Releasing the Notes

I was introduced to a band called White Rabbits, and, as I do, I started listening to everything they had ever put out. This was back in 2011, and they were fairly new, so there wasn’t too much to explore, but in that exploration I came across a song that was really catchy. The drumbeat tickled my ear drums, and it took me four or five listens just to get through the drums to listen to the rest of the song as well.

After showing it to a friend, she pointed out that it sounded more produced than a lot of the other songs by the band, and she guessed it was a soundtrack song. Turns out, she was right, it was used on the show Friday Night Lights. I had never watched Friday Night Lights, and probably never will, because sports, and it somehow felt like the song was cheapened by the tie.

It has happened with other songs as well, I struggled to listen to Flightless Bird, American Mouth by Iron and Wine for a while after it was used on the Twilight soundtrack. Not that I inherently hate Twilight, I just didn’t like the tie from one of my favorite Iron and Wine songs to any movie. It was particularly frustrating when people would call it the “Twilight song”.

Or when Cinderella Story used Hear You Me by Jimmy Eat World. That song is tied to a nearly religious experience in a crowded concert venue, and to hear it called the Cinderella song almost breaks me.

It isn’t that I regret that they had success, I love seeing them recognized these ways. The soul of these songs are just so much more than the snippet of the song used in the movie. I just struggle when I talk about and share these songs with others the ghost of Hillary Duff or Stephanie Myers sits peering over my shoulder.

So, when I found that Percussion Gun was tied to Friday Night Lights, I was annoyed that this beautiful gift of a song would always be associated with something that I felt didn’t do it justice.

I also noticed this with myself and homesteading projects. I talk about homesteading, but I really don’t know much about what I am doing with all of that. I also worry about calling myself a homesteader, since I only have an acre of land and no real experience with animals. I have been gardening for most of my life, but that is the extent of my experience.

Whenever I do a project that is homestead related, I start by thinking about how I will write about it here. Then, I have this imagined critic over my shoulder pointing out that I have no idea what I am really doing, and that there are plenty of other people who could do it better, or who have already written about it, and I wonder what makes me think that I am out of my league here.

So, I haven’t written for a while, since I have been working more on homesteading stuff and having imposter syndrome with it.

Fun fact about me: when I am feeling imposter syndrome, I tend to almost finish projects and quit. I don’t finish, because when I am finished, I have to own that thing that I feel isn’t the best it could be. If it is messed up, that means I failed; if it is still unfinished, that means that I haven’t failed yet, I just haven’t finished.

So I have been absent for a little over a month here because I have been struggling with all of that.

So, I am going to share all of what I have been up to around my measly acre:

Probably the most important part of our homestead is the home part. I have been helping with the construction here and there, mostly with framing so far, but I will be heavily involved with hanging the windows, hanging the shakes, and doing the roofing. We also plan to do the painting ourselves, just some things I can do to help with the cost of the build, and also with the speed of the build. If you look closely at this picture, you can see the piles of rocks in the front. More on those in a minute.

I am almost finished with a three-bin compost system. It could be done, but I want to add lids to each of the sections to discourage rodents from scavenging there. Funnily enough, my wife was helping with putting some waterproofing on it last Saturday and, when moving a box, scared up a handful of mice. She hates mice, and I had to move all of the boxes and wood around the area so she couldn’t be surprised again. Now we are talking about a cat (I’m more in favor of a dog personally…).

I am about halfway done with a duck house. I have almost all the frame finished, I just need a door on the front. I have built almost the entire thing from free materials, like old pallets and scrap wood from the house framing. As a part of that, I was helping my brothers-in-law with a siding job and was able to get some scrap board-and-baton to dress up the outside of the enclosure. This is an older video I took, I have added the roof, floor, and finished the walls since then.

We have been picking rocks as well. So many rocks.

When we bought the land, there didn’t seem to be this many rocks, but after the hole for the basement and foundation was dug, an army of rocks made its way to the surface. Shannon spends time out at the property each day piling up rocks that we want to get rid of, and we have even had a party where all of the family in the area came over and spent 3-4 hours moving rocks. We had a backhoe and a rock-picker attached to a tractor and hauled off dump-truck loads (which my father-in-law kindly took to his farm and used there). And we are still picking rocks.

The main thing we have been doing is planning out how we are going to use the space. We have drawn out a handful of possibilities of what we are going to do with the space, then chose our favorite and drew it to scale. Once we had it drawn to scale, we realized some of our measurements are off, so we have to make some bigger adjustments. That is where we are currently are with the plan.

As part of that plan, we have been researching the kind of plants we want as well. We have been looking into which plants are ones we can responsibly plant in our area. For example, we wanted some wisteria to grow up the posts of our pergola in the back yard, but wisteria is invasive where we live. In an effort to be land-conscious, we have been researching more native plants that we can use. We also have a whole section of the land that is set up as a wildflower meadow to attract pollinators and encourage native plants.

So I am not moving as quickly as I would like to on all of the projects I have, but I am making progress. We have started composting in the almost-finished compost bins (hence the mice), I have been making contacts with people who have the breed of ducks I want (cayuga, because the eggs are black and that just touches my emo soul), and getting jealous everytime I see somebody who is already at the stage where they can buy chicks while I still have so far to go.

Seriously, though: black eggs!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Metzer Farms (@metzerfarms)

Once I get the compost bins and duck house finished, I have been thinking of making the plans available. Not that they are super unique or anything, but I want to share what I can, I guess.

And I think that pretty well sums up where we are on the homesteading front. I think I will share more on Instagram as I work on projects, so you could follow me over there @releasingthenotes

Some things to look forward to here at Releasing the Notes:

• I am going to overhaul my overly-ambitious book list section here to something more do-able. It won’t be a solid pattern, but I do want to get back to sharing good books.
• More interaction in my Instagram.
• Getting back into regularly posting now that I have had a good break to address some things within myself.
• Maybe some of my original art/poetry/music on here once in a while. We’ll see.

Thanks for sticking around.