Chicken-dusting

Some lessons we are lucky enough to learn from friends, so we avoid the worst of the ramifications.  A few examples:

1.  When there are flames licking the beans as you pull a roasting drum off the grill, DO NOT dump them onto the cooling screen, as you normally would.  As our friend John Sheffy recounted his story of the melted fan, burnt roaster handle, and singed garage siding from a beyond-dark roast, it was easy to see why forcing more air into smoldering beans with a cooling fan would lead to a 6-foot column of flames and a near-disaster.  We were grateful for that story the first time we burnt a roast.  As flames rose from the drum that first time, Noah and I locked wide eyes, but quickly and wordlessly worked together to dump the beans onto the ground and smother them with a wet rug, not even needing the fire extinguisher we always kept nearby when roasting.  We lost some valuable coffee, but not the giant, beautiful, and highly flammable cedar tree nearby.

2.  The oil pan of a Jetta is very close to the ground, when driving gravel roads to trailheads in Montana.  When Noah called me for a ride home, he said "remember what happened to Kim? Well, I stopped before the oil all leaked out and the engine ran dry.  I think it will be OK."  Just days before ripping a hole in the oil pan on the way to a trail ride, our friend had told us how she did the same thing, but ruined her engine by running the car all the way to the bottom of the road--but with the oil light on, till the whole thing seized up, requiring a very, very expensive repair.

Other lessons we seem to have to learn on our own.  The latest:  no matter how cute they are or how badly they need to stay warm, a home office is not the place to house a brooder full of 18 baby chicks.  At least not without some kind of serious particle containment tent.  Baby chicks are incredibly dusty. On Noah's return from China the other day, we spent hours cleaning up the office--not just from the usual clutter of papers, books, and receipts, or even from the non-standard chaos of coffee bags, labels, and freshly roasted beans.  No, in order to work there again, we had to wipe down every surface, everything that had been exposed, cleaning off the fine layer of dust that had settled during the two weeks of the office doubling as a chick-rearing room.

The chicks have moved to the garage, where they are a little colder but much more isolated from our electronic equipment.  Next time, we are waiting till spring or a warm barn space!