Her summer

This is where Erin is living right now. Curiously enough it's the same university residence system I lived in when I first left home. Almost, but not quite, the same building.

I dropped her off at the airport a couple of weeks ago. The day before we'd arrived in Kelowna in time to do some shopping. She bought herself an iPhone 4. Three and a half years ago we bought a family cellphone that was a low-end dinosaur even then. Erin has used it during her various travels so far, but it was time to move on. She needs a phone of her own, something with more functionality. She won't have a land line next year, so the cellphone will be it. She needed a few gizmos to take with her for the summer and the fall: an iPod for listening to repertoire (hers had died a couple of months earlier), a metronome, a GPS device to keep her found when running and managing public transit, a camera, an alarm clock. The iPhone is all those things, and more. She subscribed with a Montreal number, so she's all set.

For the summer she's in Ontario, on the UWO campus. She arrived without any difficulty. NYO staff picked her up at the airport. Sweet! She's sharing a room with nice violist whom she really likes. She has 6-10 hours of music programming a day. She's trying to practice 3 hours and run 5k each day in addition to that. Within three days of heady music immersion she was saying that it felt like she'd been there her whole life already. She's lost her sense of time. Days seem like weeks. The intensity of the musical and social experience is playing tricks on her mind like that. She's found friends to run with. She performed the complete Haydn Sunrise Quartet today, and loves her quartet-mates. Everyone is awesome -- they're so musically capable, so motivated, so friendly and unassuming. There are occasional swing dance sessions for recreation. Meals are veggie-friendly and delicious if you stay with the salad bar.

The schedule shifts from mostly strings / mostly chamber music to a full symphonic focus in the next couple of days.

In short, she's thrilled. She's in her element, with young people just like her. If you're in Ontario, Quebec or the Maritimes (or even New Hampshire) you may be able to catch the NYO in performance somewhere on their tour schedule.

New tea, new candy

When you have a lot of rhubarb in the garden, and strawberries are coming into season, and red clover is overflowing the waysides, and you're an 8-year-old looking for inspiration for a new tea blend, the colours of your inspiration are pink and green.

I truly love this tea. We found some bulk organic white peony tea, fair trade and imported in small quantities by a Chinese woman in the area. Fiona and I chopped strawberries and rhubarb, dried them on the dehydrator, picked a couple of litres of red clover heads and lightly dried them. Mixed this all together and voilà, a beautiful blend full of the colours and flavours of spring. We used roughly equal volumes of each component, so that makes it easy to reproduce if you'd like to make your own. I expect any fresh green or white loose leaf tea would work just as well as the white peony. Fiona has packaged up a dozen bags of it to sell at the market tomorrow. It will be her "Featured Tea of the Week," and samples will be available if you're interesting in dropping by her stall.

Brewed up it's yellow with a touch of ruddiness. It is absolutely wonderful with a little dollop of honey mixed in. I expect it will be great iced as well. This is definitely a tea that I'm going to mix up a couple hundred grams of and mark "Not for sale" and tuck in my cupboard for my personal use in the middle of winter. Fiona calls it Pink Paradise. In February it will reassure me that spring will come again.

Sophie received a couple of books on candy-making in the mail yesterday. She's all inspired to make marzipan bumblebees, violet velvets, blackberry paste and crystallized rose petals. This book is amazing: great pictures and the recipes use real ingredients. The raspberry lollipop recipe starts with sugar and raspberries; the caramel apple recipe makes absolutely no mention of Kraft products in any way, shape or form. I'm looking forward to her explorations!

Macro perspective

I put the magnifying lenses on the DSLR camera the other day and Fiona had fun shooting up-close photos around the garden. A change in perspective is truly magical.

Thyme

Parsley

Lupin top

Rosemary

Hawkweed

Hens & Chicks

Veggie Pâté

Veggie pâté has become popular around here. It's so simple to make, and it adds substantiveness and protein to summer sandwiches and crackery snacks.

Veggie Pâté

4 medium onions, chopped
6 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed
0.5 kg sliced mushrooms
2 cups lightly toasted walnuts
2 cups lightly toasted sunflower seeds
2 cups dried green lentils
1/3 cup olive oil
3 Tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 Tablespoons blackstrap molasses
1 Tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
1 teaspoon dried thyme (or 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh)
1 teaspoon dried parsley (or 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh)
1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke

(This is a very forgiving recipe. If you don't have dried green lentils, use red ones, or use dried peas, or dried garbanzos or heck, you could probably use tofu or even porridge for that matter. If you don't have walnuts or sunflower seeds, substitute with hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds, cashews or any number of other possibilities. The seasonings are suggestions, not requirements. I've put all sorts of seasonings in and it always turns out great.)

Simmer dried lentils in a few cups of water for 1 hour or until tender, drain and set aside. In the meantime, sauté onions, garlic and mushrooms in olive oil until soft. Add salt, turn the heat down a bit and allow to "sweat" a bit and also carmelize a bit on the bottom. Stir occasionally, but don't worry if things get a bit crusty in the bottom. Turn off the heat. Deglaze the bottom of the pan to extract any caramelization, adding a tablespoon or two of water if necessary. Dump in vinegar, seeds and remaining seasonings.

Combine cooked lentils with the mushroom-onion mixture in a food processor. Process until smooth. Serve as sandwich or cracker spread.

Market upgrades

 It's market day tomorrow. Sophie got an order for 20 lollipops, so she's been busy stockpiling. Her dad made her a lollipop display stand and we are all very smitten with the fetching rainbow of colours. From left to right: raspberry, tangerine, lemon, peppermint, anise, root beer, maple, butter rum, cinnamon ... and repeat.

She's got new creative ideas she's planning to try with the popular lollipops. Stay tuned for special Canada Day editions of the lollipops, and a limited edition premium version.

Fiona ramped up her tea production this week. She is completely self-sufficient at mixing, weighing, heat-sealing the bags, and packaging. She gets help from me printing the labels from my desktop publishing program and punching the holes in the top (her hands aren't strong enough to work the hole punch).

New this week for her is this display stand. It's just a piece of scavenged pressboard with some holes drilled in it for wire pegboard hangers. Stuff we found in the bottomless pit of Chuck's hoardings of home repair stuff in the shop. And now she has a lovely vertical display which does her lovely packaging justice.

The easy pickings of wild ginger are almost over for the year, so she is beginning to think about the next tea blend. Lots of herbs are growing in the garden, but they're nowhere near ready for harvest yet. So she's considering some fruity blends and wild-crafted wellness teas. We have a huge collection of wild rose petals and dried rhubarb, some red clover, mint and nettles. We also have some organic ingredients we've purchased: sencha and white peony teas, red rooibos, vanilla bean pods, coconut and other toasted nuts, chamomile, orange and lemon peel. The possibilities are endless!

Purple, purple and more purple

Erin has left us. Her cabin is now officially vacant, and so a grand reshuffling of rooms is taking place. My teaching studio will move into the cabin that Erin used to occupy. I hope that I can winterize it a little better, as violins do not tolerate the low temperatures that teenagers tolerate.

Sophie is moving into what was the teaching room in the basement. It's tiny, but it will fit the essential furniture. And more importantly it will be all hers, and with a little bit of extra privacy due to being on the lower floor.

The walls used to be a warm grey. But when I stopped quickly for dog food last week unbeknownst to me Sophie made a beeline for the paint chips in the back of the store. Once I had dropped Erin off at the airport she presented me with her choices. Dark, medium and light purples. So be it. She is working really hard on this room. It's going quickly. She'll be ready to move her bed down by tomorrow.

Which will leave Fiona in a room of her own as well. With the lower bed removed from the cramped L-shaped arrangement we had before, she'll actually have room to walk through the room, and the lower space under the loft bed will become a proper desk space. Her redecorating plans are less ambitious at this point but she is turning over a few ideas. I expect that once she can see the space she'll come up with some plans. In the meantime the co-operation between Sophie and Fiona in all the work required for this room-shuffling and redecorating is amazing to see.

Bear stories

Last week it was beautiful and sunny and I decided to sneak in a quick afternoon run. I took the highway out towards the junction to the east of us. Typically this highway has only very light traffic, and it's beautifully scenic. I did my 20-minute jogging warmup and then started up my heart-rate monitor and my Garmin GPS watch for what was supposed to be an easy endurance run.

A red minivan with out-of-province plates passed me, going fairly slowly, then immediately slowed to a crawl. It was travelling in front of me at about 10 km/h, matching my speed. It was creepy. I was by myself on foot, 20 minutes from home on a remote, little-travelled secondary highway and now this van was behaving very strangely. I tried to look confident and nonchalant, and I avoided looking at the van, not wanting to make eye contact.

On the Garmin tracing above you can see the red arrow which is the point where the van pulled in front of me. My pace (bars at the bottom) slowed down a little, so that I could stay well back from the van. But my heart rate (red line) blipped up a bit despite the slower pace, because I was, well, a little freaked out about the creepy tourists I guess.

The van continued in front of me at a crawl for a good minute or more. Focused on avoiding eye contact with the psychopathic out-of-towners, it took me a long time to look anywhere but at the road three metres in front of me. Finally I glanced to the left.

There was a bear. Right there. I had almost run past it by that point. It was just on the shoulder of the road about 10 metres from me. At most. It was looking at me curiously, without any fear. Kind of a weird-looking bear, like it was having a bad hair day or something. Small to medium sized, maybe 2 or 3 years old. But yikes, it was so close. I veered to the other side of the road and though I tried to avoid doing anything to startle it, it seems from my Garmin tracing (blue arrow) that I picked up my pace a lot, and my heart rate took another big jump. Bear stayed put, I carried on around the next curve. The driver of the minivan, seeing that I was now safely past the bear he had clearly spotted, sped away.

Now, I see bears with some regularity when running. I usually wave and shout and they run off and I don't think again about it. This incident became story-worthy because of my tourist-paranoia and my obliviousness that let me get that close without noticing, not because it seemed a particularly dangerous situation. But for some reason, for a few days after that, I kept mentioning to friends and family members how I was feeling kind of spooked about risks from wildlife while running. I'd never felt that way before. It was weird.

It took about five days, and a wildlife report from a neighbour, for the penny to drop. That was a grizzly. That was not one of the shiny cute black bears (that actually come in various shades of cinnamony brown as well) that I've become so nonchalant about over my 20 years in the Kootenays. In my memory I realized I had a clear picture of the scooped face, the jowly tufts of grizzled fur backlit by the sunshine. And yes, our neighbours had had a grizzly in their garden, and seen it up close through their window a few times, and had it bluff-charged a friend's truck when he stopped and rolled down his window to take some photos. And my description of the roadside bear was a perfect match.

I'd never seen a grizzly before in the wild. We know they live around here, usually up in the subalpine zone though. So it's very unusual to see one close to town. This guy is probably a 2-year-old, off trying to fend for itself for its first spring without mama. I hope it makes a U-turn and heads back up the pass soon.

I'm still running the road and trails out that direction, but with more awareness, and more often with other people. Thinking of carrying bear spray.

So then a couple of evenings ago I did a quick barefoot run along the same highway. Our driveway is rough and gravelly, so I wore my Minimus shoes while walking the 400 metres up to the road. When I got to the top of the driveway I shucked my shoes and left them, as usual, near our highway-number-sign. I had a nice, uneventful 30-minute run. Got back on the dark side of dusk and peered in the weeds for my shoes.

Only one shoe was there. Had I kicked the other off and let it fly? No, I was pretty sure I'd set both down together side by side. I wondered if maybe my family was playing a joke on me, but that didn't make sense: the driveway is a long way to walk from the house, and anyway they wouldn't have known I was leaving my shoes. I looked all through the weeds and grass. No shoe. Finally, about 20 metres down the driveway in the dim light beneath the overhanging trees I spotted a dark lump that looked like it might be shoe-sized. I walked over and picked the item up. It was a slobbery wet Minimus with two neat puncture marks in the sole.

I hadn't heard anything, but then I was busily looking for my shoe in the brush, thinking some human (me or my kids) had done something silly. Likely a bear (a black bear, I assume, optimistically!) was curiously mouthing my shoe as I arrived back from my run, dropping it and running off when I startled it.

I rinsed my beloved Minimus with a hose, let it dry, and it's perfectly wearable.

Second market and other bits of news

Quick update from the second market. Despite the dreary weather (cool and raining on and off all day) Fiona sold out her teas again quickly (proceeds: $25, initial investment now recouped), and Sophie, who had taken huge quantities of candy with her, sold almost all of it. Just a couple of lollipops left, one gift jar, half a dozen loonie bags. I think she sold about $80 worth. She was thrilled but also a little overwhelmed to think how much candy-making this project will require to be sustainable on a weekly basis.

We will have to skip the next market as we'll be taking Erin to put her on a plane to NYO that day, so that gives both girls some breathing room in the production schedule. This is particularly good as Sophie is waiting on a Canada Post delivery of more natural flavour oils and lollipop sticks, and with the rotating postal strikes that are currently taking place it may take a few extra days to arrive.

I managed to get out to meet my running group for a quick 10k this morning. I've joined a running club based 45 km to the east of here, in the hope of being able to join some of their Friday long trail runs. (And, truth be told, because I wanted to be able to buy one of their awesome club jackets). I did a fabulour long run with them three weeks ago; then Beauty and the Beast got in the way. More on that later. Anyway, today they were coming this way to run a trail almost in my backyard. I ran out along the trail to meet them at their end, then ran back with them as far as the spur back to my house. It was a soggy run what with the rain, and I ran at the front because I had to be home soon, so it was fast and tiring. But I made it back in time to get Sophie and Fiona to the market.

From there Erin and I went to a meeting at the school. We're all trying to perform a delicate dance: keeping everything kosher and honest, supporting Erin in her ambitious musical plans, letting her live elsewhere to get musical training, while also maximizing her chance of cleaning up a bunch of post-secondary scholarship money next spring through the local school district, and getting her all the academic requirements she needs for admission to her program of choice in 2012. So she's officially "travelling" to Montreal a few times next year (and also, incidentally, travelling to China with her Montreal-based orchestra). Her permanent address is here in New Denver, and for reasons of scholarship eligibility her school enrollment will be split between the bricks-and-mortar school she has "attended" the past three years and the DL program that her siblings are part of. She'll write her midterms in January, after the China trip, when we'll have her home for a family Festivus celebration (in lieu of Christmas).

Ah, yes, Beauty and the Beast. Erin and I for some strange reason enthusiastically volunteered to commit to playing in the pit orchestra for a full-scale high school and community production of this musical in Nelson. The orchestra was all adults, mostly very good amateurs or semi-pros, all volunteering. Great bunch of people. Erin's first experience playing in a pit, and it was a true pit ... a tiny cave directly beneath the stage, wired with mics and monitors and such. It was so much fun! Partly to have the time together playing reasonably challenging music mostly solo on each of the two violin parts, partly because of the feisty, fun company of the other players in the pit, and partly because of the trickle-down energy and enthusiasm of the cast, many of whom were friends of Erin's. But my, it was a lot of driving and a lot of time.

Now Erin is back to practicing Mahler, Richard Strauss, Tchaikowsky and Shostakovich symphony music and Haydn quartet movements in preparation for her NYO summer. We're still working on Montreal plans but she was enthusiastically accepted into the orchestra she wanted to join, and things are looking more hopeful all of a sudden on the accommodation front. It also looks like her current slate of school courses, plus the 3 she'd planned to do next year, will satisfy McGill University when she applies next winter.

First Market

It was a cool day with a little bit of sun and the first Friday Market of the year was fairly slow. The late spring and cool temperatures have kept the tourists away, and the kids are still in school.

Still, business was brisk at the Tea & Sweets stall. Fiona sold out of all the teas she had packaged up. Sophie, who had brought considerably more stock, sold about two thirds of what she had. After paying the Market Society 10% they are both about half way to paying off their start-up costs.

What they learned: People really like loose-leaf tea around here. Raspberry is the candy flavour of choice, while lemon was relatively scorned. Lollipops go like hotcakes when there are kids around, and that demand will escalate greatly in July and August when the schools are out.

What I learned: Fiona and Sophie are excellent prioprietors. They were cheerful and attentive, and when asked they affably explained their ingredients and production methods.

People were very impressed by their customer service, packaging and by the quality of what they were offering. And they were kind and encouraging.

First teas

Tea packaging proceeds. Two herbal blends have been bagged and labelled. She's going to start out with just these two, plus "pot-sized teabags"of green sencha / wild-ginger intended for iced tea.

She's decided to sell six teabags or 20 g of loose tea for $2.50. The origami paper was her idea and I think it looks lovely.

New shoes

Fiona had outgrown all her shoes from last year and for some reason those in the hand-me-down box were mostly too big. And of course my sensibilities about footwear have changed in recent years. The clunky high-support traditional running shoes I put my big kids in when they were Fiona's age no longer seem like the best option.

Last weekend Fiona came and ran a 5k race with me. She did phenomenally well, and she ran with the unadulterated great form of a mostly-barefoot kid, even in the clunky shoes she had to don for the event. I sure don't want her losing that form, or her enthusiasm for running.

In light of her need for new shoes, her nice natural form and her interest in running, a couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and dropped a lot of money on shoes untried and unseen, but which seemed from my research to be the best of the very slim pickings in kids' minimalist shoes.

These Vivo Barefoot Aquariuses from Terra Plana arrived this morning. They are very impressive, exactly what I wanted for her. They fit nicely, feel comfortable on the inside, have thin, zero-drop soles with grippy treads and a puncture-resistant membrane. And they're wonderfully flexible, very much like the little siblings to my New Balance Minimuses.

We're going to squeeze in an inaugural run together this afternoon.

Tea progress

Fiona's tea business is taking shape. Some organic ingredients have been purchased. These have been combined with wildcrafted ingredients like rosehips, peppermint and wild ginger. The wild ginger in particular has entailed several trips along trails for collecting but we now have heaps of the stuff.

Two herbal blends are shown. On the left is Ruby Red, a combination of hibiscus, goji berries, dried apples and rosehips. On the right is the Kootenay Wildcraft tea, a blend of wild ginger, rosehips, peppermint and lemon peel.

This morning the teabags arrived!  We'd ordered 500 heat-sealable teabags. She will sell some tea loose-leaf, but most of it will go into teabags. Two grams of tea goes inside each bag, and then a few seconds with the iron along the open edge seals it up for good. She enjoyed making up a few today.

Next she's going to have to figure out packaging. She could just put 10 teabags in a ziploc bag, but somehow that seems a little conventional and dreary. She's had thoughts about labels and origami boxes.

In the meantime, it's fun to test out the teas, and to serve them up to guests for feedback. The Ruby Red is really lovely to behold in a glass cup.

And she's carefully tending all sorts of other herbs in flats and in the garden: lemon bergamot, peppermint, marigold, chamomile and lemon balm are growing, and lavender and anise hyssop starters are on their way to us by mail.

Schedule thoughts

So here's the thing about me. I have a terrible ambivalence about schedules. I love their tidy organizational clarity. I like fussing around making lists and spreadsheets and calendars. But I know that when it comes to living my life I much don't like clocks, and I much prefer freedom to structure. So I rarely schedule anything in my life, because it seems so pointless. My mantra throughout my years of parenting has been "a rhythm, not a schedule."

Outside activities impose a certain amount of scheduling on us. Today for example, I had to run Erin to town at 8:45, there are violin lessons from 10:30 to noon, I teach from 4:00 - 4:45 and pick Erin up at 5. But other than those fixed elements I've always thought "rhythm, not structure," the sort of rhythm that says that creative time tends to happen in the early afternoon, and practicing is usually in the early evenings, and tidying fits in just before and just after supper. Theoretically.

The problem is that the rhythm isn't working very well with six people in this family whose needs and desires are increasingly divergent. The reality is that while I tend to envision daily rhythm as being like a confluent ebb and flow of waves on a seashore, our rhythm is like a confused set of wakes overlapping and resulting in splashes, peaks, troughs and unexpected forces pushing us all this way and that, occasionally threatening to topple us into the drink.

Evenings chez Burkholder, for example. Chuck likes to chill and watch TV and play guitar (yes, often simultaneously). I like to run. Fiona prefers to practice violin, which she should do with my help. Noah is just getting going for the day and would prefer that I be available to facilitate his academic work in the evenings, but not until after he has practiced, which is usually after a bit of time on the computer. Sophie likes to practice and then get busy in the kitchen. Erin uses her evenings for schoolwork, practicing and an early-ish bedtime. Fiona likes doing math or science with me after she's done her practicing. And we're all living in the same relatively small space. And then somehow we forget that two or three evenings a week are devoted entirely to rehearsals, work or other such pursuits. Since supper doesn't usually finish until at least 7 pm I can't possibly ensure that I do all the necessary inititation and facilitation in the same three-hour window every day.

So running gets squeezed out. Fiona often practices alone. Noah rarely gets the academic facilitation he prefers, so he's not getting through his coursework. Fiona's bookwork is hit or miss. The kitchen is a mess. And particularly as reporting for our DL program looms I realize that we're not doing terribly well at fitting in the things we want to do.

Last week I signed up for a running program. It handed me a schedule. Wonder of wonders, I am fitting in the running. And it almost feels as if there is more time in my life, rather than less. Is there a lesson to be learned here? Is it time to admit that while our family doesn't like schedules, we need to impose one on ourselves to ensure that we are happy and productive?

An further object lesson presents itself in the likes of Erin, who for years seemed as resistent to schedules as anyone in this family but but now as a self-sufficient self-motivated older teen has opted to impose on herself some pretty rigid scheduling. She doesn't like being tightly scheduled, but she has discovered that it's a necessary evil as she juggles in-class courses, independent study courses, provincial exam deadlines, dozens of assignments, endless sets of rehearsals and performances in various ensembles, exercise, learning endless NYO orchestra and quartet parts, eating and sleeping and other necessities.

I suppose it's time for a family meeting.

Barefoot running

Just for fun. A presentation I put together about barefoot running, pulling together a variety of resources. There's a lot more interest around here than there was a year or so ago. Be patient while it loads, and then use your > arrow key to move through the slides. There's one quite long video embedded near the beginning which I find fascinating, but you may feel differently ... feel free to click past it. Obviously this is intended to go along with additional explanations and demonstrations in places.

Barefoot Running on Prezi

Making hard candy

Here is Sophie's system for making hard candy. Her basic recipe is from the LorAnn Oils site. They make great concentrated oils and dozens of awesome flavourings, though natural foods stores are a good source of basic essential oils as well.

Ingredients

2 cups granulated sugar

2/3 cup corn syrup (use clear or amber as desire: only colour will be affected)

3/4 cup water

5 – 15 drops of liquid food colouring

1 tsp. essential oil or other concentrated flavouring (use half as much for clove, cinnamon or peppermint oil)

For dusting: 1 cup of icing (confectioner's) sugar

Equipment:

Small to medium sized clean, heavy-base pot with heat-proof handle and lid. (Mixture will bubble up to approximately twice its initial volume, so you need to have a good bit of room to spare.)

Accurate candy thermometer (We use our laser infrared digital thermometer which works great but a decent analogue one will suffice.)

Heat-proof spatula

Molds (sprayed with light cooking oil) and lollipop sticks if desired

Dough scraper (lightly oiled)

Marble slab or other heat-proof surface (lightly oiled)

Heavy-duty scissors or kitchen snips (lightly oiled)

Pan or rubbermaid container in which to toss candies in icing sugar

Basic metal kitchen sieve

Damp cloths for quickly wiping up spills.

A source of water for rinsing hands as needed.

A well-organized workspace that will not risk a person carrying a pot full of extremely hot sticky syrup tripping over a child, a stool or a dog whilst moving to counter area to pour candy.

The beginning of the Butter Rum candies

Place granulated sugar, corn syrup and water in the pot. Stir gently just enough to dampen the sugar. Put the spatula aside and resist any temptation to stir again until mixture is done cooking. Heat on medium heat on stove until mixture starts to simmer. Put the lid on the pot and let it simmer away covered for a couple of minutes at least. The condensation on the sides of the pot will was down any lingering sugar granules and help prevent crystallization later on. Remove lid.

Monitor temperature periodically as the mixture boils. It will likely hang around 212ºF (100C) for a while until the water boils off and then beginning climbing gradually. The rate of increase may increase as the temperature increases, so be vigilant. 

A deep red for Cinnamon candies

At 260ºF (125C) add drops of liquid food colouring as desired. Just sprinkle them on the boiling syrup. Don't stir! The boiling action will mix the colour in.

As soon as the syrup hits 300ºF (150C) turn off stove and remove pot from heat. Wait for boiling to subside. Measure out your flavouring and pour on top of syrup. Use spatula to stir it in. Warning: some flavourings, especially the natural oils, let off a lot of harsh sinus-penetrating volatile aromatic hydrocarbons. Stand back while stirring!

Lovely shiny ribbons

Pour one to three ribbons of syrup onto your heat-proof oiled surface and then place saucepan back on stove on lowest heat to keep remaining syrup liquid. Don't touch the ribbons at first. 

Use dough scraper to fold them over on themselves once or twice. After they begin to hold a more rolled, three-dimensional shape, they are ready to start handling. 

Work quickly! Touch lightly with clean hands and keep your hands and the candy ribbons moving so as to avoid burns. We like to twist ours a dozen or so turns and then roll the twisted rods like snakes a bit between our palms to compact them. 

Snip into candy-sized lengths into icing sugar while still warm and pliable. Toss to cover with icing sugar. Repeat until all the syrup has been turned into candy. Sift off excess icing sugar.

Alternatively you can pour all your syrup onto a rimmed cookie sheet lined with lightly oiled foil, wait a couple of minutes and score your clear lake of candy into bite-sized bits with the back of a lightly oiled dinner knife. If the scores fill in, the candy is still too hot: wait a couple of minutes and repeat. Allow scored candy sheet to cool completely, then break into bits along the scoring lines.

Sophie gets three beautiful lollipops and this
many candies from a single batch

Or you can use lightly-oiled candy molds. (Not the kind made just for chocolate: they won't stand the high heat of this syrup. You need the kind intended for hard candy.) Pour. Cool. Turn out.

Candy should be stored in a cool dry area, inside something moisture-proof.

Candy shop

Sophie has been busy making candy. From left to right:

Root beer, mint, anise, maple, tangerine and lemon.

Next up: butter rum, raspberry and cinnamon.

She's also making lollipops which are turning out very nicely. She can do three large lollipops from each batch of candy, leaving the quantity shown in the lemon drop jar for lozenges. Each batch takes about 45 minutes from start to finish, including clean-up.

Mother's Day Run

There was a notice in the paper about a 5k run in a town to the north of us. There's haven't been running events up there in as long as I can recall, so it seemed like something worth going to. I figured I'd use it as my first official barefoot event. I haven't been running a lot this spring, or particularly hard, but I'm doing it all minimalist style and feel like I'm finally past all those niggling calf and foot troubles and have completed the transition to barefoot and barefoot-style running. Time to do something official totally barefoot.

Yesterday I was picking Erin up from the gym, where she had also done a bit of running on the streets around town, and I said "Oh, hey, there's a 5k I'm going to run in Nakusp tomorrow. Want to come and do it with me? We'd need to leave by about 8:30." She said yeah, sure, and would I please make sure she got up in time to eat something and get changed.

So I woke her up this morning and she ate breakfast and got her running stuff. And I mentioned that she should bring some warm stuff to cover up with, because we'd probably end up standing around for twenty minutes or so and that would make us cold.

"Standing around? Um, what are we doing?" she asked, clearly very confused.

"We're going to run that 5k Fun Run in Nakusp," I said. "We'll have to register when we get there, so we ...."

"A race?" she interrupted, laughing. "I thought there was just some 5k trail you wanted to run. You never told me it was an organized run!"

"Oh. Oops, sorry. Want to do a race?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever."

So we went. We ran. The weather was lovely. I managed barefoot. My lack of shoes slowed me down a bit on the downhills and on some of the gnarly chipseal asphalt, the kind you don't really pay any mind to unless you're barefoot. My feet were a bit sore by the end but nothing that won't be back to normal by tomorrow. All in all it was a successful barefoot run. My Garmin didn't triangulate until after the first long straight stretch, so it didn't record my time, and neither Erin nor I noticed that there was an official race timer at the finish line. Duh! We were definitely in the "fun run mindset," I guess. Extrapolating from what my Garmin did record, I think we both finished under or around 28 minutes, she about twenty seconds ahead of me, which was a pretty reasonable pace for a fun run for us.

It was a great way to start off the day.

Mother's Day Concert

Need I say more? It was a great concert. They are great kids. The music was fabulous. And then after it was over, Erin and Sophie did a quick presto-change-o and became choral accompanist and soprano and did the community choir performance as well.

Soccer

Sophie is our only soccer player this year. She hadn't played in a couple of years but was keen to go out this year. Her team has an awesome coach. They're actually learning strategic skills, and practicing using them in scrimmages.

There's no league per se. Just one local team for Sophie's age level. The organizers called around to similar small-scale community soccer programs in nearby villages and arranged a short roster of Saturday morning games. So far there are five games scheduled. In past years our local soccer teams have been part of the main roster of the larger town 40 minutes north, where there's a big soccer program. That meant games every single blessed Saturday, most of them up there. For a family whose May and June tends to be packed with end-of-year musical performances the weekly out-of-town games and twice-weekly practices were an onerous time commitment. This feels much more managable.

Sophie has come so far in the first three weeks of practices! It's amazing to see her digging in and handling the ball and running and really kicking. Age-wise she's "Grade 7" on a Grade 5/6/7 team, albeit one of the youngest Grade 7's, so even though she's small for her age she is no longer the tiniest kid on the field. She is really in her element skills-wise as well: challenged, but not over her head by any means.

But as an aside: how come my kid of all people has a heel strike like this?

High school

Erin returned from Corazón tour to a whole slew of English assignments. National Youth Orchestra starts before the school year ends because it's built more around the university academic year than the high school one, so somehow she not only has to get caught up in English and her other courses, but she has to get a couple of weeks ahead so that she can do school final exams and the provincial exams before she leaves.

She has a couple of performances on piano and violin this weekend, rehearsals for the pit orchestra of a full-scale musical production in Nelson kicking into high gear, and 60 or so pages of NYO repertoire to learn too. Plus Suzuki, quartet and several more Corazon performances to round out the year. And hopefully enough time to do some serious work on her solo repertoire.

And for all these reasons I am feeling exceptionally grateful for the open-minded flexibility of the K-12 public school she's enrolled in. I say "enrolled in" rather than "attends" for good reason. Over the past three weeks a combination of tour, choir rehearsals, school special events and such has meant that she has attended exactly one double block of English and that's all. This is less school attendance than usual for her, but even at the best of times she goes to school less than half the time. In a typical week during the winter she might have attended for Tuesday morning and all day Wednesday. Some weeks she might have gone two other full days, or another morning, but often not.

She is not scheduled into classrooms for most of her coursework. In fact, only English 12 is a classroom-based course for her this semester. That means that technically she is scheduled to be in the Facilitated Learning Centre at the school, where students who are doing on-line courses, individual project-based courses or teacher-directed independent study courses with teacher supervision and assistance as needed and those school attendance rules satisfied to a tee. But the reality is that she is a de facto homeschooler, and the school recognizes this. She has so many musical/travel commitments, and works so well when away from the school building, that they see no reason to impose rules that make no sense for her. Why would you take a teen who submits one to three Social Studies assignments a day during Christmas holidays so that the entire year-long course is more or less wrapped up in two months, and force her to attend school to prove that she is working and learning? It would make no sense. And the school recognizes that. They're not worried about rules for the sake of rules. They're not concerned about "setting a precedent" by allowing this. They want to serve the best interests of this particular student. How refreshing!

And so here is what she did to catch up on schoolwork during a precious warm sunny school day this week: she sat on the deck at home. This is how she works best. She took her poetry textbook out with her, and she wrote poetry and interpretive essays. Spending a day like this within the walls of the school would give some people the satisfying sense that she was "being schooled," but fortunately Erin, her parents and her teachers all recognize that her learning is far more efficient like this. Independent immersion-like work in comfortable surroundings.

Next year she won't be doing any classroom based courses, and she'll do her last few credits exclusively through on-line courseware. So she will be enrolled not through the bricks-and-mortar school but through its Distributed Learning program, which is administered through the same building and by, as it happens, the same two people who have supervised the bulk of her in-school courses. So little will change.