A New Car - The Streak!

Work takes me on a 60-mile round-trip commute five days out of every week.  That seems crazy to me, given that we envisioned a much more local lifestyle when we moved here.  But you follow where openings are created, and this was work and a learning opportunity I had been thinking about for a while.

The actual distance is obstacle number one.  Cargo is number two.  And family vehicle use is obstacle number three.

Mom has a 2005 Prius, so I could do my driving in one of the most fuel efficient vehicles out there.  It's actually a pretty good cargo vehicle, too, for its size: I could fit the company's large and small chop-saws plus a table-saw and miscellaneous other, all at once, and good size lengths of wood, too.

If I knew I'd need to haul something big I could drive Mom's Chevrolet Silverado 1500, which has a huge bed.

We'd already decided, between the three drivers among us, that the person driving the furthest would use the most fuel efficient vehicle.  Usually that's me on my 60 mile daily trip.  But sometimes Mom goes up to visit her second grandchild (and his family) up in Michigan, so then I drive the truck and Margo is left with two boys and no realistic way to get anywhere.

We decided to start looking at options for a third vehicle and considered motorcycles first, as fuel efficiency was our first priority.  Unfortunately, the most fuel efficient cycles are the smaller ones, up to around 250 cc.  Over that, say 600 cc, and the efficiency drops to around 50-60 mpg.  Not worth it for the risk, lack of cargo space, etc.

To make a long (though fun) story short, we found what remains the most fuel-efficient fossil-fuel powered car that ever made it into mass production - the Honda Insight, first generation.  The EPA rating of the 2000 model (which we found) is 61 mpg city, 70 mpg highway.  Wow!

Looking around for not all that long, we found that the closest one for sale was up in Kalamazoo, where both Margo's sister and my sister live.  It had one owner and a great record of service, so we went up to test it and decide for sure.  In the end we bought it, and I have been enjoying it ever since.

As far as fuel efficiency, it started out around 52 mpg for the first few weeks, which was driving it in the winter at approximately 70-75 mph to and from work (I'm often starting out late, but I like to arrive on time).  When the weather warmed a little and I decided to try leaving a little earlier so I could drive 65 mph my efficiency shot up at least 10 mpg.  And that's awesome, because it means I only fill up every two weeks or so (every ~600 miles) and only burn a gallon of gas every workday.  If I drove the 15 mpg truck to work, like my coworkers do, I would be burning 4 times as much gas, paying 4 times as much money.  Instead of buying about $31 worth of gas every two weeks I'd be paying $124.  Wow!  And it's better than the Prius, too.

Every car benefits from a good name, and I settled on The Streak, wanting something that vaguely implied "fast" without outright fabrication.  I think of the Ray Stevens song every time I drive it.  Mom gave it an alter-ego, Zippy, which more seriously blurs the line between truth and falsehood.  It really does feel zippy, as a 5-speed two-seater hugging the ground.

In fact its only downside is that it is not a fast car (with its 1.0 liter, 3-cylinder engine), having been designed with efficiency in mind in every feature.  But it is incredible to me that this, the first gas/electric hybrid that came onto the North American market, remains at the top in terms of MPG.  Not only has no other car achieved this fuel efficiency in the past 13 years, but Honda quit producing this one after 2006.  They redesigned it for 2010, with the newer model a four-door instead of two, five-seat instead of two, and rated at 41/44 MPG city/highway.  You got to give the people what they want, I guess.

  

The top photo is not our car cruising Dayton, though it is a very nice Insight.  The lower photo is The Streak hanging out in the garage.  If you want to see the stats for this wee beastie you can check it out on Fuelly.com.  The site allows you to log each of your fuel-ups and see graphs and charts and statistics on your use.  The Streak can be found here.

If You Love Children...

It is late, and I am tired.  But I am also inspired.  As I was washing dishes tonight, I finished watching a documentary worth seeing: Consuming Kids. 

If you love children, work with children, buy gifts for children, or care about the future this documentary is relevant and potent.  If I weren't so tired, I would offer more review and more thoughts of my own--but gosh will I sleep again?  Fortunately, Isaac only wakes 2 or 3 times to nurse, so I'm not as sleep deprived as I might be with a 3-month-old.

Before

Quick notes: Isaac is laughing now, at having his shirt pulled over his head, silly rhymes with hand motions, and being tickled.  What fun!  Alten has a new haircut (the worst one I've done yet says the perfectionist inside me), we had a "Kombucha, Popcorn, Haircutting Party."

After

 

The End of an Era: Collapse of the Yurt

"Mama, let's build a new yurt," Alten said while standing within the penciled 20' circle on the barn floor.  We were out wandering on a sunny afternoon this week and happened to be in the barn.  Seeing the yurt footprint on the floor reminded me of the beginning of construction and repair and the excitement with which I viewed the whole process, from seeing the posting on craig's list through the final yurt-raising.  I can claim constant excitement and optimism, recognizing Dan experienced constant hesitancy, frustration, and doubt.

I sat quietly on the futon in the yurt (Alten napped there in the summer a few times) waiting for the women in my spirituality group to arrive one night and was thrilled by the simplicity that having such little living space would invite.  It took me back to our one room cabin in California and I was filled with a sense of joy and anticipation.  However, it is time to say goodbye.

Thursday, December 20th we had a potent storm with lots of wind.  We weren't too worried about it, simply hoping for good travel weather because we were going to Milford for Christmas the following Saturday.  Friday it was cold and snowy, Dan's boss called and cancelled their work day so we mobilized to leave early for Milford.  Dan popped over to the garden to check the temperatures and we were ready to pack the car and leave.  To his surprise, he saw this:

Do you hear the squeal of the air being slowly being let out of a balloon?  So much forward momentum and enthusiasm stopped in one moment.  The joy in leaving early for vacation, more time with family, and most of all finally moving into our own space (albeit temporary) in the spring and being close to the garden and our dreams.  Wow.

Almost down

We moved through it pretty well, stayed home that day for Dan to collapse the rest of the structure and protect the platform from coming rain, and headed to Milford on Saturday as planned.  We started making new plans for temporary housing and are wondering where the time will come from to move forward on creating a livable space in the house that stands on the land now.  We are hoping to be in something this growing season.

The era of the yurt, 2010-2012, brought us several things:

• knowledge to always research a purchase well before committing your mind and your wallet, 
• lots of great conversation,
• a black cloud looming over Dan's head,
• experience with virtually all that can go wrong with a yurt,
• a constructive community with yurt forum www.yurtforum.com,
• a beautiful and functional yurt platform, 
• deeper appreciation for my Dad (the platform guru),
• meaningful time with the men from Dayton Mennonite Fellowship, 
• a circular, sacred space to gather my women's spirituality group that didn't interrupt anyone's bedtime,
• a place for napping close to the garden,
• a place for toddler play while working, teaching, and gatherings were going on, and
• redirection when we clearly needed it.

It is fitting that I am writing this farewell post, as the yurt was a positive for me and a negative for Dan.  Nice to send it off with appreciation.

In other news, Isaac found his toes and is just starting to giggle.  Alten enjoys his machines and words as never before.  Please note the new sidebar: Alten's quote for the week. 

Cute boy pile

Next post to come: Esther and CSHEP

Getting Back on the Horse

For all you who have been checking for the next post, it is clear we have been away from the blog for some time.  At this point, two children and a new job are keeping us well occupied.  We have made some huge transitions in the last few years and one more little one is Margo taking over the role of primary blogger.  This is my first post.  I'll bring you up to date, share some photo and video footage, and then name the intentions for future posts.  We'll see how often I can make it happen while I parent two beautiful, engaging boys. 
 
We have learned a lot in these last two years with internship as our primary focus.  We know the intensity of being prepared each day for managing work in the garden and hands-on learning, as well as theoretical lessons.  Managing people, planning, real time logistics, and being with interns almost every day for 3 months are Margo's gifts and not Dan's.  This valuable lesson informs our choice to wait a few more years before hosting interns again.  Once the boys are older (Alten is two and a half, Isaac is 13 weeks), we can commit again to something that requires Margo's attention. Thanks a bunch to Ecology Action and Peris and Samuel for all their support in making this experience possible for us and for the interns.

Alten's first snowperson, thanks Aunt Ragan and Uncle Chris!

This train of thought leads to the big job transition in our lives, shortly before Isaac was born Dan started a full-time job doing construction work in Yellow Springs, OH.  Pros: regular income, great skill building, Dan gets to follow and not manage, enjoyable co-workers/boss.  Cons: commuting 1.5 hours daily in a peak oil era (not sustainable--even with a Prius!), missing out on the daily fun and development of the boys, missing each other.  Let is be noted that we celebrated our 8th wedding anniversary on January 1 (yay!) and this is the first time in our marriage that we have not worked together.

This isn't how we had envisioned our life and isn't how we hope to be living, but it felt like a good choice for right now.  We wonder what this will mean for our garden this year.  We wonder where our journey for simple housing will take us.  We wonder what the next big transition will be.

In the mean time (a phrase I laugh at every time I hear it come out of Alten's mouth), we have delightful boys in our presence.  Isaac is starting to practice rolling over on his side and made one successful roll onto his tummy.  He is the smiley-est baby I know and prefers eye contact and conversation (he has a lot to say) to any toy.  Alten has a huge vocabulary and is enthralled by poems, playing with words, and construction equipment.  His favorite way to bless our meal is by saying what we are thankful for.  His list often includes but is not limited to: combines, snowplows, and bulldozers.

Making Mudball Cookies, Yum!

Future posts: End of an Era: Collapse of the Yurt; Esther and CSHEP; Peris, Mary and G-BIACK; and Name The New Car.

PS-Yes, Alten did catch the chicken and put it into his dump truck.  The next thing, missed by mamavideographer, he dumped it out.

Introducing Isaac Wynn!

 Isaac joined us the night before last, at 8:43 pm on October 22.  He was 9 lb 5 oz and 20", just a little less all around than his big brother two years and some months ago.

 His birth story is much briefer that Alten's, which lasted a couple of days between when Margo's work began and when he came out.  Isaac gave us shorter notice - labor lasted less than 3 1/2 hours!  Margo gave me a call while I was finishing up work at 5:15 and I hustled home.  She was in touch with the midwife, to whom we reported progress with some regularity.

Labor moved pretty fast in the end, though, and our midwife's capable assistant (who lives much closer than our midwife) got here about 20 minutes before Isaac.  Whew!  With some encouragement I caught him on his way out, and that was a great experience.  A half-hour later our midwife arrived and helped out with the rest of the documentation.  We are grateful beyond words for the experience and confidence that they brought to both of our home-birth experiences...

Thanks to the many who have shared their congratulations with us in the past day or so!  We strongly feel your love; know that it has been received, and that it may be awhile before we talk again :)

Names are, of course, a fun and funny thing.  As many others before us have, we made lists and lists out of books and books and books.  We compared our lists and crossed out names, we devised first name lists and middle name lists, then lists of combinations.  As a general direction we looked for names that meant "joy".  Those who know, know that Isaac means "laughter" or "he laughs" in Hebrew, and that's what we chose from our short list after spending a few waking hours with our new boy.  Alten chose Isaac's second name (from a very short list) and most liked Wynn, which means "cheerful" and "fair" in its Old Welsh roots, and "friend" in Old English.  We count that as a good sign!

At left, Alten is meeting Isaac for the first time.  For the first ten minutes or so he enjoyed touching Isaac and kissing his head.  After that he commenced bouncing around the house, and hasn't really stopped yet.





 




And here Daddy and Alten are holding the new boy.










Finally, this morning Mama and Isaac watched Alten sort out Mama's vitamins for the day.

More to come!

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The Other Liquid Gold

It's our first year keeping bees, so everything is new, every event is a mystery, and every new stage catches me by surprise.

I had gone over to Steve's last week to hand him back the starter frame of honey he gave me, the one he put in to help the swarm with sustenance before they started serious foraging.  (It took four months for them to stop putting brood in it.)  I also wanted to ask him when he thought he'd be pulling his honey supers off this year.

When I arrived he was in full swing doing just that; a maelstrom of bees whirled in his immediate vicinity as the glove-less master plied his trade.  He'd pull out a frame, give it a good shake or two to get most of the bees off, brush the others away, and put the frame in an empty super beside him.  When the super was full of capped honey frames he would carry it over to his wagon, which had about ten such supers on it when Alten and I showed up. 

"Hey Steve!  How many times have you been stung?"

"Just three.  OUCH!  Four."

He was heading out of town for the weekend, but expected to be ready to extract later on this week, so I told him I'd get my supers over to him toward the beginning of the week.  That way everything would be prepared ahead of time.

Yesterday I went out to pull our own honey frames using the same system, with a few changes: I used gloves, instead of a brush I cleared the bees with a feather, and Mom helped me out by applying the smoke and taking the bee-free frames over to the wagon.  It was great!  You spend the whole year trying to keep the bees calm and chill, and then, once a year, you throw them into flurry with relatively little regard.  My favorite part, I think, was figuring out how to most effectively give the frame a shake to get the bees off.  That and daintily dusting the frames with a feather, which made me feel somehow quite Elizabethan.

Our Kenyan interns, Esther and Asbeta, were shocked at the way the bees behaved. "You would not try such a thing in Kenya, oh no.  We could not even stand so close.  We would all be stung horribly."  Their bees are, of course, not simply africanized honey bees, but entirely african, and extremely aggressive.  You harvest very late in the day, with a lot of smoke.  Their bees are so volatile that colonies are frequently put on the path to one's house, so that if thieves approach your compound in the night they will be driven away by the stings, and possibly severely injured.  In that light, I can see that our bees are docile as chickens.

I parked the wagon with our two supers in the garage with plans that Alten and I could take them over in the afternoon.  Soon after I came in the house the phone rang, and it was Steve.

  "Hey Steve!  Guess what I just finished doing.  Taking off my honey supers!"

  "Oh, good! Bring them on over - I'm getting ready to start extracting just now."

This required a significant rearrangement of our afternoon's schedule, but within a reasonable amount of time the supers were loaded in the car and I was on my way to Steve's, with no idea what to expect.  I somehow thought we'd be extracting in the cool, dark basement, because that's where I'd seen his equipment, but I was nearly as wrong as possible.  He was all set up in his greenhouse with all its doors, windows, and vents closed.  It was somewhere between 106° and 110° F.  If you want the honey to flow, some heat really helps.

 

  We did my frames first, pulling them out, scraping all the caps off with a fork, and slipping them in each tray of the extractor (photo at right).  His will do two medium supers or four shallow supers at a time, which is part of why he uses shallows now.  Ours are medium, so it goes a bit slower.  We spun them once for one side of the frame, flipped them around and spun, then flipped them around one last time and spun the first side again. It was surprising to me to feel how much lighter they were without the honey.

I had weighed the two supers with their frames full of honey before starting, and after extracting I weighed them again.  This was the only way to find out how much honey was mine, since a good bit of it was also stuck to the sides and the bottom of the extractor when we started on Steve's frames.  We could then top off what was in the bucket till it reached the proper weight.

I had intended to help Steve with his extracting - all 20 supers- but Margo called to let me know the interns needed to go home.  That wasn't a disappointment to Steve, though.  He was very pleased to see me go from interest to questions to getting equipment, then receiving a swarm, and finally to harvesting honey and extracting.  He says so many people say they want to keep bees, but precious few that he knows actually take the leap.  That is all the reward he needs, and it seems to be quite a reward.  I'm lucky to have such a support.

So are you curious about how much we got?  Though it would have been great simply to have a healthy colony by fall, this was a good year.  Our swarm went from absolutely nothing but foundation in May to having fully drawn comb in two brood boxes and most of two medium supers, and even generating some honey on top of that.  We ended up with 47 and a half pounds of honey!  And we are very grateful.

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A Few Updates

What's new, besides the unbridled heat and incredible drought we're experiencing?  Well, besides a thorough report on our current weather "issues", I want to take a moment to fill readers in on the three projects I've posted most recently: the Triangle, the bees, and the yurt.

You may recall from the March post that we're trying to rehabilitate a little section of a commercially farmed field by the garden.  As the record will clearly show, we have not been blessed with regular rain. As result our already confused spring planting of winter wheat has only grown to about six inches high before browning and dying.  I really can't blame it.  The Canadian field peas were troopers, though, and came to full maturity.  We will harvest their pods to plant seed this fall with our cover crops.  And if the field peas were troopers, well, the Canada Thistle is an insurgent, and equally successful.  We'll shortly be chopping and pulling them up for, as CSU's Extension website states, "Persistence is imperative so the weed is continually stressed, forcing it to exhaust root nutrient stores and eventually die."  As if the weather wasn't stressful enough.  The two bushy-looking plants in the photo are our long-standing success: elderberries we planted in 2010.  One has more deer damage than the other, but both are doing very well. Time will tell how the Triangle project progresses.

The bees, the bees.  The bees are fantastic!  The weather that is kicking the tail of everything else is apparently just fine for our new colony.  In early May, you might recall, our friend and mentor Steve called us up to say our swarm was ready to pick up.  It was a biggish one, and he imagined it might give us some honey this year.  Each successive week I went through the hive, adding supers as time went by.  The first week of June showed a population boom as the first brood raised by the colony started hatching out.  The second week of May I had added the honey super, since the two brood boxes had almost all their comb drawn.  It was the second week of June before there was any amount of comb drawn in the honey super, but two weeks later that super was full of capped honey!  Wow!  Is this normal or not?  I don't know, but it was a great surprise to me.

  I added a second honey super then, but it has been so hot since that day that I haven't done anything more than take some water out to them and stagger their supers for better ventilation.  Maybe next week will get cool enough to check again.  Does this picture seem odd? The first evening I went out to look and saw them doing this I freaked out just a little. But a quick internet search brought up the term "bearding," which refers to the way they can hang on each other form the bottom.  Colonies do it in hot weather.  You understand, right?  Who wants to hang out in stuffy overcrowded house after working all day?

The yurt is still a mixed bag, but is quickly transitioning into livability.  A few of the finer points are the 1) leaky roof, 2) the loose rafters, and 3) the method of attaching the wall.  I wouldn't have seen issues past point one if it had not been for the extreme weather we got back at the end of June.  For any of you who lost power in that storm, you are familiar with the high winds that accompanied the relatively little rain.  It was enough to demonstrate that the yurt can withstand severe weather if it is sufficiently prepared (which it wasn't).
 For one thing, the rafters are all meant to be secured to the wall cable by means of a notch and screw, and to the center ring by a metal plate.  They all had the notch and screw, but I had not gotten metal plates for the new rafters I made.  When the high winds came, two rafters fell out of the center ring.  Now I know.

It also showed my method of attaching the wall to be faulty.  Since there were no instructions with the yurt, this point is a matter of my own creativity in problem solving.  It may be hard to picture, but try to imagine: along the top of the canvas wall there are two rows of grommets.  Who knows what Spirit Mountain Yurts envisioned - they have no comment.  So I used S-hooks to attached the top row of grommets to the cable atop the lattice wall (see photo above), and I laced a rope between the lower row of wall grommets and the grommets in the roof. When the wind came it pulled up the roof edge and knocked down many of the S-hooks, leaving great gaps for the rain to blow in.  So I guess it's a good thing we didn't get much rain then.

As to the leaky roof, I caulked it with silicone.  The rains today, gentle and soaking, showed that at least a few spots need better caulking.

 I look forward to sharing overwhelming success with you all as reports come in of weedless plots, gallons of honey, and comfortable, stable, lived in yurts!

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