It's snowy and cold now as the flood waters begin to recede.  Time to perk us all up with a giveaway!  Daddy has made a cutting of his Red Cherry Flavorita F1 tomato, a hybrid variety very well suited for indoors life.  By the time our giveaway ends Saturday night, it should have some roots and be ready to be poked into a pot in its new home.

Growing tomatoes indoors in the winter is the holy grail for a lot of folks.  It's hard to leave behind the sweet, juiciness of real tomatoes when the summer sun fades.  But it's equally hard to keep winter tomatoes going since they require lots of sun.  This variety is much hardier, able to thrive under a growlight on a windowsill.  But be aware that like any tomato it will not set fruit if your temperatures fall below 50 F!  (That's probably not a problem for those of you who don't heat with wood.

Anyhow, I'd love to hear from you all and perk me up on this cold winter's day!  Check out our giveaway guidelines and enter.  Thanks, Daddy, for taking a cutting for our winner!

We've had nearly ten inches of rain in the last month, two and a half of which fell in the last twenty four hours.  Today was supposed to be a day of meetings in the big city, but no one's leaving the property anytime soon.  The video below is our driveway....

...and this is the creek where it's spilled out over the floodplain.

I'm working on designing a microformat that can be used to indicate the location of VCS (git, svn, etc) repositories related to a web page.

I'd appreciate some web standards-savvy eyes on my rel-vcs microformat rfc.

If it looks good, next steps will be making things like gitweb, viewvc, ikiwiki, etc, support it. I've already written a preliminary webcheckout tool that will download an url, parse the microformat, and run the appropriate VCS program(s).

(Followed by, with any luck, github, ohloh, etc using the microformat in both the pages they publish, and perhaps, in their data importers.)

Why? Well,

1. A similar approach worked great for Debian source packages with the XS-VCS-* fields.
2. Pasting git urls from download pages of software projects gets old.
3. I'm tired of having to do serious digging to find where to clone the source to websites like Keith Packard's blog, or cariographics.org, or St Hugh of Lincoln Primary School. Sites that I know live in a git repo, somewhere.
4. With the downturn, hosting sites are going down left and right, and users who trusted their data to these sites are losing it. Examples include AOL Hometown and Ficlets, Google lively, Journalspace, podango, etc etc. Even livejournal's future is looking shakey. Various people are trying to archive some of this data before it vanishes for good. I'm more interested in establishing best practices that make it easy and attractive to let all the data on your website be cloned/forked/preserved. Things that people bitten by these closures just might demand in the future. This will be one small step in that direction.

This is the view looking down into our 1000 gallon tank we use for irrigation and other water related chores.

It's up on a hill so gravity can help the water along its path to our sink and various parts of the garden.

This addition was a huge improvement over our previous set up which used a 50 gallon barrel elevated in the air by 10 feet. We found our tank on Craigslist for 300 dollars, but they usually cost twice that if you need to buy a new one.

The vet says Strider has a four degree temperature and is eight months old.  For $86, we came home with dewormer, antibiotics, and a more impressive ear mite medicine for Huckleberry whose ear mites have been resisting all over the counter meds for months.  The two haven't met, and won't until Strider fights off his upper respiratory infection.  For now, he's holed up in a cozy nook in the barn.

The trip to the vet went pretty smoothly, all things considered.  Strider was a bit of a wiggler at first, but soon settled in and didn't make any sudden moves amid a waiting room full of canines.  The only small problem was a bit of projectile pooping on the walk back to the barn at the end of the day --- Strider really did try to warn me by wriggling and meowing, but I held on tight thinking that he wanted to get down and get lost in the floodplain.  As a last resort, he pooped into midair, barely soiling my coat.  I dropped him in a hurry to let him finish, just as Lucy came barreling down over the hill to greet us.  Mark tackled Lucy while Strider fled into the cave created by an upturned root mass, to be slowly wheedled out again with honeyed tones.  Back in the safety of his barn, he ate and drank ravenously before settling down to pur on my lap.

I have to admit that his manners are impeccable, all things considered.  Yesterday, I talked about trying to give him to my brother.  Today I know he's here to stay.

Every Grain

Grain for grain
Tap and clunk
Sounds of chewing.
This is the motto
this is the refrain
for what I will be doing.

I sit eating a bowl of rice
my utensil, a fork.
My resolution this year -
to eat slower.
Usually I make a list longer
than I can accomplish.
This year I have
more of a chance.

White rice,
sticky rice,
brown rice,
wild rice.

With each grain I eat this year
I will become improved.

It should take more than
five minutes
to cook
a bowl of rice.

I can only accept not changing
the things I cannot change
if I can change
certain other things.

Rice should be slow.
Cooked Slow.
Eaten grain by grain.
Written about with scrutiny.

Joel Johnson over at Boing Boing posted this interesting net gun that you can build for around 50 bucks.

The net is 90 square feet and will travel 15 to 25 feet using compressed air.

This could make catching extra zippy chickens a bit easier, and it provides a non-lethal way of dealing with those neighborhood kids who keep jumping into your yard to retrieve their ball or frisbee.

I hope my poor, malingering blueberries will malinger no more!  The little things haven't had much going for them in the two years they've been in the yard.  I bought them for a few bucks at Wal-Mart when they'd barely grown a root apiece, then I stuck them in sweet soil and mulched them with nitrogen-leaching wood chips.

I'm hoping to remedy the damage with a little TLC.  Yesterday I treated them to some soil acidifier, as well as a nice mulch of mixed pine needles and decidous leaf mould from the hill above the house.  I also used a gift certificate to order a few larger plants from a more reputable nursery.  The pullets are busy scratching up and fertilizing the new ground in preparation for our second round of blueberries' arrival this spring.

I also decided to experiment a bit with the mudhole between the nectarine and grapes.  The soil there is pure clay and in our recent wet spell the chickens churned it up into a mass of mud.  I found some old grain seeds hidden behind my desk and sowed them in the muddiest spots.  If I remember right, the grain is rye, meant to be planted in early fall as a cover crop.  But maybe it'll do something to hold the soil together and outcompete the Japanese honeysuckle which is what naturally grows in that area.  Only time will tell...

Huckleberry is about to get a new friend as you may have read in the previous post.

I thought I would post this picture in an attempt to show him he was here first and we are not trying to replace him with the new cat, but to maybe add a bit of feline companionship to his already full and rich life of napping, meowing, eating, and reading on the couch with Anna.

Yesterday, I jokingly told Mark that I'd gone to the dump (the source of our current cat) and found another cat, who I was now hiding in the barn.  No, no --- I changed my mind --- I'd stolen sweet little Bonnie from Mark's mom and had her hidden in the barn.  We both laughed and thought no more about it.

But this morning as I started to move the chicken tractors through winter mud, I heard a plaintive meow come from the barn.  I'd just left Huckleberry sleeping soundly on the sofa, but I thought it was possible he'd slipped out of the house and gotten his dainty paws wet or been chased by Lucy.  So I told the chickens to wait on me and went to check the noise out. 

Cowering behind our array of boxes and cast off belongings was...Bonnie???  The little cat had most of her markings, a white vest and white paws on an otherwise black fur coat.  But this little cat was smaller and oh so skinny when I finally tempted it to let me pick it up.  It was also a boy, just the same size Huckleberry was when I found him --- reaching that gawky adolescent stage where people tend to drop them off.  (Later, Mark found a towel on the road a mile from our house, one that hadn't been there yesterday, confirming our belief that the little cat got dumped.)

Just two weeks ago, Mark's mom asked us if we wanted another cat.  And without even checking with each other Mark and I both said "No!"  Huckleberry's a handful all by himself.  And yet --- if a cat walks a mile through the woods to find us, can we really tell it that we're going to renege on the contract humanity made with cats a few thousand years ago?  The truth is, I'm a sucker for strays.  Looks like we'll be taking the new cat to the vet tomorrow, and if it gets a clean bill of health introducing it to Huckleberry soon after.  I guess I should be a little more careful what I joke about!

Here's a picture of Lucy with our footbridge in the background where the creek has a curve in it. The panoramic nature of the photo is thanks to the Fuji Finepix S1000fd. It has a pretty neat built in feature that allows you to stitch three pictures into one long image.

After you take the first shot you save it in the memory and the next frame has about a fifth of the last image in a ghost like form that allows you to line up the picture exactly where you need it.

I'm trying to work on having days that are somehow individually memorable this year. So far..

0 (leap day)

Finally tackled the chapter on monads. I'd read various explanations a year ago, but was swimming in syntax I didn't understand. After percolating for a year, and learning to read the syntax better, monads turned out to make very simple sense.

(I can't say the same about Johnny Monad.)

I had been meaning to write sometime about a method I used in ikiwiki to let expressions in a mini-language, that normally are evaluated to match a set of pages, instead be evaluated to explain why they succeed or fail. It's a cute technique, though hard to explain. Now I'm pretty sure it's just a monad. So I don't have to explain it!

1

Visiting Abram's falls this time of year, the canyon is in constant wintry shadow. The falls are not frozen, but have icicles twice my height, and there are rank upon rank of icicles all down the walls, an ice cathederal.

It's a bright sunny day, but on the whole hike, I only get into the sunlight once, briefly, at the top of the giant steps. Then back into the shade. Back at my car, I'm suprised that it's only 3 pm, feels like it should be 5.

Made a pecan pie with daddy's pecans and eggs.

2

A grey day with snow and worse. The paper's rss feed repeats "dozens^Whundreds of wrecks" over and over, as if to make up for there being no 60 point type.

I'm reading Ted Nelson's book Geeks Bearing Gifts. The chapter summaries seem better than the actual book. And the on-demand printing makes me think I'm reading a poorly laid out web page, rather than something typeset. But I love that he goes all the way back to the invention of the alphabet and of hierarchical categorization and suggests all the basis for modern computers is arbitrary and/or wrong.

Eating ginger duck downtown I look up and a pizza delivery guy has slid out of control right in front of me and crashed.

We had a small dusting of snow to wake up to this morning which makes our crude footbridge a bit too slippery to cross.

Option number two is a series of cinder block stepping stones just to the side of the ford. This 14 second video is how it looked about an hour ago.

Inspired by Mike's 2008 summary photos, and by Mark's notion that we should take New Year's Day as a holiday, I set out Thursday afternoon with our camera in hand.  It's harder to find color in the winter, but the stark shapes and lines can make up for the lack of color.  First I got caught up in the shadows cast by the bed springs we'd dug out of the garden.  Spiralling circles --- I almost got lost right there.

But I really wanted to visit my favorite sycamore grove.  Down in the floodplain, several large sycamores grow in a ten foot in diameter ring.  They clearly mark the borders of an ancient sycamore's root mass, and I can almost see the parent sycamore in my mind's eye.  I lay down between them and looked up, just in time to catch a photo of a sycamore turned human.

Holidays evade me sometimes.  Thanksgiving and the winter solstice I can wrap my mind around.  I'm so used to the family elements of Christmas that I follow through without giving it much thought.  But the other holidays that Mark named off when I dubiously asked him which ones he's used to celebrating --- New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day --- are blurs in my mind.  What do they mean?  How do you celebrate a holiday you don't understand?

I'm afraid I bickered with Mark before agreeing to take the day off.  Now I'm glad he perservered --- so I cooked him up a pound of bacon and a double recipe of the fluffiest white pancakes in my cookbook as an apology.  You're right, Mark!  No matter what the holiday means, it's worth it to spend time in the moment.

This is a picture of hen number 6. Hen number 5 if you ask Anna. She's at the bottom of the pecking order and had to be isolated because it was just too sad watching her getting picked on by the other hens.

Now she gets to roam free on most days, adding a certain flare to the place that makes me feel like I'm on the set of a movie and she's been added at the last minute for additional atmosphere for whatever new and wild scene is coming up next.

2008 was filled with a generous portion of good and happy scenes that make me feel confident I'm exactly where I need to be and doing exactly what I need to be doing.  I offer everyone reading this a warm and happy toast for good tidings in 2009.

I get so caught up in the flow of seasons, always joyously anticipating the next one along the chain.  Yesterday, I noticed that the darkness was already coming later --- 6 pm and Mark and I were still out preparing firewood for the night.  Walking Lucy, I found mole salamander tadpoles drifting under the ice in floodplain puddles, their feathery gills sucking oxygen out of the frigid water.  Signs of spring on the last day of the year!

Inside, we harvested the first tomato off the plant Daddy gave us at Thanksgiving.  I've had zero luck with growing tomatoes indoors in winter until this plant came along.  But this is a hybrid variety carefully bred for indoors life.  Daddy paid fifty cents per seed for his start, but quickly learned that he could keep the plants going indefinitely by taking cuttings (one of which he gave me.)  Our house is really too cold even for this little guy, and about 70% of the flowers don't manage to set fruit, but I'm curious to see how long I can keep it going.

Happy New Year, everybody!  I have a feeling that this year will be the best one yet!

trestle poem
for my siblings

teenagers are fantastic
young enough for trestle monsters
with swamp grass on their head
to squeal when splashed by the cool creek water

but old enough to struggle openly,
philosophically, with the human condition
are humans necessary or alien,
destroying this beauty?

but when Mobie Dick
and the pimple faced green haired algae beast
and Aldo Leopold
all morph into Huck Finn

under this old train bridge
in rural Appalachia
where these rocks are older than any others
where these creek pebbles capture

a mosaic of silent shadows and bright sun rays
the beauty here in the bluebird that flits down to land
on the fence post is as much a magnificent part of God
as is the young people under the trestle bridge

squatting there, in the shallows
catching fish with their bare hands
standing in the deep
washing their dirt ingrained feet

this is our golden opportunity!

Remember that little book I'm supposed to be writing?  As I hoped, starting was the hardest part.  Despite ten thousand visits and visitors in December, I've now finished a rough draft for the first chapter and a quarter out of six chapters.  (So what if the chapter I finished was the shortest one....)

Yesterday, I spent most of the day researching the Arcto-Tertiary forest -- a vast expanse of trees which once spread across the northern portions of North America, Europe, and Asia, then got whittled down by changing climates until all that remains is a pocket of close relatives here in the southern Appalachians and a pocket in eastern China.  I think that my head is still somewhere deep in the Ice Age, watching the advancing glaciers batter the European forest against the Alps until every tree (ent-like in my mind) perishes.

Meanwhile, and far more relevantly, Mark and I spent our Christmas money from his mom's side of the family on replacing the stunning camera which I had to return to my nonprofit when I severed the knot.  You can look forward to vibrant photos again from here on out!  (This photo is of our lemon tree taken indoors at night without a flash.)  Thank you, Rose Nell and Jayne!

Mark Frauenfelder posted on his blog Dinosaurs and Robots this nifty new design for hens of the future.

This particular model is from the year 2070, which I assume will come equiped with some sort of laser guided feeding system.

I'm not sure how our hens would handle such a quantum leap in style and fashion, but I appreciate the extra effort by designer Maxime Evrard.

Yesterday I received my last paycheck from my nonprofit.  From here on out, it's freelance or bust!

While musing over the above, and cooking our Christmas turkey bones into stock, I dug up this carrot in the garden.  Its split bottom, with the small side twining around and seeming to strangle the big side, reminded me of my life in the nonprofit world over the past year.  I'll leave the obvious symbolism to the reader to tease apart.

My resolution for 2009 is not to be that carrot.  Saving the world, keeping us fiscally afloat, visiting with friends and family, nurturing my own household with tasty treats, feeding my soul through art and long hot baths, feeding my body with wood chopping and digging in the garden --- I hope to keep all of the sides of my life in closer balance.  Meanwhile, that carrot went into our bellies.

Kindred spirits,

United Mountain Defense is a group of environmentalist volunteers who are currently doing humanitarian aid and water sampling to help the individuals affected by the Kingston, Tennessee fly ash breach. Like most nonprofit organizations they are in financial need at this time. But they are in greater need because they are in the middle of an environmental disaster. Please take some time to visit the following web page: http://unitedmountaindefense.org/ and this frequently updated blog: http://dirtycoaltva.blogspot.com/ as a first step in educating yourself about the true impacts of this disaster.

Please donate to help United Mountain Defense through paypal on their website, or send a check in the mail. They will put your money to good use, keeping their nonprofit operating, sampling water, taking video footage that regular media outlets will not provide, even handing out bottled water to the individuals in the area whose homes have been damaged or destroyed.

If you can watch videos on your computer, be sure to check out their blog where United Mountain defense posted ground footage of their canoe trips up the much polluted Emory River. If you have been following this story in the national and local news, I am sure you will notice that many facts are being omitted. One big example is that this water is not drinkable. The fish in it are dying. And pets are getting sick from exposure to the water and polluted fish. Another important thing is this story is vastly being unreported. Only a few independent news sources like Democracy Now, have picked up on the magnitude of this fly ash spill.

Please remember TVA has not yet agreed to dispense bottled water to families that need it. United Mountain Defense workers, have taken it upon themselves to disperse this water. If you can donate even five or ten dollars, it will help considerably. Please feel free to pass this message to other concerned individuals.

Clean Coal does not exist. No coal is clean coal.

It was mostly cloudy today as can be seen in this picture of today's sunset out by the mailbox.

There's only a couple of days left in 2008 and 2009 is already starting to look like a fine year for the Wetknee farm. I guess these cloudy days bring out my introspective side a little more than usual.

The holidays are winding down, and I'm ready to get back to my daily routine.  But for those of you who might like a bit more celebration, I've posted my recipe for Sugar Free Cranberry Raisin Pie. 

In our family, no Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner is complete without this pie, made with honey for the sugar free folks.  Nearly equally good is a variation which uses apples instead of raisins.  Both recipes, plus homemade cranberry sauce, explain why I want to plant cranberries in my garden some day.  Meanwhile, I buy several bags of cranberries in the store every winter and pop them straight in the freezer where they last for a year or longer.

People either love this pie or hate it.  It's not your run of the mill pie, but I can't live without it!

and here: http://unitedmountaindefense.org

I am the girl on the mugword blog, the voice behind that reclinging woman.

The photograph was taken by my sister, Anna when I was in my tenth year of life.

From that I painted the self portrait in high school. The girl in that picture does cartwheels and back bends in graceful gymnastics, though a bit lanky, awkward, adolescant.

Her hormones are so far free of pimples.

The place where she reclines is a creek at Wortroot, one of her most highly regarded places, on the Tennessee/ Virginia line.

The girl in the picture plays in a sinking wash tub that is floating on the water. Her face is relaxed - but I remember it was a posed picture.

Her eyes are closed, as if she is going to sleep.

But the energy in her body, seems vibrant and young.

Hippies speak of inner children. Mine is left behind. But my sister took a picture. And I painted it into imortality.

Where have all the children gone? Long time ago. The children of the past. Captured in pictures passing by.

It was warm enough to continue the ditch digging operation today which will be running from the hand dug well to the trailer through the garden.

The goal will be to prevent any future freezing of the line thanks to the warmer temperatures underground.

I don't think I'll miss carrying water in 5 gallon buckets, but it really isn't all that difficult once you get the hang of it.

Suppose you have a free software package that includes an OpenID login form. Such forms are supposed to include a little OpenID logo . But as hard as you look, you can't find a license for the OpenID logo. Though there seem to be indications that it might get one in 2009, it seems like it will not be free enough to be included in a free software package.

Due to this problem, all the ikiwiki sites out there have not used the OpenID logo, or indeed any logo, in their login form for the 2+ years that ikiwiki has proudly supported OpenID. That was so suboptimal that I spent some donations to commision an unofficial OpenID logo . It's freely licensed for use in whatever.

Putting the little OpenID logo in the login form is a nice touch, it helps spread awareness about OpenID and users learn to look for it. The fact that free software packages can't include it weakens that. Having an alternative logo that evokes the "real" logo and the concept of a login is better than no logo at all. But it is also needlessly confusing.

I encourage the new OpenID board to reconsider plans for logo licensing, and bear in mind that many free software packages can have native OpenID support, and should be able to include a copy of the logo, without worrying about it conflicting with their license, or not being free enough to be included in a free software distribution.

I was asked for my borscht recipe. This is loosely derived from a recipe that is really weird -- it says to throw away the beets! Both that recipe and mine are probably very unauthentic. But good.

6 cups water
3 medium size beets
2 medium size potatoes, quartered
1/2 cup chopped carrots
1 stalk celery, chopped -- optional
1/2 a bell pepper, chopped (red or green) -- optional
1/3 cup butter
1/2 to 1 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup tomatoes (fresh are best, canned or tomato paste + water is ok)
1/4 cup milk
2 cups finely chopped cabbage
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon dried dill weed
sour cream

Put water in a large pot on high heat. Add beets, potatoes, carrots, celery, and bell pepper. Cover and boil until potatoes are tender.

Meanwhile, melt butter in a skillet. Saute onion in butter until tender, about 5 minutes. Stir in tomatoes, reduce heat to medium low, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes.

Remove half of sauce from skillet into a medium size bowl. Add cabbage to remainder of sauce in skillet and cook coverted on medium low heat, stirring occasionally for ten minutes, or until tender.

Reduce heat on pot to a simmer. Remove beets from pot and set aside to cool.

Remove quartered potatoes and add to bowl with sauce. Mash potatoes, adding milk, until creamy. Stir mashed potato mixture into soup in pot.

Grate beets, removing skin if desired, or grating it in. Combine grated beets and cabbage into pot. Add vinegar to taste (optional but recommended with sweet beets). Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in a teaspoon of dill.

Cover and cook for at least another 5 minutes on low heat, then let it cook in its residual heat for as long as desired.

Serve hot, garnished with sour cream and dill.

In a 500 square foot trailer, you have to be pretty quiet not to wake up a guest sleeping on your futon.  As a result, I wandered outside into the morning drizzle to stay out of my cousin's hair.

Squishing through the mud, I found myself drawn to those big trash bags of leaves Mom and Maggie collected for me this fall.  Various sources on the web had admonished me to shred my leaves before using them as mulch, but when I began to shred them with the lawn mower a couple of months ago the mower exploded.  Nix that idea.  Instead, I decided to experiment with using whole leaves for mulch.  So I spread some newspaper around each grape vine then doused the root zone liberally with silver and sugar maple leaves.

I ripped into bag after bag, happy as a couch potato opening up potato chips, until I came upon the first bag of black walnut leaves.  Then the second, the third.  Yikes!  Time to scurry back inside and figure out what can safely be mulched with black walnut droppings.

About a year ago at a party, someone who seemed very knowledgeable told me that the juglone in black walnut parts is really only detrimental to germination, but an extensive search of the internet showed no sources which agreed with that assessment.  Instead, most websites agree that the juglone produced by walnuts messes with the metabolism of other plants, causing them to wilt and exhibit stunted growth. 

Some plants are tolerant to juglone in the soil, including onions (and garlic, I hope, since it's in the same genus and I used black walnut leaves on two of my garlic beds), beets, cucurbits, carrots, parsnips, beans, corn, and the Prunus genus (cherry, nectarine, plum, and peach.)  So I moved on to my nectarine, cherry, and peaches to use up the walnut leaves.  I hope my unshredded leaves work well as mulch --- I've had terrible luck in the past with wood chips (even well composted) and am in need of a free mulch that really does the job.

to bring:
(a list with an important order)

meds (the 50 page, 8 year explaination for the meds)
toothbrush (it's electric now, thanks to Santa)
toothpaste (santa)
good shoes
sandals
water bottle
writing paper or computer or both
planner (I am an organizer.)
phone
charger
cd player
books on tape
guitar and sheet music
clothing (not always necessary but, in most places...)