New Vocabulary Term

"Spontaneous car fire"

That's when a car parked in your garage (or wherever) suddenly burns up with no good reason.

And that's what happened at our house early, early this morning.

Everyone is fine. The fire department was awesome. The garage is remarkably undamaged, except maybe some water damage.

It was good the smoke alarm was near the garage. It was good Jason realized it wasn't the ipod beeping. It was good we live this close to town.

Preparing for the Trip

We leave day after tomorrow for Texas, and the plans are well underway. Elmer will go with Jason to work for the next two weeks so that he will not be lonely. Many thanks to Temple Grandin for helping me convince him of this necessity. Doby the budgerigar will go to a friend's house tomorrow, the same friend Elmer will stay with when Jason joins us in Texas (Many thanks, Friend!). Another friend will tend the cats when Jason leaves.

Jason is making scones for breakfast tomorrow morning so that we can take the leftovers with us Sunday morning. The plan is to leave very early (6:00?) Sunday morning and arrive in Cincinnati Sunday night along this route. It will be a long day but it will be worth it to not have to deal with a motel and then getting back in the car the next morning. Then, we'll spend Monday in Cincinnati recuperating and gearing up for another day of driving. I hope the weather is fine and we go to one of the many superb parks Cincinnati has to offer. But, there is also a truly awesome museum with a children's section that works for everyone from little Oliver to big Ezra. That would be a fine place to spend the day.

Then, Tuesday morning bright and early, we hit the road again. This time my goal is to make it to Gina's house this way. It will be another really long day, but then we'll be in Texas and the fun can begin.

Being Right

I will admit that I like to be right; I like the superior feeling I get from knowing I'm better than you. The trouble comes when I meet someone more right than me or someone who is right in a way I used to be. And the older I get, the more people I meet who indeed seem at least as "right" as I am and often, even more right.

Confronted repeatedly with this evidence, I spend many hours, like as I am trying to go to sleep or when I am driving alone in the car, puzzling out how I can be right and someone else can be right and we are not doing things at all the same. How can I be right to use a homeschool curriculum and my unschooling friends be right in their fluid days? How can I reasonably argue that I'm right to feed my pets a raw diet when the pets of my childhood ate really cheap kibble and lived to their dotage? How can I be as uptight as I am about food and not strive to be as uptight as my even more uptight friends? If they are more right, why am I not trying to do the same thing they're doing? How can my very amorphous beliefs regarding god and the universe seem so very right when so many people I love might fret over my salvation? How can I commit myself so entirely to homeschooling in the face of my quite strong belief that it almost doesn't matter how school happens? How can I claim any superiority?

The Truth, as I see it, is I cannot.

I can only live in my skin and make decisions from behind my own eyes. And while I love to hear how other people do things and how they got to that point, it does not mean it will change my mind. I also love to talk about how I got to where I am in my thinking and doing, but I've given up on claiming I know what I'm doing. I try to serve my opinions with a heavy dose of my own doubt. I love the saying, "Your mileage may vary," because it's so complete. It helps me remember how much nicer life is when I am not superior, when I am just open to what comes my way.

Food

As I have been preparing for our upcoming trip to Texas I've been pondering the best way to deal with the trip and the food around a trip. I have driven to Cincinnati a couple of times by myself with the children, and one of those times, we did pretty well for food and the other time, not so good.

So, this morning, I said to the children "We are not stopping for any fast food on our way to Texas." They all said, "YEA! No junky food!" (This is proof that my brainwashing is working.) Then I said, "Let's think of things we might like to have that would make the trip more bearable and maybe feel more like a treat."

Ezra said "May we have oranges?" Affirmative.

Phaedra said, "May we have O's?" Affirmative. (O's are the Heritage O's you can sometimes find in bulk.)

Sylvie asked if we could eat at Cracker Barrel. Maybe for breakfast, but no junk from the "gift" shop.

After I mentioned having individual yogurts instead of our standard milkshake-for-the-road and one IZZE per day, they got giddy. They have all picked which flavor of which they'll have, and everyone agreed that hummus and chips and bread and cheese would be fine as long as we have the oranges. There was a request for trailmix and another for nuts.

I might get a strong yearning for a coke around Buffalo and Little Rock, but I have the children to keep me on this path, I guess.

How Many Trees Can I Water?

Let's pretend the next few things are limitless: time, water, and my awesome strength. In that pretend place, I could plant as many trees as we can currently imagine wanting. Here's the math that makes me question just how many trees I can plant.

If each tree needs 5 gallons of water every day for 4 to 6 weeks and that much water 2 to 3 times a week throughout the first season, and maybe all of the second season, too, that's a lot of water even for just one tree.

My friend has a pond and she fills buckets at her pond and then hauls the filled buckets to her trees. It is admittedly difficult work, but it's pretty darn quick to fill a five gallon bucket from the edge of a pond. I would have to stand at the hose filling my imaginary bucket. Oh, and I should mention that my hose water passes through my pressure tank. I could also use the frost free hydrant (much better choice). It is still going to take some time to fill the five gallon bucket.

Then I have to haul the bucket to the trees. Yes, I could run that hose out to the trees, but that would take yards and yards of hose and we would probably have questionable pressure, making the filling of the bucket still slower. I also have not investigated the frost free hydrant, and I know next to nothing (at the moment) about such things, so I do not know if a hose can be connected to it. Definitely worth investigating.

This year, I only want to plant twenty fruit trees, five "shade" trees, 40 hazel bushes, and 26 berry bushes. Then there's the two big gardens and various other garden spots around the house. Let's pretend again for a second that I plant all those trees and bushes and that the garden will not ever need water. Let's also remember that one gallon of water weighs roughly 8 pounds. Each of those 91 trees and bushes would take 40 pounds of water a day for the first 4 to 6 weeks, hauled somehow by me and the children. That equals 3640 pounds of water a day. I'm pretty sure that my plans are a bit grandiose.

Sleep

We implemented early bedtime for Ezra when he was about 18months old, and we've been pretty committed to it for the children ever since. It took a bit longer for us to see the impact of our own sleep-lack, like maybe 7 years, or once Sylvie started sleeping through the night consistently. It's amazing what good sleep means for everyone in a family.

I know that we've all heard how much our bodies need sleep, how ADD-type symptoms can be strongly correlated with too little sleep or even inconsistent sleep, how driving when tired is marked in some locales as an offense. I just think it can't hurt to say it all again.

For our family, there are many obvious signs that one, or many, of us is getting too little sleep. Sylvie cries more and screams more and annoys more when she goes to bed too late. Phaedra gets a bit mean and inflexible when her worries or anticipations keep her awake. Ezra is more prone to tears, the long-suffering kind, as we all seem to be more unjust when he's tired. Jason gets snippy and I get angry. Each of us is more easily overwhelmed. These things are only obvious when the regular pattern is enough sleep; many behaviors would seem normal or understandable if we were not more familiar with our own resiliency and adaptability.

A commitment to sleep in our family means we miss out on many things. For the most part, we do not do anything as a family in the evening. There are naturally exceptions, but we acknowledge the price in family harmony ahead of time. This means sports have been pretty much out of the question. It means one adult accompanies one or two older children to live music or plays while the other stays home with the younger one or two. It means many evenings when Jason comes home, Sylvie is already in bed and the other two have had reading time before dinner.

As the children get older, we test the envelope. Truthfully, Ezra does not seem to need much sleep for a child his age; he gets a much later time for lights out and still lays awake for another hour most nights with no sign of irritability the next day. Phaedra and Sylvie seem to need eleven to thirteen hours of sleep most nights, Phaedra on the low end, Sylvie on the high end. This can be difficult, because Phaedra finds it extremely unfair that Ezra gets to stay up much later than her. We haven't found a good compromise beyond, "Go to bed!"

For Jason and me, 10:00 seems a pretty good bedtime. We like to think we can stay up to 11:00 without a problem, but one errand the next day will reveal my sleep lack. Sometimes, it's hard to be the adult.

Security and Resiliency

I've saved this one for last because it was overwhelming both in scope and content. The presenter was Ben Falk of Whole Systems Design but the workshop was not specifically about permaculture.

Instead, he started with a list of catastrophic things that could happen, touching briefly probability (alien invasion vs. pandemic). Then he began covering a list of items and skills you might want in place in such an event.

Some things were obvious, like hand tools and the knowledge of how to use them. Other things would not have immediately come to my mind, like gravity fed water.

I feel like he tried to stay relatively light, but his topic was naturally a bit depressing and scary. My sense of "hurry, hurry" to learn how to grow a variety of food and to enmesh myself in my new community is heightened. I want to have a small generator on hand. I want to be somewhat comfortable with a gun. I want to know how to take care of cows and find a resource for hay.  I want to get fruit trees planted and get the pines down. I want to plant some trees that can be coppiced for firewood. And so on. I do not even enjoy reporting on this seminar, but I think it was important.