It's ALIVE!

On a whim I decided to buy a book of sourdough recipes. Sourdough is an interesting and very self-sufficientish concept; supposedly you just mix flour and water, and given time (and warmth) it produces its own leaven from yeast spores in the air or in the flour. Supposedly! Or, maybe you just get a crock full of pasty goop.

I didn't think it was really going to work, since the goop wants to be warm and our house often... isn't. This temperature requirement sounds odd  at first, since sourdough is famous as the food of Alaskan prospectors. I'm going to assume that those guys kept their woodstoves going or at least smoldering 24/7; we don't do that. Anyway,  I moved the crock around to different spots with no result, and finally just stuck it in the oven for a day. The oven must hold heat pretty well even when off, because when I got home my goop was all a-bubblin':

 (I am probably jinxing it by posting this; tomorrow morning it will be dead...)

Update: It did not die. Not only did it not die, it doubled in size.  I hope it doesn't do that every night, or the kitchen will be taken over by cheesy-smelling goop...

Wordless Wednesday: "--The sofa? Um, it was like that when we got here!"

Better Off, Part 1: The Luxury of Labor

Yesterday I read Eric Brende's Better Off: Flipping the Swith on Technology. It's the account of how Brende and his wife Mary spent 18 months homesteading in a low-tech, Amish-like (Amishish?) farming community. (To protect the group's privacy, he refers to them only by the pseudonym "Minimite.") I have a lot to say about this book, so I'll probably break this up into several posts. (Note: I actually really liked this book and strongly recommend it; if I spend the next three posts tearing it apart, that's just how I learn.)

Brende's ultimate question was about quality of a low-tech life: "How hard and time consuming was this life without 'labor-saving machines'? And was it one Mary and I would consider leading ourseves?" (15)

And his answer is, without the devices--and with more physical work--he and his wife found, paradoxically, that not only were they happier, but they had more time. And the work that they did was more leisurely, even downright inefficient, as Brende found by analyzing a typical day's labor:

While seven hours and fifty minutes were available for the afternooon's work (mainly threshing), only four hours and forty minutes were spent in actual physical work.... All this [other] time was sheer cushioning--the benefits of cameraderie, conversation, fresh air, and natural scenery, without the labor. (161)

That's nice, I guess. But you know why Brende and his wife were able to live this way? Because neither of them had to have jobs.

How did they pull that off? First, Brende received some "fellowship money" from his university. He is quick to point out that it is not a large amount, and that by itself would not pay the rent for the entire 18 month experiment (23). But (and second) this rent of which he speaks--$150 a month for a furnished house with a garden--is phenomenal. A kid with a part-time job could pay that. Brende's meagre fellowship would pay for ten months of that! Even better, their landlord was often willing to let them work off the rent instead of paying cash. For the Brendes, life's single largest financial struggle--affording a home--had been mostly removed.

Third, the "Minimite" lifestyle neatly eliminates most bills. No electricity, no phone, no running water, no insurance... their mailbox must have been blessedly empty. And fourth, their neighbors, both "Minimite" and "English," are amazingly generous, surprising them with frequent gifts of vegetables, meat, and even a free dairy cow. Overall, the Brende's living expenses were reduced--largely through others' generosity--to an enviable minimum. This allowed them to devote themselves full-time to the task they had set for themselves. And they certainly needed the time:

Mary and I were discovering now that it wasn't the sheer physical burden of unmechanized labor that was daunting. It was the skill. To make matters  harder, skill was not concentrated in a single specialty but scattered in dozens of little knacks and hundreds of bits of knowledge, all foreign to the button-pusher. On top of all this, the foremost skill was balancing and integrating all the little bits into a single livlihood. (50)

The work of a lifetime! What I'm getting from this--and this is my conclusion, not Brende's--is that real labor is actually a luxury. Only someone who doesn't have to work for someone else can work for himself. Is it satisfying to grow your own vegetables? Sew your own clothes? Homeschool your kids? Sure! Okay, now do it all after spending nine hours behind a cash register at Walmart. Still feel so good? There's a reason most of us don't wash our clothes by hand,* Eric, and it's not because we're seduced by shiny gadgets.

Admittedly, the money question is not what Brende set out to address; he just wanted to find out if the low-tech life was worth living. And, OK, it is. But like any desirable lifestyle, it's more than most of us could afford. Brende may be quick to point out that he was not wealthy, but he was certainly rich in time.



*Interesting fact: the hand-powered clothes washer Brende recommends actually costs more than our new high-efficiency electric washer did.

Foiled Again

My riding lesson plans have been dashed again, this time by a flu which may or may not (pending test results!) be the dreaded Pig Flu. It's not my flu, it's my instructor's (and her family's), and they are politely isolating themselves until it's over. Which is all very responsible, but this means I haven't been on a horse in a month. We're talking serious withdrawal, folks. I may start stalking a rancher.

I had hoped that being way out here in the boondocks might protect us from the infamous H1N1, but apparently it's in all the towns around us, so it's only a matter of time before it hits. The up side of its, um, popularity is that now that everybody's got it, we can see that it's just, well, the flu, and not an apocalyptic superflu like the one in that Stephen King book. So we don't need to lock ourselves in the basement after all. And, with the germ-induced end of civilization postponed, I can afford to sulk about missed riding opportunties.

So to cheer myself up, here's a picture of two of my favorite things, combined: Hugh Jackman...on a horse.

But I'm only posting this so I can admire the horse. No, really. ;)

Insert Mandatory "Global Warming? What Global Warming?" Joke Here

Notice the pretty pictures down and to the left, bragging about our weather station? Well, in case nobody's been looking at it, here's a bit from this morning's report. This, my friends, is "autumn" where I am at:

 For my Centigrade readers, that's -15.9°. Just so you all understand. It's cold.

It's going to be a long winter.

UPDATE: Posted too soon... now this morning:

Less than a month into fall, and we've already broken into subzero temperatures.Yeah, that's a good sign.

Halten Sie

As the Beast grows up she is starting (albeit slowly) to calm down and turn into--gasp!--a nice dog. With one tiny exception: the whole walking-on-a-leash thing. Putting a leash on Molly is asking for the sled dog impersonation; she crouches down and digs her claws in and pulls as hard as her stocky little body can. Which is surprisingly hard. And annoying.

And since I'm still suffering from horse withdrawal...I put a halter on her:

Actually it's a Halti. We've had this for months but I had to wait for her little puppy head to grow big enough that she couldn't slip out of it. And slip out of it she did, for she hates the Halti. You see, the Halti makes it impossible for her to pull. If she tries she just ends up turning herself around, a puzzled look on her face as finding herself facing the wrong direction.

The first time I tried walking her with the Halti she quickly gave up pulling, but spent the rest of the trip hanging her head and giving me the You are an evil evil Mommy look. Yesterday she gave up and accepted the Halti. And we had... a nice walk. No more attempts to dislocate my arm, no more sarcastic remarks from passersby, just a dog walking calmly by my side. Yes, it's cop-out; I'm not actually training her how to walk properly, just tricking her into doing it. But right now, I'm just relieved to be able to have a painless walk. Now I just need to buy another one so I can walk both beasts at the same time....

Off the Horse?

You might have noticed that I haven't continued my series of riding lesson posts. Did I give up? Did I get kicked? Did I get bucked off and not have the nerve to get back on? Did I run out of money? Nope, it's just a case of Real Life interfering with my plans.

Due to various boring (and hopefully temporary!) intrusions into the schedule--work, doctor's appointments, etc.--I haven't had a lesson in three weeks. And I am suffering from serious withdrawal. I wish there were some way I could practice between lessons so that I wouldn't worry about forgetting everything I've learned so far. All I can do is visualization--and I really have my doubts about the efficacy of that--and recite my mantra of Things I Need to Remember: "Sit up straight, heels down, head up, left hand down, right hand not clutching saddle horn,  look where you want to go, not at the horse, relax."

The thing is, there are two kinds of learning: the nerd-kind kind where you stuff your head with facts, and the jock-kind where your body learns to do something. And you can only do that by letting the body practice. I'm a pure-bred nerd, so this whole experience is... different. But between lessons all I can do is, well, stuff my head full of horse facts. Which probably won't help me in the saddle.