Foxy Lady

The last few weeks, heading out to work around 6:30 am, I’ve noticed a fox crossing the road, usually from our side to the opposing side.  As foxes tend to be active at dawn and dusk, this wasn’t too surprising, though we didn’t see any foxes around last year.  Having a fox around the property isn’t our first choice, as we have chickens now, but we kinda hoped that its home was across the street, rather than over here.

Well, I was getting ready to head out for church this morning when I looked out the window to see our friend, the fox, in our yard.  This time, however, the fox was accompanied by two baby foxes.  I quickly grabbed the DSLR, slapped on the zoom lens, and crept outside.  The foxes were over by the outbuildings.  The zoom lens did well, but didn’t get quite close enough for my taste, so I slowly crept further out.  The mother fox saw me from the beginning, but as long as I didn’t make sudden movements, she wasn’t too bothered.  I finally tried moving over to the concrete platform containing our well to sit down, but Momma Fox didn’t like me quite that close, so she moved further away.  The young foxes stayed there, but moved out of my sight.  I figured I’d gotten enough pictures by then, though, so I came inside.

We’ll have to decide what to do about this, I guess.  The hen house is relatively well-protected, but it’s our understanding that, once a fox knows there are hens in the coop, then there’s little you can do to prevent it from getting in…aside from trapping and removing the fox(es) by force.  As this is Brooke’s “project,” though, I’ll be letting her make the appropriate decisions.

Regardless, I posted some of the pictures I took up on Picasa.  It’s probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to a fox – definitely a surprising and cool experience!

Chicks!

I’ve talked about raising chickens for eggs for quite awhile now. We finally have the room, facilities, and time for me to be able to start this enterprise, so I’m REALLY excited! My dad had a flock of chickens when I was a kid that finally met their demise to some rampant dogs when I was in middle school. I never really had much to do with the chickens, but we love to eat eggs and this seems like one more step to the self-sufficient lifestyle that I want to lead. If I can manage to keep these ladies alive and well, and we stay in the house for awhile longer, a couple of milking goats are the next step!

I bought 15 chicks from Orscheln’s Farm and Home in Iowa City on March 9. One of our cars was being serviced, so I had to go pick up Andy from work in Iowa City anyway, so it seemed like a good time to go ahead and pick out my chicks. The flock is 5 Rhode Island Reds, 5 California Whites, and 5 Barred Plymouth Rocks. I’m hoping to end up with 12 laying hens when they’re grown up.

I had my spring break last week, so my goal was to use the time off (and Meg was still going to day care since we had to pay for the week whether we used it or not) to modify an outbuilding into a hen house.  My construction skills are not great and I, apparently, get frustrated really easily, so Andy helped me to finish up on Saturday.  We still need to finish the nesting boxes, roost, and the outdoor run, but the space is usable for the flock to be enclosed in a ring while they get big enough that they won’t be able to escape through the holes in the foundation of the building.  Until their move outside, they were living in a box on our back porch, which made the cat and dog more than a little nervous!

This is the building that I hodgepodged into a hen house.  I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I tried to use mostly found wood, but I had to buy most of the wood for the door.  The building has a really cool weather vane on top and a concrete slab to the side, perfect for an outdoor run.  I hope to be able to let the hens “free range” in our yard in the afternoons this summer, but I’ll need to secure the garden first, so they don’t eat our veggies before we get what we need.

“I was in the prison, and you visited me…”

Brooke and Meg were out of town this past weekend, so I attended church alone.  We had a guest pastor in church, as our regular pastor was out of town.  Her name was Pastor Arnette Pint, and she was the first Associate Pastor for Shueyville UMC back in the late-90s.  Since that time, she has gone on to a few positions, but her most recent one is serving a congregation called Women at the Well, that she started at the Mitchellville, IA Women’s Correctional Facility, so she had some very interesting perspectives.

Pastor Arnette described a variety of statistics and anecdotal stories to help illustrate what she does and why it’s important.  First, she told us that this is a relatively new concept, having a church within a prison.  This is different than having churches visit prisons, as you end up getting a variety of groups coming through and not staying – no sense of permanence.  The United Methodist Church in Iowa felt the need to appoint a pastor specifically to this prison, as the system apparently works well in other states where it’s been implemented.  Pastor Arnette relayed a story of the pastor (whose name I can’t find) that started this movement and, effectively, “wrote the book” on doing this sort of thing.  He had been ministering to the men of a prison in South Dakota and he got the sense that they wanted an actual, regular, church service.  Something permanent.  Something they could depend on.  After he started a weekly service, the numbers of attendees grew, and their outlooks after prison improved.

The part of the story that hit me was that, supposedly, one inmate thanked him for starting the service, lamenting the endless parade of churches and groups coming through to preach to them.  The inmate said “We was tired of gettin’ saved.”  It was an interesting point to make, as these churches that were coming to the prison somehow felt as though, because they were prisoners, they must obviously not be Christians.  Because they were in prison, they obviously needed “saving.”

With this framework in mind, Pastor Arnette went through some statistics, saying that 60% of inmate in her prison have been diagnosed with a mental illness, though that number is surely higher.  Most of those diagnoses happened outside the prison system, as the ones that occur once you’re in the system can be difficult to interpret.  There are 600 women in the prison, while 30 years ago, in the same building, there were only 40-something women there.  It’s a crowded place, and there’s one psychologist to manage all of them.  They communicate over the internet with a psychiatrist in order to get any medications approved.  Pastor Arnette also said that, while the statistics aren’t solid on this, she thinks it’s somewhere between 80% and 90% of these women that have been abused in some fashion during their lives, and the majority of them have struggled with addiction at some time.  For many of them, addiction is the reason they are in prison at all.  She said that, while they have counselors at the prison to help the psychologist in their day-to-day routine, these counselors, more often than not, are prison guards that have ranked up high enough to get off the floor.

The United Methodist Church in Iowa also started a program to help provide clothing for women that are leaving prison.  Apparently, the State of Iowa doesn’t provide you with a change of clothes for your bus ride home, so there are women riding from Des Moines to all points of the State in their prison uniform.  Hardly the “right foot” to get started on.  So, the Methodist Church started collecting clothes from women across the state, asking them to donate their lightly-used clothes so that these women have something to start fresh with.  The church provides a set of casual clothes, as well as a set of clothes nice enough for “that first job interview.”  Certainly a nice gesture.

One of her larger points was with regards to the cost of building and operating prisons.  She pointed out that almost $180 million has been approved by the State of Iowa to help refurbish this current prison, as well as build another prison in the state (and that’s just to build, not to operate).  That’s $180+ million to help deal with all these women that have been coming in (remember, 40 women increased to 600 in this one building over 30 years, largely due to influx of methamphetamine and harsher drug laws).  She suggested that, maybe, that $180+ million would have been better spent on helping these women before they got into prison, by providing greater access to abuse and addiction counselors, or to even see a mental health professional.

At a time when state funding for mental health is declining drastically, our spending on new prison facilities is increasing.  “How does this make sense,” she asks.

The last point I’ll leave with you are some interesting statistics on recidivism (as in, the likelihood someone within the prison will come back to the prison one or more times).  The rate in Iowa is 60%, which is comparable to other states.  According to her, in studies that have looked into programs like hers, with churches that are actually based within a prison, the recidivism rate drops to 15% for those individuals.  If those individuals leave the prison and find a church home (as in, one they attend regularly, as opposed to “just visiting”), the rate drops to 2%.

It was an excellent sermon, and an eye-opening testament to what goes on in the prison system.  Thankfully, my family isn’t known for their prison stints, so I can’t say I have any experience with what it’s like to “go through the system.”  I hope I never do, but if anyone I know has to go through it, I hope they have someone like Pastor Arnette and a program like hers to help them see it through.

Things Are Looking Up

Oh, so much better.

To be fair, I think we’ve gotten off with a pretty mild winter here in Iowa, but I’ve been getting increasingly tired of the dreary cloudiness and bitter cold…all…the…time…  As I noted to Brooke a few days ago, it ends up costing quite a bit of propane heating in order to keep the house around 65 F (which is only barely comfortable…) when it’s 0 F outside for most of the day and the sun isn’t out.

But as the forecast dictates, the temps are getting warmer and it looks like we’ll have highs above 35 F at least through February 20th, if the 10-day forecast is to be believed.

I want to believe.

Blizzkrieg 2011

We had a pretty good snow day here in good ol’ Iowa.  The blizzard warning, itself, was over around noon today, after which the wind died down considerably and the sun poked through occasionally.  Still, the high today was 9 F, so the snow isn’t going anywhere for awhile. In the end, Iowa City got 10″ of snow, Cedar Rapids closer to 9.5″, and Swisher got 10.7″.

Yesterday afternoon, the University cancelled classes for the evening and through tomorrow morning at 10:00 am.  I got ahold of my boss, who is also in charge of the class, and he and I decided to go ahead and cancel our 10:30 am class, as we figured very few people would be there anyway, and the fact that I probably wouldn’t be able to get there (and I would have been right).  Just before 8:00 am this morning, though, the University canceled class for the remainder of the day.  All was well in the world!

After Meg went down for a (short…) nap this morning, Brooke and I went outside and recorded the video above.  As you can see, there were quite a few snow drifts in our yard, a few of which coming to somewhere between 4 and 6 feet tall.  Needless to say, I’d never seen snow naturally piled to such heights, so it was quite a sight to see.  Unfortunately, it also seemed as if those snow drifts were covering our road to the extent that we wouldn’t be able to get out of here anytime soon.

Thankfully, however, while I was outside in the early afternoon starting to shovel some of the snow out of the way, a very large plow came through and made a route for us.  We took a drive into Swisher to collect Brooke’s car from our friend’s house in town and brought it back here, so now we’re good to go for tomorrow.

So yeah, we watched a few movies and generally stayed inside and stayed warm.  Not a bad Groundhog Day!

Of Snow Days and Sickly Babies

Our first truly major snow is about to hit in the next few hours.  We’ve actually gotten a decent amount of snow, and snow from weeks ago is still on the ground, yet I don’t think that this much will have fallen in a single bout in this amount of time.  Originally, forecasters were calling for something like 20″ in some parts of Iowa, while we’d probably get closer to 15″ over a period of two days, however that estimate has been reduced.  Last night, we could have gotten up to 4″, but I’d be surprised if we even got 1″.  The problem last night, however, was drifting snow, leading to a near 4′ drift on our sidewalk (very fluffy though, so pretty easy to remove).  As of this posting, they’re forecasting more like 8-10″ for Cedar Rapids, and then 10″-12″ for Iowa City between 3:00 pm today and 9:00 am tomorrow.

Normally, this wouldn’t worry me at all.  My job tends to be flexible such that, if I was snowed in under 12″ of snow, I wouldn’t really have to go anywhere.  Unfortunately, I’m scheduled to teach to the Pharm.D. students tomorrow, so if the University doesn’t cancel classes, I’m still required to get in and there’s no way for me to notify the 100+ students in the class that I won’t be there.  Regardless, I’m thinking of various strategies for solving this problem, but I hope that the University goes ahead and cancels classes ahead of time (i.e. this afternoon!!) so I can sleep well without having to worry about tomorrow morning.  Missouri is getting hammered more than Iowa is and, yesterday, SLU and Wash U in St. Louis both preemptively canceled classes for today.

Aside from snow issues, Meg hasn’t been feeling well.  Really, she hasn’t been feeling well for the past few weeks, but it really started last weekend when she stopped eating as well as she had been and certainly stopped sleeping as well as she had been.  Naptime still happened, and gradually improved as the week drew on, but she still woke up multiple times during the night and would stay awake during that period, crying out any time you’d try to lay her down (and would still cry even after she’d been asleep in your arms…and when I say “asleep,” I mean “out”).

My Mom visited this past weekend and reminded us of the fact that my sister was prone to ear infections around this age, and ear infections that didn’t present with a fever.  Ear infections that seemed to flare up more at night, rather than during the day.  Suffice to say, Brooke took Meg into the doc yesterday and, indeed, Meg has infections in both ears.  She’ll be on antibiotics for 10 days or so and we’ll need to take Meg in again in a few weeks to confirm that the ear infections are cleared up, but hopefully this will set us on a better trend toward sleeping through the night!

Of course, unfortunately, this means that Meg will miss her last few weeks of water babies

Also, Meg has had a cough for months now.  We hadn’t paid much attention to it, thinking it was related to the fact that she goes to daycare and is exposed to any number of evil demon baby diseases.  She’d seen the doc a few times during that period and the doc agreed.  However, yesterday, the doc was a bit more concerned about it, as the coughing was a bit worse than normal.  She isn’t really sure what the cause is, but she prescribed albuterol treatments, which required us to pick up a nebulizer to actually administer the drug to Meg.  She’s supposed to get the treatments a few times a day, and they take around 10 minutes to allow the albuterol to “nebulize” into her lungs.  As long as you keep her entertained, she inhales most of the drug and you can definitely tell that her coughing gets more productive thereafter.  Hopefully that helps her, too!

Meg turns 11 months this Saturday, which is a pretty crazy thing to consider.  She’s obviously come a long way in that period, and as have we.  While she’s still developing nicely, we’re still waiting on more teeth to come in (she has 1, solitary, lonely tooth…) and we’re waiting on her mobility to increase (she can scoot around and move from one side of the room to the other, but it isn’t really “crawling,” per se…).  We’re anxious to see if this, the 11th month of her life, is when all the other teeth come in and whether she starts to take her first steps.

It would certainly be nice for her to be able to chew on her birthday cake in a little over a month.  🙂

Digging a Ditch

Iowa is kinda flat and, well, when it gets windy, snow drifts tend to happen.  Our landlord, Phil, warned us that one of the roads heading up to our place tends to be pretty bad when snow is blowing around.  As the title to this post suggests, he wasn’t wrong.

Meg and I were heading back from daycare this afternoon and turned onto Gable Ave toward home.  The northbound side of Gable was a touch more covered by snow than it was this morning when I was heading south.  By “a touch,” I mean a steady gradient of a few inches into a few feet as you got to the ditch.As such, the southbound side of Gable was just fine – the northbound, not so much.  Anyway, I was going faster than I should have (like…25-30 mph total, Mom…), and too close to the northbound side of the road, causing the car to slide into the embankment after the right wheel hit a deep spot.  We were fine, of course, and close enough to home that Brooke could come by with her car to transfer Meg into a vehicle that was…mobile.

Brooke brought a shovel along.  Sadly didn’t help much.  That car wasn’t moving.  We were ready to call the tow truck.

Thankfully, we live in rural Iowa, where almost everyone has a 4×4 truck.  Two very nice gentlemen, Jeremy and Josh, drove up in their 1/2 ton Chevy truck, attached some cabling between their truck and the frame of the Sportage, I put ‘er in reverse, and they pulled me out right quick.  A large Dodge Ram pulled up after them.  People were lining up to pull a car out of the ditch!

Regardless, it was a brief yet interesting experience.  I complain occasionally about living in the middle of nowhere, but sometimes, you’re glad that’s where you are.  Thanks to Jeremy and Josh and their Silverado.  🙂

Turning It Up To ’11

There were various blog and Facebook posts bouncing around over the past few weeks discussing the year that was 2010 and the potential for 2011. I decided to spend those first few days not really posting much, mostly out of laziness, but also out of reflection.

2010 is going to go down as a seminal year for me, personally, as well as our family as a whole.  It was a year when I defended my dissertation, culminating in the completion of a Ph.D. and, therefore, the end of my tenure as a student (23 years in the making…).  It was a year marked by leaving the bustling city of St. Louis for the more laid-back trappings of rural Iowa, coinciding with both Brooke and I leaving our previous jobs (if you count being a graduate student as a “job”…) and starting new positions in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, respectively.  There was also a 10 year high school reunion in there.

The move to Iowa brought quite a few other changes.  We now live in a house, not an apartment.  I now have to (get to?) mow a lawn.  Brooke gets the garden she’s always wanted.  I have a longer commute, plus a bus ride, in getting to work.  We had to find a new church and have become more involved that we planned to (but this is how it always goes…).  We had to come to terms with the fact that it’s pretty hard to go out to eat once a week when you can’t just walk to Joanie’s for happy hour after work.  And we live on a gravel road now.  Oh, and it’s a lot colder in Iowa – nice in the summer, crazy in the winter.

Brooke and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary in 2010.  In many ways, we interact just like we did back when we were first married, if not as we did before.  Of course, the obvious big change in that area is the fact that we added a new member to the family, Meg, who was with us (outside of her mother, at least…) for nearly 10 months in 2010.  It’s been a wild ride learning to be a parent (still learning…), but we’re both getting better at it and slowly figuring out how to handle the problems that go with it.

So, when I say that 2010 was a “seminal year,” it’s because of all these things.  Lots of big change that will influence the course of our collective life that we’ll be able to look back on with fondness in a few short years.

What’s in store for 2011, you ask?  Who knows.  Seems hard to top the year that was 2010 when you look at that list.  I’d be just fine scaling the big things down for a bit so we can coast and enjoy the changes we just went through for a bit longer.  I don’t really see much coming over the horizon except for settling down a bit further, and that’s just fine with me.  A few things off the top of my head would be that I’ll find out if my grant gets funded, which will determine how long we’re staying in Iowa; we’ll try a family vacation with a 1+ year old; Brooke will almost triple the size of her garden and get some chickens; and I will brew close to 60 gallons of beer.

Sounds like a good start.  🙂

Cedar Rapids: The Movie

I happened to check the Apple Quick Time movie trailers page, as I sometimes do when I want to kill time at work (amongst other things…), and I found this little movie coming out February 11th that I had never heard of. Cedar Rapids stars Ed Helms (The Daily Show, The Office) as a small town insurance agent that has never been “to the big city” until he’s sent as his company’s representative to an insurance convention in the bustling metropolis of Cedar Rapids, IA.  The movie also stars Sigourney Weaver, John C. Reilly, Anne Heche, and other notables.

To be quite honest, the movie itself doesn’t even look all that funny and may even be a bit cliche, but I’m quite curious as to whether any of it was actually filmed on location in Cedar Rapids, which is a whopping 10 minutes from our house.

Anyway, I just didn’t know this movie existed.  We may need one of Meg’s Grandmas to come up and babysit for a nice in mid-February.  🙂

White Pre-Christmas

I must say, it’s easier to get into the Christmas Spirit when there’s snow on the ground already.  It always seemed that, growing up in Missouri, we were lucky to have much or any snow on the ground in the month of December, let alone this early in the month.  Of course, with the move to Iowa, we are significantly closer to the North Pole, where the snow will stay on the ground through mid-June…  But yeah, it’s kinda nice driving around listening to Christmas music on the radio with the sun shining and snow on the ground, knowing that Christmas is still a few weeks away.  Somehow the snow is a bit less worrysome for me knowing that it’s still December.  Of course, this only foreshadows the pains we will go through in January and February, but for now, it’s pleasant.

We did have highs in the mid-teens over the weekend, and lows in the single digits.  Glad we got our propane tank filled on Friday…

Regardless, we were expecting the First Big Snowfall Of The Year this past weekend (3-5 inches), but we only ended up with less than 2 in.  It was enough to cover the ground and was kinda nice to wake up to on Saturday morning.  We didn’t have much trouble driving around and the streets were quite clear, thanks to Iowa’s relatively decent road crew.

As a result of our busy-ness in the upcoming weeks/weekends, we also went and picked up a Christmas tree.  This year marks the first time we picked up anything larger than a “Charlie Brown Tree,” as we now have a bit more space to use for one.  Brooke had seen a place up near Cedar Rapids that we could go, so we headed up there on Sunday and cut one down.  It ended up being a little over $20 for a 5 ft tree, so I was rather pleased.  I’ll take a picture or two of it once I figure out what’s going on with the auxiliary flash for our dSLR…

On another note, the power supply went out on the web server last week, explaining the absence of the website for a few days.  I was concerned that the motherboard/processor had died, which would have ended up being a more expensive fix in the same month that we bought 250 gal of propane gas and Christmas presents, but thankfully, it was just the power supply…only a $50 fix, in the end.  It has gotten me thinking about the server upgrade that I’m planning, hopefully for 2011, so now I’m in the mode of searching for the best deals and “bang for your buck” on computer components.  Dangerous thinking, to be sure, but at least I can put off a large purchase for a few more months.