Cheeeeeese - Part I

Love of cheese seems almost a universal principle uniting humanity. I know only a handful of people who won't eat it, most due to intolerance. We Americans are not regularly exposed to excellent cheese, but that doesn't hamper our fervor for it. My own ardor has led me on a long journey to attempt to craft it with my own hands. To make cheese, you need milk.

Step 1: Buy Goats. No wait, Step 1: Build Fence. Goats are notoriously mischievous and crafty escape artists. Conveniently, I already had a barn at my disposal. Let me share a little secret of my ability to do cool things: my dad does them for me and I pretend to help. So I "helped" my dad build fence, but did eventually catch on to the point that my cousin and I were a mean wire-twisting machine. After all that work, the paddock still appears disappointingly small.

Step 2: No, really, buy some goats. After months of half-baked planning and delays, in the midst of a bitter January, three pregnant goats were toted home in the dog kennels in the back of a pickup (my dad's), wrapped in packing blankets. Those three barely-grown ladies belonged to me. I already had a dozen ducks, but these were mammals, the real deal in livestock ownership.

Step 3: Wait. The constraints of nature are such that Who, Which, and What, named for witches in A Wrinkle In Time, would not lactate until after the births of their kids. It can be a challenge for people to understand, until compared to the female of the human race. Oooooh. Right.

As time marched forward, the freshenings drew near, utters filled and vague due dates approached. Every day was a gut-wrenching good morning as I drew back the barn door, and day by day no kids awaited me, better yet no mutilated fetuses or dead mothers. I lived in dread of the hand-up-the-vagina scenario. One joyous, jittery morning, I could see that What was in labor. She was scratching at the ground and draining from behind. I tripped happily back home to inform the world via Facebook of this impending miracle, and returned a bit later to witness it. A floppy-eared babe sat complacently curled in the door. The final two also came in their respective weeks without a hitch, or a witness, bursting into the world with disregard to any meaningless symbolism I may attach to their births. Isis and Ra, veritable twins from different mothers, and little Neptune, a carbon copy of his Who from Whoville mother.

Step 4: Milk the Goat. Now there's nothing left but to squeeze some milk out of the old girls. Before purchasing my very own goats, I had the experience of only milking one time, or more accurately half a time, from an affable goat named Once (Spanish for eleven). I knew the procedure, pinch off the top of the teat with thumb and forefinger to trap the milk, then squeeze subsequent fingers to expel, aim for the bucket. This is much harder than it sounds. This was my deal, my dad wasn't going to milk them for me. I practiced in the pasture, hanging upside-down over their backsides, I lured them into the milking stall with feed, and neglected and neglected to wean the kids until I felt confident.

Finally the time came, I penned up the babies so they couldn't nurse, and let the milk flow. The routine of milking was routinely a debacle. I put one in the stanchion to have her kick over the bucket, while the others accosted her from each side, the babies bleating pathetically in their pen to be released. The only way I ever got it done was with ample bribes of cracked corn. The kids refused to take the bottle, and for fear of starving them, I let them continue to nurse, only taking them out at night to milk in the morning. I eventually moved the milking stanchion (designed by my dad, screwed together by your's truly) out of their pen to work with them one at a time. Finally I reached a level of comfort with the process, gleaning about half a gallon of milk from them a day.

Step 5: Make cheese. I will divulge my cheesemaking secrets once I attain any. Until then...Would anyone care for some squeaky curd?

The Mysterious Case of the Mystical Carp

Thus far, eighteen nights spent in Freedom Tent. I assumed, upon moving "outside", my largest obstacle would be adequate food storage. I had a box full of dried goods in sealed tupperware containers, and a cooler with a few items in it. I arrived at my tent one late night to discover that my rolls went missing. This was disappointing, as I had spent the entirety of my Sunday afternoon baking myself goodies. I had my suspects, top of the list was raccoon, those wily creatures with opposable thumbs. The thumbs are an important key because the bag of cinnamon rolls and the bag of onion cheese biscuits were completely gone, not just destroyed or partially eaten, and my bath towel had disappeared mysteriously several nights before. The next night it returned for the rest of the pita it had left abandoned, and spent the night chewing and rustling approximately two feet away from my head with only a tent flap between us. It was a rough night. And if it was a skunk, I also didn't really care to confront or spook it. I took Leon, my parents' redbone coonhound, out with me the next night for "protection" against whatever varmint had decided to move in. After all, he is a coonhound, that was the decisive reason for getting him. He immediately tracked it, nose to the ground, and amazingly recovered my lost towel and the remnants of my gallon bags. No one could say the dog didn't do his job. And then he proceeded to destroy every single thing in the campsite within reach of his teeth while I slept soundly knowing I was "protected". He shredded my tent bag, my kindling bag, strew my shower items and matches, personally "cleaned" all my dishes, and ate approximately half a bag of tortillas, leaving the other half in bits all over. I think I prefer a skunk over a Leon. It being the one year anniversary of his birth, I kept my anger checked, but I do think a year-old dog should be over that oral fixation stage.
I could see this issue hadn't passed. If Leon wasn't the answer, I was going to have to come up with a solution on my own. I brought out a large plastic tote to keep "it" out of the edibles. As days passed, the mysterious creature kept returning, finishing off the scattered tortillas one night, eating my leftovers another night, yet another day slicing a hole in my tent precisely at the location of a small bag of bread, snatched the bag and left everything else untouched. The "hole" in the door resembled a surgical incision, I could hardly blame it for being so crafty, only myself for being so naive in thinking it wouldn't be so presumptuous to actually enter my living space. Having never sighted the animal, and hearing it every night, even in a downpour, I decided it was probably a carp, those most disgusting of animals (perhaps second to moths), to promote my hatred of fish. Realistically, I'm 95% sure it's a raccoon, so I named my new pet "Mystical Carp". Having just had a close relative of the Mystical Carp ravage my duck population by more than half in a cold-blooded rampage which involved ripping through chicken wire, coons were not very high on my list of favored animals, no matter how cute and crafty.
The Mystical Carp culminated its mischief in upending my 30+ pound tote of dried goods, removing the latched lid, thoroughly searching its contents of rice, beans, potatoes, onions, pasta, oats, trail mix, raisins, bottles of condiments, carrots, and celery to make off with a very small piece of cheese. This, and its accuracy in knowing where the bread was inside my tent, leads me to believe that the Mystical Carp has extraordinary powers and a discerning palate, and that I am nowhere close to seeing the last of it.

Horsetail Thicket

The decision to live in my tent for the summer came like a flashbulb back in January; instantaneous is not my usual decision-making style, so I was particularly inspired. As much as I love living at home, it offers me no challenges, intellectually, physically, financially, emotionally. I live with people who unconditionally love me, know how to deal with me, have similar ideas as me, and let me live here for free. Living outside for multiple months seemed like some great fulfillment of my lonely childhood, longing for the outdoor adventures I read about, but could never quite have. I immediately started list-making, my ultimate outlet of excitement.
The details didn't come as quickly. Where should I set up camp? Close to the house, my source of fresh water? Close to the my livestock? After one night only feet away from the barn, I decided to move it several hundred yards north of the house, further from the highway and railroad tracks, in a clearing filled with horsetails, by a Russian Olive thicket. Horsetail Thicket. The long June days are the greenest of the year in Nebraska, the prairie grass keeping a constant but varied dance in the wind. My home, Freedom Tent, is surrounded by the remnants of an Indian campsite (and I mean within the last few weeks they camped there, not generations ago - although probably both). It is a serene location.
And suddenly the world became divided into people who could understand the appeal of a rugged life, and people who just didn't get why a person would give up a comfortable bed and regular candlelit baths. Why would you do that? Any dream of independence from my family is a complete farce. I come back to the house multiple times of day, continue to share meals with my parents, use their things. And besides, I'm a believer in inter-dependence, the connectedness of all humans, that no one person should or ever can stand alone. I don't necessarily enjoy being constantly scented of campfire smoke and goats. The mosquitoes and gnats chase me into my tent for very early nights. My run-ins with thieving critters haven't further endeared me to the virtues of nature. Cooking good food over a fire is a serious challenge and invites one to enjoy the flavor of burnt.
It's uncomfortable. It's smelly. It's inconvenient. Maybe even dangerous. But it's invigorating, and forces me to acknowledge the core functions of my life. When a person doesn't have a huge comfortable house with all the amenities (and I do), how does one live? Dealing with these issues is a reality for billions of people every day. My trying to echo their experience is a pathetic phantom. But it sparks something real and fundamental in me, a trivial experiment done in the name of life and solidarity.

School's Out Forever

Feelings of accomplishment, success, relief, freedom, and a little apprehension, gallop through my veins on this demure winter afternoon. My teaching career has ended. I taught choir to 50 junior high and high school students for eighteen weeks.
Many people whom I am very close to are in the teaching field, firstly my two best friends and my brother. Even so, I always kind of got the feeling that people who become teachers more frequently relish high school drama, and/or are unfit for any other career. There are obvious and many exceptions, see above. And in my community, a large amount of them seem to be married to farmers, not that there's anything wrong with that, simply a job that happens to be available anywhere. So my expectations of teaching, while acknowledging my total lack of preparation or experience, were on the low side. However, my lack of connection with youth, with the exception of being one a very short time ago, was about to be critically challenged. I was ready to be changed by this experience.
After about a week into it, I realized a truth of teaching: teachers gotta have their s*** together. Teaching multiple subjects a day, coaching a sport, sponsoring extra-curricular activities, and the constant stress of dealing with hormonal teenagers. This is life-consuming, with excellent vacation and benefits. I taught one class in the morning with one hour of prep time, and two classes twice a week in the afternoons. This was not exactly a high-stress situation, yet it occupied all my limited energy resources. As often happens, my real-life experiences tend to be playing the game of real-life.
Priority Number One: Classroom management. Learning cannot happen without it. I am more prone to the win-over-by-affection type of management than the yell-and-get-angry. This works perfectly in a high school classroom of 9 girls and 1 boy. Treat them with respect, and they do the same. However, a classroom of 22 junior high students won't provide the same docility. I had indigestion for the first month. I remember being a junior high student, and still have an abiding dislike for following rules, so, truth be told, I'm on their side. I can't be mad at them for acting the way they do, which ends up condoning it. Let me put it this way: there's a reason 12-14 year olds are put in their own school. To keep them from infecting the other students. To top it off, my 1-2 classes per week with them made it difficult to establish a relationship, or to teach anything of value. I also was ill-equipped to teach them music fundamentals which they so desperately needed after years of interim teachers. So I was failing doubly, at disciplining them and at actually teaching them something. Only a few weeks into the semester did I decide I couldn't carry on with it. The issue was never their level of affection for me. What junior high student doesn't love a nice teacher with a mohawk? But it is simply their nature to challenge authority. Although I got better at teaching, it never became easier.
Being around teenagers all the time is challenging. I didn't even like being one. Their desperate vying for acceptance should waken sentiments of pity in me, but I find it repulsive. This is certainly not to say the whole thing was negative. They are also each incredible, unique individuals who are developing their personalities and viewpoints. It's spectacular to witness. The younger ones are at a jumping off point where they get to choose their life paths, and don't even know it. Within a few years they will be divided, but right now their varied backgrounds and preferences interest each other and pull them together.
Although relief is mostly flooding out other emotions, I do feel a little like I'm letting these students down in giving up on them. They deserve a great teacher, which I am not. They deserve the Shelby Leylands, Marcia Keeles and Alex Millers of the world. To be a great teacher, you have to love teaching. And I don't. So it is the right choice for me, and I hope for them. My goal in teaching has been to keep the students in love with music, and I believe I succeeded, but now it is out of my hands.

Back to School

So I'm a teacher now. What a quirky turn of events. I have spent the better portion of my life convincing others, as well as myself, that teaching is simply not my calling. I have always been secretly afraid that it is actually my calling, just because the prospect seems so terrifying. Well as of yesterday, just call me Ms. Miller. And in my line of study, how many times have I heard the words "so, you're going to be a teacher?" That's what music majors do. Apparently that's not just a stereotype, as much as I tried to fight it. I do believe it is the universe's justice to push us outside of any remnant of comfort we may have scrapped together.
I graduated from Hastings College over one year ago with the happy understanding that my major area of study would be henceforth useless, excepting the well-trained hobby it had offered me. Three months ago I moved back in with my parents with the apprehension that making a living in Lewellen, Nebraska is no easy feat (albeit with the easy optimism that making a living has never been my priority). And the jobs just started falling in my lap. I was offered the opportunity to promote sustainability in the village, exactly the line of work I was interested in pursuing. I whiled my summer afternoons lounging in a serene art gallery. I sweated a pint digging beautiful deep beds for my garden. I frequently rode my bike as a form of transportation. It seemed like I was going places. Or rather, staying place.
And then something else fell in my lap. A friend of the family and outstanding musician and teacher, Steve Lawlor, was offered the teaching job at the Garden County Schools. A resident of Toronto, Ontario, Steve was obliged to turn the job down and recommend...well. I was hesitant, but open, and now the job is mine. Three choirs: high school, 7th and 8th grade, and 6th grade. I have never instructed a single person on how to sing (with the possible exception of one Shelby Leyland, who happens to be the greatest singer in the world, and who obviously didn't need my two bits), nor directed a choir. I wasn't even in choir in high school, I was the accompanist. I was in the Hastings College Choir for one and a half years, if my memory serves. I am not exactly qualified. But the school was desperate, having found no other teacher. The elementary music is taught by a retired math teacher-current pastor with no trained background. The band is instructed by another, like myself, uncertified, although qualified. We're a ragtag team.
One never knows what life will present them, and sometime precisely the thing one wishes wouldn't happen, is the thing that needs to be. I am still not convinced as my calling as a teacher, and have not started pursuing certification. But I do hope to offer the students a passion of music, and in return, receive their gifts. What those are, I can only dream. But the dreams are beautiful.

Wrap-up video of our Mexico project

The Omnipresence of Lizards

Okay, so we established that I love crabs, a slow, unexpected love affair that blossomed over long contact. But I immediately fell for the lizards.
We call the ones that live in our apartment "Tara". Tara is a non-color, a bit transparent so you can see her veins and organs if you looks closely or she has light shining through her. I saw her eat a wasp larger than the side of her head. Needless to say, we appreciate her presence here. I have only once seen a Tara on the floor, she is usually to be found clinging to the ceiling and walls.
The iguanas are naturally the most impressive, and remarkably quick, running to a hiding place when startled. There is one that consistently lives in a drainage pipe near Salvatore's. We saw one as roadkill on Calle Litibu, it's head flattened, and three other iguanas surrounding it, whether offering help or anticipating feasting on it, I cannot say. The first is a bit more romantic.

A laundry day several months ago>> I was rarin' to go on our hand-crank Amish-made washing machine, and my clothes were even more ready for a good wash. I uncovered the quaint little device and opened the lid, to discover a sizeable lizard relaxing in the base. I told it sweetly that it would need to leave, because I was in need of its new home. It took this news very calmly, without moving. So I prodded it with the agitator and it still neglected to move. This is highly unusual behavior for a lizard, which are usually quickly agitated (no pun intended). Then it dawned on me...this lizard was dead. And I had just killed one several days earlier by accidental suffocation while I was shoveling soil. I had never used the washing machine, but had constructed it several months earlier, and I supposed that the latency period had caused a drawn-out starvation and a very unpleasant death. This was devastating and I wasn't up to dealing with it, so I abandoned my bag of laundry of Salvatore's porch, and ran away to recount the story to Sascha in horror. He agreed to take care of the situation the following day. We trooped up and I stood away so as to not witness my hapless victim. He moved it around and got a plastic sand castle shovel out to scoop it up and carry it away. De repente, it scuttled to the other side of the washer! It was extremely dehydrated and hungry, I'm sure, but not willing to be buried alive. Sascha yelped and hollered and we laughed. We laid the washer on its side in the sun to give it some energy, but the next day it hadn't left, so I finally scared it out and I hope it is currently living a happy and profitable life.
I will miss the lizards. I probably see an average of six per day, and the record was eight at one time, within six feet of each other by some outdoor lights at night. Reptiles are amazing.