By the shovelful

    This past month we have done a lot of digging and planting. This seems to be a theme of spring for us as every other year here we have planted a lot of trees and this year is no different! Well, I suppose the difference is that this year we also planted our first garden here, thus making this our most digging-est year yet. Yes, our backs are sore but with all of our earth moving behind us, I have to say I am glad that we did it. Our home is feeling more home-like surrounded by cultivated green spaces and not just overgrown fields. And this year will hopefully be the first of many logging hours puttering in the soil around the house.

     First things first, we borrowed a friend's rototiller to loosen up the soil in our plowed garden area, and Mike spent one hot and frustrating day pushing it around the garden patch. Once that was done, we set the posts for our perimeter fence (thanks to a work party of folks who helped us dig holes for it!) and stapled up wire fencing, leaving a few openings for gates to go in. Then came the work of actually shaping beds, which we had determined should be "raised" because we are working with such a wet, water-logged site. The advantage to putting in a garden lower down in our creek valley is that the soil in our garden seems really decent: it tends toward clay consistency, but a very dark brown-almost black color and full of earthworms (and now a few half earthworms... sorry guys).

     Anyhow, that "raising" of beds took some muscle, for sure, and I especially got rather absorbed in the process of prepping beds and starting seeds in them. Gardening is a whole new frontier for me, despite almost a decade of fumbling attempts at trying to coax life out of containers and occasional small plots. There is such a lot to learn about soil fertility, plant timing, spacing, companion planting, diseases and pests and so on. I have spent much of my spare time in the past month with my nose to my large stack of library gardening books and I can tell this is going to take some time to get the hang of. What is most exciting is knowing that finally we are at a place where we can really invest time in improving our soil and that each year it will get better. That being said--low expectations for this year since this is the no-amendments-made starting point and what we have mostly planted this year are hand-me-down seedlings and starts from our neighbors (on the runty side, the seedlings not the neighbors). On the bright side, we have plenty of mulch material thanks to last year's extra straw, so hopefully that will give us a leg up on the weeds!

 

      I spent probably too much time building our garden gates and learned one valuable lesson in the process-- it helps to have square straight fence posts where your gate is going to go. For some reason we put our most curvy posts there, making for one tricky carpentry project. Hopefully the rabbits won't notice the gaps around the sides and stay politely outside. Also, we are finally appreciating the virtues of having unlimited gravity-fed water from our pond! It is nice to be able to easily water in small plants and seeds. Okay, more garden reports to come, for sure!

     Vegetables are not the only thing we have been planting... As per our usual, we ambitiously ordered quite a few trees this year. I don't think we quite realized how many until boxes started showing up in the post and we were pressed with getting everything in the ground. Mike headed up this endeavor for the most part, and all in all we planted something like 75 trees and shrubs. You might be thinking if you regularly follow this blog, "didn't you already plant everything you possibly could plant last year and the year before that?" But that is the rabbithole of horticulture for you-- the more you get into it, the more excited you are to expand into the new things you are learning about! There are so many interesting fruit varieties out there, such as honeyberry (the first blueberry-like fruit to bear in spring), quince (a lemon-tasting apple? Yum!), high-bush cranberry, sea buckthorn, asian pears and plums, currants and gooseberries, oh, and chestnuts! We organized a community chestnut tree order and planted 20 ourselves.

     Many of these tree additions were made to our hugel-swales (scroll back to a year one post for more on building these). Now that we are in year four of our swales, our "food forest" concept is much further along! We have been mixing plantings of upper-story things like edible trees with shrub layer and herbaceous understory layers. Each swale has an edible perenial groundcover developing and several special plants called "dynamic accumulators" (in the permaculture world) as they bring up extra nutrients and make it available in the soil once they are trimmed back. In the photo to the left you can see bushy comfrey plants thriving in the foreground. This is another project we are glad we started year one, because now we can just keep popping in more plants as we get the whim, knowing their root systems will be well nourished by the mycelium-rich logs underneath.

    Okay, take a breath, because we are not done planting yet! The last frontier here has been the pond. We finally got around to ordering some aquatic plants for the edges of our pond, which will be critical to establishing a pond ecosystem. Our pond is full of water and has been for about a year, so we felt comfortable plugging in things like "sago pond weed" and "sweet flag" around the perimeter, to their preferred depths. They will be able to adjust up or down in the pond as they need with the slowly rising and lowering water level. In another year, once the plants are further established, we can add in small fish that will thrive in the reedy shallows and build up the food chain from there to the fish that hopefully one day we can catch and eat, like large-mouth bass! Until then, the frogs have the reign of the pond, and they are singing its praises every night.

     Last but not least, our latest endeavor involved renting a mini-excavator for the day to dig a large pit for our house's water cistern. Mike did an amazing job maneuvering the awkward beast around to dig a cubic hole roughly 15 ft. long, 7 ft. deep and 10 ft. wide (maybe "cubic" is a bit generous for the final shape, but with a little honing, it will get there!) He then used the excavator to spread out and compact the soil to the east of the house, where we have always had a sloped hillside. Now we have something more like a level patio next to the house. He was also able to level out an access route to the house on the hillside behind it, effectively terracing it. With a little filling in of low spots by hand, it should all be ready to get wood chips and a small retaining wall built. Yes, it probably sounds like a lot of work that we are taking on, but with the help of the right machine for the day and a few gallons of gas investment, most of the work is done in short order. Building a cistern out of cinderblocks and concrete is going to be its own project for another day, but a very necessary one for us to have year-round water in our house.

 

      In case you have gotten this far in the post and are wondering what is going on with the actual construction end of things, fear not, we are transitioning to that end of things as I write. I have our orders in for a front door, porch decking wood, and oh, about a thousand bags of cellulose insulation. If all goes well, the coming week will bring all the prep needed for insulation to happen, and then I am hoping that Mike's family and friends who will be visiting in a week will feel up for helping us get fluffy with the cellulose. Oh, and this coming week our piglet is arriving! Lots to stay tune for!

Back in the land of milk and honey

Welcome back to this blog and happy spring!

     Mike and I have had a very busy and full winter working out east, squirreling away resources for this final season building our house in Missouri. And now, after one long and harrowing journey back west with our modern-day covered wagon (Subaru station wagon with attached U-Haul trailer), we are once again in the land of milk and honey, NE Missouri.

     The other day as I was greeting some neighbors here, an industrious swarm of bees looping around their hive caught my eye and it suddenly occurred to me what a perfect description "the land of milk and honey" is for this place because it is quite literally abounding in milk and honey of all sorts. Our neighbor's cow just gave birth to a lovely calf, Mayapple, and her udder is so full of milk that her teets won't stop dripping, even spraying milk! We are being gifted everyone's farm abundance left and right: jars of cow and goat milk, last year's extra sorghum honey, jams and jellies, last year's sweet potatoes and cans of tomatoes, and of course, legions of fresh eggs as nobody seems to be able to keep up with their chicken's bumper spring production. Since we have no food production of our own yet, I feel extra grateful to be the recipient of the overflow. Our only abundance to share at the moment are wild spring greens, which Mike forages and whips up into tasty dishes like, "wood nettles sauteed with wild ramps pesto".

Baby chicks getting their daily dose of adoration from the neighborhood kids

Wild greens salad

Setting up camp.... again!

     On top of all the beautiful and miraculous signs of life unfolding once again around us, we have been enjoying sweet reunions with many friends, with our stray cats who survived the winter, and with our home, still standing and in very nearly the same condition we left it in! In fact, our unfinished house is where we first moved back into when we arrived two weeks ago, as our arrival coincided with a weekend of rain and storms. We put our mattress on some of last year's left over straw bales and set-up a make-shift table and chairs for dining. Our first few nights back were spent dry, safe, and unwoken by the clashes of thunder and lightening and howling wind as is the usual in our tent. Funny how something I have taken for granted my entire life--shelter--now feels like such a miraculous blessing to have. What a difference from camping in the elements! Still, we decided to move back out into our old tent platform for one more summer after we made a few improvements to it, since living inside the house we hope to be soon working in would definitely slow us down.

     In all seriousness, the beginning of this year feels different. Our goals are shifting as one major project will be coming to an end and our focus is expanding to other parts of Giving Tree Homestead. Am I getting ahead of myself? Probably. Would it be prudent to put all of our energy into finishing the house alone? Yes, definitely. But instead we are throwing a few more balls into the air at the same time-- starting a large vegetable garden, ordering dozens of sapling fruit and nut trees, planting and stocking our pond, adding a new driveway to the house, perhaps starting work on our outdoor summer kitchen, and even thinking about getting some poultry, pigs, and bees going on our land! (Okay, I said thinking...) Although it is a lot, I think we can accomplish all this AND be moved in to a mostly finished house by the time it gets cold this year, with a wing and a prayer! Having my aunt Jane visit briefly this past week, I was reminded of her first visit here where she and my parents spent several days helping us fill foundation holes with gravel (see blog post #1), and it really hit me how far we've come.

Our friend Sarah singing opera music at a campfire get-together.
 Her future house in the background is almost complete!

     As we embark on our homesteading projects this year, I am cognizant that for the first time we are finally fully living here, year round. To anyone who has ever lived a split life, with half of one's possessions, friends and livelihood in two separate places, it feels really good to unify those halves into a whole life, somewhere. And that somewhere is HERE, in this magical world where red tail hawks shoot by like rockets soaring into the sky, where we are woken by the gobble of wild turkeys nearby, where turtles and tadpoles swim in our pond, and coyotes yip in our woods, and our neighbor's children can tell us where every new songbird nest is hidden in the trees and grasses near their house. It is truly an amazing world we live in, and for the moment I am blessed to have eyes that still see it. Pretty soon as construction gets under way, I may just be seeing my to-do list as I look around, but for now, spring is abounding!

My favorite spring neighbors have returned-- tree frogs! 

Siding and Winter Wrap-up

      Another year of work in Missouri has drawn to a close. Mike and I just packed our car up yesterday, said our goodbyes, and drove into the sunrise on our annual migration east. This is a gross over-simplification of the process of wrapping up however. I have come to finally admit to myself that ever year October and November are going to be extremely busy, full months, this year being no different. A sense of urgency and impending deadline sets in mid October, with the certain knowledge of the drop in temperature to come and much to wrap up.

     This year, our biggest concern was finishing the exterior plaster before temperatures plunged below freezing and both the process of making plaster (involving bare feet for stomp-mixing up batches of sand-clay-straw plaster) and the process of it drying adequately would both become near impossible. We truly have our friend Tyler to thank for the fact that we made that deadline with several weeks of warm weather afterward to spare. Tyler ended up staying and helping us for over a month, and was instrumental to getting our second coat of plastering done. We also had a second plastering work party, which greatly helped us get a good jump start on the process amidst good conversation and company. For the entire day before Mike and our friend Fran mixed batches of plaster until we had quite a reserve built up, while I finished up trim detailing around doors and windows(the trim and assorted detailing actually took us a good week before the second coat could go on). Needless to say, many batches of clay plaster were made and applied onto bales between the first and second coats. In some places, it seems like it is almost four inches thick! 

      This brings me to one of the lessons learned from our strawbale building process this year. Somewhere in the process of stacking up our bale walls, we stopped tracking the levelness of the walls with quite the same fastidiousness that we had started with. Despite reading warnings in natural building books about this tendency, we just got off, with several corners and spots along the wall flaring out quite a bit. I think we just got so frustrated with the tedious process of notching bales around our timberframe that we started saying “good enough” and assuming we could whack the bales into levelness later. Problem was that our bale pinning system (staking and screwing wooden stakes to framing) worked really, really well. We were throwing ourselves with force against the wall and it just would not budge. We tried chain-saw trimming parts and reshaping protrusions, and still, the big bulges would not go away. We built out plaster in low spots, and put in on thin in high spots, but the waviness persisted. So ultimately, we just made our peace with an undulating wall that does not hide the fact that it is composed of bales and not your average stud frame construction. Oh well!

 

     The next big hurdle in the building process was getting doors in and siding up to further protect the walls. We decided on half-wall siding to protect the lower part of the walls that would be receiving the most weather—splash back rain and snow drifts, etc. The earthen plaster does a great job of letting the strawbales “breath” so that moisture doesn’t buildup excessively to the point where mold can flourish (this has been a problem in many cement-stuccoed SB buildings simply because cement does not breath well. The same is true with many well-intentioned world heritage site restoration projects of old adobe and cob buildings which have nearly disintegrated under a protective coating of cement stucco! The restorations have all had to be redone using earthen stucco!) The only downside to clay-based plaster is that it isn’t permanent, it has to be reapplied periodically as it weathers. 

Ben Law's Woodland House in England

      As for siding, we decided for siding to go with something readily available locally, which is white oak cut by our Amish friend Ivan who has a mill five miles away. We love the look of the live-edge siding on Ben Law’s house (the English roundwood timberframer who inspired the frame of our house as well). So we asked Ivan to keep one edge of our siding unmilled, just the raw bark or the logs. What resulted is kind of an organic unpredictable edge that one visitor hilariously named “the smurf house look”! My parents came down to help us again and together we cut and hung the lower boards. This is an understatement as this took us all about a week of hustle and bustle in the last of the warmish fall weather and the first of the can't-feel-fingers winter weather that blasted in. A huge thank you to them for helping us to the finish line! Mike mostly did the trickier high gable ends with help from Brian and I, again no small feat. Note the purple flashing sticking out from the bottom, which will be where we tie in a porch roof next year.

 

     Another tedious step for us this past month was closing in the underside of the soffiting, connecting the roof to the walls. We need our roof to be vented, to let in cool air flow from the bottom of the roof to the vent built into the ridge cap, so that ice dams don't happen (the idea is to keep the roof surface cool, to counteract heat escaping the roof from melting snow and creating ice that forces its way under the roof and into the walls causing water damage). This seems excessively detailed, I know, but it is a big issue for a lot of houses so most builders vent roofs in cold climates now if they don't have cold attic space to serve the same function. For this venting/closing in we went into mouse-paranoia mode, constantly scanning for where mice could infiltrate, as they surely will. We used plywood (stained darker with linseed oil and natural pigments) and a prefabricated metal flashing piece with little perforations to let air in. Oh the detailing! Every little crack and seam now filled in, we get to cross a seriously inglorious "to do" off of our list. It is satisfying to think that our exterior is pretty much done and no more high ladder work will be necessary next year.

 

 

     One of the more satisfying things we did in our last week was to clean out the straw mountain that had formed over the course of baling. I have been itching to do this for some time, but finally! My parents helped, loading up huge tarps full of straw and dragging them over to our soon-to-be garden site for mulch next year (yes, you read it correctly! We are taking the garden plunge next year! Woo hoo!) 

     On our second to last day, our neighbor Jake came down with three horses and his plow and we took a look at the soil together, deciding it was not too frosty to be plowed up for next year's garden site. The frost will help break up the compacted ribbons of sod that were smoothly flipped over as Jake passed back and forth with the animals. The nice thing about horses is that their small hoof size does not compact the soil as they work, unlike tractors that can create a compacted subsoil horizon, just below what is plowed. Next spring we will add compost and manure and straw and form raised beds. It is a huge sized plot (Jake really went for it), and we figure we will plant cover crops on a good bit of it to help feed the soil until we are ready to use it all. I am just so excited about it though, nothing like a waiting garden bed to plant the seed of upcoming spring in one's mind.

 

      Getting doors in has been a challenge as well, complete with its own learning curve. We bought nice second hand doors for probably a quarter of the price of new ones. Trouble was, they didn't come with frames and I optimistically decided to build some to fit. Doors are one of the trickiest things to get to fit well. If hung off-level, you will have a door that constantly swings out or in. If fit too snugly in its frame, swelling wood with seasonal humidity can make it not shut properly. And so on. Suffice to say, there are adjustments that need to be made to both doors in the spring (one too snug, one too gappy), but the are both shut for now. We hunted and hunted for a front door that would do justice to the character of the house and would still be in our miserly price range, but we just didn't find it this year. We opted for the very affordable "plywood and screws" door option instead, for now.

 

      As you can see in the above interior shots, we have quite a bit of plastering yet to go on the inside, another layer of finish flooring upstairs and down, rafter and floor cavities to stuff with cellulose insulation and a stack of ceiling boards to tack up. There are partition walls between upstairs bedrooms and downstairs bathroom to put on as well. Plumbing, a set of stairs and a stove instalation, oh, and a wrap around porch with several roofs, an attached pantry and sunroom yet to attach... BUT it feels like we are so close to being finished! (I can hear you laughing.) I suppose it is all relative, we have come such a long, marathonish way that the last five miles seem like nothing. But honestly, I am glad for a break from it all for a few months. And it has come right in time for the icicles to start forming and NW winds to start blasting. Goodbye house, may you withstand the winter onslaught! 

Fall Closing In

      The beginning of fall has arrived in all of its forms--a chilly nip in the night air, leaves are tinged with brown, asters are suddenly the only wildflowers left blooming, Canada geese are honking overhead making their reverse migration, days are cut short by early and earlier dusks. Hmm. It is clearly time for us to pick up the pace on closing in the house before we too have to make our own winter migration...

   
      I wrote a little in the last post about feeling like we are passing through a dark, overwhelming chapter in our lives here, and in many ways that has not changed--the high-voltage line is still looming on the horizon and keeping me up at night, members of our community are still undecided about whether to stay here in Missouri or part ways, all that remains to be done on our house still feels overwhelming, and it keeps goshdarn raining, but.... there are also some small glimmers of light that have come our way. One is Tyler. We met him last winter and communicated some about his visiting here, so really it is not a huge surprise that he did indeed come. But somehow his arrival feels more like a visitation by a natural building angel, sent in response to desperate prayers for help... not only is he experienced, skilled and enthusiastic to help us with our house, but he also somehow fits seamlessly into our rather unusual life, bringing good conversation, laughter, and the cross-pollination of new ideas to brighten our days. I have to stop myself sometimes from begging him never to leave, which of course someday he will, but for the time being, we are blessed and so grateful for his help and presence.

Our friend Matt was swallowed by our giant straw pile at a work party! 

     Another bright spot has been help from our community in the form of a work party or two... organized somewhat frantically in the days before, we sent out calls, not really expecting anyone to be able to make it on short notice, but again, miraculously in one morning a crew had arrived and we had almost a whole wall plastered and our soggy strawbale wall disassembled. And what is even more miraculous, Mike was able to reassemble it all and finish baling completely in one more day. So we are determinedly moving forward: framing out the gable ends with the help of neighbor Brian, ploughing forward with the long process of plastering, slowly closing in all the openings left exposed. We even had a small dinner party inside on a cold evening, complete with tablecloth and candlelight. So even though it often feels like we are giant snails inching along with things, I can see we have made huge progress. A friend’s mother pointed this out to me as she had not seen it since the spring, with barely a floor on. What a difference walls make! It is almost a complete shell.

East and north sides of the house

South side with scaffolding set up for plastering

West side view, the search for a front door is on!

After a big 9 in. rain storm, our lower field was flooded and seaworthy! 

      On top of all of the house work, we have also been participating in strange harvests of various kinds. This weekend was the big sorghum harvest that our friends the Crawfords and their large extended local clan participate in every year, using the same press that many generations of their family have used in time past. We have adopted ourselves into the tradition, joining in the festive day. I just taught my first class on making and using natural dyes from native plants. I harvested flowers, berries or leaves from local pokeberry, tickseed coreopsis, wild sunflowers, walnut hulls, comfrey, and goldenrod and simmered and strained them into pots of beautiful dye color. The class was great, full of friends and new dyeing enthusiasts with white wool, silk, and cotton to experiment with. We had six rocket stoves going, fueled by sticks, and hours later, mounds of gorgeous colors being pulled from steaming pots. Beauty. (Many thanks to Teri Page for photographing the event, check out her blog- homestead-honey.com for more details about dying). Mike’s latest harvest has been the nuts of wild (and somewhat invasive) lotus plants from a nearby lake. The nuts pop out of the unusual flower heads and taste somewhat like a cross of potatoes and corn, when salted and fried and shelled. Mushrooms have been plentiful as well, and Mike’s latest food experiments have centered around creating delicious mushroom jerky. But mostly while friends and neighbors bring in their garden harvests and can-freeze-dehydrate the days away, we bide our time for the day when we too will be able to focus on food and not building. Hard to believe it will ever come! But with one month to go, our time is fully dedicated to closing in the house: with one more coat of plaster, oak siding on gable ends and the bottom few feet, and a few doors still to install, we will be hard at work.

Mike manning the fires for the class

Dye pots bubbling on top of rocket stoves

Sunflowers, Pokeberries, Tickseed Coreopsis, and Goldenrods working their magic

Wringing out the finished garments

Beautiful color! 

Light at the end of the tunnel

     After a rather long month of stacking strawbale walls, I am happy to report that it finally feels like we are making progress! The saga of the strawbales (and really the whole darn month) almost seems not worth rehashing here, but how else to account for what has felt like one of our darker months building our home? And what, exactly has made it feel so wearisome and worrisome? The almost constant rain and unexpected storms that jolt us from our sleep in the middle of the night so that we can once again cover our bale walls with tarps? Or maybe discovering that our 100 final bales (that we had purchased from a local Amish friend as a favor) were full of wet moldy bits, manure bits, plus had the unfortunate habit of distorting into banana shapes?  Or maybe the constant overwhelming threat of the proposed high voltage line right next to our pond, and our awkward early attempts at organizing our neighbors into a resistance group? Or the stomach-lurching discovery that several of our friends have been thinking tentatively about leaving the Missouri area for greener pastures? Or maybe the mosquito population explosion? Or the stray cats that keep adopting us? Not our finest month, for sure. But we have survived, with two cats in the yard... life used to be so hard....  One thing is for sure, our house is (going to be) a very very very fine house!

      

     For one, thanks to the help of my parents (who have heroically showed up to help for a few weeks), our friends Fran and Leah who have been helping us out Thursdays, and several work parties, we are almost finished baling! Like within 10 bales of being done! What seemed so easy at the beginning got progressively more and more tedious and slow going. The bale course that took us above the door/window height was really hard, involving lots of pesky little retied bales and ingenious problem solving as to how to even out courses and work in wood lintels, plus all the usual notching around framing. If you are ever contemplating embarking on a crazy strawbale building project, do yourself a favor and don't put in any windows or doors! It will be easy and rewarding, not to mention plenty warm... 

      We were pretty eager to move into plastering, as you might imagine. A change of mediums is always a bit exciting, something new. We decided to dig clay for our plaster from behind our house, where we want to put in an underground cistern. It turned out to be an excellent spot, with only one inch of top soil before we hit straight clay! To all you potters out there, may I recommend Missouri as an optimal location to resettle? No shortage of clay here, that is for sure. We ordered a truck load of sand to be delivered, and--in classic fashion--we had yet another "takes a village" moment when the truck got stuck down a hill and I had to go running to our neighbor Don to help us out with his tractor. Bless his servant's heart, he saved the day yet again! Aside from that snaffoo, plastering has been going smoothly, or should I say roughly, since it is the rough coat of plaster? (Haha, forgive me.) My mother has since been rocking out the plastering, but that is not surprising since it has always been one of her skills/affinities...

    Another step that we've been working on is tedious detailing with tar paper flashing and diamond lath (otherwise known as blood lath since it is apparently a lethal weapon that has yielded us countless gusher-scratches!) The tar paper acts as a preventative against air-leaky cracks in the plaster as it shrinks away from the wood, and the lath is necessary since plaster doesn't stick to tar paper. The layers are beginning to get complicated as we prep the wall for our rain screen oak siding which transitions halfway up the wall into straight plaster. But my dad and I have kept at it and we just installed our first few windows today! Okay, getting ahead of myself... plaster. We have almost one long wall finished, having gone through almost a dozen large tubs full of plaster, mixed by hand and foot. This is one messy phase of the project for sure, and we have been leaving the work site thoroughly coated in mud (which, it should be noted, is actually kind of effective against the mosquitos!)

      While this recent burst of progress on the house is exciting, what is even more exciting is our progress resisting the power line! A few of us concerned and closely affected neighbors began meeting, with more and more surrounding neighbors joining in. We decided on some small action steps to consolidate as a group and get out the word to the northeast Missouri community, which culminated last night in an open meeting that we hosted in a public building. We did a pretty mediocre job advertising and flyering for the meeting, and weren't quite sure who would show or what would transpire, but the turnout was huge! Well over a hundred people came (standing room only) and all sorts-- college students, public media, farmers and their families, heavy hitters like the former university president and a state representative showed up even, and everyone was livid about the power line, sharing powerful stories about how much their ancestoral farms mean to them and such. A lot of information was shared about the situation and a lot of brain storming happened. It was way beyond my highest hopes for the event and we were able to come out of the evening with huge momentum--five action committees (legal, health, PR, political, fundraising), the state rep's word to help us set up public hearings with the Mis. Public Service Committee, and another meeting slated in a week. A bigger meeting in a bigger venue. Suddenly our little neighborhood committee with a piddly budget has blown up big! Still, we didn't do half bad, having scrambled to have yard signs printed, beautifully designed flyers to hand out (thanks Jerry), media in attendance with interviews set up, and our friend Ethan leading and moderating the dialogue (he did an amazing job tracking everything and moving us toward organized action and consensus!) I have not before now been a part of much community organizing, so all of this is new and pretty exhilerating to be a part of. There was a moment in the evening when I realized how very... American it all felt, in the best possible sense, truly democratic, a power-of-the-people moment, especially in concert with having a local politician in attendance who actually seemed to be interested in representing our positions in the matter.... fancy that! So watch out Ameren, we are coming at you from every direction with guns blaring (and knowing some of the folks in the crowd last night, that may be taken literally!)