Rosie, one smart goat

The goats are penned in an enclosed back porch, which has glass doors leading to the living room & dining room. They are currently sharing it with many, many chickens who arrived in early March. The goats are tethered to one section of the porch.

Rose has figured out how to loosen her collar enough to slip out of it. This morning Jim discovered that she had:

• Slipped out of her collar
• Eaten all the chicken feed (she'll need to eat a lot of roughage today to avoid a catastrophic tummy ache)
• Started to work on the door handle to get into the house. They are lever type handles; she's quite capable of figuring them out.

I have this image of waking up to a goat climbing into bed with me. Dearie, dearie me.

The Mysterious Traveler has a nice post on the goats, including a view from my living room. Rose is the one in the pink collar.

A new tea house

It is important to me to have a place to go and relax over a cup of really good tea. My all-time favorite was Tiger Mt. Tea in Gilman Village, but they are now web-only. Yesterday on my way home from visiting Julia I ended up at Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, and stopped in at Xiu Xian Tea. It was lovely.

First let me tell you that their web site only hints at the varieties of tea they carry. One long wall is lined with big jars of tea, behind a counter. And in front of that counter are small jars of the same teas. You can open the small jars, sniff them, look at them -- without disturbing the tea that's for sale.

The staff was very helpful in suggesting teas to sample. Yes, sample. This is where it gets luxurious. I was guided to one of two large gong fu tea tables near the front of the store. These tables are works of art, carved from huge burls, waterproofed, and fitted with a drain. The one I was at had several levels, a carved bridge, and two dragon heads -- all designed so that water poured anywhere on the table flows to the drain. Electric water kettles are nearby, and there are a number of gaiwans for brewing the tea samples. The chairs are also carved from burls, and are really comfortable.

Your hostess puts a sample of a tea you have chosen in a gaiwan, rinses it with water from the kettle, and pours out the rinse water. New water goes into gaiwan, the brewed tea is poured into a serving pitcher and then...

At the moment it is served in a paper cup. The kitchen has just been set up, and the dishwasher isn't installed yet. My recommendation: Bring a tasting cup, or buy a $1 tasting cup at the store. Paper adds an odd taste to these delicate teas.

I tasted several teas, three that I'd sniffed out and some that were already sitting in the gaiwans on the table. I bought three:

• Sweet Jade, that has an incredible vanilla overtone although it is just tea, no added flavoring
  
• Iron God (rich) a savory and complex oolong with a silky finish
  
• An organic Pu Erh (Palace - Rich) with a gorgeous red color and good earthy flavor

I'm looking forward to going back there. While this is primarily a place to buy tea, they do have small tables at the back of the shop with gong fu tea trays where you can linger over a pot of tea, brewing and re-brewing to enjoy all the flavors the tea has to offer. If you are in the area and want a peaceful place to unwind, I recommend it. Maybe I'll see you there.

Twitter

Karen, bless her, has turned me on to Twitter. I've mailed the URL for her post What's Twitter, and why I love it to a few people, and now I'm sharing that URL with you here. If you've heard of Twitter and your reaction was along the lines of ??What?, Why?, or "That's just silly," check out Karen's post. And let me know when you sign up for Twitter.

New chicks on order

I got an email yesterday from Ideal Poultry. My name came up on the waiting list for Barnevelders! Barnevelders are one of the breeds of chickens that lay dark, dark brown eggs. They're pretty rare, hence the waiting list.

I called Ideal today and placed my entire chick order with them:

• 15 Barnevelders
  
• 6 Easter Eggers (EEs)
  
• 15 Australorps (Aussies)
  
• 6 Silver-laced Wyandottes
  
• 6 Gold-laced Wyandottes
  
• 8 Red sex-link
  
• 5 Gold sex-link

They are scheduled to ship 5 March, so I'm hoping for an EARLY call from the post office on the morning of the 6th.

Himself plans to be building the chicken coop starting 20 March, when his classes let out. He assures me the work will go fast once it starts. He's going to scale it for 100 chickens, with two runs. That way everyone will still have space to stretch her wings and do all those other important chicken activities. And I'll be able to keep the new chicks separate from the adults.

Short term, we'll have the brooder cage on the back porch, which is still enclosed as a goat stall.

Laid off, sorta

For the past couple of years I've had a dream gig, writing technical documentation part-time, from home, for a group of really nice people with a well thought out product. About a week and a half ago, in the middle of a mail thread on what they'd like me to work on next, I got the following message: "I was just talking to _____ to see what the high priorities are for the next few months and we feel we are in a great position (much thanks to you). For now we are going to hold off any new updates to the manuals and see where that takes us. We will definitely keep you informed if our needs change."

The suddenness of the shift threw me off for a day or two, but frankly I'm more excited about what might be next than I am concerned about what just went away. The world is changing (again), and in change there is always opportunity. I'm good with words, I'm good with critters, and I believe that there is the opportunity for depth and richness in everything we do. Surely I can combine all of that to make a life that supports me financially, emotionally, and spiritually.

While I was writing manuals in Word, Web-based writing and networking grew and morphed, and continues to do so. There it is again, change and opportunity. So I'm actively studying the current state of web-based writing, including blogging, networking, and things like Twitter. I'm studying search engine optimization (SEO). I'm looking for the next shift in this wonderful connected world the Web has brought us.

I'm watching for ways to draw together seemingly disparate skills and interests (animals, technology, psychology, bead work and textile arts, small farm management, ...). They all have one thing, at least, in common: they all live in me. Ergo, they all fit together, and they all describe the way that I fit into the world. My work right now is to find how I can offer them up in a way that supports me and mine in return.

FRESH Eggs!

Breakfast this morning included two fresh eggs for each of us. We are talking still warm from the chicken here. The whites are thick and the yolks are firm and round and deep orange. The flavor is great -- we had them over easy with not so much as salt and pepper and they held their own just fine.

Last week I started to have two eggs for dinner and ended up having four. I had them with Roasted Roots -- in this case a yam, a double handful of red potatoes, and a yellow onion, all cubed, tossed with lemon juice and olive oil, sprinkled with salt, pepper, and an Italian herb blend, and spread out on a foil-lined baking pan. Bake at 350 until tender and just starting to caramelize.

If you are thinking it might be nice to have a couple of chickens in your back yard, even just for the eggs, the answer is yes. Once you get set up with housing for them, their care takes minutes a day: Check that there is enough food & water, toss them food scraps from your kitchen and any weeds you've been pulling from your garden, and bring in the eggs. Most people end up hanging out with the chickens a bit more than that, though, because they are amusing. You'll want to really clean out the coop once or twice a year, say on some nice spring day as part of gardening. Other than that even cleanup is minimal (scatter food grade diatomaceous earth & wood chips once every week or two or three). All in all, a flock of chickens is much less work than a cat or a dog. And they do a great job on those garden weeds.

I've started selling eggs, too. Himself, watching the egg cartons pile up in the fridge, was threatening to serve chicken dinner if I didn't start selling eggs to subsidize their upkeep and housing. Our flock of twelve is producing almost five dozen eggs per week. So I ran an ad on Craigslist, and now have a few families that I'll be supplying on a regular basis.

Of course, that's encouraging me to get MORE chickens. I'll be putting in an order soon.

We have GOT to get that coop built. The big girls are OK in a sheltered run, but babies need better protection in the late winter and early spring.

The creek is rising

There is a lovely little seasonal creek just behind our house. It usually runs from late fall to mid or late spring, maybe until early summer if it has been a wet winter.

At the moment, it is running the highest I've ever seen it. It's making a wonderful noise, and it's flooding much of the back yard. We've been clearing branches from the culvert to make sure it doesn't flood near the house.
 


The winter has, so far, been pretty extraordinary. A dusting of snow or a freezing night is usually a big deal here. We had snow on the ground from December 19th until this morning, and it was below freezing for most of that time. Here are some pics from the snow.


 

Now, of course, we have the high water (with plenty of rain coming down to join that snow melt). It's only January; we are getting into the winter weather season. I'm glad we have lots of firewood, and a generator.

The Year of Prompt Solutions

The new year sputtered to a start in our neighborhood -- the pump went out on the community well sometime New Years Eve, and we all woke up to no water. Happily, it was fixed and the system recharged before nightfall. Maybe 2009 will be the Year of Prompt Solutions.

I've got some serious must-do items for the coming year: I need to get my house in order, literally and figuratively.

Literally:
We are still sorting through all the stuff -- from Jim's business closing, from my folks downsizing, from plain old unexamined accumulations. I am starting to see the light at the end of that tunnel, and that helps.

We still aren't really set up for the critters. We put temporary insulated walls up on the back porch to see the goats through our extra-severe winter weather. Gigi was still recovering when the cold hit and we really needed to keep them warm. We need a real goat shed for them. They won't appreciate it, though. They've gotten used to watching us in the living room at night. The chickens will appreciate a proper coop. They did amazingly well through the cold, partly by eating heroic quantities of layer pellets. But now the runoff from the melting snow is invading their run, and damp is worse for them than cold. Well, at least it is well-ventilated.

We managed to tear up the yard, front & back, last summer. Now we need to landscape and plant.

Figuratively cleaning house, now that's harder. I need to sort out some new directions for my work. I'm burned out on the kind of writing that has been my bread & butter for so long. Really, really burned out. It's a bit scary. So I'm looking at other ways to make a living. Faux finishing... I'm pretty good at it but this is not the economy to build a new business like that. (But, oooh, I do want to get into those traditional lime plasters. Beautiful stuff, natural materials, and it makes for a healthy indoor environment. That is what we will be wanting in our homes.) Writing is still my mainstay. I'm looking at ways to make money writing about things other than computers and software.

With the house clean and tidy, the animals properly housed, and work in front of me that doesn't constantly remind me of difficult times, I expect to have a lot more energy. Enough to get paying work done and still have the time and enegy to work in the garden and with the animals, doing the things that light me up.

I don't know how long your "must do" list is for this year. But I know we are all apprehensive about the economy, the ecosystem, etc. So let us raise our cups to the Year of Prompt Solutions.