Rainbow Unbent

I probably wouldn't have noticed it if I had looked straight at it. Or if my six-year-old son hadn't told me these things exist. Kids see things the rest of us don't. He'd talked about seeing rainbows on the ground a couple times. Not in oil slicks, but in our front pasture. I glanced over my shoulder while driving, saw the scattered weeds of an overgrown field, and gave him one of those dismissive, "oh yeah" comments that we parents get so good at.

But then on my weekly long commute, I actually saw one.

If it were a painting, I would call it contrived. And it would be.

It wasn't the kind of day-glo rainbow that comes shooting out of a unicorn's ass as it flies over a mystical ocean. No, this was almost invisible. The backdrop bleeding through, the mostly scattered hues were more implication than color. Without peripheral vision, and the motion blur of highway driving, the effect would probably be lost. I imagine few, if any, of the other thousands of drivers and passengers barreling down the interstate even noticed it.

But there it was: A band of pale blueish-purple chicory flowers, in their favorite spot, basking at the edge of the road. Ragged green grass behind, giving way to the taller grasses that grew beyond the purview of the mowing crews. The taller grass was starting to set seed and dry to a tawny gold. Still taller weeds just beyond that - millet maybe? - showing rusty brown seedheads in the back row. And covering the wire fencing that separates the highway from the farm fields, a smattering of red trumpet vine flowers.

An off-duty rainbow, hidden in plain sight. Roy G. Biv, basking in the sun, watching the world go by. And I almost missed it.

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Independence Days, weeks 11 & 12

Man, it's been a weird summer. Nothing is really thriving. The corn and potatoes appear to be hanging in there, but everything else is just kind of sitting there.

I should start writing this stuff down as the week progresses, because by the time I write this. I forget half the stuff we do.

1. Plant something - Nothing this time.

2. Harvest something - Eggs, a few beans and peas, a few berries.

3. Preserve something - I made some bread & butter pickles. A bit vinegar-y now, but they probably need more time.

4. Reduce waste - Rigged up a suction-cup shade cloth arrangement for our west-facing sliding door. It's holding up, but still needs a little fine tuning. Steady progress on cloth diapers. Other than sending Amelia to school, we're pretty much at 100% cloth for her, and for Owen. Pulled a couple hay bales' worth of weeds out of the garden and fed them directly to the cows. They were happy. Well, except Meadow. She's above eating weeds, and walked away in a huff. Moved their water trough to a more convenient spot, since they drink it dry every single day. I use the hose filling the trough as a weeding timer now. I turn on the hose, and weed until the trough is full. The cows gather 'round for water & weeds. The boys run around "helping" and hand-feeding weeds to the cows.

5. Preparation and Storage - I can't think of anything for this one.

6. Build Community Food Systems - Sold eggs at work. Bought more black raspberries and sweet corn from local vendors.

7. Eat the Food - Sweet corn, blackberries, eggs, rice, beans. Nothing exciting.

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Independence Days week 10

Late, late, late again. Too much going on...

1. Plant something - Not this week.

2. Harvest something - A handful of blueberries. And eggs. I think that was it.

3. Preserve something - Froze some blueberries. Just about to start on raspberry jam and pickles.

4. Reduce waste - Took a ton of stuff over to the thrift store. Made a long-overdue trip to the local recycling center and gave them a pickup load of cardboard, plus a some plastic and aluminum. Lori's been working hard on the cloth diapering for Amelia, to the point that she's considering putting together a web page for cloth diapers for special needs and older kids. She's been knitting more wool diaper covers.

5. Preparation and Storage - Tried to figure out a way to make the pedal-powered grain mill work. No luck so far, but I feel like I'm getting close. Talked to my next-door neighbor about solar kits, wind, hand pumps for water, and all kinds of other self-sufficiency stuff.

6. Build Community Food Systems - Sold eggs at work. Bought red & black raspberries, blueberries, and pickling cucumbers from the farm market. Finally got somebody to bring a bull to breed our cow, so that someday we can have milk again - and maybe beef too. He also brought three of his cows and their calves to graze on our pasture. This helps him get his cows bred by the same bull, keeps me from having to mow nearly as much, adds some nice fertilizer to our soil, and supports a local small-scale beef producer. I also talked to him about getting some beef from him for our own use.

7. Eat the Food - We struggled a bit this week. We've been busy with a lot of different things. Ate a lot of salad from garden greens. Ate some eggs and some jam, and various berries. Tried a couple new recipes, but I don't know if any were keepers.

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Favorites, Part 5: Baby Signs

I don't even remember where I first heard about the idea, and I was slightly skeptical at first, but I'm a convert now. I love baby signs. If you're not familiar with this, it's a simplified form of sign language for babies. Babies often have the brainpower to communicate before they have the developmental ability to actually talk. If a baby can wave bye-bye, they can learn other signs and gestures too.

The most useful signs are things like: more, all done, food, drink, nurse, and diaper change. Other signs that are easy, fun, or useful are things like: mommy, daddy, bath, sleep, cat, dog, bird, etc. You can get pretty elaborate with vocabulary. At our house we mostly stick to the basics.

But let me tell you, it's SOOO nice to be able to find out what the poor kid is crying about. Throw in yes/no and pointing and we can have a very useful interaction: What do you need Owen? Food. Ok, let's go to the kitchen and get you a snack. Do you want this yogurt? No. How about applesauce? No. (Points to sauerkraut.)

Sauerkraut?! I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. But he ate a bowlful and then asked for more. And then a drink. All without talking. And probably more importantly, he stopped crying as soon as we started moving toward his goal.

It's also cool to see combinations emerge. My favorite example was one day when I was taking Owen out to the car. I was just getting ready to put him in his seat when I realized only the driver's door was unlocked. So I walked back around to the other side of the car to hit the "unlock" button. Owen got really upset because he thought we were going back to the boring old house. So he starts crying, and signing more and waving bye-bye. More bye-bye. That's just cool.

We used the book Baby Signs, which I think was the original, or at least an early proponent. There are a ton of imitators and variants out there now. Not surprising I guess, since it's so easy and so useful.

There's no evidence that it delays speech or confuses kids when they do start speaking. The opposite seems to be true. The research shows that it apparently gives them a bit of a cognitive head start on language skills. And once they do learn to talk, the signs become less efficient than words, so they fall by the wayside.

The book was interesting, going over the research that's been done, examples of how it helped different families, and quite a few potentially handy signs. To be honest though, you don't need a book. The actual signs don't matter. They just have to be simple enough that a baby can do them. Whole hand gestures are better than anything requiring finger dexterity. Intuitive signs are useful (pretend your finger is a banana and imitate peeling it), and anything that's similar to ASL is good too if you ever have any sense you might want to learn it. And signs for words that are hard for little kids to say can come in handy as well.

Infants probably won't get it, but you can start early if you like. I think we started trying to work them in around 6 months and that may have been a bit too early to sink in. But it got us in the habit.

Owen's starting to talk now. Or at least blurt out the first syllables of various words. (Every animal is a dog. Or a "dah!") But it'll still be a little while before he really gets going. (His brother won't let him get a word in edgewise anyway...)

For such a small effort, the payoff is pretty sweet.

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Independence Days week 9

A little late this week.

1. Plant something - Nothing this week. Still trying to catch up with the weeds and grass. And yet another dead engine.

2. Harvest something - Kale, lettuce, and eggs. Oh, and gooseberries, but the chickens did all that harvesting. Someday I'll remember to put bird netting over them.

3. Preserve something - Strawberries! Finally. We made about eight pints of strawberry-vanilla jam. Tasty.

4. Reduce waste - Used bad hay to mulch the potatoes and the corn. Kept working on cloth diapering for both Amelia and Owen. (Amelia's definitely more of a challenge...)

5. Preparation and Storage - Transferred rice, salt, brown sugar and probably a couple other staples from their bags into storage buckets. Gave the grain mill a permanent home in the storage area. I tried using a stationary bike with a V-belt to make the grain mill pedal-powered, but the belt doesn't grip well enough to grind the grains. I looked online and saw that some people who have tried the same ended up with a bicycle chain setup instead of a belt. Expanded and cleaned up the storage area. Started getting materials together to actually put walls around it.

6. Build Community Food Systems - Sold eggs at work. Tried to arrange for someone to cut our hay. Tried to arrange for someone to breed our cow. Neither has been successful so far.

7. Eat the Food - Baked a couple loaves of no-knead coffee can bread. And we were testing some different bean recipes this week: Pasta with kale, beans, cheese and bacon. Some sort of bean caserole thing (which was not a keeper). And a pretty decent bean soup. Plus some eggs, bread, and strawberry jam. I'm sure there were others, but I'm drawing a blank.

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My weird home state

Ohio must be a weird place for travelers.

First of all, any state with counties named Hocking and Licking have to be a little strange.

But it's also full of cities and towns whose names are taken from various Native American cultures, which are somtimes rendered in more than one way in different places. So Pickaway county has the same origin as a town called Piqua in another part of the state. Cuyahoga has the same root as Cayuga. And Miami in one place is Maumee in another.

There are plenty of tongue twisters in there too: Tuscarawas, Pymatuning, Olentangy, Chillicothe, and my favorite - this one's actually of German origin - Gnadenhutten... inexplicably pronounced "ji NAY dun huh tehn."

But weird pronunciations are pretty common, even for easy looking names. Here's a list of towns and cities named after other more famous places, with their Ohio-ized pronunciations:

Medina = meh DIE nuh
Newark = NERK
Lima = LIE muh
Canton = CANT en
Vienna = vee EH nuh
Bellfontaine = behl FOWN tuhn
Houston = HOUSE tuhn
Louisville = LEW us vihl
Delhi = DELL hi
Berlin = BUR lynn
Milan = MEE lan
Versailles = ver SALES
Lancaster = LANK stir
Cairo = CARE oh
Carthagena = CAR thuh GEE nuh
New Athens = NEW AY thinz

and my favorite:

Russia = ROO she

What does all this have to do with anything?

Well, nothing really.

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I love this chart

I've been tracking our monthly electricity usage ever since we moved into this house, in a spreadsheet. It's got all kinds of nerdy calculations in it that estimate money saved, carbon dioxide saved, percent change, etc. But my favorite thing about it is the bar graph that shows monthly electricity usage from year to year.



I had to shrink it a bit to fit on this page, but hopefully you can at least see the downward stair effect on most months. It's getting harder to keep it going down, but I was really excited that we finally broke the 500 kWh barrier. As far as I can figure, it's going to be really tough to beat last month's 480 without either replacing our well pump or ditching our fridge or freezer. It probably helped that we were gone for the better part of a week too.

But I do think it's cool that our highest bill so far this year is lower than our lowest bill in 2006.

Anyway, hopefully we can keep descending that staircase for the rest of 2009. That's always my goal: Less than the same month last year.

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