Why I took a break from the blog

Hi, folks.

Just a heads up: this post is going to have very, very little content related to the farm.

So, as you likely noticed, we've been fairly silent since October. This wasn't a planned absence - I came home from a knife-sharpening workshop in early November and hand-wrote a blog post with the intention of posting it - but the stars kind of aligned and kept me away from this space. I wasn't checking other blogs, either. I missed reading posts from my friends (as I count most blogs I follow to be friends, especially Buttons and Tessa) and I missed updating you all on what was happening in our life. As such, I'm making a conscious effort to reconnect with you, and make our lives available to you as well.

As you may know, both Jordan and I work full time. Jordan is extra busy right now, studying and writing tests to advance his career goals, and I am busy with work as well.  I'm a library technician at a small academic university, and I manage all of our online resources. This includes ensuring our users, both students and faculty, can access online books and journals, article indexes, and specialized resources (including 3D anatomy modelling!) that the university spends a lot of money on. I turn it on and make sure we are providing proper access points; I troubleshoot when users, or myself, can't get access to what is needed; I turn resources off at the end of our access period; I do some work with off-campus authentication so users can access the resources from work, home, or wherever their research (or vacations) take them; and I provide support to our Collections and Acquisitions librarian so she has the information she needs to make decisions regarding our e-resources. In addition, I provide 4 hours of reference a week - answering research, citation, and access questions. Right now, I'm slotted to contribute all my reference hours on chat reference with users from post-secondary institutions across BC and the Yukon (as opposed to face-to-face reference with our users).

As you can imagine, this means that I have 35 hours a week staring at a computer. I really enjoy my job, and I love my career path, for so many reasons - but all of the computer work I do to get paid means I'm not super enthusiastic to come home and spend more time with the computer.  I spent a good portion of December and January battling headaches at work, and it turned out my glasses prescription needed to be updated. But this meant that looking at the screen hurt like heck for a few weeks, and I was forcing myself to look away at least once an hour to get make it through the day.

I've also been busy with Zim. We've been at school two nights a week since August. It's been going great (more on that in an upcoming post), but as I'm struggling to avoid burnout, I will be taking a break from class for a bit. I plan to make some of the equipment (with Jordan's help) so we can keep practicing at home, but I'm also looking forward to taking a break from all extracurricular activities (except my work with the union at work - I am in a position with a two-year term, which ends next January) and try to regain my balance and sanity.

If we had the snow load that we had last year, I would have lost my mind this winter. I'm not exaggerating - last year's snow was so hard on us and it was a struggle to keep up. We also bought a small SUV for me, which has decreased my winter stress (look for a post about that soon too).

Anyway, I'm currently attending a conference related to my job: Electronic Resources and Libraries, or ER&L.  The conference is in Texas, but they offer online attendance as well, which is about 10% of the total cost to attend in person. But the conference is on Texas time, so it starts at 6:45 am local time, and we live out in the sticks without "real" internet, so I am attending from Kim's house in town. I brought Zim in with me yesterday, and he'll join me tomorrow too (as it's his last class tomorrow), but today it was just me with Doodle and Pongo. And Pongo likes to sing. So I will leave you, for today, with a quick video of my favourite shelties singing the song of their people during a break between conference sessions.

And, rest assured: I am making an effort to be present on the blog. I'll be back soon with more news from the last few months.

Off with her head! (or, Propagation by cuttings)

I've introduced you to my 'work garden' before - and today, I've got an update.

(Yes, yes, I know - I owe you a huge update.  All is well, and I'll get to it, I promise.)

Princess - remember her? the giant Parrot's Beak that I've cut back once already? - has continued to grow.  She's HUGE.  Due to my terrible hands-off management of her growth, she's gotten too big, and too lopsided, and her stem(s) finally started to give way when I tried to turn her around to sun the other side of her last week.  It was obvious that Princess needed to be cut back again, and today was the day.

The work garden

Fuscias - looking appropriately fuscia

Right row, front to back: Spider plant, Donkey's Tail (Kim's), another Spider plant.  Front center: Vancouver Centennial Geranium. Left row, front to back: Garlic (Kim's), Princess Two, Princess One (you can see her leaning on the Spider plant's pot), Aloe Vera (Kim's)

The Parrot's Beak (Impatiens niamniamensis - that's a fabulous name!) has stems that get woody as they grow, but the first few inches of new growth at the top are young and supple.  I had clusters of leaves right at the bottom of the new growth, so I cut the stems right under that cluster, then removed the clustered leaves.  The bottom two inches of these cuttings went into some nice wet potting soil mixed with a bit of compost - I'm hoping that they put out roots quickly and successfully.  (Sending out a huge thanks to a now-retired colleague, who left a bag of potting soil for me that she had brought in to repot her giant fern.  Thank you again - I'm putting it to good use!!)

New cuttings - introducing Princesses Three through Five!

There's one more new branch started on Princess One, and she's got a few flowers growing on her original stem, so I'll keep her around for a little bit longer, cut and plant that fourth branch, then likely dispatch Princess One.  I am being much more careful with the growth of the other Princesses - I pinched the new growth off the main stem of Princess Two fairly short once she was firmly rooted, and she's since grown two more branches, one of which has reached my height tolerance and got pinched today. I'll keep Three through Five short as well - Three (the tallest in the above picture, on the right) is already a good height for a main stem, but I'll wait until she's rooted before pinching the new growth.

All three are now in the sun, with bags over them - Three gets the bag that I used for both One and Two when they were first cut, and Four and Five have large freezer bags over them.  This raises the humidity, creating a little microclimate of their favourite conditions, which will reduce the stress while they take root.

Princess One and her beautiful - if slightly malformed - flowers

The spider mites that I battled for months have been successfully eradicated, and I'm now very cautious about grabbing new plants.  We have a yearly 'Green Day' here at work, and the greenhouse brings plants to share - they take pest control very seriously, so I am quite confident that their plants are clean.  In fact, that's where Princess One came from, along with Kim's Donkey's Tail - last year's Green Day.  This year, I got a geranium and Kim got garlic.  They had some herbs too, but I already have lemon balm in the perennial garden at home so I decided on another huge, flowering plant.

I have another Aloe, it is keeping a colleague's big tree-like mystery plant company in another corner.  All of the Aloes come from the one I got from Mom's Aloe a few years ago - and they're all putting out babies like mad!

Interested in learning more about Impatiens niamniamensis?
Stupid Garden Plants - This plant blog is hilarious :)
Strange Wonderful Things
Gardening Know How - information about propagating Impatiens

It's that time again...

Keeping a roof over our heads and our bellies full

Last weekend, Jordan and I took some extra time off from our town jobs to work on the house.  We got a ton of work done!  As we were finishing the sanding, Jordan noticed this sawdust-covered bat between the logs.

It seems like we haven't quite evicted the bats like we thought we had!

After we finished sanding, we used the air compressor to blow off the majority of the sand and sawdust, then we had to wash the house.  As the house is down to bare wood, this seemed to go against our gut instinct to protect the house; we had to mist the logs with the hose, spray on the Log Wash solution, wait five minutes, then spray the house with the hose again.  Just after we had gotten the sandblasting done, I had sprayed the back corner of the house with the hose, and it took four days to dry - we thought washing it would lead to the same results, but luckily the logs dried within 36 hours with no discolouration.

The male half of Team House Washing, with the backpack sprayer

Once the logs were dry, we started filling the checks and then we took the leap and started chinking as well.  It's easier than we thought it would be, and it actually looks pretty good!

It turns out that the chinking is pretty much a one-person job, so Jordan has taken over these last few days and has gotten quite a bit done.  The weather has done a complete reversal on us: after two months of almost no rain, it has now rained every day since Monday.  We've tarped the back deck and are almost done the two walls along that portion of the deck, and the weather was decent the other day so Jordan did the wall with the big window, as that would be difficult to tarp. We'll likely keep that pattern, and work on the exposed walls on nice days while saving the deck-facing walls for rainy days.

While Jordan was working on the house, I took turns either helping him or working in the kitchen.  Over the weekend, I made:

1 dozen pumpkin muffins;

7 250mL (small) jars of pickled beets, and 2 jars of "cloves carrots" (sliced carrots in the brine I had left over from the beets);

5 small and 4 extra-small (125mL) jars of saskatoon jam; 12 small and 5 pint jars of pickled carrots;

and, half a large freezer bag of peas.

The beet recipe is Mom's top-secret recipe from when we were kids; the saskatoon jam recipe is here; and the pickled carrot recipe came from a book titled Put 'em up! by Sherri Brooks Vinton.  The peas were simply blanched, dried, then packed into a bag (I used a straw to suck out as much air as I could) then popped into the freezer. The beets, carrots, peas and saskatoons all came from our property; the fresh dill and fresh garlic were purchased from a local farm at the farmer's market. Jordan helped with the canning too: he pulled and cleaned the beets, shelled the peas, and provided moral support as I laboured in the kitchen.

Our canning equipment consists of an enamel steamer pot (one where the insert is as tall as the pot, so we can't use that pot alone to can anything bigger than the tiny 125mL jars), a large stock pot, and a circular cooling rack. I discovered two different configurations I can use while canning: putting the cake rack in the enamel pot, and the enamel insert in the stock pot, allows me to have two canners on the go; and by using the stock pot and insert, I could can 5 small jars, put the cake rack on top, and put 4 extra small jars on top, which allowed me to can the whole batch of saskatoon jam in one pot.

I have enough saskatoon berries left that I can make another batch of jam.

And, completely off-topic, I found the following book at the library:

Chickens are the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus Rex, as evidenced by a study analyzing collagen from soft tissues in a T. Rex skeleton.  This study proved that the T. Rex is closer related to chickens and jungle fowl than it is to alligators and crocodiles. That's awesome :D  (That study is behind a paywall for the majority of you, dear readers, unless you click the link using a computer at a public library (you might get access) or a university (you will likely get access).  Here are some links with more info: "Evolutionary history of the chicken," "T. Rex is cousin to modern-day chickens.")

We have more company this weekend, and there's no telling what trouble we'll get in to...