In this shot you can tell that Katie’s bike is too small for her, while Becca and Emma have stopped to wait for her and I have stopped to snap a picture. Abby can use Katie’s bike next year; anybody know where we can get a (free) women’s bike for Katie next year? Anyway, yes I’m in the middle of the lane on a curve, but don’t worry, I wasn’t hit by an oncoming traffic and killed. (Least not as far as I can tell.) Besides, it’s a quiet road, and we could hear cars coming a quarter mile off.

Our house is about eight miles from town. We took our time riding to town; we meandered, we coasted down hills and (everyone but Emma) pushed our bikes up one, we explored a side road and crossed the railroad tracks and threw rocks in the river, and we still made it in to town in under 90 minutes. And the weather was so cool and bright that day, and the ride so easy, that I put it on the calendar for next fall as well. And in theory it will stay on the calendar every year thereafter until Jacob is the last one at home and he is just too old to do that kind of thing any more, Dad.

That’s how our family traditions are born. Just Dad and the kids outside doin’ stuff, and we have such a good time together that we say, “We ought to do this again.” That’s how we decided about backyard campouts, and Cliff Lake, and Lunch Peak, and picking berries, and wood projects, and all kinds of stuff. Our kids are on loan to us. They won’t be around forever. We’re busy, but it’s essential to make time to do stuff together like bike in to town on a beautiful autumn morning.

I have it on the calendar to take the kids swimming at Char Falls next summer, where the water cascades down among a series of pools until the final drop, 50 feet into a box canyon (we’ll get out before that point). From what I can see of the stream and from what others have said, it’s better than the water park we take the kids to every year. It’s cheaper for sure, and closer, and there will certainly be a shortage of pink bodies stuffed into bikinis. (Note to planet Earth: All bikinis are hereby illegal. I would much rather see your face, thank you.) We’ll have to go sometime in early summer, when there’s enough runoff to make it worthwhile, but the water is warm enough to avoid icing over in the shady spots. If we like it, voila—another family tradition. And that’s how it goes.

You can see the reflection of the camera in this shot; it’s the mysterious globs of color in the upper left corner. I thought at first I’d just Photoshop that out, but it adds to the mystique, don’t you think? That lemon-yellow smudge is actually my fingertip: I’m covering the flash so it won’t reflect in the window glass and look like a nuclear blast over the trees. It lit up my finger instead. (If you’ve ever taken a picture where the camera flash is reflected in the mirror or window glass, you know what I’m talking about. What is it with camera manufacturers and flash? The flash seems to go off in every conceivable setting short of shooting the noonday sun. Oops, says the camera, I’m shooting a blast furnace now, better set off the flash! Maybe the camera companies are in cahoots with the battery companies: Since the flash uses so much power, let’s make the flash go off in every single picture and burn through batteries to boost sales for our our battery buddies!)

Anyway, I started out exulting in the relatively heavy pre-Thanksgiving snowfall. Wow. Is there anything prettier than fresh snowfall in the forest? To my over-eager eyes, this seems to augur well for a really horrific winter. The kids and I were discussing this morning how lamentable it would be if we woke up one morning and the snow level was up to the middle of the living room window. “Sorry, all snowed in; can’t come in to work this month!” Bring it on! Yahoo! Of course, that’s what I thought last year when we received measurable snowfall in October. The rest of the season turned out to be a dud.

Well, one can always hope, and give thanks for the snow one does receive. It’s so pretty. Mmmm.

In the meantime, sorry for the delay. We knew the transfer to the new space was coming, but when it did come it caught us flat-footed, without so much as a by-your-leave from you, my loyal readers. So my apologies. Hopefully this space will work better for you, and I’ll tweak it as we go forward.

For example, the links above don’t really link to anything—yet. In the coming days I’ll make sure that is fixed, and hopefully the links help you sort through all the mishmash herein. There’s a lot of material in this blog!

Thanks for reading. And let us know how you like the new digs.

Doug & Jessica

Thanks

One of my highest priorities has been to spend time with my kids, regardless of how busy I am. So at our house Tuesday nights are designated Date Night with Dad, and each daughter gets a turn with Dad to do anything she would like to do that evening. (By the time Jacob is old enough to do anything big with Dad, Emma witll be in college. So it’s a six-week rotation for the kids.) We generally don’t do things that involve money or a trip into town, but the kids seem to enjoy whatever we end up dong together.

This is Abby’s date the other night. She wanted to play Sorry, and I beat her by only one card. I would have voted for the opposite, but we’ve learned you hve to be ruthless when it comes to games like this. But it was nice to sit by the fire and play a game, just us two, while Jacob sat beside us and stuffed the unused game pieces into his mouth.

I get out the newspapers and keep the kids at bay. Here Sarah (at bottom, in fruit jammies) and Natalie observe and comment while Dad performs cosmetic surgery on Mom’s poor beat-up shoosies. Virtually all of our shoes* are free or drastically cheap (as in fire-sale-at-the-thrift-store cheap). The pair I’ve got on right now, for example, were part of a shovel-full crammed into a $2-a-bag-thrift-store sale, and my, are they handsome. They say “ecco” on the sole (I’m hoping that’s a hoity-toity European brand) and they torpedo my dowdy image, but unfortunately they’re too small. My feet expand to fill their every cranny, like that expandable foam insulation in a can. Well, that’s the advantage of not paying too much.

*In fact, virtually all of our clothes are free or drastically cheap. In fact, much of our stuff is free or drastically cheap. We’re cheapskates. Yahoo! (Ever notice how I take pride in my humility?)

The other night I tried to light the kerosene lamp we have on the shelf above our wood stove. It wouldn’t light. I checked the wick: trimmed. Okay. I checked the kerosene: gone! Well, who knew. Kerosene evaporates. The last time I used the lamp was last winter. So the lesson is, use the lamp while you have it full.

So for fun the other night I filled the lamp, soaked the wick, re-threaded it up through the cheap Victorian-esque metal parts (I ended up wrestling it through with a pair of pliers), lit the lamp, and set it on the table. It worked pretty well. Jess has a candle in a baby-food jar to help illuminate Jacob, who’s on the floor next to her in his walk-around bin. Jacob (who’s nine months old this week) is a very aerobic eater; he likes to bounce up and down while looking around while holding his mouth open for Mama’s fork. So she needs a light. But with his own candle, it worked out pretty well. This is about a two-second exposure to let the dark scene light up, so some of the kids are looking rather posed. But we ate our whole meal thus. It’s good practice for when the power goes out: the generator does not power the dining room circuit.

I asked Jess how many of these emergency candles she had. “Oh, about 150,” she said. She found ‘em on sale at the dollar store. So as long as we don’t break the baby-food jars, we’re good for a long period without lights.

You can see our Western Family Spread and our milk jug are not of our own making. (On sale, store-bought milk is half the price of raw milk, and we’re always in the mood for a bargain. So our “butter” and sour cream are store-bought.) And I think the potatoes are from the store. But everything else on this table is from our garden or food storage. The quart jars you see here have been washed and are sitting in the pantry, awaiting their turn to be filled with apple cider next week.

I don’t know what’s happened, but it seems to me that suddenly canning is popular with a whole bunch of people. Or maybe it’s just that I’m trying to find extra canning jars in the middle of canning season. Whatever the cause, I’m looking for extra canning jars and not finding them. The thrift stores are cleaned out. There were at least five other posts on craigslist from people trying to mooch canning jars, the other day when I was hunting. Maybe the best time to do this in the spring. But it’s not not spring now, and we need the jars. Jessica’s out right now gleaning apples off of locals’ trees, in preparation for her apple-pressing appointment next week at a Mennonite farm up north. She expects to pick enough apples for 40 gallons of cider, and that takes a lot of jars.

Well, I found a Craigslist posting for cases of 13-oz jars, 50 cents for a dozen. I ran over there on my lunch break and bought them out of everything they had. They’re a local printing outfit that had these old silkscreened jars that were misprinted or something, and they just wanted to get rid of them. Bing! There I am.

It took two and a half dishwasher loads to get them all washed up. This load contains 83 jars. Jess went to work as soon as I could get them washed, and has used up all but one box of jars to can grape juice and grape jelly. Here’s one of the first grape juice batches using some of the new jars.

Last night we had homemade grape jelly on wheat bread hot from the oven. (The jelly was from a jar that didn’t seal.)

She’s canned all but 12 pounds of her original 200 pounds of grapes. A few apples remain to be apple-sauced, and then we’ll can all the apple cider next week, and that’ll be it for this year. By the time we’re done we’ll have around 700 jars of canned goods in the root cellar.