I was trying to get Daphne’s diaper on this morning. Because she still has a rash, she has been running around with no diaper on, and when I suggest a new diaper, she runs around saying, “Ow, Ow.”

This morning, I laid out a diaper and went to get her, but she saw what I was doing, and she ran off at hyper speed. She ran away faster than I have ever seen a baby run. It was hilarious.

After I finally retrieved her, I set her down and said, “Daphne, mommies always win!”

Her response: “Ow.”

Jared mentioned that Daphne needed a tricycle because every time they go for a walk, she admires the bike of a girl that lives down the road.

Daphne recently started to recognize when she saw a bike, and she even learned how to say a bike. It was when she started to see bikes on TV or in pictures that I realized how smart the little cookie is.

I got on Freecycle and found a trike just down the road. As a bonus, I got a three wheeled push toy. The push toy is just her size, and it is so nice that she has a bike of her own!

Ever since Daphne was a tiny baby, I always have counted things down with a hearty one, two, three. She has learned to expect anything that is going to happen to take place on the three.

A few months ago, when she started to talk a little bit, she started to pick up on mimicking numbers, and she would say five, eight and two.

Today, we were watching the Olympics, and I was inspired to flip her around in a front filp. I kept counting it off, and she eventually caught on.

Any time she wanted to do a flip, she would come up to me and say, “One, two…” and wait for me to give the Three while I flipped her.

As I was attempting to put her to bed, she was laying on top of me saying, “One, two three.” Over and over again.

I think we’ve got the counting going!

My previous rant about slavery was supposted to be a post about paying it forward (as you can tell from the first sentence).  However, my fingers often get away with me and I make random and general musing about things that I never intended to visit in that blogging session.  Here I go again.

Paying it forward is a concept that is not new.  It is a concept that has the potential to do so much good from one act.

I was talking to Scott (goat farmer) a few weeks ago about our situation.  You see, because we live on a city plot in the middle of the city, we have no space for a goat (and the city has ordinances against it [damn them]).  My only other alternative was to find a local farm who would board my goat in exchange for help on the farm.  This is NOT an easy thing to do.  It took me almost 2 years to figure out how I was going to do it after asking many, many people if they were interested.  It turns out that this is not something that people do often.

Early this year, in my neverending quest, I sent an email to Scott asking him if he was interested in my proposition.  He said that he was, and we set up to meet.  The rest, really is history.  My goat, Milk Way has been up at his place ever since.

When we were talking a few weeks ago, he told me all about his experiences living in the city.  He likes to keep bees, and he attempted to do it in the middle of the city.  Not only is that something that is not allowed, it is something that is not easy to hide!  I applaud him for attempted it.

However, he had arranged something with a local farmer to keep bees at their farm.  The agreement was a little looser than the one that I have with Scott now because bees are pretty self sustaining (they don’t need hay and grain and milking every day).

He said that had it not been for that, that experience that I would not have my goat at his place.  He considers that he is paying back a debt to karma, and that the debt is now on my shoulders.

Truthfully, I LOVE having the debt.  I can’t help but dream of all the amazing things that I could do with some land of my own.  I can’t come up with enough pay it forward type activities.

I was reading a blog recently that asked everyone to go out and do something positive and report back how it felt.  One person noted in their reply that they have some land that they have donated out to people to rent so that they can grow their own food if they are in a situation that they can’t gardern on their own.  I thought that was a brilliant idea.

When we have some land of our own, why not have a program that allows a limited amount of people keep gardens or animals at our place in exchange for help around the farm.  It’s a win-win-win situation.  I will be passing my debt to karma on while doing some genuniely good things.

In truth, the friendship I have with Scott is very special to me because we understand eachother’s obsessive love of all things caprine which we share with eachother openly.  It was incredibly generous of him to consider opening up his land to us so that I could pusure my own little farming adventure.

The concept of paying it forward is not a new one.  I also believe that it is a concept that comes with local and sustainable living.

When goods and services are coming from far away, you don’t always meet the personalities involved, and no matter how “individual” a big company claims to treat you, it just is not the same as being serviced by a mom and pop shop.  I am not trying to be cynnical, but the cashier at Mcdonals or Macys doesn’t know your name unless you are a devoted regular.  Sure, getting things locally from a mom and pop shop may be more expensive, but maybe that is the way it was meant to be.  If someone is growing food on their local farm or spinning yarn for me to knit with, they should be paid for their services and their effort.  After all, that person selling me something is only looking to make a living themselves, just as we are.  I appreciate that these people are not working on massive scales purely driven by money.  It costs more to produce less in this world.  Consider the next time you have a chance to buy yarn from a local spinner rather than at Walmart what it is that you are supporting.

I got a very powerful message the other day from listening to the radio.  The host was talking about the production of goods in China.  China makes EVERYTHING, and he was talking about people who boycott goods from China.  I wouldn’t last 24 hours without something from China.  The biggest culprit is the little snaps that I put on diapers.  The machine I have that puts them on comes from China as does the snap parts. There is no other local source, so if I want to put on snaps (which I do), that is one thing I have to support.  Look around you and you can see what a devastation it would be if China were not making all of our goods.

The host of the radio show mentioned some of the horrible conditions that factory workers were going through so that I could have my plastic snap habit.  He said one powerful thing that I am going to try to work into my life.

“We didn’t end slavery in America, We Just Exported it.”

I think it carries with it a powerful message, one I’ve really thought about and pondered since.  It is so easy for me to just truck off to Walmart to get the latest thing I think I need so that I can save a few bucks or not have to be crafty with what I have.  At one point I was trying to be really great about what I have and what I think I need to run off and buy.  I think that I have made great strides on this point, but I’d like to make more.

It kind of like the treat people the way you want to be treated principle.  I am NOT going to support the human rights violations set forth by China to bring cheap plastic goods to the rest of the world while poisoning the enviornment.

Please see to it that you help me in this endeavour.

A friend of ours made a post today about how better and how much cheaper it was to make her own loaf of bread. Chris and I often have fun guestimating how much the meal that we are eating actually cost to make. And our new standard of measurement is a lobster dinner at home. We live in Oregon, so lobster isn’t the cheapest thing ever, but Safeway was having a buy one, get one free sale on them a while back and we had a lobster for each of us for $10. Add in some other ingredients, butter, veggies, etc., and the meal ended up to be less than $20 for she and I to have a lobster dinner and to share some with our baby girl (I guess she’s a toddler now, so toddler girl). Even if we had had to pay for both lobsters it would have only been about $25.

So now, whenever I go out to buy some food like a pizza or sandwiches from the deli, I can’t help but compare it to our lobster dinner. I spent $13 for sandwiches at the deli. Then I got home and realized I had almost spent as much as our lobster dinner on two small sandwiches!

Anyway, it’s sort of fun to try to add up how much all of the ingredients in a home cooked meal cost and then divide by the number of people eating it. If you’re watching what you spend and trying to stick to a budget, it should make you feel much better about yourself once you realize that breakfast for three cost less than a dollar!!

The other day I had lunch, as I often try to do. I had a roast beef sandwich. I didn’t really think too much about it, but later that afternoon, I was chatting with Chris about my lunch, and I realized that it was almost entirely home made–not just made at home from store bought ingredients. So here’s what I had: roast beef which Chris had cooked and which had come from her family’s farm, chedder cheese that she had made from milk from her goat, bread that she had made by grinding her own wheat (ok, we bought the wheat berries, but hey, we only have a city plot), and some mustard–the only ingredient that was purchased from the store. And the mustard is only store bought because I keep buying it before she gets a chance to make her own. So two thumbs up to my little wife who could barely cook when we got married.

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that when you do business with local people that you know, the price of things is often negotiable. Take for example when I went shopping the other week at the farmers market I was buying some produce from one of Chris’ friends and the total was something like $12.25. But she saw that I was holding two large bags of veggies plus trying to corral a wild little girl, so rather than make me deal with change, she just called it $12 and we dealt with just bills. I wasn’t trying to cheat her. She was just being nice.

It wasn’t like shopping at some supermarket or national chain where the price is the price and that’s what you get. It was an honest, open exchange of one person to another with understanding of each other’s situation. It was nice. So I guess that’s just one more reason to go support your local farmers, make friends and get good produce.

I’ve been to many fairs over the years, and to be honest the animal parts (besides things like the rodeos and horse shows) seemed sort of pointless to me. But we went to the Yamhill County fair tonight to check it out, and going with a farm girl changes everything.

When we first walked in, she said that she has almost never gone on rides at the fair. I wasn’t altogether surprised, but that’s pretty much what the fair was about for me when I was little. But my daughter’s a little too small to get much out of them, and I’m not interested in paying $2 to pop a balloon, so we skipped that section and went on to check out the animals and other exhibits.

I was actually surprised to learn that many of the animals are taken for the express purpose of auctioning them off for food. I had no idea. Again, I had thought that having all of the animals there was basically pointless. But now I get it, and it was actually sort of neat.

We went to the auction twice. Once for some of the hogs and once for some of the steers. I kept my eye on the kids that were selling and presenting. I don’t know why but I half expected them to be some kind of “farm geek”. But they were all pretty normal, they just raised farm animals.

The auction was an interesting idea. We couldn’t figure out all of the details about how everything worked, but people bid on the animal to either keep as food or donate to a local charity to feed needy families. And then the kid gets most of the proceeds for whatever they need/want. If I had known how it worked prior, we would have budgeted some each month and stocked up on some meat. But a 1400 pound cow costs a bit more than an impulse purchase allows, even at the rock bottom prices that they were going for. It was actually kind of sad to see the animals that these kids had obviously worked hard to raise go for so little.

Anyway, I guess this is just one more step in my ever increasing experiences in the agriculture arena. It’s not an area I ever saw myself interested in, but as I learn more and more about it, the cooler it’s getting.

Jared, Daphne and I all headed to the Yamhill County Fair this evening.  I wanted to show Daphne all the different animals, we wanted to go to the rodeo and I wanted to see what was going on at the auction.

We had a ton of fun looking at all the animals, and we even had some exhibitors show their lambs to Daphne, much to her delight.

The rodeo was even a blast, and Daphne managed to sit through about 4 events.  I even got to see 5 bull rides before she decided it was time to leave.

As we were walking out, we went by the livestock auction again to check on the steers.  Some friends of my grandma have steers in Yamhill County that they sell every year at market, and I wanted to see how they did.

The Reserve Champion steer went for $7.25 per pound.  That is quite an investment considering that the steer weighed around 1300 pounds.  Usually, when the steer goes for that big of a ticket, it is used as a tax write off, and the meat is donated to a local charity that can use it to feed hungry families.  The nice thing is that the exhibitor gets to keep the money for all that hard work taking the steer.

Sadly, the entire auction did not go that well.  Things went downhill quickly, and the other steers around were going for $1.50 per pound having a hard time creeping up to $2.00 per pound (the low extimate for steers at this particular fair).  Jared and I were looking at eachother wishing that we had the funds to spend some money on some meat for a local kid.  I’ve been in the situation where you see your hard work slowly looking like it was for naught as the price hangs around $1.80 per pound.

The moral of the story is that you should call your extension agent, get in contact with some local 4-H kids and consider buying a market animal at the fair.  Either the meat will be good eating and a local student will have a chance to go to college (which is what the money is usually used for) or you will be supporting a cause where kids get off their lazy butts and get something done while providing a food source for a hungry family while you get a nice tax write-off.

You can get together with friends to buy an animal as well, and you can split up the cost that way.

Enjoy some good eating and support your local future food producers in the meanwhile.