under toe
an 132 year old slave
has turned to dust

but I say
that people don't die
on their death

as our cells
move into other lifeforms
as we decay

right after death
we still contain
every bit of our old self

every morning
I walk over
a grassy monocrop

in a confederate
cemetery I have faith
these fallen soldiers and slaves

have learned
to pray and meditate
just as Zen Buddhists do

sitting in retreat
for the entire month
of February

my fallen
confederate neighbors
have become the world

The spot where the old farmhouse used to sit has been earmarked for years as the future site of an experimental nursery, but this was the first year we planted into the area.  Mark started reclaiming the spot about a year ago, a process that involved of lots of weedeating to kill off blackberries and honeysuckle, plus digging out huge poke stumps.  Last fall, I kill-mulched one bed on the side closest to the trailer, using double my usual thickness of cardboard (two layers instead of one), and that bed still came up in blackberries and was a problem over the summer.  So I decided to lower my standards and dig out all the roots in that and another new bed instead of kill mulching for next year.

And I'm glad I did!  After a week of Thanksgiving eating and writing, shoveling really hit the spot.  I've decided the biggest problem with no-till gardening is that you don't get to dig often, and I love to dig, so projects like this make my day.

But it was also good to dig that area for more serious reasons.  There were lots of big roots, including one blackberry root mass about the size of a four-year-old fruit tree, so I suspect it would have taken at least two more years of mowing before a kill mulch in that area would take.  Plus, the Appalachian foundation of piled up rocks means Kayla and I disinterred more stones during our digging project than Mark and I have found during the entire rest of our time on the farm.  The timing was perfect since I want rocks to use around my new grape and didn't have any on hand.

And then there's the pure pleasure of finding ancient possessions in the soil around an old home site.  Sure, most of what we found was broken window glass and rusty nails, but Kayla went home with two nice marbles and a little ceramic container that looked like it might have held makeup or ointment.  And I found a rusty coin from 1951, probably not worth much, but fascinating for the notion that it was being held in someone's hand sixty years ago.  I think the second picture from the top might be an old whetstone too?

If I get industrious again, we've got about three more beds we could dig out in the old house area, but since I've got other digging projects on the front burner, I might let Mark mow those areas for another year first.  Either way, it's exciting to have two long beds to fill with experimental perennials --- more on that in a later post.

is the cello
too beautiful
or the world not enough?

is the cello
too beautiful
or the world not enough?

is the cello
too beautiful
or the world not enough?

Remembering some of the last instructions of a dear friend and advisor, I turn to comedy. When life is hard, we always have the Great Depression to look back to. I got a brilliant idea in 2009 in Highlands North Carolina to make jokes about the GD. It has been mulling for a long time in my super-sized brain. When I shared these jokes with my Mountain friends, they seemed to like this light, comfortable side of me. Enjoy these new jokes!

1

In the Great Depression
we didn't even have facebook!
we sat around the fireplace
with our friends!

2

In the Great Depression
we never ate bananas in Tennessee!
We canned pawpaws!

3

In the Great Depression
you'd be lucky to spend your money
on a root canal!

4

In the Great Depression
we scooped every bit of the egg white
out with our fingers!

5

In the Great Depression
our economic stimulus came from
World War two!

6

In the Great Depression
not many women wore pants.
They were lucky to have skirts!

I cannot say I am the have-not whisperer, in all honesty. I am not even the president of the freaks. But I would like to say I am one of them. I watch proudly. I have a friend who is on the top of the world today who used to be homeless. We all pass through great dips and highs in life.

We think people as who they are now, but people change yet keep their essence intact. I have friends who have done great noble things and who seem to keep having noble things done for them. I want to live a life that is more giving, responsible, and compassionate towards the have-nots.

Nobody is less than or greater than you. We are all equal. Even the haves. Even the huge egotistical people who pull the rest of us down. But there are people who need more of me and ones who give more. I am coming to a point where I realize what I have been asking for, to teach, to help, to plumb, to write poems, all mean I need to look behind me and open the door for the underdogs, the people in the middle of messiness.

When I was young I played by myself but when others came, I let them. I lived on the poor part of town and some of my friends came from hard stuff. Hard as food stamps in the 80s. Much harder. Hard as prostitute parents. Hard as abuse that wasn't related to poverty. We impacted each other hugely. My siblings hung out with top notch geeks, I think. People who they could call equals. Maybe they were more open than I give them credit. But I was open. This is a good trait I have, knowing the difference between a charity situation and a friendship.

I get a lot from my "more enlightened friends" but I get an incredible lot from the heathens too! I am rooting for everyone tonight apparently. I hope.

Had planned to spend all day not working on git-annex and instead getting caught up on conference videos. However, got a little bit multitasky while watching those, and started investigating why, last time I worked on Windows port, git-annex was failing to link.

A good thing to do while watching conference videos since it involved lots of test builds with different flags. Eventially solved it. Building w/o WebDAV avoids crashing the compiler anyhow.

Thought I'd try the resulting binary and see if perhaps I had forgotten to use the threaded RTS when I was running ghc by hand to link it last time, and perhaps that was why threads seemed to have hung back then.

It was. This became clear when I saw a "deadlocked indefinitely in MVar" error message, which tells me that it's at least using the threaded RTS. So, I fixed that, and a few other minor things, and ran this command in a DOS prompt box:

git annex watch --force --foreground --debug

And I've been making changes to files in that repository, and amazingly, the watcher is noticing them, and committing them!

So, I was almost entirely there to a windows port of the watcher a month ago, and didn't know. It has some rough edges, including not doing anything to check if a newly created file is open for write when adding it, and getting the full assistant ported will be more work, and the full webapp may be a whole other set of problems, but this is a quite nice milestone for the Windows port.

We installed a downspout, but realized afterward that it's on the wrong side.

If I was depressed today
I wouldn't be saying this
about how sometimes a
life can feel like a dying
a rut in the way can seem
to have been a whole life.

But a woman's 90 years are really much bigger than 31.
So tuck in your suicidal thoughts.
And go on a hike in the woods you thought would be easier and shorter.
Maybe you'll get there or maybe you will get somewhere else.
Who cares.
Home is just a shell, a backpack with no name.
You are bigger than the sorrow.

When you use a TV you quit thinking
and when you write it stirs you
when you think you cannot and you do
it feels empowering
I went on a walk recently that reminds me
my body has great strength
and a much larger potential than I had been thinking
I hadn't been using my full body potential
and when I look at how much brain we usually use
I blush
so sitting for a month without speaking in a monastery
even sounds possible.

I left you hanging in yesterday's post about our skirting decision, and while your thoughtful comments were pouring in, I went outside to start experimenting.  Mark had bought me a four-foot-by-eight-foot-by-two-inch sheet of rigid-foam insulation, unfaced because we wanted to buy from our local hardware store (even though the options there are rather limited) rather than driving an hour to Lowes.  It turned out to be simple to cut the insulation sheet to size with our hand saw (much easier than using the utility knife I tried first).  Digging out a little bit of dirt where the insulation was going to go made it relatively easy to slide the cut pieces into place.

From my perusal of the internet before beginning, I'd thought I'd need to make a bottom rail for the insulation to attach to and to use button nails to attach the top of the insulation to the underside of the trailer.  But once I got the insulation wedged into place, it became clear it wasn't going anywhere, so I skipped that step.  I did use a bit of scrap wood to push one piece back so it lined up with the other, though.

The corrugated pipe we're using to send water from our (as-yet-hypothetical) downspout to our greywater wetland goes under the trailer, and I'd originally planned to cut a hole in the insulation to let the pipe through.  But as I worked, I figured it would be simpler to dig down a bit and send the pipe underneath (as you can see in the photo below).  As I type this, though, I'm wondering if that's a good idea, since the pipe will go down and then slightly up, meaning a bit of water will pool in the lowest point and will probably freeze in the winter.  I guess we'll wait and see if that's an issue, or maybe I'll fix the problem before Mark installs the downspout.

You'll notice there are a few small cracks between the sheets of foam in the photo above.  I went back and forth on these, at first thinking I'd seal them with reflective tape, but then realizing that the flashing I planned on putting on the outside would do the same job.  When I finally crawl underneath to deal with the problematic insulation under the floor (one of these days...), I may use some spray-foam insulation to fill in these gaps.

Rigid-foam insulation isn't supposed to deal well with either UV damage or water, so it needs some kind of outer layer.  We could have bought skirting made for trailers, but flashing is so easy to work with (and is always on hand), so I decided to give that a try instead.  After I took this photo, I backfilled some earth around the base (and will add even more dirt later to increase the height of the planting bed), so the gap at the bottom shown in the photo above is already long gone.

This small part of the skirting project was so fun and easy, it made me wonder why we've been putting off skirting for so long.  Then I remembered that I want to replace the disintegrating insulation under the trailer floor before we make it even harder to work under there by closing the space in.  We may need to bite the bullet and do that before summer, though, since the back of the insulation sheets I installed this week are currently exposed under the trailer, and free-range chicks adore pecking at styrofoam....

The 2013 git-annex user survey has been running for several weeks and around 375 people have answered at least the first question. While I am going to leave it up through the end of the year, I went over the data today to see what interesting preliminary conclusions I can draw.

• 11% build git-annex from source. More than I would have guessed.

• 20% use the prebuilt versions from the git-annex website.

  This is a number to keep in mind later, when more people have upgraded to the last release, which checks for upgrades. I can run some stats on the number of upgrade checks I receive, and multiplying that by 5 would give a good approximation of the total number of computers running git-annex.

• I'm surprised to see so many more Linux (79%) than OSX (15%) users. Also surprising is there are more Windows (2%) than Android (1%) users. (Android numbers may be artificially low since many users will use it in addition to one of the other OSes.)

• Android and Windows unsurprisingly lead in ports requested, but the Synology NAS is a surprise runner up, with 5% (more than IOS).

  In theory it would not be too hard to make a standalone arm tarball, which could be used on such a device, although IIRC the Synology had problems with a too old linker and libc. It would help if I could make the standalone tarball not depend on the system linker at all.

  A susprising number (3%) want some kind of port the the Raspberry Pi, which is weird because I'd think they'd just be using Raspbian on it.. but a standalone arm tarball would also cover that use case.

• A minimum of 1664 (probably closer to 2000) git annex repositories are being used by the 248 people who answered that question. Around 7 repositories per person average, which is either one repository checked out on 7 different machines or two repositories on 3 machines, etc.

• At least 143 terabytes of data are being stored in git-annex. This does not count redundant data. (It also excludes several hundred terabytes from one instituion that I don't think are fully online yet.) Average user has more than half a terabyte of data.

• 8% of users store scientific data in git-annex! A couple of users are using it for game development assets, and 5% of users are using it for some form of business data.

• Only 10% of users are sharing a git-annex repository with at least one other person. 27% use it by themselves, but want to get others using their repositories. This probably points to it needing to be easier for nontechnical users.

• 61% of git-annex users have good or very good knowledge of git. This question intentionally used the same wording as the general git user survey, so the results can be compared. The curves have somewhat different shapes, with git-annex's users being biased more toward the higher knowledge levels than git's users.

• The question about how happy users are also used the same wording. While 74% of users are happy with git-annex, 94% are similarly happy with git, and a while the median git-annex user is happy, the median git user is very happy.

  The 10% who wrote in "very enthusiastic, but still often bitten by quirks (so not very happy yet, but with lots of confidence in the potential" might have thrown off this comparison some, but they certianly made their point!

• 3% of respondants say that a bug is preventing them from using git-annex, but that they have not reported the bug yet. Frustrating! 1% say that a bug that's been reported already is blocking them.

• 18% wrote in that they need the webapp to support using github (etc) as a central server. I've been moving in that direction with the encryption and some other changes, so it's probably time to make a UI for that.

• 12% want more control over which files are stored locally when using the assistant.

• A really surprising thing happened when someone wrote in that I should work on "not needing twice disk space of repo in direct mode", and 5% of people then picked this choice. This is some kind of documentation problem, because of course git-annex never needs 2x disk space, whether using direct mode or not. That's one of its advantages over git!

• Somewhere between 59 and 161 of the survey respondants use Debian. I can compare this with Debian popularity contest data which has 400 active installations and 1000 total installations, and make guesses about what fraction of all git-annex users have answered the survey. By making different assumptions I got guesses that varied by 2 orders of magnitude, so not worth bothering with. Explicitly asking how many people use each Linux distribution would be a good idea in next year's survey.

Main work today was fixing Android DNS lookups, which was trying to use /etc/resolv.conf to look up SRV records for XMPP, and had to be changed to use a getprop command instead. Since I can't remember dealing with this before (not impossible I made some quick fix to the dns library before and lost it though), I'm wondering if XMPP was ever usable on Android before. Cannot remember. May work now, anyway...

You would have thought Anna was playing Agricola from the big smile on her face when she got to try out our neighbor's corn sheller.

She explained that she grew up shelling corn by grabbing a cob with two hands and twisting in opposite directions.

The sheller made short work of this weevily corn, which will give our chickens supplemental carbs this winter.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping got me thinking in more depth about what we want to do in front of our bank of south-facing windows.  These windows do a remarkable job of heating the trailer on sunny winter days, but, unfortunately, they do nearly as good of a job of heating the trailer on sunny summer days.  In a perfect world, we'd plant a big shade tree here, but that would block out light to my vegetable garden, so I'm instead using vines on an arbor to reflect the summer heat while letting in winter sun.

This spring, I tried out version 1.0 using a simple pea trellis and scarlet runner beans (shown to the right).  I'm glad of the experiment because it proved to me that this area is way too waterlogged to plant directly into the ground.  In preparation for version 2.0, Kayla and I dumped weeds in front of the trailer all summer, and by November, I had some great topsoil to shovel up into two mounds, one on each side of the row of windows.

This picture shows what I imagine the area will look like in five years if everything goes according to plan.  I've already put in the Issai kiwi (this summer) and the Reliance grape (last month), and the Anna kiwi will be arriving this spring.  The last two were planted in those mounds I mentioned, and Mark pointed out that we have some good soil that needs to be excavated near the goat path, which will allow me to fill in between the two mounds for later root development.  I also plan to finally install the downspout to channel that area's roof water into the greywater wetland, and Mark's going to upgrade the trellis he started to make it strong enough to handle two heavy vines, while also making a lattice on the edge of the porch for the Issai kiwi.  (I think we'll also make the trellis a little higher since the photos above illustrate how the current height will still shade the windows quite a bit in the winter.)

The part I haven't decided yet doesn't actually have anything to do with the plant life, although it does relate to trailer temperature modification.  Eventually, we want to skirt the whole trailer, but that's a long-term project that hasn't made it onto the to-do list yet.  In the meantime, I figured we'd better skirt this one little area now before I start mounding up earth and planting long-lived perennials.  I found several interesting websites while researching the skirting topic and discovered that there are at least two schools of thought on how to moderate the floor temperature of a trailer:

• Use plain skirting around the outsides, then lay down a vapor barrier on the ground under the trailer with polystyrene foam over top.  This is recommended by the extension service in Alaska.  Related alternatives involve blowing foam insulation into the belly (area between the frame and ground inside the skirting) or making a false floor below the frame to hold insulation right up against the underside of your floor.
  
• Make your own insulated skirting around the perimeter of the trailer using polystyrene foam attached to treated two-by-fours on the ground and to the bottom of the trailer.  This option is usually then covered by traditional skirting or paneling of some kind on the outside.  No one talks about this, but it seems like you might get better results if you buried the bottom of the insulated skirting a foot or so into the soil?

In Trailersteading (free today!), one of our readers skirted his home with the insulated centers cut out of doors before installing windows (shown to the right).  That sounds like the optimal skirting material, but I'm afraid we don't have a source here.  Any other ideas or feelings on which of the two skirting options above makes the most sense?

Finally, I'm considering the utility of stones or cinderblocks used as thermal mass in this area.  Hardy kiwis are damaged by late-spring frosts in our area and grapes tend to succumb to fungal diseases during our wet summers, so I figure both plants would enjoy some extra heat gained by covering the ground with stones between their feet.  Rosalind Creasy agreed, noting that a patio in front of the south-facing wall of our house can even help heat the home by radiating heat during winter nights (assuming you can shade the stones enough in the summer so they don't bake you then).  Which brings me to question number two --- would I be better off using cinder blocks instead of traditional skirting in this one zone of the trailer to provide yet more thermal mass?

Anyone who made it through this long post --- you deserve a gold star!  Here's your bonus --- did you know that evergreen shrubs and vines up against the north side of a house can act as exterior insulation, producing a pocket of air that makes your house stay warmer?  And did you know that I'll be able to guess how much our trellis will shade the windows in the summer by going out at midnight under a winter full moon --- the moon shadows will mimic sun shadows six months later.  Tips courtesy of Rosalind Creasy.

Still working through thanksgiving backlog. Around 55 messages to go.

Wrote hairy code to automatically fix up bad bare repositories created by recent versions of git-annex. Managed to do it with only 1 stat call overhead (per local repository). Will probably keep that code in git-annex for a year or so, despite the bug only being present for a few weeks, because the repositories that need to be fixed might be on removable drives that are rarely used.

Various other small bug fixes, including dealing with box.com having changed their WebDAV endpoint url.

Spent a while evaluating various key/value storage possibilities. incremental fsck should not use sticky bit has the details.

Will a chicken eat a crawdad?

That depends...I've seen some chickens run away after being pinched, but today I gave one to our White Leghorn and she went crazy for it.

We might think about breeding them for chicken food in the future or figure out a way to trap them from our wild population.

Rosalind Creasy's The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping was probably a cutting-edge book when it first came out in 1982, but now I feel like the same information is presented in a better fashion in various forest gardening books and in Robert Kourik's Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally.  The most helpful two-thirds of Creasy's text consists of an encyclopedia of plants recommended for edible landscaping and, again, I feel like you'd get more information on that topic from Lee Reich's Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention and from Eric Toensmeier's Perennial Vegetables.

However, Creasy's book is still worth reading, particularly if you're an urban gardener who has to make your tomatoes and cabbages blend in with the neighbor's perfect lawn and clipped hedges.  Creasy lists varieties of each species that are not only productive, but that also are particularly pretty in the landscape (although some of these varieties have fallen out of favor and may now be hard to find).

And I should add the caveat that there is an updated version of Rosalind Creasy's book available, although there's no search-inside-the-book feature on Amazon, so I can't tell how much the book was revised and now much of the information stayed the same.  I also still mined quite a few thought-provoking tidbits from The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, despite having read many of the more-modern books on this theme.  For example, I'd heard of ha-has, but didn't realize that they were originally imagined as a hidden barrier to keep deer, cattle, and sheep in sight but out of the garden.  And I'd never considered making low-tech permeable paving similar to the way we built our ford, by sinking cinderblocks in the ground and filling them with gravel.  Finally, Creasy's book got me thinking more scientifically about summer shade and winter heat retention around our south-facing bank of windows...but that's fodder for another post.

Made a release yesterday to fix a bug that made git-annex init in a bare repository set core.bare=false. This bug only affected git-annex 5, it was introduced when building the direct mode guard. Currently recovering from it is a manual (pretty easy) process. Perhas I should automate that, but I mostly wanted to get a fix out before too many people encountered the bug.

Today, I made the assistant run batch jobs with ionice and nocache, when those commands are available. Also, when the assistant transfers files, that also runs as a batch job.

Changed how git-annex does commits, avoiding using git commit in direct mode, since in some situations git commit (not with -a!) wants to read the contents of files in the work tree, which can be very slow.

We had a busted water pipe yesterday that turned out to be easy to fix.

A long term solution might be one of those electric pipe heaters.

So often when it snows
I go looking for deer in the cemetery
where the grass grows white.
When I get to where they would be
my dog plows his head
as in an attempt at making a snow angel.

Why would deer come twice to a place
just because my mother saw them once there
I am sure they pranced along.
Back home my bored cat traces flakes with her paw,
my mother brings in stiffly frozen laundry,
stags pass unnoticed.

Enjoy!

The control to adjust the water temperature on our low pressure hot water system is behind a blue plastic panel.

I increased it by 12 degrees recently.

We talked about installing a spring loaded mechanical wall timer, but so far it's not been a problem remembering to shut it off.

Forgive yourself
forgive your friends for not loving you hard enough
or forgive your chosen ones for not showing their light for you
forgive the fact
that twenty loved ones
seemed to all slam on the breaks at the exact same time
and forgive your mind for turning to a dim cave
of self ending heartbreak
forgive each one
then forgive yourself for writing a hate poem
to a lovely friend
forgive yourself for asking for honesty but not having the stomach
forgive yourself for thinking you are unloved
forgive yourself for thinking there is no hope
and just start hoping and loving again
stronger and more than before
so so much more.

One of our readers commented that he figured we'd drive in all of that delicious punky wood by the end of the week based on our weather forecast.  He was right about the cold, although not about our energy levels.  A day baking pies followed by a day of extended driving and visiting meant that Mark and I just wanted to be lazy during the second frigid morning in a row.  We even missed a couple of eggs in the nest box, which froze solid and cracked --- a treat for Lucy once they thaw.

I try not to bore our readers by talking too much about the weather, but I think about it a lot.  A low of twelve degrees and a high near freezing for two days means morning chores are cold and the wood stove is blazing.  I can't feed us lettuce because the leaves are frozen solid, but I can push down through the snow to gather leafy greens and Brussels sprouts (although my fingers get cold in the process!).  Our wash water line freezes up, but we still have drinking water since that line stays waterless except when the pump is running, and the fridge root cellar stays barely above freezing with the help of a backup heater attached to a thermocube.  (0.3 kwh of electricity used so far.)

The chicken tractor stays put since Mark threw a tarp over top of it before the snow started, leaving a bit of snowless ground in the current location but none in the surrounding yard.  Even though I don't have to move the tractor, morning chores take longer because I need to swap out the Avian Aqua Miser Original in the tractor and backup coop (and check on the heated waterer, although it's still flowing so far).  On the plus side, cold weather also settled down the one pesky Leghorn who is living in that backup coop because she spent the last month breaking into the yard to hide her eggs hither and yon.  For a week after being cooped back up, bad hen paced the fenceline, but chickens really don't like walking in the snow, so she finally gave up, settled down, and laid in her nest box.

I always find the temperature extremes fascinating, but I have to admit that I'm glad I live in a region of quickly changing weather.  Before we can get heartily sick of the snow, it starts to melt, and by this time next week, we'll be enjoying a high of 60 degrees.  I feel for those of you who live in the frigid north and won't see bare ground until spring, but you can laugh at us next summer when we're sweltering in the sun.

It's been a long long time since I hiked that far. The property that used to just be 80 odd square acres now adjoins a couple adjacent purchased lots of land. It took hours and hours and hours. There was snow on the ground and I needed a walking stick for the steep part for the first time in my life. I was grateful for that stick and for the wonderful hippie people who came with me, helping me over barbed wire, teaching me the technique of switching back and forth, and my grandniece who handed me her walking stick, conveniently, moments before the giant hill. I don't remember ever climbing up such a slick grade, certainly not in my current low level of fitness. The hike challenged me physically, but always I felt safe and happy. Once a close close woman in my mother's generation held my hand to support me going down (so I didn't slip.) Many times I did slide onto my bottom, even once when I slid intentionally under another line of barbed wire. My feet frozen and wet rejoiced just to have this wonderful time with old friends. Thank you to anyone who reads this. To my grandnephew who made shadow bodies with me far across the ridge from one to another. He has softened in my eyes, and looks out for the little ones, like my own little nose. What I mean by that is people grow at their own speed. Ten years ago I was running up steep long mountains in the rainforest of Costa Rica, five years ago I shot myself a blunt but loose cannon at several of thee good bucks and does caught up in craziness and wanting to prove myself. I grew up in an introverted family and these people were some of the only people who lacked common blood who seemed safe and equal to us. They went off to become brain surgeons and teachers or sailors. If I had become an architect or farmer I would have felt worthy, but I fell into doubt and sadness about our interconnections and relationships. Now I am more open. I walk behind them, with a stick I wouldn't have without them. And I know I would not make it up this giant mountain without their love. K leads from ahead, some Bilbo and though I follow behind them, I wonder if I could be as sage as Gandolf. Pace was always important to me. My first memory of R was he said I was competitive. I am! I wanted to be the first one in the water and the last one out. I think I will let the little ones take the prize now. I love you all. Thanks for being tolerant of me so far.

Anna and I had a nice and safe trip to North Carolina yesterday.

I do most of the driving while Anna handles the ice scraping and navigation.

Sitting around the turkey and ham,
realizing Daddy's bragging about every sibling but me.
Temperature drops.
Guess that Hesses really have cold blood
Can't we all just brag about eachother?
"Isn't he the hippest Daddy
in all the land?
Yet the whole time I'm reliving trauma,
laughable things spun negative,
like the hierarchy of us.
I have a tendency to be moody
and take things the wrong way.
Yet now,
when hugs went all around,
it was Daddy's wife
who told me he is so proud of me
that he talks to his friends
about the poems I write.
So I wonder now why was I so sullen?
Why was I not boasting
when everyone was toasting?

The best thing I did this Thanksgiving
was to walk with Dani
and to ask her
if Thanksgiving is hard on her.
And to listen to her honest reply of yes.

I see a time less bitter today.
I feel the hugs surrounding my body
and people reaching out to help me.
There's Anna searching every room
to say goodbye.

As I mentioned in Sunday's post, I'll be selling my original watercolors at half price this week in hopes of finding every painting a good home (and of clearing up that space behind my desk).  Today's theme is Winter.  If you buy one or more of the paintings below, they'll go in the mail early next week and will probably take roughly another week to arrive.

	Winter Wonderland 27.75" x 21.75" Sold $150 + $50 S&H Ground Cedar in the snow reminded me of a Christmas scene in miniature.
	The Longest Night 29.5" x 21.75" $150 + $50 S&H Although shriveled by the time the winter solstice arrives, this acorn is still full of life and is ready to sprout in the spring.

I hope you've enjoyed this journey back in time into my head a decade ago.  Thank you to everyone who has bought art!

Is it worth topping your Brussels sprout plants if you don't think of it until late October?  I meant to answer this question by topping every other plant and then comparing the results over the winter.

The trouble is that the tops tasted really good.  And the topped plants just seemed to be growing bigger sprouts over the following week.  So I topped them all...meaning I have no useful data.

What I do have is scads of brussels sprouts plumping up on the stems of my plants.  Although not a good experiment, this is definitely a culinary and gardening success.  Yum!

As I mentioned in Sunday's post, I'll be selling my original watercolors at half price this week in hopes of finding every painting a good home (and of clearing up that space behind my desk).  Today's theme is Insects.  If you buy one or more of the paintings below, they'll go in the mail early next week and will probably take roughly another week to arrive.

	Daddy-Long-Legs 29.75" x 21.75" $200 + $50 S&H Everyone's favorite spider, this daddy-long-legs is walking through a field of Indian Strawberry leaves.
	Dragonfly Eruption 27" x 21.75" $150 + $50 S&H This empty exoskeleton is all that remains after a dragonfly changes from its watery nymph stage into its aerial adult form.

Or buy them both together:

$300 + $50 S&H

My last series tomorrow has a wintery theme.  Don't forget to stop back by.

All week, I've been living in another world.  The piece of young-adult fiction I started in June fermented all summer, started and stopped in October, and then swallowed five days of my life this week.  I'd wake at 6, a chapter already written in my head, type until my brain went foggy, tend to the animals, type some more, pause for lunch, type, eat, type, sleep, repeat.

Now, waking back into the real world, I feel a bit like I do after spending days in bed due to the flu.  The snow crunches beneath my feet and I feel I'm obeying Thich Nhat Hanh who admonished us to "Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet."

I haven't written fiction in years, and what I wrote then was pretty bad.  But this time I don't just have a feeling I want to wallow in, I also have a world and thought problem I want to explore and share.  Now that the first draft is done, I've promised to ignore the book for a week so I can edit it with rested eyes, and hopefully I'll be able to share the result with you before Christmas.  Unless my rested eyes say the story is terrible, of course.

Which is all a long way of saying that what I'm most thankful for this year is the freedom to let a project swallow me whole.  I'm thankful for a warm fire to type in front of, and for two cats who are sometimes actually willing to sit somewhere other than on top of my arms so I can do that typing.  (Yes, it is possible to type with two cats on your lap...barely.)  I'm thankful for a husband who doesn't mind that I haven't really been present for the last week, and for a mother who let me mix up her history with my own and cook the result down until it gelled without any added pectin.

Later today, I'll also be thankful for pie.  Have a wonderful Thanksgiving wherever you are!

(By the way, the chickens in these photos are being thankful for a rare day of sun last week.)

Lucy chased a raccoon up a tree that was getting close to the chicken coop and Anna and I chopped a couple rounds of firewood, but other than that we took the day off to rest up for a day of traveling tomorrow.

As I mentioned in Sunday's post, I'll be selling my original watercolors at half price this week in hopes of finding every painting a good home (and of clearing up that space behind my desk).  Today's theme is New Leaves.  If you buy one or more of the paintings below, they'll go in the mail early next week and will probably take roughly another week to arrive.

	Dangling double-matted 29.5" x 21.25" $220 + $50 S&H A young redbud pod is just beginning to plump up in front of the still-tender leaves.  I painted this when I was first getting to know Mark, so it's a bit melodramatic for reasons you'll understand if you've read Growing into a Farm.
	First Leaves 26.25" x 17.5" $100 + $50 S&H This study portrays a tulip-tree bud just starting to burst open in the spring.

Or buy them both together:

$300 + $50 S&H

Stay tuned for tomorrow's art, with an invertebrate theme.

As several readers pointed out, I chewed Mark out incorrectly about using a wooden cutting board for meat.  It turns out that wooden cutting boards are probably safer, in actuality, since the bacteria tend to sink down into the wood, where they slowly die off.  In contrast, plastic cutting boards keep any bacteria closer to the surface, and once the plastic boards have been scarred by cutting action, those bacteria can move off the board and back onto food relatively easily.

On the other hand, it's generally considered good practice to have two cutting boards in your kitchen, one for meat and one for everything else.  Since meat is going to be cooked before eating, any bacteria present will be killed by the high heat, but if you cut apples on a cutting board that has been used for meat then eat the apples fresh, you're at risk of getting food poisoning.  In the past, I've just cut up meat on a plate (annoying, but I don't do it often), but since we'll now have a wooden and a plastic cutting board, I'll keep using the wooden one for fruits and vegetable.  We'll be extra-careful to disinfect the plastic board after cutting up meat, which can be done by washing the board and then soaking it in bleach water, exactly the method Mark naturally gravitated toward.

While doing all this research, though, I did learn one maintenance technique I need to add to my arsenal --- oiling our wooden cutting board.  Now I just need to hunt down some food-grade mineral oil and give my grandmother's board a new lease on life.

My last day before thanksgiving, getting caught up with some recent bug reports and, quite a rush to get a lot of fixes in. Adding to the fun, wintery weather means very limited power today.

It was a very productive day, especially for Android, which hopefully has XMPP working again (at least it builds..), halved the size of the package, etc.

Fixed a stupid bug in the automatic v5 upgrade code; annex.version was not being set to 5, and so every git annex command was actually re-running the upgrade.

Fixed another bug I introduced last Friday, which the test suite luckily caught, that broke using some local remotes in direct mode.

Tracked down a behavior that makes git annex sync quite slow on filesystems that don't support symlinks. I need to switch direct mode to not using git commit at all, and use plumbing to make commits there. Will probably work on this over the holiday.

We finally got our used bathtub back to the barn yesterday.

It's a good thing, because today's rain is turning into a flood as I type this.

As I mentioned in Sunday's post, I'll be selling my original watercolors at half price this week in hopes of finding every painting a good home (and of clearing up that space behind my desk).  Today's theme is High and Dry since oaks live on ridgetops in our region, and since the Virgin's Bower pictured has clearly climbed to higher ground.  If you buy one or more of the paintings below, they'll go in the mail early next week and will probably take roughly another week to arrive.

	Virgin's Bower 29.75" x 22.5" double-matted Sold $220 + $50 S&H This cluster of Virgin's Bower seeds is about to break apart.  The seeds will waft away from the parent plant and drift to a new home in the mountains.
	Oak Community II 29.25" x 18.75" Sold $100 + $50 S&H This second-generation study of a cluster of fallen white-oak leaves brings the dead to life.
	Oak Community I 13.5" x 7.75" Sold $25 + $25 S&H This is a smaller rough draft for the painting above.

Thanks for looking!

Mark and I don't give birthday and holiday gifts to each other, but if we did, this is what I'd want --- huge, punky oak logs well-inoculated with woodland fungi.  I'm going to consider this truckload a pre-Thanksgiving present --- thanks, honey!


The wood was extra --- our third trip after hauling in a truckload of straw and another truckload of bathtub.  By the time we filled the truck with logs, the floodplain was just starting to thaw, but Mark barreled through and dropped off log after log right where I needed them in the forest garden.  These will feed the soil and raise the earth level around our three most waterlogged trees --- two American plums and an apple.

If we get lucky enough to haul in the other two truckloads of wonder wood still waiting at the parking area, I'll give some to our oldest Celeste, who is in a wetter part of the gully than the neighboring Chicago Hardy fig and thus hasn't done as well.  After that, I'm not sure where the wood will go --- maybe in the newly-reclaimed parts of the gully for awesome planting spots next year?

According to the man my friends call one of the most reputable plumbers in the region, he “won’t ever hire me because I am a woman.” He said he meant it as no disrespect, and I believe he said it as a matter of information. I called asking what people do when they want to become plumbers, and he said, that he doesn’t think it’s likely that I will ever be hired to work as a plumber. He mentioned I could get my foot in the door working the more traditional role of office manager and that maybe I could learn that way.

I am feeling like a vocational mistake. Like the vocational sorting hat popped out actual words for everyone else but when it got to me in came a hiccup. I work hard when I have a job but I am behind in the career world, not just because I haven’t nestled down into a career yet and I am 13 years out of high school or because I’m 2 years out of college, not because I have a disability or because the economy is miserable, but now because I am a woman.

And for this reason I am pulling the plug on clean water and plumbing as a career... because I don't want to constantly fight

We had our second frozen opportunity of the year this morning.

It's a good feeling knowing the straw bales are tucked into the barn for the winter.

Upgrades should be working on OSX Mavericks, Linux, and sort of on Android. This needs more testing, so I have temporarily made the daily builds think they are an older version than the last git-annex release. So when you install a daily build, and start the webapp, it should try to upgrade (really downgrade) to the last release. Tests appreciated.

Looking over the whole upgrade code base, it took 700 lines of code to build the whole thing, of which 75 are platform specific (and mostly come down to just 3 or 4 shell commands). Not bad..

Last night, added support for quvi 0.9, which has a completely changed command line interface from the 0.4 version.

Plan to spend tomorrow catching up on bug reports etc and then low activity for rest of the week.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'll be selling my original watercolors at half price this week in hopes of finding every painting a good home (and of clearing up that space behind my desk).  Today's theme is Out of the Blue.  If you buy one or more of the paintings below, they'll go in the mail early next week and will probably take roughly another week to arrive.

This painting was inspired by the rock piles I found in old-farmland-turned-forest in the mountains of West Virginia.  Whenever I stumbled across the piles on my hikes in the woods, I was amazed by the hard work of the farmers, who built them one rock at a time without heavy machinery.  I was also reminded of the cairns I'd sometimes find on European mountaintops, which people would add to, putting something special (usually a rock) on top after climbing to the peak.  I felt like this striking mushroom was definitely something special and worthy of its own cairn.

	Seed Dispersal 11.125" x 8.25" matted $30 + $25 S&H This pencil-and-watercolor drawing highlights a sycamore seed drifting over a western river.  Only if it's very lucky will the water-loving seed find a damp enough spot to root and grow.
	Willow Bud 13.5" x 11.75" $25 + $25 S&H This study of a willow bud catches it in its dormant, winter mode, but the bud is just biding its time until spring.

Or buy them all:

$250 + $50 S&H

I hope you enjoyed the eye candy!

Blue collar fellows, I am making flash cards to learn about plumbing. Yes, plumbing. I would love to experiment on your sink, shower, or toilet. I have learned one of the most important arts in the world, writing poetry. Now time to learn and apply a new basic skill. I want to be a plumber because flowing water in a home is the most essential thing that is often taken granted for. Actually I did live for a month in a home with just a bucket latrine, and I grew up in a home with no indoor plumbing, just a 3 seater outhouse several yards from our home. My Mom pumped water to wash our cloth diapers. Now I am looking to apprentice or help with plumbing. Also as a woman it means a lot to me that I walk of equality, making things work rather than just talking about it. I can't complain any more that I was not taught practical skills. I must seek out and acquire them.

As usual, we're putting in a bunch of new perennials over the winter.  The unusual part is that over half of them are homegrown.  As I've mentioned previously, we set out five figs in late July, four started from cuttings and one from a rooted shoot found under our Chicago Hardy tree.  I didn't blog about it, but I also set out an Issai hardy kiwi at the same time, a bit later in the summer I planted out a couple of Poorman gooseberries from our nursery bed, and last week I transplanted five seedless grapes (Reliance, Thomcord, and Marquis) to their new homes as well.  Over half of these new plants came from cuttings a reader sent us --- thank you, Brian!

With so much bounty coming our way for free, my annual $100 perennial budget stretched in some interesting directions.  We'll be adding a new variety of red raspberry (Taylor) in the spring, and will be giving hardy kiwis another shot with an Anna plant from One Green Word, as was recommended by another reader.  Last year's store-bought apple rootstock (Bud 9) will be stooled this year and will let me graft new dwarf trees in spring 2015, but in the meantime, I bought another five rootstocks of a larger variety (M7), three of which will be grafted to new varieties, one of which will expand Kayla's orchard, and one of which will go into our nursery bed to be stooled in 2015.  Five OHxF pear rootstocks will be spread out in a similar manner (although I'll probably give Kayla two of those).  And, since I still had some cash left over in my budget, I splurged on two named varieties of hybrid hazels --- Jefferson and Eta --- since my previous hybrid hazel is from a few breeding generations previous to that.

So many exciting possibilities!  What are you adding to your perennial garden this winter?