Archive for December, 2007
December 17, 2007 – Frosty Morning
It was a bit of a foggy overnight, so that left a winter wonderland this morning.
The pastelly red sunrise wished it could be as red as the barn, but it only managed a deep pinkish hue.
The hoarfrost held on most of the day – the above freezing temperatures did not make it today.
one year ago…
December 16, 2007 – Icy Roads
The ice remains on the gravel roads. The blacktop roads are clear, but the country roads still have a think mantle of ice.
Here’s what the roads look like – the county can’t afford to treat all the gravel roads, but they do have a big scraper-thingy that digs grooves in the ice to make it less like glare ice. Once we get a warm day, it should melt off.
December 15, 2007 – Farmstead in December
Here’s a view of the farm looking north in the winter time.
The newly refurbished buildings really stand out. Soon it will be time to work on the big barn.
December 14, 2007 – Bird Tracks in the Snow
The ice is still hanging around, although a few dustings of snow have provided a bit more traction.
I imagine the birds and any animals that are used to digging through the snow to find food are having a hard time with a thick layer of ice between the snow and the ground.
December 13, 2007 – Thingamajig Thursday #99
Here’s this week’s “Thingamajig” entry.
Also check out the last thingamajig answer.
As always, put your guess in a comment below.
Hold mouse over this sentence to pop-up answer.
December 12, 2007 – Another Outsider’s Perspective
Yesterday Des Moines Register staff writer Mike Klein wrote a story about a reporter from the Rocky Mountain News who moved to Iowa for the nine months before the caucus to cover the candidates for his newspaper. Following is an exerpt from the piece:
His first impressions were “mind-numbing” drives between muddy fields. “Then I see little cornstalks growing out of the ground. Little things. Then it grows into this big plant. Then it dies. I got sad,” he cracked. Early on last spring, he was astounded at Iowans’ sense of entitlement. He watched Iowa reporters ask candidate Mike Huckabee why he had been ignoring Iowa. Huckabee had visited Iowa a dozen times already.
Then an odd thing happened. Sprengelmeyer started to like Iowa, even more than he did when he got his first taste of the state in 1988 – on a caucus road trip with three Northwestern University student newspaper cronies.
“If you are not from Iowa, you think of it as a boring place. But I grew up in the desert (Albuquerque). The scenery is dynamic here,” said Sprengelmeyer, 40. “I’ve been to the pearl button factory in Muscatine, to the cheese factory in Kalona. I fell in love with Marshalltown, an interesting place going through this big transformation with immigration issues. Iowa is more diverse than people realize.”
The reported M. E. Sprengelmeyer, also wrote a column for his paper about what he found in Marshalltown. I thought it was a very accurate, well-done piece for a reporter coming into an unfamiliar town.  Often times people who live in a place are unaware or oblivious to some of the things he mentions in the article.
December 11, 2007 – More Ice, Another “Snow Day”
We missed the brunt of this ice storm as the 1 inch ice accumulations went to our south. The ice is starting to get old – now outside we have a layer of ice, covered by snow, covered by another layer of ice, topped off with another layer of snow.
This bird nest in a cherry tree has seen warmer days! Nonetheless, it was a beautiful landscape and all the schools were shut down.
There was a north wind for this event, last week’s was from the south, so at least the piles of ice are on different sides of the buildings. It was another good cooking day – baked turkey legs, squash with brown sugar, raisins, and nuts, wild rice casserole, and raspberry pie, with a couple of loaves of honey wheat bread thrown in for good measure!
December 10, 2007 – High Hopes Gift Boxes
Once again this year we are offering gift boxes with hand-made goodies from our farm, including hand-made goat milk soap, jams from organic fruit, and beeswax candles.
This is the large sampler box with jam, honey, goat milk soap, a beeswax pillar candle and two votive candles offered for $25.
This is the medium sampler box with jam, honey, goat milk soap, a beeswax votive candle offered for $15.
This is the small sampler box with three kinds of jam made with organic fruit from the farm offered for $10.
We offer these first to our regular customers but have a few left, so we are showing them on the blog. They are in mail-ready boxes and we can mail them to you or your gift recipient for just the actual shipping charges. Contact us if you’d like to order some or get a shipping estimate.
December 9, 2007 – Gift Box Assembly
It’s December on the farm, so that means the last “farming” task of the season is upon us – putting together gift boxes.
It’s our second year of putting these together, and now that we’ve gathered the right boxes, labels and the like, the assembly time is greatly reduced from year one. On a cold afternoon, it’s a good thing to do!
December 8, 2007 – Break out the Skis
The latest round of snow has brought out the skis. This is the first year Martin has “real” skis and he can abandon the skis that strapped to his boots.
The kids love to ski and we just haven’t had much long-lived snow the past few years.
December 7, 2007 – Early Winter
The first snow that required the tractor to come out and move snow fell Thursday.
It was a relatively small wind-free snowfall so it sat nicely upon the branches and landscape.
December 6, 2007 – Thingamajig Thursday #98
Here’s this week’s “Thingamajig” entry.
Also check out the last thingamajig answer.
As always, put your guess in a comment below.
Hold mouse over this sentence to pop-up answer.
December 5, 2007 – Latke Time of Year
It’s the time of year for the annual latke fry at hgh hopes. The kids were very excited to find out it was latke night. There was actual utternaces of joy and clapping.
As a bonus, the potatoes, eggs, and onions were all straight off the farm.
December 4, 2007 – Christmas Rant
Each year I envision a simpler Christmas. Less running. Less buying. More time with people who matter to us. More Renewal. Maybe even more time preparing food together. These good ideas seem to fade as the season encroaches as the focus narrows to getting “the list” completed. I get sucked into it – finding the best deals is a game that is quite addicting. But it only goes so far. I’m not sure it brings more joy. Thus, I was very much intrigued by Bill McKibben’s “Hundred Dollar Holiday.” This isn’t something that can happen cold turkey. I’ll probably buy the book after Christmas to see if if has hints for cool ideas to replace the gift-giving treadmill so as to not take something away, but to add something else more meaningful. Below are some of Bill McKibben’s thoughts on the holiday that get to the essence of the rant.
I’ve been called my share of names, but the only one that ever really stung was “grinch.” The year that a few friends and I started the Hundred Dollar Holiday program through our rural Methodist churches, several business page columnists in the local papers leveled the G-word we were dour do-gooders, they said, bent on taking the joy out of Christmas. And, frankly, their charges sounded plausible enough. After all, we were asking our families, our friends, and our church brethren to try and limit the amount of money they spend on the holiday to a hundred dollars “ to celebrate the holiday with a seventh or an eighth of the normal American materialism. There’s no question that would mean fewer “Pop guns! And bicycles! Roller skates! Drums! Checkerboards! Tricycles! Popcorn! And plums!” Not to mention Playstations, Camcorders, Five Irons, and various Obsessions. Perhaps my heart was two sizes too small.
So it was with some trepidation that I carefully reread my daughter’s well-worn copy of the Seuss classic, neatly shelved with Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who and all the other secular parables. There on the cover was the Grinch himself, red eyes gleaming malevolently as he plotted the sack of Whoville. He hated the noise of the kids with their toys, and he hated the feast of rare Who-roast-beast, and most of all he hated the singing. “Why,for fifty-three years I’ve put up with it now! I MUST stop this Christmas from coming! But HOW?” Simple enough, of course. All he had to do was loot the town of its packages, tinsel, trees, food, even the logs in the fireplace. Even the crumbs for the mice disappeared back up the chimney. But of course it didn’t work. That Christmas morning, listening from his aerie for the wailing from Whoville below, the Grinch heard instead the sound of singing. Christmas had come. “It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!” After puzzling three hours till his puzzler was sore, the Grinch was forced to conclude that Christmas came from no store.
And so I breathed a sigh of real relief. Not only was I not a grinch trying to wreck the meaning of Christmas, it was abundantly clear who the grinches of our culture really are: those relentless commercial forces who have spent more than a century trying to convince us that Christmas does come from a store, or a catalogue, or a virtual mall on the Internet. Every day, but especially in the fall, they try their hardest to turn each Cindy Lou Who into a proper American consumer “ try their best to make sure her Christmas revolves around Sony or Sega, Barbie or Elmo. But Dr. Suess’s message went deeper for me. You see, when we’d begun thinking about Hundred Dollar Holidays, it was mostly out of concern for the environment or for poor people. Think of all that wrapping paper, we said, all those batteries, all that plastic. Think of all those needy people who could be helped if we donated our money to them instead. Think of all those families who went deep into debt trying to have a “proper” Christmas.
All those issues are important. But the more we worked on our little campaign, traveling around our region having evening meetings at small rural churches like the one I attend, the more we came to understand why people were responding – indeed, why we had responded to the idea. It wasn’t because we wanted a simpler Christmas at all. It was because we wanted a more joyous Christmas.
We were feeling cheated “as if the season didn’t bring with it the happiness we wanted. Christmas had become something to endure at least as much as it had become something to enjoy “ something to dread at least as much as something to look forward to. Instead of an island of peace amid a busy life, it was an island of bustle. The people we were talking to wanted so much more out of Christmas: more music, more companionship, more contemplation, more time outdoors, more love. And they realized that to get it, they needed less of some other things: not so many gifts, not so many obligatory parties, not so much hustle. The Real Reason to Change This is not an exercise in nostalgia. What are the problems peculiar to the moment that we might help ease by changing some of the ways we celebrate this greatest of national festivals? Problems?
Well, the environment, surely that’s one. Our enormously increased populations and levels of consumption are filling the air with carbon dioxide, changing the very climate. I’ve spent my career dealing with these issues, and they are vital, urgent, critical, alarming. Name your adjective. But these issues aren’t fundamental. The damage we’re doing to our atmosphere, our water, our forests, stems from deeper dilemmas, I think “ and so does the damage we’re doing to the poorest people in our nation and around the world. So the reason to change Christmas is not because it damages the earth around us, though surely it does. (Visit a landfill the week after Christmas.)
The reason to change Christmas is not because it represents shameful excess in a world of poverty, though perhaps it does. The reason to change Christmas “ the reason it might be useful to change Christmas “ is because it might help us to get at some of the underlying discontent in our lives. Because it might help us see how to change every other day of the year, in ways that really would make our whole lives, and maybe our entire 365-days-a-year culture, healthier in the long run.
