Thursday, January 1, 2015

Happy birthday dear 2015...

It is my (Jason's) fond wish for you that you had as much fun ringing in the new year as we did.  We got together with some good friends for a "pie" themed supper (two kinds of shepherd's pie and a potato crusted quiche...wow), then while the young kids busied themselves in the play kitchen the adults played a few jocular rounds of Bananagrams all together before the men headed to the garage for a marathon ping-pong session and the women played more games with the kids and talked.  At quarter of midnight we were summoned for a grape juice toast.

I hope 2015 looks a lot like 2014 did except that we're all a little older, a little wiser maybe, a little better at what we do.  But as the calendar turns over, we've had some things to accomplish, some things to reflect on, some things to relish, some things to celebrate, and some things to initiate on this New Year's day:

To accomplish:

We've dived into the bathroom renovation.  As it turns out, our inference that the musty odor that develops in our house while we're away is coming from the bathroom could not have been more accurate, or so it would seem at this stage.  As I dug into the demolition aspect of the project, I found nothing too remarkable with a view to mold issues until I got to taking apart the old water heater closet.  The closer I got to the business end of the bathtub, the grungier things felt, looked, and smelled.  I had known from earlier remodeling projects that there was an opening in the concrete under the tub drain, but I'd never been able to access it before and get a good look at it.

I'll cut to the chase:  Sometime between 1981 (the year the house was built) and now the tub drain had become disconnected from the P-trap assembly that joins it to the main drain line.  In English this means that some large percentage of every bath and every shower that we and the former residents of this home ever took ended up not in the septic tank and drainfield (its intended destination) but into the ground under the concrete slab.  Structurally this is mostly not a big deal.  In terms of air quality it is, to be frank, a big deal, since the inevitably mold-saturated air in that soggy pit would have been contiguous with the general room air of the bathroom, and from there the whole house.  Also, the excessive moisture that would have entered our home that way might go a long way to explaining our difficulty in controlling humidity, even in winter.  Ever since making that discovery, I have been basking in the feeling of deep gratitude that we might now be able to rectify this.  I am so glad we decided to tackle this project in 2015.

And tackle was certainly the word for it today as I used a neighbor's fabulously effective electric jackhammer (Is there something unseemly about using a room's ordinary wall outlet to fuel the obliteration of its own floor?  There might be a warning in Deuteronomy about that.) to rattle a hole in the floor under where our bathroom sink used to be so that my brother (thanks, dude) and I can re-configure the drain pipes this weekend to suit the needs of the shower stall I will build in that location.  Also if I can re-pour that section of floor I can make the shower floor recessed in comparison to the rest of the room, obviating the need for a threshold, which renders it more usable by a person in a wheelchair.  Am I smart, or what?  Well, I guarantee I doubted my smarts pretty seriously as I donned safety glasses, dust mask, and earmuffs, stood the remarkably heavy apparatus on its point, took a deep breath and pulled the trigger...in my bathroom, no less...and turned an otherwise perfectly good, cold January day into a hot mess.  It will be worth it!

To reflect on:

Most specifically, our financial situation.  It's been over a decade since we have felt the need to keep close track of our expenditures for informational or planning purposes.  We've thought of ourselves as mostly pretty naturally thrifty people who don't spend a lot on frivolity, so it has never seemed like analyzing our spending would generate much information that we could actually act on in any significant way.  But this fall and winter we've begun to realize that Janelle's lingering intuition that we are not quite living within our means is, in a word, true.  Over that past half year or so we've recognized a significant shortfall, complicated by several expected and unexpected large expenditures.  It will need correcting.  So we're taking advantage of a free online budgeting program this year to help us gain a more precise awareness of the flow of money in our home economy such that we can make adjustments to whichever end of the balance sheet we may in order to bring our financial situation up to the same standards of sustainability that we expect from our gardens.

At first blush, the solution could be pretty simple:  Janelle could potentially increase her work to full time or I could try to pick up part time work of some kind.  Neither of us likes either of these options too well...trying to fit our homestead activities around work time away from home is going the wrong direction as far as our philosophy of work and home is concerned.  But philosophy that is not doable is not good philosophy (so I say, anyway), and we're willing to consider making this kind of change if we find that the need for it is unavoidable.  We're not willing to go into debt for ordinary consumer expenses.  But before we concede the point, we're going to take a hard look at where our money is actually going and how we can make a difference on the needs and wants end of the equation.  We're also going to be looking for ways we can gain more economic benefit (financial or non-financial) from the projects we already have going.  For example, we're putting serious time into plant and animal breeding, the benefits of which work might extend far beyond our home and family...might there be a way those efforts could be rewarded by the community?  The same could go for the skills maintenance and process innovation for home food and energy systems we think we have come to embody to some extent...might there be a way for folks who would like to pick up some of the skills to help make it possible for us to continue concentrating on these things?  We don't yet know how to go about answering these questions, but we aim to work on them a bit.

To relish:

Fresh lettuce and spinach, from the garden, on January 1.  Talk about a "first!"  Never was there a sweeter spinach than that which grows in slow motion (even slower than usual, I mean) through the dim light of a mild December.  And I mean "sweeter" literally.  Maybe it's our low-sugar food choices having their effects on perception, but I've never eaten spinach that tastes this sugary, especially the leaf stems (petioles).  I'll bet you never have, either.

The spinach is Winter Bloomsdale that I've selected for hardiness, vigor, productivity, and winter survival for several years.  Last winter (remember the polar vortex?) it made it through pretty well without mulch.  This year I can't yet notice any winter damage at all.  The lettuce is growing--yes, growing!--under spun polyester row cover.  It's an aesthetic compromise in the garden, and it's a petroleum product, but the rewards in the kitchen and the belly are pretty hard to ignore.  I'd like to breed a lettuce that could shirk the cold like the spinach does...stay tuned!

To celebrate:

In the final days of December, the chickens gave us nine self-opening Christmas presents: Chicks!  Actually it was ten but one was a dud.  It's the wrong time of year to hatch laying hens (it supposedly matters what light regime predominates at which stage of maturity), but when one of my hens started going broody at the beginning of the month, I decided the timing was good for raising a few extra birds for a spring butchering.  I had wanted, anyway, to see if I could get a broody hen to raise chicks amongst the older flock in the composting coop.  If it works, I'll be pretty pleased with that system, I think.  I was so tickled with the idea that when a second broody turned up I put ten more eggs under her.  Then we left for PA for Christmas and while we were gone a third started setting.  I'm afraid I'm a sucker for not wasting a good round of broodiness...I put eggs under her this evening, too.  And I think a fourth hen has started in.  Why, pray tell, are my hens going broody in winter?  I surely can't answer for it, but, hey, we're going to roll with it.

To initiate:


I suppose setting eggs under a hen fits this category, but also we're getting a jump on the gardening: Our onion plants are never big enough at onion planting time.  Last year I started them at the beginning of February.  Better than the beginning of March, but still not good enough.  This year we decided to try January 1, so as soon as I'm done typing this I intend to sneak that sowing in (I'll sow ten or so seeds per cell in mini-cell packs in a simple covered flat (tabletop greenhouse) and set them on a rack hung in a south-facing window) before calling it a night.

Better get to it!  Happy New Year.

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