Just a Simple Morning Walk

After taking Noah to the airport in the small hours of this morning, Malaya and I had a little morning walk.  She loves the walks, of course, and it's also part of my time for trying to watch and observe our place here.  We walked, as we often do, down the driveway, through a gate, and up back through the pasture.  She  gets to be off-leash much more now than she used to, but she knows that she gets extra freedom to run in the pasture.  On the roads we have to keep her in close formation, if not on the leash, so she doesn't suddenly take off after deer, other dogs, or horses. The pasture fence though a little flimsy, seems to stop her even when she scares up a deer.  She knows this walk well enough now that I rarely put her on leash for this route, so she dashes to the end of the driveway, doubles back, and stops hopefully at the pasture gate.  Inside, she gets the "okay!" signal and tears off at a dead run, ears back and nose down.

While she runs, sniffs, and goes through her usual routine of checking and following deer tracks, I walk a bit more slowly.  We are both observing and taking data, in our own ways.  For her, it's all smells.  Who was here last night, where did they walk, sleep, pee?  I tend to be more visual.  This morning, though,   it's a bit dark, grey, and my eyes are still feeling the 4:00 am wakeup for the airport run.  So instead of working hard to 'look' I concentrate on the feel under my feet.

Every night lately has been right at the edge of freezing, and there's a rim of ice on fences and gates, but no ice on the ground.  The bare patches have a bit of crunch; top layers of soil breaking up nicely from a freeze-thaw cycle. I wonder how deep it goes, whether it will help the compacted soil work up more easily in the spring, when we start to work up garden ground.  In the low corner, where the thistle is thick and the soil seems to stay more wet, the under-foot is soft and spongy.

The paths worn by the horses are firm, and I follow one along the row of black walnut trees back toward the house. Sensing the possibility of breakfast, Malaya comes tearing from the far corner and waits smiling at the gate; together, we walk home.  

Guess what?!

The baby girls arrived last night, very very early this morning.  18 (we think, it's a bit hard to count them) are pecking and peeping in a big horse-trough brooder in the office right now.  Expect the full story of their arrival, and updates on their progress, over the coming days and weeks. 

Keep the kayak, sell the car

We are now officially a one-car, two-bike household.  For the first time since I bought that silver '86 Subaru in my last year of college, I do not officially own a car. Of course, I'm not totally car-less because Noah and I share the Jetta, but even going to a ratio of fewer vehicles than people in the household is a big jump, and a very non-standard move for 'normal' Americans. We also have access to a small pickup to borrow for farm tasks, so when we need to make a haul of strawbales, manure, lumber, etc., we have some flexibility. 

Part of equation in cutting back on jobs to make room for our own work has always been trying to reduce expenses and complications.  The car cut-back is a part of that.  The Toyota was pretty reliable and low-maintenance (2.5 years of running solidly with no repairs needed--just some basic oil and filter and fluid changes), but it still had some operating costs.  Fuel (and its mpg was half what the Jetta gets), oil changes, insurance...and the constant possibility that we'd continue to depreciate it with incidental body damage while building chicken coops, etc. (have I told you that story yet? hmm).  Luckily that dent in the rear gate from our late-night chicken coop construction last fall didn't actually take its value down too much, and it sold easily. 

The Toyota Rav4 (or as Noah always called it, "The Rave" served well for several years, but has been passed on. 

I had hardly used that car over the last year, so it's exciting to have it out, have the insurance charges for it off the budget, and not need to worry about servicing, repairs, or even just where to park it.  Having just one vehicle does require a bit more creativity and advance planning, but since the home office is now just a short walk from the home kitchen, I think we can make it work.  It's part of a process of paring down and simplifying a lot of things out of my life and space, and so far it's going well.

In good company

Missoulians will often tell you, with a mix of pride and rueful head-shaking, that our town has more not-for-profit organizations per capita than anywhere else in the country.  I don't know if that figure is verified, but I do know it certainly feels true.  Drop a glass of wine at any social gathering here (odds are it will be a potluck), and you're just about guaranteed to splash at least one non-for-profit employee, director, or board member.  Maybe a few. 

We sometimes joke with people, as we explain why we've returned to Montana, that we just thought there weren't enough non-profits or coffee roasters in the town yet.  It gets a good laugh.  But the great thing is, that glut of organizations, which might seem a strike against locating our here, is also the very reason to land here.  Because, amazingly enough, as we've met with people working for and running so many of these other non-profits, one theme emerges:  they want to help, and want to see us succeed.  Maybe it's because no one else is doing quite what we propose, or maybe it's because they like the coffee samples we give them. Maybe it's because we offer to help them too (Noah donates prints to the benefit auctions of quite a few of our local non-profits).  I think it's just part of the culture here, people wanting to support other folks also trying to do good work. 

Our latest round of supportive enthusiasm and offers for help came from a young couple who have created a small non-for-profit organization to run student travel courses (sound familiar?).  They run 1-2 courses a year taking college students to the Indian Himalaya through Nature Link, their organization, granting credit through the University of Montana.  (their org website, student testimonials, and lovely photos from courses, are here:  http://www.nature-link.org/ ). 

We met them over beers at a local brewer (also something of no shortage in Missoula) where we talked no only logistics and advice, but also the excitement and reasons we all want to run these courses.   It can be good, when we are spending other hours trying to get internet connected to our office in the Toolshed, or cramping our brains trying to understand what accounting software will work best, to sit back and talk with likeminded people about the impact an experience like a travel course can have on a student.  To remember that the kids get so much more than they bargain for, that some are completely transformed and empowered, that their presence and perspective can mean a lot to the host family too. 

Our first course won't be till May, at the earliest.  That's a long way off, but conversations like these, remembering what a great opportunity we can offer, will help us get through those details of how to offer it.  I'm grateful for the good company, the community of support. 

Making space for home

It's been quiet on the updates recently, because it has been anything but quiet in our daily activities.  After two months in the Toolshed, four months since we packed up and left our Treehouse home in Oregon, the end of the four-month move arrived in a big burst.  We've been moving. And moving again, and again and....it's a bit complicated. 

It was a bit of a Rubic's cube of a puzzle; our office rental and storage unit rentals in town expired at the end of October, but the cottage was not quite ready for us on the first of November.  So things from the office got stacked temporarily in the chicken coop, while most things from the toolshed moved to the house...then office things into the toolshed, storage unit boxes (containing a lot of our office books and Noah's prints and art materials) went into, well, first several piles on the lawn.  Then split between goat shed, chicken coop, and corners of toolshed.  Luckily none of the animals for which these spaces are named are actually in their locations yet! 

Finally, late last week we started to move into the little cottage house, wtih great delight at things like warm running water and a sink for dishwashing.  We haven't been this clean in months.  The place is small, efficien, and very bright; we're excited to have such a sweet little house.  As soon as we started moving in, though, we realized a few challenges and a lot of work lay ahead. 

The bedroom is in a daylight basement, the base of the house, and had a very cold, hard, and hard-to-clean cement floor, so project #1 was laying a new bamboo floor.  Then painting the white walls a warm yellow.  It also, um, had no closet.  In fact, after moving in boxes and bags of books and clothing, we looked around this sweet little place and realized we had no place to put any of those things!  So the last week has been a craze of building:  long bookshelves for the living room, a bread-baking station to extend the skimpy counter space of the kitchen, a table to feed the cats on, save from Malaya, clothes storage, shoe shelves for the entryway....and a closet rod/ shelf for the bedroom.  There's still a lot more to do, but with books unpacked, a couch to sit on, bed to sleep on, and food stocked in the kitchen, we are at least starting to feel a bit, well, at home. 

More photos to come as we clear out the last boxes and truly settle in, but a few for now.....a glimpse of how we have been making home:

Noah hard at work putting together the butcher-block 'bread baking station.'  A good place to knead bread is a key part of our home kitchen.  In the background is the cottage where we, finally, are living!

The final product--the bread station!  (Never mind the chaos of still-full boxes in the background.) This is all reclaimed lumber:  a maple top and some reclaimed 2x6 timbers from Home ReSource, our local building materials recycling center, and barn boards from the sides from a stock piled in the barn here on the property.  Working with these materials makes design and sometimes leveling and alignment a bit challenging, but the results have been great.