The magic oven

The new thermometer is making easy work of the bread oven. In the past I have over-fired the oven. I've burned it too long and with too much wood, so that is has got too hot. This has meant that pizzas are done in 5 minutes and over-done in 5 minutes and 28 seconds. Which is a fairly critical difference since it takes at least 28 seconds for me to get the door off and fish out the pan.

Today I tried out the thermometer for the first time. I fired the oven with some kindling, a few two-inch diameter small logs and two average sized pieces of birch firewood, burning for a total of about an hour and three-quarters. Then I raked out any of the bigger coals and pushed the small ones to the edge of the oven (thanks for the tip, Jacinda!) and threw in the first pizza.

The first pizza went in at 350ºC (650ºF) and took about 8 minutes.
The next pizza went in at 270ºC (520ºF) and took about 11 minutes.
The bread went in at around 230ºC (450ºF) and took about 25 minutes.
The lentil dal bake went in at around 180ºC (350ºF) and I'll leave it for three or four hours.

Today's breads are a whole wheat and khorasan blended yogourt bread on the right and a honey-garlic wheat bread on the left. I'm getting very adventurous with my bread-making recipes these days, just winging things with a rough formula of:

1 cup liquid
1 Tbsp. oil or butter
1 Tbsp. sugary stuff
1 tsp. salt, and
1 tsp. yeast

per loaf of bread, plus some combination of flours to make a dough that feels right when kneaded. I supplement with a bit of gluten flour if I'm using predominantly low-gluten flours (i.e. spelt, corn meal, oats or khorasan). And I make other adjustments, too, sometimes adding an egg or two, or using cottage cheese as a liquid and bumping up the volume, or increasing the sweetener, or adding seeds or herbs or nuts or dried fruit. I'm either developing some skill at this, or have been lucky recently, or else (more than likely) the oven enacts some sort of magic, because my loaves have been turning out beautifully almost no matter what oddities I throw into the mixing bowl.

We've just received the first half of our grain CSA order, so I am inspired on all fronts these days. The khorasan (a.k.a. Kamut®) is new to the CSA this year, our bin of hard spring wheat has been replenished, and I'm looking forward to getting more spelt and some heritage Canadian Red Fife wheat when the second half of our share rolls in in a couple of weeks.

The cheese, at last

Finally the Day of the Unwaxing of the Cheese arrived. Sophie suggested that her birthday would be an auspicious occasion, marking about three months of aging. We missed her birthday. I had spent the weekend driving Erin first west for a rehearsal and then all the way east to Calgary for a lesson and arrived home at 10 pm after 21 hours of driving over the previous couple of days. We had decided to hold the natal celebration a day late.

And so The Unwaxing proceeded. The cheese was a lovely texture: just slightly on the dry side for farmer's cheese, but holding together nicely in slender slices. I would have liked it a little sweeter, but it had a nice aged bite to it and goes very nicely with crackers.

Spooky run

It's the Friday night before Hallowe'en. Noah has gone to Gaming Night at the community hall. Sophie is at the Hallowe'en Dance at the school. Erin is the basement practicing Saint-Sëans. Chuck is on call. I have spent the afternoon grinding wheat and khorasan, kneading dough, making pizzas, then baking the pizzas, a few loaves of bread, a dozen buns and a huge pot of bean burrito filling.

Fiona has practiced, and now wants to do "something special."

We go back and forth a bit about what constitutes something special. Eventually we decide that it would be fun to dress in our black running tights and our black SufferFest hoodies, strap on headlamps and run the forested trail below our house. A spooky Hallowe'en weekend trail run in the dark.

We drive the van to the trail head. On the way Fiona comments that it's easy to under-estimate the power of  dark. Which I take to mean she's feeling a little apprehensive about the run. It'll be fine, I reassure her. We'll be together, we'll have our head lamps, we'll get warm after a while, we'll hold hands and talk.

It is spooky. Just enough spooky to be memorable. Silent and thoroughly, completely dark. I don't mind running the highway in the dark alone, but I would not have been pleased to be running the forested trail by myself. I am glad to be running with Fiona. She is a reassuring companion to have along. She is just brave enough to do this with me, and I tell her that I too feel braver having her along -- after all, if a spooky monster attacked me, I could toss her at it and run for my life. She laughs, I laugh. We finish the trail happy and exhilarated. We'll remember this run for a long time.

The morning after baking day

Another dozen rolls and another loaf of bread are already in the freezer. The pizza is long gone. The beans, still warm, are waiting to go in the freezer.

I managed the baking times a little better this time. Except for the pizza, which got a bit charred just at the edge, the crusts were all perfect. And it turns out that the time required to eat a pizza dinner is the perfect time to allow the oven to cool down for the first loaves of bread.

Vegetarian Baked Beans

3 cups white pea beans, soaked overnight
1 large onion, chopped
1 tart apple, chopped
1 1/2 tsp. salt
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 cup dark molasses
1/4 cup tomato paste or ketchup
2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes (to taste)
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. curry powder


Cover beans in water and bring to a boil. Simmer for half an hour. In the meantime, prepare other ingredients and dump into a heavy baking dish with a lid. Add simmered beans and stir. Add enough fresh water to bring the level up to the top of the beans. Cover pot and place in a slow oven (275ºF) for 4-6 hours. Add a bit of water as necessary. An hour before serving, mash a few of the beans and stir in. Add more water if necessary, or uncover if too watery. Time and temperature are very flexible. You can start the beans at 9 a.m. and set the temperature a bit lower and leave them all day, or you can start at 2 pm and bump the temperature up a bit hotter. Or you can (apparently) put them in a fairly hot thermal mass oven and leave them overnight as the temperature gradually cools.

(About the seasonings: I really just wing these. I always use onion, though sometimes I pitch in more than one. I always use about a third of a cup total of something brown and sweet, a similar quantity of something tomato-based, a bit of some kind of vinegar, plus salt and pepper. The rest is just by guess and by gosh. The curry powder is a nice touch in traditional baked beans and a teaspoon gives just a subtle flavour. You can triple the apples and triple the curry powder to make a real curry-flavoured pot which is nice for variety sometimes. Sometimes I'll pitch in some soy-based browning, or some vegetarian Worcestershire sauce, or some liquid smoke, or use maple syrup instead of molasses and brown sugar. It is quite fun to experiment.)

Serve with fresh-baked bread or rolls.

Left-over baked beans can be mashed a bit more and stored in the fridge to be used as a savory vegetarian sandwich spread. Beans also freeze well.

Baking day

Using the cob oven is introducing me to the old-fashioned tradition of a baking day. If I'm going to the bother of firing the oven up for an hour or two and heating it up to 600ºF, it seems ridiculous to use it for 6 minutes of pizza-baking and then leave it to gradually cool overnight. All that stored heat deserves to be put to use.

It seems to be settling into a Friday or Saturday tradition. Last week in between homeschooling activities at the school, playdates, gym time and gaming night I managed to bake a couple of pizzas and then piggy-backed three loaves of bread on at the end. The oven was ready for plenty more, though: the loaves were done in 16 minutes and the bottom crust was a little overdone, so they definitely went in when the oven was too hot and there was certainly enough heat for plenty more baking left over when they came out.

As an aside, I think I'll invest in a laser infrared thermometer so that I can check the oven temperature. The oven interior is of course very dark, and I'm usually baking after nightfall, so not only does an analog thermometer suffer from questionable accuracy sitting right on the fire bricks, getting in the way of the food to boot, but I have a hard time reading it even with a head lamp on. I've discovered by trial and error that 90 minutes of firing with hardwood makes the oven just right for pizza, and that the oven needs to cool substantially from that temperature to be suitable for bread-baking.

This week the plan is to cook pizza when the oven is maximally hot, wait half an hour or so and then whip in three loaves of dill-onion bread followed half an hour later by a dozen and a half spelt buns. Finally, when the buns are done, I'll tuck the pot of beans in and leave them overnight. There's no one around to eat the beans with two thirds of the family gone for the weekend, so they'll go into the freezer and be a reserve meal for when we have one of those days where there's no time for dinner prep.

The one thing I miss with the cob oven is the smell of the bread baking. I smell it as it steams and cools, after it's done baking, but it isn't quite the same.

Outdoor shower

Look what we have! I LOVE outdoor showers. There's something about short bursts of warm water to lather or rinse in, accompanied by warm summer breezes, that leaves me ten times more refreshed than a shower in some sort of indoor stall.

Most of the kids think that my penchant for outdoor showers is fueled by latent exhibitionist tendencies, or else just plain weird. But hey, we have a very private property. And they do appreciate that when I return from a run 10k run in 27ºC weather I can shower before I enter the house!

We have owned a solar water-bag camping shower for a while. It helped get us through the prolonged power outage three years ago due to forest fires. But to use on a daily basis it's cumbersome. You have to lower it, fill it, leave it in the sun to warm, and then hoist it up into the air somehow to use. Lather, rinse, dry, repeat.

We had a lot of extra poly pipe lying around in bits, left over from the years when we hadn't figured out how to optimally maintain our water system in the winter. The extra poly pipe could be used in an emergency to get us household water in the event that a segment got frozen.

So I snailed a bunch of poly pipe together, bought some hose and faucet fittings and rigged the whole thing up to a cast-off showerhead. The poly pipe lies in the sun and heats the water up due to its dark colour. It holds a few gallons of water, easily enough for a couple of quick showers. It refills itself automatically from the tap as water is pulled out of the other end. And for really sunny days, there's a way to mix in some cold water directly from the tap to prevent scalding.

Alas it has been mostly overcast and thunder-showery today. I haven't yet been able to give the shower a real test run.

Huaraches

Here's another chapter in my minimalist footwear adventure story. I made these sandals in the traditional huarache style out of a bit of 4mm rubber outsole material purchased from a cobbler in the area. I traced my feet, cut the sole with scissors, punched three holes and added a leather boot lace. The materials cost about $15. I may have to replace the laces once a year (for $3), but the soles look like they'll last ages.

To lace them, I followed the directions at Invisible Shoe. The knot under the base of the toe has compressed to negligible thickness and I don't feel it at all. I find these really comfortable. I was never one to like flip-flops; the prong between my toes felt intrusive and tended to give me blisters. But I find the thin leather lace unnoticeable after the first minute or two of wearing these.

Each sandal weighs less than 80 gm (3oz.), which is less than a third of what even the lightest running shoe weighs. So they're very light, but the sole material seems to be very durable -- it's good Vibram stuff, sturdier than the softer rubber typical of running shoe soles.

I've been wearing these around for a few weeks, but only just started running in them. Last night I did part of my speedwork in them. On fast downhills the lace rubs a bit between my toes. I think that if I'd gone out and done 12 miles of steep trails on my first huarache run I might have got blisters there. But with a gradual approach I'm sure my feet will get used to that. No blisters last night, anyway!

They feel like almost nothing. I feel bits of gravel through the soles, so that I'm aware they're there, but there's no discomfort. They're so open and airy that perspiration dries as quickly as it's produced. So I don't feel the need for a suede or foam footbed on top of the sole material.

The only thing I didn't like was the sound. The thin soles are floppy enough that no matter how lightly I place my feet, when I'm running quickly the rubber tends to slap the asphalt. One of the things I love about barefoot running is its silence. But last week my barefoot stealth style allowed me to inadvertently startle both myself and a young bear by getting much closer than I normally am comfortable with before either of us noticed. So a little "slap, slap, slap" probably isn't a bad thing in the big picture.

I did half yesterday's speedwork in bare feet and half in my huaraches. I definitely prefer the feel of barefoot, but I can see the huaraches being useful for gravely surfaces where barefooting isn't yet comfortable for my still-somewhat-tender feet.

Earth oven

I spent some time this weekend learning how to build an earth oven. When we wrecked our old deck and built a new one in a slightly different orientation, we ended up with a vacant sunny spot 4 metres from the kitchen door that was just crying out for an outdoor oven. When I heard about a workshop to learn to build an earth oven, I signed up right away.

The earth oven begins with a foundation with a layer of fire bricks, upon which a dome of damp sand is constructed. This is the form upon which the oven is built. For this oven we built a dome 27" in diameter, which with 10" walls will end up being about 4 feet in diameter once completed. Shown in the first photo is the thermal layer (which is made from a 2:1 mixture of sand to clay, with just enough water) which has been applied over the sand form to a thickness of 3". This is the most exacting stage of the construction. The sand, covered in a couple of layers of wet newspaper, isn't exactly very strong. The sand/clay mix had to be applied with just the right amount and direction of pressure to get it to bond to itself but not put undue stress on the sand. The door was then cut away and everything left to set up a little overnight.

The next day we pulled some of the sand out to help speed up drying the oven and began adding the first of two insulating layers of cob. Cob is a mixture of sand, clay, straw and water. The straw adds tensile strength and also helps insulate the interior of the oven. We mixed ours on tarps with our feet.

Applying the cob was much less exacting than working the sand/clay mix onto the sand form the day before. We wetted down the outside of the thermal layer and applied clay "slip" (a clay-water mix) to help the cob adhere, and then we stuck it on and pressed it in. We tried for about 3" of thickness, and intentionally made the surface very lumpy, since there will be a whole other layer to go on in a day or two once this layer has partly dried.

The cob layer can be used to add sculptural qualities to the oven. I've seen illustrations of ovens that are in the shape of snails or phoenixes or dragons. This oven is to be a basic dome shape. Ultimately the main cob layer will be a total of about 6" thick.

Once the main cob layer has reached a 6" thickness and the whole oven has had a few weeks to dry thoroughly, a final smooth "plaster" layer of finer cob is applied. This cob is made with chopped straw or manure instead of the longer strands, so it is much smoother and easier to slather on artistically. We were able to practice a bit of this on another oven at a later stage of construction. The final plaster layer of cob can be smoothed on with a wooden trowel and as you can see at the top left of the photo it gives a nice smooth finished appearance to the oven. This layer can be made from coloured potters clay and washed sand if a different colour is desired. It can also be inlaid with ceramic tile. Because we don't live in the desert, earth ovens here need to be protected from the elements to some extent to last more than a few years. This one is tucked just inside a lean-to shed with its own supply of firewood.

Cob ovens like this are fired for an hour or two before baking. The door is left open during firing, as there is no chimney. There's a bit of smoke at the beginning of this burn. The oven above has been used weekly for the better part of a year, and you can see that there's a bit of soot that has collected above the door, but not much. Once the fire has burned down to just a few coals, the coals and ash are raked out into a metal pail, the firebrick cleaned off with damp rags on a stick, and a wooden door is placed in the opening. The interior of the oven will be somewhere around 600ºF and will gradually decrease over the next three or four hours to 300ºF. You could bake four pizzas and eight loaves of bread in that time (things bake very quickly in an oven like this), and then throw in a pot of beans to finish up.

Kiko Denzer's book is the bible of earth oven construction. I've owned the book for years and it's very comprehensive. The workshop we did followed the instructions almost to the letter. I think a person could probably do a decent job with nothing more than his book. Still, the process was very much demystified by some hands-on experience, and there's no substitute for squeezing getting your feet dirty mixing cob, or for holding it in your hands and learning when it feels just right.

On the way home from the workshop I stopped at a rock pile and picked out a few nice-looking rocks for the beginning of our own earth oven foundation. This might be a project for 2011. We bake a lot of pizza and bread in our house.

Hard cheese experiment

We get nice organic milk from a friend's cow. The kids don't much like the taste of milk that hasn't come through a factory (whatever!), so I try to do other things with it. We've made kefir, yogurt, panir and mozzarella cheese. Sophie is actually our family mozza expert, having been taught by her friend and brought the skill home.

Today, with a gallon of nice whole milk to use up, we opted to try a hard cheese, in this case a Monterey Jack recipe from Ricki the Cheese Queen. We started by pasteurizing the milk, bringing it to 145ºF for half an hour. Then, once it cooled to the lukewarm range enjoyed by mesophilic starter culture, we pitched in our culture and half a rennet tablet. Then we kept the milk lukewarm and waited half an hour or so.

At that point it had curdled nicely. Still maintaining the even 90ºF temperature, we cut the curds. They were more like yogourt in consistency than cheese curds, but it's like they're born with little muscles that instinctively contract. We warmed this liquidy mess of lumpies up to 100ºF gradually, stirring every once in a while and gradually the muscular little curds pulled into themselves, contracting and squeezing out more and more of the whey.

After an hour or two we had begun to see how a four-litre jug of milk turns into nothing more than 400-odd grams of cheese. The curds were much smaller and more rubbery and there was a ton of whey.

At this point we decanted off the whey by pouring the whole business into a cheesecloth-lined colander.

This is what the curds looked like without their bath of whey. Finally we could let the curds cool down. We salted the curds, mixing the salt in with a spoon, or our hands.

Then we wrapped the curds as tidily as possible in the cheesecloth, placed it in the mould and added weight on top. We started with a pound for 15 minutes, then flipped the cheese over and bumped up the weight to four pounds overnight.

The next morning we unweighted and unwrapped the cheese and began letting it dry for a couple of days. After that we'll wax it and then we'll age it for at least a couple of months in a cool area in the basement.

Here's where some of the whey went. Our dog loves this stuff! (As an aside, this action shot revealed a lot more tongue than we thought she possessed. How does that thing fit inside her mouth?) Unfortunately due to the lactose, it's a little tough on her digestive tract, so she's being rationed. Whey is also great for bread which is perhaps where the remainder will go.

Fallow days

We're enjoying a well-deserved few fallow days. Besides the bike rides, runs and swimming days, we're attending to a few lingering jobs at home.

We finally finished disassembling the play structure. This involved sawing timbers away from seized bolts and digging out the four concrete footings. Now it only remains to transport the sandbox sand to the garden and fill the hole in with dirt from the mound left over from when we built the deck. I began this job today and it turned into an exercise in paleontology. There were several dinosaurs (plus a bull and a much-cherished rooster) discovered deep in the sand.

When I took some of the sand over to the compost pile, where we mix up soil for raised garden beds, I noticed that the manure pile was full of red wigglers. So we donned rubber gloves and picked through the pile until we had half a pound of the lively little guys, enough to start back at vermicomposting. We had a worm bin for a couple of years, until our former dog overturned it in the baking sun and chawed down on the container.

So we started our worm bin again. The theory is that by keeping the food waste in the worm bin we'll avoid attracting bears to the large open bins in the corner of the property. Those will just be for garden waste. Hopefully we can secure the worm bin and keep it close enough to the house that bears will be deterred from getting into it. Right now it is stored inside the empty rabbit hutch. You can see a few lovely red worms in the photo at left. It's almost impossible to get a good photo of them outdoors because they dive away from the light as soon as you uncover them.

In the winter I think we might be able to keep the bin in the shop, which Chuck keeps slightly heated, and keep our little friends alive that way. We've kept it in the basement in the past, but inevitably despite our best efforts to the contrary we seem to get into problems with flies. For now, outside is perfect.

Yesterday I managed to take a hand-me-down double foam mattress apart, altering the cover on the sewing machine and cutting the foam down to size, re-assembling it as a twin-sized mattress that fits Sophie's bunk beautifully. She's been complaining of being uncomfortable in her bed for years; I don't know what her problem is: we spent a perfectly good $99 on that mattress 14 years ago. Anyway, she is a happy camper now and slept way past her 6:30 am alarm this morning.

Sophie has been baking today: chocolate coffee cake I believe. Fiona has been inventing recipes for savory dips and dressings. Creativity in the kitchen is always fun. The other day we made several dozen of these Hippie Bombs (renamed; formerly Energy Balls), which have become an instant hit.

Hippie Bombs

2 cups rolled oats
2 cups sesame seeds, toasted
2 cups sunflower seeds, toasted
2 cups chocolate chips
2 cups dried cranberries
2 cups goji berries
1 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp. salt (omit if PB contains salt already)
4 cups peanut butter
1 cup honey
3 cups flaked coconut, toasted, for coating

Combine all ingredients except coconut. Mix with spoon, spatula or hands as required. Form into balls with your hands. (They can be anywhere from truffle-sized to 1/4 cup in size depending on your preference. Ours are about 25 ml in volume.) Roll in coconut. Store in airtight container between layers of waxed paper. You could easily substitute almond butter for the peanut butter, or other dried fruits like chopped dates or raisins for the ones we used. The kids are trying to convince me that to be real energy balls these need to have a chocolate-covered espresso bean at the centre, but I've not been convinced.

Carrots for dinner

The kids get all excited when they see that this is what's for dinner. Just this for the main course, plus a dip. It's a "Carrots for Dinner" night.

My kids like their veggies raw, so that's part of the attraction, but only part of it.

Mainly they love this kind of dinner because it generally means there is a really decadent dessert coming! Tonight we're having Tiramisu Triple Layer Cake and Espresso Gelato.

We're celebrating Erin's completion of her last exam at school. Despite the pouring rain and 10ºC temperatures, it feels like summer. Orchestra is over. Homeschooling reporting was completed a few weeks ago. Taxes are done. Group classes are finished. Piano lessons are on hiatus. Erin is done at school. My teaching is almost done.

Some breathing space begins to open up in our lives again. Fallow time. We've been waiting for this.

Another self-starter in the kitchen

Sophie has shown incredible talent in the kitchen. Around age 9 she developed an interest in baking on her own, gradually mastered a huge variety of different recipes and developed her understanding of culinary techniques. She has the right combination of attention to detail but willingness to experiment. If a recipe says "in a small bowl, cream half the margarine with the brown sugar," she never needed advice on what they mean by small, or whether it's truly okay to substitute butter for margarine, or whether this brown sugar would be considered lightly or firmly packed. She's always confidently made those decisions herself and moved on, figuring out quite easily which directions need to be followed precisely and which allow for estimation and adaptation.

Now I've got another kid like this. Fiona is just 7 but works on the assumption that anything the older kids can do she can learn to do too. I came into the kitchen the other morning to this sight.

"What are you doing?"

"Baking something."

"Oh, uh, okay... what?"

"Almond squares. I found this recipe here to try. We have everything we need -- I checked."

She needed a bit of help getting the mixer out of the pantry (it's heavy!), and figuring out which pan was 8x8" (she's a metric girl, this one). Other than that, she did it on her own. It wasn't the simplest recipe either. There were three layers, the instructions involved operations like cutting in and folding, there was whipping of cream and separating of eggs and grinding of nuts involved, and two stages of baking and cooling. She managed it all.

And they tasted just like they were supposed to!

Moving a pond

This is where the pond and waterfall used to be. Under the apple tree about 20 metres from the house. A lovely shaded area, but with no seating nearby we rarely enjoyed it. Now that we have a deck, I decided the pond and waterfall should be there instead.

Over the past couple of days I've been moving rocks to release the pond liner, and then removing the liner and filling in the hole. The photo doesn't give a sense of scale: the pond liner is 3x5 metres, so this is a fairly large area.

The new pond will be much smaller -- basically just large enough to serve as a receptacle and reservoir for the waterfall. I've roughed it in at about 2 metres by half a metre. I'll cut the liner down to size.

Here's where I'm putting the new pond: just in front of the "apron" extension on the deck. I plan to build a rock wall up in the rear of the pond in part to hide the underneath of the deck.

Fiona and I bought some shrubs when we were in Nelson for her last piano lesson of the year. So we've also pushed ourselves to complete the little rockwall garden in front of the low portion of the deck -- despite the rain and cool weather we endured earlier in the week. We're just using whatever rocks we can find lying around the property looking for a home. I think I could become a rock mason in my next life. There's something really addictive about moving warm rocks around, looking at them from different angles, trading one off for another, until they find their perfect resting place, snugged in next to their well-fitted friends.

I think we still need some deck furniture soon, though, wouldn't you agree? After we get the repairs done on the van ...

Silted up

I love our water system, I really do. Our supply is gravity fed, fresh mountain spring water and it's free and plentiful and all ours. It comes from high up a mountain that has no human activity on it. It is to a certain extent surface water, though, so it does run the risk of silt and contamination from natural biological activity, so we have a set of four increasingly fine filters at various points. Good, plentiful clean water.

The disadvantage is that when it malfunctions it's all ours too. The first few years living here were really tough because of recurrent water woes. The guy who owned the property and maintained the water before us died, so there was no way for him to pass along to us the many secrets to keeping it working well. We knew there was a reservoir, and some sort of weird underground valve, some underground pipe and an intake pipe that came from "somewhere up there."

Gradually we figured out what the valve (and others we subsequently discovered) did, where the underground pipes were, and we followed the pipe up the mountain to find an intake bucket. But the water there was flowing out of another, larger and older underground pipe. Eventually Chuck found a neighbour who knew more or less where the primary intake was ... 15 minutes' walk up the mountain, through nettles and devil's club and over and under fallen logs.

These days appropriate maintenance has eliminated the winter freeze-ups we used to suffer from (and yes, I mean suffer... these were costly and time-consume to fix, and it is not with fondness that I recall melting and filtering snow for cooking and washing up, and banning toilet flushing, and "borrowing" showers and laundry facilities elsewhere). Winter has been good the past few years.

But I guess we'd kind of neglected the near end of the water system in recent years, the part safely buried deep in the ground, from the water-box reservoir to the house. Spring, when the volume and flow of the spring increases due to meltwater tumbling down Goat Mountain, is the troublesome time for the last 75 metres of our water system. And last week it silted up. Sophie, Fiona and I headed up to the box hoping the solution would be simple.

It was simple. But it was also pretty disgusting. There was a good foot and a half of silt in the bottom. And algae and other indefinable organic stuff was growing in the mound of silt around the outflow so that flow had completely stopped.

We set about vacuuming the silt out with a long piece of poly-pipe. I told Fiona "You suck." At first she was offended, but when she realized I meant she should suck on the poly-pipe to start the flow of silty goo through the siphon, she was blatantly unhelpful. In the end it was I who sucked. (And managed it without a mouthful, thank goodness!)

At times the silt was so thick it clogged the pipe and we had to bang and shake and fling to unclog it. We ended up emptying the entire contents of the reservoir down the hill. Twice. Water runs like crazy at this time of year, overflowing the various intakes and reservoirs to continue into the little creek, so we were just putting it back where it had come from.

We scrubbed down the walls of the water box with a long-handled push-broom, rinsed again, cleaned various filters and let everything fill up clean and fresh again, then opened the valves.

The girls had a blast building dams in the runoff, and ogling the silt. It smelled pretty awful, and looked disgustingly slimy as it accumulated. We were thoroughly grossed out.

But by the next day it had dried out and had taken on the appearance of something altogether lovely: black gold -- nutrient and mineral-rich decayed organic matter. Incredibly fine and totally free of weed-seeds. The best!

And so we scooped some up and brought it back and sprinkled it on our vegetable seedlings on the window ledge. And we'll go back with the wheelbarrow and get the rest to add to the garden beds in front of the deck.

A taste of summer

It was that kind of a day.

A shorts and t-shirt kind of day.

A barefoot kind of day.

A kids on the dock kind of day.

A watch the bottom of the lake kind of day.

A dangle your feet in the water until they scream "bone pain!" from the cold kind of day.

A trampoline kind of day.

A water fight on the lawn kind of day.

A canoeing kind of day.

A driftwood swordfight on the beach kind of day.

A kayaking kind of day.

A beachcombing kind of day.

Not even the birch trees have begun leafing out, and not even my kids were willing to actually immerse themselves in the lake, but today was teasingly a lot like summer anyway.

The dress II

Sophie has set to work with the fabric for her dress. After tracing pattern pieces the other afternoon she had to wait for me to get out of town and purchase thread. Fortunately Erin's departure for Calgary was well-timed, the five hour round trip to the bus station taking me through a town with a store stocking sewing notions.

Next was the pinning of the pattern pieces to the fabric. Sophie chose a lovely lightweight organic cotton-bamboo with generous spandex for her fabric. The colour, a dusty green, is not what I would have expected her to choose but it's quite lovely. The light weight and stretch of the fabric made for fussy pinning and cutting, but she -- unlike her mother -- is patient and meticulous with manual work. She did a great job of the cutting.

Next she headed to the basement with me for a quick refresher course on the sewing machine. It had been almost three years since she'd used it! She clearly wants to do this entire project on her own, without help, and it's a much more complex project than what she'd done in the past. But she seems ready and motivated. She quickly got the knack of the machine, and has a nice touch on the fabric feeding. Good thing, since this fabric is not forgiving! Tonight she got a start on the main construction, sewing the front seams.

This would work

It is March Break and it is not a Calgary weekend. I am all caught up on web work for the non-profits I volunteer with. There have been no Valhalla Fine Arts meetings, no clinics to work, no choir performances out of town, and even orchestra is cancelled for the school break. The past two days have been Nothing Days.

Nothing other than supervising the music practicing of various offspring on various instruments, organizing and administering school work for three kids, laundry, meal prep, yard work, housework, tidying, reading aloud, doing weekly homeschooling reports, going for a run, helping the younger girls with their various sewing and baking projects, practicing my viola, tending the chickens, wrecking the play structure and so on. Half my violin students are away for the break so my teaching load is down. I've even actually been reading a book, just for my own enjoyment, rather than relying on the audiobooks I can listen to while driving all over western Canada.

It's just about right. Without all the extra out-of-home responsibilities I feel like I have time to be an attentive parent and look after myself and the house. Imagine if this was what my life was like on an ongoing basis! I would be running marathons and my house would be spotless. I would be erudite and fit and relaxed. Probably infuriatingly so. Maybe it's better this way.

Still, I like the flow of these "nothing days." These are days that actually give us an occasional opportunity to think "hmm, what could we do now?" Fallow time is precious.

I live in a small town

I drop by the convenience store on the way home from work, because I think we might be out of milk at home. There are three people in the store -- me, the cashier and another customer. Amongst the three of us we work out that ...

Erin needs to drop by the school and pick up her report card.
One person's Pap smear result is back and is normal.
Chuck didn't stop in to buy milk this morning, so yes, I definitely need to buy some.

Hearth bread

Chuck went off to the dump today to salvage an oven rack. Then it was out to the blacksmithy to forge brackets and arms to support it. In short order we had a lovely portable bread-raising rack above the woodstove.

It's too cold in the kitchen for efficient bread-making in the winter, so this will simplify and expedite things considerably.

Notice the nativity characters in view behind the bread dough. Worshiping it, to all appearances. I don't blame them. Fresh garlic bread for dinner -- almost a religious experience!

Like...

We like our new espresso machine, "bought" with grocery store points. It was our family's Christmas Eve treat for ourselves. The kids have a penchant for steamed milk, London Fogs and decaffuccinos. The adults like their lattés and cappuccinos. So far it has seen a whole lot of use. Everyone in the family now knows how to run through espresso shots and steam or froth milk.

Next, below, Sophie is playing with our new sudoku board. Sophie really likes sudoku but finds the physical/tactile version much easier and more fun to use. Especially fun are the little drawers on each side of the board for storing the number tiles.

At the bottom, a bloom of Two Hills art tea, in this case Jasmine Fairy Flower Green Tea. We recently discovered Two Hills, a local importer of quality organic Chinese teas farmed and processed ethically. The regular Jasmine Tea is like something from another world. The art tea version, which "blooms" in your cup, adds visual appeal too.

Our Christmas was as usual a fairly simple affair. Perhaps a little simpler than usual this year. On the gifting front there were a half dozen inextravagant gifts for each of the kids, a couple for the parents, plus a handful of "family gifts" like the ones pictured. Few gifts cost over $30, none over a hundred. Mostly useful things -- clothing, things for the bedroom, books. We had the usual cinnamon buns for breakfast, and a nice supper which included a small turkey for the meat-eaters. No extended family or friends over this year. Chuck was on call, though he only had to go into the hospital once during the day, which was nice.

Sometimes I wonder if we have simplified too much. For many years we focused on special things to do through the holidays, on making things by hand, on contributing good deeds around the community and beyond. Lately we don't even do that much, besides participating in the flurry of Christmas performances and doing a fair bit of charitable giving. So it's just not that big a deal, Christmas. It's a time to be together as a family, to focus on the value of giving, and participate in a few special rituals.

I'm not sure if it should be bigger. My kids' friends' families mostly make a much bigger deal over Christmas. The gifts, especially. Do mine feel embarrassed when their friends ask what their favourite Christmas gifts were and they have only a small humble few to choose amongst (a pair of mittens? a book? a jar of marmalade?), none of which rate next to the laptops, wii's, iPhones, iTouches, X-boxes, Kindles and such that the others got?

We had a nice Christmas. It wasn't the pinnacle day of the year (that would be the first Friday in August every year, the last day of SVI). No one's complaining. I guess we're doing okay.

And this year we had only a tiny handful of paper and plastic, plus two cardboard boxes, to dispose of.