Monday, March 9, 2009

One morning's low-tech snapshot

Low-tech scenes from our household, this morning:
  • Starting the fire.  I stirred last night's ashes into life, then added a couple of logs hauled up from the basement storage pile.  The iron box heated up pretty quickly, spreading warmth through the house.
  • Breakfast: I fired up the coffee percolator on the stove, then fried a few chapatis (simplest food: flour plus water plus salt).  Fried some eggs, fresh from our chickens.
  • Inside animals woke up.  That's the dog, yawning vastly, and eager to run outside, and the two cats, thinking hard on the kitchen table.
  • To the outside animals: the chickens were up early, as usual, the roosters crowing, while the hens pecked around the enclosure.  Ceredwyn brought feed in scoops for chickens and goats, then wrangled the new goat into position for milking, then ran back inside for milking implements.  I carried out a big bucket of hot water.  Ceredwyn tied the goat to the milking stand.  Then I held back the other two goats, who really wanted in on the action, while Ceredwyn did the work: convincing the goat that having her two udders tugged for milk was a good idea.  Together they ended up with about one cup of milk - hurrah!  We also were gifted by one chicken egg.
  • Back to the kitchen: Ceredwyn makes crepe batter from the morning's goat milk and egg.  Terrific crepes, with plenty of batter left over for lunch, dinner, snacks.

Then I went back into my office, to get back to work - Twitter posting, RSS feeds, email, scanning receipts, printing documents, thinking about mobile gaming for teaching and learning.

We'll write about the new goat, and yesterday's first milking, soon.

2 comments:

Keiramc said...

Delightful- I hadn't stumbled onto this corner of the Alexander blogosphere before. I'll be reading avidly.

In Vancouver we're well on our way to legalizing backyard chickens after last week's council vote. We're starting to explore what that would mean for our small space.

Bryan Alexander said...

Thanks for stopping in, Keira. It's good to hear from you.

Where is the push for chickens coming from, out in your corner of BC?