the squibix family blog

our long straw nightmare is over

A long time ago—last winter? I have no idea—the lean-to that I had constructed on the back of the shed to keep straw dry came down (its construction was stylish and optimistic, so I'm not totally surprised; it did last a good few years, so that was fine). I'm not quick to make repairs, and besides the fallen roof bits were covering the straw a bit, so I kind of left it. But a month or two ago when it was time to get a new bale I felt bad about storing it in the wreckage so I stashed it up on the porch. Fine, at first—it would even have been decorative if it had been a little later in the season! But once we broke the bale open it quickly became a problem. Out of its retaining strings straw kind of gets everywhere, helped by the wind and birds, and in this case the spreading was compounded by the bale's proximity to the middle school hang-out spot that is that corner of the porch. It was a mess, we were constantly tracking hay into the house, and people who wanted to walk through on the porch to the back deck had to clamber over what was essentially a 1/8th scale haystack. Intolerable.

That's why I refused to tolerate it for longer than a couple months. Over the weekend I finally rebuilt the lean-to—much stronger than before, since my construction skills are ever improving, but still stylish cause that's how I roll. Then yesterday evening, with friends due to come by for a visit within the hour, I moved the haystack to its proper location and swept up all the rest of the debris off the porch. "Wow, the porch looks so clean and big!" said Elijah when he saw. Yes, my son. Yes it does.

is this the pandemic?

We had a busy day yesterday. Indoor in-person Kids Church started up again—for the first time since March 2020!—and the boys and I left the house at 8:00 so I could be sure to be ready for the 9:15 start time. It went wonderfully, and it was so lovely to be there with the kids doing fuze beads again, but it was a little more involved schedule-wise than turning on the computer for a 45-minute like I was used to for the last year and a half. Then straight from church we headed to a mini-golf course for a birthday party—well, the first part of a birthday party, because after a mostly successful 17 holes (one of them was closed) we headed to the birthday boy's house for a couple hours of backyard socializing. By the time we got home at 5:30 I was wiped out!

I guess we've been doing plenty all summer, so it's not a total departure. But being inside again for church, and the fact that the party was with friends who we've seen much less over the past year and a half than we always used to, made the day feel like one from before the pandemic times. Of course, we were wearing masks all the time we were inside, and there weren't many people at either Kids Church or the party. So maybe we're just getting used to this life?

steps in the right direction

As I think I must have said at least once already, I tend not to write about my carpentry projects in these pages because I feel like I should wait until I finish one before I reveal it, and I never actually finish anything. Instead I get to 90 or 95 percent and then get distracted by something else—but it's fine because 90 percent is good enough. Like our back deck. I started building it in September 2019 (as seen in the second photo here) and stopped work when winter weather and darkness took over mid-November. Also I'd blown my whole lumber budget for the year.

But in the two years since then I haven't forgotten my original plans, and this week they took an important step forward with the construction of the stairs by the chicken coop and a lower deck section and/or bench that continues the curve of the deck around the fire pit. Last weekend I had just thought I was going to do the stairs, but when I got going I thought the other part should be integrated with them so I tore out what I'd done, got some more lumber, and made it even better. These words would make a lot more sense with a picture or two, but I didn't want to photograph the new part of the deck until... I finish it. Hopefully I'll at least get enough screws in by tomorrow that the evening's guests won't fall through! But finished or not the stairs are definitely usable, and I every time I use them I marvel at how easy they make getting around the backyard now. Just imaging how cool this deck'll be when it's done!

our studio

Today Leah spent some time at recording video for a project. Audio recordings are much more common: we leave the house so she can record her podcast every couple weeks or so. Today the boys were with their cousins all day so it was only me who needed to vacate to make sure the video wouldn't be interrupted, but I didn't mind at all. I know the drill: I made something like 40 video recordings over the course of this pandemic (maybe more! I have no idea really, and I'm too tired to count). But I haven't had to for some time now, since our online Kids Church program—they were all for work—wrapped up in mid-June, and we'll be meeting outside in person this summer (starting this Sunday!). The skills are still there though, as is the simmering frustration at being interrupted in the middle of a good take by someone moving a chair upstairs. So I stayed well away.

When will one of us next need to record a video? Who knows. We may be seeing other people, but there are still some disturbing pandemic signs... our studio will be ready for action for a little while yet.

Waldorf phone

Are you a crunchy-granola parent disappointed with your child's obsession with technology, because you want them to be building stick forts and playing in the dirt like the books say? Do you wish that phones and tablets had never been invented (except for yours, when you're in the bathroom or really tired because everyone keeps talking to you)? Well I have the answer for you! Introducing: the Waldorf phone!

Lovingly crafted from reclaimed lumber, the Waldorf phone offers a blank canvas for your child to play out all their technology-related imaginative games without compromising your carefully cultivated hippy homeschooling persona. Available today!

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video production is challenging

Leah is on vacation this week for Holy Week. I'm the opposite. For our second pandemic Holy Week (second and last—it had better be last!) our Kids Church team thought we'd tell the story over a series of videos, with one for families to watch each day of the week. Great, right? Only making that many videos is kind of a lot of work! I'm certainly used to video production by now: I record and edit about three video stories every month, plus the occasional extra. But I've never before had such a sustained stretch of production... and we're only halfway through the week! Of course, that necessarily means that I'm more than halfway through the work: all of the videos are now recorded, and only two of them remain to edit. I may survive!

Of course, while I talk about my own suffering it's really the rest of the family who should get most of the credit. We don't have soundproofing here, so I really appreciate their patience as they refrain from their usual yelling or else take the dogs out for a walk to stop them barking on film (can you match the family members to their roles?). Not that any of that helps when the neighbor needs to be running the chainsaw, like he was all Saturday afternoon (in the noble work of clearing away the bittersweet around his yard, so I can't really begrudge him.... but it still stopped my work in its tracks). And then there are all the planes. Did you know we live right by an airport?

If you want to check out any of the fruits of my labor, they're available on Reservoir Church's Youtube page. You might even give them a like!

wave your hands in time

I didn't move as much as I might have liked to today. The boys and I did get to take a walk with my mom, like we do every Tuesday morning, and I had to go out and find the dogs when they found a hole in the fence (not much finding... they came when I called, once I figured out where they were), but other than that I spent the day perched in front of the computer editing videos. This Sunday we're doing a Kids and Youth service at church, and the elementary kids not being willing to appear live on Zoom (nor I to let them) we invited them to submit videos, and I've spent the last week or so working to assemble them into a coherent whole. You haven't lived until you've spent three hours syncing up twelve different performers in preschool and early elementary doing the hand motions to "Peace Like a River"! When we did our star turn at Christmas time the music director included instructions to clap in time before we started the song, which gave him a cue to get all the tracks in line together; we didn't do that for the kids. You might say that their hand motions wouldn't be particularly in sync if we were doing this live, which is true, but I still have to make it look like they're at least all listening to the same music—so their vagueness and distractibility is, in this case, only making my job harder. I know what song is going to be stuck in my head when I finally get to bed this evening!

raising the stakes

When I started gardening I scoffed at the stakes offered for sale at the hardware store. Close to ten dollars for a length of wood? Ridiculous! I just used all kinds of things I scavenged here and there: branches, broken tool handles, marking stakes picked up from parking lots in the spring, old hockey sticks... Then later I came into possession of a bundle of proper garden stakes and I realized that they were actually pretty good. They're cedar, so they last, and they're cut with attention to the grain so they stay straight year after year. I had eight—so I've been using them by choice for all my staking needs. For the tomatoes especially. This spring one of them broke for the first time, from rot, and at the same time garden expansion meant I needed more, so I was forced to consider if I needed to actually buy some for myself.

Maybe I will one day. But for now I've found another solution, one that I can't believe I never used before. See, I have some power tools, and also lots of old lumber, and it takes maybe 45 seconds to turn six feet of old pressure-treated decking into two or three top-quality professional-looking stakes. A run through the circular saw to strip a one-by-one length, then zip zip on the miter saw at a 45° angle for a little point. I made some yesterday to stake up the corn which, unexpectedly, mostly blew down in a violent thunderstorm the other night. Not all the stalks broke. I don't know how long my new homemade stakes will last, but they look pretty nice now and even if they do fail to go the distance I've got plenty of wood to make some new ones next season!

holy week

I had kind of a tough Holy Week. On Palm Sunday we had somebody "Zoom Bomb" our church service—a ridiculous name for the kind of dumb prank that's unfortunately entirely commonplace on the internet. But lots of people on Zoom now aren't used to the internet, so they reacted very strongly to the intrusion. Besides making everybody on the church staff do more work as we struggled to plan a safer service for Easter, it also prompted lots more people to question whether they, or anyone, should be using Zoom at all. That question is very troubling to me for lots of reasons, the most salient being that I need to keep using Zoom myself, and I need other people to use it too, or else I might go crazy. So that made for a stressful week. Then on Saturday morning one of our chickens got taken by a fox or a coyote or something... we didn't see, but we noticed her missing a little later and we noticed lots of feathers all over the yard. I'm not always hit super hard when one of the hens dies, but this one was tough. I was feeling pretty sad to begin with, which obviously played a part. And then too in this pandemic time we were glad to always have plenty of eggs, including lots to give away to friends and neighbors; being down one hen won't cut the output too much, but with things as they are I still wish we had nine hens laying instead of eight.

Then despite all that, Easter was lovely. Maybe I'll write about that tomorrow.

I made some things

When we started social distancing I felt like I had all the time in the world. Just think of everything I was going to get done around the house and in the garden! But actually it turns out that I still have to do my job, and help lead our homeschool group, and keep in touch with my friends... and all those things are more complicated now. Since I care about them, though, I'm hanging in there and trying to make them work by making more work for myself. Like in my job as a Kids Church pastor. How do I pastor kids when I can't see them? I started out by just putting my weekly stories online, which added maybe three minutes of work to what I was already doing anyway. Then when I got a little experience on Zoom I realized I could do Zoom meetings on Sunday mornings; the first of those was this past Sunday. That took some prep. But I was also thinking about the kids who couldn't do videoconferencing... how could I make the story engaging to them? So I made a video version. And since there's no way I can get through a six minute story without a mistake or an interruption I had to do multiple takes, and edit them together. It took about five hours overall. Take a look and tell me if you think it was worth it!

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