Granola

Well, maybe it is a little bit pathetic, but this entry is about granola.

In one of Angel's vegetarian cookbooks, I came across excellent recipe for oven-toasted granola. Now each weekend I try to make enough for the subsequent week. Rolled oats, sliced almonds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, raisons, dried cranberries, honey, and sunflower oil get mixed together and toasted in the oven for about 50 minutes.

All the ingredients are fresh and organic and from the local food co-op.

A few minutes ago I finished this week's batch. It's cooling on the countertop. After it's cooled, it'll go into an airtight container in the pantry. I'll have some for breakfast tomorrow.

It Happens

Those little beasties are clever. For the past week, the Amigo has been battling a cold. I was still able to teach all three of my yoga classes, but I couldn't face intense cardio or weight training workouts on Thursday or Saturday. Like most viral infections, this one ebbs and flows. The venerable Friendly One feels good for a few hours, but then... I know that it's been eighteen months since I've had so much as a sniffle, but still, I resent the drained feeling, the headache, the throat.

Friends asked us if we'd like to attend a play this afternoon. I suggested that Angel go. The play is some distance away, and I didn't feel up to a long drive in the car, didn't want to risk "sharing" this bug with our friends.

In the afternoon I roused myself and did a little laundry. The world doesn't grind to a halt because the Old Amigo gets a cold. At 2 PM, carrying an armload of clean linens into our bedroom, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above Angel's dresser. My eyes are at half-mast, are heavy and dull. I sigh, realizing that I've got days of discomfort ahead of me, and turn to the task of making our bed.

Fresh laundry folded and put away, I return to the living room to relax on the sofa. The day is sunny and warm; finally my toes are warm. Sunlight streams in and I remove a few layers of clothing. Now I'm down to a single sweatshirt.

That, and lots of good reading material, are more than sufficient consolation. Time for some tea.

Blueberries

Yeah, I know. Three blog posts in one day is a bit much. But Angel & I just returned from an outing, and it's worth writing about.

Today it is sunny and breezy here at the 48th parallel. 63 degrees Obsolete and sunny is actually very comfortable. Today is the annual gleaning day at the Finnriver blueberry farm in Chimacum. Here's the deal: you pick berries. Fresh, organic blueberries. You give half of your pickings to the local food bank. You keep the rest. Angel and I spent about 2 1/2 hours out in the mild sunshine. We returned with about nine pounds of berries.

We did this last year too. Maybe it'll become an annual event. The people who own the farm are friendly, young folks. Lots of solar and wind energy systems around. Some nice looking buildings. Looks as though they're doing pretty well.

Now we're back and getting ready to have a bit o' late lunch. What a lovely fall day!

Book Update

The first draft is in place. Current page count is 543. I'm working through my first pass of editing and correcting obvious typos and, when I can detect them, awkward sentence structures and out-and-out grammatical errors (Thank you, CL!).

As I work through the draft, I take notes of potential areas of inconsistency. I also note changes that might improve the overall story. These sometimes come to me in the middle of the night, and when they bubble up from my subconscious they drive sleep before them like a frightened bird.

In short, things are progressing. The story seems to hang together; although it is impossible for me to tell whether or not it is any good.

The New Garden

It's coming along. I can work for a couple of hours at a time without excessive strain to back and arms. I have a large (but getting smaller) pile of Roger's Magic Dirt and a somewhat smaller pile of what passes for local soil. The latter is the result of many hours of hard work during which the Old Amigo breaks apart the local glacial till using a mattocks, sifts the rocky stuff through a heavy screen (1/2" galvanized mesh) and then carts the rocks off to the rock piles that lie near the wood pile.

I mix the sifted soil at about a 7 or 8 to 1 proportion with Roger's Magic Dirt. The resulting mixture contains some small pebbles and dimly resembles the "sandy loam" that plants love so much. This is my third such project, and this one will make for a nicely terraced extension of usable earth in one of the warmest, most sheltered parts of the yard.

At this point, it's becoming apparent that we'll need another 7 cubic yards of Roger's Magic Dirt to complete the project. Before ordering that, however, I want to use up all that I've already purchased and (if at all possible) construct some kind of ramp that will allow the dump truck to drop the next load *right* where I want it. That will allow me to mix in place (by renting a rototiller for a day) rather than shoveling into a wheelbarrow and carting the soil to its eventual spot.

Once I have the soil components piled near their eventual location, I'll be able to complete the retaining wall. That will produce said terraced extension.

It will also leave behind a final, flat sunny area in which the Venerable Friendly One thinks that raised beds would be ideal. That project will probably have to wait next summer. It will certainly require extensive fencing. Bambi and his buddies have showed up recently with industrial strength harvesting equipment.

One of my friendly neighbors claims that several members of the local deer population have degrees in mining engineering and are able to tunnel beneath fences that are too tall for them to leap. This hypothesis remains to be verified, but I do note that the section of our garden that is currently fenced has yet to be pillaged. This seems to be grounds for optimism.

A Ferry Ride

Last weekend was the annual Wooden Boat Festival. Angel and I rode the ferry over to Whidbey Island and back just so that we could take photos of some of the sites from an offshore perspective. The day was warm and bright, and there were many wooden boats in the harbor.

The shot to the right looks back towards Union Wharf. In the background near the right side of the photo you can see a yellow building. That is the new headquarters of the Wooden Boat Foundation. It occupies a site that formerly held some decaying remnants of something resembling a fuel depot.

This photograph looks back towards the Point Hudson Marina. You can get a better glimpse of the Wooden Boat Foundation headquarters. That's a big building. When it's open, visitors will be able to stand in upper galleries and look down on a shop floor where shipwrights are learning their trade.

Here is a beautiful boat under full sail.

At about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, the boats anchored in the harbor raise their sails and tack back and forth in front of the town. Quite a sight on such a glorious, September day. The trip over

to Whidbey and back took about an hour. Compared to some of the leviathans that ply the waters of Puget Sound nearer to Seattle, the Whidbey Island ferry is little. When the water gets rough, they have to cancel service.

Today, however, the crossing was smooth. On the way back a young folksinger/busker played his guitar and sang as he sat facing the sun. The kid had a good, strong voice. I admired his confidence and enthusiasm.

Later, we rode the bus back to the park-and-ride and picked up our car. This was the first time, the Old Amigo has actually gotten a senior citizen discount - an all day city transit pass for a dollar. What a bargain!

Some Updates

The Old Amigo realizes that he has been remiss in his blog postings lately. The reasons are manifold:

• We've had lots of family and friends visiting us this season. Angel and I are grateful for the company and the reassurance that people want to see us.
• I continue to look for work. Many, many hours of my life are poured into this channel each week. From what I can tell, the channel leads to an abyss.
• The yard. The yard. The yard. Heavy, satisfying work. A new retaining wall is underway. More soil trucked in.
• I've been working on my novel. It's immensely satisfying, and against my better judgment, I hope something comes of it. I have passed page 430 in my first draft. The effort has transmogrified into "what should I not write about?"

The list goes on and on of course.

Today, I dug a new bed in our main garden area so that Angel could plant two blueberry bushes that had been in pots for some months. The new bed is about 5' x 2' x 1.5' (L x W x D). I carted much of the soil down the steps in a wheelbarrow to dump near where we are building the new expansion area of the garden. I did sift some of the soil to combine with compost that I carted back up the steps in said wheelbarrow. Then Angel added some special "Dr. Organic" amendment for acid-loving plants and planted the two blueberry bushes. They look great and I fancy that they are already happier.

A single raspberry bush continues to languish in a pot, awaiting its turn. The work is heavy and must wait until I feel ready. Perhaps tomorrow.

Most days I weed a little. It is easy to fill one or two big barrels with weeds between yard waste pickups.

Also today, I "did the compost." This entails turning all the existing mixture from one bin to the other while adding food scraps saved up during the week. Our friends, D. & S. live nearby and they drop food scraps off at the house too. Angel also goes down to the Starbucks at the Safeway once each week and gets a bucket of coffee grounds to go into the mix. While I don't much like cleaning out used containers, the turning of the compost is generally fairly pleasant. Since I turn the mix each week, the reaction stays mostly aerobic and hence not very stinky.

This week I observed that the magic is beginning to happen. For a while, it seems that little is going on in the bins. Eventually, however, the microbes reach critical mass and things begin to cook. The mixture begins to look less like table scraps mixed with straw and more like, well, compost. If you've never done it, it's probably a bit hard to explain, but trust me on this: It is magical.

Perhaps I'll write a bit more on the creative process soon. For now, I note merely that it is an interesting phenomenon to experience. For me, writing a novel seems mostly to be about creating some characters and a scenario. Then I watch the characters interact and write down what I see. It, like the conversion of table scraps into compost, seems to be a magical process.

That's all from the rock at the edge of the continent on this day.

Press On