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Naomi's Internship, Week 5: Mini-Week

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Naomi Neal, who is interning at Tryon Farm and the Tryon Farm Institute in Michigan City, Indiana.

As the title suggests, last week was a short one for me, and this will, accordingly, be a short post. I worked at the pool construction site on Tuesday after a hectic visa-application-frenzied Monday, and then the week unraveled from there. On Wednesday my roommate extraordinaire and fellow Shimer blogger Alex Rosenberg came down to visit and celebrate Independence Day with me; we visited the nearby beach town of New Buffalo, Michigan and grilled up a vegan feast at sunset in my beautiful borrowed backyard. On Thursday I worked on TFI-related online projects from Chicago, and then on Friday embarked on a weekend trip to meet my significant other's family for the first time.

Phew. I'm exhausted just thinking about it all.

Because I didn't do all that much that was new or substantial in terms of my internship-as-such last week, I'd like to briefly explore something tangential: solitude. One of the biggest but hardest-to-talk-about aspects of my life here at Tryon is the fact that I spend the majority of my day alone or performing solitary jobs. In Letters to a Young Poet, which we read in my German tutorial this past spring, Rilke extols the strengthening and enlightening virtues of solitude, but even before stumbling through the German prose of his argument, I've always had an affinity for aloneness. I believe that it was growing up an only child that made me this way, just as it nurtured the bibliophilia that brought me to Shimer. I embarked on this internship expecting isolation, and welcoming it.

And I can see, or at least, I think I can see, some of my newfound solitude's positive influence on me already. I'm reading for pleasure more than I have since before I started college, and the literature and the lonesomeness combined have drawn out my preternaturally frail introspective abilities: I know myself better than usual, these days. 

But, contrary to my expectations, I wouldn't say that I've become especially productive in my hours of isolation--that, of course, is the compensation for my renewed passion for fiction. And when I do get lonely, like last Tuesday afternoon when I had nothing but hours to kill and I was tired of reading after two hundred pages, there's not much I can do about it. Not to mention the ribs I bruised last week while cooking dinner, a simple result of clumsiness--in my most hypochondriac moments of pain, there's no one here to talk me down.

So, while I'm getting better at being alone and even rejoicing in my progress, a part of me realizes that I shouldn't try to get too used to it. This summer, I've been paying close attention to the "work" aspect of Arendt's vita activa, but I must also keep in mind that an active life is a balanced life.

Heat Wave

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Kathryn Stresak, who is interning at Growing Power in Chicago, Illinois.

Have you all noticed how hot it is? Don't pull that "I don't live where you live" card! It's hot everywhere and it's hard for me not to notice. I am in the thick of it every day (except Mondays). I have always been able to handle heat relatively well. Luckily, some blood in me flows for that Vitamin D. This summer, though, has pushed my tolerance to its brink. Most days I have been out at Grant Park from 7 am to 5 pm, learning to deal with nature's temper. So in this blog I thought I would list some tribulations and triumphs of a good ol' fashioned, air-conditioning-free summer:

Tribulations:

1. Bring a water bottle full of cold water. Think it will stay cold until 9 am. Sadly drink your warm, metallic water at 9 am.

2. Bring a water bottle frozen the night before. Believe confidently this time your water will be cold until 9 am. Leave water bottle in a sunny area. Sadly drink your warm, metallic water at 9 am.

3. Bring a water bottle frozen the night before. Leave water bottle under a shady tree. Triumphantly drink your cold, refreshing water at 9 am. Leave top open. Return confidently to your water bottle at 10 am. Walk away in defeat upon discovering an empty water bottle and a soaked backpack.

4. Liberally apply sunscreen before leaving the house. Forget to bring sunscreen to the farm. Be forced to accept that it is 101 degrees outside and yes, those funky farmer's arms will be red by the end of the day.

5. Wear shorts. Get annoyingly bitten by black flies. Drop a box of harvested flowers in the mud. 

Triumphs:

1. Bring a giant sun hat. Stay cool and shaded all day. Get compliments on snazzy hat. Pretend you're a movie star "getting away from it all."  

2. Bring coffee thermos full of ice water. Trimphantly fill your ice-filled thermos with water  for the third time at 3 pm. 

3. Embrace the funky farmer's tan. Acknowledge it as a conversation starter at parties. "So I noticed your arms are incredibly tan yet your back is starkly white..."

4. Walk to the restroom. Run into Whole Foods workers passing out free popsicles. Happily bite into popsicle as people shout "Yeah, Growing Power! Keep up the good work!" as you walk away.

5. Remember as you stand, dizzy from the sun, that you are holding a water hose. Spray yourself with that water like crazy.

So there you go. Perhaps it is not the most universal list of stay-cool tips and trips but they are some of the most memorable for me this summer. I am beginning to fully understand how difficult it is to grow food while enduring the whims of the weather. There have been several days where I have started the day over-heated, then been soaked by a downpour, followed by a lovely wave of humidity. I find myself using the critical thinking skills I've gained at Shimer all the time. Whether it be how to keep cool during the hottest time of the year, building trellis systems for beans, teaching youth corps kids how to work farmer's markets or talking to city park district members about the space we share, I always have to keep my wits about me. Though I may be painting this endurance of the weather in a cynical light, I actually really like it. It's really important to know what the world is actually like without all the structures and conveniences we've built up to avoid the difficult things. 

I also have a nice article showcasing the Grant Park farm and my super cool boss Lauralyn. You should read it! It has pretty pictures!

Naomi's Internship, Week 4: Under the Early-Morning Sun

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Naomi Neal, who is interning at Tryon Farm and the Tryon Farm Institute in Michigan City, Indiana.

My day-to-day life changed radically last week. Even if I hadn't started working at the eco-pool construction site, even if I hadn't gotten some welcome distance from my computer, even if every detail of my daily tasks had remained the same, this would have been a very special week for me because I started waking up at, and sometimes even before, five in the morning. This might not seem like much, but I think that it's changed my outlook on everything. I've always entered a new day somewhere in the middle, I realize now. When I see both sunrise and sunset, the day carries a greater sense of potential and a greater sense of malleability. I feel in control of how my time passes.

 

Sunrise over the south meadow.

 

But of course, more has changed than my sleep schedule and my outlook. I spent the week working with four experienced builders on the simultaneous construction of the eco-pool and destruction of the existing structure, which will provide a skeleton for the pool's fence and poolhouse. They introduced me to a wide variety of new skills and fields of knowledge: mixing concrete and mortar, pouring concrete, the various uses and methods of application of mortar, using a nail gun, using a power drill, using a power grinder as a saw, the proper way to remove nails from old boards... the list goes on. 

Though I managed to contain it most of the time, I must admit to a certain feeling of insecurity about my inexpertise. I think, however, that this insecurity only served, in the process of practicing each new task, to heighten my pride and satisfaction upon learning how to do it, and reaching a point at which I could seamlessly participate in the flow of the crew's work. The work--both the learning process and the physical doing of it--was both hard and rewarding. I remain excited about the possibility of working with my hands professionally someday, and seeing a tangible impact of my creative exertions on the world around me, i.e., of performing concretely Arendtian "work."

I'm still chugging through the first of my Tryon-related books for the summer, having managed to get thoroughly enraptured by another long novel (the newest Haruki Murakami). Cultivated Wilderness, lent to me by my TFI boss, Scott, is a very weird book. When Scott first gave it to me, he said, "It was written by an architect, so..." and perhaps that explains some of the strangeness. The author's general idea (I think) is that every place on the earth implies layers of relationships of human beings with one another and with nature. It's written in a highly anecdotal style, which can be hard to follow, but I think I'm starting to see what he (Paul Shepheard) is doing with his anecdotes. While describing the history, both human and geological, of every place he visits, he also describes his own experience in that place, along with the people he meets there and what they say to him about the place, and these personal conversations become just as potently determinant of what the place is, for him, as the historical and physical factors. Very Shimerian.

Another of the week's experiences to file under "Shimer Applies to Everything" was the cognitive resonance I felt, when, near the end of the week, I sat in on a conference call between Scott, Ed Noonan, and a third architect, who were discussing plans for building a new house at Tryon. The course of their conversation was, it struck me, just the same as the conversations I'd witnessed between my supervisor on the building site and his two workers, and still more astonishing, very similar to the flow of conversation in a really productive Shimer class. The interlocutors, be they architects discussing a theoretical house, builders debating the placement of a column in the immediate space, or students creating a structure built of ideas around the octagonal table, have to imagine the finished project. They have to live, in their minds, in a place that doesn't really exist yet (be it a house or the global communist state) and look for all the potential problems and all the potential ways to solve them, measuring the solutions together against the imagined space to come.

In the chapter of Cultivated Wilderness which I last read, Shepheard visited the artificial islands built over the past hundred years in the Netherlands. The original plan there, apparently, was to build five of them, and over the course of the twentieth century, four of them were completed. Construction of the fifth had not, at the time of Shepheard's writing, begun yet, for reasons unspecified. He devotes a page or so of the chapter to speculating on the various possible explanations for this delay, many of which make a lot of sense. I, however, would like to respectfully add the suggestion that, now that so many years of discussion between planners and builders and ordinary citizens have elapsed, there remains little need to actually build the thing. It already exists, within the dialogue.

Parks and Mark-ets

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Kathryn Stresak, who is interning at Growing Power in Chicago, Illinois.

Hello again! Kathryn from Growing Power, here. It's been another week on the farm,  and I'm finally getting into the swing of things. The other interns have all arrived and it's awesome to hear about all the different reasons for their respective interests in GP. Unfortunately though, I haven't gotten to talk with them much because we are all spread out through the city, hard at work on our farms. My permanent location is at the Grant Park farm, of which I posted about in my last post. I feel very lucky to get a location with so much artistic flair, as well as foot traffic. I will even be giving tours during the Taste of Chicago! Y'all should come to check out the farm if you can! It's located in between Michigan and Lakeshore on Congress Parkway. This week I have also started doing markets on the west side of Chicago in areas with a high need for fresh food. We will be doing markets on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays with a different location each day. For these markets, Growing Power partners with Fresh Moves, a mobile produce store on a renovated bus!

Today I began the day at 5:30 to get trained at the Green City Market, one of Chicago's biggest farmers' markets. Then at 9:30 am, I headed back to our Iron St. headquarters to get more produce for the Westside Market, which was at Laramie and Hirsch. By noon we were on the road again to the Park & Rec center. I met up with my Youth Corp crew, an awesome group of teenagers who will be helping me out for the markets, and we set up camp. I left the market early, at 3:30, but we had already some great sales for the day. It was encouraging to see how many people were excited to buy fresh food and gave everyone encouragement.

I have an insane schedule, often covering miles and miles on bike to get to where I need to be. I bounce between being overwhelmed and overjoyed by the experience, often in the course of an hour. Tomorrow is GP Iron Street's One Year Anniversary party. When I look at everything they have built up in such a short amount of time I realize that it's all due to the crazy schedules we all have. It's a surreal experience to go from Shimer, where we put such emphasis on verbal dialogue, to Growing Power, where there is an equally strong emphasis on physical action. I realize, having been immersed in them both, how important both are needed for a healthy, strong community. Hopefully I will figure out how to strike a balance. 

Naomi's Internship, Week 3: National Pollinator Week Madness

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Naomi Neal, who is interning at Tryon Farm and the Tryon Farm Institute in Michigan City, Indiana.

Even now, two days out, it's hard to collect and arrange my memories of this past week at Tryon Farm in a coherent manner. It was exhausting! It was National Pollinator Week, and the series of events for which I'd been helping prepare finally took place. Tuesday and Wednesday were a blur of last-minute meetings and arrangements, and on Thursday, the ball dropped and the events began.

On Thursday, TFI hosted a private educational event for foster children from Chicago's branch of the Lydia Home Association. The planned activities including weeding in the pollinator-habitat garden which a group from Lydia had planted the previous summer, a butterfly/bug hunt in the meadow, and a short lecture and honey-tasting given by one of the Tryon beekeepers. However, the butterfly hunt got rained out at the last minute, so the kids worked instead on pollination-themed craft projects in the barn. These Chicago kids were, for the most part, eager and rambunctious when faced with the unfamiliar scenery of the Farm, and the high-energy group approached the activities with a lot of enthusiasm. They were full of questions about the goats, the bees, the bugs, and the plants, bouncing from one adult to the next for the satisfaction of their curiosity. The field trip ended pretty abruptly when one of the kids broke out in a plant-provoked rash, which to his and the rest of the group's urban eyes must have seemed far more unusual and terrifying than it did to locals. I must admit to having a somewhat similarly outsized reaction to the nasty case of poison ivy which seems to be slowly engulfing me.

The next day, preparations continued, and a TFI-sponsored movie night in nearby LaPorte (which I didn't attend) drew a large audience. And then it was Saturday, the big day.

The day began with our Meet The Bees! event at the barn. Thanks to our collective efforts, the in-house local goods market, beekeeping demonstration, kids' butterfly hunt, and movie screening seemed to go off, for the most part, without a hitch. After running around helping to get things set up before the event started, it seemed I didn't have too much to do during the event itself. This turned out to be lucky, since the freedom from pressing duty gave me the opportunity to be present for a meeting between Ed Noonan and Gary, who is a builder and jack-of-all-trades who works for himself and at Tryon, and who is working on and supervising the eco-pool project. Gary and his team are transforming an old cinderblock storage shed across from the barn into a natural swimming pool, preserving some elements of the original structure, and it was very valuable and informative to me to hear him and Ed discuss the various concerns and decisions which need to be made in undertaking this project. We also arranged for me to be apprenticed to Gary on the project, as a part of this crew, starting tomorrow. I'm very excited to learn what it takes to build, to get my hands dirty and to get some practical skills under my belt, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous, too. I'm sure I'll make a lot of mistakes at first, and I hope I can avoid discouragement and keep soldiering on. Stay tuned!

After the builders' meeting, I wandered through the ongoing Meet the Bees! event, trying to get as many photographs as possible. I'm no photographer, but thanks to the wonders of the digital age, I did manage to get a few passable shots. Here are a few of them:

 

A shot of the local goods market in the barn's Information Office, in full swing.

Beekeepers Colin Tennant-Brown and Suzanne Kraus show onlookers a comb from the hive during their demonstration.

Ed Noonan at the check-in table with TFI boardmember Marty Balogh, who helped coordinate Saturday evening's Pollinator Dinner.

Butterfly- and bug-hunters, big and small.

After all the pictured activities, documentary Queen of the Sun was screened in the barn's loft, to a respectably-sized crowd. A discussion followed the film. For me, this time and the later, post-event afternoon, provided some space to help in the clean-up, count the market's profits (a final number is still undetermined, but we did much better than expected), get in a little rest, and water the plants.

Around 5:30, I went over to the nearby Holy Macaroni Cafe with local organic farmer and (to her surprised discovery) Tryon volunteer Sacha to begin setting up the Pollinator Dinner. Set-up went very smoothly, and the guests began filing in after seven. I enjoyed a delicious plate of vegan fare sourced from local pollinators and friendly dinner conversation with keynote speaker Jennifer Hopwood and her husband Tim. Jennifer was there as a part of her work with the Xerces Society, an organization devoted to saving invertebrate species from extinction. Her speech was tailored to the issue of pollinator extinction, for the occasion, and like everyone in the audience, I found it very interesting and informative. We learned, among other things, that the recent and ongoing honeybee population collapses can be, to some degree, compensated for by individual efforts to encourage native pollinator populations.

 

Hopwood answering questions after the lecture.

All in all, it was a successful and rewarding National Pollinator Week festival. I look forward to my debut in construction this week--I'll keep you posted!

One of the Team!

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Dorian Gomberg, who is interning with Emergent Order.

Today was a REALLY awesome day at the office. I had been doing research on my own for a project about _______ (well, I can't yet say), and today was the first day I really got to work collaboratively on the project. Jason and I sat down for a few hours and tried to parse out and piece together a coherent structure for how the ideas (in the song, since it will be sung!) should take shape. It's supposed to be a debate between two different view points, but first we have to figure out exactly what those two viewpoints will be! I wish I could talk more in detail about the project, but what I really want to share with you is the thrill of the process. Working with Jason today felt very much like a Shimer class. It was intense and rigorous and sometimes we trailed off on tangents (interesting though they were). I had been craving collaboration for a over a week since everyone else in the office has been super busy wrapping up the last project, getting in those last final late-night edits and such. (It was cool, I got to go to the color correctionist's office and watch John, Josh, and the colorist Nick figure out exactly what tones and shade were appropriate were every shot. It's crazy how much detail goes into this stage of post production! For this piece, they wanted it to feel cold and hostile, so they gave the shots a bluish tint, but then had to adjust for the skin tones, so the actors lips didn't look purple and zombie-ish. It took two days, for a 5 minute piece!)

Last week I worked on my own song that I'll be directing a music video for in the next couple of weeks. I got a grant from the Moving Pictures Institute to do this video and John and the rest of Emergent Order are going to help oversee the process and have already offered awesome feedback on my song lyrics and ideas for the video! Working alone all week made me realize how much I thrive on input from others and how used to that I've gotten at Shimer.

Later in the afternoon, a writer came by the office to discuss ideas for another project (for such a small company, it sure seems like there are a lot of projects going on at once!) and John asked me and the other intern, Jose, if we would join the meeting. At first I was a little intimated, and expected that I would just be there to watch, listen, and learn quietly (as I have been doing a lot of). By the end of the evening it was just John, another collaborator, Max, and I talking about the vision, the aesthetic, and the message of the proposed piece, and I felt like one of the team! The bouncing back and forth of ideas was exciting and felt natural and I wanted to stay to do it longer though it was already late. It's nice because, like I said, I feel like I've been relatively quiet thus far in the office, a little intimidated by the awesomeness, but also focusing on listening and soaking it all in, but today I really felt like I got to show more of myself, my natural exuberance and whatnot in conversation and in working through ideas collaboratively.

It's funny, because whenever I mention to someone here that I have two years of school left, John kind of jokes (but also kind of seriously says) that he wants me to drop out of school and come work for them, but I think that through our creative sessions, I'm beginning to prove that what I've gained at my school at least, really is worth something! 

At my desk at the Emergent Order office in downtown Austin, Texas. (Austin is really cool, by the way).

Librarians as Social Workers

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Brad Krautwurst, who is interning with the Richmond Public Library in Virginia.

Well, it has been a long time coming, but I finally arrived in Richmond Wednesday night last week, Thursday morning I met various people I will be working with, and was allowed to go home to rest and finish unpacking before starting work Friday.  So far, I have done a few different things, with quite a few more tasks planned for the next few weeks.

Librarianship, from my experience working in the Shimer library and the few days that I have been working here in Richmond, seems to be more of a far-reaching job than many people, myself included, realize, requiring varied skillsets depending on if one is working in a public library in a city, like I am, a public library in a rural area, or in an academic library,  among others.  At this particular library, a large part of what is needed most is people to help with job searches.  I am working at the main branch of the library in a large city, and as one might expect in these turbulent economic times, many of the patrons who regularly make use of this branch's service are homeless, unemployed, or underemployed, and use the library's computers to search for jobs.

The problem that I am here to assist with is that many of these folks are older, have been at their job for 20 or 30 years before they were laid off, have never had a resume before, and lack basic computer skills to create one.  Essentially, what I have been doing is keeping an eye on the computers reserved for jobs to help anyone who needs it.  Sometimes that's been correcting spelling errors, and sometimes it's been teaching them how to copy their resume into a form, but it's all very much lived up to the conception of a librarian as a social worker that my boss talked to me about my very first day.  It boils down to libraries needing to evolve as e-books and other digital collections take over, and one of the ways librarians and library directors have found to adapt is for the library to become a community resource center, and more than simply a place to check out books.

I am supposed to be working with the City Records subset of the library much of this week, so I will write about that for next post.

A few edible incidents and some smoke

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

 This post is from Ed Vlcek, who is interning with The Chicago Honey Co-op.

"The principal things necessary for the life of men, are: water, fire, and iron, salt, milk, and bread of flour, and honey, and the cluster of the grape, and oil, and clothing." 

 Ecclesiasticus 39:31

       Every Thursday I have been going with my mentor to Marshall Metropolitan High School. They have a small, productive plot there with a hoop house, a chicken coop and 2 hives. The first time I went, we gave some students from, I think, their junior class a demonstration on beekeeping. We showed them some basic hive maintenance, including how to search for the queen and any unwanted new queens developing, as well as cleaning off any unneeded or awkwardly shaped comb. I also showed one kid how to operate the smoker.

        We use the smoker, a bellows and chamber for blowing smoke, to briefly dissipate the bees from the area we want to work and calm them down. We use any organic matter we can find to light the smoker, and it apparently works for two reasons. When bees smell smoke, they instinctively fill their bellies up with honey as a precaution if they were to have to leave the hive, possibly an adaptation to forest life and the regularity of forest fires. Secondly, the smoke masks the alarm pheromones they release when threatened. Playing with fire everyday, for those of us that love to do so, is one of the many extra benefits of beekeeping.

        Down the street from Marshall is Cristy Webber Landscapes, a local natural landscaping company, which has a green rooftop where Honey Co-op Bees are living. One day we went there to check on the hives. It was wonderful weather, and we enjoyed the panoramic view of the city and the silly sounds of the rooster who lives up there. The first thing we did was level out the hives and give them some racks of honey from last season for a general boost of energy. If you don't give them some help early in the season, and too much time is spent foraging, the hive may suffer. As we worked we found lots of drone larvae, which is a developing male bee. A worker at Cristy Webber and I decided, when told that these larvae were a delicacy in other places, that we had to try them. It wasn't bad, as far as larvae go - a sort of milky sweet, slightly acrid taste - but the “pop!” of the developing exoskeleton as I bit into the drone was a little too much to handle. I hear they are a lot better stir-fried.

        We also had a chance that day to taste some royal jelly, a secretion worker bees feed the queen larvae, and a bee product that sells for a lot of money at health food stores. The supposedly active component is Royalactin, which possibly sets off an epigenetic signal for the egg to become a queen rather than a worker. It tastes kind of like the larvae, but sweeter. It makes you feel like you are eating something you shouldn't, like some stolen magical potion.

        Somehow, in the midst of working, which often includes talking, Michael and I got onto my schooling and what I am doing with it. I told him more about Shimer, and my particular interests and aspirations. He surprised and delighted me when he said that he loved Theodor W. Adorno. The same worker I shared the larvae experience with, who is a biology major at Northeastern, joined the conversation as well, sharing his hopes for a more sane and ecological society. I am still perplexed and delighted by that day of eating bee larvae and talking about the Frankfurt School on a rooftop in Garfield Park.

        The most iconic and exciting recent workday involved me carting the hive boxes I refinished the week before on my bike trailer to City Hall, and installing them in the garden on the roof. Needless to say, this was by far the most beautiful setting we had worked in yet. In the middle of the Loop, a veritable Illinois prairie sits hidden away, with two thriving beehives. In fact, as we worked on the hive we were putting the new boxes on, we realized that they were already producing loads of honey! This is fine, early season honey, perhaps from the pollen of black locust trees or other earlier blooming flora. It had a light, rich but calm flavor. There is really nothing more exciting than taking a huge gulp of honey, right off the comb, on top of a massive building in the middle of downtown Chicago. The hard clean glass and old worn concrete of the city makes a wonderful, challenging contrast to the ordered chaos of the garden and the wandering bees. I don't have my own photos of this, but here is one that's way better than anything I could take anyway.

So now honey production is way up, and just yesterday we extracted the first batch of the season. The bees are busy, and so are we!

 

See What's Up on the Farm

Naomi Neal, Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, and Brad Krautwurst are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from KC Stresak, who is interning with Growing Power.

Hello again all. I thought this time I would shoot you some pictures, since much of my work I feel is all about activity. 

These gals are the Dynamic Trio of Growing Power. They are in charge of the sites and are teaching us everything we need to know about what it takes to be a farmer. On the left is Erika Allen. She is the head of the Chicago-based crew. I like to think of her as our ballet instructor. She can be pretty firm on the right and wrong way to farm, but really she's crafting us into beautiful farm dancers. Middle is Laurel. She is second in command and has worked with Growing Power for 10 years. I work with her most often and and constantly amazed with the stamina and patience this woman has. Laurilin is on the right. She has been with Growing Power for 5 years and is in charge of the Cabrini Green site at Chicago and Leraby, Growing Power's first Chicago site. 

Cadessia (below, top photo), Camilla (bottom left), and Terri (bottom right) are all workers at our Altgald Gardens site. Camilla, who is in charge of the site, is so excited about the project. I absolutely love seeing her face light up when a good crop comes in from Altgald or when she shows people around the site. Cadessia and Terri are so much fun to work with. We are always cracking up about something or another.

This is Jeremy. He was one of the first people I met at Growing Power. He does a lot with compost pick up from restaurants and other go to necessities when a truck is needed. He's a baller driver. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left is part of our Grant Park "Art on the Farm" project. Started in 2005, the vegetable garden incorporates aestheticism into its design that shows how practicality is beautiful. I work a lot at this site and am really starting to fall in love with it. 

Left is part of the greenhouse at the orignal Milwaukee site. January through June there is a workshop weekend every month during which the Chicago-based crew helps out. We also have the chance to take the workshop classes. Some of the classes include aquaponics, year-long growing, renewable energy, composting, bee-keeping, mushroom growing, and project planning. The workshop weekends, though tiring, are a lot of fun. I was forunate enough to attend two of them where I learned a lot about composting. I even started brainstorming potential businesses that would involve composting. 

That's all I have for photos right now. You can see I am surrounded by a colorful and thriving community that I am whole-heartedly invested in. I am excited to see what the summer has left in store for me! 

Summer Colors

    Hello! As a Shimer student who has been blogging for three years now, I like to imagine that I have some sort of following out in the real world (hi, mom!). It is this idea that allows me to believe that some of you are just dying to hear whether or not I have continued painting after the class ended.
    Fear not! I am a painter for life now. Amanda Cadogan, painting instructor extraordinaire, has converted me. Now, I have not gained too much skill or patience since you last saw my still life, but I am still going at the canvas with vigor.
    I have two projects going on simultaneously right now. Both are replications of famous paintings. One of them is tip-top secret as it is a present for a dear friend of mine, but the other I am very excited to share with you. A lot still needs to be done on it, but I have made good progress.
    The original painting is by Judith Leyster. She was a well-known, oft-commissioned Dutch painter in the early to mid-1600s. I wrote a research paper on her, and other famous classical female painters, towards the end of our Oil Painting class and fell in love with her painting The Proposition.
    My copy of it is really a detail, I have chosen to zoom in on the subjects and cut out the surrounding area, but my painting is actually several inches larger than hers.

    From the wikipedia article about Leyster, "She signed her works Judita Leystar, often as a monogram with her initials JL with a star attached. This was a play on words; "Lei-star" meant "Lead star" in Dutch, which was the common name for the North star used at the time by Dutch mariners. Leyster was particularly innovative in her domestic genre scenes. In them, she creates quiet scenes of women at home, which were not a popular theme in Holland until the 1650s."
    In my replication, I still need to finish both faces, give both of them fingers, and paint the gold coins in his right hand.
    The reason I found this painting so interesting was the subject matter. Leyster was pointing out that many men in her time were propositioning women who were not prostitutes for sex. Leyster depicts this woman as sitting in the light of the candle, holding a thread (possibly embroidering), and ignoring the man while he attempts to pay her. He is standing in shadow and laying a hand on her arm possessively as he leans in over her.  (Hopefully my painting is decent enough that these things are apparent.)
     The part I am most proud of is the woman's shirt. It is also the portion that I spent, by far, the longest on. It was also painted under Amanda's watchful eye. One day I really believe that I will be able to paint something beautiful without needing her to hold my brush.
    That's not for a while yet though. So, I will continue working on this, and my super secret painting, and all of you will be able to say "I knew her before she was famous." (Ha!)
    Until next time!