Panophoric Farm

A Joy

I love doing this.








Amy Gaither, photo credit.
Douglas Ballard, chainsaw credit.

I Work on a Farm....Again

After a few years away from tilling and working the earth, I have returned. Not to Flannigan Creek Farms, but Palouse Organics, a bigger operation owned by Frank Hill and operated by a handful of folks which now includes yours truly.

In a few ways it's the perfect job for me right now. The day Amy and I returned from our wedding I got a call from my boss who informed me that due to the deflated economy, I and three others from Terramark had been laid off. Work had been slowing down before we left, and more often than not, I'd found myself "volunteering" to take the afternoon/day off because of the lack of work. After shoveling a few roofs and other odd jobs I got a call from Frank who asked if I'd be interested in working on his farm until March 22. I'd never met Frank before, he only knew of me through the gracious compliments and recommendations of Jordan Smith, Brian Points, and James Arrick. So while only temporary work, it's still about a month and a half of consistent, good-paying work. And the work is fantastic.

My first day there I was instructed to haul a dead horse "over the hill" with the old Kubota tractor. Having just learned how to drive the thing an hour ago, I hooked a chain to hind legs and took off up the hill and through the snow. At the top I could see a ton of the Palouse, the Bitterroots to the east, and the tops of the Seven Devils to the south. After delivering the horse to its final resting place next to an eyeless steer that had died earlier in the year I trekked back to the barn and learned the intracacies of dairy cows.

Shufford, the master of the farm until recently, showed me the feeding and watering routine for Flower and Lovey, the two milk producers. He tossed some hay from a bale on the ground into a wheelbarrow with the afternoon sun coming in full from the open barn door behind him, and I almost went out of my mind with agrarian delight as the chaff and dust flew through the air thicker than snow. It's the kind of stuff you can breath in, almost choke on, and want more.

The Rich Coast

Please to enjoy some photos from Costa Rica.

Two Gems From the Inauguration

Alice Walker, speaking of Michelle Obama:
I like how she is so naturally elegant. I like how she dresses, also.


Alice Walker:
Is that Ethyl Kennedy behind Michelle? Look at the nose...
Amy Goodman:
Actually......I think......That's Joe Biden.

The Nietzsche Family Circus

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations -
always darker, emptier, simpler than these.

Blast From the Past

Well we are back from Costa Rica and totally married. Pictures of our luna de miel to follow this coming week. In the meantime, check this out. It's the long-awaited, finally-created official page for Expedition, the backpacking and rock climbing branch of Kanakuk where Amy and I met. We got to work on this site, write a lot of the content, and contribute photos so it's pretty rad to see it up and running on the Interweb.

New Hotness

Soooo, Amy got me a Nikon D40 for which to play with. Perfect timing on her part, as I was lamenting my lack of a decent digital camera for our trip to Costa Rica following the wedding. This here's a little shot I took with it yesterday before the blizzard hit.

I've had similar thoughts as Davis on my lack of thought and writing as of late, but I feel that things have been building in my mind for a bit and that I'll be back in the swing of things soon. Most of my free time during the past few months has been devoted to fixing up the house that Amy and I will be living in, and learning the hard way (read as: REAL way) a lot about building and home repair. I've had tools and materials on the mind, to the point of getting trapped in Moscow Building Supply just wandering around and ogling the many manly contraptions and gizmos, as well as getting excited about brackets and handsaws.

All this to say, I'm looking forward to getting back into something of a rhythm of writing and posting. So hold on dear reader, and your wildest blog fantasies will be realized in a wizardly cloud of 1's and 0's. Whillikers.

Can You Put a Price on Security?

This is amazing.

C&L

I'm usually a big fan of the C & L Meat Locker, and man, that smoked salmon we had last night was the best ham I've had in a while.

"But There's More. There's MUCH More!"

So the lovely Amy K. Ballard and I have been engaged for about two months now, and for those of you who haven't heard the story and would like to, here goes:

We'd been looking around at road bikes for Amy ever since she moved up to Idaho in January, usually by stopping by bike shops and taking different styles out for a test ride. Bike shop owners are surprisingly cool with letting you ride out of their store on $5000 worth of equipment with nothing but your driver's license as collateral/evidence.

I'd had the idea of proposing on a bike ride for a while, and had even thought about the one-two punch of surprising her with a bike, going for a ride, and asking the Big One midway through. Not finding any good deals and wanting to have done the deed before we both went to Wisconsin, I opted for the test-ride freebie deal. I suited Amy up in one of my racing kits from UI, she hopped on a Giant OCR-3 from Paradise Creek Bikes, and we took off down the Latah Trail towards Troy.

The ring was tucked into my jersey pocket and I'd hoped to find a nice spot in the wheat fields to stop. We turned off of the trail and headed into farm country 7-8 miles from town. Amy was doing so well, and really enjoying the views along with the challenge. We started climbing a good sized hill that I was a little worried about, but she powered up like it was nothing. A bit longer found us on another hill and Amy mentioned it starting to get pretty hard. I suggested turning around after we got to the top. to which she agreed with a laugh.

At the top, we got off our bikes stretched a bit, and I started getting the Nervous. I repeatedly told her how glad I was that she liked biking, and scratched/rubbed my head. I then told her that I wanted to buy her a bike, which she thought was great. This not being the climax of the afternoon, I threw my hands in the air and said,

"But there's more. There's MUCH more!"

Boom.

Mawage

Idaho

A Change of Seasons

After 5 merry years at the Malebox/Wisconsin House pt. 2, I'm moving on to a little house down the hill. Triple the billz is worth a home that can be clean, quiet, and free of television.

Sooooo, Chris Aberle, Drew Nicholas, and Jordan Smith are looking to fill my spot ASAP here on Polk St. Four bedrooms, wood stove, two living rooms, huge kitchen, and bidet make it a castle among shacks in a college town. Asher is staying in NY through January, and would also appreciate roommates to ease the rent burden on his end. If you or anyone you know of is looking for a place, there are two openings.

New Pictures

Hola, just posted some new shots on flickr from my time in Colorado with AJ. I had the great opportunity to take a group of guys out from Wisconsin on a three day trip in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, just south of Rocky Mountain National Park. It's, you know, scenic...

The Palouse Cup rages on, we're currently 1-1 with two games to go tomorrow.

Vocab

The Book Club, consisting of Nate Wolff, David Hoos, and myself had its first meeting last night. We discussed Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables a bit, and made plans for our next reads, which will probably include some Tobias Wolff short stories, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Yes, we set out to read some Catholic writers.

Besides the learned words listed below, we talked about the sometimes insultingly obvious tools many classic authors employ in relating themes. For example, much of THOT7G is about generational sin and curses. In order to make sure we hadn't missed it before, Hawthorne goes to great lengths to tell us how a descendent of the cursed ancestor bears an uncanny resemblence to the orginal Pyncheon. This led me to revisit one of my old gripes about middle/high school literature programs that tell kids that the classics are simply too dense and difficult to understand. Oh, and they also were written too long ago to have any bearing on a 17-year-old who drives a Mazda and has an iPod. The fact is, many of the classics function as textbooks on Themes in Writing. Dickens, much to Nate's frustration, will carry you along a nice little theme in his novels, show you bits and peices here and there until you are comfortable and fairly pleased with having gleaned something from the text, then say something like 'And the wooden table was a metaphor for the Clark family.' To which the appropriate, Wolffian response is to bring an open hand to the forhead, hold it briefly, extend the hand and cry "Dude."

Words I've learned:

lugubrious - ridiculously, excessively mournful.

Daguerreotype - an obsolete photographic process, invented in 1839, in which a picture made on a silver surface sensitized with iodine was developed by exposure to mercury vapor.

matutinal - pertaining to or occurring in the morning; early in the day.

escritoire - a writing desk.

obstreperous - noisy and stubbornly defiant, aggressively boisterous.

piquant - agreeably pungent or sharp in taste or flavor; pleasantly biting or tart.

dromedaries - the single-humped camel, Camelus dromedarius, of Arabia and northern Africa.

approbation - official approval or sanction.

effulgence - shining forth brilliantly; radiant.

physiognomy - the outward appearance of anything, taken as offering some insight into its character.

alacrity - cheerful readiness, promptness, or willingness.

testator - a person who has died leaving a valid will.

propinquity -

1.	nearness in place; proximity.

2.	nearness of relation; kinship.

3.	affinity of nature; similarity.

4.	nearness in time.

augury - an omen, token, or indication.


And I'm only halfway through...