Eating From The Garden…

At R’s, I grew jerusalem artichokes in the garden.  I first grew them the year before last when a neighbor brought us some to try.  They grew fine, but never having eaten them before, I wasn’t sure how to use them.  So, I let them overwinter in the ground, finally harvesting them in spring as I was preparing the garden for the new growing season.  Immediately after harvesting, a last-minute week-long trip came up.  When we returned from the trip the ‘chokes had gone bad (even in the cool of the root cellar — I’d read that they don’t store well and they apparently don’t).  So I composted them, the same way we composted everything else at R’s — by burying them in a fallow garden bed.  Of course, that just meant that, later that spring, not only did some hidden unharvested ‘chokes sprout from the original garden bed, but the composted ones sprouted as well!  Double the yield!

Last week when I was at R’s getting another load of stuff from my storage shed, he gave me a plastic bucket with the ’chokes he’d just harvested, stored in sand.  I knew I should not expect them to last long, even stored in the sand like that.  So tonight, I tried a recipe I’d been meaning to for a while, one that had been mentioned last fall on the HealthyCheapCooking group.  Turned out yummy!

 Jerusalem Artichoke Soup

1 lb Jerusalem artichokes
1 tsp Lemon juice
1 md Onion, chopped
1 Tbs Olive oil
3 cups chicken broth
Salt and pepper
1 cup milk (or soymilk)
1/4 cup walnuts, toasted

Peel the artichokes. Cut them in half. Rub the cut halves with lemon juice and set side.

Chop the onion. Heat the olive oil. Add the artichokes and saute them, along with the onion, for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add the stock, salt and pepper. Bring the stock to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. When cooked, remove from heat and let cool.

Place soup in a blender in batches and puree until smooth. Return to a clean pot, add the soy milk and bring back to a boil. Serve in bowls, garnished with walnuts.
Makes 4 servings.

I doubled the recipe (though I didn’t realize until typing this that I forgot to double the stock part — I only used 3 cups, so the soup would have turned out somewhat thinner if I’d paid attention and doubled *all* the ingredients).  I estimated two pounds of artichokes:

After peeling and dunking in lemon juice:

End result:

Not sure why it looks almost pink in that photo — in actuality the soup was slightly green-tinged, almost like split pea soup.  Mostly a light brown caramel color, with that light greenish tinge.

I hadn’t especially liked the smells while it was cooking, so I was afraid I was going to dislike the taste of the soup.  But no fear, it was yummy!  It tasted very much like potato soup, with only the slightest of difference to my tongue.  The walnuts added a perfect flavor and bitterness (even though I used untoasted walnuts — I’ve not toasted walnuts before, and wasn’t sure if it was just as simple as putting them in the oven for a bit, but even if it *WAS* that simple, I wasn’t going to turn on the oven just for that).

I had one *big* bowl of the soup for dinner, with some good french bread and a salad.  And the leftover soup is enough only for a smaller bowl than what I had tonight.  So even with a bulked up recipe I still only got two hefty servings.  Maybe next time I’ll make 4x the recipe instead!

While I liked this enough that I will probably make it again, it *was* a lot of work.  I’m not really sure the ‘chokes needed to be peeled and dunked in lemon juice — that might have been just so the blended soup had a paler color — just like when potato recipes tell you to peel them, but it’s not really necessary and besides, the peel is good for you.  Certainly it would have been a *much* easier process to just scrub the chokes clean and perhaps slice off the rootlets.  But when I cook something for the very first time I tend to follow all the rules, just in case it really matters.  But I think for next time I might leave them unpeeled.  The blending and switching bowls was a  minor hassle — mainly the idea of getting two pots dirty was unappealing — but if I don’t mind a less homogenously-blended soup, I don’t see why you couldn’t blend and return each batch to the original bowl…

 Anyway, success in eating from the garden!

Catching Up…

It’s been a busy several days and before I knew it it’d been nearly a week since I made a post.  I’ll try to recreate what’s been happening here.

MOVING — Last Monday was my first night in the new house.  I spent that day shuttling more things from the schoolhouse, with the last item, as always – the cat.  With a nearly loaded truck, just enough room left for him and his stuff, I put him in his carrier on the porch (finally, he gets to go outside!) for an hour or so while I loaded up his food, litter box, etc., and then swept out the schoolhouse and wiped down the bathroom and kitchen.

I got to the new house and drove into the garage using the handy-dandy electric garage door openers.  Sheesh, talk about non-Riotlike!  I need to ask the landlords if the doors can be opened manually!   But I have found a benefit to the garage — once the door is closed behind me, the garage becomes part of the house, where the animals have free reign.  I carried the cat/carrier into the mud room and opened the carrier door so Bear could start to explore.  The animals wandered around as I unloaded the truck and brought things inside the house.

DOG-FENCE — Although the house includes 40 acres with all sorts of fencing and cross-fencing, it was all fenced for horses or other large animals and would not have held back the dog.  So for several days, the dog was permitted outside only on a leash.  Poor Luna!  She doesn’t like to go potty on a leash, plus she just loves to run around, and she couldn’t!

Some local friends have a fence-building business, and they came out starting on Monday to build me a dog yard.  They had some complications at their house (plumbing emergencies) so it took a little longer than expected, but by Friday afternoon, we had this:

There’s the gate (the gap near the top of the gate will be covered with chicken wire, just in case she thinks she could jump through there), and in the background you can see the fence going up the hill.  That’s a shed on the right, and the fence goes around it and up the hill and across and back down to the house, which is off the photo on the left.  It’s a nice backyard for her, and I can only hope that she stays in it!  I’m a bit worried about when she sees deer, which are abundant here — she goes a bit crazy, and might just make it over (or under, by digging) the fence.  I may add an electric wire for just such circumstances.  Especially since I want to feel secure about leaving her there when I’m away working for eight or nine hours at a time.

WORK — I’ve taken in one freelance proofreading job at the moment, in addition to my usual local work.  It’s been a few weeks since I sent out some outreach letters for (mostly) nonlocal proofreading work, so I’m hoping I might hear back from some of them soon.  I’ve calculated that I need twelve hours per week of proofreading, at my lowest hourly rate, to cover my new expenses.

GARDEN — My garden this year will have two components — first, the orchard.  There are about a dozen trees in the yard here — mostly apple, a few apricot, and rumors of peach and maybe a pear.  I will just have to wait to see what they are!  My role now is to prune them (long overdue) and to see what grows.  Here’s the orchard with the huge house in the background:

And here’s the area that will be my garden (the lower terrace plus however much I want on the upper terrace):

First step there:  deer fence!  And, while it’s still far too early for outdoor planting (the soil was frozen and snow covered most of the yard as recently as last week), I do have room now for indoor starts.  And, I’ve decided to join Melinda’s Growing Challenge (see button over on the right), which involves growing from seed at least one new thing you’ve never grown before.  I haven’t decided what thing or things I will grow, but I have lots of seeds to choose from!

Also, another part of my garden project this year is my friend KH’s efforts in the other fields surrounding the house.  She’s planning on growing a huge garden using the hot well water (stay tuned for descriptions of how she’ll do that, and how well it works).  She’s considering establishing a small CSA, with clients getting a box of whatever’s ripe each week.  She’ll be providing the local restaurants with produce.  And, she’ll be bringing her produce to the local farmer’s market — in fact, she’s working with the manager of the local cafe to set up a second farmer’s market for the valley, one that will be right by the cafe, and not during the workweek.  (The current farmer’s market is 3:30-4:00pm on Fridays, in the hospital lawn which is not right downtown where the visitors usually pass by.)  While this is all KH’s project, I’m very interested in seeing how it works, and maybe working with her, and definitely adopting some of her ideas!

Okay, that’s enough for now — time for dinner and to get started on that proofreading…

Moving Day The Second

Compared to yesterday, today was easy – two trips from the schoolhouse to the rental – all small stuff – houseplants, clothes, dresser drawers, some kitchen and foodstuffs. No help, but no help needed. The landlords were still there when I arrived with the first load, and we reviewed a few more things, and they even helped me move the fridge into place. They were gone by the time I arrived with the second load. Luna got to go inside for the first time, and run around and sniff all our stuff – I think she might know now that’s where we’re going, because there are piles of familiar-scented stuff there. Even though it was an easy day, relatively speaking, I’m still pooped. Mainly my back is tired – I’m having to be really careful now with lifting anything, to make sure not to outstretch my hands with any weight in them. First hot bath in the new house (tomorrow night) will feel so good!

Moving Day The First

This morning I faced a doggy dilemma: when I go to R’s today to load up some things from my storage shed and transfer them to the new house, do I leave the dog behind at the ranch, where she might quite possibly decide to run off again as she did just yesterday? Or do I bring her with me to R’s; surely a confusing experience for her, since she spent three happy years (of her six) there and certainly has no way of understanding that we don’t live there anymore. I admit that a small part of me also wanted to deny R the pleasure of seeing her – I envisioned it as a ‘lesson’ that when one decides one is unwilling or unable to do the ‘work’ part of a relationship, one no longer can really expect to continue the good parts of it either. This is incredibly petty of me, I know, and that is part of why I decided to bring the dog with me. I also think it will be good for her to see the new house another time, to speed her acclimatization to that place as new ‘home’. Even though she’ll be waiting in the car as I unload things, since the fence is not built yet.

So, mid-morning, I set off for R’s. Through the freshly fallen snow… (I guess I’m just a Murphy’s Law magnet). Fortunately it was just a dusting, less than an inch. I got to R’s, had a nice visit, loaded up the truck with some boxes from my shed, and headed over to the rental. There I unloaded my things, signed the lease, and gave the visiting landlords a check for half of March, all of April, and a “last month’s” deposit. As I was unloading, my friend Emily showed up to help with the heavy stuff, which I hadn’t brought yet. So she rode with me back to R’s, where he had already put the trailer on his truck, and filled the truck bed with bulky-but-lightweight things like garbage/recycling cans, the wooden food dehydrator we scavenged from the dump, etc. With Emily’s help, we loaded the heavy and awkward stuff into the trailer and into my truck, then all headed back to the rental and unloaded. While there, KH stopped by, and she got introduced to the landlords and talked over with them her plans for the subleased fields. Other than the sauna apparently being out of service (I knew the hot tub wasn’t working but I thought the sauna was functional) everything seems in order for me to move in. A sauna and a hot tub sound so extravagant, and definitely not in the spirit of the Riot for Austerity, but I could see using it a few times a year as a treat without going too overboard on electricity usage. Soaking in hot water (indoors in the bathtub, usually) may not be a NEED but it’s right at the very top of my list of WANTS. It’s a reward, a relaxation, a warmup, and a physical boost to my bad back muscles, all rolled up into one. Elsewhere in the house, the woodstove has been repaired and is ok for me to use (and there’s a propane heater backup). I don’t have much firewood left, but KH still has lots of downed limbs in her yard.

Yes, when we arrived back at the schoolhouse, Luna looked confused for a few minutes.  When she was let into R’s while we were there, she made a beeline for where her food and water bowls had been.  R gave her water, but I felt bad for confusing her.  Familiar place, but no food in the usual place, no bed in the usual place, etc.  Poor pup…

Tomorrow – more moving, but not nearly as strenuous – no two-person things, just lots of boxes and jars from the kitchen, clothes, etc. I’m starting to feel better about this, and definitely looking forward to feeling settled and to putting my day-to-day life in order.

What’s That Saying about Good Fences and Neighbors?

Yesterday I went to the rental house with a friend who is the wife-half of a fence-building business (they also happen to be the daughter and son-in-law of the couple whose herbal business I work for).  We walked around the yard and assessed dog-constraint options.  I hate the idea of having to fence the dog in when there is plenty of room between us and the neighbors, with only forest behind the house.  But Luna (my 6-year-old lab/chow/misc mix) has shown me plenty of times that she can’t be trusted to stay home when she’s in a wandering mood.  Case in point: today, for the second time, she and Ellie (caretaker’s dog at my current abode) showed up near my work, over ten miles from home.  A friend saw them at about 9:30 am, stopped, and got Ellie into his car, but Luna wouldn’t let herself be caught (even by someone she knows).  He came to my work and told me, I drove out to where he said he’d seen her, stopped the car and called for her, and she came bounding up from behind a dune and jumped happily in the truck,  all out of breath.  She had to wait in the truck all day until I got home at 6pm.  I took her out of the truck on a leash a few times to offer potty breaks, and gave her just a tiny bit of water to drink, but otherwise shunned her all day, with several stern “Bad Dog” refrains said to her in the first few minutes after I picked her up.  No way to know if she got the message or not.

Friends keep warning me that ranchers shoot free-roaming dogs out in these parts, and it makes me even more grateful that she has, so far, managed to be found by friends.  But once we are in the new house we will be in unfamiliar territory, with only one of the neighbors being known to me at this point.

So, it looks like I’ll be shelling out some fairly hefty bucks for a fence to be built.  (Actually, more than half the fence posts are already in place, but strung with barbed wire which won’t contain a dog — so they’ll be doing a fair amount of merely adding field fence to an existing fence.  Even with that ’shortcut’ this will still be a chunk of change.

Financially, I’m both worried and not worried at the same time.  I’m not worried about running out of money in the short term — I’m extremely fortunate to have enough savings to tide me through these transition costs.  On the other hand, my feeling of financial security stems from having that savings cushion, and that comfort zone recedes as that money is spent.  On the THIRD hand, given what’s happening with the plunging value of the dollar, I might as well turn as much as I need to into useful stuff like rolls of fencing and fenceposts, which will at least hold its value, as opposed to dollars, which don’t seem likely to.

Also today, two things happened which hold potential for increasing my financial situation.  One is that I was informed of an upcoming vacancy at the local Post Office, by a postal employee who thinks I’d be good there.  I would indeed enjoy working there, I think, and in this locale there is hardly a more stable employer than the US Postal Service.  I informed the right person that I’m interested.  She is still waiting to hear what kind of position she’s permitted to hire, and once that is known, I’ll analyze the facets of the job (how many hours, which days, pay scale, etc) and see if it still seems to work for me.  I don’t want to quit any of the jobs I already have, but if they REALLY don’t compare I might think about it (the library, for example — while I totally love working there, my shifts add up to a grand total of five (5) hours per week, unless the other employee is sick or out of town.  The library is only open twelve hours per week, so that plus about an hour of administrative time is the maximum I’d ever get there.  Plus, the pay is not very high.  Frankly it might not take much for any other job to out-compete the library, but I do really love working there.  So we’ll see.

The other financial plus thing that happened today is this:  I’m pursuing the possibility of buying a Geo Metro from a friend.  He still has to get it up and running and pass the smog test, but I’ve told him that if he can get it that far I’ll buy it.  He had offered it to me together with a refurbished 50,000-mile engine, plus two “parts cars” (other Geo Metros with dead engines but with most other parts working, that could be used for parts to repair the working one) for a set price.  Today he said he’d like to keep one parts car plus the “new to him” engine, and would reduce my purchase price accordingly.  This works fine for me, since I’m not a mechanic and only half interested in having the parts cars anyway (dead cars plus rental house do not happy neighbors make). 

So, I have a job possibility to pursue, and I’ve just saved $500 on a car purchase which, itself, will halve (roughly) the amount of gasoline I’ve been using.  All in all, not too bad an equation.

Burning the Burl

This morning I put a ’special’ piece of wood in the fire, as a sort of catharsis. It was a fist-sized burl of wood that looked a lot like the face from Munch’s ‘Scream.’ The eyes were made of knots, and the mouth was a fallen-out knot, an actual hole in the wood. Not a happy-looking fellow, that’s for sure. Wish I’d taken a photo of it now. I’d had it for years, up on the wall in the shed, as a form of art. But I didn’t like looking at it, at least not lately. It reminded me of a girlfriend – it might have been she that found it or gave it to me – who used to be perennially cheerful but who is going through some really tough times right now. I only see her occasionally as she lives 40 miles away in CountySeat and doesn’t use email, but I’m pretty sure she’s returned to drinking, after decades of teetotalling, and I think she’s in a bad spiral down.

I decided that burning the burl would represent declining to fall into that downward spiral of depression or discouragement. I’d also felt, in recent weeks, rather anxious about the junction of leaving a relationship and making my way alone, together with the apparent speeding up of the world’s economic troubles. While I definitely see the direction things are going, and I expect certain outcomes that might cause some to call me “doomer”, I nevertheless do not find useful the “next week it will all come unraveled” theme that R likes to focus on. (And yesterday I had an online conversation with him that ended with more of the same, so it was fresh in my mind). So the burl-burning would also represent my refusal to let the arrival of a scary future be too overwhelming for me. I keep reminding myself that 1) it might just take a lot longer than we think for things to get really bad, and 2) if everything *does* crash tomorrow, I’m in better shape, preparedness-wise, than most people – a combination of being mentally prepared as well as having actually done some physical preparations such as having stocked up on selected items. And, of course, burning the burl also counts as decluttering – one less thing to move next week!

So I made the morning fire (15 seconds of wood and paper + one match = heat, as it is most mornings, as opposed to the frustrating occasion such as I wrote about earlier, when no amount of fussing seemed to keep lit paper lit, or to transfer flame from paper to wood…) and when it was going well, I carefully propped Mr. Scream on the burning wood. He was resting directly on two pieces of burning wood, each of which had other burning wood beneath it. I sat back to watch the flames. After a while, his edges rounded and glowing, his mouth agape wider now, Mr. Scream seemed on the verge of tumbling to the floor of the stove, and I began to wonder what little change would send him over: would the mostly-burned wood under his left side break away, even though it seemed sturdy at the moment? Would the piece under his right side, also mostly burned now, with only two little spires of remaining wood holding him up, fail? That seemed likely. Would Mr. Scream simply dissolve into ashes in place? Or maybe a rush of wind from a *pop* elsewhere in the fire would blow him over before his time had come?

I began to feel the analogy to watching the world these days. The house of cards that is our economy has many similarities to my morning fire. So many factors in play at one time, only some of which are we, as observers, aware. Some relevant things we know with certainty, such as whether our firewood is wet or dry, oak or balsam, and how the different attributes of the wood make it more or less likely that this or that piece lasts longer against the flames. But so much of what is happening is unclear to us – either because the science of it is beyond our knowledge, or because it’s simply unpredictable in terms of too many forces acting on it to know for sure in what order the outcomes will happen.

Eventually, of course, Mr. Scream did fall. The cause isn’t even important (though, for the record, he broke and fell on his own, the burning underpinning logs still offering support). But it really impressed upon me again how pointless it is to obsess over the minutae and to work oneself into a tizzy being *so sure* this or that will happen by Wednesday noon. I don’t really know how to do it, but I am ready to add some positive vibes back into my view of the coming times.

Explaining The Chart

My education in Peak Oil, economics, and global political shenanigans over the past few years has led me to believe that an economic crash or collapse or disruption is approaching.  I’m of the general opinion that if nothing drastic happens, then this will be a relatively slow decline, measured in years.  But on the other hand, there are myriad things that could happen that would trigger some fast effects.  So I think it’s all up in the air, I don’t think anyone can know for sure how things will unfold.

When R and I would discuss this, he tended to think that once he became aware of some piece of information, that the effects or consequences of that information would happen immediately.  So, when we learned about the falling dollar, he was *sure* that the dollar would crash the next day, and within the month we’d be in the midst of bank failures, bread lines, mutant zombie bikers roaming the landscape, whatever.  I felt that nearly anything was *possible*, but that such fast changes weren’t necessarily *likely*. 

So, being the data geek that I am, I decided to start charting some select criteria, so we could see how things wobbled, meandered, dipped and recovered, etc.  And if anything DID crash fast, that would look really cool too.

My criteria are: 

• gold and silver prices per ounce (as found in http://www.freecharts.com/Commodities.aspx?page=mktcom – I know that’s not spot data but it’s what I used anyway),
• the US Dollar Index value from that same site,
• the price of a barrel of crude oil from http://www2.barchart.com/mktcom.asp?code=BSTK§ion=energies
• both the local and the wholesale prices of gasoline — local taken from the sign on our valley’s main gas station, and wholesale taken from the oil site above
• the Dow Jones Industrial Average
• Wal-Mart’s stock price, taken from http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=wmt
• the number of “imploded” mortgage lenders (as per http://ml-implode.com/)
• the number of “imploded” hedge funds (as per http://hf-implode.com/)

I started charting this information in early August.  Data collected Friday evenings.

I’m trying to learn how to use Microsoft Excel (or its freeware counterpart, Open Office Spreadsheet) to draw charts from spreadsheet data, but until I figure that out I’m keeping a physical chart hung on the wall and updated in purple Sharpie marker.

Here are the photos showing data from August 7, 2007 through March 7, 2008:

We’re Online!

 This morning a guy from Adel Satellite showed up at the Ranch bright and early, and installed a WildBlue satellite dish on the side of the shop building. Got it all up and working, even the wireless router the owner bought. So now we can sit around the shop with our laptops and go online! Yay! Unfortunately, the wireless signal stops about 20 feet shy of the Schoolhouse (my current home), but having to walk 150 feet to the shop to do my online computering isn’t so bad. Beats driving 18 miles each way to town and back! Hopefully I can post every few days now, instead of every few weeks. Though it’s still a busy time coming up mid-month, as I transition to the other house and get settled, get phone service and internet service up and running, etc.

Third (and Final!) Bulk Post

Mar 5 OMENS

I’m struggling these days with some really mixed feelings about the new house, and it’s got me thinking about those little voices inside our heads that tell us “this is the right thing” or “this isn’t the right thing.” I’ve never had a comfortable relationship with those voices. I don’t think I’ve *ever* been on a plane when I didn’t have the voice in my head saying “I just know this is the time it’s going to crash – maybe you should treat the mere fact of having had that thought as a sign not to get on the plane.” I’ve never gotten off the plane or cancelled a trip due to those thoughts, but I have them, every time (fortunately I rarely/never fly anymore). On the other side, when something is happening that is good, the voice returns with “ooh, this was meant to be!”, and all sorts of situations present themselves just begging to be interpreted as signs of such fate. (One recently-joined couple I know apparently found the fact that the anniversary of HER sister’s death is the same date as HIS birthday, to be compelling evidence that their relationship was meant to be) So, I find that I’m anxious and worried with regard to the new rental arrangement, and my internal voice is trying to tell me “this is a sign, it’s not a good plan, go somewhere else.” But when I stop and think about it, I just don’t really buy that those things constitute some kind of mystic palmreader – rather, I think, there are just a few specific things I’m worried about (keeping the dog sufficiently constrained, making sure KH’s projects don’t turn into problem livestock, broken fences or neighbors annoyed at the noise or smell) and a few specific things I don’t find especially appealing (orange shag carpet, not to mention the general concept of renting someone else’s house as opposed to owning my own) and then there is the baseline bad vibes of the moment having to do with the end of a relationship, anxiety about the world crashing down around me, etc. It may or may not turn out to have been a mistake, but I prefer to make my choices by weighing the pluses and the minuses and identifying what risks are acceptable, rather than by guessing when the universe is or isn’t sending me a sign. And in this case I’m sufficiently interested in being a part of promoting a shift to a local food economy (which is what KH’s projects in the fields are generally about) that I’m willing to risk spending some time in a situation that I might end up changing again in six months. Besides, none of the other rentals I found had any lesser downsides. OK, I feel better now.

Speaking of runaway dogs, about 2pm this afternoon the herbal business where I work received a call from a neighbor, telling us that Luna (my dog) and Ellie (the ranch caretaker’s dog) were at their house. That’s about twelve miles from the ranch! I’d watched the dogs carefully when I drove off at 7:30 in the morning – I even closed the gate behind me, which is unusual, because MB (the caretaker) had left earlier on an errand and it was a situation the dogs weren’t used to, for him to leave first and then me to leave, with them remaining home alone. I certainly didn’t see them following me, and when I talked to MB later he confirmed that the gate was still closed when he arrived home a few hours later. So apparently, the dogs went out through the back meadow, which is fenced only for horses/cows with typical barbed wire that doesn’t even slow a dog down. How fortunate that they ended up at someone’s house where they were recognized! It all ended well – I went and retrieved the dogs and they sat in my truck for 2 hours until I returned home – but it did add to my anxiety about making a new place work for a dog. When I first got Luna, the issue of how to keep her contained in the yard was a big deal for me – I had fence built at two different houses, and at both locations it would generally hold her but she would occasionally escape and run playfully around the neighborhood, not hurting anyone or anything but thinking it was a game to not let herself get caught. And she’s good at that game! It was such a relief moving out to R’s where there was no one else for miles around; no need for a fence. And even there she ran 3 miles to the neighbor’s house on several occasions when we were both away from home. I definitely have more to learn about keeping a good dog-house!

 

Mar 4 I GOT THE HOUSE!

I never did like calling it “PricyHouse”, even though that’s an accurate description – it just didn’t feel nice. Anyway, now I’ll get to call it “Home” instead – I heard from the landlords and they’ve agreed to a six-month lease! In the late afternoon, KH and I walked around the yard and talked about which fields she plans to use for which purposes. She’s getting more and more excited about doing a small-scale CSA. She also has a friend with six “pet” cows that might end up on one of these fields. I’m not thrilled about cows, but I have to remember not to lump everything into such black and white terms. This *is* cow country out here, and I’m well aware that six “pet” cows is not the same as “running cows” and trampling and trashing the whole landscape. As long as she is responsible for the fencing and other aspects of the project, I need to just pretend that the fields are leased outside of my control. This is simply part of what’s involved in making the house affordable.

 

Mar 1 PUTTERING DAY

I suffer from that unnamed (but common, I think) ailment described partly by a feeling of perennial lack of time on a busy day when I leave early for work and get home with just enough time to unwind but not enough time or energy to accomplish many home chores. But the counterpart experience that defines this ailment is that, on a day when I actually *can* stay home all day, nowhere I need to go, plenty of time, theoretically, for all that knitting, reading, paperwork and bread baking that I never seem to have time to do on other days – on those stay-at-home days, I somehow feel so aimless, almost depressed, that I rarely have the energy to do any of those chores. Recently, I’ve dealt with this ailment by mostly just accepting it – allowing myself to wallow a bit, rewarding myself for every little chore I do. My reward is, sometimes, a little time I allow myself to sit and read, or play some computer solitaire or just listen to the radio. Last Thursday I got *many* chores done in the morning and mid-day, so my reward was that I allowed myself to go to town for a few hours in the afternoon and sit at the WiFi Cafe with my laptop, checking email and generally doing the online surfing thing. Today is another one of those days, except that I don’t plan to go to town today *or* tomorrow, and maybe not even Monday. We’ll see, though – three days of puttering in my current limbo situation, without internet access, might just be too much. However, it’s not like there’s a shortage of things to do at home. I have a stack of unread magazines about two feet high (mostly some recent issues of *High Country News*, my favorite publication, and some back issues of *The Sun* which a friend offered me). I have about a month’s worth of expenses to record, and two months’ worth of Riot for Austerity data to consolidate so I can report to the group. I also have about three rows started on my first knitting project, not to mention all the ingredients needed for some trial loaves of bread. I could be planning this summer’s garden, even though I don’t know for sure where I’ll be planting it. I have, in short, no shortage of home-things to do. Not even counting computer journalling or blogwriting (which often overlap but are two separate documents).

 

Feb 29 PENDING

No reply email from PricyHouse owners yet. I’ve double- and triple-confirmed with KH that she’s still enthusiastic, and that she’s willing to pay X per month to lease the fields, for a year at a time if that’s the lease the owners want. She says yes, she’s in. I’m still wary of all the things that could go wrong with her plan – anything from deer or wind making the growing impractical (I think these are the most likely situations), to there being something chemically unsuitable in the well water (it’s hot, and sulfur-y, that’s known so far), to her getting a great job somewhere else and moving away, or otherwise abandoning the project for personal or financial reasons. I’m prepared to continue with the lease even if that happens, but I like the prospects of her plan enough to accept those risks. There are plenty of personal gardeners in these parts, and a handful who grow to sell at the farmer’s market or to friends, but I think we would be the first attempt to seriously think about the need to expand the local food economy for reasons of future necessity. KH used the phrase “CSA” this afternoon in her description of her plans. It sounded like it was a new idea to her, and she was exploring it – having her potential customers pay her in advance in exchange for fresh produce throughout the season. And on such a small scale of only a few such ‘customers’, she’s talking to them ahead of time and finding out what they like as a part of figuring out what to grow. I keep thinking that I’ll identify a few veggies that she is NOT growing for sale, and perhaps try them out myself. Beets, maybe, and chard? Those grew well at R’s, and I can’t assume the soil is the same (R’s place is essentially on ancient lakebed, PricyHouse is up against the base of the mountains), but it’s a place to start.

 

Feb 28 WINTER READING/DECLUTTERING PROJECT

One project I started several months ago was a winter reading/decluttering project. My goal was to read twenty books off my shelf that I would want to get rid of afterwards. I’d long ago decluttered by getting rid of what books I had that I simply didn’t want anymore. And, of course, this is all separate from the books I have that I think are worth keeping – either as a helpful library for the future, or that simply mean enough to me to be worth the space they take up. After the latest decluttering, I realized that I had a pretty large stack of books that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t feel the need to keep, but didn’t want to get rid of them yet, as I’d not read them yet! (Over the past 30 years, I’d rarely passed a used-book store without finding at least 1-2 treasures to buy. But I hadn’t read my gems at anything approaching the same rate. So the unread pile is still rather tall.) So I decided in late fall that I would undertake a winter reading/decluttering project by reading twenty of those books, and then, unless in the course of reading them I decided I wanted to keep them after all, then those books would be passed on to others – either given away to individuals or donated to the library. Of course this project got delayed by the unplanned happenings of this winter, and it may well turn into the spring reading project, or even the 2008 reading project, but I don’t plan to abandon it. So far I’ve read and decluttered two books (titles already forgotten) and am in the process of reading numbers three and four: (*On The Shred Of A Cloud* by Rolf Edberg, and *Second Nature* by Michael Pollan).

 

Feb 26 DECISION

Finally emailed the owners of PricyHouse and told them that if they’d agree to a six month lease, I’m ready to commit to the house. In truth I’m ready to commit to the house even if they insist on a yearlong lease, but I’m hoping they’ll be willing to start with the shorter commitment. Now I just need to hear back to know it’s a done deal!