January in Prescott

The very first...

But getting better.

This month has been so busy, but so full of new adventures.  The weather has been so warm and beautiful, reminding me of summer in Montana, though it gets pretty darn cold at night and the mornings are frosty.

My younger brother Joe visited us for his Christmas break.  He had a fun time here, but we never got out of town.  We just spent all our time on the roof.  He left a few days after Christmas and as soon as he did, we got a good dump of snow.  So much snow, that we spent that day sledding around our neighborhood behind the car.  The sledding really made our day fun and cheered up a lot of people around town who seemed pretty sour about the snow.  It probably also helped that as we sledded, we would stop and help whoever was stuck.

New Years Eve was pretty mellow.  Shaun and the dogs went to bed early and Dylan and I stayed awake long enough to hear our neighbors banging some pots and pans.  I took some photos of the stars through the new skylight we had installed in the kitchen that day and we went to bed.

We've been working every day since then, finishing up the roof on the 9th.  Shaun started school that day, spending the first couple days on campus before he went to Chauncy Ranch on the 12th.  His group spent a couple days there getting ready for the expedition and they went into the wilderness on the 15th.  Three weeks to go before he gets back, but I've got plenty to keep me occupied while he's gone, including my block class and working on house projects.
My dad has been in town since the 7th, so we've really been putting a push on the house.  He has managed to completely remodel the kitchen, build a closet for the washer and dryer, and just today, he installed a french door.  Its so wonderful to see the house transforming!

It will really be wonderful when it's all finished and we no longer have to step over, around, and under power tools and wade through construction materials, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Check out my facebook links to see the progress we're making!

December Living
January Living

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December

A whole month has passes between posts again.  Part of that is due to our computer crashing.  Literally crashing to the ground and ceasing to function.  It's in the shop right now, but probably still not gonna make it. 
We spent the first couple weeks of December in the shell of our old house, the Bearclaw, living out of a couple boxes, sleeping on the floor.  Finally the new tenants wanted to move in, so we moved the rest of our shit into the shed and we set up the yurt that Dylan made in the backyard.  The canvas for the yurt still wasn't finished, so Dylan bought 26 red wool army surplus blankets which we covered the outside of the frame with.  It sounds strange, but it was really quite cozy in there!  We yurt camped for 3 nights.  On the evening of the second day, it started to drizzle.  By about 5 in the morning on that third night, our fire died down and the blankets started to give in.  The rain dripped down in a couple spots and started to seep through around the edges. 
That morning, I had to leave early for my last day of class, and spent all day in class, and as the morning progressed, everything in the yurt proceded to get wet and muddy.  Luckily, the house FINALLY closed that day, so Shaun, Dylan, and the dogs packed up and were at least able to get a roof over their heads while they attempted to dry out, even though there was no gas or water.  We had electricity, thankfully, so a couple space heaters made it feel like we weren't actually squating in an abandoned house that night.

Since then, we have moved everything out of the storage shed and the other house.  ALL of our belongings are in ONE spot.  The fish are out of their tupperware and back in the fishtank. The chickens are in the backyard and the house is actually starting to turn into a home, although there is lots and lots and lots of work to be done, including re-roofing it by the end of the month.    Luckily, my brother Joe flew in Sunday and a few friends left in town are helping us out with some of the projects.  

It is so great to actually have a house again and be doing things! 

I'll get some pictures up as soon as I can.  The big red yurt is definitely something to see!

Officially Winter

Well, We have all given thanks, stuffed our faces, and returned to normal daily life... 
Or not.

I made a quick trip to Montana for my Thanksgiving break, just to run the Huffing for Stuffing fun run.  It was wonderfully cold and snowy and the race went well.  I ran my fastest time yet and definitely earned my thanksgiving feast.  After that one day of fun, brother Dylan and I packed up all his belongings and a ton of tools into a giant moving truck and booked it back down here to the sunny south only to find that we dragged a little bit of winter along with us.  It's not as cold as Montana, but fall has officially ended here in Arizona.  It snowed for the very first time yesterday, however it all melted off within a couple hours of daylight.

Shaun spent Thanksgiving with one of our roommates at a co-worker's house.  They said it was a classic TV holiday complete with a senile old grandma.  How wonderful!

A holiday break from work and school is supposed to be just that... A break.  This break has been nothing but hectic and somewhat intense.  Upon arriving in Prescott, we had one and a half days to unload our truck into a storage shed and load up all the big things in our house before returning the truck.  It was a mad dash to box, move, organize, and un-organize, made even more complicated by the fact of not knowing where we were moving to and having multiple other people staying at our house while one of our housemates was still gone traveling for the holiday.  

Within a period of 24 hours we went from having a house to being homeless to finding a friend's house for all 7 of us to camp at to agreeing to set up a tent in a different yard to possibly moving into the house we're supposed to be moving in to, and back to staying temporarily in the house we're in. 
In the mean time, 4 of us are still trying to finish homework, write papers, and get to class on time.
And not to forget... there are three dogs, two chickens, and a fish tank in the mix of it all.
And a garage that we just tore down and are still disassembling.

Luckily, I think things are going to work out just fine.  It's winter, but we're still in Arizona.  It's not as cold as it could be and there are so many people here determined to not let us live homeless.
The deal on the new house will close soon enough and we'll be able to get a little situated before the new block and semester of school start.

Until then, we'll just all continue our little camp out/sleep over in our now unfurnished house and do the best we can with what we have... good food, friends, and positive attitudes!

Fall in Arizona

I should be working right now, but hanging laundry in the sun on such a beautiful fall day seems so much more rewarding.  11 am Shaun and one of our roommates came home with bloody mary and chocolate chip cookie fixings.  I've swept the leaves from the walk and the back landing and it's the perfect temperature to leave all the doors open.  Our place is so clean and organized since our landlord will be showing the house today, so it feels good to just sit outside and enjoy our alcoholic beverages waiting for the cookies to bake.  About once a week Suka manages to steal a fresh baked loaf of bread off the counter.  Today was one of those days, and a good one too!  A really nice loaf of Challah!

School has been going so well for me.  All my classes are interesting and I finish my school week with a field day every Thursday.  My Maps and Wilderness Navigation class drives out to some remote place outside of town where our instructors drop us off and tell us where to meet at 3:30.  We hike around in pairs with maps, compasses, and whatever knowledge we learned in class that week trying to find our way.  My group has only got lost once, but we were able to use triangulation techniques, taking bearings of a couple of known peaks to find our position along a road where the van was able to pick us up right on time.

My other classes are Writing Workshop and World Religions.  Evaluations for classes are based on a 'contract' you make with the instructor during the first few weeks of class.  If you fulfill your objectives in your contract, you pass the class. (You can also request grades, but I chose not to...just pass or fail.)  In my Writing Workshop, a class to help be become a better writer fully understand the concepts behind acceptable college level writing, my instructor actually suggested that I NOT be evaluated on spelling and grammar, since I seem to pay more attention to that than content.  It seemed funny to me at first, but it turns out that it is actually quite a task for me to intentionally not correct my spelling.  It's fun to twist the traditional view of education.

We're down to 2 chickens in the Bearclaw backyard, but they are very happy together.  The other two were eaten by something or other a few weeks ago, but  I'm designing and building a good chicken coop for the winter, and when that's complete we'll get a few more hens, hopefully to make a flock of 6 or 8.  In conjunction with a new flock and a new hen house, the Bearclaw family will also be moving to a new house.  There's a nice fixer-upper just around the block from our house, so my dad bought it to create an urban garden wonderland on the large property, and to give us poor starving college students a decently cheap place to live for the next 4 years (Shaun starts school this winter, but hopefully will take some summer classes to catch up with me!).  The moving party will be great, a full on barbeque and (around the...) Block Party, where all our friends can come over and walk around the block a few times with all our shit.

It's so strange to me that it's well into November and just now turning into fall.  All my friends (and me and Shaun, too!) can't believe that it's snowing in all our home towns and states, and still so warm and beautiful here!  It's going to be a great winter, if not quite a bit warmer than we're used to.

Harvey's ready for some cool weather, but Suka loves to lay in the sun when it's warm and in our bed when it's not.  The boys have been getting out a lot lately with Shaun and our roommates rock climbing any time they have available.  So much rock climbing around here, so close to town!  Shaun has been working at a little restaurant called El Gato Azul downtown.  He has a lot more free time than his last job, but it will be really nice when he starts school and can work through the Federal Work Study program.

It's really too nice to be staring at the computer screen and the computer's going to die anyway.

I'll go eat some cookies, listen to some drumming in the backyard, and lay in the leaves with the chickens on our giant trampoline.

Acadamia!

School School School!  

First of all... Prescott College ROCKS!  Orientation ROCKED!  There were 9 students in my group with 2 great alumni leaders.  Despite purposely lying on my application form, saying that I can't swim, I was placed on the most water intensive course.  My group hiked two slot canyons about 45 minutes from Prescott.  The first was West Clear Creek, where we started at the mouth of the canyon and hiked 9 days, some through the creek in the canyon, some across the dry hot mesa above the canyon (to avoid overly technical areas).  The 9th day, we swam for the first time through three icy cold pools, then hiked through painfully dense shrubby ground cover (all plants in the desert are sharp!) out of the canyon, then across the mesa to a farm to meet up with two other groups on our course for 're-supply'. 

I'll answer a couple questions you probably have...    No we did not change our shoes to hike through the creek.  We wore our boots.  Some of the creek crossings were ankle deep, some were waist deep.   To swim with a 65 pound backpack on, you simply walk into the water until your feet don't touch the bottom and you just keep 'walking' forward.  It's actually more like riding a bicycle than it is walking.  The backpack floats because it is lined with at least six trash bags which are tied off at the top, so they hold a lot of air.  'Waterproofed' backpacks float so well that by the end of the trip I had mastered the swim so well that my bellybutton didn't even touch the water.

First half photos here....

After 're-supply', the three groups split up and our group hiked 13 miles across the mesa to the rim of the Wet Beaver Canyon.  (Don't worry, we heard every joke in the book.)  The second half of the trip, we swam every day, all day.  We hiked, we waded, we crossed the creek, we crossed the creek again, we swam, we crossed, we waded, we swam... then we camped.  And ate.  Both canyons were so stunningly beautiful, it was such a privilege to sleep beneath the stars every night and wake up knowing that the day would, again, be long and hot. 

Part 2 photos HERE

Between the Orientation 'block' and the fall semester there is a week of 'student directed days'.  It's just a break.  So Shaun and I piled in the old subaru (now named Loretta) with our roommate and some new friends and drove as fast as we could through the desert at night to see the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean.  We took our sweet time driving up the breathtaking Highway 1 to spend 2 days in San Fransisco at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.  We had the amazing fortune of staying in the yard of one of our friends houses with 15 or so other Prescott College students literally a stone's throw from the beach, 10 miles north of San Fran.

  

Amazing Weekend Roadtrip photos HERE

Ok, enough about how amazing my first month of school was.  October has been the 'real' first month.  I have actually had to sit in a classroom and read books and have discussions with classmates.  Fortunately the classes are awesome and one of my three classes requires me to hike around in the woods or the desert for the entire day.  Last Thursday my class attempted to summit a mountain.  

I can't wait to see what's in store for the winter block and spring semester!  All the classes here look so great I'm dreading having to choose!  As a bonus for the 11 half of the 10-11 school year, Shaun just got accepted and will start his wilderness orientation in January, hiking a section of the Grand Canyon.  Yeah!  I know!  I'm so excited I can hardly even type!

I still can't believe that I live in Arizona.  And am going to school?!   Everything is working out so well here (finally!), we should have moved ages ago.

Now off to do homework (on the desk I built today)... hopefully I can get it finished tonight so tomorrow I can attend the second weekly meeting of Club Sandwich, an exclusive club only for friends of the Bear Claw Household (that's us) that rock climbs in the morning and makes kick ass sandwiches for dinner in the evening.  This weeks sandwich is pulled pork which I plan to eat on our roommate's new trampoline.

In other Bear Claw news, the fish tank actually has fish in it now, 7 of them... The dogs are both doing great, just being dogs as usual.  I've taught them a great new trick called 'Go See the Chickens'.  On the command, Go See the Chickens, both dogs run out the door as fast as they can to the backyard to see the chickens.  This trick was inspired by the awful discovery that an intruder had killed two of our four chickens.  Bad luck for chickens on this property... maybe the fourth time will be a charm.

That's all for now folks.  Another long blog in a month or so?  

School has officially started.  Today was the first day of class for returning students and the final day of paperwork and registration for all of us new students.  Today is also the beginning of our orientation course.

Our bus leaves at 2:30 today, so after finishing our registration, Niels and I came back to the house to go through our gear one more time and take it easy for a little bit.  As a last minute going away gift, another one of our chickens decided to start laying!  Finally, one of the americaunas left us a pretty little blue egg.

This is today's egg collection...  

I can't wait to see what's in store for us when we return!

I promise to post again at the end with all the exciting details and freshly acquired college knowledge!

Time Flies (when you're having fun!)

I can't believe I haven't posted a new blog in over a month.  Either I'm lazy, or I'm having too much fun.  I do have to say Shaun and I have both been pretty busy, but we've had a little bit of fun in our time off.

Shaun has been working pretty full days for Bin 239, a wine bar down town, and I have been baking in the hot desert sun on the Prescott College campus, pulling weeds, picking up cigarette butts, and propagating native plant species.  I've been learning a lot about native plants and have started 'adopting' stray baby yucca, agave, and bear grass plants, as well as some unused rocks to make my yard beautiful!  Of course the plants are small, and my landscaping is coming along quite slowly, but it looks a lot better than when we moved in.  You have to start somewhere right?  While clearing some dead sticks and leaves to make room for my agave, I was delighted to discover a little patch of Hen and Chicks, which I have separated out and transplanted all along our walk.  Our landlord's wife told me they used to be planted all along both sides.  It sounded beautiful to me, so that's where I put them! (And it's always worth scoring some points with the 'boss', right?)  As a bonus, while trying to uncover the hose to water my fresh transplants, I found a little green stick of an old chopped off rosebush.  It was attempting to grow one sad little grasshopper-eaten leaf, so I watered that too.

  

Happenings in our yard have really been pretty exciting.  A week and a half ago Harvey and Suka cornered a skunk in our shed, resulting in the entire block reeking of the smell of burnt rubber, and very quick use of all of our baking soda and peroxide.  Every time we watered the garden for a week, the smell returned.  We've seen skunks on our evening walks multiple times since then, and last night we had another close call with one in our yard! 

I'm sure the skunk (or skunks?) are coming around to check out what we're feeding our chickens.  And the chickens!  What fun!  They love to follow us around the yard, and eat cicadas out of our hands.  The dogs have been treating them very nicely and lay down to wait patiently while they walk all around them and peck at the tips of their tails.  Our white chicken (named Colonel Sanders) has been laying the same perfect little brown egg for two weeks now, every day right around 9:30.  Shaun has been giving the other hens little pep talks and FINALLY today the little hen Jabberwok laid her first!  (It was definitely her, since the fluffy cheeked americaunas will lay blueish-greenish eggs.)  When chickens start laying, their eggs are small.  Eventually, they get larger until they reach whatever size they are going to be, depending on what kind of chicken it is... Well, along with jabberhen's new egg, we had another little surprise.  The Colonel's perfect little brown egg turned out not so little!  I guess she thought she'd make up for lost time and just go ahead and make a huge one!

The expected eggs... the new egg... the unexpected huge egg!

I love it!  For those of you who haven't spent much time with backyard chickens, you should know that they are hilarious!  Incredibly entertaining...

Anyway...

School starts at the end of this week.  The lazy campus I've worked on all summer has turned into a buzzing hive of activity and excitement.  Returning students stroll through the grounds with a bounce in their step, yelling excitedly at the friends and classmates they haven't seen for months.  The new students walk around with bewildered looks on their faces, closely flanked by a parent or two, usually carrying maps... 

I feel a little bit caught in the middle.  I'm a new student, but I've been on campus all summer, so I know a lot of the faculty and senior students.  I'm a first year student, but I'm not fresh out of high school starting college for the first time.  It's awkward right now, but I definitely have an advantage after being here all summer.

I am so nervous and excited for this upcoming adventure.  I've been looking forward to it for over a year now and suddenly the beginning is just days away.  The block officially starts for us Saturday, however I won't start any actual classes until October.  

My roommate and I will spend the first week of September on a ranch with the rest of the incoming class (150 students), then we'll split into groups of 10 and spend the rest of the month backpacking, each group in a different area of Arizona.  Poor Shaun will be all alone in the house.  At least he'll have our pups and comical chickens to keep him company.  As excited as I am, I'm dreading the time away, but it will be good for us.  

I feel like there's still so much to do before I leave.  But for a trip like this, all you can do is pack up and take it as it comes.  If I make it through (don't worry, we've been practicing hiking around our neighborhood) I'll be a full fledged student... WOW! 

To keep ourselves preoccupied and out of trouble (those bartenders at the Drunken Lass are quite fun) we've been gardening, hosting 'couch surfers' (a cross country biker, and a new prescott student waiting for his room mates to arrive), baking bread, raiding fruit trees in the lawns of businesses (apples, peaches, and plums, YUM!), brewing tasty things atop our fridge (honey wine, ginger beer, apple cider, kombucha), and fermenting other tasty things to eat (kimchi, yogurt, cheese!)!   So many good smells and flavors in this house!

With all the fruit and food scraps, the chickens and our box of worms have been very very happy... almost as happy as Niels and our jar of honey wine!

Here are some great adventure photos...

A recent bike ride.

Some cool things around town.

Our house, bugs, and sunsets.

Don't look for another blog for a while!  I'll post again in one more month!

Wish me luck!