Adieu 2016, hello 2017

It was a tough year. No doubt. But I've had tougher.

Some good friends left this plane of existence. I hurt, but I've hurt worse.

I laughed some. A few tears dribbled down my cheeks.

I did some things I was extraordinarily proud of.

I experienced fear. I faced my fears.

I took some photos, wrote some stories. I sewed some art quilts that amazed the one critic that really matters: me.

I was reminded, over and over again, that it is dark and light that together make contrast, and that perception requires contrast. Contrast is what brings richness to art and to life itself.

All in all, 2016 was a rich year. I expect 2017 to be even richer.

When I toast the new year to come in a few hours, I'll raise a glass to you, too. Thank you for reading my stuff. Thank you for laughing with me, not at me. Thank you for being friends, whether I've ever met you or not.

Happy New Year. May 2017 be full of riches for you and yours.

Oh no! Not fry bread!

Yes, friends, once again I'm attempting to do this thing called "cooking". In this case, it's deep frying, and the idea was to salvage a lump of flour and yeast that was supposed to rise into a glorious sourdough to be baked this morning.

But it didn't.  Rise, that is.  I should have taken a photo of the lump, but really, it was too embarrassing.

So. About the bread loaf that wasn't. I've gotten to the point where I can make a quite acceptable loaf of regular bread, but given that I'm using sourdough starter to do so, the result has been a big disappointment to me.

Not that it doesn't (usually) rise.  Not that it doesn't make a pretty loaf of bread.  And not that I don't still eat it, but... it's just white bread.  Know what I mean?

I want sour sourdough, not just bread.

Internet research reveals that one method for getting a more sour flavor is adding some rye flour to the starter. OK, I did that. The effect of rye flour is supposed to be like candy for a toddler. It's supposed to make hyper starter.

My starter looked and smelled pretty much the same after dosing it with rye flour.

Another trick is supposed to be maintaining a drier starter. My starter is like batter, but some people's starters are like, well, lumps of dough.  I chose a consistency somewhat in between.

Anyway, being me, I didn't go at this scientifically. I used rye flour plus I made a sponge that was less like batter and more like really soft dough. Um... was the sponge the part that was supposed to be drier? I can't remember. I used about ten different sources for this experiment and they kind of got mixed up in my head.

Should it have been a clue when, after 10 hours, the sponge was more or less just sitting there? Like a lump? Possibly. Nevertheless, I went ahead and added more flour, kneaded it, put it in the bowl to rise so I could punch it down in another 10 hours.  Making sourdough isn't a speedy process.

When I punched it the next morning, it didn't even twitch, much less sag. Very tough bread dough. Hmmm. I figured I'd give it another 10 hours to get a life.

It's dead Jim.

I was sad to be unable to detect any signs of life.  This morning I was faced with the option of just throwing the lump out or doing something else with it. That's when I came up with the idea of fry bread.

Not a slice of bread that's fried (like French toast) but dough that is cooked in oil, shortening, or lard, rather than baked. Not exactly healthy but hey, the fry bread I've had at pow-wows and various fairs in New Mexico is darned yummy. Really, it would be like making a stiff pancake, I figured.  How hard could that be?

I don't have any lard. The very word sounds nasty to me, and I know where it comes from. Ewwww. The white pasty glue-like look of shortening is icky, too.  But oil?  I've got oil.  

I used virgin olive oil. Maybe I'd end up with a non-traditional taste, but then I don't think fry bread usually is made with sourdough starter, either.

I tend to go through a bunch of recipes and pick the parts I agree with most and then combine the parts.  Just sayin'. The fry bread recipes I looked at said to use lots of oil. Deep frying, you know. Yeah, well, they weren't using expensive olive oil, either, so I poured about a quarter inch in a small cast-iron pan and heated it up. 

Meanwhile, I mashed a smallish ball of dough (a couple inches in diameter) into a flat disc. I fancied myself patting it into a tortilla sort of deal like a pro. I'm pretty sure I got all the cat hair off of the ones that I dropped. Never mind. The hair would be sterilized in the oil anyway.

And then I cooked them, one by one.  It took a long time.  The whole house still smells like fry bread and olive oil.

The end result: Not bad. 

Will I do it again real soon?  Um... let me get back to you on that.

NOTE:  Don't try this at home, kids, not if you want traditional fry bread. Dense, really sour disks of cooked dough aren't for everyone. But boy howdy, they do taste good with peanut butter.

People who can't follow directions will inherit the earth

Oh, you think that's so crazy? Hello! Think about it:  Innovators and creative types are people who want to do things differently. They are the people who push the envelope. Who dare to step outside of safety. Who, frankly, just can't even understand the point of directions when there are so many other ways of doing things.

They're the ones who have always dragged humanity forward, in spite of the kicking and screaming. They've been doing so since humans first were humans. Maybe before then.  

How do I know this? Because most people – and, to be fair, most living creatures – desperately want to stick to the status quo. The known. The safe. Humanity doesn't want to change... but it has.

Innovators and inventors, artists and intellectual agitators: These people are the evolutionary edge of humanity. They don't care about the known or the safe. They don't care about how anyone else does anything.  They're the people who don't quite get why things have to be the way they are. They want to see how things might be. They are compelled to step out of the cave, out of the castle, out of the arena of political correctness and social approval because they need to see what other options might be out there.

So.  These people who can't follow directions, they are people uncomfortable in the world that is. And the better they are, the more they they make other people uncomfortable. When people are uncomfortable, they move. They change. Maybe a little... but little can add up to a lot given enough time or enough people changing.

These innovators, these artists, these creators are people who do what they want, not what they should. They see and hear and feel things that others don't. Their minds are reinventing the world as they walk the fine line between what society hungers for and what it will tolerate.  Creativity is a by-product: Stuff that the rest of the world can perceive of what goes on in those innovative minds.

Growth. Change.  Somebody's got to do it because the alternative is stagnation and death..

These people, these ones who can't follow directions, they are the ones who will still be not following directions when it all goes sour. They are the ones who found new solutions to old problems by virtue of who they have been all along.  Old problems come from safe thinking, from clinging to the way things have always been done.  

These people cannot be subverted by safety.

They are not meek, these people who can't follow directions.  They are merely oblivious to propriety. But mark my words: They are the ones who will inherit the earth.  Always have been, always will.

What have we become?

I'm glad I was born when I was born. I was a child and then a teen during the most exciting times of 20th century, when there was an incredible spurt of free thinking in art and culture. It was a time when creativity exploded in every area, when politicians dared to lead us forward into outer and inner space, and when giant steps were made towards equality for people who were not white and male. It was a time of hope and promise, when everyone was made to feel they mattered, even if they didn't agree.

Not so much anymore.

Now it seems that we have stagnated in our great strides forward. There are fewer free thinkers. It has become more important to be politically and socially correct, to agree rather than to question. To conform rather than follow one's own path. 

Our most popular forms of entertainment -- movies, TV, music AND social media -- present themselves as pushing the envelope but they do so by titillation rather than by pounding the limitations of social pressure. Even our "alternative lifestyles" have become institutionalized. What does it really mean to dare to be different when you can only do it if thousands of others are there to support you?

Sadly, social media has become the biggest oppressor of all. The biggest force to conform.  Just express an opinion. Go ahead.  Say something that really is true to your heart -- about yourself, not about how others should live. Because it's easy to talk about others. Not so easy to expose your own soul.

Express an opinion about how you feel about living your life? Rude response follows. People don't respond to concepts but rather denigrate the person who has expressed the idea. People gang up. They oppress with memes that sound good but really don't substitute for personal communication.

What if I wanted to take drugs? Sorry. That is so bad for your health.
What if I wanted to drop out? Sorry. That is not mentally healthy.
What if I wanted to be a person who explored other lifestyles, to live the way YOU don't? Sorry. That is fringe stuff and only acceptable if you buy your clothes at the proper shops and wear/drive/support the approved brand names.

I know people think they're being socially responsible, but at what cost? Humanity is dying from correctness!  

Yes, I'm glad I was born when I was, but it's not so much fun these days, knowing what I had then and don't have today. Yeah, it was risky and it was dangerous back then, doing those things, but so what? I'm glad I got to experiment with things that everyone everywhere today knows are "bad" now. I lived life to the fullest then. I explored in ways that didn't bother anyone else, in ways that only affected me. I lived. I lived. I lived.

How did we come around full circle to where just to be truly different makes us huddle in our own spaces, worried that the lynch mob will show up in our email, on our homepage, at our gate, just because we still want to be real people, true to our own souls? Because we want to be who we are, not what somebody else says we should be?

Back in the day it was easy, I admit, to be your own person. That's because everyone was busy doing the same thing, living their own lives. Nobody was judging anybody else. Who had time for that? We had monumental goals to achieve, inner and outer space to conquer -- as a people and as individuals.

Oh, I know that it took a lot of work to get us to the point where we could experience that brief blossoming of freedom. Many didn't survive it, but they left us a legacy that we used to keep growing.

Until we stopped.

To live is to grow. To grow necessarily means to change. As long as people fight change, there can be no true growth. Without growth there is rot.

Rot. 

Will what we have today become fertilizer for the next growth spurt, or will it kill us all?

The thrivalist life - progress report

When Anaheim peppers go red

Somewhat over four years ago I self-published a short (56 page) eBook entitled The Thrivalist: Beyond Survival in 2012. It's not a hot seller, but it got nice reviews from my friends. As one person put it, "This is not a survivalist handbook, with instructions on how to survive the next tsunami, two-day power outage, or bank failure. The author makes a distinction between survivalism -- gritting your teeth to endure an emergency til things are all well again -- and thrivalism -- living the good life every day in as self-reliant a way as possible for your situation."  (Thank you Laura!)

I don't just write it, I live that lifestyle.  I do it not because I think there's going to be an apocalypse or any particular Bad Thing beyond the tough things that have always happened (flood, drought, blizzard) where I live, but because I actually prefer the lifestyle.

 I always have.

I'm one of those people who, as a kid, was thrilled with stories of explorers and pioneers, of disaster victims who made it through. I didn't care if it was fact or fiction, or whether it was the past (the farther back the better) or the future. I was fascinated by those who would boldly go where no one had gone before and who planned on staying there and living the good life.

I yearned to live that way. I experimented here and there, trying out various ways of doing things. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that I was building up to the kind of lifestyle I thought I could only dream about. It was even later when I decided that there was nothing stopping me from going whole hog with it if I really wanted to. I wouldn't be the first, after all.  But you know...

It would be a lot of work to just jump in.

Hence the gradual introduction of the various self-reliance practices over time at a pace that suited me. A very gradual pace. So gradual, in fact, that I didn't realize how far I had come until I took stock today.

For instance:

Off the grid and on solar for electricity. No utility bill – yay!

Solar hot water heating in the summer and even sometimes in the winter.

Composting toilet (home-made, not store-bought). I never have liked the idea of a big tank for holding sewage.

Gray water & rain catchment for irrigation .

Wood heat for the house in the winter and for water heating in the winter.

Propane: as little as possible.  I use it now only for cooking in the summer (not needed often, see below) because I cook on the wood stove in the winter. I've learned how to bake loaves of sourdough bread on top of a wood stove!

Mostly raw food diet. Much healthier way to eat, energy saving, too. Plus if I really want cooked food I can enjoy someone else's cooking in a restaurant in town (and someone else's dish washing!)

Garden… well. Maybe I shouldn't go there. This year I planted too much of the wrong stuff – why did I plant anything that requires processing to eat? And zucchini? What was I thinking? There's a glut of zucchini in the world. Fortunately my horses like zucchini. Anaheim chili peppers? Why? I probably will let them all go to red and then dry them. But my tomatoes are doing well, as are the potatoes, which I can store till winter when I want to cook since there's a heat source happening anyway. If I can figure out how to properly store potatoes for that long. The asparagus, which is now quite a few years old, gives me more than I want in the spring. The ants enjoyed the strawberries more than I did. Apples: Finally I got some on the trees this year! Four trees and a big total of three apples that I can see. Garlic: I failed to get it out of the ground in time, so the cloves will grow another year. Ditto for horseradish. My citrus tree (maybe a lemon, maybe a grapefruit) is growing like gangbusters. I started it from a seed. Who knows if/when I'll see fruit.

Plastering my straw bale house. Ummm. You'd be amazed how many people nag me to finish plastering.  Well. I did move the cement mixer closer to the house. That counts for something, doesn't it?

No refrigeration. Yes, it's true, and this is a biggie. For nearly three years I have not powered up my refrigerator, yet I've been able to keep foods cool that need keeping cool. And that's big because for over three years I have not had to have propane delivered. My huge, ancient (1940s model) propane fridge just isn't efficient enough for me to want to burn that much fuel to keep food cold. I'm getting a new (to me) smaller, more air-tight fridge delivered tomorrow. I'll hook it up to the gas line but I don't know if I'll ever turn it on.  It'll still work better to keep my food cool than the leaky old one will.

I could do more. I'm far from self-sufficient. But the end of the world as we know it hasn't arrived yet. I have the leisure to do whatever I want – or not do it. I have time to mess around with possibilities, and to learn as I go, and to enjoy the process because I don't have to do any of it! 

Sure, many of my experiments have failed, but I keep at it – not because I have to but because it's fun. And while it's more labor intensive to live this way,  the trade-off is it costs less to provide myself with what I need to live comfortably. It means a lot to me that I can work less to earn a buck and have the time to work on my own stuff.

Accidentally vegan

If you aren't going to use a fridge to keep foods cold, you have to be careful about your food choices. Cooked/processed foods, dairy and meats don't keep unless they're down below 40°, a temperature I can maintain in the winter but not in the summer. Fresh foods (fruits and veggies) can do fine with that if they're chilled overnight (are you wondering yet how I do that?)

Not keeping prepared foods, dairy, or meat at hand, I wind up eating vegan a lot. Since a vegan diet is not mandatory for my purposes, I don't mind it at all, especially since there are so many great vegan recipes out there these days.

Last week I cooked potatoes. Sometimes I go on a potato-only diet, but that's another story. Today I realized I had 4 leftover whole ones that I wasn't really that enthusiastic about eating plain., so I whipped up a tasty potato salad. It's accidentally vegan. Here's what I put in the dressing. Note: I like things tangy.

Vegan potato salad

• Salt
• Ground pepper
• Olive oil
• Parsley
• Green onions (chopped)
• Dijon mustard
• Apple cider vinegar
• Land of Enchantment spice mix (yummy - but chopped garlic or garlic powder will do if you don't have any LOE)
• A few pounds of cooked potatoes (I leave peels on but you do what you want)

Dice the potatoes and cover with the dressing, mixing lightly to get all surfaces coated. Let it sit half an hour for the dressing to sink in.  Eat.

Swamp cooler: chilling foods without a fridge

Warning:  This is something that works best in lower humidity

Evaporative coolers (swamp coolers) are a real thing. While I've never actually bothered with a thermometer, I can tell you that my swamp cooler system can cool objects lower than the lowest air temperature overnight if the air is dry enough to evaporate liquid from the surface.

Why pay money for propane or use electricity if you can use air to do the work?

Here in the arid southwest swamp coolers work just great, whatever the scale. At its most basic, you put your beer bottles in a bucket of water and keep it out of the sun. The beer won't get cold but it will be cooler than the air, because the water surface evaporates  Any time liquid evaporates it removes latent heat from the surface of that liquid. It's what happens when you sweat.  Sweating works best when it's not humid and the same is true with swamp coolers.

Taken one step further, a metal bucket that is in a pan of an inch or two of water will keep the objects inside the bucket cooler than if the whole thing was sitting in a dry pan. And if you put a moist cloth over that bucket, making sure the edges are in the water so that the cloth stays moist, the contents of the bucket get even cooler because there will be more surface area for evaporation and the metal bucket will not insulate whatever's in it from the cooling effect.

Voila!

You do need to be disciplined about this, but then most of this thrivalist stuff calls for some discipline. You have to remember to set up your cooling system once the sun goes down and the air temperature starts dropping, and then you have to get up in the morning and get your food into the fridge before the sun rises and starts warming everything up.

I also cool jugs of water this way and put them into the fridge to create thermal mass. In the summer my system works even when nighttime temperatures don't drop as far as I want. In the winter, of course, it works really well.  

But remember, kids:  this kind of primitive swamp cooling is only cool enough for living foods (whole raw fruits and veggies). Don't be stupid about it. Food poisoning isn't fun, especially if you've got a composting toilet to deal with.

A grave situation

Two mornings ago I was walking along my usual morning path, racking up the Fitbit footsteps, minding my own business (meaning I was letting my mind wander wherever it felt like wandering), when I was ambushed by a new sight in a place where I expected things to be the same as ever.

Sinkhole above, grave below  July 2016 Lif Strand

In fact, I had walked right past a hole in the ground that had not been there the day before.  It took that long for awareness of the anomaly to interrupt my reverie and make me stop and turn around to investigate.

The thing was a sinkhole, a depression that is made when somewhere below the surface a cavity collapses and the earth above it sinks into that space. My sinkhole, the one in the photo, is over a grave.

No, I have not murdered anyone lately, nor have I allowed anyone else to bury any bodies on my property. This is the grave of a horse, and she was put in the ground some years ago. The sinkhole was totally unexpected, because unless you know where to look, you'd never know there was anything different about that place than, say, ten or twenty feet away. Dirt and weeds.

I've probably walked over that grave dozens of times over the years. I don't have creepy feelings about graves.  But suddenly I did have creepy feelings about the appearance of a sinkhole over one.

Of course, whatever I had been cogitating on to that point was shot right out the window, to be replaced by thoughts of zombie horses digging out of the ground.  My writer's mind ran with that one for a while until it reached a natural conclusion, which was that the sinkhole was too small for a zombie horse to have risen from.  So, more realistically, I started figuring out what had caused this sinkhole to form just like magic and literally overnight.

It's quite fascinating, in a gruesome kind of way.

I had just read an article, A different way to die: the story of a natural burial, originally published on Grist, a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues, and I had viewed an attached video which showed the process of decomposition of a dead (human) body. I got to thinking about the process of a body of a nearly thousand pound horse breaking down:  the effect of microorganisms on flesh that was no longer living; the sequential death of those microorganisms; how the body would go from something that looked like a sleeping horse to just bones; how long it would take for it all to happen in a hole that was over 6' deep and therefore relatively cool. Maybe an earthworm had bumped against a pebble that caused the collapse of an ant tunnel that moved a rock that shifted and allowed dirt to settle into the now-empty cavity of my horse's chest.

Then I had to wonder if the sinkhole had been big enough would I have seen a horse mummy? Or a mass of stinking, muddy glop? Or just bones?

I got to thinking about what it would be like if I had been standing on top of that spot when it collapsed. The hole is nearly four feet wide and it is a good 18" deep. It might have been bigger. I might have had to claw at the sides to break them down so I could scramble out. My foot might have broken through... I don't know what... and gotten wedged between the rib bones of the mare's barrel.

Eww.

Those entertaining thoughts took me all the way back to the house. I got busy with my day, starting with making sure the Fitbit was syncing with my online account so I could be awed and amazed by the accumulated footsteps. Or maybe more like dismayed, because I have not been keeping up like I should be. But that's another story.

I went back and reread the article, which reminded me how natural a process death is if it's allowed to be, and further, how an end comes to all living things in this system of reality that we inhabit. And yet... and yet...

Death is still creepy. So today I went out to the sinkhole.  It has not gotten any bigger and shows no signs of a zombie hoof trying to work its way out of the grave. Or a vampire horse, come to think of it, though both would have risen early on if it was going to happen at all. 

I spread wildflower seeds in the hole. It made me feel better, because I know they will stand between me and undead horses.  RIP.

Photos: Around the ranch

Photos from around the ranch the last couple days of May, nearing the end of springtime.

Fertilizer and flowers  May 2016 Lif Strand

Yes, yes, it's just cow poop and bindweed, but it really also is the circle of life, isn't it?

Springtime reeds  May 2016 Lif Strand

The cows kept eating down the reeds over the winter, but now that there's a little grass for them they're letting the reeds alone.  There's just something about the water and the color and the angle of the sunlight that gets me every time.

Koko:  Places to go, things to do  May 2016 Lif Strand

My Arabian stallion, SE Kokopelli Kid.