Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Better be silent...

After a week and a half of hard freezes here in Florida there's not much to report except that my kitchen has been inhabited by 25 pepper plant, two citrus trees, and an assortment of herbs and is feeling awfully crowded! We had planned on harvesting some pie pumpkins in January (a little late for holidays, but who says pumpkin pie is just for Thanksgiving?) but those were wiped out, along with the slow growing corn. After a sustained drought slowed germination this early cold was a double blow.

The good news is that there will be more time to let the garden go fallow and to amend the soil. We'll also be able to let the chickens weed the area and process their pickings into fertilizer :>)

Now a rant...

I often wonder if the seemingly un-opinionated moderates I know are simply following the old adage "Better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and prove it."

In my view an unspoken opinion is about as valuable as no opinion at all. If you (you know who you are) have an opinion you would be wise to speak it. Any woman worth marrying will value your opinion and will ask for it on occasion. You must be able to speak it honestly and forthrightly. She will not want your advice, just your opinion, there is a difference. Learn it.

If you have no opinion it is far better to say "I have no opinion" than to either give the illusion of agreement or an air of foolishness.

If you stay silent for fear of upsetting my sensibilities I must correct you. I have no sensibilities. You should have figured this out quite quickly upon meeting me. I am convicted enough in my opinions to take no offense to you having yours. If they contradict mine, it is simply because you are wrong.

If you stay silent for fear of your own temper you should consider your temper an enemy. It is either covering for an opinion held without conviction or it is hiding an overdeveloped sense of self. Firm up your convictions; if this does not quiet your temper, consider lowering yourself down to the level of us mere mortals.

Opinions about sports or other diversionary recreations are trivial. They do not contribute to building the character of your children or their children or the structure of society. If these are the only opinions you have or are willing to share you ought to re-prioritize your life.

Just a few observations, not meant to startle anyone's sensibilities.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Chicken Math

I feel like I'm about to break some sort of sacred blog rule by posting an entry immediately following my husband's; but hey, I'm a newbie when it comes to the whole blog thing so I'm sure everyone can forgive me. 

I love math. If there was any sort of future for math majors besides teaching or.... I don't know what, I might have gone to college for math. But, even with my love of math, there was one mathematical principle that was unknown to me until just recently: Chicken Math. That wonderful exponential equation where a person starts out with say 1 to 6 chickens and then quite quickly ends up with enough to warrant fencing in more of their property. It seems like life in general is under the same equation that relates to Chicken Math. You start out with one, small idea and quicker than you realize it expands and begins to take over your whole life. This can be good or bad. I pray that in my case it's a good thing.

My small idea began with bread. After casually trying to read the list of ingredients in our generic white bread and realizing I couldn't, easily anyway, that got me to thinking. How much of the stuff in this bread is necessary? How much of it is to make sure it'll stay fresh for a month or to add back all the good vitamins and minerals that where bleached out while making it? Do I really need to be eating this stuff? And what about my kids? What would eating this stuff do to my kids? I'd been eating it my whole life and look at me! ; ) So I began looking into making bread. What was so difficult and mysterious about this process that no one I knew did it? Want some biscuits? Ether grab a box of Bisquick or, easier still, just pop open a terrifying container of already made buttery biscuits and put them in the oven! : D I expected to find that it involved some hard to find or expensive ingredient, or that it involved an expensive piece of equipment to accomplish; but it didn't. All I needed was to mix flour, yeast, sugar, milk and butter in the appropriate amounts and I got dough! Now it did involve a little time, roughly an hour of actual labor and several of inactivity, but over all it was pretty easy. So why is it that more people don't bake their own bread? Why is it so many people live their whole lives without knowing how wonderful it is to sink your hands into warm dough and knead it to a perfect soft smooth consistency. It's one of the most therapeutic experiences imaginable. Can they honestly not care? Are they really content to go to the store and purchase bread with no clue where the ingredients it contains came from? Do they not think about the fact that that bread has probably never been touched by human hands? Do they ever wonder how their great grandparents and their parents before them got bread? I honestly don't know. I hope that they think about those things and more as they contemplate the choices they make when they shop for the food that is going to feed their families. That they remember, everything they put in or on their bodies is taken in and used to build them. We are made from the food we eat. Our bodies break down our food and use it to rebuild cells that need repair and to make new ones that have died. When my daughter was born she had never tasted food. She was made, 100%, from the food choices I made while pregnant. We joke that when our children were born they were made from Wendy's, but what does that say about us? Wouldn't it be better to say that when our children were born they were made from fruits and vegetables that we'd grown in our yard? That the proteins in their bodies came from the chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows that we had carefully raised on our pastures then processed with our own hands? I think it would. 

And there goes that Chicken Math. You start out with bread and you end up with your entire view on food and what it is flipped upside down. One small and surprisingly simple thing making you re-think your entire way of life. With the Lord's strength and guidance I pray that it won't simply end with thinking. 

Only by the Lord's mercy and grace,

Nicole

A Beginning: Somewhere in the middle

After reading the blogs of several others who share our passions for an self-reliant, agrarian, Spirit-filled life we felt it was high time to put our journey into a blog.

I'm Jon, just shy of 26, and I'm married to my high school love, Nicole, who's not too much younger. We've been blessed with three beautiful daughters, L 4, B 2, and K 6 weeks. While they take up most of our time we hope to occasionally find time to post on here.

I developed a love for the outdoors in my days in Scouts. During those days I dreamed of being a chef and owning a restaurant. My love for the outdoors was not considered "profitable" so it was placed in the "hobbies" category of my life. I started college fully intent on a degree in business management.  Once I discovered the short-sightedness of my classmates and after taking dendrology as an elective (who does that?) Providence, and prodding from Nicole, led me to a new career path in forestry. Land management combined my love of the outdoors with my desire to control my surroundings. That and I was making an impact on the world that lasts far longer than the next quarter.

Upon graduation, I, the young idealist, went to work for state government in a state 4 states to the south of my roots. The outdoors became my office, I was at the bottom of the totem pole, and all that mattered was pushing out next year's timber sales. So much for long term thinking and being my own boss. Pine plantations were a foreign outdoors to me, so my love was replaced with a semi-apathy.

Youthful ambition can lead to a dangerous disappointment when reality replaces its idealism. In my shock I settled down into the normal American lifestyle. I was already married, with one child, and a career, so I took the next plunge and bought a house. We took on a mortgage with gusto (and a little help from the government), a car payment, and a few credit card debts. We ate hamburger helper, store-baked bread, and far more fast-food than any small country could handle. I went to my job, 8-5, Monday to Friday. After work, there was four hours with the now two children and one very frazzled wife, some tv, a bit of internet, bed, and repeat. Thus was our modern American life.

Now, about 80% of that is still true. I still have my mortgage, my car payment, my credit card debt; I still spend the vast majority of my time away from my family, and we still eat far more fast-food than we should. But something changed in the last year or so. A desire to avoid the materialist debt trap of my fellow countrymen developed. The desire to be my own employer reared its head again. A new idealism took form in my mind.

Back in college I invited my wife on a class tour that would have far more of an effect on me than I ever imagined. My Forest Operations class routinely visited logging sites to teach us about the various methods of logging. This time is was horse-logging. I figured she like horses, so why not invite her. The impact was not known then, but this tour would plant a seed that would only germinate after several seasons of scarification. I plotted in my head the path to a horse-logger career: I would graduate and while she finished up her last year of school I would take the apprenticeship and learn the trade, then we would face the great unknown, hand-in-hand. God had other ideas.

Two weeks after the tour she woke me up with the news that we were expecting our first child.

My mind quickly changed gears, I would not go the unknown route, I would take the safe route. I would do the standard "get a degree, get a career, buy a house, settle for security" route. Only after two years of taking this route would I realize the liberty I had sacrificed. I was now tied to a house, tied to my debts, fully reliant on others for my subsistence, and at the whim of any financial disaster brought about by the embrace of Keynesian economics.

The dream to be a horse-logger came back to life, and along with it a desire to do for ourselves all that we are able. We started cooking from scratch, planted a garden, bought chickens, read more about off-grid living than anyone should, and a variety of other things. There are still debts to be paid, skills to be learned, character to be developed, and tons of logistics to figure. Thus, we are somewhere in the middle of our transformation from suburbanite consumer to rural producer.

This is our story of the rest of that journey, if God wills it.