Dispatches from the Co-Prosperity Sphere

Paradise Had No Plugs

2009-06-13T21:56:00.001-07:00

It's been a stressful week for me. There were some pretty big events at my office, and I had a couple of pretty long days. I have to say that by the end of the week, I was completely ready for a vacation. The last day of school for the kids was Thursday, so their vacation officially started Friday morning.

The Pirate and I carpooled on Friday, so we stopped off and did a little shopping, then got home and turned off the power. Burritos ensued, and then one of the most satisfying nights of work I've had in a long time.

Wednesday, I bought a ~1930 Royal typewriter. I got it for a song because it hadn't yet been cleaned or reconditioned. The amazing John Dolphin of Santa Cruz Business Machines showed me how to clean the mechanics of an ancient typewriter, warning me about the fact that people who didn't know what they were doing would lubricate the machines with things like sewing machine oil. The sewing machine oil just attracts dust and dirt, gumming up the works. He said that the right thing to do was to take a thin piece of metal and just jiggle it around in the crevices where the keys come up to strike the paper, then shoot it with compressed air.

Butter knives were too wide to fit into the crevices, plastic might break in the crevice and be impossible to get out. I tried a thick tapestry needle, but it ended up being slightly too thick. This is where the embarrassing packrat tendencies of the Co-Prosperity Sphere play into our favor. We had an old tape measure that was stuck. 33 inches (not even a full yard) of tape stuck out and would neither pull out more nor go back in. And yet, we couldn't bring ourselves to throw it out.

The Pirate took tin snips and cut a 1/2 inch thick, 4-inch long strip off it. I then took the tin snips and cut one corner off, making a sharp end. It worked perfectly, dislodging some of the dust and oil that had gotten itself in there over the years. The next step is seeing exactly what we need to wire this manual keyboard to an electronic one. More as things develop!

Saturday was equally productive. Yard work by the ton, shopping, and haircuts. But mostly, emotional and mental relaxation. Once again, the electricity goes off, and all of my tension and stress magically melt away. The lack of buzz and hum mean that there's nothing tugging at the edges of my awareness. I just thought of something. My father-in-law has Parkinson's, and has been steadily losing weight for some time. He says that when your muscles are contracting constantly 24/7, it burns a lot of calories. I think the same thing can be said when something in your environment is buzzing or humming 24/7. There's always some part of your attention caught by that noise, and I think that the more you fracture your attention, the more stress you have.

It's Saturday night, and I feel like I've been on vacation for a week!

This week's tip: if you do choose to turn your electricity off, and you remember to put plastic bags of water into your freezer, then transfer them to your fridge - use the heavy-duty freezer bags. We're 4/4 for thin freezer bag failure, and bailing out your fridge isn't fun.

My Bad-Ass BIAJ

2009-06-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing you can count on, it's that the gang at the Co-Prosperity Sphere is always spinning off ideas. No matter the economy, the climate, whether these ideas make our butts look big, we're throwing off ideas like a Van de Graaff generator throws off static!

While we're still working on other things, a certain mania has hit the CPS. Brain mania. This is the project I mentioned in the last post, and although I first had the idea several months ago, the wheels are finally turning.

The Inception
Many years ago, someone gave me one of those little toys that you put into water and it expands to many times its original size. This one was a tongue. It was made out of some substance whose surface was squidgy and slightly pebbled, like a real tongue. The jar I had put it in to reconstitute it was none too clean, and over the years of sitting on my desk, the water in the jar eventually turned the color of weak tea, or very strong formaldehyde. People asked me all the time if it was real. I was laid off from that job shortly before Christmas, and as a parting shot, I got one of my friends to enter the tongue in a jar into the company's annual white elephant exchange. I happened to be conferring with HR while the company party was going on, and even from across the building, I could tell exactly when my present was opened.

Over the years, I've mentioned the concept of a brain in a jar to several people, and one reaction has captured my attention: the sight of my friends recoiling in horror at the very thought of a disembodied brain in a jar. Mostly, they can't articulate why the thought upsets them, but it's clear that the entire thing touches some primal fear center. I want to know more about why the thought of a brain in a jar upsets people.

The Catalyst
Although I'd noodled the different components of the whole, I hadn't given the entire thing much serious thought because there are pivotal portions of it that are beyond my technical reach. It wasn't until the Maker Faire this year that the Pirate looked around at all the creative energy and caught fire. It went from yet another silly idea that the wife spun up to something that we're actively moving on.

The Brain in a Jar
The idea is this: a brain in a jar of some sort of preserving liquid. From the brain, wires and electrodes emerge, winding into a sort of umbilicus that disappears into a wooden box. The brain's only organic sensory input is a single eye, attached by its optic nerve directly to the brain.

The wires from the brain lead into a hand-worked wooden box, which also has leads to a keyboard and a microphone. The wooden box has as one side a display that shows three things: one portion of the screen shows what the eye sees. One portion shows an oscilloscope showing the noise being received from the microphone. The largest portion of the screen shows a chat program where people will be able to interact directly with the brain.

The Process
The addition of the Pirate to the team meant that the programming and computer hardware portions of the project suddenly got much easier. And we were utterly inspired by the fabulous project documentation from the Pirate's friend Steve Chamberlin's project Big Mess o' Wires, so we've been keeping some pretty intensive documentation of our process, which makes the Pirate very happy.

So far, it's been a lot of just deciding what the functionality is going to be. Does the brain float? Should it talk? What style do we want for the overall thing? As we make decisions, the whole thing becomes something near and dear to our hearts: a series of skills to be learned and problems to be solved. At the end of each solved problem, we are left with a tangible piece of a whole that will eventually be MADE OF AWESOME.

Stay tuned. We'll let you know how it's going

An Evening in the Sphere

2009-06-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

The Pirate and I headed over to the Maker Faire last weekend, and had our brains recharged and inspired. I bought a pair of sunglasses from the very talented and self-effacing Stuart Breidenstein and the Pirate and I walked out with a Minty Boost kit and a few other odds and ends. The biggest thing we walked out with was the desire to restart the brain-in-a-jar project, of which you'll be hearing more in future.

So, in the spirit of "let's make some stuff," the Pirate and I spent our Wednesday night making some stuff. The Pirate got out our soldering iron and third hand (no one should be without a third hand) and put together the Minty Boost. Meanwhile, I dragged a bunch of oils up from the soapmaking stash in the basement and made a big batch of body butter using my favorite fragrance, the Gap's long-discontinued Om. I now have five old Body Shop shea butter containers filled with my creation. It's a lot different in texture (I used 60% shea, 20% palm and 20% coconut oils), but goes on wonderfully, is very moisturizing and smells amazing. Next time, though, I'm thinking castor oil. It'll give the finished product a little better spreadability without making it more greasy.

At the end of the evening, we hadn't caught up on any reality tv. We hadn't watched another installment of someone else doing things we'll never do. Instead of sitting by, passively consuming, we were creating stuff. To me, that's always the best evening in the world.

Feliz Cinco de Beltaine!

2009-05-02T22:43:00.000-07:00

Today, we ended up at a party at a friend's house. She said in her email that, in honor of the combined Celtic/Latino heritage of more than one of the attendees, she wanted to have a sort of Cinco de Mayo/Beltaine party. A Cinco de Beltaine party, if you will.

The Pirate and I decided to extend the theme to the dinner and make our contribution a vegan haggis mole.

The Pirate described haggis to me as a sheep covered in oats and turned inside out. So...how does that translate to something not only vegan but also something that would go well with mole?

Or original thought was that we would use wheat gluten, which comes in big sheets, and wrap different flavors and textures of tofu in it, along with some oats. For the tofu and wheat gluten, we headed to 99 Ranch Market and got some nice baked tofu and some fried puffed tofu. We couldn't find any wheat gluten sheets, but instead we found bean curd sheets that looked even better.

I looked at rolled oats, and just couldn't imagine that it would work. I thought instead of steel-cut oats, but once we got to Whole Foods, I thought that I'd go all the way - GROATS.

I wanted to test-drive cooking the groats, so I made them for breakfast. I put a cup of groats into three cups of water and let them soak overnight, then lit the fire under them and let them go. It took them the better part of three quarters of an hour to fully cook. I put a handful of giant raisins in, and let them stew along with the groats. The result was not the glutinous mess of porridge, but a bowl of delicious, nutty separate grains with a little pop to them. It was substantial and fabulous.

I had put the groats for the haggis in to soak as well, and decided to stew them with onions and garlic. Just at the end, the Pirate put a little oregano in and it was delicious Then I cut the tofu into manageable pieces and mixed it into the groat and onion stew. I laid out the sheets of bean curd and scooped the tofu mixture into them, then rolled them up and tied off the ends - VOILA! Vegan haggis.

For the mole, we just used Doña Maria's Mole and doctored it a little with some pomegranate molasses. Once the haggises were rolled up and tied off, we covered them in mole and baked them until it was all hot, but upon reflection, I think that the next time, we should try boiling them. In the oven, the bean curd skin got a little tough and was hard to cut. But the filling was just delish! And it mole went GREAT with the whole thing.

And all that on two burners and with no electricity. YAY!

The Best Laid Plans

2009-04-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's day without electricity was a day of getting stuff done. The Pirate had vowed to have plants in the ground by end of day yesterday, and true to his word, he's got kale, chard, lettuce, beans, and something that ends in "choy" that isn't bok choy.

The new garden is in the old chicken yard and therefore already protected from deer, and when he put the raised beds in, he lined each one with hardware cloth (heavy-duty screen) so that the rats can't burrow in. The new garden is a mere 6 feet or so from Cistern Joseph-Ann, and the plan is to use all that rainwater we harvested during the rainy season to water our plants now when the rain isn't so frequent.

We're not sure how long 1100 gallons of water will last us, but if we are wise about our usage (water early in the day so less evaporates, water directly into the ground near the plants and not on the leaves) we can make it last a little longer. Depending on how long it lasts, we may end up investing in a second cistern (and I'm voting to name this one after my aunt the nun, Cistern Rosa). Considering that it took us all of 3 days of good hard rainfall to fill up a single cistern, filling two every season is well within expectations.

Speaking of gardening, I've been cooking up a plan. I've mentioned before that I'm alarmed at the number of my friends and neighbors who are out of work and therefore leaving town. I'm sure even more would love to leave town, but even moving costs money and they just can't afford it.

The first inkling of my plan came when the Pirate and I saw all the vacant land near us and thought "wouldn't it be cool if we could get people farming that vacant land?" But there are some steep barriers to entry, the first of which is that being on someone else's property is trespassing and you can be arrested.

The second inkling of my plan came when I realized that there's a lot of space to be had here. Most people live in houses on large lots, so for most people I know, room to garden isn't an issue. What's an issue is both the know-how and the materials. Here came my second idea. I've approached the owner of a local farm & feed store about giving me a discount on gardening stuff - potting soil, seedlings, etc., that can then be donated. Without hesitation, he said yes. Further details have yet to be worked out, but the first step has been taken - I have a supplier. YAY! Now I just have to get with the local charity organization, Valley Churches United Missions, to get help finding the folks who need the donations.

But not all of the day went as well. My chore was to prepare a part of our yard (a word which here means "area in front of our house," not in any formal sense of the word) for the spreading of wood chips. I finished scraping the rest of the vegetation off it, I burned off the more recalcitrant stuff, I raked, I did a small burn of the stuff I raked off. The hardest part was that I had to dig down and find the cover of the septic tank and build a box to go over it so that in future, we don't have to go digging around for it.

I dug and dug and dug until I uncovered a wooden cover that the Pirate said was put over the actual metal cover. I measured carefully and constructed a lovely redwood box to put over it - 26" x 13". And then we started digging for the metal cover, which was another 2" further down under more soil, and was actually 26" x 26". I was a little annoyed, but at the end of the day, the box I built will solve our problem - that of not knowing where the cover is and not being able to get at it readily. Sure, the next time we have the septic system pumped, we'll have to do a little digging, but at this point it's very little and we won't be accidentally digging two feet to the left because we don't remember accurately where the stupid thing is.

So, it's a fail, but not a total fail. The important thing, as always, is that we got this stuff done. It's on the list of "achieved," rather than on the list of "someday."

And, to reward ourselves, I made a nice pasta salad and the Pirate made some gazpacho. Mmmmmm...gazpacho.

Guerilla Gardening

2009-04-15T19:19:00.001-07:00

I've been having some subversive thoughts. And when I say "subversive," I mean "cool, but could get you arrested."

I'd kind of like to go back to school. I'd like to study economics because I really, really would like to solve the problem of keeping small, insulated communities like the one I live in safe from large economic fluctuations. Right now, families are moving out of the area taking their incomes and spending habits with them. Every family that moves out means that money is being taken away from our locally-owned grocery store that employs 20+ people, away from the four restaurants in town, away from our locally-owned pet store, barber shop, coffee place and gas station. Essentially, everyone who moves away takes money away from their neighbors.

I'm trying to figure out how to fix that. Given what I have (not a whole lot) and what I can do (considerably more), what can I do? And then I started thinking about all those parcels of land nearby that have been sitting vacant because housing purchases have fallen off. There are whole organizations in places like Detroit that are taking foreclosed homes and matching them up with homeless families who are willing to move in despite the possible legal repercussions.

What I want to do is a little less invasive. Instead of moving into empty houses, I'd just like to be able to cultivate a little empty land. I was thinking about how great it would be to get folks who are still here and out of work to get some garden plots going on vacant land, and then set up a small-scale farmer's market where they could take their surplus produce and sell or swap it.

I think that idea could work not just in lean times like these, but in good times too. Imagine if people who are currently day laborers or temporarily unemployed could work at a cooperative community garden where they could grow food for themselves and their own families, and have the chance by their own labor to earn a little money.

One of the problems that owners of vacant land face in these parts is that pot farmers are likely to come in and cultivate unoccupied land. If the pot farm is found, the landowner is liable for the consequences. If we got permission from the property owners, legal food gardening could discourage illegal pot farming because the land would have people coming and going constantly.

I think it could work, but I also don't think that I know enough to make it happen. It would be cool, though. I just have to do a little digging, ask a few questions, talk to some folks.

When Bills Are Good News

2009-04-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned in previous posts, one of things we wanted to see in our "Day Without Electricity" experiment was how much we'd save by doing without electricity for one day each week.

The way that our rates are structured, the more electricity you use, the more you pay for each kilowatt hour (Kwh). Here's how it breaks down for us, according to our latest bill:

Baseline Quantity = $0.11531 per Kwh

101-130% of Baseline = $0.13109 per Kwh

131-200% of Baseline = $0.25974 per Kwh

201-300% of Baseline = $0.37866 per Kwh

When you start cutting down, you start saving at the top of the range. It's possible to make a small cut and save a fairly large percentage, which turns out to be exactly what we've done. It turns out that a 13.3% cut in our overall usage added up to a 42% savings on our latest bill.

As I've said before, environmental advantages aside (and there are certainly those), we're saving over $100 per month just by shutting things down one day a week. That's more than $1200 a year. What can we do with $1200 a year? I can certainly think of a few things!

Bird Brain

2009-04-04T22:51:00.000-07:00

Today's Day Without Electricity was one of the most relaxing days I've had in a long time.

I mentioned earlier in the week that we got two new baby chicks from a friend. The first obstacle we had to overcome was the fact that for the first week of baby chick's life, it has to be kept at nearly 100 degrees. We've got kerosene lamps, but they give off a lot of vapors that I was afraid would hurt the chicks. We decided in the end to keep a fire going on the wood stove. The added bonus was that we loaded the top of the wood stove down with pots of water that we used later for washing dishes, etc. The chicks passed the night and day on a chair covered in a blanket next to the fire and appear to be none the worse for wear. YAY!

I spent the day doing landscaping. I got a chance to test out the torch the Pirate bought me a few weeks ago, and it's everything I was hoping for. It attaches to our 5-gallon propane tank, and it's both fun and scary. Last week, the Pirate had taken RoundUp to the patch of overgrown grass along the walkway up to the house. We intend to put down wood chips there, but have to kill the grass first. By today, it was dead, brown and dry, dry, DRY. We touched the torch to it and it went up just as you'd expect dry grass to.

I sort of thought that I'd walk along with the torch and touch the fire to the grass, which would wither and burn and then stop burning. That's not really how fire operates. Fire touches this bit of dry grass, and the dead leaf powder between the bits of dry grass, etc. I only touched the flame to the grass once at the top, and then stood there with the hose keeping the fire heading in the direction I wanted it to go.

After the grass burning came the cleanup of the path up to the house. It had become covered in leaves and dirt so thick that it had grass and periwinkles growing in it. While I was shifting wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow-full of dirt, I came across two - count 'em TWO - juvenile Norwegian rats. I dispatched each of them with the shovel, and now I'm starting to worry. If they're walking down the driveway bold as brass, how big is that midden?

The bright spot of the day was standing in my bedroom and watching a steller's jay trying to build a nest on top of the security lights mounted on the side of the house. He would fly off, then come back with a stick that he would carefully place on the top of the pair of lights, but by the end of the day, his little nest didn't look any more impressive.

I went outside to take a closer look and saw what the poor bird had been doing all day.

This is the roof of the shed just below the security light. There are NO trees near it. All those sticks are the ones that the poor bird had been carefully placing on the lights. Well, I'll give him this - the little guy was persistent.

Then inside to hang out with a good book and to make dinner. I'm off to bed now, and after all the stuff I got done today, I'm going to sleep like a BABY!

Shift on the Fly

2009-04-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, our household had a little mishap. No big deal - a miscommunication that led to someone not being where they were expected. The "someone" was our 17-year-old, who realized that going home rather than staying at the orthodontist meant that she would *not* be going out to dinner with us, and who was put out by being told that she would have to make dinner for herself.

After we got home and talked about it, I explained that part of being an adult is looking at the situation in which one finds oneself and taking responsibility for yourself in it. Nobody went to bed mad, and I think this particular lesson might stick with her.

Cut to today. Today was the day we took our 7-month-old kitten to the vet to get fixed. The Pirate was supposed to have picked her up and then gone on to pick up the 17-year-old from physical therapy, but the kitten wasn't going to be ready in time. No sweat - I left work early (in the middle of a process), stopped by the vet and picked up the kitten and then came home. I put the poor woozy fuzzball into the spare room and went to go find a catbox to set up for her and bring up the rest of the stuff from the car. On my 87th trip through the garage, I realized that my phone (which was still in my car) was ringing. It was the Pirate, but I didn't have hands to answer it.

When I finally did call, the Pirate wanted to know if it was okay that he had taken on two day-old chicks from a friend of ours. We're not currently set up for new chicks. We've got a recovering kitten to take care of. Um....and then I remembered all the times that *I* was the one calling him and saying "Honey, I'm bringing home..." and the fact that we just told our kid that when you're an adult, you take the situation you're faced with and you figure it out.

"Sure," I told him. "Bring 'em home."

Normally we get our chicks in groups of 25, and we set up our brooder in the garage with several heat lamps, etc. What to do for two? Here's our solution:

What's that? you cry. That's right. It's the cat carrier. With shavings on the floor and the chicks' feeder and waterer. The heat lamp is suspended from a cupboard door above. I figure they'll both stay in there for up to a week. After that, it looks like I'll be surrendering my parking spot in the garage in favor of a couple of baby chickens. They're Barred Rocks, my favorite breed for temperament and laying ability, and it'll take 4-5 weeks before they're fully fledged and ready to meet the other hens. Even at that, we may let them hang out a little longer - they'll be much smaller than the other hens.

This brings our little brood up to 23, although it's too early to say whether these two are boys or girls (or one of each).

Now, I'm off to figure out how we keep them warm on Saturday - our normal day without electricity. Don't worry - I have An Idea!!

Nipples, Crochet Hooks, and 110 volts

2009-03-29T18:51:00.000-07:00

Seven or eight years ago, my mother bought me a pair of lamps for my birthday. They're the kind that mount to the wall and swing out on an arm, and they're mounted on either side of our big sleigh bed. A month ago, the lamp on my side had begun flickering in an impertinent manner every time I turned it on. Finally, while sitting in bed reading one night last week, I noticed the carbon-y smell of burnt marshmallows and asked the Pirate if he smelled it. He didn't. I looked over at my lamp and went to shut it off when I realized that the entire fixture - the bit that the lightbulb screws into - was hot to the touch.

After turning the whole thing off and taking out the bulb, it became evident that it was in the process of shorting itself out, and the fixture was no good. The place where the bulb contacts the lamp proper was all carbonized and I knew that a new bulb would fare much the same, and probably even more quickly.

The Pirate offered to buy me a kerosene lamp and in fact ordered it, but after a couple of nights with candles as my bedside reading lamps, I realized it was no good. I wanted my old electric light back. Here's why: an electric lamp is a one-step thing. In the dark, you merely reach out and flick the switch and your entire room is illuminated. With non-electric lighting, first you have to find a flame. You can keep a lighter by your bed, but on a bedside table like mine you have no guarantee of finding it again once you've set it down. And once you've found a flame, you must then set it to your actual light source. In the case of kerosene lamps, you still have to wait five or ten minutes for the mantle to heat up before you can illuminate an entire room. If you have, say, accidentally poured the contents of your bedside water jug onto the floor, waiting ten minutes before you can be sure you've mopped it all up (and meanwhile giving it ample time to soak into the rug) is annoying.

Now that I know that I want my electric lamp back, my choices are these: 1) I can throw out this lamp and buy another one just like it. Difficult, because this type of lamp comes in sets of two. 2) I can buy a different lamp. While that's not a terrible idea, I like the look of the matching lamps, and I do insist that whatever I buy be mounted to the wall (see above comment about the obnoxiously crowded state of my bedside table). 3) I can fix the one I have.

I figured that I would at least take a poke at #3, since it was already dead and I couldn't hurt it any more. Worst-case scenario, I would declare the whole thing a loss and buy a new lamp and my bedroom will look as eclectic as the rest of my house. The word "eclectic" here means "nothing matches because I tend to buy furniture and dishes singularly when they're on sale."

I took the entire thing down from the wall and started trying to take it apart. The housing of the lamp consisted of two hollow metal tubes, fastened in the middle with an elbow that swung back and forth, and at the wall end with a similar connector that fastened it to the wall bracket. Here is a picture done by someone who's selling them, so it looks very nice. Behind the wall bracket bit was the part where the cord connected - the cord that plugged into the wall was a different cord than the one that went to the bulb. The two were fastened together with clever little connectors that you pushed the two wires into and snapped together.

I unconnected everything, but pulling the wire out of the lamp was tough - the part that had been connected to the bulb was all melty and the cord was stuck. It took pushing, pulling, prodding, and finally mangling one of my crochet hooks to pry the old cord out. What made it tough was what was going to make it tough putting it all back together - the fact that you have to make plastic coated wire go over a large number of sharp angles to get to its final destination.

The Pirate went to the hardware store, and for less than ten bucks got all the stuff we needed - new lamp guts, a new bulb and new wire. It took us a few tries, but we finally wired it all up again and it's now working great. Yes, the first time I realized that I'd put the base on upside-down and that the cord would be coming out of the top, so I had to take that piece apart and put it back together. Yes, we realized after we'd got the lamp guts wired that we should have screwed the housing on first, and THEN wired the lamp guts within the housing, so we had to undo it and put it back together. Sure, once it was all back together we realized that one of the nipples was screwed in a little too far so that now we have a little plug that's supposed to cover a hole, but it won't fit because the nipple is in the way. That's okay. I read that you always have parts leftover after any DIY job, so I'm feeling that it's a marker of success. And I'll do with it what I do with all leftover parts. I'm putting it into that drawer in the kitchen where we have screws and rubber bands and plug adapters and twist-ties and felt feet for furniture and all those other odds and ends.

So, as with all of these projects, I now have a new skill. I've fixed an expensive lamp. That means that I've saved something from the landfill, and that I've kept from buying a new thing I didn't need to buy. YAY! The downsides are two: I'm going to have to take the Dremel to my mangled crochet hook if I ever want to use it again, and I'm now looking around my house at all the tchotchkes and thinking "What else can I make into a lamp?"

Hippies and Free Range Children

2009-03-28T19:55:00.000-07:00

We just turned the electricity back on, but it was tempting not to. Something happened today that would have made Day Without Electricity worthwhile even if it were horrible: without being nagged into it, without even being ASKED, my kids went outside to play.

We're constantly bawling our kids out when they get rowdy in the house, telling them "Take it outside!" But normally, inside has movies and computer games and the phone, and it's just so tempting to stay in. We live in the middle of the redwoods on a beautiful creek, and my kids seem content to look at pictures of it.

Granted, today has been the first really fine day we've had in a while. We'd spent the morning running errands and knew that the sun was out, the air was warm with just a hint of breeze, and everything outside was in bloom. I was in my room trying to nap off a headache and heard the girls running outside. I went out there to see them sprawled in the driveway listening to music and playing with stuff. The little one came in just as dusk was settling over the mountain to ask whether tomorrow, she might be allowed to climb on the fallen trees over the creek. Allowed?! I think it'd be the coolest thing EVER!! (Don't worry - she's a great swimmer, and the creek is ~3 feet at its deepest.)

That was the best thing in the world. The second best thing was last night just after we'd turned the electricity off. I'd decided that, since it was dark, I wanted to finish the book I'd been reading, and encouraged the little kid to join me. We put the kerosene lamps in the bedroom, and Peaches, Badb and I sprawled on the bed while the Pirate sat on the floor finishing his book.

The closet takes up one entire wall of our small bedroom, and it has sliding mirror doors. When we moved here, I thought they were both ugly AND impractical, but now, I have discovered a new appreciation for them. When your sole source of light is one or more candles, anything that amplifies that light is welcome indeed. Suddenly, the hippie decor of candles and mirrors seemed quite sensible! I ended up tacking a piece of aluminum foil behind the kerosene lamp, and it worked beautifully as a reflector, upping the amount of light coming back into the room.

I'm still not a fan of the patchouli incense, though.

Earth Hour

2009-03-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

I'm disappointed. I've been inundated for the past few days with reminders that this coming Saturday, people around the globe are celebrating Earth hour by turning your lights off for a single hour on a particular day of the year. To that I say "Where's your commitment? Put your money where your mouth is! Turn off your lights, your appliances - unplug everything and just give it all a rest!" But you, faithful readers, you know this.

The reason that I'm disappointed is this: we've discovered, in our Day Without Electricity experiments, that there are some minor adjustments to make in shutting down for one day a week. That there are tiny things to consider when shutting down all electricity to our house for 24 hours. But what's involved in just turning off the lights for an hour? It's not the "bold statement" that the marketers are trying to make you believe. It entails no re-thinking of choices, it calls for no sacrifice from anyone.

I challenge anyone who's jumping on the Earth hour bandwagon to challenge themselves to REALLY change things. It's not enough for companies like Coca-Cola to turn off their lights for an hour - they're turning the whole thing into a marketing event, handing out commemorative mass-produced flashlights to visitors to their plants so that we all know that they shut their lights off for an hour. They're spending more money and wasting more resources making sure that we know about their participation than they're saving by turning off the lights for an hour!

That's the problem with events like this. The fact that for any event you care to name, there's a guy out there trying to figure out how he can capitalize on it by getting you not just to buy into it, but to BUY it.

Don't buy it, guys. While you're sitting there in the dark, perhaps with other folks sitting in the dark, start talking. Talk about the fact that you're not sitting alone in your house, in your town, in your state - you're sitting on a planet with billions of other people who are all dependent on each other. The choices you make EVERY DAY impact the choices that other people in other parts of the world have. More for you, less for them. Is that the person you are? Is that the person you want to be?

Don't do it because some celebrity told you to. Don't do it because everyone else is doing it. For crying out loud, don't do it because someone's going to give you a flashlight or commemorative t-shirt. Do it because you know that it's the right thing to do. Then - keep on doing it!

More Lessons from DWE

2009-03-23T21:25:00.000-07:00

Our second weekly Day Without Electricity was Sunday, 3/22, and it seems that every time we go through this exercise, we learn a few more things. What did we learn this time? Don't do it on Sunday.

Every time we turn off the electricity, we can see the spinning disk that counts up the kilowatt hours we're using slow down and stop. That's really gratifying. What's less visible is the way that anxieties and distractions similarly slow down and stop. Sure, my brain is working just as hard and fast as it ever was, but now it's on the problems I have right in front of me. Not some artificial, self-induced datacrisis that comes because there's drama on Facebook or not enough people are following me on Twitter. Usually, I'm faced with an actual problem like "How can I make an oven that works without electricity and isn't solar?" "How can I build a brick wall on a sloped surface using only the tools I have?" These problems require me to sit down and bring a lot of focus to bear - to look at the stuff I have available to me in new ways and be scrappy about solving my problems. Every time we do this, I end up asking myself "How much more can we do without?"

Here's another thing that happens. You can't charge anything. Sure, I can spend all Saturday listening to books in my iPod as I work, but by Saturday afternoon, it's dead. If I don't charge my phone Friday, it's dead by Saturday, so it's just as well to shut it off. And if you can't charge anything, things are dead and nothing tweets, beeps or pings at you. This means that Saturday morning, when my phone still has a charge and there's nothing else to distract me, is a great time to call my mother.

When you're not distracting yourself minute by minute with tiny things, time slows down. An hour spent talking with a family member, or a friend; an hour spent on a task (or two or three) is a long time. Longer than you probably need, but the luxury is that you have that time to take. It's beautiful.

Right now, the Pirate and I are working on the outside of our house. We've got three projects defined, and about half a dozen more sort of in the queue. These are all things that have needed doing for months if not years, but we just hadn't gotten around to them. It seems, though, that the simple act of turning off the electricity has slowed down time for us. Suddenly the time is there and these things are getting done.

It's sort of like a miracle. We've made a miracle.

But then...you have to turn it all back on. You have to speed back up and do everything with fewer cycles. You have to make the switch from one thing to another at the speed of packets moving across the ether. That's a tough switch to make all at once. When we did it last Saturday, and on previous Saturdays, we turned things back on Saturday night. We checked our email, we did our blog posts, we caught up on all our cyber-tasks and were back in the game bright and early Monday morning.

This time, the breakers all went back on at ~7 Sunday night, right in the middle of making dinner, getting everyone ready for the next day, trying to get to bed at a decent hour. We went to bed and woke up still half in that slower, more considered mindset, but there just wasn't time for it and it felt like it took forever for my brain to get up to speed this morning.

So, that was the lesson. That, and when I asked the Pirate "What bad thing would happen if we just never turned the power back on?" he was right there with the answer.

All of our frozen foods would melt, and we'd never be able to telecommute again.

Day Without Electricity - How It Went

2009-03-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Well, we've had another Day Without Electricity. The thought behind this is really because electricity is unreliable here (the lines are all above ground, we live on a windy, twisty road, and drunk people are attracted to power poles) and it's always good to know that when the supply is interrupted, your life isn't.

We were having pizza for dinner, so we decided to shut down after the pizza was done baking (our oven is electric). By 8:30, all the lights in the house were already out and the kerosene lanterns going. We'd shut down the UPS for the computers and I'd remembered to empty and turn off the ice maker. The Pirate went out and switched off the breakers, and he, Peaches and I settled in for pizza and a heated game of Super Munchkin. I won.

We turned out the kerosene lanterns and, carrying our individual candles in their brass holders (which are not only nice looking and make carrying easy, but also keep wax spots off the carpet and furniture), we brushed our teeth and went to bed.

Just before I fell asleep, I realized that my iHome alarm clock (which has a battery backup) was still set for 5:45am. That's fine for weekdays, but I like to sleep in until 7 on the weekends, so I tried to turn off the alarm, only to find out that while it's in battery mode, you can't really change its state. You can't reset the time or turn off any of the functions. Drat!

Got up Saturday and created the Big List of Chores. This is something we do every Saturday, and we write them on the dining room window with window markers. I must say, these things have become indispensable in my life. One entire wall of my house is windows, and it means that this surface is effectively a white board for lists, ideas, etc.

ANYWAY...we put on the grubbies and got to work. My chosen task was shifting a 9' x 3.5' stack of concrete tiles from next to the driveway to the side of house near the trash bins. We're hoping to use the area next to the driveway for more parking, and the concrete tiles had been creating an artificial wall that made the space less usable. The tiles are about 12" x 9" and weigh probably 4 pounds each. Not a big deal until you've stacked 15 of them into a wheelbarrow and pushed it uphill. Fifty times.

Meanwhile, the Pirate was finishing the terracing for the new garden, and putting drainage pipes in the terraces to divert the water from the terraces below. Peaches kept herself busy pulling weeds out of the bed along the asphalt path up to the house, including pulling out some French broom trees that were taller than she is.

I took a break in the middle of the day to host the Girl Scout cookie sale in front of the local supermarket. Ironic, considering that my own little Brownie was not in evidence. The other mother there told me that her husband had just been laid off. They were telling everyone they knew, because that's what one does when one has been laid off. You get the word out so that people can help you catch on somewhere else.

Eventually the topic drifted to Day Without Electricity, and she thought the idea really interesting. We then talked about things like home canning and keeping chickens - things that the Pirate and I do because they're fun and cool. We've learned a lot about how to preserve food, and I invited her over to learn how to can. I also turned her on to Freecycle (passing along the incredible gift given me by my friend Chia) where you can get stuff you need and pass along stuff you don't want. Finally, I told her about my own experiences with joblessness, and how they never lasted long (I hope I haven't jinxed myself, here). She went away feeling, I think, a little more hopeful about their situation.

I came home after the cookie sale and continued shifting the enormous pile of concrete and helping with the weeding. Our former neighbors were, it turns out, pigs. Peaches went up on the hillside to pick up the visible trash (it falls down from their property onto ours) and threw down a 2' x 3' wire cage (the kind you'd keep a rabbit or guinea pig in), all rusted and bent, innumerable pieces of plastic sheeting, bottles and cans, wrappers of all descriptions, and one ~12' piece of 1/2" rebar. Thanks guys! Nice of you to have left us something to remember you by!

The thing about being outside and doing all this work is that it calls out the need for doing MORE work. I want to build a retaining wall along the pathway leading to the house. I want to take out the grass in one bit, covering that ground with wood chips and putting in plants in barrels. There's so much to do, and when you don't have electricity and electronic things to distract you, it all becomes much more possible.

Afterward, we call came inside exhausted and filthy. The Pirate had been good enough to make us reservations at the hot tub place, and we all took some ibuprofen and headed out for some well-deserved relaxation. Peaches had her own tub room, and apparently fell asleep in it. Heh. Poor baby. Home again, home again to turn the breakers back on and go back to the world where the lights come on with a flick of a switch. The problem with that world is that they also go off with a flick of a switch, and we too often forget that second flick.

This exercise, as the last one, was very instructive. There were more lessons learned:

Turn off the alarm clock BEFORE turning off the breakers

Always have a fire going. Even when it's not cold in the house, there's always a need for heating - things like hot water for coffee, hot water for washing people and dishes, etc.

We need to work out some kind of oven. One that can be used after dark, as well.

Before going to sleep Friday night, the Pirate and I had a long talk about our experiments of non-electricity. We've already made the infrastructure investments (kerosene lanterns, wood stove, cookpots that can double as dish sinks) to make some of this possible, but there are other things we can do to further our experiment.

Outdoor shower. I'd read somewhere about a cheap, DIY solar water heater, and was thinking that one of the things that goes down when you don't have power is the water heater, which has an electric ignition. The heat itself is propane, but without electricity, it never comes on. But without electricity, we tend to work outdoors more, and get really filthy and hot showers are, let's face it, GREAT. We thought of rigging up an outdoor shower, using this type of solar water heater. It will involve putting a new water barrel on the upstairs deck, and installing a hand pump so that we can pump water from Cistern Joseph-Ann (our 1100-gallon rainwater cistern) and let gravity feed it down through the solar coils. We've already got a pvc-pipe structure that the Pirate built for the blackberries, but they never really moved in. That could easily be adapted into a shower stall. The rest just involves being okay with standing outside the house naked.

The Pirate and I were talking about building the outdoor shower and about making other changes, and he said "Well, we can buy this and hook up that..." and I told him that I didn't want us to over-resource things just so that life without electricity would look and feel exactly like life *with* electricity. What I wanted was for us to adapt our life to the resources available.

The latest issue of Ode Magazine has an interview with British journalist Nick Rosen who argues that the concept "green" has been co-opted by every product manufacturer in the world, and is now doing more harm than good. Remember "reduce, reuse, recycle"? Products that use slightly less packaging or are made with renewable resources like bamboo are still manufactured products that their makers are encouraging you to buy, rather than going without, repurposing something you already own or re-fabricating components of old things. As long as a package says "green" on it, people will buy it and feel smug about it.

I found myself feeling that this guy was voicing what I've been thinking for a long time. If society is to survive, people have to stop consuming ready-made goods and start learning to make for themselves. While it sounds preachy, it's just not as hard as people think. To that end, the Pirate and I have decide on an experiment. For the next few months, EVERY Saturday is going to be a Day Without Electricity. The breakers go off around sundown Friday night, and come back at sundown Saturday night. It'll be interesting to see what lifestyle adjustments we end up making, how much progress we make on those things that require long, uninterrupted bouts of work, and (and this is not at all inconsiderable) how much we save on our electric bill. Our electricity (and very likely yours too) is billed on a graduated scale. You pay a smallish amount per kilowatt hour for the first few kilowatt hours, a slightly larger amount for the next few, and so on. The more you use, the more you pay per kilowatt hour. This means that for each kilowatt hour you DON'T use, you're saving money off the top of the fee scale. Assuming that there are 4 Saturdays in a month, and that the month is 30 days, shutting of the power on Saturdays means we're using 13.3% less electricity. The experiment will prove what that means in terms of dollars saved.

The last thing I want to say is that, while having a smaller carbon footprint and being more environmentally conscious and saving money are all really good things, there is something even more immediately valuable. By Friday afternoon, the Pirate and I were grouchy from a long, stressful week. I was ill for much of last week, and the Pirate has been not only working on a big, involved project at the office, but picking up the slack for me. We've both been feeling fragile, needy and stressed. By Friday, I was pointing out that our habits of staying plugged in 24/7 - his obsessively checking his work email after hours, my phone constantly announcing my friends' Twitter updates, etc. - weren't helping. The more info you get, the more you begin to think that you need it. You start twitching with the constant, nagging feeling that somewhere, somehow, you're missing something important. The irony is that the important thing that you're missing is YOUR OWN LIFE. That thing that's happening around you while you're plugged into your computer/phone/Wii.

By this morning, the Pirate and I are feeling as though we've had a week's vacation. Calm. Happy about our achievements. On better emotional footing. And I attribute it all to shutting off the constant stream of information and attending to what is in front of us.

It would be great if other people participated in this with us. I could just see everyone in my little town shutting off their breakers on Friday nights. In fine weather, we can walk downtown and visit with one another. In less fine weather, we can meet at each other's houses and drink mulled wine from the ever-present pot on the fire. Or we can just stay in, reading our favorite books by the light of our little candles. I predict that if everyone did this, widespread happiness and contentment might just be the result.

Gosh! What if THAT happened?!

Day Without Electricity (Again)

2009-03-13T15:14:00.000-07:00

We'd gotten out of the Day Without Electricity habit, and I realized a few things:

If I let them, Twitter and Facebook will swallow up my entire life
I get more done when I'm unable to distract myself with SHINY, BLINKY LIGHTS

The kinds of things I do without electricity are fundamentally more satisfying to my soul than the ones I do with it

"Wait!" I hear you cry. "What about writing?" I would remind you that I have been capable of writing without electricity since before home computers were a thing. I have a wide variety of writable surfaces and writing instruments. I'm set, thanks.

Someone asked me what the "rules" were for Day Without Electricity, and while I hadn't really codified any, now might be a good time:

Day Without Electricity extends from sundown of one day to sundown of the next day (much like a Jewish holiday). This means that it spans 24 hours, ~9 of which are nighttime, but doesn't require staying up unreasonably late (and in fact encourages getting to bed early)

It means turning off the breakers to the house. This means that any critical system (like the heater for the hen house in winter) can stay on, while the rest of it goes. Yes, even the fridge. If you don't open it overmuch, your food will stay perfectly well in the fridge for 24 hours. As we observed before, though, if you have an icemaker, empty it first. You'll be glad you did.

You can use your gas stove if it doesn't have an electric ignition system. Same for your water heater.

You can use your car. Make "Day Without Gasoline" some other day.

Consider this as a drill for a future time when electricity is not guaranteed. Take notes of things you might change. (Would you buy an older, corded phone? A rotary egg beater? Learn to play ukulele?)

You MUST spend some of Day Without Electricity at home. Enjoy the quiet. Get to know your family. Play a board game or read to one another. Merely leaving home for 24 hours really doesn't count.

I'm sure there are more rules, but I don't think this is about rules. I don't want to be the kind of person who insists she's more "authentic" than someone else. This is about cutting back a little on your carbon footprint. About acknowleging that at any time, your lifestyle might change drastically. About being more present in your life. It would be cool if more people could do it and post about their experiences!

Bird Watching

2009-03-04T21:33:00.000-08:00

My kid has a friend named Autumn. That's perfectly precious, but Autumn has a brother named Odin. Autumn and Odin have 4 other siblings, including Indigo. I love this family.

ANYWAY. That is NOT the subject of this post. The subject of this post is that one of Odin's classmates is moving rather suddenly, and they're having to give up their chickens. I told Odin's mother we'd at least foster the chickens and find new homes for them. I didn't hear and didn't hear, then got a call from the guy. I tried calling him back, and again, nothing for days.

Turned out, he was moving his family back to SoCal in stages and so just wasn't home (where I'd been calling) for days at a time. Finally, today, we went out to the house after he and his family had left. It was weird to go to some strange person's house after dark and carry their livestock out, putting them under a tarp in the back of the truck.

It's cold here, and windy. I kept admonishing the Pirate to drive more slowly, worried that the cold wind under the tarp would stress the chickens out and kill some of them. Luckily, they all made it here just fine. Peaches and the Pirate unloaded the new chickens while I put the Badb to bed. Chewbeet had to let the new roosters know that he is The Man.

One of the new chickens is a cochin (they have mukluks), and a couple are bantams of different breeds. There are some araucanas, and some that are a dark auburn and black that I'll have to look up. From what we found in the henhouse, some are white egg layers.

Sadly, we don't have enough room to keep them all. We can keep 20, but the rest HAVE to go. If you know of anyone who's interested, by all means, email!

Infrastructure, Terracing

2009-02-15T14:14:00.000-08:00

Last year my parents and nephew helped us put a couple of terraces into the large chicken yard. In previous winters the rain turned the hillside into mud and the slope in the yard was treacherous. Anyone going out to refill the outdoor waterer or feeder was as apt as not to slip and fall.

We intended the terraces to serve two purposes: first and most important, we wanted to keep the chickens from tunneling out of the yard so quickly. Their scratching tends to move dirt downhill, so I thought terraces ought to retain the scratched dirt. Second, we'd hoped that the terraces would tend to level the slope between them, making it a bit safer to walk around in the yard.

Along with the terracing we redid the netting over the yard. We arched 1/2" PVC in hoops over the yard and then draped tree netting over this frame. It reminds me of conestoga wagons. To provide shade and some shelter from the rain, we draped a tarp over part of this canopy.

Now, the rain has finally come. How'd it all work out?

The canopy works. The chickens aren't flying out of the yard (well, mostly -- we have found a black Beatrice wandering around outside, but it's not like before the netting). The chickens seem to enjoy the shade and the rain shelter. They stand around in the yard under the tarp when it's raining and in the open when it isn't.

The terraces are a different story. They do slow down the migration of the dirt, but I think they need to be taller or else we need more of them. The chickens continue to dig away at the slope. The other morning I slipped and nearly fell in the mud. It's not really level at any point in the yard.

Cooking My Past

2008-08-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

My grandmother had a plum tree, several apricot trees and about a zillion rose bushes. Every year, it seemed that the apricots all ripened at the same time, and my mother would drag us all over to grandma's house for a weekend of jam making. As kids, our job was picking and pitting. My older brother chopped and my mother and grandmother did the actual canning of the jam.

Apricot jam was the staple of our house. Being of a frugal nature, my grandmother did not let a single apricot from any of her trees languish on the branch or rot on the ground (she kept a tidy yard, did Grandma Peg). In fact, it was nearly the only jam I tasted in my childhood. Grape and strawberry, the glistening purple and red jewels of the grocery store, were rare treats at our house. Rarer still was plum jam. Unlike the unrelieved sweetness of apricot, strawberry or grape, plum jam makes use of the very tart, less ripe fruit. The skin is still very tart and tangy and lends a little frisson to every bite.

I also realized why it was so rare. Plum jam is also the only jam I've made that requires you to cook the fruit first before making it into jam. Pitting apricots is literally child's play (okay, child's drudgery, but you know what I mean) compared to sitting with a large, overfull basket of washed plums and a four-inch paring knife and systematically relieving about 40 pounds of plums of their pits and stems. If there's such a thing as plum-pitter's thumbs, I've got them. The attraction of just letting the kids eat them is awfully strong. But my sense of nostalgia is stronger.

The one smart thing I did was to use the food grinding attachment for my KitchenAid to chop the things. It meant that in about 20 minutes, I had finely chopped all the plums into two enormous bowls, ready for jam.

At the end of it all, I have 2 dozen pint jars and 13 half pint jars (that's 15 quarts + 1 cup) full of the flavor of my youth. It's already set up nicely, and is a beautiful rosy pink, just like I remember. I cut open a fresh loaf of sourdough and toasted the heel (my favorite part of the bread) and spread it thick with the fresh jam.

Ahhhhh. In my mouth, I'm young again.

Loss

2008-08-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, there was apparently a yowling outside the house. I didn't hear it because I sleep with earplugs in, but the Pirate heard it and thought that it was the skinny black stray we've seen around. He didn't investigate.

It wasn't until Wednesday evening when nobody'd seen him that the Pirate asked.

"Have you seen Oswald?" No, I haven't. I knew that I'd seen him Tuesday. The cat came out of the basement when I went in to work out.

When I got home from my writers' group Thursday night, and the Pirate told me that Oswald still hadn't turned up.

Friday afternoon, I went all over our property and our neighbors (the property is vacant). I didn't expect to find him but I was hoping to find something. Signs of a struggle, anything. Whenever any of our chickens gets eaten, we find blood, feathers, broken brush. But I found nothing. I was hoping to find blood or hair or something, but there was nothing.

Apart from the huge amounts of ripe fruit on the neighbor's trees. Later, the Badb and I went back and picked huge amounts of pears and plums. I think that it's time to make some plum jam.

We're thinking that Oswald was taken by either raccoons or coyotes. Ever since the neighbor with the aggressive dog moved out (taking his dog with him), the raccoons have gotten progressively bolder. Either way, our faithful, loving, stay-at-home cat is gone. The house is a bit subdued today.

A Season's Rest

2008-08-08T20:42:00.000-07:00

Don't tell me - I know. It's been three months (okay, two and a half) since our last post. But you know how things go here. If we'd had a second to ourselves, we've have blogged about it.

June: school let out and the girls were off! First everyone went to Phoenix to see the grandparents before the girls went off on a whirlwind tour of D.C., Philadelphia and New York. When the Pirate and I came back from Phoenix, where we'd spent the week before the girls left, the woman who'd been watching after the chickens and the cats told us that raccoons had gotten in. We got in at 2am and found muddy footprints everywhere, including around the toilet seat and inside the toilet bowl in the guest bath.

July: The girls had hardly shaken the dust of the road off themselves when it was time to put on another coat - AT CAMP! This was the Baby Goddess' first time at week-long sleepaway camp, but she acted completely ready for it. When asked whether she'd ever been to camp before, she gave her counselor the hand up, palm out gesture that says "Oh, please! I'm a seasoned campaigner!" She already knew that it's crucial to get the top bunk, and could recite all the important cheers, so she had plenty of free time. Meanwhile Peaches is a counselor in training. What this means is that we're paying for her to do what the camp is paying college students to do. But she's having a fabulous time.

But let us catch you up with the avian members of the household. In mid-July we'd gotten a rooster from a woman who was raising chicks in Santa Cruz and came to realize that they were not all hens. We brought him home, but alas, our joy at having another man in the house was short-lived.

You know that no happiness is had from the sort of man who won't stay home evenings with his wife. Well, our little fellow had twenty wives and still ended up leaving the yard almost nightly. He would fly over the fence and roost in the grape arbor. I had proposed clipping his wings, but the Pirate felt that he would be even more defenseless if he managed to hop out of the yard and was unable to fly back. Remember the raccoons we had back in June? Well, they haven't left. They keep trying to get in, and we keep foiling them. But we can't protect the rooster who won't go into the coop at night.

I've also discovered a new charity: I love making soap, but soap is like baking. You can only consume so much of your own product. But there is a mission near here that's always looking for soap for the people it serves. Perfect! I can make more soap, and give it to people who really need it!

And now for the big news: at the end of July, the Pirate's parents bought a house about five miles from us, moving up from southern California. It's going to be a process getting them into the house as it was a foreclosure and so not in move-in shape, but they got a nice deal and it'll be great to have them close. In the meantime, the entire clan is going to be living in our little house for a few weeks. Cozy!

I have a surprise for you, but I'm not telling until tomorrow. And then, I'll say it with pictures!

Banner Weekend

2008-05-27T15:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy weekend for all of us. Aoibheall's parents were in town to help celebrate her birthday, we worked a booth at the Boulder Creek Art & Wine Festival, and the cats and dogs have gotten to work on the vermin.

The festival was fun; smiling and being nice to people was great. The best part for me was that since I was volunteering it was easy to laugh off any stress - what were they gonna do, dock my pay?

We went for a lovely walk in the open space preserve off Skyline on Sunday. It was a bit chilly, but what a great time. We saw lots of poison oak, a really big lizard, a bird head, flowers...it was great. At the nature information station there was a big placard showing all the different animals one might see in the area. One of these was the deer mouse. Looking closely at that picture and description, I decided that those creatures the cats have been catching weren't juvenile wood rats, they were adult deer mice.

We all came back home to wash up and then take Aoibheall out to a fabulous dinner at La Bruschetta in Felton. Seriously: I think that's the best dinner to be had in this valley.

On Monday we saw Son of Rambow. That was hilarious, and very well-made. Even the Badb thought it was great.

So, critters:

We caught a rat in the trap. It was too late for coursing so we kept it in the garage overnight. The next morning, before breakfast, it was dead. No coursing for the doggies. Score 1 for the humans, I guess.
That same night, though, Fox had caught and partially eviscerated a deer mouse, leaving the corpse and entrails at the bottom of the stairs. Score one for the cats.
On Monday I saw two deer mice lurking behind the compost bin. I brought the dogs over; Esme didn't seem interested at all, but Dagmar was chasing around, trying to get behind the bin. I shoved at the bin and moved it away from the house a little, but I think I caved in some tunnels. One of the mice was stuck inside the bin, so I put Dagmar in and she had a bit more enthusiasm for the cage match. Score one for Dagmar Verminbane.
Monday night as I was putting away the chickens, I saw there was a mouse in the trap. Deer mice are big enough to trip the lever on the rat trap! Quickly I fetched down Peaches and the dogs and we set the mouse loose in the driveway. Dagmar ran it to ground and then Esme darted in and snatched the mouse away from her. Esme gets the kill, Dagmar on the assist.
This morning Fox had a mouse cornered in the living room. She and Oswald had fun chasing it around and then down the stairs. I let the dogs back in from their wake-up potty break and they went to town. The situation was complicated by so many agents, but the Badb came in to tell me during my shower that Dagmar the Rat Killer had triumphed.

Score:
Vermin: 7
Dogs: 8
Cats: 4
Humans: 2

Fecund Eptitude

2008-05-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

Be careful what you wish for, and all that.

A couple days ago Aoibheall woke up and found half a rat on the rug in front of the bathroom. Fox has discovered that rats are made out of meat. She left the head, shoulders, three feet and the tail; I assume that was because those are the bony bits, but maybe she wasn't all that hungry or maybe she just wanted to leave us something so we could be proud of her. From what was left, I'd guess the rat was maybe three inches long.

Saturday morning, there was a little mole in our closet (no doubt courtesy of Fox). I set the dogs loose and they caught it and took it outside. They didn't eat it, but did kill it. Esme spent a lot of time licking it. Gross.

The black and white rat escapee caught herself in the trap Saturday evening. It was too late to hold another rat derby, so we decided to hold it after Mother's Day brunch. Unfortunately, the Badb has not yet had field hockey in P.E. (I think they wait until fifth grade for that) and so the rat got by her and escaped into the blackberry bramble.

This morning there was another wood rat in the trap. A bit smaller than the last one, but still a sizable four to five inches, not counting the tail. This evening Peaches, the Badb and I took the dogs out on the driveway in front of the garage for another installment of rat chasing school. This time, Esme actually had the rat in her mouth, but put it down. Dagmar was completely amped, but not quite quick enough in following. After the rat escaped into the wood pile, she kept nosing around and acting very excited. She wanted that rat.

Later this evening, Aoibheall and I were sitting at the table doing some paperwork and we heard Fox scrambling around behind the TV. Last night, it had been Oswald getting himself stuck back there, so I didn't pay much attention. But then Dagmar started whining and I noticed Fox just sitting in front of the old toy chest, keeping an eye on it. I let the dogs out of their crates. Esme went straight for the plush bed with a chew toy, but Dagmar started sniffing around the chest, getting very excited all over again.

I pulled the chest away from the wall (hardwood floors and felt feet on all the furniture certainly makes this sort of excitement easier to manage) and a little rat went scurrying along the baseboard, diving to sanctuary under the short bookcase by the Nuu-Nuu.

I moved some more stuff, pulled the bookcase out from the wall, and eventually coerced the rat out from under with a stick. Dagmar, Oswald, and Fox were all very interested in the proceedings. When the rat went running, Dagmar was after it in hot pursuit. She caught it and gave it the patented terrier rat shake. Score for Dagmar! Esme then darted in and swiped the rat, prancing around the room while holding the carcass by the head. I gave both dogs lots of treats. It took a lot of treats to be a fair trade for the rat.

Oswald was put out by all this. He'd started swearing at the others in the midst of the flushing of the game and run off outside. Just as I finished putting things back where they belonged, including dogs back in crates, I noticed him crouched under the table playing with something. "What's he got?" I asked.

"A bug," said Aoibheall.

Well, almost. It was a bat. So then we had to try to get the bat out of the house, since he let the bat go (we wanted him to, after all) and it started flying around in circles. Aoibheall opened the sliding glass door but the bat seemed oblivious. She opened the front door and the bat just flew past it, circling around and around the ceiling fan (which was off), but being joined by a moth from outside which was almost as big as the bat. I got a broom and tried to urge the bat to fly toward the open doors, but I can't take any credit for the bat's eventual escape. I think it was just luck. Aoibheall: "Bats are really inefficient."

I smacked the moth with the broom.

Vermin: 7
Dogs: 5
Cats: 3 (Oswald *would* have done the bat if we'd let him)

The House of Inept Animals

2008-05-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

Dagmar and Esme have killed moles. They've not managed to demonstrate digging for anything except cat poop, though, and they've not caught any rats.

We went to the store and bought a pair of live rats. We wanted to go coursing with our dogs. We set up on the driveway, in front of the closed garage door. Three of us standing around with brooms and poles to poke the freed rat back into the middle, and the two dogs sitting there looking expectant.

The first rat got away anyhow, making a quick break for the hillside and getting clean away into the shrubbery.

The second rat didn't get away. But the dogs didn't kill it, either. They'd go after it when it ran, pick it up in soft mouths as if carrying a puppy, and bring it back to the center. They just wouldn't bite it. Eventually I took pity on the rat and gave it grace with a hatchet. The whole scene reminded me of Rollerball and I felt horrible for a week.

Last weekend some of Aoibheall's family came out and, as I was cleaning up in the office preparatory to setting up beds for people, I found a stiff, cold, dead rat. Adult, with a pretty clear bite mark near its shoulders. So, one of the cats has upgraded from juvenile rats to adults. That's good news, eh?

Last night I saw the escaped rat (white with a dark gray blaze on its head and shoulders) dash out from underneath the coop when I went down to put the chickens away. So, the escapee is getting on with the locals. Maybe soon we'll start seeing tamer wood rats? I set the trap under the coop.

Tonight there was a rat in the trap. Regular adult female wood rat, not the escapee. I got the cage ready, figuring we'd stage some kind of training session with the dogs tomorrow. The rat got away as I was trying to transfer it into the cage. Garr!

Vermin: 5
Dogs: 3
Cats: 1
Humans: 1

The vermin are still winning. I'm embarrassed.

Summer in Spring

2008-04-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

We got sick last week. Two weeks ago we scrambled the house around, moving everyone's beds so that now we have an office for Aoibheall to work in. The Badb had what seemed like a head cold, so she had light duty. The rest of us shifted heavy beds and furniture. By Monday, all the furniture was where it was supposed to be although the books are not all back on shelves. But I had the cold.

It turned out the cold wasn't just a cold. Apparently there's a nasty stomach flu going around up here. I got it. All week, I felt miserable. Tired, woozy, and my sinuses were everflowing. By the weekend, I was mostly recovered, but Aoibheall had picked it up. She was lagging by a couple of days, and spent all Saturday incapacitated. Our original plan had been for my parents and nephew to come up and visit that weekend and maybe get their help in redecorating the girls' bedroom. Instead, we urged them not to visit and share our cold.

On Thursday morning, Aoibheall said to me that she thought the young chickens were big enough to move out to the big chicken house. They're only a month and a half old, but they are fully fledged. I figured that was fair, so when I got home from work I started moving them out of the garage. They've been in the big house since then, and they're getting used to it. This evening, they even meekly walked back into the house from the yard when I brandished the New Blue Broom of Justice (the pipsqueaks had no respect at all when they were living in the garage).

Yesterday, we were all recovered. This was a good thing, as we'd scheduled a visit to the Exploratorium. Badb had said that what she wanted for her birthday party was to go to the Tactile Dome with a couple of friends, but scheduling had been tough. Yesterday was when our schedule and her friends' had opened up.

One friend was going to meet up with us at the Exploratorium and we picked up the other first thing in the morning. We then drove down into Santa Cruz because Aoibheall and I are taking Tai chi on Saturdays. The class meets in a park with some pretty cool play structures (including some awesome looking slides). The girls played in the park while we learned how to stand and twist. That accomplished, we all piled into the car and started driving north.

We picked up some fruit and lunch stuff at a Whole Foods on the way. We made it to the Exploratorium in plenty of time - we had half an hour to wander around before our 1:45 appointment in the Tactile Dome. We ended up with four adults, one teenager, and four little kids. Unlike last summer when we went to the Exploratorium for Camp Guel Guaynat, we felt little pressure to keep track of everyone. Our ratios were better and everyone had a wonderful time. At closing time we all went out to get a lovely dinner at Pluto's. Everyone was well-fed, although we were all pretty tired from a long day of doing things.

The weather was fabulous. It was warm and sunny, even in San Francisco. We are so suggestible. We came home and made mojitos and watched SpongeBob Squarepants episodes with the kids. (The choice of video was influenced by the zither music from The Third Man - almost at the end of watching that movie, Aoibheall said, "I know why we know that music - it's the same as the background music for SpongeBob!")

The weather was warm and clear again today. I'm back to my spring haircut (I'm sure my Uncle Chuck approves) and Aoibheall cleaned it up this morning. Then we had a big breakfast and got ready to tackle all our piled up chores. The girls needed haircuts and we had the grocery shopping to do. While I was doing the groceries, the girls were getting haircuts and Aoibheall walked through the Cost Plus next to the SuperCuts. We decided that with the beautiful weather we were going to have dinner outside. Well, to do that right we needed a few things. Our patio furniture is plastic and is on the verge of collapse. Cost Plus had some swell chairs and some enamelware that we decided would be perfect for outdoors. We had sangria, limeade, and tostadas out on the deck.

When I took out the compost after dinner, I saw that we'd trapped a rat. Hurrah! Another opportunity for Dagmar and Esme to show their valor! Aoibheall and I set up on the deck with brooms and we brought out the dogs. Dagmar was intensely interested in the rat, who set to squealing as soon as the dogs appeared. Esme decided that she, too, was intensely interested but wanted to be interested from about 15 feet away. Deep defense, I guess. Aoibheall used her broom to open the trap and the rat came scurrying out. It dashed across the deck with Dagmar in pursuit, but our doggie is still not the killer we've been hoping for. The rat got away and fled up the hillside.

Vermin: 3
Dogs: 3

Oh, and speaking of vermin, Oswald has been getting better at hunting. Unfortunately, he's upgraded from moths to bats. I appreciate his enterprise and want to encourage his Hemingway spirit, but I do wish he'd pick on critters that I'd be happier without. We've got plenty of bugs; I like the bats. If only he'd cooperate with the dogs and do something about these rats.

Winter in Spring

2008-03-13T09:29:00.000-07:00

The peeps are now in their second big week. On Saturday, they were allowed outside for the first time. Babd and I went into town and bought a new Blue Broom of Justice, as the old one just isn't doing the job anymore. Mostly because it's now the Blue Stick of Pathos, having lost all its bristles.

Our friend came out to see the historic event as the peeps were rounded up and turned loose in the only really nice grassy patch anywhere near our house.

The first day, they all stuck together and peeped piteously, obviously feeling insecure about the whole thing. It didn't help that a Steller's Jay sat in a tree not far away, shrieking at the poor things the whole time. Jealous, I'm sure.

The chicks have been growing at a phenomenal rate, and are now at the stage where they're no longer little feathery balls, but have grown both legs and necks. They're still working on their coordination, so you'll see them often stretching their legs, then standing up and stretching up their little necks, then squnching down again as though being that tall were a very scary prospect. Somehow, although this is now our fourth batch of chicks, I just don't remember any of our other chicks growing at quite this phenomenal rate.

They've got their flight feathers and the more adventurous among them are flying, rather than walking, around their little enclosure. They've graduated up from the 2 tiny, 8-hole feeders we were using to the giant trough feeder, and from the little 1-quart waterer to the 1-gallon waterer.

The downside of this sort of exponential growth is problems like spraddle. Spraddle is a condition where the bird's legs are abnormally developed and won't support her. Because she can't walk, she can't eat or drink and can become very weak. Birds are cruel, and if one of our hens is just lying there, the other ones will peck at her. The one we had before was one of our meat chickens, and for a week before we finally killed her, she was in a box in the garage, separated from the other birds so that she could reach the food and water.

The causes of spraddle vary. In pet birds, it's often caused by dietary problems like a lack of calcium or too much phosphorus. It's harder to pin down in a large flock where only one bird displays the symptoms, although growing too fast can also cause it, as the bones of the legs aren't strong enough to support the quickly-increasing weight of the bird.

Last night, as I was cleaning the baby coop, I found one of our Buff Orpingtons lying in the shavings, not moving. I thought she might just be sleepy and reluctant. If you poke a chick with your hands, they'll wake up just fine and move themselves along, but this one wasn't going anywhere. The Pirate and I looked at her and the way she wasn't moving and said to each other "Does that look like spraddle to you?" Yeah. It did.

We picked her up and put her in a box with shavings and food and water, but she wasn't eating. She was so weak and pathetic that every time we reached into the box, she would nudge her way into our hands, plainly wanting to be held and comforted. She was cold, she was tired, and we felt warm.

We took her upstairs and I ended up giving her water through a syringe and food through a baby spoon (having to first reduce her regular feed to a fine powder and mix it with water). She perked up a little, and we woke up in the night to look at her, but by morning she was even weaker and plainly giving up the struggle. By the time I was dressed this morning, she had laid down under the food dish and wasn't moving.

The problem is that even if we could cure her (and the cure for spraddle requires a month of round-the-clock treatment and monitoring), she would never be as large or strong as the other hens, and could likely be killed anyway. The Pirate and I agreed that the right thing to do was cull her from the flock now, rather than letting her suffer for who knows how long.

She died quietly and peacefully, but the Pirate and Babd and I all cried over it at home, and I cried most of the way to work. It was raining as I left this morning, so the sky was crying too, and I felt cold and sad.

Being steward of other living things is really, really hard sometimes.