Moving

Okay so Blogger is having problems and once again I can't re-0rder pictures; I just threw these on here as I found them in my picture files. On the left is a picture of sandhill cranes, taken by "Judith Sparkles Photography," the people who did our engagement photos.

I apologize for any spelling errors, or non-sensical phrases or sentences.

I've spent over two hours on this post and now it is time to get back to real life.

Yesterday was the end of the quarter, and grades are due on Wednesday.

I have a long weekend ahead of me . . .

Engagement photo outside of our current "river house."

Engagement Photo outside our "River House"

Picture of the backyard from inside the house, taken in the spring/summer
Picture of the backyard, taken from inside the house, in spring/summer
same
Picture of outside taken in the fall
High water during the fall flood in 2010. Check for this little fishing guy in other pictures to get a sense of how high the water was.
That's the bottom tier of our yard, totally underwater (yes, these pictures are in another post as well)
Bottom tier of our yard partially submerged (this is not the water at its highest)

This picture is at the beginning of the flood, before these trees went underwater. (Again, I apologize for not being able to reorder the pictures)

Even before the flood got too high in our yard, you can see that the steps leading down to the water were underwater.

That's how high the little fisherman sits above the bottom tier. It's a good 2.5 foot drop.
View of the sandbar, totally submerged up to the wooded part.
View of the back of our house.
Not a flood picture. This is a picture of a turtle just off of our neighbor's back yard, taken in October. This was about a month after the flood. We watched these turtles all summer (2011) too. On some sunny days we saw several turtles sunbathing on this rock (tree?) and other ones in the neighbor's yard on the other side.


That's the sandbar, which was totally covered during the flood.
Early stage of the flood, when our landlord was watering the backyard, trying to grow grass (the brown stuff is straw)


Hard to tell, but this is a pair of sandhill cranes on the sandbar. Cranes tend to mate for life and I think they might return to the same place to breed every year. Whether it is the same pair or not, since we had our engagement pictures taken, there have always been 2 cranes (and then three) here in the summer.
backyard at sunset.

Adele in the kitchen, with a view of our paneling and the river.
Oliver loving the snow the first winter we had him.

We bought a house and are going to be moving soon. There are a lot of reasons to be excited about moving. As I learned 10 years ago from a friend who was an army wife, the best thing about moving is the fact that you get to start over in a new place that is not messy or dirty! If you move often enough, according to her philosophy, you never have to deep clean your house - you just pack up and move.

Here's a list of things I will miss about our current house, followed by some of the things I will not miss.

I will miss the river. I love living on the river. It made it easy to relate to Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow. I love the river in the fall (we moved here in November) when the trees are bare, and the river reflects the clear autumn sunlight. (I will not miss the way that this particular effect makes it impossible to see anything in the kitchen/living room because of the glare.) In November, the sun is low enough in the sky that during the dwindling hours of daylight the back side of our house is filled with rays from sunrise to sunset. (On sunny days. On cloudy days we still have a gorgeous view of the river and the colorful trees on the other side.) There are fewer noisy boats racing up and down the river, trying to avoid sandbars. In late November/early December, we get to watch the river freeze. Chunks of ice make there way down the river for a few days, with a crust building up from the edges in toward the center, until one day we notice that the river is completely frozen. Adele got to see a tiny little bit of this at Thanksgiving last year, but she was too small to understand what was happening.

Our backyard expands in winter, and it seems like we live on a huge lot. Our three tiers of yard just roll right into the frozen expanse of river, and it looks like our yard goes on till the row of trees on the other side. Sometimes we see deer tracks and other animal tracks (including a coyote once) on the river. Each winter that we lived here, a hawk liked to perch in one of the trees in our back yard. I could spend hours just watching that hawk. I expect he'll come back this winter too, but we won't be here to see him. Oliver prefers his back yard in winter; he is terrified of walking on grass, but loves to jump around in the snow.

In spring, it is exciting to watch the river thaw. The first year we lived here, we participated in the last annual "spring thaw" party. We took guesses in early February about when we thought the river would thaw. I can't remember who won that year, but our next door neighbor hosted a friendly gathering for the whole neighborhood. It has been very nice to be part of a happy, established community in town. (Those neighbors have since moved away, but we have enjoyed our new next door neighbors too.) As we watch ice soup flow down the river in the fall, so do we watch ice soup flow downstream in the spring thaw. It is always exciting to see where the sand bar will be in the spring, after the rushing water changes the shape of the river. The sandhill cranes come back and search for nesting places in the wooded part of the sandbar just downriver from our house. As the spring progresses, we see tiny baby cranes (and geese, ducks) waddling with their parents on the sandbar.

Last Fall and last spring, the river flooded quite dramatically. A third of our yard was underwater both times. We were very fortunate not to have dealt with any flooding in our basement in spite of all of the water outside.

In summer, in addition to enjoying the calls of the birds both young and old, I have enjoyed watching turtles lay in the sun on exposed rocks along the edge of the river. We listen to groups of campers who stay up late around campfires on the sandbar. We watch canoes, pontoons, motorboats, rowboats, and jet skis go up and down the river. The eaves keep the sun out of our house, so it is usually pleasant inside, even without air conditioning.

At all times of the year it is relaxing to watch the river moving by. The river is a constant reminder that life is bigger than us. This river has been here for thousands of years and will continue to flow long after we are gone. And this particular river forms part of the historic Fox-Wisconsin waterway that served as a highway of transportation across North America for hundreds of years. The water that flows past our house every day is new and different, but these shores have been here through amazing transformations as Europeans settled here, and as America became an industrial nation.

I'm trying to hold on to the feeling of sitting, watching the river flow. This house is a peaceful, wonderful place, and we have been very lucky to live here for three years.

Inside of the house, I will miss my kitchen. This house has an amazingly large kitchen with lots of counterspace and and a butcher block island that I'm not sure I can live without, but I'm going to have to try. I'm oddly attached to the wood paneling in the house. The location on the river and the paneling make this house feel a lot like the cottage my grandparents built on Lake Wisconsin, where I spent many happy hours as a child. The paneling makes me feel like I'm on vacation at the lake. As odd as it may sound, I'm going to miss it.

There are, of course, things I will not miss about this house. For instance, I'm not a huge fan of the cranky neighbors across the street, and will not be sorry to leave them. Since we took over responsibility for mowing the lawn, we have been wishing for a much smaller yard. We will not miss the yard at this house! (Especially not the extra-thick grass on the bottom tier of the yard, which must have enjoyed all of the natural fertilizer that came in the form of two floods in the last 12 months!) I will not miss having two huge living rooms, as these areas just tend to collect piles of stuff, and I don't have enough furniture for either of them. I won't miss trying to decide whether to put my few pieces of furniture facing the river (one focal point) or the fireplace (another focal point) on the opposite side of the house.

I will not miss the wallpaper. Not the blue and brown plaid in our bedroom, the pink fan design in the hallway, the blue paisley in the guest bedroom, the orange and yellow flowered stripes in the kitchen, or the green plaid in the bathroom. (I won't miss the yellow in the front dining room either - not because it is gaudy but because it has been falling down for three years, and because I read The Yellow Wallpaper as a freshman in high school, and it was a disturbing story.)

Although we knew this would be the case when we moved in, I will not miss having a landlord who spends my winter break jackhammering in the basement, building doors in the garage, or digging up our backyard with backhoes and other heavy equipment for four falls in a row.

I will be glad to have a basement that I can use for more than storing empty boxes and dirty laundry. (I will miss the laundry chute - but I won't need it at our new house, as everything is on the first floor.) I will be ecstatic to have more than one bathroom (although that means three toilets and showers to clean.) I'm not sure how I'll feel about not having a mirror in front of the kitchen sink. Now I'll have to turn dishes around to see if they are dirty, and I won't be able to watch the television in the reflection.

I will miss our garbage disposal, but I will be able to compost in the backyard, and I will be able to put up a clothesline. I think we are going to put in shelving in the basement for all of my canned food. Maybe someday we'll buy a nice hutch for my china. And eventually we'll put up a fence for the dog!!

Oh the times, they are a-changing

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't updated my blog in a while. Since June. Like I didn't know that . . .

Here's what happened. While I was waiting for strawberry jam to seal on the counter, I composed several new blog posts. If I remember correctly, I was having some trouble getting Blogger to load my pictures in the correct order. Blogger was not the only source of trouble that day. Only two of my 13 or so half pint jars of jam sealed. The jam was a mess - the recipe I'd been using said to stir the jam till it "sheeted" off the back of a wooden spoon. I cooked the heck out of those berries and sugar, and it never sheeted. Eventually I just poured it into hot jars, figuring enough was enough.

So much for giving out strawberry jam to friends and family members as Christmas gifts. The jam, I have learned, is excellent for making Giant's Thumbprint cookies - I think I have used up about 3 jars of jam on 5 or 6 batches of cookies since making the jam. But that is all it is good for. It is almost impossible to spread at all, even on something as hard as one of Krista's Kitchen's sturdy "Best Crackers Ever." I pawned a few jars off on my immediate family, and the rest is waiting to be made into cookies, possibly for Christmas.

This summer my dad and I grew a decent garden, although I did not freeze much food at all - just a few batches of chicken stock made with garden ingredients and stuff from the farmers' markets and lots and lots of zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, and zucchini cookies. I didn't make it to as many farmers' markets as I would have liked, either. We did have a steady source of produce from our CSA (we just ate a salad out of the last box) but this was not a great summer for eating real food.

I spent most of the summer applying and interviewing for jobs, and doing some traveling. Michael and I took Amtrak out to Reno, Nevada for a Scrabble Tournament. We had quite the adventure getting there and back again. Not as much of an adventure as old Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, but almost. I had a job interview the second day of the train ride out West. By the time we go to Reno, the train was something like 18 hours delayed, which got us to Nevada mere hours before the tournament started, instead of a full day. On the way home we were another 10 or so hours late, so we had to spend the night in Chicago before catching a bus back to Madison. That was going to be a blog post, but it never materialized. In general it was fine with us that the train was delayed - we got to see some beautiful sights in daylight instead of missing them in the dark.

Here are some pictures in reverse order:

The Rocky mountains, from pretty far away.

I don't really remember where this was but it was before we got to the Rockies.
Foothills of the Rockies?
That is a CAFO. This was in Nebraska. It was the first thing we took pictures of on the trip. Once I saw the cows, I had to dig the camera out. Apparently (I later learned) it is illegal to take pictures of these places. We'll see what happens.
More CAFO. Some women sitting in front of us wondered what kind of ranch this was. I told them that if they've ever eaten a McDonald's hamburger, or bought ground beef at the grocery store, the animals probably spent some of their lives in a place like this. This picture cannot capture how vast this place was, or how many cows were there.

Michael came in second in his division at the tournament. I did not.

We arrived home to Madison in time for me to go to the Art Fair on the Square with my mom, which has been a tradition for several years now. Then it was back to the grind - searching for jobs to apply for, writing applications, hoping for interviews, going to interviews, and then waiting to hear about jobs.

We also went to three weddings this summer, which were fun. Congratulations Krista and Nate, Mark and Pondie, and Charlie and Tricia!

By mid-August I had been offered two jobs, and ended up taking a full time job teaching both English and History in Pardeeville, where I taught half-time last semester. So far I am enjoying teaching, but it has significantly impaired my ability to garden, cook, and can. (It has interfered with my ability to clean, too, but I'm not complaining about that.)

In spite of getting a job shortly before school started, my dad and I made two batches of Barbara Kingsolver's spaghetti sauce in late August, and my mom and I made three canner loads (plus some!) of applesauce in October.

On the first day of school, Michael and I met at the bank at 4:00 to get preapproval for a home loan. Working with a realtor who we have known for many years through Scrabble Club, we started looking at houses. We weren't sure how house-hunting was going to go, as Michael wanted a new house and I wanted an old house. I was partial to two-story houses, and we really wanted to stay in our current neighborhood, even though it is not in the best school district in Portage. Two weeks ago, we accepted a counter-offer on an 11 year old house about a mile from where we currently live. It is also two blocks away from the best elementary school in town.

We will miss the river, the sandhill cranes who got into our engagement pictures and seem to return to the sandbar every spring (we saw them taking a goodbye-for-winter stroll along the edge of the sandbar tonight), and our wonderful neighbors. We will miss being a block and a half from the levy path that runs along the river. We will miss panoramic views of the changing seasons. We will not miss mowing the huge yard or only having one bathroom. I will not miss being a renter, although I am somewhat scared about the new responsibilities that will come with home ownership.

I'm planning a small garden at our new house (yay, even less yard to mow), and Michael has grand plans for the large unfinished basement, which will be his "man cave." (He has promised to let me set up a little corner of the basement for my 'reading nook' though.)

We'll be moving into the house during the month of December. It will be a happy, exciting, sad, fun time of change.

In the meantime, I'm keeping a day or two ahead of my US Studies students, trying to motivate my 6 Media Analysis students to participate, and feeling grateful that I have 18 students who, after about three weeks of school, finally learned to participate in American Literature.

It is the tail end of a 4.5-day weekend, three days of which I spent in Chicago spending too much money with my sisters. It was nice to kick back with my sisters, get pampered (mani-pedis on Friday), read (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan), eat, and shop. We stayed at the Inn of Chicago - the same place Michael and I spent the night after getting in to Chicago at 2 a.m., long after our bus had left.

Now it is time to get back to work, re-learning US Studies, creating an assignment sheet for Media Analysis, and reviewing The Crucible for American Literature. I like being a teacher. It is a lot of work, but it is work that I generally enjoy.

I don't promise to blog more frequently in the next few months, but here's hoping I have a garden next year, and that after my freezer is depleted this winter, I stock it back up next summer.

CSA Week 2 (our first pick-up)

Last year was our first experience with a CSA, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it again. Part of the problem was that our old CSA (which I loved for many, many reasons) was about a 35 minute drive from home, and the pick-up interfered with other Wednesday night activities. After a long winter without fresh vegetables, we broke down and joined a (different) CSA this year. The pickup location for our new CSA is much closer to home (it is a 7 block walk). The prices were a little bit lower as well, but the format of the CSA is different. Last year we had a half share, which meant we got half of a box of produce every week. This year we signed up for an every other week share (which seems more typical, based on the CSAs we looked at) and we get a full box of produce every other week. Last week was the first official week of our CSA, but we're even-week EOW customers, so today was our first pick-up.

We got lettuce, green onions, chives, and radishes. I'm ready for salad!

If only I had saved a few strawberries from the farmers' market . . .

Farmers' Market Haul

Once upon a time, more than 15 years ago, I found myself with a few quarts of strawberries and a ripe rhubarb plant in the back yard. I decided to make a pie. I pulled out my mom's old yellowed falling-apart Betty Crocker cookbook and searched for a strawberry rhubarb pie recipe. I couldn't find one, so I used an apple cranberry pie recipe instead.

My uncles raved about that pie, so I must have served it to them.

One uncle said I'm make a good wife someday due to my pie-making abilities.

What he didn't know was that I'd used a Betty Crocker premade crust for the pie.

Now I know how to make my own crusts from scratch - and I have a rolling pin to make them with. All I needed were the berries and the rhubarb.

On Saturday morning I headed to Madison. When I arrived, my dad was reading the paper in his usual breakfast spot and he announced that strawberry season was officially open. Hurray!

We headed down to a nearby farmers' market where I picked up a pound of heirloom rhubarb ($3.00), a quart of strawberries ($6 - but you'll pay that for the first berries of the season!), a bag of washed spinach ($3) and a container of whole milk yogurt ($2.75). I didn't want to go too crazy because I knew our first CSA pickup of the summer was coming up in a few days.

I had lunch with my mom, ran into a good friend at the little bakery that made my wedding cake, and did some gardening/yardwork with my dad.

Saturday night I went to a friend's wedding reception, so there wasn't time to bake a pie, but by Sunday afternoon the berries were calling to me.

It tastes as good as it looks.