Internet At Home!! - The View From Here/Up For This Week

The View From Here

First blog post with internet at home! But it's almost 4pm and it has literally taken half the day getting it to happen. Why is it that technology is so prone to glitches of the kind that you wouldn't expect in situations that are even less - well - technical?! We were supposed to have been sent a modem by Friday - it never arrived. Today, I walked (30 minutes) down to the phone company's store, waited there 30 minutes, and was given a modem which turned out not to work at all, no lights! 30 minutes on the phone, and the best they could tell me was go back and exchange it. I'd already had more exercise than my still-extremely-tired body wanted. I took the bike, coasted down, rode back super-slow. Another 30 minutes on hold to get tech help because configuration wasn't happening straightforwardly, and then we got cut off and I had to start over! 

It's almost a caricature of a technology story. You don't expect to be given a faulty piece of equipment in any other scenario, but here I am, not even surprised! I'm glad to have managed to stay fairly equable about it - might have been easy to end up feeling very frustrated. 

Another bright side to look on - it was beautifully sunny all morning and until mid-afternoon, which was when I was going back and forth chasing a functional modem, and by the time I was stuck holding on the phone (and working on my translation), the forecast clouds had come over everything and it was gloomy and preparing rain!

Now that I have internet at home, it should clarify some things and make other things happen faster. Hopefully it'll make it easier to get organized. 

Up For This Week

I will do a wordstalk this week and will also try to think more about what this blog is 'for.' I really want it to be interesting to people. I have tended to write about our life, writing/literature, food, gardening, words. If anyone would care to tell me what they'd like to see more of, I'd greatly appreciate it.

This week we have friends from Oregon - an old friend of Phil's and his 18-year-old son and a friend of his son's. They are the kind of kids who will go for a 100 mile bike-ride just for fun, and so it's likely that I won't be going along for many of the adventures - I've stayed home yesterday and today so far - (and participated by fixing great food, of course) - I just wouldn't be able to keep up. It's great for Phil, though - he gets to 'go like crazy' and show all the beautiful places he loves to hang out in to people who've never been up here before. Glad they had some sun today - yesterday they were hiking in deadfalls and devil's club while it rained incessantly!

Even without accumulated exhaustion to catch up on and plenty of translating work, I could work all day in the garden and not catch up! It is so lush and beautiful. I'll show off just a little bit here:

Cauliflower leaves I made into kraut, and frilly chicory:

Here they are in the bed, with carrots and maca in the background. I planted so much bitter chicory and radicchio - not to mention arugula - and I'm the only one that likes it!

Chard is falling everywhere and spinach is bolting

Beautiful pea flowers - pea pods too - cilantro bolting in back, a beautiful kale in the middle

A bed almost entirely of lettuces...

And a patch of beets direct-sown in the ground (not in a raised bed)  -

Some beets fresh-harvested

And rainbow carrots - remember those carrots that we salvaged way too early to plant them, that were lifting their leaves in prayer to be put in the ground while it blizzarded outside in March? Here they are, a little woody but beautiful -

And some turnips! The slugs made a mess of the leaves, which is a shame, as turnip greens are even more nutritious than kale/collards (harder to eat, though).

much love.

Back Home! Garden Flourishes, Look What Market Spice Tea Does to Apples!

It's so good to be home! We have guests arriving from Oregon today, so time to turn around and change mode. I'm probably not going to be a big part of festivities with our guests, though, since they are all strapping men and there's not a chance I'll keep up. And I'm very much looking forward to settling back in, 'recombobulating,' tending the garden, and getting back to writing!

First, a strange story. I bought some rooibos Market Spice tea in Anchorage - I love the rich cinnamon/orange zest flavor, and love that they have it with rooibos so that I can enjoy it even though I have to avoid caffeine. I bought it in bulk in a ziploc bag. 

I also bought some organic granny smith apples - impossible to find in Homer this time of year and the ND still wants me to eat apples! Apples and tea went in the same bag, and look what the tea did to the apples! 

At first we thought they must have been frozen and thawed out and discolored, but they smelled really strongly of cinnamon and orange oils - and look, it even discolored the label on the apple!

Fortunately, I discovered this battle and separated the parties before the apples could be trounced any further. They were still edible, with a strong cinnamon/orange flavor, and where the skin was discolored, the flesh was softened.

Good to know, huh? Maybe that's something one could use for a marinade idea. 

Back home, I'd been gone three weeks, and the garden has been loving the rainy summer this year. I was so excited to find this beautiful cauliflower!

And here are carrots and chives with the cauliflower leaves in the foreground. Cauliflower leaves are monstrous! I'm hoping to kraut them.

Here's another cauliflower I just harvested (raspberries in the background are coming on)…

… and some rather funny carrots that I'm not quite so sure about!

Lots more beauties - had some romaine for lunch as well. And although it's definitely autumnal-feeling here now, I think I could get in another crop of lettuce/spinach/other short-season greens before it all gets too cold.

I'm pleased that my energy is as good as it is, but rest is definitely part of the picture for the next few days. But I'm looking forward to getting back to translation work and to writing, and to fooling around in the garden! It's also nice to have my own non-garden foods at hand again. I did make a batch of 'bark' on the road with coconut oil/stevia/a ton of chlorella/maca/shredded coconut/flax meal/spices (lots of cardamom, some ginger).

It was very strong with all the chlorella, but it was good, and I seem to feel better when I have some of that kind of food around. So, nice to have all the other bits that I put in there (reishi powder, spirulina, nut pulp from nut milk, spices, etc) to make a big fresh batch!

Cabin Pictures, Self-Acceptance, A Flow of Water Breaks a Nightmare

How's everyone's weekend going? I hope that everyone else is getting more sunshine than we are: it's been gray, overcast, a little rainy. And busy, in a good way. Phil's friend Joe has been spending the weekend with us: right now, they're out fishing (but they may be back soon: I can see the wind starting to pick up and it's raining) but yesterday they made great progress on replacing the windows in our little storage room, which is part of the insulation project we're in the midst of. 

Here is our cabin from the south. I was wishing I had the 8x zoom on that lumix for this photo: remember that our cabin is 30ft from the edge of the bluff! I was standing right on the very edge to take the photo and had a scary moment when I almost stepped back to adjust! 

You can see how it's a solar oven in there when the sun's out, all that southern exposure! The red ladder is against the tiny storage room where they were replacing windows. The main room (about 10x16) is on the left. Underneath the main room, the gaping mouth is our crawlspace, which Phil built a better hatch for this week to keep out squirrels, porcupines and other critters who like to eat fiberglass. All the windows are going to have to come out of that south face too: an upheaval in waiting, since our counter, which is also my writing/work space, food prep space, our eating space and general space-on-which-everything-gets-put is right under the windows all across the south wall and everything is going to have to come off!

Here is the cabin viewed from the west:

A work in progress, as you can see. That glare to the right of the porch is some new windows, and the door that's halfway open leads into a small shed. 

While they were working on the windows, I was working on my poetry writing and also on some translating work. I felt fine about it. It has felt so good to me to make my poetry writing a priority and to view it as some of my most important work. And I love translating and take some pride in it - and of course, the fact that it makes some money is a good thing too.

Especially since having had some validation at the Writers' Conference, it's becoming easier for me to take my own directions and motivations seriously. Not that long ago, I would either have felt obligated to help with changing the windows, or would have felt guilty about being incapable of helping much - and similarly for every other project that I'm ill-equipped or disinclined to do: I'd have either forced myself to do it anyway or guilt-tripped myself. This feels like such a good thing, to accept the value of what I do and who I am. Especially living with a hyperactive greyhound like Phil, and with my own neuroses around burning calories, I've also tended to feel bad if I'm spending a lot of time doing sedentary work. But while there have been times in my life (not many, though) when I've 'needed' a lot of exercise, most of my life I've felt pretty awful if I exercise too much: getting time outdoors (which need I share with Phil) is the crucial piece for me, rather than getting out of doors and moving as vigorously as possible for as long as possible. Another thing that it's good to feel ok about.

How do we get around the trap of feeling that artistic endeavors are not worthwhile, because they're not consistently 'productive,' or productive at all in any traditional sense most of the time, and often require so much emotional energy without always providing a tangible harvest? I quit being a serious musician because of some of those kinds of considerations (and some life catastrophes years ago) - even quit writing for a bit at one point, but it seems like I can't not write, so that didn't last long. What do you think?  A less utilitarian view is more appealing to me at the moment, whereby the value of an activity, or of the resulting 'made thing' (a literal meaning of 'poem') isn't necessarily measured by some arbitrary monetary calibration.

A sweet little story from yesterday: as many of you know, we have a half-finished project to get running water in our home. We have a water tank in the 'bunker,' with a pipe buried 7ft down in the ground running from it to our cabin. Since there's a 16ft elevation change, we're hoping to be able to gravity-feed rather than getting a pump. This project had been stalled for some time, and the nightmarish problem that we were embarrassed even to mention was that when we poured water down the pipe (which is buried 7ft down, remember) it didn't come out the other end! 

Well, Phil and Joe took another look yesterday afternoon. Have you ever tried to push a rope? Well, they pushed a tight cable over half-way down the pipe from each end, thus reaming its entirety in two goes. (A plumber's snake, the traditional 'right tool for the job,' turned out to be heinously expensive to rent, and Phil is a master at improvising tools). They don't even know what they did, but after that, it worked!

Here is Joe holding the pipe outside our cabin, with water flowing into the rain barrel! Doesn't he look pleased?

Of course, by the time they were done, we were out of water - remember, we still haul it by the 6-gallon jug. We had just enough in the cabin for morning drinks. Small stuff, then, and nicely emblematic of the ambivalent exhilaration over the prospect of unlimited - or at least less-limited - water supply! (And now I'm at Safeway, using the internet and filling up water!)

A Break in Scheduled Programming: Things Are Looking UP!

Hi Everyone!

I hope you're all having a great week. Up here, the week seems to be galloping by, and in all kinds of positive ways. However, with all the extra busyness, I'm especially noticing how hard it is to stay connected and keep blogging with no internet connection in easy reach. And that thus far I've fallen far short of what I promised to write about this week!

So, grabbing a moment between finishing up some editing, finishing up caulking some windows, mulching a raised bed, making lunch, and heading to writers' club in a few minutes, I just wanted to give a little shout that things are turning to the better.

Does anyone else find themselves relying on cacao or caffeine for extra energy and then observe an inappropriately addictive relationship building with it, to the point that you have to quit cold turkey? I can't have caffeinated tea or coffee at all at the moment but have lately been using cacao in that way - and I love the taste, love the antioxidants, and it improves my appetite, which is supposed to be a good thing. But since yesterday, I've been off it cold turkey - no cacao nibs in my barks, no cacao in my morning smoothie, etc. I was starting to get unpleasant itching symptoms as well as just wanting more and more of it. This is maybe the third time I've had that dance with cacao. Would love to hear others' experiences.

So far yesterday and today, my energy has been lower and less consistent, as has my appetite. That's probably partly due to the lack of the 'cacao crutch,' but I'd been going full on for several days with enormously less rest than I'd been needing for a long time previously, and it's likely that that caught up with me a bit too.

Otherwise, my job/money worries seem to have found fairly quick resolution. One translation job that I thought was finished has come through with a lot more work. Some more editing too. And another completely new part-time job that I inquired about seems to have come through (still a couple things to iron out). I'll tell more about it when I know that it's for sure, but suffice it to say, for now, that it'll be a contrast to everything else I'm doing, whilst utilizing my relevant experience and skills, and should be a really good complement to everything else. There are also a couple of unpaid tasks that I'm taking on in addition, to help contribute more to the literary world and the environment-sustaining world.

Do you believe that you'll always find the work that you need, when you need it?

I hope you enjoyed all the photos yesterday! There will be more, from now on! It feels good to add things in and start to get the hang of them.

I Have Photos!!

A phone call to the Canon support team connected me to a real person in quick time, and it turns out that there was an extra step I needed to do to get the computer to 'see' the camera. In his words, Mac OS X.6 is 'a bit of a bear' when it comes to camera interface. He wasn't able to tell me why I'd never had that problem with the couple of cameras I'd tried - I guess that's not his to say.

But anyway - here are some pictures!

Here's Phil, whacking down the rampant horsetail grass in front of the outhouse. (It's rampant everywhere, including where we've pulled roots three feet down!) And yes, that is thin air and the edge of the bluff to his left, beyond the rowan tree. Best view from a toilet anywhere, I suspect!

Here I am in Anchorage last Friday, with a little wild rose Phil gave me. They are so pretty. Do you think my new hat is cute?

This is 'Turnagain Arm,' a long coastal inlet that the road south from Anchorage to Homer passes alongside of for the first 50 miles or so before climbing up into the mountains. This is the south side of the road. If you look closely, you'll see that those sticks of trees are festooned with terns. Right before I took the photo, they were all attacking an eagle, who must have been trying to make a meal from their nests. Eagles are so enormous and powerful, but we've been seeing them beleaguered by much smaller birds over and over these last few days - it's nesting season!
This next photo is the north side of the road in the same place (Girdwood). Still snow around in midsummer, but it is mountainous.

We drove back home with a stove in the back of the truck, which some friends of Phil's daughter had given her. We stopped in at Phil's friend Joe's place in Ninilchik, 40 miles from home. Here are Phil and Joe with Joe's boat and the truck swollen with stove:

Can you believe this photo was taken at 9pm?? And 45 minutes later, here's Phil's daughter, the proud new owner, with her stove:

Now I want to show some pictures of our place. I think I mentioned yesterday that we've actually harvested from our garden! Here's a picture taken from the cabin that we live in up toward the 'new bunker,' Phil's bugbear project, where three of our raised beds are in view:

And lots of our little starts too. And raspberry canes front right. Here's a closeup of the raised beds by the construction site:

The radishes are going great guns! And don't you love those stylish alder branches sticking up on the left? They're intended as trellis for those little baby peas. The garden cart in the background is loaded with about 100lbs of 'eel grass' that Phil harvested from the beach. Smells just like manure and makes great fertilizer!
But look at these mushrooms volunteering amongst the spinach and swiss chard:

Supposedly they are something to do with all the horse manure we mixed into the soil.
Here's my harvest:

And on the right you can see a salad tray that I recycle as a seedling tray.

Finally - I'm running out of time online here - I want to post a couple of pics of the beautiful used bookstore where I work occasionally.

Here's the view as you come in the front door:

Yes, that's quite a bookfilled desk from which to greet customers!

And here's another view of the first floor:

OK - I'd love to hear from regular photo-bloggers how to streamline this process! Maybe my computer and internet connection both are slow - but it's taken a long time to do this indeed. Probably I won't generally put as many pictures in a single post, but will just include a few each time. This is a bit of an overkill after many unillustrated posts.

lots of love.

The View From Here/Up For This Week

The View From Here

Happy Solstice, everyone! The sun is out today! We now have a camera, so internet connections permitting, I'm hoping to illustrate my posts more liberally at least some of the time.

We got our first harvest from our garden yesterday! It's still astonishing to me how quickly stuff grows here considering what a late start it has to get. 

So lovely to curl fingers in the dirt in the raised beds and feel that it's warm in there!

And there I was hoping that the rest of this post would be a bunch of photos of our garden, etc. But whereas with every other camera that I've played with, I've just plugged it into the computer and downloaded the pictures, the computer doesn't seem to recognize this one at all. It did come with a software cd but I was really hoping to be able to use the native Mac software and not clutter up the hard drive with more software. The camera we got is a Canon PowerShot SD 1200 - a slightly older model because Phil felt that having a viewfinder was absolutely necessary and the newer ones don't. Plus, his brother is a professional photographer and won't use anything except Canons or Nikons.  I was pretty sold on the Panasonic Lumix for about the same price - would have adored that 8x zoom - but have to agree that the viewfinder is important. What do other folks have as a camera? Powershot owners: is there something about them that necessitates the special software? 

At any rate, I hope to have pictures up soon.

Up For This Week

Like many people whose blogs I follow, I'm reconciling myself to the realization that I probably can't blog every day at the moment. Not having an internet connection means that even if I do write a post, it doesn't mean that I can automatically get online and put it up. 

My desire to make more room for writing and to take that whole part of life seriously and make it important means that I'm going to have to sacrifice some trips to town, and other things. The garden has an endless amount of work that it would like to have done. 

The State of Alaska is providing an incentive for homeowners to insulate their homes and make them more energy-efficient, by offering to pay for the materials and labor. There is a limited time-window in which this needs to be done. Phil set this in motion for our cabin some time ago and we're coming down toward the deadline. So yesterday, I spent the morning caulking windows. I carved out a little time to work on poetry and felt so much better as a result, but checking email and blogging had to be postponed. 

And it's pretty clear that I need to get a more regular income stream going, so I need to put some time and effort into identifying and securing that.

That said, I want to make sure that I'm posting here at least three times a week. This week, I'll do some more photo posts of all the amazing plants that jump up when they get the chance. Another wordstalk. Possibly another book review. And another 'theme and variations' post, although I may have covered most of the possibilities by now. A product review, and maybe something on our new camera. Ok, I might not get all of this done!

I'm putting my request out there to the universe for any tips on keeping the relationship 'ship' afloat when there's a lot of changes underway and a lot of work to be done. It's one of the most important things in my life and at the moment my heart is very heavy - things are not going well. I would also love and gratefully accept any advice and input on activating income streams, whether it's using the internet for passive income or bringing my special (writing/editing/translating) skills to the notice of the right person. Please - I'd be so grateful. And I wish for everyone a beautiful, sun-filled week.

'Making Do,' Eating Locally, Accepting Where I Am

The final section of the discussion of 'Catching Fire' is coming soon: the really crucial stuff about what Wrangham's scenario implies for raw-foodists.

But I have to make a digression, to honor a feeling. I've been wanting to write a series of posts about 'making do,' being creative with what you have even if it isn't much or isn't ideal. From some perspectives, 'eating locally' is a part of 'making do,' and living in Alaska, where the ground is frozen seven months of the year in the balmier places even, makes that a challenge!

I've been hearing people elsewhere talking about starting their gardens, and have seen photos of fiddlehead ferns poking up. I ate loads of fiddleheads last year - in June! So we're still a good ten weeks away…)And this morning, as Phil and I hiked on the frozen beach, talking about fishing expeditions, I found myself tearing up with compassion for myself (not self-pity, I hope!) - remembering how very hard I had tried to 'eat locally' for many months last year, to convert my body to get most of its calories from fish and game - and how very much better I feel now that I'm no longer forcing that, but how sad that it cuts down on 'local' subsistence so very much.

Of course, in the three-to-four month growing season we can grow quite a lot of vegetables, and last year we wild-crafted large amounts of berries and greens (nettles, ferns, various shoreline grasses and herbs, as well as kelp and dulse). That's something to look forward to.

And for now, I am doing my best. I sprout lentils, fenugreek, sunflower seeds. I mix dried nettles in with my salads (delicious!). Cilantro pesto from my wonderful cilantro patch last year is in the freezer and getting used. I want to find out if it's possible to grow maca here, spirulina - would be so cool to grow superfoods besides the superfoods that grow wild here.

Since I've been sent this opportunity to make this place home for now, I have to make the best of it and learn all that I can from it. This is one of the last wild places, a place of great beauty. And it has been my husband's chosen homebase for the past 30 years (almost as long as I've been alive!) And even if it is true that eating fish and meat made me sicker, I can derive all sorts of powerful medicine from the plants that grow here. They have to be pretty potent to survive here at all. Considering how horribly spiky it is, in the first of spring, the new growth shoots of devil's club are surprisingly delicious. (Devil's club, by the way, is 'oplopanax horridus,' where the 'panax' part indicates its status as a panacea. More to explore there.)

Like many who live in Alaska, we have no running water at home (imagine the challenges there)! We haul six-gallon jugs from the public spigot at Safeway in town. Well, that spigot has been out of order the past few days (thank goodness I didn't make kombucha - we'd have had no water at all). We are finding another way today, and it has also inspired me to harvest snow from outside and explore that.

So, I temper the twinges of sadness I'm feeling at living in the land of the long winter with determination to do my best, and to learn as many of the lessons offered to me here as I can possibly compass. I continually make my peace with the 'eat all local' ideal, and give thanks for all the ways that I can connect with people elsewhere, and hopefully share some of the powerful plant and animal lessons that I'm learning here. It's certainly a global and iconic instantiation of the whole practice of 'making do,' and I look forward to writing more about that.