A Whole Different Physics

When I started the truck to come in to work this morning it read -28C. The truck was angry, but since I've learned about battery blankets (which are a distinctly different thing than engine heaters) it started up quickly but with a bunch of weird noises that dissipated as it warmed.

The temperature on the front of my fridge was 20.3C. My fridge backs onto an internal wall, and faces the sink, a window, and the little under-sink ground-level electric blower that is so lovely on the toes when doing dishes. The thermostat for that under-sink heater is set into an outer wall, the same wall my plumbing is in, and it's turned to 5C. It was on when I came downstairs. I imagine the actual point of measurement for it is somewhere inside the wall. The 20.3C measurement and the <5C measurement were roughly eight feet away from each other.

Downstairs, in the woodstove room, it was 22.4C. There's a dog door in that room, lined and insulated but still pretty draughty, and the wall with the tap to outside is opened up around that tap to keep it from freezing, and the laundry room at the end of the hall has some air leaks. So I count that as pretty good.

I am evolving some plans to block air leaks, one light-switch-insulation or chimney-surround-panel at a time.

The floors are cold from 5-6" from the outer walls as the cold radiates along the floor beams and in through the concrete.

Outside things are... strange.

Open water smokes and steams. Everyone's morning water dishes looked like cauldrons of dry ice; the ducks all gathered around and stuck their heads in and looked vaguely sinister. A goose jumped into the water and sat there preening and I guess out there it was as much of a hot tub as it looked.

The pink sun slanted up over a river on a high simmer, steam rising and streaming away. On the lake even the fresh ice was smoking. Outside the office, in the sheltered little bay, there was 4" of perfectly clear, perfectly smooth ice. People are going to bring their ice skates.

All the water dishes were frozen, and not just frozen but bonded to the rubber. To empty them I need to smash the sides down on the hard ground, pop them upside down, and then stomp on the dome the water formed as it froze and expanded. It's some cardiovascular work for sure!

Everything that's supposed to bend mostly doesn't. I have one deep-winter extension cord which works well; that one goes to my fox light. The other cords: truck heater extension cord, phone audio jack and charger in the truck, even the seal on the shipping container are all stiff as frozen molasses and feel fragile. This is the weather where rubbermaid bins crack when you look at them sideways. Eggs burst and freeze with their clear insides hard as a rock so they never really leak out.

I used to think of freezing as a binary thing: ice is solid or it's not. I didn't realize it could be solid like the shell on an m&m or solid like steel and those were such different things. At this temperature even the airborne water is solid; it floats past in little glitters that I used to think were fanciful Christmas decoration but now understand are a very real thing. At this temperature water expands precipitously, bursting all containers it can't sufficiently bend.

Energy movement is very apparent. A little bit of wind strips heat away and gives physical sensation to the concept of convection. Clothing that protects from the air seems to melt away at the touch of a steering wheel, leaving me so grateful I have some specific conduction-resistant fabric for gloves. Stand in front of a south wall in the sun and there is the clearest, most loving feeling of warmth from the sun and my body understands how different radiation is from those other forms of heat transfer. I remember learning these in school, in physics, but now they live in my body.

So many technologies keep us alive in this. Without shelter, without clothing, I wouldn't last long. In many ways outside is so deadly and will be for months. I don't feel rejected by the land, though. I'm being shown wonders, and I'm being held by timbers and fire and the faint warm radiance of the sun, cradled in the same way I cradle my animals in straw and four walls, all of us curled up around our warm beating hearts until spring.

First Meme

This is the first time I'm doing a meme on here. amazon_syren asked me five questions; if you would like me to ask you five questions comment below. If you would like to just chat but would not like to be asked questions, also comment below. Ha.

1) Based on this year's harvest, are you wanted to try any new varieties of corn next year? Or planning to cross-breed any varieties you've already grown?

The first year, the test year, was about figuring out my foundations and what was realistic, but also about doing my first crosses. Realistically, corn grown anywhere on my property will cross with corn anywhere else on my property if it pollinates at the right time, so many of my saved seeds will be crossed. Specifically I'm interested in most of the crosses I did with my best-performing varieties, gaspe and Saskatchewan Rainbow. There are definitely varieties I'd like to get my hands on, and I am hoping to get a wildly mixed set of seeds to keep a slow drip of genes coming into the projects.

So: new varieties, the landrace grex from my group. Crosses: gaspe x montana morado, gaspe x a little bit of everything, saskatchewan rainbow x a little bit of everything, morden x a little bit of everything, morden x either magic manna and/or painted mountain (to make an earlier flour mix), gaspe x cascade ruby gold, gaspe x atomic orange, and a three-way saskatchewan rainbow x atomic orange x montana morado.

2) How do you sew stretchy knits for waist-bands? Do you use a serger or is there a trick to it? (I've never managed to do well on stretchy fabrics, so I'm looking for tips and tricks, if you've got them).

I'm a waist-band minimalist in a lot of ways. I don't have a serger, and I also wear long enough tops that my waistbands are covered. Last iteration of sewing, I just took elastic that I thought was pretty and that was wide enough, gave it a good stretch before I sewed it to break it in, cut off a piece that sat around my waist comfortably, and sewed it into a ring. I put that ring, pretty side out, on the outside top of my pants waist and did two strips of zigzag stitch to hold it in place, on along the top edge of both the elastic and the pants, and the other through the bottom edge of the elastic and also through the pants. It's held up.

For knit long underwear and outer pants I'm planning to do yoga waistbands with a different fabric than the main pants this year, basically a folded and slightly shaped band 3-4" wide in a stretchy and more snugly-cut fabric than the rest of the pants that replaces the top couple inches of whatever was going to be going on there. But basically the trick to not popping the thread is to use a zigzag or lightning stitch for the initial seam (my machine has a really nice zigzag stitch for this) and if you want reinforcement do a zigzag or decorative stretch stitch over the seam in a visible way, that also captures the raw edges somehow ("overstitch").

For the arenite pants they do an elastic casing, will report back.

3) Pigs: How are they?

Oh my, this is a lot.

Pigs are an amazing survival tool. American colonization happened on the backs of pigs, dropped off in river bottoms on the coast and left for years to multiply. They foraged their own food and in turn became a very low-difficulty, high-calorie supply for the invading armies/colonists. They also were an amazing weapon in a land with no fences, rooting up and destroying indigenous plantations. So ecologically on my farm pigs are calorie batteries, calorie recyclers, and disturbance agents. They're great for turning and piece of land into a garden: happy to dig up stumps, turn over sod, eat down many annual weeds, all the while fertilizing as they go. I have to be careful because I do not always want disturbance on my farm, but they let me make great use of so many things I couldn't otherwise make useful. My breed is also fatty and furry and well-insulated, they're fantastic in the cold and it's easy to put together a shelter for them, it doesn't have to be fancy, though as living crowbars they'll tear it right down again so I'm glad they're easy to put up. They'd do better on a bigger farm where I wanted more disturbance more often, or maybe I just have too many pigs.

On a more social level they're great at driving home social relativity. Pigs and humans have a very different sense of personal space: pigs communicate through touch both with their super sensitive noses and through just shoving each other. I've had to learn to speak the shoving language and get comfortable with that. It would take a lot of cruelty to get them to not touch me at all, though by shoving back hard and fast they treat me as a fairly high-ranking pig and therefore don't throw me out of the way as they do the young piglets. They are curious, friendly, and they show when they're cared for well by frolicking and playing. Really they love playing, and any tarp that strays into the enclosure turns into a tug-o-war game. Like any varied population they have individual personalities; some get particularly attached to me (can be annoying, they follow me around and squeal) and some keep their distance. Mamas are happy for me to watch them birth, for the most part. Except for the noise they make, which really does set off my sensitivities sometimes (think continuous loud rusty gate when they're excited), they have excellent temperaments to partner with humans as long as the human is willing to go halfway and speak their language of physical touch.

So pigs are good ecologically, great socially, and good for getting me outside a human-only perspective.

4) What is a favourite Traditional Food Of Your People? Why do you love it, and how do you make it your own?

This is a hard one! I don't really have a people. Maybe I should start with a story about my mom's mom. She lived in a small town in Iowa and had a ton of kids but she was still what my mom describes as adventurous with food. For instance, as early as the 50s she experimented with chow mein: canned bean sprouts, canned mushrooms, spaghetti noodles. It made an impression on my mom and I grew up with my mom as, honestly, not always the best cook but always adventurous: together we made feijouada and wonton soup and sticky rice in lotus leaves and a million things I don't remember, stepping our way through recipes in, among other things, a time-life "cooking of the world" series. She utility-cooked the standard midwestern noodles + tomatoes + ground beef type foods, and we ate a lot of rice, and she did a lot of 90s-era stir-fries, but I'd say the thing that got passed down on that side of the family was primarily a sense of play and adventure. Anything I wanted to make with reasonable indgredients, I was supported in that. So pretty much all my cooking now, from charcuterie to whatever I'm going to do with the duck fat on my counter when I get home to the duck-tonkatso-miso-with-spaetzle I'll probably have for dinner tonight builds on that legacy of play.

However. I memorized my grandma's pancake recipe and have been making it since I was 7. I eat the pancakes off a plate with my fingers, sometimes spreading with jam or dipping in syrup.

My grandma-in-law is jewish and I picked up a love for kugel and for a pseudo-matzo cream-of-wheat-and-egg dumpling in lipton's dried chicken soup packets from her. I make those straight up these days, no spin needed.

Mom always used to make muffins on the weekend for us. They were chocolate chip muffins; sometimes she made a particular coffee cake. Those feel like love to me, though I make pandan muffins with hemp seeds rather than chocolate chip half the time now. I still make that coffee cake.

And I still do the midwestern brown-some-hamburger (pork nowadays, or goose confit), add a can of tomatoes, some pasta, and some garlic powder and cook a minute thing that is probably the biggest Food Of My People, when I'm feeling up to it.

5) Favourite book(s) of 2022?

The new Hardy Apples book by Robert Osborne is probably the only thing I read cover to cover this year. I really, really enjoyed the Noma cookbook though. No fiction this year, and I think Braiding Sweetgrass was last year? Very little book-form reading, I'm afraid.

Sometimes food just happens

I was in the office today; one day a week when I'm in the office I allow myself the treat of eating out, though there is really only subway in town (and two pizza places, and a chinese place or two, but they're not work-lunch-shaped). I went into the grocery store for a ready-made lunch there instead, and while I was there I saw both the buns I like that they've been out of for a couple months, and a very very very marked down very expensive steak. I got both of those.

When I got home I heated up my cast iron, even though I wasn't hungry, because I wanted to cook the steak immediately. The nearest fat to hand was duck fat from roasting that duck yesterday so I blobbed a bunch into the hot pan, tossed in the steak, and flipped it a couple times. I'd forgotten how lovely a brown crust duck fat makes on things. When the steak came out I had some broccoli ready to go in. I tossed it in with some Maggi like you do, but hesitated; there was such a lovely fond in the pan and I 1) didn't want to scrub the pan and 2) didn't want to waste the flavour. So I rooted around in the fridge and found the last of a bit of expired-but-still-ok whipping cream and poured that in too. By the time the cream had boiled down to a thick sauce the broccoli was cooked the way I wanted it. I sliced the steak, put it into a medium-small mixing bowl, poured the broccoli on top of it, tucked a couple buns in, and came downstairs to eat. Instead I guess I'm writing?

Stir Crazy

It's cold.

Thea has reverted from dignified guardian to six-month-old pup. Every time she sees me outside she races in circles, chases her tail, gallops in circles around Avallu and grabs his tail.

Hazard has taken up mat-wrestling, wherein he runs down the hallway, jumps on the mat and skids it across the floor, then rolls over, hugs it, bites it, and kicks it with his back claws until the threads shred.

Demon is still Demon, though he occasionally approaches Whiskey not just to snuggle but to playfight.

Whiskey wants to be ON ME unless he's fighting with Demon or runnning up and down the stairs. ON ME.

Avallu has taken up life outdoors. I'm not sure where he sleeps; sometimes it's in the old goose run on the side of the carport. He comes to visit me from time to time and do the lean-snuggle against my leg. He no longer follows me everywhere.