Piggies play in the snow

I recently joined the Barefoot Runner's Society's Canadian chapter. There are a handful of us there, most of us recent converts to this "less is more" approach to running, most of us trying to figure out how we're going to get through the winter without losing what conditioning our feet and legs have acquired.

The few more experienced runners have suggested that it is more than possible to run barefoot in below-freezing temperatures. Cleared dry pavement or asphalt, they say, is possible down to -10ºC or a little below. With slush and snow on the ground it can be tougher, but with a proper warmup still possible to a few degrees below freezing. And so today, with the first snowfall of the year on the ground and temperatures hovering just below the freezing point, I gave it a try.

I ran in shoes for the first kilometer, trying to get properly warmed up, increasing the circulation to my feet. I was doing an out-and-back route, so I kicked my shoes off at the side of the highway at the 1.0 km mark and carried on. I figured I'd run another kilometre (less if it was truly too awful to endure), turn around and head back to my shoes.

It was certainly a challenge to run that kilometre. I wasn't running in actual snow. I was on the highway which was wet with occasional bits of slush and slushy puddles. I worried about how much the return kilometre would hurt. But I made it through the full outbound kilometer, and right as it was ending things got a fair bit easier. I decided to carry on another 500 metres to my normal turnaround, which would bring my barefoot distance to a full 3 km by the time I got back to my shoes. After the turnaround the numbness on the bottoms of my feet disappeared. The water began to feel almost pleasantly cold on my now-fairly-warm feet.

By the time I reached my shoes the only thing that was bothering me was the gravel that the highway maintenance crew had spread on the curves in the road. It had an annoying habit of hiding in the slush. But I ran slower through those patches. And it just didn't seem worth stopping to put my shoes on, so I picked them up and carried on home.

Right now my feet feel like they've just enjoyed some sort of Finnish sauna and snow spa treatment with a bonus exfoliation treatment. They're happy and tingly. I never would have thought this was possible!

First recital

Erin went to Kelowna last weekend and performed her recital for a small appreciative audience in the wonderful century-old Anglican cathedral there. The acoustics were so live and lovely for the unaccompanied Bach I just had to record it.

I am in awe of this girl's playing. She has come so far in the past few months. And just look at her -- how much she loves what she is doing, how much she plays right into the music, clearly caring deeply about both the music and what she is giving to the audience.

The local recital takes place later this week. I think there might be a lot of people there.

Washer TV

It's taken several long years to rationalize this purchase. I wanted an energy-efficient front-loader, but I just couldn't make my peace with the extravagance. We have an exceptionally low pressure low flow water supply. We can barely have a shower -- the flow through even the "pulse" setting on the showerhead is scarcely more than a dribble at the best of times. And this meant that when the old top-load washer was running, just about all other water-related activities in the house had to stop. And since it took up to half an hour to fill the tub in the top-loader for each wash or rinse, that was a lot of time not to wash dishes, hair or bodies, especially with more pre-teen and teen showering going on here.

In addition since we hang-dry almost all our laundry, the idea of having wet clothes go onto the drying rack much less wet than usual was very appealing. That would mean they would be dry in less than a day, maybe even in as little as 12 hours if the wood stove was beneath them.

And so when this unit came on sale recently we decided to finally taken the plunge. We squeaked it into the tiny laundry room this afternoon, set it to run a first load, and then hunkered down in front of the viewing window to watch the show. It was fabulous! Unfortunately I missed the final spin, because I had a meeting, so I'm running another load (of dog bedding, no less) in order to catch the finale.

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.

Cursive in a day

I've gotten used to "graphomotor delays" in my kids. Erin was 8 when she first managed more than a kindergarten-style scrawl. She had been reading proper novels for four years and was playing the Bach Double on the violin but still printed in mostly upper-case tilted, squashed letters. I remember Noah agonizing for an hour over signing his name on his passport application at age 11. Even Sophie, who was considerably less asynchronous, has only developed a legible cursive script in the past couple of years.

It hasn't mattered much. We don't need to use written work as a form of evaluation of the kids' learning. It is always clear, from their enthusiasm, their questions, their conversation, their observations and their honest self-assessment, what they have learned. For the most part it's been fine to wait. Erin now writes easily and well. Noah can write neatly but his dysgraphic tendencies make it a heck of a lot of hard work for him, so he much prefers to type. Sophie does fine and while writing is still a bit slower for her than it would be for most 12-year-olds, I'm sure that whenever she starts doing lots of writing her speed and fluidity will quickly catch up.

Then there's Fiona, the surprise at the end. She hasn't inherited her siblings' lags in the realm of written text.  She hasn't done much printing compared to schoolchildren her age, but what little she does is neat and easy for her. And so last evening when she said "I want to learn to write my name in cursive" I figured why not? The Portland (Getty-Dubay) Italic font we've tended to use around her makes for a pretty quick transition from printed to cursive.

It took about 30 minutes of practice for her to learn the "joins" necessary to write her name in cursive. Not bad, I think! Now that she can do it neatly, she plans to work on a messy version, so that she has an artistic grown-up looking signature.

She's using a nifty notebook and pen set we found a few weeks ago. The paper is treated with invisible dyes which are revealed by the oxidizing ink in the pen. Naturally this led to all sorts of experiments to figure out the patterns and the processes of the chemicals. And it has also led to more interest in handwriting.

The drive to learn

"Help me understand about unschooling. I know kids learn to talk and walk with no overt teaching but they learn by example, I think these are more of a biological drive in the human being. I am not sure learning Pi falls under the same category."


If you want to look at it from a "biological imperative" standpoint, I think you can definitely lump learning about pi into it. I think human beings are programmed to learn to walk and talk, but I think another thing that sets us apart from most of the rest of the animal kingdom is that we are programmed to learn from others. Humans have memes as well as genes: bodies of knowledge that are passed along by the culture that surrounds us. And I'm not talking about school-ish learning here. I'm talking about the sort of learning that in the distant past let hunter-gatherer kids know which plants near where they lived were safe to eat, how to fashion a weapon, how to build a shelter. We are hard-wired for learning. These days the things children are driven to learn are less of the "building a shelter" type and more of the "swapping graphics cards" or "calculating interest charges on a loan" type. We are hard-wired to learn whatever is necessary in our particular environment for becoming a productive, capable member of our society.

Unschooling doesn't mean no formal learning: it just means no uninvited teaching. Much of an unschooler's learning may be informal, but if they want formal structure to their learning that's totally cool. My unschooled 11-year-old is currently getting up every morning to sit down with a high school math textbook and do work with pencil and paper to master it. She has decided that higher math is likely to be useful to her, so she wants to learn it. My 14-year-old son who until recently had nothing you could call handwriting gradually discovered that there were a few occasions in real life when it was helpful to be able to write neatly and efficiently with a pen. Since real life wasn't giving him enough practice to get good at it, he set to work making himself practice on a daily basis, and now has a neat legible written script.

Proving learning to an overseeing body hasn't been a problem for us. My kids are learning like crazy, and progress is well-nigh inevitable. It isn't necessarily linear and steady, but over the long term, like a school term or two, there's always stuff I can point to as evidence.

I've also not found that my kids need much if any prodding to challenge themselves. Occasionally (rarely) they have needed some substantial support from me in following through on their desire to challenge themselves. But for the most part when they know that they are fully in charge of their own learning their ambition and motivation rises up and propel them forward. In fact they often challenge themselves far more than I would ever have thought of expecting of them. 

Buckyballs

Sophie got a set of Buckyballs for her birthday. She had seen them on-line and fallen in love with them. I didn't understand what she saw in them. They're just a bunch of rare earth magnets, 216 of them to be precise. They look like small ball bearings, but each one has a magnetic north and a south pole.

I'm a convert now. They're addictive. They're lovely to handle and they're pretty. A string three balls wide makes a lovely choker. They'll align themselves in particular shapes happily. A random amoeba of buckyballs will peel away from itself in a lovely string of metal pearls. They don't like to lie in two-dimensional arrays unless they're coaxed, but once coaxed they achieve a tenuous stability.

The magnets are strong: strong enough to function as jewelry, strong enough to scare each other off when like poles approach, strong enough to feel like they have a life of their own.

Sophie is quickly mastering the various techniques: using chains of 18 to make hex units by wrapping a dozen around a circle of six, pinching 9-ball circles to create reluctant but stable triangles, turning curved shapes inside-out if they don't want to connect with complementary shapes to reverse the poles, doing all that nifty coaxing to form flat perfectly aligned rectangles and squares.

I think these will continue to be enjoyed over the long term. They're cute. They have personality. They have tactile appeal. They're unpredictable, but less so as you get to know them.

Creativity and writing

We're part of a new program at the local school, a Distributed Learning (i.e. government-funded home-based education) program. It's a bunch of well-meaning people within the school system trying to figure out not only the government regulations and expectations but also what homeschooling is actually like.

So far it feels considerably more intrusive than the SelfDesign program we left. But for us this year the intrusiveness is tolerable. Why? Because Fiona loves sharing her learning with a "teacher," and is proud and excited to provide evidence of learning to an interested adult outside the family. And because Noah and Sophie are both looking for more accountability and structure than we've been able to consistently create at home. Even if they don't relish every bit of work, they're interested in accomplishing some course-like work and projects in math, science, infotech and digital media.

But then there's the other stuff. Like history. And of course writing. Our liaison teacher has not been pressuring us to provide evidence of Noah's and Sophie's writing ability, but it's clear that his job, which he's muddling through for the first time ever, would be made considerably easier if they would produce even just a couple of little scraps of written work.

So last week I explained to the middle two kids that reporting would be easier, both for him and for me, if they could write something this term. And I put together a list of writing prompts of various sorts and asked if they would pick a couple and create something. Then I went away for the weekend.

Sophie's creative side rose to the challenge, but not exactly in the way I had intended. She took the page of writing prompts and scrumpled it up in a ball. I don't think she did this in anger or frustration -- perhaps just to be silly, just to prove that she didn't need to respect this "assignment" and that if she did it she would do it by choice? For whatever reason she wadded it up to wrinkle it, flattened it out, put it through the laser printer as a blank page to "iron" it out, folded it repeatedly, soaked it in black tea and dried it, then put it through the laser-printer iron again and finished up by tearing and burning the edges. Beautiful, isn't it? Can we count that a history project?

(She did eventually write a lovely poem and a short research report which I duly submitted as Evidence of Learning. But I think the assignment page treatment was even more creative.)

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.

Recommended for geeks

Noah is a serious PC gamer. For a while I resisted the FPS (first-person shooter) games and the stuff with violent content. But my resolve got worn down over time. Lugaru (now Overgrowth) was probably the turning point. It was a game using anthropromorphized bunnies with combat skills. He loved it and it engaged him deeply at so many levels. He got to know the development team, recorded trailers, created a fan-site, learning HTML in the process. He was getting a lot out of it, and yet it gradually became clear to me that it was not categorically different than many of the other combat games out there except that the warriors had fur, long ears and snouts rather than human faces. Lugaru seemed to sit right on the line between acceptable fantasy gaming and violent gaming suitable only for "mature gamers." And in time I realized that the line was blurry, grey and meandering, or maybe not really there at all.

Noah is a gentle soul who has always been horrified by real-life aggression. His gaming wasn't changing that. So I just gave up and let him at the mature games. He now owns a ton of them; it's where most of his allowance and lawn-mowing earnings have gone over the past three or four years. Left 4 Dead, Half Life 2, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Team Fortress 2, Portal, Fallout 3, you name it. Many are incredible in their realism; he plays on-line with others and on his own with amazing intensity and prowess. He attends the bi-monthly LAN gaming nights at the community hall and plays until midnight with the adults.

But interestingly, his long-term passions at home are for a handful of less realistic games that allow him to really get inside the game programming -- either because they have "sandbox editors" that allow him to modify elements of the game (creating new objects, scenarios or maps to play with), because they have a development community and allow "modding" of game elements using scripting, or because they allow him to follow along and/or participate as games are built from scratch.

Noah highly recommends Minecraft. It's a game still in development, not even in beta testing, but you can buy an account and be privy to weekly upgrade releases. It's being written by one guy, Notch, who is one of Noah's heroes, and it's both brilliant and simple. You can watch the programming take shape, see the complexity grow. It's a lot like peering over the shoulder of a game developer as he works away at a type of programming that's rarely visible these days due to canned game engines and modules. There's a development blog and a set of user forums to encourage even more engagement of the masses in the development process. The graphics are blocky and look like something circa 1990, but the appeal is in the logic and design process, not the graphical presentation. Our pumpkin this year was carved in the shape of a Minecraft creeper face. Creepers are the little villianous creatures that look sort of like boxy green tombstones with vague pixelly faces. Easiest jack'o'lantern art we've ever done, I have to say.

An old stand-by which keeps resurfacing here is Clonk. Noah first got Clonk Endeavor, which is now freeware, but now owns and plays Clonk Rage. It's a funky open-source German 2D game which allows multiple players to play split-screen or over a LAN or the internet, and also works for solo play. It's part action game, part real-time strategy, part platform game and can be played out in seige scenarios or on collaborative missions. You control little humanoids called clonks, who can build, mine, use machines, explore, attack each other and engage in survival missions. There are many game extensions that create an amazing range of themes and scenarios from wild west to futuristic technology to knights to extreme environments. The social element of this game results in lots of hilarity around here. And every time Noah pulls this out again he delves deeper. He has gone from downloading and installing mods to adding objects to creating his own scenarios to writing scripts from scratch using code, which allow the game to actually function differently.

And then there's Garry's Mod (GMod). It's a virtual physics sandbox which allows players to manipulate virtual objects. It works with the Source Game Engine, so in order to use GMod you need to own at least one game (through Steam, an on-line game delivery source) which uses that game engine. But then it becomes really a game of its own. And there are mods for GMod, and mods for mods for GMod. There's a very robust community of tinkerers out there who have a blast sharing content and ideas. Noah particularly loves WireMod, which sits atop GMod, which sits atop the Source Engine. He's used it to build hologram generators, locators, beacons and, most recently, a mathematical calculator which works out products, square roots and the like.

So although Noah is a gamer, he's also a game-tinkerer, who is gradually developing a robust understanding of the incredible complexity of game programming. He is completely self-led and self-taught, and I'm in awe.

Thermometer

I mentioned in one of my recent posts about the cob oven that an infrared thermometer would be very helpful in learning how to bake reliably in it.

Yesterday I found one. I was in Kelowna getting Erin to a rehearsal with her accompanist there in preparation for a recital at the Anglican catherdral there in a couple of weeks. On the way home I stopped at an auto parts and surplus store to pick up AV cables for my mom's new TV, and darned if I didn't stumble on this little gizmo.

Okay, I didn't stumble. I spent 25 minutes scouring the store for it, and finding all sorts of other nifty things in the process. But the fact remains that I walked out of the store with this awesome thermometer. It has a nice range: 0 to 500 ºC, so plenty high enough to read the oven at its peak heat.

Friday was baking day, so I haven't had the chance to use it on the oven yet. But it's come in handy, and been great fun, in many other ways. Kids comparing their hand and face temperatures. Judging the temperature of the tepid bath I ran to soothe Fiona's itchy rash last night. Observing the electric kettle nearing the boil. Judging when the boiled water has cooled sufficiently for white tea brewing. Comparing the insulating capacity of two different brands of stainless steel go-mugs. Calibrating the outdoor thermometer (yes, it's accurate!). Seeing how hot the top of the wood stove gets (217ºC or 422ºF in the photo). It'll be great for instant accurate mess-free measurements of the liquids in my bread recipes before adding yeast, or the milk mixture when making yoghurt. And for measuring the temperature of pans and cooktop surfaces.

And of course the laser is great for tormenting the cat with. That's just a bonus.

Once I have a pH meter and a digital kitchen scale my life will be complete.

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.

Posterized

She has to come home after all, I guess, since the posters are being printed, large and glossy.

Montreal chat

Erin is in Montreal, checking out the McGill music faculty and falling in love with the city all over again. She was there for a week in 2008 on an exchange trip and loved it then. This time her perspective is different. She's not there for a visit; she's looking to live there, and soon.

Last night we managed to chat for a while on-line. She's had two lessons. Liked both teachers a lot, but loved one of them, and thought she was "adorable." The French accent probably didn't hurt. It sounds like they connected really really well. Both teachers basically told her she'd have no trouble getting into the performance program and that she should focus on trying to win scholarships. She got some input on her recital performance pieces and on general posture and technique and tone stuff. She has one more lesson with another teacher today, as well as the McGill open house to attend. It was lucky good timing for this trip that the open house happens this weekend. Hopefully she'll get some helpful information and impressions from that. Though the real money for her is in the personal and artistic connection she thinks she might be able to forge with a teacher there. So far things are looking very good on that count.

She's dreaming of an apartment. A small funky somewhat scuzzy one in a run-down building within a few miles of the university, near a metro station, that she can paint "blue and purple and chalkboard," and fill with IKEA furniture, tea, an espresso machine and strings of LED lights. She's using whiney "pleeeeeeases" with far to many e's to ask if she can possibly live in Montréal next year, during her last pre-university year, as soon as she finishes her high school coursework. Did I mention she's fallen in love with the city? I was already entertaining thoughts of an arrangement of some sort in Calgary, but Montreal is so darned far away. Soooooooo darned far. (This issue just cries out for strings of repeated vowels.)

Four years ago I wrote about how, in raising our kids, we've tended to compress or entirely skip many of the intermediate stages. We've let the kids stay little and dependent for as long as they'd like, and then let them be independent and autonomous as soon as they're ready. But (gulp!) does this translate into letting my country bumpkin move more than 4000 kilometres away at age 17 to a city of a million and half, completely on her own and without the support of a university environment? I don't know ....

SufferFoot Recovery

I developed a bad case of SufferFoot after SufferFest. I had been so enamoured of my new minimalist shoes that I chose to wear them for the race without noticing that I'd only run a total of 33 km in them prior to that, none of that on trails. Even before the race I'd had a tiny bit of heel pain in my right foot. During the race it got much worse, and for a few days afterwards I could barely walk. It was the dreaded plantar fasciitis. I'd never had it before, but it's a very common injury for runners and non-runners alike. Barefooters tend to have much less trouble with it, but minimalist shoes are still shoes, and I had just run a nasty long run in shoes.

For once I think I behaved sensibly. I laid off running entirely for a week. I iced my foot. I taped it. I exercised the little muscles and stretched my foot and calf. I didn't walk any more than I had to. I used highly cushioned shoes while the pain was bad. I took anti-inflammatories semi-regularly for a few days, something I almost never do. It took about a week before I could weight-bear reasonably comfortably.

During week 2 I started walking again, and did some slow jogging for no more than 10 minutes at a time. It was really hard to limit myself, but I did it. Things started to improve much faster that week.

During week 3 I increased my mileage from 1.5 to 3 to 5 kilometres at a time, still running really slowly. I had wised up, dispensed with my minimalist shoes and settled back to running barefoot or in Vibram FiveFingers. I discovered that things started improving much more quickly when I wore less on my feet. I was a little worried about this approach, which followed barefooters' wisdom but flew in the face of conventional wisdom. My foot still hurt a bit at times, and it felt vulnerable; I wondered if the uncushioned impact on my heel might make things worse. But instead the fact that I had to actively engage the small muscles of my foot functioned as a kind of active physiotherapy for my still inflamed fascia. Subjecting my stiff and sore foot to that little bit of stress was actually making it better! By the end of the week I was able to do jumping jacks and rope-skipping barefoot without any pain.

So today I ran 8 kilometres at a decent pace on a fairly flat but rocky and rooty trail in my VFFs. My feet feel great, better than ever. Not a single twinge from my heel. Yay!

So what's the lesson here for an aspiring minimalist runner?  It's to be careful of using minimalist shoes as a stepping stone to true barefoot running. They provide protection from rocks and such, true, but that protection can encourage you to run a lot farther without support than your still-weak-and-atrophied feet can handle. I should not have run that kind of 25k run in non-supportive shoes. Not at this stage. In another year, yes, probably. But not yet.

And the ultimate answer isn't to fall back on high-support shoes: it's to continue gradually strengthening the feet through shorter as-minimalist-as-possible runs. If I do a particularly long, fast or difficult run that exceed what my still weak feet can handle, I'll put them in supportive shoes for that, then kick them off for the next run to get back into the foot-strengthening regime.

Now that I seem to be through this little set-back, I'm looking ahead again. My current plan is to take my mileage back up to my typical 30-40k a week, and then as the weather gets cold and nasty and the days get shorter to see if I can continue to increase my mileage considerably higher. If I'm doing well with that by mid-December I think I'll register for a spring marathon and start training. You can follow my weekly mileage in the widget at the right side of my blog. If I hit 60 km/week (37 miles: alas the widget only does miles) by mid-December, I'll sign up for a spring marathon. If it turns out to be impossible to fit that kind of mileage into my week through the winter, so be it. I'll put it off until the fall.

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.

Traveling

We seem to be traveling more than ever lately, and in so many different directions.

Erin was off to Banff last week for WordFest, a writers' festival that the school's writing classes attends each year. She's an old hand at the trip: this is her third year. She enjoys it, both socially and educationally. This year an assistant teacher who had just met her on the trip expressed incredulity that Erin had ever been shy. Uh, yeah ... in fact she's still shy, but she can definitely come across totally differently in the right environment, the writers' festival trip being the right environment. She had fun.

Since that trip put Erin 85% of the way to Calgary, we opted to drive out and meet her at the end of WordFest and drive her on to the east to the big city for a violin lesson, with Noah getting a viola lesson on the same trip. This entailed staying at a new, interesting hotel in Banff, so the younger two decided to come along as well. We drove out on Saturday afternoon arriving mid-evening, left for Calgary at 8 Sunday morning, fit in the two lessons, then turned around and drove the whole distance home, arriving mid-evening. Doing this with the two eldest in a day and a half is one thing. I figured that with all four it would kill me. But actually it wasn't so bad. The kids travel so well now. They nap a lot. They don't whine. They are accommodating with their bathroom and food needs. When they're awake, they are enjoyable. They invented a game called "Rock, Paper, Random." It's a word game that's sort of a cross between Rock, Paper, Scissors and Apples to Apples. You and your opponent yell out in tandem "Rock, paper, ___!" inserting some random noun at the end, and then you table arguments as to why your random word wins over the other person's. The most convincing, or elegant, or witty argument wins the round. For instance Noah's "door" won over Sophie's "tooth" once he reminded us that you can tie a loose tooth to a doorknob and yank it out.

Yesterday Fiona went off to Nakusp for a skating outing at the arena there with a couple of friends. Today Noah, Erin and I head 90 minutes south to Nelson for youth choir and a meeting about the 2012 trip to Cuba.

And then tomorrow at 6 a.m. Erin leaves with a couple of friends to Montreal. Last summer Gwen Hoebig recommended the McGill performance program to Erin and suggested that if she could find a way to get lessons with particular members of the violin faculty this would be helpful to her future prospects. So when we found out our friends were heading off to visit another (mutual) friend who is currently a student at McGill, we asked if Erin could come along. She has lessons scheduled with three of the top violin faculty. The lessons are well-timed: with her recitals coming up she can certainly benefit from getting different perspectives on her performance repertoire, and also from the opportunity to just play for lots of different people. And getting herself known to these teachers is definitely a good thing. She'll be back after the weekend, in time to make it to her weekly gig as accompanist for the community choir. And then in the next three and a bit weeks she'll have two or three trips to Kelowna for rehearsals and recital, and one or two trips to Calgary for lessons. Yikes.

The day after tomorrow Chuck, Sophie and Fiona will be heading to SW Ontario for an extended-family get-together. Chuck's mom's 90th birthday is coming up, and there are new great-grandbabies in the family to meet. Chuck is the youngest of his mom's eight children, and Fiona is the youngest of her 20 grandchildren. There will be many more great-grandchildren in the future. Sophie and Fiona have already been recruited as part of the church-basement-decorating committee, and will be playing their violins as part of the musical entertainment. They'll be gone for just four days, two of them spent in travel. Not relaxing, but they're definitely looking forward to it. Fiona hardly remembers meeting most of the extended family ever. She knows some of them via Facebook, but is very excited to meet them in real life.

And Noah and I: we're staying home for six days straight. Yay!

Here and There Slocan

Just a quick note to let you know that Here and There Slocan, our photo blog, is active again. Fiona and I have been taking lots of photos together and for now at least we're managing a photo a day.

Shrooms

We weren't looking for pine mushrooms today although if we'd gone well off the beaten track we probably would have found places that hadn't been picked over by intrepid harvesters. Rather, Fiona and I were looking for a hiding spot for our new geocache. But we'd brought the camera and were blown away by the rainbow of mushroom colours we found in the undergrowth. All the recent rain has brought these fellows to the surface in all their glory.