Author: Karen GoatKeeper

Karen GoatKeeper loves to write. Her books include picture books, novels and nonfiction for science activity books and nature books. A recent inclusion are science teaching units.
The coming year has goals for two new novels, a picture book and some books of personal essays. This is ambitious and ignores time constraints.
She lives in the Missouri Ozarks with her small herd of Nubian dairy goats. The Ozarks provides the inspiration and setting for most of her books.

Categories
GKP Writing News

Chemistry Teaching Units

It’s August. Many homeschool people are busy choosing chemistry teaching units for this upcoming school year. And mine aren’t available yet.

The City Water Project teaching units are up on Teachers Pay Teachers. These are fun during the summer. Some of the Investigations and Activities can be done inside, but water rockets are definitely an outside activity.

doing digital and print versions requires a title page
Title pages are both challenging and fun to create. For the teaching units I try to keep them simple.

Setting Up Chemistry Teaching Units

My science activity books have several parts. One part has the Investigations and Activities. These are somewhat similar. The first are more like lab work. The latter can be fun stuff.

Another part is composed of pencil puzzles like word searches, deduction problems, quote puzzles, coloring pages. I devise all of these myself and have found doing them for chemistry challenging.

Chem Notes are scattered throughout the unit. These are information/trivia sentences. For chemistry, many are related to the history of chemistry.

Each unit contains a story. For the unit on matter, the story is about flour as flour is used for two Activities. The solutions unit will have a story about making pottery as the clay is a mixture.

These Take Time

I’ll admit it. I’ve been working on the Little Spider illustrations when I should be working on chemistry.

I thought my time would stretch for both. It doesn’t. Each illustration is complex and takes far longer than I anticipated.

Each chemistry teaching unit takes time too. Several are set up. Most need the Chem Story finished. All need the Chem Notes. And I need to redo a few Investigations.

Everything Will Get Done

I keep telling myself exactly this. It is true. If I keep working on one illustration a day, “The Little Spider” will be done in just over three weeks from now.

And the chemistry teaching units will be put up on Teachers Pay Teachers. The first one needs some Chem Notes to finish it.

Is it on chemistry? Sort of. It’s on the metric system, using a scale and significant figures. These are important concepts for the rest of the units.

Categories
GKP Writing News

Creating Picture Book Pages

When I painted the panels for “Waiting For Fairies”, I painted the entire picture each time. However, I didn’t do that for “For Love of Goats”. Creating picture book pages depends on the illustrations for me.

watercolor image of little spider begins creating picture book pages
My first step for creating the pages for “The Little Spider” was to sketch, then watercolor the main images. The story is about a little spider that goes ballooning to a new home. this image is when the little spider is airborne.

Combining Watercolor and Computer

My picture book pages always begin with watercolor. First I do a rough sketch. Then I add the paint.

As I do the sketches, I am already looking over my ideas for the final illustrations. Although it’s great to do the entire picture in watercolor, sometimes using the computer to do some of it is better. This will be true for “The Little Spider”.

This is especially true for the text. I love doing the lettering, but rarely have all of the text look alike. The computer does all the text with the same lettering making it much easier to read which is important in a picture book.

adding background while creating picture book pages
For this picture book I am combining computer and watercolor images. For this page I started a new page and put a full light blue color. The watercolor image is selected using freehand selection keeping as close to the image as possible. It is copied onto the blue background. Then comes the tedious task of removing any white surrounding the image. I prefer using the eraser rather than painting to do this. It takes several passes using progressively smaller erasers.

“The Little Spider” Illustrations

My watercolor panels are very spare. They tell a simple story. Because the little spider lives in an area with lots of background that obscures that story, I don’t want to add much of it.

To achieve this, I have painted background panels. One is of the ground. It is mostly in shades of brown.

However, this is boring. So another panel has various objects such a small ferns, leaves, rocks, sticks etc. When I add ground to a panel, a few of these objects will get added too.

adding text for creating picture book pages
In my opinion the text in a picture book needs to be simple and easy to read. Personally I like using Georgia font as I like serifs and the rounder shapes than found in Times New Roman. The image has been narrowed for web viewing, so the text may be adjusted later. However, this is close to my final page for this panel. It took close to an hour to complete from creating the background color to adding the text. And this is one of the simpler pages out of the thirty-two for the book.

Background Colors

The sky will appear in several of the illustrations. Yes, I could do a wash of blue. My washes tend to have brush strokes and I would prefer not to have these in the illustrations.

Instead I will use a computer generated blue panel. This makes the sky a flat blue which it is and keeps it definitely in the background with the story scene on top of it.

The same is true of other scenes where I want a green background, but not one to overshadow the watercolor panels. I can add a few grass plants onto the flat background.

Creating picture book pages takes lots of planning and time. For me it also takes combining watercolor and computer to get just the illustrations I want.

Categories
Latest From High Reaches

My Cucurbit Year

Somehow my garden is having a cucurbit year. I don’t think I planned it this way. It just happened.

I like growing and eating squash, melons, pumpkins and an occasional cucumber. My goats love the squash and pumpkins too. The chickens prefer melons.

Beginning Squash Plans

butternut squash for my cucurbit year
This year I planted the butternut squash so it would grow up over the shade house cattle panel arch. It worked fairly well. I do have to check every day for new shoots trying to spread out across the ground. The squash are not too big for the vines to support them hanging. Some do get caught on the wire and have to be moved off.

Summer squash is a popular item. So I planned a bed for my favorite zephyrs. Three hills with three plants per hill. I plan ahead for losses due to squash bugs and borers.

These are supposed to be semibush. Not this year. This year robust vines five and six feet long wander out across garden paths and other garden beds.

Winter butternut squash was slated to cover half of the shade house. It didn’t listen. These vines took up their half and we are having an ongoing battle over the shade house interior plus the lima bean section and a couple of garden paths.

The usual monster squash, a goat favorite, went into a large 30 foot square bed by itself. Vines now fill this bed, climb up the six foot fences around the bed and try to invade the yard. Leaves tower four feet over the ground.

monster squash for my cucurbit year
This is still an unknown squash variety. The vines are tremendous, spreading out sixty feet, if they can. The leaves are over a foot across. Mature squash can be over 12 pounds. The goats love this squash. It keeps for months once its shelled.

Unplanned Cucurbits

My long beans didn’t come up for some reason this year. In a lapse of sense I put in three pie pumpkin seeds. These are happily taking over the front corner of the garden.

Another winter squash, Yuxi, went in when the winter melon seeds didn’t germinate. These monster vines are flowing up along one garden fence and trying to invade the tomatoes next door.

Although planned, the royal watermelon has in past years been very small. Compared to the nearby monster squash, it is still small. But the vines are running amok across a front section by the water barrels.

Cucurbit Year Invasion

At least a third of my garden is now buried under cucurbit vines. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the leaves weren’t so big.

Although I have only an inkling of how many monster squash are hiding under those leaves, judging from the butternut crop, this cucurbit year in the garden means we will be eating a lot of squash this winter as well as this summer.

Categories
GKP Writing News

“The Last Train From Hiroshima” Book Review

The world and war changed on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time. If all you know about that day and August 9, 1945, is that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened the cities, killed thousands of people and ended World War II, you are the victim of the spin doctors. “The Last Train From Hiroshima” by Charles Pellegrino tells the stories of the survivors and victims of both sides relating what really happened.

History, real history, is more than names, dates and heroic deeds. It is littered with people and events that make you feel uncomfortable. Yet, if that history is white washed, it will happen again. The purpose of looking at history is to learn from the mistakes and decisions of the past. And, as many have known for years, people can learn more from their mistakes than their successes.

Story of Hiroshima

Why do we learn so little about what actually happened on those days? General MacArthur laid out his Protocol forbidding survivors from talking about what happened. He curtailed any scientific research about it. He confiscated and classified written information about it. Then he and the Japanese government put out their sanitized versions.

John Hershey managed to gather and publish some of what did happen. His book, “Hiroshima” follows six survivors on that day and for some days afterwards. Dr. Paul Takashi Nagai published “The Bells of Nagasaki”, the story of his survival and the efforts of the University medical school personel and became the focus of a smear campaign.

Atomic Bomb Trivia

Did you know the Hiroshima bomb was a dud? Only around 10% of it exploded.

How does an atomic bomb explode? It isn’t one explosion, but a series of waves each carrying its own type of destruction.

How many people died? No one knows or will ever know.

Why did some people survive even though they were close to the explosion? Some of the Hiroshima survivors took that Last Train from Hiroshima just in time for the second bomb and survived that one too.

And the second bomb didn’t explode over Nagasaki, but its suburb Urikami, just over a little hill. This made it easy to hide the true effects of the second bomb which was a plutonium bomb, not an atom bomb and three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Yet, this bomb has been relegated to little more than a sentence or two in the history books.

Aftermath

Few people knew about the effects of radiation. People without a scratch on them would sicken and die days, weeks or years later as speculation about what was wrong proliferated. These effects too were mostly hidden from the public.

Some older survivors of one or both bombs lived long lives advocating for peace. They had lived through hell and didn’t want anyone else to have to. Masahiro Sasaki summed it up this way: “It’s been more than sixty years since the bombs were dropped. God made everyone equal. So, I forgot who dropped the bomb. What I am trying to say is that it does not matter who dropped the bomb. It’s not an issue. It should never be an issue for any country. It’s an issue for all humanity.

“The important thing is that I, and Sadako (his sister who folded paper cranes as she was dying cancer caused by radiation), knew the feeling of Omiyari (In your heart, always think about the other person before yourself.) – and if this principle can be taken to heart and passed down by just a few of you here in this room today, it may, in time, lessen the dangers in the world.”

This is an excellently written book. It is objective, not dwelling on gory details. That does not make this an easy book to read.

My ratings and book reviews of both “Last Train from Hiroshima” and “The Bells of Nagasaki” are on Goodreads.

Categories
Latest From High Reaches

New Septic Tank

When A-1 Septic came out, the man found out our ancient metal tank had rusted almost through. Luckily our vehicle normally parked in the garage hadn’t fallen through. We needed a new septic tank.

A previous owner of our house built a garage over the old one. This is not a good arrangement so the new one would be put in the front yard.

My goats were not impressed when the backhoe, the Bobcat, the big trucks and several men arrived at milking time. They got milked anyway.

500 gallon septic tank is big
The new septic tank isn’t that heavy. It does more than fill up a regular pickup bed. The rib design is to add strength to the tank sides.

Setting Up For the New Septic Tank

In the meantime the backhoe had dug a big hole. The new septic tank holds 500 gallons of waste and is four feet long, three feet wide and three feet deep. It needed to be a foot underground.

The old tank was crushed. A thick layer of gravel cushioned the new pipe going across to the old pipe and out of the garage. More gravel went on top of the new pipe.

Once the tank was in place and the pipes connected, a new problem arose. In order for the new septic tank to settle correctly, it needs to be at least half full of water. We have no hose.

new septic tank in hole
A backhoe lowers the new septic tank into the hole it dug for it. New pipe is needed to hook the tank up to the sewer system. Being plastic, the tank doesn’t stay settled down in the hole very well so it needs to be half filled or more with water. Then the dirt is piled back on top.

Problem?

We do have rain barrels. The rain barrels have tadpoles in them. I grabbed my fish net and started moving tadpoles out to only one barrel.

A small pump moved the water into the new septic tank. We ended up with one barrel of water to hold my plants over until rain could fill the now empty barrels back up.

Now the pile of dirt started going places. Some went back on top of the new septic tank. Some went into the garage to fill in that hole. The rest is sitting in front of my vegetable garden to fill containers and raised beds once the rocks are removed and compost is mixed in.

Surprisingly, this whole operation only took a couple of hours. It’s a nice feeling to have this potential disaster averted.

Categories
Latest From High Reaches

Dealing With Septic Tanks

In the city everyone hooks up to the sewer system. No such system exists in the country, so most people use septic tanks.

Decades ago these tanks were made of concrete or thick metal. Polypropalene ones and concrete ones are available now.

Kinds of Waste Water

Two grades of waste water flow out of the house. One, the grey water, is from sinks and the bathtub. This water has mostly water, dirt and soap in it.

The second comes from the toilet. This has urine and waste in it.

Many old houses like mine have two sewer systems. One takes out the grey water. The other takes the sewer water to the septic tank.

A-1 Septic helps dealing with septic tanks
When a septic tank gets full, a service like A-1 Septic in Salem, MO, sends out a truck to pump the solids out.

Taking Care of Septic Tanks

Since septic tanks let solid matter in and keep it there, the less that goes in, the longer it takes to fill it up. Water flows through the tank and out to a leach field.

One way to cut down on the solids going in is to not flush paper down. Instead this paper is burned or put out with the trash.

According to Daniel Black, owner of A-1 Septic, the tank should be pumped out every three to five years. This keeps it from packing so solid it is hard to empty.

The solids are taken out to be sprayed out on hay fields as fertilizer. It breaks down quickly to grow grass well. A field isn’t cut for over a month after spraying so the waste is washed by rain and broken down by bacteria and the sun.

Old Septic Tanks

I’ve learned a lot about this lately because my tank needed to be pumped out. It had seemed just fine for three decades and was easy to ignore.

The crew came out. First, they had to find the tank. They have a little camera on a long line that goes up the pipes to the septic tank exit. This can be found by a device like a homing device.

Second, the dirt is taken off of the top of the tank. The smart way is to have a clean out pipe, but mine didn’t have one. This is not unusual for old houses.

Metal tanks have a big defect. The metal rusts. My tank had almost rusted away.

Now I need a new septic tank.

Categories
GKP Writing News

Coloring Little Spider

Coloring Little Spider is the easy part. Sort of. Getting all the sketches done was the difficult part.

Planning “The Little Spider”

I did have a rough text list for this picture book. However, as I did the sketches, some of the text didn’t work. There wasn’t enough of it for all the pages of the book.

I went back to the computer and started creating pages. The first one was the title page. then a copyright page. Neither one had a sketch.

Then each drawing was matched to a page and the text was written on the page. Another wrinkle to doing this was keeping the pages on the correct side. There is a right facing page (odd numbers) and a left facing page (even numbers).

Some of the pages didn’t have sketches. These were added to the stack.

Coloring Little Spider

Baby spiders called spiderlings are not the same color as adult spiders usually. Different kinds of spiders have different shapes.

My little spider is a composite, but mostly garden spider. I laid out my paints.

Greens were needed for the plants. Little spider needed ocher yellow, gray and black. Webs and spider silk are white, but this wouldn’t show up, so I’m using thin black lines.

coloring little spider and her journey
The little spider says “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” Why? Follow along to find out as the little spider leaves her web behind and searches for a high place. Her first attempt is a long blade of grass as shown in this image.

Patience?

I like watercolor. It has a really nice look to it and is versatile. Texture comes from layering the paint. Tones come from adding water.

That is the drawback to watercolor. It is a water-based paint. Each color must dry thoroughly before the next one is added.

This takes patience. Rushing lets the colors bleed into one another. I’m not good at patience.

My solution is to work on several sketches at a time. One round I spend coloring little spider. Another round I paint the grass. Still another round is for adding legs to little spider.

This first time through the sketches won’t finish them. I will go back over them to add more texture to the grasses and stems and branches.

Categories
GKP Writing News

Social Media

“Hopes, Dreams and Reality” will be available to readers by next week. That leaves me looking at more ways to let people know about my new book. The suggestion so many have is to be on social media.

Irritatingly, people and businesses assume everyone is on these various platforms. The only two I am on are Pinterest and Goodreads. There are no plans to be on any of the others.

Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover
As I launch this new novel, my dream is for people to notice and read it. But people won’t notice it unless I can let them know it exists.

Why Not be on Social Media?

Time is a big reason I am not on these platforms. Since I am not online at home, my internet time is very limited, usually about five hours a week. This does not go very far.

Perhaps I could be online at home, but the service stinks. There is good service up on top of the hill because a teacher lives there and it was put in for virtual teaching. Those lines do not come down to me and won’t any time soon.

That leaves me with slow, unrealiable service be it through the phone company or satellite. It’s much cheaper and better to use the internet at the library, so that is what I do.

Nor can I use a cell phone to access the internet. Well, I suppose I could, if I wanted to go hiking across the creek, down two pastures and up on a hill to find service.

Privacy

Another big reason for me to not be on social media is privacy. The companies behind these platforms only want to sell me things I have no use for or sell my information to others who want to sell me things I do not want. It’s bad enough using Yahoo.

Yes, I do know privacy is a thing of the past. However, I enjoy the illusion.

Even more chilling for me is the amount of misinformation found on these platforms. I am not interested in sifting through the lies, the political rhetoric, the deceptions, the frauds and more.

When you do seek information, how do you know it’s for real? I’m reminded of a cartoon from some magazine of a dog at a computer saying “Online, no one knows you’re a dog.”

Where does this leave me?

It leaves me a website few people visit. It leaves me a network of people I know through Goodreads and NaNo (National Novel Writing Month).

My first promotion of Hopes, Dreams and Reality” will be free downloads through Smashwords for two weeks. If you are reading this and wish to take advantage of this offer, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a positive review of the book on its Smashwords or Amazon book page.

Categories
Latest From High Reaches

Necessary Rain

City people might look at rain as a nuisance. Country people don’t usually. This necessary rain waters gardens, grows pastures and woods and brings up mushrooms.

The lack of and the abundance of rain are the mainstays of rural conversation. Here in my part of the Ozarks both conditions have been topics this summer.

cover for "My Ozark Home" by Karen GoatKeeper
Floods and rain are some of the images and haiku topics found in this retrospective of our first 25 years living in the Ozarks.

Local Focus

News is reporting on both ends of the rain spectrum lately. New England is flooding. The Southwest is dry and being cooked.

These reports are disturbing. Even the reports of similar problems in Europe and Asia are concerning.

However, my focus is here. I rarely go even thirty miles from home. This is my world. I do sympathize as such weather, to a degree, has come here. But the reports are for far away places I will never visit. I live here.

More than necessary rain
This is from a flood in 2015 here in the Ozarks. It took off most of the planks from our bridge. They got caught down the creek where we found them and hauled them back. The creek was a foot over the bridge, but dropped rapidly after the rain slowed and stopped.

Heat and Drought

Last summer saw temperatures over a hundred here along with dry weather. Hay fields burned up, including mine. Hay prices soared, if I could find any.

My goats survived on mulch status hay and cold pastures over the winter. The garden lasted into early winter under plastic with well water and mulch.

cover for "Exploring the Ozark Hills" by Karen GoatKeeper
Storms are part of life in the Ozarks and are the subject of some essays and photographs in “Exploring the Ozark Hills”.

Cool and Rainy

This summer has stayed cool, rarely seeing even ninety degrees. A couple of days flirted with the hundred degree mark during a dry spell.

Now clouds cover the sky for days. They don’t drop a lot of rain, but enough for make the pastures lush.

Hay is still a problem and the prices are still high. First it got too dry and burned the fields. Now the necessary rain falls and it’s too cool and wet to make hay.

Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover
In this new novel the main character Mindy must survive a major flood and put her life together afterwards.

How Does This Matter?

In my world, this matters a lot. This is where I live, where my goats live, where my garden is.

For the people living in other places, enduring weather so much worse than I am seeing, it doesn’t matter. What matters is their local weather because that is where they live.

Categories
Latest From High Reaches

Summer Squash Time

Gardening is rewarding, sometimes too rewarding. Summer squash is one of the prolific rewards.

There are many varieties to choose from. My preference is Zephyr.

Planning for Summer Squash

One garden bed is designated for planting these big, demanding plants. I dig down at least a spade’s length and dump in a pile of manure. The soil is put back on top to form the hill. Three fit in one bed.

Mulch hay is packed around the hills six inches or more deep. This will keep moisture in the soil and keep it cooler as the Ozark summer sun is hot. It does provide a place for squash bugs to hide.

Zephyr summer squash
Zephyr summer squash has distinctive coloring. The squash seems to stay tender to a bigger size than many summer squash types.

Planting

Summer squash is very frost sensitive. It is also fast growing. I stick three seeds in each hill.

The advice is to pull two of the three sprouts. I ignore this. I know squash bugs and borers will move in and can decimate a plant overnight. Leaving all three in each hill is insurance some will survive.

Growing

The fun part of growing my plants is watching them get started. They put out their first leaves. Their little roots are reaching down through the hill.

Those roots find the compost. Overnight the plants double in size and keep growing. The leaves are bigger than dinner plates. Flowers open.

squash bug eggs
A main enemy of summer squash is the squash bug. This is a cluster of squash bug eggs. The eggs are often on the under side of leaves, but can be on stems or on top of leaves. They should be destroyed.

Bug Wars

My big plants make the bug wars easier. I can get down on the ground and look up to see under most of the leaves. Squash bug eggs are collected and dumped into the tadpole rain barrels to drown. Bugs are squashed.

A watering can is another weapon. These bugs panic when they get wet. I water the much and stems so I can dispose of the fleeing bugs. I know I will eventually lose, but this delays the inevitable.

squash bugs
The newly hatched nymphs are green and barely an eighth of an inch long. They soon turn gray and grow quickly to this one close to adult size. The adult has the triangle on the back and overlapping wings of a true bug. The predatory wheel bugs look similar, but are good to have around. Squash bugs can destroy a squash plant overnight.

Harvesting

Summer squash must be checked and cut every day. Everyone’s plants produce about the same time. There is a glut of summer squash.

There are lots of recipes using squash available. I don’t do much cooking in the summertime and rarely do any desserts.

What do I do with this bounty? I sell some. We eat some. The goats eat some. I cook up some and puree it, freeze the puree and have great soup stock for next winter.