My second-favorite thing about winter is getting firewood in the dark. (About a dozen things contend for the coveted spot of Favorite Thing About Winter, and they alternate depending on the day.) In the wintertime when I get home I always come in, drop off my Spiderman lunch box, grab the firewood tote, and head …

Adam and Jen posted a note Sunday at church: Help! Come pick beans and I’ll give you half of what you pick! So on Monday evening, we went. Their garden must be half an acre in size. String beans, corn, tomatoes, and I don’t know what all. The beans apparently came on too late for …

Full disclosure: I did not shoot this picture. I saw this goat, on this mountain; but since I forgot to bring in my pictures of the goat or anything else from our latest adventure, I’m using the shot taken by my friend Rich on top of Scotchman Peak last Saturday. I like how these goats …

I will have to remember this picture on next year’s vacation. I planned to see a bunch of things I wanted to see: Mt. Rainier, Multnomah Falls, the Portland Temple, Mt. St. Helens, Cannon Beach. The result was that we probably rushed to see too much. I think this (along with the swimming pool at …

I keep forgetting to bring in pictures I can post of our trip. I have to bring my pictures in to work using a flash drive, and post them from here because it’s so much faster than at home. What we really need is functional high-speed internet we can use at home. We’re on dial-up, …

One of my college professors once said, “I can tell who you are by two things: what you laugh at, and what you listen to.” That statement has stuck with me all these years. His latter point is self-evident. Laughter is an obvious gauge of the mind as well as the spirit. I interpreted “what …

We pretend to self-reliance, yet we’re on the grid. Why don’t we have solar panels on our roof? Short answer: It doesn’t make economic sense for us. Our electricity bill, for nine people, in a 2100 square-foot house, averages $55 a month. We don’t sacrifice anything in having a power bill about half the national …

I won’t be posting Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday of this week because we’re taking the kids to the coast. Here’s the greenhouse as of Saturday evening. I spent the morning organizing the root cellar with Jess and then working on our firewood supply (I now have over two cord stacked and drying. One third done!). …

The ducks are fine without water to swim in; they did fine for a year with only buckets of water t o drink out of, and one and a half kiddie pools to swim in. (How do you get half a kiddie pool? Step through one side of it, preferably in the dark, while holding …

I rand down this morning to get a picture of the greenhouse for my blog. This was the best angle and it was right into the sunrise, but if you squint you can see my progress so far. This is all I got done last Saturday, but I spent a lot of time that day …