The View From Here; Water Drainage and Water Saving

Happy full-moontide! For me, as my jury-rigged hormones figure it out, it's that raspberry-leaf and licorice time of the month. (Seriously, it works great - try it!) I'm grateful that we still have viable raspberry leaves on the canes, but their colors are turning and the energy is clearly revortexing groundwards for the winter, so I'm also grateful that I dried so many earlier this year.

One rainy day recently, I climbed up on the roof of our 'bunker' (construction project, eventually to be storage shed and water-tank shed), braving the slick roof for the sweet view of our cabin. This is our dwelling-place:

- a rainy day, so you can't quite see the breathtaking view across the bay -

- and here is the 'bunker,' from the roof of which I took that photo:

Yes, we adore that robin-egg blue too!

Phil worked his tail off yesterday - trying to get all the dirtwork done before the ground freezes.

I took that photo standing on our counter - in that small place between the cabin and the bluff, he was trying to get a waterline to drain, so that we can actually run water down the sink! He dug pretty deep (and it was muddy, wet and rainy, so that was some perilous going yesterday, especially as the outhouse is on the other side of the trench!) and he's also putting down styrofoam as extra insulation, to lessen the risk that water in the pipe would freeze.

However, even though we now theoretically can run water down the sink (hurray!!), I'm only going to do so part of the time, and part of the time do what we've always done and pour the sink water out on the garden.

The reason for this? Our bluff is a major erosion zone - the Pacific Ocean, even mitigated by coming into the bay, is strong and mighty. Especially around equinoxes and solstices, we get enormous tides, and the edge of the bluff is a little closer to our cabin each year. Further up the bay, I've seen houses that have just slid down the cliff. So, the less water we have running down the face of the bluff, the less we'll be contributing to erosion.

Hiking the beach below: considering that rainfall is not high around here, it's astonishing how much water is cascading down the bluff in so many places. I promise pictures in the wintertime, when all these gushing streams have frozen: it's quite beautiful.

Phil has done a ton of work at the toe of the bluff, trying to shore it up, and is planning to do yet more this week...

Can you see his daughter's little dog investigating what we call our 'Sea-bastion?' Buddy the dog turns out to be quite the climber!

My camera wasn't quite up to it, but I always love trying to get photos of the eagles perched on the rocks. They are as patient as the rocks themselves, perching, waiting...

Conserving water is very often a good idea. When I lived in HI, most folks were on catchment and sometimes there'd be a drought, so you really had to watch your consumption. I became adept at the 60-second shower and at showing newcomers how to wash dishes without pouring away gallons of water. Here, we catch water for our garden, and mostly haul our water from town. The less we use, the less we have to heft heavy jugs, but also the less erosion potential.

While I'm ecstatic about having a Vita-Mix now, the difficulty of washing the pitcher was one of the many arguments I used to deny myself getting one for the longest time. Especially with our sink setup...

Sometimes, I heat up water to wash dishes. Almost always, I have herbal tea on the go when I'm using my Vita-Mix. So what I tend to do now is to rinse out the pitcher with some warm herbal tea in it - run the motor (yes, uses a little more power, but definitely saves water) with warm tea. And then I have a much easier-to-clean pitcher, and a warm, watery version of my smoothie or pudding, which I could think of as a chaser, but probably better as an aperitif to be drunk first.

You can see the tea in the pitcher, all foamed up, withe the green smoothie in the pint mason jar and the herbal tea in the quart jar. Oh, and my best friend my pen just off to the right!

A couple more water-saving tips: although I love loose-leaf teas above all, I do use some tea bags. And I save those bags as pan-scrubbers and other cleaners. I use fruit peels in a similar way. In the morning, when I make Phil's sourdough banana pancakes, I save the banana peel and use it to wipe the fork I used to mix up the batter, and then he can use the fork to eat with.

I keep the same mug/mason jar going over and over for tea. I often don't wash the skillet in between cooking food for Phil (seasoning, you know!) Sometimes, especially when it's very cold or we're low on water, I just accept that not everything's going to look immaculate. And then I'll boil some water in the tea-kettle and do a more thorough wash later to make up for it.

Have you ever had to think about where your water's coming from and going to?

My First Blog Giveaway! And the Power of Perspective

If I can get blogger to co-operate - here goes with my first ever blog giveaway!

I am so grateful to Amazing Grass for their generosity in sending me so many samples to try out - hope you saw my series of reviews for them last week. Now, we're teaming up for a giveaway! 

More on that in a moment - first, today's reflection on self love - 'How do you witness the power of perspective in your life? Do you currently face something where your perspective could make a difference?

Awe and gratitude to Tina once again for a wonderfully-crafted series of reflections, that have been such a powerful tool in my own work on becoming my best - and we are just coming to the end of our first week.

Cauliflower leaves look so huge in the perspective of chives and carrots. And the thought of the frozen months makes all this fecundity so treasured…

Perspective… We all have our true north, but even true north has its declination. I love that Tina has brought in 'perspective' as a part of this invitation to find our true north. Self love is all about finding the best expression of our own gifts, but perspective invites us to acknowledge that this expression is flexible in different contexts.

I feel that my 'true north' is my poetry writing, and that everything else I do feeds into it somehow. But, as Alaska's Writer Laureate Nancy Lord advised us in the closing speech of the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference back in June, it's good to do 'other writerly things' as well as just writing. Perspective tells me that I can't realistically expect to have wonderful poems springing forth fully formed like Athena from Zeus' head every single day, nor that the process of revision will be as delightful in every case as I often find it to be. 'Other writerly things' include reading, even reading the occasional low-brow genre novel (amazing the kinds of poetic ideas that come from excursions of those kinds), walking in nature, blogging, gardening, interacting with other writers. 

A sense of perspective also dulls the aching edge of perfectionism. Since we are all coming from different perspectives, it's foolish for me to think that everyone who reads my work is going to love it - indeed, it encourages me to stop and think about whether I even want it to appeal to everyone!

The realization that it's OK to have preferences has come very late to me, and it's a precious freedom.

Raspberries are full-on here. I put a handful, that I'd just harvested, in my smoothie this morning, with chia-sweet, a ts of flax, pea protein powder, almond-brazil milk, herbal tea (reishi and fo-ti and chai rooibos), maca and wheatgrass juice. I love how the Vita-Mix can handle all those little seeds and the wonderful, thick, smooth texture of the smoothie!

Because that is how I love to make my smoothies, I chose Amazing Grass' superfood powders to give away (as opposed to the 'made up' meal replacements and energy bars) - I think the superfood powders are just a wonderful 'ingredient' that also stand alone just mixed with water. And so, I'm giving away an 8.5 oz bottle of the 'original' green superfood powder 

and another of the chocolate flavor. 

The chocolate flavor tastes out of this world to me; the original flavor is great too (but not quite chocolate!) but it doesn't have the oat fiber that I, for one, have to treat with caution, so I think it's an even more super product.

Please enter this giveaway and take your chance to enjoy Amazing Grass' great products and generosity!

To Enter:

1 - Mandatory - leave a comment below telling me why you want to win this.

2 - Visit Amazing Grass' website and leave a comment back here telling me which products interest you the most.

3 - Tweet this giveaway with a link and reference me @Ela_HG - and leave a comment here telling me you've done so.

4 - Follow Amazing Grass on twitter and leave a comment here telling me you've done so.

5 - Mention this giveaway on your blog - and leave five entries here saying you've done so.

I'm going to run this for a week and announce the winner next Tuesday. Good luck and thanks!

Reflection on Self-Love for Today

Hi everyone!

Another busy day in a busy week, so this is going to be brief indeed. I just wanted to pop in and give my response to today's 'reflections on self love.'

Today, 'take a few moments to think how you showcase intrinsic beauty. What positive qualities describe you? Search deep. Throughout the day, consider these qualities. How do they showcase in your life and make you beautiful? (Original post.)

My response: I love to help people. I love to see others' needs and points of view, and to support them as best I can, even when I don't relate to or understand them fully. I make food that I can't eat to share with a great variety of people, and when I prepare food, I always consider the person I'm preparing for when I decide what to serve and how.

As for my own fueling - here's my first Vita-mix use (lunch yesterday) - and see that blue sky and ocean in the background!

Coconut kefir whey (I promise, a post about that soon), half a carrot, top and bottom of a tomato I sliced for Phil's lunch, leftover massaged kale and chard, cilantro, chives, sage (from garden), dried oregano, chlorella, nutritional yeast, a little piece of avocado, spoonful of flax, some lime juice.

Green and good!

The brighter green on top is a blob of parsley-arugula pesto.
I'd still love to hear suggestions for what I should make, now that there are so many things open to me.

Love to all - we just got a netflix free trial and are going to be modern and watch a movie tonight (something we seldom do, but maybe more now).

Technology Musings, Broccoli-Cauliflower Marinade

Happy Friday!

This is probably a topic that many people who have lived their whole lives in cities have not had to think about. But it is something that has preoccupied me off and on, more on than off, for years. Technology and how it dominates our lives, where we would be without it. I get myself tangled continuously in the ethical dilemma of whether we 'should' have it. 

We just got internet at home, and that's been a longterm wrangle over whether it's yet another expensive speed-up, requiring maintenance and inviting one to spend more money. Everything moves faster than if you have no home internet, and so it's easier to spend more time, waste more time, spend more money, waste more money. Another concern has been the anxiety of addiction, of the rabbit-hole of stimulation and information, getting caught in the web of links and never getting up off one's bottom again!

I decided that the 'pro's' of having internet outweighed the 'con's' - most of my work is predicated on internet connections, and for one of my projects, the software tends to crash, and being online makes it easier to back up work successfully. I'm not too concerned about the rabbit-hole phenomenon: I know it's there, but there's so much else to do as well and it can only hold one's interest for so long.

But 'technology' in general is a much broader infiltration, taken for granted in our lives. I was thinking about this as I walked to town to pick up the modem on Monday. As I mentioned, it turned out that they'd given me a dud and I had to go twice. I was pondering what would happen if we had no rapid transportation, if we had to walk to town every time we needed something. And what if we didn't have trucks to carry things in quantity? We'd have to go frequently, but not so frequently that we were exhausted, and carry what we could. 

And what if we had to grind all our own flour? Grinding grain is hard work. Or, for myself and others who can't tolerate grains and prefer nut flours, those are produced by pressing the oil out and drying and grinding the remaining solids. When I lived in Hawaii, I used to make my own (and sometimes for many other people) coconut creme with a wheatgrass juicer, from the mature coconut meat. Delicious and wonderfully fresh, but it was such a production, from gathering the coconuts, whacking them open, prying the meat from the shell (which can take ages) that often the pulp was just given to the chickens rather than spending a whole lot more time doing the work to render the flour.

Without technology, everything would take such a long time! And we'd either have to spend all of our time on basic survival issues, or else we'd have to split society up into those who gathered coconuts and made the coconut creme all day and those who got to write poetry and go on retreats, etc. So, on balance I have to be grateful for technology, offering me the opportunity to do so much more. 

Having said that, in the few days that we've had internet I have spent some money. I've also earned some money, although it hasn't actually arrived in my bank account yet. But there were a few purchases that I needed to make (herbs, supplements, etc) that I was able to make more quickly.

On the other hand, I've been trying to think laterally and not be addicted to 'the right tool for the right job' to the extent of ending up with acres of built-in redundancy taking up space in your home! Our home is so tiny, and our budget is similar.

So, I did not buy a dehydrator, even though it's harvest season and Fred Meyer had one on offer. Our little toaster oven can do small amounts and theoretically has a dehydrating function, but it is so noisy! Here, instead, is what I've been doing. This is our little annex room off of the main cabin, with clothes, laundry, food stores, etc. I have my flax/coconut/mesquite/chia-sweet cookies on racks sitting on an old rubbermaid container, and that's just a little desk fan circulating air onto them. Much quieter, and it worked fine, although it's taking a long time to dry my mint, yarrow, wormwood...

And I won a Vita-mix on eBay! I'm excited and almost can't believe it. I got the 5200 series with two jars, which is exactly what I wanted (to grind quantities of grains, flax, sesame as well as the smoothie stuff). I got it for somewhat less than I was prepared to pay - and there'd been 22 bids on it before I put my bid in! I'm so looking forward to all the options that it will open up - all the recipes that I've been wanting to try that my little blender won't be up to. I'll make a list of what I'm looking forward to doing and share that later also.

But my little Kitchen-Aid immersion blender is pretty good. Here's something yummy I did yesterday - enjoyed by more folks than just myself! I marinaded broccoli, as well as cauliflower from our garden, in apple cider vinegar, a little hemp oil and a little sea salt, and let sit a few hours.

With the blender and a quart mason jar as container, I made a dressing from sunflower seeds, nutritional yeast, flax meal, apple cider vinegar, black pepper, sea salt, and a bunch of arugula and mint from our own garden!

Here it is before they were combined.

And I forgot to take a picture of the completed dish until it was mostly gone! 

I love how the flax meal improves the texture as well as balancing the omega 3-6 ratio. Isn't it good when you do something for nutritional value and it enhances the flavor/texture too, or vice versa?