Hello 2013!

As 2013 begins, I've been thinking of things I want to improve or do in the new year. I'm not one to condone only making changes to your life on the 1st of the year. I think for real improvement you need to change during the year and stick with it, all the way through the holidays. I consider these "resolutions" more as plans for the new year.

By making these resolutions public, maybe I'll have a better chance of doing them. So here they are, as odd as they may be, this is what's up:
1. In the upcoming year, I really want to go steelhead fishing. I received an amazing set of chest waders for Christmas and I absolutely can't wait to use them. I've been scouting rivers and steams in the Willamette area and there really are so many options. I fly fish, which I love, and for the first few years I only had a steelhead rod (longer and less flexible) for fishing trout. I was setting the hook and flinging the trout out of the lake into the trees. (Okay that was a hyperbole.) I do have a sweet trout rod now (magenta!), but I would love to break out the steelhead rod again and actually catch the fish that it's made for. 

Sepia-toned lovin' with three rainbows caught last spring.

2. This term Organic Chemistry pretty much kicked my butt. No love. Although I passed the class, I did not do so with flying colors by any means. I wasn't able to make it on the Dean's List this term, so my goal for the upcoming year is to identify why I didn't succeed to my full potential and address those issues. I would love to get back on the Dean's List. Hell, I would love to get a 4.0 for a term. I'm actually registered for 19 credits this winter, so it's going to be a ton of work to get my grades. But I have everything planned out, getting at least 25 hours of studying done per week. I'm going to stick to it. My schedule is even color-coded, so you know this is for serious.

3. As far as my income goes, well, there is none. Except for what my loving grandparents afford me, I am really pinching pennies here. I have a ball park idea of how much I spend on food every month, but have never really budgeted it all out to see where the money goes. I am going to keep track of at least a month's worth of food expenses. I'm predicting my biggest non-nutritional money-suck treats are these citrus gummies they sell in bulk at our local Co-op. Delicious, but about $8/lb. (They have Vitamin C though!) My diet at school consists mostly of vegetables, and I love finding deals at our local farmers' market during the growing seasons. It's all grown locally and it's way better than any grocery store comparatives. Here's what we got for $20 one day over summer:

Butternut squash, tomatoes, carrots, celeriac, rutabagas, lettuce, spinach, Italian plums, and eggs!

4. My poor chickens have been living in a mud pit since the rains have come. I really would like to upgrade their living quarters this year. Preferably sooner rather than later. Plans include: raising the coop floor and providing a ramp entrance to keep the coop floor drier and cleaner, upgrading the run door so that it's easier to let them in and out of the yard, and providing the chickens some interesting "furniture" like a straw bale to climb on and maybe some more perches. I want to get a trough waterer that I can channel rain from the coop roof into. No more chickens perching on the top of their water bucket and pooing in the town well! (Not the brightest little creatures...) I really enjoy the idea of this trough, it can be connected to a larger water source (rain barrel!) and they can't dooty it up. 

Furthermore, I want to get a good gate on my garden so they don't dig in the beds again. It was very upsetting when they pulled out all of my baby kale plants. I may or may not have put them into a three-week timeout for their heinous crime... 

So fierce, so beautiful...

5. Finally, I want to do even better with my garden this year. I think things went beautifully for me, a novice, this last year. I grew almost everything from seed and the great majority of my plants were of heirloom varieties. I know now that brassicas are not worth planting unless I want to go Rambo on aphids. While I did enjoy many tomatoes, it wasn't worth the space lost to plant eight plants of one variety, maybe just four for next year. The best crops were definitely the loose leaf lettuce greens, radishes, beets, snow peas, and carrots. I never planted spinach at quite the right season to get it to produce. I should plant kale earlier this year; I did a fall crop really late and got lovely baby greens from it, but I should do twice as much earlier in the season. This year I want to try growing bell peppers, ground cherries, and Asian-style eggplant for some variety. (The company I linked to here is based in Oregon and have the best quality seeds I've ever used, I won't get them anywhere else anymore!) I don't think there's much that's more rewarding than eating a meal that's almost 100% from your garden.



All in all, these are just a few of the big resolutions for 2013. This new year seems to already be shining with promise, and I'm excited to dive in. 

I wish you a wonderful new year and good luck in your future endeavors!

Earl

Unlike the Dixie Chicks song with a similar title, I'm not saying goodbye, but hello, to Earl in my life.

Earl is the name of my mother's 1965 International Harvester pickup, named after the first owner in our family, my great-grandfather.

It's a D1200 model with a V8 and needs some serious TLC on the interior. Battling the old-car cancer known as rust, Earl's been passed down the line for generations and I recently found a soft spot in my heart for the beat up old rig. About six inches deep in mud, an inch for every year it was parked in the same spot in the pasture, this truck has become my winter project.

I mean, how can you say no to that face?

Amazingly enough, with a bit of coaxing the truck fired up. Gotta love American-made pre '70s vehicles. Cast iron? Yeah we got that. Who needs catalytic converters anyway? We did end up having to use the tractor to push it when it wouldn't start again, and I got my first taste of driving with no power steering. Which was awesome.

My father and I did a full inspection of the truck and made a huge list of everything that needs to be done. It's in good shape, especially compared to his also sunken pasture-mate, a '58 Bel Air. (If you want to read a piss-your-pants hilarious story about an IH that was not in such good shape, go here.)

You might take a glance at the bed of the truck and ask, "What in the hell is all that?" The answer my friend can be explained in two parts. Firstly, "I don't know," and secondly, "just shit." The big brown box is a fridge made circa the dawn of man, and you know how I feel about old fridges. After we dropped that off at the biggest, yet most organized junk yard I have ever seen, we moved everything from the IH to our Dodge for a dump run. 

I wanted to make sure before I started throwing shit around that I couldn't really cause any damage to anything. To which my dad supplied the quote of the day, "That's the nice thing about a dump run, there's not a lot of subtlety involved." Ah, touché Pops. So I donned gloves and got to work. 

(The whole time we were at the dump, I kept expecting to find some partially disintegrated human corpse. Weird phobias from watching too much Bones? Check.)

What did we discover in all that garbage? A Easy-Bake oven paddle. Not the oven, just the paddle. This is a toy my sister hadn't looked at since she was probably eight. We found the greater portion of our old front porch, which was remodeled at least five years ago, the cage of my guinea pig who died when I was still in elementary school, a patinated penny from the '70s, about 20 pounds of gravel, and also this beautiful, miniature, Japanese garden. So zen. 

Now that the eye-sore of a garbage heap in the back was gone we could concentrate on other aspects of potential maintenance. Upon further inspection we found the muffler was basically rusted in half, which I didn't really think was possible. Maybe corroded is a better word? I actually did a Google search for "corroded muffler" and this was the most dramatic image I could find. Which is just precious.

Pulled all the spark plugs to see how the motor was running and the answer was: dirty. So we drained the fuel tank and made a list of parts to get at NAPA. Opaque is not the color you want fuel to be, apparently. I have virtually no upper body strength so watching me pulling the plugs was painful for my dad. He mentioned that they made pullers for... then he paused. I filled in the word he wanted to say, "pussies", at the same time he said a much more acceptable group title of "women". Pretty much.
Sorry I don't have vice-grips for hands, dad! But I did manage to get them

Went to our most amazing local gas station/grocery/everything-you'd-ever-need-store, Jim's Market, and picked up enough Sta-bil to let the truck sit for another six years and some carburetor cleaner. We didn't dilute either of these to the specified amounts. Doing which, being involved in a medical field, almost killed me.

We bought out a significant portion of NAPA under the keen direction of the manager, who happens to be a school friend of my dad. They went to this sketchy logging camp together as teens, which, as far as I know, was supposed to be for reforming juvenile delinquents, not a fun summer camp. We got a new fuel cap there too. I'm not sure if you'll be able to tell from the picture, but the top one is the new one.

The oil was black. Which is bad. So we fixed that and changed the filter, the biggest canister I have ever seen. Also changed the fuel filter and got the right threaded rod set-up for the air filter. Because the part I'm holding here was not the original part...

Then I got to work cleaning out the bed. I'll spare you a lot of details but I have terrible circulation and I still can't feel my hands from the cold hose water. But look at it, totally worth it!

The interior was full of rope, receipts, and rust. Here's kind of a before and after.

There's so much moisture in the cab I could swim in it. Turns out rust loves that shit. I can see the ground through the floorboards. We got some rust stopper, but we're going to have to scrub in and do some major surgery and repair on these pups. 

This is the original registration to my great-grandpa, I don't think it has ever been moved. The truck doesn't even have 95,000 miles on it. It's pretty hilarious, because my little 2005 everyday driver has the same number, almost to the mile, as this 1965 beast. 

Lots more to do, a couple items on our list are: welding new floorboards in, making a new seat cover (I'm looking at Sunbrella now, I'm thinking this would look pretty sweet with brown accents), fixing the door panels, getting a new muffler, installing new headliner, and finding and replacing sundry broken and/or missing parts like a turn signal lens, door handle, shifter knob, horn button, and arm rests. Et cetera, et cetera...

I feel like I've already learned a lot, and it's super entertaining comparing parts to human anatomy. Definitely a fun project to do with my Pops and you'll be getting updates as we get them done.

Textbooks

Fall is nearly here, which means another year of college will be beginning soon. I am very excited for my courses this term, which is moderately unusual. I think it's because I'm finally done with math, but also because I'm getting into classes that directly pertain to what I want to do when "real life" finally starts.

Although I'm not currently in the "real world" my current reality finally hit me like a train when I had to go buy my textbooks. This term I'm taking Human Anatomy and Physiology (with lab), O-Chem (with lab), Animal Genetics, and Principles of Animal Nutrition. At just 15 credits, it's the least amount of classes I've taken in college thus far.

However, the term is not even close to being light on text books. Or reasonable prices.
The only optional textbook was in Animal Nutrition, but since I'm planning on going to vet school, I figured it was worth buying and adding to my veterinary library. So there goes $78.

The Genetics text is required- $100 even. That's what's nice about the Animal Sciences department. It's usually just one book, if that.

Then we get into the real hairy shit. One of my roommates took A&P last year, so I was planning on using his book. But, lo and behold- they've switched editions since spring. (Because human anatomy has changed so much...?)
Also I needed an online access code. So there's really only one option, which is the new bundled package, which has the book, code, and a picture atlas, and blah blah blah. This pup rang out at $167, plus the lab packet valued at $12. So $179 for the whole course. Ouch, however, I will be taking the class all year, so I won't have to buy the book or code again.

The great part is that when I try to sell the book back at the end of the year they'll basically charge me to take it back then turn around and sell it for over $100. So that's awesome and totally fair.
*coughsomuchsarcasmit'snotevenfunnycough*

Then Organic Chemistry. Now, I already had reservations about this class because I didn't do so hot in the gen-chem series. There's the new bundled package for this course too, but I don't have an arm and a leg to spare so I decided to go used. Used books cost less and sometimes have curse words doodled in the margins (which is always a plus), so I picked up the book and study guide priced at $114 and $78 respectively. This class also required a molecular model set, which could only be bought new at $68. So totaling out at $260, I'm obviously pumped about O-Chem.

After nearly getting a hernia from carrying about 8 billion pounds of textbooks and crying all the way to the check out line, I received the 10% student discount (-$61) and swiped my card for $556 worth of knowledge and learning opportunities. Even the lady ringing me up commented about the shocking altitude my stack of books reached.

Is this motivation to go for the elusive 4.0 this term? Yes.

Is this motivation to seriously look for some part-time work? Yes.

Is this motivation to give up and become a bum after fall term? Definitely yes...

Of course at the bookstore checkout I got the traditional coupon sheet that helps ease the suffering of poor college students like me. Although I don't know what I could possibly get at Dutch Bros that would fix this.

Maybe crying into a BOGO nonfat vanilla latte will make me feel better...?