Stay At Home Moms

Springtime is a great time!

I have to say, this time of year was my favorite when my kids were young.

We would put a picnic together and head down the “draw” to our favorite spot. Wild onions, lupine, balsam root, animals…we never knew what we would find.

Four wheeling down the canyon, then hiking in to the old house for a picnic.

Of course, winter days playing in the snow were great, too.

I felt like a stay-at-home mom on my days off, like I had the best of both worlds. Oh, I did!

Watching Ann Romney take her hits in the media, I can’t believe we are still living in the dark ages.

I don’t care what political party you belong to, I believe in CHOICE.

Long gone are the days when men chose what was best for the little lady.

John Wayne, I’m sorry, but you are a dinosaur.

Unfortunately, some of our harshest critics are other women, not men.

What is wrong with us? Can’t we be happy for someone else? Just because you can’t afford to stay home doesn’t mean no one can.

When I was flying, people never could get used to my schedule. “Oh, you’re home? How long were you gone this time?”

Many people believed I was always gone, and I could hear their criticism thousands of miles away.

Taken on one of my "rare" days home.

I worked eleven days a month.

I feel the old defensiveness creeping in just writing this.

Why do people feel they have a right to judge you for your decisions? Why did I care?

In the three weeks I spent at home, I volunteered at the school.

I had so much time off that it was easy to help at school and with 4H cooking.

I played with my kids, cleaned house, made dinner, read books, took pictures…my days were always full.

I loved being home, but I also loved work.

I loved being at work, but I couldn’t wait to get home.

The push/pull and tug of heartstrings is hard enough without the judgment of other people, especially other moms.

Stay at home moms help all of us.

They are the ones who fill the cracks and volunteer on days no one else can.

Look around. There is still no other career more important than raising kids.

But in our society raising children is still not valued. So we have to value ourselves.

Every day at home is a day creating security and beautiful memories. We forget how nice home is and how safe our children feel being there.

Springtime calves...

Vacations are great, but my kid’s fondest memories are probably at home on the ranch.

Darcie with Jackie's pig.

No one can live your life but you. If it works for you and your family, that’s what counts.

I think having conflicting emotions is normal. That said, I think we need to get better at being where we are.

Fairmont Springs hot pools in Canada...what an awesome vacation!

We need to live in the moment. We can’t forget to thank God for all we have right now, today.

I know that I wanted nothing more than to stay home - once I had children. Then, when I did stay home more, I wanted to be back at work.

I felt like a schizophrenic.

But it’s that constant push/pull tugging that we feel inside us that helps us decide who we are and who we want to be.

Without self doubts and re-evaluating our decisions we would just be swept along by life.

Life is a fast moving river....

Instead we have choices that we can reaffirm each day.

We all have those days when we question ourselves; when things are not perfect.

But if you pay attention to the overall course of your life…you’ll be able to tell.

Inside, in your heart, how is life going? Do you wake up grateful for all that you have?

I think about the day before I go sleep and thank God for all of it.

I am so lucky for what I have today, right now.

Swimming at the John Day Breaks, two miles from our house...another vacation?!

There’s No Place Like Home…

Our house and shop 1/20/2012

There’s no place like home…there’s no place like home….

I love to travel and I love to be home.

How can that be?

Isn’t that some sort of impossibility?

A paradox?

Airport Sheraton, MIA after our cruise

Swimming in Miami one day, ending up in freezing rain the next.

Seattle Airport virtually closed after we landed.

Renting a Jeep at a horrific price because there are no flights leaving and the hotels are full.

Driving through the Columbia Gorge where traction devices are required for vehicles over 10K.

Does that mean the semis get to stop in the middle of the freeway to put on their chains? Seriously?

Listing power poles…

Powerline poles crashing down on the roads…arcing fire.

Doesn’t anyone clean the ice off the lines now that the farmers aren’t allowed to?

Has anyone considered…underground power lines????

Coming home to no power…and beautiful snow!

Broken poles….

Broken tractor... Road closed due to four more broken poles. So much for Wasco Electric and Sherman County maintenance...where does all that wind tower money go?

Lighting all my candles…the house smelled like a fir-pina colada-fruit salad!

Watching a movie on Colt’s computer, snuggled up on the couch…enjoying it?!

Our frozen deck

Power lines almost on the ground...

Icicles. Sunlight shining. Snow covered foothills and stubble.

Beautiful wheat fields and wind towers

Frozen wheat stubble!

View out my front window…

Decadence. Pure decadence.

Sledding down the hill…with a Ranger on tracks to pull the sledders back to the top!

Ranger on steroids…

After all, home is where the heart is!

Except this heart dessert was on the Panama Canal cruise we just came back from!!

Farming…It’s Always Something Expensive!

Colt at the well. The soft start is on the right.

“The well pump is out.” My husband announced wearily. “That’ll be another $25,000 – $30,000.”

Shaking my head, I commiserated with him. It sucks to drop that much money with no guarantees that it won’t happen again. We’ve had issues with pumps ever since this well was drilled. The good news is that we haven’t had to pay for any of them before now – the wind tower project did. The well was just turned over to us a year ago.

The well was used to compact and build roads for the wind towers.

Actually, we haven’t had to pay for much of the $300,000 well ourselves – just half of the bill to bring in electricity and laying the pipe. And it was a good year farming, so we have the money to pay for it.

Plus it’s a write-off. Whoopee!

Personally, I believe that it went out the last two times because the people who were using the well didn’t respect the equipment. Instead of using the “soft start” system that was set up, they would just turn it on and off manually. That’s tough on a 100 horsepower pump over 600 feet down.

The wind towers are all up and running and the well has been turned over to us!

Dwayne, at Person Pump and Drilling, suggested a heavier-duty pump with a little more horsepower. The bearing that went out is suggestive of misuse, just like we thought, so it is no longer under warranty of course. Besides, this pump is two years old. http://www.personpumpanddrilling.com/

Bill Martin says we could have pulled the pump ourselves and saved money.

I think Bill's crazy!!! Person's is the only way to go!!

Now the well is ours, and the soft start can’t be bypassed, and hopefully the pump will last ten years! I know we’re going to cross our fingers and respect the equipment. Funny how many people don’t take care of things if they aren’t theirs….

Colt at the well. The soft start is on the right.

Big, expensive equipment

I know my life is hard…I am so busy… :)

Photo art! Art is everywhere!

The guys made quick work of a big job.

I just sat on a box and watched!

Persons always do a great job. Les Read ‘s kids went to school with ours, so we always call him first.

Over six hundred feet of pipe to pull…

And he had good help!

Bo did a great job.

At least the weather was good!

The wind towers are all up and running and the well has been turned over to us!

The well was used to compact and build roads for the wind towers.

I think Bill’s crazy!!! :) Person’s is the only way to go!!

Bill Martin says we could have pulled the pump ourselves and saved money.

Beyond the Light Switch

Remember I told you a film crew came out to our farm/ranch a year ago? If you want to see the portion of the PBS special, with David Biello of Scientific American, that was filmed at our farm, here it is!

It starts on Cape Cod (for context), and the second half is in Oregon at our house. Just for fun!

The whole two-hour special is worth seeing. I bought the video at BeyondtheLightSwitch.com. It takes 30 seconds or so to load. It will open in a separate window so you can read/do something else!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3743025/BTLS%20Windv3.mov

http://www.beyondthelightswitch.com/

Home on the Range

The Macnabs were chased out of Scotland by the Campbells. Yes, they were probably the Campbell’s Soup Campbells.  My husband’s mother father was a Macnab, and the family originally immigrated to Canada. Two of the brothers and two of their cousins moved south to homestead the Oregon Territory. This part of the Columbia Gorge looks amazingly like northern Scotland and I imagine they felt a kinship with these hills.

They married into the Van Patten family, another resourceful “clan.” Getting a crop into the field was the primary goal. The Oregon Homestead Act required you to eat and sleep on your land and have glass in your windows. Showing great resourcefulness, or perhaps just being Dutch, they built only one house on the four corners where their land joined in Sherman County. Each  had a bed and small table in their corner of the house. You had to live on your land, sleeping and eating there.  Five years later the land would officially be theirs.

I haven’t been able to “fact check” this, but they were told they need glass in their windows, too. Pane glass broke easily and was hard to come by. Ingeniously, they drank the pints of whiskey and placed the empty bottles in the windows, fulfilling the letter of the law.

Today my windows are real pane glass, nary a whiskey bottle in sight. My dining room is all that is left of their hastily built homestead house and I don’t know how much of it is original. Still, I feel like a pioneer. Twelve children, including my husband’s mother, were born and raised here. The house is small, maybe eighteen hundred square feet. Five hundred feet were added in 1930.

The uncles and aunts still make regular visits to their old home. They enter, often without knocking, to the home they still consider their own. I enjoy following them around as they reminisce, trying to see my home through their eyes…

“I swear, this house sure seemed bigger when we lived here…” they muse. I’m sure it did…the uncles are all over six feet tall now and have to duck through some of the doorways.

“Remember shoveling out this place after a dust storm? Sometimes we had to move out…couldn’t breathe. Come back days later, after the wind died down.”

I remember when I first moved in. I had to vacuum the windowsills. Farming practices have improved the situation. I added double pane windows, insulation and vinyl siding. No longer do I fight the raging windstorms that suffocated and blinded and sometimes killed those unfortunate enough to be caught in their fury. I still dust more frequently than those living in civilization, but at least I do it with a cloth and a can of Pledge.

“Remember when this bedroom was a sleeping porch? Many a morning I woke up covered with a blanket of snow.” Uncle Tom shivers, remembering.

“You could see your breath. Remember the icicles?” Uncle Pat adds.

Eight boys, farm hands all, slept outside in the freezing Oregon winters. They were hardy stock. All of them survived World War II, too. Uncle Tom was down to eighty pounds when he came home from the swamps of New Guinea, suffering from malaria. Their cousin Bill was killed instantly when his B-17 collided with another near Hamburg, Germany in 1944.

“The old barn…still there. Remember when we were playing cowboys and Indians out there? I aimed my gun at you and said  ‘Bang.’ You dropped down and I thought you were dead! We ran for the house, sure we would be in big trouble for killing you. Then you wandered in, bawling, half an hour later, bleeding and bawling your head off. That bullet went in through your jaw and out through your cheek!”

Rose nods, remembering well. Her teeth and jaw still  give her problems. Her only satisfaction was the whipping her brother and cousin received.

“How about the time you shot the hole in the kitchen floor? We covered it up pretty well for awhile…threw a rug over it and the kitchen table over that. Then Mom went down to the cellar and saw the mess…glass and peaches blown to bits everywhere. We caught holy heck for that, too.”

I can still see the repaired hole in my cellar ceiling. Winter nights when we put together jigsaw puzzles or play cards I can almost hear their rowdy clan…popping corn over the open fire and playing Ping-Pong on a piece of plywood Grandma Bee placed on the dining table.

The double-hole outhouse seat remains in the barn, testimony of days so long ago when, windstorm or blizzard, going outside was a necessity. The uncles delighted in hiding in the dark, leaping out of the shadows and tossing clawing, wild kittens on their shrieking, terrified sisters. To this day the girls are afraid of cats and guns.

The siblings remember windblown drifts of snow so high farming horses were used to break through and carry them to the one room schoolhouse. Today we occasionally have enough to sled on. Rose and Helen remember dresses made from potato sacks and being thankful for them. They hauled water by hand up the canyon in buckets. The same water was used first for cooking; then for washing dishes, clothes and bathing; finally, for watering the rose bushes. I can only marvel at their tenacity as I push buttons for my dishwasher and run clean water for my bath.

As solitary as life is here, it is hard to imagine the hoards of people who came by this remote place on their way west. The Oregon Trail ran right through our property. So deep were the wagon ruts that we can still see them in the spring as the new shoots of wheat push skyward. My nearest neighbor is a mile away. I rise each morning to the crowing of pheasants and fall asleep to the howling of coyotes. You’ve never seen so many diamonds in one sky as we can, lying in our Jacuzzi stargazing. You’ve never seen a lawn like ours, either: thousands of acres of lush, green winter wheat.

Paradise.

We truly are in the middle of nowhere. The toolies.The boondocks. Country hicks to some…providers of a nation’s food to others. Our life is simple, our wants, few. Sunrises are fantastic…sunsets over Mount Hood, amazing. However, my idea of homesteading is far removed from days of old.

Most of the old homesteads have been burned or fell down. The few that remain, like sentinels in the fields, are a testimony to how many people used to live here, before tractors got bigger and more land worked in a day. My kids and I loved to four-wheel down the canyon behind our house to the old Happold Place. (See the fictional story I wrote about this house, “I Am The Ghost.”)

Springtime brings a profusion of wild onion, lupin and balsam root. Deer and antelope truly play nearby, along with elk and cougar and the occasional bear.  Living here, in the middle of nowhere, is a paradise I never expected to find.

 

 

 

 

HOME SWEET HOME!

What do you do you do all day in the middle of nowhere???     Write! Create!

I swear I did not Photoshop this!!

September 25, 2010: At least the moon is taking the ‘hits’ for us. Look at the dent on the right side!

I live on a wheat ranch in eastern Oregon. The nearest grocery store is forty miles away in The Dalles.

I grew up in Dover, Delaware; Osceola, Indiana; and Gainesville, Florida.                      Go Gators!

Living so far away from cities and neighborhoods and people was a huge transition for me, but now I love it.

Springtime: soft white winter wheat

Mid June the wheat is almost all golden.

The nights here are so dark. And so full of stars! When I sit in my Jacuzzi at night, the view is incredible. You can hear the coyotes howling and the owls hooting. Or you can hear perfect silence.

Walking down the dirt road by my house is always peaceful. The stalks rustle and move in the wind, and when the wheat starts to turn and ripen it smells like you are in a bakery. Deer, antelope and jack rabbits are frequent companions, as well as pheasants and occasional elk.

The sunrises and sunsets are awesome.

We grow soft, white winter wheat. Most of it gets shipped to the Pacific Rim for Asian dumplings. Our wheat isn’t stretchy – that is, it doesn’t have enough “tensile strength” for noodles. I think some of it is used for cake flour, too, but Asia is our largest market. Lately we have been planting wheat with more protein content, so that its use is more versatile.

My father-in-law used to travel extensively for the U.S. Wheat League. He has friends all over the world that I would call while overseas. I remember the lunch his friend from Korea took me out for – wonderful food I would never have tried without him.

We plant in the fall, around mid September if there is enough moisture.

We have three large tractors to plant 4500 acres a year, 9000 total.

We harvest in July and August, usually starting right after our four wheeling trip to the beach for the 4th of July.

I love harvest, even with the long days and heat.

My cousin Karen getting a ride.

Friends come out to ride combines and the hustle and bustle of the time is exciting.

The combine dumps into the bankout wagon, and the bankout wagon dumps into the trucks.

Putting the trucks away after harvest.

My only real job during harvest is to cook dinner and make goodies, so I find the days long and enjoyable. Its fun to go ride the combines, or sit in the truck on the way down to the elevator at the river.

Rufus, Oregon grain elevator. It is called an elevator because the wheat is offloaded from trucks, then taken up to the top and dumped.

Biggs Junction, Oregon grain elevator

Antelope at sunrise

I love to watch antelope, but farmers hate them. They are the ‘goats’ of the plains, and will eat anything, especially weeds. This sounds like a good problem, until they carry the seeds to clean fields and defecate.

The only “bad” thing about living here is the wind. Sometimes it blows for days. I can’t imagine being in a sod house, or a pioneer cabin where you could hear it day and night. Perhaps that’s why people suffered from “prairie madness”! At least inside my house it’s fairly quiet – even when the wind is howling at 50 mph.

The bad has become good. We now have wind towers, and they will fund our retirement for years to come.

Flying jets uses quite a bit of fuel; now I can “give back” something in the form of alternative energy.

I’ve found that you have to be careful what you wish for. For years I wanted to “farm the wind.” Now we are. So much for solitude. The holes were dug in May 2007. My front yard used to be wheat: then it became a freeway. Huge semi trucks thundered by at fifty miles an hour. The worst part of the project, for me, was the huge, ugly transmission lines that were built to take the power out. I didn’t think about that part.

Of course, three years later it was all done. Huge white blades slice the sky around my house and now I love to watch them turn. I love how they look – huge propellers that remind me of flying. Its like waking up on a quiet airport. I heard you could hear them, and sometimes when I step outside I can hear the rhythmic swoosh. But it’s not loud, at least not louder than the wind is! It amazes me how many people hate how they look or sound. Compared to coal plants, wind towers are so clean. I know the wind doesn’t blow all the time, but I am amazed by how much it does. I never noticed. What seemed like a breeze is actually enough to power the turbines. They turn at 7 mph and produce power at 9 mph. Naysayers claim that they only produce power 33% of the time, but hey, that’s 33% more than nothing!

If you want to see more about our wind project, you can go to www.roadtobiglow.com Kevin and Colt are even on the video – if you click on the silo it goes to “Old MacDonald had a Farm” except its old McCullough’s…. Don’t even try to power up the Biglow site unless you have fast high-speed internet. It takes an incredible amount of juice, or it “streams” like crazy!!!

The old...

The new!

Paradise.