St. Joseph’s Vanguard And Our Lady’s Train

What a lovely place. I experienced the perfect moment yesterday evening, sitting on a bench in a grove of oak trees, looking west over the vineyard at the sunset, enjoying the sweet breeze, eating artichoke-parmesan fritters and listening to the plunkings of the guitarist seated nearby.

The wine is great, especially the Verentino. It’s only 30 minutes from South Austin and a lovely drive through Texas hills. Enjoy!

Here are our pictures from the Texas Alliance for Life Safari day:

It’s looks like the Serengeti but it’s actually just south of Austin around the landfill run by Waste Management.

The big and little chickens:

The coral vine beginning to blossom (with pink flowers), which the bees are gonna love.  My apologies for the bad photo:

My mom wanted to inspect the bees with us, so she bought a bee suit!

The inspection went well; our Ambrose hive is doing well: They are still very gentle bees; they are bringing in some nectar, though it looks like there won’t be much of a harvest this year (we think it is due to the lack of rain this spring and summer around Central Texas).

They have lots of brood, so the queen is laying well, and there are very few small hive beetles.

Mom enjoyed inspecting them, though she lamented afterwards when we got inside that it felt like a sauna in her bee suit–I totally agree.

“But I thought human life-destroying embryonic stem cells were the ones that were going to help people!”

Nope.  Embryonic stem cells have helped–get ready for it–0 people.  That is zero, goose-egg, none.  Not one person on this green earth has been helped by a treatment from embryonic stem cells, because scientists have not been able to come up with even one treatment.

Adult stem cells, however, have helped tens of thousands of people and continue to do so, even curing once-incurable diseases like sickle-cell anemia.

As a side-note, I quit grousing briefly about Wikipedia, registered as a “Wikipedian”, figured out how to make edits, and edited the entry on sickle-cell anemia to add the proven fact that sickle-cell anemia is being cured by adult stem cells, but hours later another Wikipedian removed my factual addition based on an objection to the reference I used.

Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia: certain people have more power in it than others, like with any human organization, and thus they are able to control what people read and think to be true.

I’m wanting sugar. Pie. Cake. Muffins. Ice cream. A big fizzy cold Coke. But, I can’t have any, well, much of it. It’s this darned insulin resistance I’ve got, which is tied to our fertility issues, so we’re working on keeping my blood sugar levels down in the hopes of helping our fertility.

My dear husband has helped me create a list of our most common foods and their corresponding Glycemic Index numbers. We were encouraged by this exercise because, due to my organic foodness, it turns out that we already have very few sugars in our diet. So, really, not much is changing, but I like to gripe about it. The drama helps me feel better, you see.

A few things are changing, however. First, I’m trying to cook with all the buckwheat flour I can, since buckwheat has a low GI number, as well as producing a lovely compound in the body called D-chiro inositol when digested. I’ve made some muffins that turned out well, but I need to use strong flavors to mask the buckwheat flavor, so I’m perplexed regarding how to make things like pancakes. In addition, where before I might have more easily bent my organic rules and eaten ice cream (after all, it’s Haagen Dazs, which is, after all, all natural), now I’m being really strict about sugars; I’m only allowing myself to eat sweets on Sundays…and, maybe sometimes, when I really feel the need, I’ll buy a tube of cookie dough and eat it in hiding, so that Devin can’t scold me.

I picked up our two Buff Orpington chickens from my friend, Jeremy, yesterday!

Here is the video of it:

Update: I’m getting some error and the video won’t play when I try to start it, so bear with me as I try to figure out what is wrong (you can never tell with computers…). In the meantime you can watch the video on my Google video page.

Second Update: It is working for me now; let me know if you run into problems.

Shortly afterwards, I did put them in the fenced-in run area, but Lobelia and Gertrude started pecking at the little ones, which was really hard to watch because the little ones were scared and trying to get away, so I took them out again and have set up a mini-coop for them to stay in until the chickens get used to each other more.

When I can devote a few hours to watching them, I will put them in the same area again and make sure the big chickens don’t hurt the little ones while working out their pecking order.

Howdy friends,

I’ve been in NM for the past four days or so and away from the cpu.

Katie’s family here is doing great, and we have had a good time together; yesterday I set up a new blog for Katie’s mother!

Also, I used the very fun gift from Gerardo and Roxanna, The Dangerous Book for Boys, to make paper airplanes with my nephew Nathan, who is about 5 years old.  They were a big hit, and I ended up making about 7 of them for his little brother Adam and my twin nieces, Ava and Addi, who, though they didn’t really like to throw the planes much, still wanted one to hold.

Katie and I went to the Flying Star cafe, a hip eatery that is kind of like Jason’s Deli but with some more authentic local cuisine and style.  I ordered the New Mexico burger which came topped with green chiles.

Katie found out about a sustainable farm in Oregon run by an ex-software developer and his wife, via The Beginning Farmer.  There’s a video of their farm on the Beginning Farmer’s site; he talks about getting tired of working in a cubicle for 25 years (tell me about it ).

I return to Austin tomorrow and just have one week before my wife returns!

…and, I’m so happy. It’s wonderful to be together after two weeks of phone conversations, and I just want to be near him, to touch him and feel the gift of his physicality.

We had a great day. We drove up into the Jemez Mts. north of Albuquerque, with the intent of looking at property. We’re not looking to buy yet, more just dreaming of the day when we’ll actually make an offer on a farm. The drive was beautiful, through red rock formations and along a winding stream. We decided that the village of Jemez Springs was too far from city life but did enjoy the pleasure of stopping in at the convent of the Handmaids of the Precious Blood in Jemez Springs; we had not planned our visit at the convent, having had no prior knowledge of their existence, but passed their mother house on the road and stopped to ring the doorbell. We were greeted by Mother John Paul, who chatted with us briefly before inviting us to pay a visit in their Perpetual Adoration chapel. We promised her that we’d pray for vocations for their community, and she promised to pray for a child for us. The village of San Ysidro was more near to the city, only 17 miles from the suburb of Rio Rancho and had some pretty and green bottom land along the river, and we stopped to look at one property for sale–8 acres and a house for $185 thousand. Not bad, but we’re not ready to make an offer yet.

We spent the afternoon watching a few HGTV shows (love ‘em) and visiting my sister, Courtney, with her children Nathan, Adam, and baby Sophia Rose (totally named in honor of the Rose family). Devin beat Nathan in a splashing war in the backyard pool, particularly when he pulled the trump card with the water hose. I held little Sophia, who slept and slept and slept some more.

Tonight, we watched our nieces Ava and Addi, my brother Jordan’s daughters, at swimming lessons. They’re two and are learning to put their faces in the water and float on their backs. So precious. They were a little shy with Devin at first but decided he was okay and spent the rest of the evening climbing on him.

Tomorrow, we’ll picnic in the Sandia Mts. with Courtney, her children, and Tammy (Jordan’s wife) and the twins. Then, Saturday morning, Nathan’s last soccer game of the season (he’s five, so you can imagine the game’s intensity) and picking raspberries with all the kids at Heidi’s Raspberry Farm in the afternoon. We’ll do our best to take photos during the weekend.

Here are a bunch of pictures from:

1. The Texas Alliance for Life Walk for Life
2. Kayaking on Lake Georgetown with Katie, my dad, and step-mom
3. The gravel and backyard
4. My uncle and aunt’s ranch in the Texas Panhandle

Dave Thies playing at the Walk for Life:

Adam G. at the Walk

Dr. Joe Pojman speaking at the Walk

Roxanna and Gerardo (and Baby Garcia!)

Dave and Lianna:

Adam eating with Fulton T. and Therese

The food line with Kody and Dee dishing out snow cones on the left side (shadowed)

Switching gears to Lake Georgetown (this is about three weeks ago)

Katie taking a kayak break

Here she is saying something to me, probably related to when I was going to take the picture

We switched off the camera since I know you want to see yours truly (notice how I conscientiously am wearing my lifesaver in case of the remote chance of being knocked unconscious and off the kayak somehow)

2 cubic yards of pea gravel on the driveway, ready to be wheel-barrowed to the back yard

The back yard filling in

The zinnias are looking great (and the butterflies love them, too)

The cows up at the ranch coming in for water

My lovely wife next to the old barn as we hide from the cows so as not to spook them

We had two cubic yards of pea gravel dumped on our driveway this week, and yesterday I began shoveling it into the wheelbarrow and wheeling it into the backyard.

It was hard work, and I grew in appreciation for those who labor manually to provide for their families. The work is much hotter and physically taxing than my computer job, and the pay is much less. Yet, it felt good to work outside with my body, something that I miss sitting in front of the monitor all day, and I do envy the manual laborers that benefit of their work.

As to what we are doing with the gravel, Katie’s dad drew up a nice backyard design that we have been implementing the past several months; the gravel is filling in the dead or weed grass areas around the raised beds, beehive, compost pile, and berry bushes.

I’ve got some pictures of that (and the Walk for Life, and several other things), that I will post when I get back my camera gear this weekend; it got lost in my dad’s car under the seat a few weeks ago and was just recently found.

Blessedly, the wind calmed down this morning, and I just spent the last hour sitting in the sun next to the backyard fountain. I threw the ball to my parent’s yellow lab, Sam, and threw it and threw it again; Sam likes the ball. It was lovely to listen to the tinkle of the water and watch the doves alighting to drink. My father’s flower garden is glorious this year. His lavender is waist high, as are his yarrow and daisies. The trumpet vine over the patio pergola is covered in blossoms.

But, one this is oddly missing–buzzing. There aren’t any honey bees nor native bees nor wasps. I did see a hummingbird this morning and there are houseflies (as always), as well as little gnats humming along. But, the air seems unusually quiet. It seems a shame to waste all that pollen and nectar. I know it hasn’t always been this way because Devin and I were amazed last summer at all the bees visiting the trumpet vine. I’m not sure if the silence is a casualty of colony collapse disorder or too much spraying by the local farmers, but it seems sad. Maybe it’s time for my father to take up beekeeping…

It was an uphill battle for the poor hive since the beginning when we cut them out of my mother’s wall, and finally, the Augustine hive has all died.

The moral of the story for me and Katie is: Let the hive do whatever they want.  If they raise their own queen, let them have that queen and don’t try to replace her with an expensive one with good genetics.

The good news is two-fold:

1. The Ambrose hive is bursting at the seams and is doing great, especially after they were so small during the winter, and

2. The Augustine hive most likely swarmed once and hopefully it found a nice home in a rotted out tree somewhere.

My friend and I were talking at work today, and he told me that the electric bill for his 800 square foot apartment was $260 last month.

He suspects his air conditioning unit is faulty because it runs all the time, and yet it is still 85 degrees or higher in the apartment most of the time. The apartment people have “fixed” it 4 times, which works for a day or two then goes back to not working.

I know his situation is not unique in our country. Rather, I would assert it is the norm: our houses and apartments are built, by and large, very inefficiently when it comes to energy. The insulation is poor, the walls and windows are thin, and doors aren’t sealed well.

The result: We use a ton of energy to heat and cool our home, energy that could be saved by having well-built and insulated homes. This energy comes from coal-fueled power plants and other fossil fuels (natural gas for heating, for example).

Multiply this waste times the millions of homes in the United States, and you end up with untold amounts of wasted energy and increased pollution.  Why isn’t solving this problem at the forefront of the agenda that is trying to address the energy problem?

All the houses I see being built right now are doing the same old thing, building them the same old inexpensive, energy gobbling way. When, God willing, Katie and I buy some land and build our own house, this will be one of the primary factors influencing our building decisions: We want to build our home with thick walls with good insulation, possibly using straw bale, SIPs, or adobe bricks, catch all the run-off of rain from our roof and use that water wherever we can, and depending on the location use solar panels and home wind generators for electricity.

If every home were built in this way, tailored of course to the particular weather and geography of its land, we would save billions of dollars on energy costs and reduce our consumption and waste manifold. I don’t know how we can accomplish it, but we need to encourage better home-building practices that don’t just minimize costs and maximize profits for the builders and developers, but also provide good energy efficiency to the families who will live in those houses for 50 to 100 years.

My Uncle Rusty and I went hunting for rattlesnakes several times over the past weekend, but on our last day of looking, we had come up empty.

So we went and checked on the electric fence to see why it was not charged, and we decided that it needed a new battery.  On the way back to the house to get a battery, I asked my uncle if I could get out and try to shoot some prairie dogs.

I went off the little trail and into the pasture, looking for any prairie dogs within range, but I didn’t get far before I saw a rattlesnake about 5 yards away.  It was about 1.5 feet long and wasn’t coiled up; I had my uncle’s shotgun, and I shot it.

I was very happy because I had helped my uncle get rid of one more dangerous rattlesnake out there on the farm.  I proudly told Katie of my hunting prowess, and she told me I should go cut off the rattler, which I did.

Later that evening, lightning struck twice and my uncle spotted and killed another rattler just off the path, also about the same length, and he estimated these snakes were 3 years old perhaps.

Katie and I travelled with my mom to visit our Aunt and Uncle in the Texas Panhandle again.

We tried to get close to their cows, but they were skittish and kept their distance from us; then we went out hunting for rattlesnakes to kill because my uncle spotted some recently.

The rattlesnakes, in addition to being dangerous to people, also can bite the cows and make them very sick, and they eat the quail eggs.  There are pheasants and quail up here at the farm, and my uncle wants to continue to foster their habitats for hunting and what-not.

The wind farms are moving in all over the place up here from Abilene to where we are in the northwest corner of Texas.  I can imagine in ten to twenty years seeing the landscape covered in the huge windmills, which I don’t think is a bad thing; animals can continue to graze under them and crops can be grown around them, too, I believe.

I joined the “Green team” at my work last week, which is a group that is going to encourage good stewardship of the environment at our company, which just announced that we have joined the Austin clean energy program, where we will get 10% of our total electricity usage from West Texas wind farms over the next 15 years.

We harvested our 5 garlic bulbs last week and hung them up to dry, then we cleaned them up and they are presumably ready to eat.

Well, I remember reading about all the great benefits of eating raw garlic, and I had a hankering, so I peeled one small clove and popped it in my mouth; “hmmm, good garlic flavor,” I thought at first blush. But then the little garlic spice grenades starting going off in my mouth, and the garlic acid was burning my tongue, more and more with every bite.

Finally, I spat it out, fearing that if I swallowed it I would have a very unhappy tummy, washed my mouth out with water and brushed my teeth, but even now, hours later, the garlic taste remains.

Katie and I are now debating whether our home-grown garlic is really that much more potent, or whether it is supposed to “age” more before we eat it. Any ideas?

The chickens have been doing well; Gertrude, the less social one, has taken on the bad habit of sleeping in the nest box, which means she poops in it and unless we clean it out early in the morning, they lay their eggs there (quite gross).

We received good news recently, however: A friend of mine at work (who I grew up with and played soccer with in high school) and his wife have bought chickens for their backyard, and they bought too many, and they bought the exact kind I originally wanted, the much-coveted Buff Orpington!

So they kindly and providentially told us they needed to give away two of them, which are about 3 weeks old currently, so we are going to take them.

Hopefully we can get them to “play well” with Lobelia and Gertrude, who have had the run of the roost for a long time now.

The Buff Orpington:

I would have posted this last week but was annoyed by our bees.

The Augustine saga has been:

1. Bee hive cut out of mom’s house and put in our backyard, no queen

2. We give them frame of brood from Ambrose and they raise their own queen (probably a mean one)

3. We buy $30 queen and re-queen them with her by killing the other queen

4. They toss the $30 queen out of the hive, we put her back in the hive

5. They kill her or toss her out again and she dies; now they’re queenless

6. (As of last week) We give them one more frame of brood from Ambrose to let them raise their own queen and hopefully survive.

Also in this time, they got infested by wax worms twice, which are about the nastiest things you have ever seen.

Unless the queen they raise is the Wicked Witch of the West, we plan to let them do their own thing and not waste any more money on expensive queens they reject!

How is it that I never knew this before?

I heard it recently and looked it up: Sure enough, the first man to formulate a scientific heliocentric cosmology (yes, before Galileo) was Nicolaus Copernicus, a Catholic priest.

For more on the truth of the Galileo-Catholic Church controversy, see here.

The predominant understanding of this situation in popular culture is quite off base (see my back-and-forth with someone on the New York Times Papal Discussion blog recently: search within the page for the word “Galileo”).

I am a certified youth soccer coach for any age group up to under 12 years of age (U12)!

My coworker and I both plan to coach teams next season in the local youth soccer program, and I wanted to get some training for how to coach before starting, since, though I played my entire life, I never had to teach others how to play.

I am excited but a bit daunted by all that is involved; fortunately, my dad will be assistant coaching with me, as well one of my coworkers, who already has an existing team that his son is on.

I love the sport of soccer and look forward both to coaching these young men how to play it as well as playing it myself with them!

I received this email from Senator John McCain’s Presidential campaign today (excerpt):

One of these challenges is global climate change. Whether we call it “climate change” or “global warming,” in the end we’re all left with the same set of facts. Good stewardship, prudence and simple common sense demand that we act to meet the challenge and act quickly. And if we are wrong and climate change is not a threat, all we are doing is leaving a better planet for our children and lowering our dependence on foreign oil.

That is why I have proposed a cap-and-trade system that would set limits on greenhouse gas emissions while encouraging the development of low-cost compliance options. This is a market-based system to curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mobilize innovative technologies and strengthen the economy.

I like what he says here.  There is still debate about global warming (or the new more ambiguous but all-encompassing term, “climate change”), but we also should act with good stewardship of our environment, something that I think we are woefully failing at currently.

Let’s take prudent action as a country to begin to address the stewardship problems.  Ultimately, it will require changing our thinking and our habits as individuals to make a big difference, and changing is hard for us, so making reasonable incentives for being a better steward is a good way to go I think.

We just returned from visiting my sister-in-law, Kelly, in Colorado Springs! Here are the photos:

This Catholic center is in the mall!  The Capuchin Franciscans run it, say Mass, hear Confessions, and it is very cool.

In the Garden of the Gods:

A neat building in Colorado Springs:

Snow-capped Pike’s Peak:

Today while we went to Mass the chickens escaped from their pen area and managed to eat all the sprouting corn plants and some sweet potato vines.

They knew they had been bad when I went out there to grab them and put them back in their pen, and Lobelia was especially bad, making me give chase in order to catch her.

This escapade is in addition to their morning-crowing that threatens to wake up the neighbors, which they have cleverly learned gets me up out of bed to give them scratch to eat so that they will pipe down.

Oh well, at least they are giving us 2 excellent eggs each day!

Crazy bees.

Katie was weeding the garden yesterday when she urgently called me to come outside: A queen bee was walking around the wooden frame of the raised garden bed, surrounded by her attendant bees; by the fact that the queen’s wings were clipped, we knew that this queen was one of the new ones we had just installed.

Katie and I were about to head off to dinner, but we needed to do something or else this queen would perish, potentially leaving one of the hives queenless (and therefore doomed), so we threw on our bee suits, brushed the queen into a glass jar, opened up the Augustine hive, and searched for a queen to see if this was the hive missing one.

Sure enough, we found no queen, so we opened the jar and let the queen into the hive; the bees surrounded her and she raised her tail in the air, the bees’ way of exuding pheromone; we were fearful they would attack her, but they did not, so we closed them up and hoped for the best.

We have no clue how she got to where she was outside the hive, for her wings were clipped and she couldn’t fly. Oh well, we’ll see if those crazy bees accept her this time.

Our friend Amy sent us this unusual story about a man making his beehives in the shape of monasteries because “bees have souls, too”.

Well, technically they don’t, but this story is still funny.

Now, before I arouse the hopes of any of our blog readers, I’m only referring to gardening here, not to new Rosebuds. We’re still waiting on Our Lord for that one.

However, as the title suggests, Devin and I are enjoying the fruitfulness of our backyard farm. Everything’s growing wonderfully! I’ve taken a number of photos which Devin will post soon, and I promise to narrate when they’re posted. Enjoy!

Sweet potato vines–my first time sprouting them.

Volunteer red potato; our potatoes last fall died, so I’m going to give this one a chance.

The new grape arbor Devin built.

Dev’s vines–they sustained a little damage from my weed killing with vinegar last Saturday but have bounced back. Sorry, Devin!

Dill going to seed–it continues to be my favorite herb, giving a home now to lots of lady bugs.

The first berry on our new bushes–we’re not sure if this is a dewberry or blackberry.

Corn is up! We have about 14 sprouts now.

A view of the damage wrought by the vinegar. I used pickling vinegar, which is 9% acidity, with a little dish soap added. Our goal is to kill all the grass in this garden area and cover the ground with gravel. I used vinegar because I didn’t want to add weed-killer to the soil, which might harm our earthworms and helpful soil bacteria, as well as the water table.

Katie and I ordered two new queen bees from B. Weaver apiaries and had them sent to us via express mail, and they arrived last Thursday!

We searched through the Ambrose hive but could not find the queen, even after 20 minutes of looking, so we decided to introduce the new queen and take the risk that the Ambrose queen was still alive, which would cause them to fight to the death.

Augustine, the hive we cut out of my mom’s house, we gave brood to raise its own queen, and sure enough, they did! The new queen had already laid many eggs and there was capped brood in the comb; however, we had to kill her to introduce the new queen to the hive, so I squashed the Augustine queen, who is only a month old or so, and put in the new queen.

Why did we re-queen the hives? Well, in the case of Ambrose, the queen we had was now over a year old, and as queens age, they run out of bee sperm from their mating flights and emit less queen pheromone, which is what keeps the hive together.

This is a natural process; when the queen gets old enough, the hive either supersedes (replaces) her with a new queen they raise (offing the old queen), or they swarm, roughly half the hive leaving with the old queen to find a new home, while the other half stays in the hive and raises a new queen.

Neither of these scenarios is best for the beekeeper, usually, because you end up with a queen with unknown traits or half your hive gone, putting a big dent in honey-making. In the case of Augustine, it was a double whammy: Half the hive swarmed with the old queen and they raised their own queen of unknown genetics.

What we did know about the Augustine queen was that the bees she produced were pretty mean and aggressive, so we really wanted to re-queen this hive with a known good queen, bred for gentleness and honey-making.

We will find out this next week whether the hives accepted their new queens; sometimes they get mad at them and kill them right away. But hopefully they will welcome them as their new monarchs!

Last year we dug up part of the front yard which had withered the previous summer in a drought and began planting flowers; this was then:

And after just one full year, this is our flower bed now:

Planting flowers and herbs is easy and fun: God does most of the work by making them all grow and reproduce!  This year, we have about 15 little basil herb plants coming up where our lone basil plant last year dropped its seeds. 

We’re busy today but wonderfully so, and I couldn’t be happier. Devin just built an arbor for our grapevines, digging down 18″ to ground our posts, even cutting into the limestone a few inches. Great work, babe! Photos later.

In the garden, we’ve got sprouts! Update today: 1 okra, 1 cucumber, 2 Roma tomatoes, 2 zucchini, 3 nasturtiums, 5 zinnia, and a few little weeds. We’ll pull those up later, to be sure they’re not actually good plants that are volunteers.

I realized this morning, as we were working together in the backyard, that I receive special joy in working with Devin outdoors. It’s probably because I used to spend time with my father outdoors; he always called me his “little green-thumb”, and I recall happy hours at his side–at the lumberyard, the nursery, and in the backyard. Jung says that we marry our fathers, and, while I’m not too sure about that, I do confess that I feel deeply secure and happy as my husband’s “little green-thumb”. And, it’s fun to share with Devin all the skills I learned from my father; it was strange for me when we were newlyweds because I had an assumption that a wife should stay in the kitchen and let her husband care for the lawn. However, I’ve since come to accept the fact that I know how to do many things that are typically characterized as masculine–pounding a good nail, using a level, chalking a line, and laying tile. I’m still my mother’s daughter, though; I wear pearls and play the piano and can make a good pie crust.

Thanks, Dad! You taught me well.