I had a super fun day visiting with a fibery friend who drove out from town today with a specific mission: she has decided to make a list of "50 things by 50" (her birthday is in a year). When she was gathering suggestions of things to put on her list (cliff diving and tattoos were definitely out, she said) I suggested shearing a sheep – and offered that she could shear one of mine, and keep the fleece for her present. She thought this would be absolutely fabulous – and hey, if someone else wants to do the jobs I have to do anyway but considers the work to be entertainment, well, who am I to argue? :)
Today, she and her husband came out, along a friend and the daughters of the two families. We had a great time visiting while my friend learned to shear, with hand shears, the old fashioned way. After the first lamb was all tidied up, there was a second volunteer … and since the kids were all out having fun and nobody was in a hurry to go, the second lamb was shorn in a team effort by both ladies – while I sat with my feet up on the barn railings! This is my idea of a great day – someone else shows up to do my work, I get to visit, and everyone has fun! The kids played on the hay bales and went exploring at the creek, the wool was packed into bags, we warmed up with tea, and everyone headed back to town happy. I can’t wait to see what my friend makes with this wool – she is a superb spinner and knitter and will no doubt make something fabulous.
Just as those friends were heading out .. another friend pulled into the driveway. He had been to an auction today, old buggies and horse tack such, and at the end of the auction there was something that he thought I might like. If I didn't want it, I was to say so, but it was a gift for me if I did think I might enjoy it.
Gee, what do you think I said?
It's an antique Canadian wheel - from Nova Scotia, he said, though I looked and it has no maker's mark (not at all uncommon for these wheels). The wheel itself is straight and unwarped (not at all common for antique wheels!), though it sits unevely in the supports and there's one loose spoke, but those are minor issues and easily fixed. The flyer (the piece where the wool is wound onto the bobbin) is cracked and damaged and has no hooks, but I’ve tested the space with my standard Ashford flyer assembly (which is a ‘spare part’ type thing that I can purchase fully made), and it fits! I can see how to fix this wheel up and make her productive again – and I am unimaginably happy. I know my friend was pretty sure I’d be pleased … but I doubt he has any idea how truly, deeply thrilled I am that someone would surprise me with such a fabulous, much-wanted, and absolutely perfect gift right out of the blue!
Many spinners say that their wheels choose their own names – and this one most certainly did: she is Jacqueline (pronounced the Acadian way, Jack-eh-leen'). My generous friend’s first name is Jack – just like the beloved grandpa for whom my farm is named - and so this wheel is named for the thoughtful, open-hearted person who carried her from the auction block to her new home.
I am so blessed to be surrounded by such wonderful friends. I love my life.
Lots of people shake their heads at me because I “do so much work” – generally suggesting that I’m slightly nuts to do so much ‘from scratch’ or for going without convenience tools like a dryer. So, I figured today I’d document what it is that I really do (on a busy kind of Saturday), and see how much work it actually is and how it feels.
Now, although I plan to get a fair bit done today, I’m not overextending as I’m still recovering from the flu: although I am overjoyed to simply be upright and mostly functional, my energy levels are still pretty low, so I need to move slowly and not do any heavy physical stuff. So everything I do today will be accomplished in first or second gear only. Also, I’m home by myself, the rest of my nuclear family having headed to Manitoba for a family visit that I opted out of: after 2 weeks off work with the flu, I really didn’t feel right taking more time off, besides the fact that the long drive and whirlwind visit is probably more exertion than is good for me just now.
So …home alone, puttering around, gettin’ stuff done. What’s it look like? Here we go:
To start the day, my parents stopped by to drop off some pies (and ingredients for MORE pies!) for Thanksgiving – they are headed out of town, and this was their gift to us. Cool! So I got to visit with them for a bit, which was nice. By the time they left and I finally got moving it was a little before 9.
First order of business was laundry: I re-rinsed the load I’d forgotten in the washer yesterday and while that was spinning, gathered up some more to go in for the next load. Meandered to the kitchen and started the coffeemaker, then changed loads in the washer and hung up the clean stuff inside (there wasn’t much, so this was a quick 3 minute job).
Now to the kitchen: I retrieved my Carla Emery Encyclopedia of Country Living and looked up some pickle recipes. And browsed, as always (it’s a great book). While pondering my options, I sliced and tossed into a pot the few tomatoes that actually ripened this year (just chunked and threw in the pot with a bit of water), added some seasonings, and set it to simmer. Pondered some more. Put a bunch of canning jars in the dishwasher and started it. Scrubbed off the ceramic water filters (since I will need a lot of water today and I want the Berkey filtering as quickly as possible) and refilled the reservoir. Set one batch of brine to boil and sat down to read my knitting magazine. By now it’s about 10, and I’m happily sipping coffee and drooling over gorgeous pictures of sweaters and yarn.
The tomatoes finished simmering around the time the next load of wash finished, so I shut off the burner, put more stuff in the washer and headed outside to hang up what was done. It’s a lovely day outside, and perfect for drying clothes – there’s a bit of a breeze and it’s cool … they should be dry in no time … although they’ll just stay on the line until I feel like taking them down, I expect. Which might be tomorrow.
Back to the kitchen to run the tomatoes through the food mill (I love, love, love my food mill – it saves me so much food prep time), pour the resulting sauce in a jar (retrieved from the dishwasher, now steaming), scrape the seeds and peels into a bowl for the chickens, and rinse off the things I’ve used so far.
Poured another cup of coffee and read some more Vogue Knitting. Realized I probably need more brine than I made, so added to the batch and boiled it up again. Topped off the coffee and sat down to read some more. Just as the brine boiled, I finished my first pass through my magazine and decided I should actually eat something before I go outside. Shut off the burner, poured a bowl of cereal and another mug of coffee and came to the computer. Time now: 11 am.
I’ll spend another forty five minutes or so here while I have my coffee, check Facebook, and write this … then I’ll head outside to pull up carrots. I really need to hack all the quackgrass out, but I’m not up to that yet, so it’ll just be a carrot-harvesting day. Well, carrots and the quackgrass and weeds in their immediate vicinity, but no big mattock work today.
How do I feel so far? Very relaxed. I haven’t moved at more than a comfortable meander all morning and I have a jar of tomato sauce, a batch of pickling brine, clean canning jars, and some clean laundry to show for it.
The laundry’s done and my coffee mug is empty, so it must be time to go outside.
…
I came inside at 1:20 with a large bowl of carrots (the weeds and carrot tops got fed to the sheep). By 3:30 the carrots were all washed, sliced, loaded into jars (with jalapenos, garlic, and onions), doused in brine and in the canner boiling. While the canner bubbled away, I tidied up and swept the floor … and noticed the crock of lacto-fermented pickles. I had intended to stop at 4:00, but it takes a lot of time and natural gas to heat up the water bath canner, so I figured I might as well can some of those pickles while I had everything going. Rummaged around for more jars, loaded them up with pickles, and started the next batch processing. Put even more pickles in jars, and finished cleaning up while the water bath burbled. By 6:00, everything was done and cooling on the counter – except for the jar that broke. (Never had that happen before – it broke in the canner, and I came back to discover pickles floating around in the water bath. Weird.)
So, it’s 6:06, all the work for today is finished, and my evening is free. I think I’ll check out some things on the web, eat some supper, and do some knitting while I listen to my audio book. I
Today was a fairly busy kind of Saturday, but I’m not exhausted and there was no stress at all: I took my time doing every job, and the only significant physical exertion was lifting the pickle crock up off the floor, that and the fact that I was on my feet quite a bit. Still, there was never any pressure, no rush, no hurry, and I had the freedom to choose which of the many jobs that need doing I would do today.
It’s a good way to spend a day.
Sharon Astyk posted this today:
Blackberry is elderly, and there's a good chance he'll spend this winter the way he did part of last winter. Victim of the other roosters, and run down by the cold, eventually I moved him into a box in the woodshed with a bantam hen to keep him company. I don't really want a rooster in the woodshed for the winter, any more than I really wanted to go out in the pouring rain to gather up soggy poultry. But the chances of Blackberry going under the knife are nil. If the woodshed it must be, so it will be.
The real farmers who read this may well be rolling their eyes at me. This is proof I'm not a real farmer, right? After all, real farmers have to make their bottom line, they don't have room for all this messy sentiment.
…
Blackberry, however, is special. He is beloved. And the very fact that a rooster could be beloved, to me, seems a good sign - it means we are being attentive. We are watching closely enough, that we know our creatures well enough to develop relationships. And we know our economic realities well enough to know that we cannot allow relationships to emerge in every case.
I do want to stand up for sentiment in agriculture because I would argue that our industrial society discourages real sentiment, the emotion that emerges from knowing things, and exchanges it for sentimentality. This is an exchange that runs deeply to our detriment, in part because it enables us not to know things.
…
The love my children and my husband and I have for a rooster who gives back more than ordinary chickens is a way of expressing the love we have for our farm in general - fierce, protective, passionate. The whole thing is alive, and sometimes to keep it living we cannot do everything we'd like to. But we can pour out our love in selected places, keep an honest and just relationship with even the animals that don't get all our love, and pour into the land and its creatures the complex realities of our passion and sentiment.
Oh, yes.
I replied:
Around here, we call it 'winning the Immunity Challenge' (not that we ever watched Survivor, but we did get the general gist of the concept around the water cooler at work). There are some animals that just ... earn their retirement.
We have a hen, "Little Red", who is ancient by chicken standards (she was probably 2 when we inherited her from neighbours who were moving away , and that was 5 years ago), and she'll never go in a pot. When she passes on, she'll probably get a marked grave, of all things. Most of the other chickens we don't even recognize much less name - and if they die, well, the carcasses get tossed on the compost pile with minimal ceremony. But not Red. She is a character. Just the other day I was outside knitting and she actually jumped onto my lap! What a cool chicken she is. I’ll miss her when she’s gone.
And then there is the LGD who is getting on in years ... he will be given a dog house with plenty of straw and 'senior dog rations' until he breathes his last, even if he hasn't got it in him to chase coyotes anymore – because he has earned that through years of service to us and his flock. If his life becomes nothing but suffering, we will pay the extra to have the vet come out here to ease his passing, rather than subjecting him to the trauma of leaving his home, so that our guardian dog's last sight is of his beloved flock and his people. He, too, will have a marked grave, and we will cherish his memory for years to come.
The sheep ... well, they're too valuable as meat, even the ones we love - so the wonderful ewe with OPP will have a quick and merciful death at the hands of our trusted butcher and we will honour her life by making the best use of all of her ... maybe we'll ask for her horns so we can make buttons or something, but she has to go. It would not be a kindness to let her slowly suffer from lung troubles, and OPP does not affect the value of the meat - so we do her the most honour by making full use of all she has to offer us, and keeping her suffering to a minimum.
It seems silly, on the face of it, to care for our creatures so. We are soft hearted, but I don’t think that is a bad thing – it helps us to honour the animals in our care. I think it was your kids, Sharon, who said "all meat has faces". When we know the faces of our meat, when we honour them with a clean, quick death and our gratitude at the table, we do right by the creatures we are responsible for. When we grant retirement status to those animals we have a soft spot for, it's part of the same attitude: we remind ourselves that these creatures have value, that their feelings - even as animals - matter to us, and that we wish to give them the best care we can.
I think it makes us better farmers, if we care for our animals' comfort. It helps us 'hear' them when they voice their distress, because we are used to listening to them as ‘real voices’ – not just a mindless bellow. Keeping their feelings in mind when we design their shelters and plan their feeding ... caring that they have good lives - even if they are normally short ones - means that we are good husbandmen (is there a gender neutral term for that?).
Industrial scale farming has no place for caring for the animals. Real, family scale farming does. I think it’s a good thing.
A Facebook conversation about knitting turned into a trade: she’ll sew a skirt for me, and I’ll knit a neck warmer for her! We both feel like we’re getting the better end of the deal – which is pretty much the definition of a successful swap. :)
I knit from the Swirl Neckwarmer pattern – and may I just say how truly awesome Ravelry is for finding patterns! I used some heather green 100% wool yarn that I had in my stash: 2 ply mule spinner yarn from Custom Woolen Mills, made from local wool on antique equipment by really neat people (I’ve been there for a tour … awesome place).
I only used a single strand of wool, unlike the doubled strands the pattern recommends, as the yarn I had was sufficiently bulky on it’s own. The Brioche stitch is amazingly voluminous, which means it will trap air and be nice and warm, which is the point. My crochet skills are not quite as amazing as one might hope, so the edges of the finished product actually swirl out a little more than in the original, but I’m considering it a design feature.
Will post a photo when I get one uploaded. It was really a fun knit, worked up very quickly and easily … highly recommended.
This came up in conversation I had with a (much younger) person yesterday … I thought a lot about my response, so I figured I’d post it here.
If you just want to go on dates, have fun, hang out, and enjoy life in the company of others, and if you end up with someone long term, well, cool, if not, ah, well, no biggie …. then this isn’t for you. But, if you have looked around and seen how often couples end up together who are, in fact, terribly mismatched and deeply unhappy in one another’s company, and you’ve decided that isn’t the kind of partnership you want – then this is for you.
First, you have to acknowledge that dating is about actively looking for a life partner, a spouse - not just choosing someone to hang out with for awhile, or someone to go to the dance with next week. In this perspective, ‘dating’ is intended to see if the person is a good fit for you as a partner for the long term – not just “someone I really like to hang out with right now”. This is very different than the way most people see ‘romantic attachments’ these days.
The short version of the rule is this: never date anyone longer than six months unless you are absolutely certain you want to marry them. There’s no point tying up fragile hearts and wasting their time and yours if you aren’t actually going to go through with getting married.
So, the corollary is, if you aren’t looking for a spouse, then don’t date anyone exclusively – or if you do, at the very least, don’t let it go on more than six months. It’s not fair to you or them, because your heart gets all tied up in the relationship, inertia takes over, and your lives get entangled (you share the same friends, you are used to doing everything together …) and then breaking up later is even harder. This is how people end up married to people they aren’t matched well with: it was fun at the beginning, nobody was taking it seriously, then somehow, a year or two had passed and being together got to be a habit, then more time went by and breaking up was more trouble than it was worth, or a pregnancy happened, or it just seemed like getting married was the next thing to do … and here they are, married to someone they liked enough to date for awhile, but not someone they ever really intended to marry. Or they don’t get married, but they spend three years together … then three more years in another relationship that fizzles out … then a couple more somewhere else … and you’ve wasted years on relationships that didn’t click at the start (waiting longer doesn’t make things better – it just wears you down).
So if you’re looking for a partner for life, then accept that that’s what you are doing, and go about it with your eyes open. Don’t just “end up” getting married to someone you dated for years ‘cause they were familiar, comfortable and … well, it seemed good enough at the time.
This is where it becomes obvious that it is important to know what you are looking for, and that means you need to know a lot about yourself: you need to know what kind of person you are to live with, and you need clear ideas about the kind of person that you want to live with. (For instance, I know I’m really, really hard to share space with – and so I need someone who is pretty easy going about most things around the house, but who is also strong enough to tell me when I’m being unreasonable and to cut it out.) So you need the ability to objectively assess both yourself, and your potential partners. This is not something that is easy to do, and it takes quite a lot of practice. And, learning to do it tends to sting quite a bit – as most of us aren’t anywhere near as ‘nice’ or ‘easy to get along with’ as we’d like to think, and admitting those kinds of things to ourselves is very difficult.
Start with yourself. If you’re still young, then it is almost certain that the person you are is a rapidly changing landscape and from one week to the next your ideas of who you are and what you like to do and how you like to spend your time are all over the place. That’s a normal part of growing up. Don’t tie yourself to anyone else until that crazy “try everything on and see how it fits” phase has settled down! Trying on different kinds of partners might be part of this – maybe you go out with a ‘quiet sort’ for awhile, and see what that is like, then someone more outgoing, then someone kind of in between … but never more than six months. You’re testing things out, seeing what works … and refusing to get yourself caught in the wrong place too soon.
You’re going to say “but what if the quiet one I started off with turns out to be exactly who I end up needing five years down the road … I’ll regret letting that go!” Well, maybe – but more likely, things will sort themselves out and you’ll find yourselves back together, having each learned more about yourselves in the time apart than you ever could’ve learned had you clung to each other hoping and praying that “this is the one”.
If you let time do its work on you, if you pay attention to what works for you and what doesn’t and then you start actively seeking out people with the characteristics that bring out the very best in you … you’ll find the right match. Maybe not as soon as you’d like, but then, the old saying is “marry in haste and repent at leisure”.
It’s tough taking a realistic view of dating and relationships in our crazy society, which talks up ‘perfect dream romance that lasts happily ever after’ as though this were the normal thing everyone should expect to have happen to them by the time they are eighteen. Then again, just look around – buying into this fantasy hasn’t exactly gotten us a bunch of stable, happy households, has it?
Maybe it’s time for a change.
Six months. Might be an idea.
For those who have watched my life and say “hmph, a whole lot you know” … yeah, you’re right. This advice came to me too late to change my path, but the woman I learned it from has a rock-solid marriage and is a totally amazing person to boot, and I think she’s really on to something here. Perhaps, had I thought about things this way earlier on, my life may have taken a different route. Ah well, our lives make us who we are and I’m content to be who I am after all the adventures … but perhaps this advice will be of use to someone in the next generation.
This year, I grew some woad in the garden (seeds from Richters, of course).
Translation for non-fibre artists, and those unfamiliar with Celtic warriors:
Woad is a plant that contains the same blue ‘stuff’ as indigo, which is what your blue jeans are dyed with. Celtic warriors painted their faces blue to scare the enemy (Braveheart, anyone?) and as the indigo plant, which has higher concentrations of the dyestuff in it, won’t grow in colder climates, woad is how blue dyes and paints were made in the northern parts of the world for centuries.
Yesterday evening, I picked some of the leaves from the garden… and a good thing, too, as we had a hard frost last night (and woad doesn’t do blue after frost). This morning, I followed the instructions from here and here to extract indigo out of the woad.
The first batch I did turned out … the second didn’t. I heated the second batch differently, but more than that, I think it was that the leaves for batch #2 were harvested this morning … after the aforementioned killer frost. Hmmm.
The successful method worked like this:
We now have 2 jars with a greenish liquid on top and blue granules on the bottom! Very awesome. I’ll let it sit overnight and then the instructions say to rinse the top liquid (remove and replace with clear water) repeatedly until it is clear on top and blue sludge on the bottom. Then we’ll remove the last of the water and let the powder dry out. I’ll probably try doing that directly in the glass jars.
This was the coolest mix of gardening and chemistry ever. I’m definitely growing more and trying this again next year! Of course, to dye wool or fabric with this requires a whole ‘nother adventure, but wow … I made blue stuff out of green stuff that grew from seeds! Too cool!
