Lessons in Light

It all started out with a simple lesson in light, variable shutter speeds, painting with light, and camera movement. With their 4-H friends, they started with a lesson in panning - moving the camera to catch the action with just the right shutter speed, but with a blurred background. Then they moved on to painting with light - illuminating a car, then a tree, with the only flashlights we could find that evening.



Then the 4-H kids headed home, but the Best girls were still into it. Night owls that they are (not hard to do when it gets dark at 4:30), they took off with the project, playing with shutter speed, blur and light inside before dressing up to head outside where they developed a story in ghostly images. Can you make it out?

Getting Out and About - Beach Rides, 4-H, Community Service, and Road Trips

While we spent a lot of time on the farm this year, it seemed like we spent even more time driving to and from town for a variety of activities from 4-H happenings to ballet rehearsals. We had a lot of fun this past summer with Cuesta College for Kids for both girls, dance camp in Santa Barbara for E which equated to a Santa Barbara vacation for V and me, beach rides with friends, volunteering at La Purisima Mission State Historic Park, a trip to Los Angeles to visit grandparents, a weekend trip to Nevada to camp with Grandpa to camp with a Utah cousin, and a weeklong trip in the fall to visit the Utah cousins in earnest. With animals to tend to, it's tougher to take long trips. Though Mr. B generally chooses to stay home, it seems a bit unfair to have him doing all the heavy lifting if we hit the road, so we try to stick around.

The girls did really well with 4-H last year. They attended loads of presentation events, including this SLO County Field Day.

We didn't know what to expect, but since the girls were showing their photos, posters and sewing projects, and it was touted as a mini-fair, we invited the grandparents along. It was nice to have them there - the girls feel extra special when their grandparents come to their events - and it was a cute mini-fair-like event, but since there were no horse events (our girls' only 4-H animal), their presentations were pretty static, and all quickly ran out of things to do. V found the milking station, and we all enjoyed a picnic BBQ.

A week later, the girls went to State Field Day, for which E had qualified with both her presentation and her sewing project. There, V enjoyed her first chess match, and we were thoroughly befuddled with the 4-H shuffle. E got to show off her 1913 bathing costume and earned a state gold medal for her presentation, but our lack of event knowledge led us to miss a lot of the available activities. It's all a learning curve, isn't it?

In other 2013 lessons, the cousin campout in Nevada taught us that there ARE rivers in the desert. We met up with Utah cousins to camp near Fort Churchill State Historic Park, a halfway point between their Utah home and ours. We spent most of our time on the river, soaking or floating or throwing rocks. The float down was fun, but the heat was brutal so the hike up, even in ankle deep water, was a bit tough.

The Carson River on which the campground rests is a short walk from the actual camping sites, and we found the best seating was with our chairs in the water under the shade of the trees growing from the far bank. It seems to be a seasonal drainage; we watched its flow drop day after day during our visit.

The costumed docents were on hand at the neighboring state park, so the girls got their hands into music making and quilting while cousin Jim checked out the weaponry and Grandpa Randy eyed the canon. It was a good spot, but one better visited much earlier in the spring.

In other news: V's dire need for a rabbit, which she bought with money she earned taking and selling photos this year, led us to learn that not handling rabbits regularly leads to feral, mean little bunnies who actually growl and bite and carry on...until you flip them over. V named him Stevie. Mr. B and I created an enclosure, caged on the bottom from digging predators and on the top to keep out raptors, at the top of the big garden where we put Stevie's house. He seemed to like free run to graze, but turned out to be pretty danged territorial.



We established that it's a full day's ride from Morro Rock to Cambria and back again if you take time to enjoy fish tacos or fish and chips on the beach before heading back. We found an almost ideal parking spot for Maddie, but think they should add a trough and perhaps a bale of hay there at the Cambria store. While the girls were exploring Cuesta College for Kids classes, Aleta joined me for a ride on the beach, a bucket list item, before she headed off for a year in Germany.

We found out that water wars are just as popular at the Templeton July 4th Parade as they were 15 years ago when I last took part with this group in this fun-filled, family-friendly event:

That Barnum Bailey's Circus is just as amazing as I remembered it from my childhood:

Volunteering with La Purisima remains one of the girls' favorite activities:

Bountiful Living

This second season in the garden I got a pretty good feeling for just how slow the learning curve is in raising outdoor gardens. Sure, I had a little garden in town, but the forest interface, extreme heat and winter freezes bring us to an entirely different degree of difficulty.

Last year, we learned that drip irrigation is the only way to go, and I installed what we could afford. This year, thanks to a Christmas shopping trip to the farm supply store with Grandma Lynn, I was able to provide drip irrigation to more than half of the garden. Another friend had loads of drip tubing laying around that had been donated to her garden. With her spare previously used hose, and another couple of trips to the farm supply store for additional links and fittings, I was able to finish the task.

I also learned that using green (aka "hot" or "fresh") horse manure is certainly nutrient-rich for the garden, but it also brings LOTS and LOTS of fresh weed seed. Clearing out the garden for planting this year was a bear! Keeping up with it was impossible, but when the time came to really get on the ball, a friend loaned me her cute little, one-foot-wide rototiller. I was super thankful, but eight-tilling-hours into the task I took a look around and determined I'd need another 30 hours of straight tilling at that rate. Instead, I took a half hour to drive into town, a half hour to rent the biggest walk-behind tiller available, half an hour to drive home and two hours to complete the garden tilling job. Another hour round-trip to return the tiller and the job was done, and time was freed up to do some freelance work that would help pay not only for the tiller rental, but also for the seed, electricity to pump water for and tools for more garden work.

We had great success with volunteer cherry tomatos as well as our zucchini, crooked-neck squash, watermelon (two varieties), pumpkin (two small pie varieties), Anaheim chilis (in the second planting) and basil. Our beans were a bit tough, the bell peppers didn't set fruit until very late in the season and with thin walls, and our various full-size heirloom tomatoes were sparse. The chickens got into the garden and ate all the corn, squash and bean starts in the lower garden, and it was too late in the season, at that point, to start again. (I built a new gate to help fend them off for next year.)

I had a great time harvesting, canning and freezing the harvest this summer and fall. The girls are tending away from the garden, the kitchen, pretty much anything that might look like work these days. It was a bit lonely in the canning kitchen, but I hope they come back to it in their futures. While it might be seen as a chore, it's still playtime in my mind.

Meanwhile, our hens gave enough eggs constantly this past laying season to share with another family regularly and now and again with a local baker who prefers eggs from pastured hens. Our hens were joined in September by "Roo," a gift of rooster who could no longer stay in his Utah backyard. (It seems the city thinks crowing might not be the best thing for maintaining a neighborly community.) We think he's a bantam Plymouth Barred Rock since he fits the description, but is outweighed by our PBR hens easily two to one. He fit right in with the girls, and has also begun warming up to the half dozen Australorps we picked up this fall after half our flock disappeared in a single afternoon. (Lots of feathers left around the garden, so we don't figure those girls just walked off.)