Frog in a Flower Pot

The title pun compares the burst of farming activity this April to emergency services. Actually there was a bit of both this last month and an inordinate amount of photos to go with each meaning. So sorry folks, this is a long blog to slog through. We have only had a few fires in the heating stove since April first. Many days have been above 80 degrees. There has been a little more rain than last year, but not nearly enough.

So Spring has been bursting out all over. The bluebirds are back in their cat-proofed bird house. We found a frog sleeping in an outdoor flower pot. Humming birds are demanding sweet water and butterflies, bees and all manner of insects are out and about. Early in the month grapes needed to be pruned and fruit trees dowsed with dormant spray as usual. But I decided to strengthen the trellis on all of my grape vines since many have been sagging under the weight of big harvests and the failing of the bamboo stakes put in the ground 10 years ago. Those have now been replaced with over 200 pieces of rebar bound tight to newly braced and tensioned support wires. This all took much longer than the usual Spring pruning and there was still a lot to do but Cheryl and I needed to get away before an even more intense summer schedule kicked in.  (Link to Spring Album)

Fort Walla Walla Museum is huge

We left for a whirlwind tour of mostly Northeast Oregon on April 5th. We focused on the basics, wine and chocolate. The first day of our trip we wound our way through the rolling Palouse wheat fields to Walla Walla where we had arranged a tasting pairing chocolate from Petits Noirs, a “boutique chocolatier located in the lush region of the Walla Walla Valley, where vineyards and fruit orchards scale the fertile terroir,” and a selection of wines from Barreca Vineyards. After camping in our 1984 VW/Westfalia Van at the remote Harris County Park with our dog, Gretchen, we spent much of the next day drinking wine and eating chocolate with Lan and James Boulanger, friends of our daughter Bina Brock. Refreshed in body and spirit and having traded a lot of wine for chocolate, we left feeling perhaps a little younger, or maybe just buzzed and wound our way up into the Blue Creek Burn, a 2015 forest fire just outside of Walla Walla. We were too early to find morel mushrooms, but just in time for Spring greens and wild flowers. We camped on a spur off the main road up Klicker Mountain overlooking hundreds of miles of Palouse fields and the twinkling lights of cities and several wind farms.

Klicker Mt Campsite

We awoke the next morning to the sound of a crawler tractor working its way up the main dirt road. A while later a pickup truck came down the mountain and turned off into the meadow where we were camped. It turned out to be 88 year old Bob Klicker, who still owned the mountain. He said we could camp as long as we wanted and we talked about his family’s history there. But we didn’t stay, we wound our way back down the mountain and over to the Fort Walla Walla Museum for a brief visit and then turned south through Milton-Freewater and eventually onto I-82 for a fast trip to Baker, Oregon. We hoped to get to the Forest Service office in time to ask about where to look for mushrooms. But it was closed. As we were about to leave, the last guy out of the office pulled his old pickup back into parking lot. He turned out to be the district ranger and suggested that morels were growing on Dooley Ridge and that the meals were good at a nearby brew pub. After a good meal and driving perhaps the most winding paved road I have ever been on, we found a spot to camp below Dooley Ridge.  (Link to trip photo album)

Gopher Snake in John Day River

After a cold night and a pleasant but fruitless search through the burned forest for mushrooms, we went back over the winding mountain pass and stopped in Sumpter for supplies. This old mining town had not quite defrosted and roads to any interesting mines were snowed in. We checked out a roadside “museum” of old mining equipment rusting in the sun and then drove on to John Day, Oregon, and the Clyde Holliday Oregon State Park. It had beautiful flowering trees, mowed lawns and paved RV hookups next to the nearly flooded John Day River. It was also nearly full and we pulled into a less-desirable RV slot while we picked out a better one and registered. When we went to move the van, it wouldn’t start, triggering the first real “emergency response” of the month. After moving most of our stuff out to open the engine compartment, I discovered that some rubber air ducts had shaken themselves free of the carburetor. In a short time and without tools, I had them back in place and the van running again. So we drove it to the 1188 Brewery in John Day.

The next day we ate breakfast at the Snaffle Bit restaurant, which turned out to have WiFi service. I caught up on email and filled up on French Toast and sausage while Cheryl talked about Australian cattle dogs with another customer and dined on California eggs Benedict. Then we headed out to the recently built Thomas Condon Paleontology Center and Museum on the Sheep Rock Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds. We learned a lot about the evolution of mammals in the 44 million years since the mass extinction of dinosaurs. The very new museum was fascinating and the scenery spectacular. (See album) We returned to Clyde Holliday for the night. About 11 PM a very loud siren went off for a very long time. Cars sped one way past the park

Main Exhibit Hall at Condon Paleontology Center

then fire engines sped the other way. As the sirens died down coyotes picked up the tune and were soon joined by local dogs. We learned the next day that a cabin had burned in the hills but the family got out safely. (emergency response #2)

We made our way north over Highway 19. This again is a spectacular highway with campgrounds we didn’t know about and stopped at the town of Fossil, OR and the Oregon Paleo Lands Center which according to tourism guides was a jumping off place to a nearby dig where you could find ancient fossilized plants and animals for yourself. But we sat down to talk with the pioneer of fossil collection in Fossil, Karen Masshoff, and learned that the town really did not want to support it’s namesake, heritage or evolutionary science of any kind and that the fossil site was a mess of clay and discarded pieces of rock. We moved on to camp at Cottonwood, “Oregon’s newest campground”. Overnight camping was in the “One Tree” area, which was aptly named for the one old pine tree along the John Day river. It was a windswept and desolate place, especially compared to Clyde Holliday. But it had towering basalt cliffs and a rugged beauty that we enjoyed on an early evening hike. we stayed for the night.

The next day we ate lunch in Condon, OR, perched in wheat fields and a wind farm above the Columbia, then crossed into Washington and did laundry in Goldendale. The drive over the pass into Toppenish went fairly smoothly but on the freeway from Yakima to Wenatchee the van started gasping for fuel again and we barely made it to a rest stop overlooking the Yakima Valley. Examining the carburetor, I noticed that the governor linkage was sticky. Cheryl gave me her trusty can of Ballistol lubricant and I dowsed it liberally until it seemed free. (emergency response #3) From there we drove without incident to Ellensburg and then over Ryegrass Pass to Vantage where we camped at a very spiffy and expensive Washington State campground right on the Columbia River backed up by the

Our van is under the green tree.

Wanapum Dam. We parked next to a huge motor home with Alberta plates, a satellite dish and a new SUV towed behind. I couldn’t help but remember the Wanapum name for White people is “Upsuch”, the greedy ones. Just after dark I stepped out on the bluff overlooking the lake and heard children calling for help and crying. I walked over with my headlamp on and gathered together a couple of boys who had misjudged the way back to their camp from the beach. After some talking and walking back to the main campground, I realized that they were from a boisterous group of children with several tents and took them over there. The adults were out looking for the lost boys and the other children sent a couple of kids after them yelling “We found them.” I didn’t wait there for the adults. (emergency response #4) It was an incredibly windy night that sounded like a hurricane. We had to lower the lid on the camper so the canvas wouldn’t tear.

On April 12th, we headed out for breakfast at George and found that Martha’s Restaurant had closed. Moving on to Ephrata and hoping to find a good country breakfast, we drove down a side street to look at a place that turned out to not have hot food and were headed back toward main street when flashing red and blue lights appeared right behind us. A county sheriff pulled us over for not making a full stop. He turned out to be okay, didn’t issue a ticket and recommended the Country Deli as a good place for breakfast although he confessed to us that he had celiac disease and couldn’t eat there. We did and it was perfect. (emergency response #5) We were glad to get home early in the afternoon and deal with things like my 192 new emails.

Morels in the Carpenter Road Fire

While we had been gone, Spring had emerged bigtime. The vineyard had turned green and the asparagus had popped up. Tulips and lilacs were in bloom as were the cherry, apple, peach and pear trees and the forsythia.  (Link to Spring Album)  The critters were feisty. Gray-C released a mouse in the house a couple days later and a towhee attacked it’s own image reflected in our shiny stove pipe. After one more failed attempt nearby, we picked hundreds of morels in the Carpenter Road wildfire area and ate rib eye steak with morels, garlic and asparagus for dinner.

On the last day of the month I woke up to the sound of what turned out to be a diesel fire truck parked across the street from our place. I walked down there and found out that a 13 year old runaway girl had slept in the grass near our neighbor’s driveway. Someone had seen her lying there and called 911. The local fire department was the first to arrive. One of them talked to her and sat on the ground leaning up against the guard rail with her. She was wrapped in a blanket. Several other firemen talked with each other nearby until a Sheriff Patrol car arrived and drove off with her to the south about an hour later. (emergency response #5). That was the saddest of all. We were glad to be back at our home and she wanted to leave hers for good.

Click for a video of the pile steaming

Technically it is not yet spring. But Spring is breaking out all over anyway. Early in February we got a couple inches of snow but not enough to call in a snow plow to clear the driveway. I did call up the plow guy on February 10th to clear a path through frozen snow to Old Blue, our 40 year old Chevy Pickup, so I could help Rick at Quillasascut Farm clear out the goat feeding barn. Three huge truck loads later the barn was clear, there was a ten ton pile of manure next to the garden, and my back was a little sore. Two days later the pile was steaming and my back was more than a little sore.

The Filbert is ready for Spring

But my back is fine now (after a visit to our chiropractor, Peter Roesler) and the snow is gone. Chickadee’s have started their mating songs. Turkeys are fanning their tails and fighting, grass is rising up from the very flat and wet earth. Tulips are poking up from the flower barrel in front of the house and the filbert trees are adorned with catkins of pollen. Of course all of this means that it’s time to get out and prepare the garden and prune the grapes. Cheryl has leek starts growing inside, but I haven’t quite started pruning yet.

I got the bottle shed organized and now have close to 2000 wine bottles sorted by type, color and size and stored in wine cases ready to wash and scald. I did get three of my best wines from 2014 bottled, Marechal Foch, Luci Kuhlmann and Baco Noir. I also bottled some apple wine from 2012. All of them are wonderful and I got a chance to share some of them with hundreds of people at the Hunger Coalition Dinner, February 26th.

Another spring cleaning project was to reclaim the wood shop from all the tools and supplies stacked on the floor. There is more to do sorting screws etc. but the shop is ready even if I am not. The office/tasting room bathroom project is done for now and includes new linoleum on the floor. But the office is a bit of a mess because I have been jamming on a new guide to rock hounding hot spots for the annual Panorama Land Gem and Mineral Show, which closed yesterday – and was a big success. And I got the first draft of the chapter in my father’s biography, “Raising a Family”, off to him and my brothers and sisters. If I can get another rock club newsletter done by the end of the week and have the first meeting of the Heritage Network organized by the next week, then I can do the slide show and grape catalog for the Home and Garden Show the weekend after that. Things happen quickly in the spring.

Dad at the BBQ

Remodeled bathroom

Having my Samsung Tablet take dictation for my diary has been fun. Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out what I really said. It translated “evaporated milk” as “vampire rated milk”. It called my Pend Oreille County book “pond or a book”. When I talked about visiting Cheryl’s cousin Pat and Allan (her husband ), it wrote “I visited pattern islands”. When I mentioned that while cooking dinner I screwed up the cornbread and kale, it wrote “I screwed up the cornbread and the girl that went with it.” When I said that I put suet in the feeder, it wrote “I put some saw it in the theater.”

The tablet was not the only technology giving us fits. I spent hours with Norton support getting both of our computers on the same plan, but saved over $100 in the process. We spent even more time tracing down all the routers that Providence’s online patient medical information website bounced to before becoming lost. But we got Hughes Net to give us information that we gave to Providence and they not only got us back online, they fixed a problem that scores of other patients were having.

We’ve also been watching episodes of The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan. He “rehabilitates” dogs by training humans to be “calm and assertive”. It’s a lot like Zen. Spring is hectic but don’t worry, be calm, assertive and happy.

A big question going into the winter was “Will we get enough snow?” El Nino jumped on that one and we have plenty of snow. My new barometer has been shifting up and down as systems move in and out building up over a foot of snow early in the month, with much more than that at higher elevations.

After a snowstorm you sometimes get a clear sky in the morning and the light before sunrise turns the whole landscape blue. I’m including a couple of pictures and a video of snow falling – but not blue. The beauty of snow and the problems it causes make a fitting background to the rest of this blog.

Otter Sled

I bought a new Otter Sled that really helps move things around in this weather. On January 6th a log truck didn’t move around so well and dumped a load of logs just south of Rice, Washington. Cheryl had two pictures she took of the wreck posted on a Spokane TV webpage. Also not so much fun was the power outage on January 26th that lasted half the day or the outage in Kettle

Log Truck Roll Over

Falls that took down the Crossroads Websites in December (More about that later on.)

Do computers affect the way you think? I typed that question into Google and got 60,900,000 responses. Evidently even computers round off the results when convenient. For years I have been keeping a diary, which eventually gets transformed into blogs, which eventually turn into the Christmas newsletter. I found a simple app called Journal for my Galaxy Tablet. Then I discovered that I could write an entry just by talking to the tablet. It doesn’t get everything right, but does figure out a surprising amount. I could just paste all those ramblings into a blog with rather random results. But I am going to round off the results to make them more convenient.

Cheryl and I watched 3 movies this month: Sisters, Star Wars VII and The Revenant. Like all interesting stories, there was a lot of conflict going on in each – and varying amounts of humor. I’m sure each of them started out with a lot of writing. We also watched some of the final games of the football season and of the Australian Open Tennis Tournament. There was not as much writing involved creating those conflicts, but plenty afterward.

Germania Mine

I reflected on that since I have been doing a whole lot of writing this last month myself. I made more progress on my father’s biography than any time since last January. I wrote an article for the North Columbia Monthly on the Germania Mine and it’s part in World War I.  Plenty of conflict there. I also helped write an article about the history of the Panorama Gem and Mineral Club and the January Newsletter for the club. Even there you find rockhounds overcoming adversity to reach their reward. So (unsurprisingly) there are some conflicts and resolutions in this month’s blog.

I am dealing with one long-standing unresolved problem by remodeling the bathroom part of this office/tasting room. When I remodeled the main office to create a tasting room last year, I moved two file cabinets full of old

Demolition Phase

records into the bathroom. They increased the load on two floor joists that were already sagging with the weight of a 200 lb slab of concrete under the shower. The shower leaked and rotted part of the joists. I had two main challenges, 1. Go through records in the file cabinet dating back 30 years saving some and recycling others. 2. Move out the shower slab and remake the foundation so that it didn’t sag and it would never rot again.

From the first challenge, I learned that things that are worth saving are ones that show how significant things came to be later on. Old manuals and project paperwork didn’t make the cut. Pictures and stories did.

From the second challenge I learned that it can take a lot longer to fix something done poorly than it would have to do it more substantially the first time.

In a power outage last December the hard drive on the Crossroads Archive website died. Our Internet Provider, Scott Hirsch, at Secure Webs was able to revive it on a new server. That was a huge relief since the site took three years to build with a federal grant and hundreds of hours of volunteer labor. It gets about 30,000 visits a year but we have not added material for that last 3 years while trying to resolve a dispute with the Stevens County Government, who administered the grant. As President of the Heritage Network I asked the county to release its interest in the website so we could add more material to it. The county had used grant money to purchase webserver hardware for the website. They replied that would constitute “gifting”, because it is illegal for a government agency to give resources to a private entity. Since after the power outage and the server replacement the site was no longer running on hardware tied to the grant and since from the beginning our group has paid for the domain registration out of our own pocket we thanked the county for their support and said we would continue to manage it on our own.

Fruitland Irrigation company flume under construction. Colville River at Meyers Falls to orchards, just above Colville River. Yarnell, James Marion

We were shocked three weeks later to get a letter from the county commissioners demanding that we turn over both the expired hardware and control of the site to them by the end of the month so they could shut it down. After I calmed down a little, I composed a reply with a series of facts detailing how the county had refused to provide a site for the information itself and we were forced to create it from scratch with our own money and labor, and that they never owned or operated the website and it had never been “gifted” to them. The Heritage Network board reviewed the reply and we gave the expired hardware and the reply to the county. It’s been over three weeks and the month is over. There has been no response from the county. I hope that conflict is resolved too.

I also paid taxes and filed reports to the State and the Feds for the winery. I’m not generally opposed to government. But it leads to the last subject in this blog, Predators. Now that the snow is frozen, turkeys and coyotes can run over the snow. Eagles cry from their roosts near the bay every morning and a few nights ago an owl flashed by our kitchen while our cat was contemplating pushing through the clear pet door. I’ve been reading accounts of encounters with Sasquatch during the last 200 years in the book, Tribal Bigfoot. There are hundreds of websites dedicated to the topic and a TV reality show. Still they remain illusive and that’s a good thing for both species.

Not as illusive and not nearly a good thing, my sister circulated a report from the Archdiocese of Seattle on 77 priest pedophiles from it’s ranks. It included a list of the different parishes they had worked in. So many transfers indicate a long-standing pattern of complicity in covering up this problem. All of my family knew one or more of them. In the real world the movie is never over. But at least January is.

This was a fun visit with Cheryl’s Sister in Law Joyce and her niece, Cindy.

Winter has set in with definitive cold and frozen ground. Temperatures are in the 20s and the snow now predicted in a couple days may stay for months. But I am just now getting around to writing about some good times we had with family this year. It’s not like we don’t see a lot of people all year, with tastings at the winery and days at the Farmers’s Market, we see a lot of the public and our neighbors. But family stays and plays. We watch them grow up and grow old. There’s nothing like people you have known all your life or all of their lives to focus on the whole experience of living. Besides they often come from a long distance just to be with you.

Such was the case with Joyce Pulver, Cheryl’s sister-in-law, who came through Spokane on a bus tour with her niece, Cindy on July 17th. We got together for a little driving tour of Spokane and then ate dinner at Anthony’s, a restaurant with great seafood overlooking Spokane Falls. We last saw her in Marietta, Georgia years ago. She still looks great and is a joy to be around. Too bad she doesn’t live closer. (Almost month earlier, we attended and played music at family gathering of Cheryl’s cousins, Kathy and Pat and Loose Gravel band at Pat and Alan’s house in Chewelah. But we didn’t take pictures.)

April, James, Joe Brock and his son, Ovid

Daughter Bina and Nala

A couple days later we got our first visit from a young bear who was interested in our cherry tree. We chased it off, but it goes to show how long ago that was. Only a week later, my daughter Bina and her whole family drove up from Alameda in Joe’s big Dodge Power Wagon. It was great to see the whole family together. Joe Brock doesn’t make it up this way often since he is mostly busy building kite boats and testing them in open water. Their kids, Ovid and Nala are a lot of fun to be around. I made a big goat-leg stew for us one night and they got to catch up with old friends before heading west to see more family near Mt Rainier.

This picture links to the “Poopy Butt” video.

The weather kept getting hotter. I explored an old mining area with daughter April and son James near her home in Curlew just before the big fires broke out. All of August was a smoky fire season. April and James made it back over here during the grape harvest. We sat around the garden and vineyard talking and sampling grapes. Cheryl (C-ma) got into a conversation with young James in which he found the term “poopy butt” to be tremendously funny. I have a video clip from that that I plan to blackmail him with some day. You can see it by clicking on the picture.

The Inlaws and Outlaws Band: Matt Yake, Roger Ellison, Bill Yake, Marc Barreca and myself

Loretta held by Jeannette Barreca

Sometimes relatives come to you, sometimes you go to them, as we did for the annual Barreca Thanksween gathering. It’s grown too big for most of our houses. This year my brother Jeff reserved space at Angelo’s Restaurant in Burien. Family members were spread out overnight in houses and in our case, a bed and breakfast, all over Seattle. Most of us got together early in the day to play music (or listen to it) together at my brother Mark and his wife Nancy’s place in West Seattle. Cheryl hosted an impromptu wine tasting while I played bass. The star of the event was newly born Loretta, daughter of our brother-in-law Bill’s son, Mathew, and his wife Liza. Unfortunately April, Tony and James Houston could not join us.

Cheryl playing with our dog, Gretchen. Note the burnt trees in back and some cut down on the right.

The best Thanksgiving however was the real Thanksgiving this last Thursday. Daughter Bina and grandaughter Nala caught a plane from Alameda and stayed at April’s house near Curlew. April cooked a big organic Turkey that has been in our freezer for about a year. Cheryl made a great

James Houston and Nala Brock after eating snow.

squash and persimmon pie. I broke out some wines that were truly reserved… There was lots of fresh, organic home-cooked food in April’s 100+ year old log cabin. We played with grandkids indoors and out in the snow. Even our dog came along despite a lot of whining on her part during the trip. April, Bina and kids stopped by on their way to Spokane and the flight back to California. There was a lot to give thanks for this year and we are especially thankful for visits with family.

Nala and Cheryl discussing coloring when James jumps in with Lepi Nala’s stuffed Leopard.

James and Nala run up on the roof while our cat, Gray-C looks on.

After you have washed out a carboy that was used for holding wine, it is still wet inside. Wet carboys are a magnet for unwanted microbes. Some people are alright with leaving some bisulfite solution in the bottle during storage. I am not. I don’t use sulfites. So I prefer to have the carboy completely dry. During the summer I could manage this by inverting them in milk crates and leaving them in the bright sun for a couple of days. But this was slow and during most of the year ineffective. Henry Anderson from Dominion Distillery suggested that I could use something like a boot dryer. Looking at the various products from PEET, the biggest boot dryer company, I could not find anything that exactly fit my needs. I emailed them and asked if they could think of anything. They wrote back saying that they did not have exactly what I needed but that I might be able to adapt their gun cabinet dryer to do the job AND they would send me one for free to try it out! It was your basic “offer you can’t refuse”. Two days later it was in my winery.

Fastening the PEET gun cabinet dryer to the bottom of a milk crate with zip ties.

The original dryer outlet pipe is too big to fit inside any carboy I have. But a 1 1/4″ PVC coupling fits snugly over the outlet. A 3/4″ PVC pipe fits inside all of my carboys with enough room to allow a flow of air in and a flow of water down and out. I bought a reducer from 1 1/4″ to 3/4″ and was ready to make a carboy dryer. I knew that the 6.5 gallon carboys I have are exactly 12 inches across and fit nicely in a milk crate. I figured that if I could stack a crate to hold the carboy over a crate that held the dryer, I would be in business. It almost worked.

Hole cut in the bottom of a second crate

There were two basic problems. One was that the carboy mouth would sit so tightly on the reducer that water and air could not flow past it. The other was that the pipe pushed the carboy high enough in the second crate that it was unstable. A temporaty fix of putting wooden spacers between the two crates showed that the natural flow of air through the dryer was perfect for the job. The first carboy was dry within a couple of hours.

The temporary spacing lifted the carboy away from the PVC reducer.

To make the solution more stable, I modified a 1 1/4″ PVC coupling so that it had 4 vent holes around the bottom and slipped it over the 3/4″ pipe. That way the carboy would have circulation enough to dry out when sitting on the vent coupling. Then I created an insert out of 2×6

6.5 gallon carboy drying in crates separated by an insert.

lumber to lift the upper crate up around the 6.5 gallon carboy and make it more stable. I gave the insert cleats on the bottom and a collar around the top so that the milk crates would not slip out of place. That works great for these old acid jar 6.5 gallon carboys. But the smaller 5 and 6 gallon carboys are only 10″ across. They flop around in this setup.

A PVC coupling modified to leave vents between the carboy and the reducer.

Dryer pipe sticking up through the wooden insert

Luckily, one of the 5 gallon carboys I have came with a wooden cage that is 12″ across. It fits nicely inside a plastic milk crate. With just the two milk crates without the 2×6 insert between them, I can slip the wooden cage into the upper crate and adjust it to hold a 5 gallon or 6 gallon carboy safely. A similar modification will eventually fit the 3 gallon carboys into the dryer. I’m happy as a clam and already have half of my wet carboys dry.

5 gallon carboy in wooden cage within the upper milk crate. No insert needed.