Raptors

While in Duncan we visited a raptor centre a few minutes from the place we were staying. They had a few dozen birds, from baby eagles to falcons, hawks, owls and full-grown bald eagles. We were able to watch the flying demonstration, where they encouraged a few of the birds to fly in the open from perch to perch, handler to handler, off into the forest, back onto the gauntleted arm of a handler for a treat, and then off and about again.

Chinook the red-tailed hawk was hormonal and rather recalcitrant. He flew by a few times but then went and found a perch. He did not want to come back out of the tree and kept us waiting for a good while, but was finally enticed back with a dummy rabbit on a string doing sneaky tricks on the lawn.

Athena the gyrfalcon (left) was more straight-laced and willing to play things according to the script. She did some amazing acrobatics for us, chasing down a dummy bird swung about in the air and catching it mid-dive.

Oliver the barn owl was pretty nifty. He was a little spooked by the wild bald eagle who was in the top of a fir tree overlooking the flying field, just checking things out. But he flew for us, keeping a little closer to the safety of trees and handlers than usual.

The biggest bird we saw up close was this immature bald eagle. She was fully grown, but not feathered out as "bald" yet, a colour change in her plumage which will take her another two or three years. We see bald eagles a lot in the treetops and the skies near home. I remember when we first moved to BC almost two decades ago it was a really special thing to see a bald eagle. The discontinuation of DDT use has caused their numbers to rebound very quickly. Bald eagles around home are so common that we often don't even mention them if we see one while we're driving. But seeing them up close is another matter entirely.

A few years ago a guy in our community rescued a mature bald eagle which seemed blind in one eye and was hopping and walking about the rocky beach. He'd worked with birds before, so whoever found it called him up figuring he was the local expert. He kept the eagle in his garage for a few days, feeding it up on lake trout and kokanee salmon to see if it would get interested in flying and hunting again. It ate heartily but seemed not to see anything on its right side, and had no interest in hunting, so after a few days he moved it out to a raptor rehab centre near Vancouver. We were invited over while it was still in his garage, and got right up near this totally wild magnificent bird. Jim was killed tragically in an accident with a falling tree on his property last spring. I think my older kids will always remember him with that eagle.

Fiona, though, didn't remember meeting Jim and his bird. She was too young at the time. So it was great that she was able to see the partly tame birds at the raptor centre.

Storytelling

My kids pride themselves in their weirdness. The more random, bizarre, eccentric, irreverent and facetious they are the better. While we were on our way to Duncan last week they engaged in some collaborative cartooning and story-telling. This particular drawing started with four small wobbly horizontal lines, and got passed back and forth between Erin, Noah and Sophie as each added features, lines and blobs and tried to make the picture head off in weird directions. As the picture got more and more complicated, explanatory stories grew up to weave together the random elements. Eventually they decided to write down some of the explanations. Two selections follow, with their accompanying cartoons.

"A Little Piece of Heaven. This is an illustration of [your-deity-of-choice] disciplining a demon sloth. As you can see, this sloth is guilty of defecating on disabled children and smoking marijuana. The Lamb of God is assisting by biting the sloth with the Fang of Justice. [ed. note: The Lamb of God bears the Twin Fangs of Justice and Karma] The Lamb of God has a jetpack and lovely eyelashes, and is being motivated by the Carrot of Motivation, forged by Hephaestus who can be seen in the background, forging the Carrot of Depression. The Banana of Judgment is hovering overhead, silently disapproving of the sloth, while Lactose the Intolerant pours chocolate milk on the sloth's head. This illustration is widely believed to be the most accurate representation of Heaven ever created, as many artists fail to realize that Hephaestus is an emo hobo."

Lactose the Intolerant has got to be the funniest demigod name ever. I laughed until I hurt.  And look at little Hephaestus the emo hobo, hard at work at his anvil. He's so cute I'd like to adopt him.

 "Cult Portrait. This illustration captures a touching moment between the Mustachio Cult members after their first ritual slaughter. They are posing in front of their clubhouse with their beloved pets, including a kitten, a snake, an alcoholic chicken and a cross-eyed dog. From left to right their names are Dudley, Frank, Bill, Rufus and Emo George. The child is called Baby Bunting, and the man in the window is Shy Paul. As you can see, they run an egg business on the side to raise funds for buying cloaks and throwing slumber parties."

This one was loosely inspired by a rural home/business/homestead that we spotted while driving with a hand-painted sign that announced:

MINE
TOUR
EGG

We wondered how many years they'd been trying to sell their egg. It was a very old sign.

I like the cross-eyed dog with the mustache.

Spring climax

It's that time of year, when so many activities and responsibilities seem to reach their climax. It's the end of our year of reporting with the SelfDesign program, and that involves a mad rush to submit and rectify purchases we've made, and spend the balance, as well as the final "annual report" document to be collaboratively created with our Learning Consultant for each child. There were the final rehearsals and performances for Sophie's women's choir, where Erin and I provided instrumental accompaniment. There are the lengthy and complicated planning sessions and board meetings for the Valhalla Fine Arts summer programs. The regional Suzuki Celebration Concert took place, with ensemble contributions from our local crew. The AGM of the regional Suzuki society happened the same day, meaning mad catching up for me on my Treasurer duties so that I could table a financial report. There was a trip to Calgary for lessons, our first in two months. Erin and Noah went off on their Corazon choir tour, with immensely successful participation in the Rocky Mountain choral Festival. They have a series of three final concerts and two recording sessions for Corazon which will round out their year, all within a two-week window at the beginning of June. We're into the last week of rehearsals for the community orchestra, with a concert next weekend. The bookkeeping and income tax deadline looms large in mid-June as always. Yesterday was Fiona's piano recital. And we have the end of year Suzuki recital coming up at the end of this month.

Then there are the other loose ends. The gardening, the chicken massacre courtesy of a bear, the thousands of dollars worth of work that urgently needs to be done on the van, time-consuming work and inconveniently distant from home, the music library catalogueing I'm trying desperately to get done for the summer school, my clinic work, updates on web content for the various non-profits I volunteer with, meetings with the school about a new homeschooling prospect for next year, and violin teaching to fit in around the edges. And somewhere else the grocery shopping, meal prep and housekeeping. And music practicing with the kids. And ... er, ... homeschooling. And ... er, .... running. Neither of the latter two is happening much.

In the midst of it all, we went off to Vancouver Island for the Provincial Music Festival for a week. Erin and Noah had "won" the Intermediate and Junior Strings divisions respectively at the local level. Erin had been recommended to the Provincials in the past, on piano, but we had opted not to go then due to her lack of interest in the competitive milieu. This year she was happy for the opportunity and while Noah was lukewarm at best, he responded well to a nudge and I supposed figured if he was going anyway with the family it was no big deal to participate. I was very ambivalent about the whole endeavour, as it is a competitive situation. But we knew a few of the other participants, friends from SVI and VSSM, and I was hopeful that the exposure to other hard-working passionate music kids would be good for my two. I just hoped the competitive nature of the festival wouldn't poison the atmosphere.

It didn't at all. The adjudicator was encouraging and insightful. The other students were great. It did not feel like a pressure-cooker. We saw old friends and made some new ones. We saw a couple of well-loved piano teachers whom we've known as guest clinicians in our area. We enjoyed a number of stunning performances by amazing kids. Unfortunately for whatever reason there were no master classes or workshops for the strings kids. Guitar, dance, winds, speech arts, piano and voice all had their workshops, but the string players got nothing. No one seemed to know why. A bit disappointing, but whatever.

Erin and Noah played well. Neither were "outclassed" by their peers, as there was a range of abilities represented. Our province has basically two large urban areas and these have one to three local festivals each, turning out some incredibly highly-trained students. Then there's the rest of the vast province with small local festivals like ours with just a handful of string participants and a few teachers. So there were other "big fish from small ponds" like my two. The quality of performances was very high, the ability level ranging from, oh, Suzuki Book 7-ish for one of the participants in Noah's class to Bach Chaccones and Paganini Caprices in his and Erin's class.

We watched an afternoon of chamber music too, as well as all the solo performances. I was blown away by the musical-ensemble sophistication of these kids, and left feeling very frustrated that I'm not able to give my own children that kind of experience in any way, shape or form. They get good individual teaching, albeit very infrequently (one lesson in March, one in May....). But they do not have a proper youth orchestra or challenging community orchestra to be part of, and neither is part of a string quartet or trio or anything of the sort. Their absolute keenest love is for chamber music, both of them, and there is simply no way they can get the kind of opportunity they crave -- for a well-matched group of local students to meet every week and work hard at challenging standard repertoire like Brahms, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Schubert. And I see no way to change that.

The kids I think felt similar combinations of inspiration with frustration. The students from cities just take for granted that they'll have regular lessons, orchestras and ensembles that can challenge them at whatever level they need. If they get inspired and work hard, they have a next level of challenge to look forward to. They are so lucky!


Is there anything we can do differently to give Erin and Noah something a little closer to what they need to continue to develop musically? I'm racking my brain, but I can't see how. Given the fact that they don't really want to move, my medical license is no longer portable between provinces, they aren't yet equipped to live away from home alone, nor would a boarding-type arrangement work well for my unschoolers. And a float plane isn't really practical, is it? How about a stargate or star-trek style transporter?

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 ...

Milo, and the Slide

Fiona and I went to the garden center in Nelson this week. We bought some bedding plants as well as some shrubs and herbs for the garden we're creating in front of the deck. Our old kitchen garden was clear-cut and covered when the deck went in, so we're starting anew.

Just as we were about to leave we discovered a little flat of Venus Flytraps. I'd always wanted a carnivorous plant, and Fiona, it turned out, not only wanted one but was quite knowledgeable about them. She told me all about trigger hairs and how big they could grow. It's fun to discover that now even my youngest child is now full of knowledge that I don't have, and I have no idea where she encountered it.

The specimens in the greenhouse were of diminutive proportions, but hey, a flesh-eating plant is a flesh-eating plant. We eagerly added it to our wagon load of shrubs and herbs.

It would have been too cliché to name it Venus, and we felt for sure he was male. So we settled on naming him Milo. Venus de Milo. Get it?

He's just a baby. But he's already been fed so many flies and ants that I'm sure he'll end up suffering from childhood obesity. Will we be able to keep him alive? We don't do so well with indoor plants, but we'll see.

On the way home from Nelson we had bad luck again. Last week we had got held up an hour from home by a nasty accident that closed the highway for half an hour and were late for our dinner meeting. Then, after driving to Calgary on Thursday and back on Saturday, and to Nelson all day on Sunday for a Suzuki performance and back home in the nick of time to get to orchestra rehearsal, and turning around and driving back on Tuesday for piano lesson, we got almost all the way home from Nelson only to discover that heavy rains had caused a mudslide that had closed the highway. We were told it would be a minimum of four hours before the road re-opened. We sighed, did a U-turn and drove back to Nelson, arriving exactly two hours after we'd left. Then we headed north, taking the longer route home, one mountain range over. Sigh. It was a long day. Fiona was a trooper. I hope she still has stamina left, because we have a day and a half of driving to do this weekend to get out to Vancouver Island.

We listened to podcasts to keep ourselves from getting too bored. Stuff You Should Know, Vinyl Café and Radio Lab were on the playlist yesterday. We recommend them all highly.

Hair off

Erin got her hair chopped off in January, sending eight thick hanks of 18-inch long hair off to Locks of Love. Recently Sophie decided she had finished her tenure as a long-haired kid. I wasn't sure that she was sure about her decision, so I didn't jump in right away to get her an appointment at the salon. But soon occasional comments turned to nagging at me to book her appointment and when I did she counted down the days eagerly.

Look at all that amazing blond hair! She's had a tiny trim once in a while but other than that hasn't had her hair cut since she was a preschooler. It shines like gold and is so beautiful. I wondered if I would miss it, even if she wouldn't.

The bottom got a trim first, because that's the way the Locks of Love people want it. Just half an inch or so to get rid of the wispy ends.

Then the little elastics went in and the scissors started sawing. I wondered if Sophie would have panicky second thoughts. I had asked her before if she was nervous, and like a good little violinist she said "not nervous, but excited!" She's well-trained to read those fluttery-tummy feelings as excitement rather than fear!

By the time her hair was dry even I was thinking "this is how her hair was meant to be -- it suits her perfectly!" In fact I was already forgetting that she'd ever had long hair. Her new bob looked totally normal and right.

It's been a week now. She loves it. It takes a few seconds to brush and a couple of minutes to wash. She enjoys the look and the feel and says she has not a single regret.

I don't miss her long tresses at all. I can hardly even remember them. I'm glad I took that first picture!

Twenty-one years old

This is probably the first significant item of real quality that I bought. Fresh out of my internship, I dropped a thousand dollars and change on a good road bike. This is a lesson in the wisdom of buying quality. My 21-year-old bike is still a wonderful machine. Today I started tuning it up. I want to start riding it more again, and it is still completely up to the task.

My love affair with bicycles began on my 11th birthday. I was given a "ten-speed" bike, a real grown-up one with 27" wheels. I remember the day well. There had been a bit of an ice-storm overnight. The bike had been hidden in the neighbours' garage. I could not ride it outside until the ice melted, but I fell in love with it inside. It was silver.

I rode that bike everywhere. I went on adventures. Even back then I was drawn to distance. My brother and I would get up at dawn and bike out of the city and along county roads to other villages, exploring and relishing our freedom. We probably got up to things my parents would have been horrified by. But hey, we survived, and I have such memories of those days!

As the bike began to wear out, I became a bike mechanic. I could tear that bike apart to the ball bearings and put it back together. I bought parts and tools, I replaced chain links, I repacked the headset and crankset. I lubed, I cleaned, I replaced, I repainted. But eventually over the years the poor thing just kind of wore out.

I bought myself a new bike, slightly better-made, thought still a cheap chain store bike, about the time I headed off to university. It wasn't a great bike but I looked after it really well and added a few accessories to make it look great. It was stolen from where I'd locked it up in the parkade by my apartment about three years after I got it.

My next bike was actually a decent road bike. I think I paid $450 for it. It was lighter and snappier. I started enjoying longer rides on it. I fitted it with panniers and biked all over southwestern Ontario on it. Not extended tours, but 50 or 100 km a day over a weekend, visiting people, going places. During my internship year I biked all around the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland on it. I also acquired an inexpensive mountain bike to help me get around the hills in St. John's, and to help bail me out in the winter when my horrid car stopped working.

The next year I had an actual income. I was living in Halifax, another region with superb road-riding routes. And I fell in love with the Terry Symmetry I stumbled upon in at the Trail Shop. It's a bike engineered for short women -- that's me! The top tube is very short, thanks in part to the 24" front wheel. Other things are sized down too -- the handlebars, the cranks, the brake levers. It fitted me beautifully and weighed next to nothing. I sold both my other bikes and bought it. I rode a hundred miles on it the following Saturday, and felt just fine the next day. I rode it lots and lots in Nova Scotia.

When I moved to BC, though, I moved to a town on the side of a mountain, with nothing but hills ... and a huge network of world-class single-track mountain bike trails. So I bought a mountain bike and cranked most of my miles on that. And once we moved to the slightly-flatter town where we now live, we had kids, so even if I was riding on the road I was generally hauling two kids in a trailer, and I needed the granny gear of the mountain bike. My Terry Symmetry spent a lot of time collecting dust after that.

Now that I'm in decent shape again, and the kids no longer need to be hauled about in a trailer, it's time to start riding my Terry again. It needs some new rubber up front and a new real derailleur cable before too long, and I want to upgrade to SPD clipless pedals. Other than that, though, everything is ticking and humming and spinning as it should.

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.

Turning Japanese

There's a Japanese flavour to my children's lives. We live in a community that received, relatively speaking, a large influx of Japanese immigrants and nissei (2nd generation Japanese-Canadians) during WWII, when the Canadian government saw fit to intern them away from population centres on the west coast. Many internees put down permanent roots here, and we also have a wonderful community garden and a terrific museum and interpretive centre to memorialize and pay homage to their experiences. Summers bring taiko drummers, Nikkei centre reunions, Obon ceremonies. Then there are the Japanese roots of the Suzuki method of music education that we participate in, up to our necks. And there are the Japanese influences, cultural roots and language strongly visible in the practice of aikido at the local dojo. And our very small local high school (~ 45 students) hosted two Japanese exchange students for a couple of years, one of whom became a good friend of Erin's.

So it's not surprising that there was an interest in Japanese language here in our family. It has borne fruit particularly in Fiona, who thought that she would like to formally study Japanese this year. She decided that Rosetta Stone would form a nice spine to her studies, augmented by numerous other resources and exposures. We'd had the chance to try the demo in early 2009 and had had it on our wish-list for quite some time. Having bought second language resources in the past for various other children, I wanted Fiona to be sure that she would really make use of this before we took the plunge. A couple of months ago she'd decided that yes, Rosetta Stone was something she really wanted. We used her SelfDesign learning allowance to fund the purchase. The software arrived just before the music festival week, so we've finally had the chance to dive into it properly this week.

It's so much fun that we're both using it -- independently and together. There are sixteen lessons in Level 1 (of three levels, each considered roughly a year-long course of study) and we are only half way through the first lesson, but already I am amazed at how much we are both learning with all the enjoyable repetition. We are disciplining ourselves to use only kana (Japanese phonetic script) for the written text, unless we absolutely totally get stuck. We find the voice recognition aspect is alternately forgiving and oddly picky ... but that's less important than the fact that it often forces us to repeat things for its own strange reasons and makes us really listen to the reference pronunciation and be exactly in our own efforts to reproduce them.

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.

Running barefoot

I've run tiny distances in my Vibram Five Fingers over the past week, and worn them around a bit to get used to them (and embarrass my children) but I hadn't done a proper run in them until today. I decided to do an easy 5k and see how it felt. It felt pretty good. My calves have to work harder, for sure, and I was feeling a bit of a strain in them by about two thirds of the way through, and I felt the beginnings of a blister starting on my big toe -- typical for running in a new pair of shoes. Other than that I felt just fine. The weather was fantastic. I wore shorts and a tank top and even walking through the shade during my warm-up I was plenty warm enough. We have entered the perfect running season here.

I decided to do a regular easy 5k run. I figured I'd be using new muscles and getting used to a new running style and therefore it would be good not to push things. I brought a little metronome along and used it to keep my stride cadence at about 184 per minute -- quick little strides that are much shorter than my usual heel-strike running style in my stability shoes. I found that felt pretty easy and natural once I got into the rhythm. I pushed things a little on the downhill but for the most part I kept my effort in the "moderate" range. When I got home I entered time and distance in my on-line log.

My regular 5k runs are shown above in green. The pink ones are the ones where I've pushed myself a bit, the "tempo runs." You can see that I typically run 9 to 9.5 minutes to the mile on my regular runs, and a bit under 9 minutes on my tempo runs. What amazed me is that today (shown far right) felt like a regular run, but plotted out as my fastest 5k run (8:40/mile) since I started back at regular running a couple of months ago. And that was despite the fact that I ran the last kilometer completely barefoot, and felt like I slowed down fair bit. My Garmin told me the truth. While the last km felt like a cool-down, it was exactly as fast as the previous four.

It seems that the less there is between me and the road, the faster I am, even though I don't feel like I'm giving things any more kick. This is very fun.

Archived!

I write this blog for many reasons. Some are about the process, but several are also related to the product. The accumulated virtual scrapbook is an important memento of family activities, adventures, challenges and milestones. Important not just to me, and not just in a nostalgic way, but also to the kids and also in ways that reassure and re-affirm.

I sometimes worried that I didn't have a backup copy of the blog, that it could theoretically just disappear from the web with a server crash or a reconfiguration or something and all those precious mementos would be gone. I also like the idea of having a tangible record, something I can hold in my hand and flip through, sit on the deck or curl up in bed with, or show to others.

So a month ago I clicked "submit" at Blog2Print and ordered up hardbound volumes of my early blog posts. I put 2003-2006 in one volume, and 2007, the year I really got hard-core as a blogger, into it's own separate volume.

The books arrived today. They're beautiful. The paper and print quality is excellent, the photos are clean and clear, at least as much as my early low-resolution images would allow. The glossy cover is well-applied and attractive. The indexing is accurate. Each volume is about 200 pages. They weren't cheap, though compared to scrapbooking as a hobby they were certainly a reasonable alternative. My kids have already spent lots of time delightedly flipping through and reading aloud to each other from funny entries, enjoying the portrayals of their younger selves and the memories of things past.

If a virus eats Blogger it's okay now. Though I guess first I should get my 2008 and 2009 volumes ordered.

Dreaming...

"So," I said at dinner last night to the assembled fam, "Looks like the iPad is will hit stores in Canada right around my birthday."

The reaction was not what I had hoped for. There was some eye-rolling and snickering. "Nice try," seemed to be the consensus.

Wolf

Only in a small town can a guy roll in on Monday, visit with a few friends, offer to do a talk on wolves and a visit with his own "pet" wolf, and get a full fifth of the community's residents out to the event a mere two days later. Standing room only.

Fiona took this picture. She got up close and personal with Tundra. Heck, everybody did. Scrubs and cuddles and licks and sniffs and those piercing eyes looking as if into our souls. We learned a lot about wolf behaviour and about the complex ecology of top-order predators. Who'd have guessed that re-introducing wolves would produce massive increases in waterfowl populations? Why? Because without wolves, ungulates over-graze and prevent the growth of saplings that beavers rely on. Without beavers, wetlands are severely reduced. Without wetlands there are no waterfowl.

Tundra was a pretty amazing, magical creature. Her strength, intelligence, grace and alertness were so engaging. I was pleased that her owner spoke at length about why having a wolf for a pet is generally a really bad idea. The main reason he came back to was that the bond between himself as pack leader and the wolf is so strong that they simply cannot be parted. No flights, no non-wolf-friendly holidays, no pet-sitters. That and the four or more vigorous walks a day ... for up to 18 years.

There are wild wolves around here, though I've only seen one once -- a fleeting glimpse from a bridge. We're very glad to have met this one, even if she's a human-conditioned ambassador for the species rather than a wild animal.

Solo performances

The solo performances at the festival were also a very positive experience. The adjudicators were complimentary and encouraging of every last child, even those who didn't play very well or were struggling beginners. They gave every student some constructive feedback and often spent more time with the kids who might otherwise have felt a little out-classed in their group, bringing forth from them some really brilliant improvements. The atmosphere in the classes was so positive -- families and students high-fiving each other after performances, even if they'd never met before, lots of warmth and supportiveness.

I've already shared the Summit Strings Tango, which was played on the final Honours Concert. Noah and Fiona also played solos on that concert. The kids all got a little scholarship money. (Noah suggested he would like to use his money to bribe his teacher out of assigning him any more studies!) And Noah and Erin were chosen the Junior and Intermediate students recommended to the Provincial Festival. I think Erin would like to go. I know Noah is not keen. The festival is structured in a competitive fashion, which is something I swore we would not do until the teenage years. Time flies. I have two teens. We shall see.


And yes, I still have four children, but one has requested that her youtube video not be embedded here. It's easy to find for those so-motivated.

Pink Stuff for Pirates

Our favourite salad dressing is referred to as Pink Stuff for Pirates. I think it began because we were storing it in a used grocery-store salad dressing bottle with the surface layer of the label torn off, and I wrote "pink stuff" on it to distinguish it (as if it needed distinguishing, in all its lurid fuschia glory) from the "white stuff" ranch dressing also on the table when we eat salad at dinner.

My kids have a penchant for labeling all sorts of things with strange randomness. For instance we have a small jar which encloses a bag of bulk-bin ground cinnamon in the pantry which is labeled "ant farm project." They claim this will help prevent others from invading our home after any global political / environmental disasters and living off our stuff, because they won't know what is food and what is not.

Pink Stuff for Pirates is very popular here. Assuming you have an Asian grocery store where you can find the curiously strong Ume Plum Vinegar, it is easy to make.

Pink Stuff for Pirates

1/2 cup ume plum vinegar
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. dill
6-8 medium to large cloves of garlic
1 cup olive oil
1 cup light vegetable oil

Combine all ingredients in a blender and whizz until well puréed. Store in fridge in any appropriately-labeled container. The cranberries and garlic help keep it pretty well emulsified. The combination of oils helps keep this dressing from solidifying in the fridge.

Kids Seriously Over-embarrassed

These are my new running shoes. Except that they're not really shoes. They're more like rubber gloves for my feet. They're called Vibram Five Fingers, and are the KSO (for "Keep Stuff Out") model. The acronym also works for the title of this post, though, which is more to the point. I actually wore them to the Music Festival Honours Concert specifically in order to embarrass my children and they were effective to the extreme.

I read "Born to Run" a few weeks ago and it all made perfect sense to me: our bare feet were made for running. They have incredible natural bio-engineering in them -- arches and joints and nerve endings and natural flexibility -- all built for barefoot ambulation, and more to the point evolved to perfection for marathon-style "persistence hunting." Historically sandals or simple shoes provided some protection in cold climates and on very rough ground, and heels were useful with stirrups for horseback riding. Eventually, of course, they became part of a fashion statement.

But eventually, primarily within the last 40 years, we began raising the heel of our running shoes too and adding comfortable rubber/gel/foam/air cushioning underneath. This meant that running form changed. We began running with a heel-strike, i.e. landing on our heels rather than on the middle of the foot with its lateral and longitudinal arches and all the natural shock absorption and stability the foot as a whole is capable of. The heel is a round knob of bone and thick skin with no natural engineering for lateral stability or flexible shock-absorption. So it's not surprising that weird stresses from landing on that hard rounded knob began creating injuries in runners. Ilio-tibial band syndrome, shin splints, runner's knee. Here's a great video comparing natural running to running in cushioned motion-control shoes. Research shows that the stress on the knee is actually higher in runners wearing $100 shock-absorbing shoes than it is in the same people wearing nothing at all. Why? Because we run differently in expensive shoes. We run badly. Though this type of running form is considered normal now.

I am generally drawn to natural simplicity and even last summer, for reasons that weren't as much scientific as aesthetic, I began experimenting with barefoot running. However I got a nasty sharp thing buried in my sole at some point, so I bought some less robust shoes as a compromise. Then a few weeks later got the hip injury that was miraculously cured three months later by even more supportive and cushioning shoes. It seemed like a failed experiment.

But I think that I did two things wrong. First, I ran completely barefoot on trails without first conditioning my feet to outdoor barefootedness. And secondly, I did a lot of running in my minimally-cushioning shoes without changing my heel-strike.

So here I am again. I'm trying to learn to run with a mid-foot strike and a fast light cadence even in my Asics Kayanos, and then I'm using the sensory feedback I get through bare feet or the super thin Vibram Five Fingers soles to train the bottoms of my feet to feel the surface I'm running on and respond accordingly. So far I'm only running a couple of kilometres at a time in the VFFs. My calves are a bit sore from the extra work they do, and there are the inevitable almost-blisters that always come of getting used to a new running shoe. But the running itself feels light and comfortable. I'm hopeful. Hopeful that I can continue to create mortifying embarrassment for my children for years to come.

Music Festival 2010

Our region's Festival of the Arts took place this week. My kids played 22 selections total. A lot of music! Some were unaccompanied string solos, many were string solos with piano accompaniment (necessitating rehearsals with a lovely accompanist friend who came from her neck of the woods for the week), some were piano selections and some were chamber group music.

The atmosphere at the festival was fantastic. Over the past few years a new group of volunteers has taken the festival and moved it forward into a new, non-competitive style of vitality, collegiality and inspiring supportiveness. The adjudicators were fabulous. Both the strings and the piano guys were known to us through summer workshops so we even knew ahead of time that they were going to be fabulous, which really allowed everyone to feel confidently optimistic about the experience during the preparation and rehearsal phase.

The last time the festival took place, two years ago, it wasn't as excellent an experience for a combination of personnel-related reasons, but the mutually supportive atmosphere amongst the students and their families had really begun to take shape. And one of the results of sitting all day in the pews of a church whispering and sharing jokes and good feelings with other performers during the time the adjudicator was writing up her comments was that the students from our little town decided that they wanted to continue to do regular chamber music playing together. Summit Strings, formed in order to do one simple performance at that 2008 festival (see link above), became an ongoing affair and a continued commitment.

Over the past two years Summit Strings has grown in musical ability, maturity and sound, and they've also grown together as friends. It has been my privilege to be their coach and facilitator during this time. They are a small group of violinists (even smaller since two of them moved to Calgary this year), with Noah playing what would normally be the cello line on viola. They've played a wide variety of repertoire at a wide variety of venues, from local outdoor festivals to Suzuki institute concerts to community performances and dance workshops.

And so it seemed especially fitting that it was at the same music festival where the seed of Summit Strings had first been planted where they were asked, two years later, to take to the big stage and open the Honours Concert. They played their "party piece," a sweet little Tango by Michael McLean, with the bass line of the piano part played by Noah on the viola. This video is from the morning performance at the festival class. The Honours Concert performance was tighter and more exciting (partly because, at the adjudicator's suggestion we put Noah in the middle, an approach which worked really well) but the sound and video quality aren't nearly as good in the full, dark Capitol Theatre.

Sunday bliss

My determination to grab some running time back from the constraints of our more structured approach to homeschooling is finally bearing fruit. I can often tear off for a quick 5k in the mid to late afternoons, or even, as the days get longer, in the early evenings.

A year ago when I started running I claimed the early mornings of odd-numbered days for myself. Now I am claiming every Sunday morning. Don't count on me before noon, kids.

And this photo is why. This is where I run. It's an old rail-grade trail. It runs from our little town along the lakeshore and past one tiny hamlet of a couple of dozen homes onwards north towards another hamlet. This photo is taken from the first hamlet looking back along the lakeshore towards our town. Fresh snow on the mountains, clouds alternately cloaking and revealing the peaks, beautiful warm sunshine on the foreshore, grouse and flickers and pine siskins and waxwings everywhere, the lake lapping at the stones on the beach, the smell of pine and cedar and humus and the sweet aroma of new birch buds.

It's my bliss, though also my agony. I'm running proper long runs these days: twelve, fourteen, sixteen miles and more. The better part of three hours most Sundays. I feel great while I'm running, though the last hill brings me back to reality. And afterwards I hurt. A good kind of hurt. Muscle exhaustion, occasional blisters, achy feet. I love the feeling of real physical fatigue I endure after lunch on Sundays. It's almost enough to make me want to take a nap. I eat some more and drink a London Fog or two instead.

I went running with a real runner this past weekend. A Suzuki-mom friend of mine recently moved to the town 40 minutes to the east, and she's a triathlete, personal trainer and running/cycling/swim coach by training. She's been doing some free running clinics, and I went over for Friday's session. I was the only person who showed up this time, it being Good Friday, cold and almost snowing and all. Which meant I got an hour of professional private coaching for free. Amazing! It was only the third time I'd ever run with someone other than Fiona and Sophie, and the first time I'd ever done so with an expert.

I had driven over with some trepidation, worried I'd discover I really sucked at running. She was very helpful and encouraging, though. We talked about hip rotation, quad vs. hamstring recruitment, posture, mid-foot strike, turnover speed. I discovered there's a fair bit that I'm doing right just by good luck, and that most of the things I'd been thinking about adjusting were along the right lines. She gave me some good drills and exercises.

I'm not really interested in going faster or farther. I mostly just want to ensure that I can do my regular runs without risk of injury, and continue to feel like I'm getting stronger and more efficient. I am becoming a committed trail runner. The roads here are almost like trails, being lonely and beautiful and steep, but I relish freedom from asphalt and even rare traffic that the trails give me.

I'm toying with trying some barefoot running, or at least minimalist-footwear running. Fiona wants to start running trails with me again, and her pace and stamina would be a good place for me to start with that. Stay tuned for more on that!

New family vehicle

... and even Fiona has got her learner's permit for this one.

It has already graded our driveway and will apparently (so I am told) be helpful with innumerable other tasks around the property.

It sure is orange, is all I can say!