Nocturnal heroics

The deed is done. Under cover of darkness, we managed the Stealth Wasp Manoeuvre suggested by Rebecca. First the bucket, then the blue plastic crazy carpet, then the piece of 3/8" plywood. Noah eagerly documented the whole affair with the camera. Chuck and I managed to walk without tripping up to the steep bank at the northeastern edge of the property and place the board on the ground. He stepped back and held the flashlight. I removed the bucket, then picked up the plywood and gave the whole nest a mighty heave down the bank. No swarming ensued.

Altogether I think the kids were disappointed by the lack of drama.

However, we'd just come from the lake, where we'd been watching the nearby forest fires flare in the dark. The drama there, under a dome of bright stars, definitely outdid the Wasp Stealth Manoeuvre. There are two fires visible down the lake, one near Enterprise Creek and the other further south at the head of the lake in the Springer Creek drainage. They're both pretty big and uncontained, but mostly burning upwards, away from homes and roads. Bright bursts of orange flames were visible on the ridges. Things are hot and dry here again, despite the almost two weeks of rain and cooler temperatures we had in mid-July.

High-rise tragedy

For the wasps, that is. They've calmed down and have stopped swarming, but they're not a very happy colony. Erin was able to leave the cabin easily after a couple of hours. We can now walk calmly by the nest without worry. We can squat a few feet away and watch them busily rebuilding their nursery.

I don't want to kill the poor guys with some noxious chemical or even with heat. I'm currently trying to come up with a safe way of relocating the nest.
Original Bug Shirt, gloves, shovel, bucket, garbage bag, smoking branches? Suggestions welcome!

Trapped!

You'd think that if Erin were going to get trapped in the cabin by creatures of some sort, it would be by bears, or a cougar, or a pack of coyotes. But no, for almost two years, she regularly got trapped out there by our family dog. And now that we've re-homed the dog, she's still getting trapped out there due to the most unexpected types of wildlife.

Today a wind blew up and out of an overhanging birch tree fell a large wasps' nest. At least a hundred very angry wasps are currently swarming around her door.

At least she has the 7th Harry Potter book out there.

A Simple Curve

We finally got a chance to see this movie. I missed the local screening, and while we had the DVD zip-listed for ages, it never quite percolated to the top of our queue. Friends kept offering to lend it to us, but we all kept forgetting.

It's a pretty enjoyable film. I think it's well-made. The casting is good, the story line is believable and, while not complex, there's a depth to it. It won a number of prestigious awards, and I think rightfully so.

What fun, though, for a family who knows every nook and cranny of the Slocan Lake area, and that knows most of the minor actors and extras. An independent film, it was filmed on a small budget without elaborate sets. It was filmed in the local hotel restaurant (we even knew which table they were sitting at), at the little bay a few minutes north, on main street across from our second-favourite café. And, since the film is set in contemporary New Denver, we didn't see our town blurred by the filter of history, like we did with The War Between Us, which was also set and filmed here.

I would swear we know most of the characters in the (fictional) plot. Nealon sure captured the spirit and personality of the area he grew up in. I'd highly recommend this film to anyone who is curious about the kind of place we live. Not for young children. There are some suggestive scenes and some discussion of sex and drug use.

Babies

Fiona spends most of the night in her own bed these days, but about half the time she shows up at first light either in my bed or in the little nest on the floor beside my bed. This morning she came for a cuddle and then sidled down onto her sleeping bag on the floor, leaving Chuck and me hoping for another half hour of sleep.

Silence descended. My eyes closed. Minutes passed.

Then suddenly an eager little face popped up over the side of the bed, mere inches from mine.

"I have baby tomatoes!" it whispered. "At home!"

I'm not sure what possessed her to shared the excitement of yesterday's discovery with me on the wrong side of 7 a.m., but what could I do but surrender to her wide-eyed excitement and that smile? We got up and as soon as I'd pried my eyelids up with a cup of coffee, we headed out to look at her little plot. It was true! Her garden at GRUBS has had baby tomatoes for a couple of weeks, but here at our higher elevation, it had taken longer. She was so excited -- not only to have the tomato babies, but to have been the first to discover them.

It wasn't only tomatoes. Miniature cucumbers were discovered, and two brilliant squash blossoms were trumpeting high on the trellis, heralding their own small squashy swellings.

Siblings

It was the night the bear ate Skunk and more than half a dozen of his hatch-mates and I couldn't bring myself to post about anything else at that point. But I love the photo, so I'm posting it now. We were at a retirement potluck for two friends. Most of our friends in this particular social circle are older and their children are grown; the only couple who also had younger children moved away last year. But the adults all enjoy my children, and my children enjoy the doting interest the adults always express in their doings and goings. So it was without a single complaint that my kids allowed themselves to be herded off to the group area at the local park & campground for a potluck with a bunch of retirees and near-retirees. The food was great -- lots of salty munchies and freshly harvested Okanagan fruit to start, Judy's famous fruit punch and even meat, a rare treat for our two omnivores.

After dinner the adults played bocce on one of the pair of sandy courts and my kids acted as cheerleaders, photographers, referees and entertainment from their positions in the other court. Look at how much they enjoy making fun with mostly just each other for company. It's not that this is their only fun, or that they are their only social circle -- it's that when the situation presents itself, they enjoy each other immensely. The express genuine delight and energetic enjoyment of each other's company. This is so precious to me, one of the secret perks of homeschooling. At least when it's not 11:49 pm and happening in our living room.

Power llama

Some day I hope we'll have a couple of llamas to do this job, but in the meantime, we have a teenager who enjoys honing her driving skills on the Toro tractor.

Erin tends to disappear out of our lives at times. It waxes and wanes; sometimes she's quite involved in family life, but other times, she prefers her own space. She's very private, enjoys spending lots of time alone in her cabin, and keeps very different hours than the rest of us much of the time (she's either up until 5 a.m., or up for the day at 5 a.m., it seems). Sometimes I miss having her around. I feel like saying "hey there, stranger!" when she wanders into the house to pee or grab a bite to eat. She's funny and fun to be with when she spends time with us. We actually get along pretty well most of the time. I wish she were around to interact with a bit more. And I confess I miss her partly because she's actually capable of providing a lot of good help.

Like when she becomes our power llama. She just gets out there and whizzes around on our acre of lawn. And before I think to check on her, the mowing is done, and I haven't had to lift a finger.

Harry Potter Week

It started with a trip to see the fifth movie. We see a movie in a theatre approximately once every 12-16 months, since it entails a big drive. But HP5 was the opening night in our family Harry Potter Fest, a two-week-long gala in our home. We continued the Film Festival component at home with a revisiting of the first four videos in the privacy of our living room. And Sophie and Erin began re-reading the first six books as we awaited the 7th's release.

We've been JKR fans since way back. I bought the first book in January 1999 for Erin, then almost-5. There was no hoopla back then that we were aware of. It was just one intriguing pick off the shelves of the tiny independent bookstore that was in New Denver back then. I asked Jeff, one of the owners, about it. He highly recommended it, and mentioned a couple of other kids who had loved it too. In a very small town, you know whether your kid shares the book tastes of other local kids, and we knew that if I. had liked it, Erin would too. It was an instant hit. Over the next year, she read, or we read together (for the scary parts) the next two as well. And I don't think a year has gone by since that she hasn't read all the HP books available. We've waited impatiently for each release since then. The younger kids have had all the books read aloud to them and independent re-reads have been frequent. Noah isn't much of a novel-reader, but seems to have the best mind for detail of all of us and soaks everything in in the course of a single readaloud.

Erin is now on her second read through the 7th book. The rest of us are savouring our first go through it at a slower pace, as a readaloud. We're close to the end now and will be sorry to be done.

World's cutest blog

Okay, I'm biased. But Fiona's new blog has got to be one of the cutest blogs in the world. I set it up for her. Noah helped her choose a template and configure a few things. He also taught her how to upload photos. But the ideas, the inspiration, the writing are all 100% Fiona.

Click on the screenshot to link to the blog itself.

GRUBS jackpot

When we arrived at the GRUBS* garden today, this is what we saw tucked off in a nearby corner of the health centre property. The maintenance guys have been busy building something, and taking apart other things, and they used the Bobcat to dump a huge pile of debris in an out-of-the-way corner of the facility property, as has been done for decades. We were thrilled. Right away we retrieved four strong wooden pallets to build a compost bin. We'll nail and tie the pallets together next week and then transfer our new compost pile into it.

Also in the heap of debris, though, is a fair bit of decent cedar fence-board. Combined with salvaged bits of cedar 2x4's from our deck, we figure we might have a shot at building a small shed, something we've been dreaming of for a couple of years. Who knows?

We have an absolutely amazing compost pile cooking at GRUBS. We built it a few weeks ago from goat manure & bedding, grass clippings and assorted weeds and stuff. A local composting guru came and gave a bit of a talk to us all, and then helped us set the pile up the right size (1 x 1 x 1 metres), properly layered and aerated. Within a few days the interior of the pile was far too hot to touch. Those of us wearing glasses would immediately get fogged up when we peeked under the plastic. The middle of the pile is almost finished, but bits of it got dried out during our recent heat wave, so today we set to work doing another major mixing / turning / dampening-down. While forking over some dry stuff near the bottom of the pile, I suddenly heard a tiny series of squeaks. The kids were entranced to discover a nest of baby mice.
Their bodies were about 3 x 1 cm and hairless. We replaced them as gently as possible and covered them up again. I hope mama finds her way back to them.

* GRUBS, for those who need some background info, is a club I started, together with another mom, about 2 and a half years ago. It's a club for families, focused on the triple mandate of organic gardening, community service and environmental education. The core members are mostly unschooling, but anyone is welcome. We applied for and were granted a parcel of land on the corner of the primary health care facility property, where a community-based Primary [health] Care Steering Committee had pencilled in a "community greenhouse" that had never materialized. We began developing a children's community garden and GRUBS meeting area on the site.

The site is perfect for our needs, in that it is adjacent to the lake (with its moderating influence on temperatures, giving us a somewhat longer growing season) and right in town. It has a partly-shaded lawn on one side, a swimming beach in front, and a lovely wooded area on the other side. There's a nursing home on the far side of the lawn, meaning that residents and their visitors often drop by to visit with the children. And the view, my goodness! Straight down to lake with nothing but mountainous wilderness to be seen. We are so lucky. It's a million-dollar parcel of gravel.

The gravel, pierced by beech and birch roots, has been our nemesis, though. The front half of the area in particular was bereft of any topsoil. So building the garden has been a big, long-term job. We stripped off the sod and composted it, then returned it to create a couple of raised beds. We created more raised beds at the back of the area using nutritionally depleted topsoil and great piles of manure we were generously given. And we continue to add almost anything organic we can find to the site in an attempt to create more growing substrate and nutrients.

In the meantime, we work here and there at community service endeavours. We're involved in harvesting and processing surplus fruit for people who are unable to manage their own. We bought a wonderful fruit press to help us towards that end. We volunteer with gardening and environmental work bees that occur around town. And we've had guest speakers come to talk to us about wildlife, wildcrafting, wildlife habitats and various other environmental issues.

This year we're all exceptionally busy with the rest of our chaotic lives. We try to meet once a week for a two-hour meeting and work party at the garden, but it's hit and miss. With visits to the garden haphazardly during the week, the kids maintain their own plots, and we manage to weed and water regularly. But it's been a bit of a challenge to keep the social energy and enthusiasm going from week to week. Still, when we get there on a Saturday morning and run into a couple of other GRUBS families and a couple of interested visitors, and see the riotous growth that has occurred since we were last together, it's clear that we're doing something long-term and important and exciting.

Straddle climb

When I was a kid we did this too, but only between doorjambs and hallway walls, so we were limited by the ceiling. Outside, between western red cedars, the sky's the limit. Or one's sense of good judgement, whichever comes first. The fortunate feature of this particular pair of trees is that they're too far apart for Fiona to straddle.

Creating explosives

Noah has been creating explosive compounds during readaloud time. Not real ones -- just the models. We're reading from "Napoleon's Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History" and are into the chapter on nitro compounds. Schonbein's wife's exploding apron ('guncotton') was a great segué into this chapter.

There are lots of chemical structures drawn in the book, so while I'm reading the text, we'll be building the molecules in questions out of our MolyMod kit. It was fun to look at glucose transforming itself from a linear to a cyclic arrangement, and to imagine how big 100 million such rings would be in a cellulose molecule.

I have a thing for colour. Not in the artistic sense -- in the symbolic sense. I love cuisenaire rods because the association of colour, length and mathematical value works so well for me. And I love how striking the two-reds-and-a-blue nitro group combination is in the MolyMod kit. We'd made lots of molecules in the past, but focusing on the nitro group through our reading and its distinctive colourful representation in the kit has really made this information stick for the kids.

Chemistry is poking it's many-faceted face out of a variety of corners around here lately. For some strange reason some of my children have decided to memorize as much of the periodic table
as they can. Erin, who is a visual/textual learner, decided to write the elements out in order. From memory for the first 50 or 70, and then cribbing off the table.

There's something funny about a four-year-old coming up to you with a big grin and saying "Magnesium is 12 and Aluminum is 13."

As with everything, even the apparently mundane task of memorizing the periodic table turns into hilarity and storytelling with my kids. Elements quickly become associated with people whose ages match their atomic number. Jokes and stories evolve. Grandma E. is radon! People hate her because she lurks in their basements and does unhealthy things.

Life's never dull.

If you're planning a visit

If you're planning to visit us, take this warning to heart: use the back door. The front door, which enters off the used-to-be-a-deck, is not only missing much of its decking -- what is there has been carefully and deceptively laid out to give the illusion of stability. The inner circle within our family knows the secret route across, but it's not clear to a casual visitor, and the remainder is booby-trapped in multiple ways.

The kids spent hours rigging up these booby-traps today. Shown in the photo is an early stage in construction. I can't reveal too much here. The evil enemy might be reading this blog.

It's not that we don't love visitors. If you're not the evil enemy, don't be deterred. Just come to the back door.

Poster children on duty

I almost posted on Tuesday about the state of our house.

The weather has been very very hot recently. Dry. Scorchingly dry. The smell of forest fires in the air, the haze of far-away fires hanging over the lake. Inside the house, the lights have mostly stayed off to keep the heat down and it has been hard to see the accumulating dirt and mess. I had been working myself silly on the UPPCC. The kids had been working themselves silly destroying the deck. (Pry-bars are physics, right?) Where meal-prep had occurred it had been slap-dash, and clean-up had only been partial.

In the evenings, when it cooled down, do you think we wanted to spend our last hours of exhaustion tidying? No. We were off to the lake for a dip, or throwing our weary bodies on the floor in front of a Harry Potter DVD, or playing music, or sitting under the turbo-ceiling-fan reading. So the house was a hot dark mess. We didn't care. We were mostly either outside or asleep.

And then the phone rang Tuesday evening. Chuck's sister B. had tried calling a few times earlier, but of course we'd been outside working. She and her husband, who normally live in Ontario, were in the middle of a road trip west. They were two hours north of us. Would we welcome a quick visit?

Well, of course! The kids have only met B. a handful of times, and she'd only visited us one here, and we've all only met G. once. All the way from Ontario? How could we resist? So I enthusiastically invited them to spend a day or two.

I hung up the phone. We had two hours. Normally, intensive cleaning and tidying drives me bonkers because it all falls to me. But the need was so acute and so time-limited that everyone pitched in, full-on. No one slunk their way through one assigned job and faded into the background. Every child showed initiative. Chuck came in from the shop and set to work. I'd wipe down the kitchen counters and turn around to discover that yet another room had miraculously tidied and vacuumed itself. What would have taken me 8 hours took the bunch of us about an hour and a half. By the time B. & G. arrived, I was making bread in my sparkling clean & tidy kitchen. My family had outdone itself!

But it didn't stop there. My children somehow transmogrified themselves into the poster children for unschooling that are their angelic alter-egos. Both B. and G. are high school teachers, and I'm always a little sensitive to impressions around the countless members of Chuck's family who are current or former teachers. It was as if my kids were performing from the script of my dreams. They talked, they smiled, they answered questions. They were polite and well-mannered. They kept it real by exercising their copious powers of creative play and their dry senses of humour. They played card games, they played weird hilarious games quizzing each other on chemical elements, they played chess, they bantered back and forth. They played together, with obvious caring and affection for each other.

They got up early in the morning. They were bright and full of energy. They helped themselves to healthy breakfasts. They went outside and biked and swung and twirled and tumbled. They tended the chickens. They talked about books they enjoyed. By request they each played some music for our guests. Fiona did a lovely job of "Musette", beaming all the while at Erin. Noah threw his heart into the "Nina" by Pergolesi. Sophie's Vivaldi fingers flew. Erin played "The Cat and the Mouse" by Aaron Copeland on piano, a brilliant, funny piece that showcases all her technical ability and sense of humour. The kids applauded for each other with enthusiasm. They played some more logic games. They set to work on the deck-wrecking. They were eager, pleasant, well-behaved, interesting and polite.

I write this all down not to brag, but because sometimes I need to be reminded that my children are these wonderful people. They are not just slovenly layabouts who do nothing but consume bandwidth and breakfast cereal. They may act like slovenly layabouts much of the time, but inside them are these wonderful, capable, helpful, compassionate, erudite young people. Later this week, or next month or next year, when I am despairing over their lack of empathy or gumption or moral fibre, I can read this and remind myself that they can behave just beautifully.

Then again, as I write this I realize that perhaps it wasn't entirely that they were behaving differently. Maybe it was also that I was looking at them through the eyes of our visitors and seeing them in a different light.

Jelly with blisters

Yesterday after a couple of hours of hard digging at GRUBS, I came home and set about building the Ultimate Predator-Proof Chicken Corral, henceforth known as the UPPCC. I sledge-hammered the rest of the ancient concrete slab and made a pile of busted-up concrete that I don't know what to do with. You can see it in the picture below, on the far side of the corral. I dug the better part of 9 post holes, 7 of them through clay. It takes about 10 times longer (no exaggeration!) to dig a post hole through clay than through porous soil. In the interest of expediency I sent Chuck off this morning to buy some posts. Falling, limbing and peeling small cedars for the same purpose would have taken ages. Finished the post holes this morning. Sunk the posts. Children were very helpful at holding them vertical while backfilling. Salvaged a gate (our property used to house some dog kennels -- chain-link gates are everywhere). Whacked apart some more concrete to get gate-hanging hardware. Re-dug the post hole that was in the wrong place for the gate. "Measure twice, dig once," right? Oops.

I installed the gate. Fiona was good company and was suitably impressed with my gate. I don't think she'd had much faith... Then I installed some fascia underneath the coop to prevent the chickens from escaping from the corral via that crawl-space. Dug a trench around the perimeter so that the bottom 6-8" of fence could be buried in the ground to deter coyotes, weasels and the like from digging their way in. Attached the first piece of fencing.

At this point a feeling of satisfaction began to take root. I admit I opened the gate and walked into my UPPCC (which was only about 1/4 fenced at this point) several times, just for the pleasure of entering and exiting a structure which was beginning to feel like an enclosure.

When Chuck got home from work he helped me lift the rooflet into place. It fit! It's a salvaged bit of tin roof attached to a log frame, and I had hoped to just lay it on the fence stringers. It worked. That was definite consolation for the misplaced gatepost hole.

I finished the first run of fencing. It's 48" fencing, buried 6" in the ground, so not much over 3 feet high. Not exactly bear-proof, but a start. I was able to let the chickens out into the enclosure while I kept working. I decided it was time to have something to eat (I'd subsisted on fluids thus far) and realized it was 5 p.m.. Definitely time for breakfast!

I realized that the best source of stringers for the top of the fenceposts would be the deck, which is falling apart and needs to be dismantled (I think that was supposed to be last year's renovation project). So I set the kids to work busting up the deck. Lots of noise is good when you're in bear country, and they certain made lots of noise. They did a great job of being meticulous with nail removal; I was very impressed, since they were totally unsupervised, and, as you'll see above, Noah was not exactly wearing steel-toed work boots. I got three or four stringers installed thanks to the kids' salvage efforts.

The next step was to start fencing up and over the top. A couple of bears showed up to remind me why. They just skirted the lawn and we just ignored them and kept on working. The kids are getting pretty matter-of-fact about the bears and so am I. The kids were in the UPPCC with me, and eventually asked if they could go back to the house. The bears didn't seem anywhere nearby. "Yeah," I said. "Just go together, and make noise. And keep your eyes peeled. Scream if you need to." It's only about 25 metres to the house, and the bears usually don't come close to the house. I kept working, though I did listen for the reassuring clunk of the door shutting behind them. Maybe I'm getting too complacent. Note to self: watch children to make sure they don't get eaten by bears.

It was getting late and the chickens were happily heading into the coop on their own. I shooed them in and locked everything up tight. Tomorrow I'll keep working on stringers and upper and top fencing. But the sledge-hammering and digging are done, thank goodness! I haven't worked this hard physically in a long long time. I felt like jelly playing my viola. Jelly with blisters. Lots of 'em.

Manic robins

What is this robin thinking? What kind of nest is this? It is almost a metre long, attached to one of the milled logs that makes up the front wall of our house. Most of the immense nest-beard is a piece of the 20-foot long Big Rope that hangs from between some trees in our yard. The Abominable Dog used to love to chase and chew on that rope, pulling off occasional strands and wadding them up into tangles. Fortunately the rope is perfectly functional still, but one of the wadded-up tangles was discovered by a robin. I would love to know how it got it up there.

The nest itself is just beginning to take shape, with the robins eagerly flying back and forth this evening. "It's not really a nest yet," I said after dinner. "It's more a stockpile of materials for a potential nest." Chuck quipped "reminds me of some people we know."

I don't think they read this blog, but if they do, I think they'll see the humour (and the truth) in that remark. And they'll know who they are. ;-)

Cherries

Aren't cherries fun? With their paired stems and lovely red fruit, they make delightful over-the-ear pendants. Harvest jewelry, if you will. And let's not even get started on pit-spitting, which has been elevated to an art form by Fiona and her adult friend Katrina.

But when it comes right down to it, cherries are for eating. And the more the better.

But maybe not all in your mouth at once.... ??

RIP Skunk

Yesterday we went to the park to meet some friends for a potluck dinner. While we were there, we talked (as we always do) about who has had bear problems. "The Big Cinnamon Bear" that's been a problem around various properties east of town came up for discussion. No, we'd had a smallish black bear, and a larger black one, but not the BCB.

But when we came home, there he was. He had trashed the fencing around our chicken corral and was sitting inside it, merrily feasting on 9 of our hens, including our beloved Skunk. The carnage was awful.

Several other favourites survived -- Toy, Brownie, Minnie and Beluga. But Skunk, the greatest rooster-to-be I ever met, the Pinball Clemens of chickens, with his falcon-like head and brick-red and iridescent black-green plumage, our one-of-a-kind heritage breed Ameraucana cockerel, is no more.

Today the bear was back a couple of times. Chuck gave him one good sting with the air rifle and he took off somewhat reluctantly. The chickens have to have almost arms-length supervision at this point. I had them out for three hours of free-ranging, (which was when the bear showed up) but they are back inside the coop now under lock and key.

Time is of the essence now. I had gradually been smashing up the bits of concrete and digging up the metal posts that riddle the area where the fully-enclosed outdoor chicken run needs to go. Today I spent hours smashing, throwing and digging post holes. Between Chuck and me we got seven of the nine done. Tomorrow we begin construction.

Still lovin' it

Fiona started learning violin on a box almost two years ago. A little over 18 months ago, she became very eager to be included in the regular Tuesday routine of violin lessons that her siblings were part of. Her grandma began giving her little five-minute 'lessons,' just to fulfil her need to feel included. But, though we had no such expectations, she began to progress. And she loved it!

She has an unusual combination of two traits that keep it fun month after month. The first is her emotional resilience and ability to cope with mistake-making, to see the learning opportunities in mistakes rather than simply getting angry about them. Today she was working on polishing the infamous last section of Gossec Gavotte. In the midst of one of the sixteenth-note slurs, an extra finger went down and she played a sextuplet instead of a quadruplet of sixteenths. It was like her finger had played a joke on her, and it was a very funny joke indeed. "Where did that come from?" she shrieked and launched into a hysterical giggling fit. Then she had to try to replicate it, and that led to more hilarity. I was thrilled that I had the camera handy, and that she's so un-self-conscious around it.

The second trait is her intense focus. At the beginning of her practicing today I suggested she play slow piece as a warm-up, and that she could choose to think either about her tone, or about her left thumb. These are longstanding focus-points, so I left it up to her which to choose and didn't give any other guidance. "See if I can tell which you're thinking about," I challenged her. So she launched into the piece. And suddenly I realized that she was thinking very intensely, and very productively, about two new skills that are far more complex than the ones I suggested -- "walking independent fingers" in the left hand, and the subtle left elbow swing that helps position the fingers at their best mechanical advantage over each string as appropriate. "Chorus," which she was playing, is one of her more recent pieces, and rather than doing simply what I'd asked, she chose to do an exceptional job of not one but two pretty complicated new tasks, simultaneously. This is typical. She is always trying to "go farther" with things. She never takes the simplest choice. She chooses to challenge herself, far beyond my expectations. And with such pleasure!

I know other kids with a lot of focused intensity (a few of them in my family, actually). And I know other kids with emotional resilience. But to get both happening to such a degree in the same pint-sized body is something special.

We have our not-so-great days too. In the past six months there have actually been a few days when she didn't want to practice (and so we didn't). And for the past two or three months, many of her practice sessions have been brief and cursory, under 30 minutes. But she's now got past the 'hump' at the end of Book 1, and she's still lovin' it. What am I doing right with this kid? Nothing special, I think. Mostly I'm just lucky.

First crack

One of my friendly-but-anonymous blog visitors left me a comment a few weeks ago that turned me on to the idea of home-roasted coffee. This great how-to page at coffeegeek has comprehensive instructions on home-roasting in a popcorn popper. Thanks to eBay (ready source of used hot-air poppers) and a nearby coffee roastery that sells organic / fairly traded / co-op managed / shade-grown green beans from various sources, we were able to try this out for the first time today. We worked outside because of the heat from the popper and the messy chaff that blows out of the popper and only mostly into a bowl.

It worked beautifully. We were able to hear "first crack" (a harsher sound of cracking beans) and then later recognize the subtler "second crack" as the beans headed into the dark-roast phase. When the beans come out of the popper, they need to be cooled quickly to halt the roasting process, and gosh, they are really hot. Our over-the-sink colander/strainer worked really well and Fiona and Sophie were both eager to "shake the beans." What we ended up with was full-city-plus dark roasted beans that look luscious. They're a blend of Sumatran, Salvadoran and Guatamalan. We'll wait a couple of days for the off-gassing of the beans to be complete before grinding and brewing.