Home from the fair

I have always wanted to go to a Mother Earth News Fair, and finally, this year, I got a chance. Kim and I spent a long weekend in Puyallup, Washington, hanging out with lots and lots of homesteaders, gardeners, environmentalists and food activists, going to workshops and demonstrations, and cruising the vendor booths. 

Here are a few highlights.

Best workshop (Miriam's pick): "Growing Your Health Independence" by Dawn Combs of Mockingbird Meadows. Lots and lots of specific and practical information about stocking a largely home grown medicine cabinet for common family ailments.

Best workshop (Kim's pick): "Top Bar Hives: It's All About the Wax" by Christy Hemenway. (Here's a link to her TED talk about the importance of honey bees) I probably don't need to tell you that Kim has come home already planning her first hive.

Worst workshop. Ever. Hands Down: "The Half-Acre Homestead" by Lloyd Kahn. Despite its description, and despite the respected and long standing reputation of the presenter, this workshop was a series of photos of "homesteading tools" thought to be useful. Like a pitchfork. And a shovel. And nails hammered into a kitchen wall to hang cooking implements from. A cappuccino maker. And a spatula for scraping plates into a compost bucket. When the presenter started flashing photos of marijuana vaporizers (as a homesteading tool? Really? Is that because homesteading is so horrible?) I left. At the point so had half the audience.

Second worst workshop: "Homestead Healthcare" by Amy and Joseph Alton (aka "Nurse Amy and Doctor Bones").  I had my doubts about this one because the presenters are the owners of a company that sells medical supplies to doomsday preppers, but the workshop description was benign enough I thought there might be something there for me. Nope. Pretty quickly we were into isolation techniques for when the great pandemic hits, and how to keep "your women" from getting pregnant because then they wouldn't be able to contribute 110%. Who has women? Do men still own women? I left before they started talking about treating gunshot wounds and zombie bites.

Favourite signs that you're not at just any country fair: The candy apples? Organic. Those cinnamon-sugar mini donuts? Gluten-free. The pony cart rides?



Those ain't ponies...

Best Vendor Samples: First place goes to Bob's Red Mill, which was giving out gluten-free granola packets, nifty gizmos to keep open packages closed, and dough scrapers. The runner up is Mary's Crackers, which was giving out packets of, well, crackers.

Most Nerdy Fan Moment: Ed Begley Jr? Nah. Joel Salatin? Nope. Not even Barbara Damrosch. For me it was meeting Erica of Northwest Edible Life. I embarrassed myself. Read her wonderful post on the fair for a much more thoughtful take on the weekend than the one you're getting here.

Happiest Moment: Picking up Frankie at the kennel and being greeted by a happy dog instead of a stressed out one.

Auction revisited

Yes, those are lamps from street lights for sale. I'm sure all kinds of people went to the auction looking for those.

The annual spring Coombs Farm Auction happened a couple of weekends ago and Kim and I went - we had so much fun the first time we went we decided to make it an annual tradition. (In my family, where we treat traditions with a level of seriousness and commitment most people reserve for their religious beliefs, we believe that if you do something, anything, twice it's a tradition and must be observed faithfully for ever after. Once, if you really have fun.)

If you're a long time reader of the blog and the above photo looks familiar, there's a good reason: the same players were there, bringing the same farm stuff (aka "junk") to be auctioned off by the same family raising money for a children's charity. Here's last year's photo, so you can aompare it to the one above.



Same sign, same guy, slightly different junk. Better weather, though.

This year I didn't try anywhere near as hard to find a diamond in the rough - I just took pictures instead.


Is this junk, or is this junk?


Old rusty barrels.


Dirty and cracked bottles.


Rusty, broken-down Ford tractor.


A fancy cabinet-style incubator with no top and a circuit board full of straw, chicken poop and feathers. It must be functional. For sure.

The cost of a holiday

Sure, we had fun on our recent trip to New Orleans, but Frankie and Petunia didn't enjoy the experience too much.

Petunia, for whom the phrase scaredy-cat was invented, spent the entire week hiding in the house. Both neighbourhood families who came in to check on things spent a lot of time scouring the house for her, but no way was she coming out. It's a good thing food was disappearing from her bowl with extreme regularity (there's nothing wrong with Petunia in the appetite department) or our good neighbours might have thought Petunia was a figment of our imagination.

Don't feel too bad for her, though. She got her own when we came back. I think we opened the door for her "let-me-in, no, let-me-out" dance about 57 times within our first hour home.

And Frankie. Poor Frankie. Poor sensitive, dear, sweet Frankie. You can feel sorry for him. We knew our going away was going to be rough on him, so we did our very best to find a good place for him to be. Friends are pretty much out of the question, since Frankie can't be left at home alone. We have good friends, but that's a lot to ask. And we didn't want to leave him in a cage in a kennel on a cold cement floor.

So we called around, and talked to a lot of people, and finally decided on a local kennel run by a couple who were willing to bring him into their home with a few other senior and special needs dogs, rather than have him with the general doggy population. We brought Frankie for a visit, checked them out, and decided it was the best of our choices.

He was safe, and well cared for, but really stressed. How do we know? When we picked him up he had his stressed out Cujo buggy dog eyes, and had licked one of his front paws raw. We know those symptoms well, from the days when we were first confronted with his separation anxiety.

It breaks our hearts. If only there was some way to be sure our pets know we will be coming home.

Now, after a few days of his regular routine, Frankie's eyes are his own again, and we have our sweet boy back. But his healing paw is driving him nuts, and he won't leave it alone. We tried a sock, we tried a velcro-fastened bootie. But Frankie is a dog who made a hobby of escaping from crates and closed rooms. Do you think a bootie would stand in his way?

So today we resorted to The Cone. Frankie is being a good sport about it, but he's having a hard time adjusting to his changed dimensions. Kim had to carry him up the stairs because when he looked down as he tried to climb up the cone would catch on the edge of the treads. Our champion athlete who could catch any ball thrown keeps bumping into walls and cupboards. And he keeps looking at us with those beautiful sweet eyes, and we know he's thinking "It's bad enough you left me, now you have to subject me to this indignity?"

That's the cost of our holiday: psychological trauma inflicted on our beloved pets.

It's making us think twice - no, forty-seven times - about our next holiday.

Nawlins, y'all

The Pontalba Building at the edge of Jackson Square

Did you miss me? Last week Kim and I took a trip to seek out a little sunshine, some history, and lots of good music. Where did we go? New Orleans, of course, and we had a really, really good time. 

The band Yes Ma'am on Royal Street

There was music everywhere. Royal Street, behind our hotel, was closed off to cars during the day and became a pedestrian mall with a different band busking on every corner. We heard all kinds of music, from rock 'n roll to classical violin, but mostly there were bands with a 1920s-and-30s swing-vagabond-gypsy flair, with washboards and string basses and banjos, all of which suited us just fine. Fabulous musicians, all performing for tips and CD sales. Speaking of CDs, we came home with ten...

The Froggies on Frenchman Street

The Smoking Time Jazz Club on Royal Street

We could have done nothing but wander the streets listening to the buskers and come home feeling like we'd had a real musical treat. But we also went to a number of clubs, including historic Preservation Hall...

...the Spotted Cat...

Showarama Hot Trio

... and the club called dba, where there seems to be a swing dance party in permanent session. I got swept into the dancing by a very nice young fellow who just couldn't sit still and needed a partner. Kim found this funny. I found it horrifying, but once I relaxed I actually had fun. The club was dark and it was impossible to take photos, but I think this one captures a bit of the feeling of being surrounded by a packed room full of people of all ages and sizes, furiously swing dancing and lindy-hopping.

It was a lot of fun to watch, and I am just grateful (given I was sitting six inches from the dance floor) to have escaped with all my teeth and no broken nose.

One of the things we learned about New Orleans is that nobody seems to know what gluten-free means. The world will really be a different place when the Cafe du Monde serves gluten-free beignets. They don't, currently, but I didn't let that stop me. I didn't let the prospect of a sugar-induced diabetic coma stop me, either.

Yes, I ate them, and yes, I lived to tell the tale.

Another thing we learned about New Orleans is that the people are genuinely, unbelievably friendly. Not fake humour-the-tourists friendly, but real make-eye-contact-and-smile-and-"How y'all doin' ladies?" friendly. Not just hotel employees, but regular people on the street, too. We thought Canadians were friendly, but we've got nothing on the people of New Orleans.

We chose New Orleans for our holiday as much for the history and architecture as for the music. The French Quarter reminds me of a sort of Caribbean version of Paris, which I guess it is. Maybe it's because both sets of my grandparents lived in pink houses, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the colourful Creole architecture.

Some buildings, like the Napoleon House across the street from our hotel, date to the late 18th century.

It's now a bar and restaurant, with a lovely courtyard. We ended up there for an emergency cappuccino one afternoon near the end of our trip. It's called the Napoleon House because there was a plot to spring Napoleon from his prison on St. Helena and bring him to New Orleans, where he would be installed as an honoured guest in this house. That never happened, of course, but there's more than enough atmosphere in the place to make you think it did.

We spent a couple of afternoons in cemeteries: St. Louis #1 in the Treme neighbourhood, and the Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District, and thanks to a helpful tour guide we learned a lot about how to deal with a dead body in a location where the water table is just a few feet below ground, that ground being more of a soil sponge than actual terra firma. Above ground tombs are the answer, and the construction of them (brick covered with plaster) reminded me a lot of how an outdoor oven is built. It turns out the similarity is not accidental: with internal temperatures reaching 350 degrees during the summer months, human remains and wooden coffins deteriorate in short order. Which is a good thing, since it probably won't be too long before another body needs interring in the family crypt. When that happens the door is opened, the small pile of remaining remains is gathered up and put in the "basement" of the tomb, and the new body and coffin slid in. I don't at all mean this in a disrespectful way, but it made me think of hot composting. What an efficient and practical way of dealing with what is left of us when we die.

(And speaking of Treme, we are real fans of the HBO series, and how thrilled were we, in the Cafe Rose Nicaud on Frenchman Street, to discover that we were having breakfast right next to one of its stars? Woo hoo!)

Many tombs themselves are returning to the earth, as the families that owned and cared for them die out or scatter. The tour we joined was led by a volunteer from Save Our Cemeteries, a local group working to restore and preserve the tombs in the city's historic cemeteries. It may not have been as colourful as the vampire and voodoo tours we passed, but we felt good knowing the money we had paid for tickets would be going to a good cause.

A funeral took place the afternoon we spent in the Lafayette Cemetery in the Garden District. It was a good reminder for us that many of the tombs are still in use by local families. These fellows were waiting a little ways away waiting for the service to end and the family to leave, so they could reseal the door of the tomb.

While we were in the Garden District we wandered the streets looking at beautiful houses...

...ancient live oak trees with gravity-defying canopies...

...and the local animal population.

It doesn't seem right to write about a visit to New Orleans and not talk about Katrina. There is an exhibit at the Presbytere on Jackson Square focusing on how Louisiana has dealt with hurricanes, that taught us a little bit. Mostly what it taught me was how little I know, and how much I want to know more. There was no way I was going to be a disaster tourist and get on a bus to tour the hardest hit areas of the city, but I really wanted to learn more about how a community of people can surmount catastrophe and betrayal and abandonment in order to rebuild a unique and special culture. Just before we left I found the book 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose, who was a Pulitzer prize finalist for his post-Katrina columns in the Times-Picayune  - the writings that have been gathered together in this book. The short essays are full of humour and despair and stories of real people; frustration and hope and anger and irony and celebration. It has been a long time since a book has affected me this much, and I really recommend it.

And now it's lovely to be home, where the snowdrops have hit their maturity, and where the first crocuses are starting to bloom. I'm a home-body: it's wonderful to have an occasional adventure, but it's even nicer to come home.

Knitting

Thanks to the inspiration of Ann at Shim Farm, who reminded me of the pleasures of Lopi, and my friend Elisabeth, who knits socks that are works of art, I recently rooted through my long-forgotten box of knitting supplies, dug out my needles and knit this shawl.

It seems the familiar Leave Things 90% Unfinished Syndrome that governs our home renovations applies to knitting projects, too. The shawl got almost finished quite quickly, but then it stalled, with strand ends waiting to be woven in and the fringe undone. Finally I got my act together and finished it off one day (and took the photo you see), only to come home from tutoring the next day to the news that Frankie had decided it looked awfully soft and cozy and had dragged it off the back of a chair with his paws and snuggled with it on the floor, in the process creating a number of pulls and bobbles. Oh well. Nothing that can't be fixed. After all, people (and that includes dogs) are more important than things.

I mostly knit the shawl in front of the TV, which made the process of watching the latest episode of Boardwalk Empire less of a frivolous use of my time. Does anyone just sit and knit, without something else going on? That's a bit too stultifying for me, and there's only so much TV I am willing to watch. So my new favourite thing to do while knitting is to listen to an audiobook on my ipod. Which I did on my recent trip to Calgary, which involved about 50 hours on a train. What a perfect combination: the rock of the train, spectacular scenery passing by the windows, being read a good book with a pair of needles in my hands, learning to cable knit.

And speaking of needles, I have learned of the pleasures of wooden needles, which somehow feel more fitting in my fingers than metal or (gasp!) plastic ones. They make it easier to channel the spirit of Laura, which is part of the fun.

The next project? Another scarf, with wool made of merino and silk, in a shade of green to bring out the sparkle in my honey's eyes.

Singing in the rain

Kim and Frankie at Spray Lakes.

We're just back from a road trip to meet my parents in Canmore for the Canmore Folk Music Festival. I think you always learn something about yourself when you go on a road trip, and this journey was no exception. I learned that, compared to my parents, I am a wimp.

On the last evening of the festival it was me, Mom and Dad all sitting in a row in our little camp chairs, listening to wonderful musicians work their magic surrounded by the mountains and trees and blue sky. Only it wasn't blue sky: after a blistering hot weekend the clouds had rolled in and the wind had picked up. I was just thinking that maybe I should have brought my rain jacket when the first stray drops hit my bare head. Then the stray drops turned into light rain, and the crowd around me began to move as people lazily reached for sweaters and jackets. Then the wind became a little more persistent and people hunkered down a little more. Then the light rain turned into official rain, then heavy rain, and the crowd started to scramble, zipping up jackets and flipping up hoods, huddling under the tarps they had been sitting on, opening umbrellas. I had just suggested to my parents that maybe it was time to reconsider our priorities when the sky really opened and the rain began pelting down. I hung onto the rain poncho my mom fished out of her bag for me, doing my best to keep it closed while the wind did its best to whip it open.

And then it began to hail.

That was it for me. No more trying to be a good sport. I leaned forward to shout through the din that maybe we should call it quits (my parents' townhouse being a convenient half-block away from the festival grounds) and the forward movement let a big puddle of water that had been accumulating in a dip in the poncho slide right down my back, soaking my butt. But Mom and Dad just looked at me in bemusement, politely wondering how a daughter they had raised could let a little rain get to her. I ran. They stayed, for the whole rest of the evening, through rain and hail and  distant lightning that lit up the night sky, while I warmed up, dried off, and ate chocolate at home.

I am a wimp.


Frankie the Travellin' Dog asleep in the car.

I learned something else: Frankie the Farm Dog likes hotels. We've had this trip planned for a while, and of course we booked Frankie into a kennel. But in the last six months or so he has begun to show his age, and we started to feel awful about leaving him behind. So we did something we've never done before: we brought him with us.

Since it would take two days of driving to get to Canmore, this would mean finding a pet friendly hotel along the way. I was more than a little worried about how Frankie would do, since he's a creature of habit and routine and any changes in his environment make him anxious, but much to our surprise it turns out Frankie quite likes hotel life. He likes elevators, and long hallways, and drinking from hotel toilets. He was a butt-wiggling happy dog in the hotel on the way to Canmore, and a butt-wiggling happy (though somewhat tired) dog in the hotel on the way back home. Go figure.

Tofino

Did you miss me? I've been enjoying a wonderful week with my sister, who was visiting from Toronto. We went thrift store shopping, played with the chickens, planted potatoes, went to an auction, cooked and ate and talked and talked and talked. And we went to Tofino overnight, so she could get an ocean fix.

Since it was a special visit we spent a night at the Wickaninnish Inn. This was the view from our window. 

The Inn is on Chesterman Beach, which wasn't busy midweek, so there was lots of room for walking and thinking and listening to the surf.

And now my sister is back at home with her family and things seem awfully quiet here at Mucky Boots. Come back soon!