Whew!

Harlow did a nice job helping us out to set up the farm and garden yesterday. She's a good helper dog, but it takes a lot out of a girl.


She was enthusiastic in the beginning...

Then half way into the project she needed a nap... 

I found a bedside table!

Yesterday I stopped by my favorite East Main Street antique/ used furniture store. They have great stuff, usually at prices that I might actually pay. 


I've been on the hunt for a new bedside table for a while. The little white table my cousin built for me in seventh grade shop class just wasn't cutting it, obviously:

I've got a list on my phone of the furniture we need/ want for our house, and the size of the space the piece needs to fit into. So anytime I see something I like and is in my price range I can pounce. 


I needed a bedside table that could keep my books and other miscellaneous junk off of the ground, while not blocking the entrance into the bathroom. It's kind of a tight space.


So when I walked into the used furniture portion of the store, I knew I'd totally scored. It'd never occurred to me to look for a rounded table! After checking the measurements quickly with their tape measure and my list, I purchased this little buddy for $49!

Harlow proves that every picture is better with dog.

The table has a bit of damage on the top, but nothing that can't be sanded out and redone. Someday I'll get around to redoing this table and the chair in the office, which also has water damage but is well-built. 

The table meets my needs for book storage without cluttering up the walkway. The darker wood also matches our new bedframe and the rocking chair in our bedroom.

I told you about the rocking chair I recovered, right? The one where I prove I'm not afraid of pattern?

Okay okay, it's pattern in white. I know it doesn't really count.

You may have also noticed the new cover for Harlow's dog bed, in a gold basket weave at the foot of our bed. Overall, the bedroom is coming together. We still need a new nightstand and dresser in a darker wood. I'm not sure that the great Ansel Adams print above the bed, framed in black, really "fits". I'm also still unsure about the curtains, though the paint has totally grown on me. And the lamps... I've got a plan for those :)

April 15 Friday Farming

There wasn't much farming to report upon our arrival home last Sunday. The tulips are pushing through in more places, the grass is growing into the beds, the weeds in the vacant lot seem to be setting up for a banner year. The only thing blooming thus far are the crocuses by the front step; they looked fabulous in the sun on Monday, but this morning's rain put a damper on their enthusiasm.

We're planning on getting the garden set up this weekend, despite the forecast for a wintry mix of snow and rain. I'm hoping more rain than snow, but that seems obvious.

At the top of the list is terracing the garden. We've settled on some sort of semi-temporary mechanism, like 2 X 12" boards, so that we can remove them at the end of the summer and till in more organic matter. Our garden slopes a bit towards the north and terracing helps prevent erosion and promote effective watering. We also packed a bunch of compost into the garden last fall and I'd hate for it to wash away.

We'll also need to install a gopher fence. DJ's been sniping at them in the evenings and on weekends, but he's up against an army of cannibalistic, breeding, plague-carrying rodents, so sniping at them won't get us far. Instead we'll build a 2' high gopher fence, of small-opening chicken wire, to keep the little bastards out. I know there is a possibility that they'll tunnel under the fence to get into the garden, but we'll have to cross that bridge when we get there.

The garlic I planted last fall is poking through!

Once the garden beds are laid out, I'm hoping to mark them off and use the Square Foot Gardening approach to keeping things organized this year. This weekend marks the first time on the spreadsheet for planting things into the garden. Seeds which will go into the ground include:

• Sugar Snap Peas
• Snow Peas
• Carrots
• Spinach
• Bibb lettuce
• Romaine lettuce
• Shallots
• Rocky Mountain Wildflowers (gardening the lot next door to keep the weeds down)

The planted garden will look like this:

I will also begin a few vegetable items for transplant as an experiment. I want to see if Bibb lettuce does better as a direct seed, or a transplant. I'll have a couple "Squares" of it this summer, so I have room to play around. Seeds to start this weekend include:

• Bibb lettuce
• Romain lettuce
• Snapdragons
• Cosmos
• Marigolds
• More broccoli
• Eggplant
• Leeks

I also need to spend some time this weekend pulling weeds and grass from beds and fertilizing the hydrangea bush. Hopefully we can get down the rain barrel and the deck chairs too!

Its a Trap!

After driving 11 hours back from Portland on Sunday, DJ and I both knew he'd do some weird shit at night. I needed to read a little to shut down my brain, so he fell asleep with a sleeping mask on to block the light.

I think I was  bracing for it all night, so when I woke up to him sitting up and standing up in bed I was pretty aware of what was going on.

DJ: "mumble mumble mubmlt arp!"
CK: "What's that honey, what's going on?"
DJ (in his i'm-totally-sleepwalking-so-I-revert-to-my-5-year-old-self-voice): "It's a trap!"
CK: "What's a trap honey? We're home, come back to bed."
DJ: "But... it's a trap!"
CK: "Honey, we're home. We're in Bozeman. Get into bed."

He finally got into bed. I fell back asleep quickly. Then the dog started moaning and whimpering in her sleep. All yowly and not quite awake. I could hear her paws twitching on the carpet.

The next morning we discussed what happened, and he was dreaming that someone set a trap in our bed. Apparently "It's a trap" is a Star Wars phrase?

Monday night was worse. DJ is now reading "D-Day" by Stephen Ambrose, in preparation for our Europe trip. His subconscious sometimes gets things confused though, and last night he drempt we were in a boat off of Normandy, being bombed by Japanese zero planes. After he woke up and calmed down, we chatted about what was going on. Then he asked where we were? Apparently he wasn't actually awake until that point.

And then the dog moaned again and I started laughing.

I wish these two beings would just sleep calmly!

Pacific Northwest Roadtrip

We returned home last night from a one week road trip to the Pacific Northwest, where we visited friends and family and Dusty was the best man in a friend's wedding.

I didn't take my camera, but had a handy blackberry for quick photos.

We drove to Harrison on Friday afternoon, and saw a bunch of windmill blades being shipped via rail. Pretty cool to see!

We weren't in a hurry on Saturday, so we toured the central part of Washington state. My family used to go boating on Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam. The dam was a Depression-Era program which brought electricity, flood control and agricultural irrigation to Washington. I wanted DJ to see it. Obviously we were too close for great photos.

Unfortunately, we paid for our little detour later, in the form of delays, chains required and crappy spring snow over Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades. We took my sedan for the trip, as it gets so much better gas mileage. We never take my car out of town in the winter, as I don't have snow tires or all wheel drive. Since I never leave the city limits, I don't have chains either. Which was going to be a problem when the Washington State Patrol shut down the pass and then checked every vehicle for AWD or chains. Umm... yeah. Thankfully, the state patrolman was distracted when he checked our car; I'm pretty sure he glanced at our Montana License plate and just waved us through. We went for it, and it slowed our arrival in Seattle by about an hour and a half.

After a great dinner with Brian and Denise on Saturday night, we woke up kind of early Sunday morning and headed down to Pike Place Market to walk around. Of course, all I photographed were the blooming trees!

And daffodils! Planted on rooftop containers. So great.

You might be wondering what we did with Harlow while out of town. She stayed with our friend Mark and his dog Charlie. We were a bit cautious, as neither dog had really spent much time with another dog before. But they got along famously, and Harlow was able to go hiking off leash, play in a great back yard and generally just be a very spoiled dog. She's exhausted today. Mark is a great photographer and would send me a photo or two like this:

Monday we went back to Pike Place Market and loaded up on fixin's for a dinner at DJ's mom's condo in Long Beach, Washington. Seafood!

After stopping for a great lunch with DJ's grandmother, dad and dad's wife, we drove down to Long Beach. It's so weird to me to be at a beach where you don't take a blanket and a cooler and lay out. But it was a very relaxing stay with a lot of reading, snoozing, and walking. We even had my friend Erin up from Astoria for dinner!

Wednesday and Thursday were spent in Castle Rock visiting Dusty's parents. Friday about noon we headed down to the Portland area, where we picked up Dusty's tuxedo for the wedding, and hunted Pliney the Elder. Pliney is a great beer which is IMPOSSIBLE to find. Serioulsy, people laughed at me. Between Seattle, Astoria, Vancouver and Portland, we could only find a single bottle!


Saturday was the wedding, held at the World Forestry Center near the Portland Zoo. Super fun. The only photo I snapped was a late night blackberry shot. We are shiny. Oh well!

Sunday was a long haul of a drive from Portland back to Bozeman. Eleven hours, plus a one hour time gain. Gah. We left at 8am and arrived home at 8:30pm. Thankfully the roads were fine. It must be close to spring, as Road Construction Season has begun with bridge replacements over the Clark Fork River in Montana...

April 1 Friday Farming

I'm retroactively posting this Friday Farming, as I didn't have time to put together a blog post before we left for a week. I snapped the photos though, and want to keep a weekly record, so I'll upload them. I'll retroactively post the April 8 Friday farming too, for my records.

As I've said before, spring in Montana requires patience and perserverance. I'm not good with either of those qualities, but just muddle through. We were unable to get the garden terraced before leaving for our trip, and thus I wasn't able to put the spinach, carrots and peas into the ground when I wanted to on April 1. It might be as late as April 17 before my seeds go into the ground. That said, the weather report from Bozeman today indicates that we recieved about 8" of wet, sloppy spring snow, which would have only rotted seeds in the ground.

Maybe gardening is all about just letting things run their course and working with the resources you're given?

Anyway, here's how things around the homestead looked the morning before we left:

Crocus, near the front steps, about to pop up and start blooming. Which means more food for the gophers. Last year the gophers ate all the blooms before we were able to enjoy them.

Tulips, in the bed near the power boxes. 

More crocus.

More tulips, in a cluster.

Daffodils in the front bed, to the right of the door.

Chives, wintered over from 2010, in what will become the herb garden on the left side of the driveway.

Bee balm popping up.

Delphinium coming up, out of last year's growth.

Aspen trees, budding.

Hydrangeas, unwrapped from their winter blanket. 

And finally, the garden bed. No sign of even the garlic shoots yet.

I should add quickly that the broccoli I started a few weeks ago indoors is struggling. It's not getting enough light. We'll see what happens.

Forward motion

I'm a big believer in the idea that it's okay to complain about something only if you're willing to take the steps to resolve the problem. It just seems like good karma; no grousing if you're going to just tell someone else to fix it for you. 


I've been frustrated with work a lot lately. It's been a weird combination of overwhelmed with things to do yet simultaneously unmotivated by any of it. Let's cut to the chase: I hate the design review component of my job. I dislike the conflict inherent in telling someone they can't do an ugly addition to their historic house. I find my car driving itself to Joe's Parkway for bulk candy when I have to write a staff report; trying to numb the pain with high fructose corn syrup. 


But, it's a part of my job. We have bills to pay. And I had a few realizations about it last week, the biggest being that my position in local government gives me automatic credibility, deserved or not, when I hand over my business card. 


Let's not BS here, there are people in this community who would do my job 100 times better than I have the ability to. There are some excellent cultural resource experts out there. They're just smarter than I am and employed in a field where they don't have to get in a pissing match with an architect about divided light vs. single pane windows. I really do think that I'll look back on this portion of my career in 30 years and be sad about what I could have accomplished rather than eating 23432567 chocolate-covered cinnamon bears. 


Anyway. Along the lines of feeling unfulfilled and knowing that I was the only person wholly responsible for making myself happy, I finally contacted the former chair of the history department at MSU to discuss an idea we'd batted around a few months ago. I've wanted to teach American History, or cultural landscapes or cultural geography or historic preservation or architectural history since... well, the beginning. 


Historic Preservation is inherently an interdisciplinary field, and today I pitched the idea of a seminar for undergraduate students at MSU in Public History. The idea is to use a number of lecturers to discuss how geography, public policy, public administration, history, architecture and landscape architecture come together in the field of historic preservation. To discuss how to understand how a landscape came to be, the laws that might apply, who has a vested interest, and how to interpret or preserve those cultural resources. 


Hopefully students who participate in the course will want to intern for me in the future, thus getting a lot of stuff done for me!


The interim History Department chair was really enthusiastic about the idea. He's going to see how it fits in their course book, and I'm going to create a single page "pitch" that he can shop around in the department and to other departments and students. I'd teach, err coordinate, the seminar in the spring of 2012 as an adjunct faculty member. 


And? Dudes. They'll pay me. Not much, but still. Awesome!