My kids and hubby are out for the evening, so I decide that I’ll have a nice chicken sandwich, get some good  practice on the Beethoven Concerto I’m performing next month, then relax with a junk food snack while watching Netflix or something.  So, I walked across to the corner store to get a loaf of bread, a bag of chips and a bottle of pop.

Since I’m just walking and it’s so close, I didn’t bother taking my wallet.  I grabbed all the coins that were sitting on the table at the time, mostly toonies, which added up to $8… did some quick mental math (bread: discount outlet, usually $1.20 or so… chips, $3.50, pop, $1.50, even with tax I should be fine) and off I went.

Well, I got up to the till and it came to $8.69!  It turns out this particular bread, this particular day, was $2.20. And I went for the nice Covered Bridge chips (slightly less junky) which were $3.99. Oh well — while slightly disappointing, it’s not REALLY a big deal after all.  So my relaxing evening will be a little different, I’ll just not take the chips.

The lady beside me then says “oh that’s okay, I’ll pay for her chips.”

I’m rather surprised by this — I don’t think I look destitute, and I don’t recognize her as anyone I should know.

I said she didn’t have to do it, but she insisted and practically forced a $5 bill into my hand.

I paid for the chips and pop and bread, and gave her back everything I had left — which was over $4 of course. I thanked her, smiled.  She just said, “oh, you had almost enough.”

And that was that.

Such a little thing, really, but it brightened up my day.  So now… how shall I pay it forward?

Basically, she banned all computers, MP3 players, video game systems, cell phones, etc etc, for 6 months.  And to kickstart the whole experiment, they went several weeks with no electricity at all.  She figured that after weeks of old-fashioned living, simply getting electricity back would be excitement enough that not having all the electronic devices wouldn’t seem so bad in comparison.

And they had amazing results.  The older kids adapted surprisingly easily, and the family found new time to spend together.  The eldest son even found a talent for music which he’s now pursuing professionally.  And even the youngest child, who had the hardest time with the experiment (even ‘running away’ to live with her father for a time) still saw a great improvement in her grades.

If you’ve read anything about Last Child in the Woods, or Nature Deficit Disorder, or anything about Waldorf philosophy, then you’re familiar with the whole idea of today’s culture being too ‘plugged in’ and not connected with our environment — both in terms of nature AND of the individuals around us.

Technology has its usefulness, of course.  I wouldn’t be posting this right now if it weren’t for the incredible advances the internet has given us, for instance.  But it can be too pervasive, too all-consuming.   As the author put it, “Her girls had become mere accessories of their own social-networking profile, as if real life were simply a dress rehearsal (or more accurately, a photo op) for the next status update.”  Brilliantly observed.

Flipper is techno-addicted, no question.  He’s pretty responsible about obeying the rules, no video games until his work is done, etc.  But his free time is filled with video games, his new electronic music recorder, his videocamera, his MP3 player.  His Gameboy until I permanently took that away some years ago.  This isn’t all bad — he’s learning to make stop-motion movies with his videocamera.  He’s producing full multi-track original songs with his music recorder.  But he shows a level of obsession that is worrying.  He sneaks his camera in bed at night.  He makes video recordings of himself playing video games.  He watches endless Youtube videos of other kids playing video games.  When he engages in creative drawing or writing, it’s all centered around his video games — diagrams of new levels for Mario, inventing new Pokemon characters, designing LineRider tracks… Again, at least he’s being creative and wanting to invent new uses — maybe someday he’ll be a video game designer! — but the exclusion of nearly all other creative offerings is, well, pretty tragic if you ask me.

His Asperger’s likely plays a role in this.  AS kids will hyperfocus on particular areas.

But still.  Wouldn’t it be great to do what SHE did?  Even just for a little while?

I would do a few things differently, of course.  First of all, I love the “no electricity” introduction, but we probably would not do that for more than a week.  And not COMPLETELY off the grid, either.  Our beautiful, fresh, clear water comes from a well operated by an electric pump.  With no electricity, we’d have to go to bottled water (or else install a hand pump, which I can’t see happening).  Since the object of the exercise is to experience a more natural living style, that would be a step in the wrong direction.  So, the electricity stays on, the water pump stays on.  The fridge and deep-freeze would also stay on.  Part of our natural-living lifestyle involves lots of home preserving, and much of that is stored in our deep-freeze.

But the stove and the microwave could stay off.  We’d live on raw foods, fresh foods, and barbecue (charcoal, of course).  Maybe experiment with a solar oven!  The TV would stay off, and the computers, obviously.  The radio?  Oh, that’s a hard one.  But just for a week.  It will be all the sweeter when the music comes back on, and in the meantime we’ll just make our own.

We’d invest in a wind-up alarm clock or two.  Leave all the lights off, all the time.  We’d run the vaccuum, though… that’s essential for my dust-allergic hubby.  We might consider allowing the electric kettle as well…  And our telephones are all electric as well.

And of course, for this to work at all, we would have to do it in the summer.  No heat, dark after 5pm… doing it in the winter would just be daft.  But in the summer?  Quite doable.  Just like camping… but at home.

After a week or so of that, we’d turn on the stove again, but leave the computers off.   Maybe for another 2 weeks.   I guess we’d have to start buying newspapers to keep up with important world events.  I’d have to call people instead of emailing them — that’s hard, for an introvert like me!

Another potential obstacle — Many of my son’s school resources are online or on the computer.  And yes, we “do school” in the summer, just on a pretty loose schedule.  I’d have to print stuff out ahead of time, or just take a break from some of them.  Intellego Unit Studies, for instance, ONLY work with an internet connection.

But it would be a most intriguing experiment, one we just might consider doing this summer…

Knitting in the Round Lesson 1:

Knit the outside, not the inside.

Knitting in the Round Lesson 2A:

When picking up your newly free needle, make sure you grab the right one.  From which follows:

Knitting in the Round Lesson 2B:

How to pick up and repair dropped stitches.  (Useful for all knitting as well)

Well, it’s now permanent.  On October 11, we asked her if she’d like her bed moved into her room, and she most excitedly said yes.

Pictures and more details after the jump:

Here’s her bed on its way out of our room.  It had previously been in the corner just behind it.  At this point when the pic was taken, I had already moved the chair into the corner and pushed the dresser over a bit — which was necessary in order for there to be enough space to get the bed out the door!

All the laundry everywhere had been piled up on her (unused for nearly 2 weeks) bed, and has since been put away.  Honest.

Taken apart, the bed makes its way easily into her room.

Here it is all moved into place and made up.  One big advantage of the move is that this bed has a smaller footprint than the floor mattress did.  So she now has more floorspace, as well as underbed storage!

Pomme christens her new sleeping arrangements by jumping on the bed, of course.  In high heels, no less.

One last pic, the bed is now all made up and properly covered and surrounded with stuffed toys and dolls.

We love this bed, it’s an Ikea Kritter.  It’s larger than a typical toddler bed, but smaller than a twin size.  So it’s great for a toddler, great for saving space, but is still big enough to last her well into childhood.  The only real drawback of it is, in fact, its unusual size.  Only Ikea’s own sheets fit — and we only have the fitted sheets.  We use no top sheet at all for now, and we have to fold a twin-sized comforter in half and place it sideways, or else stuff all the extra comforter down the back.

Still, it’s a small price to pay, it’s such a great bed otherwise.

As for her sleeping itself?  Well, I have to say it’s mostly good news.  There are, of course, nights where she still takes hours to go to sleep, fussing and whining the whole time, while hubby and I take turns sitting with her.  And there are nights where she drifts gently off to sleep while we’re still reading a story.  Most nights are somewhere in the middle.  She’s generally calm, but squirms and fusses quite a bit when it’s actually time to settle down to sleep.  Until she holds still for a few moments, then she’s out like a light.

But, even with rough nights where she just doesn’t want to actually sleep, she has never, ever, tried to just keep getting out of bed, or whine that she doesn’t want the bed in her room, or cry that she wants to sleep in our room instead.

These problems seem to mostly be in the realm of the child who has been made to sleep in their own room since birth.  I won’t be so presumtuous as to say it never happens with co-sleeping “graduates.”  But I do think it’s not an unreasonable observation, that children who have had their needs for dependence and security at night met in infancy and toddlerhood, and not rushed into sleep independence, are therefore more secure and confident when the time actually comes.  The need, once filled, is no longer an issue.

On the other hand, babies made to sleep independently from the beginning, often with “cry-it-out” methods, learn that bedtime is a scary time, a confrontational time, a battle of wills between parents and child, a time of parental withdrawal and abandonment.  As soon as they’re old enough to “fight back”… well, they do.  Over-generalization?  Maybe.  But often seen.

I just was given a warm thank you by a regular reader, while chatting on a thread at MDC, who called my blog ‘inspirational’.  Then I realized I hadn’t posted in over two weeks, and there is so much to blog about!

So I’m going to try to catch up over the next few days.  For the sake of brevity and to keep from boring you out of your skulls, I’ll break things down into separate posts rather than putting it all together into one massive e-tome.

In this post, I’ll just mention my 2 biggest big news.  First: I’ve got a new job!  I’ve been accepted as the new Music Director at Gibson Memorial United Church.  (The website ‘staff’ page isn’t updated yet, so don’t fret if you don’t see me there.)  This means I play organ and piano for Sunday services, as well as weddings, funerals, etc, and I lead the church choir, as well as any other musical events that may arise during the year, such as children’s choirs.

I have previously done a shared Music Director position, split 50/50 with another musician and dear friend.  She did all the ‘grunt work’ in terms of selecting choir music, serving on committees, etc, so I just had the fun part.  This will be the first time I have to do all the work, all by myself.  It should be a lot of fun, though, it seems to be a good group of people, and it’s a lovely little organ.

The other big news is somewhat related.  Before the job was even confirmed, we… bought a new car.  A brand new, new new new, 2009 Hyundai Elantra.

We were not planning to do this.  My old car, a 2002 Kia Rio, still had lots of life in her, but needed some work done.  Some expensive work.  And until the work was done, it was very unreliable, stalling randomly, not starting half the time, making funny noises… We occasionally looked through used car listings, but didn’t find anything in our price range that suited our needs.  Hubby agreed that I should have a reliable car, for carrying the kids as well as getting to my jobs.

Then we got the fliers about the dealer year-end sales, with 0% financing and deep discounts.  It was worth a look, even just as a fun “date night” to go do some test drives.  We tried some Kias first, and while I really loved the feel and drive of the new Rio, hubby dearest (all 6’5.5″ of him) didn’t fit!  Strange, because he fits very well in the 2002 model.

Then we tried the Hyundais.  We had an Accent before, which we loved, until some idiot drove right into hubby’s lane — and totalled our car.  So we were checking out the new Accents.  And you guessed it, he didn’t fit.

The salesman wanted to show us the Elantra, which is like the “next size up” car.  We thought it was way too much car, more than we could possibly afford.  He convinced us to give it a try though, and we did, just for fun.  It was great.  Tons of room, great dashboard panel, comfortable and a good drive.  But too expensive, right?

Well, maybe not.  The discount was so deep, that it was only a thousand or so more than the Accent!  And with the low financing, the payments would actually be comparable to getting a cheaper used car — which has much higher financing.

We had only 2 days to decide, since the sale was ending.  We crunched numbers, and came up with the figure we could afford.  We had to haggle quite a bit over the Rio as a trade-in, but in the end, they were able to come in under our maximum, and we were sold!  When they were able to find our choice of colour — deep blue, in the base model with standard transmission — and it was the only one left in the province, then I knew it was kismet.

So I have a New Car.  We have never before had a new car.  All our ‘new cars’ have been used.  In general, we still think that’s the best way to buy cars.  It was only the low interest rate and deep discount that changed our mind this time — honestly, the price we’re paying is about the same as you’d pay for a 2007 model second-hand!  It’s like the first two years’ depreciation were already taken off the price.

We did some more math, and realize that the cost per year of the old Rio — including purchase price (in 2006) and yearly repairs — worked out to be about the same as what we’re paying now for the Elantra payments.  Which is under warranty, so major repairs won’t be $$$ for us.  Hubby had still been a bit nervous about the decision, but when we realized this bit of number magic, he relaxed.

So you can understand that we were both VERY relieved when I did, in fact, get the job.

Here’s hubby and the sales guy, as we transfer our belongings from the Rio to the Elantra.  Which you can’t really see, other than the open trunk.  Oh well.  Better pictures later, I promise!

After googling about WordPress media upload problems, I browsed lots of irrelevant (about WP 2.5) or inapplicable (about blogs hosted at wordpress.com) or incomprehensible (change security settings to 777 — huh?), I did the simple(and overdue) task of upgrading my WP 2.7 installation to 2.8.

And uploading works now.

So here we have a picture that’s about a month old now, my first strawberry from my backyard.  I planted 25 strawberry cuttings in pots and hanging baskets, 2 died mysteriously but the rest have done very well.  None are huge, but it’s only their first year.  This variety — Seascape — can be harvesting in its first year, whereas most varieties, you’re supposed to pinch off the flowers in the first year and only harvest fruit begining in the second year.

As you can see, the first fruits of the first year were a very good size!  That first berry was the biggest, none have approached it since.  But they’re all beautiful.

Seascape is also an all-season ever-bearing day-neutral variety, so we’ll still be getting berries into the fall.  I’ve noticed the berries are getting smaller as the season wears on, and we only get one or two each day.  Even though we can harvest fruit the first year, it’s not a plentiful bounty.  Just little snacks for my daughter.

It’s also been a terrible year for strawberries.  It has been raining at least 80% of the days all summer, and it’s been below usual temperatures.  My peppers are suffering as well, they’re just not growing much in this cool weather, though my greens are doing great and even my tomatoes are thriving.

But since it’s bad weather for berries, I’m grateful to get any at all, and greatly looking forward to their second season. 

I stopped into the Superstore this morning for some groceries, and popped into their garden center as I needed more compost for my potatoes.  I have been getting “good stuff” from the “real” garden center, but since I was there anyway I thought I’d see what they had.

At first, I saw just some no-name cow manure and a brand of sheep manure I’d used before and been very unimpressed with (for some reasons, there are large pieces of sea shells all through it).  Then I saw something I wasn’t expecting to see at all — mushroom compost!

Yup, President’s Choice (Loblaw’s proprietary brand) has bags of mushroom compost. It’s not cheap — $5.99/bag, whereas the unimpressive sheep manure is just $1.99/bag.  But this stuff is black gold. It’s worth twice that, in my opinion.

I only wish I’d known about this back when I was making all my Mel’s Mix.  It’s now too late to really mix it in to all the beds, since they’re all planted and settled in their ways heh… But I can use it to finish the potatoes, and for any topping-up and re-filling needed in the existing beds.  I have a bucket of Mel’s Mix left over which I’ll be using for topping-up as well (some of the beds compacted more than I expected so I’ll add more mix as the plants grow, especially so that the carrots will have more than 3.5″ to grow in…) so I think I’ll go ahead and mix some mushroom into that.  It will throw the mix a little off 1/3-1/3-1/3, but that’s okay.  It’s MUSHROOM COMPOST!!

It seems that post REPLACED the garden one.  Whoops.  So many words, just gone… sigh…

No time to re-type it right now, I’ll have to do it all over again later.  But I’ll do it with pictures next time, so it will be worth the wait… I promise…

But then the kids woke up — at 10:30 — and after breakfast (can you still call it breakfast when it’s nearly 11am?  I guess if McDonald’s can, then we can!) we headed out for some errands.

Wednesday is errand day.  In our school district, elementary school students get a half day on Wednesday.  It’s been like this since time immemorial — or at least since I was an elementary student growing up here twenty-odd years ago.  It seemed weird when we were living in Ontario, to learn that kids did NOT get Wednesday half-days there.  What kind of crazy, backwards place was that?

Anyway, there’s no half-day for Flipper, but it’s still a reduced schooley-stuff day, since we turn it into our errand day, and it’s nice for him to have time in the afternoon to play with his neighbourhood friends who are actually home.

Today, along with the usual bagels (discount dozen day!) and a trip to the library (only $15 in late fines this time…), we hit the Home Depot for some garden supplies and also stopped at Flipper’s dad’s, to pick up a fishing pole his dad got him for his birthday.

While we’re there, Flipper’s nana (that’s my ex-mother-in-law, for those keeping score) asked if I happened to like rhubarb.  As a matter of fact, we do.  Quite a lot, in fact.  They have a rather large patch, and as she said, “I just can’t seem to get rid of the stuff.”  Nobody wants all their extra rhubarb.  This boggles the mind.

So grampy and I went back to the patch, and he started pulling stems — he knew which ones he wanted taken out — and I’d cut off the leaves and put them in a bag.  By the time he stopped handing me stalks, I had 75 in the bag.  Yessiree, 75 stalks of fresh, home-grown, beautiful rhubarb.

I was hoping to at least get my strawberry plants into their pots tonight, but after making supper, practicing for the recital I’m playing for this weekend, and starting to deal with at least some of this monstrous heap of rhubarb, there just wasn’t time.

Rhubarb count:  1 batch (12 large and 12 mini) rhubarb muffins.  3 cups frozen.  App. 65 stalks remaining in the fridge.

Plans for tomorrow: rhubarb-apple-blueberry crisp, 12 more cups frozen, leaving about 40 stalks.  Hm.  Plant strawberries.  Practice for concert.  Arrange babysitting for Friday.  Write something for Eco Child’s Play… Hm, perhaps I should get up early…

I had bought all the wood last weekend:

… and stacked it neatly according to their destined boxes.  The bigger boards on the right are for the potato box, which is 10″ deep.  All the rest is just 6″.  All the boards are 1″ width — narrow, I know, but it should do the trick.  The six smaller boxes are 4′x4′, while the potato box is 4′x6′.

You can also see my baby plants on the deck getting some fresh air.  Hardening off is not going well, but we’re getting there.

I had also managed to acquire all the required ingredients for over 60 cubic feet of Mel’s Mix:

This is, of course, not all of it.  The rest, which includes five 4-cu.ft bags of vermiculite, more peat, and more manure, is inside the shed.  I was able to get four different kinds of compost: cow, sheep, marine, and chicken.  Couldn’t get my hands on horse.

So today, I dug out the drill, the wood screws, measuring tape and hemp twine, gloves, scissors, and a couple big pails.  And I built the potato box first:

Notice the tent in the background?  We got that second-hand for $100, it’s 10′x12′ with two rooms, worth $300 new, and has only been used for one weekend.  It was a birthday present for Flipper, to use as a backyard play tent, but we’ll all use it and it will be great for “real” camping too!

Anyway, to build the box I rotated the corners, kept the warped sides concave into the box (cheap pine boards, some of them are pretty curvy), and since these are 10″ deep I used three #8, 2″ wood screws at each corner.  I drilled pilot holes for the first few screws, but they went in so smoothly and easily that I tried one with no pilot hole, and it went in just as easily.  This happy discovery saved me quite a bit of time!  I had no issues with the wood splitting, even though it’s very narrow, except for one minor crack when I screwed directly into a knot in the wood.

Spurred on by this success, I built one of the smaller boxes.  The only difference was that I used only two wood screws on each corner:

These are all the boxes going in this area beside the house, so I stopped building for now and set to work filling these ones.  First, I opened my package of weed barrier cloth and cut a couple pieces to size.  I had contemplated stapling the barrier right to the boxes, but decided to try just laying them underneath and see if that worked.  So far, it seems to work fine.  That done, I started pouring compost into the potato box — since they’ll be growing in pure compost, I didn’t have to worry (yet!) about mixing any Mel’s Mix.

I did, however, pour the last of the Mel’s Mix I had previously made for the indoor seed starting into the smaller box.  And Pomme helped to spread it around.

Once I had about 2″ of compost in the potato box (that was 2 bags of sheep, and one bag each of chicken, cow, and shrimp), I added the grid by tying hemp twine to little nails along the edges of the box.  Since I am only growing potatoes in this box, I thought about not doing the grid at all, but then I decided it would help me to space the seed potatoes evenly.

I cheated a little bit though.  I made the grids 2′x1′, since I’m basically dividing the box into thirds for the three potato varieties I’m growing (Kennebec, Onaway – both white – and Norland, a red)  and that was enough to give me clarity for even planting.  I put two potato pieces in each square foot, then covered each piece with a scoop of cow compost.

The trick that I’ve learned in reading about SFG, is to start the potatoes near the bottom of the box like this, and as the plants appear above the soil, continue to cover them up again with more compost, until the box is filled.  At that point, you let the plants grow.  This gives a nice long underground stem — which is where the potatoes grow from.  Apparently, it maximizes yield in a small space.  I’ll alternate which kind of compost goes on each time so they’ll get a nice mix.

After a well-deserved break, and with Pomme down for a nap and Flipper playing next door, I started working on filling the smaller box.  I’ve read about mixing the ingredients on a big tarp, or mixing in a big plastic tub (several batches needed per box), but I decided I’d try mixing it right in the box.  We don’t currently have a wheelbarrow and I was on my own for the mixing, so it seemed worth a try.

First, I did the math and calculated that I’d need about 2/3 of a cubic foot of each type of manure, plus 2-2/3 cu.ft. each of vermiculite and peat moss.  I was able to find a plastic tub that held 2/3 of a cubic foot, and a larger one that held just about 2-2/3 cu.ft.   Using them as “measuring cups”, (and with my dust mask on when working with vermiculite) I poured the ingredients into the box:

… and promptly started to doubt my math.  It’s hard to tell from this picture, but it was an AWFULLY large pile of stuff.

But my Mathlete of the Year award in grade 9 and pile of medals for math competitions throughout high school (I know, I am such a geek) were not for nothing.  Once I smoothed out the pile things looked much more… accurate.

This hasn’t been mixed yet in the photo, I just wanted to verify the quantity before starting that job!

You can see in this photo that the potato box is already in shade.  This area gets sun first thing in the morning but is in shade by suppertime.  The back yard is partially shaded until about noon, then has full sun until nearly sunset.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other…

Mixing it within the confines of the box was a bit tricky, since there wasn’t any extra room.  But I scooped from around the edges into the center, turned the center, folded and mixed and shuffled, until it was pretty uniform.  Then I watered the whole thing down (using my thumb on the end of the hose because we don’t have a thingie for it yet!) and added the grid lines:

Success!

All that now remained was the actual plants.  This box is for greens and “renewable” crops that can be replanted (either with more of the same or something new) or maintain a continual harvest.  Carrots, spinach, summer savory, thyme, broccoli, leaf and romaine lettuce, and green onions.  The herbs, broccoli, and romaine were already started indoors.  The broccoli was strong and seemed hardened, while the romaine and herbs are still new sprouts but I figured I’d take the chance.  The rest of the veggies were planted with fresh seed.

And there is the finished product!

Now I only have to do this… five more times.  Eeps.

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