summer countdown

its hot again! yesterday we piled all the kids and some grownups into our 15 passenger van and drove to the mountains for a swimming hole adventure in the Shenandoah. it was so nice to get off the farm and into some nice, cool water! we stopped at the farm stand on the way (virginia ham, holloway's corn and rat cheese) for some fresh local peaches. lately my diet has been consisting of fresh corn, watermelon, cucumbers, and peaches. sky and i are going to a local you-pick blueberry place tonight, so i'll be diversifying to include blueberry pancakes and smoothies...

we (ez, sky and i) played music for awhile last night, in anticipation of the Communities Conference contra dance we'll be putting on in a couple of weeks. Ezra is all about the jazz standards these days, so we put together some "interesting" new sets.

today i'm buckling down, sorting through all of my stuff and (hopefully) getting rid of/sending home most of it. i don't like having my room overtaken by crap, so i'm gonna try andget it all done today so i can have my room back. count-down mode is taking over as my departure looms ever closer...

cool harvest

well, the belly dance hafla was quite an event! i'll try and post some photos soon. a bunch of awesome musicians came out; they set up middle eastern-style and rugs and cushions on the floor. there were a bunch of drums, and Crow who was playing oud, fiddle, guitar and a drone-box thing. i played fiddle for a while, Crow asked me to tune down a whole step since everything is in the key of C! it was so hypnotic playing that way, it felt really good. an afternoon of music interspersed with bread-baking and meditation.

but.......there was distant thunder by late afternoon, and when i finally got down to the barn at 7pm for the evening milking, the storm was starting to blow by. treating sick cow and 3 very rambunctious calves meant that the darkness and storm were closing in at herding time. it was exciting and a bit alarming to be hooking up electric fences while lightening flashed in the sky! i biked home just as it started raining.

now its monday lunchtime, we just finished a 4 hour, all harvest garden shift. giant, gorgeous rainbow chard, okra, squash, zucchini, eggplant, way too much corn, and roma tomatoes for salsa. it feels really good in all the usual cheezy sorts of ways to be doing lots of gardening, but sometimes i wish i could relax a little bit more on garden shifts. i always worry that i'm not working hard or well enough.

10 more buckets of apples appeared in the kitchen yesterday, so its good that the applesauce train is chugging on! today is thankfully grey and cool, but the rest of the week is supposed to be in the scorching 90's.

summer sunday

sunday noon and i'm listening to "a prairie home companion" in my boyfriend sky's room. i grew up on this radio show and it has deep nostalgic resonance for me. sky and i are always arguing about the relative merits of national(istic, as he calls it) public radio. despite their increasing level of corporate sellout advertising and somewhat conservative news reporting slant, i'm a fan. npr news, not to mention the other great programming--this american life, wait, wait don't tell me (the npr news quiz show), and of course, a prairie home companion are like familiar old friends to me. listening to these shows makes me feel more connected to the larger cultural movement that i consider myself a part of--liberal/radical, artsy, and silly. living at twin oaks can certainly feel isolating sometimes and its been a real blessing to have several good npr stations here, as well as work that can fit around or include radio-listening.

speaking of work, i've got to finish dealing with the jars of applesauce we canned last night. the applesauce shift it turned out to be quite a production! apple bits covering everything, lots of steam burns, and about 30 beautiful of jars of (admittedly a bit runny) sorghum-sweetened applesauce. we got rid of 5 big buckets of apples, but there's about 13 still waiting in our walk-in fridge. we're going to do another round tomorrow night, cooking up the apples in our big tilting skillet, then running them through our very ghetto electronic apple-saucer.

this afternoon, a couple of folks are hosting a belly dance hafla, drummers and belly dancers jamming out on the grassy lawn. i'll probably drop in and play along a bit on the fiddle. after that i've got the evening milking shift, which will be a bit of a circus as we've now got 3 new baby calves that need to be hand fed--and they are some wild and vigorous babies!

in transition

greetings.......

its been a long while since i've posted. i'm now starting my last month here at twin oaks, the 85 person income sharing commune where i've lived for the past 5-ish years.
and, i just turned 28!

big changes all around.

this morning, i got to sleep in until 7:30 AM, and then read my book for awhile (an L.M. Montgomery novel. she's the author of anne of green gables, and has a bunch of other exulting, lyrical books about passionate and impetuous young women growing up on PEI). then i cooked lunch for the community which mainly involved reheating lots of leftovers (lentil loaf, bulgar pilaf, cheesy green beans). During lunch the dairy crew met; this has been my most consistent work area during my time here. we named the new calves--this years theme is "trees", so we ended up with loblolly and devilfur.

its a hot and hazy day, though the weather's been blessedly cool of late. even today there's a tiny breeze every now and again. the watermelons have started pouring in from the garden, and our kitchen is full of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, beans, and tiny sour apples. i've got a date with sky (my partner) tonight, and we're going to have a go at cooking up a big batch of applesauce to can for the winter.

summer is succulent.

catching up

ok, just to play catch up a bit.........after returning from israel, i spent a week and half in nyc staying at uncle harry's. it was a pretty rough transition, coming away from great community and intense landscape to being on my own in nyc. i got very immersed in posting all the photos from the trip (photobucket.com/karmakas). sky came and visited, we spent a few days together at harry's and downtown at tegan and arrow's (nyc raver/bio-deisal kids who are twin oaks satellites
). it was great and hard. good to see him and hard to figure out where to go from here.

the day he left, i travelled up to connecticut for a weeklong "internship"at a jewish retreat center called Isabella Freedman. they have a passover retreat for older folks, 12 of us came to help supplement the year round staff in the kitchen and dining room.

from phillie

greetings from philadelphia. i'm spending the weekend visiting my friend michael, a lawyer-turned baker who is part of the extended Elat Chayyim family. he's got on underground (in all senses) organic bakery going in the basement of his co-op house here in west philly. he makes hand-milled, organic sourdough breads, runs bread making workshops, sends out weekly emails to his customers and hosts a bread-blog. its a pretty cool mission, building community through bread baking. west philly feels good, friendly, relaxed and very community oriented.

before coming here, i was in nyc soaking up the jew vibe. thursday night i hung out at a weekly jew party for religious jews on the edge, yiddish speakers, israeli's, and anyone else who feels like showing up. its called chulent, jewish stew, and folks come and hang out, talk, eat, smoke cigarettes and pot and play music all night and into the wee hours of the morning. friday i went to some very hippied out renewal services on the upper west side. the chairs were all in a circle, with the rabbi mixed in with everyone else. there was a woman in the back, doing yoga barefoot. i felt right at home, singing, dancing, and getting into that awesome state of religous/spiritual ecstacy. after, i went over to someone's house for shabbat dinner potluck, turned out they were connected with isabella freedman. most of the kids there taught at teva, a jewish enironmental education program for kids. a very laid back atmosphere with delicious food and nice folks.

ulpan trip

here' a tiny blurb about the last ulpan trip, february 28th

after the desert, i returned to Jerusalem to join the ulpan for one final tiul (trip). we met at yad v'shem , the holocaust memorial museum. all of Mt. Herzl is a remembrance to the holocaust, and the architecture of the museum itself is amazing, basically a suspended triangle that looks out over jerusalem. the museum is a long hallway with rooms on either side so that you sort of snake your way through, deeper and deeper into the horror. at the first end, there was video of pre-holocaust jews, celebrating, dancing, etc. i was very moved by seeing cross-gender dancing (a bunch of young women and men in a big circle, dancing to tunes that the VB's play!) from the early 20th century--the gender separation for dancing among religious people is pretty intense.

needless to say, the whole experience was totally overwhelming. the replica of a train car and the mini model of the body-burning set up were most striking to me. but room after room contained countless heartwrenching stories and many small objects that had been recovered or found.

for now i'm going to move on, there's more to say but its all a bit overwhelming.

from the museum, we went into the old city of jerusalem for a quick bite before entering the tunnels to go underneath the western wall. descending below street level, we walked through tunnels of ancient rock, covered up by later construction. clear windows below our feet showed through to more down below. it was pretty stunning.