As The World Turns

First I didn’t post because there wasn’t much happening — just going to work, walking the dog, and making slow progress on my reading and cooking projects.  THEN I didn’t post because there was too MUCH happening and I didn’t have time! 

The big change is, I now have a housemate.  I’ll call her K (but it’s not the same K who was going to lease the fields from me when I first moved here — that plan fell flat almost immediately when K acquired a herd of goats and no longer had time for any other projects — her time was filled by a series of one “goatastrophe” after the other).

No, this K is a friend of one of my employers, and we met at a potluck a few years ago.  She recently moved here to work for the employer/friend, at least through spring, and her original housing plan didn’t work out, so I offered her a room here.  She’s very nice, with two great dogs that are getting along fine not only with my dog but also with my cat, about whom I’d been a bit worried.  She cooks and gardens, and will help me learn in both arenas.  She doesn’t know much about computers and if she wants I will help her learn about that.

Today we had a nice relaxing Thanksgiving.  We went for our usual dog walk but extended it into a longer hike up the hill behind the house where there is some spectacular scenery.  I dug one row of potatoes from the garden and boiled them up for some really yummy mashed potatoes with sour cream-horseradish dressing.  K made gravy (and I watched and learned).  We made stuffing from a box, opened cans of cranberries and mandarin oranges, steamed some fresh broccoli and celery.  I cooked half a local pumpkin, intending to make pumpkin pie, but it took so long to cook (on the woodstove on a not-so-cold day when the stove was only puttering along) that I postponed the pie-making until tomorrow.

We talked all day while we were hiking and cooking and doing other chores.  Then we ate dinner and watched “Strangers In Good Company”, a delightful movie that had just enough display of “survival skills” to fit my movie genre criteria :)

So, things are a little different for me these days.  I have lots of reasons why I prefer to live alone if I’m not living with a life partner; but there are also lots of benefits to sharing a house, and this time I decided it was the right thing to do.  So far (it’s been nearly a week) it’s working out wonderfully.

More Soup ‘n’ Biscuits, Plus A Book Update

Last weekend I made a lentil and tomato soup that turned out pretty darn good.  Not without some mistakes and things I’ll do differently next time, but still — pretty good.  I just had some of it tonight for the third night in a row, and it was even better tonight than it was before.  I also made biscuits again, and it was rather a fiasco (let’s just say that I thought I was being so clever to only make half the recipe this time, until the process of converting butter quantities (in the recipe) to oil quantities (what I actually used) distracted me and I put the whole recipe’s amount of oil in.  So then I had to double all the dry ingredients and end up with a full batch again anyway).  Then that still turned out way too moist, for unknown reasons, and I added at least another cup of flour to get it to kneadable/rollable texture.  It was kind of a comedy of errors of biscuit baking, if you can imagine that.  But the good news is, they didn’t turn out any *worse* than the first batch.  I’m still eating them a few days later.

In other news, I *finally* finished Bill McKibben’s “End of Nature.”  Although I think it’s a really important work, it’s somewhat out of date by now (written in 1989) and his writing style near the end started to get downright annoying.  I know McKibben is spearheading the 350 project, which I think is great, so I’m sure his current writings are much more appropriate now anyway.  On Friday the book I’d been waiting for arrived, Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Sixty Degrees and Counting“, which is the third in the trilogy.  I’m nearly halfway through and enjoying it greatly.  I do get nervous, though, when reading about bitter cold as I’m trying to warm this house with the woodstove.  Wondering how I’d fare if we had a couple weeks of fifty below zero, as happened in the second book of the trilogy.  While waiting for the latest book to arrive ILL (inter-library loan) from the library, I also read “Bucking the Sun” by Ivan Doig.  A fascinating story about a family working on the building of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana during the Great Depression.  Any book that combines the Great Depression, severe winters, and hydrology has to be interesting to me! :p  I still have several books on request at the library, but now I’m half hoping they don’t show up for a while, or else how am I ever going to have time to read seventeen more books off my own shelf this winter?

Now I’m Cookin’ With Ga — er, Wood!

My other “focus” project for myself this winter, in addition to the reading/decluttering project, has to do with cooking.  I’ve never been much of a cook, and now is the time to change that.  I’m not aiming toward fancy dishes, nor even toward a huge repertoire.  I just want to expand my list of what I can cook COMFORTABLY — meaning 1) in a hurry, 2) when I’m stressed, anxious or upset, and 3) without thinking too hard about it.  Without a cookbook would be nice, but some things are just going to need a written recipe — my goal is for it to be easy for me — meaning I know which cookbook it’s in, and what ingredients I need (without looking at the cookbook, so I can get the ingredients on a whim in town when I decide to make something) — or make sure I’ve stocked up so that I *know* I have what I need.  I think it’s also important that I develop a sense of what’s important and what’s flexible, for each meal, so that I know when I can substitute or do without some particular ingredient (as well as add extras!).

For example, a few years ago I decided that my “standard” potluck dish would be sauteed mushrooms.  It’s something that most people like, but it’s not a typical potluck dish so I never worry about someone else bringing the same thing.  I’ve made it often enough that I know what I put into it, I know whether I can make a batch with that partial stick of butter or whether I need more (and whether I can substitute olive oil for the butter if I want).  I know how little (or how much) garlic I want.  I know how much time it takes, how much of my energy it takes (ie how far in advance I need to start).  I’m comfortable with it, in other words.

I want to add ten dishes to my “comfortable” repertoire this winter.

Without getting too bogged down in rules, here’s what I’m thinking:

Stir fry, rice/beans, soup, stew, chili, bread, biscuits/gravy, pancakes, pie, cookies, lasagna.

Stir fry:  I’ve rarely if ever made a stir fry.  I want to make it often enough that I can ” throw a stir fry together” using whatever I have laying around.  I have a wok and want to get in the habit of using it (or get rid of it if it’s not the right tool, but from what I hear it’s an excellent tool).

Rice/beans:  Of course I’ve made rice and beans before.  But I want to experiment with some new kinds of beans, and a variety of seasonings.

Soup:  Ditto, I’ve made lots of different soups before.  But none that I can just “throw together”.  I’ve made some I really like (carrot-ginger, mmm!) that I just need to make a few more times so that it’s etched into my mind and I don’t need the recipe in front of me anymore.  With other soups I need to learn about spices, as the veggies turn out horribly bland, and the water isn’t brothy, so it’s just soggy veggies in water.  I think learning a few tricks about seasoning soups will do wonders for me.

Stew:  same as soup, just focusing on root vegetables (and perhaps a touch of meat if I can find local/organic sources — but perhaps not — I haven’t cooked meat at home for many years now, and haven’t decided to change that, but I’m not overly attached to it, as long as I’m happy with the source of the meat — oh, except for beef, I still boycott that).

Chili: I’ve only made chili once, and it was years ago and I’m pretty sure it had ground beef in it.  I’d like to learn to make a tasty vegetarian chili.

Bread:  I tried bread a handful of times in the past few years, and usually got something edible, but not overly.  I want to find a recipe that works for me and then make it regularly, matching however much bread I eat (which currently isn’t much, but the more soup I make, the more bread I will correspondingly want to have).

Pancakes:  I used to make them often when I was a kid, but I haven’t made them in years.

Biscuits/gravy:  I want to be able to make these on an early morning, knowing what I’m doing but not having to think too hard about it.

Pie:  I’ve made really good pumpkin pie a few times, but no other kind.  And definitely no homemade pie crusts — not sure if I’ll tackle that this winter or not.  But I’d like to add at least one other kind of pie to my repertoire.

Cookies:  I’ve rarely made cookies and I don’t plan to make them often — I just want to know how.  Sugar cookies seem to be what I want to know how to do.  The only successful cookies I can recall making were M&M cookies, which must have been about 35 years ago when I was a young teenager!

Lasagna — Never made it, want to know how.  Again, not that I plan to make it often, but it would be a good thing to make in order to have a week’s worth of “just heat” meals.  And, of course, I won’t be using meat, so I need to find a good vegetarian recipe.

Now, one twist to my cooking projects this winter is that I really want to emphasize non-traditional cooking methods.  Whenever the woodstove’s going, any stovetop cooking I’m doing will probably be done there.  And I’ll be interested in seeing how my solar oven works in the wintertime (it’s still sunny, after all!).  Further, I want to get more familiar with using my electric crockpot to slow-cook things — that way I can cook even on days I’m away working.

I’m not going to make a lot of strict rules about how many of these things I’ll get to, but they are all things I want to do/learn/add to my skills, so I’ll just do as many of them as I can get to.

Side benefits will be less money spent on eating out, more self-reliance, and a reduced chance of letting any of my stored food go to spoilage, once I actually follow the cardinal rule of food storage:  Store What You Eat and Eat What You Store.

Now I better go, because I’m getting hungry.  Let’s see if I can start on one of these projects tonight!

Restart: Reading!

I’ve always loved reading.  It’s my ideal vision of a vacation, or even just a day off, to curl up with a good book.  This feeling has only increased in the last few years now that I work at a library.

But somehow I’ve ended up with the idea that reading is “leisure” and thus you’re not supposed to do it until all your “non-leisure” chores are done.  Which, of course, they never are.  So I haven’t read nearly as much as I’d like in recent years (ok, that’s not the only reason, too many other things competing for even my “leisure” time, and me having “issues” with time management all had their role).

Last winter, I started a project that combined reading and decluttering — I planned to read twenty books over the course of the winter — twenty books I own, that are sitting on my shelf, but that I don’t think I’ll feel the need to keep after I’ve read them.  I know, some people simply cringe at the idea of ever getting rid of a book.  I certainly have my “library” of books I don’t ever plan to part with — reference books, and books that define me — that a new acquaintance could see upon my shelf and *know* me through them.  But, ahem, I have plenty of books that don’t fit that category.  And my brand of minimalism spurs me to scan my shelves regularly and try to keep shrinking the pile, or at least keep it from growing bigger.

I didn’t get far last winter — my life was overturned at the beginning of the year by the end of my relationship and my move into temporary housing and then into a rental.  I’m a very slow recoverer, mentally, and even though I might have used reading as a good distraction or escape during that time, I didn’t.  So I read a whopping TWO books from my declutter list last winter. (Of course, I read several other books lent from friends or from the library, but only two from my project.)

Now I’m ready to restart my project.  I’ve actually pulled twenty books from my shelves and set them into a pile.  One of the books I’m in the midst of now, will count (The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben).  I’ll add the titles and authors, as I progress, to the blog sidebar — first in the Currently Reading section and then in the Recently Read section.  According to the self-generated rules of this project, once I start a book I can of course decide to keep it.  If I decide to keep it, I might finish reading it anyway (in which case it counts as one of the twenty) or I might abandon reading it in order to focus on reading books I can give away (the reading part is important to me, but the real motivation is the declutter part).

And of course, I will keep reading other books as well.  One book I devoured so fast I didn’t get to put it on the blog sidebar until just recently, was called The Last Season, by Eric Blehm.  It’s the true story of a backcountry wilderness ranger in the High Sierra — what drove him to live his unusual life, how he became an expert in “search and rescue” when a backpacker would become lost or missing.  And then, when the ranger himself goes missing while on patrol, the search, conducted by his peers, for him.  I really liked the book, but then again, I know people very like the ranger and others depicted, so I felt like I was reading it from <almost> an insider’s perspective.

Currently, in addition to The End of Nature, I’m reading Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson.  I learned of these books (it’s the first in a trilogy) when David on the LessIsMore yahoo list posted an excerpt from Fifty Degrees Below (the second book in the trilogy).  The excerpt was this:

“they thought they were temperature tough-guys, but really they were just indoors all the time. They used their buildings as clothing, in effect, and heated or cooled these spaces to imitate what clothing did, no matter how crazy this was in energy terms.- – But they did it without thinking of it like that, without making that calculation. In the summer they wore blue jeans in imitation of what people three generations before had seen in Marlboro ads. – - Blue jeans were the SUVs of pants, part of a fantasy outdoor life…. Now as it got colder people still wore blue jeans, which were as useless in the cold as they were in the heat. Frank meanwhile
[living outdoors] shifted piece by piece into his mountaineering gear.”

I thought it sounded interesting, made a mental note, then thought no more about it.  Until a month or so ago, when Fifty Degrees Below showed up in a box of paperbacks donated to the library.  I snagged it and set it aside for me to read first.  Then I realized that when books are in series, I really like to read them in order.  So I submitted my request for Forty Signs of Rain, and it showed up on Friday.

Then, also, R has lent me his recently-finished copy of Ivan Doig’s Bucking the Sun.  Back when we were living together, he recommended Doig’s English Creek to me, and I really enjoyed it.  So when he said he was enjoying Bucking the Sun, I figured I’d like that too.  I haven’t started it yet though — just got it from him today, and I think I need to finish at least one of the others first — three books at once is a bit much for me right now.

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!