Where Did Summer Go?

This summer flew by for us! We spent tons of time improving our yard, hanging with the pets and hanging with each other. It was nice to make a home and not travel, and I think our pets loved it too. 

An afternoon spent with my mini chicken, Notorious B.I.R.D.

Mike and I also celebrated 10 years together this September. It was a reminder of how old we are getting (haha). It feels like we just met the other day, but we're both getting gray hairs...

We decided to do something special but local, so we rented a decommissioned fire lookout here in Oregon. It's about 7 miles into the forest, on rutted out roads, and you definitely need 4 wheel drive to get there. Our 18 year old Subaru performed like a champ!

Mike spotted wild blueberries on our way there, so we stopped to pick some.

The fire lookout was located on top of a butte (that's pronounced with a long "u") and was used in WWII to spot enemy aircraft. We were at about 4600 feet elevation. Since we live at 3500 feet elevation in Bend, we didn't feel any difference.

The forest service road on the way there.

We did have to hike a bit at the end of the road, pretty much directly uphill! It was a thigh-burner, for sure, but only about 3/4 mile. As usual, you can't even see Mike in the pictures because he is so far ahead of me...he likes to get the tough parts out of the way fast, and I'm a sloooow but steady hiker. 

The single track trail to hike up to the fire lookout. Mike nowhere in sight!

Mike was waiting for me at the lookout.

The lookout had glass windows on all 4 sides, with a catwalk that wrapped all the way around. 360 degree mountain top views - for $60/night. You can't beat it! We could see Mt. Washington, Mt. Jefferson, and the Three Sisters.

It was the perfect place to spend a day, sitting, chatting, and reflecting. Clouds moved in and out, covering Mt Jefferson. We were treated to a gorgeous sunset and a gorgeous sunrise. Pictures (especially my pictures) just can't do it justice.

The lookout was immaculately clean and had a twin bed, a few cots, a two burner propane stove, and a little wood burning stove for heat, with a woodshed nearby. The outhouse was the cleanest outhouse we have ever seen - without one single scary spider or bug! 

The fire lookouts are maintained by volunteers and the guests that stay there. But not every guest sees the bigger picture, and in the journals/logs (they go back several years), some guests reported seeing vandalism, gunshots through the woodshed and outhouse, and trash. But hopefully those very few incidents will motivate future guests to try even harder to help, or to educate the ignorant. We did our part and cleaned the lookout, Mike cut a bucket of kindling, and we made a donation to the Sand Mountain Society when we got home.

The cute little woodstove! It was so tiny it went out twice throughout the night.

Mike enjoying the morning view.

In other summer news, we got our house repainted (special thanks to our friend Dylan) and gave it some personality. 

Circa May 2015 before we had the trees removed

Circa June 2015 - after getting rid of some dead trees

September 2016!

It's a light aqua color (tropical spray), with a coral colored door (coral reef). We removed the shutters and got new industrial looking lights to try and modernize the house a bit.

We are still working on the yard but I am more than a little excited to see what pops up next spring! I've got tons of perennials and wildflowers that I reseeded, and tulip bulbs in the ground. And don't even get me started on the backyard...I'm completely addicted to this new hobby!

Spring Has Sprung...A New Dude and New Chicks!

Spring is a fickle season in Central Oregon. Sometimes it's sunny and blossoms are blooming, and other days it's flurries and frigid winds. Either way, we're taking advantage of it - on snow days Mike hits the mountain, and on warm days we get busy exploring or working on our yard. 

One new addition to our house is our friend, Josh, who has temporarily taken over our guest room. He is now an enthusiastic Bend resident, and the first, but hopefully not the last, of our friends to move up here! 

Josh and Mike discussing fat bikes while we run errands.

It's nice to have an extra set of hands around the house. We have a million and one projects left to do, and about half of those involve the yard. We got zealous and ripped up all our grass, and installed boulders. It was so expensive to water the grass that I paid a couple thousand to have rocks dumped on the yard. Makes sense, right?

One day, our yard will be covered in drought tolerant flowers.
It just might take about 3 years for them to all grow in.

One other bonus of having Josh here is that it makes us appreciate our neighborhood more, and reminds you of things you've gotten used to seeing. Although, I'm still in awe when we go hiking in places like Smith Rock.

The view as you walk into the canyon.

Walking along the river trail.

Loved this "balancing rock!"

The sun setting; you can see the "balancing rock" on the right.

There's people to the left behind Mike up on "Misery Trail" for scale.

One new "spring" experience we're going through is that our favorite hen went broody. Basically, she wanted to hatch out some babies and she refused to get off the nest. Even when we pulled all the eggs out, she'd just sit on an empty nest and get all irritated if we opened the nest box door. The problem with a broody hen is: we don't have a rooster. So our eggs aren't going to be hatching anything. 

After a month of her refusing to get off her nest and eating minimal amounts of food every day, we started to get worried. She was losing lots of weight and looking awful. We finally gave in and bought two baby chicks at the feed store. She immediately perked up when she heard the peeping and took them in as her own! She is the best momma hen.

One of the babies - "Two Spot (Tupac)" at one day old.

It's hard to tell but this is the other chick, "Notorious B.I.R.D."

It's been a fun experience with the chicks so far, and we don't have to do a thing except feed them, give them clean water, and make sure predators don't eat them at night (hence the reason they are in a cardboard lined cage). Otherwise, the momma hen does everything. We are crossing our fingers that at least one of them is not a boy...

Chick update in the next post...We should know by then if they're roosters or hens!

Happy New Year!

The last 2 months have been a crazy blur - we went to the SEMA convention in Las Vegas for Subietech (our first business trip ever!), made some wonderful new friends to spend the holidays with, took a little vacation to Palm Springs and Los Angeles, and then I got sicker than sick with Stevens Johnson Syndrome (don't google it, it's disgusting). I was laid up for weeks, and I'll be recovering well into 2016. On the bright side, it has given me a new zest for life, and a lot of time to reflect on things we would like to do in the new year!

SEMA is pretty boring if you don't like cars...

Red Rocks National Park - a.k.a. what I did while Mike was at SEMA.

When we first moved to Bend and changed our lifestyle, we imagined we'd have lots of land and be starting a homestead where we worked to feed ourselves. A year and a half later, we realize that our idyllic daydreams were A: unrealistically ambitious for an urban couple, and B: not what we really wanted. What we really wanted was to live lightly on the earth (as much as possible in the modern world) and to know exactly where our food comes from (grow/raise *some* of it), while living reasonably close to culture/fine dining, an airport, and a hospital. We still want to travel, play with our pets, have afternoon tea, and take naps (that last part is all me). If you own a true homestead, there is no time for any of that. 

And, we actually cannot afford a farm. Farmers are secretly rich. Seriously. Farm equipment and buildings are crazy expensive.

Homesteading: the dream

Homesteading: our reality - pets, camping, foraging, and the pear tree.

We accomplished a lot in 2015 towards our goals - we remodeled our fixer upper with all eco-friendly appliances, got the compost bins built (reducing our trash), tidied up the yard, put up a fence, and started keeping chickens. I also found all sorts of local sources for produce, honey, bread, and meat. Of course there are lots more things we can do better, and we will definitely keep trying to do so. For one thing, I'm going to can and preserve a bunch more food for winter 2016, and figure out a place to store it.

Our new bunnies - just pets, not meat.

We also added 6 new family members! Introducing LDP, short for Lou Diamond Phillips, the big dark bunny on the right, and Momo (which means "peach" in Japanese, or "dumpling" in other languages, either of which is appropriate!), our little gray bun on the left. They are in a temporary pen on some very temporary linoleum in our living room, until we can build them proper, modern living quarters. LDP is part Flemish Giant, and is larger than the kitties, which amuses us to no end.

The other 4 family members are of course, the chickens, who live in a very expensive coop in the side yard. In retrospect, however, the expense was well worth it. They've been snug, safe, and warm all winter, and while we watch those who built cheaper coops and runs struggle with snow, predators, collapses and fires, we are grateful we splurged and built something extremely sturdy and insulated. 

One major goal for 2016 - clear this demolished deck and make a patio!

What does 2016 have in store? Well, I finally got my sewing machine unpacked, so there's a world of curtains, quilting, and other things to get started on. We are having the yard excavated and spring will bring us a blank slate to begin building on. We'll be planting a new fruit tree, a variety of berries, and building raised beds from our demolished deck pieces...and then there's a patio to learn (i.e. Google how to) to pave. Not to mention gardening, round two - I hope to redeem myself from 2015's failures. While we do have trips planned, I think 2016 will be a year where we concentrate on staying home and feathering our nest. We're starting to get more involved with things in Bend, and we're meeting people with the same ideas and values that we have. There's definitely something to be said for creating a little home to be happy in, and building a community to be happy with. Wishing everyone happiness and fulfillment in 2016!

Feathering Our Nest - With Chickens

One of my daydreams, once I had a yard, was to get chickens and have fresh eggs. If you have researched anything about homesteading, then you know that almost everyone has chickens (if not goats, sheep, cows, pigs, ducks, geese, etc.). So we jumped on the urban-backyard-farmer/homesteader bandwagon and started building a chicken coop. 

Luckily, we have awesome friends! Josh and Bernice pitched in to help us build our ambitious coop and run, which turned out being a lot more expensive and labor intensive than we realized. But it was a great lesson in construction. We situated it in our side yard, in between the compost bin and the pear tree.

Building the frame - after a whole day of digging the foundation.

Working on the floor of the coop

Harvesting pears while the guys are working on the coop

In case you're wondering how we figured out how to build a coop, we solved that as we solve all our problems - by Googling it. I researched the hell out of coops and chickens, learning as much as I could about their needs, health problems, climates, etc. After hours upon hours of staring at the computer screen, I concluded that it was well worth the $30 to pay for plans - so we bought the "Garden Coop," which you can find online. It's very well designed and super easy to alter, customize, and make to suit your space and budget. 

Mike made it all pretty with cedar siding, to match the fence.

Part of the roof and wire up, and Bernice staining the wood

We got all fancy on the inside - painted the walls a cheerful yellow and insulated them with styrofoam packing stuff (so proud of repurposing the styrofoam from all our boxes!). We also cut way bigger doors than they proposed, and laid vinyl parquet tile floors, for ease of cleaning. Turns out this was great foresight, because I clean the coop every day. I can't stand poop.

The inside of the coop after we laid the vinyl tiles and painted

Almost done! We got a proper lock for the human door and finished the roof
and the siding on the coop wall that faces the run. The chickens also get
to forage around the side yard, pear tree, and compost bins every day.

Learning about chickens has been fun and life-changing. Chickens can be nasty. The term, "pecking order" really has meaning now. Their hierarchy isn't a pyramid; it's a linear line. There is one top chicken, and everyone else falls in line below, and there truly is a bottom chicken on the totem pole. It took us a little bit of time (and some re-homing of a little tiny fluffball chicken we named "Death Metal" because she was so mean) to get the balance just right. We still have one "bully" chicken (the 2nd to last on the hierarchy), but no one is bleeding and for the most part, they like each other.

Upper left is our best layer - about 5 eggs/week. The white is the sweetest,
the silver (lower left) is the mean one, and the littlest one (lower right) is the smartest!

I'm not sure if we'll end up naming them. Chickens are weird little creatures - pretty closely related to dinosaurs, actually - and although ours are all friendly and you can pet them and pick them up, there is something really primitive and savage about them. Did you know they can cannibalize each other and their eggs? 

Regardless, we do nothing but the best for them. I clean their coop and run every single day, we spend hours playing with them in the backyard, and we sprout and ferment all their food. Everything they eat is organic, whole grains or veggies, non-soy, non-corn, and real (I don't believe in those pellets, crumbles or "feed" you buy in the store - it looks too much like kitty litter). 

Fermented grains in the jars, and sprouting mung beans, lentils and wheat.

Despite all this, Mike is still weirded out by the fact that the egg comes out of a chicken's butt. The first egg tasted like tuna fish because I had been feeding them tuna (high protein) to help them through molting season. After that, we switched to an all vegetarian (plus bugs) diet, and they get greek yogurt, peas, lentils and sprouted beans for protein, plus these disgusting mealworms that I've been raising in a bin - I won't gross you out with a picture of that. The eggs taste MUCH better now. But Mike still isn't a fan because now we know how dirty chickens can be, and we see how eggs are produced. I'm slightly weirded out but less so (I've eaten some pretty crazy stuff in my life), and even though I think bugs are THE WORST, chickens can turn earwigs, spiders, and mealworms into some pretty yummy eggs!

Seeing where our food comes from makes me believe that if we got more involved, like raising a pig, goat, sheep, cow, etc, it'd be pretty easy to go vegetarian or even vegan. It's so easy to eat something that's packaged pristinely in the grocery store. You never see the poop and the blood and the feathers and the fur. There's a lot of labor, and life, and sweat and dirt that goes into making a meal. If it's this disgusting on an organic-free range-happy life level, imagine how gross it is on an industrial-battery cage-stockyard level.

We've had the chickens about one month now, and our conclusion...

It's been super educational, in terms of getting to know your food and learning about the care of another animal. We'll have to have chickens for at least a year or two to "re-coop" expenses (see what I did there?), but they're relatively inexpensive to maintain, even doing all organic, non-soy, non-corn, *true* free range. I'd say that our 4 chickens probably cost about $20/month. This just about breaks even for what I'd pay in the store for free-range organic eggs ($4.50-$5.00/dozen large), but I have peace of mind knowing exactly what is in my eggs, I can control the nutritional content of the eggs through what I'm feeding the chickens, I know the chickens are truly happy, safe, and loved, and they are really fun to have. We'll see how we feel after a year! 

Chicago, LA, and Home Again

We wrapped up our super busy February with a move into our not-quite-completed home:

we hired professional movers this time to save our backs!

It's a little awkward to live in a home with no stove/kitchen sink/dishwasher/master bedroom/washer-dryer. We can't actually unpack things, because some walls still need to be painted, we don't have interior doors or trim, we're still missing light fixtures, closet doors/systems, and the kitchen is still under construction (counters need grinding, walls need tile). But it's such a relief to be in a home we own, with no worries about the landlord finding out about our (four!) cats, and knowing we can change anything we want.

the current state of the living room

Our current "kitchen" - toaster oven, coffee pot, and hot water dispenser.

It's not all under construction...the flooring is in, and our toilet is awesome.

Princess approves of the new floors!

our fancy toilet, with the heated seat and "nightlight."

We moved the kitties into the home, then 4 days later, took off for Chicago for Wedding Reception Round 2. It was actually really nice to see people I hadn't seen in a long while, and catch up with old friends. I was so busy with friends and family, I didn't even take any pictures!

And then we were off to LA, where we ate our way through the first few days. We had been daydreaming about the food - so we cruised around, alternating running into restaurants and eating in the car. 

Cook's tortas! It's on Atlantic and you should really go.

Donut Friend in Highland Park - I got mine with dulce de leche, bananas and whipped cream.

Ceviche at Guisado's in Echo Park.

Mole tacos and Bistek en salsa roja at Guisado's.

the charcuterie platter at Bestia, where we also saw Gordon Ramsay!

We stayed in a super creepy mansion in Echo Park's historical Victorian neighborhood. The homes are all from the late 1800s and are very well restored and maintained. However, that doesn't detract from the scary factor. This is a pic of the home from the outside:

I was pretty nervous every time we came home late, convinced I'd see a ghostly apparition standing at the top of the stairs, or around the corner....or at the side of my bed. But it did have a nice view:

  

The view from the 3rd story balcony

Honestly the location was ideal for our jaunts around town. We could be back in our old 'hood in 10 minutes. In fact, it was so close to downtown, that one morning Mike ran out and brought me back breakfast in bed!

the coddled egg from Eggslut in Grand Central Market - breakfast is served!

Our LA Wedding Reception Round 3 was just as wonderful as the Chicago one - but imagine having everyone you love in one room, with like 45 seconds to talk to each one. It's overwhelming! I wish I could spend a whole day with each one of our friends and family...and even that wouldn't be enough. I think another trip to Chicago and LA is in order for this year.

But while we're home, we're chipping away at the house projects, one by one. Today, we finally got the carpet installed in the master bedroom, and I'm finishing up the paint so we can move in. Completed "after" pic of the master bedroom coming up soon!

Adding a little drama to the master bedroom with the dark accent wall!