Local remedies

Sometime on Sunday I made the mistake of commenting to Noah that despite our rustic living, travel, and pretty high stress levels, neither of us had really gotten sick this fall.  Within hours I was slightly congested, by bedtime I had a bit of a headache, and I woke Monday morning floored by fever and aches and a general inability to think clearly or stay very upright.

One advantage of working with your partner/ for yourself/ at home is that rather than simply propping myself up by whatever means necessary to soldier on through lectures, teaching lab, or writing exams, I actually did what you are supposed to do when starting to get sick--I went back to bed.  I made an attempt at working, at first, because we did have a lot of coffee orders to still get roasted, packaged, and mailed out, but after an hour or so Noah wisely suggested that I just go sleep some more. So I did, fitfully and feverishly for another 4 hours of the day (cats love this).

That helped, especially when combined with an ancient but new-to-me herbal treatment recommended and delivered by our neighbor and old friend Cedar.  When we cancelled the dinner we'd planned to share that evening, because I was feeling crummy, she instead brought over a bag full of yarrow (Achillea millefolium) that she'd harvested this summer, recommending it highly as a treatment for cold, flue, fevers, or infections.  It's a pretty strong and bitter brew, but steeped with peppermint and licorice and ammended heavily with honey and lemon, the taste is not so bad.

So common I don't have a closeup photo of it (something to
fix this summer!), yarrow is the white bloom at the center.

Of course, being a scientist, I am always curious of the evidence of effectiveness, wanting something beyond my own one-time feeling that it helped. It's not that I don't believe folk remedies or alternative medicine, but I sometimes want something more concrete--a little research, or at least knowing that someone has really looked into how it was used.  Herbal-remedy websites plastered with ads, riddled with spelling and grammar errors, and lacking citations tend to leave me with little confidence (though they said such glowing things).  So I turned to a quick search of academic journals and immediately found a peer-reviewed article in the journal Economic Botany that gave yarrow tea an interesting bit of academic credibility.

You can follow the link below to read the whole article "Yarrow (Achillea millefolium L.):  A neglected Panacea?  A Review of Ethnobotany, Bioactiivy, and Biomedical Research"   if you really want to see it yourself:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12231-011-9154-3?LI=true

If you're not into reading whole, dense articles, the two-sentence summary:  The ethnobotanical evidence for yarrow being an active plant is very strong, since it has been used in so many different cultures, for such a long time, and for similar types of ailments.  The chemical profile varies greatly across the range of the species, but it contains many bio-active compounds, though there have been few studies of yarrow effects on humans; the study recommends it as a high priority for testing as a medicinal herb.

It's enough to convince me to do some collecting of the blossoms this summer--we'll have quite a bit of it growing our yard and pasture, as well as many of the surrounding open areas, so supply should be good.  So far I'm pleased with the results, and with much of the bag left from Cedar's gift, I'll definitely be trying it again--I'm not so optimistic as to assume that this was the last cold of the season.

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!

Corners of Home 1: Sewing desk

Noah is off in China, so things are both quieter (no late-night construction projects) and busier around here lately (solo care of 2 cats, rambunctious dog, and 18 chicks that are getting a bit feisty themselves).

But as we have finally eliminated most of the cardboard boxes from our living space, I thought I'd share a few of our homey corners with you over the next few days.  With all the moves over the last few months, we've pared down a lot of things, so a lot of what is left is what one or both of us insisted on keeping, sometimes because of its history or story.

This desk, which anchors the sewing corner in the upstairs of the house, has a US manufacturing stamp on the bottom, dated Dec 1948.  It's solid, and it is not light, but I've moved it from Missoula to Oregon and back now.  I found it with a free sign in my 4th year of grad school.  At the time it was covered in a rather ugly olive-brown coating somewhere between a varnish and a paint.  I took it home in my station wagon, set it oustide and proceeded to sand the entire thing down by hand and re-finish it.  I'd decided it would be the dissertation desk--and I did write much of my PhD dissertation sitting at that desk, in the house on Chestnut Street.

I'm grateful that its new incarnation involves fewer papers and more creative putting together of things. The bright orange bit on the corner is one of the first priority sewing jobs--replacing a broken zipper on an orange jacket Noah hasn't been able to wear for almost a year now.  I'm hopeful that a good setup lets projects like that happen, rather than lingering for months!

(other details:  chair, salvaged from my parents' attic, has also made several multi-state moves and been treated to some repairs with wood glue.  print above the desk is an image of a wild ginger leaf captured, of course, by Noah, and printed specially for me as a gift last Christmas.)

Snowbirds

It's blustering with direct reminders of the Pacific blowing constantly over the mountains into our little valley.  I spent the weekend in Seattle, Washington, for a friends' wedding, but some of the weather found its way back here too.

On the morning walk, Malaya charged a few flocks of Dark-eyed Juncos, though, so I know that higher up in the mountains that wet is falling as snow.  The first flock of those little birds, we saw on the way to check on the chickens, and I realized that the chicks have passed that milestone--they are now definitely larger than our little outdoor songbirds.  (my new computer doesn't have such as easy connection to the camera, but hopefully more chicken pictures will appear soon, once I get the connectors back!).  They have real live little wings now, and are just getting quicker and quicker (and harder and harder to catch, consequently).

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.