Plants + Zombies vs People

The Pirate and I have been playing the video game "Plants vs Zombies" lately. So much so that I finally declared a one-week moratorium on the game, just so that we could catch up with sleep and chores and regain our children's affections.

But yesterday, during Day Without Electricity, I felt like I was back at it again - fighting a neverending battle wherein every time I thought I was getting ahead, something else popped up to thwart me.

Let me back up.

In Plants vs Zombies, you have a lawn that's a grid of available spaces, and a selection of plants to put into those spaces. Some plants shoot projectiles. Some are big and hard to destroy. Some blow up. It's up to you to decide, given the array of zombies you'll be faced with in any given round, which plants to deploy.

Out by our chicken coop, we've got blackberries. They were there when we moved in, just a few struggling canes coming up from near the creek. We were enchanted at first. We didn't have the chicken coop yet, and we had a 20-foot expanse between our house and the blackberries that they could take over. Even the next year when we were building the coop they hadn't come far enough up the creek bank to be annoying.

But now, they're not only choking the path to the chicken yard and overrunning the trees on the creek bank, they've become infested with raccoons. Raccoons are, in my mind, like zombies. They come out at night and relentlessly attack your household, worming their way in any way they can. I have no doubt that if you held still long enough, a raccoon would, in fact, eat your brain. The blackberries are also infested with rats, but rats aren't quite as threatening as raccoons. First of all, one good whack with a shovel and you can dispatch a rat. Do that to a raccoon and there's a good chance that you're going to be grappling for control of the shovel. Second, raccoons don't have the decency to act afraid of you. Surprise a raccoon and they'll reluctantly get out of your way, giving you a bad look on their way out. The Pirate has even tried shooting one with our paintball gun, which is enough to scare off a good-sized dog, and he got no response.

So yesterday, I'm out there in the heat wearing long pants, boots, and long sleeves, wielding both a small saw and pruning shears, cutting the blackberry canes a few feet at a time and loading them into the wheelbarrows. They're fighting back with their enormous thorns, and they've got the Undead Blackberries thrown into the fight. Undead Blackberries are canes where part of the cane has shriveled and died, making the thorns less flexible and more prone to punch through your thick leather gloves. The thick leather gloves are hard to punch through, but anything that does is firmly held in place against your skin. Everything's a tradeoff.

And the whole time, I'm expecting to be surprised by one of the little zombies, coming out of a hole as it realizes that I'm defoliating its hiding spot. Which of my badass weapons do I use to defeat it? My pruning shears? I can perhaps reach in and cut off its tiny sharp poison-saliva bearing teeth one at a time? Or maybe I can use my little folding branch saw to...very slowly saw off its head or one of its limbs provided it cooperates and sits very still until I'm done.

I'd love to declare a moratorium on this game too, but somehow, I don't think that'll go over well with the Pirate. So, it's back to the game for me!

Paradise Had No Plugs

It's been a stressful week for me. There were some pretty big events at my office, and I had a couple of pretty long days. I have to say that by the end of the week, I was completely ready for a vacation. The last day of school for the kids was Thursday, so their vacation officially started Friday morning.

The Pirate and I carpooled on Friday, so we stopped off and did a little shopping, then got home and turned off the power. Burritos ensued, and then one of the most satisfying nights of work I've had in a long time.

Wednesday, I bought a ~1930 Royal typewriter. I got it for a song because it hadn't yet been cleaned or reconditioned. The amazing John Dolphin of Santa Cruz Business Machines showed me how to clean the mechanics of an ancient typewriter, warning me about the fact that people who didn't know what they were doing would lubricate the machines with things like sewing machine oil. The sewing machine oil just attracts dust and dirt, gumming up the works. He said that the right thing to do was to take a thin piece of metal and just jiggle it around in the crevices where the keys come up to strike the paper, then shoot it with compressed air.

Butter knives were too wide to fit into the crevices, plastic might break in the crevice and be impossible to get out. I tried a thick tapestry needle, but it ended up being slightly too thick. This is where the embarrassing packrat tendencies of the Co-Prosperity Sphere play into our favor. We had an old tape measure that was stuck. 33 inches (not even a full yard) of tape stuck out and would neither pull out more nor go back in. And yet, we couldn't bring ourselves to throw it out.

The Pirate took tin snips and cut a 1/2 inch thick, 4-inch long strip off it. I then took the tin snips and cut one corner off, making a sharp end. It worked perfectly, dislodging some of the dust and oil that had gotten itself in there over the years. The next step is seeing exactly what we need to wire this manual keyboard to an electronic one. More as things develop!

Saturday was equally productive. Yard work by the ton, shopping, and haircuts. But mostly, emotional and mental relaxation. Once again, the electricity goes off, and all of my tension and stress magically melt away. The lack of buzz and hum mean that there's nothing tugging at the edges of my awareness. I just thought of something. My father-in-law has Parkinson's, and has been steadily losing weight for some time. He says that when your muscles are contracting constantly 24/7, it burns a lot of calories. I think the same thing can be said when something in your environment is buzzing or humming 24/7. There's always some part of your attention caught by that noise, and I think that the more you fracture your attention, the more stress you have.

It's Saturday night, and I feel like I've been on vacation for a week!

This week's tip: if you do choose to turn your electricity off, and you remember to put plastic bags of water into your freezer, then transfer them to your fridge - use the heavy-duty freezer bags. We're 4/4 for thin freezer bag failure, and bailing out your fridge isn't fun.

My Bad-Ass BIAJ

If there's one thing you can count on, it's that the gang at the Co-Prosperity Sphere is always spinning off ideas. No matter the economy, the climate, whether these ideas make our butts look big, we're throwing off ideas like a Van de Graaff generator throws off static!

While we're still working on other things, a certain mania has hit the CPS. Brain mania. This is the project I mentioned in the last post, and although I first had the idea several months ago, the wheels are finally turning.

The Inception
Many years ago, someone gave me one of those little toys that you put into water and it expands to many times its original size. This one was a tongue. It was made out of some substance whose surface was squidgy and slightly pebbled, like a real tongue. The jar I had put it in to reconstitute it was none too clean, and over the years of sitting on my desk, the water in the jar eventually turned the color of weak tea, or very strong formaldehyde. People asked me all the time if it was real. I was laid off from that job shortly before Christmas, and as a parting shot, I got one of my friends to enter the tongue in a jar into the company's annual white elephant exchange. I happened to be conferring with HR while the company party was going on, and even from across the building, I could tell exactly when my present was opened.

Over the years, I've mentioned the concept of a brain in a jar to several people, and one reaction has captured my attention: the sight of my friends recoiling in horror at the very thought of a disembodied brain in a jar. Mostly, they can't articulate why the thought upsets them, but it's clear that the entire thing touches some primal fear center. I want to know more about why the thought of a brain in a jar upsets people.

The Catalyst
Although I'd noodled the different components of the whole, I hadn't given the entire thing much serious thought because there are pivotal portions of it that are beyond my technical reach. It wasn't until the Maker Faire this year that the Pirate looked around at all the creative energy and caught fire. It went from yet another silly idea that the wife spun up to something that we're actively moving on.

The Brain in a Jar
The idea is this: a brain in a jar of some sort of preserving liquid. From the brain, wires and electrodes emerge, winding into a sort of umbilicus that disappears into a wooden box. The brain's only organic sensory input is a single eye, attached by its optic nerve directly to the brain.

The wires from the brain lead into a hand-worked wooden box, which also has leads to a keyboard and a microphone. The wooden box has as one side a display that shows three things: one portion of the screen shows what the eye sees. One portion shows an oscilloscope showing the noise being received from the microphone. The largest portion of the screen shows a chat program where people will be able to interact directly with the brain.

The Process
The addition of the Pirate to the team meant that the programming and computer hardware portions of the project suddenly got much easier. And we were utterly inspired by the fabulous project documentation from the Pirate's friend Steve Chamberlin's project Big Mess o' Wires, so we've been keeping some pretty intensive documentation of our process, which makes the Pirate very happy.

So far, it's been a lot of just deciding what the functionality is going to be. Does the brain float? Should it talk? What style do we want for the overall thing? As we make decisions, the whole thing becomes something near and dear to our hearts: a series of skills to be learned and problems to be solved. At the end of each solved problem, we are left with a tangible piece of a whole that will eventually be MADE OF AWESOME.

Stay tuned. We'll let you know how it's going

An Evening in the Sphere

The Pirate and I headed over to the Maker Faire last weekend, and had our brains recharged and inspired. I bought a pair of sunglasses from the very talented and self-effacing Stuart Breidenstein and the Pirate and I walked out with a Minty Boost kit and a few other odds and ends. The biggest thing we walked out with was the desire to restart the brain-in-a-jar project, of which you'll be hearing more in future.

So, in the spirit of "let's make some stuff," the Pirate and I spent our Wednesday night making some stuff. The Pirate got out our soldering iron and third hand (no one should be without a third hand) and put together the Minty Boost. Meanwhile, I dragged a bunch of oils up from the soapmaking stash in the basement and made a big batch of body butter using my favorite fragrance, the Gap's long-discontinued Om. I now have five old Body Shop shea butter containers filled with my creation. It's a lot different in texture (I used 60% shea, 20% palm and 20% coconut oils), but goes on wonderfully, is very moisturizing and smells amazing. Next time, though, I'm thinking castor oil. It'll give the finished product a little better spreadability without making it more greasy.

At the end of the evening, we hadn't caught up on any reality tv. We hadn't watched another installment of someone else doing things we'll never do. Instead of sitting by, passively consuming, we were creating stuff. To me, that's always the best evening in the world.

Feliz Cinco de Beltaine!

Today, we ended up at a party at a friend's house. She said in her email that, in honor of the combined Celtic/Latino heritage of more than one of the attendees, she wanted to have a sort of Cinco de Mayo/Beltaine party. A Cinco de Beltaine party, if you will.

The Pirate and I decided to extend the theme to the dinner and make our contribution a vegan haggis mole.

The Pirate described haggis to me as a sheep covered in oats and turned inside out. So...how does that translate to something not only vegan but also something that would go well with mole?

Or original thought was that we would use wheat gluten, which comes in big sheets, and wrap different flavors and textures of tofu in it, along with some oats. For the tofu and wheat gluten, we headed to 99 Ranch Market and got some nice baked tofu and some fried puffed tofu. We couldn't find any wheat gluten sheets, but instead we found bean curd sheets that looked even better.

I looked at rolled oats, and just couldn't imagine that it would work. I thought instead of steel-cut oats, but once we got to Whole Foods, I thought that I'd go all the way - GROATS.

I wanted to test-drive cooking the groats, so I made them for breakfast. I put a cup of groats into three cups of water and let them soak overnight, then lit the fire under them and let them go. It took them the better part of three quarters of an hour to fully cook. I put a handful of giant raisins in, and let them stew along with the groats. The result was not the glutinous mess of porridge, but a bowl of delicious, nutty separate grains with a little pop to them. It was substantial and fabulous.

I had put the groats for the haggis in to soak as well, and decided to stew them with onions and garlic. Just at the end, the Pirate put a little oregano in and it was delicious Then I cut the tofu into manageable pieces and mixed it into the groat and onion stew. I laid out the sheets of bean curd and scooped the tofu mixture into them, then rolled them up and tied off the ends - VOILA! Vegan haggis.

For the mole, we just used Doña Maria's Mole and doctored it a little with some pomegranate molasses. Once the haggises were rolled up and tied off, we covered them in mole and baked them until it was all hot, but upon reflection, I think that the next time, we should try boiling them. In the oven, the bean curd skin got a little tough and was hard to cut. But the filling was just delish! And it mole went GREAT with the whole thing.

And all that on two burners and with no electricity. YAY!

The Best Laid Plans

Yesterday's day without electricity was a day of getting stuff done. The Pirate had vowed to have plants in the ground by end of day yesterday, and true to his word, he's got kale, chard, lettuce, beans, and something that ends in "choy" that isn't bok choy.

The new garden is in the old chicken yard and therefore already protected from deer, and when he put the raised beds in, he lined each one with hardware cloth (heavy-duty screen) so that the rats can't burrow in. The new garden is a mere 6 feet or so from Cistern Joseph-Ann, and the plan is to use all that rainwater we harvested during the rainy season to water our plants now when the rain isn't so frequent.

We're not sure how long 1100 gallons of water will last us, but if we are wise about our usage (water early in the day so less evaporates, water directly into the ground near the plants and not on the leaves) we can make it last a little longer. Depending on how long it lasts, we may end up investing in a second cistern (and I'm voting to name this one after my aunt the nun, Cistern Rosa). Considering that it took us all of 3 days of good hard rainfall to fill up a single cistern, filling two every season is well within expectations.

Speaking of gardening, I've been cooking up a plan. I've mentioned before that I'm alarmed at the number of my friends and neighbors who are out of work and therefore leaving town. I'm sure even more would love to leave town, but even moving costs money and they just can't afford it.

The first inkling of my plan came when the Pirate and I saw all the vacant land near us and thought "wouldn't it be cool if we could get people farming that vacant land?" But there are some steep barriers to entry, the first of which is that being on someone else's property is trespassing and you can be arrested.

The second inkling of my plan came when I realized that there's a lot of space to be had here. Most people live in houses on large lots, so for most people I know, room to garden isn't an issue. What's an issue is both the know-how and the materials. Here came my second idea. I've approached the owner of a local farm & feed store about giving me a discount on gardening stuff - potting soil, seedlings, etc., that can then be donated. Without hesitation, he said yes. Further details have yet to be worked out, but the first step has been taken - I have a supplier. YAY! Now I just have to get with the local charity organization, Valley Churches United Missions, to get help finding the folks who need the donations.

But not all of the day went as well. My chore was to prepare a part of our yard (a word which here means "area in front of our house," not in any formal sense of the word) for the spreading of wood chips. I finished scraping the rest of the vegetation off it, I burned off the more recalcitrant stuff, I raked, I did a small burn of the stuff I raked off. The hardest part was that I had to dig down and find the cover of the septic tank and build a box to go over it so that in future, we don't have to go digging around for it.

I dug and dug and dug until I uncovered a wooden cover that the Pirate said was put over the actual metal cover. I measured carefully and constructed a lovely redwood box to put over it - 26" x 13". And then we started digging for the metal cover, which was another 2" further down under more soil, and was actually 26" x 26". I was a little annoyed, but at the end of the day, the box I built will solve our problem - that of not knowing where the cover is and not being able to get at it readily. Sure, the next time we have the septic system pumped, we'll have to do a little digging, but at this point it's very little and we won't be accidentally digging two feet to the left because we don't remember accurately where the stupid thing is.

So, it's a fail, but not a total fail. The important thing, as always, is that we got this stuff done. It's on the list of "achieved," rather than on the list of "someday."

And, to reward ourselves, I made a nice pasta salad and the Pirate made some gazpacho. Mmmmmm...gazpacho.

Guerilla Gardening

I've been having some subversive thoughts. And when I say "subversive," I mean "cool, but could get you arrested."

I'd kind of like to go back to school. I'd like to study economics because I really, really would like to solve the problem of keeping small, insulated communities like the one I live in safe from large economic fluctuations. Right now, families are moving out of the area taking their incomes and spending habits with them. Every family that moves out means that money is being taken away from our locally-owned grocery store that employs 20+ people, away from the four restaurants in town, away from our locally-owned pet store, barber shop, coffee place and gas station. Essentially, everyone who moves away takes money away from their neighbors.

I'm trying to figure out how to fix that. Given what I have (not a whole lot) and what I can do (considerably more), what can I do? And then I started thinking about all those parcels of land nearby that have been sitting vacant because housing purchases have fallen off. There are whole organizations in places like Detroit that are taking foreclosed homes and matching them up with homeless families who are willing to move in despite the possible legal repercussions.

What I want to do is a little less invasive. Instead of moving into empty houses, I'd just like to be able to cultivate a little empty land. I was thinking about how great it would be to get folks who are still here and out of work to get some garden plots going on vacant land, and then set up a small-scale farmer's market where they could take their surplus produce and sell or swap it.

I think that idea could work not just in lean times like these, but in good times too. Imagine if people who are currently day laborers or temporarily unemployed could work at a cooperative community garden where they could grow food for themselves and their own families, and have the chance by their own labor to earn a little money.

One of the problems that owners of vacant land face in these parts is that pot farmers are likely to come in and cultivate unoccupied land. If the pot farm is found, the landowner is liable for the consequences. If we got permission from the property owners, legal food gardening could discourage illegal pot farming because the land would have people coming and going constantly.

I think it could work, but I also don't think that I know enough to make it happen. It would be cool, though. I just have to do a little digging, ask a few questions, talk to some folks.