The Dead Room

For the 4th of July weekend, my friends Emily and Alfred from the community garden invited Dan and I up to their family cabin at Bear Lake for the weekend. Offered to let us camp in the yard. Camping? Adventure? A part of Utah we had never been to before? A body of water? A weekend with people from the Violin Making School? Okay! Our only problem was that we didn't have a tent, so Dan ordered a truck tent online. It arrived the Wednesday before the weekend and we took it to Liberty Park to set it up to test it.

Not quite standing room for me but Dan managed okay. 

Ready for adventure!

Tons of land for sale in this valley.

Mr. Cupcake overlooking Bear Lake.

So the house belonged to Alfred's father who passed away a couple of months ago. He was an old school hunter, big game and small. As soon as we arrived, Emily offered to show us The Dead Room and we had no idea what we were in for. Turns out it was an entire natural history museum in a single room, with species not even Dan could identify. Mr. Cupcake enjoyed the photo op.

Outside now, obviously, but there was some pretty wacky art!

So when one goes camping in a truck tent, you could be all bohemian-like and have things like thermarests or air mattresses, but we just didn't want to spend the money. Instead, we spent the money on a piece of OSB which Dan cut to fit to serve as the platform, and we brought our bed with us. And the Persian rug. Like you do. Camping in style!

Mr. Cupcake watching Dan talking to Kevin from the Violin school. Dan is also a maker of fine instruments and had a lot to chat with Kevin about.

I'm about two drinks in here.

The inevitable jam session.

Dan brought two of his ukeleles and his canjo.

The place we were staying was just a short drive from the Idaho border, so we decided to pop across the line and see what kinds of craft spirits Idaho had in its liquor store. (Huckleberry shine and Grand Teaton vodka).

I misread the email about what we were supposed to bring and so we brought two dozen eggs instead of one. I think someone else did too because there were about six dozen eggs in the fridge for fifteen people. That's a lot of scrambled eggs, so we decided to make devilled eggs on our second night there. Dan makes amazing devilled eggs.

 I made a Greek salad.

 And a lettuce salad with greens from my garden.

While we were there I had a chance to go out on a wave runner a couple of times (Did you know they go up to 46mph?) and a peddle boat with Dan. That was fun, it was nice being on the water with him, though we wished we were sailing.

Another shot of the Dead Room.

View of the house from the beach.

We had a great time that weekend and it was really a lot of fun meeting new friends. We met a couple who live on the other side of our block! When we got home and ran into Yatzik, our neighbor down the street, and told him that we had just spent the weekend at Bear lake, he mentioned his friend who lived up there and gave the exact description of the family that is living in this very house. Such a coincidence! 

We took a winding route to get home, different than the way we got there, as we like to explore and see new things. Then we got home and were tired, you know how it is. 

A collection of adventures, in reverse chronological order

Oh hello dear reader, long time no see. I'm sorry. I haven't had much time to sit down and to actual blog posts, though I have been tweeting like crazy. There have been so many adventures that Sam, Dan, Mr. Cupcake and I have been up to so I'm going to do some binge posting for the next hour. I hope you will bear with me.

Saturday July 12th, I received an email invitation from Slow Food Utah to participate in a Farm Mob at Sandhill Farms in Eden. Show up, do some garlic harvest work, bring food for sharing for lunch, take a dip in the reservoir after lunch. Sounded good to me! My friend Emma from Wasatch Community Gardens and I went together (we had participated in an apricot harvest the night before) and had a great time doing good hard work and meeting lots of neat new people.

The first thing Marsha told us was that we could have as many garlic scapes as we wanted. Garlic scapes are the part of the flower that you actually cut off, usually around June, so that instead of flowering the plant puts all of its energy into fattening the garlic bulb. You can eat them, though they are a bit fibrous raw, so you usually steam them.

This place was amazing. They had an acre and a half devoted to 50 varieties of hardneck and one softneck garlic.

Hardnecks tend to be more interesting flavor-wise, and they prefer colder winters (you plant garlic in October, harvest in July), but they don't store as long as soft neck garlics do. It is soft next garlic that you buy in the grocery store. I have grown both before. Below is a rack on which to hang more soft necks.

They also grow lavender, though not for sale. Emma was bundling up lavender when we first arrived.

Brief orientation and introduction to the farm. They were expecting about 15 volunteers, but between Wasatch Community Gardens, Slow Food Utah, and Real Food Rising (as well as some friends of the owners), 30 people showed up to help!

Above are teen leaders from Real Food Rising. We were cleaning the dirt off the garlic that had been harvested a few days earlier. We used toothbrushes to clean the dirt off!

A view of the field from the garlic workshop.

Lunch was pretty spectacular, and I didn't take a full table shot (the table was getting mobbed by hungry gardeners!) but I thought this wooden bowl was especially beautiful.

More views of the farm.

At the end of the day, Roody and Marsha made all the rejected garlic available to everyone - anything that was ugly or too small or had been stabbed by a pitchfork in the harvest. I'd say I came home with quite a haul!

Then, later that day, we had the second of two neighborhood garden parties. We invited all our neighbors, and I invited some friends from the U, from Twitter, and from my community garden. Sam was uncommonly social for the first while until more than five people showed up. 

At the end of the night, I had about half our liquor cabinet on the counter as I was mixing cocktails for everyone.


The next day, Dan and I got busy making jam with the 20lbs of apricots I came home with on Friday.

My garden plots. The sunflowers are now taller than me, and I just strung up my tomatoes yesterday. The lettuce is done and the earwigs seem to be eating the greens off my beets.

Since Dan and I are such conservationists, Dan dried out the apricot pits (since we had a lot of them) and cracked the shells to get at the kernels inside. This is what is known as bitter almond and is what Disaronno is made from.

That it for this one! 

A 20 mile bike ride along the Jordan River

Dan and I working on getting fit, so we have decided that, weather permitting, we will get out and do something active every weekend. We loaded up our bikes, water, and a picnic and drove down to Utah lake to cycle the Jordan River trail.

Mr. Cupcake rode in my under-the-seat pouch.

The view from the place where we stopped for a picnic.

We got close enough to these wind turbines to hear them swoosh.

My friend Steve once told me that hills (on a bicycle) are good. I didn't believe him at the time (probably because it was a painful endeavour) but on this day we did climb some steep hills and were rewarded with a view of the valley.

On our way back, some horses and a donkey were next to the trail on the other side of the fence. This donkey was lounging.

Sheep! I love seeing so many sheep in this state. In North Carolina we seldom saw livestock - just hog barns. There was an occasional horse corral but mostly it was crop land. Here there seems to be a good growing climate for grazing animals.

Looking south towards Utah lake.

It was quite a pleasant day, really, with an easy 79 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite applying sunscreen however, we did get sunburned and are nursing those burns still.

Doing this made me wish we had one of those "101 Hikes in Utah" books or a book on cycling trails/routes. Not wanting to spend money just now (we're going to Scotland in October), I went instead to the library yesterday and got all kinds of books on hikes, cycling trails, trees, wild flowers, and birds. Birds! While we were on this bike ride, I saw a bird about 12" long, black body, yellow/orange head with a long black beak. I don't know much about birds but I'm starting to take an interest. Dan has the Audubon bird app on his phone and when he looked it up, he figured it's a yellow-headed black bird. I couldn't get close enough to take a picture, they fly away so fast! We also saw a goose couple and their 5-6 so-cute goslings swimming in the river. On the way up the hill at the end of the trail (our turn around point by the wind turbines), I saw a gorgeous lizard I haven't looked up yet. About 8" long with dark stripes along the body - the body was brown/beige and the tail was a sage green.

I love being out in nature. I don't recall if I mentioned it here but when we lived in North Carolina, I felt like that place had no spirit to it. You have to remember I have spent most of my adult life living on the west coast in the rainforest among a culturally-saturated Coast Salish territory where the First Nations People and environmentalists were united in their love for Mother Earth. There was none of that in North Carolina, not where we were. The indigenous populations had been wiped out generations ago, and in a region that grows tobacco, well, yes this will sound judgemental but there was little care for the environment that I could see. Compared to what I was used to, at least. Heck, even Korea 12 years ago was composting food from every apartment building - long before North American cities even thought of it!

We had a friend visit us in North Carolina last September. Someone who we knew from Vancouver Island but who was raised in Virginia. I mentioned to her my thoughts about not feeling any spirit in the land in NC and she knew what I meant. Given the region's history, it's possible that there is just too much blood and suffering in that land (slavery, civil war, continued segregation and systemic racism) and that it has never really recovered or healed. That makes a lot of sense. That was also a big reason for me wanting to return to the west. The west is where my heart is.

It's also far less densely populated, which we like. It hasn't been settled for as long as the east has, so it is relatively young by modern society standards. People here understand the beauty of the place and work hard to preserve it. (I say that, but there are a number of mountaintop-removal sites and a highly productive oil and gas industry in the Uinta basin). Nevertheless, there is a culture here of getting out and being in nature, be it hiking, cycling, skiing, camping, snowshoeing, and everything in between. It's very motivating.

It's also nice to feel safe walking around in this city (I am digressing, I know). I'm sure I mentioned this before. I used to live two blocks from work in Kinston and people would be concerned about me getting home safely if I walked. Having been the victim of a peeping Tom when I lived in Japan, having all the people walking by our house and looking in all the time in Kinston freaked me out, I was always on edge. I never felt safe there, in that house.

I'll awkwardly wrap up here because I do want to end on a positive note. I love it here. In terms of ticking all the boxes, Salt Lake City is the best place I have ever lived. Cowichan Bay is a close second, but the circumstances under which I was there (waiting for immigration, away from Dan) mean it couldn't be first. I do miss living with chickens and having my other best friend to hang out with every day. :-) Salt Lake has given me a launching pad for my career which I had, until last year, all but given up on; I found community in gardening; I have lost 28 pounds since we have been here and it has come of fairly easily, thanks to diet and being more active!; the house we live in is great and comfortable; Dan works more reasonable hours and I get to spend more time with him; financially it is far better for us, my work notwithstanding; and as of Friday, the vodka Dan made for Sugar House Distillery was on sale to the public. They sold 200 bottles the first day. Things are good.