Kana's Chronicles

Life in Kana-text (er… CONtext)

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author on her sailboat

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recent posts

Kana Smith holding one of her books
  1. Kana Smith's avatar

    what an apt description–I know that feeling too! Like thumbing the wheel of a lighter when there’s not enough fuel…

  2. dovalpage's avatar
  3. joannerambling's avatar
  4. Kana Smith's avatar

    I do enjoy each obsession as it’s upon me… But I will say that some of them are more USEFUL…

  5. just call me Sharon's avatar

Author: Kana Smith

  • Our Little Patch of Plantation

    The current buzz-word for this practice is Urban Homesteading, but “urban” doesn’t quite describe us. Our little place isn’t within the city limits of any town (and if it were, even Idaho’s capital city barely qualifies as “urban”)… Perhaps in our case we should call it “backyard homesteading,” or just plain “turning-a-regular-home-into-a-mini-farm.” Whatever you choose…

  • Budget Limbo: How LOW can we go?

    Yesterday we made the six-hour drive back home from my parents’ house, and we hope that Grandy and Boboo are recovering from the chaos of their week-long house-full of US! The kids immensely enjoyed their week, though of course it went by too quickly for them—sleeping in a tent in the backyard, roasting marshmallows for…

  • Rhubarb Leaves of Death: Family Mysteries Revealed

    When we arrived at my parents’ house Saturday evening, my mom had her old recipe of rhubarb cake ready for us. She used to grow rhubarb in our back yard when we were little, just along the walkway through the yard, and my sister and I both burst out with our remembered terrors regarding that…

  • Can’t Stand the Heatstroke: Getting Out of the Kitchen!

    When my sister and I were kids, we spent a good chunk of every summer with our grandparents in Colorado. We both remember fondly the traditions and rituals of those summers—the daily swimming lessons at their pool, the picnic pool-lunches (fingers coated orange by Cheetohs, and purple tongues from grape soda), the yellow slip-n-slide on…

  • A Tattooed Chicken-Farmer in Heat (Wait, that didn’t come out right…)

    Okay, okay: “A Tattooed Chicken-Farmer in THE Heat.” That’s what I meant. (Though our teenager, who has learned to approach our door warily if he arrives home unexpectedly, might vote for the original…) Point is, it’s HOT in high-desert Idaho in the summer. Too hot to think. Too hot to remember all the, um… the…

  • “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens…” (Part 1)

    Well, after tackling the political angle of backyard chickens and mustering our (mostly free) resources, we finally got our start on building the chicken house…  Or, to use the Hawai’ian handle, the Hale Moa (HAH-lay MO-wah). We got through the framing today, so here’s our chicken-house-building (part one)—mostly in pictures, because I’m saving up most of…

  • His Worst Week, His Best Week. Same Week.

    Life has its ups and downs—true for all of us. But magnify those altitude-adjustments by whatever mysterious hormonal algorithm determines teenage moods, and we’re talking about emotional topography to rival Idaho’s Sawtooth mountains. Having said that, though, teenagers’ experience of life isn’t any less real for the fact that they’re hormonal or young. And sometimes…