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This is the last piece on our first summer of blueberry farming.  With the help of Rick Baird, Jamie’s brother, we got our rabbit fence up - literally minutes before we left to come back home for the winter.  It was a sad time, but it was also joyous to see such a beautiful fence and the blueberries prospering so well.

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Just before we left, I asked Jamie to do a little piece on her favorite blueberry patch.  Now as you may know, blueberry patches are very, very secret, and to let you in on where her’s is - is really an amazing act of trust.  But just to make sure that you really don’t tell anybody where this patch is - you have to swear that you will never tell anybody where this is - I mean it.   I know it’s hard on the internet to get people to take a blood oath, but I’m asking you - prick your finger  and swear that you will never - ever tell anybody where this patch is located.  Then after you have done that, you can watch the video.

I am so amazed at her drive to pick berries.  She picked over 5 gallons of berries while we were in Minnesota.  Most folks go out for a few minutes - get bite a few times, and stop.  She goes for hours at a time.  Amazing!

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Part of homesteading has to be water management. I mean - you can’t take a bath in the lake every single day, and the truth is - building fences, remodeling houses and gathering wood can really be a “strong” experience - if you catch my whiff. So it was clear to me that we needed an outdoor shower. Jamie found this black bag with the shower head attached and it holds about 2 1/2 gallons of water. Then we added a bucket of water and voila! We had enough to really clean two stinky people. Such fun, and of course it’s so private out there that you just want to take your clothes off - really!

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After we got the logs, we had to get them on the land. So here it is. And some more information about what kind of logs we are using.

I have several more pieces ready to go too - one on our outdoor shower, one more tour of the land and one on the clay that we are going to be using for the plaster finish on our strawbale house.

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We bought our logs the other day.  I was truly amazed at what Ken Gerke could do with a front end loader.  Now we are still playing with the design but at least we have the logs for us to use.

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This is for my buddy Dana, who built his own place in Show Low AZ.  Jamie and I are a few years behind, but hopefully we can learn from his successes.  So this piece is really just for Dana, but you can watch it if you want.

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It’s been a while since I posted the Blueberry chronicles.  Actually, the plants are all in and really doing fine, but here’s the second part of the saga of getting the patch ready, and the plants in the ground.  It was a real family affair with Jamie’s brother’s and nephews helping a lot.  Jeff, Rick, Ryan and Alan  - even Jim came by.

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Hey, this summer nights downtown is getting to be so much fun.  Last Thursday, we went down and were dancing.  Everybody loved it, and really, we did to.  So as we were walking back to our car, we ran into these folks.  They were totally into their drumming, and so was Jamie.  So cool.

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Last week, I was lucky to be able to attend SilverDOCS film festival and conference in Silver Spring, MD.  Jamie and I spent the week in Silver Spring, where there were over 100 documentary films, and a five day conference on documentary film making.  One of the events that I attended was the panel given by the National Minority Consortia. At the end of the panel I asked what were the various organizations doing to promote vlogging on their websites.  I thought their answers were instructive.  We shall see how it plays out.  Each one assured me that they were working away to make it very friendly for people to vlog on their sites.  If you go to the link, you can get to each of their websites to judge for yourself.

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Folks, you may or not know about our international peace project - The Bead People. Jamie started by making a few bead people - then she realized that there was a story there - so she wrote - The Wind of a Thousand Years. Over the last year, we’ve gone through 2000 copies and we are waiting for our next edition of 1500. Amazing, and they are soooo much fun - not to mention spreading a little peace with every bead person and every book. But now, we really need a Spanish translation. Some folks have been asking for it, and one person wants to take them to Nicaragua. This project is basically a non-profit operation, with people contributing money for printing, beads to make more bead people, and now I am asking for somebody to translate our book in to Spanish. We’ve been told that we really need a native speaking person to do the translation - basically because the book is very poetic, and we want to keep the feeling of it.

If you would like to give it a shot, please send an email to me or Jamie - at milt (at) thebeadpeople.org or jamie (at) thebeadpeople.org You can actually read the story on line right here, and see the famous short film, Beads Beads Beads at thebeadpeople.org

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In Rapid City South Dakota, we are trying to get folks to spend more time downtown - a familiar issue for lots of small towns.  The other night we went to event and ran into an old friend, Fred Thurston, an architect that loves to work on restoring old buildings.  He is now restoring them and turning them green at that same time.  It’s called LEED Certification.

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After spending our first night on the land, we had to wait a day until the blueberry plants showed up, but when they did, we needed to decide on a place to put them.  Originally we thought about an old garden plot that Jamie’s grandmother had, but after reading about what blueberries like, it became clear that that area would be too wet for blueberries - they love water, but don’t like wet feet.  After picking the land, it was time to began breaking the sod.  Oh yes, it was not pretty.

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We’ve begun a long awaited adventure.  We are creating a homestead in Northern Minnesota, Cass Lake Minnesota, to be exact.  This is the first of many posts that I’ll be doing as we move along.  Since we shot this, we actually got our first batch of blueberry plants planted.  Jamie and I have been dreaming about this for way too many years.  Jamie is a berry picker par excellence, and will be happy on any day to go to the woods, sit with her berry bucket, and pick those little tiny explosions of joy.  Pop a wild blueberry into your chops and you will know what I mean.

So for now, we are making our next big plan - to build a strawbale pavilion so that we can do our outdoor cooking and a place to stay, while getting ready for The First Annual International Bead People Blueberry Peace Festival.

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Folks,  here’s a piece that introduces you to Show in A Box.  What is Show in A Box?  It’s a bunch of plug-ins for Wordpress that makes your video look great on the web.  Originally designed as a monolithic plug-in that you down load and install, it has evolved over the past year into a dynamic group of plug-ins that are continually being improved and added to, so that you can pick and choose which pieces you want to use.  You can also choose which “theme” you want to use with your blog.  There are many people that have been involved with the development of Show In A Box, and frankly I’m the least of the crew.  But I can make videos, and so I volunteered to make this intro.  I might be wrong, but I believe the original idea came from Ryanne and Jay, or Michael Verdi, or….well, it just keeps growing,  and over the past year it has grown to many more folks.  After you have seen it, go to the Show in a Box website, get involved with the project yourself, download some of the plugins, and take control over how your video looks on the web.

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We went to a wonderful workshop last week with Dr. Ed Zlotkowski from Bentley College in Boston. Ed is the senior faculty fellow at Campus Compact, an organization that promotes Service Learning. This piece is a short clip of Ed talking about “Kolb’s learning cycle” and why so many students in America are basically left out of the education process.

According to an article on the web, “Kolb’s learning cycle is typically expressed as four-stage cycle of learning, in which ‘immediate or concrete experiences’ provide a basis for ‘observations and reflections’. These ‘observations and reflections’ are assimilated and distilled into ‘abstract concepts’ producing new implications for action which can be ‘actively tested’ in turn creating new experiences.”

Most students in America are forced to begin learning by entering in 3rd stage - the “abstract concepts” stage, which really means that as a student, you began to learn a topic by reading a book. And because most people in America do NOT learn that way, higher education becomes “education by selection”.

This is part of a series of interviews that I’ve done on learning, and how so many of our schools are failing. Our intention is to open a dialogue about the educational system in America, and to create a new model of education that actually works for students.

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I used to be a stage manager, and that meant that I was also a stage hand. I don’t do it much anymore, but it’s fun to keep you hand in. A week ago or so, I did the “in and the out” for Chicago when it came to Rapid City. It’s usually a 4 to 5 hr IN and about 2 hrs OUT. In between, they do a show or two. On this day they did 2 shows. This piece shows you in less than 4 minutes about 6 hrs of work, from an empty stage to when the truck pulled out to go to Cheyenne, Wyoming for the show the next day. Hope you like it - it was a lot of fun.

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I’ve been doing Jin Shin Jyutsu for the last 10 years, and I can honestly say that it has been the one thing that has kept me healthy.  It’s really amazingly simple to do, but when you study it, you realize that it is the study of a life time.  So simple - just be the smile - drop the shoulders.

This flow is called the Main Central and it’s included in The Touch of Healing, a book by Alice Burmeister.  Alice is the daughter-in-law of Mary Burmeister.  Mary brought Jin Shin Jyutsu to America in the 1950’s.  She had studied with Master Jiro Murai in Japan during the war.

The Main Central is designed to harmonize your entire body, but it works especially well on your endocrine system.  It works by opening the path of the Chi that constantly flows in your body - up the back - down the front.  I like it because it helps my memory, and clears my head.

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About a month ago, my son, Murray, asked me to shot some stuff of him getting back to his mountain bike. We did some really fun things - but mostly it was his bike riding - along with his wife, Linda, that really make this piece. I had a blast - doing the music, and just playing with some video. It’s a trip to just have some fun. Hope you like it. By the way, it’s about 11 minutes long, but it’s pretty fun, and Ryanne, here’s a documentary to look at.

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So Wednesday night we had a really nice spring thunder storm.  But then on Friday morning, it started again, and by the end of the day, there was 15 inches of snow in th middle of the state.  Jamie was speaking  at the South Dakota History conference - doing a reading from Washsaka. It was really nice, but back to the weather.  Today, it is sunny and beautiful.  Typical South Dakota.  I was reading the paper this morning and it was talking about which state had the most optimistic people, and guess what - it was South Dakota!  So crazy, but I suppose it could be true.  After all, things are always really really tough in South Dakota - you have to work like crazy to make a living, but we are used to it.  So in really all the people who are left here in South Dakota are the folks that hung on during the depression - all the slackers left.  They moved…well, I don’t want to imply that the softies are living somewhere else, but I will say, you have to be either crazy, or really tough to live here.  And if you are really crazy, then I suppose you could be said to be optimistic.

Anyway, here’s the storm!

Miltr

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Last week I attended the Rapid City School Board meeting. They were planning on cutting many of the academic programs designed to help people with reading, math, gifted and talented. And of course their big mistake was they included grade school band and orchestra. Amazing how short sighted these folks are. 1100 people showed up and pretty much everyone was upset. It was actually very sad to see how little these board members understand about how learning, and true education really works.