Bicycle Power

Bicycle-Powered Blender!!!

I love it!

I want one.

We went to Bite of Eugene at Alton Baker Park yesterday and lots of local food vendors showed up. It was an interesting break from the almost constant tv/computer viewing my children have been coercing me into.

These smoothies were free to passersby but have yogurt in them. I asked if it was possible to just make the next batch with apple juice and the fruit and leave the dairy out so Robert could drink some. They were totally game, and even rinsed out the blender to make sure there wasn't any yogurt residue.

Shortly after they started doing it, another woman walked up asking the same thing. :) Serendipity.

Robert quite enjoyed helping to prepare the smoothie.

Then some free jumping!

Even Aubrey partook.

       And here is my non-sequitor photo.

I had planned a solid week of sewing last week. All the children and myself are short of summer clothes and I have all the fabric and notions at my fingertips. So on day one I sat down and sewed up these shorts for Robert within two hours. They are completely huge. But he still wants them.

Alas, I haven't sewn since (and that was seven days ago.)

Faeries, Elves, Chickens and Manuscripts

Well. I feel sheepish. (Baa.)

I signed up to do this Nablopomo for the month of August where you post something every day on your blog. Um. It's already August 4th (my mom's birthday, by the way) and it's the first day I've even remembered to post anything. Ai-yi-yi.

So a recap of stuff that happened since August 1st: I recuperated from 9 hours at Faerieworlds on the 31st of July.






I took the kids to the library and to Blockbuster and spent a huge amount of time typing up my manuscript and tweaking the format. Willamette Writers Conference is this weekend so I'm freaking about preparing for that.

August 2nd found us back at Faerieworlds



and by the time I got back home I was crumbly, hot and headachey. More work on manuscript in the evening.

August 3rd was yesterday and I took the kids to swimming lessons, went and picked up our raw milk from the farm, hit the library again and researched agents and publishing houses for the rest of the day.

My mom-in-law, Anna, came over, I played Banangrams with her and Robert and printed out a selection of the manuscript to take to our critique group.

Group was great. It's a strange mixture of inspiration, discouragement, and hope. My book is still very rough draft and the whole structure needs to be changed. It is written in chronological format right now, and it really needs to be organized thematically instead. I need to write another hundred pages or so, and there are other subjects that need to be addressed.

This all can't happen by Thursday, of course. So, mostly I'm working on the hook and my pitch. I also want to finish researching and spinning my pitch to specific agents and their houses.

Today, I visited with Anna in the morning, talked to her about the book's theme, took the kids swimming (lessons), sent Pebbles (one of our roosters) packing,

(Bless his fuzzy little heart; he started crowing yesterday and we can't have roosters in the city. Fluffball, the white chicken you can see a tiny corner of in the photo, is also a rooster. But we're pretty attached to him, so he's going to a friends' house on the 22nd.)



checked the mail, made lunch and started reading a book I'm dying to read but stopped myself after three pages because I simply can't justify reading right now.

Before I go to the conference I need to:

pack
charge batteries
gather business cards, a briefcasey thing to hold the first fifty pages of my rough draft (3 or 4 copies -- I'm thinking insanely here, but it's fun) and my agent research
I need to go grocery shopping so Anna has food the kids will actually eat without giving her too much grief
journals and laptop
get my allergy shot, chiro appt and massage done
and continue to take kids to swimming lessons, have a SpiralScouts business meeting and a Firehawks Hearth meeting at the swimming pool on Wednesday night.

Making some yogurt before I go would be nice, too.

Sheesh.

I think I'll go write now.

Summer Posting

Posting on my blog during the summer is ethereal. Just when I remember to blog something, the whim passes. Or I remember I need to do something else and veer away to perform this sudden task -- forgetting the blog post in the interim. Or I'm breaking up the enumerable fights the children seem to be having these days. Or I'm working on my book. Or I'm picking fruit, or looking for u-pick farms or dreaming about canning and wishing I hadn't missed the strawberry season because Paul's favorite jam is strawberry. Or -- Ug -- recovering from a car accident.

So, those are my paltry reasons for not posting.

I am going to be doing the NaBloPoMo for August. So I will become a larger presence on this blog. Meet me here to see how my August is shaping up. I'll be going to the Willamette Writers Conference to pitch my book to three different agents, I'm taking the kids to a Faerieworlds Festival, we have our annual Spiralscouts camping trip, and there's a trip to the coast planned, too. Not to mention I want to pick and can and freeze peaches and goddess knows what else.

Our chickens will move to a permanent home, too. Maybe even before August. Their place is temporary right now.



Our housemate built this the day after the neighborhood cat got into the yard and the chicken's playpen and we lost a chick for a night.

I think I'll go play with the chickies now. They are still afraid of me after three months. Hmm. I think I'll let them out to free roam and capture one and sit among them and just hold it on my lap. I'll bring some kale to feed them. Maybe I can lure them to me. (Yeah right.)

Cob building workshop

Last weekend I went to a Sustainable Living Festival at a nearby farm. In addition to about a dozen lectures that I listened to, I also took a cob building class. I've been super interested in cob for years and actually wanted to build our home out of cob ... before we found and bought the one we live in now.

So, now I'm thinking ... cob chicken house.




What's cool about cob is you use what you have. It's a great self-sufficiency skill to acquire. The most common materials are: clay, sand and straw. But again, you use what you have. Bailing twine, sawdust, the earth you dig up from your back yard.




First you lay down a tarp if you don't want the ground to get all icky. Also it helps for rolling logs, as you'll see later. Our instructor, Keiko, laid down sandy soil first. He got this from a river bed.




Then he added clay dug from the ground and dried in the sun.



We all started smooshing it together with our feet. Mine are the red toes.



You add water to get it nice and wet.



Keep stomping and squishing.



Then you do a ball test. Make a ball in your hands and pat it down real good ...



... then you drop it. This batch isn't quite done yet. Needs more sticky stuff. So we added more clay and water.



For this particular demonstration, Keiko was having us make a cob oven. It was a mini one.
First you've got a base (simulated by the milk crate and wood lathe thing), and then you lay down your fire brick.



Keiko interrupted his demonstration to show us some bricks. Instead of free forming with cob, you can also make bricks with a form like this.



This is a cob brick. (It is unfired and used to build in this form.)



You can also fire cob bricks in a kiln (like pottery, 'cuz -- duh -- it is pottery) and they end up looking like this. And they last a really long time.



So back to the oven. Once your cob is ready, you build a sand castle with wet sand. :) This is what you are going to put your cob on.



For this little oven, Keiko had us make the walls of the oven be two fingers thick. It's important to keep your measurements the same all the way up to the top, otherwise you end up with a really thin dome top. Push down on the clay, compressing it but not pushing into the sand.



If a crack happens. Oh well.



Just cut out the broken part and keep working.



Here's all the cob put over the sand form.



Use a piece of wood or a paddle to smack it around a bit to further compress the clay and work out any lumps or weird pooches in the walls.



And then the walls are all smooth.




Cut out a door.



And dig out the sand.



Keiko talked a bit about insulation next. On an oven, you want to keep the heat inside so it doesn't cool off too fast when you pull the fire out to cook in it. (I imagine you'd want insulation on your house, too.) You can actually go up to a foot's width of insulation. At least six inches. Here he's made an insular layer made of sawdust and pottery slip. ('Cuz that's what he had.)



Our next project was a quicker way to make cob that was nice and strong and could be used for walls and such.



Take your cob mixture: sand, clay and water; and add straw. This isn't so much mixed in, as stomped on. Think "squash the grapes." The idea is to keep adding straw and dancing on the whole pile until no mud squishes up between your toes. You don't want a sloppy cob to build with or your walls will smoosh over.



When it was dry enough, we rolled the tarp over and consolidated all the cob together into this log that was strong enough to stand on.



Now you can start building with it. Same as before, compress and integrate the layers together. Don't just lay them on top of each other.



Alternately, you can make coils. (Good for curved walls.)



Now make a giant coil pot!




I got lots of ideas and I'm so glad I went. Next step, dig a hole in my back yard and start drying my clay soil out.

Happy building!

Aprovecho field trip

This is the part of their forest that they sustainably harvest. Note what this side looks like compared to the wild forest that they leave alone and don't touch.

This is a cool building that they are finishing up construction on. You can see all the layers here. First there is straw, then a mud/cob layer, and then a lime wash plaster.

Sallal Berry Plant

Douglas Fir

Red Cedar

This is the wilderness part of their forest. This was my favorite part of the tour.

This is a legacy stump. One of the old-growth trees that originally inhabited this forest.

Jeremy, our guide/instructor, is showing Aubrey a "writer's conk". Named for the under surface of this fungus: you can carve messages for future travelers to read. Writer's conks only grow on dead trees.

This is the wilderness area where they don't touch anything. Nothing is removed (as in felled trees, etc.). Do you see the difference between this and the harvested area?

Native Columbine flower

Robert looking over a bridge at a creek.

Jeremy identifying a Big Leaf Maple. Maple leaves have five sections to them. (maple=5 letters) Another species version is the Vine Maple. There are nine sections to those leaves. (vinemaple=9 letters)

This is another legacy stump, but it's also a "nurse" log, because a new life form is growing out of it.

Miner's lettuce, an edible plant. The leaves taste sort-of like spinach.

This is not a nurse log. This tree fell over in the forest but did not die. Instead, the branches grew up and up to resemble trees. It was pretty neat-o to see.

This forest is fifty years old. Aprovecho purchased some land fifty years ago that had been pretty much clear cut and they planted all these trees. Except for three trees. One of them is to the left of the picture. It's a hundred years old. As they sustainably harvest the trees in this side of their land, they'll always leave those three old trees, and a few of the middle-agers. They use the lumber they cut down for building their houses on the property and for firewood.

They also leave dead trees, or snags, for the purposes of encouraging wild birds and mammals to live in them. They eat the larvae and beetles and termites that can sometimes bring a load of trees down.

Aubrey and Robert are using the metal ox to pull a downed tree to the bottom of the hill where it can be milled for use.

This was a super cool cob bench. You can't see in the picture, but there are a couple of "steps" for sitting on below the kids' feet. They used the clay from their own land to create the cob.

The day finished up with a rocket stove specialist sharing why rocket stoves (like the small one shown above) are more fuel efficient and also much healthier to use. His team has gone to neighboring countries that tend to cook over open flame in their homes, without proper ventilation, and showed them how to make rocket stoves themselves with the raw materials that they had and how to repair them when they broke. Helping others learn how to be self-sufficient is part of the educational curriculum at Aprovecho. Our guide also shared that respiratory disease is the number one cause of death in children under the age of five. So it was real important to cook away from the house, outside; or to have proper ventilation inside so as not to inhale the black sooty smoke day in and day out.

Aubrey and Robert's fire.

This is a rocket stove invented and designed by our stove guy for some folks in Brazil.

This one's made of clay.

Aprovecho is an educational center that teaches people about foresting sustainably, organic gardening, permaculture, burning fuel efficiently on rocket stoves, and the differences between a wild forest ecosystem and a sustainably logged ecosystem.

The people that teach on Aprovecho also live there. It is an intentional community.




Our "school", Homesource, is a place where my children take classes in stuff that interests them and they come up with some pretty awesome field trips from time to time. This was one of those times.

I haven't decided if Homesource is for us, because of course there are strings to everything and I don't particularly like these strings. But we'll try it for another year and see.

I'm real glad we went on this field trip. It was great to get the kids out in nature and do some hands on activities (like logging!) that they don't/won't get anywhere else.