You Can't Go Home Again

My Grandpa retired this month. He was a chicken farmer. He came to the US in the 70's after a long and I'm told, successful stint of chicken farming in Taiwan. My Grandpa is in his early 80's and his retirement and the resultant closing of the chicken farm has left me pensive.

I grew up on my Grandpa's chicken farm. In fact, all of my siblings and cousins did. My Grandma would watch us while our parents were at work. When school started, we'd catch the bus at home and then take a different bus to the chicken farm when school ended. Every weekend, the entire family (my Grandparents, their children, spouses, and grandchildren) would get together and have dinner together. My world revolved around that place for a long time.

We played up and down the chicken farm. It was a pretty huge place. There were fields surrounding it, usually fallow, that we wandered. There were huge piles of sawdust the we climbed and rolled down. There were pallet jacks and we rode up and down the hallways. You had to be a little careful there too. There was a bunch of machinery to process the eggs, rat poison to deal with rodents, which I ingested as a child thinking it was candy (my mom had a minor freak out), and I'm told that coyotes prowled the fields after dark (again because of the rodents). You get the idea though, lots of memories.

These days, my good memories consisted of getting free eggs. They were not the best eggs, but they were pretty good, and they were free. The part of me that exists in the here and now laments that we don't get free eggs anymore. The part of me that exists in those memories laments that the farm is gone.

The good comes with the bad too. I think it's important to tell things how they are sometimes. My Grandpa's chicken farm was not the picturesque image of a farm. It would be what you could call an industrial-modeled farm. The chickens were housed in two giant chicken coups that stretched for a quarter-mile (ish). The chickens were kept in cages and probably never saw the light of day. When you opened the door to a coup, you were blasted by a wave of hot, smelly air that literally stopped you in your tracks. If you made it inside, you were greeted by the sound of thousands of chickens clucking in simultaneous cacophony. Several times, animal rights activists came and freed the chickens. I think they were eaten by coyotes after they got out.

The chickens produced so much manure, that neighbors worried about it contaminating the ground-water supply. We tried selling the manure off as plant fertilizer, but it never could match the amount of raw waste the chickens would make. Eventually, we erected huge roofs to go over the piles of manure so that when it rained, the water would not travel through the manure and on to the local groundwater. I imagine that thousands of years from now, after the ice caps melt and the sea level has risen, those piles of manure will be some of the last free holds of land and they'll be like the Galapagos Islands of Washington state.

Despite all of the short comings of the farm, I have only fond memories of it. I will definitely miss the old place. I spoke to my dad and he has a different feeling, mostly that of relief. He and his siblings were the ones that actually had to "deal with" the chicken farm with my Grandpa. Admittedly, if I had to be the one to sort out some of that crazy stuff, I would be relieved for it to be all over too. Like the title of the post says, you can't go home again.

For the love of Pinterest

I tried to stay away from Pinterest. Really, I did. I knew it would just be another site that would encourage me to spend countless hours staring at a screen. But it's just so darn full of interesting ideas. And pretty clothes. And tasty food.

Yeah, I've been sucked in.

One of the earliest ideas I found there were these coasters. Aaron and I have been searching for coasters for quite a while (in the meantime, we haven't used any. How uncivilized!) and I knew instantly that these were right up our alley. But, like many of the projects we get excited by, we threw it on the to-do list and promptly forgot about it.

Until today. The nice thing about Pinterest is that it makes it harder for me to forget all the exciting ideas that I find, since I log in pretty much every day and they're sitting there staring me in the face. (Sadly, it also reminds me of all the clothes I can't buy. C'est la vie.) We had some free time this morning, so we headed off to the store and picked up a cheap copy of Scrabble.

Then came the tricky part. It's actually semi-difficult to come up with 4-5 nicely themed coasters using all four letter words and only the tiles in one scrabble set. We cheated and a couple of the coasters have three letter words followed by a blank tile.

Once we were content with our chosen vocabulary, we broke out the wood glue and had at it. So far, we haven't backed ours with cork like the ones on the site. We're still considering whether we want/need to do that. Which meant that we had to glue ours together by connecting the tiles themselves.

I have to say, Scrabble tiles may have a quality control problem. It's easy enough to ignore that they're slightly differently sized and not quite square when playing with them on a gameboard. It's entirely different when you're trying to form an even 4x4 tile object out of 16 of them. Looking back at the original site, I guess I can see why they chose to place them on cork instead, and we may still do something similar to make sure they don't break. We'll see. For now, they just have little gaps in them. It gives them character. (Right? Imperfection is always character building.) And they're a little quirky. Just like us.

Backyard Rehabilitation

Our backyard has been in pretty sad shape since we moved in. The soil is primarily clay and when we do manage to dig through sections, we discover all kinds of fun left to us from the previous owner of this property. (Our house is a new development of several houses on a patch of land that used to be just one home with a giant yard). I'm pretty sure that our yard must have been home to some sort of garage or shop where somebody worked on machines and cars. We've found random screws and nails, rusted out hinges, random scraps of cloth, and even an oil filter buried back there. There's still a tarp that's fairly deep stuck in the ground near the back. Helo's having a grand time attempting to uncover it.

Little by little, we're trying to reclaim the space and make it both usable and healthy again. Grass has been a struggle for us in a few areas of the yard both because of a lack of sunshine and a dig-happy puppy, so we're contemplating some new approaches this year. Our hope is that by late summer we'll be well on our way.

This is what we're starting from:

This is the side of our house. The large hole is courtesy of Helo.

Side of the back. Our currently dormant veggie garden, some Helo landscaping, and lots of branches thanks to recent stormy days. Our herbs are also hanging out back here until it gets warmer and we can move them to the front where there's more sun.

The middle of the back. A little more of Helo's handiwork, and some struggling grass.

The other side of the back. There used to be a Peony in the back corner, but it wasn't super happy and I guess Helo didn't want it to suffer.

Clearly, we have our work cut out for us. The first project we have in mind is building a small storage space under our deck (not pictured) for our gardening supplies, reminiscent of this one. After that, we're considering creating a small patio space in the area that Helo most loves to dig, since it's super difficult to get grass to grow there anyway. Beyond that, we're not entirely sure yet, but ideas are flowing and we'd love to hear yours!

Make it work! - House edition

There will probably be a lot of posts with this title over the course of the blog. I think that it has become the new motto for my life. I don't think that there's a day that goes by where I don't have to "make it work!" I've gotten so used to it that it's kind of fun now, although there are still times where it can be stressful.

Chrissie and I got a lot of practice at this when we were searching for our house. Our house is a bit different from the place we had in mind when we first started "the process." Originally, we wanted lots of space, an open floor plan, big kitchen, big yard, lots of character, good construction, close to the city, quiet neighborhood. When we went to go look for houses matching this criteria, we discovered that the house we wanted did not exist. Well, I should say it didn't exist in our price range.

This forced us to condense the list a bit and it took us a while to figure out which things we really needed and which things we could do without. During our search we saw just about every possible combination of our original list of features. When we finally found our house, our decision to buy it could be summed up by the phrase, "We love that it comes x, y, and z already and are totally willing to work on the rest over time."

Making it work! is a blessing in disguise in several ways. First, all the effort we spend working on the house puts our own personal stamp on it. The payoff is that the place feels a little more homey every day. Also, it has helped me accept "pretty darn good" as a suitable substitute for "perfect," because, "pretty darn good" is, well, pretty darn good. Last, it forces me to look at life through the lense of what I have instead of what I don't, which is ultimately much more managable.

Hopefully, one day the list of "made it happen!" will be longer than the list of "make it work!" That won't be for a while though. We're really good about getting things done, but there's always a new project catching our eye. Which I think is fun.