Good heavens!! That dog was utterly ginormous!
Did you see the size of his teeth, Florence?
Florence?

for A, and anybody else who's stuck in colder weather

blogger format

I'm trying to figure out how to use the "dynamic view" in Blogger, yet keep gadgets on the edge of the page (like the list of blogs I read, and the archives of my own blog). Anybody have experience?

december 2011 trip to ohio, maryland, & w. virginia

Here are a selection of shots from our visit to see some of Jason's family last month. We flew into Cincinnati, where Uncle Jim and Aunt Kate live, rented a car and drove out to Maryland and W Virginia, visited mostly Jason's immediate family there (sorry we didn't get to hook up with everybody - maybe this summer!), and then drove back to Cincinnati to fly home.

If you are crying inconsolably to see more of our family trip (and don't pretend you ain't), I posted like 160 pics to facebook, and I can certainly shoot you a link to view them, even if you don't have a facebook account.

at the Krohn Conservatory with Uncle Jim and Aunt Kate

I don't know where Zoralee gets her expressions....

Zoralee's 3rd birthday

A fun little series of geographical factoids about Zoralee is this: she began her existence in Alaska, was born in Montana, had her first birthday back in Alaska, second birthday in Texas, and third birthday in Ohio. 

For Zoralee's birthday, we went to the Cincinnati Zoo. If you're familiar with our attempt 1 and attempt 2 to visit North Dakota zoos and pumpkin patches, you'll know how spectacular the Cincinnati Zoo was - for all of us! And we were literally the ONLY visitors that day, on account of the pouring rain. So the animals were alert and responsive to us. It was great. Just great.

The gorilla keeper told Zoralee to climb beyond the silly fence and get right up to the glass;
he said both humans and gorillas enjoy the interaction, so why not?
The babies showed Zoralee their tricks and brought a box over to play with her.
We were in no hurry to leave - I mean, how cool was this??

Zoralee and Haven (Uncle Cam's niece) at the Cincinnati Museum Center
When our own Jim and Kate turned up sick, Rach set us up with her step-in-laws,
and it wound up being a real highlight to hang out with them!
The Children's Museum at the Cincinnati Museum Center is awesome.

two plaid-shirted, jeaned, tennis shoe'd dads and their little blondie daughters

at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia

 

This set of wings was lying around in a back room at St. Peter's, where we went for a fund-raiser luncheon. It was to be used for a Christmas play that night. Hefty things; I wouldn't trust them on a toddler, especially a tipsy one who has had even a single drop to drink.

my free bird mother-in-law

breakin' the law

We visited the National Zoo in Washington D.C. (which is free!), so we hit two amazing zoos in a week's time. LUCK-Y. 

a close up sighting of our favorite zoo bear

A she-gorilla had a crush on Jason and kept following him around.
That feigned shock, open-jaw "aren't YOU something?!" expression is the same one I used
to woo Jason years ago, so I kept my eye on her.

Jason with his sisters and Mom

a wild night of family dancing

 

a little story about the dancing:

After everybody had shaken their booties for a good long while to pop and rap music, Jason and I winked at each other. It was time to deliver our very clever joke. We said casually to our two twenty-something nieces, "Oh heyyy, maybe you guys would be interested in our music for a change," knowing they would say, "We don't care about your folky music," which they did indeed say. Then Jason pushed the button on his iPhone, and we started jamming to 50 Cent's "Hate It or Love It." Yeeeeahh boy, we were con-nect-a-tect-a-tect-ing with the young folks, that's for sure. They watched us be fools for a minute, and then Ashley said, "Umm, you guys already played this joke on us last time."

Oh. Right. Best of all, we'd used the very same song for our joke two years before, because it's like one of five rap songs we know.

What would it feel like to not be a couple of spaz-oids? I'm afraid we'll never know.
 

two of Jason's high school buddies, Jason and Jesse

Ziah with two of Jesse and Emmy's three kids, Jasper and Brielle

winter pic and some notes

I am serious. I'm on the computer, yes, yes, and now I'm logging on to blogger right NOW, and I'm posting a quickie blog - like a single picture, maybe two, and a couple of sentences - if it's the last thing I ever do.


today

I don't think I've mentioned before that we have an extra dog. Shasta has been with us for a few months, and we're dog-sitting until her parents get a place to live where they're allowed to keep her.

This week, the kids and I rode the train from Montana back to North Dakota. 14 hours on a train with a baby and a toddler - - this maneuver is NOT RECOMMENDED for a single adult if it's your sanity and love of life you wish to maintain. Actually, it wasn't too awfully terrible until the last couple of never-ending hours, when neither child would fall asleep but instead chose to be whiny and irritable and act like, well, like they'd been cooped up on a train for a whole day. At the end there, Zoralee was run over in the aisle (her own fault) by a very tall man who literally folded in half over top of her and caught his hands on the floor or a seat arm to keep from totally toppling over. So sorry, dude.

The day after we got home, we closed on our new old house. A person has to sign their name one jillion times on one jillion papers when they are buying a house.

For the last couple of days, I've been doing the very unglamorous post-trip chores of laundry and unpacking while battling a small flare up of the winter blues / post-partum / something or other. Felt like a million dollars today when I made a huckleberry cheesecake and a batch of dill sauce from a cookbook my folks gave me for Christmas (two recipes, unrelated to each other - the dill sauce can be put atop scrambled eggs or other breakfasty entrees). The kitchen is still a wreck, but I say, "never mind about that."

My birthday was yesterday. Thanks for the well wishes! It was an ordinary day of grocery shopping, getting books at the library, and setting up a new bank account. Amidst those ordinary things, Zoralee threw around a couple of innocent size-related insults. At the grocery store, she said, "That lady has a big bum," which, to be fair, was true. At the bank, when we were in back with the one lady who opens new checking accounts, Zoralee said, "This is a small office." I'm not sure what CEOs she has been hanging with to know the difference, but she does lead a fairly exotic imaginary life, so it's tough to say.

Night! Can't wait to catch up with the rest of you'ses blogs....tomorrow or soonish.

I've got me a 3 year old and a 6 monther

These pictures are from a couple weeks ago, but they get across the two coinciding points that I've got fast-growing children and that time waits for no mama. We're on vacation to visit Jason's family on the east coast, so I've got a lot to post when we get home. Meanwhile, Zoralee turned three the second day of our trip and Ziah turned six months today! Ziah weighs 17 pounds on Nana's scale. I'd have to look back at my extensively well-organized records,* but if memory serves me right, Zoralee was like 18 pounds at the age of 2. Don't quote me on that. Point is, these two are built differently, and it shows - - in the thighs, among other places.

Gosh, I wish I could tell you the things each of them are doing, but we've got zoos and Christmas lights and cousins to see, and cookies and cakes and other piles of carbohydrates to consume, so I'm not in a good position to bloggity-blog-blog all the live long day.

Except, that last sentence reminds me of one of Zoralee's quotes from a couple weeks ago. I told her not to sass me (can't remember the context), and she said, "I AM gonna be sassy all the live long day to you!" So, how 'bout them apples.


* scraps of paper tossed with care into a pretty, plaid bag

survive and thrive friday: first deer with the bow (!), deadfall trap, bowdrill fire-making

physical training

*   *   *

Our biggest news is that Jason got his first bow-and-arrowed deer this week! It was a saga, a battle between man and beast that spanned the course of three days. Each night, as the sun went down, the man returned home, head hung low. He took off his leafy, scentless, silhouette-breaking clothes, not sure he would be able to track and finish off his chosen deer. And the deer bedded down in the tall grasses, thankful he'd escaped death for one more day but alert for when that weird bush would show up again and shoot sharp things toward him. When it was all over and Jason drug his 4x4 buck down the valley toward home, a squirrel ran along through the trees, watching him. There's a teepee ring on the hill right near the house here, so Jason wondered how many times this scene had played out in this same place over time - the squirrels watching as braves brought meat home for their families.


The meat is hanging in the barn now, waiting for us to get to it - hopefully tomorrow. I grew up on deer meat, and we always got together as an extended family to process whatever game we had. But this will be our first time to process a deer just the two of us. It feels a really grown up thing to do, maybe too grown up (!); I honestly don't know if I'll recognize which chunks should be cut into steaks or roasts or ground into hamburger.  I'm thinking we may end up with some roasts the shape of Texas or West Virginia rather than, say, Colorado. Wish us luck.

Deer-hunting season is a reminder to me of many good things: trips into the woods with my dad, grandpas, aunts and uncles, thermoses of hot chocolate, lumpy fanny packs of matches, flashlights, hand warmers, and other emergency supplies, roads and hills named after family hunting events, "you go this way, I'll go that way, and we'll meet at the bottom of this draw...," and back home, counter tops and tables cluttered with maps and binoculars, and piles on the floor of warm long johns and blindingly bright orange hats and jackets. And stories, always stories. In my family, when you turned 12, you represented the potential for two more deer tags, so off you went to a hunter's safety class to get certified. It felt pretty hard-core to contribute to the family's meat supply, and I am really grateful for that experience.

*   *   *

This is a small trap Jason has been experimenting with "to work out the kinks in the comfort and safety of our home," because you never know when you might need to give a major headache to a sweet, curious little squirrel out in the wild. Actually, of course, the idea would be to eat what you catch. I'm glad Jason is thinking along these lines, should all hell break loose and we're forced to eat weasels, because I sure as spit ain't.

The log is held up precariously by these three sticks.
Crazy enough, only one stick is touching the ground! It's like a magic trick that
baffles and entertains the onlookers and simultaneously kills small animals.
Here, a curious, colorful, miniature alligator nibbles at the bait.

The onlookers' eyes close as the sticks come loose and log crashes down.

"Gopher, Everett?"

Jason got his deadfall trap inspiration from this book.

 Here's a website that has instructions with photos.

*   *   *

Finally, a couple shots of bow-drill fire-making. In this particular experiment, all we got was smoke and no fire, but Jason subsequently figured out that your wood types have to be the same (at least for some of the components). Maybe another day we'll have pictures of fire to show. Also, it's getting pretty late, and I don't feel like explaining how this works, so maybe you should google it if you're interested. Or else just use a match and paper.

Let's survive!

Let's thrive!

Unless we're a deer or a rodent in the crosshairs of Jason!

scenes of winter

diving off a to-do list into winter

thumb

Who's freezing - show of hands?

What about alternating days of each?

survive and thrive friday: snot sucker, buying a house, and PERMACULTURE

In case anyone was under the ridiculous impression that every single Friday I would reveal a "Survive and Thrive Friday" post, ohhhhh, ha ha ha! No, no, no, no. It's just that when I ever do post about surviving and thriving (things we're trying in the pursuit of self-reliance, self-sustainability, and more wholistic living), heh heh, it'll be on Fridays, see. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Or Saturdays. And not necessarily the same Friday or Saturday every month. No way, man.

*   *   *

Let's start right in with no more ado but with lots of snot. Rachel showed us a Nosefrida snot sucker over the Skype, and I was instantly sold on it. We've all been sick for a couple weeks, and nights are 134% worse than usual because babies keep waking up irritated at having to mouth breathe. Come to find out, you know what's even cooler than sucking a tiny dab of snot at a time out of a baby's nostril? Sucking a tube full.


After dropping into casual conversation a couple of times the fact that I was gonna go out and buy a Nosefrida for $25, Jason brought home a 30 cent length of tube from an auto store. He cut the end off one of our nasal aspirators and stuck it on the tube. Tuh-duhhhh. Works like a frickin' charm. The actual Nosefrida has a couple filters interspersed, but in our experience so far, the snot doesn't even come two inches up our homemade tube, so there's no way it could reach the sucker's mouth. I would advise to be careful and not suck too hard or for very long, because there's a tiny set of lungs on the other end!! I was so excited about better sleep that I was a little vigorous at first, and Jason had to put the Whoa Nellie on me. Good old Ziah didn't seem to care one ounce. For the first couple days, he just laid there when I sucked the snot out of him, literally. I love this kid. Pretty soon he wised up and got wiggly over it, but it was a nice snot sucker honeymoon while it lasted.

You know, in this whole survive and thrive thing, I feel like I could write a lot every week, but most of the time it would be about conversations we're having, inspired by the survival podcast I keep mentioning. And that could get old, talk being cheap and all, so I'm gonna try to limit my mentionings to things we're actually trying / doing. No guarantees though, because some of these concepts are way too earth-shattering to not mention before we've verified for ourselves that they're true. Er...right!

The biggest news is that we put an offer on a 100+ year old farm house two Fridays ago, and it was accepted! It was a rather quick situation, and we're still in the throes of getting financed, having it inspected, blah blah blah. In general, we've been hesitant to get into housing debt, but when we saw this one listed and then viewed it a couple days later, we knew it was enough of a fixer upper that we could for sure come out ahead. And North Dakota is one place we feel confident investing in real estate. We still have the heebie jeebies about the debt, and about being part of the U.S. banking system at all, but we'll see. How home-ownership plays into surviving and thriving is thus and so: 1) building equity that we can turn into the cold, hard cash we need to be closer to "the dream," and 2) having our own space in which to practice permaculture concepts.

What the heck is permaculture, right?! Well, it is a crazy EXCITING concept - in my own words, it's creating little ecosystems that are as close to self-sustaining as possible (just like nature does it), but with the results / outflow / products being things that are useful to you, the creator. It's like a garden that you put a lot more initial intention into so that, while it's operating, the least amount of your energy is required to reap big rewards. A key word is efficiency, and permaculture-esque ideas apply to the running of a household or any human endeavor, really. You could have a little greenhouse in which to grow produce year round - Jason is working on a design for one now - with your chickens located right inside the greenhouse so that their poo is instant fertilizer and their heat helps keep it warm. They would also provide CO2 for the plants, which would provide oxygen for them. Permaculture is such a huge topic, and I don't even have it all worked out in my own head, that I'd better refer y'all to a couple of websites we've been visiting and learning from.

"An incredible example of permaculture in action can be seen in any of the short youtube documentaries about Sepp Holzer in Austria. Amazing stuff." - Jason

Here's one that gives you a quick overview of Sepp and his wife's homestead, and how they've basically thrown away all modern, conventional farming and gardening wisdom and instead watched nature itself for how to grow things without degrading the landscape.




Jason downloaded FOR FREE this permaculture designer's manual; we have yet to delve into it, but the writer, Bill Mollison, is the guy who came up with the permaculture term and the concept as it is envisioned in modern society. You have GOT to start with this interview of Bill Mollison from 1991. I think it'll inspire you to start the manual, like it has me.

A guy named Paul Wheaton at www.richsoil.com has lots of interesting permaculture-related stuff, and from there I found this link about caring for cast iron cookware. We probably use our cast iron 90% of the time, but have SO not perfected its use. Food still sticks a lot. Well, this page is chalk full of insights, and I got several tips I instantly integrated into the care of my pans. They have a forum at www.permies.com.

That's it for now, folks. Happy surviving and thriving!