Fall bits

Where has October gone? Where has my blogging mojo gone? My additional teaching load, and all the juggling of travel and activities by Noah and Sophie, is taking a toll.

Fall was amazing until the rain finally caught up with us. The leaves were a good two weeks later to start turning, and then when they did it was in a flash of gold glory. Still it was sunny. And (relatively) warm. 

Now it's been raining for a couple of weeks. And cold, and grey, and dark. The wood stove is working all the time and we're inside a lot more. 

Fiona has been doing a lot of neat art and math. The topo map project (previously mentioned) but also a lot of Vi-Hart-inspired doodling, zentangle style art, and circle-geometry stuff. The art classes that were offered last year to homeschoolers are underway again, and this year's focus is mathematics and patterns in art, which is just a perfect fit for Fiona's current enthusiasms. An art class where the vocabulary frequently includes words like radius, concentric, tetrahedron, equilateral, rotation and intersection? Right up her alley! They're currently working on making mandalas, using various paint techniques, geometry with compasses and straight-edges, and carved print blocks. 

A last few tidbits, clockwise as above. 

We've been doing some organized running clinics. Fiona attended the first one and enjoyed it. I'm going to continue doing some regular Sunday clinics in a neighbouring village. I am trying to work up interest in an ongoing local running group, so I've put some time and energy into hiring a clinician, setting up an email loop, and doing publicity.

My knitting bug has hit again, with the stoking of the wood stove. The only local yarn shop (90 minutes away) closed last spring, so I shall have to find a good on-line source for yarn. It's a shame not to be able to see colours and touch hanks in person though. 

My networking with other runners and cyclists has made me keen to get to know even more of the local wilderness. Last weekend I stumbled on a fabulous trail that I had never heard about. A well-kept secret, I suppose. It's low-elevation, easily accessible, rolling in profile, quite and stunningly beautiful ... yet very close by. How could I not have known? I've biked it and run it and loved it both ways. It's made me hungry to truly and thoroughly get to know the backcountry around here. In the last couple of years I've got a good handle on the trails between my area and town. But that's just a wee portion of what's out there. I want to get back into backcountry hiking and camping too.

Fiona dressed up for Hallowe'en as No Face from the Studio Ghibli anime movie Spirited Away. An easy and warm costume for a typically cold and wet Hallowe'en.

The Law and Government classes are drawing to a close. These fun theatrical classes about the evolution and structure of our constitutional monarchical government system have continued sporadically throughout the summer and into the fall. Fiona has continued her role as Head of the Executive branch of government, but she now has a new role as Miss Matter, a witness for the defence in the case of against Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who have refused the installation in their living room of a video surveillance camera according to Section 10 of the Kingdom Security Act designed to protect against the rumoured terrorist plans of Evil Lord Voldesnort. The mock trial is scheduled for the Nelson Courthouse in a couple of weeks.

Bokashi

Bokashi bin, and wheat-bran starter

Okay, it isn't pretty, but it's pretty cool.

We've been outdoor composting for more than 20 years. We tried indoor vermicomposting for a while, but despite our best efforts couldn't entirely prevent fruit-fly outbreaks. We don't have a garage, so the worms were on their own outside, and eventually bears got the bin. And bears, really, are the problem. Yard waste won't attract them, but the food waste definitely does at certain times of year. Our solution has been to move the compost pile to the far corner of our property and let the bears snack as they like. But it's not ideal. Habituating the bears to human food waste is not such a great thing. Bears learn quickly and seem to share their knowledge through some sort of bear intranet. One compost bear tends to become several.

Winters present a different problem. Just getting to that faraway compost pile is a challenge when the snow is thigh-deep. No one likes doing it. Compost is the most dreaded chore on the kitchen chore rota. And of course, nothing actually rots during the winter, so in spring there's a gradual thawing of a mountain of food scraps. Just in time for the bears' arrival.

And now that most of us are eating meat a few times a week, we have the problem of bones and meat waste. We don't have garbage collection, so that stuff has to go into the freezer to be stored until we make our monthly trip to the dump.

So now we're trying something new. The chicken manure, leaves, garden waste, straw and grass clippings will keep going in the compost pile, but our food waste will go in our bokashi bin inside. Bokashi is Japanese for "fermented waste" and the bokashi approach to food waste processing was invented in Japan in 1980. It uses a combination of lactic acid bacteria, photosynthetic bacteria and yeast to ferment food and cellulose (i.e. wood/paper) anaerobically. Indoors, in a sealed container.

You put your food -- including citrus, meat, bones and dairy -- in a sealed drum or bucket with a wheat-bran "starter" which provides the micro-organisms necessary for fermentation. You sprinkle a little of the starter in every time you dump a day or two's worth of scraps into the drum, and re-seal it. Then, once it's completely full, you seal it fully for a minimum of 10-14 days. After that, it is fully fermented, won't attract animals, and is just waiting to fall apart into compost.

Last week we had a chance to intercept some bokashi bins at the post-fermentation stage. During the annual Garlic Festival in September, Fiona and I had worked a few hours on the waste management team. This meant directing visitors and food vendors to get all their recyclables in the appropriate bins, and to place any food or food/paper/wood waste in the buckets destined for the bokashi drums. The half-dozen 60-gallon drums underwent their fermentation, and were delivered to the school-and-community Harvest Festival last Friday by the bokashi guy. They were opened and dumped into trenches in the garden.

The stuff smelled pretty distinctive. Not horrid. Very cidery / vinegary. It was laced with the white mold that sometimes shows up in our compost pile and is a hallmark of a good bokashi process. Like the documentation suggested, it looked pretty much the same as it had when it went into the drums. It hadn't decomposed, but the bokashi guy assured me that much of the cell structure had been destroyed. It will apparently decompose in 10-30 days when mixed with soil or buried in a compost pile. The school bravely dumped a couple hundred gallons of the stuff into the garden beside the place where the little preschoolers play. And just as the bokashi buy promised, no bears have shown up.

I think it will take us 3 to 4 weeks to fill a 5-gallon drum. We have three drums. We'll fill two, wait the 14 days while working on the third one, and then take the fermented ones out to dump in the compost pile. That's one trip to the compost pile every 6-8 weeks. Two or three trips each winter. Sure, it'll require a sled. But that we can handle, given the infrequency of the requirement.

So far our bin smells cidery when opened, and harbours no flies. Thanksgiving turkey bits are in there, with dozens of plum pits, a few bamboo skewers, a lot of tea leaves, some paper and coffee grounds, a bunch of dried-out mozzarella cheese and the usual food scraps. Week one has gone as expected. We'll see how the winter goes.

We Live Here 3D

Recently Fiona has been fascinated by Vi Hart's quirky art-in-math videos. She's made Fibonacci spirals, binary trees, trihexaflexagons and various other doodly-mathy things. Recently she noticed how a particular style of spiral doodle looked a bit like topographic lines on a map. And as she didn't really understand how topographic lines worked, I explained them to her, and printed out a topo map from our area. I also suggested it might be fun to someday cut out and stack layers of cardboard using topographic lines as a guide to create a three dimensional model of the topography of an area, real or imagined.

Well, she wanted to do that right away. So we found a couple of old cardboard boxes, traced over the topographic lines on the map we'd printed out, and started cutting. One topo line at a time we cut out our paper map contours, traced them onto cardboard, and cut each layer. Fiona glued the layers together and was entranced as the topography began to take shape. The creek drainages, and the peaks, the valleys, the ridges.

Today she painted.

A layer at a time, with bright and darker greens and greys. She used acrylic paint for its forgiving nature and opacity. Of course the open corrugated edges weren't really filled: I wondered about smoothing everything out with some polyfilla. But in the end I didn't suggest that because I figured the real point was to notice the way in which topographic lines on a map, which are so beautifully visible on this model, allow one to approximate the three-dimensional shape of the terrain.

After the painting was done, we looked at the model without the map, and tried to identify peaks and locations. Then we got out the map to check and get a bit more precise with our locations. And we decided to repurpose some sewing pins into map pins, and mark a few places with names.

Fiona is very pleased with the finished product. It took us two pleasant afternoons, totalling about 4 hours. We worked together part of the time, and sometimes I read aloud while she worked.

(We have a few of these picture-perfect unschooling days a year, where a thread of interest turns into an interesting project and results in some awesome photos. I always blog about them because .... well, because they're noteworthy. Not because they're typical.)

Suffer-bike-run

Sufferfest went almost exactly as I expected, except that it was harder, and more fun, and the weather was exceptionally fine. So, not exactly as I expected. But close.

The bike ride was long and hard. The 45k included about 1400 metres of climbing. I was worried I wouldn't finish before the course closed: a number of people didn't finish, and a few sneaked in just past the official cutoff but were granted finishes. It was a hard physical slog for longer than I've ever worked that hard. Longer than my marathon. I finished in under 5 hours, though not by much. Official times have not been posted. But I'm told I came 3rd overall among female riders. Maybe there were only three women? There were about 40 riders but it seems most of them were male.

Surprisingly I felt pretty good once I had a chance to catch my breath at the end of the day. I had a scrape on my leg from a small crash but that was all. I went home, slept and got up for the run. Muscles still seemed happy enough to oblige.

The 25k run was fine. It had about 650 metres of climb and an equivalent descent. As expected my bones and gristly bits held up well and the next day I just had a pleasant amount of muscle soreness. I managed to shave about 5 minutes off my 2010 time, sneaking in under 3 hours. Two years older and 5 minutes faster, even after a huge bike ride: I'll take it!

It was a really motivating weekend. Especially with respect to the bike. I have a decent amount of endurance, but I realized it would help to be a lot stronger when it comes to powering up hills. So there's something to work towards for next year.


Next year I'd like to do the bike ride again. And I think I'd like to run the 10k with Fiona. She's started running with me and would like to keep that up. There were an impressive bunch of kids running the 10k this year, and she would like to be part of that next year.

Sufferfest v2.0

Two years ago I ran the 25k Sufferfest True Blue trail run. I hadn't trained specifically for it, though I had been training hard that summer. It was the first year for Sufferfest and I wanted to support the event, just a stone's throw from my home town. I originally thought to run the 10k event, though the 25k looked enticing. I had just run my first-ever race, an Alberta (i.e. flat) Half Marathon three weeks earlier and was feeling good. I figured an extra 4 kms wasn't that big a difference.

But it turned out the Sufferfest trail run was a whole different animal. Steep up, steep down, rooty and rocky. I had also just switched over to minimalist trail shoes and though I had run in them a fair bit, I hadn't really run any trails. I felt great at the outset and ran hard -- over all that crazy terrain, which quickly took its toll on me. My knee and my foot were paying the price by the end and I did a long rallentando to the finish line. It took me weeks to recover.

So you'd think that if I entered Sufferfest again I'd be a little more judicious in my choice of events. But no, I've gone an entered the 25k again, despite a summer of little to no training. I've been running on and off, but no real long runs, only a handful over 5 km and nothing at all systematic. (And I've entered the 45k mountain-bike race the day before. It's a length that's almost double the longest trail ride I've ever done in my life.)

My old friend the Minimus 10

The bike stupidity aside, I feel differently about it all this time around. I have a lot more experience pacing myself over long runs and steep trails. I've been running in a minimalist way for a long time now. I plan to run in my Minimus Trail 10's. They're considerably more minimalist than the shoes I ran my first Sufferfest in, but now they rank as old favourites, and more shoe than I usually run in. On roads I run barefoot. On rough trails these days I wear either Unshoes, my home-made huaraches or Minimus Zeros. So the Minimus 10's are a solid old standby. I know they'll work for me. My muscles, ligaments and tendons have adapted to this kind of running -- and some -- and I've done a lot of miles on exactly the sort of trails I'll be running this weekend. I've also noticed that my body is pretty good at endurance running. It forgives my completely non-systematic increases in mileage. I'm fine running nothing more than 5 km for a couple of months and then going out and doing a challenging 15k. Sure, Sufferfest is a big run and I'll be tired and sore as stink, but I don't think I'll be injured.

Not unless that bike ride kills me. Stay tuned.

Bike bridge

Our property is ideally situated to avoid logging, development or loss of privacy. We own a mere 2.5 acres (1.0 Ha) but the surrounding crown land is heavily forested, but steep and creeky -- not suitable for logging. Above us runs the highway, and a long way down a 45- to 60-degree slope is a regional park, so no risk of anything man-made growing up in either of those directions. Which is lovely, except that it makes it almost impossible to create any trails that start at our place and connect up with anything. We're prisoners of our terrain. Our small area of more moderate grade is all we've got to work with. 

So Fiona and I decided that if we can't hook into the nearby cross-country trails from our property, we could at least create some sort of interesting circuit to make use of on our bikes. We have dreams of a reticular network of tiny trails connecting obstacles, jumps, skinnies, ramps and whatever else we can dream up. Today, with Chuck's help we got started. We used two 18' cedar logs to span a small gully. Then Fiona got busy with hammer, nails and a bunch of cedar decking recycled from our old deck.

In less than an hour we had completed the bridge. Fiona got up her courage: the access at the far side comes from a short but steep slope. She made it across without any difficulty!

Yogurt-maker hack

I have a large plastic thermos, and inexpensive item that is world-weary and not particularly water-tight. It has a capacity of about 3 Litres, and is perfect for making a large batch of yogurt for our family. Since we've been freezing the local summer fruit bounty, the kids are making a lot of smoothies and subsequently we go through a lot of yogurt. This is so cheap and easy.

A Thicker Yogurt

4 cups boiled water
4 cups tap water
4 2/3 cups instant skim milk powder
1/2 cup fresh yogourt with active bacterial culture, or two packets of yogourt starter

Combine boiled and tap water in a large thermos. In my house the resulting temperature is about 115ºF, which is ideal for starting a yogourt fermentation. I can trust this temperature, but if you're trying this for the first time, definitely check the temperature of the mixture and adjust as necessary. Whisk in skim milk powder, then whisk in the fresh yogurt. Using skim milk powder allows you to get a thicker yogurt by getting more milk solids in less liquid volume, and it means you don't have to go the fussy process of heating the milk to kill any lingering thermophils.

Place lid on thermos. Place in unheated oven with the light turned on to provide a bit of warmth. Leave undisturbed for 8 hours. (Put a sticky-note on the oven to remind yourself and others not to turn it on! Ask me why my thermos is world-weary with bubbly plastic on the bottom...) With luck you should have a nice thick yogurt. It will firm up a bit more in the fridge.

Yield: 8.5 cups of yogurt