Babies

I had been wondering what I would write about...

...and then it became goat baby season.



If you recall, Gigi and especially Frosty had been looking rather large before Mike and I left for NY, but luckily we came home on a Sunday night to find the same number of goats as we had left. The next Monday, though, Mike had to go to Olympia for a three-day conference... and on Tuesday, I had a board meeting for Farmhouse Table (Mike's old work). I left work a little early to go home and feed everyone before the meeting, and noticed that Gigi was acting a little funny (hanging around in dark corners by herself, not eating, talking more than usual), but sometimes goats do that for a couple of days before they have babies. And besides she wasn't really due for another week or so. I considered skipping the meeting, but being the president makes that hard, especially when you don't really know whether or not babies are imminent at all. Plus I figured that even if it was a go, nothing too terrible was likely to happen in the three hours I would be gone.

But I came home to find Gigi and two kids all standing up in the back corner of the barn. Just like it's supposed to happen -- no assistance needed, no emergency c-sections, just all on her own and two healthy babies. So I stayed up for a while making sure they really were looking healthy and were able to eat, and that Gigi had something to drink, and that she wasn't sitting on them or abandoning them to be picked on by other goats or kicked by alpacas or pooped on by chickens. I tried to get them to all go into the kennel with me so no one would bother them, but Gigi wouldn't follow, even when I picked up the kids and took them over... she just kept going back to the corner of the barn where they had been born looking for them.

So I left them all as they were. And got up 5 hours later and they were still all fine, didn't need me at all. So I went swimming and then to a meeting at work, and came home for the rest of the day. And they were still all fine. Gigi already had the babies well-trained to stay near the barn and nap while she went out to eat hay. When she let them come outside with her, she didn't let them wander away. When other goats came too close, she chased them away. Somehow, motherhood had overnight made her super responsible and grownup. And so having them immediately integrated into the neighborhood seemed to work just fine. The alpacas were a little grumpy at times, accompanied by an occasional chase or kick, but nothing that seems to have done more than be scary. And while the other goats head-butt the babies away when they're annoying, they do it really gently.



There is a girl, the white-colored one, and a boy, the brown one with blue eyes. The girl looks like the huge white dragon/dog character from the movie Never Ending Story... so we named her Falkor. And by association, the boy became Atreyu, the warrior that sets out to save the endangered planet in the movie, and who Falkor helps along the way. The names are a little oddball, so I'm not totally sure they'll stick, but so far they seem to work. Meanwhile, the babies are a little shy... and very fast, and not so interested in being picked up. Very different than Bert and Ernie, bottle babies that they were (interestingly, Bert has continued to jump on people as often as possible while Ernie has really chilled out)... so anyway, we'll see how these two evolve (and how we go about scaling down our numbers of goats as the number of babies increase and the size of the pasture stays the same).






Shearing
If you have alpacas in Washington State, chances are that someone (or in our case, two someones) will give you the number of the roving alpaca shearer who lives up near the Canadian border but travels the state. He was going to be in Wenatchee this week, so we asked him up. Alpaca shearing is a little dicey, or at least our alpacas hated it. They did not like us cornering and catching them to put on halters that morning, or cornering and catching them again later that day to tie them down on a tarp. I had been around sheep shearing before, and the sheep I'm sure didn't love it, but didn't seem to mind or fight nearly as much.



Moppy growled and spit green smelly spit the entire time (into the face of the shearer's assistant once) until the shearer put a sock over her mouth to keep it contained. Loli, in typical Loli style, ran faster and was harder to catch than Moppy, but once she was cornered sat down and gave up. No growling or spitting, just some sad whimpering (which was sad...). Luckily (for us) they seem to have forgotten it by now, or at least aren't holding it against us.





We've given the wool to a coworker of Mike's who spins, and who will keep half and give the rest back for us to pass over to Mike's mom, who had asked to knit something for us with it. So before and after pictures below -- Loli and Moppy, alpacas-turned-weird-skinny-deer.






Passover and Colorado
Enough of all this goat and alpaca stuff, you say, how was the Passover trip? Good, I say. We spent some too-quick time in NY with seders and family



and stopped on the way back for a weekend in Colorado to visit old college friends, beautiful scenery,



and to go to a reunion of some of Mike's old friends.



The only trouble with going away during Passover is that when you get back, spring, i.e. the busy season, is already well on its way. You may recall last year's failed attempts to have the goats graze our lawn. So this year we bought some move-able electric fencing. And set it up. And got it to work. And leash-walked and/or carried some of the (non-pregnant and non-baby) goats into it. The shock of touching the fence seemed to hurt just enough to teach them to stay away from it. And all went well, well, until we tried getting them back into the pen. Ed, Cle, Bert, and Ernie were fine, but Dublin and Breezy have never liked being caught by us, and half the time aren't even lured in by grain, so the process involved a lot of chasing and running and attempted bribery and attempted lassos and eventually a half-dive-tackle to get them back in.

And what it all means is that we really need to come up with some sort of fenced-ish corridor to get the goats from the main pen to wherever we need the temporary fence to be... or a lot more leashes... or to never let Dublin and Breezy into the temporary fence area (which would be a bummer because they're good mowers). And so, for this spring, some of the grass might need lawn-mower-mowing while we're trying to get together a goat-mowing system that really works. But I think we're halfway there.



(We walked Gigi and Frosty around on leashes too so that they could have some grass without getting too far from babies or getting a in-utero-kid-shocks).





See Frosty's big belly? And speaking of big bellies, some of you have been asking about mine. Well, it's not as big as Frosty's yet, but definitely makes clothing choices more limited. I'm sure one of these days it will become more apparent on photos, but so far you can tell better in person. So you'll have to wait a bit. But things seem to be going well and uneventfully, and we are glad and grateful for that. The whole needing-different-clothes and getting-nauseous-bending-over-pulling-out-weeds and getting-tired-from-things-that-used-to-be-normal parts I could really do without, but I guess that's how it goes.

Stay tuned for continued adventures in goat babies, whenever Frosty decides that it's time.

Poop

With the snow melted, the goats exploring again beyond the (previously) hay-covered areas near the barn, and the chickens spending more time outside, this is often our welcome home greeting in the evening.




This change of seasons has also brought on spring cleaning... shoveling poopy straw out of the barn,



loading some into our friend Rob's truck for him to take for his compost pile,



and piling the rest into a large mound and hoping for other friends to call in need of poop (there's way more than we need for the garden).



Here's the mound from above. What you can't see are the many many mice who had found shelter in the barn and are now finding shelter in the warm poop-straw pile. Luckily, in the absence of a cat, some of our chickens have stepped up to the plate and are catching mice. It's actually pretty impressive, although I'm guessing they're not catching more than one out of every ten at most.




We've also been trying to be more conscientious about turning our piles of previously-cleaned-out poopy straw, so that they actually do turn into compost, rather than just accumulate as piles of poopy straw that exceed our ability to make use of them.



It would be nice if we could train the goats to help rather than just stand around watching.




We also spent some time the last few weekends raking up the hay that's been dispersed and standing in the way of grass re-growing, and adding it to the poop piles.



This, by the way, has created things like a new space underneath the hay feeder that Ernie can exploit, sitting underneath it, out of the reach of any bullying goats, to eat from the bottom.




And finally, we put the kennel back together, so that we will have a space for our mama goats, separate from the others, to have babies. It had been blown apart by wind over the winter and our duct tape fix jobs were no longer quite doing the trick. Here is the frame partly reassembled, flat on the ground.



Here's the frame fully assembled and upright, with Mike in the background wrangling the chain link that has to be stretched around it. Even though there were no "walls" on the kennel at the time, some of the goats were very polite and only came in through the "door."



Ed was less polite, and instead spent his time trying very very very persistently to stay in the middle of all the action.



And these are the two goats the kennel is back together for -- Frosty on the right and Gigi on the left (see growing udders?)



We are leaving for a Passover trip to NY at the end of this week and have asked Frosty and Gigi to please not have any babies before we get back. Technically they shouldn't be due until May, but they are starting to look a little bit nerve-wrackingly round. In any case, it has been really nice to get some of this season-changing-stuff done before we leave. No wildflowers yet, but things are starting to subtly turn green.


Meanwhile, the cover crop we planted in the fall in our garden area is coming up, albeit somewhat patchily,



and garlic, also planted in the fall, is started to grow.




So with that, I'll leave you with a goat-alpaca shot, and go back to packing for first stop conference in Seattle, and second stop eastward-bound. Hopefully there will be some goat babies and burgeoning gardens to report on once we're back and settled again...

Barnyard chaos

For the last week, every day when we get home we find this.



Well, usually, it's just Bert with his head stuck in the feeder. Ernie gets his head wedged in there too but has learned how to wiggle himself out (except when Bert's head is in the same hole as his, as in the photo above). Ernie was the goat baby who used to get his head stuck in the fence when he was little, so maybe that taught him to be more careful or at least more Houdini-like about it. But Bert just seems to be stubborn. I have no idea how long he just sits in there every day, getting jostled by other goats, trapped in a small space waiting to get rescued. And everyday, he yells for and then fights the rescue efforts, expresses some happy thanks once they're completed, and goes on to do the very same thing again the next day. I really would have thought he would have learned by now.



Goat personalities, like human personalities, are weird. Bert is stubborn, like his dad Ed. Both of them want to be wherever you are so as to chew on you or jump on you or destroy whatever fence or gate or opening is closest by. I would suggest that this might be a result of too permissive an atmosphere as babies (allowing Bert and Ernie to jump on our heads, for example), but that really doesn't seem to be it. Ernie, Bert's brother, equally bottle-fed, is chill. He comes over, jumps on a lap, then leaves and minds his own business. And Ed wasn't a bottle baby at all, so he never jumped on our heads in the first place -- and he's just as crazy as Bert... but note that his sister Gigi is not. Crazy random personality quirks plus genes plus environmental factors I guess, but it's strange.

Aside from goat personalities, the biggest source of barnyard chaos these days is probably inter-species interactions, interestingly enough. Our alpacas, cute though they are, have not really gotten used to being with non-alpacas. Added to that that Moppy (the older, white one) is (maybe) going blind, so she comes up to everything curiously to smell it, then gets freaked out and gallops away with abandon, creating a path of chickens jumping out of her way... Usually everyone gets out of her way quickly enough and no one is worse for the wear. Except the other day when she came over to smell my cheek and then coincidentally sneezed in my face (I'm pretty sure it was a sneeze and not a spit, but at the time I wasn't convinced). And boy, alpaca sneezes and their accompanying spittle smell terrible.

Anyway, this brings up some new issues, namely that it might be unwise to have easily spooked 175-pound runners sharing a barnyard with, say, a toddler (I know I know, babies take a while to get to be toddlers, and you're not allowed to house toddlers in the barnyard anyway, but still...). The goats are pretty gentle with kids, and also good at getting out of the way of running alpacas, but the triple combo may require some adjustments (alpaca adoptions anyone?).

The chickens have also gotten a bit crazy recently. Not sure if winter was too long for them, or if everyone's just excited for spring, but they have decided that rather than eat their food, they'll just throw it around the barnyard. And even though we don't give them more until they clean it up, we've nevertheless developed a floor full of feed plus poop plus straw that really could use a good cleaning out. And meanwhile, of course, the goats have discovered that if they push hard against the fence that separates their area from the chicken area, they can move the bottom of the fence enough to stick their tongues through and eat up spilled chicken feed from the ground. Not so good for them. And not so good for our fence. Suffice it to say we're really due for some barn cleanup and perhaps a little re-engineering this spring once it warms up (which will probably be soon).

One neat idea that we saw recently (which doesn't really apply here, but still) was in visiting friends who are part of a goat co-op. Rather than one family owning goats, the goats are housed in a joint location and milked on a rotating schedule. Whoever milks each day keeps the milk. Keeps the animal care from becoming overwhelming for anyone, but of course brings up those communal property system questions (who cleans up when, who's responsible for what when push comes to shove, etc.). But it seems to work pretty nicely. Here are pictures of one (of the two) goats,



plus the friends we were visiting...





This visit was part of a larger, really fast and ridiculously whirlwind (as usual) weekend trip to Arizona and New Mexico to visit Mike's old haunts from Phoenix and my old friends from MN. It was fun to be in a new place, even if just for a couple of days. Here are some pics from town (Silver City, NM)



including a puppet parade,



the nearby creek,



and the view from the outhouse above Eric and Maria's place (yes, they have an indoor toilet too).



Oh, and a big pit mine.



And last but not least, a Wenatchee-twist-on-an-old-favorite, rhubarb/cherry/walnut hamentaschen (cookies for the holiday Purim which was just this past weekend)... they ended up a little more bready than cookie-like (probably the whole-wheat-ness of the flour), but very yummy nonetheless.

Jobs and such

You're in for a high-text, low-photo blog post today. Since last update, I spent 4 days in Oakland, CA at a conference (with non-conference highlights that included dinner with older bro Rafi and an outing to san fran to see a friend's son-in-law-to-be play in a band); had a long-weekend visit from Mike's mom (highlights of which included a moonlight snowshoe, where it was too dark to take pictures, visits to several nearby wineries, and some good down time), and a skate-(cross-country)-skiing outing (faster and a bit more cardiovascular than classic cross-country skiing it seems) about an hour from home (where it was snowing and cloudy so I again didn't take pictures).

While weather-wise, we had really thawed out quite a bit over the last month or so, this week the snow came back, so we're back at about 8 inches at home (although in wenatchee it's been almost all rain -- so it's been an odd commute to work recently -- from winter to not-so-winter and back again everyday). Despite the snow, preparations are underway for spring! Temporary fencing (so we can graze the goats outside their regular pen and minimize lawn mowing, see construction fencing debacle of last year) is in a box in our back room. Seed catalog order for the garden is just in. Oh, and Mike figured out how to use these glass-cutting kits to turn empty wine bottles into glasses -- now we just need a way to do a better job sanding (melting?) the not-so-sharp-anymore-but-still-not-super-smooth edges.

But in this post, I'm mostly going to talk about work. Because I haven't in a while. So, I've just finished my super busy season at work, as you may have noticed -- November through February (so I guess really a good third of the year) is just filled with travel and presentations and reports and grantwriting and long days. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but here's part of the problem: I don't really seem to care all that much about what it is that I'm doing most of the time at work -- I don't really think that what I'm talking about in presentations is all that important, the conferences are sort of hit or miss, the reports, well, just kind of have to be done, and the grant writing is at times interesting but also a decent pain in the neck to coordinate, and I'm spending a lot of time (all indoors) doing it. And not caring about the content of your work is not necessarily a bad thing either, but it's somehow under-motivating.

But here's the thing. Back when I started (going on 3 years ago), I really thought I would care more about this work. I thought I would really like my job. And a lot of the people around me really care about what they're doing, so it's not like it's not-care-about-able or anything... So what's the deal? Attention deficit need for constant new content material? Maybe, but I don't think so. I worked on farm bill stuff for 5 years without getting sick of it (I was totally sick of the PhD process, but not really the topic area) -- and actually, I recently gave a presentation about farm bill stuff, and it was part of what made me notice my disenchantment with current work. Because I really liked talking about farm bills again. Of course it's easier to like things when it's a one-off opportunity and you don't have to stick with it day-in and day-out, but I don't think that's the issue here.

In this case, I think it's that the aspects of my current job that I most liked have fallen away, leaving mostly just the aspects I find boring. What appealed to me about the job in the first place (see this old post and this one, from long ago) was the complex-problem-solving aspect of it -- the idea of helping lots of different people with contrasting perspectives and an inability to get along because of them resolve relevant issues (probably the same reason I like(d) farm bill stuff). But here it's pesticide use and safety. Which is fine -- I like pesticide safety -- I think it's important to phase out nastier pesticides and use nicer alternatives. I like feeling like farm work can become a little safer and agriculture can become a little smarter through what I do.

But the aspects that really addressed those kinds of issues have grown smaller over time. I used to talk more with environmental groups and try to find common ground with tree fruit industry types, and now I don't much. There just wasn't the institutional support behind it, and I guess I didn't have the commitment to stick with it on my own (or perhaps more to the point, there was little I could actually offer groups in terms of negotiating compromises, because I wasn't authorized to change much on my end). I used to at least think I could do more in terms of farm worker safety education, but I feel like I mostly give presentations to people who are there for the pesticide license credits and may or may not listen to what I'm saying, which may or may not be relevant to them anyway. And I used to think more about what might make growers inclined to change pest management practices, but now that's mostly been reduced to editing survey questions and crunching numbers (which has never been my favorite).

Every once in a while, there's a flurry of big picture discussion or teamwork or deeper thinking or problem-solving, but mostly the ratio of interesting ideas to tedium that has always been a bit of an issue for me in research has dropped a little below my threshold. It's interesting, though -- I see one of my bosses (the social science one), who just loves the details. She likes the big picture too, but she can just dive into spreadsheets of numbers and make tables and spend hours thinking about the best wording for a particular question -- things that I just don't have the patience for. It means we work well together (from 4 hours away), she writes up the data parts of presentations and abstracts and papers, and I add the implications and philosophical parts. But seeing the way she works with details and data just sort of reconfirms that it's not my thing. And my other boss (the entomologist) is just so nice, and such a good boss for work-life balance stuff and on a personal level, but is overbooked and his deeper interests lie elsewhere (bugs), so it can be harder on a work-content level.

So, some of this I've talked about before. But here are the newer pieces. First, enter grant-writing. I was approached this past fall by some people I've worked with at the University of Washington (Seattle) agricultural safety and health center about putting in a grant for their 5-year center renewal (i.e. the 7-10 projects they'll work on over the next 5 years). So I put a proposal together to essentially bring the problem-solving pieces back into my job. The project would focus on the fact that while many farm workers feel super vulnerable and exposed to unsafe chemicals at work, many growers feel that workers are not very exposed, that chemicals used are reasonably safe and are used carefully, and that concerns are overblown. This situation of course makes it hard to do much, as the relevant parties (not to mention all the other players involved) totally disagree as to whether or not there's even a problem.

So the idea would be to go around and talk to members of all these relevant groups individually and find out more about how they see pesticide use and pesticide safety, etc. And then convene a board with representatives of each of these groups and show the whole board the results -- so everyone can see fairly transparently, guided by some sort of third party, how different these perspectives are... and how at the end of the day it probably matters less who is right (because they're probably all right to some extent) and more that there may be certain areas of commonality to work with despite the differences. And then this board would get to figure out what those areas of commonality might be and come up with some plans to work on them. There are a few more researchy type things in there too, but that's the gist.

I'm not really sure if it would be a pointless nightmare of entrenchment or something really interesting and rewarding. I'd like to think that it might, once the wrestling is over with, yield some useful solutions to pesticide problems in agriculture, at least more than I feel pesticide license class presentations and survey data do. And in any case, it would certainly put the problem-solving and complicated worldviews and diplomacy aspects that I tend to like back into my job. Now, it may or may not get funded. And if it did, it would be half time. Then it could be paired with half time on a biological control (insect predators that eat insect pests) project I'm on. And somehow also worked out with another 10% time position I've been written into on someone else's grant to help do insect computer model outreach classes in Spanish and Spanish-speaking videos of insect information. Certainly, working 110% time is not what I'm shooting for, but it's unlikely that all three grants would be funded, and if they were, I could probably back out of one of them, leaving me at a more ideal slightly-less-than-full-time schedule.

Now the newest development is that the entire agricultural health and safety center program that the University of Washington is part of is currently on the federal budget chopping block. So this new grant may not even be an issue. And although it's the project of the three which is probably of most interest to me, without it I guess I'd be easily less-than-full-time, which could be nice too.

Here's the second piece of this that relates. It's not quite job related, but has given me a surfeit of group problem solving to keep me busy. When Mike left his job at the CSA (veggie box subscription) and produce market, the organization he worked for asked if I would be on their board of directors. And I said sure. And then their president stepped down (his work commitments had grown), and they asked me to be president. And I said, "while I don't know that it's wise to have such a new board member be president, I can see that there aren't that many other options at the moment (due to a variety of reasons), so sure." So I'm the board president now. It's probably a good time for it, actually, now that my regular job has just chilled out a bit, and also because the group is undertaking a "strategic planning" process, trying to move from a seat-of-the-pants do-stuff organization (which has been quite successful that way) to one that has a vision for the future, and plans of how to get there. And one that goes beyond the personalities of its founders to bring more people into the fold and have a little more varied input in decision-making.

So, what does that become? A lot of group dynamics, complicated problem-solving, bridging really different perspectives on what should happen and how, mitigating power dynamics that are less helpful and pushing them towards ones that are more helpful, getting somewhere and making decisions rather than revolving around the same discussions over and over, etc. etc. etc. It's kind of psychology, and kind of sociology, and kind of organizational development, and all for the sake of getting to think about agriculture and eating. In some ways a big pain in the neck. But mostly, it's super interesting, and keeps me engaged, and continues to make me want to help get us towards a mutually-acceptable solution, and makes me oddly confident that if we wrestle through all the mess, we'll (pretty soon) get somewhere that was better than we would have gotten if we had just left well enough alone. I guess I'll let you know if that turns out to have been overly naive (but I don't actually think it is)...

So, that's work. Some boredom, some options for mitigating or improving that, and on the whole, well, who knows. But while we're at it, let's just add another element in (in terms of work schedules and various grants and commitments and part/full time questions) -- which I actually wasn't going to mention quite yet, but, well, here goes -- lots of excitement lately at home since, if all goes well, Mike & I will be adding a new human baby to our flock in late August (ish)! I figured I was going to have to tell you sometime before the pictures of us working in the garden involved me with a noticeably larger belly, and you started asking questions... It's not there yet, but well, there's the scoop! :) (see, there are rewards to reading through 'til the end of a long text-y post). Will keep you posted, I'm sure.

On that note, it's off til next time!

Most of our snow has melted

Wow. It's been so long since I wrote that a lot of our snow has melted. While the rest of the country has been hit with extra snow in the last month, ours has really tapered off. Here is Ed, pre-thaw (taken from above by a very tall goat-sitter friend):



And here is the scene from yesterday. You can still see snow (although there's none in town anymore), but that neighbor's car in the background used to be totally covered up. While I wish we had gone skiing a couple of more times when the snow was around, the goats have really been enjoying the warm-up and have been making use again of the entire yard rather than just the alcove of the barn, which is always fun to see.



In other animal news, one of our roosters (not Gimpy the paralyzed one, the bigger and slightly meaner one), died a couple of weeks ago. No idea why. He was just dead one evening when we got home. No sneaking-in-weasel marks, no chicken-ganging-up-pecking marks, no he-attacked-the-alpacas-and-they-stepped-on-him trample marks... a heart attack perhaps? He was a very large rooster. Anyway, we (and by we I mostly mean Mike) put him into a large plastic tupperware tote and buried it under the snow to await real burying under our garden once the ground thaws.

Meanwhile, it has been a really busy couple of months. I am about to leave this week for my third trip to California in two months. And add to that another 5-6 shorter trips around Washington and Oregon, and visits to Spokane and Montana (these last two were for fun rather than work, though, more below). Basically, I've realized, after three years, that every winter is this busy for me. I think it's because all the farmers have nothing to grow, so they all want to talk. Winter is when all the meetings are scheduled and when surveys have to go out, plus all the normal end-of-year reporting and new grant application cycles. So I'd say about November to February is pretty non-stop-running. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to things quieting down a bit (although hoping they do so to a moderate level, rather than the so-slow-as-to-be-boring level it can sometimes hit). We'll see.

Spokane
Last I wrote, Mike & I were just about to go see Yoni-the-bro play Christmas weekend at the cathedral in Spokane. Very fun.



And this year there were some added perks this year. First, getting to meet Yoni's girlfriend Shani, who was visiting from Vancouver. Second, getting to attend a Burundian wedding at the cathedral. Turns out there are about 10 Burundian refugee families who have recently been settled in Spokane. They have taken to getting married at the Anglican cathedral both because it reminds them of their denomination of Christianity from Burundi, and because the cathedral lends a good bit of pomp and circumstance to the proceedings.

But 10 families doesn't quite fill a cathedral (especially when most of them, including the couple to be married, are on African time and arrive quite a bit later than the ceremony is supposed to start). So they have been trying to get broader church membership to attend. And while I can't say that Yoni, Shani, Mike, me, or our friend Julie (who was visiting family in Spokane and came to the wedding with us -- she had lived for a while in Tanzania, near the refugee camps where the Spokane Burundians had happened to have been living before coming to the U.S. -- and needless to say, with her command of Swahili, Julie was a big hit at the wedding), really qualify as broader church membership, we were able to boost attendance a little bit nonetheless.



There was all sorts of singing and dancing, and somehow, actually, I really related to the whole thing despite understanding little of it. I think it was the phenomenon of a small group of people, with a different set of cultural practices and background, trying to live those practices by example for an encouragingly but clueless waspy-type audience thinking "oh wow, your practices are so nice and quaint and cute, yes, we will be enthusiastic and supportive and clap along" while you're thinking, "no, dude, it's a totally different thing when you have 600 people all doing this in sync rather than 7.... it's not actually cute and quaint, it's just as powerful (or not, depending on your perspective) as anything that happens in your enormous gray stone stained glass cathedral." Of course I'm projecting Jewish here, and while there are way more Jews in America than there are Burundians, this is not really true of Wenatchee or Cashmere... So it was kind of interesting (and yummy food to boot!).



Yoni and Shani came back with us to Wenatchee and stayed an extra week through New Years. Their visit involved, among other activities, some downhill skiing (for Yoni, Shani, and Mike) and a snowboarding lesson (for me, but which left me incredibly sore, mostly from pushing myself back up to standing from a fallen-down position over and over and over again... on the bunny hill). It was neat to have them here for a bit.



Snowshoeing
When Mike and I got married, going on two years ago now, a few of our guests climbed the nearby hill and slid down it on the long grass in their wedding-guest-clothes. Ever since then, we had thought it would be fun to climb that hill and see the view from the top. Except that when we finally got around to it last month it was covered with snow. So we went on snowshoes. And never made it to the top -- too steep (indicating both that that our wedding guests were really buff and dedicated, and that it's perhaps a little slipperier in snow). Nevertheless it was really pretty.



And the snow in spots looked kind of like sand dunes.





We were a little nervous about the whole thing because a couple of our neighbors are very very territorial about private property issues, and while the hill does not belong to them, and we did not know who it actually belonged to, it is indeed private property. Of course as we were climbing, we heard them going for a walk below and stopping to talk to some people at the bottom. And then on our way down, we ran into said people on their way up the same hill in snowshoes. Turns out they had recently bought the property (we had seen for sale signs, but then they were gone, and we figured it was just as likely they had blown away as that the place had been sold), and were planning to build a house (into the side of the hill) and move there upon retirement. Meanwhile they drove out for the day once a month from Seattle, climbed the hill, had lunch on top, and observed how water ran and seasons changed, so as to make smarter decisions on where to build and how. Luckily, they were very nice, and didn't mind our trespassing, acknowledging that they often came across neighbors on their hill, and that it seemed to be quite a common spot for climbing up to see the view. So we finished going down, and watched them climb up towards their snowy lunch spot.



Swimming
I've mentioned before that Mike and I have been swimming with the Masters (=over 18) swim team in Wenatchee. Unexpectedly, it has involved some swim meets, something I had never done before, but which turn out to be fun. Probably the neatest part is that most of the swimmers are way older than me or Mike, but are nevertheless way faster. And quite competitive. Peony is a 76-year-old Korean lady with a strong dramatic streak. You kind of feel like she's in middle school and takes a liking to people until somehow, inevitably, it turns bad -- like if they can't come to a lunch she hosts, or something else happens that somewhat unpredictably goes over wrong, and then she no longer wants to talk to them... except the difference is that it seems so much sillier and so much less important when you're not in middle school.

Anyway, at swim meets the events are mixed among age groups and gender, but awards and points are given out based on times, sorted by age group. So if you have someone of similar skill level in your age group in the Inland Northwest (central and eastern Washington plus northern Idaho), it's harder to come in first. There's a lady that swims in Peony's age group who is an 80-year-old nun named Sister Madonna. She started swimming maybe in her 50s and now runs marathons and does ironman triathlons and swims in our league. She's not fast, but being 80, she wins a lot of awards. And being a nun, she writes a lot of books about spirituality and athleticism and conquering challenges. Typical inspiring type. And Peony, though she is sweet as anything to Sister Madonna in person, wants nothing more that to beat her in butterfly events, to the extent of almost bitter behind-the-back-talking-about-her in the locker room at meets. Nice lady, just with a bit of over-competitiveness running unchecked :)

Anyway, Mike managed to take a video of me swimming butterfly at our last meet. It's a bit hard to see, but gives you a sense of what the meets are like. Stay tuned (maybe) for better photos/videos at some point in the future.



Montana
Our last recent trip was to Montana to see the bro-in-law/sis-in-law/nephew. Mike's brother's 1-year-old was turning, well, 1. So we went for the birthday party. Long drive, but nice for down-time and much cake/ice cream/cooking/playing had by all.





With that, I'll leave you with a picture of the Columbia River in Wenatchee, when it was still cold enough to have icebergs floating down the river. Oh, and a note about movies. Mike & I just went to see the Black Swan last night. And it was... really scary. Very well done, but scary. Way more competitiveness than masters swimmers. I don't think I want to be a ballet dancer when I grow up.