Spring Fest!!!

This past Saturday, we hosted our first annual Spring Fest! It was a day filled with lots of tasty food, wonderful live music, and great company. Even though it rained, we had a great time! We ended up moving the party into the shed behind our house - which ended up being the perfect place to dance to live bands.

Eating on the lawn!

Before the rain came...

Everyone brought amazingly delicious food...

THE VEINS playing in the shed, our new favorite spot.
The music lineup included:

Seth Hanson
Jacob Cohn
Funk Yourself
Adriana & Friends
The Veins

plus, of course, a good dose of spontaneous jamming by whoever was left as things were winding down.

Happy Spring Fest everyone!!

Sidewalk chalk and homemade yogurt!

Happy Spring from EcoHouse!!

This is Madeline here and it's my first time posting on our house blog! This was the first week back from Spring Break and although the weather didn't feel like April should (it snowed...grrrr, Iowa), we made the best of it in our little corner of campus.

(Is that grass a little bit green?!)

The sidewalk chalk made an appearance, as did the hacky sack. Vincent revealed his ninja-like hacky sackin' skillz, while Jacob and Tom kept it goin in stride. Adri and I made valiant attempts but sadly our clumsiness won out over our grace. 

I found myself with some free time this week and decided this was the week to make the first batch of communal yogurt! This was four times the batch size I usually make, so it was an interesting challenge with our limited pots, ha. We'll be making this much yogurt on a weekly basis now, and I'll teach the house so that the cooks can rotate each week. WOOO homemade yogurt!

We opted for two kinds of yogurt: whole milk and 0% (skim) Greek yogurt. We used Kalona milk, which is an organic farm about an hour from Grinnell whose cows are grass-fed, and it's so delicious!! I incubated the yogurt in pots on the radiator in the living room. Gotta get creative...

I also made a couple batches of "inception cookies" because why not put cookies in cookies...? Thin mints chopped up and baked into regular chocolate chip cookie dough, topped with sea salt. I think these cookies made me some friends.

A few other happenings:

• Jacob also graced us with his first post-Spring Break loaf of bread! This one was onion, sunflower seed, and rosemary, topped with some cheddar. No picture unfortunately (it was gobbled too quickly...) but it was beauuuutiful and tasty as ever!
• Silvia Federici visited campus for the Center for Prairie Studies series "(Re) Considering the Commons" this week, and Vincent and I got to have dinner with her and a few other students. She spoke on women, labor, reproduction, food, the commons, and other related topics. She inspired some great (albeit sometimes, ahem, heated) discussion on campus!  
• Hannah is going to be putting together a new art project that some house members will participate in. She'll be creating a Tumblr of letters on the topic of mental illness, and the letters will be addressed to all sorts of "recipients" (disorders, grief, ourselves, people who have passed away, people who are still or used to be in our lives). A few of us will be contributing and knowing Hannah it will turn out wonderfully! 
• We finalized our list for who's going to live in the house next year! Woohoo! It was quite a doozy but we did it! HUUUUUUGE, eternal thank you to Adriana for the countless emails and hours she spend this week trying to finalize our house plans. We owe you. 

I thought a quote from Alice Waters would be a nice way to wrap up this little foodie blog post:

"Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education." 

-Alice Waters

Love,
Madeline & EcoHouse Spring '14

Civilization
Those are the people who do complicated things.

     they'll grab us by the thousands
     and put us to work.

World's going to hell, with all these
     villages and trails.
Wild duck flocks aren't
     what they used to be.
Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

         *

A small cricket
on the typescript page of
"Kyoto born in spring song"
grooms himself
in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I quit typing and watch him through a glass.
How well articulated! How neat!

Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.

         *

When creeks are full
The poems flow
When creeks are down
We heap stones.

                      Gary Snyder

end-of-semester musings

Well, that's it -- another semester gone by. This semester has been one of the best that I've had during my time at Grinnell, and especially at EcoHouse. Together, house residents have accomplished so much this semester; from hosting a canning workshop and a local foods meal at Harvest Fest, to having some of our favorite professors over for dinner, to helping out with the Local Foods CoOp Thanksgiving meal, to a week of living bravely and intentionally, this house has done a lot to help promote sustainable living, both to others and to ourselves.

One of my favorite aspects of this semester was the group's willingness and enthusiasm for focusing on locally grown foods. Looking back, buying and cooking with almost exclusively local foods for a majority of the semester was a huge success and taught us a lot about where our food comes from, making connections with local farmers, and finally, how much better food tastes when you know who grew and harvested it! (We definitely noticed a difference when our CSA share timed out...there was a long period of grieving. WHY, WINTER, WHY MUST YOU BE SO UNFRIENDLY TO FRESH TOMATOES?!) Though planning and budgeting our food, as well as keeping track of our food sources (which were different for eggs, produce, and bulk grains) was at times difficult or stressful and at times caused disagreements or tensions within the group, we seem to have figured out a pretty good system that everyone seems to like. We'll keep working on this new communal/local foods experiment next semester, and hopefully we'll just continue to get better at it.

One of the best things about this communal foods system is that it's let us start cooking and eating together several times a week. While not everyone chooses to contribute to the communal food budget, those who do have formed a mini co-op within the house, alternating cooking on a nightly basis. We usually decide at our meeting, at the beginning of each week, who wants to volunteer to cook each  night, and how many people will plan on eating at the house that night. This system has worked pretty well for us, and it has been so nice to get to eat with housemates and friends almost nightly. I think I can speak for many other EcoHouse residents when I say that these meals (as well as our weekly house-meeting dinners) have been one of the leading forces in bringing us together as a community. Let the communal meals continue next semester (read: let the delicious food and wonderful house bonding continue next semester!).

While all these things (local food projects, Harvest Fest, Be Brave Week, etc.) have been successful, the number one reason why this semester has been my favorite one at Grinnell so far is the beautiful people that I have had the amazing opportunity to live with. From Vincent and Madeline's heated conversations about current events or environmental issues to David's math jokes to late-night kitchen conversations with Hannah, I can honestly say that it's the people who make this house the truly magical place that it is. Every time I walk into EcoHouse and smell some of Jacob's fresh-baked bread, see Eleanor reading in the living room, catch Leah playing her ukulele, or see Ivy's smiling face, there's no question about it -- I am here. I am surrounded by people who care about me. I am home.



-Adriana

Professor Dinner!

On Saturday, December 7th, we had our second Professor Dinner at EcoHouse. There were professors from a wide array of disciplines at the event in addition to music prof. Eric McIntyre’s young children (unfortunately religious studies prof. Tim Dobe was unable to bring his two “robust” sons)!

We enjoyed a dinner of spaghetti & meatballs, homemade bread, salad, and dessert. Following the dinner, several EcoHousers participated in an impromptu jam session to the delight of all involved. One got the feeling that some of the profs were transported back to their own college days free from the pressures of the scholar and teacher’s life.

We value making connections with Grinnell faculty outside of the classroom and similar academic settings. These sorts of connections foster not only long-lasting ties between individual students and professors, but also help build a strong Grinnell community prepared to respond to the current and impending challenges engendered by ecological degradation.

-Vincent

EcoHouse celebrates Halloween!

Happy belated Halloween from EcoHouse! (brownie points if you can spot Madeline)

No phone, no internet, no problem: Be Brave Week

While perusing Luther College's sustainability house blog a few weeks back, I came across a post called "A Week of Living Bravely" that caught my attention. Residents of the house had each chosen one thing they wanted to do to live more intentionally for the week. After talking about the idea, members of EcoHouse decided we wanted to try this experiment out for ourselves. So we did.

From Sunday, November 3rd to Sunday, November 10th, residents of EcoHouse embarked on our own "Be Brave Week," supporting each other throughout the week as we tried to minimize our impact on the environment, be more aware of ourselves and those around us, or just generally live more intentionally.

For residents of EcoHouse, Be Brave Week projects included taking one-minute showers, paying more attention to the news and politics, making more of an effort to connect with people on a daily basis, turning off cell phones, eating more intentionally (i.e. not eating dessert every day, just because it's there), and staying off the internet when inside the house.

The final idea on this list -- staying off the internet inside the house -- was my personal project. It definitely took some getting used to, and required some major lifestyle adjustments. I could no longer do most of my homework at home, since it required being online, so I'd have to get my work done earlier in the day. Likewise, I couldn't just wake up and do my online reading for class while curled up in bed, so I had to get up a little earlier, walk across campus, and do my reading in the library. In the end, the lifestyle adjustments (doing homework earlier on, waking up earlier, etc.) were totally worth it. I realized how much I had depended on my computer before and suddenly felt very free. I was no longer staring at a screen (bad for my eyes and my mental state) right before going to sleep and right when I woke up. Finally, I spent much less time on social media and really realized how much better my life is without it (and how much more free time I have!).

On Sunday the 10th, one week after we started our project, we met to share our experiences with one another. Every single person, to some extent, had faced some challenges throughout the project, but ultimately, everyone expressed that they appreciated taking time to reflect on (and reconsider) how they live their lives from day to day.

The week not only made us more aware of how our actions affect ourselves, others, and the environment, but brought us closer together as a community. I was asked several times throughout the week how my Be Brave Week project was going, which always started an interesting dialogue. We encouraged each other every day, and some people even decided to pick up on other people's projects. By the end of the week, I think it's safe to say we had all learned to live a bit more intentionally, in one small way or another.


-Adriana