Woods-Kimber New Family Experience

Amazing weekend with Dada

2010-11-23T06:07:00.000-06:00

I had the most amazing weekend with Dada. It started Friday evening building Snap Circuits projects for the first time, which delighted and captivated Dada and reminded me how little I understand about electronics.

On Saturday we went to home depot and had fun buying materials for a small PVC greenhouse we needed to build. We worked on building the greenhouse and then switched gears to make Dada a bow and arrow, which we did using bamboo we cut from behind the house, making an arrow out of another bit of bamboo. We watched the last part of Avatar (which had inspired the bow and arrow). We played plants vs zombies on the iPad. All of us drove to P. Terry's for dinner with the top down. We read good stories at bedtime.

On Sunday we finished the greenhouse, for which Dada chose gold spray paint. Julie and Dada helped prepare the PVC parts and put on the plastic skin. We played more PVZ. We helped clean the house. We went on a 3-mile walk with the dog, both of us barefoot. Dada bought something from a convenience store on her own for the first time. We fletched her one arrow and she added Na'vi-style decoration to the bow and spent much time doing a passable Neytiri impersonation (including using a butter knife as her "hunting" knife). We had a great dinner that Julie cooked, watched The Simpsons, and then Dada helped me pack for my trip to Japan. More good bedtime stories and discussion of when I would get to Japan and be able to call home.

It occurred to me as I went to bed at I could have been playing golf or something, but I can't think of any better way to spend a weekend at home.

Dada's Latest Art

2010-02-25T16:00:00.001-06:00

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Dada drew this picture the other night while watching the Olympics. It represents a ballerina doing a hand stand.

I found this drawing to be particularly remarkable:

- The composition seems pretty sophisticated for a six-year-old.

- The detail on the feed and legs.

Dada's pictures are rapidly improving in sophistication. She definitely has both vision and the technical ability to execute it, as well as a unique style. I am eager to see what she does as she learns more about technique.

Christmas 2009

2010-01-07T03:36:00.003-06:00

Christmas 2009

It seems like Christmas came and went in a blur. This year Dada was very much into the wrapping of presents: she wanted to wrap anything she could and have it under the tree, whether it was a gift for her or a gift for someone else or just an empty box. She was also very much about decorating the tree and spent several days helping Julie trim the tree.

It is difficult to capture the present opening activity, but I was able to get this picture of Dada admiring her gift from her grandfather Ba, a globe of the Earth (with its companion moon globe in the background).

Dada's Santa gift was an Easy Bake oven, which she seems to have been the gift trend of the year, as her friend Jane and her cousin Sophia also got one. She also got lots of books, with Roald Dahl being a strong theme.

We have worked pretty hard to try to avoid having Christmas be all about getting piles of toys and so far we seem to have succeeded. Dada seems to be as excited about giving presents and seeing other people get presents as she is about getting her own presents. It probably also helps that her birthday is just 4 days after Christmas, so there is a bit of an extended period of gift getting, helping to take the focus off the one big day.

On Christmas day we opened our gifts in the morning, having had to wait until almost 9:00 a.m. for Dada to wake up, played with our toys for a bit, and then hopped in the car for the trip to Houston to see Dada's grandmother Boo, where there were more gifts to open and Christmas dinner, this year a very modest affair with just immediate family.

We spent several days in Houston. Got to go ice skating outside at Discovery Park in downtown Houston, went to the zoo, and visited the mall just to get Dada some exercise, despite the crushing after-Christmas crowds. We also spent several evenings reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out loud as it was too compelling to limit to bedtime.

Julie's brother gave us several board games: Life, Scrabble, and Monopoly. We ended up playing a rather epic game of Monopoly, with Boo ultimately crushing Julie, Dada, and I. Dada was fascinated by the money and became rather obsessive about arranging her cash neatly on her side of the board. I was amazed at how much of the game she grasped. We had to help her with making change and provided advice about developing her properties, but by the end of the game she seemed to understand what it was all about. Attention span was an issue, as you might imagine, so we tended to play in short sessions. But we are very pleased to be able to move from Candyland and Chutes and Ladders to games that involve actual strategy and skill.

All-in-all a nice, low-key holiday.

Halloween 2009

2009-11-02T18:53:00.001-06:00

Halloween 2009

Halloween seemed to jump out at us but we did manage to put together a costume for Dada, shown here as a very cute witch.

Julie also put together a witch costume and Dada and Julie did a little trick or treating while I stayed in and handed out candy.

The weather was perfect, clear and just a little bit cool.

We didn't get as many kids as we have in years past, so now we have way too much leftover candy. Oh well.

First Day of School!

2009-08-25T09:41:00.004-05:00

Dada had her first day of school yesterday--she started kindergarten at Dawson Elementary, in Ms. Ramirez's class. Since the school is just a few blocks away, we all walked there together (well, not Humphrey, who isn't allowed inside the building) and had a chance to meet Dada's teacher and see her classroom.

After school, she announced that she'd had a great day and had some lovely artwork to show us. She will probably like it more once she's gotten used to getting up early and knows her fellow students a little better.

Garden Journal: 20 June 2009: Corn is Done

2009-06-20T11:17:00.003-05:00

Corn is done

The corn has provided its harvest and is done. We had planted Silver Queen with an aztec multi-colored corn. The aztec corn appeared to hybridize with the Silver Queen to produce mutant ears with a few very large colored kernels and otherwise stunted Silver Queen kernels. Next year just the aztec corn.

The watermelons and other melons are doing well: we have at least five watermelons and one or two other melons.

The potatoes are ready to harvest: pulled three out of the bin that were right at the surface. Need to go out in the morning so we're not doing it when it's beastly hot.

The peas and soybeans are pretty much done: the peas got outcompeted by the grass and were hampered by bad soil. Not sure about the soybeans--probably planted them too late.

The tomatoes continue to produce pretty heavily. Thinking about setting up some shade to allow them to survive the heat of summer.

The little cherry tomato continues to produce without pause.

We are now into daytime temperatures near or above 100 and probably will have through September.

Not sure what, if anything, we can plant in place of the corn in this heat. Maybe more melons.

Pool time

2009-06-11T18:59:00.001-05:00

Pool time

This is Dada on our first trip of the year to the pool. She is wearing her new nose-covering mask that let's her go under water in comfort.

This looks like the year Dada starts to swim for real.

Gym Show

2009-05-31T06:15:00.001-05:00

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Dada has been doing gymnastics for quite a while now--since she was about 2 years old. For the last year she's been going to Jump Gymnastics, a little studio not too far from our house.

Yesterday was the spring "gym show" where all the kids get to do a quick routine for the assembled parents and they all get a medal at the end.

This is Dada getting her medal after doing her routine.

Then it was back to the house to play Lego Star Wars with dad for way too much of the day.

Garden Journal: 17 May 2009, Peppers and mellons

2009-05-17T16:26:00.001-05:00

Peppers and mellons

The lettuce and spinach finally gave it up, so Julie pulled it up and we replaced it with a variety of peppers. The watermellons Julie planted earlier are starting to come in pretty good, as you can see here.

We're getting a few peas and the tomatoes are heavy with fruit but not yet ripe yet.

Got 1.25" of rain yesterday. Refilled all the rain barrels.

Corn

2009-05-09T19:09:00.002-05:00

We have cute little ears of corn now.

Bat girl

2009-05-06T05:03:00.001-05:00

Bat girl

Dada has learned how to hang upside down on the monkey bars, shown here at the new bars at her school. She is very proud of this skill.

Garden journal: Front yard May 2, 2009

2009-05-06T04:59:00.001-05:00

Front yard May 2, 2009

Peas have started producing a few pods. Beans are plentiful. Corn is getting quite tall and is well tassled. Lettuce and spinach are both bolting but still tasty.

Garden Journal: 25 April 2009: Soybeans and tomatoes

2009-04-25T08:46:00.001-05:00

Soybeans and tomatoes

Tomatoes are setting fruit, soybeans are coming along nicely, watermellon has sprouted, corn is tasselling. Have mulched with leaves--figure weeds from leaves can't be worse than indemic grass.

Lemon tree in self-watering pot is putting out new leaves. Appeared to not like being constantly watered. New strategy is neglect.

Garden Journal: 18 April

2009-04-19T11:25:00.002-05:00

Planted more watermelon seeds: another "Bush Sugar Baby" (Burpee) and a Fordhook Hybrid (also Burpee). We don't have sprouts yet, but should soon after an inch and a half of rain followed by sunny, warm weather. Also set out a gourd plant; we're grateful to Julie's mom for alerting us to the fact that gourd, squash and melon plants can cross-pollinate, resulting in flavorless melons. The gourd is planted well away from the watermelons.

Dada's sunflowers continue to thrive.

Garden Journal: 13 April 2009

2009-04-13T21:27:00.002-05:00

dada-planting-watermellons

Today Julie and Dada planted watermelons in space opened up by ruthless harvesting of lettuce.

On Saturday also moved a tomato from my failed self-watering container (wrong kind of soil, I think) to the tomato bed and replaced the chicken wire enclosures with store-bought tomato cages.

Soybeans are up and growing well.

High winds

2009-04-13T21:21:00.001-05:00

High winds

Dada and I took the first bike ride of the year on Sunday. It was a very pretty day but pretty windy. We stopped at the top of the hill in Town Lake park to have a snack and gaze on downtown.

The wind wasn't really this strong but it was gusting enough to knock the bike over, even after I put the kickstand on the downwind side.

After we left the park to head home we stopped at Sandy's for a couple of ice cream cones. Julie was just done with a meeting she'd been at so she met us there. After our snack we rode home, stopping to chat with our neighbor Sherry, who happened to just pull into her driveway as we were passing her house.

A nice ride, but I am definitely out of shape. Very glad the pollen and weather are now conducive to outdoor exercise.

Growing Up Fast

2009-04-05T21:20:00.002-05:00

Green Playground, 2006

Green Playground, 2009

Dada and I happened to be at the "Green Playground", which is what Dada calls the playground at the Central Market north. I took the second picture, which is essentially the same pose as one I remembered having taken several years earlier. I thought it would be interesting to present the two pictures together.

Garden Journal: 5 April 2009: First sunflower

2009-04-05T21:17:00.001-05:00

First sunflower

Dada's first sunflower burst into bloom a couple of days ago and was able to get this picture on Saturday.

Soybeans have sprouted, as have the squash in the milpa bed.

Mulched around the peas in the pea teepee with leaf-heavy compost from the compost bin. The recent rains have the compost bin working pretty well.

Added a soaker hose to the milpa bed and another to the tomatoes, soybeans, and peas. Total investment about $25.00 for hoses and quick connectors. Also bought another watering can to make hand watering easier, $11.00.

We've decided to leave the potato tower at its current height: we think that will be plenty of potatoes for our needs.

Spring BBQ Trip to Llano

2009-03-31T04:38:00.002-05:00

Bare Naked Family at Cooper's in Llano

We had been talking about going to Llano for BBQ for a couple of weeks but hadn't made any definite plans. Sunday morning Julie said "I want to go get BBQ" so we did. We indicated our intent on Facebook but didn't really expect anyone to join us on such short notice.

Cooper's BBQ in Llano is arguably some of the best BBQ in Texas. It's definitely in the top five along with Kreutz in Lockhart. It's a different style of cooking from Kreutz' no-sauce-just-smoke approach, using a higher-temperature cooking technique and using a vinegary sauce.

The place itself is, like all good BBQ, part of the experience. Llano is about an hour northwest of Austin, a pretty drive through the Hill Country. When the blue bonnets are in bloom it can be spectacular. We were hoping they might be this year, but they were not.

Cooper's is always very popular this time of year and you have to get there relatively early to ensure they have everything you might want, which means leaving Austin around 11:00 to get there around noon or so before the line gets really long. That's a little early for our neighbors the Bare Naked Family, so we didn't really expect them to join us. In fact, their response to our Facebook status was "We are too wiped out to go...but another time maybe!". So off we went.

We got to Cooper's in good time, stood in line planning what varieties of meat we would get, got our food, and ate it with gusto. Dada especially liked the brisket and prime rib. Just as we were finishing our meal we got a call from the Bare Nakeds saying they were just arriving into Llano. They had apparently had a change of heart and hit the road not long after we did. We hung out with them and tried to recover a bit from our own overindulgence.

This was their first time to eat at Cooper's and they really enjoyed it.

After our meat fest we went down to a little park on the Llano river where we enjoyed the river and played on the rocks and generally hung out in the beautiful spring weather. We then decided to go home via a scenic route that would take us by Lake Buchanan, where we stopped for a while to marvel at how low the lake was.

We had pulled into a public boat ramp with a little park with some old-school metal slides (to which Sunny and Dada made a beeline). The lake was about 20 feet below the end of the concrete boat ramp. We wandered around on the exposed lake bed, which is littered with chunks of what I took to be rose quartz and other pretty rocks.

Finally it was time to head back home, which we did, taking more back roads.

A much longer Sunday drive than we had intended but a really nice day, totally blowing off Spring chores to just hang out in the sun and gorge on smoked meat.

Note: Missing from this picture is Sunny, youngest of the Bare Naked's who was off to the side holding Dada when this picture was taken. See our Flickr stream for that picture.

Garden Journal: 29 March 2009: Soybean patch

2009-03-31T04:08:00.001-05:00

Soybean patch

Given the fecundity of the potato tower we decided to pull up the secondary potato patch and plant soybeans instead. Our soybean seeds had been back ordered and finally came.

Dada loves soybeans and so do we so it seemed like something good to plant along with the beans and peas.

We also planted two hills of squash in the milpa in places where the corn either didn't come up or didn't actually get planted.

We've had a good bit of rain and everything is growing quite well.

I started putting cages on the tomatoes--got four out of six done before I ran out of steam. We ended up spending all day Sunday on an outing for BBQ so didn't get a chance to finish that task.

Did mulch the tomatoes with shredded live oak leaves our neighbor Linda had collected for us. Having a hard time finding mulch free mulch material. Tempted to buy a chipper-shredder and put bamboo through it...

Garden Journal: 26 March 2009

2009-03-26T13:57:00.001-05:00

Front yard 26 march 2009

We haven't done much with the garden lately except watch it grow and try to get rid of lettuce.

We've had a good bit of rain the last couple of weeks and everything is growing quite well.

The lettuce has produced much more than we ever expected and we simply can't eat it or give it away fast enough. The spinach is not quite as productive but it's still growing pretty well and provides more than enough for salads certainly. But it's about time to try to cook up a batch.

The peas have sprouted and are starting their climb up the tee-pee. The corn and beans are coming along nicely and I'm falling behind on the potatoes—will need to get out there this weekend and raise it up at least 6 inches. Also need to put up cages for the tomatoes before they start to sprawl.

Dada and Sunny at Maria's Taco Xpress

2009-03-16T08:53:00.001-05:00

Dada and Sunny at Maria's Taco Express

Yesterday Julie, Dada, and I attended our first "Hippie Church" show at Maria's Taco Xpress a South Austin landmark but someplace I'd never eaten and Julie had never listened to music at.

The show this week was by Guy Forsyth, a local musician and close friend of our neighbors the Barenaked Family.

Guy is an amazing musician and songwriter and just a huge amount of fun to see live. For his "gospel" show he augments his regular band (bass and drums) with various horns, woodwinds, and accordions. The place was packed and everyone was having a great time. Since this is South by Southwest week there were all sorts of interesting people there who may or may not have been famous, but certainly lots of dedicated hipsters, in addition to the regular Austin crowd of regular crazies.

This picture is of Dada and Sunny, youngest of the Barenaked clan, hanging out during the show.

Garden Journal: 15 March 2009: Rainy Day Fun

2009-03-15T22:50:00.001-05:00

Milpa stepping stone

It rained approximately 3 inches from Thursday through Saturday by our raingauge.

Filled up all our barrels and then some. Plants all very happy.

Sun came out in the afternoon today and we saw sprouts in the pea mounds at the base of the pea teepee. Three days of rain and we're all like "where is the sun? What did we do?" I know the folks in the Northwest are all "boo freakin' hoo". Of course, it will be back in the 80's by Tuesday.

While it was raining we entertained ourselves making stepping stones from a kit from the hobby store. Pictured is my attempt to honor the milpa. It's kind of fun, although after we bought the second box of cement mix from the hobby store (with a 25% off coupon, at least) we did learn that Quikcrete from Home Depo works just fine for a fraction of the cost. So we'll know for next time.

Julie picked up some interesting bits of broken tail light and road reflector on her walk with Humphrey. Now I'm thinking about other things to use as molds. The next step up would be pulling our own molds and casting into that. When will it end?

Dada and I went on a fruitless quest for pickle buckets (for self-watering containers) Saturday afternoon. Chick-fil-a says they do sometimes have buckets but the recyclers get them at random times. Guess I'll have to try in the mornings or something. Although I'm starting to think it would ultimately be cheaper to just buy the $5.00 buckets at Home Depo. But that just seems wrong.

Garden Journal: Understanding the Dust Bowl

2009-03-09T08:53:00.001-05:00

Grass from front yard

This picture shows two clumps of grass I removed from the yard in order to make holes for soil for the peas for the pea teepee. I have removed the soil, what little there was, but otherwise not done anything too them.

Observe the incredible density of roots--this grass is growing in about two or at most three inches of cedar mulch on top of the caliche that makes up the subsoil in the front yard.

With this view it's easy to see why we have been completely unable to remove this grass from the yard. One also gets an understanding of why removing it turned the prairies of the Midwest to dust.

I don't know what variety of grass this is but I assume that it is some sort of native grass.

Garden Journal: 8 March 2009: Planting peas

2009-03-09T08:46:00.001-05:00

Planting peas

Busy day today.

Julie and Dada planted carrots in amongst the spinach and lettuce.

Julie planted garlic and basil in the tomato bed (basil seeds come from a basil plant off the back porch that had gone to seed).

I built the bean teepee pictured here, although since we only had seeds for bush beans, we are planting peas. I made a doorway on the north side so Dada can go into the teepee. The teepee is made from bamboo and secured with zip ties, which made the whole thing go together pretty quick. The poles are set into holes made with a little augur I picked up when I got the chicken tractors.

I also added another 3-4 inches of soil to the potato tower.

Dada's map of the garden March 2009

2009-03-08T09:22:00.001-05:00

Dada's map of the garden March 2009

This is a map Dada drew of our garden. It's a remarkably, I think, accurate portrayal of the garden. I think the triangular bit in the lower left is the to-be-constructed pea tee-pee, about which Dada is very excited (she wants to pee in the pea tee-pee--can't say I blame her).

Garden Journal: 7 March 2009: Tomato transplants

2009-03-08T08:38:00.003-05:00

Tomato transplants

Our attempt to start tomato seedlings didn't quite work out: started too late and the experiment of using fiber egg cartons turned out to be doomed from the start--too hard to keep them moist.

As it happened, one of the largest community gardens in Austin had its plant sale today so we went and bought tomato plants.

Bought 8 plants, 6 for planting in the tomato bed (shown here), two for growing in containers.

Planted the tomatoes in prepared soil that is roughly a 50/50 mix of last-year's compost and the soil/compost mix we bought. Added a handful of worm castings to each hole and watered with a compost tea solution. As shown in this picure, the plants are, left-to-right, front to back:

- Arkansas Traveler
- Cherrokee Purple
- Brandywine
- BHN 444
- Brandywine
- Valley Girl

All are full-size tomatoes. Tried to pick heirloom or interesting varieties.

The plant sale was packed--we were told it was a record attendance, which is not surprising given the dramatic upswell in gardening this spring.

Corn and beans are coming along nicely, as are the potatoes, spinach, and lettuce. Can now harvest sufficient lettuce and spinach to make a full-sized salad without noticeably reducing the available greenery.

Cherry tomato plant continues to grow and produce. I cut away all the dead stocks but there is still lots of green growth--I guess tomatoes can be perennials if freeze doesn't kill them.

Our biggest problem now is figuring out what to use for mulch. We don't have a chipper (with which we could chip bamboo and other trash wood that grows nearb) and haven't found a ready supply of popular stuff like oat hulls or whatever. We have lots of leaves, but I'm not sure that would be the best mulch. Could buy hay from the feed store but trying to avoid having to buy anything.

Our plan for today is to plant garlic in with the tomatoes, carrots in with the lettuce and spinach, set up at least one more soaker hose, and set up one or two pea tee-pees (we've been soaking the seeds overnight, per the instructions, so they have to be planted today). Also need to raise up the potato tower another six inches or so.

Elm and Ash pollen very high the last few days, including today.

Garden Journal: 1 March 2009 Garden salad

2009-03-02T10:27:00.001-06:00

Garden salad

This picture is greens and probably the last of the cherry tomatoes from our garden.

Beans and corn seem to be progressing nicely.

Garden Journal: 26/27 Feb 2008: Bean sprouts

2009-02-28T08:14:00.001-06:00

Bean sprouts

Our corn and beans started emerging on the 26th. By the afternoon of the 27th, both the corn and beans were mostly sprouted and well on their way.

We also had our first salad with tomatoes, lettuce, and spinach from the garden (our volunteer cherry tomato plant continues to produce despite cold, chickens, and neglect).

Garden Journal: 25 Feb 2009: Tomato seedlings

2009-02-25T17:14:00.001-06:00

Tomato seedlings

The tomato seeds that Julie planted are starting to sprout. These are Arkansas Traveler tomatoes.

We also appear to have a corn seedling in the corn bed, as well as more potatoes coming up.

Over the weekend I made new backsplashes for three of the four chambers (one was sufficiently intact that I left it as it is. I used some copper sheet we had bought a few years ago for metal art projects. Probably not the most cost effective use the copper but it was handy and it should hold up to the ravages of rabbit urine. Would have done more but Ash and Elm pollen were very high and had to limit the time I spent outdoors.

We have found a source for rabbits out around Fredricksburg. Will probably head out there in a couple of weeks, as soon as I can finish preparing the hutch.

Garden Journal: 21 Feb 2009: Oats have sprouted

2009-02-21T17:44:00.001-06:00

Oats have sprouted

This picture is of the oats I planted as eventually be fodder for the rabbits. I didn't exactly go about this is any well-considered way, so I was pleased to see that the oats actually sprouted. I top-dressed with a sprinkling of worm castings and watered it in a little.

I also top-dressed the spinach with worm castings and put some on the rose bushes and pomegranate bush.

I also cleaned out the rabbit hutch and put the doors back on. I still need to hose it down with bleach to sterilize it and make new backsplashes, which I can make from some copper sheet we have lying about.

I've also been meaning to list the seeds we've planted to date:

- Rainbow Inca sweet corn
- Sliver Queen hybrid corn
- Provider string beans (bush)
- Ornamental mix of sunflowers (in Dada's bed)
- Summer perfection spinach
- Lettuce mix

Started:

- Fummer Feast heirloom tomatoes
- Arkansas Traveler tomatoes
- Crafter's gourds

Garden Journal: 18 Feb 2009: First potato emerges

2009-02-19T17:41:00.001-06:00

First potato emerges

Our first potato plan emerged in the potato tower. Was starting to wonder if they had rotted or something.

Garden Journal: 17 Feb 2009: Starting tomatoes

2009-02-17T22:51:00.001-06:00

Starting tomatoes

Julie started several varieties of tomatoes. At the moment these are in the kitchen on top of the breadbox where the dog can't get them. We have a bank of grow lights we could set up but we might just put a full-spectrum bulb in the fixture on the counter shown here.

Rained in the morning today, collected 5+ gallons of rain water.

Garden Journal: 15 Feb 2009: Planting corn and beans

2009-02-16T10:14:00.001-06:00

Planting corn and beans

This afternoon we planted corn and beans in the small raised bed, our attempt to create a traditional mesoamerican milpa in which corn, beans, and squash are grown together (or at least in concert) to provide both complete nutrition and maintain good soil health. We won't plant the squash in the bed but might try growing it in self-watering containers.

Garden Journal: 15 February 20099: First true leaves on spinach

2009-02-15T09:29:00.001-06:00

First true leaves on spinach

The spinach is showing its first true leaves. The lettuce has sprouted fully as have the sunflowers in Dada's flower bed.

The chickens are starting to lay again--we're getting one or two a day now.

Yesterday we were visited by the organizing committee of the Funky Chicken Coop Tour, to whom we had submitted an application to be on the first annual tour of backyard coops. They seemed impressed with our little setup and as far as we know we are approved to be on the tour, which will be Saturday 11 April. Another chance to talk at length about raising chickens, urban homesteading, green homes, and other tedious subjects.

Have set up rain collection barrel number four, bringing our front porch capacity to about 200 gallons. The original three barrels are currently full from rain over the last week or so.

Robot made by Dada for Daddy

2009-02-15T09:19:00.001-06:00

Robot made by Dada for Daddy

On Friday I returned from a three-day trip to D.C. and Dada presented me with this robot she and Julie made at the Children's Museum. It is modeled on the robot from the Wallace and Grommet short film where they go to the moon in search of cheese.

Garden Journal: 9 Feb 2009

2009-02-09T23:23:00.002-06:00

Tray planted with oats for rabbit forage

Got 3/4" of this morning. Filled all three barrels and a bit more. Nice soaking rain.

Pictured is my attempt to plant a tray of rabbit forage, in this case oats. The tray is about an inch deep and about 12" x 18". I filled it with bagged soil we had lying about and then spread one packet of oats (marketed as "cat grass") on the left half of the tray. I didn't bother making drainage holes because I expected it to rain little enough that drainage wouldn't be a problem. Then it rained the next day. We'll see what happens.

Julie ordered more seeds from Seeds of Change: more corn, soybeans, quinoa, lettuce, etc., about $26.00 worth of seeds.

We'd like to plant the corn and tomatoes and stuff now because we just can't believe it will actually freeze again even though we know it's entirely possible at least through the end of February.

Garden Journal: 7 Feb 2009: Chicken tractor

2009-02-08T09:50:00.001-06:00

Chicken tractor

Dada and I made a return trip to Jo Wilhelm's farmstead to get two chicken tractors that Jo had been unable to sell after our last visit a couple of weeks ago and that she said I could have.

Chicken tractors are simply any form of portable enclosure that you use to pasture chickens. We wanted to be able to put the chickens in the front yard where they could do some good for the unplanted areas, eating the grass, fluffing the mulch, and laying down some valuable poop.

Here you see one of the two tractors with its complement of chickens.

Jo also let me get a couple of water pumps, a bunch of chicken and rabbit feeders and waterers, and assorted other not-quite-junk that she still had laying about. Very excited about the pumps, which, if they work, will make setting up a small fish farm much more affordable.

Today the spinach and lettuce started spouting, so we now officially have a garden and not just boxes full of dirt.

Skating

2009-02-08T08:44:00.001-06:00

Dada at skating rink

Yesterday Dada and I went roller skating for the first time at a rink. Our neighbors were having a birthday celebration at the roller rink and invited us to join.

Dada has skates that's she's used some but hasn't really learned to skate completely. But at the roller rink she started to skate more independently. She even started to try spinning, albeit holding onto the rail.

We had a really great time at the rink--I love to skate too, although I'm really feeling it today (it sucks to be old).

Garden Journal: 4 Feb 2009: Potatoes

2009-02-04T21:57:00.002-06:00

Seed potatoes before covering

Had a little break from work so I spent the afternoon preparing the potato bed and planting the potatoes. Got the bamboo woven without too much difficulty (green strips would work much better but I was able to make what I had work).

Dug out the cedar mulch and grass and then lined the bed with weed mat before putting in the soil. I had forgotten that the cedar mulch was particularly deep in that spot (I think it's about where the front-yard load was dropped).

Soil is about 1/2 my compost and 1/2 soil/compost mix that we bought. Scratched in a couple of cups of old bat guano fertilizer I found in the garage.

Covered seed potatoes with about 3 inches of soil and watered with rain water.

Had a few left-over potato chunks, so I planted those in one corner of the tomato bed.

Julie's mother is in town and made quinoa for us, a South American grain similar to amaranth that cooks up a bit like cous-cous. It's pretty tasty and a pretty amazing food stuff. It is one of the few grains that provides an almost complete protein, better than soy beans. Did a little research and it should grow fine around here in the cool months. Might try growing some.

Separated my new worm bin from the old worm bin--the new bin seemed to have enough worms to be self-sustaining at this point. Going to try the "old dirt, new bedding" technique for finishing the worm compost in the old bin--I want to maintain my worm population, so I don't want to just let the old bin die out, but I also want the worm compost to be as finished as possible--I tend to be a bit impatient and don't always let it finish completely.

I've also added some worms to the leaf and chicken bedding compost pile, which should eventually turn that into a giant worm bed, at least for a while.

Garden Journal: 1 Feb 2009

2009-02-01T22:47:00.003-06:00

Finished Self-Watering
Container

Checked the new worm bin and found worms, although I didn't take a full inventory. But it means it took no more than two weeks for some worms to migrate from the old bin to the new bin.

Today I made a self-watering container (http://www.seattleoil.com/Flyers/Earthbox.pdf), for this sad lemon tree we have that has tended to get neglected and barely clings to life even though it has produced a number of very nice lemons.

Inner bucket

The container is made from two 5-gallon buckets, with the lower bucket acting as the water reservoir and the upper bucket holding the soil. The upper bucket has a small cup that extends down into the lower bucket to act as a wick. The lower bucket has a drain hole that ensures that the water level is always below the level of the soil.

I painted the buckets with spray paint specifically labeled as "bonds to plastic".

I also cut the rebar for the potato tower down to about 4' high to make it easier to weave the bamboo. I did discover that at least green split strips can be bent by hand into hoops and will hold their shape once bent. This suggests the easiest thing may be to form hoops and then add them to the posts, rather than trying to literally weave the bamboo strips. Starting to understand the appeal of the tire approach from a level of effort standpoint.

The cedar pollen levels have fallen way down, so much more pleasant to be outside working on the garden.

Garden Journal: 31 Jan 2009

2009-01-31T18:08:00.002-06:00

Watering the spinnach seeds

Today I filled the tomato bed with soil from the raised beds, reducing the level in the small bed so we can use it to start tomatoes and whatever.

That chore done, we were then able to plant spinach and lettuce in the big bed. In this picture, it's spinach on the left, lettuce on the right. Shown is Julie watering the seeds with collected rain water (although we'll probably install a soaker hose before too long).

We're still working out the details on the potato tower: I added more rebar uprights as just having eight didn't allow for a tight enough weave. We're also starting to think that we might have to cut the bamboo green and then immediately weave it. We also discovered that split bamboo is sharp and splintery. Who knew?

Dada planted sunflower seeds in her flower bed.

My next project is to assemble a cold frame cover from the windows I got last weekend.

Garden Journal: 28 Jan 2008: New rain barrel

2009-01-28T07:48:00.003-06:00

New rain barrel

Yesterday and over night we got maybe a half inch of rain, the first significant rain we've had in quite a long time.

As reported earlier, I had gotten a new rain barrel over the weekend but hadn't set it up. But hearing on the radio that it might rain and that it would get colder as the day went on, I jumped out of bed and set up the new barrel (the white one). The green one is our primary barrel and was still full from the last rain (we haven't needed to water anything in a while).

I filled the white barrel from the green barrel and then put it in a better position (it had been partly hanging off the edge of the porch) and positioned the grey barrel where it could more directly take the rain chain, which channels the water from the gutter for this roof.

From that less than 1/2 inch of rain we gathered about 25 or 30 gallons, which isn't too bad for a very small roof (the roof involved is about 8' by 16').

This will certainly be enough rain water to supply what we need for planting our first crop of spinach and lettuce, setting out the potatoes, and getting seeds started in the cold frame.

You can't see it in the picture, but the white barrel has an outflow pipe at the bottom with a standard hose fitting. At some point I'll gang the barrels together so that water flows from one to the other and we don't have to worry about moving the chain around to fill one barrel or the other.

Garden Journal: 25 Jan 2009: New (To Us) Rabbit Hutch

2009-01-26T00:04:00.002-06:00

Rabbit hutch

We have been getting more serious about raising rabbits in our little urban homestead so I started checking Craig's List for people selling or giving away rabbit equipment, in particular, hutches.

While I could of course build a hutch (I built one for a friend back in North Carolina some years go), I know the time and materials required and given that you can find used cages for 20 bucks or less and given that I didn't have the required materials on hand, it just didn't make sense to try to build one.

We were in no particular hurry either, so we started watching and waiting for an appropriate opportunity to present itself. Worst case, we would break down and order some cages from Murray McMurray or something.

A few days ago I found a listing on Craig's List for a variety of rabbit raising items being offered by a Jo Wilhelm, who lives out near Perdenalles Falls State Park, about 45 minutes south of us.

I made an appointment for 10 a.m. Sunday (today) and showed up not knowing what to expect. I was met by Jo, a woman somewhere in her mid to late 60's. She asked me why I was interested in the rabbits and when I said for poop (for worms) and for eating, she really perked up.

She explained that her husband had passed away and she had sold the property and now had to get rid of all the stuff on it, including her rabbit hutch and whatever of the accumulated "junk" she could before she had to pay somebody to haul it off.

She showed me her chicken house and then the coop. Everything had been hand built by her and her husband as part of their attempt to develop a low-impact, sustainable farmstead with the goal of being Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers.

The hutch was just what we needed: space for a breeding herd of three does and a buck. It looked like something I could have easily built myself and even included repurposed realtor signs for cage floors (Jo is a Realtor by trade). It included the requisite accessories: water bottles, hay mangers, etc.

I said I would take it, at which point Jo said that I was the first person who had expressed an interest who was interested in raising rabbits for food and profit and not as pets and for that reason she would give me the hutch. I was floored and grateful.

That just left the challenge of getting the darn thing out of the barn. Long story short, we had to cut some bits off and shorten the legs and take apart part of the barn door but we got it out.

I also got a small finishing hutch, which is used to raise young rabbits (technically "bunnies") to eating weight, which you can see in the picture next to the main hutch.

It turned out that Jo was even more into sustainability than we could ever be, living in an straw bale house with composting toilets and rain water as the only water source. She had even raised tillapia at one point, although she said she gave up when she couldn't keep their pool warn enough (tilappia perish below about 40 degrees F, so you have to be able to heat their water if you want to keep them year round here in Central Texas--easy to do with a small tank but a tall order for a big pool).

I had the opportunity to explore the junk pile and came home with a rain barrel already plumbed and two water softener tanks that will make excellent rain water catchments to expand our front-porch capacity. In addition, I snagged two aluminum-framed, double-glazed windows and a wooden-frame window, which will make excellent cold frame covers. I also got a stack of 5-gallon buckets and various other odds and ends.

I paid Jo 20 dollars for everything, which seemed like a great bargain to me. I was disappointed that I didn't have more time to explore or more cargo space. As it was I had to borrow Joanna's pickup to go back and get the hutch itself (breaking inbetween trips for another birthday party in Dada's busy social schedule).

The hutch will require some cleaning up: it needs to be hosed down, cleaned out, and disinfected before we put any new rabbits in it, but that shouldn't take too long.

Now we just need to find a source of rabbits to put in the hutch and let them do their thing....

And I have verified through a bit of online research that the going rate for red worms is $30.00/lb and there does appear to be a ready local market. I found one listing on Craig's List for worms being sold by somebody in north Austin and their listing said "they go fast". I took that as a good sign. If I could sell even just enough worms to cover the feed cost for the rabbits, that would be pretty cool, since we'd get meat and high-quality compost out of the deal. That would be about 1 or 2 pounds a month, I think.

Oh, and I'm thinking of raising meal worms, just because it's really easy to do.... They would be primarily a supplemental food for the chickens and (should we actually set up a little fish farm) fish.

And one more thing: Jo has a yard full of old refrigerators and dishwashers. I'm starting to form an idea of a constructed wetlands built using refrigerators as the tanks--they're water tight (or can be made so), are about the right capacity, insulated, and can be easily finished out so as to be attractive as a water feature. Just an idea for now--I need to keep thinking about this.

In any case, in one busy day of hauling, we have gotten a long way toward our goal of raising rabbits, doubled (or better) our rain water capture capacity, found a potential source for other useful bits of junk, and made contact with somebody who has lived the life and made the mistakes and knows a few things about raising rabbits.

All-in-all, a good day's work.

Garden Journal: 22 Jan 2009

2009-01-24T13:08:00.002-06:00

Today Julie prepared the seed potatoes according to the directions we got from the Natural Gardner, which involves cutting them up and dusting them with dusting sulfer (to prevent mold). They have to sit for about five days before planting.

Garden Journal: 24 Jan 2009

2009-01-24T13:05:00.001-06:00

Tomato bed

Today I dug up and dug out the compost that had become the tomato bed and distributed about half of it among the two raised beds and the potato tower, which is starting to take shape.

The cedar pollen has been at near record levels the last few days, which makes working outside difficult but I wanted to get the raised beds ready to plant spinach and lettuce, which we can plant now if the soil is ready.

From this picture you can see that the composting-in-place approach created 4-6 inches of new soil. The bottom of the stones indicates the original dirt level (I hesitate to call it soil). I simply built the compost pile on top of the soil and a thin layer of cedar mulch. That was early last year.

My plan is to combine the remaining compost with the remaining soil we bought and plant more tomatoes there this year. But first I need to put down something to discourage the grass that had invaded that bed last season.

I'm starting to think that the grass that is growing in our yard is the grass that kept the plains in place--it is growing despite our best efforts to keep it from doing so and will not take no for an answer. Certainly a loose dry stone wall was no impediment. I'm planning to put down several layers of newspaper sections around the edge of the pit before putting the new soil in.

Garden Journal: 21 Jan 2009: Potato tower phase one

2009-01-22T23:09:00.002-06:00

Potato tower phase one

Today I took my lunch hour to start setting up the potato tower. I set 8 pieces of rebar, each about 7' long, into a circle, and then started weaving split bamboo around it.

It looks like it should work pretty well.

The rebar was recovered from the gutter in front of a house they had been remodeling around the corner from us. The pieces were quite long, maybe 14 or 16 feet. I used our cutting torch to cut them a more appropriate size.

So far our only cash outlay has been for the soil and seeds.

From The Archives: Dada Taking Flight

2009-01-20T07:55:00.001-06:00

P1000698

For grins I installed Windows 7 beta yesterday on my home desktop and set up the screen saver that cycles through photos. I have it set to use our full photo archive.

This picture came up and I was struck by the composition, entirely accidental, of Dada and the airplane behind her.

Unfortunately, the composition isn't as good as I'd want it to be--Dada needs to be higher relative to the background and closer to the camera, but I thought it was a pretty good shot nevertheless.

Garden Journal: 19 Jan 2009

2009-01-19T17:47:00.001-06:00

Dada on dirt pile

Our soil arrived today and we spent a feverish hour or so shoveling it into the raised beds (and Dada's little flower bed).

Garden Journal: Fishy Dreams

2009-01-18T22:47:00.002-06:00

Tilapia Dinner

One of the concepts in the Toolbox for Urban Sustainability is the constructed wetlands.

A constructed wetlands is just that: a complete wetlands ecosystem constructed artificially. They are most often seen as part of a waste water handling system, one that can be applied with a minimum of technology or used for grey water treatment or whatever.

They can also be used for high-density, low-impact fish farming, since the wetlands both provides some forage for the fish and manages the fish wastes, producing both fish and excess vegetation, useful for eating by humans or animals or as green material for composting.

Such a wetland can also function as a water feature, something I've wanted for a while but was fairly low down the priority list (and fairly expensive to set up and maintain, to boot).

However, the constructed wetlands changes the equation: it plugs into the larger sustainable system, is itself inherently sustainable, and provides another source of home-grown animal protein at very low cost given the appropriate fish.

So now I'm actively, but slowly, working toward this dream of a having a small constructed wetland acting as a water feature and fish production system at the same time.

I had already had the idea of having a water feature that was powered by some combination of wind, solar, and human power (powering the pump for a waterfall, that is). A small-scale constructed wetland does require constant pumping and aeration (to ensure sufficient oxygen for fish in tight quarters), so having it be partly solar and wind powered would add to the sustainability (it would have to be plugged into the grid for backup if nothing else).

I've researched fish and the ideal fish is some species of Tilapia, which is essentially the chicken and rabbit in one of the fish world: it eats almost anything, grows quickly, reproduces prolifically, and tastes good too (in the sense that it produces a very mild white fish like catfish or cod).

It turns out that one species of tilapia, O. mossambicca (Mozambique tilapia) is legal to stock in private ponds without the need for any sort of exotic species permit or aquaculture license. The main challenge will be to get some (other than the challenge of actually building the wetlands itself)--I can't find any place on the Web that is closer than 5 hours away that sells tilapia for pond stocking.

But I am excited that at least this one species of tilapia is allowed in Texas—they are the optimal aquaculture fish and I didn't really want to have a catfish tank (although that would work ok too).

So we'll see how it goes—my next challenge is to scrounge the containers I need to build the four tanks that make up the wetlands—as with the rest of this project, I want to spend as little as possible on this. 55 gallon food barrels would be ideal and I know they can be had if you just find the right restaurant to talk to. But there's no hurry. And you never know what might show up on freecycle or Craig's list....

We are also close to pulling the trigger on rabbits. We've determined that the feed cost is acceptable and we have some room to put some hutches that's out of the way. So next step is finding some cheap rabbit cages and knocking together a little shelter for them.

All in good time....

Garden Journal: 18 Jan 2009

2009-01-18T13:35:00.003-06:00

New worm bin

Today I set up a new worm bin, as my current bin is ready to be harvested.

I'm trying the low-work approach of putting the new bin on top of the old bin and just let the worms from the lower bin migrate into the new bin as they use up the available food in the old bin (of course, you have to put some food in the new bin, which I did).

I'm not sure how long this process will take–I expect at least a month.

I also harvested the chicken bedding from the chicken house and added it to the leaf compost bin, which should heat things up nicely.

The bin itself is a mixture of shredded newspaper and leaves. Dada helped me shred the newspaper (using a small office shredder), which she seemed to enjoy doing.

Garden Journal: 17 Jan 2009

2009-01-18T13:02:00.003-06:00

Dada in the creek

Today I got the second raised set into the ground, ready for soil.

The two beds are 12' x 4' by 24" and 7' x 4' x 20" (determined by the dimensions of the lumber we had on hand, all leftovers from the house construction).

Front Yard 17 Jan 2008

Our plan is to put the potato tower at the end of the 7' bed, where there is just the right amount of room for a 3'-4' diameter circle.

We went to the Natural Gardner garden center and ordered soil, to be delivered on Monday. We bought a variety of cool-weather seeds (spinach, carrots, lettuce) as well as seeds to start: tomatoes, beans, etc.

For soil I ordered 4 cubic yards of the "Hill Country Garden Soil", which is a basic garden soil, and 1 yard of turkey compost, which will be mixed in the truck. That should be enough soil to fill both beds to a depth of 16" and leave enough left over for the potatoes, Dada's flower bed, and whatever else we might do this spring.

We thought about asparagus, which grows well in the Austin area, but decided it would take up too much space--it supposedly grows 5 to 8 feet tall. The up side of asparagus is that once you plant it you're pretty much done, except for the harvesting, for some number of years.

The cost of the soil was $308.00 delivered. This is Julie and Eliot's Christmas present to each other and will hopefully be the only outlay of any significant size we'll need to make for this garden.

We also went to Callahan's, the local feed store where we get chicken supplies and whatnot, and got some more seeds (corn, squash, gourds) and new bedding for the chickens (so I can harvest their current bedding for the compost bin).

Our plan is to use the 7' bed as a cold frame for seed starting, planting spinach and lettuce in the 12' bed. Our primary concern at the moment is birds: we'll have to protect the seeds and seedlings from marauding gangs of grackles.

After we got home from our errands, we went out to the creek behind our house to collect bamboo to use in the potato tower. Shown is Dada exploring the creek. The bamboo in the creek grows to about 20 feet tall and 2" diameter at the base, making it ideal for splitting into the strips we want, as well as for making poles for beans, trellising tomatoes and so forth. We got about 10 good stalks.

Having no experience splitting bamboo, I gave it a try and discovered that it's actually quite easy to get nice long strips just by drawing a blade up the length from the base to the tip.

Dada opens presents

2009-01-11T16:54:00.002-06:00

P1010258.JPG

Dada's birthday party was last Saturday. We had perfect weather: 80 degrees, sunny, no wind. Dada had several friends from school as well as her friend Jane (pictured).
The kids had a great time playing on the playscape and running around. The parents seemed to appreciate not being at some fun factory. The kids decorated cupcakes with sprinkles and that seemed to go over well. We did however forget to do candles and sing happy birtday as the kids got into the cupcakes before we were ready and in all the confusion we totally forgot. We ended up doing a cupcake at bed time and then Dada and her daddy baked cake together on Sunday.

Garden Journal: Raised bed one in place

2009-01-11T16:34:00.003-06:00

Raised bed one in place

Raised bed one in place in front yard. Constructed from 2x12 lumber left over from house construction. Dimensions are 4' x 12' x 2'.
Took about six hours to build and place more or less.

Garden Journal: Getting Serious about Urban Homesteading

2009-01-04T09:33:00.010-06:00

Our Yard 4 January 2009

We are starting on a more-or-less serious attempt at sustainable, productive, urban gardening. I will be using this blog as our garden journal. This is the first entry.

When we moved into our new house we did no landscaping (not in the original budget). The yard was a combination of decades-old compacted caliche (probably contaminated with toxins) and fill dirt with little organic matter.

In order to keep the yard from blowing away we put down two truckloads of cedar mulch. Then we had one of the wettest springs and summers on record. Also, we applied the leftover retainer from our architects to a bit of professional landscaping in preparation for our house being on the 2006 Green Homes Tour, which resulted in some rose bushes, a pomegranate bush, and various assorted things around the front porch. Our builder gave us a mountain laurel, which Julie planted by the street and made a little flower bed around. Julie also started a little kitchen garden around the back porch.

Otherwise we did nothing with the yard except attempt quixotically to keep the weedy grass under control with the rain and all. We probably needed at least twice as much mulch to fully control growth of grass. And since this grass was what grew naturally in the soil we had it must have been pretty hardy stuff.

In 2006 we pretty much let stuff grow as it would and tried to keep it knocked back. I composted all of our neighbors leaves (or rather, built a large compost pile that I struggled to keep wet enough to actually compost). I also got their grass clippings over the course of the summer (essentially I am transferring the fertility of that yard to our yard, which isn't very neighborly, I suppose, but they would just waste the material--at some point our yard will be sufficiently restored that I can start putting the compost on their yard--but note that the neighbor house is a rental and the guys living there now are not exactly focused on the yard).

We also had our flock of chickens established. I use the "deep bedding" approach to coop maintenance, in which you use a deep (about 1 foot) layer of bedding in the coop. You then clean this out once a year, which provides a rich mixture of partly-composted wood shavings and chicken poop and minimizes the effort needed to keep the coop clean. I use pine shavings which are available in convenient bales from the feed store. All the chicken books say not to use aromatic woods like cedar and pine but so far I've noticed no problems using it.

At the end of 2006 I harvested the first batch of chicken bedding and added this to the existing leaf compost pile. That heated things up nicely.

Our friends and neighbors Jay and Kay gave us an oak tree, which we planted in the front yard. Eventually it will shade the south-eastern half of the house but for now it is just a small sapling barely 8 feet tall, struggling to survive in the hideous soil that is our front yard.

In 2007 our thinking about the front yard was to prepare the soil to eventually plant a native, low-growing, drought-tolerant grass such as some of the new buffalo grasses developed at Texas A&M.

Toward that end, in April, I decided to compost in place, with the goal of having a batch of compost ready for the fall. I borrowed a friend's truck and picked up a load of horse manure. I dumped that in the front yard and then combined it with the leaves and chicken bedding to create a compost pile about 5 feet square, enclosed in chicken wire. In restrospect I realize this would have produced only a fraction of the compost needed to prepare the soil properly for a lawn. I covered the pile with a plastic tarp to retain moisture. It immediately heated up nicely.

I also decided to try growing tomatoes in the compost pile, having heard of people doing that to some success. I bought a variety of plants and stuck them in the pile, cutting holes in the tarp. I was afraid the compost would be too hot and it almost was: the plants barely survived. Then we entered an abnormally hot and dry summer and the plants barely clung to life. Meantime, the weedy grass, now emboldened by the compost pile, attacked the pile. Once the pile had collapsed to about a foot-high pile, I removed the chicken wire and built a dry-stone enclosure using stones left over from the construction of the stone facia on the house (we had insisted that the builder not remove any of the leftover construction materials, especially not the stone).

I added soaker hose to the pile and hooked it up to a cheap timer, which proved to be only marginally reliable. Oh well.

Over the summer the grass took over the pile and I stopped trying to cut it back. About September some sort of tipping point was reached and the tomato plants exploded. Unfortunately, I had failed to provide any sort of support, so the plants trailed on the ground, which made finding and harvesting the tomatoes a little more difficult and probably resulted in more loss to bugs (but less loss to birds, perhaps).

This last spring Julie also got two 55-gallon rain barrels that capture the runoff from our front porch roof, which is the only roof not plumbed for rainwater capture (which currently drains away as we ran out of budget and decided to put in the solar electric system rather than the rain water cistern since we had no landscaping to irrigate). Even in this dry summer, this has provided a reasonable amount of water and we could have had much more if we'd had more barrels. I'm thinking I'd like at least two more, which might provide enough capacity to irrigate the raised beds assuming we get a frogstrangler now and then.

In the meantime we changed our minds about the lawn idea and decided that we'd rather have raised beds for growing vegetables. We also found two books to be both inspiring and helpful:

- The Urban Homestead, which focuses on gardening and foraging

- Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide, which focuses on land reclamation, waste management, and general sustainability

So for 2008 our plan is to put raised beds in the front. Julie and I have given each other a supply of soil for Christmas--it would take several years and more material than I have easy access to to make enough compost to fill even two 4x8 beds. So we'll have to buy some soil. I'll be able to build the beds from leftover construction materials (from the house and chicken coop).

I've started a new compost pile with this fall's leaf crop. I'll need to get another pickup load of horse manure to add to it. I would love to have access to a supply of rabbit manure but that would probably require actually raising rabbits, which probably doesn't make much practical sense. Rabbit manure can be immediately and directly composted by worms--in fact it's possible to make a self-sustaining business from selling red worms raised in rabbit droppings (especially if you also sell or eat the rabbits). Something to think about anyway.

We're shopping for soil now and I'll build the raised beds today or next weekend--if we get them in now we can start a crop of greens right away.

We also have some grow lights for starting seedlings that we could set up and use to start plants now if we can find the wherewithal--it's a lot of work to save a few dollars on plants later, but probably the right thing to do from a self sufficiency standpoint.

Over this weekend I made compost tea following the directions from the Toolbox, which requires that you use a fishtank aerator to oxygenate the water for 24 hours while the beneficial bacteria and fungi grow in the water. This recipe is for soil detoxification--I have no idea if our soil actually needs it but it probably does and I have no idea if my tea will actually help--I'd have to do before and after soil tests, but I figured it can't hurt and I can always make more (I used worm castings for the innoculant, of which I have a ready supply [we maintain a worm bin for our kitchen waste that doesn't go to the chickens]). Anyway, it felt like I was making a difference. And I walked to the fish store to buy the air pump and air stone, so there.

Our immediate plans are:

- Build two roughly 4x8 raised beds adjacent to the driveway. I will be able to build these with leftover construction lumber and fasteners I have on hand. These will be filled with purchased organic soil and augmented with our worm castings and compost.

- Build a potato tower. The urban homestead book suggests using tires for this but that doesn't appeal. So our plan is to build it out of bamboo, which grows prolifically in the creek behind our house (and it's tall stuff too). We're thinking split bamboo woven into vertical posts set in a circle. The idea with the potato tower is that you keep adding soil as the potatoes grow, maximizing the volume of potatoes for a given area.

- Maybe also build a bean teepee, which we can also make out of bamboo from the creek. This is a tall teepee that you let beans grow up the outside of. We'll see.

- Seed the rest of the yard with wildflowers or whatever. Judy and George sent us some seeds from Monticello that look interesting.

- Start some plants for spring planting: tomatoes, peppers, etc.

That's probably more than enough to keep us busy and will go a long way towards making our yard look more maintained.

So, out to the yard to knock some beds together....

This is the Year That Was: 2008

2009-01-02T06:55:00.005-06:00

Dada at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma

You may rightly infer from the lack of blog posts the last few months that our life has become both busy and routine. Here is a rundown of what we've done since May:

We traveled to Boise to see Nei Nei's house. Shown here: Judy and Dada in downtown Boise.
From Boise to Coeur d'Alene for a little Hyatt family reunion (with some Bacon's thrown in for flavor). Shown here: Dada in a princess dress as part of the the dressup fashion show put on by all the girls (Booker declined to participate).
From there to Tacoma to see Ba. Shown here: Dada and Ba at the Point Defiance Zoo.
In traveling from Boise to Cd'A we visited Judy's friends Cris and Nanci who have a cabin up in the wilds of Idaho where Dada got to experience a little off-the-grid wilderness living and have a marshmallow roast.
We traveled to Amarillo for a reunion of Julie's family. Shown here: Julie and Dada at a rest stop somewhere between Lubbock and Amarillo on Highway 87.
We played in the new fountain in the new park downtown.
Dada started a new pre-school that is a 5-days-a-week and much closer to our house. She likes it a lot and has made lots of friends. Shown here in her skunk costume for Halloween (she refused to wear the skunk headpiece).
Dada started at a new gymnastics studio that is much closer to our house and a better fit for Dada generally. Shown here: Dada receiving her medal following the end-of-year gymnastics show.
We spent as much time as we could at the pool.
Replaced Dada's WeeRide bike seat with a tagalong behind dad's bike.
Went to the Austin City Limits music festival.
Spent way too many hours playing Spore[tm].
Reconnected with our family cache of Lego, which had been in the attic of our old house since we moved into the new house. It had been packed in a large box. We spent the better part of a weekend sorting and organizing it into the bins you see here.
Went to Maker Fair in Austin
Adopted a new dog, Humphrey
Went to the Fall Festival at St. Mark's (where Dada's school is).
Saw Clifford at the Texas Book Festival
Took several trips to Houston to see Boo over the holidays. (Shown: Not Boo's house but another house in Houston.)
Grew tomatoes into January (our volunteer cherry tomato plant continue to produce even now)

It's Finally Hot

2008-05-24T22:05:00.001-05:00

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Last Sunday it was unseasonably hot, with temperatures well into the mid 90's, so we decided to go to "Town Lake" park (it actually has a new name but nobody knows what it is). This is a new park that has a fountain that is designed to be played in.

It was an "ozone action day" so we decided to be good citizens and take the bus to the park, which worked pretty well (it's just a single bus ride from near our house to within a couple of blocks of the park).

We all played in the fountain until we were good and tired (and a little hot) and it was time to get a treat. Dada wanted a snow cone from Snow Beach, our favorite snow cone place, which this year is located conveniently on the way back to the bus from the park (last year it was in a different location that is now in the process of having high-end condos built on it).

Dada and I waited in line at Snow Beach while Julie went on down to Sandy's (an Austin institution selling frozen custard) because she and I both wanted root beer floats.

Snow cone in hand, Dada and I met Julie at Sandy's and we had our floats and then went on down to the bus stop and waited for the bus. There was no shade at that stop but the bus didn't take too long to show up.

We stumbled back home and collapsed in airconditioned comfort.

Now With Video

2008-04-21T22:27:00.001-05:00

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Originally uploaded by drmacro

Flickr now supports the uploading of short (90-second max) videos. Before I started using it as my primary computer, Dada would entertain herself by using the Mac's built-in camera to video herself. This video is pretty typcial of the result.

Skates!

2008-04-07T12:08:00.001-05:00

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While I'm trying to avoid work I might as well make another blog post.

To continue the Super Why theme, Wonder Red wears roller skates and Dada had been talking about skates for a while, so yesterday we went and found some skates small enough to fit her.

This is Dada on skates for the first time. She was remarkably good at--we showed her how to use the toe blocks to stop and get up after falling down and she picked it up immediately.

She was also exhausted after about 10 minutes of skating, which also has its advantages...

Princess Presto

2008-04-07T12:01:00.002-05:00

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I've finally gotten around to uploading most of the backlog of pictures we've taken over the last few months.

This is a rather random selection. Dada has been getting deeply into the PBS Super Why show, which is great for teaching kids reading and spelling basics. She alternates between pretending to be Wonder Red ("With word power!") and Princes Presto (with her magic spelling wand).

Here she is in one of her Princes Presto outfits, although she appears to be carrying Wonder Red's Wonder Word Basket (or maybe it's just Easter eggs, not sure).

On the reading front, Dada is starting to read and write basic words. She can make it about halfway through Hop on Pop before running out of attention and spends lots of time writing lists of words.

She's also spending a lot of time playing the Super Why games on the PBSKids.org site, although I'm not sure how much actual learning value they have, not that we worry about that too much.

RIP: Forrest the Basset

2008-04-06T10:01:00.002-05:00

Forrest the Basset

I am sad to report that our dog Forrest finally succumbed to the cancer with which he had been living for the last year or so. He never seemed to be in any pain but the cancer finally made it impossible for him to eat. At the end he was too weak to stand on his own. He survived much longer than we originally expected--when he was diagnosed we were told that he probably just had a few weeks but he survived more than a year on a simple regimen of Prednisone.

Forrest was about 13 years old. We adopted him when he was about a year old, just after we had moved to Austin. He was the friendliest dog in the world. He loved everybody.

We will miss Forrest terribly. He was our first dog and now our last dog (at least for now). Now we are just a one-cat family, having adopted Helen last December.

Trip to Philly

2008-01-22T20:06:00.001-06:00

On the Platform, 30th St. Station

My company had its holiday party this last Friday and generously offered to offset most of Julie and Dada's travel cost for the trip. We decided to make a weekend out of it and spend Saturday and Sunday morning sightseeing in downtown Philadelphia.

I had gone out to Norristown on Monday for my usual monthly week at HQ. Julie and Dada came out Thursday afternoon, arriving at PHL airport about 4:30. Our plan was for them to take the train from the airport to Philadelphia's 30th St. train station, where I would meet them and we would all take the train back to Norristown and then take a taxi to our hotel near the massive King of Prussia mall (the 2nd largest mall in the U.S., after, I presume, the Mall of America).

Everything went smoothly at first: I made it to 30th St. at 5:30, the earliest they could have possibly gotten there. They got to 30th St. right at 6:00, where I met them on the platform.

Dada was wearing her new puffy coat, in preparation for the frigid cold that had been predicted for the weekend. It had started snowing Thursday afternoon and Dada was very excited to see snow for the first time since leaving China.

We hung out in the train station waiting for our 6:30 train back to Norristown and then caught our train. It's about a 45 minute ride and Dada fell asleep on the way, having not slept on the plane out. I tried to call ahead for a cab but the dude said I had to wait until we got to Norristown. That came as a surprise.

When we did get to Norristown, at about 7:30, I called again only to learn that there was a 45 minute wait due to the weather and whatnot. I tried calling the other cab company I had a number for, but there was no answer. I checked the bus schedule but the only bus that would take us to King of Prussia didn't go until 8:30. So I said I'd wait the 45 minutes.

Happy to be in our hotel

Where we were was the Norristown Transporation Center, which has an enclosed waiting area that connects two rail lines and the buses for the area, but there was no bathroom and there's really nowhere to go around it, being in a rather dicey part of town (and it certainly wasn't an area to be wandering around in the dark and snowy cold dragging big bags and a four-year-old). So we waited, cold, hungry, tired. Finally, I tried the other cab company and got through. They sent a guy immediately and suddenly we were off, dashing to our hotel. Whew, crisis averted.

Finally, we got to the hotel about 8:00, hungry but grateful.

[You might ask why we didn't just take a cab from the airport. A cab from the airport takes almost as long as the train and costs about $80.00 on a good day. With the nasty weather and traffic it could have taken longer in a cab. And Dada likes trains. And I didn't expect to have to wait for a cab in Norristown.]

Dada playing in the snow

We had a nice dinner at the Indian restaurant next door to our hotel. Dada played in the snow, such as it was, until we decided our hands were too cold. Then we all had an early bedtime.

Dada had proved herself to be a good traveler on this leg of the trip, doing most of her own walking and generally being very well behaved.

On Friday I had to work in the morning and then our plan was to go to the home of my colleague Marianne, who had generously offered to have her sitter watch Dada as well as her own kids, Adler (3.5) and Sylvia (22 months). The adults would go to the party and then we'd all spend the night there and then head to downtown Philly in the morning.

Dada and Adler enthralled

Adler and Dada got along very well, playing together like old friends. We had no trouble making our exit for the party, the kids zombified by some wholesome educational TV.

We had a very nice party, getting to meet all the spouses of all my co-workers and eating some really good French food.

When we got back to the house we discovered that Dada had, for the first time, allowed a sitter to put her to bed--in fact the report was that she had put herself to bed, more or less.

In the morning we had a nice breakfast and the kids played some more--it would have been nice to let Dada and Adler play all day, but we had to get back to our hotel in King of Prussia in order to check out and get into Philly in time to hit a museum. Marianne's husband Andre toted us back to our hotel, waited for us to pack, and then got us back to the Norristown Transportation Center in time to catch our train into the city.

Walking to our hotel from the
train

Our hotel in the city was only three blocks from the train station, so we humped our bags through the streets. The promised cold weather had arrived and now it was bitterly cold, with a biting north wind. We got to the hotel about 1:00 or so.

Our room wasn't ready so we check our luggage and headed back out to find a cheese steak and then head to the Please Touch children's museum. Marianne had given us a little "Not For Tourists" guide to Philly that directed us to a cheese steak purveyor just down from the hotel. We had a really good cheese steak (at least I presume it was, it was my first, but by the ingredients I could tell that it was probably about as a good a cheese steak could be). I had pizza and Dada ate most of the parmesian cheese out of the shaker on the table.

At the Please Touch Museum

Fortified, we braved the cold to the Please Touch museum, which is a pretty nice children's museum. The focus there is literary, with elaborate displays based on Where the Wild Things Are and Alice in Wonderland. Dada spent a lot of time building with blocks and pounding plastic "nails" into a building. About 4:30 we called it a day and headed back to our hotel, about six blocks away.

We got into our room and had a little rest then set out for some dinner.

I wanted to eat at a mildly formal Italian restaurant, the sort of place we don't really have here in Texas. Our little guidebook wasn't much help but an online search led us to a nice little place just a few blocks away, Ernesto's 1521. It wasn't even 6:30 but when we got there it was packed. The hostess explained that it was symphony night and everyone was there early so they could make their show. She said they had no space and gave us a couple of recommendations near by.

We started walking up the street looking for one of the places she had mentioned when we were called back--apparently they discovered they did have room for us afterall and seated us right away. The meal was wonderful, just what I had envisioned. Julie had Osso Buco and I had the duck special. Dada ate all the parmesian cheese out of the dish on the table.

More than satisfied with our dinner it was back to the hotel for another early bedtime.

Dada in her nest

Even though the room had a pull-out couch for Dada, she decided to make a nest in the little closet in the room (using the cushions from the pull-out couch) and sleep in there, which she did.

In the morning we worked out that we could do museums until noon, when we would need to make our way to the train station in order to be at the airport by 1:30 for our 3:00 flight (PHL is a relatively small airport but the security line is always long and slow).

So we went out into the even more bitter cold and biting wind to get breakfast and then headed to the Franklin Institute, which is a kid-friendly science museum.

At the Franklin Institute

The walk was cold. Very cold. We were walking straight into a strong north wind with our thin Texas blood. But we made it to the museum without getting frostbite.

Dada enjoyed the museum a lot, as did we--lots of interactive science stuff. Julie's favorite part was the giant heart where you walk through the heart tracing the path blood takes. It frightened Dada but she asked to go through a second time. Dada also liked the area where you could make little paper whirlygigs and fly them on these jets of air. She probably could have stayed there all day.

Waiting for our cab

We grabbed a quick lunch at the museum snack bar and then at noon headed back to our hotel. Even though the wind was now at our back, it still seemed to be just as cold.

We had planned to take the train to the airport, but by the time we got back to the hotel a cab ride seemed like a good investment.

We got a cab to the airport and got there in good time.

As predicted the security line was long and slow--apparently half the people in front of us had been living in bomb shelters or something and hadn't gotten the memo about NO FREAKIN LIQUIDS! Anyway, we finally made it through.

On the jetway in PHL

We caught our flight to Houston with no particular problem. I had gotten upgraded to first class but they couldn't upgrade Julie (we had decided that if Julie also got upgraded then she and Dada could sit in first while I went steerage, but it was not to be). So the dude who was in what had been my seat in the back got the first class seat.

In Houston our plane was delayed but we were able to hang out in the President's Club, although they lied to us about the delay and we ended up waiting another half hour at the gate with the little people. But Dada got a chance to run around, so that was good.

Finally, we got our flight to Austin. I had also gotten upgraded on this leg, so this time Julie sat in first and Dada and I flew steerage. Dada was very good the whole time, as well behaved as one could ask for a child her age.

We got into Austin about 10:00 p.m., got our bags and scampered home, ready for a good night's sleep in our own beds.

Now We are Four

2008-01-01T11:29:00.001-06:00

Dada in Egg Chair

Dada turned 4 on 29 December. We had planned a party at the Spaghetti Warehouse so we had to get home from Houston early enough to make that party. We got back to Austin about 2:30, opened the birthday presents that had arrived from relatives, and then we all immediately went down for much-needed naps.

We had forgotten to put together Dada's birthday present, which was one of those egg chairs from Ikea with the fold-down canopy. We'd bought it months before and stashed it in the garage.

So about 5:30 (dinner being at 6:00) Julie dragged the parts in and I quickly assembled it while Julie got Dada up and dressed. I was literally tightening the last little bolt as Julie brought Dada downstairs.

We presented the chair and then rushed to the car to dash downtown. Remarkably, we pulled up in front of the restaurant right at 6:00, where most of our guests were waiting for us. We had invited all our adult friends and neighbors--unfortunately Dada's China travel companion Jane and her parents couldn't make it.

We had a very nice dinner and the usual cake and then presents, which Dada liked very much. The gifts included a collection of art supplies including scissors, which Dada immediately turned to the task of modifying party hats to add little doors backed by paper with Hello Kitty stickers. We also cut down some party hats to fit the Dora doll she'd been given.

Overall a very pleasant birthday. Dada likes all her presents, although between Christmas and birthdays and travel it's hard to even have played with everything yet.

Cactus Series 20080101

2008-01-01T11:07:00.001-06:00

We are trying to get Dada to write thankyou notes today. In between notes she executed two quick pictures that she identified as "cactus" (by which she means prickly pear with spines, in reference to some growing in the yard of one of our neighbors and by which Dada had gotten poked some months past--the spines are small and barbed and quite painful).

Cactus Series 20080101-01

Cactus Series 20080101-02

I suppose it's father's pride, but I find both of these drawings remarkable for a just-turned-four-year-old, both in their simplicity yet clarity of expression and the clear connection between Dada's obvious intent and the quality of the execution and the variation on the theme. She drew these two pictures one after the other, so they don't reflect a maturing over time but simply two different abstractions of the same source object.

Christmas Report

2008-01-01T10:37:00.001-06:00

For the first time we had Christmas morning here in Austin, instead of in Houston. This was also the first year we stayed up late as parents to assemble "Santa" gifts for Dada.

Dada's big presents were a wooden kitchen play set (from GranJudy), delivered as an Ikea-style flat pack, and a wooden tree doll house (from Grandpa Bill). Both required assembly.

In breaking with tradition, I chose to do the assembly sober, which made the work go more quickly but took away the angry, desperate edge that one normally associates with late night Christmas eve. We didn't even have any missing parts or tool-related injuries and we were in bed well before midnight. Bor-ing.

Dada is very much about process and not yet so focused on the getting aspect of gift-getting occasions. On Christmas morning she got up relatively late and came downstairs. The first thing she went for was the stack of her own books that she had individually wrapped in the days prior. The magnificent big gifts under the tree were of only minimal interest at first. But, once all the wrapped things had been unwrapped she turned her attention to the tree house and the play kitchen and declared them both fun and engaging.

After present opening, we had a nice breakfast of homemade biscuits, farmers' market bacon, and freshly-laid eggs, then packed as quickly as we could in order to get to Houston in time for Christmas dinner at Boo's house (and another gift opening free-for-all).

We made it to Boo's house in good time, opened our presents, and had a very nice Christmas dinner with Boo, Julie's brother Tom, Boo's friend Bill, his son John and his family (Jeanie, Andrew, and Mathew), his daughter Nora, and Robin, the daughter of one of Boo's long-time neighbors (who was, unfortunately, not feeling well enough to come to dinner).

After dinner we all watched the kids play Super Mario Galaxies on the Wii (which I had brought from Austin) and then moved the party to Nora's fiance Kevin's mother's house, where they were hosting a dessert party. Keven's mother's husband's sons had gotten Guitar Hero I and II for Christmas so Eliot spent a good bit of the evening showing those kids how its done while Dada played with the boys and Julie got to have an evening of adult conversation.

The next several days were spent mostly taking it easy and trying to stay away from shopping centers (although we did take Dada to the local mall where there is a carousel and an indoor playscape).

On Friday night we went back to Kevin's mother's house for a party celebrating the engagement of Kevin and Nora. More adult conversation, more Guitar Hero.

Saturday we came back to Austin in time to celebrate Dada's birthday....

Forrest's New Pal: Helen

2008-01-01T09:09:00.001-06:00

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Following the passing of our basset Lucy, we discussed getting a new dog, in large part so that our remaining basset Forrest would be a little less lonely. We noticed that the Central Texas basset rescue people would be at PetCo a couple of Sunday's ago so we went down to talk to them.

However, I had misread the date and they had been there the day before. Doh!

However, the lady who manages the cat rescue at that PetCo said that she had the perfect cat for us, a sweet cat that likes dogs and doesn't like cats.

We met the cat, Helen, and decided she would be good. I had said in the past that I would only have a cat if it could do its business outdoors because I never wanted to step on cat litter again. But we decided we'd give the cat a try.

She is so far a wonderful cat--she's about 18 months old, already spayed, as almost all her shots, is house trained. She's very friendly and well mannered and very smart. So far she's proved to be the least neurotic cat I've had.

The only downside at the moment is that we were cautioned in no uncertain terms not to let her outside for three months to ensure she doesn't flee. Not sure I can make three months but we have taken pains to keep her inside, including blocking the dog door, which she had already figured out how to use. So that's a little annoying but not that big a deal.

We are enjoying have a cat in the house--she's very playful and likes to be wherever we are, generally brightening up the place.

And the upstairs Roomba seems to be able to deal with the cat litter.

Catching Up, or "The Christmas Blog Post"

2007-12-18T08:06:00.001-06:00

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I think it's fair to say it's been a busy six months since Eliot started his new job with Really Strategies. The job has been a lot of fun but it's also meant longer hours and more travel then he had been used to for the last few years. This has meant a choice between time spent crafting blog posts and time spent with Dada or, perhaps, sleeping. However, he also realizes he's been working at an unsustainable pace and needs to dial it back in the new year.

Nevertheless, we have been doing things worth reporting.

Dada continues to delight and amaze as she cruises toward four going on sixteen. She's over 40 inches tall and shows no sign of stopping. She can count to over 20 and is starting to demonstrate the ability to do simple addition and subtraction. Her verbal ability continues to amaze and we are constantly reminded that we have to watch carefully what we say because she remembers everything.

After our trip to Seattle to see Dada's cousins Sophia, Julia, and Booker, we didn't do much travel except to Houston to visit Julie's mother. We spent as much time as we could at the pool, which we did right through September, when the temperature finally fell into the 80's and it was too chilly to go swim (and the pool closed).

We got to go to the Maker Faire, a two-day celebration of all forms of DIY, from robots and electronics to knitting and craft and all things in between. This event is put on by Make magazine, a fabulous publication. Austin is only the second city, after San Jose, to host a Maker Faire, so we were pretty excited. Julie signed up to volunteer and Dada and I just paid our way in.

It was very cool and Dada and her daddy had a great time. The highlights for Dada were the bicycle-based, human-powered, amusement rides and the rockets. Estes, the model rocket people, had an area where you got a free rocket kit that you could put together right there and then they gave you an engine and sent you out to the launch area. Dad put the rocket together and Dada decorated it (stickers!) and then we launched it. We snagged a second kit to take home and bought a full rocket and launcher set from the Make store so we could do more rockets at home, which we did, so the delight of all. Julie's duties were complete by early afternoon and she got to enjoy some of the Faire too. The trip was capped by a liver performance of the Diet Coke and Mentos guys, which was worth the price of admission all by itself.

Eliot had tried to do model rockets as a lad back in Idaho but had never been able to get his to launch. So finally, nearly 40 years later, he finally got some rockets to go. It's actually a lot more fun than we would have thought, what with the whooshing and the chasing and the fiddly putting together and so forth. And it gets you out in the out of doors on a nice day. We had a couple of weekends where the wind was low and the weather nice and were able to go to the park and shoot off a few rockets.

Dada also got to meet Mo Willems, author of some of Dada's favorite books, such as Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and Nuffle Bunny. He gave a reading and had a book signing at the Texas Book Festival. Dada seemed to be less impressed than her parents. We even got a bonus session where Mo taught the audience how to draw pigeons.

Dada and Eliot still take bike rides around Town Lake and south Austin when the weather and allergen levels permit. With all the rain we've had, mold and then ragweed has been just awful, which has made it hard to be too active.

Julie learned to crochet and produced some very cool crocheted skulls for Halloween, which we augmented with red LED eyes. Ooo spooky.

Our neighbors the Whites: Greg, Jen, Sunny, Kesley, and Austin, returned from having been in Santa Fe for several months. Dada really enjoys having Sunny and Kesley around to play with and Eliot certainly enjoys having someone to play Guitar Hero with so it was a little quiet around here for a while, but things are more or less back to normal.

Julie has developed her pie crust and biscuit skills to a high degree, producing incredibly flaky crusts and biscuits, completely displacing Eliot as the Biscuit King. It has been a source of some friction.

The chickens continue to produce eggs at a rate faster than we can consume or give away. We realized that one side effect of Eliot working from home is that there's no longer a convenient target for egg gifting like there was when he went to an office with other people in it.

Forrest, the basset hound continues to do OK--he was diagnosed with cancer nearly a year ago but he seems to have stablized. He is on prednisone but not pain medication and doesn't appear to be in pain (although it can be hard to tell because he's such a stoic dog). He's about 12 years old, which is pretty old for a basset so we just don't know what to expect.

The new year looks to be more of the same, with Eliot as busy with work as he allows himself to be. We're starting to think about putting Dada into a full-time preschool but haven't done much about it yet beyond saying we should probably put Dada into a full-time preschool. She's happy where she is now in her mother's day out program but it's probably time for her to have a little more structure in her schooling and it would be nice to have her in a school that was closer to home (her MDO program is close to our old house in north Austin).

Dada is very excited about Christmas and is fascinated by the Christmas tree. in a continuing demonstration that she is a process artist, she has been decorating and undecorating the tree almost continuously since we put it this last Sunday. We're just happy she's occupied with something....

Dada Art Dec 2007

2007-12-18T07:14:00.001-06:00

Dada Art Dec 2007

This little abstract was produced by Dada the other day and I found it remarkable for its composition and the clearly deliberate way Dada decorated the wide color stripes with dots. It might help to know that she did the dots in the stripes and then added the lines of dots between each stripe.

In Memoriam: Lucy the Basset

2007-10-30T21:19:00.001-05:00

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I am sad to report that yesterday our Bassett Hound Lucy finally lost her battle with cancer. She had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer in her spine last January and was only given a few weeks. However, stubborn dog that she was, she held on for almost 10 months. But yesterday it became clear that she was in too much pain and could not really walk any more.

We don't know precisely how old Lucy was but we think she was somewhere around ten years old.

Forrest, who also has inoperable cancer, seems to be doing OK, although it's hard to tell.

We miss Lucy very much--she was a very cuddly dog. She always thought she was a lap dog even though she weighed over 50 pounds.

This picture was one of the six that went into our adoption dossier. We've often wondered if this picture influenced the assignment to us of a child whose profile included the notation "likes to be held".

Austin City Limits 2007

2007-09-23T16:36:00.001-05:00

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Last weekend was the Austin City Limits music festival, which we attended. The festival is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. We went all three days, although we didn't go for the whole time each day--it was way too hot and it's just too much time for a toddler to spend. Plus we're too old.

But we had a good time. We rode our bikes to the festival each day, which is way easier than trying to take the shuttle buses or getting dropped off and walking in (which is still a pretty long walk).

The only problem with riding the bikes is that it's an uphill ride home, but we took it easy. On Saturday we stopped off at Jo's coffee on the way home. Jo's is at the base of the South Congress hill, which we have to climb to go home. We had a snack rested and then went on.

On Sunday we put the bikes on the back of the Explorer and parked in the Palmer Event Center lot and then rode in from there so we wouldn't have to ride up the hill at the end of the last day. That worked out pretty well--we went to the fest early on Sunday to hear some early shows and then left about 5:00, the hottest time of the day. On Sunday I went back by myself to catch a couple more acts and see a bit of Bob Dylan.

This picture is of Julie and Dada as we enjoy a bit of a snack on Saturday before heading for home, exhausted from a long hot afternoon.

Julie took this picture of me with Dada on my shoulders, which was her perch for a good part of the festival. She also rode in the sling some (sleeping soundly through Andrew Bird's excellent show).

It was still hot this year (highs in the mid 90's) but not as hot as last year. The rainy summer had made the grass in the park quite lush, which made it much more pleasant in the park, not the dust bowl it had been a couple of years ago. Some highlights were the Ziggy Marley show at the Kiddie stage and Guy Forsyth, who I had heard a lot about but had never seen live.

Bob Dylan, the closing act on Sunday, was a bit of a disappointment, or would have been had I had any expectations at all. His voice was awful. As we were leaving I kept expecting to turn around and see some sort of demon on stage croaking out the lyrics. He just did not work in that venue at all.

Dada Laughing At Herself

2007-09-02T12:02:00.000-05:00

Dada laughing at herself
Uploaded by drmacro

For work I took possession of a MacBook, which has in integrated camera. Dada likes to play in my office while I work. She discovered that she could record herself with the camera and takes delight in watching the resulting videos ("talking pictures").

This video is a video of Dada watching one of the videos she took and laughing along with herself.

Our Budding Artist

2007-08-17T13:47:00.001-05:00

eliot-by-dada-001

I don't want to be one of those "our girl is so clever" parents but Dada has started to demonstrate what I think is remarkable graphical skills for a child so young, in particular, her control over the pen and her ability to create abstract minimalist drawings that are not just the usual stick figures and that clearly express her stated vision.

Anyway, today she drew the picture shown, which is a picture of Eliot. When she drew it initially the mouth was just the line. She thought I looked sad so she drew tears but she drew them from the mouth. Still, even with the drool-for-tears I think it's a remarkable little piece of caricature.

Rainy Day Aftermath

2007-07-31T08:58:00.001-05:00

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I'm a little behind on the blogging, but finally got this picture uploaded. This picture was taken 30 June 2007 on a bike ride that Dada and I took on one of the rare sunny days we've had since mid May. We are on the hike-and-bike trail looking at the raging torrent that is Town Lake.

Town Lake (recently renamed Lady Bird Lake) is normally a placid lake with dams at both ends, but on this day it was a raging torrent due to the need to release as much water as possible from the lakes upstream (Town Lake is one in a series of flood control and water containment lakes along the Colorado River.

I don't think anyone had seen it moving quite this fast before, certainly not since the dam broke back around the turn of the last century.

Ponytails

2007-07-27T22:42:00.001-05:00

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For no particular reason we convinced Dada to go with three ponytails for going to school. Here is the result.

New Job for Eliot

2007-07-04T17:06:00.001-05:00

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The picture has nothing to do with this post, but I didn't want to post without a picture. The picture was taken with Dada's KidTough Fisher-Price camera, which was a gift from her Grandpa when he visited last weekend.

Anyway, this last Monday I started a new job with a new company. I am now employed by Really Strategies, Inc., systems integration services and content management product company based in Norristown, PA (which Judy tells me is the ancestral home of some of our ancestors, who were apparently somewhat big wheels back in the day).

Anyway, I'll be doing more or less what I have been. I'll be working from home and traveling to clients and whatnot. I've got myself set up with a cozy little home office in the music room, shiny new computer and whatnot.

The new company is quite small, about 20 full-time employees plus a separate development organization based in Guangzhou, China. Everyone seems really nice and motivated and it looks like it should be fun, interesting work.

Magic Carpet Ride

2007-06-25T08:03:00.001-05:00

Photo from Cover

Dada's Grandpa Bill has written up a journal of his experience in China, titled "Magic Carpet Ride", written to Dada and intended for her to read when she is older. Bill created the journal as a printed book and we have Dada's copy in our fire safe. However, I have created an HTML version of the journal and posted it here:

http://www.toothacheballerinas.com/magiccarpetride/frameset.html

It's not quite complete in that I haven't hooked up all the pictures used in the printed version (but all the pictures are on Flickr in the "All China Pictures" set if you care to see them). I'll update the HTML version when I get the rest of the pictures hooked up.

The journal provides an interesting perspective on the adoption trip, the same trip that was reported in this blog.

What Did We Do Before the Web?

2007-06-19T10:27:00.001-05:00

What Did We Do Before the Web?

[Note: I thought I had posted this at the time (8 June 2007) but apparently I didn't. Doing it now.]

This picture was sent to me this evening by Julie from her camera phone. I'm traveling today, returning from an overnight trip to NYC and currently camped out at the now all too familiar EWR President's club waiting for my invariably delayed flight back to Austin.

It is wonderful to be able to get these pictures of Dada more or less in real time, seeing what cute thing she's doing at the moment.

It definitely makes traveling a little easier.

Blogging the Past: The Kimber 'Stead

2007-06-03T08:04:00.001-05:00

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[I have started uploading scans of old family photos to Flickr. This is one of them, taken in 1966.]

About 1960 (not sure of the exact year), my (Eliot's) grandparents Ellen and Ellery kimber left the Parkdale fruit ranch where Ellery had been foreman for almost 20 years (and where my father, Bill, had grown up) and bought 4.6 acres on the Hood River in Oregon. This little piece of land had a small house and a nice little "beach" right on the river, as well as an acre or so of open, flat bottom land suitable for cultivation. Eventually the property include water rights to the middle of the Hood River.

Ellen and Ellery, then in their 50's, expanded the little house to add a comfortable livingroom and master bedroom, updated the kitchen and bathroom, and generally modernized it to 1960 standards. They also built a generous carport and, later, a little A-frame greenhouse.

All this happened when I was an infant and toddler so I don't remember the construction, but I was around for some of it, based on the photographic evidence.

This land, which we generally referred to as the "Kimber 'Stead" or just "The 'Stead" was where I spent several weeks every summer until I graduated from college and continued to visit regularly until my father and I were forced to sell it following the passing of Ellen and Ellery in 2004.

While we loved the property neither Bill nor I could practically use it and it couldn't really generate much rental income, so it made more sense to sell it, which we did. (Ellen and Ellery had deeded it jointly to Bill and myself years ago, keeping a life estate, in order to avoid loosing the property should they have used up their savings on health care at the end of their lives.)

As it happened, it was that inheritance that allowed us to easily afford the adoption and buy the lot in Austin and build our dream house. So we feel that, while we lost a treasured family asset, we gained a greater treasure (Dada) and stayed true to the spirit of the place by building a new Kimber 'Stead (albeit, a smaller one). I think that Ellen and Ellery, always practical and unsentimental New Englanders, would have approved.

I like to think that it is from my grandfather that I got what little facility I have for building things and for growing things, although I will never have the natural and intuitive ease he had--it always seemed like he could build anything and make anything bloom.

My grandmother was a librarian by training and profession, eventually becoming head librarian of the Hood River County library (there is now a meeting room in the library named in honor of Ellen and Ellery) and help instill in me a love of books and words. She did crosswords and acrostics almost every day of her life until very end, when her eyesight failed her.

Blogging the Past: Sri Lanka Oct 2004

2007-06-02T08:31:00.001-05:00

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In October of 2004 I made a business trip to the Innodata facilities in Sri Lanka and India. [For all the pictures, see the Sri Lanka Trip Flickr set that this picture is a member of. I have also geotagged the pictures so you can see where on the map they were taken (more or less).]

I fell in love with Sri Lanka.

The country is beautiful, being a tropical island in the Indian ocean. The people are beautiful, and the majority Buddhist religion gives the entire country a laid-back "moderation in all things (including moderation)" vibe. The food was really good too, spicy and flavorful and varied.

While a very poor country, it doesn't seem to be the same sort of grimly grinding poverty that I observed in northern India. While most people are very poor, they seem to have a cheerfulness about them and I didn't see evidence of the really marginalized poor that you see in India, like people living the medians of highways. That might result simply from the fact that it's a tropical country where fruit grows everywhere all the time or a lower population density or it might be cultural, I really don't know. Sri Lanka has a remarkably high literacy rate which has given it an edge in taking advantage of information technology globalization.

I also fell in love with the three-wheeled taxis (called "tuk tuk's elsewhere, such as in Thailand, but generally referred to as "three wheels" here). They are zippy and fun and ubiquitous. I learned how to bargain for a good fare (80 rupees to go from my hotel to the Innodata building a half mile away). The manufacturer is Baja and they are imported into North America. I was on the verge of buying one when we decided to put all our resources into our house and child. Still the dream burns in my heart to drive a Baja three wheel around Austin (I saw one on Burnet road one day, the delivery van model, so I know it's a dream I can achieve).

I was there for two weeks and over the weekend the Innodata guys arranged for three of us (Narinder and Madu from Innodata's Gurgaon office were there too) to go to the Elephant Sanctuary near Kandy and then visit Kandy itself, as well as several other sites in the area. That was a wonderful trip, although the return as a somewhat harrowing, as our driver decided he wanted to get home and drove like a maniac back down the mountain from Kandy to Colombo, dodging bikes, busses, three-wheels, and, at one point, a frickin' elephant in the road carrying a log. Madu slept the whole way but Narinder and I were pretty much white knuckled the whole way, although toward the end I just let go and put myself in the nads of a higher power.

Anyway, we made it back to the hotel in one piece.

The picture here was on my last day in Colombo, where I was guided through Colombo's main market district. This guy was selling coconuts. You pay him 10 rupees (10 cents) for a coconut, he lops off the top and pops in a straw and you drink the milk and then discard the coconut itself. It was quite tasty.

I really want to go back to Sri Lanka, although the current flare up of the civil war would probably make that a hard sell for the family. It's a remarkably inexpensive place to visit and has wonderful beaches and lots of wildlife, including elephants.

Blogging the Past: 20th Anniversary

2007-06-01T01:14:00.001-05:00

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2004 was our 20th wedding anniversary and we celebrated by taking a trip to Hawaii. Julie had said "it has to be somewhere we've never been before, it has to be cooler than Austin, and there has to be pampering".

After some consideration, I settled on the Hotel Hana Maui, a ranch-style hotel and spa on the north shore of Maui. I was able to rent a bay cottage that had a direct view of the ocean with no buildings in front of it. It was very much like taking a cruise without all the tedium of being on a boat with 2000 other people.

This picture was taken from the main restaurant at the hotel, where we took most of our meals (those that we didn't take on the beach or poolside).

If you follow this picture's link to Flickr, you'll see that I've used a new feature of Flickr to associate the picture with a point on a map (it's the "taken in Maui, Hawaii (map)" entry in the "additional information" part of the picture's page). If you follow that link and then zoom in on the map you can see a very clear satellite picture of the hotel.

Anyway, we had a great time in Hawaii. It was, we knew, our last chance to travel as a childless couple and we made the most of it. But now I very much want to go back to Hawaii with Dada (and ideally her cousins Sophia, Julia, and Booker). There's barely a day goes by that I don't think about Hawaii and how nice it was there and how much I'd like to go back.

In addition to Hana, we spent a couple of days at a big hotel on the other side, after a fun drive around the south side of the island. We got to do a little snorkeling around reefs and such and went up to the top of the Haleakala volcano.

Blogging the Past: Dossier Pictures

2007-06-01T00:45:00.001-05:00

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This picture is from June, 2004, when we were finalizing our dossier to send to China. One of the requirements is that you provide six snapshots of you inside and outside your home. Our friend Joanna came over and took some pictures of us, of which this is one we submitted.

Looking at it now I wonder what the Chinese matchers made of it. We've often wondered if the fact that I'm holding Lucy influenced their selection of Dada for us, given that Dada was identified as a child who "likes to be held". You can also see a Chinese painting and a Chinese kite in the background, as well as a picture of my grandfather.

I don't remember now if we purposefully posed ourselves there or if it was just a natural place to stand (which it was).

It's hard to believe it's been three years since we sent all that paperwork off to China....

"Almost cut my hair..."

2007-05-27T16:28:00.001-05:00

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Happened just the other day...

or maybe, more appropiately:

Get a hair cut dad!
Get a hair cut dad!
Make it your next stop,
Down at the barber shop.
Get a hair cut dad!
Get a hair cut dad!
Come on, enough is enough;
Come on dad, grow up!"

(Austin Lounge Lizards)

Actually, I did cut my hair, five years ago.

People who've only met me recently probably have no idea that for a good number of years I was a long-haired freak, having grown my hair as long is would grow. This style choice was driven mostly by my desire for a hair style that required the least maintenance given that I have a very hard time making it to the stylist on a regular basis. It was either as long as it would grow ("give me down to there hair, shoulder length or longer...") or a buzz cut I could maintain with clippers. Julie nixed the short approach, so long it was.

But after nearly 10 years I was starting to get tired of it and it was starting to become something of a cliche in Austin--the middle-aged dude with the ponytail and beard. So it was time for a change.

We saved the ponytail for donation to Locks of Love.

I tried the clipper route for a while, and even toyed with shaving my head completely, but eventually settled for a close styled cut that can grow out without looking too wild.

I showed some of these pictures to Dada today and she found it pretty amusing that at one time her dad had hair as long as hers.

Uploading old Photos to Flickr

2007-05-27T07:22:00.001-05:00

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I'm finally getting around to uploading our archive of older digital pictures to Flickr. Currently our Flickr photo set starts essentially with our trip to China to get Dada. No reason not to have everything up there.

If you do go to our Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/woods-kimber) or if you're subscribed to the photostream, you'll start to see pictures from our pre-Dada past, like this one of our dear departed animal companion George, who passed away in 2004.

Snake on a Bridge

2007-05-24T18:25:00.001-05:00

Snake on a Bridge

Yesterday Dada and I took a bike ride down to Town Lake after dinner. Our route took us over the Lamar pedestrian bridge, which goes across Town Lake.

As we were approaching the north end, I saw a guy taking a picture of what appeared to be perfectly ordinary bushes, but as we passed I saw that he was taking a picture of a large snake, stretched out on the concrete.

We stopped and went back to look at the snake.

This picture doesn't reflect the size, but it was easily 3 feet long, a fully-adult snake of the "not a cute little garter snake" variety.

Nobody there at the moment knew what type of snake it was but I knew it definitely wasn't one of the harmless varieties around there (black snakes, rat snakes, etc.) and looked like it could be a copperhead or water moccasin, both of which are indigenous to the Hill Country and both are water snakes.

The snake wasn't being threatening but I didn't get any closer than I had to for this picture (a cell phone picture, so I was stretching my hand out toward the snake's head).

I've done a little online research to see if I could identify it but haven't found anything conclusive. It's markings are like cottonmouth except that the colors are reversed from what I saw in the pictures on line. It's definitely not a copperhead, which has a more triangular head and different markings.

Anyone know what kind of snake this is?

Not being snake handlers we didn't didn't linger and rode off to see if there were any bats emerging from the Congress Ave. bridge (there were not as it was still a little early in the evening).

On the way home we rode past Jo's Coffee Shop on South Congress, where we heard rock music. We circled the parking lot to check it out and then I rode on, but Dada was all "I want to hear the music", so we went back and listened to a couple of tunes before heading on up the hill toward home. Dada is definitely a rock and roll girl.

Country Boy

2007-05-17T19:56:00.001-05:00

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Tonight I am in Guilford, CT, staying at The B&B at the Bartlett Farm, a farmhouse B&B.

Being a farm they have farm animals. The proprietor's son took me on a little walk in the evening, during a brief respite in the weather between storm systems (it had been cloudy and threatening all day, but the sky cleared as I headed to New Haven from Norwalk and the evening was beautiful, if a little chilly).

I took a few pictures of the various animals on the farm (goats, chickens, fallow deer, a bull calf and a steer, a horse, a sheep, a donkey [which apparently protects the deer from coyotes]) and this was the only good one, but it came out really nice, I thought.

Tomorrow, I have a sales call on a potential client in Guilford and then it's on to Houston to spend the weekend at Peggy's lake house with Julie and Dada, assuming I can successfully navigate the Metro North transit system back to Grand Central and then over to LGA in time to catch my flight to Houston.

Night in Gotham

2007-05-16T23:34:00.001-05:00

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Today I traveled to Norwalk, Connecticut via NYC. I was to have arrived in NYC around 4:00 but because of the weather, didn't pop up out of Penn Station until after 8:00, at which point the skies opened up for one last drenching before the storms passed out to sea.

During the downpour I spied the Empire State Building looming up out of the mist and, despite the rain, had to grab some shots, of which this is the best. I also took a video of the scene, trying to capture the clouds scutting past the top of the building, but I had the camera sideways and I don't know of any way to rotate video.

I sort of expected to see the Bat signal on the clouds.

"If I can Make It There..."

2007-05-09T08:13:00.001-05:00

On Liberty Island

New York Trip: Day 2

On Sunday we woke reasonably well rested and ready to hit the day. Our plan was to go to Chinatown for dim sum and then to the Statue of Liberty. We had to be at Penn Station no later than 6:00 p.m. in order to get a train to Newark Airport in order to catch our 8:20 flight back to Austin.

We packed up our stuff in good time, handed over our bags to the Bell Captain and were back on the street by 9:30, headed for Grand Central and the subway downtown.

The morning was a little cool--the wind was from the north and brisk but it wasn't too bad. We made it into the subway station and bought a couple more metro cards (we were buying the $7.00 one-day passes). Julie went through the tall turnstile and then I tried to go through, but with Dada in the sling, I accidentally pushed on the wrong set of bars and got locked out. I tried my card again and it said "you've just gone through, nice try". A bit frantic, I went back to the card machine and started to try to buy a single-trip card when an enterprising young man hanging out by the machine offered to sell me entrance to the turnstile for two dollars, which offer I gladly accepted. Reunited, we caught the 6 (or was it the 5?) back down to Canal St. and popped up once again in Chinatown.

I was expecting it to be pretty quiet at that time on a Sunday morning, but it was nearly as bustling as it had been the night before, although there seemed to be more people quietly asking us if we wanted to buy CDs or designer handbags. After a moment of confusion we got ourselves oriented and headed for the Jing Fang dim sum restaurant, which was the first one on the list Julie had made from the guide book.

We found the place and went up. It was a typical large-format dim sum place, with a sea of tables and lots of ladies pushing carts around. We got lots of yummy things, eating faster than we probably should have. Dada enjoyed the noodles especially, and ate the Jello layers off some little sweet bean desserts. After about an hour of eating we paid up and headed back down to the street.

Crossing Canal St. we noticed a cell phone lying in the street, so I rushed over and grabbed it, setting it on the base of a light pole there on the corner. It seemed like the something I had to do.

We did a little souvenier shopping there along Canal as we worked our way back to the Lafayette St. subway stop, buying some T-shirts and postcards. We went back down into the Subway and, after some puzzling, worked out both which line would take us closest to Battery Park and how to catch that line. I must say that I do not find the signage in the NY subway system to be, shall we say, understandable.

Anyway, we eventually got the train we needed and got off at Bowling Green. Julie went across the street to the post office to try to buy some stamps (for the post cards) while I bought a hat in preparation for the coming boat ride to Liberty Island.

We headed down the hill to Battery Park, only to be presented with a construction fence that appeared to block all access to the park. But we worked it out and wandered around and eventually found Clinton Castle, where you buy your tickets for the ferry to Liberty Island and Ellis Island. We got in the line for tickets, having walked past the long line to get on the ferry (long in absolute terms, but probably short relative to what it will be like in a month or two).

Not long after we got in line, a guy approached us and asked if we were taking any tours. At first we thought he was some kind of tour guide but when we said "no", he said "here, have our tickets--we just realized we don't have time to take the ride, we have to go back to {England|Australia|Ireland}.", handed us the tickets and walked away, looking a bit downcast.

Wondering at our good fortune, we stepped back out and got into the line for the ferry. It was only later that we realized we could have easily offered to pay the guy for the tickets.

The line moved relatively quickly and there were buskers every couple of park benches that kept things entertaining. I think it probably took us 20 minutes or so to get to the security check tent, where we had to do an airport-style security screen (except we got to keep our shoes on). After some struggle to put myself back together (belt, camera, sling, Dada, jacket, in that order), we hustled into the staging area where you get on the boat, only to have the gate closed right in front of us. Doh! But at least we'd be at the front of the line for the next boat and get our pick of the seats on the top of the ferry.

After not too long the next ferry came to the dock and we got on board, grabbing a good seat up top. Dada wanted food but we wanted to wait until we got to Liberty Island, which we did.

We enjoyed the boat ride, Dada's first. I was happy for the sling as it meant she could lean over the rail to look at the water without any great danger. She also enjoyed the constant parade of helicopters that flew back and forth across the harbor.

Finally, we arrived at Liberty Island and worked our way off the ferry. We found the food area and got in line. We were all pretty hungry by this point. It was about 11:30 by now but it was still crowded and the organization of the restaurant didn't help but I was able to get an order in. Amazingly, when I got my two trays with their tippy drinks (with Dada in the sling), there was an employee there to help us (Julie had been getting some soup for Dada while I got the hot dogs)--wow. I paid and she helped us get our food to a nice outdoor table.

We had a nice relaxed lunch, watching the wide variety of people there--families from all over the world. Dada got a little nutrition into her. Then we set off to walk around the statue and see what there was.

By this time the weather had cleared nicely--it was just about perfect, with a few fluffy clouds to accent the statue, a little breeze. We walked around the statue, marveling at its grandeur. Dada was walking--we had to insist that she actually use her legs for this part of the trip. She had a great time running about.

We worked our way around to the back of the statue in the hope that we might be able to go up to the promenade, only to discover that to go up in the statue you have to buy a special ticket at least two days in advance. We were sad. Dada is still talking about it--"we didn't have the right ticket". So we walked back around the statue--Dada had said she wanted to see the Lady's face again--she was somewhat concerned about whether or not she had ears; we determined that in fact she did have ears.

Dada ran around on the grass, ensuring that she would be in dozens of other families' photos.

The afternoon wearing on, we bought some ice cream for Dada and ourselves (Dada wanted chocolate ice cream with chocolate sprinkles--what we ended up with was chocolate frozen yogurt with sprinkles that tasted like chocolate chalk, but Dada liked it). With our cones in hand, we got in the queue for the ferry to Ellis Island and back to Manhattan. The trip back was just as thrilling as the trip out, with Manhattan spread out before us (we did not get off at Ellis Island--we were pretty sure that it would not have anything to offer Dada at this age). We got off the ferry and wandered back into Battery Park.

We came onto a little fountain plaza with jets that shoot up--you can walk among the jets. Dada wanted to touch the jets, which we did.

Now it was time to get back to our hotel, collect our bags, and make our way to Penn station. It was a little after 3:00, which had been my rough time goal, figuring it would take us at least an hour to get from Battery Park to Penn Station, given that we had to collect our bags.

We found the Bowling Green station and grabbed the 5 train back to Grand Central, enjoying the opportunity to sit down for awhile. Dada fell fast asleep in the sling as soon as the subway got under way. We got out at Grand Central and walked back to the hotel. We had made good time so we took the opportunity to rest there in the hotel lobby. I collapsed onto a couch with Dada asleep on my chest. I ordered a very welcome beer and chilled while Julie arranged for our bags.

Around five, we roused ourselves and headed out on the street to wait for the doorman to get us a cab to Penn station. After some struggle to get a cab, we got loaded up and took cab ride number 6 (Dada had been carefully keeping track of the number of cab rides we took). It was a quintessential NY cab ride, with a chatty driver from Ghana, dashing through crowded midtown streets, only to discover that Penn station was awash with Rangers fans just leaving Madison Square Garden following the Rangers' loss. The usual cab stand in front of Penn station was blocked off but the cabby was able to convince the cops to let him drop us off next to the barricades, which we had to duck under.

We rushed down into the bowels of Penn station, headed for the NJ Transit side, bought our tickets and literally had about two minutes to make the train. We rushed to the platform, jumped on, and pushed our way through the cars crowded with Rangers fans, finally finding an open backward facing seat, putting us knee-to-knee with a couple of fresh-faced kids heading home from a day in the City.

After some momentary anxiety over which stop was actually EWR, we got off at the Newark Airport stop, went up and over and got onto the little Airtrain monorail that takes you right to your concourse. I love this aspect of Newark Airport, that you can take a train from Manhattan right to concourse C.

Since we were not checking our bags, we checked in at a kiosk and got into the security line. The line was long but moved fast enough and soon we were inside Airworld, my second home. Now in the warm embrace of the air transport system, I breathed easier.

We had about an hour before we had to be at our gate, so we made our way to the Continental President's club, which my AmEx card gives me access to when I'm traveling on Continental. We found some seats, made a little nest, grabbed some snacks (crackers and cheese, an apple, some water to drink). Julie went and got me a beer while Dada and I snacked and then went over to the big windows to watch the airplanes. Julie found a USA Today ("The hometown paper of Airworld") and relaxed.

As our boarding time approached, we made the obligatory potty stop, collected our bags, and headed for the gate, which was of course at the end of one arm of the concourse. We had to remind ourselves not to rush, there was no hurry, but it's such an instinct. I had to keep slowing down to let Julie and Dada (who was, remarkably, walking) catch up.

We made it to the gate area in good order. We had a small problem with our seat assignments, which was that we had two seats in one row and one seat, a middle, in the row in front. I asked the gate agent if she could do anything and there wasn't much she could do. Oh well. I could have given her our tickets and waited to see if somebody didn't show, but I decided I'd rather get on the plane earliest rather than bet on better seats.

Dada watched airplanes and played on the ground, burning off a little energy. By the windows where we could see the planes, we met a deaf Rastafarian who was obviously part of a band (he had a collection of guitars next to him). We used our pidgin sign language to remark on the big airplanes.

As we were waiting, the gate agent motioned me over and told me that a window seat had opened up next to our row, which allowed us to take a window seat that we could trade for the window seat next to the two seats we already had, so I took that gratefully. Nobody in their right mind would trade a window for a middle, but trading a window for a window not next to a three-year-old is a no-brainer. Such is the currency of air travel.

Boarding time finally arrived and we asserted our privilege as a family traveling with small children to board as soon as we could. We settled into our row, putting Dada into her pajamas (which we had packed into her little backpack).

The band settled into the rows around us, with the Rasta dude sitting across from us. They were running out of bin space for their instruments, so Dude was trying to put what looked like a case with a mandolin or maybe a ukulele under the seat, which wasn't working. So I handed him a blanket to try to disguise it, which he accepted gratefully. The flight attendants never challenged him.

The flight was uneventful, although Dada stayed awake for most of it, finally going to sleep across Julie's lap after a fit of maddening squirming. Thank goodness for the portable DVD player we had bought for the trip--Julie and I were both way too tired to really have been able to engage Dada for the whole flight.

We arrived in Austin at about 11:30 p.m. and made our way off the plane, Dada once again awake. We got into the car (we had parked in the garage as close in as we could) and zipped back home, grateful for having built a house only 10 minutes from the airport.

Julie got Dada back into bed while I cleaned up the worst of the dog pee that had accumulated due to the combination of drugs that make the dogs very thirsty and the malfunctioning of our electronic dog door that effectively trapped the dogs in the house.

Finally, Dada in bed and the pee flood under control, we collapsed into bed and fell into a deep and welcome sleep in our own home, vowing to never again fly so early or so late with a child.

"The Bronx is Up, The Battery's Down"

2007-05-07T12:59:00.001-05:00

If I can make it here,
I can make it anywhere

"The people ride in a hole in the ground.
New York, New York, it's a heck of a town."

New York Trip: Day 1

This last weekend we went to NYC for a family vacation. This was to be the first time for us to travel as a family where we were not specifically visiting family and where Dada was old enough to really understand where she was. I happened to need to be in Philadelphia on Friday so we made a weekend out of it. [All the pictures of this trip are in Flickr set, NYC Trip May 2007. Most of the pictures are friends and family only.]

We started with a very early flight from Austin to Philadelphia Friday morning. Our flight left Austin at 5:40 a.m. Of course, Dada woke up as we were putting her in the car and stayed awake until we were in the cab heading to my appointment outside Philadelphia, where she fell sound asleep.

Dada was a great traveler. We really didn't know what to expect but we knew that with any 3-year-old you have to be prepared for anything. As it happened, Dada only had two very minor meltdowns, the first when we tried to put the seatbelt on her on the plane in Austin, the second when we tried to put the belt on her in the cab from the Philly airport. Other than that she was happy and delightful the whole time. I think too that in the future we will try to schedule our travel to not be at quite such horrendous times.

Our plan was to take the train from Philly to NYC. We were assured that from where my meeting was, we could take a cab around 4:00 and easily catch the 5:15 train to Penn Station. The next regional train left Philly at about 6:30, so I really wanted to get that earlier train so we wouldn't be rolling into NYC really late.

We got our cab at 4:00 and started toward the 30th street Amtrak station in downtown Philadelphia, only to discover that traffic all over the area was jammed. Our poor cab driver was pretty stressed. He ended up taking really twisty back ways, but he finally got us to the train station at 5:05. We rushed in, Julie and Dada got in line for the ticket booth and I went to a kiosk to try to buy tickets. I was able to do so, after a couple of maddening false starts and we rushed for the track, which meant getting in a long line of people heading down a single escalator. But we got on the train with two minutes to spare and were headed for NYC.

In the run-up to the trip we had been explaining to Dada that we would be going to "New York City", to which she would respond "New York City?! Oh my gosh!". We have no idea where she got that, but it was painfully cute.

We arrived at Penn Station tired but happy to finally be within striking distance of our hotel. We hadn't had much to eat all day so we stopped at the first Deli we came to in the train station and had a sandwich and something to drink. Fed, we headed up and out of the station, stopping at an ATM to replenish our cash supply (the cabs in the Philly area had been way more expensive than I had expected).

We popped up into the bright afternoon sun there on 7th ave in front of Madison Square Garden. There was a long queue for cabs so we started to head for the subway until we realized we had no idea how to actually get on the subway, except that we knew we needed fare cards. So we got in the cab line and waited.

The line actually went quite quickly and soon we were on our way to the Tutor Hotel at the UN, which is between 3rd and 2nd avenues on 42nd street, on the edge of the Tudor Village, in the shadow of the Chrysler building. We got into our room without too much trouble. I had booked the room with Expedia and it was supposed to have had a queen bed but it just had a double. We were so tired that by the time we realized the problem we weren't willing to deal with it then.

Dada was wound up and Julie needed a rest and a little time to herself after a long day of wrangling Dada while I had my meeting, so Dada and I went down to the street to see what was happening.

As it happened, there was a little playscape just down the block from the hotel. The Tudor Village is this little collection of quaint brick buildings that sits just south of the UN building. There is a little park complex that sits above 42nd St. with playscapes on both sides. So Dada and I spent about 30 minutes playing on the playscape and enjoying the beautiful spring evening air. Dada was demanding ice cream so we walked over to a little bodega that was right there and got an ice cream bar. We sat in a little park to eat it, listening to the sounds of some kids having a whiffle ball game in back of one of the buildings next to the park (we know it was whiffle ball because at one point a whiffle ball came flying over the fence).

Finally we went back to the room and went to sleep, with Dada "camping out" on the floor, after a few plaintive declarations that she wanted to sleep on the bed.

The next morning I went back to the bodega to grab some bagels and coffee while Dada slept, coming back to the room just as she was waking up. We ate our breakfast and got our acts together and headed out, our eventual destination being the Museum of Natural History, by way of Time's Square.

We walked down 42nd Street, stopping in at Grand Central Station to check it out and see if we could figure out how to get a fare card. No dice (we just didn't know where to go and hadn't noticed the dedicated subway entrance on Park Ave.). So we continued on to Times Square, where we discovered that Broadway was blocked off following what we assumed was a celebration for Spiderman3, given that there was red and white confetti everywhere. We walked around and tried to find an uptown subway entrance, with no luck, although we were able to get a subway map at the Times Square information booth.

Finally, tired and frustrated, we stopped into the Hello Deli, of David Letterman fame, and had a cup of coffee and a snack. The lady behind the counter told us that we could find a bathroom at the Starbucks around the corner and that there was a subway entrance across the street. Both were sort of true, except the Starbucks she pointed us to was a My First Starbucks with no bathroom, but there was one half a block up that did. We stood in line and eventually everyone got their potty break. Then we went to the subway entrance, only to discover that it was weekdays only. Doh!

We were starting to get a little stressed, as we were only at 53rd St. and didn't really want to walk even to Columbus Circle at 59th (the south edge of Central Park), much less the museum up at 89th. We wanted a cab but didn't see too many, partly because the closure of Broadway had undoubtedly diverted many cabs. But finally I was able to flag one down and he whisked us to the museum.

We got to the Museum of Natural History at about 11:00. Dada was very excited to see dinosaur bones, partly because she had her own "bone" (a little plastic bone pool toy) and she wanted to re-enact a Curious George episode where George tries to trade a bone he found for a dinosaur bone. We saw dinosaurs and stuff then decided to get lunch at the cafe at the dinosaur area. Sadly it was closed, so it was back down to the 1st floor to another cafe. Had some decent food then started heading out toward the park to enjoy the beautiful weather and get some ice cream, which Dada was very keen on. On the way we looked at dioramas of birds and Asian animals and stuff. Oh, and while we were waiting in line for the bathroom (apparently there was only one bathroom on the 1st floor, a family bathroom), Dada spent a lot of time studying the large snail display. She appears to have developed a solid interest in snails. [She also recognized the Continental logo as a snail ("are we going to fly one with a snail?"), which it looks a little like, at least compared to the large brown and white snails we've been finding in our yard.]

Eventually we popped back out into the day. We got some ice cream and sat down on a bench to each it, with Dada eating the chocolate coating while Julie and I ate the ice cream itself.

By now it was time to start heading back toward the hotel for nap time, so we wandered south, staying close to the edge of the park so we could pop back out and get on the subway. We wanted Dada to run around in the park but she would have none of it, wanting to ride in the sling. So I carried her in the sling as she got sleepier and sleepier. We eventually found the 72nd St. station, bought a couple of fare cards after a little trying (the machine wouldn't accept my ATM card when I tried to buy the second card) and went in, only to realize we'd gone in on the uptown side. But we had unlimited ride cards so we just went out and found the downtown side. Finally we made our way to Grand Central, Dada sleeping like a baby. We had to transfer at some point, I think at Penn station, which was a long walk, but we made it.

We got back to the hotel, Dada still asleep, and put her on the bed, where she immediately woke up. We also discovered that one of her tennis shoes was missing, having come off at some point on our subway trip. Julie had bought these shoes in Philly as we'd failed to bring anything other than flip flops for Dada in our haste to leave Friday morning. Oh well.

We tried to nap but Dada was awake and not going back to sleep and I couldn't really sleep, so Dada and I went back out to play on the playscape while Julie napped. There were a number of kids at the playground and Dada had fun playing with them. Unfortunately for Julie, Housekeeping came around and chased her out of the room, so she came and kept us company.

From a family standpoint, the Tudor Hotel worked out really well, being right there in a very family-friendly neighborhood. We definitely got a little of the experience of what it's like to live in NYC with children, at least in a place where relatively wealthy people live. The main downside was that the closest subway was several long blocks away at Grand Central. But it was otherwise a nice hotel--I think we got a deal because the UN is out of session and they were having a "grand reopening", have named the hotel back to the Hotel Tudor after having been a Comfort Inn or some such for a little while (this name change seriously confused one of our cab drivers).

About four or so it was time to head towards dinner.

We had decided to go to Little Italy for Italian food. We collected our jackets, made one last potty stop at the hotel, and headed back up 42nd St. to catch the subway at Grand Central. As we were walking, miracle of miracles, we saw Dada's lost tennis shoe waiting for us right on the corner of 3rd Ave and 42nd St. We were amazed and quite happy.

We found the right subway line and headed down to the Canal St. stop, coming up out into a very different city at Canal and Lexington, where Chinatown and Little Italy overlap. We walked up to Mulberry and found our destination restaurant, a place our "New York with Children" guidebook had suggested as good but moderately priced. It was a great place, full of people and Italian-speaking waiters. At one point the owner, a man in his 60's, came over and fussed over Dada's pasta, taking it back to the kitchen to add some water and butter and then feeding it to her. She was a little taken aback at first but then gladly accepted the food.

After our dinner we wandered up Mulberry, taking in the sights of Little Italy, in search of a place to get some, yes, ice cream. We stopped at a little Italian bakery and gelato place, where I had an amazingly good cup of espresso, we all had fantastic little cookies, and then we had very good chocolate gelato.

Sated, we headed on into the setting sun. After a couple of blocks we decided it was time to head back to the hotel and dropped into the subway to go back north.

We were back in the room about 9:00. Julie succeeded in getting Dada to sleep on the floor while I took some pain killers and a hot bath to help my back, which was a little stressed from a day of carrying Dada around in the sling.

But we'd had a wonderful first day in NYC, with perfect weather and only a few travel snafus and two minor miracles (the other being that some hats we'd bought and left at the Italian restaurant were still there when we went back after eating our ice cream and realizing we'd left the hats, which we realized because we bought a little bag of cookies and wanted to put them in the hat bag to carry).

Our plan for day two was to eat dim sum in Chinatown and then visit the Statue of Liberty before heading out to Newark Airport for our 8:20 p.m. flight back to Austin.

Next up: Day 2, Wooden Ships on the Water

Plague of Snails

2007-05-03T10:02:00.001-05:00

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The extraordinarily wet weather we've had this spring has resulted in a plague of snails. They are everywhere and they are big. The chickens pretty much don't want to see any more snails.

The other evening Julie went out and collected a bucket of snails. I decided it looked like an interesting photographic opportunity, what with the interesting colors of the shells against the orange background. I had in mind one of those pictures where a large number of ordinary objects combine together to form an abstract pattern against a solid background.

What I didn't count on was how fast the snails are--you'd think you could take your time working out a composition but no, the little buggers will be up and over the wall by the time you've got the camera positioned. Because of the low light conditions, I was using the self timer, which added to the problem.

I also think I really need a snail stylist to fully realize my vision--these snails were all kind of wet and the bucket had a lot of dirt and stuff. But I didn't have the time or patience or interest to both dry off the snail shells and clean up the bucket. Maybe next time.

If you want to see the rest of my snail shots, they're on Flickr tagged as "snails".

Pool Season Starts

2007-04-30T10:15:00.001-05:00

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Yesterday it was finally hot enough to warrant going to the pool, so we rounded up Sunny, Kesley, and Austin, who live a few houses down, and Dada and bundled everyone into the car for our first trip to Deep Eddy this year.

Everyone had a great time, although it wasn't quite as sunny as we would have liked. But it was still plenty warm. We took a break for some Jim Jim's water ice (very yummy) and then finally came home to have a sauna party back at the house. Julie got to hang out and read the NY Times Magazine while the rest of us played in the water.

For the sauna party, the kids brought over some snacks while Austin and I put up the safety rail around the sauna heater [I had only just a couple of weeks ago realized that there is supposed to be a wooden railing around the sauna heater and that it had been part of the sauna kit but the builder never installed it and I never noticed it]. The sauna now safe for kids, we all piled in and had a good time getting very hot. Dada wasn't really down with it and decided to watch Clifford instead.

A very nice start to the hot season. It won't be long before we start spending most afternoons at the pool...

Chicken Obsession

2007-04-16T08:19:00.001-05:00

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I have apparently become obsessed with photographing our chickens. Now that I have a spiffy new camera, I want to capture the sort of shots that are in some of our fancier chicken books. Also, the Wyandots are, I think, particularly attractive and make good chicken models.

Unfortunately, the light conditions in the chicken coop are challenging. It's either deep shade or shade plus bright light, making it very difficult to get either good exposures or sharp pictures (because the shade demands a slow shutter speed). The built-in flash tends to be too harsh.

However, last night at around 7:00 I decided that the light conditions were good and tried to get a few shots. Most failed, either because they were too dark or too blurry from motion, but I got a few.

Remarkably, the flash worked OK for these shots, probably because I was using the zoom rather than getting physicallly close. I know that I really need to get an external flash and mount a bounce card on it, but that's for another day.

This portrait of one of the Blanches came out pretty good, I thought.

For anyone who is similarly chicken photo obsessed, I've set up a "Chickens" set on Flickr where I can put the best of the multitude of chicken pictures I will surely take.

Photographic Art: Easter Eggs in Basket

2007-04-15T10:19:00.001-05:00

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Julie dyed some of our hens' eggs using food coloring. I really liked the effect. The basket is the basket we use to collect the eggs. The arrangement of the eggs is how I found the basket. I took the picture using the little flexible tripod Julie gave me for my birthday. The picture is lit using available light and taken using the self timer to accomodate a very slow shutter speed. This is taken using the standard lens on the camera, not any sort of macro lens. I was surprised that the lens could focus this closely.

Easter Excitement

2007-04-15T10:00:00.001-05:00

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Easter was pretty low key this year, between the nasty weather and the fact that Dada hadn't been particularly indoctrinated into the whole Easter thing (we didn't really want to stress a holiday that is essentially about candy given Dada's chocolate dependency and her day care,while run by a Christian church, perhaps felt that the doctrinal issues of death and resurrection were not quite within the intellectual grasp of three-year-olds and while I fully appreciate the ancient animist association of spring with rebirth and the return of life, a full pagan celebration seemed a bit much, especially given that we had to cut the 1/4-scale Stonehenge from the construction budget. And we couldn't even stay up late enough to watch The Ten Commandments this year.).

But Uncle Jay did come by with a present for Dada, a little wind-up chicken that lays jellybean eggs. The thing is hilarious and Dada loved it. Here you can see Jay and Julie and Dada playing with the chicken.

Julie did dye a few of our own eggs using food coloring--they came out really nice (I'll post some pictures in another post) and we had a very brief egg hunt Sunday morning (it was quite cold and a bit damp).

We actually spent most of the weekend watching airplanes take off and land. A group called the Collings Foundataion had brought three WWII bombers to Austin airport and Dada and I both wanted to see them. So even though the weather was frightful (cold rain and wind with a threat of sleet) we all went out to the airport and found the planes. We got to walk around the planes and climb around inside, which was fun, but because of the weather the planes were not flying and there were no other planes flying as well. There was a B-24, a B-25 (same model I took a flight in on my 40th birthday), and a B-17.

The next day Dada was "we go to the airport where the airplanes are and see more airplanes?"

I couldn't see a reason not to. The weather had improved, in that the rain had moved off even though it was cold. So about noon Dada and I bundled up and headed back out to General Aviation. This time the venerable war birds were flight ready. But in addition, the airport was alive with other airplanes, including a tarmac full of small passenger jets waiting to take off.

Where we were was a small private executive jet center. Dada liked the WWII planes but she was completely captivated by the variety of aircraft taking off and landing around us. We had been there about an hour or so when we learned that the bombers would start flying around 4:30. So we decided to stay, rather than go home and then come back (since we're only 10 minutes from airport we certainly could have), largely because Dada simply didn't want to stop watching the airplanes. She also liked the well-stocked snack room there in the jet center, which had remarkably non-skanky microwave food and, most importantly, ice cream.

So we ended up waiting until about 5:00, when the B-17 finally took off, meanwhile watching everything from Southwest 737s to little single-engine Cesnas take off and land. Finally, about 5:30, after watching the B-17 land and come back to get another load of riders, we went home, cold and tired, but thrilled by our afternoon of airplane watching.

Not a particularly traditional Easter activity, but Dada definitely enjoyed it.

Chickens?!

2007-04-05T08:39:00.001-05:00

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I took a spur-of-the-moment picture of the chickens through the wire and it turned out quite well, with the chickens framed by the out-of-focus wire.

Here I've Photoshopped it a bit to add the spotlight effect in order to further highlight the chickens. I can't claim any Photoshop expertise or skill but I thought this came out pretty well.

Here is the original cropped but otherwise unmodified version:

Hockey Night

2007-04-05T07:48:00.001-05:00

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A new family has moved into the neighborhood and they have three kids with whom we have all become fast friends. The two girls, Sunny and Kesley, just love Dada and Dada loves them. The whole family is very cool and interesting (they have had and are having quite the family adventure, which you can explore here: barenakedfamily.com).

Anyway, when I got home Monday night, in a particularly vile mood after a not altogether joyous day at work and fighting traffic and what not, we had dinner and then right after dinner I had to take a phone call and Dada wanted to go see Sunny and Kesley, so we went down the block, where the kids were all out playing "street hockey" in the street. I didn't really want Dada to be running into the street trying to play with the older girls, so I invited everyone to come play in our driveway [our architect had specifically said "the kids will want to play on the driveway" and he was right].

So we convened a game of "hockey" in the driveway and the girls let Dada play with them. This is Dada in the jersey and holding her hockey stick.

We all ended up playing until dark. Sunny and Kesley's brother Austin came over with his skateboard and I got out my Tierney board (a snowboard simulator with wheels) and we all ran around until it was too dark to play so we went inside and Sunny and Dada played Wii tennis and Austin, Kesley and I rocked out in the music room.

It was great fun and the perfect antidote to a foul mood. By the time we went to put Dada to bed I was remarkably not tired (considering that I've been waking up around 5:30 a.m. lately) and the soul of patience as we read this very tedious Curious George book that provides endless opportunities to name things and count things and identify shapes and so on.

During this time, Julie was out in the yard working on landscaping and whatnot, which she enjoyed as much as I enjoyed playing with the kids.

Here is another picture of Dada in her hockey gear. I call this one "Kabuki hockey":

One Year, No Fooling

2007-04-01T21:26:00.000-05:00

March 31 was the one-year anniversary of getting the gas turned on in our new house, which I consider to be the official "start of occupation" even though we'd been in the house for about two weeks at that point.

One year on the house is doing quite nicely and we're very happy with it and the neighborhood. We've had very few problems with the house itself--nothing major in the way of construction mistakes or design features that just didn't work and that we now regret. My biggest complaint is simply that the location gives me a long commute coming home in the evening, but that's only compared to the 10-minute commute I had before.

We're slowly working on landscaping, although with all the rain this spring the unwanted grass in the front has gotten away from us--we'll actually have to mow it just to knock it back. We have planted a real tree and a shrub in the front, but there's still 8 tons of gravel waiting to be hauled back into the playscape. Guess I need to get on that. Julie is starting to plan some raised beds in the front, which we'll build mostly from leftover stone from the facade.

We're pretty well integrated into the neighborhood--we know our neighbors and our neighbors' landlords. We know where to eat and the back ways to get around traffic when we have to venture out.

The solar electric system has been working very well for us--our march electric bill was $20.00, which is an average of about 8 kWhs per day we were billed for. That reflects what's probably the smallest possible usage (cool, relatively long days) coupled with the most efficient solar electricity generation (the solar cells operate at peak efficiency at about 75 degrees F, so they actually get less efficient as it gets hotter in the summer, but then the sun is up longer and usually out more).

We're completely unpacked (or as unpacked as we'll ever be). The house certainly feels lived in (and is starting to look a bit lived in as well). It definitely feels like home.

The first picture is what the property looked like in March 2005, right before they started demolition. The second is the new house as it looked on Apri 4, 2006. The last picture is the house on April 4, 2007. The main difference is we have a little landscaping and have been unsuccessful at keeping the grass from growing up through the mulch.

Chicken Update: Nesting Boxes

2007-03-25T17:29:00.001-05:00

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Despite rain and illness, I was able to construct serviceable nesting boxes and attach them to the chicken house. I had originally planned to have it so the eggs would roll down into the little bit that sticks out at the bottom but then later decided that that was too much like factory farming and would preclude providing a nice comfy nest for the girls.

The girls now seem to use the nests consistently for laying. We've been getting an average of about 3 eggs a day for about two weeks now. However, due to illness, I only had my second meal of home-raised eggs on Thursday, because I'd been sick for a week. The day I got sick I had eaten my first meal of home-raised eggs. I don't think the two were connected but since the sickness involved not really wanting to eat I didn't push it.

Dada gets very excited by finding eggs in the nesting box.

The box still needs to be painted but it hasn't stopped raining long enough for the wood to dry out enough for me to paint it. I built it out of scrap plywood left over from the house construction as well as a bit of scrap from Mike around the corner who has a cabinetry shop.

Here is one of the Rhode Island Reds enjoying the privacy of the nest. We've lined it with newspaper, ball moss from our neighbor's tree, and fresh cedar shavings (even though all the authorities say never to use cedar with chickens, they seem to be happy with it and they all survived from chickhood living on cedar, so I think it's an old wives' tale).

Dada With Cute Pigtails

2007-03-25T17:22:00.001-05:00

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Not really news but this was the first time that she'd worn this type of extra fancy hair band, and it's an excuse to make an overdue blog post.

We've been variously under the weather to one degree or another most of march, Dada included, although we seem to be pretty much on the mend.

We're enjoying the warmer weather and later evenings to spend more time outside and eating more of our meals on the porch.

Dada has grown 1.5 inches since her birthday at the end of December, making her about 37.5 inches or almost a meter.

Eliot's BBQ Secrets

2007-03-10T08:19:00.000-06:00

We've been holding BBQ's for a number of years now and Eliot has established a reputation for smoking a pretty good brisket. Since my technique is neither particularly sophisticated nor secret, I thought it would be useful to capture it here for posterity.

I start with a large (10+ pounds) full brisket, the kind with the big fatty bit at one end, rather than the smaller ones you typically find in supermarkets, where the fatty bit has been trimmed off. I get mine from Costco and they seem to be pretty good quality, although you could probably find better ones at a specialty meat market.

I do dry rub smoking, that is, I don't use any marinade before smoking or a mop during smoking. This is the BBQ style exemplified by Kreutz Market in Lockhart, Texas.

My rub formula is as follows (amounts are approximate--I never actually measure when I'm doing this):

- 2 cups black pepper, ground

- 1 cup (or so) kosher salt, ground

- 1/2 cup whole cumin seed, toasted then ground

- 1 tablespoon chile powder

- Garlic salt

You could also add some sugar, which I can't remember if I've ever done.

Rinse off the brisket and pat it dry, then rub on the rub and wrap the brisket in foil or plastic wrap or whatever. Refrigerate overnight.

For smoking, I use a standard side-box smoker. I insist on pure hardwood charcoal--never briquets. Lately I've been using pecan as the smoking wood, largely because the one good tree on our new property was a pecan tree that the builder accidently cut down--I saved the wood and have been using it for smoking ever since. I think pecan produces a slightly less harsh taste than mesquite. I've also used hickory in the past to good effect.

You want to allow at least one hour per pound--I found that for a 13-pound brisket 13-14 hours was really necessary, which can mean getting up quite early if you want to serve by 6:00 p.m.

You need to keep the smoker temperature between 225 and 300 degrees, ideally right at 250. Colder and it won't cook, hotter and it cooks too fast. I use a meat thermometer and cook to temperature, about 155 in the thickest spot.

During smoking, the main challenge is keeping the fire going--I find I have to add coals and/or smoke wood about 20 minutes or so. I have a relatively small smoker so it's hard to build up a big pile of coals, but a larger smoker would be easier to tend.

Visit From Sophia

2007-03-10T08:18:00.001-06:00

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Over the week of President's Day, Dada's cousin Sophia and her mommies Catherine and Jennifer, along with GranJudy (Nei Nei) came to visit. Tante Lanita (Dada's great aunt and GranJudy's younger sister) came a day later.

The girls had a wonderful time, spending as much time as they could on the playscape, swinging and climbing in the play house and generally running around. Dada continued to ask about Sophia constantly after they went back home. The constant level of cuteness was difficult to take at times.

We all had a great time--Catherine and Eliot enjoyed getting to play video games together like in the old days (we even had Super Mario 64 installed on the Wii--back in the day before Eliot had video game consoles at home, he would visit Catherine and play Super Mario into the wee hours of the morning).

We got to visit Judy's cousin Harriet and Harriet's mother Frances, who both live here in Austin, along with Harriet's brother (and of course also Judy's cousin) Jimmy Carl and his wife Pat, who were visiting from New York. It was nice to meet these not-so-distant relatives and make connections.

Judy is deep into researching the Hyatt family history and capturing it on Ancestry.com. We spent a lot of time scanning in old photos and newspaper clippings and adding details to the Hyatt tree on Ancestry.com. It was very interesting--I had not really appreciated the Hyatt history in the panhandle or even that I have a famous distant relative (adventurer Richard Halliburton).

On that Wednesday we hosted a BBQ at the house that was a lot of fun--the weather was perfect, clear and about 78 degrees, pretty amazing for mid February. I cooked a big brisket as something of a dress rehearsal for our Spring BBQ planned for a couple of weeks later. I discovered that 12 hours is not quite enough cooking time for a 13 pound brisket (for the Spring BBQ I got up a 4:00 a.m. and had a much better result with a cooking time closer to 14 hours).

Harriet, her husband Bob, Jimmy Carl, Pat, and Frances came to the BBQ which was really nice. Peggy came up from Houston as well, making it something of a Gotcha Day re-union (albeit a few days late). Everyone had a good time, although Judy and Lanita had somewhat exhausted themselves getting the house clean [note to prospective house guests: if you want to clean our house, you are welcome any time and may stay as long as you like].

Catherine, Jenn, and Sophia left for Dallas on that Thursday to spend another night with cousin Dianna before returning home.

Judy stayed on for a few more days so she could spend a bit more time with Frances and Harriet. This turned out to be fortuitous because Julie and Eliot got pretty sick over the weekend and it was good for Judy to be able to look after Dada a bit.

All-in-all a fun visit. It was just this sort of visit from family that we wanted to have more guest room. The only real problem was for guests staying in the music room--Stanley's crowing is a bit loud, but it's not too bad (or at least you can get used to it). We're told that roosters crow less as they mature. Let's hope that's the case.