (and maybe everyone has already seen these, I know how far behind the pop culture curve I am!) and a video from Playing for Change

I'm still trying to upload some recent photos of our blizzard on Thursday (it was pretty minor as blizzards, go, but it sounds exciting). Can't figure out the danged photo software on my laptop.

Harry found this Storm Trooper Dance video while we were watching the others, and wanted me to post it too!

Spring! Ahhhhhhhhh.....

2009-03-16T08:27:00.000-07:00

Haven't written much, feel like I'm perpetually holding my breath, wondering what might collapse and when in this breathtaking world economy we're living through right now.

But in real life, all has been well. February was weirdly warm, we got some planting done and the little sprouts are doing well. We're helping out Home Grown Food with publicity and running workshops and Steve's been creating fun buttons for them to sell.

Our chickens are doing fine, though our boss girl is molting and she looks a bit odd without a big beautiful bouquet of tail feathers. The three pullets are in the garage now, we put them out in the big coop on warm days and lock them in there. They will have a bit of a time integrating into the flock when they're full-sized, but I hope the hen-pecking won't be too severe.

We missed Nick's birthday party because pertussis was running through his crowd of friends, but short of holing up all winter, there's no escaping the bugs. We went to a really fun, huge, hands-on physics fair at the university the following weekend, and shortly thereafter came down with a lovely coughing crud that we're still expectorating.

Harry is still going to croup, but glory of glories, we went in to urgent care and found that they've created a new liquid steroid formulation that doesn't taste like poison anymore! He was able to slug it down and we didn't have to do the middle of the night drives with the window down for hours on end. I can't tell you what a relief that was!

My folks arrived for a wonderful visit which ends tomorrow, we even got a dash of snow while they were here. They've split their time between our house and Cindi's. On Saturday, Dad came up with Nick and Owen and we met downtown for the St. Patrick's Day parade, which was hokey but fun.

Steve's still got a job (hooray!) and he even negotiated a raise, because he's been so damned efficient that he's reduced his hours by 20 percent. So they're paying him 10 percent more and he's going to make up the other 10 percent of lost time by generating new moneymaking ventures for the magazine, calendars, t-shirts, etc. to sell.

I went out for a mother's brunch out yesterday with a group of six or seven women, all of us unschoolers, down in Boulder, and I was shocked at the degree and rapidity with which the economy has affected them. Two husbands are laid off, two women are going back to work part-time, two are considering how they might manage through a divorce because the financial stresses are creating such strain. It made me realize how fragile people are going to be throughout this crisis and how valuable an extra dose of gentleness for people I meet will be.

I'm excited to get planting and growing. I've been reading up on various intensive gardening methods. I'm going to plant out some potatoes in a protected bed today, but I really want to plant more using this method.

We're going to experiment with some grains. I have amaranth seeds to plant, but eventually i think it would be fun to grow oats and wheat.

My new friend who is hosting a community garden on her land wants to raise piglets and has asked if we want to participate and buy/help raise a piglet. I would like to, though I'm wondering how I'll handle butchering time, when it comes around. (We won't be doing the job ourselves, mind you, but I imagine it will be emotional nonetheless.) I figure either I'll make my peace with it or be motivated to go vegetarian.

I'm still waffling on the dairy goat partnership. I just don't see getting up crack-of-dawn to go over to Rosemary's farm and milk most mornings. Housing here would be problematic. We still haven't figured out how to pen the chickens up to keep them out of our gardens but still able to roam and graze. They're nibbling away on the green grass shoots coming up, and they get very antsy if we lock them in their coop for too long during the day. (Oh, we moved our compost pile from one side of the yard to the other on Friday and the whole thing was loaded with worms. The chickens were positively apoplectic, running back and forth along the fencing we'd put up temporarily so they'd stay out of our way, as Steve carted the smelly goo across the yard. Once we released them ("Release the chickens!" she bellowed, and all the worms quaked, but you couldn't really tell because they were pretty gelatinous to begin with."), they raced over to the new compost pile and walked around the sides of it, heads cocked sideways, beaks darting between the wooden slats to grab whatever critters were unlucky enough to have landed at the outer edges of the pile.

Morning and it's duties calls, so I'll sign off for now!

ps. Maddie just finished a blog post as well, if you haven't found her blog, it's here

Changing my mind

2009-02-17T09:14:00.000-08:00

In more ways than one. I had written a post about today's market convulsions, as I've been glued to the Internet this morning, reading fascinating and frightening commentary about what's happening. But I notice that each time I do that, I ruin my enjoyment of the day and skew my perspective on life in detrimental ways, so I think instead, I will let the world's economies do what they're going to do, and head out to a community garden planning/seed ordering meeting with the kids. It is, after all, a glorious day here, and in many other places in the world. And gardening is the best antidote for economic crises, both in spirit and in pratical returns! So I'm changing my mind -- all *is* well, sun is shining, children and chickens are happy, and I feel much better realizing all that!

Does the Dog Whisperer pick up his dogs' poop?

2009-02-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

It's one of those questions that nags at me each time I catch Sunny giving me the eye as I stoop and grab her poop in my bag covered hand. What is she thinking? Am I undermining my status as pack leader by picking up her poop? WWtDWD?

I brought this up with Steve the other morning, as we were walking in circles on the schoolyard, getting a little exercise before our kids were up and before the school kids were heading to school.

I said I was pretty sure Cesar didn't pick up after his dog pack, didn't seem like a pack leader-ly thing to do, but then I remembered that dogs are coprophagic and decided that maybe he could pretend to eat the poop and still retain status. And then Steve really grossed me out by saying that he's such an authentic pack leader that maybe he actually does eat... eewwwww, nevermind.

We're doing fine. It's been a mild, dry winter and I'm giving in to the gardening urges and planting spinach in a cold frame. We've got greens started in a windowsill and will finish erecting a hoop cover over our new long raised bed this week, to let the soil heat up and speed the composting process so that we can plant out in another few weeks.

The kids and I have been immersing in all sorts of survival skills reading -- from My Side of the Mountain (one of my very favorite books growing up), to Bear Gryll's new book, Man vs. Wild, based on his TV series, to the first two seasons of Survivorman on DVD (thanks Grandma and PopPop!)

We're inspired to learn some fire starting and knot tying skills at the very least, and Maddie would like to construct a small building in the backyard, so she and I may build a larger coop for our growing flock, though she is also drafting ambitious plans for a two-story home.

We're trying to get more organized about our garden records and the kids and I are going to track how many eggs we're producing and perhaps even weigh our garden produce as we harvest it, if I can find a little kitchen scale at a reasonable price.

We're also going to participate in a co-gardening venture at the mini-ranch of a friend of a friend who lives a couple of miles away. She has chickens goats and horses and is going to plow a bunch of aged manure into an acre or so of unused paddock, which we and a few other families will plant and tend over the summer months. The kids will enjoy going over there, for all the animals and the wonderful barn full of rope swings. Even though we'll have a lot growing in our own yard, I'm thinking I'll learn a lot from gardening with others and may end up growing things I didn't know I liked. Plus, we'll have all the more surplus to share with neighbors and there's always dehydrating, canning and freezing that can be done.

Steve's working a lot these past couple of weeks and both he and the couple who publish Nexxus are breathing sighs of relief that not only are ads coming in, they're actually reversing the decline of the last couple of years! There are four more pages of ads this issue than last, and last issue had more ads than the previous. At least for now, Nexxus is in good shape and people are willing to spend on advertising to keep their businesses going.

That's most of the news that's fit to print (okay, maybe the Cesar Milan stuff was a bit libelous, but I doubt he reads my blog....)

Continuing the California in decline theme...

2009-01-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

This is the piece Steve did for the LA Times book review this weekend. Don't think the link will take you to the right place after a week, however...

edited to change the link to this, which is just a thumbnail of the piece. Fame is even more fleeting in cyberspace than in print, sadly!

Color photos from 1939-1944

2009-01-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

Found a reference to this huge Flickr collection today (imagine, the Library of Congress is now on Flickr!) I find it utterly fascinating to see color photos from this era. I love the carny/fair shots and I found the sharecropper photos particularly poignant.

Today's high? 21 degrees.... Celsius!

2009-01-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

How balmy to hit 70 in January! I'm starting to warm up to this whole climate change thing....

Yesterday was nearly as gorgeous, we watched the inauguration then took off for the raptor rehabilitation center for a hike along the poudre river and a visit to some disabled birds of prey, including a huge bald eagle, golden eagle and great horned owl. In the afternoon, I bought 27 bags of steer manure for some garden bed building today. Of course, whatever I want to get done, I need to finish it by tomorrow, as the weather is expected to turn tomorrow night.

Steve and I have had a prosperous week, which is nice for a change. Steve last did two pieces of freelance art for the LA Times over Thanksgiving, and with exquisitely bad timing, he submitted his invoices in that narrow window just before the company declared bankruptcy. His unpaid invoice is now part of the bankruptcy proceedings and who knows when or if we'll ever see the full amount.

A week after the filing, the company was okayed to continue payments for future work and Steve got two assignments last week, which he just finished. Whilst I got my first writing assignment in 4 1/2 years from the LA Daily News, where my good friend and former colleague is now the editorial page editor. She was putting together a package on this current out-migration from California, and wanted a first-person piece. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it for her and you can read it here. Doesn't pay much, $150, and that is if I can get payment before something drastic happens at the Daily News, a distinct possibility these days. Still and all, a fun return to writing, and I may do more in the future.

Home-ground wheat -- with aspirations for home-grown...

2009-01-07T11:42:00.000-08:00

We bought a grain mill last month and finally got it up and running this week. The pancakes and muffins we made with the first batch of wheat were deliciously nutty. I'd read that fresh ground wheat tastes worlds better than the store bought stuff, and wheat berries last for decades when stored securely, while whole wheat flour can go rancid fairly quickly.

I'm trying a batch of the no-knead bread with it right now, though I'm not sure how it will do, as our wheat is whole grain and I haven't tried this recipe out on straight whole wheat flour before. I'll report the results tomorrow morning. Here's Maddie and Steve doing some grinding....

Other recent events include a warm spell that got my gardening urge flowing again, so we started on another sheet-composted bed, down on the main lawn. The chickens, ever hopeful that there might be worms, were quite the hindrance while I was shoveling, but they spread things out nicely once I was done. We'll plant corn, beans and squash on this patch, but I might try another sheet composting on part of the lawn to grow some winter wheat in the late summer or fall, I'll have to read up on how to grow wheat. Threshing might be a fun adventure.

We tossed another layer of dirt onto the bed that was built in October with the Grow Food Not Lawns workshop, and watered everything in hopes of keeping some composting action going as we wait for spring. I'm going to tunnel-cover at least the October bed to get a head-start on spring crops.

We also enjoyed a visit from Grandma Judith and Aunt Joanne, who rode the train from Iowa to stay for a long weekend. They toured the Budweiser plant just down the road from us, learned to place a dice game called Farkle that we learned over Christmas from Aunt Cindi, and spurred Maddie to new knitting heights, which she blogs about here.

Chicken Disaster Averted! Harry Saves the Day!

2009-01-06T09:52:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, we had a close call at S & S Homestead, but thanks to the sharp eyes and quick wit of Harry, all is well. It was midafternoon, very cold and the playground was deserted. I was fixing Harry a snack in the kitchen and he was standing at the sliding glass door when he cried out, "Mom, there's a fox in the yard!"

I ran onto the porch in my stocking feet, brandishing a paring knife, and I bravely shouted "Git!" The fox promptly turned tail and leapt lightly back over our back fence and into the school yard. I ran around the yard looking for signs of chicken carnage, not knowing how long the fox had been in the yard (it turns out Harry had watched it jump in) and not finding them in the coop, I feared the worst. I called and ran around and one by one they sauntered out from the far side of the garage, wondering why I was making such a racket. One, two, three four. Phew!

I locked them in their run and ran back upstairs to change socks and thaw my toes. I was surprisingly shaken by the worry that the girls had been gotten.

Maddie looked up information on the red fox, its diet and its home range, and we determined that the fox in our yard was mostly likely the same fox we've seen several places in our neighborhood and several times on the canal path. As they're omnivores and need about a pound of protein a day, and we're now in deep winter, we decided to put some dog food out for it, sprinkling it in the grasses along the canal in hopes that a hungry fox will be diligent about hunting out the kibbles, but a well-fed dog on a walk won't work that hard to steal it first.

With any luck, we can keep it from getting so desperate that it goes after the chickens again, or, heaven forbid, Sunny.

Feeling grateful, yet guilty...

2008-12-26T18:37:00.000-08:00

I've kept an eye on Murrieta's housing market over the past year, since we left, with an increasing sense of having just avoided a major train wreck, combined with a growing feeling of guilt about selling our house to someone who is now stuck with a 50 percent loss.

Thanks to all of the foreclosures that continue to flood the SoCal market, and especially the Inland Empire, as our corner of SoCal was known, our house is now worth approximately what we paid for it in 2001. I'm stunned that six years and a half years of appreciation could have evaporated that quickly, and from what I'm reading, it's not over yet.

I just ran across this article today, on GQs website, about the city just to the north of Murrieta, which it describes as ground zero of the foreclosure crisis.

I'm so glad we got out and yet I feel badly for our buyer....

Happy Yule, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year!

2008-12-26T10:43:00.000-08:00

What a strange, strange fall it's been. I confess that I haven't been posting these last two months because I have been spending my on-line time trying to understand what has been happening to the economy, and as I've begun to grok it, I haven't known how to write about the ordinary details of life without feeling like I'm ignoring the looming tsunami.

Trying to find the balance between understanding how things are changing and preparing oneself as best one can, while maintaining a sense of hope and gratitude for all that is well in this very moment, has been a challenge for me. I toggle back and forth between astonishment at the dramatic developments of the fall and the direction that those folks who accurately predicted this crisis six or eight years ago say we are likely to head next, and the attendant anxiety that accompanies thinking about such deep changes. I remind myself of the Buddhist insight that all this thinking and planning and worrying is truly just a story, the waking dream, and that in this moment, I have exactly what I need, joyfully enough.

So, with such crazy, careening thoughts and planning, can you blame me for not posting more and would you have wanted to read what I was thinking about anyway? (If you would have wanted to read it, I recommend the writings of Chris Martenson, Sharon Astyk, and John Michael Greer , though there's a whole blogosphere of writers out there, some that are really "out there" and some quite fascinating and compelling voices.)

On the home front, we are all well and thriving, and how wonderful is that!

Maddie is nearly 10 and I feel like I'm watching the early stages of her metamorphosis from child to adult -- she still plays freely, creatively and entirely in her imagination with her brother, spinning long and elaborate interactions between characters that they create, but she is also increasingly interested in becoming productive, in testing and expanding her abilities and competencies. We have set up an Etsy.com site for her art, and I'm sure she'll post about it once she's gotten her online store up and running.

Harry is a storyteller as well, and when he's not dialoging with Maddie in their long-running creations, he is telling his own stories, to himself and sometimes to us or other adults he knows and loves. Building, creating and battling are common themes in his play.

The kids continue their evolution into reading -- Maddie is a very fluent reader and Harry has quietly made the leap to early reading as well. Like Maddie, he was very quiet about his evolving skills, a trait I've always been fascinated by, as a primed-by-schooling-to-seek-outside-approval-and-validation sort of person. (Please, leave me positive comments on my blog so I can feel good about myself, okay?)

As I continue my exploration of mathematics and learning that I wrote about earlier this fall I am inspired by the ideas and activities presented by Pam Sorooshian and Sandra Dodd.

I find that even as I try to bring all sorts of new activities and games into our lives to explore particular skill sets, the kids are often quite thoroughly engrossed in their own skill building experiences, thank you very much -- from blogging to communicating with other kids in an online Legobuilding world to participating in the economy of the online World of Warcraft (We have a character for whom the kids would like to aquire an epic flying mount. But at a price of 5,000 gold, the kids are having to do a lot of farming for resources and selling them in the on-line auction house to other players, which involves determining low and average selling prices and pricing bundled resources at a proper per-item price.)

And just now, Steve and Maddie walked in the door with the three newest members of our household, two Auracana chicks and another Buff Orpington chick. We love our four girls, but we find that between the baking and the breakfasts, we're not self-sufficient on eggs yet. So our flock has increased to seven, and these three girls should start laying sometime in May. I imagine Maddie will post about them shortly, with photos from her new camera.

On the homefront, it's been pretty darned cold the last few weeks. I've been investigating and moving forward on various energy efficiencies. We've got plans to replace some of our old aluminum frame windows and sliders, I've bought insulating shades for some windows, we'll hang more curtains and I'm going to order a wood-burning stove (the local supplier is backordered through February, thanks to a steel shortage, apparently).

I've been pondering my lessons learned in the garden this year and am planning next year's changes and expansions. We're going to shift fencing to keep chickens out of the greens beds and we're planning to sheet compost and add a Three Sisters planting (I love Toby Hemenway's book, Gaia's Garden) to our backyard. I'm going to start earlier with row covers and hope to get a crop of melons and peppers this year. My grander ambitions include a glass and wood cold frame or two (the sheet plastic ones have been official blown to pieces by our periodic prairie winds) and a full-blown greenhouse, either attached to the south side of our house, or freestanding in the backyard with a northwall made of strawbale or cob construction (Maddie's been very interested in cob construction, so even if we don't do a greenhouse, Steve plans to do a backyard oven of cob this summer.)

And my secret, really crazy ambition is to get a dwarf dairy goat and make my own dairy products. I've found someone who'd like to board it at her mini-farm, though I'm contemplating at least part-time residency here. This may all wait a year or two to see if code enforcement officers go by the wayside as the economy gets worse, and to give our gardens and chickens time to produce enough to share with our closest neighbors.

The front yard will get more edible perennials -- a bed of blueberries, some hazlenut bushes, another asian pear, and the currants, gooseberry and service berries that are overwintering in our garage from a too-zealous plant-buying spree on my part this fall.

I don't know how self-sufficient we can really become on a quarter-acre in a cold winter climate, but I'm excited to explore the possibilities. I'm particularly inspired by the urban-homesteaders who have this blog.

We've had a wonderful month or so of visits to and from family and friends. Thanksgiving we spent at my folks where we got to reconnect with my Aunt Toby, Uncle David, and cousins Stacey, Siobhan and Eric.

Then in December, our inspiring friends, Karen, John, Saylor, Stone and Sage came for a visit as they started a grand adventure as a family on the road. As always, they both inspire me to be a calmer, kinder, more empowering parent, and that wonderful effect last for months after their visits (thank you and I know the kids thank you too!)

Lastly and wonderfully, we had a warm, fun and delightful Christmas week visiting with my folks and my sister and her family, down Boulder way.

Now, it's time to clean up the mess and remove a few carloads of stuff from the house to make up for the carloads that came in with the holiday. Oh, and feed the chicks. And keep the chickens warm (Steve built a great new run for them on the south end of the deck where they get sun but are protected somewhat from the winds and get some of the radiated warmth from the house as well). And walk the dog (before it gets cold again). And change the rat cage. And explain to the kids why a kitten is currently out of the question.

???

2008-12-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

(Posted by maddie)

Today I went out to our chicken coop, gathered up the three eggs in one of our two nestboxes and left Ginny to lay in peace in the other.
Later that day my mom went out to check again, in the nest box I had emptied out were two eggs, and in the one Ginny had been sitting in, one.
This would have been completely normal if we had 6 laying chickens, but we have 4 laying chickens.
Even more amazing is that all the chicken owners we know have chickens laying 3-4 days in a week.
We're all very perplexed now.

(: Maybe it's because we give our chickens lots of love :)

Birthday weekend sightings

2008-10-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

I spontaneously woke up at dawn this morning -- I love it when that happens, but I usually have to wait for the shorter days of fall and winter. When Steve got up, we decided to take Sunny out for a walk in the schoolyard behind our house. She ran to the far end to poop, and as I was walking over to pick it up, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. A large, gorgeous fox has just run across the street and into the schoolyard through an open gate by the road. I called to Steve to get Sunny on leash, then we retreated behind a tree to watch the animal, which trotted quite familiarly down the fenceline and towards our yard. I was glad that I hadn't let the chickens out yet -- I'd been watching them in their coop as I did dishes earlier and had decided they looked content enough to peck around in their small run, so I'd left them in there. The fox was clearly familiar with the schoolyard and tried to get through a closed gate in someone's fence when Sunny finally spotted it and started barking. It gave up and ran back to the road and trotted up the shoulder out of sight.

A lap of the schoolyard later, Steve pointed out a large, hot air balloon floating over the backyards on our block, fairly low to the ground. Sunny started barking fiercely at it but as it approached and passed overhead, she was barking from behind our knees, trying to hide from it. As soon as it passed by, she ran for our front door and begged to go in, which I'm certain is a first for her. The kids and I have been reading Brisingr, the final book in the Eragon/Inheritance series, so I joked to them that she must have thought it was a Ra'zac!

Steve and I continued our morning ritual of walking in circles around the block (we use Sunny as our kid monitor -- we know they're still asleep if she's still sitting in the bay window watching for us) and he pointed out what a gift such sightings were on a birthday weekend!

For my actual birthday yesterday, we had a series of lovely family outings, starting with breakfast at our favorite downtown coffee shop, followed by a Goodwill visit for Maddie's Orc costume elements and canning jars and other little treasures, including a pure copper collander that's probably worth a ton for the metal alone.

We got giant pumpkins to carve from the city-run children's farm in Martinez park, then decided to return in the evening for its trick-or-treating event, which was very charming. Oh, and we hit our favorite feed store for a load of spoiled straw for today's gardening workshop (more about that in a moment) and to coo over the baby chicks. The wily feed store owner nearly talked us into getting some more chicks (I'm trying to hold the line at 2 more, as six is the max the city allows under its new backyard hens ordinance, so it seems reasonable to abide by that even though we aren't actually legal to have any here in the county) but we may wait until after we go to California at Thanksgiving.

The chickens are producing regularly now, though I'm not sure that our Buff Orpington is laying yet. We get three eggs most days, sometimes two, which is good considering that birds lay less when the days shorten. Steve has pinioned them (a skill he learned in his pet bird owning days) which I was afraid would be a traumatic event but wasn't any worse than a haircut. But it does keep them from flying to the top of our six-foot fence and into the neighbor's yard, where a large black dog known to kill birds resides. At first, they made an awful racket when they were laying and I was terribly worried about them, but they seem to have got the plumbing working smoothly and now they only call when they're done, either in self-congratulation or to let the next hen know the nestbox is available.

I'll post more later today, but I need to get ready for this Grow Food Not Lawns workshop we're hosting this afternoon, and Maddie's impatient to have the computer and work on a story she's writing. Imagine, eager would-be gardeners coming to our house to help build a no-dig raised bed for us. Such a deal!

Pain in the neck

2008-10-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

First of all, Judith is doing very well, she's bounced back remarkably, and should be able to leave the hospital in a couple of days. What a stunning week in someone's life. With any luck, she should regain energy that's been missing since April, when she was (no-doubt mistakenly) diagnosed with post-viral fatigue syndrome. (Fatigue is the number one sign of a heart attack in women, but her doctor missed it, probably because she doesn't have heart disease in her family, her energy levels fluctuate based on how well her cortisone medicines are managed and she keeps herself busy enough to justify fatigue...)

Steve returned from Iowa on Monday, as I was developing the worst stiff neck of my life. By Tuesday morning I headed into the medical clinic to make sure it wasn't more than just a neck ache, as swallowing was often quite painful and there was no position i could sit or lie in in which the pain wasn't strong. Sent home with some muscle relaxants and instructions to keep taking ibuprofen, it took another day for me to feel noticeably better. I'm cautiously optomistic that this is fading, though I don't know how much of my relief is just from the muscle relaxants finally kicking in. Sigh. Fine mess for a massage therapist to find herself in, eh? I have done a good deal of triggerpoint work on my neck and upper back that seemed to jump start the feeling-better process. It's making me realize how much help neuromuscular therapy can be, and making me think about restarting a practice here, once I'm fully recovered, of course.

Unfortunately, all this was unfolding in the middle of my folks' visit, so they've been having to shift for themselves on meals and doing a ton of housework and playing with the kids. I'm very grateful they're here, just wish I hadn't been out of it for so much of their visit. They leave tomorrow for Cindi's house and the next day for a week in Hilton Head, SC, then we'll see them again after that. It's great to have them around. They're currently househunting here, looking for a second home and I'm holding my breath that they'll find something they like!

Sunday morning update

2008-09-28T06:39:00.000-07:00

Steve reports they've started weaning Judith off the balloon (?)machine that supports her heart function and that's going very well, in fact her heart is functioning stronger now that she is only getting support every third beat than when the machine was assisting with each beat. Today they're going to try and wean her from the ventilator as well. She's semi-conscious through this, and last night was having quite a bit of trouble with the breathing tube and feeling like she couldn't breath. It was hard for Steve to see her struggling and signaling for help when he could do nothing but hold her hand and try to reassure her that her blood-oxygen levels were fine. The medical staff says she will remember none of this trauma. This morning, at least, she is peacefully sleeping through the heart machine weaning.

Steve says he's having an interesting experience in being homeless, and has learned to scope out the darkest corner in the lounge and spread his stuff on the couch there to reserve it, he's scouted out the restrooms and vending machines and of course the cafeteria.

He needs to come home though, because the magazine is on deadline now and his work has piled up. He's feeling badly about leaving when she's not out of the hospital yet, but with any luck she'll be conscious and alert by tomorrow.

Saturday morning update....

2008-09-27T06:25:00.000-07:00

Steve says Judith is holding her own, but not making a lot of progress, and he's not sure what to make of it. She's still on a ventilator and heart support equipment, but they did manage to wean her down a bit on some meds last night. She looks pretty good and has a sense of vitality, he says. The hospital seems very competent but a bit lacking on feedback to families of patients. Maybe they don't know much either....

He's out this morning at the Des Moines Farmers Market, having been kicked out of Judith's room by a nurse changing dressings and such, and he's recharging a bit exploring the blocks-long event. He's feeling the strain, I'm afraid....

The kids and I are headed to our favorite family raspberry patch this morning, then our own farmers market downtown, and possibly to Loveland for this Stone Age Fair. We all agree it sounds fun, but we're not sure how much running around we want to do in one day....

On a side note, the kids and I were cruising the Net last night and visited our former babysitter's myspace page last night, to listen to some of her music (the kids recognized her right away, though i wasn't sure they would, as we haven't seen Sam in about a year). I was stunned and delighted to read that she's been nominated for a Grammy in the new artist folk/Americana category! Her music has matured and gotten complex in ways even my lay-ear can identify, and I'm not in the least bit surprised that she's being noticed. (The first song on her page is Sam backing up a friend on vocals and guitar. I especially like her studio version of New Day)

Maddie's first salon visit

2008-09-26T22:11:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, Maddie and I got our hair cut at a salon in town. It was my first professional cut in a ridiculously long time, and Maddie's first cut ever. She loved the experience, much to my surprise! Harry managed to find his own fun in it as well...

Friday morning update

2008-09-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

Just talked to Steve, who's having breakfast in the hospital cafeteria with his step--Dad and step-sister. Judith made some gains in the night in lung function, and didn't lose ground anywhere else. They might have hoped for more healing progress, but they're happy to get what they got. She's mostly unconscious but stirs some. She's "warm, pink and dry," as the night nurse put it, and that's good. Now it's just waiting for the healing to happen. Steve did get the impression from the night nurse, and even from the surgeon's pre-op demeanor, that the medical staff wasn't sure Judith would make it, so this is a huge achievement for her to be here this morning, a testament to her strong will, I'm sure....

Judith has made it through surgery

2008-09-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

It was a grueling, 7 or 8 hour affair, made longer by bleeding problems caused by the blood thinner they'd given her for her heart attack, but they've done everything they wanted to do -- a valve replacement and triple bypass -- and got the bleeding under control. She's in her ICU room now and will be kept under sedation for the next day or two, to keep her from fighting the intubation and other equipment to which she's hooked up. A big hurdle overcome....

Stuff

2008-09-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

First an update on Judith -- Steve is in Iowa. He drove there yesterday. She's had a couple of complications, first congestive heart failure caused by the extra fluid they gave her to boost her blood pressure, which is now under control, and now the realization that a heart valve was damaged by the original MI. So she needs supplemental oxygen and a machine to help pump blood through her system. She's scheduled for open heart surgery at noon today, to repair or replace the valve and clean out a few other partially blocked arteries. Prognosis is good for this surgery, and we're hoping for the best.

Maddie, in the meantime, has decided to start her own blog. You can read it here
We'll get photos up soon. She's been carving overgrown zucchini into replicas of famous statues, but I don't know how well they'll photograph. We'll do our best to light them properly, before they start getting moldy!

eta: I haven't been able to get links to work in the last few posts. Here's the address of Maddie's blog:
http://maddiestuff.blogspot.com/

Campfire stories...

2008-09-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

We had a fabulous time over the weekend at Buckhorn, a church camp in the mountains overlooking Fort Collins. We left chickens tucked into their coop and new, bigger run (which they don't like any better than the previous run), rats with plenty of food, and a dismayed Sunny at the boarding kennel Friday afternoon, and drove 45 minutes up a gorgeous mountain canyon to Foothills UU Church's annual family camp. After our rainy camping trip a few weeks ago, we decided to stay in a cabin. They were very rustic, but had indoor plumbing and a fireplace that looked better than it performed (Steve lit a fire in it Saturday night, and we ended up opening the cabin windows to safeguard against carbon monoxide poisoning, or at least throat irritation.)

The setting was gorgeous, on the shoulder of a mountain with a view far across the plains. We could see the lights of Fort Collins at night and watched several gorgeous storms drift over that flat, green sea at various times during the weekend.

Among the highlights of the weekend -- a massive game of capture the flag in the pine forest (I worried through the whole thing about twisted ankles and impaled runners, but there was only one mild middle-aged injury -- not mine -- and I was very pleasantly surprised to wake up the next morning not particularly sore). There were also s'mores around the campfire, a drumming circle, group sings, a brief plein-air service Sunday morning, and an exciting, unscheduled exploration of a cave near the fishing pond with some of the tween-aged kids.

Camp food was cafeteria fare, but at least it gave the kids a taste, so to speak, of some of what they're missing, or not, as homeschoolers. It's funny how much we all watched the clock for meal times, even knowing they were going to be less-than-spectacular.

There was a fun group sing Saturday night, followed by a Buckhorn tradition -- To Tell The Truth. Campers submit one true and unusual story about themselves, then two "liars" are recruited, and the panels are put before the audience for questions and a vote on who is the true tale-teller. Steve and I were both asked to be liars; I demurred because I thought it would be too stressful but Steve happily agreed, though he didn't tell me what his story was going to be.

So he sat there on stage Saturday night and, along with a middle-aged Dad with a bit of a beer gut and a slightly stocky young woman with a very serious face, repeated "I worked my way through college as a stripper." Lord, and there I was in the front row of the audience, trying to keep a straight face myself and not give it away. Guess who the audience believed was the real stripper? Yep. I hope he feels flattered by it. (It was the other Dad, believe it or not...)

Each night the members of the board game group got together and convened board and card games for the other campers, but I slept so poorly on the bunkbeds that I didn't dare stay up too late gaming (also, our cabin, like all of them, was a duplex with 3 young kids staying on the other side -- and considering that we could see the other family's lights through the chinks in the common log wall, we were awakened as soon as the little ones tumbled out of bed at dawn and started exclaiming.)

By Sunday afternoon, we were tired and very happy, and we drove down the mountain for home, ready to liberate chickens and dog and relax a bit. In that strange way in which life sometimes imitates art (how many times does the main character have a peak experience only to have tragedy strike immediately afterward?), we came home to bad news on the message machine. Judith, Steve's mom, was having chest pains and being evaluated in the local hospital. As the evening progressed, she was transported to Des Moines, where she had another angina attack, which was determined to be a heart attack. This morning, she had angioplasty and a stent inserted and she's now resting and recovering. They're terming it a mild-to-moderate heart attack, and it's a blessing she had such strong symptoms and heeded them quickly. Steve will be heading to Iowa later in the week, once she's been discharged, to help her get settled at home. My folks will be arriving over the weekend for a long-anticipated visit. I'm still reeling a bit from the emotional rollercoaster of it all and hoping for a quick and strong recovery for Judith.

I'll post photos from the trip shortly...

Raspberries-- A post from Maddie

2008-09-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

We went to the u-pick raspberry farm early, in fact a little after it had started. We expected there wouldn't be many people there because the hours had been changed and we got there so early, but to our surprise and dismay there was a parking lot full of people. But when we got there we found out it was the boy who lives at the u-pick farm's high school class, visiting on a field trip to the u-pick raspberry farm.
It turned out that there was a lot of fruit there, in fact we got 3 pounds of raspberries for $10!
WE LOVE RASPBERRIES!!!!

Catching up

2008-09-09T07:26:00.001-07:00

It certainly feels like fall here, with yesterday's rain and drizzle and high in the 50s. Today should return to, well, not really a summer feel, but an Indian summer, even though it's still technically summer. Steve has put together a garden montage that shows our agricultural efforts in all its glory, before the Killer Hailstorm of August 08. Sigh.

One day in the first week of August, I watched the particularly black clouds roll in, excited for a break from the heat and the thrill of lightning and thunder. I called Steve as it started to pour, and the hail got louder and louder on our porch roof until I couldn't hear a word he said. I began to realize this wasn't like the other hail storms we'd received as I noticed that a good 50 percent of what was falling from the sky were pieces of leaves, from the trees above us. I watched as our squash leaves shredded into tatters and our onion tops split and curled like wrapping ribbon. Our neighbors assured us that was the worst hailstorm they'd seen in many years, if ever, which made me feel a bit better, as I had decided there was no point in gardening if that happened every year!

I lost the will to blog after that, I'm afraid to say.... Didn't want to sort through the sad pictures that reminded me of wasted energy (I had a girlfriend visit the house an hour after the storm and blithly ask, "So what have you been doing all summer?" I wanted to weep.) Luckily, Steve found a will somewhere and was able to reconstruct the gardens in their glory days. You can click on the photo to get a bigger version of it -- included is a shot of a new raised bed we've planted and a shot of the kids and a neighborhood friend feeding our chickens.

As it turned out, some things came through unscathed and some bounced back. We have a few zucchini baseball bats as a testament to my faithlessness regarding the durablility of squash (I didn't check the patch for survivors for weeks). Steve's tomatoes got dinged but not downed. We planted a bed in mid August that is doing fabulously -- full of cool-season greens and sugar snap vines that we hope to coddle through the first early frosts.

The rest of August was a mixed bag -- I had a lovely stomach virus that lasted a week and a half and cured me of my romantic visions of chickens sitting in my lap as we watch the sun set (not, mind you, that I think I got it from chicken poop -- it was going around in a big way here -- but cleaning chicken poop up when you're nauseous gets old reeeally fast...) So Steve's working on a run for them in the yard as I type.

The crazy heat-wave of summer (driest first half of the year on record at DIA, longest stretch of days over 90 too) was shattered with that hailstorm and the couple days of rain that followed it. We've had what I think of as early fall days ever since. So the pool's been put away for the year.

We found a u-pick rasberry patch in town, a half-acre that a family tends, without chemicals, and we've been getting up early one day every week or two to pick. It's been a poor year for fruit, because of the cold spring, so the raspberries haven't hit their stride yet and we've only managed to get a pound or less each visit so far (it doesn't help that we can't get up and out there early enough to beat the first pickers to the best fruit). So far, the kids have eaten all the berries on the drive home, but I'm hoping to pick huge amounts sometime in the coming weeks that I can freeze for winter consumption.

We had a not-back-to-school potluck at the end of August that was great fun -- it's always inspiring to see what other parents are finding for their children to explore, and at the BBQ I met a homeschooling/Unitarian Dad who is a manager at my local nursery and who offered to set me up with some filberts and other edible landscape plants at a discount -- score! Now our front yard has an army of raspberries, currants, gooseberry, serviceberry and an Asian pear tree, all in pots, waiting to be planted! Eeek, what have I done?!

We went on our first camping trip in the Colorado mountains last week, up to Rocky Mountain National Park with some unschooling friends, one family from town and a couple families from the Boulder area. Huge fun! The kids are ready to camp every week, with their friends of course (the cool thing about unschooling families is, they might actually be willing to camp every week!)

It was a lovely evening around the campfire, and shortly after we retired to our tents, it started to rain. Steve and I lay there listening to the rain patter on the tent fly, thinking how lovely it was, and the rain went on, and on, and on, and I started to wonder if we had pitched our tent in a swale and if so, how much water might pool up, then I began to feel a gentle impact on my sleeping bag, oh, round about my hip, and I reached out into the very chilly night air to feel the drops falling, one by one, from our leaking tent fly... Sigh.

After a couple hours, the rain stopped and I got out to assess the damage, only to find the most stunning night sky I've seen in years. I gasped that I could see the Milky Way, which woke Maddie, so we stood under that gorgeous expanse of stars and meteors and clouds of galactic light for 20 minutes, picking out the constellations we recognized, counting the meteors that flashed. Maddie even saw a meteor that curved sharply, and after we decided that meteors probably can't do that, we began to wonder exactly what she had seen, since planes don't go fast enough to leave a tail of light... got a little spooky after that, and since it was clouding over again, we headed in to our damp tent. I let the kids have my spot on the airbed with Steve, and I slept the rest of the night in the van, if you can call it sleep.

Morning came none too soon, with frost on the benches, snow on the near peaks and a fire that Steve, bless his soul, was able to resurrect after all that rain. A glorious outing, despite the damp.

We're going to a church camp in the mountains in another week and a half, which I think will satisfy the kids camping bug, even though we're staying in a cabin this time. We've re-engaged in the UU community, after a summer of contentment at home. I'm teaching a fourth grade RE class that's exploring world religions through their holidays and holy days, which I think will be a very fun way to explore other cultures. The kids are excited about attending that with me.

All in all, fall (or it's imminent calendar arrival) is energizing us and we're having great fun -- now if only I can get all those plants into the ground in the next month!

Hillside Folks Festival

2008-07-27T08:59:00.000-07:00

I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood that had block parties and socialized, and, oddly enough, that never happened in California, not in Riverside nor in Murrieta. When we moved here late last fall, we met our immediate neighbors pretty quickly, but just didn't connect with anyone during the long cold months of winter and early spring.

Then in late spring, we got word that some neighbors were organizing a cleanup day, to help one woman who couldn't maintain her yard, to clean up some open space on the edge of our tiny, three-block neighborhood, and to haul off anyone's hazardous waste and brush. We participated in that, and got to know some really nice folks on the surrounding blocks.

Steve got notice last week through the neighborhood email ring that the "fourth annual Hillside Folks Festival" would be held at the house of a musician and guitar builder who lives on Hillside Drive, half a block from us. Steve had actually met this guy when he flew back to Colorado last fall to take one more look at our house before we put a bid on it. He'd been walking his dog on the canal and he'd assured Steve that he'd love the neighborhood and shouldn't hesitate to move, and he mention his folk music concert.

So we headed over to Ronnie and Elaine's house yesterday evening, bearing pasta salad and a new formulation of mosquito repellent (lemon eucalyptus oil works as well as DEET, for two hours at least, according to the Feds) and found the neatest little music festival in this family's backyard. Five or six different groups/individuals performed half-hour sets over the course of the evening, a long table of potluck food and drinks and really warm and open neighbors to get to know. We had a great time, the kids too, and we stayed until nearly full-dark, when the repellent was unable to deter the famished mosquitoes any longer. It was truly delightful, and just the right sized experience for the kids, not too loud, not too crowded, but some really fun music, which we even danced to a bit at the end, though i didn't have enough wine to really cut loose, I'm afraid, and it's awfully hard to dance gracefullly with a 3 1/2 foot-tall partner who wants to hold both your hands the entire time and be twirled to boot! Ah well, the neighbors seemed like an accepting crowd.

Wow, the end of July already!

2008-07-25T18:23:00.001-07:00

Well, I know why I didn't post in June -- I couldn't bring myself to hunt through photos of Maggie, our nearly 16-year-old dog. She did a quick, downward spiral the second week in June, and on Friday the 13th, we called the wonderful, house-call veterinarian out and had her put to sleep. It was as gentle a way to go as possible, after a long, hard and unpleasant week, but it was still difficult to say goodbye. I still don't feel like looking through photos, so, a memorial post will have to wait.

We did have a fun visit with my folks here the first week of June, celebrating Dad's birthday, then a trip to Pennsylvania for Steve's Grandma's 98th birthday the first week in July. Got to see fireflies again and Grandpa Jack and Jennifer, and play scrabble with Shirley, who, truly, seems about 20 years younger than she is. (Not many of us can say that!)

We came back to the heat of July, bought an above-ground pool 3 feet deep and 10 feet across, and have been inhabiting the spirit of summer -- lots of play and lazy days. The chickens are getting bigger, and are still delightful (will post updated photos of these teenagers soon), the kids are sprouting up themselves and getting into new interests as well.

After watching the weeds grow for a couple of weeks, Steve and I got into a frenzy of gardening this week, realizing that we were in serious danger of being completely overrun. The garden now looks tidy, and I'm avidly reading a book on permaculture and getting really excited about a radically different way to garden. In a nutshell and as I only sketchily understand it, permaculture in the home garden involves appreciating the interconnected relationships in nature, the way every element of every natural system serves multiple functions, and how the system is constantly working to rebalance itself and evolve into more mature ecosystems.

So, in practice, I'm realizing that we can make use of our shady front yard and enrich our tired soil by creating an understory of perennials, many edible, and spreading a thick, thick layer of mulch over the tired grass and cottonwood roots that is our front lawn at the moment. I'm thinking we can plant our back yard much more thickly with fruit trees and bushes (blueberries! With some acidification of the soil, of course) and maybe even a nut tree or two (to bear years from now, but patience is a necessary virtue with gardening, I know, even if I can't practice it. Yet.)

There's plenty more we could do, from creating a mini gray-water wetlands in the backyard to creating beneficial wildlife habitat around the edges of our backyard to encourage natural pest control of our raised beds, but I think I'll start by trying to apply the principles to our front yard in the fall, as that's the ideal time to start a thick layer of compost and mulch over beds that will nourish new plantings in the spring. And I'm delighted at the idea that I can get edible forest crops from our shady front yard!

Off to play a new board game, Settlers of Catan. Steve and Maddie are now hooked on Alhambra, bwaahhh haa haaah, so I can graduate to even more Euro games! (Actually, I'm thrilled to have someone to play with! I'd been playing Alhambra with a couple of imaginary friends just to get a feel for the game; once I was able to explain it in three paragraphs or less, Steve was on board with it, and then Maddie wanted to join in the fun. Woohoo! Can't wait til Harry's of age...)

Baking milestone!

2008-05-30T12:53:00.000-07:00

For the first time in my life, I actually finished a jar of yeast! For most of my adult life, I've been throwing out expired tinfoil *packets* of yeast -- I've never even aspired to using up jars of yeast. But I have been baking so much of late! Here are the recipes that are responsible for this culinary feat:

No-Knead Bread -- best crusty European-style bread ever!

No-rise pizza crust (see a trend here? I'm not a patient baker yet....)
Mix and set aside for 8 minutes:
.25 oz package of dry yeast (a little more than 2 tsp)
1/4 tsp sugar
3/4 c. 110-degree water

Pour this over:
1 3/4 c. all purpose flour and 1/2 tsp salt

Mix well with a heavy spoon, then knead for 2 minutes. Press into a 12'' circle, place on lightly greased pan and stretch to the edges. Top and bake at 500 degrees for 8-12 minutes.

Our other favorite recipes, which I just realized don't use yeast, I'll include just for the fun of it:

Popovers -- we *love* these for breakfast...

1 c. milk
1 c. flour
2 eggs
1/2 tsp salt

Blend eggs and milk, add flour and salt. Mixture should be the consistency of (unwhipped) whipping cream, add milk if it's too thick. Pour into greased muffin tins, filling about 2/3rds. Bake at 450 for 15 minutes, then turn oven down to 350 for another 10-15 minutes or until golden. Makes 10-12 popovers.

Crepes from the Ratatouille Cookbook:

3 eggs
1 1/2 c. milk
1 cup + 2 tbsp flour
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp melted butter
Put all ingredients in blender in order listed and blend until smooth. Scrape down sides and blend again. Set in fridge for 30 minutes or overnight.
Pour 1/4 to 1/3 cup into pan over medium heat (we use cast iron and a notch or two below medium. Cook about 45 seconds on first side, and 30 on the other.

There, now if I lose the scraps of paper I have some of these recipes on, I'm safe (as long as the internet doesn't go away! Or Blogger....)

CHICKS!!!!

2008-05-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

We got chicks! And boy are they cute! We got one Rhode Island Red named Ginny (from a book series called Harry Potter), one Black Austrolorp named Minerva McGonigal(again, from Harry Potter) one Turken (it looks like a buzzard!) named Sybill Trelawney (yes, you guessed it: it's from Harry Potter too) and one Buff Orpington that will be biggest of all named Madame Maxime(all of the names are from Harry Potter.)

All of them seem to be doing good. They're all very small, and want to explore all of their new home, but they're babies so they also just can't resist falling asleep! They go run all over their cage and then start getting sleepy and doze off and fall on their nose. Then one of the chicks wakes up and starts cheeping and then the other chick gets woken up and then she goes back to sleep (in a better position.) They're SO, SO, SO cute!!!! :D

I can hear them peeping and cheeping now.
We built a nest for them out of socks(i think they like it.)

They're all so cute, well maybe with one exception: the Turken, like I said: it looks like a Buzzard!!! :O

But even she's cute.

Here's some pics!!
Enjoy! :)

(By Maddie)

Here's the kids at the feed store:

And here is Ginny, our very needy Rhode Island Red (she cheeps loudly every time she notices we've left the room and *loves* to fall asleep curled up in one of our hands. What a doll!), Sybill Trelawney, our very goofy looking Turken, Minerva our handsome Australorp and a fuzzy bottom that belongs to Madame Maxime, our Buff Orpington.

Here is Ginny, falling asleep on the feed trough...

And a closeup of crazy Sybill

Okay, I didn't really mean it.

2008-05-22T16:46:00.002-07:00

Today there was a storm, and a big one too! We could hear thunder or something in the background. It hailed too. Now, what was the cause of this? Answer: A tornado.
No, I'm not joking. We didn't know this till we went to a farm supply store to get chickens, they said they were going to get some aurucana chickens--well, chicks.
It turned out that the aurucana chicks they had shipped in were NOT aurucana chicks.
They were Rhode Island Reds!

We bought some stuff for the chicks though: a waterer, feeder and some chicken food.
And that's where we found out there was a tornado that was devastating Windsor and Loveland (well, sort of: not as bad in Loveland.) We watched the weather and looked at some of the videos that were being taped by a helicopter. Wow, I'm glad that storm missed us! In fact it barely did! There's cottonwood branches all over our front and back yard!

There's even a power line that got knocked down on the road!

Now it's over: just some thunderstorms.
(You can hear them from here!)

Well, that's the most exciting thing that happened today. There's other things that happened: a piece of hail I found that was about an inch long. And that's it except for the tornado and the thunder i can hear right now from our porch.

Hope everyone that's reading this blog can't say they have been in a tornado, or at least one that hit a bit too close. I think we're lucky it missed us.

No snow!...Is that good or bad?

2008-05-20T13:49:00.000-07:00

No more snow! It's spring, and we're gardening like CRAZY! 5 beds so far and we're building more! Only 4 of the 5 garden beds are planted, but we're making and planting more. We have plans for many garden beds and maybe even chickens!

I hope we get chickens.

We also have weeds in our gardens, and in our yard--actually, all over our yard.

We have 2 garden beds full to bursting with strawberries, one with broccoli rabe, radish, boc choi/pac choi, etc. and one with peppers and seeds (the seeds being beets and maybe cantaloupe. We can't remember!) And the last one was not (and still is) not planted.

We have a school yard behind our house, and the sprinklers go off almost every evening to water it. Which also helps us: some of the water gets sprayed over the fence and into our yard.

Well we don't have to water our yard too much! It's just a little sprinkle that manages to get over the fence though. Oh well (acually it just waters the weeds we have growing by our fence!)(no thank you!)

Anyway: that's our garden, in all it's crazy-ness!

Hope you enjoyed the post! :D

Back from CA and frantically gardening!

2008-05-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

We had a fast, full and very fun trip to CA, flying in on April 30 and staying with my folks for four or five days before everyone packed up and headed to the beach at Camp Pendleton.

For much of April, my mom had been getting call after call from the beach cottage rental manager at Pendleton, trying to get her to change the week of our stay because a big "rap concert" was going to happen the week we were there and it would be noisy and not appropriate for a family vacation. Turns out, they finally admitted, that they wanted our beach-front cottage for a dressing room for the musicians.

My mom refused to be buffaloed, either out of that weekend or out of a beach-front cottage, though they did move us a few cottages down the way, which was fine, as it still fronted to the protected cove in which the kids like to splash.

We had no idea what we were in for.

When we drove up to check in, we could see an enormous stage scaffolding that looked like a roller coaster erected on the sand just to the north of our cove. This was Monday, and the concert wasn't until Thursday night. While my mom checked in, I picked up a flyer advertising a "Benefit Concert for the Troops" featuring Janet Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Clint Black, NE YO, Blind Melon, ZZ Top, Girlicious and Jessica Simpson, among others. We were both stunned! No wonder they wanted our cabins as dressing rooms, with all these different stars (and in fact, we were one of only two families that refused to switch reservations, the rest of the cabins were empty and waiting to be staged as dressing rooms for the entire week.)

So for the next several days we watched roadies erect lights and sound systems and we clambered over long black snakes of electrical cord on the jetty each time we made our way down to the main beach. Then on Wednesday, the LA people began to arrive, the handlers and hair dressers and those-who-take-care-of-things. For the first time in our years of visiting Del Mar beach, Steve, with his ponytail, ceased to feel like a sore thumb standing out in a crowd of buzz cuts.

Crews started hauling furniture out of cottages and trucking in leather sofas and barstools. They tacked signs up on each unit -- Girlicious Dancers. Pamela Anderson and Kathy Griffin (this was on the cabin right next to ours, much to Steve's delight). Jessica Simpson. (I'm pretty sure I saw her posing for photos the day of the concert on her back patio, but as I'm utterly clueless on the pop culture front, I didn't recognize her. I remember thinking that her dress was retro and ugly....)

On Wednesday evening, Janet Jackson and her dancers rehearsed for several hours with an excited squad of marines who got to march on stage in formation and then be overtaken by Rhythm Nation dancers. It was interesting to watch her, wearing sweats but fully made up and gorgeous in a Michelle Pfeiffer way, walk through her routine with a bored expression that looked almost angry. From time to time, she would burst into a dazzling smile that utterly transformed her. Stage presence is such a fascinating chemistry to see in action! We watched a ventriloquist with a "Dead Terrorist" dummy (definitely bizarre, but oddly compelling) run through a couple of his routines for the cameras, which is when we began to realize that this was more than just a concert here on Pendleton. It turns out, the entire event was filmed and will be broadcast June 1st on NBC. Thursday morning, Blind Melon rehearsed and NE YO and I think Snoop Dogg did as well, though it's all blurred together already.

All this was going on as we built huge sand castles, collected sand dollars and rescued a sea gull with a fishing lure hooked in the webbing of its foot. Maddie patiently fished with my Dad for hours until she caught a flounder, her first catch large enough to keep (and eat, a couple of days later at home. Steve, wonderful Dad that he is, gamely gutted and filleted the creature, while the rest of the grownups cringed and Maddie looked on with interest). It was a fascinating, if surreal, juxtaposition of high pop culture and mundane beach holiday.

We had originally planned to leave the afternoon of the concert but were too star-struck to miss it. So we got to see the Girlicious dancers practicing to the strained strains of ZZTop (boy, they didn't sound like they were aging well as musicians) and Steve rearranged the patio furniture so he could (somewhat more) discreetly spy on Pamela and her pink miniskirt as she arrived with a retinue of handlers.

As the evening approached, the beach began to fill up with marines and wives and girlfriends and rough looking young men from Oceanside who must have gotten on base thanks to buddies who had enlisted. We wandered unchallenged for the most part behind the scene, ambling past Clint Black's dressing room to see him pacing and waiting his turn (The other family who was at the beach with us, a couple with a neat 9 year-old boy named Luke, went up to him and had Luke's picture taken with Black. They said he was very nice).

The kids were put off by the sheer volume and crowds, so after a brief tour of the concert-grounds with them, my folks and Steve and I took turns sitting in the cabin and attending the concert. I really liked Snoop Dogg's performance -- he archly performed an undoubtedly cleaned up version of his rapper persona; I thought he was very charming and engaging and gave it his all, which impressed me. Janet Jackson came across as very professional and dedicated to her craft as well, rehearsing several times before the performance.

The music went on for hours and ended with a small fireworks show that I was too exhausted to stay awake for, even though it exploded right above our cove.

Most performers left as soon as their set was over and the roadies began tearing things down in the wee hours of the morning. We checked out on Friday and headed back to Fallbrook, exhausted but thrilled by our backstage pass.

After too-brief visits with some California friends, the kids and I flew back to Colorado (while Steve drove the Echo home) and we have spent the last week settling in, enjoying warm spring weather and gardening like fiends.

I feel pressed to get everything in since the growing season's so short, but I'm definitely running out of steam. We do have the two strawberry beds, the raspberry bushes and the fruit trees that we put in before we left, and now we have a big bed of onions and two beds of peppers, zukes, beets and melons, and a line of sugar snap peas growing. our winter bed is getting long in the tooth, though the bok choi was fabulous and the spinach and lettuce are still producing. Nobody's eating the radishes though and the carrots weren't thinned enough so they're still tiny. Oh, and I let the broccoli rabe go to seed because I couldn't figure out when exactly to harvest it.

I'll try to get some green beans in and a few more melons in before I give up and turn my energies to weed control, and I bought Steve some tomato plants that he'll get in the ground soon, along with the other grape vine he bought before he left.

I can envision so much more growing, but it'll have to be next year and the year after that perhaps!

Some vacation photos, which you can click on to enlarge:
A starfish my dad found dried out on the bay, which we successfully revived by returning it to the water.

Here's Blind Melon rehearsing the morning of the concert. Note the uniquely Marine Corps stage set!

Janet Jackson, rehearsing again the day of the concert. I filmed this from our patio, so the sounds a bit off as we're behind the speakers...

The seagull we saved, a day before we realized why it was so easy to get so close to it, poor thing...

Maddie and Steve made some crazy sand swirls on our empty stretch of cove...

Famous neighbors

Here's our piece d'resistance, which, like all the others, did not stand the test of time and tide. Our cabin is in the background with the red chairs. Pamela's is just to the left of it. One building over was Jessica S. and the Girlicious dancers, and Clint's was another building to the left of them.

The proud fishergirl and her grandfather!

My new favorite pop music artist...

A couple of shots of Snoop Dogg's performance

Magazines, logos, education gadflies and berries...

2008-04-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

April's been crazy busy for us, in a good way (though Steve's been working too hard.) I'll try to hit the highlights...

Steve got an interesting and experimental assignment from the LA Times -- illustrate, on a ridiculously short deadline, a daily reader-written noirish serialized story. Steve illustrated two of the seven episodes each week (in an average of 4 hours from getting the story to submitting the art), on top of April being the deadline month for Nexus. So he was working almost around the week for the last two weeks.

During that time he had his 15 minutes of local fame, after winning a logo design contest sponsored by the local alternative weekly. The city of Fort Collins hired an out-of-town marketing firm to rebrand the city and design a quite mediocre logo that has drawn significant public derision. Here's Steve's design.

The kids and I have been hanging out with our homeschooling friends, at park days and the roller skating rink. Harry and I have just gotten our own skates to practice on, and Maddie may get a pair too. I went to a fascinating lecture by John Taylor Gatto with my friend Jill, and met a handful of other unschooling parents there as well. Gatto's a two-time state of New York educator-of-the-year (and three-time NYC-e-o-y) who is radically critical of public education as it has evolved through the last century. He's quite the firebrand and offered a banquet of food for thought. I liked his label of "open-source learning" as the way to go, as that's what we do and validation of one's personal choices always feels oh-so-warm and fuzzy.

On the garden front, spring's here, albeit a chillier one than I'm used to. I've been digging like crazy in the garden, and have a long, beautifully mulched bed of strawberry plants, two more beds to plant today (with berry runners a friend gave me from her bountiful garden), and 10 raspberry plants in the ground and sprouting (well, one isn't looking too good, but the others are thriving).

Our cold frame cold-crops are getting close to harvestable size and I've got some sugar snap peas started outside. We'll probably start a flat of warm-weather seedlings in peat pots before we leave for California and plant the sprouts when we return.

We're flying to California on Wednesday for 10 days or so, with a housesitter to watch the dogs, rats and plants for us (with any luck, Maggie will hang in there for our absence -- at 15 1/2, she's doing pretty well for her age, but every month starts to feel like an achievement....)

We're looking forward to spending four days at the beach at Camp Pendleton with my folks, and a trip to Sea World, courtesy of our neighbor Joe across the street, who works at the Budweiser brewery and gets free tickets to A-B attractions. Oh, and we get to go see our old kids' dentist (woo hoo!), as so far we've had terrible luck with the two children's dentists in Fort Collins that we've tried. Dr. Cutts is the most laid-back dentist I've ever met, and the kids feel so at ease with him. And we'll get to see some of our California friends again as well!

Math is an art??

2008-04-08T10:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've always held a vague idea that there is a way to explore mathematics that is really interesting and fun; every once in a while I've read a quote or a snippet from an article that hinted of the magic to be found in exploring mathematical relationships, for example, and it's been on my to-do list for a couple of years to look into it.

Our friend Jill posted a link to this article (click on the link towards the bottom of the page "Lockhart's Lament" for the article) on our homeschooling group last week and I'm absolutely fascinated by what this mathematician/educator has to say. I'm realizing that I've been duped into believing that math is about numbers and calculations, not about spatial relationships, leaps of insight, playfulness and art. I'm not finished with it yet (it's 25 pages long!) but it's challenging all my assumptions about what math is and how it should be experienced! In particular, his explanation on pages 3-5 of how math is an art form rather than a practical application was quite paradigm-shifting for me....

Coincidentally, Steve came across another article in an issue of the New Yorker last week that explores the fact that we now know humans have an innate feel for approximate math and it can get quite complex, but that how we talk about and teach math is very non-innate and hampers our understanding. English is among the languages that does a bad job of communicating math (cantonese, I think is the best, for its simplicity of naming numerals) and while addition and subtraction are intuitive enough, multiplication and division are outside of our hardwiring.

One of the fascinating suggestions both mathematicians raise is this, (the quote is from the New Yorker article):

Our inbuilt ineptness when it comes to more complex mathematical processes has led Dehaene to question why we insist on drilling procedures like long division into our children at all. There is, after all, an alternative: the electronic calculator.
"Give a calculator to a five-year-old, and you will teach him how to make friends with numbers instead of despising them," he has written. By removing the need to spend hundreds of hours memorizing boring procedures, he says, calculators can free children to concentrate on the meaning of these procedures, which is neglected under the educational status
quo."

Lockhart, the author of the 25-page lament, writes in a dialog form that is a nod to Galileo's writings on science and mathematics in which three distinct voices debate (bless you, participants in the world of Wikipedia! I would never have figured out why he was using this construction otherwise!) :

It would be bad enough if the culture were merely ignorant of mathematics, but what is far worse is that people actually think they do know what math is about— and are apparently under the gross misconception that mathematics is somehow useful to society! This is already a huge difference between mathematics and the other arts. Mathematics is viewed by the culture as
some sort of tool for science and technology. Everyone knows that poetry and music are for pure enjoyment and for uplifting and ennobling the human spirit (hence their virtual elimination from the public school curriculum) but no, math is important.

SIMPLICIO: Are you really trying to claim that mathematics offers no useful or practical applications to society?

SALVIATI: Of course not. I’m merely suggesting that just because something happens to have practical consequences, doesn’t mean that’s what it is about. Music can lead armies into battle, but that’s not why people write symphonies. Michelangelo decorated a ceiling, but I’m sure he had loftier things on his mind.

SIMPLICIO: But don’t we need people to learn those useful consequences of math? Don’t we need accountants and carpenters and such?

SALVIATI: How many people actually use any of this “practical math” they supposedly learn in school? Do you think carpenters are out there using trigonometry? How many adults remember how to divide fractions, or solve a quadratic equation? Obviously the current practical training program isn’t working, and for good reason: it is excruciatingly boring, and nobody ever uses it anyway. So why do people think it’s so important? I don’t see how it’s doing society any good to have its members walking around with vague memories of algebraic formulas and geometric diagrams, and clear memories of hating them. It might do some good, though, to show them something beautiful and give them an opportunity to enjoy being creative, flexible, open-minded thinkers— the kind of thing a real mathematical education might provide.

SIMPLICIO: But people need to be able to balance their checkbooks, don’t they?

SALVIATI: I’m sure most people use a calculator for everyday arithmetic. And why not? It’s certainly easier and more reliable. But my point is not just that the current system is so terribly bad, it’s that what it’s missing is so wonderfully good! Mathematics should be taught as art for art’s sake. These mundane “useful” aspects would follow naturally as a trivial by-product. Beethoven could easily write an advertising jingle, but his motivation for learning music was to create something
beautiful.

SIMPLICIO: But not everyone is cut out to be an artist. What about the kids who aren’t “math people?” How would they fit into your scheme?

SALVIATI: If everyone were exposed to mathematics in its natural state, with all the challenging fun and surprises that that entails, I think we would see a dramatic change both in the attitude of students toward mathematics, and in our conception of what it means to be “good at math.” We are losing so many potentially gifted mathematicians— creative, intelligent people who rightly reject what appears to be a meaningless and sterile subject. They are simply too smart to waste their time on such piffle.

SIMPLICIO: But don’t you think that if math class were made more like art class that a lot of kids just wouldn’t learn anything?

SALVIATI: They’re not learning anything now! Better to not have math classes at all than to do what is currently being done. At least some people might have a chance to discover something beautiful on their own.

SIMPLICIO: So you would remove mathematics from the school curriculum?

SALVIATI: The mathematics has already been removed! The only question is what to do with the vapid, hollow shell that remains. Of course I would prefer to replace it with an active and joyful engagement with mathematical ideas.

Much of the rest of his article is a deconstruction of current mathematics education in public school (what I'd really like to read about is how he'd do it right!) But I am fascinated to consider that mathematics may be a far more complex, artful and exciting world that I'd ever conceived of before and I"m looking forward to exploring in a completely new way...

Can it be four months already?!

2008-03-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted much lately (Maddie's been taking over blogging duties!) but I realized on the first day of spring that we've been here four months, through the end of fall and all of winter. Aside from about six weeks of sub-normal (read ridiculously cold) weather from mid-Dec to late January (when I was wondering how many of these winters I'd get through before I started to dread them) the freeze broke and we had lovely late winter weather that was perfectly tolerable.
And now, there are little flowers and strappy leaves poking up here and there in our yard, delightful surprises from past owners that make me jump up and grab a watering can, anxious about these ignored bulbs.
We've got a couple flats of seedlings in the ground (lovely actual dirt again! Not that hard, rocky decomposed granite of Murrieta -- even though it is on the clay-ey side, I'll take it anyday!) in one of our cold frames, and I've got four raspberry plants waiting impatiently for me to decide where their patch will be. Steve's been digging up ground for a strawberry patch, which I'll have to finish up and get planted as well.
Steve's been biking into town in the mornings, for exercise and coffee, which stokes his desire to get an in-town job and stop commuting to Boulder. It will be interesting to see how things develop for him on that front.
He and I got to go on a lovely sunset bike ride during my folks' visit and it made us greedy for more, so we've made arrangements with a friend whose son our kids *love* to play with to trade kids-watching for massage for her! So, more dates on the horizon!
All in all, I think we've made the adjustment here very well. Maddie and Steve are completely gung-ho to be here, and I'm largely happy and enjoying the new places and experiences to enjoy, though I do feel still a bit wistful and transplanted sometimes and missing my folks. I can't say for sure with Harry, but he seems increasingly comfortable here, though when I mentioned our old home and life a few weeks ago, he said he misses it still.
Off to open a box of games that I ordered online, cool imports from Europe that my group of gaming friends reccomended as good family games. They include Settlers of Catan, Metro and The Amazing Labrynth.
When Cindi and the boys come up tomorrow, I'm going to make them play them all with me!

Frosty the snow Monster

2008-03-20T14:38:00.001-07:00

We had some snow the other day and in the school yard behind our house we made a huge snowman -- actually a snow Monster!

Just look at how big it is!
I would say about 4 stories tall!

Actually, this is the real size.

how are you going to throw that!?!?

Here are some pictures not related to snowmen but are still cute!
oh how i love snow!

ok, I'm stocked up and ready to go!

Tag! You're it!

RATS

2008-03-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

Oh no, there's a rat in the house! There sure is, but it's our pet. Ever since our mice died we have wanted a little pet. We had heard that gerbils were good pets so we went to Petco thinking that we would get a gerbil. At the time, we thought they were solitary but we found out they really aren't. A person at the pet store told us all about them. She said that thay actually do like to be together. She also said that they might not be playful right now because they had just came in and are also young. And then she said that she had 11 rats in her house and one cage for the boys and another for the girls and babies. Now that's a lot of rats! She also showed us some rats that were up for adoption. They were so cute!!! We just had to adopt them!!! So now we have two extremely cute rats named Remy and Emile. Remy is all black. Emile is black-hooded and white. ha ha! I like the names. Here's some pictures of them. Enjoy!

sunny + fang = love

2008-03-11T10:12:00.000-07:00

Today my grama and grampa came to our house with their dog Fang, a pure white German shepherd and Sunny's boyfriend too. We moved a month or two ago and ever since Sunny's missed Fang and Fang's missed Sunny. But today (as i told you) they visited us and Fang visited Sunny and of course she was overjoyed! And ever since Fang and Sunny have been playing furiously! Today WOW is down, so I'm whiling away the time blogging. Anyway, Sunny needs a bath again ever since Fang came she's needing baths 24 seven!!!!
(I blame fang) He cant stop licking her!!! And Maggie just wants to sleep (Maggie's our 15-year-old dog in our years. And in dog years 108!!!) I know she's very old but she's doing fine. Astonishing!!!! Well, I can't put up any pics; I'm on one of our laptops. Oh well. Anyway, hope you like this post.

wow!

2008-03-06T20:37:00.000-08:00

Today we got into world of warcraft and are having a blast! We are on a few realms we filled up Hydraxis (our main realm) and we're on our way on filling up a couple other relams such as: dragonblight, venture co. and duskwood. And harry has played a big part in doing so. He has the most characters by far. Harry doesn't really seem to like levelling up one character; he likes to make a bunch of characters (human girls mostly) and get them up to level 5 or lower and make more. I on the other hand do enjoy making characters but I mostly like playing my main (a level 16 druid). I don't really like levelling up new characters. I enjoy playing existing characters that can do more spells and so on.

I enjoy druids the most, I would say. They can shapeshift.Starting at level 10 they get bear form, then next is seal form they get at level 16. Seal form makes you swim faster and you don't run out of air when you swim. And at level 20 they can do cat form. I like it the best. Then you can turn invisible (rogues can do it at level 2 if they train.)

That's all the druid forms i know. Our highest level character is a level 21 night elf druid and that's why I don't know any other forms. I also like the druids because they have long-ranged attacks and a spell called entangling roots. It will entangle the enemy in roots and if you get out of its range you can attack it freely with out it attacking you, but if it has long range attacks it can stil hurt you. But it's still not a drain of your mana because it still dose nature damage, a type of attack, but if your target is immune to nature damage it is a drain of mana but as far as i know this would only occur if you were fighting another player and only a night elf at that. So i think druids are pretty darn cool. Harry likes the rogues because they can stealth; that's what druids in cat form can do but rogues get it much sooner.

And there's much more I could type but I want to watch my mom and Harry play. Harry wants to get his rogue a bandit mask (only rogues can wear it). Well, I'm going to stop typing and watch my mom play. Hope you enjoy this post, by!

As all good projects are wont to do...

2008-03-05T07:41:00.001-08:00

the remodel has bogged down. After a day of lightning fast demolition and a day of solid reconstruction, Steve came down with a stomach virus, leaving Lincoln to finish up drywall taping on his own. Then I discovered that you can't reliably order bathroom furniture based on your son's name (the manufacturer told me, when I called to check on delivery time, that they actually *didn't* have it in stock, as they told me they did, and it would be six to eight weeks. oy) So, back to Home Depot a few times and down to Lowes in Loveland and we finally have a vanity, counter and medicine cabinet sitting in the garage, along with boxes of tile for floor and walls, whilst Steve wrestles with backerboard and two illustrations for the Times due Friday.
Have we bitten off more than we can chew? Will we finish it in time for Mom and Dad's visit? Stay tuned!

Remodel mania!

2008-02-29T10:35:00.000-08:00

Steve took all of two days off after the magazine redesign/issue deadline before starting on some house projects. His college roommate is in Boulder and is a handy guy, so the two of them tore out the upstairs bathroom and the ugly walls and ceiling of one of the downstairs bedrooms, which Steve is turning into his office.
Here's some before and in-the-middle-of photos.

The office, (waaay) before (before we bought the house, so nice and empty)

The intrepid remodelers...

And the very ugly bath...

With any luck, I'll be able to post "after" images within the week. (If not, it's going to be *very* close quarters in our one remaining bath when my folks come to stay!)

We have a vanity en route from the Los Angeles area (not being brought by my parents -- we've already loaded their station wagon up with our request for cheap Trader Joe wine) that I bought using my new method of freeing up decision-making energy for the actual enjoyment of life. I call it Simplification Through Synchronicity (TM pending).

I "know" someone, by which I mean I read her posts on the simple living site's discussion boards, who just spent a couple of months with her daughter volunteering in a poor town in Mexico. She wrote about the lack of choice at the local tienda -- there either were beans on the shelf or there weren't. When you saw something in stock, you bought it because it might not be there another day. She said that returning to the States and going to the grocery store or Starbucks was paralyzing to her at first. So many decisions to be made before you even bought a quart of milk (non-fat, low-fat, organic, Rbst free, lowest cost, half-gallon a better deal?)

It reminded me of something Steve read months' back, I can't recall if it was a book or an article (shoot, for that matter *I* could have been the one that read it, or heard it on the radio -- mind like a steel trap, I tell ya) about how our minds are overwhelmed by choice -- the number of choices we have to make in a day has increased astronomically and it costs us some amount of mental energy to make each one.

I flashed back on this as I tried to decide what laptop to buy this week, and what vanity to buy for the bathroom. With the internet, there's *so* many options available at so many price points and so much opinion to seek out about relative merits of this versus that. I was completely paralyzed by it all. Until I decided to let the gods guide me. (or universal energy, or whatever. Call it chance. It works just fine for me however you name it.)

So after running computer model after computer model through CNET's reviews, I found one on Ubid.com where the auction was ending in 20 minutes, it was more-or-less in my price range, it got a fairly good review and the high-bidder was from Fort Collins, CO. And the third highest bidder was from Loveland, Ohio (there next town down from us is Loveland.) So I bought it! And it felt so good to have that stupid decision behind me.

Next major choice was the vanity. Researching for hours on the internet. Paralyzed by choices. Finally, I found one I liked, it was a bit more expensive that Home Depot's, but it could arrive a few days earlier and the brand name was Harrison. Bought it. We'll christen the upstairs bath, Harry's Bathroom.

I don't want to spend my life agonizing over these decisions, because I know (from another fairly recent psychologist's interview/book/vaguely remembered source-and-discussion-with-Steve), that it doesn't matter what choice you make, you will be as happy with it as you are habituated to be. The brain has a certain set level of happiness, and we settle at it regardless of which choice we make. We may think it matters what house we buy or what spouse we choose, but in fact we will be about as happy either way, because of the general way in which we have learned to respond to and process things in our life.

So, I'm experimenting with letting the universe, via synchronicities, help me decide. And I'm loving having that extra energy to enjoy the important things in life

An interesting piece on the value of unstructured play...

2008-02-21T08:50:00.001-08:00

A homeschooling friend noted this NPR story today, and I listened.

Once the surges of reactivity and parental guilt subsided ("oh, no, I buy Harry *toys*", "we've ruined their childhoods by not moving a remote log cabin in the mountains!" Where *do* these thoughts come from? Why can't I just pat myself on the back for not loading them up with structured activities?? Sigh...) and I got to the meat of the story, I found it very intriguing that independent, imaginative play is so directly linked with self-regulation skills.

And one flew away...

2008-02-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

Morgan from the Humane Society called us this morning to say she was ready to release our bohemian waxwing, and when could we meet her? What a great soul to go out of her way for us like that. We called up our friends Jill and Addie, who joined us for the release. Morgan assured us that waxwings are very good at finding their flocks, like bats, and that they're not as rare here as our birdbook made them out to be; this is within their winter range.

Here's the patient, shortly before release (having eaten lots of frozen mixed berries)

And here's Morgan and Harry, about to open the carrier (the box next to Morgan contains 9 of the 11 that didn't survive. We left them out in the field, near where I think a fox might den (based on how Sunny growled at the culvert one day as we hiked there), and we'll go back tomorrow with Jill, Addie and Luke to see if they were appreciated....

And here is a bird so happy to be free that all you see of it is its shadow as it flies off.... (if you click on the image a larger version is called up)

We released it in a nearby preserve that has a couple of very old cherry trees in it, leftover from some farmer's orchard. We thought she might like a snack and she might find her flock as well...

An epiphany!

2008-02-19T08:54:00.000-08:00

I don't know why it's taken me until 43 to figure this out, but there's a whole other world of games out there, not the ones on the shelves at ToysRUs, not the card games that I've played until I'm bored to death -- fun games, creative games, intelligent grown up board games! I'm so excited! I've always had this vision of being the family that plays games together, in the evenings, in bad weather, at holiday gatherings, but to be honest, there's only so many times I can play Uno and Skipbo and Kings in the Corners and, uggh, monopoly, before I get bored silly.

But this fun group of gamers have the coolest collection of really interesting games! Bohnanza and Werewolves and Alhambra are the three that I've played with them so far and they've all been fascinating and fun!

I want to play more and I'm delighted to find that there are whole new game realms to explore!

Doesn't this seem backwards?

2008-02-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

I got an email from a homeschooling-and-UU-Church friend alerting me that her group of mostly UU Moms (MUUMs for short) who walk together were planning to walk around the playfields of our elementary school tomorrow. This a)thrilled me to know there were some like-minded families within a mile or two of us whom we could meet tomorrow and b) made me realize that Steve and I could be walking laps around the playing fields with a walkie-talkie and the kids could stay in the house, as is their wont this winter, with the other walkie, and see us out the windows.

So, when the kids said they wanted to keep doing what they were doing this morning, Steve and I said, fine, we'll take the dogs out to the playground. And it struck me, at Lap 5, that things were a bit backward. The kids were at home doing embroidery (Maddie -- thanks Aunt Diane for the birthday embroidery kit!) and sitting at the computer (Harry exploring Stormwind city in World of Warcraft) while the parents were out on the playground!

It's a cool and windy day, so I can't blame the kids for not wanting to march about in it. Hopefully it will be warmer tomorrow for the playdate. We're off shortly to a game-gathering, another wonderful find at our UU Church. A group, again, of mostly UUers who get together every Sunday afternoon to play board and card games. The kids and I are excited.

Steve, alas, has to go into work again today. He is redesigning his magazine this issue (which adds a great deal of extra work into the normal production cycle), and this past week was supposed to be the final deadline week for the Mar/April issue, but he got sick last weekend with something like the flu and missed 3 days of work this past week. So now he's working all weekend and having to push back printing deadlines to get everything done. Oy.

And lastly, a bird update. Steve looked up our waxwing in a birding book and found that it wasn't actually a cedar waxwing but a bohemian waxwing, a far northern bird that rarely strays this far south into the continental US. Once every decade or so, when food is scarce in its normal range of southern Canada and the Pacific Northwest, it will fly further south in search of fruit on trees (like our chokecherry tree out front.) And the flock is back in the yard today, eating from the chokecherry and trilling in our cottonwoods. I'm trying to figure out how to get large owl shaped cutouts pasted to our high window above the entryway....

Wildlife and wild death...

2008-02-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

Well, we had a terrible bird accident at our house yesterday. I was sitting on the back porch enjoying the afternoon sun when I heard an odd whump, which reminded me of certain small earthquakes back in California, then a flock of birds zoomed past me and across the field. As I was sitting there wondering what it might have been, the kids raced to the back door to tell me that a bunch of birds had flown into our front windows and were lying on the sidewalk outside.
It was terrible. Twelve beautiful cedar waxwings were down in all, most already dead. We picked up the dying and held them to keep them warm. The one I was holding worked a chokecherry fruit out of its gizzard as it lay in my hand, and I gently removed it from its beak. After it died, I took Harry's from him and wrapped it in my shirt, holding it to my belly. I could feel life pulsing in it still. Maddie held hers close as well. After a while, I knew mine had died, but Maddie's actually had opened its eyes and was sitting, beak open, stunned. We set it up in a basked with a warmed rice bag under it and covered it with a towel to keep it quiet.
After an hour or so, I checked and it looked fairly alert, so I got online and asked on our local unschooling discussion board about bird rescue places. One of our friends told me of the humane society and when I called, they said, bring it in, we're open til 6:30. So the kids and I braved cross-town rush-hour traffic, bird-in-basket-in-lap. The wildlife rehab worker said it looked better than any cedar waxwing they'd gotten in recently and that we'd done a good job of keeping it warm. Apparently these birds are not building-savvy and fly into windows often, and in large flocks this time of year.
So we left our little survivor there, much to Harry's dismay. The wildlife worker said we could call today and see how it's doing and perhaps be there when they release it.
Here is a photo of some of the ones who didn't survive, as well as a few other, happier wildlife shots....

Deer like to browse through the field across the street from our schoolyard from time to time...

And here's a shot of Sunny and Cherry the squirrel, experiencing a minor detente.

An update: the wildlife supervisor said our waxwing made it through the night, but is still not moving much and not eating, so they're not ready to release it yet. They gave it some homeopathics, interestingly enough, and he said it's not doing poorly, but it's obviously still injured. Sooo, I'm glad we took it in (I had the thought as we were driving off that maybe we should just leave it out to fly away, instead of trekking halfway to Loveland with it, but I guess it was more injured than I realized.)

Our favorite picture

2008-02-11T09:49:00.000-08:00

The kids like to look through funny animal photos on the web, and we were at it again when we re-discovered this one, our all-time favorite now that we're living in squirrel territory...

New realms of geekdom

2008-02-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

Say it loud, say it proud, I'm a weather geek!
Steve pronounced me thus, with some surprise, and he's right. For years, I've quietly been reading the NWS forecast discussions on-line, trying to parse out what the forecasters mean with their myriad abbreviations and arcane terminology. But yesterday, I went on a weather hike sponsored by the local Audubon chapter (good lord -- I just had a total brain fade and couldn't figure out to spell that word. Thank goodness for google. It's still looking alien to me) and led by a meteorologist.
I peppered the man with questions all the way up and down the side of Coyote Ridge. At the top, we could see Pikes Peak, a more than two-hour drive to the south. We could also see the rising ground south of Denver known as the Palmer Divide, which, along with the also-visible upwelling at the Wyoming border, creates a bowl that protects the Front Range from the extremes of weather in this part of the country.
I found out how weather forecasts are created (my god, what an expenditure of weather sampling equipment! Two balloons a day, every day of the year, from thousands upon thousands of sites around the globe, drift off, rarely to be found or returned). I could bore you with the physics behind the warm Chinook wind, the Snow Eater, that blows off the mountains in winter, mysteriously warming us 20 to 40 degrees in an hour or two. I grok the rain shadow effect now, and I understand why we often have a scrim of clouds on our eastern horizon that cuts the glory of sunrise short so many mornings.
Disappointingly, I also discovered that we haven't adapted amazingly well to this climate after all. I'd been thinking that the fact that weather in the 20s seemed comfortable to us was a sign we had acclimated. But apparently, the same phenomenon at work in dry desert climates ("oh, it's 90 but it's a dry heat!") works in the cold as well. So 40 degrees in a moist climate can feel as cold as 25 degrees in a dry climate like ours. As long as the wind's not blowing!
He was animatedly expounding to me his frustration with the popular reliance on relative humidity as a measure of comfort instead of dew point (which I confess, was starting to make my eyes glaze over) as the walk came to an end. I can't wait to go out again in April when he'll explain the spring weather phenomenon. And the summer walks ought to be really exciting!
Oh, and for some reason this book, the National Audubon Society's Field Guide to North American Weather, which he showed us, really cracks me up! Something about the way cloud formations are treated just like the bird species in their other books seems delightfully absurd.
I returned from the hike to a sumptuous breakfast of crepes and two kids who wanted to get online and get going with World of Warcraft! We bought the game Friday, discovered my laptop didn't have enough memory, asked Steve to pick some up on his way home ("Honey, we need more memory, a load of equanimity and some compassion if you can find it on sale!") Then came the 10 hours of downloading updates that put gaming off until the next day.
We did finally get online and played it until an act of god interrupted our cable internet service last night. I'm guessing I'll be playing it shortly, as soon as the kids get up.
At first I was resistant to the game, as much of the quests center around killing (albeit NPC or non-player characters -- the computer generated ones), but as we played yesterday, I began to notice the random acts of kindness. Other players occasionally ran past us and threw a spell on us to improve our armor or stamina. Players would start fighting alongside us as we killed NPCs to finish a quest (at first, paranoid soul that I am, I thought they were trying to steal the loot you get after your quest NPC dies, but the game ensures that only the person who starts killing gets the loot and in fact they were just helping us out).
So, I'm warming up to it and the kids seem to love it. I have to make sure to get plenty of exercise before I sit down at the computer though, since the sessions seem to go on and on!

February!

2008-02-01T07:38:00.001-08:00

Wow, I don't think I've ever been as excited to see February begin as I am this year. Living in a winter climate definitely sharpens your awareness of time (or at least season) and its passage.

I'm thrilled that tomorrow is groundhog day, believe it or not. I used to think that was a silly publicity stunt made up by some small town. I never realized this before, but it's exactly six weeks after solstice so it marks the end of "solar winter," the 12 weeks of the year that have the least light, and from here on out, we could start growing plants in a coldframe (if we had one set up. Next winter!).

We're in a time called late winter now (deep winter ended about a week ago) and I can feel it (either that or Colorado's notoriously changeable weather is simply obliging my brain's need to see patterns in everything.) But whatever the reason, the snow has melted for us, the temperatures aren't as cold and the quality of light has changed. I can imagine the possibility of spring. I remember, even living in mild California, that in the depths (okay, the shallows) of winter, I couldn't really remember how summer felt, the prickling of heat on the skin as soon as you walked into the sun, the days that were hot before they began, and the reverse was true too, I couldn't remember in the heart of summer, what a chilly day felt like. So, I can't say that I can envision summer here yet, but I can definitely imagine spring. We're getting it lately, a day here or there. Ah, and it's glorious.

We're doing very well. I'm enjoying myself being at home with the kids, not coercing myself as much on the "chores! to-do list! accomplish something today!" front, having the emotional space to be more present with them. I'm playing so much more with my kids, and we're learning so much. Board games, card games, computer games (still love those Nancy Drew mysteries, Mom. Thanks!), crafts, projects and toys.

We've been having some fun get-togethers with folks on the unschooling list. We hosted a playdate to make fairy gardens last week, we went rollerskating for the first time this week (fun! I'm doing it every week! I say this not having fallen down yet...) and we went over to our friend Jill's house and learned about World of Warcraft from Luke. Harry wants to play with Luke every day at his house and have sleepovers there and Maddie wants Luke to come over every day. I love how completely enthralled kids are about their experiences, they hold nothing back and it's an enthusiasm and openness that I'd love to recover in myself.

Maddie wants to post various photos, and I've promised Mom I'd post some video tours of the house, but for now, this will have to do.

Looking forward to February and really enjoying staying at home and exploring this new life!

Back in Colorado

2008-01-03T09:27:00.000-08:00

After two weeks in California, where the three of us who flew developed nasty colds and passed them along to my Mom, :( , we braved the viral skies and flew back yesterday. I had such different plans for this trip, visiting old friends and playing tourist but instead, we sat on the sofa and watched many hours of Dog Whisperer, which was fascinating enough. I definitely need to assert my pack leadership more, at least with the dogs.

We stayed in California long enough to forget what life in Colorado was like, which was strange. I couldn't even remember our neighbors' names when we returned. The house was cold but fine and the fish survived though they're very feisty on the desk next to me right now. There was a dead black Phoebe under our deck. I'm theorizing it got beaned by the squirrels who dragged a giant bag of birdseed valiantly over the edge of the deck and to the ground, where they enlarged the previously gnawed hole in it and emptied it over the course of the vacation. But Steve figures the bird just got too cold. How boring.

Steve drove cross-country and back in the van, bringing one of his wooden canoes back with him. The dogs were uncomplaining travelers. And now we're back. Time to start inhabiting this new life. Leaving California yesterday felt more real (and harder emotionally) than it did in the moving van six weeks ago, because I don't expect to return for several months. And yet I'm eager to get involved in the church and to finish unpacking and settle into a life here. Guess I should start by unpacking the van!

The Fire Man

2007-12-18T14:09:00.000-08:00

A poem, by Maddie (inspired by our new UU Church's candlelight Solstice service)

Flickering and popping,
Lighting up the world without stopping,
we owe fire our life, you know.
And even so, we rarely treasure it.
Fire being big or small, you cannot measure it
At all.

It can be a candlelight or a bonfire lighting up
for easy sight.
It comes from a spark or a candle.
Without it we'd be in the dark.
But even so, fire can be a vandal.
So I hope you enjoyed this scandal.

Now, do not cry; it's not a permanent goodbye.
And I can assure you I don't lie.

Meet the Robinsons

2007-12-15T09:18:00.000-08:00

We gave this movie a pass in the theaters because the reviews were so tepid. What were they thinking?! I rented it for the kids this week after striking out with Pirates3 and Harry Potter5, and found it absolutely charming! Kinetic and kooky, with absolutely wonderful themes about success and the importance of failures, family and the stories we tell about them and the importance of letting go of the unhappy stories we tell about our past!

Steve loved it too and we both cried a bit. The kids were, oddly enough, less enthralled by it that we were, but they still liked it.

New Desk

2007-12-14T09:45:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, I woke up feeling mildly depressed again, which I've hesitated to blog about, as I know that recounting depressive thinking (it's crazy cold and it's only early December, I'm trapped in a house with two kids and no friends, what have I done with this move) only strengthens it, and I know that I could tell myself a different story and feel very cozy and happy (it's a beautiful winter's scene outside, the kids are happily engaged in their new home, I can putter about to my heart's content).

But nonetheless I was feeling down yesterday morning, then I had a long and wonderful conversation with my Mom, which made me feel 100 percent better and more connected. So I decided to call up a friend I haven't seen yet since this move and invite her and her three girls over. What a wonderful afternoon we had, making homemade pizza and scented soaps and talking!

They stayed till early evening, then I spent the next 4 1/2 hours putting together a new desk for Maddie, an early Christmas present. Luckily, I'm not working right now, as I managed to slice, bruise and blister my hands pretty good in the process. But it's done, and with any luck, I may be able to reclaim the dining room table for actual eating! We'll create a work station for Harry today.

Here's Maddie and Harry sitting at the desk this morning, sketching. Maddie wanted to place it in front of the dining room window so she could sketch Cherry and Snowflake, our two resident front-yard squirrels, while they nosh on seeds and peanuts.

Here's a drawing Maddie did of Cherry (and yes, she did the animals in the corners too, which are glued to magnets -- I think that's Fang on the lower left)

And here's Harry's sketch of the back of our digital camera!

Birthdays and more snow...

2007-12-12T10:12:00.001-08:00

Hmm, which present to open first. A huge thank you to Great Aunts/Uncles Diane, Richard, Toby & David for finding the time to send packages and cards with money in them! It was very fun for Harry to receive presents at his new home, as torturous as it was to wait to open them...

There's never a shortage of present openers at birthday parties, is there....

Sunny doesn't care which family she snuggles up with, as long as they've got warm feet...

Our friends Jill and her daughter Addy braved the snowfall to come, bless them! Jill plays rock-em sock-em robot with cousin Owen.

Harry was quite enthralled with this camera-mounted remote-controlled spy car that Nic picked out for him (though the face he makes trying to shut one eye and see the video feed is kind of freaky to me...)

The icing was so slippery the cake fell over shortly after this was taken. Still tasted great!

The cake has an image of Redwall Abbey on it.

All in all, a lovely party, despite the snow that kept folks away and the still-new, still-strange environs.

A few days after Harry's party, we got yet another snow! It's lovely each time and I can enjoy it until I start thinking about the fact that it's not even officially winter yet and we've already had three snows in the four weeks we've been here for god's sake! Then I calm down and remember how everyone says the weather changes constantly here and I'm sure it will be warm(ish) and sunny again soon... Right??

Maddie working on a snowfort after our latest four inches of snow yesterday.

Daily coyote

2007-12-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

Getting ready for Harry's birthday party on a cold and snowy day, but wanted to post a link to this wonderful blog.

The best mortgage lender ever!

2007-12-05T16:16:00.000-08:00

I don't usually do endorsements (don't want to sully the purity of my blog) but I just have to rave about Navy Federal Credit Union (thanks Dad, for being in the Marines!) We just got a call today from our loan processor to tell us that we were getting a rebate from NFCU for taking out our home loan with them. Now, mind you, this is a $70,000 loan, not very big potatoes, and they charged us a grand total of $421 to process the loan (and that included $350 for an appraisal), but they issued us a $2,000 rebate!!

Needless to say, I'm feeling very warm and fuzzy towards them right now. In fact, I'm willing to overlook the two returned check fees they charged me this month in the midst of all the moving chaos.

Closing went well -- we actually met our home seller, Kate. That's how you do it here in friendly Colorado. No escrow companies here, the title company handles the close. So Kate, our vivacious young title agent Candace, and our respective real estate agents sat down at a big table and signed documents for 45 minutes. I was really impressed when Candace explained how title insurance worked using our actual neighbors as examples. That admiration dissipated when Candace confessed that she and Kate were friends and that she had actually helped Kate remodel the house when she first bought it.

Kate was a young woman who seemed both sad and relieved to be done with the house. She'd bought it with a "no-good" ex and put a ton of work into it, ripping off plastic wallpaper and taking down mirrored wall panels, scraping popcorn and removing weird faux ceiling beams. I had a much greater appreciation for all she'd done, after realizing that I probably wouldn't have bought the house in its original state. (Previously, I'd been noticing only the work that still needed to be done -- the bathroom that needs a remodel, the peeling kitchen countertops and the worn carpeting.)

She said we had wonderful neighbors, which I was glad to hear, and reccomended a potential babysitter across the street from us. And, once all the paperwork was signed, she said, "now I can tell you, let the water run in the upstairs bathtub on the coldest nights of the year or the pipe freezes and you can't use it until it warms up again." I thought it was so funny that she was worried we'd back out of the sale if we knew that in advance.

It was quite nice to actually meet the person who lived her before us. It seems so strange to turn a home over to someone else sight unseen. Steve and I wrote out a letter to our buyer in Murrieta, explaining the various apple trees and grape vines in the garden and how to care for them, when we mailed her the mailbox keys we'd accidentally taken with us. She kindly sent us 9 pounds of mail that hadn't been forwarded, but without even a note. Which of course convinced me that she's mad at us because we couldn't get all the dog pee smell out of the upstairs carpet before we left. (sigh.)

What an interesting and fraught process buying and selling a house is....

Playing doctor

2007-12-02T13:49:00.000-08:00

The kids have been having fun with a new game, thanks to a craft-related accident I had last night.

Maddie has been wanting to make homemade paper by shredding paper products, blending them into a pulp, suspending them in water and sieving through the water with a screen to create a sheet of artsy-looking paper. I was trying to peel the plastic sleeve off a roll of metal window screening when I jammed a piece of wire under the skin of my thumb about an inch. I thought the wire had broken off under my skin, so I had Steve try to dig it out with tweezer and needle while I closed my eyes and chanted OMmmmmm. Turns out there was just a fragment of metal in me, not a long wire.

Shortly thereafter, Harry announced that he wanted us to make him a patient with a wire that needed to be removed. (I was convinced he was processing his trauma through play acting, but Steve thinks Harry just thought it was cool to see Steve operating on me. Gives you a little insight into our respective issues or lack thereof.)

So we set Harry up with a potato (who was working on his car when it exploded and impaled him with wire, nails and other objects) and Harry carefully removed foreign bodies with tweezers. Maddie got into the game, and all evening long, she searched out various food items that could be skewered with unpleasant objects, doused them with red food coloring and sent them down to Dr. Harry in the basement.

The game continues today, and here's Maddie and Patient Potato (who apparently works at a munitions dump with lax occupational safety regulations):

Here's Dr. Harry at work:

Next up, a Banana in bad shape. What happened to him? "A carton of sour-humored milk attacked him," says Maddie.

Cold, colds and closings

2007-11-30T13:01:00.000-08:00

It's been a cold week, venturing up into the 40s a couple of days, but otherwise staying in the 30s. Which was okay, I guess, as I had caught the kids' virus Monday and wasn't up for much of anything outside for most of the week. The kids are getting over their colds, with some residual coughing at night. Not exactly hitting the ground running here in Colorado, but it gives us time to settle into our new house. Harry and I are struggling with some homesickness, not so much Maddie and Steve. It'll help when we're all well and can socialize with some friends here.

We're getting ready to head on over to the escrow office to close our house sale. As of 5 p.m. this afternoon, this house will be ours! Feels good and weird at the same time. I'll be glad to get through this transition time. I heard from my Mom that there's a big rainstorm in SoCal right now, and it made me homesick! We have a 40 percent chance of some snow tonight, so maybe that'll help me get over it.

Very local weather

2007-11-25T19:15:00.001-08:00

We met another of our new neighbors this afternoon. He waved from across the street and introduced himself. Doug just returned from a surfing trip to southern Mexico and was surprised to find new neighbors. Maddie and I had been looking at a whirling thingamajig on his roof for a while, which I figured was a weather station.

Turns out Doug is a hydrologist specializing in snowpack consulting. His weather station is part of Weather Underground, so if you want to know what the temperature and windspeed is just across the street from us, you can always click here.

The funny thing is, Doug looks *way* more like a Californian than any of my California neighbors ever did, blond hair, deep tan, puka shell necklace, tres surfer dude, yet he's a Minnesota native who's lived in Colorado for 11 years now. Treats himself to a surf vacation every year, he said.

So far, we've got Joe and Vivian who live across the street and down a house. Joe has worked in the Budweiser plant a couple of miles away for many years. Jean lives to our south and used to have a daycare in her house, but I think is retired now. Tom lives to our north, with his 18-year-old son (Michael?) who likes reggae and some rather more urban music (I'm not up on my pop music enough to name the style) and plays it rather loudly when he drives up or away.

We hope to meet more folks, but with the weather chilly as it is, it may be a while before we do...

A few notes on our new home...

2007-11-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

We've been in the new house a week now, and are greatly enjoying just being in such a different place. The scenery and climate are so different, and oddly enough, the people are just much nicer than folks are in SoCal. I can't quite figure out why it is, but I notice it everywhere in little ways.

The house is bigger than our Murrieta house, with more light and more openness, and that's very pleasing. It needs a lot of work, and that's daunting. We had to call out an appliance repair guy yesterday when I discovered that the oven wouldn't work after I'd already made dough for a loaf of bread. I suppose we should have waited and bought a new stove, as the repair cost $184 and it wasn't a pretty stove to begin with, but with any luck our sellers will reimburse us for the cost of the repair, and if not, well, it was a very tasty $184 loaf of bread. (Actually, the reason I didn't just buy a new stove is that I want a gas stove to cook on eventually, and that requires replumbing, which we can't do until we actually own the house. Which will hopefully be at the end of this week, though I haven't heard from our loan officer since we moved. I need to unpack her number and call her!)

Steve went out yesterday afternoon and painted a scene along the irrigation canal. I'll try to remember to ask him to post it here. Yesterday was as warm as it's been since the snowfall Tuessday night; I'd guess it got into the low 40s. It's supposed to hit the low 50s today before returning to 30s/40s for the rest of the week, so we'll dig out some Christmas decorations and get them up. It's actually quite pleasant as long as the temperature is above freezing. I sat on the back deck with a book and a cup of tea yesterday, and I plan to do it again today!

Our solar blower does a nice job of heating the house, though it can't get it above 66 on the colder days and of course, after about 3:30 pm it goes off because the temperature in the collector gets too cool. I think we could heat the house entirely with the blower and a good wood stove, just waiting for close of escrow for that as well.

The kids have been plagued with horrible coughs, Harry even more so than Maddie; if it doesn't improve significantly by tomorrow, we'll take them in to a doctor. They have energy enough during the day, but are racked all evening and night by terrible, unproductive coughing. And Maddie got hit with an epic nosebleed on our way to town to run some errands last Wednesday, and has been worried about a repeat ever since.

I find it ironic that our fish made it through the move just fine and even spent a week in tiny tanks before we finally got them set up in the right size for them, but our kids have been hammered by the change.

Maggie, our 15-year-old dog, has taken to this move much better than I though she would. The back porch steps are a bit of a challenge for her, but she's making it up and down them and she dances at the front door for a walk every morning. Sunny seems to get very charged up by the snow (too much so, sometimes -- when we were exploring the fabulous play structure at the elementary school outside our back fence yesterday morning, she was tearing around in circles and decided to bite Harry on the calf for no particular reason!) She isn't really up for the long walks I want to do, as the snow get clotted in her paws. Maybe I need to get her booties.

We have a (red fox?) squirrel that lives in one of our cottonwood trees out front, a male, as Maddie pointed out. The kids have named him Cherry after watching him scamper to our (chokecherry?) tree and breakfast on its fruits. (I need to acquaint myself with the local flora and fauna better. We had a fabulous view of a gorgeous Northern flicker on the cottonwood yesterday morning and after looking it up in the bird book decided it was a red-shafted Northern flicker.)

The upper half of the house is pretty well unpacked and I've set up a little meditation/yoga corner in our great room. Maddie's asked to do yoga in it each of the last few mornings. I'd love to make that a habit (in fact, I'm going to suggest a yoga session as soon as I'm done with this post.)

The lower level is a jumble of boxes and I'm reluctant to do much unpacking there because I want to replace the carpeting ASAP and can't find the enthusiasm to set up, move and reset up the kids toys and craft areas. Have to wait to get carpeting in as well, though, and Steve's willing to just live with the old carpet for a while.

Now that I've got an urge to do some yoga, I'd better go off and get to it before it wanes. Steve should be back soon from church; he headed out to the 9 am service of Foothills UU Church, a huge, exciting Unitarian church here (the kids are too cough-y to go today.)

A late first snow

2007-11-25T08:37:00.000-08:00

According to the Coloradoan, last week's 4 or so inches was one of the latest first snows in more than a century. I guess the snow gods were waiting for us to arrive. After unloading in sunny 70-degree weather for several days, Tuesday night it began to snow. The kids have been sick with cough/colds, so they didn't get out and do some real snowplay until yesterday (Sat) when it warmed up enough that the snow could be packed.

Here's some photos of us moving in with our cousins helping to rake up a huge pile of leaves, the first day of the snow, and yesterday's sledding...

Our last week

2007-11-20T08:17:00.000-08:00

Last Monday, we were packing up our house with our friend Laurie.

On Tuesday, we went to Disneyland (which turned out to be a bit more than the kids could handle, as they were either coming down with a cold before they got there or picked one up at the park, and wanted to go home by about 3 p.m.)

On Wednesday, we loaded the van and said goodbye to Laurie in the evening.

Thursday around noon, my folks came down and, seeing our panicked faces, agreed to load their truck with as much of our remaining stuff that wasn't fitting in the van as possible. Then around 2:30 p.m., Steve headed out to a U-Haul place to rent a pull-behind trailer, which we packed up with the last of our stuff, including the keys to the Penske moving van. So we unpacked the U-Haul about halfway til we found the keys, repacked it, and finally rolled out of town, frazzled and four hours behind schedule.

As I had foolishly made a non-refundable room reservation in Cedar City for Thursday night (it would have been so much better to go stay the night with my folks and take off the following morning), we drove from 4:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. and rolled into bed at 3 a.m. local time. Four hours later, Harry awoke us all with the croup, though he refused offers of walking and being held and chose to take a shower by himself instead, which worked wonders and he was able to get back to sleep about an hour later. Not me, however.

We made an on-the-fly decision to not push through to Fort Collins on Friday (I was stressed enough about driving a van with the U-haul trailer -- I'd read a piece in the Times a while back about the terrible accidents that occur when trailers were pulled faster than 45 mph, which I was definitely doing).

We made reservations instead for Glenwood Springs, where, to our delight, our new friends Jill and her son Lucas, met us and stayed overnight as well. Why would an unschooling family from Fort Collins drive four hours to see us on our drive east (aside from a general sense that life is an adventure)? Because we were transporting a puppy from Jill's sister (a dog rescuer in San Diego) for them. Little Spanky was a godsend on the drive, keeping the kids diverted.

After another night of disrupted sleep because of poor Harry not feeling well, we got up and walked dogs and played in the hotel pool with Luke, then took off around noon.

We rolled into our new home shortly after 4 p.m. Saturday, in time to unpack a mattress and a few kitchen essentials.

Maddie woke up Sunday morning with a fever, and slept most of the day. Jill came over Sunday afternoon and helped us unload ridiculously heavy furniture, and Cindi, Chelo, Chelo's mom, Alicia, and Nic and Owen came over yesterday and raked a season's worth of leaves up, helped us move the rest of the furniture from garage to house and toted boxes hither and yon as well. The kids weren't up for playing with their cousins much yesterday, unfortunately, but we'll see them at Thanksgiving.

Today, they're definitely feeling better. Except for the pinkeye. We've never had this before and the kids are finding it so unpleasant they're actually willing to do the eyewashing and soaking.I feel terrible that they've been sick and now infected -- moving has proved a much greater stress on them than I expected.

All in all, though, we're excited to be here. The kids miss my Mom and Dad (and Fang), their friends Joseph, Robbie, Spenser, Luna and Solie, and our old house, but they're having fun in the new one and in that sense, seem immensely adaptable (I don't know how much to blame somatasized stress for their illnesses, or whether it's just coincidence that they're getting sick now.) They're very excited about tonight's forecast of 2-4 inches of snow (we had lovely, 70-degree weather since our arrival, but that's all to change today).

I'm going to wrap up this post and start putting rooms back together. I'll post photos once we get our internet service (I'm poaching off a neighbor's wireless at the moment, and I don't want to slow their service down too much.)

It seems like an insane thing that we just did, but it's also exciting to be exploring a new area and a new climate. I reserve the right to fly back to SoCal frequently in the next year, though, to stay in contact with everyone we've left behind!

Goodbye, Good Tern

2007-11-06T08:55:00.000-08:00

Well, it's come to this: I'm considering the fate of the Good Tern, my handbuilt wooden boat. Lots of sentimental value - and a sound vessel - but after the kids came along, I just didn't find myself out sailing that much, and after several years of neglect she needs a bit of work that I just might not be up for.
There's a lake near our new Colorado house - perfect for the canoes, certainly - but I might rather sail in a borrowed boat, or find a sailing club once we're there, or perhaps not sail at all, rather than bring this old girl along.
The large photo is the Good Tern moored at Lake Perris in her glory days a few years back; the other photos show her in her current state: great lines, but lots of chipped paint and faded varnish. No metaphors about my own or anyone else's aging - just decisions, decisions...

Crazed

2007-11-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

Okay, we're packing. We're running down details of two escrows. We had to take Sunny to the vets over the weekend because she charged our neighbor's enormous akitas and got chomped on the leg for her attempts to prove her 21 pounds of dominance (she's doing well now). I'm lining up the cheapest moving van. We're visiting with friends. Wrapping up responsibilities at the UU chuch. I'm trying to fit in a few final clients. I'm freaking out.

How do you process stress, fear, excitement and grief while remaining functional? I'm relying on chinese herbs and, sigh, Coke. We've gone through two two-liter bottles in the last week. We hide it from the kids, of course, sneaking it in opaque plastic cups. I'm worried about getting addicted. Colorado's a healthy state though, I'm sure I'll find plenty of help in getting off the stuff once I get out there, right?

Happy Halloween. A Maddie post

2007-10-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

It's three days til Halloween. We just put up our Halloween decorations today. We have two wooden gravestones and three styrofoam gravestones. We also have a small plastic coffin with a zombie with light up red eyes that pops up and screams if it hears a noise or senses any movement. We also have five pumpkins. And a light up skeleton coming out of the ground. One of the pumpkins we have is white and we are going to carve it like a ghost. One of the pumpkins we grew ourselves but even though it's small we still like it. And we are hoping this will be a happy Halloween.

what, more animals?!

2007-10-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

A post from Maddie:

A couple months ago we got some mice. One is gray and nibbles so we named him Nibbles. We also got two other mice and named them Pumpkin and Oatmeal. Oatmeal is fuzzy and blond and Pumpkin is orange. But Sunny wants to eat them all bwahaha but we won't let her. And we got them a new mouse cage with a wheel that spins in a circle when they run.

Here is Nibbles and Pumpkin (Pumpkin is in back)

Here is Oatmeal.

Making an offer

2007-10-28T21:23:00.001-07:00

We're making an offer in the morning on this house in Fort Collins. I can't get the photos uploaded in the right order, so you'll have to figure out what's what yourself, but here's the details on the house -- it's on almost a quarter acre, has four bedrooms and two baths, I love the open floor plan. It has a solar collector on the south facing side wall that blows hot air into the house via a fan. There's a family room in a daylight basement with a fireplace as well.

It has a lovely deck with sliders onto the master bedroom and the kitchen. It backs to an elementary school playground which we can use after school hours (how ironic that we're backing to a school!) and has lovely views of the mountains beyond the school. There's a walking trail along an irrigation canal at the bottom of the street that goes for miles in either direction.

We're very excited about this house, even though we're going to have to sneak our chickens in under the radar (I called county code enforcement to ask about backyard flocks and the woman told me that chickens aren't allowed in residential zoning, "but just to let you know, we don't go out and check. We'd only check if a neighbor complained.") So we'll keep up our good relations with our neighbors and keep a few chickens under the back deck. With any luck, we'll be under contract tomorrow and we'll be able to move by mid month (We'll rent from the seller until our loan comes through, as she's already moved out).

Oh, and it needs work. Carpet needs to be replaced upstairs and down, the upstairs bathroom needs to be completely redone and the kitchen is desperately in need of an update. But we (Steve) just did all those things so we know what we're getting into and are pricing our offer accordingly.

Back to business

2007-10-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

Mom and Dad are back at home and unpacking their cars and RV and trying to de-stress. The skies are a bit better here today and Steve and I are back to focusing on the home sale. He's almost completed the 25-item honey-do list that our buyer presented, and we're trying to figure out where our title snafu stands -- we've got the previous owners ex-husband (an ex-con, no less) on our title and the title company is working to clear it up because we can't close escrow until they do and I don't know how patient our buyer's going to be about this. What a screw-up on the part of our title company. If they don't salvage this sale, we'll be hiring a lawyer of our own, much as I hate to go that route.
The title company lawyers are in San Diego and affected by the fires, as are the mortgage processors for the loan we want to get to buy a house in Fort Collins. Honestly, I'm starting to wonder if the universe is trying to tell us something (yes, all of Southern California burns and it's all about me. It's always all about me!)
Escrow's supposed to close Nov. 15th, I really want to get under contract on a house in Fort Collins and we're being told, wait a few more days, just to be sure we're going to be able to clear this up for you before you make an offer. I'm getting lots of practice in maintaining equanimity.
ohhmmmmmm.

Spared

2007-10-23T19:41:00.000-07:00

Firefighters did an incredible job of holding the fires on a line about two miles from my folks' house since yesterday evening. I'm really impressed, from all that I read online last night, I'm stunned that they were able to do that.

News reports say that the fires in Live Oak area are out except for hot spots. More are burning to the north of town but aren't a danger to their house.

Mom and Dad are still on Pendleton, breathing foul air. Hoping the evacuation will be lifted tomorrow...

Fires...

2007-10-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

For anyone wondering what's happening with my folks, they're packing the RV and cars. There's a fire to the east of Fallbrook that may have jumped I-15 already and headed towards them. I don't think we can get to them because I'm hearing the I-15 is closed southbound and possibly in both directions. If they have to evacuate, they'll probably have to go west to Oceanside. I'll update as I know more.
We're unscathed for the moment, don't even have the winds in our valley that are apparently tearing through northern San Diego County. Air is foul, but that's all. This is one of the few times when I wish we had television reception...

You can see what CHP is responding to on this site -- it's written in dispatch speak, but can give an idea of where they're shutting down roads and when fires have reached freeways...

CHP Dispatch Use the pull down menu on the left to get San Diego County updates...

UPDATE: 1 p.m.
They're evacuating on my folks' side of the freeway now, but not as far as their neighborhood yet (they're issuing mandatory evavcuation orders between the 15 and Live Oak Park, if anyone knows the area. That's still about 2-3 miles west of Friends Way). They've driven the RV on base and left it there and have returned home to pack more in their cars. I wish I could help them but we can't get to them.

Update 2:15:
All of Fallbrook is under evacuation orders now, but the wind might be shifting the fire S or SE, instead of due west towards Friends Way, so they're sitting tight for now. The fire has jumped the freeway.
Winds are picking up for us, so that may well indicate a shift in direction.

2:45p.m.
The fire's burning in Live Oak Park and headed uphilll towards my folks, about a mile and a half away. I'm hoping they evacuate as ordered.

5:30 p.m. The sight of police going door to door convinced them to leave about 45 minutes ago. Traffic is crawling and it may be an hour or two before they make it on base. They're planning to stay in their camper there overnight, then head up our way if the evacuation hasn't been lifted tomorrow.

7 p.m. Folks are on base, getting supplies and heading to the beach campground to squat in the RV for the night. Air is foul, but they're safe.

This is the latest info from the local paper:

" The Rice Fire in Fallbrook has burned about 1,000 acres and was spreading south toward Highway 76, northwest toward De Luz, as well as towards downtown Fallbrook, fire officials said Monday afternoon. The blaze began in the Stewart Canyon area east of downtown Fallbrook. All town residents have been received mandatory evacuations and should be on their way out of town, if they haven't left already, authorities said. "

Four months later...

2007-09-29T09:54:00.001-07:00

We're in escrow, and I must say, it's no fun selling your house in such a crazy down market. I hate how low we went, so do our friends and neighbors, but the timing worked out just right for Steve's new job, which he's quite excited about. We'll drop Steve at the airport early Thursday morning and the kids, Sunny and I will keep driving up Interstate 15 for oh, 500 miles or so, before taking a right turn and stopping for the day.

We'll be in a rental car packed with boxes of books to drop in a corner of Cindi's basement. We'll see what's still on the market when we get out there and check out a few of the communities between Boulder and Fort Collins as well. Escrow closes in mid-November, which will also work out fairly well magazine-deadline-wise.

Steve's new boss turns out to be a wonderfully responsible employer and is providing *fully paid for* health benefits (my jaw dropped when I heard this. Does *anyone* still offer full coverage?? And it's Kaiser, not some weird pseudo-plan that negotiates discounts for you). Even though Steve was lured by the extra $8/hour that Ravi offers if you choose to be an independent contractor, Ravi told him he prefers that Steve comes on as an employee (with the benefits, and half the SS/medicare taxes covered -- I forgot about that cost of self-employment, and retirement), since it's hard to justify Steve as an independent contractor with the work he'll be doing in the eyes of the IRS (Do you know how many day spas pretend that their full-time massage therapists are independent contractors to avoid paying payroll taxes, even though the therapists can't set their own rates or hours? All of them!) Ravi's my new ethical role model, and I haven't even met him yet!

Well, Harry, who picked up a cold at Legoland (and who sounds a bit croupy, but isn't even waking up at night -- as opposed to the trips to the ER we routinely made last year and earlier -- hooray for thicker tracheal cartilage!), is asking me to play Dragon Fable, so I'll sign off for now...

Either there's not enough news or too much

2007-09-26T19:13:00.001-07:00

I haven't had the energy to type any of this, probably because I've spent too much effort ruminating over it!

Steve returned from Colorado a week ago today and was immediately offered the half-time magazine job in Boulder for the alternative health magazine, which he really likes. The boss is great, the magazine is interesting, the work schedule is quite flexible, the hourly salary is higher than the newspaper job and it offers some sort of health benefits. Unfortunately, it's in Boulder, which is an hour from Fort Collins, but 15 minutes from my sister, but $150,000 more per house than Fort Collins, but a cool alternative city, but more urban than we really want but.... (can you tell I've been making myself crazy?)

Today, the Loveland paper called and asked him what it would take to get him to take their job, which is fulltime and very mediocre pay. (He put them off until tomorrow as he was walking out the door to teach a class and we're struggling with how to respond to our first offer on the house.)

Yes today, we got an offer on our house, after drastically lowering the price for a two-week period to see if we could get any bites (four months on the market and not a single offer tells me we're overpriced, as much as I can't believe it. I guess I'm as deluded as the next seller.)

Last Thursday or Friday we said we'd consider offers between $345 and $365 for two weeks only. An open house on Sunday drew 8 buyers, an apparent miracle in this market. Today, someone who has seen our house twice in the last few weeks saw our new price range and offered $350k. Ugh. And we're afraid to counter offer and have the buyer walk, as our neighbors' did. So while Steve and I agonize over our options, some small voice in my head is saying, look what a gorgeous fall evening it is, the full moon's rising, this apparent dilemma will mean nothing in another few months or years, quit taking it so seriously!

The kids and I did have a great time in Legoland with our homeschooling friends on Monday, while Steve attended a life drawing class at an art center in Fallbrook.

And tomorrow, we have yet another house showing... I feel like I should have something more profound to say, but my head's too full of thinking to be profound!

Big sigh of relief

2007-09-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

I'm SAHMing it for the next couple of days, with Steve off in Colorado and my Mom on the East Coast, no way I can see clients. What a great feeling to have nothing to do but stay home with the kids, cook, clean up and play games with them. Like this addicting one, which disguises some intriguing physics lessons as game play...

I'm trying to figure out why it's felt so wonderful to just stay home the last day or two. I've done many loads of laundry, baked a rasberry trifle and Guosim Shrew Shortbread from the Redwall Cookbook, and we're in process with a batch of no-knead bread that promises to be heavenly (I've always thought it impossible to get a crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside rustic loaf like this in an ordinary oven!)

I think a lot of it is just giving myself over to the day and enjoying how it unfolds. Often when Steve's home, I'm pricked by the thought that I should be off doing something, either hiking or running vague errands or just something, since I have the opportunity to go out. But I don't really want to and I end up wandering around the house a bit aimlessly and feeling out of sorts.

I do know I've missed feeling grounded at home for quite a while. I can remember getting tired of this much domesticity also, but for now, I'm revelling in it.

Steve is spending the day at the Loveland paper and his first impression of it, from last night's dinner with some of the design desk folks and editors, was that it was a flashback, not just to being back in journalism, but to his college newspaper, which was about the same size. He's so far not thinking that this could be an enjoyable growth opportunity. We'll see how today's tours and presentations went. I'm more excited about the magazine job in Boulder. He meets with the editor tomorrow, if all goes well.

And our neighbors' weren't able to negotiate a sale of their house, the potential buyers couldn't offer any more than their initial offer. Discouraging news all around, at the moment....

UU Jihad

2007-09-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Sister Shining Battle Axe of Unassuming Balance. What's yours?

I went for the reformed Unitarian Jihad name -- seemed a bit more subtle than the original name they coughed up for me.

Loved the column this was inspired by...

September already!

2007-09-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

So, we've survived the awful heatwave that finally broke last week, the kids have learned to snorkel and we're into September already! I just finished a 3-day bodywork seminar with Erik Dalton that was jam-packed with wonderful techniques and information, in fact too much -- I'd love to integrate everything he taught into my practice, but I'll be lucky to retain a fraction of it. There's always so much to learn out there and I sometimes yearn to be able to devote all my energies to my professional life, but there'll be time for that in another decade or so....

Steve's getting ready to fly out to Colorado for a job interview at the Loveland paper. At this point, it's just a question of whether he likes the working environment there, I think. He's more than qualified for the position and I'm sure they'll be wowed by him. It is full-time (though they're open to a 4/10 workweek), which is a drawback for us, as that leaves both our lives unbalanced. I really enjoy that we can both work part-time and parent (I was going to say parent part-time but parenting's always a full-time experience.)

I'm torn about this job possibility. I love the idea of being able to be home more with the kids (and the various benefits that would come with this f/t job) but I don't want to give up my work entirely and I'm anxious about trying to shoe-horn it into Steve's days off and not leaving us enough family time. I still dream about a small homestead and a lifestyle more akin to the Nearings , but Front Range Colorado land is pricey and I'm pretty intimidated by the idea of an owner-built house.

As usual, I'm ruminating way to much on things that may never happen. While Steve's out there, he may interview with an alternative health magazine in Boulder that's looking for a half-time designer, and that sounds very intriguing to me.

On the topic of alternative health, my folks are newly into raw fruit and veggie smoothies (Mom got excited about it at the Qi Gong workshop and after talking Dad into trying some for a week or so, they discovered it made them both feel much better and improved my Dad's wrist and hand pain significantly -- thanks to the anti-inflammatory properties of the phytonutrients, I'd guess.) They just bought me a high-speed blender for an early birthday gift, so I'm experimenting with recipes that pack as much phytonutrients in as possible while still being moderately palatable to my picky tastebuds.

The kids are ridiculously busy, as usual. Maddie's enthralled by the Redwall Cookbook and has been lobbying to try new recipes every day. So far, we've made raspberry jelly rock cakes, hot mint tea and scones and Steve's made shrimp and hotroot soup (I cannot do shrimp. Makes me gag more than the vegetable smoothies) which he really liked. Hare's Haversack Crumble is next.

Harry's suddenly developed an interest in knitting, and after regular knitting proved too frustrating, we tried finger-knitting. It may still be a bit too soon for him to try this skill, but for some reason he's quite determined about it, so we'll keep trying. He's also quite focused on taking things apart to see how they work and coming up with new inventions (which he describes in lengthy and painstaking detail, to the point that I forget exactly what it is he's talking about. Bad Mom.) His interest in writing and reading is picking up and we've been working a bit of phonics in lately.

The housing market is still slow, but has picked up a bit. We had two showings last week and one of those couples put a (low-ball) bid in on our friend and neighbor's house. Our friends are countering the $20k-under bid with a counter offer $2k lower than their asking price (we've each dropped our asking price $30k since listing in June). It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

We got the alarming confirmation today that the previous owner's ex-husband is indeed still on our title (especially alarming because the man was in prison on a domestic violence conviction when we bought the house. eeek.) I've worried that this was a possibility ever since we got our first tax bill seven years ago, but got weirdly tharn about it and simply accepted our title insurance company's word back then that there was nothing to worry about. Now, the company is saying they can only fix the title when we go to sell, but that they will be able to at that point. I sincerely hope so. It's not likely we'd get too far by politely ask the guy to sign off on the deed for us (he did get out of prison a couple of years ago, but I'm not really interested in tracking him down and asking him for help in clearing this little snafu up.)

So, this whole house thing isn't exactly the smoothest part of our lives these days, but all else is well, and that's what matters!

Battle On!

2007-08-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

The kids and I have been playing these on-line RPG games lately, after being introduced to Runescape by an unschooling friend and finding that I don't like the multi-user online games -- too many people walking around typing in computer-speak and randomly trying and usually succeeding at killing and robbing me/us.

Battle On is fun and a great deal of it is available without having to pay the $20 one-time fee. We've also played dragonfable, which has a more interesting and more humerous interface, but is limited in what your character can acquire as a free player.

I was frankly getting sick of the downloaded dungeons game, Fate, that we've been playing for the last year or so and the kids find these two new games less intimidating as the battles aren't a random melee in which you have to attack as fast as possible, but are easier-to-think-through, turn-taking affairs, and the dialog and quests are often quite amusing...

August is my winter...

2007-08-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

I read Chris Erskine's column in the times last week, in which he was rhapsodizing comedically about summer and thought, that's not my experience of summer -- I think of it as a time to hide from insufferable heat and blinding sunlight, dreading excursions in the broiler of a car (which, this summer, has a too-tight fan belt that makes it scream earsplittingly everytime it idles with the A/C on, so that I feel compelled to turn off the A/C whenever nearby motorists wince and stare. And no, we haven't made the time to go back to the mechanic and get him to adjust it properly. I have no idea why not...) I can't imagine how people live in places like Palm Springs and Phoenix.

We did pry ourselves out of the house yesterday afternoon and headed down to La Jolla cove, where it was only warm and muggy and the water was delightfully not-frigid. I hadn't brought full diving gear, just a change of clothes for most everyone (Steve had to squelch about in wet shorts for the rest of the evening, I'm afraid) and one pair of goggles, which the kids and Steve used to peer at underwater at schools of fish, while I held onto Maddie ankle to keep the tidal surge from sucking her out to sea. We'll go back on Friday properly equipped for our first real snorkeling outing.

Both kids have made one of those quantum leaps of natural learning and are comfortable, confident swimmers, bobbing and breathing, diving and paddling. Their strokes are rough by my swim-team trained eyes, but more than serviceable, and all accomplished without anxiety or coercion. I remember my experiences at swim lessons as a child. I remember being lied to by a teen-age swim instructor trying to get me to submerge ("There's a green-haired clown you can see if you dive down and look into the pool light!") And it felt at the time like a lie, a surprising, stupid lie. Did I learn to put my head underwater, or did I learn that it's okay to lie to people to get them to do what you want? A bit of both, I suppose, judging by my current communication skills.

In any case, we've had a busy couple of weeks, dinners and playdates with some fun homeschooling families, outings to the Wild Animal Park and a rather nutty Qi Gong conference for my Mom and I. Steve must have spent almost two weeks writing a wonderful service for our UU Church on spirituality and the visual arts (that I didn't even get to hear because I was teaching RE!) Now he's pulling together clips and resumes and cover letters for a couple of promising jobs in Loveland/Fort Collins.

And it's looking at this point like we're going to need a job right away in order to move out there. We'd been thinking we could bank some equity and take a year to get established but the market continues to tank here and we aren't going to sell for anywhere near what we'd hoped. In fact, I found this lovely chart yesterday, in a CNN story on the top 500 foreclosure zip codes in the country. Our city's zips and the neighboring city's are in the top 50 or so. It's getting rather scary and I wonder what broader socioeconomic damage this might wreak.

Not worth worrying about now though. We've got some snorkeling to look forward to!

Home selling update...

2007-07-24T17:49:00.001-07:00

Well, the number of people coming to see our house has dropped off dramatically in the last week or two, so we called our agent to ask whether we should drop our price again or just be patient. She called around to a few agents whose clients have recently dropped their asking prices, and they report that going down 5 percent or less ($20,000!) isn't bringing any more potential buyers to their doors. Soooo, we may be looking at just having to be patient. How long, is unclear. Until October, if this were a normal year. And since this is anything but a normal year, who can say.

I've been hesitant to post because I don't want the blog to turn into a housing market vent, but when I think about it, we've been having a very good summer, aside from the impatience I suffer over the whole move.

Steve just finished six weeks of teaching an intensive summer school course, so the kids got lots of time with their grandparents while I worked at my surprisingly busy practice. I'd dropped one day a week from my schedule to save rent money and in anticipation of a summer slowdown, then was surprised by the continued strength of my practice. My two days are often filled and I've been doing a few outcalls to handle the overflow. I keep wondering how busy I'd be if I actually tried to market myself.

Our lovely neighbors up the street have offered us unfettered access to their pool and this has been the summer of swim for Harry. He now leaps fearlessly off the side and swims across the pool, holding his breath for the most part but ocassionally remembering to breathe. I've really enjoyed the luxury of a backyard pool and the lassitude of bobbing away a couple of hours in the afternoon heat.

We've also made some great new unschooling friends and have been socializing with old friends we haven't seen in a while. Nothing like an impending move to spur you to reach out and connect with friends again. It's been wonderful and, as always, I berate myself for not thinking of and doing it sooner, but I obviously wasn't supposed to until I did.

We've just rediscovered the Wild Animal Park, after having tired of it and visiting little in the last two years. It's fun to feel like a tourist in your own backyard again.

In the few weeks break before the fall semester, we plan to visit my friend, Mariel, and hit some museums in LA. My mom and I are going to take a four-day Qi Gong workshop in La Jolla mid-August and I think we'll get a hotel so that Steve and the kids can hit the pool or the beaches while we are in the workshop and we can hit the Zoo at night in the evenings. It might be fun to take a day trip to Tijuana while we're down there.

I keep thinking we should do something a bit more ambitious, like a tour of Arizona's wild places, but my money stories keep nagging at me. (What's the best use of money anyway, but to enable some wonderful life experiences? Hard to say no to clients who want to book though, so I've been having trouble taking time off.)

It's been an interesting summer, I think I've been much more present than usual, if only because I tell myself this will be the last summer I'll be living in SoCal. But I've also been more aware of my emotional states and it's been good to learn to ride them out.

Had a client yesterday at the retreat facility who introduced himself with rather more detail than I usually get (anonymity is of paramount importance to many of the folks who come to rehab), shaking my hand and saying, "Hi, I'm (insert first name here) from Fort Collins, Colorado." He proceeded to regale me throughout the massage with all the wonderful attributes of life in his hometown in Colorado.

Someday, perhaps, I'll be able to do the same, but for now, I'm trying to appreciate the wonders of Southern California (which I find hard to do, worrying that I'll some how stop wanting to move if don't keep my defenses up -- silly, I know.)

Pottermania

2007-07-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

First off, no spoilers here!
We all dressed up and went to the chain bookstore's release party Friday night with our homeschooling friends Rich and Felicia and Ben, Abram and Eli, and immersed ourselves in the frenzy. Photos to be posted shortly.
Maddie directed our costumes and I think we looked great, though I kept having to shrug off feeling silly to be among the minority (of both grownups and kids) in costume in the store. I don't think of myself as getting too into pop culture, but I have to say, this series has captivated me. Which was why the bookstore party underwhelmed me. Too many people, too little interaction, too lacking in real energy and heart. I would have much preferred a smaller gathering that included readings from previous books and real lessons on divination and other magical-themed learning. Ah well, we shall have to have a proper Potter party of our own sometime....
So, I managed to savor the first nine or ten chapters of the book over the course of yesterday, reading them first to myself and then aloud to the kids (Steve read several chapters to them while I worked at the retreat in the afternoon), but as the pace picked up, I became unable to stop reading. I tried, once, around 3 a.m. this morning, to put down the book and go to sleep, but my thoughts kept racing. So I gave in and read through to the light of dawn, blearily finishing the last chapter and a half as the sun was rising.
I *never* pull all nighters, I hate the feeling of sleep deprivation. I've been wandering around today wondering exactly how I feel and why I feel the way I do, and I'm sure I'll be processing the book for weeks, but what I'm noticing most strongly is that I'm mourning the end of the series.
I so wanted to stretch out the reading of this, but I was transfixed by the story. Others will write far more eloquently of what Jo Rowling has done with this series, I'm just amazed and thrilled that I got to experience it in real time.
And I'm impatiently waiting for my husband to get on with *his* reading of the book so I can finally talk about it with someone!

Our Tomato Vendors

2007-07-13T17:04:00.001-07:00

The kids have earned at least $15 so far, and the neighbors don't seem to be running out of appetite for tomatoes yet!

The excitement of living on the edge

2007-07-13T12:37:00.001-07:00

I read and hear often and in many places of well-off people reminiscing about when they were younger and living hand to mouth and how, paradoxically, those were the best times of their lives. I've never thought to wonder too much about why that is until just recently.
I sat down last week to pay the month's bills and realized that we had come to the end of Steve's LA Times buyout money. Eighteen months later, we'd run through the $22,000. We did well, I think, putting $16,000 into IRAs during that time, and putting $14,000 into home upgrades and repairs. (Hmmm, how exactly did we do that??)
I had a moment of panic as I wrote out an enormous check to cover our Visa bill (granite countertops and aging car get the biggest share of the blame), but after taking a deep breath and asking myself "Is it really true that we're in trouble? Nah.") I had a curious sense of excitement well up. "Okay, now the game gets interesting. How can we cut back? Let's really get intentional again about our spending. Here's more incentive to learn to cook new and delicious meals at home," and other intriguing thoughts surfaced.
I think living closer to the fiscal edge makes life more interesting and more vivid because it spurs us to be more conscious and aware of what we're doing. It's a prompting to mindfulness. It forces me, at least, to be more awake and aware and to consider alternatives that often are simpler and more satisfying.
I won't argue that a life of plenty is very appealing, lots of toys to play with, less worry about finances, frequent and enjoyable indulgences (not to mention social approbation.) But after a while, a life of plenty can be deadening, so much stuff and distraction, more choices (each of which costs us mental energy to make), more to maintain and to clean and to store.
A season of simplicity and fiscal contraction feels like the right thing to do from time to time. I've read that humans are meant to fast from time to time, that our bodies expect and are attuned to have times of leanness and hunger, but we never experience that any more.
I find that I'm rather excited about the idea of a spending drought, a consumer famine, a break, however minimal, from this crazy whirlwind material culture we are in...

Manifest celebrity

2007-07-01T20:49:00.000-07:00

We were down at my folks' house over the weekend, to get out of the way of the droves of people wanting to see our house (not. sigh.) and went to downtown Fallbrook on Friday night for a little date.

We ended up at the Irish pub (because it was the only place still open at 9 pm) and sat in a little room in the back, away from the very loud cover band in the main bar. I was telling Steve about my friend Carrie, who was in LA last weekend (actually at a bar in Malibu) to hear a band called Fu Manchu and ended up standing right next to Elijah Wood, whom she said was very cute and very small.

This got Steve to rueing that in all his years working in LA at the Times, he hadn't rubbed elbows with more Hollywood types, which led us to laugh about the time we were invited to a Christmas party hosted by the opinion page editor (who was the sister of a major producer) and met Harry Shearer and didn't realize who he was or chat him up at all, and how we left the party early because we weren't having a good time and discovered that Warren and Annette had arrived shortly thereafter.

We'd just paid the bill and were thinking about heading out, as the band was getting louder and not better, when the waitress leaned over and told us that if we waited around a bit, Tori Spelling was on her way in. Sure enough, an entourage of LA-looking people, followed by a guy in a kilt and then Tori. She posed for a few photographs with several other patrons and Steve and I sat there for a while, waiting for something interesting to happen, which didn't. (All I could think of is the rich and famous, but mostly just rich, who I work on at the drug and alcohol retreat facility on Saturdays. It's taken all the glamour out of celebrity and fortune for me, I'm afraid.) Eventually, we went home, chuckling about how we had manifested a small dose of celebrity...

Sleepwalking into summer

2007-06-29T00:32:00.000-07:00

June is just about over -- our apple trees are bearing fruit (the Anna's is already too mealy for me, but I'm picky about my apples being crisp), Steve is reveling in his tomatoes (he and the kids made $6 the other day selling origami paper cups that Maddie made full of pear, cherry and early girl tomatoes to the neighbors) and the weather is heating up.

I'm in this curious place of being intensely antsy to have the house sold and not believing it will ever happen, that we will never really leave here. Summer here, with its intense heat, makes me a bit dazed anyway, and that, combined with the utter unknowability of what life in Colorado might be like for us, makes any thought of moving seem like just a dream.

I'm trying not to waste this time waiting for the future, as I so often do even when I'm not busy planning major life changes.

I woke up the other morning and noticed how dread seeped into my consciousness as my first thoughts were about what I had to get done today -- "got four clients to get through, I need to get the kids to my folks house, this house needs to be picked up."

And I looked at Harry, sleeping next to me (I started the night in his bed, since Steve and the kids had fallen asleep in the big bed listening to a book on tape, then Harry wandered in at daybreak to sleep a few final hours with me) and thought about how he and Maddie wake up and start their days -- he padding quietly downstairs, she bounding out of bed loudly enough to make me jump when I'm in the kitchen downstairs, but both of them always curious and open and ready to engage with the day, and I wondered how I have gotten so off-track.

Looking at Harry, I vowed to be more aware of how I'm framing my life with my thoughts (I don't *have* to get through four clients, I *love* working on people and making them feel better, though maybe I need to pare my day back to three clients, to keep it from turning into work) and to find ways to inject a sense of freedom and fun into my days. All the work of the past few months on the house has me in a chore mentality, and I need to remember to relax and play again.

Summertime, too, is bittersweet for me, because I remember how it seemed like a time of such freedom, so relaxing (even boring!) when I was young, before 40-hour-a-week, 50-week -a-year jobs, before babies and kids who never stop needing help, food, drink, an ear, comfort, diversion. I wonder will I ever get back to that experience of summer that I had as a child and teenager?

I don't know, but I can create some space for myself to relax in right now. It's funny, now, with the house as clean and the yards as tidy as they've ever been, I still find myself jumping up to water a plant or pick up a toy or wipe down a counter. Truly, it never stops, neither the list of things that could be done to fight entropy nor the voice that insists I must do them now.

One thing that I have done that I'm very excited about, is touch my toes. It's been several years that stiffness and pain has been creeping into my back, burning down my hamstrings and making my achilles tendon ache. This started before I began doing massage, but I'm acutely conscious of it now that I am so focused on muscle and fascia. I've been internally berating myself for not doing yoga regularly, but frankly, on many days I'm tired out by massage, child rearing and housekeeping (or the internal resistance to any or all of the above) and I rarely have the energy at the end of the day, when I'm loosest. As far as morning yoga goes, it undermines what little determination I have when I'm so tight that the poses are painful to hold.

I've found a book, Pain Free, (recommended first by a client months ago, then by another massage therapist last week) by Pete Egoscue that has just what I've been looking for -- slow, deep, static stretches that release the fascia without being difficult to hold, a lazy woman's path to properly aligned joints, pain relief and greater flexibility. I've been doing the exercises a week and already my back feels 80 percent better and I can touch the floor, after several years of being 3 inches away from it. Now that the back is loosened up, I'm going to go through the stretches for neck pain, which is among the most intractible of the pain conditions I see in my practice and will hopefully be able to recommend the book enthusiastically to my clients.

So, this evening I was laying on my yoga mat on the back patio with my legs propped up on an ice chest, enjoying being able to lay down and claim to be doing physical fitness at the same time, listening to Mossflower on CD with Maddie, as she picked handfuls of rosemary and mint leaves and carefully shredded them and piled them on my arms and legs to ward off mosquitos (I am apparently ambrosia to mosquitos. Steve can stand next to me and get one or often not a single bite, and I will get half a dozen), until a couple of bites on my unprotected wrist made me flee into the house, and I didn't in the least bit register how wonderful a moment it all was, until I was finally laying in bed at midnight, unable to sleep, remembering how my daughter had carefully anointed me with fragrant herbs.

I don't know whether to despair that I can have such a charming experience and practically sleepwalk through it, or applaud myself for at least seeing the magic of it before I fell to sleep...

I know that moving somewhere with new people, new routines, new climate, will make me feel awake and present for a time, and that's a big part of the allure for me. But I also know that the new becomes familiar and routine, and if I don't figure out how to maintain mindfulness, I'll sleepwalk through life in Colorado in a few years as much as I do it here. Steve was suggested I return to sitting meditation (which I abandoned in Maddie's early months). I'm sure it's a good idea. I just wonder if I'll have any better luck with it than I did with my aspirations for a daily yoga practice. Hmmm, perhaps there's a lazy woman's path to mindfullness as well...

Now we wait...

2007-06-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

We returned from Colorado early this morning, after flying from Denver to Vegas and driving home the car we had dropped off at the Las Vegas airport on the drive out to Colorado (we left our Jeep with Steve's college friend, Lincoln, who lives in Boulder, figuring that we'll need a 4WD vehicle in Colorado and we might as well start moving cars out now -- I know, it's byzantine. But it saved us money and saved driving time as well).
We had a wonderful time playing with the cousins. The weather was gorgeous, if a bit hot, and we loved the afternoon thunderstorms that cooled things off. (Harry just helped me by typing in the last two sentences. And Maddie finished the last two words off. She just exclaimed "hey!" when I tried to give Harry all the credit.)
We met with the unschoolers in Fort Collins again -- I so enjoy spending time with these families. We wandered around Bellvue, the idyllic hamlet outside of Fort Collins that Steve says looks like Hobbiton. Pam and her wonderful family live there, in a hundred-year-old house that was once a Seventh Day Adventist Church, and now is home to four chickens, a rabbit, three dogs, at least one cat and two triops. Maddie was in heaven.
We saw a couple of houses that we really liked, including one with a fabulous view of a small community lake and the mountains beyond. I *really* wanted to put a bid in on it, but without our house under contract, our broker assured us no one would take our offer until we had a buyer of our own.

We actually had a Realtor walk in the house today to show it to his clients without advance notice, so I scrambled to grab the kids and scoot out the back door, leaving dirty dishes in the sink and an suitcase waiting to be unpacked on the bed upstairs. Oh well. At least we hadn't had time to make a bigger mess of the house.
Maddie wants me to go downstairs and listen to a book on CD, Mossflower, with her. We just discovered this series at the library and listened to Mariel of Redwall on the drive out (picking it because one of my best friends is named Mariel!) It's a bit like a milder version of Lord of the Rings with mice, rabbits, rats, stoats and other woodland creatures. (I keep meaning to look up what the heck a stoat is. I think I looked it up once after reading Watership Down and still couldn't figure out what it was, but that was pre-Internet. I'll have to google a picture of it tonight....

45 Years

2007-06-11T23:20:00.000-07:00

We're just back from a long weekend at the beach celebrating my folks' 45th anniversary. Cindi and Nic and Owen came from Colorado, and my folks rented a couple of cottages and a campsite on the beach at Camp Pendleton and we had a wonderful time. We had originally tossed around the idea of having a big party, but a surprising number of my parents' friends are battling serious health issues, and it wasn't coming together, so we switched gears and made it a family affair. The cousins, as always, ran around in a happy pack.

Here they're taking a break from beach time and party preparations to watch Nic play a video game..

And here's Grandma getting some snuggles from Harry and Nic..

At the party, Steve gave my folks a musical card that played the Star Wars theme (A long, long time ago... you were married), and Harry was so enamored with it that he stood up and recited the scrolling narration, as best he could recall, to which Owen and Maddie apparently had strong reactions... (click on the photo to see it up close)

And here's Harry, reprising his soliloquy yet again...

All in all, it was a great party and a great weekend, but terribly bittersweet, at least for me. Steve tells a story of how he decided, without thinking about it too much, to follow his college girlfriend (and later wife), Elisa, to California after they graduated. Jazzed by his exciting new adventure, he called his mother and gushed about his plans to leave Iowa for the West Coast with this young woman she was less than thrilled by. Judith listened politely until he ran out of steam and then said, "Oh, I thought you were calling to wish me a happy birthday." (Steve says he was pretty much speechless and feeling horrible at that moment.)

I feel a bit that way with all these preparations to move bookending this anniversary party. I want to be excited about moving to Colorado and bringing new experiences and new people into our lives, but I hate that I'll be losing the almost daily presence of my parents in my life and in Maddie and Harry's. (Okay, and Steve's too. He's going to miss them, and not just for the frequent babysitting.)

I hesitate to write this because I know the other grandparents haven't had this chance, and I regret that tremendously as well, (it's so hard to knit an extended family together tightly when there's much or all of a continent between us all) but I'm so glad that the kids have had such deep relationships with my folks. (I'm really, really hoping that they'll find a way to tolerate Colorado for at least part of the year and live there part-time).

We will, in Fort Collins, be a day's drive from Grandma Judith and her wonderful farm, and Grandpa Jack may come through Colorado more often than California, so we're hopeful to deepen our connections on the Sedam/Wachter side of the family, even as I try to ignore the impending stretch and thinning of connection with my folks.

So, a bittersweet toast to 45 years and an enduring marriage. I only wish I could pack them up and take them with me.

Almost 6 years ago,

2007-06-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

A girl up the street from us posted a flyer on the mailibox advertising her fledgling babysitting business. She was not quite 13 and Maddie was 2 1/2. They hit it off from the start, mostly because Sam was wonderful with her, both leading in play and following, always staying engaged and being a playmate.

At first, Sam would come over so that I could nap when I was pregnant with Harry, then when he was born she came to play with Maddie when I nursed Harry down for his naps.

We were crushed a year or so later when she told us her folks were moving to Temecula. We tried another sitter or three, but no one could replace Sam. So we started driving the 20 minutes to pick her up and bring her back home. And the kids continued to grow with her as a surrogate big sister.

She was tremendously patient and good natured, letting them take charge of play and roughhousing endlessly with them (in her initial sales pitch, she emphasized that she had two younger brothers that had trained her well for babysitting, and it was true.) I kept up with developments in Sam's life on those drives back and forth to her house, as she and her family vacillated between homeschooling and Christian schooling and public schooling and homeschooling again for her and her twin sister Hana. Then to our delight, they moved back to Murrieta to a neighborhood on the other side of town, and it became easier to have Sam over to play. She was for years my only break from stay-at-home parenting and then, after Steve took the buyout at the Times, our biggest source of date time.

When she turned 17 she got her driver's license, which suddenly made it even easier to have Sam over to sit, now that I didn't have to provide transportation as well. But I lost the chance to catch up with her and her life on those drives, and I had gotten busy too, with my massage practice, and didn't take the time to chat on the way out the door or back in. (It was Sam who helped me realize that I wanted to be a massage therapist. She was talking about not knowing what she wanted to be when she grew up and I half-jokingly said something like "I don't know either. I think I want to be a massage therapist when I grow up," and I stopped and thought, "Okay Sue, time to listen to yourself.")

So, I've known that Sam's gotten busier and busier over the last year or two, but wasn't paying too much attention and chalked it up to a social life and growing independence. When she told us a couple of months ago that her folks are thinking of moving to Denver and that she is planning on moving to Chicago, I saw it mostly as confirmation that it's time for us to leave. I did wonder what she was going to do in Chicago and whether it was brave or foolhardy of her to just take off, but I still didn't realize who Sam had become. I knew that she sang and played guitar for her church and that she was good enough to be asked to lead youth music worship each week. I knew she was giving guitar lessons to students and thought vaguely that I should see if the kids wanted to learn from her someday. I knew she was singing at some coffee shops around town and asked her to let us know when she had a gig, but I don't think she was quite ready to have us in the audience.

Last week, I asked her again if she was playing anywhere anytime soon and that we'd love to hear her. I was mostly thinking that I wanted the kids to see someone they knew making music, to connect with it in that way. She called us late in the week and said she'd be playing a set outside the mall Sat. evening. So we went last night.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing as I walked up, and when I saw Steve walking towards us a few minutes later after parking the car, he was mouthing "wow" at me. I sat in the folding chairs of the courtyard and watched her standing on stage, barefooted, unassuming, conversational and at ease in a self-deprecating way. She played guitar and sang in a powerful, rich folksy voice, very distinctive. I wish I knew more about music to describe it better, but here's a link to her myspace page if you want to hear for yourself. Her songwriting is amazingly sophisticated as well, at least to my untrained ear.

So many thoughts went through my head during that set of music -- amazement at her raw talent, dismay that I hadn't been somehow paying more attention to her life and worry that one day I'd turn around and realize that my own kids had blossomed into beautiful, talented adult beings without my paying enough attention to their transformation. I saw her decision to move to Chicago in a totally different light now -- of course she was going to Chicago! She needed to immerse in a larger music scene, to expand herself, to experience more of life and transmute it into music.

Steve sat next to me and marveled at what she was giving to us all, struck, he said, by the realization that this is why you pursue art, to offer it up to the world, to share your gifts.

And somehow, I also felt embarassed that I had been asking this amazingly talented young woman to come play with my kids for ten bucks an hour for all these years, what a waste of her time! (But I realize that's not true. In fact, Sam sweetly dedicated a song to Maddie and Harry, "the kids I babysit in the back row there.") I thought, "Good lord, my kids have been climbing all over the future Alana Morissette." I better get an autograph before she goes. No, what I really want is some pictures. Pictures of the young woman who helped me raise my kids, before she heads off on her own life's adventures...

A few more shots

2007-05-31T23:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Lisa, our Realtor, asked Steve if he had some art he could put up over the sofa, so today he painted the lovely piece you see hanging over it in these latest shots! And then he started building a new hearth for the fireplace. A true renaissance man!

And a few more shots, in case anyone wandering by our blog is interested in a cozy little four bedroom in Southern California!

Some photos of all the work we've been doing

2007-05-28T23:58:00.000-07:00

this past two months.