Pucallpa, i.e. South America Part 2

Well, I've had a lot of suggestions, both subtle and not-so-subtle, that I should post more often -- you know shorter but more frequent entries. And when Mike and I left for South America I thought, well, maybe when we get back I'll try that. And since getting back, I have indeed been trying that. And you can see the results. Almost two months back and just now on my second entry. Don't get me wrong, I agree that posting more often would be great. I like reading blogs with frequent updates.

But I think I understand why it's so hard for me to do the same. My day job keeps me at a computer so much that in the evening and on weekends, turning a computer on is just about about the last thing I ever want to do. I do everything I can to avoid it. Case in point: Mike, as more a member of the internet generation than I, and as someone who does not spend all working hours on the computer, will want to look up a phone number and so heads towards whitepages.com while I panic and say "no! don't turn it on! use the phone book!" And truthfully, turning the computer on is a slippery slope -- a few minutes to work on a blog leads to emails waiting in the inbox and this and that to look up, and before I know I've just spent all sorts of precious non-work time doing the same things (different content, of course, but still) that I do for such a large majority of the weekday hours. I just don't like my job enough to channel it like that when not at work.

So, all that to say, I agree in principle, and I really do like keeping you all updated, but it's just hard to make myself do it more often. Maybe once I become a fuller time farmer and a lesser time academic-y office worker I'll be more excited about blogging on off-time :). But for now, I'll keep the suggestions fully in mind and keep trying to strike some sort of balance between my computer-avoidance and my desire to write to you.

All that said, I still need to tell you about part 2 of our trip to South America, i.e. Pucallpa. Pucallpa is where I spent 2002-2003 eating lots of bananas, learning lots of Spanish, and interviewing lots of farmers in the jungle about agriculture and forestry and challenges and opportunities etc etc etc. As many of you know, I found it a lovely place to be, and I remain really fond of Peru. I went back to visit in 2005 on the tail-end of a dissertation-research-site-sleuthing-out-trip to Brazil (where I didn't end up doing dissertation research in the end), but hadn't been back since. So it was lovely to see old friends again. My friend Martha's youngest daughter, who had been 6 when I lived with them, was 13 and so obviously much had changed :).


Pamela, Martha, and me


We went to the zoo and Pucallpa's "natural park"


We also got to be "witnesses" to James' (Martha's 2nd oldest son) marriage proposal to his girlfriend. (This is the after-picture.)

As usual, we took a couple little side trips down the long and winding road (it actually is long and winding, and eventually goes all the way to Lima) to visit other people I had lived with and/or known while doing interviews in the countryside. Unfortunately, many of them were out of town, in other parts of Peru visiting family for Christmas/New Year's (it was the perfect time for Mike and I to take enough time off to go to South America, as my office gets really really quiet that time of year, but apparently it was also the perfect time of year for others to take time off too... note to self). So it was of course a little disappointing to get to the farm of Naty and Nicanor after many years away plus a the 3 hour ride and 1 hour walk from Pucallpa (during which I could hardly recognize the road or the entrance to their place it had changed so much) and just find house-sitters, leave them a note and a calendar with pictures of the Wenatchee valley, and walk back out to try and find a car to take us back.


The entrance to the road where Naty and Nicanor live

But that's how it goes, and still it was really fun to show Mike the old haunts, and for Martha and Pamela and I to see how it had changed, even if we didn't get to see as many old friends as we would have liked.

Meanwhile, change was by far the theme of the trip. First hints were in Lima, where we had walked into a supermarket near where I used to stay when in town, and it was now under new management, and was in fact one of the fanciest supermarkets I'd ever seen -- deli counter, people with free samples on trays, the works. For Minnesotans, think Kowalsky's. Of course it's always funny what's normal and what's not in different places, but Mike put it pretty well -- "You mean," he said, "there are supermarkets like Kowalsky's but you can't flush toilet paper down the toilet and the government can't control the water supply?" Yes.

"Modernization" grows differently in different places at different times I suppose. In San Alejandro, an hour from where Naty and Nicanor live, there didn't used to be electricity or running water when I had been there, but now as soon as electricity came in, even just for a few hours a day, there were computers and internet cafes and cell phone towers to replace the town's 2 public phones. In fact there was cell phone coverage in areas that no way would ever have cell phone service in Washington state -- I mean, our house hardly has cell phone service in Washington state, and we only get internet via satellite.

Anyway, when I had been back in Peru in 2005, Lima had changed quite a bit in the two years that I had been gone (new buildings, fanciness, etc.), but Pucallpa had been pretty much the same. So coming from Lima, I was wondering if the same would hold true this time. It didn't. Pucallpa changed amazingly in five years. I had a hard time figuring out where I was in "downtown" because where previously there had been a few bigger cement buildings next to some smaller wooden ones, now almost everything in the town center was big and shiny and made of "noble materials" (the word used for bricks or cement or whatever isn't plywood).

And Martha's house was different -- they had upgraded from plywood walls to boards, and from a scraggly wooden fence when I had lived there to a nice-boards wooden fence in 2005 to a brick fence (i guess it's called a wall) with a door with a lock and a key in 2009. James (who recently graduated college) and Augusto (Martha's husband) both had found jobs which provided them motorcycles for transportation. The shower was now located inside the house in a bathroom rather than as buckets out in the backyard (although Martha said she couldn't quite adjust to showering inside and still used the buckets outside. I had to agree with her, although I didn't know why until Mike noticed when he tried showering outside that the water outside was not as cold as inside, because it had been heated up by the sun. And of course in 100 degree weather, cold water showers are great (especially with no other option) but of course there's cold and then there's cold.)

Martha's family now had a sink with running water in the morning and evening (but not midday). And they had a refrigerator (although still no culture of buying food ahead of time and storing it in the fridge -- Martha still goes to the market everyday and mostly uses the fridge for keeping leftovers -- although note that when we left a pot of rice and meat and plantains out overnight (out of pre-fridge habit), the part of it that Martha was worried about having gone bad in the 100 degree heat was the plantains. And she was right, the meat was fine (speaking of which, the Shigella bacteria I thought I brought back from South America actually turned out to be E.coli, and I'm pretty sure that was from lebanese schwarma on the street in Paraguay). Martha's family now has a computer in the house, no internet though -- and no shampoo -- just laundry soap in the shower -- (not that shampoo is computer related, but it reinforces this idea of different cultural prioritizations than we might have in the U.S. in terms of which you would buy first -- shampoo or a computer).

The population of Pucallpa had also grown tremendously, and there were rumors that a supermarket might be going in soon in the place of one of the open air markets (which, for nostalgia reasons is a little sad mostly because Peruvian markets are awesome, but maybe also because now instead of 50 vendors making a living selling little bags of fava beans, one supermarket owner employs 20 people and makes the profits... although maybe the 20 new employees with steady work no matter who buys their fava beans is an improvement itself... who knows...).


Juice bar section of one of Pucallpa's markets

Anyway, many more streets were paved, there were new traffic lights, and the number of motocars had multiplied.


Mototaxis in the market

And there was a cathedral in the center square. Which was actually a good lesson for me. When I had been in Peru before, there was always the sense of "Oh, the government or such-and-such company had said they were going to do X, but we haven't seen anything" or "It's been like that for years with lots of talk and no action," and of course there's still that sense in many areas, but really, lots of things had changed big time. In 2005 I remembered hearing the story that someone was raising money to put a cathedral into Pucallpa's central square because "all good latin american cities have cathedrals in their center square" but they had started building and ran out of money, and were running an unsuccessful campaign to get more. I had figured thus that the cathedral might never happen, and wondered if that was really such a bad thing anyway. But instead I came back and... it was done -- and actually it was a really cool modern design cathedral, very neat looking. So things do change, even when you think they won't.

Probably by far, though, the biggest changes were along the road to Lima. In 2002-03 (and in 2005), it took 24 hours by bus to get to Lima, through the jungle, over the Andes and down the other side. It was only about 500 miles, so mapquest in the U.S. would probably pin it at 10 hours, but the roads were problematic. Where paved there were huge potholes that required driving on the wrong side of the road and slowing down to 5 mph. Where not paved (i.e. most of it) the road was dusty in summer and mud in winter, subject to landslides that would hold up traffic for days. There was little besides forest on the side of the road in between the few towns scattered here and there. Often it was secondary (i.e. previously logged) forest, but still pretty dense growth. For years people said that the government had promised to pave the road, or at least to send construction equipment to clear out landslides regularly, but that it never happened. All my interviewees in 2002-03 said that road transportation to markets was one of their biggest barriers to making a living in agriculture. And now all of a sudden (well, for me all of a sudden), the road had in fact been paved.


Asphalt! (and power lines!)

There was one section still remaining to be completed, but really it was amazing. Although of course interesting in some expected and some unexpected ways.

First, it used to be that if you needed to get from one place to the next, you'd stand on the side of the road and either a shared taxi or a random truck would pick you up and for a small amount of money would take you where you had to go. Each of these vehicles would end up filled to the brim, with 6-7 people in the normal seats and 3-4 people (plus packages) in the trunk (think station wagon model trunk). Every time you passed a town people would come over to the vehicle to sell you little plastic baggies full of juice or cheese wrapped in paper or nuts or whatever.

But this is different now, mostly because now cars go 50 mph instead of 15 mph. And they cover the distance in easily 1/2 to 2/3 the time of what it used to take. And so they stop less to pick people up, because it slows them down in ways it hardly used to. And the ladies selling cheese are still around but they don't bother to come up to the cars, because the cars pass them at 30 mph instead of 5 mph. And you can actually get that cheese in Pucallpa rather than only at Km 86 on the road, because it's so much easier and more reliable to transport it there.

But drivers still pack their vehicles as full as they can. And so while it used to actually be fairly safe to ride in the trunk of a station wagon with no seatbelts as your car swerved to the wrong side of the road to get around a pothole, now, with paved asphalt and cars coming around curves at 60 mph in both directions, it seems a lot more dangerous. And in fact, there were all sorts of new stories that I had never heard before about someone being killed by a car when walking on the side of the road (which used to be just fine to do -- but of course when you can now more accurately almost call it walking on the side of the highway, it becomes not so fine). And so sitting on a little cushion placed on top of the parking brake in the front seat with no seat belt availability trying to keep my knees out of the way of the driver's stick shift seemed less sensible than it used to be (and not just because I'm getting older and so potentially more risk-averse -- I think it's actually just a different ballgame now).

The other new thing about the road paving project was the impact it had on the sides of the road. Martha hadn't gone down the road in a while either, and so as the two of us were trying to recognize houses where we had stopped years earlier in order to visit, we were doing so by looking for "the place with 2 wooden houses on the side of the road near the curve with the big hill on one side." And now of course the curves were a bit different because the paving project had changed the trajectory of the road a little here and there, and had made everything zoom by faster, and even more importantly, where there had been 2 houses there were now 10. And the wooden houses we remembered had been replaced by new construction projects.


Fancy new houses

Because before, living in that spot had been fairly isolated despite being on the main road -- it had involved a 10 km walk to the nearest town, or a 30 minute ride in a passing vehicle. But now if you could get a car to stop for you (which people actually generally could, despite the lack of cheese purchases through car windows), it was a 10-15 minute ride, easy to get to school, to work somewhere in a town, to get your produce to market.

As such, the roadside forested areas had been cleared for new houses and new towns, and actually, it reminded me of the roads in the Brazilian Amazon. Turns out that perhaps the Brazilian Amazon had just been 15 years "ahead" on the "development" scale than the Peruvian Amazon. So no more locating yourself by house landmarks or big tree landmarks (although the fast-growing tree species that the organization I had worked with was encouraging had in fact gotten really big).

It's of course the typical Amazon story. You build (or pave) a road, and people come to live by it and build houses and cut down trees and farm, and when the soil fertility runs low, they bring in cattle to graze. We saw way more cows than I had remembered.


More grass, fewer trees, more cows (but not in this picture)

And in town, the borders of town had spread much further out, classic expansion of urban areas and changing definitions of what is considered rural. Certainly many more conveniences and really useful amenities but of course a different feel alongside that.

Meanwhile, some things had stayed quite the same. For example, we arrived to the house of one family I had previously stayed with, an older couple, although the woman's husband had since died (and she had decided not go away for Christmas/New Years). The younger guy who had lived with them and helped out with the farming was home, but said that Nieves, the woman, had left to go to town to cross the river to another parcel where she had planted corn, but if we hurried we might be able to catch her at the port (of course). So we drove to town and through to the port, with no sign of her. We asked the people waiting for boats, we asked the people selling gasoline, no one had seen her that day. The gas people, though, pointed us to a store, owned, they said, by Nieves' daughter-in-law. Still no sign of Nieves but the daughter-in-law suggested we take a motocar back to the town center and look for her there. As we headed back out, we passed a motorcycle, and Martha, the motocar driver, and I all turned our heads to look at the woman riding on the back of it. It was (of course) Nieves! So we turned back around and went back to the daughter-in-law's store and sat with Nieves over a drink of barley juice (non-fermented).

Nieves had been planning to go with her son across the river to see if the corn they had planted was ready, and if it hadn't been eaten by birds, to harvest a little. Having found all of us at the port, however, she suggested to her son that he just go alone. "How about we all go?" I (of course) suggested. "No," she said (again, of course), "it's better if he just goes alone quickly and then comes back, and we can just sit here and talk." Then the son had a hard time finding a boat that could take him across, and so of course somehow in the process of trying to help him a boat and someone to drive it, the plans changed, and there was a bigger boat available and Nieves said "Yeah, maybe we all could go!" So we all of course pile into this boat -- Nieves, her son, Martha, Pamela, Mike, me, and the boat driver -- and head across the river with machetes.


Looking for a boat


Into the boat we go

Everyone got a good laugh off the gringos chopping corn stalks with machetes, the corn got harvested faster with six than it would have with two (or one), and we headed back to the port then back through town and back to Nieves' house for lunch, unexpected (yet predictable) adventure accomplished.





In any case, it was great to be back in Peru. I still really like it there. And I like that Mike can now put faces to names and connect stories with places. And we ate a lot of really yummy food. Actually shortly after returning to the States we both (and my bro Yoni, who was visiting and goat-sitting!) went to Portland (I had a meeting there) and we went out to a Peruvian restaurant, where Mike commented on how much he had missed the food in the week since we had been back. Ah, Peruvian food, yum. Maybe we'll have to figure out how to take a few months sabbatical someday and go back for a little longer (probably a long time from now, though, once Peru will have most certainly changed significantly again).

Anyway, I guess that's it for part 2 of South America. Stay tuned for catch-up on our winter goat milking adventures and the growing flock of chickens. Probably not in the next few days, but whenever I can next stomach a weekend computer session for the good of the goat-beard-blog.

South!

...America -- Part I

Mike and I spent 2 1/2 weeks in Paraguay and Peru in December/January. It was lovely. It was lovely in fact in three distinct parts. First was touristiness, i.e. Cusco, Peru & Machu Picchu. Second was family, i.e. Asuncion, Paraguay visiting Mike's oldest brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. Third was nostalgia, i.e. Pucallpa, Peru and its surroundings, where I had spent a year in 2002-03. This post will get you as far as Cusco and Asuncion, with Pucallpa (and of course some new goat/chicken returned-to-Wenatchee updates) saved for next time.

1. Cusco and Machu Picchu

Cusco was the old capital of the Inca empire, and Machu Picchu was (perhaps) its university, hidden (well, not hidden at the time, just hidden for a while after the Spanish conquest) in the mountains nearby. Nowadays you typically access Machu Picchu by train and bus, or by walking 4 days along the Inca trail with a guided tour group. Mike and I chose, well, neither -- we ended up on the compromise access route, leaving the train partway and walking 1 day with a guide. I think it was a good compromise. Allows you to arrive to Machu Picchu on foot, which is impressive in that you walk through high jungle mountains for hours and then magically come upon a huge ancient city from above.





But it doesn't require 4 days time for the full walk, nor the (I've heard) sometimes weird social dynamics that can come with a group of 6-8 foreign adventure tourists plus 3-4 Peruvian porters cooking and carrying tents/food/stove for 4 days. In any case, it was a great visit, and we were also able to spend some time during our stay walking around Cusco and the nearby town of Pisaq, adjusting to the altitude, eating lots of food (within which may have been lodged some Shigella bacteria that stole a ride with us back to the States), and walking around a few other archaeological sites around Cusco.


Cusco


Pisaq

The funniest part, perhaps, was being there with Mike. In Peru, I stand out a little bit as a gringa. But I'm small, and I know the language and the geography, and so I often feel (although perhaps just in my head) like I can walk around with at least a modicum of anonymity. But accompanied by another gringo, and in this case an extremely tall extremely bearded gringo, cancels out any shred of anonymity there might have been. Our wanderings around Cusco were greeted by shouts of "Hola, Papa Noel" or "Mira, Santa Claus!" And we realized that, given the time of year during which we visited and Mike's bearded look, we should have come with pockets full of candy canes.

In fact, both the fun part and the tiring part was our inability to pass as anything but tourists. Of course we were there in fact being tourists, so it's not fair to complain much. But it is nicer to be a tourist tourist in a place you don't know at all, where the shopkeepers' attempts at English and the inflexibly compiled pricey tour packages are, if not ideal, at least very helpful. In this case, it felt slightly frustrating, knowing better, to pay twice the going rate for food half as good as in other parts of Peru. But it was a great first stop for us and of course, a beautiful spot (with certain geographical similarities (and differences) to Wenatchee, which is interesting in and of itself).





2. Asuncion

After a brief stop in Lima, where we spent the day with the family of a coworker of mine from Wenatchee at her Christmas/birthday/family reunion party (where Mike got to be the big tall bearded Santa-Clausy gringo who provides entertainment by attempting salsa and huayno dancing with the relevant aunts, which he and they thoroughly enjoyed), we flew to Asuncion, Paraguay, to spend a week with the bro-, sis-, and nephew-in-law.

Paraguay involved lots of relaxing and sleeping and swimming and barbecuing and eating sopa paraguaya (or paraguayan soup, which is not actually soup, but instead a cornbread-like-dish). Culturally, Paraguay is a lot closer to Uruguay or Argentina or Brazil, if I were to put it in terms of what I know of South America, than to Peru or Ecuador (of course of course yes yes there are big big differences between each of these countries, but still...). It's east-side South America, with plains and cattle and mate (tea, kind of) and beef and European flair; different than the Andean llama jungle style of west-side South America.


left to right: Jason, Sebastian, Dallys, and amiga Cynthia


with Sebastian and Blondis the cat

In any case, here ends South America Part I. Stay turned (hopefully soon-ish) for South America Part 2. Note, meanwhile, that Mike is at this very moment working on uploading pictures to one of those photos websites where you can go to see more of them if you so choose, but until then you just get my limited photo choices :). I'll keep you posted, though.

Separating Ed

Apparently boy nigerian dwarf goats can be fertile as early as 7 weeks of age. But they also can nurse until 6 months. Which makes for a dilemma. You don't want a goat like Ed to impregnate his mother or sister, so you need to build him a separate pen. But in order to do that, you need to wean him. So we put in a fence to spearate our pasture into two pens, one for Ed and Breezy and Dublin (who are not related to Ed) and one for Cle, Frosty, and Gigi.

Fast forward to a couple of weekends ago when we put everyone into their new pens (complete with an elaborate stepstool system for us to get from one pen to the other since we didn't have time to put in a gate). Lots of bleating, lots of complaining, as expected. But when we went to milk Frosty the next morning, expecting our typical few squirts, there was a ton of milk. Which meant several things:

1. It's not that we are ineffective milkers, as we had thought we might be, it's more that the kids had drinking most of it (duh... but since we hadn't seen them nursing much lately we had figured they were almost self-weaned).

2. Gigi doesn't seem to keep up with Frosty's milk supply on her own.

3. Keeping Ed separate from Frosty and Gigi means committing to milking like normal people, twice a day, morning and evening.

4. The other option would be to dry Frosty out, but that would involve also separating her from Gigi, adding separation anxiety to separation anxiety (plus a quick new need to build a third fenced pen).

5. We're leaving for 2 1/2 weeks, and while our neighbors and my kind brother have both been generous enough to take on goat-sitting duties, milking twice a day is a bit too much to add to that, especially since Frosty still spends half the time trying to step in the milk bucket.

So we decided to reunite all the goats. We decided that since Gigi hasn't started going into heat yet (and Frosty her mama hadn't started cycling until 6 or 7 months), Gigi won't be fertile even if Ed maybe possibly is. And we decided that Frosty wouldn't let Ed try anything on her anyway, since she is still responsible for feeding him. Anthropomorphizing? Maybe. But meanwhile we're crossing our fingers and considering this the best, more reasonable option for people who are perhaps foolishly attempting both farm animals and travel in the same lifetime. We'll separate them again, this time for real, come January.

Meanwhile, a couple of pictures from Mike's birthday/chanukah/beer brewing party, which included an excellent kid-driven living room dance party and an after-party for those who arrived, sans kids, after the first shift called it a night.





Will let you know next post how the animals survived our absence, whether or not today's snowstorm passed soon enough to let us get to seattle for our flights, and the word on the street from peru and paraguay. Best wishes for multiple kinds of holiday-y winter-y good stuff, and talk to you next year.

Three fall sagas

The egg saga



Our chickens have been getting older. For the hens, that has meant egg-laying time. But not egg-laying in the nice little straw-filled laying boxes provided for them. Rather, eggs turn up hidden in gopher holes in the pasture, on the floor of the coop, or in a little indented spot in the straw under an overhang at the far end of the yard. Nevertheless the treasure hunting and omelet potential have been fun. Meanwhile, for our roosters, getting older has meant crowing in the mornings, chasing hens around the yard, sparring... which was waking us up at 4:30 in the morning and making the barnyard a bit chaotic... especially once we realized that we had six roosters.

We had originally bought 12 chickens -- six egg layers and six meat birds. One of the meat birds had been killed by a neighbor dog early on, and two others were commercial breeds that needed to be butchered a couple of months ago... so we had thought we only had three left. But friends of ours had also gave us three chicks that needed homes, and it turned out that all three were roosters too (it's hard to tell when they're young). So we decided that it was time for some chicken butchering, even though it's kind of sad.

So we decided to have a party. A housewarming, birthday, sukkah-building, fall, chicken butchering party. Of course that was somewhat over-ambitious and made for us running around between a sukkah (outdoor hut built for the Jewish harvest holiday of sukkot) and a chicken-killing station (which was for some reason :) populated by fewer people than we had hoped) and a barbecue grill and a normal party. Anyway, eventually all six chickens got turned into freezer meat and the sukkah got built (but subsequently fell down in the winds that blew up that night -- see?)...


Before


After

...and we even got to spend a little time at the party party part. And the next morning, there were no roosters crowing in the yard. But when we went out in the afternoon, we heard a cockle doodle doo. Turned out it was Gimpy, our limping chicken who had been battle-wounded in the same dog attack that had taken out our first meat bird. Gimpy had been a bit of a mean chicken -- pretty feathered, but mean to the others, kind of an attack chicken -- and we had just attributed that to chicken post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Turns out, in hindsight, he was just an undercover rooster. With 6 other non-limping roosters around, he had kept it under wraps, but with the rest of them out of the way, he took his presumably rightful place as crowing head of the barnyard (note his non-chicken-like upright posture -- limp compensation it seems).


Gimpy standing with the baby goats (Ed & Gigi)


Gimpy chilling

And we were foiled in our quest for no roosters (the saving grace is that he only crows once out of the coop in the morning, so no more 4:30 am wakeups at least).

Meanwhile, once the 6 other roosters disappeared, the hens seemed to stop laying eggs. We just weren't finding them anymore. The laying boxes were just filling up with poop and none of the normal egg hiding spots were seemingly being used. So we got worried that we had traumatized all the eggs out of the hens by getting rid of half the flock all at once. I bought a dozen eggs from the store in response. One day, though, there were two eggs sitting on the ground next to our yard's gazebo-made-out-of-a-satellite-dish. And then the next day, a friend suggested that maybe they had been laying under the gazebo and that those two eggs had just rolled out from underneath. So I looked underneath (which involves lying totally flat on the ground on smooshed goat and chicken poop) and sure enough there were a couple more eggs.


The space under the gazebo

And reaching under, there was another. And another. Turned out there were about 20 built up under there, and we had found the solution to the mystery of the halted egg production. All of a sudden there were 3 dozen eggs needing to be used. Come over for omelets please!


Eggs :)


The milk saga

Our baby goats have been getting older too. Ed, the boy, has turned out to be very vocal. He bleats and bleats whenever anyone is around. He cries and struggles when we try vaccinating him (whereas all the others doen't particularly like it, but don't protest nearly as much). He seems to think he's a chicken, and bleats indignantly when we lock him out of the chicken coop so that he doesn't eat all their food. Some of the other goats have been following suit as well. This is only helpful in that when you come home and the yard is quiet, it's a clue that the goats have broken into the barn where we store their hay. It's a dead giveaway.

Meanwhile, we'd been trying to figure out when and how we could separate mama Frosty from Gigi & ed so as to wean them and start milking her. Mike built a milking stand that she could eat grain at while being milked, and Frosty has learned to come into the barn and jump up onto the stand and look for grain snacks -- but we've really only gotten a couple of squirts out of her -- probably because the kids are still feeding some, probably because she's holding back (goats can do that), and probably because we're not terribly skilled tiny-goat milkers yet.


Ed and Cle (non-milk-related :))

So... milk, not so successful yet. Eggs, quite successful. In light of that we bought 25 chicks online who arrived by mail, and they are currently living in our bathtub waiting to get big enough to live outside and be integrated with the rest of the chickens.


Baby baby chick


A couple of weeks later

We're reorganizing the barn so that the chickens will have a bigger place that can accommodate more of them, and so that the goats will have somewhere to be inside if they want to when it gets really cold (we've had 3 little snows so far at our house, but none yet in Wenatchee where the elevation is lower).


Snow!

We're also needing to put up another little fence because Ed, when he gets to be 3 months or a little more, has to be separated from the girls unless we want more baby goats. Meanwhile, the new chickens should start laying in the spring, which might give us a little on-the-side egg business. Maybe if we can do some eggs and a few goat baby sales and a bit of honey and/or who knows what, we could transition to more time doing farm-y type work and less time doing desk-y type work... not yet, but we'll see how things go.


A travel saga

Mike and I are planning to visit his brother & sis-in-law & new nephew in Paraguay in December, and also to go visit my old friends/places in Peru. It has been a bit of a saga to get all that together -- between few airlines flying to Paraguay and attempts to make frequent flyer miles work, and internal Peruvian airlines who say you can pay with a credit card on their website but then you can't and then flights get more expensive if you pay any other way, and this and that and the other thing. But it's looking now like it will work as a trip... which is exciting!

Meanwhile, less exciting is figuring out how to have the goats and chickens taken care of if we're away for two weeks, especially in the winter, when getting up and down our road to/from town can be tricky with snow (so we hear)... I already hit my first deer on our road -- well, it hit me, early in the morning in the dark, just sort of ran out from a hiding spot into my side mirror (and knocked the mirror off, but otherwise didn't do any damage -- I assume the deer just got a bruised shoulder too and moved on).

Anyway, all this to say that the goat-chicken-sitting is a bit of a challenge -- so if you're looking for a rural Washington getaway for Christmas/New Years time with all the omelets you could ever want, let me know! :) Actually, though I think it'll work out. We just went to Utah for a weekend to visit friends, and one of our neighbors watched the animals. It seemed to work out okay, so we'll see...

That's about it for now. Here are a couple of pictures to leave you with -- one from a little hike near our house; and a couple from the above-mentioned trip to Utah :)


Hills overlooking the next-door-canyon


Utah


With Zhao

Til soon!
:)

Catch-ups

This summer has been busy, and so somehow I haven't been able to catch you up on goings-on of late. The baby goats are already 5 weeks old, and really big (well, relatively speaking), but I don't have good pictures of them being quite this big and running and climbing and chewing all over everything and everyone, which is what they seem to do best these days. So I'll settle for posting some slightly older pictures and assume that eventually I'll get some better climbing shots in here (hopefully before they get older and once again less springy) :) So here's Frosty and the babies (now named Ed & Gigi) and then Ed & Gigi on their own, probably both within their first few weeks.





I have to catch you up first on their being born. It was actually all pretty seamless, Frosty took care of it all. Mike and I had been planning to put new straw in the kennel and close Frosty in there for the nights near when we thought she was ready to kid, so that she would have some space to herself, without the other goats bugging her all the time. And of course we kept running out of time to set it all up, but the night that we finally did, about an hour after we put her in the new pen, probably around 10pm, we heard a bigger-than-normal goat yell. And went out and there was one baby goat on the ground being licked. And then Mike went inside to get some towels, and while he was there, there was another goat yell and another baby. Took a little bit of helping to get Ed & Gigi to be able to nurse, and Mike and I both spent the rest of the night getting up every couple hours to check that everyone was still okay and warm enough, but that was about it. They've all been quite self-sufficient.

Anyway, even without getting to see them more consistently in pictures, you can still see fast changes -- here from climbing during their first couple days to running around several weeks later.





Meanwhile, the other goats have also adjusted well to the babies. At first there was a bunch of head-butting (which doesn't really seem fair when the kids are so tiny, although I guess that's how it works) but now everyone seems to get along fine. And by now the babies are almost as tall (but not nearly as wide) as the adults. Dublin, who was so, well, mean, when we first got her, has really mellowed out and has taken to letting Gigi climb on her and stand on her back. Frosty, no longer pregnant, no longer hides from Dublin's head-butts, and so I think the two have established a more stable and realistic pecking order, which maybe has helped as well.

Anyway, that's pretty much the scoop on the goats. Ooh, and our chickens just started laying eggs! They have been hiding them in little corners of buildings and little holes in the ground rather than in our belatedly-installed laying boxes made out of milk crates, but I'm sure we'll all settle into a routine sooner or later -- for now it's a daily treasure hunt.

Besides that, we've got here a few wedding pictures (borrowed from people who've sent their photos along -- thank you!) and pictures from the Enchantment Lakes wilderness area nearby where Mike and I went camping post-wedding... with, of course, a little commentary here and there. I'll try to get some additional photos up on some site somewhere at some point so those of you who like details can browse through them. But here's a start.

Wedding pics:


The roof of our house plus some of the tops of shade tents, taken from the nearby hill.


Our pitchfork inspired requests to pose as "Cashmere Gothic."


Signing paperwork.... and, well, these next ones are all pretty self-explanatory too so no more captions for now.











Anyway, we lucked out with a lovely day, and really felt honored by all the people who were able to make it out to celebrate with us and by all the tons of help friends and family provided -- as, of course, even a reasonably laid-back wedding takes some planning. It was also nice in that "long lost" friends and family got to spend some time with each other. And it is not too often in life that you get to see people you know from so many different places together in a spot where many of them wouldn't have ended up going otherwise. So I, and Mike too I think, really appreciated it all quite a lot.

That said (you know I can't just leave it at that), I have to say that the process of getting married is (at least from my perspective) kind of a pain in the butt. And perhaps, in many cases, the wedding is as much (or more) for other people as it is for the people getting married... and while I really appreciate being able to provide that opportunity for other people (as I've also really enjoyed going to other peoples' weddings over time), nevertheless the cultural lore suggests that that's not quite how you're supposed to feel.

And so that cultural lore makes it hard to publicly express anything but sheer happy-glowies at a wedding without disappointing others or somehow diminishing their happiness about it -- so, I'll just say a little of it here. Please don't get me wrong -- I wouldn't have wanted to get married in any other way, and I don't have problems with the institution of marriage -- but I guess to me it rings somewhat false to celebrate something gradual and ever-changing as if it were a one-time event. I understand that weddings give some sort of societal credibility to a relationship, and I understand that it's nice to establish markers so that we make time to appreciate and celebrate pieces of life, but, well... it's kind of like a dissertation (and I do have to credit Mike for this analogy).

With a dissertation, it's not really about the dissertation defense. It's about the multi-year process of learning (which is in itself both rewarding and annoying and a privilege and a pain), and which was preceded by other seasons of learning and which will be followed by other seasons of learning, albeit in different capacities. And so, while defending a dissertation can be a big deal, if we're really being honest about it, the work and the accomplishment and the real core of it came before, over time, and comes afterwards for many years following. By focusing too much on the defense, we tend to miss or minimize the bigger process, and perhaps tend to candy-coat it as well. So I guess what I'm saying is that it would feel more true to me to celebrate life things in little small everyday bits and pieces rather than bigger "more legitimate" celebrations.

Of course, a lot of good came from our wedding, as with most, and I'm very happy about the marriage... but all in all the wedding itself was, for me, a mixed bag -- and I don't think it actually should have been or could have been otherwise.

But in any case, enough of all that :).

After the house emptied out, Mike and I went backpacking for 5 days in the mountains nearby -- and the trail up was STEEP and the trail down was STEEP, but it was a nice trip. The Enchantments is to Washingtonians a little like the Boundary Waters is to Minnesotans (but more mountainy) -- you need to get a permit to camp there (so as to limit the number of people in the "wilderness" at any given time), and it really is a beautiful beautiful spot, but when you get up there, it's just like a parallel universe, just 6000 feet higher and full of people on vacation (well, except for the people who do the loop in one 18-mile 6000-foot elevation gain day as their trail run -- note that in most places, I'd consider myself to be in average shape; here, I'm way at the bottom of normal).

Anyway, it was a lovely outing away, nice to be outdoors and walking, and it has been good since then too to be getting back to normal, back to routines, and back to the day-to-day.

Hiking pics:


On the way up.


We mis-estimated time and had to sleep one night on the steep-ish (but pretty!) gravelly bouldery rocky ascent trail. We found the one spot the whole way up that was flat enough to accomodate a tent.


These photos don't quite do it all justice, but the Upper Enchantments (at 7800 feet) looks like the moon...


...while the Lower Enchantments looks like fairyland peppered with mini-trees and bigger mountain goats.


On the way down.


Snow Lakes from above.


Me hiding in zee lower corner with zee big backpack for scale.


I wouldn't quite call Mike hiding but it still works for scale.

So, with that, we'll call it a day -- til next blog time.