Learning 2.0 Pays Off in Strange Ways

Last summer I went to UK to hear Barbara Kingsolver talk about her year of eating locally and the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle which documented that year. I admire her ability to make that happen without giving in to the food addictions of her family. For mine family it's macaroni and cheese that they can't live without among other things like Ale8 and Pepsi addictions.

I have been interested in sustainable living for most of my adult life. Resources are not infinite and the throw-away society we live in really bothers me, largely because of the environmental impact this lifestyle.

Last year we grew a garden for the first time in years, but the weeds took over. I just couldn't keep ahead of them. The most fertile spot on the place was also the weediest of course. So I need another strategy. Gardening guru, Dick Raymond, recommends buckwheat tilled in several times to block and kill the weeds organically. Maybe.

In step with the eating locally effort, we bought 50 baby chicks. 25 heavy roosters and 25 straight run Rhode Island Reds (a straight run is hens and roosters) for more roosters and hens for eggs. We built a portable pen that we could move so the chicks could graze and that worked well. The problem came when the chicks got to be 10 weeks old.

Chicks are ready to be harvested between 8 and 12 weeks for fryers. But they just didn't seem to be real heavy. They needed to gain more weight. It didn't take long to figure out that they weren't going to get any heavier. So I decided to start harvesting.

This is where Barbara and I came to a parting of ways. I have never done anything so awful in my life. I can't even squash a bug most of the time. Especially if it is a big juicy one. Why did I think I could do this? I struggled through 15 birds, before I called it quits.

Later, while helping Ike with some web stuff (teaching him to set up a blog and redesigning web pages) I found out that he is an expert at processing chickens. We traded. I think I got the best end of the deal. Thank goodness for web 2.0. Now to get the kids to eat chicken again since we have a freezer full of very expensive chicken.

To read his column on the experience, click here.

Be Careful What You Ask For

My oldest daughter is a junior in high school. She has a friend who sleeps on the bus and sleeps in class. M. has taken it on herself to spare this friend the embarrassment of being caught asleep when classes change and getting her off the bus at school and at home.

A couple days ago her friend woke up at the end of class and growled at M. that she was getting real tired of waking up to her voice. Wrong thing to say. They ride the same bus and M gets off right before her friend who lives a half mile down the road.

True to form her friend was sleeping, but this time she didn't get a wake-up call. The bus driver didn't see her and drove right past her house. About fifteen minutes later the bus went back past our house to turn around. Apparently she woke up at the end of the bus route and had to be taken back home.

According to M, revenge is sweet.

Going to Work to Rest

Have you ever felt like you had to go to work on Monday to rest up from the weekend? Of course sleeping in would be better, but I never seem to have that luxury.

Since it wasn't rainy this weekend and was reasonably warm, I worked outside most of the weekend. I've decided that I need one of three things: a smaller place, someone with muscles who likes to do outside work or machinery.

A smaller place wouldn't have helped much this weekend since most of the work I did was within 100 feet of the house. I don't see anyone with muscles in my immediate future, or long term future for that matter, so I guess the alternative is machinery. Machinery with an engine, not the wheelbarrow kind. But machinery doesn't like me and since I am trying to be environmentally conscious, I guess it will be the wheelbarrow for a while.

I just wish rock and dirt wasn't so dog gone heavy. It is amazing how much the backfill around the house has settled. Dozens of wheelbarrow loads moved Saturday and more to go.

But peas, lettuce and spinach are up, and I got 50 strawberry plants in the ground. The compost bin is built and in place and I've almost moved enough dirt to plant some honeysuckle to cascade over the retaining wall by the deck. And the peach tree is pruned, so maybe we'll have peaches this summer.

Using Flickr to Help Patrons

I've been working with a woman who is writing a book about Muddy Creek and the Waco community from Civil War to the 1930s. She contacted me to help her get her historic facts straight. Most of the information she needed came from old directories or news articles about the area. Pretty straight forward.

Then she started asking questions about homes on Muddy Creek, and it was starting to sound like she wasn't real familiar with the geography of the area. And a "Tara" style home is really out of place in Waco.

Yesterday after work, I drove by some of the older homes in the area and took quick photos of them, not good photos, but enough that she could see the general style of home. I uploaded the photos to my Flickr account and made a special set for them, so she could find them easily. Finally I placed each of them on a map so she could see how the community fit in relation to the creek and to the main road through the area. It must have really worked to give her a reference point because now she's rewriting.

We'll see what comes next.

Cat Bordhi demonstrates Judy Becker's Magic Cast-On

I'm learning to make socks and this video shows a really easy way to cast on the first row for the pattern I'm using. Since I had a hard time finding it again, I thought I would post it here.

File Management Tool

A few weeks ago Linda Benedict who writes the Alone in the Archives blog mentioned a freeware program called Renamer, which allows you to rename files. This came in really handy for us recently because we made some minor changes to our file numbering system for the images we've scanned.

The thought of going through hundreds of files to add an accession number to the beginning of the file name or of going through thousands of files to change dots to dashes was daunting to say the least.

With Renamer you define the rule, for example 'replace' dots with dashes and in seconds it has changed 2500 files. This may sound like a petty concern, but the files sort differently with dots and dashes and it gets really hard to find things you know should be there.

Adding an accession number to all files in a folder was just as easy. Tauheeda, the student who was going to have to rename all the files was ecstatic.

Why Is It?

While the girls and I were driving down the road, we passed a man and a boy walking along the edge of the road. My youngest daughter saw them and made the comment "weirdos." The discussion that followed is not worthy of a post, mostly because it was pretty one-sided. My side.

Why is it that when we see someone walking or riding a bike our first thought is 'weirdo' or something equally derogatory? And heaven forbid, someone tries to be a good citizen while they are walking. If you carry a bag to pick up trash along the way, then you aren't just weird, you're a bag lady, or something equally demeaning.

Yes, I walk. A lot. Yes, I often carry a bag to pick up trash. Yes, I even pick up cans that go to support Habitat for Humanity.

Yes, I've been called weird and a bag lady and not just by my kids. Why is it that I am embarrassed for being a good citizen?

And last but not least, why is it that there are no trash cans alongside the Ravine?