Knitting projects

Our friends at Colour it Green Diary were asking to see our knitting projects, but I was embarrassed to show them. Since then we've made progress on our skills. Mostly, this has happened since the semester workload has peaked and so we now have a little free time.

Time to try to make some kind of productive and economic and householding sense from the mountain of our own yarn we have on hand.

This is probably none too soon, because word has gotten out at college that we have yarn, and I've sold quite a few skeins and given quite a few "free samples" away. I can't afford the time to sell too much yarn just yet because I'm required to pay sales tax on yarn and am not yet set up for that extra paperwork.

When we sell food, there's no sales tax.

Aimee's first project is the green hat. It was knitted on a circular knitting ring, and as you can see, came out perfectly. That's typical for my wee wifie, who if she cannot see her way clear to doing a thing 100% right first time, may very well not want to do it at all.

Makes me wonder what she thought she was doing when she married me. She must have realized at the time that perfection in family life would not likely be the result!

The blue hat on the right is my first successful project, knit up on the 80's model "Singer Chunky Knitter" in the other picture. It is not at all perfect, but wearable.

The "Singer Chunky Knitter" machine is the bee's knees, the third one we've tried, and the only one that works with this heavy pure woolen yarn. But it works very well, quite smooth and easy to run, not a lot of pushing effort needed, and very few dropped stitches.

It took quite a bit of effort to even locate this second hand machine, which I found gathering dust at a knitting club in Rockland. It cost $300 and has yet to get anywhere close to paying for itself. But it will. We're at the beginning of the production-organizing process here. I expect we'll turn out many of these hats before we're done.

Guess what everyones getting for Christmas!

In fact, if you were to cost out the economist's "marginal costs" of those two hats at this point, each cost around $500. But the next ones, and the ones after that, will divide and subdivide that number up quite quickly because at this point, with the amount of yarn we have saved, the machines and other equipment on hand, and lots of long winter evenings, each new item just costs its own labor.

Also visible in the picture of the machine is my first attempt at a sweater. This is indeed the project I've been working on since I got the machine, but it's a failure -- doesn't fit at all well, and will probably need to be unraveled. Maybe not. I'm trying to decide if I can afford to keep a sweater with six or seven skeins in it that I can only wear when I'm wearing bib overalls, because without the bibs overalls it looks stupid.

But it is warm, and I do wear bibs a lot, and it even covers my butt!

Oh well. Sweaters will need a bit more practice, I think.

My next project will be a hat for a family member in a different color, but almost identical to the blue one. I'll try not to have any dropped stitches in the next one, and try for tidier seams and nicer sewing.

After a few hats, I might have the courage to try again for a sweater!

Aimee's already knitting me a hat like her green one. Only trouble is, she says I'm not allowed to lose it. I always lose my hats, so I'm not sure if I can afford the trouble that will inevitably come if I wear it and then lose it!

Carbon chemistry and honey-do's and computerized trucks

Here's our kitchen stove heating the house nicely and making my breakfast oatmeal today. Hot stoves make me happy.

After about three-four days of sog and fog, it's turned cooler out there, but another rainstorm is coming before the weekend, to be followed by snow. None of which has yet stuck, but it will, soon, and that will be all she wrote for several large categories of work until May.

All this inclement weather is turning my attention back to the woodpile. Despite a poor start because of a last minute community wind job out on the islands, I thought I'd checked the boxes on my honey-do list pretty well over the nine-day Thanksgiving break. Taking narry a day off, I caught up pretty well, including a none-too-soon resurrection of my mechanical training, a tune-up job which turned a somewhat recalcitrant wifely truck into a much better-behaved one.

I particularly impressed myself with the work on the truck. Normally that truck and indeed any up-to-date vehicle terrifies me. Vehicles have become far too computerized and complicated for backyard mechanics and the probability of a mistake turning a hundred-dollar backyard job into a two thousand-dollar dealer-only nightmare is very high. But with careful reading of the Chilton's manual and repeated "pulling" of electronic codes, I was able to run through the diagnostics, fix the rough running, and get it running a lot better.

This will become more of a necessity as this truck ages. We can't afford to throw good money after bad in any vehicle, and our 200,000 mile pick-up will have to be written off completely one day soon. Between now and then, it's best if I save some money by doing as much of the work as I can myself.

Still, I thought I was doing fairly good, as husbandry goes.

Probably I was, but if that pile of wood runs out before May, my husband name will be poop around here.

Firewood has been a problem for us every year on the Great Farm. Not availability: we're surrounded by wood: we own or lease about 14 acres of prime New England woodlot, capable, by the traditional estimate, of delivering the same number of cords of wood each year. Far more than we use. But finding the work time to cut, buck, split, stack and dry the four or five cords or more we should really have piled up each year, that has often defeated me. This year I gave up on making wood during the wet spring when the tractor couldn't move in the woodlot, and instead did a huge insulation project.

So now I have to buy in some more "outside" wood. This means money, which is tight, and work time, which is also tight. One place I know will deliver. I can just have wood delivered to the dooryard in a three-cord dump load for about $600, but that wood generally isn't dry enough. Most sellers also sell stuff that's way too green.

The one place I know of where the firewood sold is actually dry has a fair price too, but I have to pick it up myself in that same tired, woefully small-bed, rice-burner Nissan pick-em-up truck.

It requires three round trips to get a cord. Half a day.

Oy. But it has to be done.

It's right about this time that I realize why I should have had kids earlier in life. When I was a strapping teenager my old man took full advantage of my inherent capacity for labor, and I had any number of chores to perform, both for our house and for our family business (a chocolate shop in downtown Broomhill, Sheffield). I could really put my teenage self to good use around here. Or some newer model Womerlippi.

I could also use a pick-em-up truck that takes a full cord of wood. But not a thirty-thousand dollar new model nightmare. An old two-wheel drive three-quarter ton Ford in good nick would be ideal, circa 1972, no computer, all points and spark plugs and carbs. I could keep that baby running for forty years if I could keep the salt off it.

Or a nice long-wheely Land Rover pick-up. Still a short bed truck, but my, how you can keep those things running. And get a trailer to go with. A trailer that could take a full cord and carry three little piggies to market would be nice and save me some grief.

When we were in the UK service and Land Rovers were ten-a-penny we used to bowdlerize the old Irish folk song, The Wild Rover:

And it's no, nay, never,
No nay never no more,
Will I drive a Land Rover,
No never, no more.

But I wish I had one now.

And a new chainsaw. My two old ones, never the most powerful of saws in the first place, are getting tired and one quit on me last week, possibly for good. The two I have are identical, which was deliberate, so the dead one will become spares for the other, but they're only lightweight saws and so not very quick at making wood.

My favorite farm blogs are also wittering on about firewood. Colour it Green Diary in SW England wants a woodlot. She could borrow ours if she were closer. We'd share, or trade for knitted goods. Throwback at Trapper Creek in Oregon has one, but coniferous. I liked the picture of the deep Oregon woods and the easily split softwood logs because it reminded me of Montana. Although we have conifers in Maine and in fact our woodlot has huge spruces and hemlocks, we think of them as sawlogs, not firewood. We use oak, maple, cherry, beech and ash for firewood. Ash predominates in our own woodlot, one of the best New England firewood trees because it can be burned while still wet.

Our woodlot grows a thirty-foot tall, six inch DBH ash in about seven years. Takes a few of those to make a cord, but it makes for perfect stove wood.

Aberdeenshire's Stonehead and Paul on Raasay both have new snow.

Beautiful, but cold. And makes it hard to shift firewood, especially with a tiny Nipponese pick up. I'd better get moving this weekend, and get those extra two cords in.

And all the fixings

Here's the result of all our Thanksgiving cookery. Minus the pumpkin pie, which I forgot to put on the table for the photo.

Sprouts, carrots, potatoes, pumpkin, lamb sausage and sage for stuffing: ours.

Turkey: Raised by an young Amishman called James, who at the age of 15 or 16 essentially runs his own farm and can drive a three horse plow with ease. Three Belgiums too, mind, huge 18-hand mega-horses.

Cranberries, stuffing bread, onions: Commercial.

And here's a slide show by provocative NYT artist/commentator Maira Kalman, whose work I like.

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/back-to-the-land/?8dpc

I found it hard to read some of her comments. Apparently there are people who think that growing your own food is elitist.

Here's an example, the most egregious since it seeks to inject reverse racism:

"I’d rather the kids learned how to read, write and add rather than dig, clean up, and recite the elitist food cant of white people with too much money and time on their hands."

I may grow my own food on my own land that I struggled for years to be able to buy, and that may make me elitist, but I plan to do so until the day I die.

I tend to feel more like I'm reclaiming my birthright as a working class Englishman and a Yorkshireman from a rural area now swamped by suburbs, reclaiming in fact what my grandfather and grandmother tried to teach me, but were not able to succeed at, thanks to the distractions that engaged me as a teenager. I also tend to think that what we do here on this small farm is a natural consequence of the many years of thought my wife and I have put into our criticism of society, and represents our own effort to change that for the better.

We raise affordable, high quality meat, eggs, firewood, fleece (for yarn), and vegetables that we sell for a reasonable price, or often just give away.

How is that elitist? Somebody needs to get out of the city once in a while.

Never one to dodge an argument, I posted the above response on the NYT site.

I should have added that since of course we both also teach math, science, reading and writing to under-served American kids of all colors and races, we both also believe in education. But if that education is only fitting to secure the recipients a better-paid place in the machine, and not the fierce independence of thought Aimee and I value so highly, then it will be at least partially a wasted effort.

And who then will renew society and make it better each generation? A society too, that will always need to eat.

Things to be thankful for...

...on this Thanksgiving.

The biggies:

My wife Aimee, who always amazes me with her capacity for hard work, serious thought, and ability to reconstruct our lives every few months or years. If I'm ever in a rut, Aimee will fire up her mind-tractor and pull me out.

My sister Carol, without whom Aimee and I would have had to pack up our entire lives here in the US, with all the hard-won benefits of our jobs, our PhDs, our sweat-equity in this house and land, and go home to Wales to look after my ailing, aged parents. But Carol does this every day, does almost all --99%-- of my share, and never complains.

Chemotherapy: Aimee's Dad, Dick, still kicking and making fun after, what?, 6-7 years of leukemia. Agent Orange is not a friendly citrus fruit-spy.

Our jobs at Unity College. Challenging, tiring, often infuriating, never dull, always relevant to the future of the natural and human worlds.

This old farmhouse, safe, handsome, sturdy, warm, efficient, cost-effective, situated among good neighbors and wild woodlands.

This old farmland and the surprisingly abundant food for man and beast that you can get off 3.5 acres of rock-strewn Maine and the ten acres of hayfield we rent (in the form of 400 finished bales) each year.

The 12 acre woodlot lease that keeps us warm each year, for less than zero carbon, and $50/acre. Each acre sequesters more than twice what we burn.

Oddments in my mind today:

Penicillin: we have a sick ewe-lamb, Polly, who has a good chance of recovery because of this wonder-drug now nearly 70 years old. Polly was my favorite lamb of this year's crop, and I will hate to have to put her down if she doesn't recover. Penicillin also saved my life as a kid -- scarlet fever at age 5 was a killer before Alex Fleming found this drug.

Amish: For three years I lived among them in Garret County, western Maryland,, now they've come to enrich our lives in northern Waldo County, Maine. I just bought 1,500 square feet of metal roof made by an Amishman for our college barn, enough to do a large house -- for under $1,000. We're having an Amish Turkey to go with our Quaker potatoes and pumpkin today. All the Peace Church and Plain people are high in esteem and value in my mind, our own Quakers and Brethren together with the Amish and Mennonites.

Haggis the dog. He's never been a very good sheepdog, but he's a very intelligent and loyal friend.

Apples. We have so many of so many kinds and sheep and humans love to eat them. Maybe I can get Aimee to make apple dumplings before the weekend is out.

The Pittsburgh Steelers and England's Rugby International Team. Roethlisburger and Palamalu, Wilkinson and Moody.

Farm blogs. Every day my life is enriched a little more to see what is going on in SW England, on Raasay, in Oregon, and how much we have in common with smallholders and farmers all over the north.

T-day week: nine days off!

Well, we made it through to the second big break of the term, the Thanksgiving Holiday. All the students have packed off back to mom and dad, leaving us with a mountain of grading each to do, and nine days in which we might actually concentrate on one thing for more than fifty minutes.

You have no idea what a luxury that is. If I was ever introduced to the moron that invented the 50 minute class, I'd give him a piece of my mind! The notion that you can concentrate on studying anything that is important or difficult or college level at all in just fifty minutes is just nuts.

It takes me twenty minutes just to turn my mind on and warm it up! Some of my students take even longer, and never quite manage it, especially 8 to 8.50 am.

First off this vacation, I went right back to work! Call me a workaholic but the chance to do a few hours uninterrupted on our barn project was too good to pass up. I'm so tired of setting up for twenty minutes to do just fifty minutes of work and then breaking everything down again, taking another 15 minutes. I worked there from 9 to about 12.30 Saturday, and made sure of a few to-dos that will help us finish on time. I was joined by some students for two hours of the time, and they were pleased to actually finish a good sized part of the barn, the hay floor decking.

Today I have an anemometry project to look forward to, a rush job, but nothing difficult. I've been asked to provide an anemometer to a just-built wind development, to sit side by side with a logging decibel meter and record sound levels correlated with wind speed. Tricky, but not too tricky. Normally I'd like to include students on a job like this, but the call came early yesterday and so there were none to include. The job requires a boat trip out to an island, so there should be some fun pictures to post.

Other than that, I plan to keep farm, do some car servicing, do my grading, and be nice to my wife this holiday.

Oh, and eat turkey. I'm getting a nice one from our local Amish.

Falling activities

We both had to work yesterday, so Sunday was our only day off this week. For Aimee, the workaholic schoolma'am, that means grading, no doubt, albeit while watching the Steelers play the Bengals.

For me, who hates to do school work on weekends, a day off means cleaning, yard work, farm work, cooking for the work week ahead, and putting up food. Then I will too watch the Steelers. later, we'll have England vs, Argentina, always a grudge match, albeit more of a running bad joke these days than the shooting war it once was.

The Brits never really hated the Argentinians after 1982. More than anything we felt sorry for them. And hated their stupid arrogant leaders. We even let them beat us at rugby every so often.

So far today, I made pickled onions to use up the smallest ones from the garden. Like any good Englishman I like a lunch of pickled onions with cheese, bread, and beer or hard cider. This time I tried using apple cider vinegar, combining some of the cider vinegar I had inadvertently made earlier when a gallon of hard cider maturing in the fridge exploded and had to be taken out of said fridge. Never had onions with apple cider vinegar before, so am interested to see if they're as good as classic Yorkshire malt vinegar pickled onions.

I also made a Provençal- or Italian-style herbed pot roast with a blade of lamb, canned tomatoes (not our own because of the blight) and our own sage and onions, with garlic, thyme, and rosemary. Should make for a good dinner and last all week.

Then we let the sheep out to eat the apples that fell in the storm last night. We got five inches of rain in ten hours and there are temporary ponds here and there.

Sheep have a fun time trying to eat apples with only their bottom teeth.

Remembrance Day

Photo: My maternal grandfather, Arthur Holden Watson, in what was probably the uniform of the East Yorkshire Regiment, prior to going to France, 1917. Click on the link above to read more.

I essentially missed Remembrance Day this year, which upset me a good deal. Unity College, like a lot of educational and civic organizations these days, does not really recognize the day with any special programming. And I had, perhaps foolishly, managed to volunteer myself for extra duty -- writing a grant that from my viewpoint needed badly to be written, so what time I had to reflect was lost to fund raising.

No matter really -- the money I'm trying to raise will go towards educating Maine schoolkids about renewable energy, which will go some small way towards reducing the burden our services carry securing the pipelines of fossil energy from the middle east. Which, if you think about it, is just the kind of thing I should be trying to do as a renewable energy and sustainability academic, were I to wish to properly use and honour the example of the service of men like my grandfather (pictured above in 1917).

In my perhaps oversimplified, un-deconstructed, non-postmodern, obviously mistakenly deontological world theory, I tend to feel like I'm doing my duty more or less the way I should, given the complications. And there's the small matter of my own six and a half years in uniform.

I also tend to find the college's, and much of society's, lack of formal remembrance sad, but it's a mark of the essential disconnection that exists between the white collar world which makes up much of that society, especially that of college professors, and the military.

Considering that a large number of my colleagues were protesters during the Vietnam War, this is understandable. Many of the boomer generation of intellectuals haven't updated their ethics or moral compass on war since they were protesting. But the implicit, but unconscious, white-collar boomer's notion that we can disconnect ourselves from soldiery and service in wartime permanently is a failure of elementary reasoning.

Obviously there will always come a time where, no matter how liberal you are, you will need to be protected.

To understand this, you only need to understand your 20th century history, be able to admit to the fact that there are bad people, and bad governments in the world, and be able to separate the just wars from the unjust ones you protested. And there are plenty of candidates.

A Jew in 1930s Germany, a Londoner in late 1940, a West German liberal in 1949, a South Korean in 1950, a British civilian in a Birmingham pub in 1974, a Falkland Islander in 1982, a Rwandan in 1994, a Bosnian Muslim or Kosovan Alabanian, and on and on, all these justly needed our protection against the likes of Hitler, Stalin, the Provisional IRA, or the Argentinian Junta.

The world is not necessarily safe, yet, not even for nice, liberal, democratic, peace-loving, intellectually-minded white collar middle class feminist-environmentalist-progressive people who have no connection to, or experience of, military service. Paradoxically, it therefore takes the service of much more pragmatic, down-to-earth, often conservative, soldiers and sailors and airmen to keep our woolly-minded brethren safe in their beds. Whether they are grateful or not.

"Freedom from fear," said FDR, is a human necessity of the first order and one of four reasons we fought and fight. I suppose I should be glad that so many of us are free of fear that we don't even know enough about whether or not others are protecting us to be grateful for it.

I tend to think, too, that today's efforts are much more just than many of my colleagues seem to believe, that for instance a young woman in Afghanistan who wishes to go to school or work, or indeed wishes anything better than the domestic and sexual slavery that many of her menfolk and especially the Taliban and their ilk see as natural, deserves our protection just as much as any of these listed above.

Which means that our soldiers are over there doing a job of work that needs to be done.

(I need to say, too, though, that I have nothing but distaste and distrust for the likes of Cheney, Limbaugh, Beck and the rest of the drumbeat idiocy of the right, none of whom served by the way. It doesn't hurt to say it one more time: Dick Cheney was a four-time draft-dodger.)

Not a few young soldiers, sailors, and airmen I know are, or have been, my own students. They deserve our support, praise, and respect for what they have done and are doing. And they deserve a more considered and considerate Remembrance for their sacrifices.