What We're Reading: Rainwater Harvesting Manual

 My school is adding a school garden next year, and one aspect of the garden will be water collection.  We plan on collecting rainwater runoff from the roof and condensation from the air-conditioning units.  In theory I know exactly what I want, but I have never designed a system of this scale (or ever) before.  I have put in a few calls and have been told that the Texas Water Development Board has written the definitive guide for rainwater collection systems. 

Why do I keep giving myself homework over the summer?

The Long Weekend

Weekends are supposed to be relaxing.  Generally they are, but they can be long.  I tend to try and cram all of my productivity for the week into the last few days.  This weekend we had Jenny's birthday party with family, a birthday party for one of Mr Js classmates, and stacking yardwork we had to address before our trip to Canada next week.  We had a blast each step of the way,  well not the yardwork, but it just adds up to a long weekend.

On top of that, we lost a chicken this weekend.  Eliza managed to avoid being put away in the coop Saturday night and our doggies got to her in the morning.  We can't get mad at them for being doggies, but Jenny and I feel horrible.  Lets just hope we can make sure this doesn't happen again

I spent most of Sunday doing yardwork and securing a more secure, all-be-it much smaller roaming space for them.  They will be officially fenced off early this week.

Early Eliza

{This Moment}

{this moment} from Soulemama- A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. If you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your 'moment' in the comments for all to find and see. 

Wishing you a beautiful weekend!

We're Eating: Sweet Corn and Peaches

A Gluten Free Cornbread and Peach Cake with Vanilla Bean Ice Cream adapted from Rustic Fruit Desserts

For Father's Day this year, I decided to make a feast at home. We hit up the farmer's market on Saturday and came home with:

• Eggs
• Sweet Corn
• Portabello Mushrooms
• Zucchini
• Yellow Squash
• Onions
• The tiniest, cutest little eggplant
• Tomatoes (Curse you squirrels that we don't have any from the garden!)
• Cheese from Humble House Foods

We grilled all the veggies including the corn. We also made burgers with ranch meat and portabello mushroom burgers for the veggiesaurus (that would be me).

I made cakes using the peaches my mom and I picked at Marburger Orchard a month or so ago. Chuck and I had peeled and frozen the vast majority of the 29 lbs of fruit we picked. 

For Father's Day, I got Chuck 6 olive trees. I know, not a native tree. But they are from a local olive orchard. Who knew? Turns out that South Texas has a climate similar to the olive producing regions of the world. In 2 to 3 years, we should be able to brine some olives of our own.

In other food news, our farm share just started up again. Yeah!  This week we received:

• Basil
• Eggplant
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Hot peppers of various kinds
• Cucumbers

Anyone see a ratatouille in our future? Me too.

Tales from the Coop: Meet the Ladies: Eliza

Eliza

Meet Eliza.

Eliza has stood out since she was a chick because she had what looked like a cotton ball on her head.  As her feathers have come in, she has developed a more sophisticated look.  Her namesake is Eliza Dolittle for obvious reasons.  I think you can see the resemblance.

Unfortunately, her unique hair-do does not help her win any intelligence prizes.  Eliza is a White Crested Black Polish.  WCBP hens are known to be one of the slower breeds of chicken because their top-knot severely limits their field of vision.  Poor Eliza gets lost in the yard when the other chickens get more than three feet from her.  The poor girl will squawk for a couple minutes and then sit down wherever she is and waits for the other hens to find her.  I have seen her sit in the same spot for thirty minutes just waiting for the other chickens to wonder back.  I guess the chicken intelligence scale is a sliding scale.

We Made: A Robot Quilt

I've been working on a robot quilt for Mr. J for roughly a year now. He's obsessed with all things robot or wheels (and lately cats, but that's another story) or gears. It took me 6 months to find all the fabrics I wanted for what I envisioned as an epic quilt. I wanted mainly primary colors with a few odd balls thrown in. I also wanted only non-creepy robots  and not space robots. I had to give in on the space robots. There were too many cute fabric that had a little bit of space stuff. 

I wanted to make it large enough that it would act like a comforter and drape over the edges of a twin bed all the way to the floor so we wouldn't need a dust ruffle. I hate dust ruffles. They seems to trap dust under the bed which is just gross when you consider the amount of dog hair that comes in and out of our lives. 

Anyway, I was given the book Patchwork Style for Christmas. I had largely finished gathering fabric by that point so I selected and modified a pattern from the book and started in. The fabric is cut in strips of similar sizes and then randomly sewn together in long strips. The strips were then sewn together on the long edge. Mr. J helped me select the order to sew the individual pieces together. It lead to some color pooling, but it is his quilt and someday I'll tell him how we sewed the quilt together.

I know that making the quilt myself was more expensive than buying something, but we have an old red blanket that someone in my family made a long time ago. We've now patched it several times because I love that thing so much. You don't generally save store bought quilts. They don't develop the fabric equivalent of a patina-the super soft cuddly state that fabric gets too when it's really old

The final size is slightly longer than a traditional queen size quilt and roughly the width of a full size quilt. For perspective, the top picture has it laying on a full size bed. I've sewed the quilt top together, but I realized halfway through that my machine wasn't big enough to do the final quilting. Luckily, there are several local quilters who have the fancy long arm sewing machines you need to sew a quilt of this size. I'm dropping off the quilt for it's final step this week.   

Hopefully, it should be done by mid-July. I'm so excited to see what it looks like!

Sunday Cake: Gluten Free Baking

This weekend was my little bro's birthday. Our birthdays are 6 days (plus a few years) apart so this is heavy cake baking time in my family. My little bro has celiac so he can't have any form of wheat gluten. He was diagnosed quite a long while ago before there were decent mixes available for baked goods. We've all tried gluten free baking with various degrees of success. A notable failure on my part was the gluten free biscuit incident of 2004. I thought the phrase "biscuits you could chip a tooth on" was an example of hyperbole. Not so, my friends. These biscuits were stuck so throughly to the pan that I had to throw the pan away. Steel wool didn't even work.

My brother is pretty laid back and really doesn't ask that we make a fuss and try to bake for him. But if there is one day a year to make a fuss it's on your birthday.

So this year I made him a vanilla lemon layer cake with lemon curd filling, whip cream icing, and blueberries. I also made homemade vanilla bean ice cream. It was, to toot my own horn, very tasty.

As Mr. J chanted all weekend, "Happy Birthday Uncle David!"

This Moment

{this moment} From Soulemama- A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. If you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your 'moment' in the comments for all to find and see.

We're Reading: Literature in Translation

A few years ago, I heard a story on NPR about how few books published in the US are works in translation. Less than 3% of the books published every year are from translation. Apparently, we just don't have much of an appetite for literature in translation in this country. Even Pulitzer prize winning authors can't secure publishing contracts. I had a snarky comment written about some of the people who can get published, but I'll leave former governors of Alaska out of this. 

Ever since I heard the story on NPR, I've made a point to read more literature in translation. I've really liked all the books I've read that have been translated. I'm guessing that since so few books are translated, only the real gems make it through. I finished the Steig Larsson trilogy a few weeks ago when the final book came out. I love love love this series. I'm usually not a big crime novel sort of reader, but this series was incredible. I'm really sad he was only able to publish the three books before his death. 

There was an article in the NYT a few days ago suggesting that publishers might start looking for more European bestselling authors to publish in the US. I would really love to see more diversity in what is published here.  

Right now, I'm rereading Borges Labyrinths. I went through a phase of reading a ton of Latin American magical realism authors the summer before I went to college. Some of my favorite books come from the genre and they are always such great, interesting summer reads. 

If you are interested in reading more literature in translation, a group at the University of Rochester has set up a website called 3 Percent. 

Tales from the Coop: Meet the Ladies

Since the ladies are almost to egg laying age, we thought it would be a good time to give each of them their time in the spotlight. Each day we will spotlight a different hen by posting pictures and telling you all little bit about her.

We're Eating: Road Trip Food

We've written about our road trip here already, but what we didn't include was the elaborate planning that went into getting ready to take a toddler on a multi-day car bound adventure. I was a little worried about the food situation. We eat vegetarian and most of the road food available for vegetarians is some form of a deep fried potato or some form of cheese. Not so healthy. 

Instead of hunting around the gas stations for the least worst option, we just decided to make a bunch of stuff to bring. For the road trip, I made:

• Non-garlicy hummus
• Homemade white bread
• Two large loaves of banana nut bread
• Homemade granola bars
• Fresh fruit 
• Nuts

The hummus is from our own standard recipe that I just eye ball. The banana bread was actually from a recipe from a Martha Stewart cookbook that called for buttermilk instead of sour cream like the recipe I linked to above. Also, I accidentally left the granola bars in the oven for an extra 30 minutes with no harm done. 

Believe it or not, this held us all the way through the 5 day road trip with some main meals supplemented at restaurants.  The banana bread and the granola bars were the big stars. And Mr. J managed to get through the whole road trip without a single french fry!

Tales from the Coop: Yard Chickens

Our little ladies have quickly outgrown their coop. We haven't had time to upgrade the structure for them yet, so our previously chicken tractor bound hens have gone wild!

We let them out for a few hours a day to stretch their wings and roam for bugs.

It also gives Mr J more opportunities to commune with the chickens. He thinks he is part of the flock and loves to hang out in shade with them!

I haven't been worried about the chickens flying out of the yard until today. We have a four-foot fence around our yard, and they haven't shown much interest in flying until recently. Today they decided to roam further than ever! If they keep this up, then I will either have to learn how to clip wings or build faster.

We Made: A Squirrel Proof Garden...we hope.

Just to recap, we have a thief afoot in the garden. 

A thief we caught red pawed.

A thief our two big dogs are too lazy to chase. You can see the fluffy tail on the right.

A thief who brazenly busted one of the stakes setup to keep him or her out.

*Sigh*

Ever since the garden started really producing, more than half our harvest has ended up being stolen from the garden and left out in the open with one or two bites. When my parents first moved into the house I grew up in, we all woke up one morning to a shotgun being fired next door. The neighbor was shooting the squirrels that had eaten her tomatoes. I thought that was extreme. I'm reconsidering. 

But since I don't really believe in shooting the squirrels (hardly very eco-friendly if I kill the wildlife to save my produce), we have locked up the garden tighter than a safe. We spent the weekend re-staking and re-netting the garden. We haven't really figured out how we will get the produce out, but the squirrels will also be thwarted. It's now a test of wills. 

This afternoon we watched two unsuccessful attempts by the squirrel to break into the garden. Chuck ran out in the yard with the dogs to scare away the squirrel, but the dogs were totally bored with the idea. Useless. 

Sunday Cake: Yogurt Cake with Blueberries

I baked lots of stuff this weekend which I'll write up eventually, but I didn't get around to making a cake because I was tired of cooking by Sunday.

So today, I made the yogurt cake from Smitten Kitchen with the following modifications:

-we only had 3/4 C of plain yogurt so I made up the rest with plain ricotta cheese from the farmer's market 

-subbed lemons for lime

-subbed blueberries for blackberries

All in all a success. But Monday was a welcome party for new faculty so I'm bringing it on Tuesday.

This is my own version of How to Win Friends and Influence People.....with baked goods.

Hackberries

Like many parts of the country, heavy rains and strong winds have been visiting San Antonio lately. These storms have taken a heavy toll of our tress because of the 22 month drought that broke this spring. Many trees lost root and trunk mass during the drought, and the heavy rains have now made the branches too heavy to be supported by the tree bases.

On our two acre lot, we have lost significant portion of about a dozen trees in the past three weeks. Because of this, the hackberry tree has become the bane of my existence. Hackberries are notorious for the trunks rotting from the inside-out to the point where they can no longer support the canopy. These vile trees then attack fences, roofs, and cars across the land.

We have removed many trees in the past month, which is very hard for me to do. I hate to see large trees cut down, but I know it has to happen. The trees may appear healthy on the outside but they are serious hazards. Much of the problem with the hackberry exists because they are a non-native species. They were brought to San Antonio to be shade trees and planted throughout the area. Now they pop up in yards and do not survive well in our climate, causing them to lose large branches. As Jenny and I continue to reshape our yard, we will aim at replacing non-native plants with natives that are better suited to our environment. Besides, there are so many beautiful native in Central Texas, it is hard to go wrong! Suggestions?

This Moment

{this moment} From Soulemama- A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. If you're inspired to do the same, leave a link to your 'moment' in the comments for all to find and see.

What We're Reading: The Red Pyramid

Jenny and I fell in love with Rick Riordan's writing while I taught fifth grade English. Don't ask me how that happened, but it did and my students survived. When Riordan's last series (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) about a modern day demigod son of Poseidon ended, we were heart broken.

Luckily, he has released a new series called the Kane Chronicles. The first installment, The Red Pyramid, has a similar structure as Riordan's previous middle school lit books. Sadie and Carter Kane learn that they are the children of Egyptian magicians and must battle gods, monsters, and mortals to save the world. Told in two first person perspectives, The Red Pyramid is extremely similar to Percy Jackson and the Olympians, but it is a style that works for Riordan and is extremely engaging for the reader.

We're Reading: Parenting While Plugged In

The New York Times has an interesting article today about parenting in the digital age.

“Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.” Yikes.

The article also points out that technology may be changing the language divide that has typically been found in families of different SES levels. Essentially, researchers have shown repeatedly that kids who are raised in higher SES households hear many thousands more words during early childhood than children raised in lower SES households. However, the advent of parenting while checking your iPhone for the eightieth time that day limits how many words parents say to their kids. Hmmmm.

When we bought a new computer a year before Mr. J was born, we intentionally got a desktop with the idea that it would limit our random surfing. If you have to physically leave the rest of the family to get on the computer, it's a little more of a limit.

But then Chuck was issued a laptop by his school and I needed a laptop for my school so we're back to square 1. Add in two iPhones and we're the poster children for potential distracted parenting. It's really tempting when we're both mentally burned out to just turn on the TV or laptop and float through the family time.

But we don't really want to do that. An author I like, Zadie Smith dedicated one of her books with the quote, " Time is how you spend your love." I think it's very true that children don't understand very much about how much we love them. They really only understand what we DO with them and how we act. Children know when we're dividing our attention and really, there is nothing on a screen that I want to spend my time on more than my family.

So we've instituted a few rules.

1) We can watch the BBC World News at 5PM and the National News at 5:30PM, but then the TV goes off until Mr. J goes to bed.

2) We can check our e-mail once before Mr. J goes to bed, but iPhones and laptops need to stay in the bag until after bedtime. This occasionally gets broken when one of us has a time sensitive work thing.

3)No TV on Saturday at all. Mr. J has sorta stopped taking naps. He needs to chill out for a few hours in the middle of the day or he has a rough evening. We're still trying to figure out calm restful activities that will actually keep his attention better than just letting him watch a movie.

4) I quit Facebook partially because it was just a huge time suck that really added very little to my life. I'm also trying to be very good about using my personal e-mail only for personal stuff. My work e-mail is a pain to get into off campus which makes me less likely to check it from my phone and therefore less likely to obsessively check it all evening.

We're doing fairly well, but the lure of the screen is always there. And yes, I realize it's a little crazy to be writing about limiting computer time on a blog but there it is.

McDonald Observatory and Balmorhea

Big Bend Day 2

It will make you breathe deeply whenever you think of it, for you have inhaled eternity. There is no tree, no house to measure things by. You are in scale with the cactus plant, the stone in the distance — the all-important and the nothing.

-Ludwig Bemelmans,

“Texas Legend,” McCall’s, August 1956

Big Bend Day 1

Finally, I wish to offer my opinion, just as a private visitor, that although the old saying that “he who travels must be prepared to take away only as much as he brings with him” applies to all our great parks, it holds true especially of Big Bend. It is a desert-mountain country whose qualities offer an allurement, a satisfaction of soul, only if the visitor will put himself in the right mood, and will remain long enough to know it with some intimacy. He who drives in and drives out without letting the motor cool, may see, to be sure, some most interesting natural objects, but he will not know, and can never love, Big Bend.

-Freeman Tilden, 1945