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day 3683: odin doesn’t know it but he’s learning lessons from The Cosmos Organicos Garden Collective.

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day3638 - odin doesn't know it but he's learning lessons from The Cosmos Organicos Garden Collective. I.

over the years odin has learned a lot of things in the employee garden we tend at organic valley. we’ve been kite flying and planting and hoeing and weeding since he was barely old enough to push a wheelbarrow and it’s neat to know he thinks it’s normal that people grow food where they work and lots of folks we work with care about where there food comes from.

and now, since we joined The Cosmos Organicos Garden Collective, he gets to see how great it is when a group of people get together to share in the effort.

holy cow we have a whole lotta of food! the plot is on the right and goes all the way back to where the guy is watering in the background. and we’ve started take over another plot across the path that he’s watering in photo.

and i have to say another fun part of the story of The Cosmos Organicos Garden Collective is the nice man in the background is our vice president of sales, eric newman and the woman in front is theresa marquez our chief mission executive ( so now i don’t have steal theresa’s green beans because they’re our green beens 🙂 ). i don’t know about you but other companies i’ve worked for the “c-suite” executives didn’t hang out with employees and certainly didn’t get their hands dirty in the garden!

day3638 - odin doesn't know it but he's learning lessons from The Cosmos Organicos Garden Collective. II.

odin doesn’t know it yet, but he’s also learning that working at organic valley really is quite different than many other companies in a lot of ways.

who knows maybe someday he’ll have his own employee plot and join the garden collective.

day3638 - odin doesn't know it but he's learning lessons from The Cosmos Organicos Garden Collective. III.

side note, i can’t even begin to describe how gorgeous a day it was in the rolling hills of the driftless region.

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day 3673: odin tests out The Five Minute Smoke Tube and you won’t believe what happens next.

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day 3673 - odin tests out The Five Minute Smoke Tube and you won't believe what happens next. I.

i bought some fireworks on blowout deal after the fourth of july at one of those crazy michigan fireworks stores and threw some five minute smoke tubes into the mix because odin likes smoke bombs and we’ve been experimenting with our own recipes that we light off in a custom smoke bomb metal tube we had fabricated locally. first thing we learned was that if you light a smoke tube in a metal tube it acts more like a rocket launcher! yikes! don’t do that.

it smoked for a few seconds then, “PHOOOOOOOOOOOF” it blasted out of the metal tube and left a fiery bit of its insides behind.

day 3673 - odin tests out The Five Minute Smoke Tube and you won't believe what happens next. II.

i looked across the street and our neighbors were trying to figure out what the heck we were doing.

“oh we’re ok! just playing with smoke bombs!” i think they are somewhat used to this kind of behavior after 8 years.

day 3673 - odin tests out The Five Minute Smoke Tube and you won't believe what happens next. III.

the second one we lit in a metal tin. odin got out of dodge quickly. about 30 seconds after we lit it i realized it was blowing into our next door neighbors window and open door so i had to scramble to move it quickly to a different spot. d’oh!

day 3673 - odin tests out The Five Minute Smoke Tube and you won't believe what happens next. IV.

after about a minute we realized that it was going to put out a serious amount of smoke. they’re not joking around in the product description, “This item puts out a large volume of white smoke for five minutes! Super dense and long lasting smoke item!”

i started to get worried we were going to smoke out the entire block and someone not knowing what was going on would call the fire department.

you can see kris is attempting to brush frida in the background. she is not amused. double d’oh!

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day 3669: rolling down the (kickapoo) river!

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day 3669: rolling down the (kickapoo) river! I.

the kickapoo river is a 126-mile-long twisty turny tributary of the wisconsin river and gets its name from an algonquian word meaning “one who goes here, then there”. rolling down the river the low and slow river is one of the many highlights of the driftless region. because the region didn’t get razed flat by the advancing glaciers then dumped with drift they receded the river offers some spectacular views.

and it’s all the more fun when you roll down the river when family are visiting.

day 3669: rolling down the (kickapoo) river! II.

between intentionally goofing around and actually accidentally running into each there was a lot of contact on the river. i’m surprised one of them didn’t dump it. nope, that honor went to their mothers 🙂

day 3669: rolling down the (kickapoo) river! III.

it was absolutely gorgeous day. sunny, light breeze, warm but not hot and no bugs!

day 3669: rolling down the (kickapoo) river! IV.

day 3669: rolling down the (kickapoo) river! V.

the ancient geography throws off a serious Enchanted Land where Faeries might Play vibe.

day 3669: rolling down the (kickapoo) river! VI.

this here is what is known locally as river beer. i think not so much because it tastes like a river but because if you take a spill it’s not the end of the world if you lose a few in the river. but we don’t do that, leave no beer behind is my motto.

day 3669: rolling down the (kickapoo) river! VIII.

on the ride back from the landing in a packed bus of merry ( and tipsy ) river goers, odin notices the sign on the bus has the same number for the half a dozen services on emergency services sign. he thinks someone was trying to make an joke that he doesn’t get. i tell him there was a day when 911 didn’t exist and you had to call a different number for all the different services and the numbers were different from town to town. he gave me the man-the-olden-days-were-crazy look.

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day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig!

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day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! I.

a little over a year ago i thought about getting into kite aerial photography with odin and almost exactly a year ago we beta tested the rig and took frida goes for her first ride in the galaxie 500 in search of the wind. and then we waited. and waited. and waited for a non-stormy windy day when we had the time to fly a kite. turns out that combination of conditions is a rarity! and i started to believe that waiting for the wind was the wrong strategy and we needed to start thinking about heading to windy places.

so we planned ahead and brought the gear on vacation in the upper peninsula of michigan where odds are good we’d find a good breeze coming off lake michigan.

sure enough, just a few hundred feet from where odin and his cousin flew kites for the very first time almost exactly 8 years to the day, we launched the rig into the air.

but first, we tested without the camera attached to see if the breeze seemed strong enough. sure seemed so!

the kite was up for about 10 minutes and took 40 shots and i we got 1 that was perfectly aligned when shooting every 15 seconds. i’m sure there’s probably some sort of optimum to be found between decreasing the time between shots ( and reducing the battery life ) and just leaving the kite up longer.

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! II.

we mounted the canon sd450 running the canon hack development kit onto the kit and using the super simple intervalometer that comes with the stock kit set the camera to take a picture every 15 seconds. i was hoping we’d get into the frame on take off. odin’s feet did 🙂

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! III.

the results turned out awesome! it doesn’t have any fancy stabilization sytem and it was really windy so odds are low that at any given moment the camera is going to be perfectly aligned with the horizon. i think in the future i’ll set the time between shots to a shorter duration to increase the chances if getting aligned with the horizon.

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! IV.

at this point the kite was maybe a 150 feet up with the camera swaying around around 20 feet below. odin and i started thinking how cool it would be to get a much longer line and a reel to make it easier to get the kite higher up and down faster ( yes, that’s foreshadowing ).

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! V.

the kite was up for about 10 minutes and took 40 shots and i we got 1 that was perfectly aligned when shooting every 15 seconds. i’m sure there’s probably some sort of optimum to be found between decreasing the time between shots ( and reducing the battery life ) and just leaving the kite up longer.

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! VI.

it took a lot of effort in the stiff breeze to bring the kite down with the awkward “reel” that came with the kite. we though surely grandpa must have a old fishing reel! we raced back to the house and of course he did. so we hooked up the kite to the fishing line and went back to the beach.

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! VII.

we tried to let the kite out slowly with the reel but the winds were soooooo strong it just went zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz all out at once – the entire 300 feet or so of line. i thought the reel was going to catch on fire!

day 3649: finally flying the kite aerial photography rig! VIII.

and much to our surprise we couldn’t reel it back in as there was too much drag on the line.

what to do?! i thought i could run the line under a picnic table and keep walking backwards until i pulled the kite down. i got about 10 feet before the line snapped and the kite went sailing away out of sight. at that point we were both very happy we decided to test it without the camera attached.

it took about 30 minutes of wandering through people’s back yards before we found the kite. it had floated about 4 blocks away and thankfully landed in in some trees without the fishing line getting tangled in powerlines.

a very nice lady helped us get it out of the tree by giving us a length of gutter that was just long enough to knock it down. i think she really enjoyed hearing about our adventure as we pulled down the kite and yanked the hundreds of feet of line that draped over her house and across the street into the next block.

odin commented that the kite aerial photography rig was a 110% success but maybe we needed to do a little more work on building a better reel. i couldn’t agree more! i thinnk there might be a outdoor kite line reel winder with lock in our future, but what to do until then? surely we must be able to build something from stuff lying around.

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day 3505: hanging out with the cosmos organicos garden collective contemplating probabilities.

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day 3505: hanging out with the cosmos organicos garden collective contemplating probabilities. I.

exactly one year after the fire at the organic valley headquarters, we re-opened the rebuilt section of the building. hurray! and a few days after that cosmos organicos garden collective was in the garden preparing beds and planting. it’s great to get out and get your hands dirty and even more so when you’re doing it in the “shadow” of a rebuilt headquarters ( big shout-out to everyone who made it happen )!

day 3505: hanging out with the cosmos organicos garden collective contemplating probabilities. II.

working in the healthy organic soil you find lots of friends like this toad and many, many earthworms.

day 3505: hanging out with the cosmos organicos garden collective contemplating probabilities. III.

and even more fun – one of the collective found a four leaf clover! which got me to wondering what are the odds? turns out, it’s about 1 in 10,000 clovers which is a square of 100×100 clovers. assuming there are about 4 clovers in an inch, that’s a square of 33″x33″ or almost 3’x3′. so in every 3 foot square you should find a 4 leaf clover. that sounds relatively trivial, but the way my eyes work, i’ll never find the four leaf clover. they all look the same. the odds of me actually finding a 4 leaf clover in a 3 foot patch are small.

day 3505: hanging out with the cosmos organicos garden collective contemplating probabilities. IV.

odin helped out in the garden which is always fun and reminded me of just how many years he’s been toiling away in our garden plot, since well before the formation of the collective! in fact, i think that yellow wheel barrow is the same from the photos taken five years ago. it’s amazing how time flies.

day 3505: hanging out with the cosmos organicos garden collective contemplating probabilities. V.

work break! don’t tell The Suits odin was running around on the roof of the tool shed. haha. just kidding. there are no suits.

day 3505: hanging out with the cosmos organicos garden collective contemplating probabilities. VI.

amazingly enough, just a bit after finding a a four leaf clover the same person found a five leaf clover! this hurts my brain a bit. the odds of finding it are about 1 in 1,000,000 clovers which is a square of about 1,000×1,000 clovers which is about 333″x333″ or 27’x27′. so that’s a manageable amount of search space but still, IT’S A MILLION CLOVERS! i mean, the actual odds of me picking put a 5 leaf clover out of a million clovers is nill. nada. zip. and yet i’m working side by side with someone who can do it like it’s a parlor trick.

i asked him how he does it.

“i dunno, the irregularity sticks out.”

so we’ve got a four and five leaf clover finding savant in the collective. my question is what are the odds of finding a 4 leaf clover and then a 5 leaf clover? it feels like a similar calculating the odds of rolling two successive yahtzees in two rolls but how do you factor in the visual heuristic?