Changes afoot

Well, it's definitely summer.  Hot weather, pretty hikes, opportunities for Eytan to try and flip over out of the backpack...

...warm weather naps for Timber (who was seen batting around a gopher a week ago and a (non-poisonous) baby snake yesterday. yikes.).



The garden is growing.  Buckwheat and oats are tall and starting to produce seed heads.  We're not sure yet whether or not to try harvesting them as grain or just cut the plants and feed them to goats.



 

The vegetables are benefiting mightily from their weedcloth. 



The lilacs we planted a few years ago flowered for the first time.  The strawberries and raspberries are plentiful.  And the asparagus that we harvested for a couple of months before letting it go to seed for next years is looking like forest.

 

Timber's presence seems to be cutting down on the number of mice in our barn.  There have been a few more earwigs in the chicken feed (lack of mice?), but all in all the chickens don't mind that.

Eytan has been very happy to be spending time outside.



He got a good giggle from watching his mama replace the rope attaching our hammock swing to the willow tree (after the old rope, which was really old and weathered, broke twice -- first with Eytan & Mike on the swing, then again with Eytan and I on it... no worries, everyone was fine, if startled).  But for whatever reason, he thought that me throwing a rope into the tree was hilarious.

Eytan likes the goats.  He especially likes when they interact with him on his terms.  He doesn't like when they crowd him or come over and sniff him while he's on the ground -- they're a little too intimidating.  But if he can stand up and grab onto the fence and pet them or crawl after them in the pasture, he's a big fan.  Actually, the same can probably be said for Timber, who seems to have a mixed relationships with the goats.



Eytan has become quite mobile and quite independent.  Our childproofing hasn't really kept up, but it's been fun to see.  And it's nice to have him understand most of what we say and communicate back about what he wants and doesn't wnat, even if he still gets pretty frustrated by what he's not quite yet able to do.

We've also been doing some traveling lately.  In June was a trip to NY, for a conference I was attending, which also involved some Saba/Safta/Great-George time (actually a lot of it, since Mike was taking a Spanish class and only there part of the time, and I was at said conference a bunch).

There were some visits to old friends.

And Great-George's camera became so interesting to look at that it elicited a lot of smiles captured on (digital) film.

There was even some musical exploration to boot.

In July, Mike and Eytan and I drove to Kelowna, British Columbia to meet my bro & sis-in-law for a quick weekend getaway.  It was really interesting to see some of the impacts of borders, even between countries as close as the U.S. and Canada.  On the Washington State side, the area we drove through (about 2 hours north of Wenatchee) looks like a desolate desert -- pretty, but like you're miles from anywhere (and you kind of are).  As soon as you cross into Canada, however, the same geographical landscape looks inhabited, and even touristy, brimming with roadside stands selling jam and u-pick cherries.  It's a difference that seems to stem from BC's decision ten years back to focus the area on agrotourism.  These are pictures from a winery we visited.

Meanwhile, the other big thing keeping us occupied is the whole idea of moving that I mentioned last time.  We did indeed decide to move to the Pittsburgh area in October.  I accepted a job as a professor in a masters program in food studies... it's a program that focuses from agriculture (with a burgeoning farm campus) through culinary education, with culture and policy and agroecology on the way.  It'll be different from what I'm doing now -- liberal arts college rather than public land grant, and primarily teaching, rather than research (although I'm going to hang onto the one grant in WA that most interests me, so we'll get to come back for a few weeks at a time a couple times a year).

It's been an interesting decision-making process because on the one hand, I've long sworn that I would never want to be university faculty, despite (or in part because of) my PhD.  My various experiences in universities have repeatedly turned me off to professor-dom -- too much of a pressure cooker, too much of a go-it-alone self-important tone.  And yet on the other hand, I've long thought that I might like to work at some sort of hands-on farm-school -- agriculture-oriented, combining theory with learning-through-doing.  And it turns out this job is sort of both.  From what I can tell, it seems to be about as hands-on, interdisciplinary, team-oriented, and boundary-crossing as you get in agricultural higher education.  And so I figure I should give it a try -- I might like it, despite my misgivings about going back to a university campus. And trying is really the only way to find out.

When I finished graduate school, I was really tired of feeling like I was doing all the pushing myself.  I suppose that is somewhat the nature of a dissertation, but I just felt like I wanted to someone else to be in charge for a while.  And after four years of  (both benefiting from and) being limited by working for someone whose professional priorities are pretty different from mine, I like the idea of being more in control of my own work again.  At the same time, I also like the idea of moving back into a more team-oriented atmosphere, or at least one that seems way more collaborative than many of the university departments I've come across in my (limited) experience.  So we'll see if it all pans out.

Interestingly, I recently found the pro/con list Mike and I put together when we were thinking of moving to Wenatchee.  And the pros seemed to be way more about getting to live in central Washington, and the rural and farm-oriented possibilities inherent, than on any high hopes of liking my job (even if I hoped I would).  Which is in fact sort of how it turned out in the end.  And so I guess it's time now to re-focus on the job parts and see what comes along with that.  Mike is applying to go back to school (teaching, nursing, or medicine are currently the strongest candidates), which is something he's wanted to do for a while -- and for which he's likely to have way more opportunities in Pittsburgh than in Wenatchee.

And truthfully, we might even be able to have some rural-ish options near Pittsburgh.  Western PA is supposed to be really pretty, and Pittsburgh is closer than I had realized to West Virginia and Ohio.  And so if it turns out that we can find a spot rural enough, without too cumbersome a commute into town, we may try, and could even potentially bring the goats with us (the Chatham campus farm does need some livestock).  We'll have to see what makes sense (probably on a visit we're planning for September, coinciding with a conference I had planned to go to even before this job was on the horizon).  It's interesting to me though, that the idea of moving to an urban area is one of the most hesitation-inducing aspects of this change.  I mean, I've spent way more time living in urban areas than in rural ones, and I like urban areas, and at times I really do wish that we didn't have to drive a half hour here for a supermarket or restaurant or doctor.  But I also have really liked being in this rural area -- the goats and the eggs and the orchards and the stars and the quiet and the mountains and the pace... so we'll see :)

This whole new job thing came up fairly quickly, so it just needs a little time to settle.  I had been sending out applications for jobs for a couple of years already, not hurriedly, but just when anything semi-relevant came up... And very little had bounced back.  The only interview I had had was for a livestock manager position at an educational farm in California last summer, which might have been really neat, but had a start date coinciding with me being 8 months pregnant, so it didn't quite work out.  And then all of a sudden this summer brought three interviews.  One for this job at Chatham, one for a sustainable agriculture professor/student field experience coordinator in Montana (for which I had a phone interview but not an in-person one) and one research/outreach job in farmworker health & safety in Seattle (which did go to an in-person interview, but where I ended up bowing out of the process when we decided on Pittsburgh -- it might have been interesting too, but more similar probably to what I'm doing now). 

So, there we have it.  We're trying to figure out how to sell or rent out our house and and wrap up loose ends and get some nice hikes in along the way.  I'm glad that we get to spend the summer here, and that we'll have reasons to keep coming back for a while yet.  And beyond that, I guess it's time to start thinking about the new adventures taking us out of the blazing western sun and back into the throes of temperate humidity.