Tails of summer

Summer is wrapping up, weather is cooling off a bit, and it's starting to hint at fall. Our garden, however, is still huge, and we are finding beets and onions and potatoes, finishing up peas and lettuce, wondering what to do with ever-bearing chard, and watching corn and pumpkins grow. We have green tomatoes and peppers but not ripe ones yet.







Here are "before" and "after" shots of the garden.










And with fruit season in full swing in Wenatchee, we are drying cherries, canning nectarines, and cooking a lot.



Meanwhile, all the goats are doing well, Ernie and Bert are growing a lot.



Ernie has stopped sticking his head into fence holes and getting it stuck and crying until we pull him out. Bert has stopped falling asleep by himself in the middle of the field and then waking up panicked because he doesn't know where his mama is. We took both babies to the vet to have them neutered and de-horned (we tried a different vet, who does cats/dogs and llamas/goats/sheep... seemed to go okay), so they're all ready to go.

Both baby goats have become big fans of the "let's jump on top of Mike and Nadine's heads while they are sitting down" game. It is pretty cute now, but may lose it's charm as they get bigger... Bert and Ernie are probably the most comfortable with us of all our goats (although Frosty now asks for full-body scratching sessions, pretty amazing considering how skittish she used to be)



But a couple weeks ago, Mike and I decided we should sleep outside in the pen with the goats one night -- it would be just like camping, and we have great stars at our house... and we thought maybe even the more skittish goats (Breezy & Dublin) would get more used to us being around if we were there overnight. So we threw our air mattress over the fence with sheets and pillows and blankets. The goats sniffed it all a bit and then proceeding to ignore it and us for the rest of the night and next morning, until we stood up to take the mattress back inside, at which point they seemed to realize we were still there and came over to say hi. So... plan for friendly-izing the goats, not too successful. But the stars were great.

The babies have taken too to sitting on our laps chewing their cud. Unfortunately, Ed has taken to continually head butting us and pushing and biting the babies' tails whenever they sit on our laps. We tried scolding and pushing him off, and then began to wonder if maybe he was just feeling left out -- so Mike pulled Ed onto his lap for some chill time the other day (which is normally hard b/c he's so big) while I had Ernie and Bert, and he totally stopped pushing us around and biting the kids. Who knew... goat rivalry.

We have even gone away overnight twice, with no troubles (shhh... no jinxing). Once to friends of friends in Tonasket, near the Canadian border for lake swimming and barbeques. And once up past Leavenworth and Lake Wenatchee overnight camping with other friends who had just bought an old VW bus (with kitchen and sleeping loft inside) -- funny.











Other news includes Mike having found a year-round full-time job for a salmon restoration organization -- the kind of thing he's been looking for for quite a while. So that's exciting, and means we'll probably be staying in Wenatchee for a bit more, depending no how things go. Meanwhile, we're off later this week to Minnesota for a wedding and visits to Mike's family/friends, plus a quick stop at the State Fair.

Ah, last but not least, a question for you tech savvy readers. For whatever reason, I can't get videos to post anymore -- they upload fine, but then when you try to play them, it says "an error occurred - please try again later" but never seems to get any better -- any suggestions? I'm building up a backlog of baby goat videos for you... (meanwhile this is the closest I can get in a still picture to baby goats bouncing off of us (note blurry Ernie in the air on his way down falling off Mike's back), here while Mike tries to dig out eggs that chickens had hidden under the gazebo.

Smoke and mirrors

Being home

It seems like Mike & I are destined to stay home this summer. We had friends invite us camping this past weekend, so we came home Friday afternoon ready to get the goats fed and pack the car. It had been hot (90s and 100s) and dry (no rain) for the past month or so, which is pretty typical of summer here. But then we had a row of major thunderstorms come through -- rain, hail, lightening, thunder. Key word being lightening. Summer storms like this often bring summer fire danger to our area. And this time the lightening had sparked several fires in the region.

So the Friday afternoon we were planning to leave, a fire started two canyons over and we arrived home to see a plume of smoke over the hill by our house.



Checked the news and called the ranger district, who said that our canyon was not in danger, but that we should be ready to leave in case the fire spread unexpectedly. So we called the camping friends and canceled, packed a few changes of clothes and some photographs, and hooked up a little trailer to the car so that we could load up the goats if evacuations were advised (we figured the chickens would be okay if we left lots of chicken food and let them run/fly around at will).

Nahahum Canyon (the one two canyons over) was evacuated, planes carrying fire retardant flew overhead,



a water truck was stationed on the road above our house, and a guy drove down our road from the intersection of Nahahum Canyon with Hay Canyon and Olalla Canyon (ours) to say that he was evacuating, as his property was on fire. Yikes. But the fire stayed away from our area and by the next day the smoke was already going the other direction. In the end, the fire burned just under 2000 acres. We unpacked the cars, but still skipped the camping trip. And it was interesting, in any case, to see, the fire crews doing their work-- they're really good at it.

Meanwhile, our garden is getting big. We are eating lettuce and snap peas nonstop, and are freezing chard in baggies.


(Yes, this is our bathtub... and it's just the tip of the iceberg, pun intended :))






Corn is getting tall. Ooh, and garlic is ready.





And we're weeding weeding weeding. It looks pretty, though (and compare to earlier this season).









And while we really like traveling, it is also really nice to be home and get to see how everything evolves over the season.

Ooh, update on Ed. We took him in to the vet for castration. Unfortunately, the whole process made me think of medieval torture chambers, too much screaming (there was some sedation involved, but nevertheless) and a bit of gross-ness to boot. We (Ed and I) were both a little traumatized for the few days afterward. Not sure if goats just yell a lot, or if they don't do well when anesthesized so vets try not to overdo that, or if the rules and customs are just less gentle for livestock as they are for pets or humans, or what... I'm guessing it's probably all of the above. In any case, Ed is on the road to recovery, and I have to say, his personality is about a million times softer and less aggressive already. But yikes.


Pause for chicken picture.



Being at work

Time to talk about work for a little while. I had a big meeting of this three-state project I'm part of on biological control (making use of predator insects rather than pesticides to manage agricultural pests -- or at least trying not to kill these predator insects when using pesticides). And, as often happens with meetings, the ideas floating around were really interesting. I don't know whether or not the project will ultimately be successful, but if it is, it would basically mean getting three big-ish U.S. agricultural crops (apples, pears, and walnuts) to be relying heavily on biological control rather than chemical insecticides.

And we're not talking small-scale hippie organic farmers... we're talking everyone. And in a way that maintains good quality fruit production. Which is pretty revolutionary in the ag world. You don't hear the mainstream corn and soybean people talk about phasing out chemical use. At all. So for all my frustration that the university is too buddy-buddy with industry without considering worker and environmental health enough, this is really a major major step in terms of using those good relationships with the industry to push it majorly towards more sustainable practices (which in theory is why I liked the idea of this job in the first place).

But then I get back to my office and drown in boringness. Okay, not really drown. But I do sit there uninterested and uninspired a lot, writing reports and crunching numbers and making phone calls. It's the same problem I have always had with research -- the ideas are interesting, the execution is boring and tedious and long and a little bit soul-depleting. When I was an undergrad, my solution to this problem ended up being increasing the hours I worked in the lab I was in. In that case, working 10 hours a week rather than volunteering for 3 gave me more ownership of the work going on and I liked it more than just coming in and doing what someone told me to do without really understanding why (even if it was explained, it's not quite the same). Getting paid for the work helped too, I'm sure... But in this case, I'm trying the opposite strategy -- working less. Postponing our trip to Minnesota was too bad but did make it possible for me to start implementing the plan of taking Wednesdays off. I've done this a couple of times now, and I like it quite a bit.

Brief interruption for work photo playing pesticide safety roulette at a health fair for farm workers and their families (the times when my job is not office-based -- sometimes I like that better, although interestingly, not always... probably some of the same issues as below still apply)



Anyway, taking Wednesdays off turns the week into two two-day chunks. Which makes it easier to motivate to get stuff done before the mid-week "weekend" -- so even if the ideas aren't motivating enough on their own on a day-to-day basis, the "getting stuff done" impulse is. And staying home to weed (even if it's hot) and castrate goats (even if it's traumatic) provides a little more balance to the office-heavy work week (and theoretically frees up weekends a little more to do things like go camping (when there are no fires). So it's just the beginning, we'll have to see how it goes. One danger of course is that if my workload increases such that 4 days a week isn't enough, I'll have to reassess. But for now, I'll go with it.

Big-picture-wise, I think part of the problem with my job-motivation lies in a strategy mismatch with my boss. My boss is a great boss, really nice, really understanding, really flexible, responsive when you need anything, keyed in to the importance of work-life balance, vacations, etc. etc. But I've been coming to the conclusion that he is a great boss especially for individualists. You know, more typical academics, who are so fascinated by their work that really what they want is just to be facilitated with resources and left alone to answer interesting research questions. I think I tend to flounder in that work environment -- thus my issues with standard research. I guess I really like teamwork, even with all its annoyances. Or at least I'm not sure that any subject in and of itself is compelling enough to inspire me to want to work on it alone all the time. And don't get me wrong, I really like being alone... not all the time, but I need way more alone time than a lot of people I know. I just also like the idea of doing something I'm somewhat interested in alongside a group of people who are also interested in it and excited by it and together being able to create something useful.

Academia has a lot of collaboration but it's mostly in the group-project-at-school kind of way. You get together, split up the tasks needed to finish the project, each go away and do your piece, and then come back and cobble them together, sometimes more and sometimes less effectively. Very efficient, and really useful if the people in your group are hard to work with in a more integrated way, but not so satisfying (for me). So while my boss is great at providing resources and letting you go, at balancing independence with high expectations, he's not quite as good a team leader or team builder or collaborative thinker or communicator. There have been a couple of occasions where he really has been (grant applications that we've brainstormed together rather than pieced together from individual goals or that have been designed top-down), and those have been way more compelling for me. But most of the time he's more of an individualist -- really great for most academic types, but for me it's a bit rough.

Of course, I am grateful to have employment, to be somewhat interested in it, etc etc. It's lucky. But it's also tiring to spend the large majority of your day overcoming your natural personality tendencies, and makes it hard to come home and enjoy rather than crash. Anyway, good to know for thinking about how to mold career possibilities towards the more energy-replenishing ones inasmuch as becomes possible... We'll see... :)


End notes

Three interesting last tidbits. When Mike and I were bottle feeding the baby goats (which we no longer have to do -- everyone is doing a-okay (and still very cute, see below)),



we had bottles with goat milk that we'd take in and out of the fridge at feeding times. And after a while, our main bottle of goat milk started going sour. But the milk in the baby bottles didn't. Rather, it seemed to separate into chunks and liquid (curds & whey anyone?) without going bad, still tasted fine. Mike came up with a thoery -- since the goats kept sucking on the bottles, some of their stomach bacteria (rennet, anyone?) may have gotten back into the bottle (milk burps?) and started turning the milk into cheese rather than sour milk as it got warm and old.

I stopped into a cheese-making plant/museum on a recent work trip and read there that cheese was first discovered when someone put milk into a water-tight-sack that was made out of a sheep's stomach. Since sheep/goat stomach is what rennet was/is made out of, the milk in the sheep-stomach-container got hot and separated into curds and whey, tipping people off in the direction of cheese-making. So, Ernie and Bert have provided us perhaps a new way of preserving milk (don't worry, we didn't actually make cheese out of their leftover bottle milk) :)


Kids and kids.



And then we made them weed (alright, actually, their dad started weeding when they came over for brunch and it became all the rage).

Tidbit 2: I accidentally put my cell phone through the laundry (yes, after doing the same thing to mike's a couple weeks ago). While Mike's phone's screen works but buttons don't, my buttons work but the screen doesn't. Except for sometimes when it does. It seems that this screen function more or less corresponds to heat conditions -- too hot, screen dies; cooler air, screen lives. Putting the phone in the fridge when temperatures rise works sometimes. Luckily, I copied all my contact numbers out during a good-screen moment, and also luckily, our phone contract expires at the end of this month, so pretty soon we'll be 100% back in business for telephone contact (although truthfully, it all works not-that-badly right now anyway).

Tidbit 3: The dissertation-turned-book is out! It's pricey because target market is academic/university libraries, but click here to see the cover and description. Kinda cool.

So that's the scoop! I still can't get those goat videos to attach :(, but I'll keep trying! :)