Karns Christmas Blog

HAPPY THREE KINGS DAY – Jan 6, 2017

It’s a good d
MOOSE NUGGETS FOR CHRISTMAS

A song
Curt and Cindee 2016 rendition.ay to receive our Christmas gift to you.

This song made us laugh so much that, despite its negative theme, we decided to use it as the basis for our Christmas letter. We hope you will laugh at our attempt at humor. To hear the original tune that inspired us, check out this web site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQBgGOC8ESM

What a strange year, time for Christmas cheer, wonder what Santa will bring?

You never do know, how it will go, or if he’ll bring you anything.

A magical gift, an old gearshift, presents that come in disguise,

We’ve been good, not as good as we could, it’ll be a Christmas surprise.

Old sore knees, arthritis if you please, getting old: don’t like it one bit!

Grandchildren on your knee, a uke – u- le- le, or a big ol’ sack of….

Moose nuggets for Christmas, the thought causes disgust,

That’s what we’ll get from Santa, I’ll bet, since this year’s been wacky for us.

Every spring around April, we head out to tap the birch.

We hang the jug on the spile, lots of trees: we don’t need to search.

Sap in the jug; a gulp from a mug; carboy here it comes;

Dumping in the yeast, fermenting at least until the brew is done;

Bottles galore; without spilling on the floor; the bottle caps have to fit;

Tasting a batch; adding this and that; making sure it doesn’t taste like….

Moose nuggets for Christmas, the thought causes disgust,

Cuz’ that’s what we’ll get from Santa, I’ll bet, since this year’s been wacky for us.

We worked so hard out in the yard, we took out so much root.

We dug those holes, fought tree-eating voles, to get Alaskan fruit.

Mice in the shed, slugs in the beds, trees struck by spider mites;

A long dry spell, no water in the well, a year of political fights;

A few apple trees, some currants with leaves, adding plants bit by bit,

Everywhere there’s moose, no fence to use, so we’ll prob’ly get a sack of…

Moose nuggets for Christmas, the thought causes disgust,

Cuz’ that’s what we’ll get from Santa, I’ll bet, since this year’s been wacky for us.

Wwoofers in the shack, when the hornets attacked, still helping us every day;

Dug swales in the yard, plastered real hard, mixed up tons of clay.

From Germany and Italy they built our immigrant wall;

From Californi-a and Virgini-a, our Wwoofers did it all.

Planted garden in the spring, harvested lots of things, even dug a pit;

Had a solar shower, electric power, and a place to take their…

Moose nuggets for Christmas, the thought causes disgust,

Cuz’ that’s what we’ll get from Santa, I’ll bet, since this year’s been wacky for us.

Had a little earthquake, maybe three or maybe more;

Looked down in the cellar, there was water on the floor.

It’s a solarium leak, we’re up the creek, dripping into the ground,

No patch can hold it, or clay to mold it, ‘less we dig it eight feet down.

Indoor wetlands, we’ll dig with two hands, we have to do our bit,

At the end of our wit, laying in the pit, this job is a sack of..

Moose nuggets for Christmas, the thought causes disgust,

Cuz’ that’s what we’ll get from Santa, I’ll bet, since this year’s been wacky for us.

With many unfinished projects, we’ve got so much to do

So when you come over to our house, there’ll be lots, we’ll name a few:

Boxes to build; Holes to be drilled, stringing that watering hose

Trees to cut; for the sauna hut; running back and forth to Lowe’s.

Starting the seedlings, cleaning the worm bins, tossing the compost pit;

But helpin’ us out; we’ll give Santa a shout, so he won’t bring YOU a bag of….

Moose nuggets for Christmas, the thought causes disgust,

Cuz’ that’s what we’ll get from Santa, I’ll bet, since this year’s been wacky for us.

Lots of other things happened this year as well:

*Cindee successfully put on a Permaculture class in downtown Anchorage that built a community garden for homeless people.

*Curt has been participating in the Presbyterian Church’s apology for the treatment of Native Americans, and has been to Washington D.C. as a spiritual leader lobbying on the importance of climate change. Curt also enjoyed fishing and hunting this summer.

*Keith graduated from University of North Texas with a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA). He’s playing in bands, putting out his 2nd album, and looking for a college job.

*A few months later his wife, Courtney gave birth to a son they named, Jack. Courtney is staying home with him this year.

*Jeanie’s husband, Dan, is in his last year of studies to become an electrical engineer, and again out-fished us all dip-netting for red salmon.

*Jeanie shot her first solo caribou this fall. However, Jeanie and Curt were overdue from their hunting trip, which meant Cindee had to call the troopers and the Fairbanks part of the family headed out for a rescue attempt. (Turned out they had sent a text message saying they just needed one more day—but the message failed. It was tough on all of the rest of us).

*Another really tough thing was the loss of Curt’s mom this summer—from cancer for the third time. We are sad, indeed, but grateful for her life with us. Her funeral brought relatives up from the Lower 48 we hadn’t seen in many years rekindling important family relationships.

Along with the rest of the country, we were seriously disturbed by the presidential election process. It is our hope that this new administration will open its eyes to the most critical single issue facing the world: climate change, as well as the most critical issue facing our democracy: unlimited corporate money allowed to influence our political processes.

Hope for the best in 2017-----be the change you wish to see in the world-----and we can be sure there will be more than------Moose Nuggets for Christmas in 2017!

Curt and Cindee Karns
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Or email us at cindee.karns@gmail.com curt664@hotmail.com

A Happy Holidays Story

From Curt and Cindee Karns

We offer you our warmest wishes this holiday season. And this year we really have cause to offer you our WARMEST wishes! After last winter we are serious! This year we have turned our furnace all the way up to 60 degrees; it seems like such a luxury! We’re not wearing long underwear every day, and today we are not typing with fingerless gloves. You see, we are now calling 2015 the year of our discontent.

Before you hear our story, you need to know that our house is wonderfully designed as an environmentally friendly house. Part of that design is a unique water system that collects rain and snow melt as its water source, stores the water in a self-refreshing cistern, and recycles all the gray water. In short, our house does not have a well or septic system, because it doesn’t need it. But it does mean that we only have 5000 gallons of water at any one time, plus a second cistern of equal size, which stores spring water as backup.

And, as our story will show, unusual houses have unusual problems, and 5000 recyclable gallons is sometimes a lot less than one might think.

January 2015: Almost no precipitation in January. Not So Unusual!

We went on vacation to Texas! Yay! But then the boiler quit in our bioshelter home and the heat recovery ventilator (HRV), set on its summer setting by an unknowing repairman, dutifully blew icy air onto the copper pipes of our heat exchanger, freezing and breaking the pipes, and causing the whole system to pump all 5000 gallons from our cistern straight into the ground. We returned from Texas and went into Alaskan survivor mode! Which means:

We fired up our ceramic wood stove and warmed the house. Never mind that the only wood that grows on our property, and therefore fills our woodshed, is cottonwood. Cottonwood is lightweight and holds very little heat compared to hardwoods. But…hey…it’s what we have…and it burns! We just had to run to the woodshed…a lot.
We embraced the adventure and heated water on the stove, put it in buckets and took it to the shower. We felt like real, old-timey Alaskans as we dipped pitchers of water out of the bucket and poured it over our heads for our showers…every day.
We hired the pumping and heating company to replace the broken heat exchanger and get the boiler going again
We fired up the trash pump and moved water from our backup cistern into our primary cistern. We spent two nights sweet talking the house pump—then gave up and bought a new pump—and, voila, we were back in business. Running water again.

February 2015: Almost no precipitation in February. Only A Little Strange!

Immediately after getting our house up and running again, Curt had business in Fairbanks, and Cindee reminded him that they both had grandchildren there. We left for Fairbanks.

It turns out that pumping water into the cistern, just two days before we left, stirred up the sludge that normally rests on the bottom of the cistern. While we were gone, the sludge got sucked into the pipes and blocked the water flow, burning out pumps and, basically, causing the whole boiler to go into non-nuclear boiler meltdown! The HRV dutifully blew icy air onto the heat exchanger, freezing the water and breaking all the copper tubing causing a total loss of water in the cistern…again.

Now, you might think that the recovery process would be the same story as before, and in some ways it was, but…there were a few more wrinkles.

We had already used our insurance for the first blow up; we couldn’t use it again.
We had relatively little water left in the lower cistern, but we did have a small reserve, so it only took several hours to prime the pumps, instead of two days.
The boiler really died this time, too, and it broke down just 6 months past the date when anyone, anywhere, had replacement parts. Not believing this strange fact, we spent another 3 months frantically searching the internet, trying to prove it wrong. Would we really have to replace the heat exchanger AND the boiler? We didn’t believe it, and so we didn’t do it this month. We were in denial and continued in "survival" mode.
We were already pros at “poured showers.”
We again embraced the adventure and decided to stop using wood heat. After all, we own sweaters, and the persistent ground temperature will always keep our house above freezing! That, of course, lasted two days. Forget the adventure! We wanted HEAT! 38^oF might be above freezing, but our noses and our toeses didn’t know that. Besides we had enough wood in the woodshed to last the winter…probably.

March 2015: Almost no precipitation in March. Almost unheard of!

We were leaving for a few days to cut the year’s supply of firewood for the cabin. There was still no heat for the house, but we turned off the HRV, and we left water dribbling in the faucets so they couldn’t freeze, no matter what! So we returned home with confidence.

Our confidence was short-lived, though. Arriving home, we found water all over the bathroom floor and seeping into our bedroom. We finally looked at each other and knew it was time to start researching WHICH new furnace to buy.

April 2015: Almost no precipitation in April. And after the dry winter we had had, almost no runoff from snow melt. What?

In the meantime, it was April and growing season had started. We had to buy seedling starts, because we didn’t have enough heat in the house to start seeds. So…. Cindee planted them in the green house and we waited for spring rains. We started buying some water at the store. Then the house ran out of water and still there was no rain.

We needed to water our plants. So, we hauled some water from the neighbors. We thought about hauling water from the river, but without a pickup that wasn’t a real option.

May 2015: Almost no precipitation in May. Incredible!

Fed up with hauling water, we finally got the coffee cart water delivery service to come out here and deliver 500 gallons of water (not coffee) to our lower cistern for the small fee of $100. We waited several days for the chlorine to dissipate and then pumped it up to the house. We were sure it would rain soon.

We planted the potato garden, but decided not to water it until the rains came. Locally grown potatoes are cheaper at the store than water from the coffee cart!

Finally, we got a bid for a high efficiency furnace for the house. This system would be set up NOT to freeze if the boiler quit. We were going to have heat AND hot water. Hallelujah!

June 2015: Almost no precipitation in June. What Else is New?

And then came the heat! Record breaking temperatures and our rooftop garden was baking in the sun. We had to replant the broccoli—the baby plants dried out too fast.

More water was delivered and we prayed for rain. No rain. All summer----no rain. We spent $900 on water delivery this summer. It sounds terrible, right? Maddening. But, we finally justified it since everyone else on city water pays $90 a month for water, so by the end of the year we still came out $180 ahead. :-) It was the first time in the Bioshelter’s history (built in 1985) that it had run out of water.

But even in the worst of it, when we were so upset that the house wasn’t working, we tried to conjure up images of people all over the world who haul water every day, more than just the 31 stairs we had to carry it from the car to the house. We tried to remember the lives of our parents and grandparents, who had to go to bed to get warm in the winter because the winter wind blew right through their houses. We tried to imagine a life without fossil fuels, where everyone would need wood to stay warm—where feeding the fire would be a normal hourly task. When it really got bad, we would break into the sound track of any number of Alaskan Survival shows on TV, “Can they find enough wood to survive the winter? Will they make it in this rough Alaskan wilderness?” But underneath it all, we kept hearing the voices of our ol’ dads telling us, “What doesn’t kill ya, makes ya stronger.”

We had an epic 6-month struggle through a cold winter with no snow and a hot summer with almost no rain.

—the first significant rain (that is, the first that was more than damp steps)

Climate scientists tell us more of this global weirding is to come. This reality spurs us on in our daily lives with questions like these: Will we keep a stiff upper lip? Will we keep on carrying on? Will we all be resilient and bounce back? Will we recognize in all of this a call to join the Christ child’s purpose in coming into the world? (To engage each of us and all of us in the transformation that is both personal and societal: the transformation of heart and of culture that will cause everyone to be engaged in caring for the whole of God’s beloved creation, including the people.)

Month of September 2015: record rainfall for our area. But it was too late for the potatoes.

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We Also Had Lots of Fun During 2015

Grandson Tycho turned 1-year-old, and turned into quite the charmer.

Granddaughter Auri turned 3-years-old caught her first fish, helped by her Uncle Keith!

Daughter Jeanie turned into the super manager, trying to be super-mom and super-UAF’s Physics Lab director at the same time.

Son-in-Law Dan turned into the super salmon catcher, (pulling out a record number of red salmon of the Chitina River), dad and engineering student.

Son Keith turned into an ABD—all but dissertation student—on his way to his doctorate, while still writing jazz charts, recording another album and performing in three bands.

Daughter-in-law Courtney continues as super music teacher, whose music class staged a “flash mob” song and choreography as a surprise for the school!

Cindee continues as super-permaculture-woman, teaching classes, working new ideas into our bioshelter home and encouraging everyone to embrace the adventure of living well into the future.

Curt continues as super Dad, Opa and traveling church worker, logging more days traveling for work than in any previous year.

We trust that you have also been embracing the adventure this year.

God bless!

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Top Pictures of 2015