Trading

We're at day 16 of the "buy no food" farm challenge, and so far, so good. We were a little worried because the boys and Mark are off on a camping trip this weekend, and that usually means at least one trip to the store. The boys and Mark are all gluten-free and dairy-free, and camp food is usually noodles, meatballs, pancakes and all sorts of stuff we have to put and replace with fussy GF versions so my kids feel like they're eating somewhat the same food as everyone else.

however, we've lucked into a great Boy Scout troop that has realized that if our three campers plus three other campers can't eat gluten, that's one-third of the people going. So they put them all in one group and they're bringing GF food for everyone and we don't have to worry about it. That's the first time in ten years of Scouts that food hasn't been a serious issue.

We have a ton of food, still,​ and we're eating lots of veggies from Gleaners. I've had people emailing me and asking what I have to trade. Pecans are a hot commodity. My aunt sent me a 30-pound box of pecans for my birthday, and I'm very happy at the bargaining power pecans have.

Clearly, we still have plenty of eggs, too. 

I got one pound of organic coffe last week, and someone else is bringing over another pound this week.

Mans someone emailed me and said they were looking for strawberries. No dice, I said. We've been out since September.  he said he had blueberries for me I came across them.

i thought that was a funny thing -- to keep on the lookout for strawberries. As if that would happen. 

Then another lady emailed me. "I have three gallons of frozen strawberries," she said, from their garden last year. "Got any pecans?"

So today, I gave up some of the strawberries and kept some. And now we have a gallon of blueberries in the freezer as well, and the kids are having organic fruit smoothies every morning. 

I almost feel guilty that this isn't harder. 

Maybe in two weeks,  when the meat starts to runs out, I'll be changing my tune.

Two weeks in..

Today's day 15 of the farm challenge.
So far, so good. I still haven't bought any food, and we're still not starving.

I got a lot of goodies at Gleaner's Pantry this past weekend -- I need to write a post about how the GIleaner's Pantry works. Some of my friends think that I'm eating food from a dumpster. Others think that I'm stealing food from the mouths of hungry old ladies. The truth is somewhere in between. No old ladies are being starved. And the food is yummy.

So, this week, we got mushrooms, broccoli, cauliflower, apples, bananas, a couple of onions, a few tomatoes, a cabbage and some oranges and Cuties from Gleaners.
And we've been eating simple, quick meals at home, because we're busy with feeding baby goats four times a day, and milking twice a day, and real life and homeschooling in between.
So, oatmeal or eggs for breakfast.
Leftovers, fruit, tuna fish on greens for lunch. Dinner's been chilaquiles, a chicken enchilada casserole, bean soup. One night we had Bibimbap, which is just a stir-fry over rice with meat and a fried egg on top. That was pretty tasty.
Random thoughts so far:

• Trading is where it's going to be. I swear, I have all sorts of cool trades coming up that I couldn't even imagine. I'll save those stories for another post, though.
• More greens, less meat. More rice, less ingredients. That's the only way we're going to get through with my teenager.
• I need to bake more, even though I don't want to and don't have a lot of time. Bean soup is OK by itself, but it's great with a piece of fresh-baked GF bread. If I want everyone to eat well and enjoy this, I either need to bake bread, or I need to farm out the task to my kids --  and it's not a bad skill for them to have. My oldest will be 15 this summer and has celiac, so GF bread-making is something he can take to college with him.
• I'm tired of cooking, already. I'm tired of making three meals a day and never being able to order take-out or go out for dinner. And we're only two weeks into it.
• I miss cheese. A lot. And I miss gluten-free crackers. Those were my comfort foods. And we're out of both. I know I can make goat cheese. But I want something with no effort. That's the entire point of comfort food, right?
• I'm grateful for sugar and ice cream and eggs and milk. Having a goat makes a HUGE difference. It will be amazing to have milk and cheese and something to trade with all summer. (Not that I'd ever trade goat's milk, because that would be illegal. So I never would.)
• I'd love something fancy, like Thai food. Peasant food is where it's at if you're going to be cheap and filling. But I'd love a piece of grilled fish, or sushi, instead of blobby, casserole-y, soupy food. And I know that means that I need to make something like that. But I don't have the servants to do it.
• I amazed at how easy this is, truly. The hardest part is staying out of the grocery stores, purely from habit. Twice I've been out and almost stopped by the store to get "a couple of things" and had to stop myself.

This week I'm going to make some meals ahead. That way I might not have to cook so much, and I might get some more creativity going. We'll see.

Waste not...

So, today's day ten of the Farm Challenge.

Honestly, I haven't even really noticed, at all, any changes in far as what we're eating.

But I've noticed huge changes in how I think, and it's going to make a big difference in the future.

First, though: We have baby goats!!
Seriously, it's the best thing ever. And the worst thing.

But they're very, very cute.

Zenora, our "lead" goat and my son's best friend and beloved pet, gave birth to a boy and a girl yesterday.

We had been waiting for days and days and DAYS, and then, suddenly, at the end of our 4-H meeting, one of the 4-H kids came out and shouted, "You've got baby goats! Did you know that?"

And there they were, in all of their tiny glory.
So I officially became the best 4-H leader that ever existed, and all of the kids (of the human kind) got to watch two goat babies go from a wet, shriveled mess in a pile of goo into an amazingly tiny little animal that could walk on its own.

It truly was magical and wonderous and all of those things. I think we had 14 people out in the barn watching Zenora nuzzle and lick her tiny babes.
And then, sadly, we watched her decide that she had zero interest in nursing them, and refuse to give them any milk at all. She'll talk to them, and check on them, but won't let them get any milk.
So, bottle babies it is. Which means that we have to milk Zenora, and give the babies the milk, and keep it around the clock.
We did every two or three hours the first night, and I think we can get it down to four hours tonight. That still means a middle of the night feeding for a few more days. Rotten Zenora!
The good news out of that, getting back to food and the farm challenge: We have goat milk!
Of course, I have no idea what to do with it. I've eaten goat cheese, and I've had one glass of goat milk to drink, and it wasn't bad. But I certainly am not a goat milk expert.

Here's what we got this morning from Zenora: Almost a full quart.

And tonight, when we milked her again, we got more than a quart. Is that good? Amazing? So-so? I have no idea. I do know that we're about to be up to our eyeballs in goat milk. I'd better figure out how to make cheese, pronto.

One of my good friends, who came over to help with the birth of the goats, is a goat cheese guru and makes everything from chevre to cheddar. I'm going to need lessons!

In the meantime, though, I'm starting to change the way I think about food.
I'm afraid this will reveal the privilege I've had for so long, but that's the whole point of this, isn't it? To talk about waste and excess in our food system, and how we can all cut down and cut back and how no one should go hungry in the United States (or on the entire planet, but that's a different fight,) when there's so much food?
So here goes:
We waste food. There are five of us, and we've always wasted food. We make more than we eat, we throw leftovers in the fridge, and then the leftovers go bad.
I buy too much. The food goes bad in the fridge, because I didn't plan meals around what I had.
I make too much, I cook too much, and most of all, we EAT too much.

And slowly, because there's no more "boughten" food coming in, I'm starting to see the patterns emerging, and how to change that.
Tonight, we had tuna sandwiches for dinner.
I know, I know. Tuna sandwiches. Thrill a minute. But I was up with goatlings at 3 a.m. and ran a co-op class today for a dozen kids and made a chicken mummy. Cut me some slack. I would normally have ordered pizza.
And we have a TON of food in the fridge. Leftover lamb roast. Leftover pork roast. Chopped chicken. Salad. Taco meat. Tortillas. Beans. Salsa. The fridge is stuffed, and we have a pantry full of food. And we have avocados about to go bad, cherry tomatoes, lettuce, cauliflower that needs to be used.
Now, on a Friday night when I was wiped out and didn't want to cook, I would have ordered a pizza or gone to get tacos. Maybe even gone to the store, if I were being cheap, and gotten a cooked chicken.
And I wouldn't have considered that waste.
But all of the food in the fridge that *didn't* get eaten, that's going to go bad, is still being wasted.
And even now, though, I didn't use it. I got a loaf of gluten-free bread from the freezer (we're down to six loaves,) used ten pieces of our precious bread, ONE can of tuna fish (I would have used two last week,) less mayonnaise than I would have used a week ago, and padded the sandwiches with pickles, pickle juice, and some lettuce.
And if you had told me a week ago that tuna sandwiches were wasting food, I would have told you you were wrong.
But there's NO MORE TUNA coming in. And we HAVE TACO MEAT in the fridge. I could have saved that tuna for a night three weeks in the future! There will be a time in a month when I want bread, and I had tortillas in the fridge!!
So.
A different mindset entirely. It's going to be interesting to see what happens as the challenge progresses, and where we are in a month! In the meantime? 
​Baby goats!

To those whom much has been given...

Today is day eight of the Farm Challenge.

I'd originally envisioned doing this until June 1, as a chance to really just cut spending until we figure out where Mark is with the job situation. I hadn't planned this, so I couldn't "cheat" by stocking up or making sure that I had the basics -- the whole point of this is to live off of the excess and waste in our society, and to see how much of what we actually "need" is just a "want."
But because I hadn't stocked up beforehand, there were some staples that were going to become scare. Quickly.
Last night I wrote that I needed olive oil - hard to cook without it.
 And sugar.  Hard to bake almost anything without it.
And vinegar -- I have all sorts of things that I can can and pickle, but you can't do any of that without vinegar. I was thinking about trading for vinegar, and maybe trying lard for fat (I'm not farmer-y enough yet to be skilled with lard.)
But I'm in this for the long haul, and while I can still afford to go out and buy a couple of big jugs of vinegar for pickling, that would sort of take away the whole point of the challenge, you know? 
So I decided to just wait a few days, see what I was going to be really low on, and try trading.

But today was the first hard day.

Mark is home today. And he's not supposed to be. And as much as I adore him and his company, it's very weird to have him home at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday. 
I'm trying to sort out classes and supervise kids and get math squared away, and here's this man in the middle of things, looking for something to do.
So Mark started on an outdoor project, and I started back to my normal day, but there was a  just a big, fat "everything's going to be different, deal with it," sort of vibe to it all.
And then, one of my kids came in to ask me about the delivery downstairs. Was it a co-op order, or was it a trade for something?
"What co-op order?" says I. "What's in it?"
Two Costco-sized bottles of olive oil. Organic sugar. Vast amounts of vinegar for pickling. 
And, just for me, a little bit of dark chocolate.
A neighbor, who said it's "our little secret," dropped it off.

This.

This is why I can't leave this place, or these wonderful people.
I am NOT in need. I am NOT hungry. I am, to use a word that I don't like much, blessed. We have so much, and have such an abundance, that I can feed my family for weeks without any income.
And yet people see that I attempting a challenge and rise to help.
People I don't know well. People to whom I'm not related. People that only know me through Facebook.

The only word I can use it is bounty. It feels almost obscene, the abundance and much-ness of it all.
How, how, HOW can I even have any doubt, or fear, or worry about the future, when I have friends that drop off vinegar and chocolate?
How can I have anything except faith and cheery optimism when I have people who believe I can feed my kids with nothing but an idea?
So, I think I'll go further, because, well, people believe I can do this, dammit.
I'm going to July 1. No money spent. Only the excess that American's grocery stores throw away, what I've stockpiled, what I can trade, and what I have.
And by July 1, I guarantee I'll be out of meat and sugar and coffee, and I will be a big grump. And by then, there's a good chance that Mark will be working again and this will be just an exercise to see if I can.
But the goodness and good nature of this place that I love so much has just astonished me.
gain.
Tonight is pasta with jarred tomato sauce (I didn't feel like cooking.) Tomorrow is pork tenderloin with green beans. We're still eating incredibly well.

One week in: Zombies at the door

So, we're one week in to the farm challenge.

This is where it gets interesting. We're in the middle of our "role-playing," as my son calls it. We're making this a family challenge, to see if we really can live like farmers, or zombie hunters, or pioneers.

The reality, though, is that there are no zombies, but there's still some scary stuff out there. Today was my husband's last day at work.  He might find a new job next week, but he might not get another job until crude oil picks back up. Which might be never.

And we're trying to stay put until Mark can find another job nearby. I mean, why would sell this amazing farm with all of its stories and history and wonder and move to some soul-sucking piece of concrete hell in Texas just because there are jobs there?

We do, I guess, have to rely on Mark to find a job. I'm fairly sure that we'd starve if I have to support us. I know my strong points: I'm brilliant and funny and a great writer and a talented chef and a great friend for the people who get me.
I'm also, for all practical purposes, completely unemployable. I mean, would YOU hire me? I talk too much and I'm full of fabulous ideas and would be happy to pop in to your business a few hours a week here and there, but on my own hours, thanks, and just to tell you how you're doing it all wrong.
And while I have my legions of fans (like, at least ten,) I also have people who I completely annoy and who block me on Facebook rather than wonder if my unintended snark is directed at them and their life choices. (It isn't. Ever. Except that one time, but she deserved it. Mostly, though, it's just me being completely clueless that people might take things personally.)
The last real job I had was in 1996, where I made $24,000 a year as an editor for The Galveston Daily News, and I brought in about $120 a week waiting tables on the side. Once I met and married Mark, I quit to launch my lucrative writing career. And here I am, 20 years later. I'll let you know when it launches.

No, it's best if Mark is the one bringing in the money. He's willing to get up out of bed at 6:30 every morning, go to a job that involves numbers and chemicals and people wearing real clothes and saying words like "process safety engineering committee" and he does it for an entire nine hours IN A ROW, and then he's willing to go back again the next day. He's way better than I am.

So, for now, my contribution is to make sure that we stop spending money.

So we're on a mission: As long as we can, making a game out of it, spend NO money on food. That way, the money we do spend can go toward the mortgage, the electric bill, the dentist, and gas. And it will buy us time to figure out what's next on our mission.

A week into it, we're doing pretty well. We have a ton of food, and we're eating great meals: Tonight was pasta carbonara -- pasta with bacon and eggs and salt and pepper. Plain, but easy. Last night was stuffed baked potatoes. We had lamb one night, and tacos another, and there was a pasta-hamburger dish in there somewhere. 
Lots of veggies -- salads, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, green beans.
We're out of cheese, olive oil and vinegar. That kind of sucks. The olive oil is going to be hard to live without, and I can't pickle or can anything without vinegar. 

We only have half a bag of sugar left. I baked a cake this week, and some granola bars, and we use it in coffee. I just stuck a cobbler in the oven, and I like making desserts. Sugar might be an issue.

The coffee is still holding out, thankfully. So is the bread. And we got a ton of food from Gleaner's this week: Cherry tomatoes, bok choy, bananas, apples, pears, onions, greens. Blackberries, gluten-free brownies and even one container of gluten-free lemon cupcakes.
We have lots of eggs (we're getting a dozen a day, at least,) and we might have goat's milk in a few weeks.

So, while scary things circle outside, we're not going to let them in. We have popcorn, and hot chocolate, and we still have streaming video, dammit, and we'll fend them off.
We've been through worse, and we'll get through this.
How can you worry about zombies at the door when you've got cherry cobbler in the oven?

Finding Mr. Filian

So, I've written before about my father and his wretched childhood. It's the stuff of family lore -- too miserable to be believed, and too sad to make a really good story. (Here's a little bit about how we're trying to do it differently.)
You can't really dig your teeth into my father's childhood as a story because there's no hero, no happy ending, and no lessons learned.
Only a miserable, wicked childhood, unending abuse, and a brilliant, beautiful boy who was broken by it.

In a nutshell: My father, Don McGovern, was born in 1932, in Pittsfield, Mass., to a woman named Maggie Elser, who was married to a man named Bart McGovern. Apparently, Bart had married Maggie out of sympathy, or pity, or a sense of honor, because she was already pregnant with another man's child when he married her.
And Bart, who was a mean, nasty, miserable drunk, never let Maggie nor her child forget that Bart had taken pity on a whore and her bastard son.
He beat them both, called them names, and made sure my father knew that he wasn't wanted. Then Bart had three more children with his poor wife, and made them just as miserable, while making sure that they all knew what a terrible woman their mother was. The stories of what happened to all of their children are grim, stark and ugly. My father might have had it the best of all of them.

My father left home at 12 or 13 to escape being beaten to death, and pretty much never went back. He joined the Navy for a while, lived on the streets, lived in Chicago, New York, San Francisco. He was an actor, a writer, a con man, a husband a few times over.

His one dream, though, was to know who his "real" father was. He was sure that his father was a gentleman. A good man. Not a drunk, or an abusive, uneducated boor.

My father asked, and asked, but Maggie would never tell. Finally, at one point, Maggie's sister told my dad what she knew. The sister said that his "real" father had been a handsome man, an engineer, traveling through town. He was charming and funny and educated, and had a quick fling with Maggie. He did tell her that he had a sister who was a doctor -- quite a feat for 1931. And when my father found out that Maggie had died, he grieved doubly, for when he asked his aunt for a name, she said, "I'm sorry, Don. That's a secret she took to the grave."
 
I've always wondered, too. I mean, how can you not? This is my grandfather we're talking about, and it would be fascinating to learn the real story. 
But she took the secret to the grave with her, and it was one of those things that we'd never know.

She died in 1975 or thereabouts -- forty years ago. This is one of those things that you just have to let go, right?

Until tonight.
My mother called and said that my father's last sibling, Terry, was going through a box of his mother's things.

And there, written on a piece of paper, was the name of my grandfather.

Frank Filian. An engineer with the Massachusetts railroad, she thought. And that was it. Just a note. A letter. Something she'd decided to write long ago, and something that no one ever thought was important until now. Terry called my mom and mentioned it. My mom called me. And presto, instant grandparents. Probably cousins and aunts and uncles, too, if I look hard enough.

I've been poking around ancestry.com for an hour or so, and I've found a couple of Frank Filians. I have no idea if they're the right ones. I have no idea what, if anything to do with any of this information. 
But you know, just when you think my family can't get any damned weirder, relatives start coming up from the grave.

We'll see where the search for Mr. Filian goes.

Mr. Voldemort's last horcrux

(Originally published May 27, 2013. My dad died in October that year.)

That's my dad in the picture.

I've taken to calling him Mr. Voldemort in my blog posts because, well, it seems to fit.

He really is, despite his good looks, a rotten old bastard, and as much as I adored him to the point of worship when I was a kid, there's not much good in him. He is brilliant, funny, and astoundingly successful at talking women into bed, and on the face of it, you'd think he was a good guy.

You'd be wrong. He's not nice. He's not kind. He's not reliable, honest, sweet, dependable, trustworthy, good-natured, even-tempered, sober, cheerful or loyal.

In fact, of all of the Boy Scout traits of good character (trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent,) he gets two: Brave and clean. Well, and I'll give him courteous, because he has flawless, impeccable manners, as long as he's not mad at you. If he is, all bets are off.

He's 81 years old, and he's dying. He doesn't have much longer -- my mother says it's less than a month. Maybe it will be this week. Maybe it will be a few weeks. He should have been dead years ago. He's the kind of guy they made up the phrase "tough old bastard" about.

I joke that he's on his last horcrux -- in Harry Potter, Voldemort splits his soul into seven pieces, and can't be killed until they're all found -- because by all rights, this guy should have died when the mafia stabbed him in the kidneys, or when my mother tried to poison him, or when his first wife tried to kill him when she found he was leaving her for my mom, or when he had a heart attack and drove himself to the hospital, or when any one of a dozen men found him in bed with their wives.

And yet.

Yet, yet, yet.

This is my *Daddy* we're talking about. Who took me fishing when I was ten, and quoted MacBeth to me, and told me about the constellations. The man who taught me to sing "It ain't gonna rain no more," and who told me wild stories about wrestling alligators and riding his bike cross country and lumberjacking with the Indians in the '50s. The man who was roommates with Warren Beatty, who boasted that he could "out-think, out-play, out-smart, out-wit, out-last and out-fuck" every man in the room when a young punk talked smack about his game of pool.

He taught me to play pool, how to make a shrimp cocktail and a mean chocolate mousse, and how to appreciate a Matisse and a symphony. He explained why the Great Books matter, and he showed me a quick wit is sexier than a great body. And I really thought that perhaps he was super-human, and he'd live forever.

He was an actor, when that meant something besides movies. He never wanted to be a movie star. He just wanted to be adored. And now, because he's been mean and nasty to anyone who ever loved him, he is alone with my mother. Mrs. Voldemort. I wouldn't wish dying alone with her on anyone. Not even him.

This boy, in the picture to the right, is my boy. Sander.

He's eight years old, and so much like my father. He's stubborn as a mule, he wants what he wants when he wants it, and he believes that he should be the center of the universe.

The last time we saw my dad, he took one look at Sander, and my dad looked at me, and said, "Good-looking boy."

I said, "With any luck, he'll be as good-looking as you were."

My dad said, "NO ONE is as good-looking as I was."

And that, of course, was part of the problem. My mother said that women just about fell over themselves to get to my dad. The night she met him, she saw him get out of a limousine in a tuxedo, and she said to the friend she was with, "He's mine. Hands off."

Apparently, it didn't matter to either one of my parents that he was already married. Or that he had a son who was not quite three.

My father, at some point on our last visit, told Sander that he was going to grow up to be a *very* handsome man.

Sander has said to me, "Mom, you're going to have to help me let down all of the girls gently. I really can't handle more than one at a time."

But here's the thing: Every time my father mouthed off to his mother and step-father when he was a kid, he was beaten.

When Sander mouths off, we work through it and give him a hug.

When Sander refuses to work and lies on the ground and says he wants out of the family, I remember that when my dad did that, he was locked out for three days. And I hug Sander and tell him that he's stuck with us. 

When Sander can't quite get a grip on himself, I think of my father. And slowly, gently, quietly, inch by inch, I see the shining, beautiful, amazing things that are hidden deep in my father, and I see them coming through in Sander. The stubbornness turns to determination, as he tries to get things done.

The frustration that he wants it NOW turns into patience, as he learns that a baby sister takes precedence over non-essential needs. The trust that my father never had, and never deserved, grows every day with Sander, as he learns that really and truly, if he gives in, just a little, and trusts that we're all on the same team, it will come back to him in spades and he will have someone watch his back.

Sander's frustration lessens every day as he gets older. He's still tough. There are still days when I want to just say, "Goddamn it, kid, I'm going to ground you, punish you -- do what it takes so you will just LISTEN!"

And then I remember that my grandmother beat my father so badly that he left home at 14 and never went back.

And from the very few times when I have tried "discipline" rather than "massage" as tactics with Sander, I know what happened.

This child has an independent, wild streak that will never be broken. He will never "listen" to me. He will never "obey." It's not in his nature. I can coax him to be on my team, win him over so he's a loyal team player, and love him like crazy. But with a kid like this -- volatile, edgy, and determined -- one violent act would be the end of everything. He trusts me. He loves me. All of the beautiful "could have beens" that make up my father come out in my beloved, gorgeous, amazing boy. All it would take is "one good spanking to set him straight," and I'd lose that forever.

And so, while I will mourn my father, or what's left of him, I will celebrate the new. Sander doesn't have all of the Boys Scout traits: He's not thrifty or reverent, he's certainly not clean, and I don't know if he's ever going to be obedient. But he's trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, cheerful and brave.

I can be proud of that. I wish my dad were the kind of man who could be, too, instead of only seeing that he's good-looking.

But I can't save my dad. I can't go back and have a re-do with his childhood, and be kind to him, and tell him that it's all going to be OK. Because it wasn't. His childhood was hellish and violent and full of nastiness. To his credit, he was never violent or unkind to us as children, because he wanted better for us.

And so, when Mr. Voldemort finally gives up that last horcrux, whether it's a day from now, or a month from now, he will have taught me the most important lesson of all: How to raise his grandchildren into wonderful human beings, with all of his good traits, and none of his bad ones. And if I succeed, that will be one hell of an accomplishment.