Every time I buy airline tickets, the trip seems remote and easy to prepare for. Until the day before departure…so I’m running around trying to square away the dangling bits of a million little projects before heading to NY tomorrow. Decided to harvest some tobacco and try curing it in the shed, to cut my losses in case the plants freeze and die while I’m gone. It seems that tobacco is easy to grow in large quantities, but the processing requires significant infrastructure, knowledge, and patience. So I’ve got tobacco curing… …on a string and a prayer: Ideally it should turn yellowish on the live plant before harvesting, but that’s also supposed to happen before frost, which could (probably won’t) happen this week. The top of the deep-freeze doubling as tobacco processing table: In other news…I took the excellent motorcycle training course offered by Team Oregon, a three day intensive with tests at the end of the third day. I now have a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license, a fancy new helmet and gloves, and an ancient (naturally) motorcycle. It’s a ’73 Suzuki TS185, a two-stroke (the ones that go “ding-da-da-dading-dading-ding-ding”), dual sport (street legal, but reasonably capable off-road) model. It starts on one kick and runs great, is frighteningly fast, and I’ve collected most of the needed parts to get it in proper shape. Another weekend in the shed and I’ll have it legal and register it: …and now, off to NYC and the Catskills for a week. If you know me (and who else would be reading this?) and you’re in the area this week, call my cell and let’s arrange to make pints disappear.

* Perhaps more accurately called “the hours-long lightening of the grayness”

We’ve been talking about brewing our own beer and wine for some time, and we finally started! About a month ago, I got a basic brewing kit from The Home Fermenter Center in Eugene, with equipment and supplies to make a 5-gallon batch of beer. Not long after that, I had a great Craigslist score – Six 5-gallon carboys (big glass jugs) with airlocks, some wine bottles, another giant plastic bucket for mixing and such, and some other odds and ends. The kit came with ingredients to make pale ale – cans of malt, a packet of yeast, and a vacuum-packed mesh bag of hops. The day we had planned to start the project was the day we found out about Babycat’s demise, so this first batch will be called Babycat Brew in her honor. The basic process is pretty simple, though like all good hobbies there is no end of gadgets, techniques, and options available to the obsessive. You basically boil the malt in a few quarts of water, drop in some hops, transfer it to your fermenter and top off with water, cool it, add yeast, and leave it sitting with an airlock on top (a device that allows fermentation gases to escape while blocking potentially contaminated outside air from entering). For a week and a half, one of the background sounds of our life was the “glorp” of CO2 escaping from the fermenter. When that’s done, it’s beer (or something else nameless and foul, if sanitizing procedures weren’t followed!). The glorping was done several days ago, meaning that the substance in the bucket is now beer! (or possibly some hideous slime creature). After an hour or two of preparation (cleaning bottles and equipment), we siphoned the beer from the fermenter into another bucket, taking care not to transfer the layer of spent yeast at the bottom. We added a bit of sugar and stirred – this gives the yeast something to work with after bottling, which carbonates the beer. Right now, it’s rather tasty (YAY!) but completely flat. More siphoning, this time into bottles, which Teri capped and placed into old 6 pack holders. Now we give it a week more of warm temperature so the yeast can make bubbles in the bottles, then cool and enjoy! The whole process is very satisfying, and even using the ultra-convenient “kit”, the cost is less than half of what we pay buying 6-packs of local craft beers. Not satisfied with just beer, I’ve also started a small batch of blackberry wine, made from our own berries. Here you can see the bubbles rising to the top of the jug as it ferments: I ‘racked’ it just a few days ago – siphoned it carefully into another container, leaving spent yeast at the bottom – and had a taste. Not great yet, but clearly on its way to becoming wine. The difficult part is that it’ll need another 6 months to a year to mature. Tomorrow, I’m off to New York to visit family and friends and deal with some of our stuff, which languishes in a too-expensive self storage space because a 3000 mile Uhaul trip is too-too-too-too expensive. When I return, I look forward to enjoying some Babycat Brew with Teri!

I remember days in Brooklyn when I’d turn on the tap and think: swimming pool. The chlorine was abundant, and didn’t blend evenly. Yuck. Now that we’re out in the mountains, we’re drinking well water, but the level of sulfur in it is just amazing. The iron and other minerals I can take – they remind me of childhood in Wisconsin – but where NYC water made me think of swimming pools, the water here often brings visions of rotten eggs. Not very appetizing. We limped along with a small Brita filter, but it really didn’t have the capacity we needed. I researched gravity-fed filters for a long time before deciding on the Berkey Light (pictured to the left). It was a bit of an investment, but the filters last a long time ( you can scrub particulate off the outside of them and keep going long after you’ve tossed your Brita filters ) and are some of the most effective available. I definitely recommend the Berkey filters, but if I had it to do over again I’d build my own system around them. Nothing wrong with what they sell, it’s just a lot of money for a simple arrangement of two buckets with a few holes and a spout, something I could have made myself for a fraction of what they charge.

I can’t add much to Teri’s beautiful memorial post, but I couldn’t skip posting on this topic altogether. Oh Babycat. We knew when we decided to let her be an inside/outside cat that there was a risk, but even though her time of freedom was so brief neither of us regret the decision. She changed as soon as she started spending more time outdoors. We often noticed how much happier and more relaxed she seemed. Before, she was always nervous, annoyed, and twitchy. She had the spirit to not trade too much of her freedom for petty conveniences and false security. We could use more people like that. Goodbye Babycat; you’re in our hearts and you’re becoming part of our land now, and we’re grateful for all the ways our lives have woven together.

Our Babycat, our princess, our little panther didn’t come home last night. A neighbor found her body this morning. We buried her on the property, in a little grove of trees, and made a headstone out of rocks we gathered from the river. We made an offering of mead to the earth, burned some sage to help her on her way, and planted some catnip. This is her tribute. Go in peace little spirit.

Or rather, they were in our yard until Ceili decided to chase them. Then they were in our trees. There were 6 altogether, but after they scattered and flew we could only see this mama and her baby in a tree near our house. Closer shots of mama… …and of junior: And here’s Babycat, out for her morning stalk. She’s a much happier kitty since we got her a collar and ID tag, and started letting her outside during the day.