Currently: Sunday, January 13

Cold snow crunches underfoot, noses crinkle in a morning walk. 19 young chickens are getting tougher in their coop, and our chores got easier with a new hand-me-down heated waterer.  Squirrels and birds have found the spill of corn near the barn, even under a layer of leaves and snow.  A perfect set of wing prints in the new morning powder show the landing spot of one magpie.  This evening that little patch of white remains untouched, surrounded by criss-crossing paths of footsteps from many trips to the barn, imprints of a busy day.  It's left, a rare smooth patch,  a small trace of beauty from winged neighbors, too special to disturb.

No such thing

Another little mini-drama production from the cottage at Sundown Road.  Our characters are intent on finally following through with a plan to cut through the floor of the upper story of the house to allow warm air from the bedroom (the basement/ downstairs), which has the sole heater for the house, to flow directly and more efficiently up to the upper story.

Scene 1: This morning, around 8:30 a.m., finishing coffee while wearing down jackets and wool hats:

Noah:  Before you go to work, how about we quickly punch that hole through the floor for the warm air vent?

Mary:  Hmm, I was thinking of doing that this evening, maybe.  It's kind of a big project, isn't it?  I do need to get some SimBio stuff done today.

Noah:  No, it's just a simple little project.  It won't take long.

Mary:  Well, I guess.  But there's no such thing as a little project.

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Scene 2:  fast-forward montage of measuring, remeasuring, debating, fetching tools, and drilling a pilot hole to confirm that location #1 will not work for placing a heating vent.  characters encounter obstacles including poorly located access points, floor beams, stripped screws, and overall strange house design.
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Scene 3:  Mary perched on a windowsill, Noah crouched with one foot on bed, one on nightstand, finally having found suitable location, drilling through the subfloor and flooring commences in a rain of woodchips and sawdust.

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Scene 4:  11:00, Mary leaves for office, Noah commenced drilling, cutting, fitting vent cover to hole. One broken jigsaw blade.

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Scene 5:  Trip to Lowe's for larger vent cover to accommodate accidentally too-long cut on one side.  Turns out jigsaw was better for some cuts than the skillsaw.

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Scene 6:  4:00
Noah:  Well, it's all in and fitted.  Now I'll just take the rest of the day to build the box around the sides.

[editor note:  this is to make a chute straight up through the space between downstairs ceiling and upstairs floor, so warm air doesn't fill entire sub-floor space.  again, strange house design).


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I stand confirmed:  there is no such thing as a small project.  

We can laugh at it, mostly, but we have had way too many projects like this lately, with little setbacks adding up to big frustration and projects that go on and on.  I'll admit, though, I'm glad we didn't start this one in the evening after all; it would have been another very very late night. 

Happy Solstice

The shortest day, a long soft night.  We've had busy social times here, and more travel, festivities, and family time are planned.  The next few days--actually, next week or more--will be packed.  But right at this moment, after friends over for dinner have left, the house clean, warm and cozy, it's a moment of quiet, the right sort for solstice--a moment to breathe.  It snuck up a bit this year, seeming sudden.  Though it's the official start of winter, it's also the start of a long sigh of relief, to be turning back towards the sun.  From here on out, it gets brighter.

Winter light through hoarfrost on the fence wire.  

I'll leave you with a section of a traditional Irish blessing, from the collection Earth Prayers, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon:

May the blessing of light be on you, light without and light within.  May the blessed sunshine shine on you and warm your heart till it glows like a great peat fire, so that the stranger may come and warm himself at it, and also a friend.  And may the light shine out of the two eyes of you, like a candle set in the two windows of a house, bidding the wanderer come in out of the storm.

As I move into winter and more moments of sunlight, I hope to bring them in with that goal--to let that light shine out as well, welcoming and warm.

Happy Solstice, everyone.

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).