whatever

i don't really have much to say, but i shoul wrtie sinc i haven't in some time. everything's great here at the homestead, summer vegetables like summer squash, peas, tomatoes, basil, and cucumbers have started rolling their way into the kitchen. ther ehave been really hot days this week, and one day we didn't wor in the afernoon and went to cool off by swimming in the coquille reservoir which is short walk rom the homestead.

It's my 26th birthday, and we're going to have a picni at the reservoir and then go into town for bowling and maybe kareoke too.

Another fine week at the homestead

Let's see, on my cook day this week I made a potato salad with three different kinds of potatoes including purple ones, and i mean purple on the inside too, with chives and dill and veganaise. and a stir fry with kohlrahbi, beet greens, stinging nettles, new zealand spinach, beets, walla walla onions. Everything from the garden. Plus a couple of cherry cobblers that were delicious. i also hosted a barbeque at the homestead with bbq venison over a fire pit and my papa's potatoes and onions, carrot cake(again, delicious) and watermelon. and for the entertainment, me on guitar. everybody had a real good time.

Rant

Sometimes it's best to just let the thoughts roll out onto the keyboard. maybe it's easier for some people on paper, but the keyboards better for me.

things have been really good for me lately. i've been putting a lot more energy and enthusiasm into my work and also even after work doing different things, like the cherry picking, cooking and baking, preserving, jerky making, music playing, whatever. this week, we're gonna have a bbq/entertainment night where everybody plays instruments or whatever, that'll be fun.

i'm still planning on leaving in august for the ashland/ williams area south east of here. though in the last two weeks i've thought of staying on longer a bunch of times. maybe it's because the people change here all the time that discourages me, or maybe it's that i know there's more out there to see and learn from. that and there's as much democracy here as there could or should be. the owner really calls the shots, though for the most part he's good about lettung us decide most things together. i'm looking for really democratic communities, that share the land or have the land divided up, so there's private and communal spaces.

I have more faith in myself than I used to, regarding being able to live a happy, healthy life. Though I still am torn between looking for a place to settle down now, or travel some more. I would like to go to australia and new zealand though i'd need a bit more cash for that. I really do need to find some paind work and make a thousand dollars or more. I don't know what to do about that. There's harvest work around and i think i'll look into that now.

food!!!!!!!!!

the food here just keeps getting better and better. Potatoes are coming out now, and we had an awesome potato sald, and mashed potatoes with 3 different kinds of taters, including purple potatoes. On monday, a bunch of homesteaders heading home saw a roadkill deer on the highway and stopped. they found that it was still really warm, a fresh kill, and brought it back to the homestead. I got back from picking cherries in town( there's a whole cemetary full of 100 year old cherry trees) and came home to find a dead deer on the ground with a bunch of kids standing around it, clueless as to what to do with it. we consulted a few books, and proceeded to skin and gut it. it was quite an experience, one that a number of us guys at the homestead had been talking about wanting to be part of, so we were really excited and nervous at the same time.

after two hours we were done, and we went to sleep, woke up early in the morning and started to cut up the meat into steaks and jerky sized strips. when it was over we had over 30 pounds of venison steaks and jerky, and a whole bucket of stock bones which i used to make 2 gallons of venison stock, which is now in the freezer along with most of the meat. that night, we three butchers went out into the woods, had a bonfire, and stuck a whole side of ribs on the fire, slathered in a barbeque sauce i made. before eating the meat, we talked about the animal, and how thankful we were for it and how we hope it's in a better place, how we hoped it lived a happy healthy life,(which it probably did), how by being a part of the process of getting the meat on to our plates felt so right, compared to the way most people in our culture get their meat.

It was the most deliscous meat i ever had! well maybe not, but it was amazing and tasted great. we've already made some jerky in a food dehydrator which came out good too.

we're really in cherry mode here at the homestead, bringing 20 gallons of cherries back with us everytime we go picking. Most goes to jam, some to cherry pies and cobblers.

even though it's the middle of july there are still tons of oyster mushrooms in the woods. and the gardens are filled with kohlrabi, onions, chard, kale, spinach, lettuces, there are at least six different edible flowers. I may be roughing it, living in the woods and all, but the diet is not rough.

FOOD!!!!!!

I love food. wow that was really easy to write but doesn't begin to describe how i feel about food. my diet has been awesome lately. roadkill venison, stinging nettle omelettes, cherry pies( in which the cherries were picked that day). there are cherry trees all over this town and nobody picks them so we do. anyway, good eating.

After my birthday august 1st, i'll be headed to ashland which is a town right over the oregon border from california. from there I'll be exploring that region for work and other opportunities.

oh, and i'll be headed to israel for a month or so some time in october. yay!! i'll get to see my friends and family. it's already been long enough.

ahhhh coquile, oregon!!!

what a week? kept working on the foundation of the maintainance shop, it's real good experience in dry stack foundation building, but man, is it back breaking! We finally filled the hot tub with water, which is now, the bamboo forest sanctuary,Inaugurated it with thoughts of what the homestead will be like in ten ears, twenty years, and musci. My music, anaka's music on her ukelele. My music, disney classics, among other things. Today is the summer solstice, longest day of the year, when light turns to dark. here in oregon, it's funny thinking that winter's just around the corner, when it seems like it just left, but that's the way things go here.

i'M LOOKING INTO DIFFERENT OPTIONS IN THE ASHLAND-MEDFORD GRANTS PASS AREA OF SOUTHWEST OREGON. I'VE GOT THE ITCH TO BUY SOME LAND, A LITTLE PIECE OF EARTH TO CALL MY OWN, AND I THINK THAT SOUTHWEST OREGON IS THE PLACE FOR ME. SO i MIGHT FIND A PLACE TO LIVE FOR A WHILE DOWN THERE, WHILE I'M LOOKING FOR LAND. I HOPE TO VISIT MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY IN ISRAE IN A FEW MONTHS, AND I'M REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT. OTHER THAN THAT, I'M GOOD. SO PEACE

Street Painting, Cat Palace, Aquaponics, and Naked Bike Ride

So I went up to Portland with soem of the people from Mountain Home to tak epart in the Village Building Convergence, this 10 day event trying to make the city more community oriented, blah blah blah. it's really cool, neighborhoods paint their intersections every year, build public spaces out of cob and other natural or recycled materials, plant gardens, that sort of stuff.

So yesterday we helped paint a street mural, that was fun getting messy, and we saw a cat palace being built, basically a tower that cats can go into and play around in with an aquarium and solar powered led string lights, very fancy. the guys property by the way was awesome, with lots of cob structures,exterior walls of the house, guest house, some other stuff.

we saw a guys aquaponics set up. thats where you grow fish and plants together. the waste pf the fish is food for the plants. It was pretty cool, cause it's probably one of the best ways to get fish, other than having ponds or just plain going fishing.

we had dinner and a salsa dancing lesson at the vbc headquarters, and then it was off to the center of town to witness the Naked Bike Ride, held annually all over the world, thousands of nude, semi nude, or weirdly dressed people riding their bikes through town, with police escort to boot. It was wild, and liberating. I kind of want to do it myself at some point. And to come back to the VBC next year, we only caught the tail end of it and there were lots of free or low cost workshops that i missed out on. One mre day in portland and than bakc to the homestead.