Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Summer in Olalla
Summer in Olalla Canyon has been good. Worthy of some updates:
Visitors!
Mike & I have been lucky enough to have visitors this summer. In June we hosted Shea & Kari from Minneapolis, did lots of sleeping and eating and touring and hanging around in the yard, oh, and strawberry picking:
Also hiking the Icicle Gorge trail near Leavenworth, a couple of miles past where the Icicle Road washed out last spring (see here where the road used to be).
So now you hike around the washed out part of the road and continue along the road (where you used to be able to drive) until you get to the trailhead.
It was a really nice outing.
In July we hosted Rachel & Micah. Micah, who is almost 2 years old, took a real protector role with the goats. In the morning when he woke up, he would hear the goats bleating, stand by the window looking at them, and shout "I coming, goats! I coming!" and then go with Rachel and let them out of their small nighttime pen to go out and graze in our (finished!) larger fenced in area. Rachel & I had timed the visit to do a triathlon reunion tour, picking up where we left off 3 years ago at a sprint triathlon in Minnesota and keeping it going with a sprint triathlon in Chelan. In the end, Micah ended up getting sick and throwing up in the car on the way to the triathlon (poor kiddo!) and so Rachel mama stayed with him in the park while friend Amy & I did the triathlon. Here's the start and a couple pictures:
Both Rachel & Micah and Shea & Kari's visits included a trip to the new Leavenworth Farmers' Market where friends Tony & Amy (yup, triathlon Amy) grill pizzas as their first venture of a new catering company (plus there's lots of normal farmers market fare too. We've ended up coming to this market a lot to help out a little, buy food, and support the pizza booth.
Goats and chickens!
I promised last time to tell you about our new goats. Dublin and Breezy are pygmy goats, the meat breed equivalent to Frosty and Cle (who are dairy breed nigerian dwarves). It's been fun to have a few more goats running around keeping the grass in check, although Dublin seems to have a bit of a mean streak. Goats have to establish dominance when they first meet by head-butting for a while.
Okay, fine. But Dublin didn't know how to stop. She had not been the dominant goat in her previous herd, so she never learned how to be dominant graciously. And with our goats, she's by far the biggest. But even after her dominance was quite accepted by all, she'd run and head-butt the others, but sneakily in their side or stomach, rather than head to head. Which we wouldn't have worried about too much except for Frosty being pregnant and having goat babies in the belly that Dublin was head-butting. But they've seemed to pretty much work it out by now.
Frosty, by the way, is ready for babies any day now. Since our fence is done, we've stopped locking the goats up in the kennel inside the fence, instead leaving the kennel ready for Frosty, so she can have some space to herself rather than get bugged by the others during goat-birthing-ness. Already she's started keeping her distance from everyone else. Cle and Dublin and Breezy, especially now that the weather has cooled off a bit, go bouncing around the pasture, while Frosty just hangs out and chews on grass.
Meanwhile, Cle has really done well with the larger space -- he's back to cute and friendly again, no more mean and pushy (maybe because Dublin has that role now?). Nowadays, Frosty, Dublin, and Breezy go off minding their own business, eating while Cle wants to be part of the action -- see desire to be near camera.
Yesterday he started half-climbing up the ladder I was standing on to re-paint some numbers on the barn, deciding it was important to chew on my sneakers and untie my shoelaces.
But when we open the door to the chicken section of the barn, all the goats take notice and run to try and sneak in and steal chicken food. Meanwhile, the chickens themselves are now big and grownup.
The layers (6 of them) have gotten over their initial role as scaredy chickens. Originally, anytime we'd open the door or try to let any other chickens in with them (including the much younger and smaller meat chickens) they'd all huddle in a corner hiding and hoping no one would touch them. In part this makes sense because when we tried to introduce them earlier on to three "jungle" (i.e. half wild) chickens that we inherited from friends, the jungle chickens just kept pecking the layers until we separated them again.
Anyway, now they're all big enough that they all get along fine, they sleep inside the "coop" (a little room in the barn) and then run around outside during the day. Of the 6 meat birds we got originally, three have worked out well. The other three were breeds designed to live inside tightly packed chicken houses and eat nonstop. So they were kind of lazy, messy, not good at finding their own food, and generally just not too sharp. One of them was killed by a neighbor dog who broke through the chicken wire while we were at work, inspiring us to redo their barn room security (no problems since (so far)!). The dog also paralyzed one of the layers, but she has recovered astonishingly well, and still limps, but otherwise does just fine.
Meanwhile, the two commercial-style meat birds who were left after the dog incident had to be butchered at 8 weeks (or else they would get too heavy to support themselves), so Mike & I had a chicken-butchering sunday a couple weeks ago, which was a little sad, but okay in the end in an existential sort of way, and resulted in chicken in the freezer and some chicken soup.
Since then, all the animals have gotten into sort of a groove. When we come home, they come running (I'd like to say it's because they like us so much, but mostly it's because we feed them) and trip us because they're running so close under our feet. Meanwhile, we're trying to keep up with watering the pasture that feeds everyone. Central Washington gets almost no rain in summer, and so everything has gotten yellow and crispy. But so far so good. We've also managed to plant a few small fruit trees and a few tomato plants -- not the garden we had hoped to put in this year, but not bad for a busy first season :)
Work updates
All is well on the job front. After some job uncertainties, I seem to have more jobs than I need. The project I am on now got re-funded, and I've also committed to working with a faculty member from my (ex-)department (Community & Rural Sociology, which has since been cut, but many of the faculty are getting shifted to other departments) on a grant of hers. It shouldn't be more than full time all put together, but I have in the back of my head the idea to eventually cut down to slightly less than full time and get to spend more time on goats and gardens. So that may be pushed off a bit for now.
Meanwhile, although I still don't love research, the new project might be a good change from some of the frustrations of the old. I really do like the outreach portions of the old project, although I still feel like they're just half-efforts at good outreach. The team I work with is used to working with the tree fruit industry (i.e. growers, shippers, packers, etc.) and not with farm workers. And so, even though my job is in part to do outreach to workers, when push comes to shove the priorities are a bit different.
A couple of examples: We held 4 field days to help teach growers to use softer pest control methods. Four of us (plus several others from other WSU divisions) spent days preparing and then four full days out at the different sites. Attendance ranged from 20-40 people. I also helped organize two health fairs this summer at two migrant farm worker housing camps (well, really the community health clinics mostly organized them, but the project I'm on sponsored them). When the time came, no one I worked with had been involved with or really knew when the fairs were. I sent them an invitation, and no one came. Of course, the health fairs were held on a weekend, and the project did sponsor the events, which is great and a big improvement, but beyong that the level of involvement was pretty low. Nevertheless, we had 2-300 people at each health fair. So hours and hours and hours and personnel and personnel and personnel dedicated to 20-40 person grower trainings, but very little time dedicated to 2-300 person worker trainings.
A second example: When our final report was due to the state department of agriculture (who funding the project I'm on), four of us spent a full week sending drafts back and forth and perfecting it. When the final report was due for the section of the project related to environmental/labor issues, I was asked to write it and send it around for comments. After a week, no one had responded. I sent a reminder and got a few helpful suggestions. Granted, this second report was for a grant that provided less money than the first, but still, priorities are not as evenly distributed as I would like them to be, even if there is lip service to them, and so it makes it harder to invest as much in what I'm doing when there's little institutional support.
A third example: I went to meet with a toxicologist in Seattle who works on pesticide safety issues. He is concerned about farm worker health issues related to pesticide exposure. When I came back my boss said, "Oh I think I know who that guy is. Be careful -- he has an agenda." But from my perspective, he doesn't have any more of an agenda than anyone else. He has different politics and different opinions, but framing it as an "agenda" just serves to undermine his scientifically "objectivity." Which of course is a really slippery concept, since all scientists choose what questions they ask, what data they notice or don't notice, etc. in ways that are influenced by more than straight "facts." (of course, this perspective got me into lots of trouble with economists during my dissertation, even though it is philosophically and scholarly-ly quite well researched and supported). Anyway, point being there's a real hesitance to engage with anyone with different perspectives on the tree fruit industry and it's done under the guise of calling people "unscientific."
Here's a little break for a picture (of the bird babies that were living above our porch), and then back to the work stuff:
Okay, one more. My boss, who is actually a really nice guy and really really good at what he does (so I don't mean to downplay that), goes to Guatemala every year with his church mission to help build schools, hospitals, etc. It's a nice way for him to give back to "humanity." But at the same time, he doesn't seem terribly interested in this kind of "charity" for the people involved in his own community and own industry even (i.e. worker spend years moving from one housing camp to the next having their kids miss school, picking fruit, and making well well well below the poverty line in terms of wages). Not that the farmworkers are all doing so badly -- they have a lot of good opportunities and possibilities, but it seems as though it's easier to invest in social problems in a country far away where you have no involvement in the social problems you find there. Engaging more fully with farm workers here means questioning what the "industry" is doing in terms of providing a safe workplace and opportunities similar to what it provides to other workers. And if your professional life is wrapped up in supporting the industry (although i'd argue that the WSU tree fruit center, as a public institution, defines its clientele too narrowly), then it's easier to do your charity work away from home. But it also feels like restricting your broader social engagement to once a year and meanwhile sticking your head in the sand a little bit so you don't have to engage as much with what is around you.
Nevertheless, I can't be too negative about this (and keep in mind that I'm not so invested in my job that this particularly upsets me or makes me not like my boss (as I said he's a really nice guy) or makes me want to look for another job -- it's just one of those things that in an ideal world could be better). Actually I did just see a job posting for someone to do farm worker safety trainings, which is kind of appealing, but not the right time). Anyway, when we were writing a recent grant proposal (the one we just got), my boss really emphasized that he wanted a strong component in there to focus on outreach to Hispanic growers and workers. He also seemed really impressed by the number of people that attended the health fairs, even if after the fact. And also, our final report (the one that took four people a week's time to write) really did highlight the work we had done on outreach to workers (of course it's good publicity no matter what realities it represents, but still, it didn't have to highlight it quite as much as it did). So I can't really say there's not some commitment to the outreach portions, it's just really not the way I would approach it at all, and when push comes to shove, action priorities come out differently than what's proposed on paper.
Meanwhile
Other summer happenings have included a trip to Madison, WI for a conference (work-related), a trip to Minnesota for a funeral of Mike's grandpa (sad-related), and lots and lots and lots of logistics for having a wedding at our house in a couple of weeks (exciting-related).
So, that's pretty much all I've got for the moment, but see you again, if history holds, in another month or so.
p.s. Aren't those cool looking clouds? (from our yard one evening this summer)
Visitors!
Mike & I have been lucky enough to have visitors this summer. In June we hosted Shea & Kari from Minneapolis, did lots of sleeping and eating and touring and hanging around in the yard, oh, and strawberry picking:
Also hiking the Icicle Gorge trail near Leavenworth, a couple of miles past where the Icicle Road washed out last spring (see here where the road used to be).
So now you hike around the washed out part of the road and continue along the road (where you used to be able to drive) until you get to the trailhead.
It was a really nice outing.
In July we hosted Rachel & Micah. Micah, who is almost 2 years old, took a real protector role with the goats. In the morning when he woke up, he would hear the goats bleating, stand by the window looking at them, and shout "I coming, goats! I coming!" and then go with Rachel and let them out of their small nighttime pen to go out and graze in our (finished!) larger fenced in area. Rachel & I had timed the visit to do a triathlon reunion tour, picking up where we left off 3 years ago at a sprint triathlon in Minnesota and keeping it going with a sprint triathlon in Chelan. In the end, Micah ended up getting sick and throwing up in the car on the way to the triathlon (poor kiddo!) and so Rachel mama stayed with him in the park while friend Amy & I did the triathlon. Here's the start and a couple pictures:
Both Rachel & Micah and Shea & Kari's visits included a trip to the new Leavenworth Farmers' Market where friends Tony & Amy (yup, triathlon Amy) grill pizzas as their first venture of a new catering company (plus there's lots of normal farmers market fare too. We've ended up coming to this market a lot to help out a little, buy food, and support the pizza booth.
Goats and chickens!
I promised last time to tell you about our new goats. Dublin and Breezy are pygmy goats, the meat breed equivalent to Frosty and Cle (who are dairy breed nigerian dwarves). It's been fun to have a few more goats running around keeping the grass in check, although Dublin seems to have a bit of a mean streak. Goats have to establish dominance when they first meet by head-butting for a while.
Okay, fine. But Dublin didn't know how to stop. She had not been the dominant goat in her previous herd, so she never learned how to be dominant graciously. And with our goats, she's by far the biggest. But even after her dominance was quite accepted by all, she'd run and head-butt the others, but sneakily in their side or stomach, rather than head to head. Which we wouldn't have worried about too much except for Frosty being pregnant and having goat babies in the belly that Dublin was head-butting. But they've seemed to pretty much work it out by now.
Frosty, by the way, is ready for babies any day now. Since our fence is done, we've stopped locking the goats up in the kennel inside the fence, instead leaving the kennel ready for Frosty, so she can have some space to herself rather than get bugged by the others during goat-birthing-ness. Already she's started keeping her distance from everyone else. Cle and Dublin and Breezy, especially now that the weather has cooled off a bit, go bouncing around the pasture, while Frosty just hangs out and chews on grass.
Meanwhile, Cle has really done well with the larger space -- he's back to cute and friendly again, no more mean and pushy (maybe because Dublin has that role now?). Nowadays, Frosty, Dublin, and Breezy go off minding their own business, eating while Cle wants to be part of the action -- see desire to be near camera.
Yesterday he started half-climbing up the ladder I was standing on to re-paint some numbers on the barn, deciding it was important to chew on my sneakers and untie my shoelaces.
But when we open the door to the chicken section of the barn, all the goats take notice and run to try and sneak in and steal chicken food. Meanwhile, the chickens themselves are now big and grownup.
The layers (6 of them) have gotten over their initial role as scaredy chickens. Originally, anytime we'd open the door or try to let any other chickens in with them (including the much younger and smaller meat chickens) they'd all huddle in a corner hiding and hoping no one would touch them. In part this makes sense because when we tried to introduce them earlier on to three "jungle" (i.e. half wild) chickens that we inherited from friends, the jungle chickens just kept pecking the layers until we separated them again.
Anyway, now they're all big enough that they all get along fine, they sleep inside the "coop" (a little room in the barn) and then run around outside during the day. Of the 6 meat birds we got originally, three have worked out well. The other three were breeds designed to live inside tightly packed chicken houses and eat nonstop. So they were kind of lazy, messy, not good at finding their own food, and generally just not too sharp. One of them was killed by a neighbor dog who broke through the chicken wire while we were at work, inspiring us to redo their barn room security (no problems since (so far)!). The dog also paralyzed one of the layers, but she has recovered astonishingly well, and still limps, but otherwise does just fine.
Meanwhile, the two commercial-style meat birds who were left after the dog incident had to be butchered at 8 weeks (or else they would get too heavy to support themselves), so Mike & I had a chicken-butchering sunday a couple weeks ago, which was a little sad, but okay in the end in an existential sort of way, and resulted in chicken in the freezer and some chicken soup.
Since then, all the animals have gotten into sort of a groove. When we come home, they come running (I'd like to say it's because they like us so much, but mostly it's because we feed them) and trip us because they're running so close under our feet. Meanwhile, we're trying to keep up with watering the pasture that feeds everyone. Central Washington gets almost no rain in summer, and so everything has gotten yellow and crispy. But so far so good. We've also managed to plant a few small fruit trees and a few tomato plants -- not the garden we had hoped to put in this year, but not bad for a busy first season :)
Work updates
All is well on the job front. After some job uncertainties, I seem to have more jobs than I need. The project I am on now got re-funded, and I've also committed to working with a faculty member from my (ex-)department (Community & Rural Sociology, which has since been cut, but many of the faculty are getting shifted to other departments) on a grant of hers. It shouldn't be more than full time all put together, but I have in the back of my head the idea to eventually cut down to slightly less than full time and get to spend more time on goats and gardens. So that may be pushed off a bit for now.
Meanwhile, although I still don't love research, the new project might be a good change from some of the frustrations of the old. I really do like the outreach portions of the old project, although I still feel like they're just half-efforts at good outreach. The team I work with is used to working with the tree fruit industry (i.e. growers, shippers, packers, etc.) and not with farm workers. And so, even though my job is in part to do outreach to workers, when push comes to shove the priorities are a bit different.
A couple of examples: We held 4 field days to help teach growers to use softer pest control methods. Four of us (plus several others from other WSU divisions) spent days preparing and then four full days out at the different sites. Attendance ranged from 20-40 people. I also helped organize two health fairs this summer at two migrant farm worker housing camps (well, really the community health clinics mostly organized them, but the project I'm on sponsored them). When the time came, no one I worked with had been involved with or really knew when the fairs were. I sent them an invitation, and no one came. Of course, the health fairs were held on a weekend, and the project did sponsor the events, which is great and a big improvement, but beyong that the level of involvement was pretty low. Nevertheless, we had 2-300 people at each health fair. So hours and hours and hours and personnel and personnel and personnel dedicated to 20-40 person grower trainings, but very little time dedicated to 2-300 person worker trainings.
A second example: When our final report was due to the state department of agriculture (who funding the project I'm on), four of us spent a full week sending drafts back and forth and perfecting it. When the final report was due for the section of the project related to environmental/labor issues, I was asked to write it and send it around for comments. After a week, no one had responded. I sent a reminder and got a few helpful suggestions. Granted, this second report was for a grant that provided less money than the first, but still, priorities are not as evenly distributed as I would like them to be, even if there is lip service to them, and so it makes it harder to invest as much in what I'm doing when there's little institutional support.
A third example: I went to meet with a toxicologist in Seattle who works on pesticide safety issues. He is concerned about farm worker health issues related to pesticide exposure. When I came back my boss said, "Oh I think I know who that guy is. Be careful -- he has an agenda." But from my perspective, he doesn't have any more of an agenda than anyone else. He has different politics and different opinions, but framing it as an "agenda" just serves to undermine his scientifically "objectivity." Which of course is a really slippery concept, since all scientists choose what questions they ask, what data they notice or don't notice, etc. in ways that are influenced by more than straight "facts." (of course, this perspective got me into lots of trouble with economists during my dissertation, even though it is philosophically and scholarly-ly quite well researched and supported). Anyway, point being there's a real hesitance to engage with anyone with different perspectives on the tree fruit industry and it's done under the guise of calling people "unscientific."
Here's a little break for a picture (of the bird babies that were living above our porch), and then back to the work stuff:
Okay, one more. My boss, who is actually a really nice guy and really really good at what he does (so I don't mean to downplay that), goes to Guatemala every year with his church mission to help build schools, hospitals, etc. It's a nice way for him to give back to "humanity." But at the same time, he doesn't seem terribly interested in this kind of "charity" for the people involved in his own community and own industry even (i.e. worker spend years moving from one housing camp to the next having their kids miss school, picking fruit, and making well well well below the poverty line in terms of wages). Not that the farmworkers are all doing so badly -- they have a lot of good opportunities and possibilities, but it seems as though it's easier to invest in social problems in a country far away where you have no involvement in the social problems you find there. Engaging more fully with farm workers here means questioning what the "industry" is doing in terms of providing a safe workplace and opportunities similar to what it provides to other workers. And if your professional life is wrapped up in supporting the industry (although i'd argue that the WSU tree fruit center, as a public institution, defines its clientele too narrowly), then it's easier to do your charity work away from home. But it also feels like restricting your broader social engagement to once a year and meanwhile sticking your head in the sand a little bit so you don't have to engage as much with what is around you.
Nevertheless, I can't be too negative about this (and keep in mind that I'm not so invested in my job that this particularly upsets me or makes me not like my boss (as I said he's a really nice guy) or makes me want to look for another job -- it's just one of those things that in an ideal world could be better). Actually I did just see a job posting for someone to do farm worker safety trainings, which is kind of appealing, but not the right time). Anyway, when we were writing a recent grant proposal (the one we just got), my boss really emphasized that he wanted a strong component in there to focus on outreach to Hispanic growers and workers. He also seemed really impressed by the number of people that attended the health fairs, even if after the fact. And also, our final report (the one that took four people a week's time to write) really did highlight the work we had done on outreach to workers (of course it's good publicity no matter what realities it represents, but still, it didn't have to highlight it quite as much as it did). So I can't really say there's not some commitment to the outreach portions, it's just really not the way I would approach it at all, and when push comes to shove, action priorities come out differently than what's proposed on paper.
Meanwhile
Other summer happenings have included a trip to Madison, WI for a conference (work-related), a trip to Minnesota for a funeral of Mike's grandpa (sad-related), and lots and lots and lots of logistics for having a wedding at our house in a couple of weeks (exciting-related).
So, that's pretty much all I've got for the moment, but see you again, if history holds, in another month or so.
p.s. Aren't those cool looking clouds? (from our yard one evening this summer)
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Animalitos
I guess I'm sort of a monthly blog post-er. Good to know, I suppose.
This month has been pretty packed. Mike & I moved into our new place, managed (with tons of help) to get it painted (yes, there is one wall of one room that is that bright orange color)...
...and fenced and full of cardboard boxes (here's a picture from a little ways down the road)...:
...and also went to NY for a wedding of friends and also a little pre-wedding party for us too at my folks' place (lots of old friends in the garden on a pretty day, it was lovely).
There are also all sorts of animalito updates, starting, of course, with the goats.
Frosty and Cle have changed a bit the last few months. Where Frosty used to be the dominant goat, Cle seems now to have taken her place. And not that she (Frosty) was all that kind to Cle in her dominance, but Cle has gotten even a bit less kind and more annoying with his. He's always been more hyper than she, but now he's also more aggressive, pushing her off the top of wherever she's sitting, and just generally being a bit of a pain. Not that she doesn't push back, but it's just different than it used to be. They're less attached at the hip, a little more independent (well, it's all relative) and kind of combative.
The other funny thing is that all of a sudden everything we had in the old house -- leashes, lawn, goats -- now looks so small against the backdrop of our current (versus former) yard. There's no way that two dwarf goats on their own can keep up with their jobs as lawnmowers anymore. Luckily, the previous resident of the house left us a push mower, and Frosty is looking pretty pregnant (check out the udder!)
so we might be getting some extra goat help this fall (and we also found two pygmy goats on craigslist in need of homes who may join the herd as well this week -- p.s. I wrote this a little while ago, so we do in fact have two more goats now -- updates and photos pending).
Anyway, the major goal at the new place so far has been getting a fence up. There already is a horse fence, but that's just big wood slats that would not keep the goats anywhere near inside it. So Mike has been lining this fence with smaller-holed wire fencing. It's almost done, and so the goats almost have free reign of that part of the yard (which is actually really exciting and fun to see, and I think it'll help mitigate hyper Cle too -- p.s. true, Cle is much less annoying and way cooler in the bigger space), and meanwhile it's given us the opportunity to try out some different goat pen configurations.
At first we just had the goats in their normal kennel and we'd take them out on leashes when we were around. Then we tried tying the leashes to posts when we were around, which used to work at the old house. But with these bigger spaces, somehow it just didn't go as well. I think the goats, even though they don't really like us getting too too close (well, at least Frosty doesn't), didn't want us to get too far away either in this new unfamiliar place. Every time we were out of sight, Frosty would just start bleating and bleating. Whenever we came back over, she'd be fine.
So one day Mike figured out that if he attached their leashes to our push mechanical reel mower they would mostly stay in place but if they got really excited, they could pull it around the yard behind them. Think goat-style ball and chain. (And note fence-in-progress too below).
That way they could stay near-ish to us as we worked on the fence or the moving boxes, but couldn't run outside the bounds of where they were supposed to be. That worked great until all that pulling snapped the two leashes and started wedging the wooden handle off the mower, at which point we started just tying their leashes together to make them one anothers' ball and chains.
The other problem with the lawnmower system came out one day when, untying them from the mower to put them back in the kennel, Cle, in his infinite hyper-ness, just pulled the leash out of my hand and took off running, dragging the leash behind him. As Mike and I started after him (he's way faster than us), we saw him coming around the side of the house, leaping off the porch with leash in tow. A quick dive tackle got him back under control, but it reminded me of the dive tackle chase adventures from when we first got them last fall. (apparently we haven't done our duty well enough training them it seems -- the pygmies who we've adopted are rumored to understand "here goats" and come when called... although we haven't really seen it work yet -- it seems that that kind of training works better the more goats you have, and the more of a herd mentality you can develop).
Anyway, we've meanwhile added some chickens as well -- 6 (meat) chicks, 6 young layers (may start laying in the fall), and 3 inherited "jungle" (i.e. kind of wild) chickens (who started pecking at our layers when put in the same space, so we've just let them out to wander the yard and feed themselves instead). The meat chicks are living in our bathtub in a cardboard box with a heat lamp, until they grow enough feathers to be out in the barn.
The layers are in the barn until they grow enough feathers and get big enough to be outside and defend themselves against the jungle chickens (okay, this photo is actually a preview of them being a bit bigger and exploring outdoors, more to come).
The first few days with us, one of the barn chickens got lost under a pallet on the dirt floor, but after a rescue (which she probably didn't need, chickens are pretty self-sufficient even if not so smart), they're all back in the game.
In other bird news, we have a nest of wild baby and mama birds inside the electrical box right outside our house, which probably will need some disrupting once the babies leave the nest, as I can't imagine it's that good for the electrical box. And in non-bird news, we saw a (bull?) snake in the grass -- well actually, while laying fence, we had a fence coil that had been spread out and then slipped and rolled itself back up, catching the snake (that was 10 feet from us but we hadn't seen it) up in it and throwing it across the yard. It was a bit of a scare for all of us, snake included I'm sure.
And in non-bird, non-snake news, we were driving back up to the house one evening after dark and saw a young deer in the road who didn't quite understand how to get out of the way of a car. So as we slowed down, the deer tried to run away, but did so by running ahead of us on the road so that we just had to drive slowly behind, following it. Eventually he found a side road and figured out how to get onto a different path and we could make it the rest of the way home at more than 5 miles per hour.
So I guess our lives have gotten a bit farmier in the last few weeks. Mornings and evenings checking on animals and chasing wayward goats inbetween. I like it, though. A bit overwhelming in terms of getting things all settled, but I like coming home in the evening and getting to spend a couple hours outside putting up chicken wire (well, I didn't like the chicken wire itself that much, but I liked needing to be outside) or rototilling a garden space (well, just a little bit so far -- the rototiller is still a work in progress (ooh, and we got a snowblower for winter too)). Will keep you posted.
I think that's it for animal news, surely as we unpack more there will be more house pictures and updates... Meanwhile, a question for you readers: is there too much goat news on this blog or are we liking the balance? Weigh in and be entered in a raffle drawing (well, maybe).
Meanwhile, here are a couple of pictures from bike-riding the loop trail by the Columbia river in Wenatchee.
Hope all is well and be back soon.
N :)
This month has been pretty packed. Mike & I moved into our new place, managed (with tons of help) to get it painted (yes, there is one wall of one room that is that bright orange color)...
...and fenced and full of cardboard boxes (here's a picture from a little ways down the road)...:
...and also went to NY for a wedding of friends and also a little pre-wedding party for us too at my folks' place (lots of old friends in the garden on a pretty day, it was lovely).
There are also all sorts of animalito updates, starting, of course, with the goats.
Frosty and Cle have changed a bit the last few months. Where Frosty used to be the dominant goat, Cle seems now to have taken her place. And not that she (Frosty) was all that kind to Cle in her dominance, but Cle has gotten even a bit less kind and more annoying with his. He's always been more hyper than she, but now he's also more aggressive, pushing her off the top of wherever she's sitting, and just generally being a bit of a pain. Not that she doesn't push back, but it's just different than it used to be. They're less attached at the hip, a little more independent (well, it's all relative) and kind of combative.
The other funny thing is that all of a sudden everything we had in the old house -- leashes, lawn, goats -- now looks so small against the backdrop of our current (versus former) yard. There's no way that two dwarf goats on their own can keep up with their jobs as lawnmowers anymore. Luckily, the previous resident of the house left us a push mower, and Frosty is looking pretty pregnant (check out the udder!)
so we might be getting some extra goat help this fall (and we also found two pygmy goats on craigslist in need of homes who may join the herd as well this week -- p.s. I wrote this a little while ago, so we do in fact have two more goats now -- updates and photos pending).
Anyway, the major goal at the new place so far has been getting a fence up. There already is a horse fence, but that's just big wood slats that would not keep the goats anywhere near inside it. So Mike has been lining this fence with smaller-holed wire fencing. It's almost done, and so the goats almost have free reign of that part of the yard (which is actually really exciting and fun to see, and I think it'll help mitigate hyper Cle too -- p.s. true, Cle is much less annoying and way cooler in the bigger space), and meanwhile it's given us the opportunity to try out some different goat pen configurations.
At first we just had the goats in their normal kennel and we'd take them out on leashes when we were around. Then we tried tying the leashes to posts when we were around, which used to work at the old house. But with these bigger spaces, somehow it just didn't go as well. I think the goats, even though they don't really like us getting too too close (well, at least Frosty doesn't), didn't want us to get too far away either in this new unfamiliar place. Every time we were out of sight, Frosty would just start bleating and bleating. Whenever we came back over, she'd be fine.
So one day Mike figured out that if he attached their leashes to our push mechanical reel mower they would mostly stay in place but if they got really excited, they could pull it around the yard behind them. Think goat-style ball and chain. (And note fence-in-progress too below).
That way they could stay near-ish to us as we worked on the fence or the moving boxes, but couldn't run outside the bounds of where they were supposed to be. That worked great until all that pulling snapped the two leashes and started wedging the wooden handle off the mower, at which point we started just tying their leashes together to make them one anothers' ball and chains.
The other problem with the lawnmower system came out one day when, untying them from the mower to put them back in the kennel, Cle, in his infinite hyper-ness, just pulled the leash out of my hand and took off running, dragging the leash behind him. As Mike and I started after him (he's way faster than us), we saw him coming around the side of the house, leaping off the porch with leash in tow. A quick dive tackle got him back under control, but it reminded me of the dive tackle chase adventures from when we first got them last fall. (apparently we haven't done our duty well enough training them it seems -- the pygmies who we've adopted are rumored to understand "here goats" and come when called... although we haven't really seen it work yet -- it seems that that kind of training works better the more goats you have, and the more of a herd mentality you can develop).
Anyway, we've meanwhile added some chickens as well -- 6 (meat) chicks, 6 young layers (may start laying in the fall), and 3 inherited "jungle" (i.e. kind of wild) chickens (who started pecking at our layers when put in the same space, so we've just let them out to wander the yard and feed themselves instead). The meat chicks are living in our bathtub in a cardboard box with a heat lamp, until they grow enough feathers to be out in the barn.
The layers are in the barn until they grow enough feathers and get big enough to be outside and defend themselves against the jungle chickens (okay, this photo is actually a preview of them being a bit bigger and exploring outdoors, more to come).
The first few days with us, one of the barn chickens got lost under a pallet on the dirt floor, but after a rescue (which she probably didn't need, chickens are pretty self-sufficient even if not so smart), they're all back in the game.
In other bird news, we have a nest of wild baby and mama birds inside the electrical box right outside our house, which probably will need some disrupting once the babies leave the nest, as I can't imagine it's that good for the electrical box. And in non-bird news, we saw a (bull?) snake in the grass -- well actually, while laying fence, we had a fence coil that had been spread out and then slipped and rolled itself back up, catching the snake (that was 10 feet from us but we hadn't seen it) up in it and throwing it across the yard. It was a bit of a scare for all of us, snake included I'm sure.
And in non-bird, non-snake news, we were driving back up to the house one evening after dark and saw a young deer in the road who didn't quite understand how to get out of the way of a car. So as we slowed down, the deer tried to run away, but did so by running ahead of us on the road so that we just had to drive slowly behind, following it. Eventually he found a side road and figured out how to get onto a different path and we could make it the rest of the way home at more than 5 miles per hour.
So I guess our lives have gotten a bit farmier in the last few weeks. Mornings and evenings checking on animals and chasing wayward goats inbetween. I like it, though. A bit overwhelming in terms of getting things all settled, but I like coming home in the evening and getting to spend a couple hours outside putting up chicken wire (well, I didn't like the chicken wire itself that much, but I liked needing to be outside) or rototilling a garden space (well, just a little bit so far -- the rototiller is still a work in progress (ooh, and we got a snowblower for winter too)). Will keep you posted.
I think that's it for animal news, surely as we unpack more there will be more house pictures and updates... Meanwhile, a question for you readers: is there too much goat news on this blog or are we liking the balance? Weigh in and be entered in a raffle drawing (well, maybe).
Meanwhile, here are a couple of pictures from bike-riding the loop trail by the Columbia river in Wenatchee.
Hope all is well and be back soon.
N :)
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Transitions and thinkings
Note: I've been hoping to write shorter posts more often, but it just hasn't happened yet. So here's another long-ish catch-up update!
It's been a busy month. Mike and I are moving as of a week from today into Olalla Canyon 20 miles outside of Wenatchee. It's been beautiful up there (at 2500 feet), although so far our activities in the area have consisted of driving up, painting the house, driving down, driving up, painting the house, driving down, driving up, dropping off fencing to be put up later, driving down, and more recently, boxing up stuff, driving up, unloading stuff, and driving down. You probably get the point.
The garden we're planning for this summer there is on hold for another few weeks until we get better settled, although I'm hoping to buy some chicks (i.e. baby chickens) at the feed store tomorrow to raise in our bathtub until they get big enough to let loose... Meanwhile we're very lucky and grateful to have had friends come and paint with us (and bring BBQ grills along for making dinner), lend us pickup trucks, and help with all sorts of odds and ends. So, soon our photos will come from a new spot! Stay tuned, but here are a few previews of the hillside, the barn, and the side of the house:
Meanwhile, I have been wanting for a while now to catch you up on work stuff. So I've taken a break from packing this afternoon to do some blog writing, as likely we'll stay busy with house stuff for another few weeks and beyond. Plus Mike is in Alaska until tomorrow, at the long-awaited World Beard Championships, so I'm taking advantage of the quieter house (see video in Anchorage paper http://community.adn.com/mini_apps/vmix/player.php?ID=4239155). (For those of you who don't know Mike, I would direct you to look for the guy with the big beard, but in this case that doesn't really help, now does it?)
So here goes:
Work
Washington State University, where I work, is in the midst of budget cuts. As part of this, there is a proposal to cut my department (Community & Rural Sociology) and lay off all the faculty and staff. This may get modified in the next week or so, but as of now there's some, well, uncertainty about the future. My job is still good through December since I am actually paid not by my department but rather by the Tree Fruit Research Center where I am based. After December it will all depend on whether or not the project I am on finds more funding. Our hoped-for funding did not come through, but there are still other potential options. I had also hoped to jump projects after current funding ran out, but the "jump to" project would have been under the direction of a faculty member from my department currently slated to be laid off. So we'll see.
In any case, this seems to be a good transitiony moment to think (and write) about job stuff, prospects, likes and dislikes, and thoughts for how to proceed from here. So below is a random picture, from the road on the way back from our new house towards town, to represent "transitiony-ness":
See? Transitiony-ness encapsulated :)
Outreach and social science
Anyway, at the moment, I like my job okay. Last month I didn't like it too much -- too much office time, and a lack of pressing deadlines to motivate. Now I am back out of the office more and get to remember that I do actually like seeing things and talking to people, although now of course deadlines for written office-based products are looming close too.
I like that my job asks me to create relationships with environmental groups and farm workers on the part of an institution that has generally done a good job networking with the apple industry but not these other broader stakeholders. It's cool that people are starting to recognize the importance of working not just with people who apply pesticides, but also those concerned about pesticide exposure and pesticide safety as well (as they too are constituents of a public insititution and should have as much access to that institution as the tree fruit industry does).
The tricky part, though, is that the people I work for (and the apple industry more broadly) are not really used to working with these other groups. So I will often come back with ideas or feedback from meeting with groups and be told, "Well, that's nice, but we can't actually do that." So an interest in outreach but lack of follow through. And it's not that industry or WSU has to be responsive to every (or even most) requests, but it is true that "working with new groups" doesn't mean just telling them what a good job we're doing (which I think was implicitly, although probably not consciously, the original idea) -- instead it means actually compromising and negotiating and doing all that harder stuff that makes you, at least initially, more vulnerable.
So it can be frustrating to be given the go-ahead to do outreach but not actually be able to do any of it in a way that I think will be effective. That said, I did just succeed in getting our project to fund 2 health fairs (education on pesticide safety as well as diabetes prevention and other health concerns) at migrant farm worker camps this summer, so that's a definite step in the right direction. Maybe I just need to be more patient, as these sorts of changes take a while (but that is hard when your time frame is a 2-year, now maybe 1 1/2 year post-doc).
Similar issues come up with being a "social scientist" in a natural scientist haven. The entomologists (bug researchers) think it's a good idea to find out why farmers haven't adopted certain pest control practices, so they have me work on surveys, but expect the answers we get back to fit into a puzzle that will let them continue doing what they've been doing as they've been doing it. They're not quite ready to learn from these surveys that getting farmers to farm more sustainably means that not just farmers, but researchers too have to negotiate and change and adapt what they are doing.
Instead, the researchers (subconsciously, it's not really an articulated thing) want me to go out and solve the challenge of getting farmers to adopt new pest control methods and come back and tell them it's fixed so they can continue to research and recommend new methods of pest control. It's not that they're not doing a good job or don't have good intentions -- they really do, but just a little more openness, taking into account the way that humans act and not just the ways that bugs act, could make it work better.
So, again, while there's an interest in expanding the way things are done, there is resistance to changing things too much in the service of that expansion, which really makes both the expansion, and also my job, hard.
One funny example is that researchers get frustrated that apple growers don't accept and adopt their well-researched and well-proven pesticide recommendations. After all, these recommendations have been scientifically vetted. But in order to increase survey response rates to figure out why these growers have not jumped on the bandwagon, when I suggest putting $1 in each survey envelope (which is basically the only known, i.e. scientifically-vetted, way to increase survey response rates), the response is a, "no, that won't really work here."
And whereas it's okay to resist "scientifically demonstrated" recommendations because they may or may not fit a particular situation, or even because you just don't believe in their validity, it's somewhat contradictory to resist them and at the same time not understand why other people (growers) resist your scientific recommendations. Again, a mismatch between understanding how people work and understanding how "science" (or in this case "social science") works.
Health and border issues
Meanwhile, there have been some interesting, perhaps more rewarding, pieces to my job. I've been attending a lot of rural health care and farm worker health focused conferences, which has been a new thing for me. I was just at one in San Antonio, TX (which was really a neat place, actually), and went to a western region one earlier this year in San Diego, CA. In San Diego it was particularly interesting because we were so near the Mexican border that we got to accompany a group down to the border fence and check it out. This was a church-based group that does communion across the fence, in protest of plans to turn the slatted fence there into a solid wall.
The issue with the wall there is that this is a spot where few people actually cross illegally, but where many people come to meet and wave at family members living on the opposite side. So the impact of a solid wall there would be more psychological than preventative. It's an odd spot too because it's right on the beach, and so this fence that separates the Mexican side of the beach from the U.S. side of the beach just extends out into the water and then stops. And people on each side are walking the beach and buying ice creams and selling bracelets and meeting up with family members, and now taking communion in this bilingual strategic religious/protest ceremony, with border patrol looking on. Here are a few photos looking towards Mexico (the bottom one is the city of Tijuana):
Of course this is all tied in to immigration debates, as Mexican immigrants crossing the fence are among the highest profile groups in national debates, even though they are not actually the largest group of immigrants here. But the crossings are dramatic, they involve a relatively high risk of thirst and heat-related deaths crossing the deserts, and yet people continue to come, motivated by the prospect of jobs. U.S. employers are hiring farm workers and construction workers, even in a recession and despite government and societal censure.
For people who come to work in agriculture, theirs is a lifestyle of staying out of the way of border police, and migrating with the crops from California or Texas up to the northern parts of the country and then back. Which makes it hard for people to access health care when needed, and yet they work in high risk jobs where it can be crucial. And many migrants now come from parts of Mexico where not Spanish, but rather Mixteco or other indigenous languages are spoken, providing new linguistic obstacles to accessing health care...
Okay, you're right, these aren't migrant health workers, they are the Wenatchee hospital delegation performing in the Apple Blossom parade (see more details below), but it almost fit!
Anyway, in terms of my job prospects and how they relate to all this, I'm finding what I do interesting enough to stick with it for the moment, or at least while it lasts. Or ideally, to find some way to do it part time and spend more time with more goats and chickens and gardens at our soon-to-be new place. And I'm betting that some new opportunities will arise as the old ones potentially fade. Meanwhile, Mike and I like it here enough to try and stick around a little longer and see what happens.
Not work
What else is new these days outside of work?
Well, the spring green has come and gone in Wenatchee -- there are about three weeks of green here, where hillsides turn from brown to all shades of green (and then fade back to brown). The green is complemented by thousands of wildflowers all over the place. They say (whoever they are) that you get attuned to really light shades of green when you live here. It's only driving to the west side of the mountains that makes you realize that our green, relatively speaking, is not a deep green like theirs is... I guess it's a different kind of pretty.
The Wenatchee Apple Blossom festival has also come and gone, with a big parade down Wenatchee Ave (and some vendors selling Greek food in the park, which I greatly appreciated). Here are a few parade photos, with different pieces of Wenatchee valley culture represented (plus one with the traveling princesses of Penticton from across the (other) border in Canada).
Here are a couple of pictures too of a spring mushrooming trip. Apparently our new soon-to-be home-canyon may also yield mushrooms in spring and fall, according to the funny older guy who sold us the place (and who invited us up last month to visit and see what he had fixed up before the closing and also to feed us cookies and fund our purchase of a washing machine). Funny.
Meanwhile, I've also started teaching beginning Hebrew to a Messianic congregation here -- a group that follows Old Testament practices but concurrently believes in Jesus. It's an odd combination, but kind of fun to be teaching them basics. I also have a bit of an out-standing request to teach Spanish to friends, and the latest thought has been to combine such Spanish lessons with hiking excursions, but we've really been lagging on the hiking front lately. Once we're settled in with the move, we're hoping to get back to some hiking outings and wine tastings and visits to apple orchards south of here owned by guys who remind us of Willie Nelson (or who did when we got to visit this past winter).
Oh, and we're pretty sure that Frosty the goat is pregnant -- she has not been going into heat anymore, and her udder is getting more visible. Of course, we tend to read signs into any changed behavior, like "She's lying down a lot, she must be pregnant" (even though the weather has gotten significantly warmer and more worthy of lying down in the shade) or "She looks fatter around the middle, she must be pregnant" (even though we've reintroduced the goats to grass, which generally makes them bloated -- see pictures of growing grass below!). But still, we're thinking that come August/September, there may be some goat babies around.
With that, I'll go back to packing and moving, and will try to check in again from the new house, once we get ourselves an internet connection working. Here are a couple pictures (and a windy out-the-car-window video!) of our new commute from Olalla Canyon towards Wenatchee (in springtime):
Best wishes and happy end of May!
It's been a busy month. Mike and I are moving as of a week from today into Olalla Canyon 20 miles outside of Wenatchee. It's been beautiful up there (at 2500 feet), although so far our activities in the area have consisted of driving up, painting the house, driving down, driving up, painting the house, driving down, driving up, dropping off fencing to be put up later, driving down, and more recently, boxing up stuff, driving up, unloading stuff, and driving down. You probably get the point.
The garden we're planning for this summer there is on hold for another few weeks until we get better settled, although I'm hoping to buy some chicks (i.e. baby chickens) at the feed store tomorrow to raise in our bathtub until they get big enough to let loose... Meanwhile we're very lucky and grateful to have had friends come and paint with us (and bring BBQ grills along for making dinner), lend us pickup trucks, and help with all sorts of odds and ends. So, soon our photos will come from a new spot! Stay tuned, but here are a few previews of the hillside, the barn, and the side of the house:
Meanwhile, I have been wanting for a while now to catch you up on work stuff. So I've taken a break from packing this afternoon to do some blog writing, as likely we'll stay busy with house stuff for another few weeks and beyond. Plus Mike is in Alaska until tomorrow, at the long-awaited World Beard Championships, so I'm taking advantage of the quieter house (see video in Anchorage paper http://community.adn.com/mini_apps/vmix/player.php?ID=4239155). (For those of you who don't know Mike, I would direct you to look for the guy with the big beard, but in this case that doesn't really help, now does it?)
So here goes:
Work
Washington State University, where I work, is in the midst of budget cuts. As part of this, there is a proposal to cut my department (Community & Rural Sociology) and lay off all the faculty and staff. This may get modified in the next week or so, but as of now there's some, well, uncertainty about the future. My job is still good through December since I am actually paid not by my department but rather by the Tree Fruit Research Center where I am based. After December it will all depend on whether or not the project I am on finds more funding. Our hoped-for funding did not come through, but there are still other potential options. I had also hoped to jump projects after current funding ran out, but the "jump to" project would have been under the direction of a faculty member from my department currently slated to be laid off. So we'll see.
In any case, this seems to be a good transitiony moment to think (and write) about job stuff, prospects, likes and dislikes, and thoughts for how to proceed from here. So below is a random picture, from the road on the way back from our new house towards town, to represent "transitiony-ness":
See? Transitiony-ness encapsulated :)
Outreach and social science
Anyway, at the moment, I like my job okay. Last month I didn't like it too much -- too much office time, and a lack of pressing deadlines to motivate. Now I am back out of the office more and get to remember that I do actually like seeing things and talking to people, although now of course deadlines for written office-based products are looming close too.
I like that my job asks me to create relationships with environmental groups and farm workers on the part of an institution that has generally done a good job networking with the apple industry but not these other broader stakeholders. It's cool that people are starting to recognize the importance of working not just with people who apply pesticides, but also those concerned about pesticide exposure and pesticide safety as well (as they too are constituents of a public insititution and should have as much access to that institution as the tree fruit industry does).
The tricky part, though, is that the people I work for (and the apple industry more broadly) are not really used to working with these other groups. So I will often come back with ideas or feedback from meeting with groups and be told, "Well, that's nice, but we can't actually do that." So an interest in outreach but lack of follow through. And it's not that industry or WSU has to be responsive to every (or even most) requests, but it is true that "working with new groups" doesn't mean just telling them what a good job we're doing (which I think was implicitly, although probably not consciously, the original idea) -- instead it means actually compromising and negotiating and doing all that harder stuff that makes you, at least initially, more vulnerable.
So it can be frustrating to be given the go-ahead to do outreach but not actually be able to do any of it in a way that I think will be effective. That said, I did just succeed in getting our project to fund 2 health fairs (education on pesticide safety as well as diabetes prevention and other health concerns) at migrant farm worker camps this summer, so that's a definite step in the right direction. Maybe I just need to be more patient, as these sorts of changes take a while (but that is hard when your time frame is a 2-year, now maybe 1 1/2 year post-doc).
Similar issues come up with being a "social scientist" in a natural scientist haven. The entomologists (bug researchers) think it's a good idea to find out why farmers haven't adopted certain pest control practices, so they have me work on surveys, but expect the answers we get back to fit into a puzzle that will let them continue doing what they've been doing as they've been doing it. They're not quite ready to learn from these surveys that getting farmers to farm more sustainably means that not just farmers, but researchers too have to negotiate and change and adapt what they are doing.
Instead, the researchers (subconsciously, it's not really an articulated thing) want me to go out and solve the challenge of getting farmers to adopt new pest control methods and come back and tell them it's fixed so they can continue to research and recommend new methods of pest control. It's not that they're not doing a good job or don't have good intentions -- they really do, but just a little more openness, taking into account the way that humans act and not just the ways that bugs act, could make it work better.
So, again, while there's an interest in expanding the way things are done, there is resistance to changing things too much in the service of that expansion, which really makes both the expansion, and also my job, hard.
One funny example is that researchers get frustrated that apple growers don't accept and adopt their well-researched and well-proven pesticide recommendations. After all, these recommendations have been scientifically vetted. But in order to increase survey response rates to figure out why these growers have not jumped on the bandwagon, when I suggest putting $1 in each survey envelope (which is basically the only known, i.e. scientifically-vetted, way to increase survey response rates), the response is a, "no, that won't really work here."
And whereas it's okay to resist "scientifically demonstrated" recommendations because they may or may not fit a particular situation, or even because you just don't believe in their validity, it's somewhat contradictory to resist them and at the same time not understand why other people (growers) resist your scientific recommendations. Again, a mismatch between understanding how people work and understanding how "science" (or in this case "social science") works.
Health and border issues
Meanwhile, there have been some interesting, perhaps more rewarding, pieces to my job. I've been attending a lot of rural health care and farm worker health focused conferences, which has been a new thing for me. I was just at one in San Antonio, TX (which was really a neat place, actually), and went to a western region one earlier this year in San Diego, CA. In San Diego it was particularly interesting because we were so near the Mexican border that we got to accompany a group down to the border fence and check it out. This was a church-based group that does communion across the fence, in protest of plans to turn the slatted fence there into a solid wall.
The issue with the wall there is that this is a spot where few people actually cross illegally, but where many people come to meet and wave at family members living on the opposite side. So the impact of a solid wall there would be more psychological than preventative. It's an odd spot too because it's right on the beach, and so this fence that separates the Mexican side of the beach from the U.S. side of the beach just extends out into the water and then stops. And people on each side are walking the beach and buying ice creams and selling bracelets and meeting up with family members, and now taking communion in this bilingual strategic religious/protest ceremony, with border patrol looking on. Here are a few photos looking towards Mexico (the bottom one is the city of Tijuana):
Of course this is all tied in to immigration debates, as Mexican immigrants crossing the fence are among the highest profile groups in national debates, even though they are not actually the largest group of immigrants here. But the crossings are dramatic, they involve a relatively high risk of thirst and heat-related deaths crossing the deserts, and yet people continue to come, motivated by the prospect of jobs. U.S. employers are hiring farm workers and construction workers, even in a recession and despite government and societal censure.
For people who come to work in agriculture, theirs is a lifestyle of staying out of the way of border police, and migrating with the crops from California or Texas up to the northern parts of the country and then back. Which makes it hard for people to access health care when needed, and yet they work in high risk jobs where it can be crucial. And many migrants now come from parts of Mexico where not Spanish, but rather Mixteco or other indigenous languages are spoken, providing new linguistic obstacles to accessing health care...
Okay, you're right, these aren't migrant health workers, they are the Wenatchee hospital delegation performing in the Apple Blossom parade (see more details below), but it almost fit!
Anyway, in terms of my job prospects and how they relate to all this, I'm finding what I do interesting enough to stick with it for the moment, or at least while it lasts. Or ideally, to find some way to do it part time and spend more time with more goats and chickens and gardens at our soon-to-be new place. And I'm betting that some new opportunities will arise as the old ones potentially fade. Meanwhile, Mike and I like it here enough to try and stick around a little longer and see what happens.
Not work
What else is new these days outside of work?
Well, the spring green has come and gone in Wenatchee -- there are about three weeks of green here, where hillsides turn from brown to all shades of green (and then fade back to brown). The green is complemented by thousands of wildflowers all over the place. They say (whoever they are) that you get attuned to really light shades of green when you live here. It's only driving to the west side of the mountains that makes you realize that our green, relatively speaking, is not a deep green like theirs is... I guess it's a different kind of pretty.
The Wenatchee Apple Blossom festival has also come and gone, with a big parade down Wenatchee Ave (and some vendors selling Greek food in the park, which I greatly appreciated). Here are a few parade photos, with different pieces of Wenatchee valley culture represented (plus one with the traveling princesses of Penticton from across the (other) border in Canada).
Here are a couple of pictures too of a spring mushrooming trip. Apparently our new soon-to-be home-canyon may also yield mushrooms in spring and fall, according to the funny older guy who sold us the place (and who invited us up last month to visit and see what he had fixed up before the closing and also to feed us cookies and fund our purchase of a washing machine). Funny.
Meanwhile, I've also started teaching beginning Hebrew to a Messianic congregation here -- a group that follows Old Testament practices but concurrently believes in Jesus. It's an odd combination, but kind of fun to be teaching them basics. I also have a bit of an out-standing request to teach Spanish to friends, and the latest thought has been to combine such Spanish lessons with hiking excursions, but we've really been lagging on the hiking front lately. Once we're settled in with the move, we're hoping to get back to some hiking outings and wine tastings and visits to apple orchards south of here owned by guys who remind us of Willie Nelson (or who did when we got to visit this past winter).
Oh, and we're pretty sure that Frosty the goat is pregnant -- she has not been going into heat anymore, and her udder is getting more visible. Of course, we tend to read signs into any changed behavior, like "She's lying down a lot, she must be pregnant" (even though the weather has gotten significantly warmer and more worthy of lying down in the shade) or "She looks fatter around the middle, she must be pregnant" (even though we've reintroduced the goats to grass, which generally makes them bloated -- see pictures of growing grass below!). But still, we're thinking that come August/September, there may be some goat babies around.
With that, I'll go back to packing and moving, and will try to check in again from the new house, once we get ourselves an internet connection working. Here are a couple pictures (and a windy out-the-car-window video!) of our new commute from Olalla Canyon towards Wenatchee (in springtime):
Best wishes and happy end of May!
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