Closed for winter

Since last I wrote, fall has somehow wound its way into winter. The leaves were really nice this year, although I didn't get too many pictures. Here are a couple pre-colorful-ones, though, from our yard.





The goats, chickens, and alpacas cleaned out the garden thoroughly (see photos from previous post),



Mike tilled in the few remaining stalks,



and we planted garlic just in time for the first snowdusting up our canyon (bulb-like as it is, you plant garlic in the fall, mulch well and it sprouts in the spring and ripens in summer).



We started using the wood stove. And bought two tons of hay. Sounds like a ridiculous amount, I know, but it ends up being maybe 40-50 bales and should last us all year. Previously we had been buying hay patchwork, either by the bale from the feed store or by the pickup load from hay farmers, but it meant that we constantly had to be on the lookout for hay -- either on craigslist direct from the source but requiring a borrowed pickup truck, or at the store, pricier but doable with a car. And then we saw an ad for someone with a huge trailer who would pick up hay for you, deliver, and stack it, minimum amount 2 tons. We figured we'd try it.

The delivery guy came up with his two daughters and a lot of hay. We were having people over that evening (I turned 34 in October and Mike turns 31 in December, so we had decided to have a joint "retirement" birthday party since our ages added up to 65), and I was making brownies. They were ready just about when the hay delivery arrived, so I pulled them out of the oven and put the pan on top of the stove to cool while Mike went outside to start helping unload. I put a big pot of water on the stove to boil, but then thought maybe I should go out instead and help a bit or at least take photos and document the process.

Although I thought twice about leaving the pot on the stove while I stepped outside, I figured I'd just go out for a few minutes and then come back in (red flag red flag, I know, but the story doesn't end too badly so no worries). Went out, took a couple pictures,





tried to help unload bales, found that at 80-100 pounds a bale I wasn't much help, and then decided instead to distract the daughters (ages 3 nd 5 maybe) so they didn't end up underneath bales or getting sent by their dad to sit in the truck and stay out of the way. I asked if they wanted to go into the goat pen and see the animals. They of course said yes, and so I told them to ask their dad if it was okay while I went in and turned off the stove.

I had been out for about 5 minutes, and when I went back in I found not a boiling pot of water, but instead an unexpected scene. Turns out I had accidentally turned on the wrong burner when I left -- not the one under the large forgiving pot of water, but instead the one under the glass pan of brownies. The electric burner had heated up and exploded the pan, sending glass shards everywhere and melting the remaining glass underneath the brownies, which had inturn lit on fire. Oops. I turned off the burner, the fire died down, and I tried to move the pan off the burner, but it was too melty. I thought about cleaning up the glass and then decided better of it, checked that all the burners were off, and left the house, closing the door behind me and hoping none of the visitors would need to come in for a bathroom.

Now, granted, it's a bad bad idea to turn on a burner and leave the house. We all know that, and yet it can be good to have a reminder every once in a while, especially a reminder that turns out so well considering. If I had to leave the burner on under the brownies, I was glad I had come back in after 5 minutes to check on the "boiling water," rather than forgetting about it or assuming that there was enough water to boil on its own. Thankfully too no one was in the house when the pan exploded (including the girls who had come in to use the bathroom 10 minutes prior), so the only casualties were the pan and the brownies. And so, when all the hay was unloaded and everyone had left, I brought Mike into the house to show off my damage... I wish I had pictures of the flaming exploded brownie pan to show you, as it was fairly spectacular... somehow, though, I didn't think to pull out the camera at the time. We aired out the house, threw out the brownies, and cleaned up glass from as far away as the bedroom. In the end it was a nice party, even without dessert.


Small town connections

I got a phone call the other day while at work. I picked up and heard "Hi Nadine, this is Rick from the car mechanic shop. Sorry to call you out of the blue, but I have a question for you." I didn't need anything fixed on my car, so this seemed strange, but... He continued, "I found a jump drive (small computer disk-like-thing) and when I plugged it into my computer, there were a bunch of photos on it. I recognized you in some of them, and your husband too, he's the one with the big beard, right? Also another of our customers at the shop. So I was wondering if the drive was yours." Funny. I hadn't lost a jump drive, but I went down to pick it up and see what I could figure out.

The drive he gave me looked familiar, so I wondered if it might be Mike's. If not, maybe I could figure out whose it was from seeing whoever else was in the photos. Rick continued "Yeah, I was trying to figure out whose this might be, and I recognized your husband first but couldn't come up with his name. But I knew you guys had a green Honda civic... and then I came up with your name and looked up the records and gave you a call. Small town, you know..." And then, "You know where I found the drive? On the floor in the hall of the Firefly building downtown" (which is on the complete opposite end of town... but happens to be the building where Mike now works) Aha, I figured, it must have fallen out of his pocket one day.

"My wife and I own a little knick-knack shop in that back of that building, so that's how I saw it," he said. I told him that Mike now worked there too. "Funny," Rick said, "I haven't seen him there." "Oh," I said, "he's only worked there about a month... and actually he shaved off all his hair and beard this summer so he's probably a little bit unrecognizable." And indeed, the jump drive was his, and had traveled all across town to be returned via a combination of car repair circumstance and small town inevitability.


Walla Walla, Washington

I remember learning about Walla Walla, Washington in elementary school social studies. Probably when learning state capitols, many of which are now rusty (in my brain). I remember Walla Walla, although it's not a capitol city, probably because the name is so funny. Later I heard about Walla Walla sweet onions, which do indeed grow near Walla Walla. Meanwhile, Mike and I have been trying to take quarterly weekend trips around the state, since there are so many neat places to visit. And this quarter was Walla walla. It's about a 3 1/2 hour drive from Wenatchee, and as it turns out, really nice. Probably one of the few places so far I've seen in Washington besides where we live that seem intriguing to me from a standpoint of living (rather than visiting, for which there are tons of great places).

Walla walla is of course, onion country, and it is also winegrape country. And wheat country.



Cute downtown...



And outside the downtown there are some residential areas before it quickly becomes country. Not the mountain foothills of Wenatchee nor the desolate scrub lands high desert areas of much of the rest of eastern Washington, but rolling hills, greener, and pretty. Quite rural, and yet with the amenities of more urban areas, primarily because of its wine-region-tourist-destination status. We went to a new-ish private winery owned by the retired brother of a friend from Wenatchee. He gave us a nice little tour.



He and his wife then sent us, of all places, to the small airport on the edge of town, where there are dozens of small former warehouse buildings that have been converted into wine "incubators," places where winemaker-wannabees can rent space at reduced (then gradually increasing) rates for 6 years to get a start in the wine business. If they do well, they move to downtown and leave the space open for a new person. If they don't, they close up shop and call it a day.

We had been wine tasting in Washington state a few times previously, but what was different here was that most people tasting were young 30-somethings, who perhaps had seen the movie Sideways and were doing the slightly-more-sophisticated-seeming version of fraternity style bar hopping. Kind of neat, but I have to say, after three wineries over the course of two days, we were pretty done.




The 400 fly

I swim a couple of times a week early in the morning at the high school pool with the "Masters" swim team, i.e. swimmers over 18. It's a pretty open and non-competitive group, except that the coach used to coach the high school swim teams, and she is (lovely and), well, very coach-like -- getting everyone in the pool, doing drills, going to meets so our team can earn more points and beat the other teams in the region... except that the swimmers are not in high school, but rather range in age from me and mike (at the young end) to 76 and 78 year old swimmers and beyond (well, not really so far beyond, but you get the point). Mike and I have gone to a few of these meets, which turn out to be pretty fun, and the last time we went ended with really good Korean food in Spokane.

Anyway, sometime I'll write more about swim meets, but instead here we'll profile an annual swimming event of the Masters team, the birthday celebration of a 76 year old Korean woman who very slowly and very methodically swims a mile of butterfly stroke every day. With a dramatic flair, she every year says, "I don't want anything for my birthday... all I want is for everyone to swim 400 yards of butterfly in my honor." And if you do it in less time than it takes her to do it, you are rewarded with chocolate (and a trophy if it's your first time, and last year a sweatshirt because it was special birthday number 75). Then we all sing happy birthday from the pool and she smiles and looks overwhelmingly pleased.

Now, for those of you who don't swim competitively, which I never had before this team, 400 butterfly is a lot. There are no 400 butterfly events in a typical meet, 200 fly is the longest event. No one swims a mile of butterfly (besides Peony), no one even swims 400 butterfly. So this is actually not just some little request. But in the end, it turns out to be quite a nice request, in that it shows you that you can do things that you usually think of as too hard, and really, they're not that hard at all. If we can be doing it at age 76, that'll be the real feat.

With that, I leave you with a couple of pictures of how our yard looked as we left home for Seattle to fly east for Thanksgiving.





Oh, and a cute picture that Mike's old coworkers staged at the get-together they organized for him when he changed jobs. Til next time!

'Pacas

Oof! It's been busy. Sorry for the long silence. I've been accumulating photos and happenings, but have been low on time for updating you... "Why so busy?" you ask? Well, stuff at work has picked up a bit, which is good because it was starting to get pretty boring and unmotivating. And our garden harvest has been in full swing. And as foreshadowed in the last blog post, we did in fact adopt two (old-lady) alpacas (see above!). And then with Mike's change of jobs (which has been great, by the way), the CSA where he had worked the past two years was feeling the loss, given one month of vegetable-box-creating-and-packing left yet to the season... so I started volunteering to help pack boxes on Wednesdays. And through a long and complicated set of circumstances and logistics (of course), I also ended up coordinating their annual fundraising dinner (see pictures from the dinn two years ago). This is all nice, but it has meant that my day-off-a-week plan has still involved a day off from work, but one filled with vegetable boxes and dinner logistics rather than garden work and blog posts at home. But this week was the last week of CSA packing and next weekend is the fundraiser, so hopefully I'll be back in the swing of it soon.

So... where to start? First of all, this is the picture I've been trying to get for you, of baby goats jumping on top of our heads and shoulders. They seem to have phased out the practice somewhat, with their increasing size. But this is Ernie, nicely perched where he landed on top of Mike.



The other news of course is alpacas. Last I posted we were about to drive to Yakima (2 hours to the south) to a really large alpaca ranch whose owners had recently passed away, and whose children were trying to sell some of the animals. Alpacas tend to be pretty pricey, but these folks had a few animals who were too old to sell and instead they wanted to give them away. So we decided, after checking them out, to bring a couple to the newly established Olalla Canyon alpaca-retirement-complex.

We had borrowed a truck and were set to rent a horse trailer in Ellensburg on the way (there were none to be borrowed or rented in Wenatchee, it seemed), but when we went to pick up the trailer, it turned out they couldn't rent it to us because there was no brake controller on the truck (they had told me this was necessary ahead of time, but I misunderstood and thought it was something else they needed...). So no dice. Called the alpaca lady and asked her opinion on just carrying alpacas in the back of the pickup (we had heard stories about transporting alpacas in the back of a minivan, and that got us thinking). She said, maybe, but not without a rack or sides to keep them from jumping out. So we found a hardware store in Ellensburg to buy some plywood to make a rack for the borrowed truck. While there, she called us back saying that she actually had two old abandoned camper tops for pickup trucks at the farm and we could have one if we wanted. We bought the wood just in case (we had wanted some plywood for a hay storage area at home anyway) and went on ahead.

Turned out, one of the camper tops actually fit... well, after a whole bunch of lifting and hitting and banging and finagling...



And we ended up picking out two alpacas: Moppy, a white suri variety (i.e. grows dreadlock-style-wool) and Loli, a brown huacaya variety (i.e. growers puffy sheep-style-wool) whose full name is Little Lolita, which seems sort of funny. We got them up into the now-covered back of the truck (with much help) and went on our way.

Upon arrival at the Olalla retirement complex, however, these two alpacas had no interest in getting out of the truck. So it took a bit of cajoling and the use of food and of their desire to always be near each other to get them into the pen.



We kept them separate from the goats for a day or two and then put them all together to see what would happen. Now, the alpacas are way bigger than the goats (thank goodness we didn't get llamas, or the size difference would have been ridiculous), but they are way more scared and spookable it seems. And somehow, that nervousness makes them aggressive and territorial, rather than shy. So they spent a lot of time at first chasing the goats away from food... which didn't seem to bode well for future barnyard harmony. We figured, though, that if they didn't shape up after a while and all learn to get along, we would just have to look for a new retirement home for them.



The whole picking-up-the-alpacas episode, interestingly, made me think a lot about South America. Not just because it was alpacas, but mainly in the way that nothing worked out like it was supposed to, despite my best intentions to figure it out beforehand, and yet it all worked out well, probably better than it would have according to plan. Sometimes I miss that about being in the U.S. Maybe it's that when you understand the system decently well, it's harder to find occasions where you just misunderstand the basic rules of the game or find yourself lost in ways that open up new opportunities. And somehow, those unexpected situations of figuring things out with unexpected help and unexpected hindrances is fun or adventurey-feeling or something. Of course sometimes things like that can turn out badly, but really nice versions of similar episodes had seemed to make themselves a mainstay of my lives in Peru and Brazil, and so I really enjoyed the little twinge of it in Yakima.

In any case, I do have to report that the alpacas are doing better now. Still really spookable (especially by chickens) and nervous (around us) and sometimes a little aggressive (towards goats), but much much better. Apparently too they have steel-trap memories, and so the unfortunately traumatic incident of taking their harnesses off (which, yes, did involve a little spitting) has meant that we have to do a lot more legwork to gain their trust. Oh well. A couple weeks ago I got mad at them for eating so much via goat-oppression-and-fear, and really considered trying to find them new homes, but they've shaped up a bit since then. And they are pretty cute... and sometimes do stuff like this, which is always endearing.



And if we can make it work til spring or summer, we can shear them and start spinning and knitting, or give the wool to friends or sell it to pay for feed, etc. So for now we'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, it has started to get cold. Leaves are changing and frosts are common now. We harvested 8 boxes of green tomatoes, and are plotting a canning party for green-tomato-salsa.



Donated about 40 pounds of chard to the food bank because we couldn't keep up (despite liberal use of the freezer).



Corn, onions, beets, leeks, strawberries, carrots, 35-40 pumpkins (pie? soup?), eggplants, peppers, black beans (turns out they're surprisingly easy to grow, at least the ones your chickens don't dig up and eat) and on and on. Kind of exciting.















So we're in veggie processing mode -- storing boxes under the porch (root cellar style), freezing, drying, canning... we'll see how far through the winter it gets us.


Drying out corn stalks as decorations for previously-mentioned fundraising dinner.

When we had harvested everything above ground, we let the animals into the garden area to finish off the plants and weeds. And boy did they. Very excited. So excited in fact that they ate all the leaves and then chewed off the tops of the beets and carrots before we could get them all out of the ground. I'll have to get you some before and after pictures, but for now, here are the "during" pictures.









The plan is to plant some rye/peas as a cover crop for winter (to keep soil in place and replenish nutrients) and then lay it all to bed.

Fall has also meant mushroom hunting, and it was a good year for it, accompanied by mushroom taste-tests (pre-verified of course by a well-experienced poisonous-mushroom-knowledgeable friend).





And a friend's annual birthday/cider pressing party,




This is what happens if you leave some room in the top of the jug but not enough when you freeze cider.

as well as a visit from Seattle friends for more apple picking and cider pressing (nics pics courtesy of Nile and Matt).









We also went to a Jack Johnson concert at the outdoor Gorge amphitheater near here (for a birthday treat). I had not been to the Gorge before, nor ever really been to a "big" type concert like that before. Overlooking the Columbia River, it was really pretty -- the photo is a bit too dark, but... the concert was fun (see the little lit-up stage down there?).



And to a quilt show (which was actually really cool).





Other than that, not much news. I helped a friend who's now a prof in Utah teach one of her classes through video chat (crazy, technology), and that was kind of a nice change-of-pace from research stuff. Sometimes I like prepping classes, and I liked this (graduate) class a bit more than I had liked the undergrad classes I taught in Minnesota (of course that's why professors are annoying, because so many would rather teach (the often more interactive and engaged) grad students than undergrads, but still...). Anyway, don't know if I'd really like it longer-term or if I'd be any good at it, but I figure I shouldn't totally rule it out as possible future work if it seems to make sense down the line... In more immediate work news, though, I may have an opportunity to lead a research/education project with folks from the University of Washington (in Seattle) on farm worker health issues, which I might like more than some of what I do now. Will depend on grant funding applications, etc., of course, but might be an interesting option.

And I think that that is about it from the home front for today. Moppy and Loli, and the chickens and the goats, all send their regards.

Back in the saddle

We are back from Minnesota. It was a nice trip, a more-leisurely-than-normal 10 days of visits that included quite a bit of time in "outstate" Minnesota (i.e. not the Twin Cities), as well as a visit to the State Fair (home of deep fried cheese curds and everything-fried-and-on-a-stick, a wedding, several trips in various kinds of floating devices on multiple lakes (kayaks, pontoons), and some big mosquitos. Somehow I didn't take any pictures. So I guess you'll just have to trust me on it this time.

Since then we've been getting back in the saddle. Goats and chickens are all doing well.


Garden is growing (but no ripe tomatoes yet, and the weather is cooling down!)


Mike started a new job, year-round, full-time in a field he's really excited about, doing restoration of habitat and coordination with fish hatcheries, hydropower, and fishing regulators for promoting healthy salmon populations in the Columbia River Basin.

I went to a work meeting 3 hours away in Goldendale at a big museum (and near to the monastery where you can buy Greek food, seemingly our closest source)


with a sculpture garden


and pretty views of the Columbia River


and nearby wind farms.


In season-of-many-Jewish-holidays news, after Rosh Hashana in Minnesota, Yom Kippur was characterized (for me) by a week or two of quick-study-cramming to be able to read the morning and afternoon Torah portions (teeny Jewish community means few people to help the nice rabbi imported from Seattle).

Mike and I then ran out of projected time for sukkah-making (remember our pretty but ultimately fragile attempt last year?), but managed a teeny makeshift (probably-not-so-kosher) triangular sukkah with thinned corn plants from our garden for a roof.


In non-holiday-related news, we're off tomorrow to check out a couple of alpacas who potentially need adoption... Fun? Or another step down the road toward increasing numbers of not-so-useful-but-still-cute farm animals? Of course you can sell alpaca wool (and you can eat alpacas too)... and our goats still mow the lawn and the chicken eggs cover feed costs (although they've been laying a bit short lately), but... slippery slope?

Will keep you posted.

Goat videos!

I still can't get videos onto the blog itself, but thanks to enterprising friends, here's a link to videos in Picasa. Try it and see if it works. They're pretty much in chronological order -- first one is Breezy, then baby ones of Bert and Ernie, then more recent ones....