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I had a nightmare the other night that all the marionberries had ripened and been picked already.  I was facing the prospect of actually buying jam ALL YEAR LONG.  It terrified me.

After two days of worry and trying to shake my residual fright, I decided to face my fear.  Even though there wasn’t time in the day at all, I dragged the two youngest kids out to Sauvie Island to see for myself.  (Francis is in bike camp this week).  We picked for an hour or so, but it was obvious that the berries will be in the field for another week or maybe even two.  Ahhh.  Sweet reprieve.  I am going to make it.  Midnight berry picking will not be necessary.  Life is kind sometimes.

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Holy Shit.  Can I say that here?  Tour de Coops was freaking crazy.  Never have I had such an assortment of very nice, very INQUISITIVE people in my own backyard.  How interesting.  How exhausting.

Bright and early on Saturday morning I was up and bustling about trying to get last minute things ready for the tour.  In particular, I wanted to water thoroughly so that the garden and flower beds didn’t look wilted or parched.  I wanted to make sure all the chicken shit was off the lawn.  I wanted to check for any last minute faux pas like dirty water in the coop or chicken feed thrown all over (the chickens do that, not me).  In general I was feeling pretty calm and happy thanks to Espoir and his brother doing all that weeding the day before, Devra making some nice strong coffee, and Brad making a really lovely breakfast of puffed oven pancake.  (It is good that Brad made such a huge breakfast as I never really got lunch that day.)  I felt like my peeps were watching out for me.  What can be better?

Before the hordes started arriving, I took these pictures:

Front of the house from the street

Walking back to the coop by the garden (and kids' lemonade stand)

And the little capitalists taste-testing their product

Where I REALLY thought I would sit all day relaxing during the tour...

The back corner of the yard with the featured coop

So there I was, bright and early, pleased with how things looked and imagining a really relaxing day chatting with a few people about chickens and visiting with my friends.   Within fifteen minutes of the start time for the tour, my yard looked like this:

And that continued all day long.

I am not really complaining.  We were a super popular stop on the tour, even though our house was placed on the map of Portland coops wrong.  (Many people, even Portlanders, put us in north east rather than north.  On the tour map, our house was a star at NE 17th and Skidmore.  Whooops!)  It was fun answering questions and chatting with people.  The tour-goers were some of the nicest folks ever conglomerated in one place.  They also had a lot of questions.  Top ones I remember were:

1. How many chickens do you have?
2. What breed is that one there?
3. What about that one there?
4. Have you had any problems with predators?

Question 2 and 3 made me realize that you should not do this tour if you don’t know exactly what your chickens are.  I only have one mystery chicken, but without fail, everyone wanted to know what she was.  After a while, I just made crap up.  (“She’s a marans-australorpe cross.”) I was a little worried about what Brad was doing when faced with this question.  As much as he loves the chickens, he doesn’t really know what breeds they are.  If he doesn’t know what a chicken is, he calls it a barred rock.  That means we have 7 barred rocks.

The tour wasn’t just a success for the adults around here.  Look closely in the picture above and you will see MOST of the people with lemonade glasses in their hands.  Oh yes, Francis made BANK.  The kids had $35 in their till at the end of the day.  We projected that about 100-150 people came through our yard…just imagine what that number would have been if the map had been correct!

Tour de Coops 2010 è finita!  Woot woot!

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Yup, we’re getting ready around here.  Tomorrow at 11am, 200-500 people descend on us wondering about all the workings of our urban chicken coop.  After a morning of scrubbing, spraying and weeding, I feel pretty much ready for whatever may come.  I feel doubly calm as I hired out the boring work so that I could do the stuff I like: spreading compost, mucking out the coop, and repairing stuff with tools.  I am a great believer in paying people to do things that I don’t have time to do, and as it seems that 75% of the population seems in more desperate straights than I right now, it seems logical that I should give people work rather than making myself miserable and overwhelmed.  I consider Ronald Reagan and his trickle-down economy theory at times like this, but I want to subvert his idea and make it legit by asking, “Who can I overpay to get them to do things that I don’t want to do?”.  My friends Espoir and Barack were more than willing to be hired to pull weeds.  And they did an awesome job.  And, did I mention?  I don’t have to do it!  Ahhhhh!  This is living!

So things look good.  I scrubbed down the coop.  I rinsed it out with bleach and water.  I am going to put a bouquet in there (oh yes I am!).   The garden and surrounding beds are all weeded.  All we need to do is set up Francis’ lemonade stand and let the eager chicken freaks come and gawk.  Can’t wait!

If you are in Portland, tour booklets go on sale at 10am July 24th, in the parking lot at Westminster Presbyterian Church at 1624 NE Hancock.  Read more about Growing Gardens and the good work they do fighting hunger here.

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I went to the informational meeting for the coop hosts for the Tour de Coops and oh-my-holy-Jesus, these people are intense!  I had considered getting the chicken coop all prettied up for the tour, but it hadn’t occurred to me that really these people are gardeners—intense, crazy gardeners.  They are going to care about things like my invasive species and such, and my wilted and dying basil, and my patch that was suppose to be cauliflower but is actually some crazy chrysanthemum that seems to spread wildly all over my yard.  And what with my trip to Ashland next week (poor me!), I only have 9 days to get the entire yard totally whipped into shape and ready to be oooed and ahhhed at.  I’m a bit stressed out about this.

The tour is going to be fun though.  The organizers said that we should expect between 300 and 500 people to come visit our yard.  With that many feet, maybe I should make a path right through the invasive ivy.  They could trample it to death, right?  The previous owners of this house were great believers in plants that spread, so most of my work these days is ripping out, not putting in.  I picked up an invasive weed pamphlet up on the Wildwood trail and saw not one but five weeds that are in residence in my yard (blackberry, ivy, pokeweed, morning glory, and old man’s beard or clematis).  That isn’t even counting spearmint, which perhaps is not invasive but still makes me do battle yearly pushing it back so that I don’t have an entire yard of cocktail garnish.

To be fair, my yard is better every year.  Sometimes it is even pretty.  I’m thinking that if I can pace myself over the next couple weeks I can arrive at something lovely in time for the tour.  I’ll let you know!

2 Comments | In: Chickens Are Super Fabulous, Environment, Projects That I Do With My Clever Little Fingers, urban farming | | #

Okay, so this is Parmeter.net, so maybe it is a bit self-serving to devote a blog entry to this, but I do just need to tell you all about how talented my uncle is (and YOUR uncle is if I have an adequate grasp of the bulk of my readership).  Yes, Rick Parmeter is good at what he does, and as I live in a house that has millions of problems needing to be solved with finesse and cleverness, I am a big fan of a craftsman who can solve them.  He thinks through things in a very interesting way that manages to be thorough and yet fluid, practical and yet still creative.  He is picky with details and yet open to different ways to solve problems.  Here is the reading nook that he created under our stairs in the basement:

Where once there was chaos and cardboard boxes stacked in dusty piles, now there is something pretty…. with storage space!  Victory!  We spend a lot of time here now.

Another Uncle Rick creation is poised and ready to go.  The bathroom isn’t quite done yet, but the cabinets for it sit in the dining room, preparing themselves to launch into their new and long-lived service.  (They have sat in a corner of our dining room for over a year because we weren’t really ready to start the actual remodel.)  Will I miss them from that corner?  Not really.

Next up is the stairs to the basement.  Everything is so nice down there, but the entryway is not.  It hasn’t helped that we knew we would replace them and sort of purposely abused them.  (“Don’t bother putting down that paint drop cloth!”  ”Don’t worry about the stairs!  They can be ripped up!”).  They look really bad next to the daybed nook, but Rick is on it!  Here is a view I will not miss:

Can’t wait to show you what he’ll come up with!

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The coop is looking pretty nice.  The girls (chicken variety) and I are gearing up for a week or so of elementary school visits.  I sent a cute little flier to the teachers at a nearby school advertising our willingness to host students.  I figured that what with being walking distance from school, we were the perfect end-of-the-year field trip.  And chickens are a perfect study in social groups, sustainability, and compost, not to mention how pretty and funny they are.  I can think of  a million art and writing activities for chickens, (FOR kids, I mean, WITH chickens).  So far we have two classes slated to make the visit.  I only wish that it wasn’t so wet and dreary out.  Nothing like a rainy day to bring the gross elements out in a chicken run… I am talking about wet poop sitting in the mud of course.  Oh well.  I will just throw some straw around and hope that covers it a bit.

I didn’t do many art projects this week, but I did finish the board of glory— a ceramic chicken for each hen (and the one rooster) who has passed through our yard.  How many are up there?  11!  All of them have their names stamped on the side and an attempt at depicting their size and coloring.  This is a quickie project, so the results were sort of a mixed bag.  Some glazes were right on and others left something to be desired.  The important thing for me at this point is that I have caught up.  Now if no one dies or we don’t add any new hens, I can relax for awhile.

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Pardon the extended metaphor.  Remodeling is a deep, dark tunnel.  Something good is at the end, but you must pass through far worse possibilities before you arrive.  Finally, I see paint at the end of the tunnel… and it is bright red.

We’re doing the bathroom red… really, really red.  I am hoping that people will open the door and say, “ohhhh, my!”.  Sheetrock and wonderboard went up last week (or down, as the case may be).  This week I ordered tin ceiling tiles (for the wall behind the sink basin) and painting started.  It gives me hope that it will all end eventually.  As flexible as I consider myself, I am sick to death of not having a dining room, and even sicker of not having an art space.  One day of paper mache with Francis in the kitchen had me convinced that food prep space does not care to share with artsy activities, not when the food prep space is already somewhat compromised.  In this department, we are no longer eating at a tiny kid table, but we do have a table tucked in right next to the couch in the living room.  It is right next to the window so you feel like you are constantly at a sidewalk cafe.  Is that cool?  Only sometimes.

Anyway… the other great thing that has nearly wrapped up is the ceiling in the art room.  As you may remember, the leaking floor in the bathroom had rotted out the beams underneath it.  We pulled sheetrock away from the ceiling in that space back when we initially tackled the basement in 2008, but then were not able to address the larger problem because we couldn’t afford to deal with the bathroom up above.  (I just went looking for a photo example of the room and me being who I am, all of the pictures I have taken of the space attempt to cut off the offending hole as well as the stupid duct that hangs down in the room.  If you look really closely though, you can see both the hole and the huge HVAC pipe that cut across the room on the way to the bathroom upstairs.)

August 2008 basement remodel

2010 New and Improved soffit!

Another view of the soffit of my dreams.

I hated that damn pipe, but now that we addressed the bathroom on the main floor, we have also moved the pipe to run along the SIDE of the room rather than smack dab down the middle.  It looks awesome!  Of all the silly things that I am excited about, this soffit takes the cake.  I love my new soffit.

Whoops.  Need to feed the children.  More remodel photos coming!

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We are redoing our bathroom.  This is a project that has been on the books for some time, but is only now becoming a reality.  In some ways it has been funny—one of those things that we became accustomed to telling people we were going to do, but never really did anything to actually start doing.  For example, the cabinets that were intended for that space have been sitting in our dining room for at least a year now.  At some point we started hanging kid art on them and Christmas decorations and sort of stopped seeing them.

I didn’t take any “before” pictures of my bathroom, so you are just going to have to believe me when I say it was sort of gross.  It was a long beige intestine-shaped thing.  When entering it, you had to reach behind the door to turn on the light before making your way down the narrow and skinny hall that dead ended in a toilet.  Dark.  Creepy.  A little stinky.  The tile was cracked, the grout was flaking, the flooring was not straight, the pedestal sink did not match the basin so the whole thing rocked and shifted, the wall paint was mismatched, there was obvious water damage alongside the tub—there were a lot of problems.  Then the toilet backed up onto the floor and we ripped into the wall to find out why, so there was a huge hole in the wall.  It was all so awful, we just ripped it up!

The wall as you enter will have a really gorgeous cabinet unit that Uncle Rick designed.  I can’t wait to show pictures of it.  For right now enjoy this shot of tar paper and plumbing!

What we are doing in the back is sort of hard to describe.  Because the bathroom was sort of long and stupidly narrow, and because the kitchen on the other side of the bathroom is cramped and poorly laid out, we are actually cutting a chunk out of the bathroom in order to give that space back to the kitchen (at a future date).  Yes, this does create a Count of Monte Cristo creepy holed in area in between the two rooms.

What you are looking at here is the framed-in shower area with the hidey-hole behind it.  How’s about that shower?  As you can see, it is gigantic.  I wanted a shower that the whole family could fit in as (at least at this point in our lives), a shower is a group activity.

Anyone who has lived with construction knows that it is a bit disruptive.  Despite the noise and mess, I love it.  It is so exciting to see what happens each day, even when it is subtle stuff like the new vent being moved or a new plug where there was not one before.  And our contractor Graeme is a really pleasant guy to have around and is doing such a nice job.  I get to feel important each day consulting on where to put integral things like shower hooks and water supplies!  There are new faces in and out of the house each day, but I do worry a bit that so many people see that I take a nap midday.  I know that I might look like a lazy person.  It isn’t true though.  I am just doing a lot of work on my inner soul.

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A year or so ago, I admitted that I was actually afraid of glaze.  I had some projects that needed to be finished off, but I couldn’t quite commit to going the distance.  Mostly this was because I wasn’t sure what I would find once I went ahead and glazed them.  I think I have remedied this situation.  I have finally completed a dumb little project that I should have done SOOOOOO long ago.  I finally made sample chips of all my 06 glazes.

What took me so long?  I guess it was that I could not wrap my head around how to make the chip, glaze it, and record exactly what that glaze might be without screwing something up.  I knew I didn’t want to create a code of numbers (too clunky plus I knew I would lose the code), write in pencil (would burn off), or put multiple colors on one large tile (not portable & doesn’t store well).  Finally, I figured out that I could stamp the name of the glaze on the back of the tile.  The tiles hang on nails on a corkboard and can be moved around and held up to works in progress.  Now that is progress.

Speaking of progress, I have a much more workable work area now.  I finished up hanging corkboard and got a big-ish whiteboard to jot notes down.  I needed this when glazing some recent projects.  It will allow me to go back and assess if glazes worked well together.

Anyway, I am pleased with myself.  My first project using my new color chips came out of the kiln today.  You can’t tell here, but this is a BIG ONE!

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My uncle is making a nice new daybed/filing cabinet/reading nook/bookcase for us.  It is spurring all sorts of organization that is badly needed.

My life, okay–my personality–is problematic.  I am very sentimental.  I have a hard time letting time slip away from me, so I cling to all sorts of reminders of the past.  I went to move boxes around and noticed that I had two huge cardboard boxes labelled “memories”.  That seemed like one box too many, so I sat down and attempted to pull things out to recycle right there and then.  That was last month.  I spent most of that work session reading, laughing, and crying, clinging to cards with clever notes from deceased family members, precious reflections from friends during a time in life when WE ACTUALLY SAT DOWN AND WROTE REAL LETTERS TO EACH OTHER.  I couldn’t get rid of anything.  How could I get rid of the letter from a friend coming out to his parents and telling me how surprised he was that they still loved him?  How could I get rid of a letter telling about a friend’s new life in a new country with a new man she loved?  She was shocked to find love.  She was astounded to be learning how to communicate.  How could I toss my sisters’ early stories of the excitement of new relationships, especially when those boys they told me about are now my family?  It is all too precious.  I couldn’t toss any of it.  Finally I decided that I could recycle cards with just a signature (not good enough!), letters from people who I absolutely do not see anymore, and silly things that I wrote that are not immediately, apparently special.

A few things that I realized during this exercise:

• I have more friend than I ever though.   Many many people have loved me (*and hopefully still do!).  I think back on times when I felt lonely or sad in high school, and I am a bit in wonder of how I could have felt this with such a huge outpouring of support from all these friends.  I read back on these letters and see, “Oh, you’re so great!”  ”I love you so much!”  ”You are such a great friend!”, and yet, I don’t remember feeling that way.  I don’t know what my excuse was.  I guess I was a teenager.
• My siblings are so wonderful.  I have three of the most loving, clever, devoted sisters that a girl could have.  Throughout the span of my life, these women have been tied so strongly to me, and in their letters I see how, especially when I was off adventuring, they were continuing to reach out to hold on tightly to our sister-bond.  I have three sisters, so you would think that one could be a dud– but no.  They are all fantastic.  Lucky, lucky, lucky I tell you.
• Woa.  I was popular with the boys!  It makes me laugh at how transparent all these “friendly” letters are now (including the ones from my husband).  Why was I so dumb?!  Opportunities missed, I tell you!  Actually, I was very fortunate to have good male friends all the way through high school and into college.  These are charming, smart boys.  Their letters make me smile and hope that Zephyr can one day be somewhat like them.
• Thank you aunts and uncles who cared about me.  I have letters and cards spanning 20 years from aunts and uncles just showing that they were interested in my life.  That is important to get this sort of support outside of your own parents.  I hope to be a good aunt and god mother too.
• And yes, my parents were/are excellent.

Okay, now to ponder: do  you keep letters you “earned” (for drama & band!) even if you don’t have a letterman sweater to put them on?

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