Claro que si

It snowed last night. Alot. So instead of dealing with 75 maniacal middle schoolers from Grand Canyon High, I got a day off and went to the movies with a friend. We saw "The Motorcycle Diaries" and boy oh boy was it good. And not in that hollywood, overdone, big effects, already-know-the-plot-from-the-trailer way either. A Sundance film, it has found it's way into a few theaters and it is some kinda thing. If you like good ciniema, run, don't walk to see it. If you like hollywood's pre-digested rot-gut, don't bother, just rent "The Fast and the Furious" again. I'm not gonna tell you what it's about, you'll just have to go and see it.

Let's just say it provided incentive to brush up on my spanish, especially before my trip to Cuba.

And salsa! I went to salsa dancing lessons last night for the second time and I have gotta say, it is a little adicting. Now some of the folks there can be kinda intimidating, but the vast majority are like me, that is barely a clue but reasonably enthusiastic. And I'm getting better, which is exciting, but not unforseen, as I could not possibly have gotten worse. As if that wasn't enough, I got the number of a cute little thing that dances like nothing I have ever seen before. Wait, I take that back. For those that remember, months back I posted about seeing my first fire-whirl, that is a tornadoe or whirl-wind of fire, which sometimes occur during wildfires. They spin tightly, dancing up and down through the trees, "like a sexy woman salsa dancing in a tight red dress."

Fortune Favors The Bold

No, I don't really have anything to write about that particular subject right now, but it was going through my head earlier, and I tend to think wise words bear repitition. If it speaks to you, good. If not, then keep reading. No, the rest of the post isn't going to be any deeper, but you're here now so you may as well keep reading.

We bottled the beer today. 47 bottles. Actually 45 good bottles and 2 mostly sorta filled bottled of what was left at the bottom of the catch pan and fermenter. Still, for the price of ingrediants, it works out to like 39.7 cents per beer. Amortize the cost of equipment over three batches or so and it is still cheaper than more commercial beer. Of course the proof is in the tasting, which will have to wait a week or so. The bottling process itself was midly comic, with my roomate and I and dozens of bottles scattered around the kitchen trying to siphon the beer out of the fermenter without spraying it all over the floor/fridge/counter/compost bucket, etc. I'll tell you what though, all those months of saving beer bottle caps really paid off when we went to cap those bottles.

The rabbits, contrary to popular belief, are not breeding like rabbits. I will try again tommorrow. So far in two previous attempts, the older doe tried to mount the buck when he wouldn't do his job, and the younger doe wouldn't allow the buck, even when he did try. But each succesive attempt has shown the promise of improvment. And if you were wondering, no this is not going to be used as a metaphor for life, as the garden was. Sorry to disapoint you.

Grasshoppers are eating the rubharb

It sounds kinda like a code. Like, "the eagle has landed" or "liberty is on the move."
But no, it's real, grasshoppers are ganging up one one of my two rubharb plants and have brought it quite to its' knees. If rubharb had knees. It's funny they should gang up on just one plant, you'd think they would spread out and eat both plants, so as to not kill them and consume their resources unsustainably. But no... Damn locust, they're just like people.

Post script: I meant to write that yesterday. Today it would seem the problem has solved itself, as both rubharb plants, the asparagus, lettuce, and pretty much everything is now under several inches of snow. So we'll see how things look in spring, for now it looks as though winter has arrived, bring on the ski season!

Eh, what's up doc?

Yep, that's right, we got rabbits. 3 of 'em to be exact: one buck and two does, both of which are about ready to breed. Soon I hope to have many rabbits, and following that, much meat in the freezer and pelts to make... ummm, hats?

I must be sick

But not in the puking/feverish/malaria sense of the word. More like in the deranged/mentally unstable sense. Why else would I be looking for a new race when the soreness from my most recent exercise in masochism hasn't even worn off yet? This last Saturday, 2 co-workers and I ran the Soulstice Mountain races in the mountains north of Flagstaff. They were sensible and ran the short course, about 6 miles. I was out of my head and signed up for the long course, 11.5 miles, all of it at altitudes above 7500 feet, with elevation gain and loss around 2000 feet. It made sense 3 months ago when I signed up, but come race day, it kicked my butt.
I made my two goals, that is I finished the race and didn't come in last, or even too near to last, but I still bonked, hard. Around mile 10 or so my blood sugar was crashing and I ended up just half running half staggering the last mile and a half. But I can stagger with the best of 'em. Anyway, after I crossed the finish and downed a bagel and some fruit, I felt fine, as if I could keep running. Therefore I suspect I could have run significantly better with proper blood sugar management. Ah well, lessons learned.
So now I am half-sorta looking for a new race to look forward to. I am considering the Valley of Fire half marathon in Nevada, and would be all over the Death Valley half marathon, but I'll be out of town then. We shall see how ambitious I get here.
And I go to visit the rabbit guy this afternoon.

The house smells like beer

But not in that rancid, sweet-sticky-nauseaus-morning-after-the-party way. More like a wholesome, yeasty, grainy, aromatic way. Yep, the next phase of Operation Turn-My-House-Into-An-Anachronism is under way. The first batch of Homestead Dark is now brewing away in a corner of the kitchen. Thanks to the very simple recipe here that my roomate found while meandering 'bout the web. Of course since I could never take a recipe and leave well enough alone, I modified this one a bit to. I figure that if molasses is good, honey must be ok too, and using them both must be better yet. And since I didn't know whether to steep the hops or just dump 'em in, I did both. Bottling is in 5-7 days and then they will age until the party. Oh, you didn't know about the party? October 30th, saturday night, my place. Halloween, so if ya got a costume, wear it. And be prepared for some homebrew goodness. Part of the reason for my lack of knowledge is that I did virtually no research before begining the brewing. That's part of the problem with most of my half-cocked ideas: they have a very short shelf life and tend to get pushed out of the way by new ideas on a regular basis, like the runt goslings get kicked out of the nest by their genitically superior brethren. Except I have found no evidence to support the notion that my schemes get better with natural selection. Oh, and speaking of geese, still no eggs. I am begining to suspect that they naturally shut down in the winter and that their travels may have flipped the switch into the off position till spring. Today, since they had not yet ventured into the goose shanty that I built for them, I herded them in there and fed them inside so as to introduce them to the concept of shelter, since it is getting into the 20's at night and snow is on the way. So what is next, you may (or may not) wonder? Well, a stack of 20 or so books on the kitchen table dealing with small scale farming, homesteading, and animal husbandry will surley yield some projects, but for now I'm pursuing a book I just couldn't pass up when down at the Home-Brewer's Outpost: "The Lore of Still Building." Oh yeah baby! Stay tuned for updates.

Number of dashes used in this post: 14
Number of paragraphs: 1
Number of english classes I took to graduate college: 0

A nice night for a hike

The pager went off at 8:49, just as I was about to begin the process of brewing my first batch of homemade beer. (More on that later.) The call out said 69 year old woman hiking alone on the Kachina Trail was over due. Well, call out information is rarely worth a damn, it could as easily be a 45 year old german man in the grand canyon, but nonetheless I grabbed my gear and headed for the Search and Rescue building. The usual, issue radios, grab stretches and litters, complain about how cold/windy/dark/late it is, even though everyone there is excited to be there and going on a search. "Gets me outta the house..." one guy says. When we get near the mountain, we find out it is actually the Humphrey's Peak Trail she is on, but remarkably the rest of the information is good. I think to myself that I should have brought gaiters; we'll probably be in the snow. We get on scene, meet with the incident commmander for a quick briefing and head out. Seems the DPS helicopter saw a flashlight, but had to refuel and should be back shortly. We think she is about is in the bowl, about halfway up the mountain. Split into two teams, my team starts up the main trail, stopping to whistle and shout every so often. The lights of town below blink through the trees and fool me into thinking it is a flashlight. And the wind has picked up, gusts to 40 mph now, so trees are creaking and falling around us. Helicopter won't be able to do much in this wind, at this altitude, at night. But come back he does, if only for a few moments. He sees us and then sees teh flashlight again. We are close, but he can't stay, too high winds. We pick up our pace and shortly after midnight, we see her flashlight and call out to her. She seesms a bit disoriented, can't hear very well, doesn't respond to most questions. Then she takes her earplugs out. Ahh, much better. She is ok, not hurt, but cold. Got dark and got lost on the way down, was tired and didn't think she could make it out that night. Had planned to sleep under a rock. Did she see the helicopter? Oh yes, she thought they were looking for criminals, but she shined her light at it just playing. All things considered she was in good shape: had food, water, warm clothes, two flashlights, and a space blanket. And she had never been hiking before in her life. Well, we walked her out, got her checked out by the medics, wished her well, and went home. Sure I missed out on dime beer night (last call at 2, didn't get home till 3) but it was worth it. A nice night for a hike.

Feathered fertilizers

"...and none of 'em can fly."

Just then a gust of wind came up at the exact moment the gray one leapt into the air, beat its wings furiously, and "jumped" over a 6 foot fence and into an adjoining pen 40 feet away.

"Huh, never seen 'em do that before."

Some one with greater foresight might have taken this as some sort of omen, a portent of misadventure to come. No one with anything resembling foresight lives at the Homestead, as I have descided to call my place in the suburbs.

So, for $50 I was the proud owner of a flock of 5 geese, or rather 4 geese and a gander, as well as two water troughs, a feeder, and half a bag of feed. Not bad, heck even if butchered tommorrow they would still come in cheaper than any meat at the grocer.

We managed to get them caught and loaded into the back of my truck, which thankfully has a camper to keep them from flopping into oncoming traffic, but unthankfully now smells like goose shit and pinfeathers. So, between the two of us we got 'em loaded but at home, by myself and faced with a truck bed of irrate geese, I paused. Calling clearly didn't work (here goose goose goose) and I am too big to manuver inside a cramped camper shell with 5 geese and no small amount of green poultry lubrication. So first I tried a canoe paddle to pursuade them to come out, but to no avail, so after trying various pieces of lumber, I settled on the garden hoe. Hooking one end around their body I could guide them to the tailgate where I would seize them before they could scramble away and pin the flapping, squacking beasts under my arm and haul them off to the backyard. After the first one it was easy, until the last, that same gray one that "can't fly". She would have no part of that hoe, hissing and biting it and ultimatly making a break for daylight. I managed to head her off at the street and herded her through the neighbors yard with a garden hoe in one hand and a canoe paddle in the other, chasing the wayward goose through the flower bushes and into the backyard.

Now I was told that they would yeild an egg every other day or so, but since saturday when I got 'em, I have seen no eggs, though they are doing a job fertilizing my garden bed. They have been fairly quite, at least as quite as you can expect a flock of geese to be, so no complaints from the neighbors or the gestapo (aka home owners association). I am concerned about the chance they could leap the fence into the neighbors yard, but since my fence is a good foot taller than their previous best, and they have less room to taxi, I hope it won't be a problem.

The rabbit guy still hasn't called me back yet.

You've got a future and I'm a shiftless vagrant

That's alot of what my soliloquy about why we shouldn't see each other anymore came down to in the end. And after going over in my mind exactly what I would say all afternoon and even writing down an outline so I wouldn't stumble too much, at the end she said "yeah, I was pretty much thinking the same thing this week." WHEW! I have never succesfully ended a relationship before, so I was a bit nervous about ending this non-relationship; when it all went smoothly I was kinda suprised.

In other news, I've got the goose-fence mostly in place, now all I need are geese. And rabbitts. More news as this story develops.

It's the end of the world as we know it...

Drinking beer. Before noon. On government time. Who does such a thing, really?

The season is over. And with it, quite possibly a career in fire. Still glad to be done, but when it was over, and I was alone in my room at the end of the day, I undressed as usual, but when I went to take of my boots, I hesitated. Walked around the house for a few minutes more, then slowly took them off, looked them over, and put them away, knowing that I may never wear them again. A good thing, really. After three seasons they were beginning to show signs of wear. Like the hole in the right side where I put a falling axe through the boot and into my foot a few years ago. And the left one, where the stiching was ripping out from walking side-hill so much. A good thing the season ended when it did, I really don't know if they would have lasted another 2 week pay period.

I didn't file for unemployment, though I am eligible and most on my crew have done so. I figure that I am quite capable of work, and even have several prospects, I just don't really want to. In my opinion unemployment was not meant for folks like that. Better to save it for the folks who really need it; heck, it could be me some day.

Joke of the moment:
"I had amnesia once..."
"Really?"
"Well, maybe twice."