They Do Not Quit

I learned to drive a snowplow last week.
Well, at least I learned what three of the levers do. Mostly.

Pushing the gear lever forward, backs the tractor. Pulling it back toward me puts the tractor in gear to go forward. This is apparently Japanese.
A 4-way compass-rose toggle raises, lowers, and articulates the bucket. Actually, I have only learned one point on this toggle: the NW quadrant simultaneously lowers and tucks the bucket, to lay it on the ground. Which is the most useful setting, really, as it doubles as a parking brake. All the other directions, I still have to tap it and see what it does before I push it the right direction.
Yet another lever, behind me, raises and lowers the rear snowplow, and has an odd little play of its own. There is also a throttle in case my right foot gets tired on the gas pedal.

Working these levers, one by one, I made some very wobbly stripes across the driveway. Then tidied them up into wobbly clear areas, and worked those wobbles down along the driveway into another pile. I kept at it until I could not feel my left foot, stalled, re-started, and parked the tractor. Then I went out with a snow shovel to hide the evidence. Snow shoveling warmed up my toes, but by then it was getting dark.

So approximately 20 linear feet of the banks along our 1/4 mile driveway are my doing, but I did leave it clearer than I found it.

When I awoke the next morning, the rest of the driveway was cleared into head-high banks, monuments to the ongoing artistry of Cap'n Ron Wisner, who gives the term 'disabled' a baffling irony. It's not that he is healthy, exactly; he often sprains or throws out various body parts running his snowplow. It's just that he Does Not Quit. And he is so tickled when he gets done accomplishing something tangible, tidy, and of real service to others, that I don't see him quitting anytime soon.

Ernie also Does Not Quit. After almost a year of baffled attempts, and increasingly simple advice from online friends, he triumphed this week over the lesser gods and demons of the Online Store. We now have working sales links for rocket stove plans, a cob oven booklet, and other assorted goodies at our website.

Paul Wheaton also Does Not Quit. He came to visit on his way across the frozen north, recorded a multi-hour rocket stove podcast and then held its publication until we got the online store working, with the happy result that a number of his Pod People offered enthusiastic advice for resolving all our remaining technical problems.

Well, not all our technical problems. Now we have some accounting to do, in order to properly report this new income.

Luckily, First Mate Janine Wisner happens to be a retired accountant.

It's been an exciting week at the Wisner homestead, all things considered.

-Ernie And Erica

Okanogan Permaculture Study Group

Since moving to the Okanogan Highlands, we've gotten interested in local culture, and particularly in the number of creative, conscientious, and experienced folks who are dedicated to good stewardship of their lands. 

Our newly-forming Okanogan Permaculture Study Group includes a lot of these folks:  private farmers and foresters and ranchers; agency employees who look after public lands; nature lovers such as hunters, fishers, and conservationists; builders and garden designers and teachers; all kinds of people who are thinking how to improve their own little piece of heaven in sustainable ways.

Wintering In

For the last five months, we have been insulating, burying water lines, sealing windows, building a masonry heater, chopping firewood, clearing the driveway of obstacles, and sorting our storage into 'do not freeze' and 'who cares'.

Now that the snow is here, and we are snug inside, it's time for other things.

Today I've been working on sewing, gift-type items mostly. Yesterday I made an egg basket.

Our chickens have, contrary to the usual practice of chickens, increased the eggs they are laying now that it is cold. (Well, really my in-laws' chickens, but I feed them often enough that they recognize me as part of the Hive Mom.) I think it's mostly the fact that the spring chickens have finally matured enough to start laying. It doesn't hurt that we feed them the fatty scraps from our winter-weight diet of bacon, pot roast, or cheesy pasta. I took them some leftover bird-suet, too. Ron tells me that their feathers are mostly protein, so if they don't get enough meat (bugs being scarce under snow) they stop laying in winter. Vegetarian chickens are rarely the happiest or healthiest chickens; Ron and Janine even gave them the turkey carcass after Thanksgiving (though we do make a point not to feed them their own eggs). If you doubt, check out the Youtube video of 'a hen and her mouse'.

The basket is sized to hold an egg carton (I used a dozen-egg carton to measure it, but it should hold two of these, or the 18-egg carton, pretty easily). It also has flattened bulges in the bottom, to keep the eggs apart in case you don't bring the carton out with you. I'm thinking it needs some more detail, maybe a cloth liner, or some cording along the rim, to coordinate with the detail on the handle.

Tonight, I think I'll do a little more of the sewing, then make a smaller sewing work-basket for my current projects.

It's very satisfying having this much 'free' time. I try to keep the creative projects to the evenings, and save the business day for keeping up with email, finances, and the ongoing logistics of setting up workshops and teaching classes. I'll be in Portland working with Trackers for winter break, for example, and if I don't want to drive a Geo Metro through ten-plus hours of snow, I'd better get some train tickets tomorrow.

Ernie has been doing his version of 'sedentary puttering,' which includes setting up his dad's computer to run boat-design software, and keeping in touch with the Internet providers after a mix-up with our service. We went down to the elder Wisners' house yesterday for a couple of games of cards, contract Rummy, which has many more rules than anyone could remember until I broke them one by one. And there are plots and plans afoot for Christmas gifts. Apple butter, peach preserves, and Ron is stocking his pantry for a winter storm of fresh-baked bread and other treats...

Hope the longer nights are affording you a similar abundance of time for peaceful productivity,
yours,
Ernie and Erica

Oysturkey and the Tea Stump

Thanksgiving was very creative this year.
Ernie can't eat poultry, so we did a wild-rice and oyster 'stuffing' with oyster mushrooms and lots of other yummy stuff in it. I got silly and made it look like a turkey, complete with oyster 'wattle'. We shared it, and lots of other good food, at the Campbell family thanksgiving dinner. There were only 15 people for dinner this year, plus another 5 who stopped by after dessert - down from 30+ people when I was growing up.
In between seeing family and helping with the Trackers Thanksgiving Break camps, we got excited about making a tea-stove for a local preschool teacher. Turns out the pre-school (and kindergarten) is located in the basement of the same church where the Campbells went as kids - talk about a small world, or at least a small Beaverton.

The program has the kids outdoors every day, sometimes all day, and so they wanted a way to make hot tea or snacks, without risking the kids getting hurt. We've done tea stoves for outdoor kitchens before, but this site had a special challenge: since it's a shared space, the stove has to be able to move to a storage shed when not in use.

So we went looking for light-weight, weather-resistant, insulative materials that could handle internal temperatures over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. And be safe on the outside for little fingers. We found Western Industrial Ceramics, who cater to glassblowers and other small-scale artists and businesses, as well as large-scale foundries and high-temperature furnace installers. Nice to meet people who are equally happy to help you on a tiny project, while telling you about orders from the aerospace industry!

We used their ceramic-fiber insulative board, and a cool-looking tube they happened to have in overstock, to make a lightweight stove that works beautifully. It boils a gallon of water in under 10 minutes (a liter takes less than 5), on a tiny handful of kindling. (You can see the amount in the fuel feed; it's literally the split pieces of one or two sticks, and a couple of 'big' pieces of 1x2" scrap. After the water boiled with this amount of wood, we added one stick at a time, and kept it boiling for another 20 minutes on two more sticks, just because we could.)

Plus we got to decorated it like a magical stump. The brass rim helps keep the heat around the pot, and little fingers away from the danger zone. The outer shell is plaster-of-Paris on canvas, with a non-toxic clay paint. Not super waterproof, but reasonably tough, and easy to repair.
I'm going to post the basic plans on our website soon at ErnieAndErica.info; the one alteration will be a slightly taller heat riser (the pre-formed core is a bare 18" tall) so the pot is up above the tip of the flame and doesn't get so sooty. Paul Wheaton of the Permaculture Forums is also interested in working with us on a bigger model that could be used as a turkey-fryer (or, for my own personal preference, an outdoor cookstove for canning when it's hot in the summer, without violating the burn bans on open flame).


We were pretty pleased with ourselves. Hopefully, the teachers will be happy with it - they are planning to coat the outside with some linseed oil so it is a little more waterproof.

Another fine mess at Mom's house, by Ernie and Erica.

Tonasket - Like a Heavy Basket

About ten years ago, Ernie's father and stepmother retired from commercial fishing to live on top of Mt Hall.

They found 12 acres of alpine/high-desert woodland with an actual pond, which now supports a small dock and canoe (just in case the water level ever gets high enough to support recreational boating).

Ron plows snow into the pond each winter while clearing the driveway, and grumps that he wouldn't mind the Forest Service helicopters dipping water out to fight wildfires, if they'd just return the same amount afterwards.

Janine waters the garden and a handful of fruit trees from one of their two wells.

They've invited us to join them up here, with the option to build our own home, or boat, or whatever strikes our fancy, on a corner of the property that has its own well, power, and road access.

Dancing with the Future

Working with kids is a lot like contact improv dance, or any kind of theatrical improv games. You never know what's going to happen. Excellence comes from having a good general plan and fitness, yet being flexible enough to say 'Yes!' to a better opportunity.

Working with children is like improvisational modern dance, except instead of a troupe of peers with similar skills and training, you are dancing with the future.

I just got done with two really fun training programs, one as a trainee, one as a trainer. Luckily they came in the right order. '-)

TrackersEARTH has doubled in size yet again this year, which means bringing a lot of perrenial staff like me back on full-time for the summer, AND hiring almost the same number of people from outside. And buying a gorgeous chunk of land up in the Marmot area (between Sandy and Mt. Hood). So we all went there together to get to know each other, and practice the skills for handling large numbers of children in multiple sites at once. One new and interesting plan for this summer is Silent Wednesdays. That's right: from the moment the kids walk in with their parents, until they walk out the door again after pick-up, nobody talks. We prep them for this on Monday and Tuesday, and of course emergencies may arise, but we role-played this a little bit (I've done it with adults for cob building, too, and it seems very cool.)

Then I went to teach a training for the Multnomah County Childcare Resource and Referral Center. On paper crafts. Which would be a piece of cake for me, even after a long week... except that I had put IN THE COURSE DESCRIPTION that we would 'Use ordinary paper to create a marvelous world: moving birds and fish, jumping frogs, glittering snowflakes, seasonal
mobiles, memory mosaics. Refresh your creative spirit, get the kids crafting, and recycle your own paper scraps into cards,
placemats, party favors, and gorgeous handmade paper art."

Now I can do each of the things above, and I've taught many of them with good results.
Yet the above list represents a LOT of hands-on skills to learn in 2 hours, especially if I need to coach adults through their creative anxiety or directions that are not written for their learning style. And many of the ways I would make these projects are not suitable for children under age 3.

Fortunately, I had Kiko's mother's excellent book, Making Things, by Anne Sayre Wiseman. Photocopies from this became DIY instruction pages. I got permission from an origami enthusiast from the UK, David Petty, to reproduce some origami diagrams from his website.

I was prepping for this class between training for Trackers summer camps, and taking the CDL trainings and exam. I had to get a new printer, which had a defective part, so I had to go to the 24-hour copy center anyway, but I also needed sleep...

I headed up the hill for the 3-day overnight Trackers training camp, feeling very much exhausted and overburdened. Ernie came along for the first day to advise on their primitive outdoor kitchen. We drove back down that night, I gave a ride to another trainee in the morning, and then settled in for training.

My colleagues are awesome.

We had trainings on handling mandatory reporting, safety with fire, knives, bows and arrows, and how to make fiery magic tricks. We had trainings on traditional handicrafts like spinning, knitting, and finger-knitting easy enough to teach 4-year-olds. We had meetings of groups who will be coordinating the camps with themes like Middle Earth, Four Elements, Ninja Stealth, Jamey's Magic School Bus Time Machine, Wilderness Survival, and School of Magic. We hung around by the campfire and made music, had a Dr Horrible Sing-Along Blog viewing with 40 people singing along, celebrated a birthday, and slept in tipis or under the stars. Staff from the Bay Area came up and shared little fragments of their lives with us, and returned with a skin-on-frame canoe to use in programming.

The capper was a 2-hour silent hike / stealth game / foam-arrow 'tag' / bear-, elk-, and cougar-tracking adventure. We never did learn the entire shape of the game, just went out in groups with some of the competent team coordinators and practiced silent communication and quiet awareness. Got muddy, hid in ferns, met the traces of large and small creatures, and got yelled at a lot by birds and squirrels. There's something humbling about being among the first people to crush a patch of oxalis and pathfinder, and knowing you will have the chance to share this delicate understorey with hundreds of children over the summer.

I came back to town relaxed and centered, and much more aware of the grittiness of concrete and traffic that surrounds my daily life.

So when the time came to take my prepared printouts, and make the childcare-providers class, I was cheerful and confident.
I invited them to role-play teaching each activity to each other, whether as adults or as children of the ages they supervise. We had a marvelous session, with everyone contributing ideas for fathers-day projects as well as learning plenty of new paper crafts. We even invented a Jumping Tadpole, which is easier to make and jumps farther than the best Jumping Frog that I was able to find online.

It's a pleasure to work with each other cooperatively, instead of trying to guard some kind of superior place! I like being a facilitator much better than a lecturer.

Trees With Wings

We got back from our most recent (and delightful) workshop to discover some tantalizing paperwork from Social Security, suggesting that Ernie's claim is moving forward faster than expected.

Wow.

Then I checked his account online, and a deposit Monday confirmed it. Still waiting for the official award letter, so we don't know what monthly amount to expect.

From juggling pre-employment costs and part-time jobs, to planning for long-postponed repairs and projects.

We've weathered some tough times these past few years. I hope we can make the transition to relative luxury with equal luck, before we buckle down to fixed-income living again.

So far we're still giddy, and trying not to make any firm decisions until reality sets in. It's weird not to have to choose between printer ink and the electric bill. I have started harping on 'boat part equivalencies' just to keep in the habit. ("Two large pizzas is worth about 3 quarts of epoxy, go ahead and order it, but not too often.") I sound like Erma Bombeck.

He wants to pay to get my teeth fixed. I want to see the official award letter before we spend any of it.

But the basics we've already lined out:

1) Pay off all outstanding debts.

2) Get the car repaired and tuned up, current on all its maintenance.

3) Start planning the big-boat building project that's been Ernie's goal for years.

Trees With Wings is the phrase that we came up with, on a trip to the coast last year.

(This seems to be the only 'trees with wings' currently on the internet, so I'll be looking into business names soon. Cool art, but nothing like the image we plan to use: http://www.redbubble.com/people/jadey/art/2771046-trees-with-wings#)

Another is "The Lifeboat Project."

The idea: To create a blue-water sailboat, live aboard, and use the boat as a platform for education programs, disaster relief, and small scale cargo or charters. To use the building, outfitting, and operations of the vessel as educational opportunities, and strengthen links between coastal communities for a resilient future.

The boat: a 40+ foot sailing catamaran, capable of transporting cargo, crew, or serving as a 'mothership' for maritime education adventures. Also capable of beaching in remote areas to assist with disaster relief, wild foods harvesting, or serve as a floating field hospital.

Building it ourselves seems necessary to suit Ernie's 2-meter height and special needs (like handholds and fewer steps).

That means we need about a 50' shed, at least 20' wide (the whole thing, assembled, is 25' wide, but we can build the parts indoors and then assemble them outdoors).

And lots of plywood and epoxy.

(Ernie ran the numbers, and it looked to him like traditional wooden boats required too much old-growth wood. Not environmentally sustainable without dedicated forest lands, given the lifetime and maintenance of the boats. With regret, since we love them, we are not likely to build a traditional wooden boat in the near future unless we can salvage most or all of the wood. We salvaged about 90% of the Tari's wood, and are adding higher-grade fiberglass and epoxy before registering her for this year's festivals.)

From a question of 'will it ever be possible,' it's become a question of, 'Where do we build it?' Do we go up to Ernie's dad's remote mountain cabin, for his invaluable help to speed and smooth the build?

Do we stay between Portland and Seattle, where Erica's family and our current circle of acquaintances would be delighted to be involved (including several very competent boatbuilders)?

Do we lodge ourselves with the friends who have the best available barn or Quonset hut, near the coast, or the other friends with on-site milling of custom Port Orford cedar?

Such pleasant questions to consider.