Arizona why are you so prickly?

How to procrastinate homestead style

This week my ceramics teacher, watching me work with intense focus on my piece, asked me if I was a control freak. It made me think later on my bike ride about why I put so much energy into some things when I find them worthwhile. My conclusion is that (hopefully), I am not a control freak. I simply don't have an off button when it comes to keeping myself occupied with doing things that engage my mind and especially my creativity, and I want to do those things well if I can. Hence, procrastination usually revolves around some sort of project like ceramics at school, or at home it's always something homestead/getting ready for the Apocalypse style.

Here are the latest two projects:

1. Derek jokingly suggested that I knit a coozy for his new glass mug. Some scrap yarn, old buttons, and the length of Fire in The Sky (a really bad alien movie set in Snowflake AZ), and... A mug sweater? This could get out of control.

2. Next, I got inspired from one of my classmates, who got an oyster mushroom growing kit last month and now is eating one of my favorite mushrooms, fresh from his kitchen. So I did a little research. What I found out is that you can grow them at home in a bucket of coffee grounds, and all you need is a couple stems (actually called stipes) to start with.

Step one, get some oyster mushrooms. I bought some from the grocery store that were still all clumped together at the base with fuzzy white stuff (mycelium). Then I chopped off the stems and sliced them lengthwise into strips. At the same time, I boiled some squares of corrugated cardboard. That step is intended to sterilize them, but I don't know if it's needed or not. Then, you slap together some little mushroom sandwiches:

I put the sandwiches in a tupperware for 3 days because I wanted to keep the moisture in and be able to check up on the experiment. Today the stems had grown some new fuzz, which latched onto the cardboard sheets, essentially gluing them together.

This means the project is working! The mycelium is going to take over the cardboard and eat it. Yum. Oyster mushrooms like cellulose, as in trees, which is why they colonize dead tree trunks. Unfortunately I haven't seen them around Flagstaff and our wet season is the summer, hence home growing...

Next, put the cardboard sandwiches at the bottom of a bucket and start filling the bucket with your used coffee grounds. If you save up coffee grounds for a week or two, you can put those in the microwave for a few minutes to sterilize them. Otherwise, just dump your freshly roasted grounds in the bucket and they're sterilized from you making your coffee-- convenient. You could even throw in the filter if you use paper ones. Cover the bucket and keep it all moist and not freezing (oysters are forgiving and will tolerate a temp range from around 40-80 degrees if I remember right, but don't take my word).

And then wait... I don't know how full to fill the bucket. Maybe once you get impatient? The mycelium will spread through the grounds and colonize it as you keep filling the bucket every day. At some point it fruits and mushrooms appear. Maybe more on this later. Enough procrastinating for one morning...

skiis, bikes, guns, hippies

New years resolution: bike better more, make more music, kick food justice ass, be a better activist, tell more people how special they are. Maybe not only write about bike rides?


For Christmas I got a crash course in down hill skiing from Uncle Blair, and then skied into a cabin in the woods to join him and his lady, and d bones. I became one with pizza and french fries and slid down the hill occasionally in control, while Derek tested the limits of snow biking. Although it was really cold and windy, the scenery unfolding around us was too amazing to get dispirited.

Looking back at where we started

the cabin compound

It was really rough being out in a cabin staying warm in front of a wood stove, watching the stars, knitting...


And knitting. This winter marked the start of a ladies crafting night, which has been a breath of fresh air. There's something very special about getting ladies together to sit around and laugh and realize we all go through the same ridiculous stuff. In what has been a challenging integration into this mountain town, these nights make me feel a whole lot better.


After New Years Adam, Derek, and I hopped in the car and headed south to ride the black canyon trail, where I didn't take many pictures because I was pushing my bike along exposed hillsides of cactusy death.

dorky sequence of one of the rare unexposed sections

Adam and Derek had fun (I smiled a couple times and tried to recall how much I liked riding)

This picture belies the full experience of having guns being shot all around you because this is where people ride their ATVs to shoot their guns at shit. Pop, pop, bratatatatatatat, pop. Another reason I hate guns...

That night we camped out under the stars after Adam ate a fried tortilla pizza, basically two deep fried burrito-sized tortillas stacked, an inch of cheese, and a couple vegetables. For some reason he looked sick 3/4 of the way through and couldn't finish it. I took a hobo bath in the ladies room and remembered bike tour days of unabashedly scrubbin down in public restrooms and coming out feeling like a million bucks. Also brings back memories of sleeping in public parks and chilly bottle baths after dark, hoping for no sprinklers, weird dogs, cops, drunks. Ideas of normal are purely situational.



Waking up before sunrise we rolled out of our camping spot never to see it in the daylight. I wondered if it was pretty or if it was like the scene out of Wristcutters where the couple wakes up after a night sleeping on the beach, only to realize the "sand" was made of spent hypodermic needles, medical waste, and broken glass. I did see some broken glass in the light of my headlamp... The great horned owls sounded nice though all night.


After dropping Derek off at the airport the next morning for his new year adventure, Adam and I entered into the retirement world of the city that never should have existed: Sun City, in the northwestern corner of the Phoenix sprawl. In Sun City they line the streets with orange trees, loaded with oranges so bitter and caustic you can't eat them. Then the rind leaves an indelible sappy glue on your hands to leave a bitter reminder of the fake food. Obviously, the elderly cruising by on their golf carts enjoy the oranges purely from afar.

I didn't take many pictures of Sun City, mainly because I was in shock. On my way to pee in the walgreens bathroom, I noticed the store had everything young people would use on sale. Tampons, condoms, pregnancy tests. They must sit on the shelves and expire. We did go to a thrift store plaza, where I bought some plastic storage containers from a matching set, which had probably at one time not that long ago held some old lady's makeup or other oddities that needed sorting. It was truly like there was a conveyor belt from the retirement community to the stores. Full sets of really nice stuff, and random themes from people who had spent a life time collecting stuff with paper roosters glued to them.


Finally, on our way back we stopped at a hippie art commune in the desert that fore some reason Adam had heard of. They like circles, bells, and apparently The Band. I secretly wanted to join them and live their life. In their vision for a better world, they're doing something right.

Last: I got over my desert mountain biking trauma and started riding Sedona, remembering that bikes are fun.