The Family-Holiday Morass strikes again

I haven't gotten around to doing anything in the past few weeks. Ever since Thanksgiving, it's been one unfocused, vaguely hectic day after another. Nova has been struggling along with her teeth. She has horrible decay in her front top teeth because of my tooth-cleaning negligence combined with night nursing, and her bottom back molars were coming in.

Nova had her 2nd birthday, and I made two cakes for two separate celebrations of the occasion. The first, a Chocolate Brownie Torte with White Chocolate Mousse and Caramelized Bananas was a bit of a flop, but tasted good. Nova enjoyed blowing out the candles and eating it.


The second cake was equally mediocre, but held together better. It was a basic chocolate cake with orange frosting and chocolate-frosting decorations. I tried to decorate it with the traditional pastry bag and tips. Nova ate the bits of chocolate off the top. Obviously her diet is not as tooth-friendly as a dentist would wish for, either.

We have been doing a much better job at keeping up with the tooth-cleaning, though, and she has an appointment to get some fillings on Christmas Eve. Hopefully there'll be enough excitement afterwards that she'll forget the agony and forgive us for putting her through it!

Meanwhile, we've had a storm which had us snowed in, with the power on, for a good 36 hours. We all played in it together on the first day, making snow angels and throwing the dry, powdery snow around. Nova had no interest in coming inside until she was soaking wet. This morning, I introduced her to sledding. We went down the gentle slope of hill next to my parents' house a few times, and promised to come back to it later today, or tomorrow morning.

I intend to write Christmas cards and send them out in the next 48 hours. Ha!

Renovation Update

I haven't been posting much lately, and don't have much excuse, but I'm logging on today to report that there is visible progress in our house renovation -- the floors are in (mostly):



In addition, we spent the entire day Wednesday on an expedition to Ikea to pick up the kitchen cabinets, which are piled in the basement, waiting for the plumbing, wiring, insulation, drywall, and painting to be done.

"Shut Up!"

A few days ago, Nova started saying "Shut up!" loudly, emphatically, and frequently. We were puzzled and troubled by this development. We don't say that around here, at least I don't think we do. Where had she picked it up? Who was she telling to "shut up"?

Well, along came this morning's batch of pancakes, and Nova started the shouting again. "Shut up! Shut up!"

And then we took it out of the fridge:



Syrup!

Beginning The Artist's Way

I don't remember when I first heard about The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. It must have been over a decade ago, but I never felt the urge to try out the program until a few days ago. It's just not my style, not what I really needed. I was pretty confident about my creative direction and the work I was doing. I was writing novels, revising them, sending them out, getting rejections, and starting the whole process over and over again.

The accumulation of rejections, without a single expression of interest in my fiction writing, was moderately discouraging, but not unusual. I was prepared for it. I kept going, knowing that persistence was the key to success. I could have kept going like that, but since our return to the US almost three months ago, I just can't find the time. You might think that with all the other adults around to entertain Nova, I should have more time to write than I had in Galway, but it doesn't work out that way. There, I could write while she napped, or find a quiet moment in the early mornings or evenings. Here, there's just too much to do, and too many people around all the time. I need my own space to write. I need a house or a cafe table to myself, where I know I won't be dragged off into conversation or into doing some minor housekeeping task for just a minute.

That's just not possible around here, not these days. I can beg a few hours here or there to write a newspaper article or go to a writers' group, but to write fiction? Forget about it. Not the kind of time I'd need to create anything substantial. I know what I need: To write or revise a novel, I need at least 1-2 hours/day, at least five days a week, for three or four months. And I can't get it. I've asked for it, and I can't get it, can't afford it, can't find it. I'm really frustrated. I have to figure what I can do, and how to deal with my stalled novel-writing career, my lost momentum.

I went down to the Bunch of Grapes on Tuesday and picked up The Artist's Way, hoping that it would help somehow. I don't know if it will or not, but I'm going to give it a half-baked try. The first chapter advises setting aside 7-10 hours a week to work through the program. If I had 7-10 hours a week, 7-10 solid hours, d'y'know what I'd be doing? Writing!!! Real writing, not just self-help journalizing! But the book also promises creative and spiritual renewal, which would be nice. So I'm going to give it a shot, at a rate of about a half-hour a day, half the recommended time, because that's all I can find in my current situation.

We'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, I hope to keep blogging about the miscellany of life around here.

Last Blast of the Blueberries

In the early 1980s, perhaps in the summer of 1983, my grandfather, Professor Henry Clay Smith, took it into his head to plant about fifty blueberry bushes in front of his house. He had the idea -- suspect even at the time -- that these blueberry bushes would provide for his grand-children's college tuition. Even with today's rising food prices and this year's excellent blueberry season, the patch could produce at most $1000 worth of blueberries in a year. In retrospect, we think that the blueberries-as-college-tuition idea might have been an early sign of my grandfather's future decline into Alzheimer's disease.

But it was a spectacular season. When we arrived here in late July, the front bushes were producing a good crop, and only four days ago, in the first week of October, I took these pictures. Most of the bushes look like this:

In the last row, two final bushes were still loaded with berries:

Next year, as part of my orchard plan, I hope to put in a few blueberry bushes of our own.

Home food production design

Mike has a fondness for talking about the zombie apocalypse. He figures, since he can live on beans and packet noodles, he's in better shape to survive it than I am, with my gourmet tastes for a ridiculously wide range of foods. My brother and his wife are living off the grid (except that they hop over here to use the shower, washing machine, and internet connection) and have a truly lovely vegetable garden.

I want to get in on this apocalypse-prep game, but my way of doing it is to skim about fifty million web pages and a few dozen books on the subject before I do anything that requires physical work or much investment of money. Besides, I don't really think that the apocalypse (zombie or otherwise) is coming anytime soon, and in the meantime none of us are making much money (to put it mildly). So, I have spent the past four or five days calculating our food needs, projecting costs, and figuring out how that all lines up with what kind of food we can produce on our three acres of sand without putting in more than 5-10 hours a week, max. Because in all likelihood, I'm the one who's going to be doing all or most of the work, and I don't want to be a full-time subsistence farmer.

Figuring out the cost of food and the cost of gardening is a bit of a puzzle. Because we're living with my parents, I can't get a good food-cost estimate from our current grocery bill, but when I was single here I always seemed to spend about $200/month at the grocery store. $200/week seems to be a reasonable estimate for a family of four in our very expensive neighborhood, and it lines up pretty closely with the USDA "moderate" food plan. I also looked at prices in the grocery store - $7.50/lb for the cheaper chicken breasts, $5 for a half gallon of organic milk (but only about half that price for the regular milk), and $3 or more for most of the fresh produce, except for bananas, onions, potatoes, etc. which are a bit less than a dollar a pound. I figure this is the expensive stuff, and that organic fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy products have the highest markup of anything in the grocery store. Most grains and dried beans are cheap, most spices won't grow here, and growing tropical fruits here is pretty much out of the question.

So, let's assume that the annual cost of food would be about $10,000 for a family of four, because that's a nice round number and pretty close to my best current estimate (and the USDA's numbers, too). The cost of gardening and raising animals is a bit harder for me to figure.

Fruits and Vegetables:

Let's start with gardening and my pet project, the orchard. Fencing seems to be about $1/foot. We would need 200 ft. to enclose my planned garden, 300-400 feet for the orchard. So, in the interests of keeping numbers tidy, let's say that's $500 of fencing. A cheap greenhouse/cold frame will run about $500. If those last 5-10 years each, that makes $100-200/year for fencing etc. I'll say $200/year, because really, I know it will be even more than that, even if we get fence posts out of our own woods (we have a couple of locust trees). I'll also figure about $200/year for fertilizer and mulch. We make some compost, but this land needs a lot of enrichment. Another $100-200 a year would go to seeds and plants (I know this could be done for less, but I'm trying to be realistic). So, the cost of my vegetable garden should run about $500/year, no more than $1000/year.

The cost of our local CSA is on the upper end of that range. They're pretty good, but you can't choose what you get and there's usually a lot of waste. They also don't do fruits, except for some raspberries. In addition, they're only open 5-6 months of the year. My hope is that we'll be able to get close to year-round vegetable production using the techniques outlined in Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. So yes, I think I can make that work.

Dairy Goats:

I would like to keep goats, but I know it would take a lot of time and effort, and Mike thinks it's going way too far along the road to actual farming. But just for fun, let me run the numbers. Suppose we kept 2 milking does and 1 wether. They would need housing, fencing, and milking equipment, probably a solid thousand dollar's worth or more, which might be good for about ten years (coincidentally, that's also the approximate working life of a milking doe). From the look of things, they'd get a lot of forage around here, but miking does would still need grain and all that plus the odd bit of veterinary care. Let's say that's $5/day total for 3 goats (based on price of Purina Goat Chow and feed estimates at the Fias Co Farm website). That's almost $2000/year (rounding up)... I looked up some other sites and this estimate seems way too high, but it still seems like you're looking at at least $20/week for feed for a few milking goats, taking into account the fact that we're on an island and everything here is expensive, except for perhaps the goats themselves. You can buy a goat around here for about $75-$100. Total cost of keeping some dairy goats: probably not much less than $1500/year.

If we spend $30/week on good milk and cheddar cheese, that's also $1500/year, and a whole lot less work. I know that you can make goat butter, but frankly it sounds like more trouble than it's worth. The only way I think it would be worthwhile is if you could share the goats among 2 or 3 equally committed and involved households -- not a likely scenario, given what people are like. I'd also like goats to clear out some of our brush, but that's a different scenario. OK. I'm scratching goats off the list for now!

Chickens, Eggs, and other poultry:

My brother and his wife keep chickens. They seem to be pretty easy, not too much work on a day-to-day basis, and Nova enjoys them. They go into their coops at night, and forage freely during the day. I don't think they eat much chicken feed, at least not in the summer. The down side of their free-ranging is that we never know where the heck they're hiding most of their eggs, though there are usually a few in the laying boxes coops. Also, they poo everywhere.

They shared a big batch of mixed-sex chicks with our cousin, Jethro, and they all planned to use the male birds as meat. This has not been as successful as the egg end of the business. Slaughter, plucking, and gutting are all pretty nasty, and there are vegetarians around. I think it might be worth it, though.

Another option would be to get ducks, which are cuter than chickens and have nicer voices. I just ate a duck egg and it was yummy. Duck meat is awfully good, too, and quite a luxury item. They're also good at eating bugs and slugs, and so complement the vegetable garden.

I like this page for a run-down on the cost of raising chickens, and feel confident that because even the cheap eggs here are $3/dozen, it would be worthwhile for us financially. At present, our household of goes through one egg per person, per day, on average. Most of us have an egg for breakfast most days, and some go into baking and cooking. So, for my theoretical family of four we'd want 28 eggs a week, over two dozen. If those eggs cost, say, $2 less per dozen than our grocery store eggs, and we extend the laying season a bit and store some for the early months of winter, that could be a savings of $4/week, or $200 over the course of the year. Not big money, but something.

Small Livestock for Meat:

I have a book called Backyard Livestock, which I've been poking at on and off since I picked it up a few years ago. It's almost got me convinced that we could save oodles of money by raising our own animals for meat. However, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration, like our current lack of fenced pasture land, the cost of transporting animals off-island and halfway across the state to the nearest federally licensed slaughterhouse, and the fact that Mike is threatening to turn into a vegetarian. In any case, I will leave that part of the project for another year.

In Conclusion:
I'm pretty sure we can save money by growing most of our own vegetables and raising chickens &/or ducks, but the jury is out on doing anything involving mammals.

Clearing ground, and more design musings

So, we have moved back to the Vineyard, back to my parents' house, and are renovating the house that I grew up in, summers, and lived in for a few years here and there in my earlier adulthood. It's all on one big lot. My parents built the original house in 1971-'72, but in the mid-90s, they decided it just wasn't big enough to serve as their primary residence... especially since it had (horror of horrors) only one bathroom. So they built this house, which is about two or three times the size of the old one, and has three and a half baths.

The two houses share roughly five acres, most of it covered in scrubby oak and pine. People have always said to me that they think this is a beautiful part of the island, but I've never been enthusiastic about the landscape immediately surrounding our house. I find it dull and a bit closed in. The trees loom over the house, making it feel dark except when the late-afternoon sun hits its more open northwest side.

In hopes of remedying this situation, I have made a preliminary landscape plan which calls for cutting down at least fifty to a hundred trees and killing off about a huge poison-ivy thicket. I want to replace all of that with lawn, garden, and orchard. It's a long range plan, and I worry that it might be a bit too ambitious, but if we're going to be living here for the foreseeable future, I want to enjoy the place and get the most out of it.

At the moment, I have no qualms about clearing those trees. They crowd each other horribly, and all of them of species that are plentiful around here.

Meanwhile, we're 99% done with the demolition and my father is on the verge of saying we can set a date with the tile guy. I'm shopping kitchen cabinets like there's nothing else to do, and musing on the economics of gardening and home food production. More on that in a minute!