A couple of pictures of MUSHROOMS from the property I live on

Lakeside, Oregon

I live in Lakeside!
Here are some of the things I've been working on.

I started these seeds for our garden. So far there is only spinach, radishes, and snap peas and potatoes. I am already hungry! Matao will be building raised beds. The neat thing about the Oregon coast is the fact that you can plant and grow certain crops all year long. Frost only comes a couple times during the winter and we will be building the beds with the plastic sheeting that goes on green houses. This will protect all of our crops through the winter. We also planted herbs. We have Rosemary, four varieties of Thyme, Sage, African Basil, Pineapple Mint, and Lemon Balm.


On the craft side of things, I watched a video tutorial and learned how to make bows. I am tired of all the ribbon I have though, so if you feel inclined to send me more ribbon, go right ahead. :)

Harvesting Chamomile

We had a bunch of volunteer chamomile in our garden this year. That means that it just happened to grow there without us planting it! Today, since the flowers have started to dry, I ripped it all out by the roots then picked off all the flowers. It took forever but smelled amazing. I made tea with the leaves because they're good to make tea with while they're fresh, while the flowers will last a lot longer.
PIX OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN
I used old pantyhose as a giant tea bag for a large batch of tea. Hurzakkkk

Tragedy!

Josh is out of town. Here are the updates I have been giving him on facebook:

Animal update: Squash's scratching instincts just kicked in. She spent an hour trying to scratch the hay in the water dish. I thought she was trying to drown herself.
Wednesday at 12:36am

Animal update: It rained last night so I put the plastic sheet on the chicken coop. I must have accidentaly not noticed the door was open to the coop? 4 AM Dagny woke we up. We chased the fox off the property. He got them both. This morning, trail of feathers. River of tears.
Wednesday at 8:28am

Animal Update: Potato- new chick showed slight signs of lethargy this morning. Seems to be doing fine now. Wouldn't be surprised if we lost her though. Chicks are outside with heating lamp and happy. They have lots of room to run around. Just scrubbed Willow's cage down with vinegar/water, reaffixed her roof, and chang...ed bedding. She is the happiest rabbit. Brushed Baron. He was a grump. I need to handle him more. Dagny misses you terribly.
Thursday at 3:42pm

Animal update: Potato is still really weird but eating and drinking fine. Seems.... retarded. Today was hot. I turned off the heating lamp because they seemed hot but it's back on now because it's night. The bunnies seemed hot too. I wonder if we can figure out how to make them not so hot all summer. Maybe we can make ...big blocks of ice for them during the hottest part of the day. Even willow was hot inside the house. She slept soundly most of the day on her side. I thought she was dead but she wasn't. Dagny has a blister on her paw from running alongside my bike. That fucking dog is FAST. You'll have to bring your bike up asap. She is tired and slept all day. I am trying to bring her everywhere because no one is here to love her when I'm gone. So that's all of them!
Today at 10:47pm


Also here are some projects I want to do
1. Terrarium in a light-bulb
2. Potatoes in a bucket

Congraduation

Now what are you going to do with your life?

We graduated! We're adults! In other news, we got 3 more chicks! Their names are Mango, Squash, and Pineapple aka Glen Peck II. Sean Hennity is most assuredly a rooster though we are going to wait until he crows. We decided it will be his death crow. :( Many people are against his inevitable murder including Kelsey and my little sister Hannah who have both found Rooster sanctuaries. But hello, I want to eat some chicken. Have you ever seen an animal that just gives and gives its whole life? They keep your lawn nice, the bugs down, they warn you of danger, they give you delicious eggs and even when they die you can eat them. My vegetarianism goes far but this is where it stops. I want some lightly friend Sean Hennity on some spinach with honey mustard dressing :x

Does that make me a bad person? No, because I raised the god damn chicken and I may be the one to kill him. And you know what. That's the way it's been for a really long time, people raising their meat. And it doesn't mean I'm a bad person for eating my pet. It makes me a much better person than someone who eats chicken nuggets at McDonalds. Hrmph. (I want that chicken spinach salad)

Enough about my blood lust. Josh is gone to Hawaii and so all the animals are depending on me. The angoras have been matting a little because no one has been brushing them. Bear looks so bald I never feel the need to until I find a mat on his face or something. I took Willow to lay in bed with me for a little today, that poor floppy eared useless rabbit, and she snuggled for a little while then nipped me hard. I was like HEY and she nipped me again. So I put her in her cage and she went pee right away. That's a good rabbit!

That's all for now.

Nicole

Pic Post!!!!!

Post-Graduate Education

I just signed up for an online course called "Technology in Agriculture" for the summer.

Real life larnin here I come.

This morning I opened the chicken coop to say good morning and they were in such good spirits! They practically leaped out to greet me. Hello chickchicks! They ran around the yard while I said good morning to The Baron who will decidedly be an outdoor rabbit. The house is smelling too much as it is with the two girl rabbits inside. The Baron was very happy this morning too. He hopped around his pen in circles. Hello Baron! Then, Dagny saw Frank, the squirrel. She chased him up the tree and he yelled at her for a while. Frank and I had a talk about the chickens which are deeply unsettling to Frank the squirrel. He clucked about them at me for a while and then I left some nuts out for him. Willow and Madam Zozimoff were a little peeved because I left the light in the back room on all night but I turned it off so maybe they could get a little nap in this morning.

I love animals!

Picture Post

Speaking of those Joyous Animals, here they are:

The Animals

As of today I have three rabbits, two chickens, and a dog.
"How do you have time to take care of them all?" Someone asked me.
I found the question perplexing. Like how do you have time to brush your teeth or water your plants? It's not a matter of time or dedication.

Today was one of the happiest days in my life.
I woke up and I could tell it was going to be a very warm day. I did my little rounds, checking on the rabbits and chickens, filling their water and food dishes. I made Dagny watch over the chickens while I got ready and did some homework.

It's not even as though I had to wake up super early. I woke up around 8 or 9 but the thing is I love waking up early. I love taking care of animals. I love having a reason to take care of them! I know this is what I not want, but NEED to do with my life and I'm happy to get started.

Our Two Hens

PCPeep found her second worm today. I've never seen a chicken display such joy. I am worried because PCPeep is almost twice as large as Sean Hennity but they both seem very healthy. I harvested my new angora, Madam Zozimoff's hair for the first time today. She didn't like it too much but I think we'll get into a better groove once we get to know each other better and exactly what means "ow" and what means "I'm bored." I am probably too rough with her. It's just hard because she is so silent. Her protests are sometimes over trifles but they would be similar if they were for death! I must learn to read the animals better. I wish we had a camera to record these wonderful creatures. Soon there will be pictures.

On Eating Meat

I've been conscientious about my meat consumption for about 4 years now. For two years I rarely ate meat then for the next two I only ate fish. Recently, I gave up fish as well. I've been pondering the viability and ethical nature of raising animals for consumption. I am human, I do believe meat is delicious. My reluctance to consume meat comes from a few different places:
1. Environmental Factors
2. Animal Ethics/ Valuing lives (looking into my dog's eyes and hating humans = a shifting idea of equality)
3. Health (antibiotics in meat, fat consumption, etc)

I could go into all of these things but I won't. I assume any reader sympathetic with this blog should be intelligent enough to understand someone's reasons for not eating meat in an industrial setting.

And so if I can control most of these factors- growing my meat and loving it before consuming it- could I eat meat?
Could I eat rabbits I grew in a cage? Could I break a turkey's neck for a delicious turkey and avocado sandwich? For a couple weeks I thought I could. But we just added a new rabbit. And we have two chickens and I love those little fuckers. And they all have the most hilarious personalities. Could I take a life for a meal?

I don't think so. I really don't think I could feel any more justified doing that than I could by taking a human life. It's more socially acceptable, obviously, to take a non-human animal's life for consumption. I don't know!

Maybe I'll remain a vegetarian for life. Would that be so bad?

I have a pretty prestigious internship doing exactly what my college education has prepared me to do. It is something I worked hard to obtain and something I am very close to losing because of my brain.
Panic attacks, agoraphobia, anxiety, what ever you want to call it hits me before I even wake up on Tuesdays when I am scheduled to go in. It starts with a sort of sleep paralysis. The alarm goes off and I fall back asleep- frozen in fear. I dare not move a single muscle until the alarm goes off again. When I finally do wake up I am wide eyed. I cannot breathe. I cannot move. I berate myself, encourage myself, distract myself but nothing works. It's a sort of complicated ritual actually. If I see the clock change from the time I am supposed to be getting ready to the time I am supposed to leave to the time I am supposed to have arrived I feel worse. Usually I cannot see the time change because it is so horrible. Often I sleep through it. Today was so bad I nearly threw up on myself, afraid I wouldn't be able to even move enough to not throw up in my bed.
I cannot get out of bed. I cannot leave my house. If someone held my hand and led me outside I think most days that would work. Today I would have fought someone if they had tried to make me. I probably would have cried and punched and threw up. That didn't happen but it sort of did in my brain. I do not want to feel like a tantruming child. I do not want to feel like I do not deserve the things I have worked so hard for.

In bed today, while I was fighting this horrible battle with myself, I found myself thinking about my inadequacies. If I live on a farm and have animals depending on me for their food and lives would I have too much anxiety to tend to them? Would I be unable to rise to water the fields? I know I could. I don't have the answer for why. But maybe when my land is more than a plot on a concrete block, agoraphobia won't kick in until I get to the roads that surround it.
I don't want to throw up right outside my front door anymore. I don't want to lose money, respect, and maybe even jobs just because my own brain stops me. I don't want to keep taking these medications that don't work.

I'm stuck. I need out of this life with these strange expectations to wear high heels and have a powdered face and turn in crisp sheets of white paper in time for arbitrary deadlines. I have run away to other countries, into boys arms, and into my dreams where no one can criticize me and none of those things have worked. And as much emphasis as I put on escaping and how much I know that doesn't actually work I know a more natural lifestyle will. It will make me feel like living again and if it doesn't there is no hope.

The Most Important Thing

We are the children of a plasticized society full of depression masked by consumerism and pharmaceuticals that seem to cause more problems than they help. Our lives are so unsatisfying that even our pets are on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. We are the children of the loss of skill, craft, and survival knowledge. We blindly follow our technology into the middle of nowhere, believing the directions on the LCD screen are more accurate than the sun. We do not understand how our clothing is made or our houses. We are the children of prophesy, of the books that warned of our downfall. Our recreational drugs are packaged in easy-to-swallow ovals like Brave New World predicted. There are television screens in every room, like in 1984. Our information can be changed in a whim, without tubes and papers but with typing and edits. We are a race of people who are lost in piles of useless trinkets from places we'll never see that are soon turned to trash. We are a race of people who, in our free time, stare into the face of advertisements, spend a majority of our time doing unnecessary tasks to earn false money, and spend it on what we saw advertised the night before. Our food is packaged, our nutrients are shaped like cartoon characters. Our meat suffers and dies by immigrant hands in unimaginable conditions and is consumed by an apathetic public.
Our nation is constantly at war from Eurasia to Eastasia, Iraq to Iran to Afghanistan.

We are the ignorant, spoiled children bred from parents in carpeted cubicles. We studied, finished our "education." We have worked with clean hands, serving food to obese people and selling unnecessary goods to empty-eyed women. We have played sports, we have letters on our jackets, we are collegiate stamped-and-approved and still, we are unhappy. We are in debt. We are at a stand-still. We are expected to continue on this path but Death haunts us and it shows in the marks we make in our skin. It shows in the medical records and bills that rain in from the street to our front doors. We are statistics. We are unsatisfied. We have lived this life and we have decided that we do not want to live it. Some of us have tried to take our own lives. Others cannot shake the feelings of unsettling anxiety. We are struggling in wealth. We despair among the things we did not make, did not earn, and do not understand. We don't want out, we need out.

Suicide is not an option. That would make us weak. But this is our life and we only have a certain number of years on this crumbling earth. We are alive and therefore we are obligated to do our best. This is The Most Important Thing.

We will learn the things our ancestors knew. We will grow our own food. We will make our own clothes. We will be manipulated instead by the rise and fall of the sun rather than the flicker of commercial breaks. We will suffer but it will be a natural suffering. Our bodies will feel the air. Our hands will feel the earth. And we will be happy without orange plastic bottles filled with ovals. And we will be happy without closets full of mismatched shoes. And we will be happy to be on the earth and to breathe the air and to live this life that we cannot, and should not want, to escape.

Nicole