Home and Family

Whenever I mention to people that my stove set my house on fire last week, they assume it must be my wood cookstove.  But no, it was the electric stove that nearly burned down the house last week.  I was canning raspberry jam on a warm indian summer's day, and thinking about our anticipated sukkah guests that night, when I walked back into the kitchen to find the stove and the back wall of my kitchen in flames, and one of my electric burners shooting sparks.  Fortunately the fire extinguishers we have always kept at hand near every st0ve worked just fine - but we were lucky.  Another two…

Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland Lass! Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pass! Alone she cuts and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound. No Nightingale did ever chaunt More welcome notes to weary bands Of travellers in some shady haunt, Among Arabian sands: A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides. Will no one tell me what she sings?— Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy,…

So I somehow forgot to mention when I went on maternity leave and promised to post on Thursdays that I meant I would start this Thursday, since I was on vacation last week.  Sorry 'bout that.  I will shamelessly blame the baby and sleep deprivation again. We spent much of last week visiting family near Boston, which was lovely - the transition with K. and C. really took it out of us.  I'm not a high-stress person, I tend to be pretty relaxed, but we really needed a break after two very hectic weeks and a lot of emotion.  Among other things, we had sent K. and C. home two days before the movie…

Hi Folks - The more I look at my life, the more I think I'm not doing things as well as I could be - too many balls in the air.  Many of the things I care about are paying a price.   The addition of the chronic sleep deprivation that goes with a new baby is pushing me to strip down my life to the bare minimum. What's frustrating me most is that writing and online work are taking up time I should be spending on sustainability measures - while I'm writing about the joys of pickling, I'm not actually making pickles with the kids.   For a long time this was manageable, but right now, with a two…

Given that January is the season for regretting excesses and making new starts, I thought I'd offer Sharon's patented formula for losing 10lbs fast - absolutely guaranteed to take off the weight like lightning.; Day 1: Spend most of the day getting ready for a weekend event - running errands, shopping at local markets, prepping to prepare lunch for 20+ people. Run into friends and acquaintances and chat about the upcoming event. 3pm Day 1: Get a call from your caseworker announcing that she has four children, 4, 3, 2 and 1 in need of an emergency placement - can you take them RIGHT NOW?…

I grew up with handy parents, and I learned some things from them - cooking, chopping wood, making do, but there were still things I missed out on. Even though my step-mother is a talented woodworker, I never learned. Even though she does plumbing repair, I didn't pay attention when I could have. My father hunted, but I wasn't interested when he might have taken me and taught me to be a better shot than I am. My grandmother and aunt were remarkably talented at knitting, sewing and crocheting - I've had to painfully learn those skills over myself without them. Can I just say how badly I'd like…

There are ten children in my house, but six of them are phantoms. No, we haven't gotten a foster placement or heard anything new since the two weeks in August when we were asked to take two separate groups of five kids each. Both of those placements fell through, and there has been nothing since, which is sort of the problem. I have little patience with being expectant, whether pregnant or waiting for a foster placement, and the six (this is a totally arbitrary number that I'm using only because it represents the number of van seats, and thus the maximum placement we could take) "ghost…

Thought you might want to see what the storm looked like from here. Let me note that this is a pretty minor situation - the farms in the valley that we rely most heavily on lost *all* of their crops - the whole thing was swept away by the storm. Still, I admit, I broke into the chocolate the first time I saw my garden under the water. You can see my poor flattened corn up there and a few cheerful echinacea flowers that at least for now have survived the flood. The back beds are wetland native herbs and plants - they at least will probably make it. You can see the raging torrent that…

So we made it through. Let me just note, however, that anyone who says that Irene was a wimpy storm that didn't do much damage shoulda been here. We're safe, but it was a near thing. We had close to 9 inches of rain and wind gusts that I'd estimate above 60mph - they took down two big locust trees and several willows. One of the locusts came down 10 feet from the buck barn where the buck goats and the calves were, another 10 feet from the rear of the house, while my kids were sitting in the room reading. Our enormous beech tree was entirely surrounded by the rushing creek (it is normally…

Friday was a fabulous day, after a very, very long week. For a week, we frantically prepared for our final home visit. Some of it was pretty normal stuff - minor repairs, etc... Some of it, I think was pretty weird - who knew that freshly washed window screens were a requirement to be a good foster parent (yes, they did explicitly require that). They gave us hoops, and we jumped through like trained tigers ;-). But we passed - in what is still the first biggest news here in our particular tiny household in New York, Eric and I will be (as soon as the paperwork is processed) New York State…

I came home last Monday night after three days spent in Washington working on business for the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, and it was one of the most glorious homecomings I could imagine. Not only was there the joy of coming home to my boys and Eric, but also my home is more like paradise in June than at any moment. (Mac the Marshmallow waiting to welcome me home) We're headed into the transition point from spring to summer, and you can feel it. The spring bulbs are behind us, the peonies are in bloom, the animals are fat and happy on lush growth, and there are jars of…

Ed Brayton has a post showing a series of polls that indicate that a majority of Americans now approve a gay marriage.This is good news for a whole host of reasons, among them that gay marriage is good for straight folk too - particularly in a society struggling with economic and environmental issues. I've written about this before, and about why I think gay marriage may be a gift to all marriages: As long as we view the establishment of a marital household as the creation of something discrete and apart from the families from which they emerged, in both economic and social senses, we find…

I'm getting a lot of questions via email and comments about our experience entering into the foster parenting world, and I did want to talk about this. Some people are critical, and think we're nuts (quite possibly), some people want to watch because they want to try this too (cool), some people have been there themselves in some portion of the system - as a worker, parent or child and have a lot to teach us. I wanted to put up a post that tells more about where we are and what we're doing - and also includes an important caveat about what I will and won't be writing about. What I Will And…

I've had a number of emails recently, as I've written here, at The Chatelaine's Keys (Yes, I know the site is down - there was a billing mixup that required a fax to fix - we don't have one at home and we got a foot and a half of snow on Friday, too much to bother struggling out for. The blog will be back soon, now that Eric is at work where faxes are more prevalent than out here on the farm.) and on facebook about the process of preparing to foster and eventually hopefully adopt more children that asked what this had to do with peak energy and climate change. I'm a little reluctant to…

Note: I wrote this piece in 2009, when my boys were younger. By now they chop food for dinner, Isaiah can indeed use the hatchet and Simon and Isaiah have their own flocks of birds, and the sale of any eggs they raise. The general principles are still the same. We still don't give allowances per se, but allow the children to do extra labor to earn money, over and above the chores they do simply because they live here. I found myself thinking about this book in the context of the discussion around the "Tiger Mother" book that advocates all of children's attention be focused on purely…

This will be a quiet week - I've got my Dad making his annual visit, a talk, a short trip, and then a slew of guests arriving for the weekend for Simon's 9th birthday party and Simon's first Torah reading (he's too young to read in the main synagogue, but he'll be the youngest kid ever to chant Torah at our shul in Junior Congregation), and there's a lot of cooking, plus the getting-ready-for-winter stuff is in high gear. So don't expect too much of me ;-). The single FAQ about me is "how do you do it all?" The standard answer I have given since the question started to occur is still true…

I have a vivid memory as a teenager of yelling at my Mother, "I didn't ask for two mothers! I don't need two mothers! I don't even want *you* and you got me this other one who won't leave me alone!" I was 14 and about as revolting as every other fourteen year old, or maybe just a little more. And like most step-children, I resented the heck out of my step-Mom, Susie. I have to say, I'm awed by anyone who sticks with it through the outs and ins of step-parenting - you've got my admiration - just thinking back on how unrewarding it was for my step-mother makes me realize y'all who take on…

We almost did it. We really did. We went so far as to get mortgage pre-approval, meet with a builder about the costs of repairing the barn and the house, and make an appointment to make a written offer. And we decided to stay here. There were several reasons for doing so. The first was that our offer would be contingent, and we thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the sellers might well sell the house out from under us - that is, since we didn't per se want to sell the house, but rather to buy *this particular different house* the fact that we're in no way ready to show (my…

It might have been Serendipity - we happened to be driving by, just Eric and I on our brief solo trip. Or it might have been the survey ribbons that went up across the road a few weeks ago - the suggestion that our neighbors who have been building a 5000 square foot house with a special dog-washing bathroom (no, I'm not kidding) are going to help finance that by selling off the plot of open land right across the street. Or it might have been the fact that our property tax assessment went up by nearly 2000 dollars this year - to almost 6K! Or it could be the fact that despite the face we're…

The first thing you need to know about my farm is that it is huge. I mean enormous - by world standards. The vast majority of the world's farms - more than 80%, are very small farms, of less than 2 hectares (about 5 acres), and they produce the majority of the world's staple crops and calories. I suspect most folks in most of the Global North will find that a little surprising. The term "farm" in the US tends be applied most often to very large farms. We have a strong internal sense that small scale agriculture is particularly unsuited to growing staples. Most small farms in the US…