The Whirlwind Week

The past week has been quite full and varied, so instead of trying to sum it up too much in words, we’ll tell it in pictures (with a little captioning).

Saturday was perhaps the fullest, starting with the Waverly (vol.) Fire Department’s pancake breakfast. We got there right at 6:30am to avoid the rush, and make sure we got our fair share of the fried rinderwurst patties (mmmm!).

Andy and I got a reprieve from picking corn Saturday morning, so we could run the Waverly

Light and Power's Best Dam 5k (get it?). Andy went ahead and won his age group, and beat most of the high school cross country team that ran the race as well.

We then had a big (early) Thanksgiving dinner at my dad’s for lunch - with the Drape extended family all together. After cleaning up, Chrissie and I headed out for Solon, IA (about two hours away) and Anne Davies’ (New School teacher) wedding.

Sunday’s big event was Grandma Weidler’s 97th birthday party following church (photos thanks to Matt, self-appointed chief photographer of the event). My Grandma Weidler (mom's mom) is the twin on the left in the pictures. My Grandma Edna (dad's mom, turning 97 in January) is the one standing in the picture of three grandmas (and almost 300 years of wisdom!).

We had a great time with my brother and his family (Doug, Kim, Zach and Mara) while they were here – so much so that when they tried to fly out on Monday, it didn’t work, so we went back and got them, and they stayed one more day. Yesterday they tried to leave again, and it worked.

Andy’s cross-country season ended yesterday with the conference meet. Since he’s a home-schooled kid, he has been able to run officially in these meets (funny). He went ahead and got 6th overall, and 1st for his school, at yesterday’s meet (more funny).

Matt finished up his school stint last week, and will add his own blog entry with details on his time in class.

We also took in the Fall Waverly Draft Horse Sale. Some amazing horses there. We went to the main auction for a bit one day - the first horse sold for $800… the fourth for $26,000. We didn’t buy anything (sorry Grandpa Roger).

Yesterday, we took a little stroll across the Wartburg College campus (my mom's, and Uncle David's, alma mater), just down the road from where my dad lives.

So there you have a bit of the update. A week left, and lots of corn to go. It’s finally turning to fall weather here, so I actually get to wear the coat I brought, and don’t have to keep working in the one pair of work shorts I have. Don't forget to tune back in soon for Matt's version of his 4th grade experience.

an important clarification

We realized yesterday, after our kernels musings, that we need to clarify about this corn we are harvesting. This is not sweet corn. This is "feed" corn (also sometimes referred to as "field" corn), corn that will end up (depending on your view) satisfying many cattle, in order to satisfy many beef-eaters. The vast majority of cattle in the US have corn as a significant part of their diet (though there is a growing movement to head back to "grass" fed cattle, but that is another story).

A little more on the mechanics of how this all works. Sweet corn you harvest when the stalks are still nice and green, and in a perfect world you eat that corn as quickly as you can after you have picked it (it's sugars start turning to starch as soon as you pick it... so the closer you are to picking time, the sweeter it is). With feed corn, one wants the corn to dry out (better for storage), so you don't harvest the corn until the stalks have died and dried, and the moisture content of the corn drops below 20%. You really want the moisture content to get to ~14% for storage, but you can't always wait for that to happen in the field (snow can sometimes come early, and you don't want to have to wait until spring to harvest :) ), so when we haul it out of here (actually, the Figenbaums haul it out of here), it goes to Tripoli (pronounced "truh-POH-lah") where it is stored and dried. Once dried, it is either sold from there, or some might come back out to the farm and Drape grain bins to be stored until sold (at this point, I can't begin to explain the process around the sale of corn (or beans), so you'll have to wait on that). Corn that comes out of the field in the neighborhood of 15% moisture content, can be put directly into grain bins at the farm.

I'm sure if my Uncle Dave is still reading our blog, he'll let me know if the city-boy has any egregious errors in his attempt to sound informed about corn here.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

1. How are you able to take a year off?
This trip has been in the works for about 5 years, although we’ve talked about traveling as a family since before our kids were born. After ten years as a high school teacher, Chris became an administrator in 2002. At that time two things happened – he got a significant pay increase, and he lost his summers off. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be an administrator forever, and we were all heart-broken about the end of family summers. So we vowed to save his pay increase, and planned to take a year off at some point in the future. While we didn’t save as much as we thought we might be able to (does anyone ever?!), we did save a significant amount over these five years.

We’ve always called this year our “sabbatical”. About a year ago we made passing reference to the sabbatical. Andy, who was just about to start middle school, asked when this was going to happen. He put in a request that he not miss sixth grade (first year of middle school), and not miss eighth grade (big year!). So he spoke it into being, and here we are, with Andy in 7th grade and Matt in 4th.

Chris is on a leave of absence from the school district, and while he was replaced as Principal of The New School, he is promised a position when we return. He is fully committed to being an educator in South Seattle, but what form that takes remains to be seen. Chrissie is also on leave from both Rainier Scholars, and Emerald City Bible Fellowship (our home church), and is able to return to both positions when we return. (Thank you Bob and Shawn!)

In other details, our house is rented to Pete, Kit, Cade, and Jack from The New School, Stephanie remains in the basement apartment, brother Doug is keeping our truck, and the worldly possessions we didn’t take with us are boxed away in our attic. [Thought: If everything we need for a year can fit in our car, what the heck is all the stuff in the attic?!]


2. How did you decide where to go?
We started by making a list of all the people we know in the world. This list has changed since we first made it two or so years ago. People have moved back to the US, or changed countries, and we’ve made some new friends. We connected [most of] the dots, and bought plane tickets. The beauty of going places where we know people is that we have personal connections to those places. It is much more difficult to travel totally on our own to places we’ve never been and don’t know much about. Besides, pulling out a world map and trying to decide where to go without some sort of plan or purpose is completely overwhelming.

We purchased Round-The-World tickets through the Star Alliance, which is the network that United Airlines is a part of. Check out their RTW Mileage Calculator sometime at http://www.staralliance.com/. Even if you don’t go anywhere, it’s really fun to play with! We were allowed 39,000 miles for our trip, and we are using 38,944!


3. What are you doing about school?
We are officially registered as homeschoolers with the state of Washington. Ask us sometime about our experience trying to get some help from the Home School Resource Center in Seattle – it wasn’t pretty!

The boys will attend “real” school here and there, as they can. Matt is attending Carey School in Waverly, Iowa for a week or two. Both boys will attend school in South Africa for a few weeks in November. But mostly, they are enrolled full time at the Drape Academy. (Chris is principal and teacher, Chrissie is lunch lady, counselor, and classroom volunteer.)

MATH: The boys have math workbooks. Andy is doing the workbooks he would be doing at Aki Kurose as a 7th grader. The District has all their math curriculum available on their website, which was a big help. He has about 8 workbooks to get through this year. Matt is using Singapore math, which we heard about on NPR once. He’s starting with 3B, which is a review of 3rd grade math, plus a few things he hasn’t learned yet. He will work his way through 4A and 4B this year. Andy is in charge of calculating the mileage for our road trips, and we’re all working on the family budget.

READING: Lucky for us, both boys are avid readers. We are actually a little concerned about how we’ll keep them in books while we are traveling overseas. Before we left Seattle, we read lots of books about the countries we are visiting. You can look up books on the SPL website, and search the Children and Young Adult sections by typing in country names in the subject field.

WRITING: The family is having journal-writing time most every night. Sometimes we just write about anything that comes to mind, and sometimes we have a topic or writing prompt. Theoretically, we hope to turn some of our journals into blog entries, or more formal writings. Maybe in the spring?

SOCIAL STUDIES: We read quite a bit about Native Americans while we were traveling to and from Yellowstone. The Nez Perce traveled through Yellowstone on their flight toward Canada. We read a few chapters from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and then watched the new HBO movie by the same name when we got to Iowa. We have read quite a bit of historical fiction about countries we are traveling to, especially South Africa and Cambodia. Our theme for the year is Justice. (For anyone who has taken a US History class from Mr. Drape, you will know the African proverb: Until lions have their own historians, hunters will always be glorified.)

SCIENCE: We studied “thermal features” in Yellowstone. Now we are into farming in Iowa. Matt wants to do a science experiment to see what effect drinking real Coke would have on him. We’ll see about that!

PE: Hiking in Yellowstone, Frisbee anywhere, basketball in Grandpa’s driveway, soccer anywhere, picking up rocks at the farm. What isn’t PE?


4. How do you know what to pack?
Many thanks to several travel books for help on this. (See our reading list!) One book suggested you pack a nanny, and another book suggested that you don’t really need to pack a change of clothes. So we’re aiming for somewhere in the middle. We all have travel backpacks, and that’s all we’re taking. It’s basically a suitcase that you can strap on your back. Lord willing, the piles of things we plan to take will actually fit into the packs. We hope to be able to send some things home too, so we don’t have to haul our souvenirs and gifts all over the world. And yes, we will be very tired of the few shirts we’ve packed by the time we get home. We’ll post some pictures when we are ready to leave the country!


5. Where did the rubber chicken come from?
A teacher at The New School, Libby Sinclair, gave it to Chris as a going away gift last spring. (Thanks, Libby!) We thought it was an excellent gift, and it folds up into a nice little ball, so we decided to take it along with us. Andy has always had a thing about chickens, Grandma Fran has quite a family of chickens (“the girls”), and we have an unintentional chicken theme in our kitchen at home. So it fits, both thematically, and physically.


Feel free to submit a question. We’ll do our best to answer. [Hit the “comment” button at the end of this post.]

Kernels of Corn

Yesterday my Dad gave Matt and me the assignment to figure out how many kernels of corn there are left to harvest. The answer was ~6,960,000,000 kernels of corn are left to harvest! The way we figured it out, was first that we had 400 acres of corn left to harvest. Then we multiplied that by 200 bushels per acre so that we would know how many bushels we had left to harvest. The answer was 80,000 bushels left to harvest. Then we multiplied 80,000 bushels by 60 pounds per bushel. We got 4,800,000 pounds of corn left to harvest. We then had to figure out how many kernels are in a pound. We counted for a very long time. The answer we came up with was 1,450 kernels per pound. To figure out how many kernels we had left to harvest, we then multiplied 4,800,000 pounds left to harvest, by 1,450 kernels per pound. We have 6,960,000,000 kernels left to harvest.

This morning, my Dad gave me a new problem. I was supposed to find out how many kernels we have already harvested. We have harvested 150 acres of corn. 150 acres times 200 bushels per acre = 30,000 bushels harvested. 30,000 bushels of corn harvested times 60 pounds per bushel = 1,800,000 pounds of corn harvested. Next, 1,800,000 pounds of corn harvested times 1,450 kernels per pound. ~2,610,000,000 kernels of corn have been harvested.

My Dad then told me to find out how many kernels will be harvested. I added together ~2,610,000,000 kernels harvested + ~6,960,000,000 kernels to be harvested = ~9,570,000,000 kernels of corn will be harvested total.

P.S. These are approximate (~) numbers. Depending on the size of the kernels, a total number of kernels per pound can be larger than 1,450, or smaller than 1,450. You also get anywhere around 200 bushels per acre. The number of acres done, and to be done are also appr. numbers. Matt and I did the best we could.

-Andrew

halfway...

Sunrise at Grandpa Gene's, over the Cedar River

We’re at the midpoint of our Iowa time, and having a grand one at that. This past week has been corn, corn, corn: we hauled away appr. 420,000 lbs of it Thursday, and there is much more to go, about 400 acres of it left. If you figure a hopeful 200 bushels of corn per acre @ 60 lbs per bushel, I believe that means we have about 5 million pounds of corn to go yet. We’ll let Andy and Matt do the math on that to figure out just how many kernels of corn that is. Harvesting corn is more intense than beans – things are moving more quickly (perhaps more on that later), and with that Chrissie stepped into Grandma Edna’s role here at my dad’s place (he has a small farm about 13 miles away from the “home place”) – bringing sandwiches to us during combining/hauling, so that we don’t have to come in from the field. She’s so nice.

This Monday morning will be a little mellow – a respite from the fieldwork as we had a good thunderstorm last night and the ground is too wet to work this morning. We’ll do a little catching up on Drape Academy and overseas trip planning, and may make a run into the big city of Waterloo. After lunch, we’ll probably be back at it in the corn.

This week will be an eventful one:
-My brother’s family (Doug, Kim, Zach and Mara) will be joining us all here on Tuesday for the week
-It’s the big annual Waverly Horse Show/Auction, when the size of the town will double as folks come from all over the world to buy and sell (I’m not exaggerating)
-Don’t forget corn, corn, corn
-Andy has a cross-country meet (funny… see below)
-Matt has more school (more funny… see below)
-We’re having an early Thanksgiving with my dad’s side of the family on Saturday
-Chrissie and I plan to go to a wedding (Anne Davies, New School teacher) a couple of hours away from here Saturday evening
-We have the big celebration of Grandma Weidler (born Bertha Afra Baumgartner) and her twin sister Lena turning 97 this coming Sunday
AND
…corn, corn, corn.

So, the funny things on Andy and Matt - We’ve been able to find adventures for them within our larger adventure here. A number of people at my dad’s church teach at one of the local elementary schools. My dad was talking to one, who happens to teach fourth grade (Matt’s grade) a few weeks before we came, and she said she would love to have Matt join their class for a bit. That has all worked out, and Matt is loving hanging out with Mrs. Egli's fourth graders at Margaretta Carey Elementary School in Waverly, Iowa (http://www.waverly-shellrock.k12.ia.us/carey/). Matt, on his second first-day-of-school

On the Andy front, junior high does not present the same classroom connection as elementary, but I did write to the cross country coach, who very graciously and enthusiastically has let Andy join in on the fun. He even wants Andy to run (unofficially, of course) at their cross-country meet tomorrow in Manchester, which, as you can imagine, has Andy sky-high excited. It’s been great to craft some individual experiences for them here that are not just chasing after the big boys on their large working toys (although we are certainly doing a proper amount of that, as you have seen). We’re excited to continue to find ways for Andy and Matt to dig in on this adventure in their own ways that can help not only broaden their experience and understanding of where we are, but Chrissie’s and mine as well.

On the front of finding little adventures within this larger adventure we’re on, Chrissie and Matt cruised over to Chicago (about 5 hours away…) this weekend. Chrissie’s dear high school friend, Brenda Nelson, lives there with her son Noah (a year older than Matt). They had a great time, and it allowed a little family separation that made us miss each other (they were gone all of 36 hours) – so far we aren’t tired of each other, which is good. (Do you hear that, Carmen?!)

So, there you have a bit of week two, and looking ahead to week three here in Iowa. We do miss our Seattle friends and family greatly. We love getting the updates that we do from you. (HINT: Please write!) We’re busy enough that we don’t always notice the missing, but it certainly creeps in around the edges. It’s a blessing to have such connections with you all. We notice we are not complete apart from those relationships. The beauty of this trip is that it is our chance to connect with those we miss when we are in Seattle!