Memphis Democrat
February 25, 2008

Ted here again at Dancing Rabbit with all this week's news.

I have the fun of writing on my birthday today (February 25), when after two beautiful sunny days the weather is turning toward the cold and grey again. That suits me alright, since it matches the cold grey rain that accompanied my first entrance into the world. I guess it feels right. If the freezing rain holds off long enough, I'll spend some time pruning fruit trees out in the orchard this afternoon, which is something that has become a bit of a tradition for my birthday in the past few years. Still cold enough to prune the apples and pears, but close enough to warmer weather that we can follow soon after on the peaches. I'm banking on a fantastic fruit year this year, after last year's total bust. I know it is dangerous to make any assumptions, but I can't help it. On a walk yesterday in the warmish breeze with Sara and Aurelia, it was too easy to slip into anticipation mode...

This has been a week of birthdays, with Liat celebrating on Friday and Sara yesterday. With the abundance of late February birthdays, we took the opportunity for a collective party on Saturday night, setting up some gym mats covered with blankets and pillows and surrounded by couches where everybody could lounge about and chat by candlelight with snacks and drinks as music in the background provided some ambiance. I only lasted until 11:30, but I heard the music lasted much farther into the night.

The evening before, Liat organized another fun party for her birthday, where we pulled out lots of board games from the closet and spent several hours creatively recreating the silly pictures of people playing the games within usually found on the game box. Photo highlights of the efforts have already been sent around, I have to say I'm impressed.  Apparently the next step is to print them out and paste them onto the boxes so we're the ones playing the games in the pictures forevermore.

Going back in time another couple days, our newest resident Amy Radford and her two kids Sierra and Angela arrived Wednesday and spent the next couple days unloading their moving truck with a little help here and there from a number of other folks. Their two dogs and four cats, not having any ready space outside to live in, are spending a bit of time boarding at the kennel in Edina while Amy wrangles her extensive collection of reclaimed building materials into a shelter for the animals to live in. The three plan to live in a new tipi that arrived a few weeks ago, so as soon as the poles arrive, we'll have a tipi residence here again for the first time since 2001. The weather here is a little harsher than the Oklahoma they left behind, but they seem to be hardy folks, and I'm sure they'll be just fine. Of course, my standards have been reset a little now that Matt has spent all winter in a hammock under a tarp...

Wednesday night we also had a forum for Matt, who is applying for membership after a residence of not quite half a year. At one of our final retreat sessions last weekend, we talked a bit about population numbers for the coming year, and it seems likely that this is the year we'll breach the 50 person mark. It has taken a few years longer than the optimistic projections Dancing Rabbit members made 10 years ago or more, but it is moving steadily upward nonetheless. There are varying levels of comfort with the pace of growth, since we also still lack any surplus housing for new residents and members, but with at least three new building projects getting underway this coming season, and several others continuing, the infrastructure continues to expand, and it is an exciting time to be a Rabbit!

We welcomed Dan and Dave back from their respective trips this week, and also welcomed Tamar's friend Daniel for a visit on his way back to Vermont from adventures in Death Valley and other points west in his veggie oil-fueled truck.

Aurelia has been in the midst of an explosion of growth in learning to speak. Combined with her vocabulary of sign language, she has a surprising ability to get her meaning across and give us a window into her thoughts. Many of us find ourselves continually trying to catch up with her latest additions, but the rewards are great as well, including discovering that she knows a lot of the names of the people she sees around here every day. We've been working on getting "please" added into the vocabulary, since her "I want...!" has been more and more in use. It is wonderful to see her surrounded by so many examples of speech to learn from, and in general I'm loving being a dad these days.

As we head into another round of cold temperatures and mixed precipitation, I keep remarking to myself that this winter has set a new bar for wintery mix. Never quite enough abundance to warrant getting my skis out, but plenty for Thomas, Tamar, Liat and most of the kids to head across the road for a couple rounds of sledding with last week's new accumulations. With the melting between bouts of cold, our new pond has also nearly filled up now, and it has already been crisscrossed by numerous skate tracks. I'm looking forward to testing it out in another few months, and musing about rigging up a sail on one of the canoes or kayaks to indulge my love of sailing in a modest sort of way. Meanwhile, we'll hunker down with a load of firewood and maybe get around to seeding some onions in the greenhouse this week while the weather rages outside. Stay warm!

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