Space Shuttles

So here it is at long last...a few more pictures from last weekend. Ellis at first thought the freshly extracted honey was actually just "be-ah". Once he realized that there were tens of pounds of liquid gold sitting around, he went into full pooh-bear mode.

It is somewhat miraculous that it never dawned on him to just put is whole head under the trickle shown above.

Ellis also participated in making apple rings to make up for his father eating a couple too many of the ones already made. To be fair, Ellis likes these too and they have sort of replaced his fruit leather habit. He recently studied transportation vehicles of various types at school. All space vehicles he calls "pace shuddoes" and he loves to stick a nice dried apple ring over his finger so it looks like a 1950s sci-fi depiction of a satellite and then delcare, "I make a pace shuddoe." After making the space shuttle he gets to do his most favorite thing and eat it.

And, before anyone goes all CPS on us, we admit that Ellis looks tired in these pictures as if they were taking in the last hours of a 15 hour day of hard labor. That is complete nonsense, they were taken in the ninth hour.

Why he loves gamma and gampa's house

Double-fisted with pockles. Oh yeah, you know what I am talking about:

"Ahh, chocolate and blueberry, quick grandma, I need a palate cleanser. STAT!"

Still to come: making apple rings and playing pooh bear.

Just the beginning

We have quite a lot of Ellis photos to put up from our visit to the farm. I will start though with this one from last week. Ellis, again, was sent home with some intestinal trouble that made itself evident in his diaper. As a result, he got a 48 hour ban from school. So, on Thursday I got up early and worked for a few hours while Rachel took care of him, then we switched and when he just wouldn't let me alone, I took him down to the Hands-On Museum where we are members and let him run wild. Here he is playing with two plastic sharks in the water table. This kept him so happy that I was wishing for my laptop and wireless. After lunch Rachel took him back and I went into work while she stayed home. All in all, it worked out pretty well.

I gotta cure for whatever ails ya'

I cured a ham a couple of weeks ago and forgot to post about it. This was our practice ham, technically a picnic ham, in the style that honey-baked makes. The process included a week in a brine in the fridge and then 8 hours of heavy maple and apple smoke. I didn't quite get to the internal temperature necessary, so I had to put it in the over for another 2 hours to hit 155 F.

I had figured that the real improvement or cost savings would come from getting into the European dried hams or the Smithfield/country hams that are so hard to come by. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that home curing did produce a superior product to honey baked. First, the ham was never injected, before or after curing, avoiding the squiginess that I think of with American baked hams. Rather the meat was very dense and slightly drier than what I am used to on Easter. Since it was a picnic, there was only a limited portion for slicing which we sampled and set aside for taking to the farm. The bone made excellent pea soup.

Pictures and stories of fall

We went through all of Ellis's clothes today to prep for fall and weed out the too-smalls. In the process we made many discoveries including that his yellow, red and blue sweater from Katherine fits better than ever. I didn't quite get a picture of Ellis in it and matching hat, but he loves it so that will be no problem over the next months.

Following a brief escapade in the above mentioned sweater, Ellis went on an outerwear binge of sorts, piling on a pair of camouflage bib overalls and two vests over his long sleeve shirt. (The under layer vest is on backwards.)

Apparently, the outerwear fetish is hereditary. Rachel would happily tell you that outerwear is my shopping weakness. Right now I can't tell if Ellis has inherited my weakness for nice outerwear (the over vest is Timberland) or his grandfather's weakness which is of an altogether different order.

My father's style might be described as hobo-chic. This style is only noticeable as he prepares to go hunting or ice fishing and it generally involves up to a dozen layers beginning with long underwear (sometimes two sets), up to two pairs of jeans, turtle necks (a three pack, all at once if possible) a couple of sweatshirts, more sweatpants on the bottom, finally coveralls and an XXXX-large rain suit. At the end of all of this, my dad can barely bend his joints and, although an inch taller and 25 lbs lighter than me, looks morbidly obese. He has to take three bottles of water to the field and that pours back out as sweat which is then trapped below the rain suit. Detergent bills alone would cover Everest-quality, lightweight, moisture-wicking gear, but he will have nothing of it. When I show up in Gortex he is skeptical from the start and begs me to borrow a couple of layers from one of his two trash bags full of clothing that ride around in the back seat of his car for the portion of fall when deer killin' is legal. I politely decline, he bitches at me about it until we part ways to head to our stands and then we try to kill deer.

You would be right to posit that this overdressing might make a successful hunt much more difficult to achieve. Many years ago my dad should have learned his lesson when he overdressed in October for bow hunting. Walking in to the woods after work he saw a large buck hundreds of yards away walking toward his stand from the opposite direction. He knew the buck wanted into the swampy marsh that stood between them and which his stand overlooked. He also knew that if he could get there before the deer, he would have the wind to his advantage so he dropped down to a lower trail where the deer would not see him and ran the last 100 yards to his own stand. It was 55 degrees out and my dad was dressed to overnight in freezing rain. By the time he got to his stand he was pouring sweat. Afraid to take the time to situate himself fully, he remained kneeling on the foot platform and waited. He heard the deer walking in behind the stand and sure enough it walked directly below him. The deer looked down, my dad drew his bow and waited for the deer to walk a few yards out. The deer was stubborn and stayed put. Finally my dad decided to lean out and shoot him through the spine, straight down, and as he leaned over to take aim a small shower of sweat drops rained down, plunked on the deer's gray coat and he bolted into the marsh.

While not a tragic story, still disappointing. Of course, deer season does come with a few tragedies every year. A couple people get shot, some because of drunkeness, but more commonly they have heart-attacks and nobody knows what to do or even about the heart attack until they don't come home. I don't really worry about my dad having a heart attack out there, but I do fear that he may be the first man ever to die of heat stroke on Nov. 15th in Michigan: Father of two, grandfather of one, found dead, mummified in camo, holding very clean and unloaded shotgun. Time of death was not determined because body temperature was not reliable given the circumstances. Numerous coyote prints were found about the body, but dogs and buzzards were not patient enough to work through man's clothing to get to flesh. Numerous plastic bags were found shredded. Experts believe the spam sandwiches formerly contained therein probably kept coyotes from being more persistent in removing the clothing.

9 months later

Wait, look to your right, yup, yup that is Ellis and this is still our blog, with a new title reflecting our new lifestyle with the two of us working outside the home. In addition to the title and template changes, Rachel redid the sidebar to reflect more of our favorite internet spots. Well, mostly her favorites, but I will fix that shortly. Other changes will be coming as we have time. I would like to point out that our friends Ben and Elissa at Pieholden Suite have returned to our blogroll now that they post more than once per pregnancy, thanks to their cute, not-quite-new baby boy Ansel.

The new title comes from an Anton Chekhov quote I ran across. Mostly we were thinking about how we felt like every waking hour was a to-do list. Many of those to-dos are just what it takes to keep a household from falling into a state of total chaos. Admittedly, our definition of chaos, or what we will call our chaos-bar is pretty high. That said, the rate at which a two year old can contribute to the coming heat death of the universe is truly astounding. I am attempting to capture this in a single theory, but currently I am having some trouble. I cannot seem to nail down whether or not the dirtying of the toddler himself is path dependent and whether or not it is entropically driven. Does dirt cemented in snot on a toddler's face have more or less entropy than free dirt? It seems likely that free dirt actually has more entropy, but the entropy of the dirt-snot-child system may go up upon the binding of the dirt to the mucus. One possibility is that the presence of the dirt might disorder the molecular structure of the snot. But that doesn't explain....I guess the only solution is to forget about the kegerator and the new and improved Ann Arbor-based meat smoker and build a calorimeter that can accommodate a hankiless child and some nice fine dirt. I will let you know what happens.

Daddy in grey

Many have heard the stories of music stars (Johnny Cash comes to mind) who famously fall into upper-downer cycles. Take pills to get up to perform, take more pills to sleep. Yesterday, I inadvertently identified the tired daddy version of this: I drank coffee all morning and took a benadryl induced nap from 2:30-5:30 pm. It is a little unsettling to have this strike you, but then again, I slept well last night and got up at 6 this morning feeling good enough to take the dog for a run, brush out her extra hair and write a bunch of long overdue emails...on just a single cup of joe and before Rachel or Ellis got up.

Checking my trapline

Caught our first mouse. I only need 23 more to make Ellis half of a pair of mittens. I think the people I borrowed the live trap from had hoped they were sparing some mice my blood lust. But, the live trap leaves the hides exquisitely intact. My only worry is that the mouse's brain* may be too small to properly tan the hide.**

*Scroll down a ways in this link. Put your sandwich down first.
**(no I am not seriously tanning mouse hides)

ok, so not so triumphant

After months of silence, I make my triumphant return to blogging in the form of a bulleted list

• A mouse (or maybe several) chewed into a bag raisins and also a bag of dog food in our basement. I had not one, but two, dreams about it last night. Both involved complete mouse infestation and the presence of multiple cats living in the basement unbeknownst to us, mostly under the washing machine.
  
• Because of those dreams, I woke up hoping I'd dreamt up the whole scenario including the lost raisins and dog food. But no. And now I have to figure out whether traps or poison are less likely to harm a toddler and a dog. And less likely to cause an undiscovered carcass and a "so that's the smell" incident in 2 weeks.
• This really warrants a whole post, but Ellis's daycare is part of a Montessori school which is now back in session. The parents, well, who am I kidding, the moms, are super! involved! in the school activities. They also have mandatory "family service hours." Occasionally I get the goofy idea that I should try to meet new people and so I volunteered to be a room parent. Actual quote from the orientation meeting:"You'll definitely earn all your service hours as a room parent, but please submit your signed slips to document the hours just so we have a paper trail." I almost starting laughing right in the meeting. Later Trey joked he could earn his hours by performing an audit of the family service hours accounting, 'cause, you know, that's how important it is.
  
• Since we failed to produce a house warming party or a birthday party for Ellis, we're been thinking about doing a Halloween party. But I have to think of costumes. Ugh.
  
• Speaking of plans doomed to failure-- must stop thinking about it and actually do some work on changing the blog lay out.
  

Who are you calling an elitest?

The Republican Convention seems to have had a profound effect on us. Between bouts of venomous spitting over the hypocrisy of the right embracing teen pregnancy and apoplexy over the Republican's ability to make anyone who is educated into an elitist we have been wringing our hands wondering whether or not we are indeed elitist snobs from snooty town. Tonight we found the perfect salve for such worries in the Saline Community Fair supplemented with a heavy dose of the State Championship Demolition Derby.

We began with a stroll through the animal barns. Highlights for Ellis included the bunnies and weird exotic birds. They had a substantial petting zoo brought in which included all manner of sheep and goats in addition to llamas/alpacas (I am not sure how to tell the difference), camels, an ostrich and a tortoise. Ellis performed very well in animal identification. The sheered sheep confused him a little but he was sure that it was either a sheep or goat. He made up for it in the final bonus round when I said, "Hey Ellis, is that a pony?" and he said, "No daddy, dat a donkeee."

After much waiting around to get into the derby and then more waiting holding down our good seats, the derby finally got underway and on the first crash Ellis hollered, "Oh dear." After that he settled down a little bit and enjoyed all four heats that we watched, but became progressively more interested in the moon and paid less attention as time went on. Moments like this make me think we are raising the Archduke of Nerdistan.

Prior to the derby Ellis partook liberally of the fair's culinary offerings, sharing with us a kielbasa, barbecue sandwich, chips, my Poke (his new word for "coke"), Rachel's Diet Poke and then splitting an elephant ear with me. He then pigged down the elephant ear his cousin didn't want. Feeling bloated and perhaps like he could indeed float away, Ellis tried to crowd surf. Fortunately, the guy two rows down was padded and didn't mind a toddler landing on him. Ellis, of course, was fine.

I came home from the derby feeling more like an elitist than ever, having realized that we didn't attend a single other derby all summer and waited for the championship which required that a driver have at least one victory for the season. Oh what irony that the only derby I had attended all summer was the derby reserved for elite drivers. But at least when I am overcome imagining the butchering that would have occurred had Chelsea Clinton turned up pregnant in 1996, I can think of my son crowd surfing at a demolition derby.