- [Announcer] Tonight on WPBS Weekly, Inside the Stories.

A sustainable community in Jefferson County continues to grow.

Come with us to Woodhenge and learn about local eco-friendly efforts.

And once a necessity, now a historic pastime.

One North Country photographer captures the process of ice harvesting on Raquette Lake.

Also, fiddler, Gretchen Koehler, fiddles with traditions in the most unique way.

Tune in to find out how.

Your stories, your region, coming up right now on WPBS Weekly, Inside the Stories.

(energetic music) - [Announcer] WPBS Weekly, Inside the Stories is brought to you by the Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center, Carthage Savings, the J.M.

McDonald Foundation, and the Badenhausen Legacy Fund at the Northern New York Community Foundation.

- Good evening everyone, and thanks so much for tuning in to WPBS Weekly, Inside the Stories.

I'm your host Stephfond Brunson.

In Jefferson County, a sustainable community continues to grow.

It's called Woodhenge, and this off-grid renewable energy community educates people on the importance of solar and wind energy as well as sustainable agriculture.

But that's just the beginning, take a look.

- Woodhenge is a sustainable community, an intentional community, you can give it a whole lot of titles, but it is where people live and where we like to build things together, grow things together.

We're not a commune, although we've been accused of that.

We're not a cult, we've been accused of that.

It's just a matter of I like to build things, including houses, and show people how to live without a mortgage, how to live without the power company, how to live without a grocery store.

If you take from a system, any system, a food system, and energy system, you need to put back into that system as much as you've taken out.

Otherwise, it's like a bank account that you keep taking money down until you go bankrupt.

You can view me as either a cheapskate or a granola-hugging tree-eater.

It really doesn't matter, the net result is the same, but my wife and I have both studied how the world lives in many different cultures, and discovered that the culture we are in is incredibly wasteful.

More than half the food that is produced is wasted, more than half the energy produced by power companies is wasted, and things like that bothered us.

We're both retired teachers, but as teachers we view this as part of our secondary and tertiary goals as teaching to teach the kids to look around them and stop wasting things, because, you know, I don't view sustainability in terms of years or decades, but millennia.

What are we leaving for the people a thousand years from now?

You know, what harm are we causing to the environment that's gonna cause our kids, our grandkids, our great grandkids, to suffer.

- [Announcer] Concerns about the environment and wasteful use of energy, coupled with a desire to recycle materials destined for landfills caused Jim and his wife to rethink how they wanted to live.

After purchasing property near Adams Center New York, Woodhenge was born.

Jim and his wife decided they wanted to build a house with minimal energy consumption, off the grid, and with recycled or repurposed materials, while still living comfortably, with amenities such as lights, internet, and television.

- The house is a postin beam construction.

We used beams from the Watertown Bowling Alley when they were tearing it down.

We purchased 10 of their 100-foot-long trusses.

And so I built the frame first out of those beams, and then the cordwood walls, it's also called stack wall construction, went in later.

We harvested 70 face cords of red pine from a local forest that had been stripped during the ice storms of the '90s.

The mortar, I experimented in school, and we came up with paper create.

Paper create is a mixture of paper pulp and cement products, so it's both insulative and relatively fireproof, you can take a torch against it.

The windows were recycled at a various local businesses.

The doors were built by me or my students It's on a crawlspace so I could get underneath to do the wiring and plumbing.

The house has a grass roof and you'll notice if we get rain today and you come back, it'll be 10 degrees cooler because the moisture evaporating off of the earth roof will cool the house down by about 10 degrees.

All but one of the buildings on this property are powered by the sun and the energy is stored in batteries.

These panels happen to be on a barter that I got, I traded batteries that I was given out of a fort drum junk pile.

The, for a guy who took these panels off his dad's house, these are kind of historic panels in that they went up on a house in the 19, late 1970s when the OPEC oil embargo was around.

And this guy's dad wanted to defeat it and then he thought they were no good.

We found out that the panels don't degrade over time as they predicted, these are producing easily 90% of their original output - [Announcer] A large part of Jim's sustainable living plan is self-reliance with a goal to produce most if not all of their own food.

Thus Woodhenge contains a large garden and an orchard with a variety of different trees.

- We like to grow a lot of our our own food and we've discovered that over the years, you determine what to plant based on what grew well.

So every area has its own microclimate.

We happen to be growing a lot of garlic in the garden but this is music, German hardneck garlic.

But we grow onions, beans, peas, all kinds of squashes, pumpkins, corn, beets, rutabaga, et cetera.

And the idea is you either root cellar them, dehydrate them, pressure can them, steam juice them or water bath can them or I have friends with freeze dryers and we freeze dry them.

There's a variety of apple trees, there's probably 40 different kinds of apple trees here.

And I tried to plant two of each so they'll come ripe at different times and we try to pick them when they're in season.

Some are good for pies, some are good for eating raw, some are good for applesauce, some are good for cider.

We have found for cider that the best cider is a mixture of every kind of apple you can get, it gives the best flavor.

This is one of our plum trees.

We have six different varieties and this particular year was a great year for plumbs.

You can see by the weight on the tree and the fact that we have several broken branches that we probably should have pruned a little bit more of this spring but I'm happy to see it.

These will come in and either be dried, juiced or turned into jam.

That's a good one.

- [Announcer] Jim offers a range of workshops and seminars on a variety of sustainable and self-reliance topics such as canning and preserving food, eating efficiently with wood, building alternative living structures and more.

He shares tips and techniques through his book.

- My book is called The High Art and Subtle Science of Scrounging.

And it deals with finding things for free or near free that would benefit you.

Food, clothing, cars, houses, land, entertainment, travel, fuel, they're all covered in there on how to find them for free or near free.

Sometimes people will even pay you to take the stuff away and thank you for taking it away.

- [Announcer] Jim's book is available by contacting him through his Facebook page.

- What kind of job do you really want?

Executive business coach Michelle Nadon has her clients create a wishlist of jobs they dream of having and she encourages them not to hold back.

Now she's encouraging you to do the same.

So if you're looking for meaningful work and feel stuck in the process, here are some tips that can help you get the job you've always dreamed of.

(upbeat music) - Figuring out your goals for your career is sometimes very daunting but I would argue that every last one of us really does have an idea of what it is that we wanna do.

It could be a really far-fetched idea and it could be a perfectly possible idea but we have those ideas.

And what I've found in my experience is a lot of people don't action the things that they wanna do because quite frankly they've been talked out of it by somebody else or they've been schooled or socialized not to go above and beyond what they perceive to be their position.

And I think that's inherently maladaptive, to be perfectly honest.

I think that it would behoove us all to get a lot more familiar with what we actually do want and go and pursue it.

Now sometimes you don't know what you want and this is where I make the distinction between having goals and creating a wishlist.

So when I have a client who's really struggling to figure out what they wanna do, my favorite question to ask them is okay, let's pretend I'm a really rich witch and I'm writing the check tomorrow morning.

What do you wanna do?

If you had all the money in the world, all the access are exactly what you needed to go and do what you wanted to do, What would that thing be?

And boom watch the answers come falling down.

Okay, so get comfortable with a wishlist, give yourself permission and get them onto an actual list, after that, executing on the list is easy.

The big chore is making the list.

So having a goals list is an unbelievable and probably the best start you could possibly make with your career.

But once you have your list what do you do with it?

Well here's what you do with it.

You go through the list item by item.

You just review it and you look at the item and you say okay, is this a short term, a long term or a medium term goal for me?

Right and you ask yourself a second question for each item on your list.

On a scale of one to 10 how do I feel about this?

Is this a 10?

Is it a 7.5?

Is it a five?

What's its actual weight?

The weight that you give a goal equals the priority it is to you, okay?

And then dividing them into short, mid and long term is not difficult but people struggle with timelines all the time.

Well what's short term?

What's midterm?

What's long term?

Well, you know, what it's whatever you decide it is.

Back in the day when I was coming up through my career, my short term would always be one or two years and my long term would be 20 years from now.

And I would have a whole pile of midterm things that I wanted to do in terms of professional development to get to my 20 year list, okay?

So now in my life I only have short and long term, I've got no more midterms anymore.

But when you break them into short, mid and long term, just think about what does that timeline look like for you?

Is short term six months?

Is it a year?

You decide.

Your instincts will actually tell you what works, what's midterm and what's long term.

So at the end of the day your goals list ends up in three different categories short, mid and long term and then you take your priorities, this one's a 10, this one's a nine, this one's an eight and you put them in descending order and then boom, you've got your list to work from and you can take those and you look at it once a week.

Every business week I do my planning on Monday mornings, I look at my goals list and I say, okay, what needs advancement in either my mid, my short, my mid or my long term?

And then I get them, I get those items into my actual calendar so that I can keep my goals moving forward on a really steady basis And, you know, when you get into the habit of that and it works like magic and you actually realize your goals, what more could you ask for?

- Expressing need is vitally important as we grow into adulthood.

Teaching our children how to share feelings early on can help them express those needs without hindrance.

Learn how one family does this with their young ones in this parenting minute.

(upbeat music) - My name is Doris.

My husband David and I, we have two children, Dalia and Daniel.

- Come on.

- Go for it.

Our hope for our children is that they are happy, confident, and caring so that they can thrive in school and in life.

(children shouting) When I became a mother, it was very important for my children to be able to name and express their feelings so that they can better deal with their emotions.

Remember these?

- Yes!

- When my children were very young, we started using picture books as tools to identify emotions within characters.

Sometimes I'll ask some questions to help them begin to identify their feelings for themselves.

I see a sad face.

Is that right?

If they can connect to their own feelings, then they can connect to others' feelings - [Daniel] They only had a little.

- [Doris] We make time daily to ask questions and practice listening.

- How was your day, daddy?

- Oh my day was amazing, Danny.

- [Doris] And I think it just really shows 'em how to be a good friend and the importance of thinking of others.

- Congratulations Dalia.

- [Doris] Tapping into feelings has helped my children with confidence and self-awareness.

At school they know how to manage feelings as they come up so that they can focus on learning.

- [David] All right, so have a good day in school, okay?

- Every February, Raquette Lake continues a century old tradition of ice harvesting.

During their annual ice harvest, community members use traditional equipment and machinery to cut and transport ice blocks.

Old Forge's photographer, Kurt Gardner, captured the event a few years back and shares this video essay.

(wind blowing) (upbeat music) The date of this year's Ice Harvest will be announced once the ice on Raquette Lake is deemed thick enough to cut.

While the art of ice harvesting happens in one area of the north country, the art of fiddling happens in another.

Gretchen Koehler of Canton shares her visual music compositions called Fiddling with Traditions.

You have to see it to appreciate it.

Here she is with pianist, Daniel Kelly, composing to the likes of artist Katherine LaPointe Vollmer.

- My name is Gretchen Koehler and I'm a traditional fiddle player.

(fiddle playing upbeat music) Fiddling with Traditions is a new suite of handcrafted fiddle tunes that were inspired by Northern New York folk artists.

The core of it is the interviews I had with these different artists and I actually wrote articles about them so you could meet them, see what their studio looks like, see how they create, see a bit about our conversation.

I also made music videos so that you could really see exactly what I was thinking when I was composing.

This next piece was inspired by Katherine LaPointe Vomer of Lionheart Graphics.

Katherine does pastel painting, which is like paint in chalk form and she does vintage travel posters.

So I thought it'd be really fun to take the audience on a trip from the Adirondacks to the Catskill Mountains and actually down to the Gunks which is one of her, these are all her travel posters.

When I was looking at her collection I'd been to so many of those places.

One of the other things that Katherine does is this pastel painting where she does plain air painting, where she sets up her easel out in nature and she needs to paint before the light changes.

And this moment was perfect for my jazz piano player, Daniel Kelly, So he whips out his musical easel and plays a jazz improv at the top of the mountain to show us the view at the top so it was quite fun to look at her posters and kind of put them into the piece.

The tune is called The Gunks.

(fiddle playing upbeat music) - That does it for us this Tuesday evening.

Join us next week for a fresh look inside the stories.

Next Tuesday is Valentine's Day.

We took to the streets to find out how well partners know each other.

How well do you know yours?

And New York Times bestselling author, Ellen Marie Wiseman, visits the studio to discuss her most recent book, the Lost Girls of Willowbrook.

Also WPBS goes inside the story of the overdose epidemic in teens.

Oswego County sounds off on how they're managing the crisis.

Meantime, we wanna tell your story.

If you or someone in your community has something meaningful, historic, inspirational or educational to share, please email us at WPBS Weekly at WPBSTV.org and let's share it with the region.

That's it for now everyone, we'll see you again next week.

Good night - [Announcer] WPBS Weekly, Inside the Stories is brought to you by the Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center, a free resource offering confidential business advice for those interested in starting or expanding their small business.

Serving Jefferson Lewis and Oswego Counties since 1986.

Online at watertown.nysbdc.org.

Carthage Savings has been here for generations.

Donating time and resources to this community, they're proud to support WPBS TV, online at carthagesavings.com.

Carthage Savings, mortgage solutions since 1888.

The JM McDonald Foundation and the Badenhausen Legacy Fund at the Northern New York Community Foundation.

(upbeat music)