Hash Brown Hail Mary

I'm still zombie-fied after getting off the hamster wheel...
Oh man, what was I thinking?  On my day off, I am torn as to which items to knock off the To Do list.
That same To Do list also has "relax in bed to rest the bum knees" and "spend time with hubby."

So, when possible, I do sleep in.

There's a time to zoom and a time to collapse.  Or maybe I should learn to pace myself??
I've been so chock full of work hours away from home these last few months that my progress with my herbal school assignments has slowed to a crawl, though the materials get read and re-read repeatedly and with relish.  I'm easing into a different mindset with that because it's one thing I did just for myself.  I saved for the tuition for a long time, bought the materials and then some, and it's designed to be self-paced.  It would appear my pace is slower than some, but I'm determined to EXPERIENCE this learning in a more natural way than my previous traditional academic classes, which were more one-dimensional.

In a time when I thought I'd surely be rooting for the home team to keep pushing pushing pushing to the final goal, I lost sight of the fact that part of my goal always is to be in the moment.  So we WILL keep taking the right steps as we ask for God's blessing on these plans, and trust He will correct the direction of things as we go.  I ALSO will do things (well, some things) more slowly in order to not miss these days.  These days of being together in this and loving each other, and learning, and being IN this.

Well...didn't mean to go on about that.

Some Perspective
The forced bedrest prior to returning to work made me examine where I need to do better, and also allowed other areas to settle to their more realistic places.  And allowed my expectations to get un-stuck from Hyper Proceed-Forward mode.  Phew.  And it will disappoint some people.  I am not naturally a people pleaser in some areas, but in the area of my work ethic at a job, I'm nearly a hyper-pleaser.  This has had to stop.  I have had to stand up for myself, because ultimately I answer to myself and to God.  I'm an independent contractor and I pay self-employment tax, which is no picnic, so I'm taking back the management of my work life and my boundaries.  There have been too many times I've let my niceness be taken advantage of, and my relaxed attitude about payment be taken advantage of, as well.  I do love to help people.  But I need to draw boundaries in those areas so I am not a pushover, and preserving my high standards not just at work but to have time at home and with Jack.  And others don't have to like it.  I can't please everyone all the time.

Whoa, Nelly!
I'm allowing myself to slow down.  To rest, not have to think about anything in particular all the time, not have to be "on" all the hours of the day.  I didn't realize how much caregiving requires, but I think the being "on" (meaning being the buffer, the equalizer/mood lifter/need-meeter) for long stretches needs the converse time of being "off."  I thank the Jewish holy days for their interruption of the rat race, and the compassionate command to REST on certain days.  Passover was such a one this year.  We ran right up to its beginning with life, life, life and all its little and big emergencies and I barely got the leaven out of the house in time, cooked up some goodies for the Seder.  When that "enforced" rest comes, of not doing any career-related work for a sacred span of time....well, it's just NICE.  And it's a gift from God.


I heart the Jewish holy days.
I simply loved Passover this year.  It was spent with wonderful friends who are like family, and also with our faraway friends and family we miss very much with us in spirit and thought as we sat down together to recount the Exodus story, have fun, and REST.  I needed it and it happened again.  As it does every year.  And it reminded me of where my heart lies, the priorities that are precious to me, the fact all these THINGS we DO are FOR just this...this family/these friends, this time, this memory of deliverances, the reality that we live in a time where God creates spaces to remind us to never stop hoping, and loving Him.  Regaining my gratefulness, and getting to breathe.

Passover pushed my Reset button.  I was burning out.  The only solution is to keep on persevering, but I cut my work hours back by half a day to have more time with my husband and one day a week our schedules correspond to give us a full day together to work to prepare the Farm. (yay!!!!!)

What's with the hash browns?
I just looked at the title of this post.  I just tried making hash browns, and I did everything wrong, so the lumpy heap of shredded potato mush was wrung of its excess oil and put into the soup pot instead.  So in this house, if at first you don't succeed, you become soup! The has brown second incarnation was much better than its first!

Back to the Budget
I'm all over the place in this post today...my apologies!  I'm resetting my mind to keep the grocery budget to a minimum and to stop eating out.  Everyone can have their conscientious platform for this reason and that reason about the ills of fast foods, storebought, so on and so forth.  I know where I stand on all those, and I know what I can do right now.  What I can do right now is make more at home and make better food cheaper.

So I have to make my own "fast food" more at home.

Soup's On...Again
My reset begins with the bags of frozen veggies I found when cleaning out the freezers for Passover.  They were looking a little peaked but were not freezer burned, and I simply hate waste.  The ones looking worse for the wear went into the Lazy Man's Compost...aka  the ground or compost around the driplines of some of the still-dormant trees in the side lot.  If we had chickens, they'd have gotten some of that.  The better excess frozen veggies went into soup.  I just can't afford meat from the store as regularly as I used to get it.  And as fast as the prices are climbing, that might become zero soon.  I've seen this day coming, but the prices are now exceeding what I conscientiously can justify paying based on our income.  We MUST get to the farm ASAP if we want to continue to eat!  In the meantime I bought a large package of chicken drumsticks for about 6 dollars, and that became the base for a large batch of soup stock.

Don't have a pressure canner, so froze it
We ate on that for the last several days, along with other things, and today I froze 2 gallons of the soup using glass canning jars, leaving airspace for expansion.  Another cheapy quick food was to take a block of five dollar (2lb) cheese, grate it, add canned pimientos (and maybe a few diced green olives), add mayo and chill...for really great homemade pimiento cheese sandwiches through the week.  (Or matzah spread during the week of unleavened bread).

The familiar budgeting cycle continues.  Make soup!   Bake banana bread!   Make sandwich spreads!

It all tastes better than those places we would pay many times the cost and get a fraction of the flavor.

Fail-proof Side Dish
Oh, and a tip from Passover this year...if you have spare pumpkin, sweet winter squashes, or sweet potatoes, bake one up and then use it in the same proportions as the recipe for Pumpkin Pie on the Libby's Pumpkin can.  Their pumpkin pie recipe dates back at least to the 1950s and can be used for pumpkin, sweet winter squashes, or sweet potatoes for an awesome and fast crustless "souffle" as a side dish.  It's SO easy!  I simplify further by using a generous amount of pumpkin pie spice mix instead of the individual spices, and adding a dash of ground ginger.  It's fabulous!  We cooked two batches from one calabaza pumpkin and it's easy enough for a beginner!


What's cooking in your Spring, your thoughts, your kitchen?

Clearing the Perimeter

Hey!  Just a quickie post before March is done and I leave anyone with the impression that nothing good has happened..

Throughout this post, I'm putting pics of the first clearing of the property perimeter! The weather has been as close as we get to a true winter.  Grasses are brown and crunchy, and the palmettos and pines and some other shrubs are evergreen.  This is still the dry season in Florida, but it will soon make way to what everyone here calls the wet season, even though overall we are still officially in a drought.  We have wetter droughts than many states...since we're pretty much a state-sized sandbar.  The temps in the daytime during these pics were in the 40s at night and high 60s to low 70s during the days.

ruts where machinery pulled out the broken down equipment

What with the time frame of how long it takes to save up $$ for each step, this baby sure takes its sweet time "getting born"!  The GREAT news is that another step was taken about two weeks ago!

Time for us is measured in our availability to go to the land.  We have opposite schedules, so we have to "book" time together and it's always around when the next time we can travel to the property will be!

What was a property so thick with saw palmettos that we were not able to walk from boundary line to boundary line because of the wall of spiky green now has a ten or fifteen foot swathe cut (mulch-cut) around the perimeter...and we can now not only circle the property but also walk into some pockets of natural clearings!!

Even that was a careful process.  Early this month I was still recovering from a knee and tendon injury (our best guess requiring cortisone and steroids and bed rest, ugh).  About the time the clearing was completed, I was up, but still limping and having to be really careful how long and how carefully I walked.  For 8 days it had been a process of lying in bed with the leg elevated, using a walker to excruciatingly shuffle to the bathroom only, and as it slowly relented, eventually to the kitchen to make a sandwich.  And, to my thinking, wasting a whole lot of time I could have been working and trying to refresh the nest egg of savings for the next projected project (do you ever think project-to-project like that?).

I will interject here that upon (forced) reflection, I probably needed that mandatory bedrest in a lot of ways.  I caught up on sleep that had gone into a serious deficit.  Being a person who does not take vacations due to the fact that being on our land is SO important to our wellbeing in the future, it was the closest thing I 've had to a week off.  It initially included a lot of pain, but as the pain relented, at least as long as the leg was not in motion or being stood upon, I had a lot of time flat on my back to think, pray, and read to my heart's content.  Some of the things I began realizing that were nagging worries took a different place when choice was removed.  Some of them disappeared, because I sort of gave them up...they are too exhausting to maintain.  Others remained, as I felt helpless to DO.  But all in all, I realized my dependence on God's goodness.

I also felt very vulnerable, and was reminded both of how delicate is the thread of what I think of as survival, and also how very extremely BLESSED I am to have Jack and our daughter, a roof over my head, and food to eat.  I also realized I lack friends within close range, and that is a big adjustment from the days I lived in Memphis, but I do have friends within a do-able commute who would have been up for heroics had we needed them, and I have many wonderful friends farther away within easy reach by telephone.  I also got to read the Bible a lot more than I manage to most weeks, and really enjoyed going off into forays into the Kings and Chronicles accounts, which I hadn't read in a while.  Remembering that they are actual events that happened and actual people who lived, those accounts are filled with so much drama and overthrow there's no telling what the ratings would be if they were accurately "movie-fied." They are NOT boring, ha!

Back to the land...

We love the man who cleared the perimeter.  We had gotten estimates from other companies, but with the property being so far out there geographically, the numbers came in slowly and too high each time.  Plus, some of the people we talked to just creeped us out.

This man, Brandon, is a workhorse with an artist's touch when it comes to land-moving-and-clearing equipment.  He leaves as much as possible in the way of trees and larger shrubs and the mulching equipment returns the shredded brush to the ground exactly on site, not disturbing the topsoil.  If you ever needing brush clearing in any part of south-central to south Florida, write us and we'll give you Brandon's number.

The first attempt out there was when his equipment broke down and Brandon spent the entire day going and getting MORE equipment to pull the other machine out.  We were able to walk along a path that was partially cleared along one side of the property for the first time even as we waited for everything else to be completed the next week.  The rut where the heavy machine had been pulled out with chains was the path I used, cane in hand, to gingerly pick my way along that Friday afternoon we went out to check on the work.  My leg still was not cooperating.

But we got to SEE the property in a different way for the very first time!

Why could we not rush at any point into the thick of the greenery, machetes in hand, and just begin clearing it ourselves??  Because of warnings from every veteran of palmetto scrub about the rattlesnakes. 

Even though they can't really be seen, there is a variety of wild rat that lives all around the foliage and root tunnels of the saw palmettos, especially ones growing that thickly.  And the natural predator of those rats is the rattlesnake.  Lots and lots and lots of rattlesnakes, if any of the stories are true to any degree.  Years ago, that alone would have been enough to prevent me from EVER wanting a property with saw palmettos, much less any property in Florida.  (If you've ever lived in beautiful Tennessee, you'll understand...)   But this is where we ARE and that's the property God led us to after a very long journey, so...you deal with it. 

If rattlesnake bites were not so life-threatening and even deadly, I'd get over myself and be done with it.  But the property is at minimum 30 minutes' DRIVE to the nearest ANYTHING, including emergency medical care, even if we called 911.  And there is also the little matter if cell phone reception, which can be had, but can NOT be depended on.  So we have to exercise great care.

On that Friday of walking in bulldozer ruts to see more of the property than we had before, we brought Kaleb, our Australian shepherd.  He was thrilled!  It was the first time we let me off-leash out there, and he did just fine and stuck pretty close to me.  Jack took the push mower as both a rattlesnake-scarer and to simply chew up a finer path for us to safely walk on.  He ended up being able to go into the interior of the property some, too, as there were natural weedy clearings where no palmettos grew.

Oh, it was beautiful!  I always forget how much we need the peace of being out of the city, the noise, the bustle.  I begin to hear the REAL sounds of birds, the wind in the pines, the whispers of moving creatures rustling not far away, the dry sounds of grasses, the crunch of footfalls, and a sky hung with clouds.  And we can just BE.  It is perfect!!!

And I want to be there YESTERDAY...and  so does Jack!

Most of the pictures here are from that day before all the clearing was finished.  A week later we got to see the finished produce, and on that same day the truck got stuck in the sand, we got it out, then at day's end, right before dark when the mosquitoes suddenly appear and begin a relentless bloodsucking attack, the truck wouldn't start. 

There is a memory of AAA managing to find a tow truck to come out that far, a nightmare ride down an unlit 2 lane country highway squish together in the cab of said tow truck, gripping the dash and prayyyyyyyyyinnnnnnnnnnngggggggg that no animal ran across the road, etc, while the man who will now forever be known as Large Marge's Crazy Husband (think back to the nutty PeeWee Herman movie with the Demented Ghost Truck Driver Large Marge) drove 80 mph (I do not exaggerate) down a 55 mph highway in the dead of night.  For a LONG LONG drive.  Ever paid to be towed 25 miles to the nearest facility??? And then...after all that....when it was put back on the ground, the truck started.  After ALL THAT (and all that money...)  OK, back to the pics.

We need to fence the property so we can put No Trespassing signs up and keep out the stray 4 wheelers and begin working in there with less chance of theft from opportunists who watch rural properties and take apart projects as quickly as non-resident landowners make improvements.  We have a list of what we think it takes to Make It There...to relocate there.  As slowly as things are going, perhaps we get to savor each step??

It's now the end of March and Passover is afoot very shortly.  I'm caught up in the cleaning and baking I did not do before now, and the clock is my competitor.  But I HAD to post these pics before any more weeks got away!  It may appear rough, or just more pics of all green, but it's the stuff of our hopes and dreams and attempts to get off the hamster wheel and on to work that is not simply work for the sake of keeping the plates spinning, and hopefully more work with definable outcomes we can see benefitting us more simply and ....helping us live the lifestyle that is more realistic to our basic needs.

What happened in YOUR March??  I'd love to know!  Thank you to all for your continued encouragement!

Holding Our Breaths

...that there will be no more emergencies for a while.  I haven't been here at the computer enough to elaborate, but thankfully we're still standing (or, well, limping?) and I have hopes of a more thorough update very soon.  A few of the highlights would read along the lines of

Client emergencies, or prevention of near-emergencies

Leg and Knee injuries, both of us

Being unable to walk without a walker for a period of time for the first time in life

Missing a good bit of work

Worrying (while missing work) about missing work while simultaneously really enjoying the fact there was no choice about it, and repeat

Disappointment in not having nearby support network to help my family when we can't help ourselves as well as we'd like

Reluctance to unload frustrations on long distance friends due to my loathing of The Whine Factor, as I've usually already whined to Jack about such, ad nauseum

PAIN

Inability to do projects and basic everyday things, thus getting "behinder" in the ever-growing To Do Since Way Back When list

Scheduling frustrations at work, miscommunications, oversensitivity on my part about perceived insensitivity on others' parts...am I just a worker bringing in numbers till I drop?  Probably not processing these thoughts accurately...not feeling the love but feeling I go the extra mile, and feeling the mileage at times

Feeling pressured and feeling unappreciated and feeling underpaid in various ways (though never by husband, he's been great)

Truck problems

The AAA driver who drove us and the tow truck 80 mph in a 55mph  two lane unlit country highway in the dead of night for a VERY LONG DRIVE, thus very nearly putting the "dead" in that particular phrase

$$$$ spent on truck problems

Time spent on truck problems

Having opposite work schedule as husband

Being a worthless lump of napping lethargy on my days off

TAXES OWED this year (!!!) despite careful planning throughout past year (!!!)

$$$ expenses sucking the wind out of my sails as I watch us put some things on credit cards that we worked SO HARD to pay off

I hate car rental companies

I hate mechanics who don't do the job right the first time and require return visits and...CAR RENTALS to get to work while machine is in the shop...AGAIN

I was in a car accident that wasn't just a car accident

It was traumatizing

I'm still getting over it

I'm not prepared physically (house cleaning and food, etc) for Passover, and it's almost here

I want a vacation

I'm having to exercise extreme diplomacy in a particular sphere of my daily life ALL THE TIME and it is sucking the air out of me!

I want to be living at the land NOW

Water system problems

Have I mentioned there are lunatics inserted periodically into these little vignettes we call life and they keep reappearing!

blahblahblahblah and now I have to get to bed.  Oh, I've been having really strange dreams, too, and premonitions, bleh


And THAT is why I hope to get here to write a more coherent post any day now :-)   And probably why I should NOT write until then!!

I hope your March has been a lot easier ...and clear headed...than ours has!


In all things, God has been so merciful to us, so very very kind and good.  I'll never have any complaints in that department!!  And Jack has been magnificent.  And my daughter is a joy.  I'm blessed beyond any reasonable doubt, and ever grateful.  SO GRATEFUL

 So off to bed to see if April will hurry up and get here, wheee...more about the land and the GOOD news amid all the yuck, in a future post.  Adios ~~

--------
03/22/13 update from the next morning....water went out.  Well equipment replacement, $1,000.00.  Youch.  I feel like I just fell down a well...of debt.  That makes about $8K in the last few weeks, and our stash of carefully shepherded reserves is now "unreserved."  Feeling low, but grateful ever...thank you, God, for Your goodness in everything.  Thank you for my precious ones, without reserve.  Amen and now begins shabbat...shabbat shalom...

My Partner In Crime

If you've read this blog very long, you'll know that my day is not complete without thanking God every-which-way possible for the love and companionship of my husband, Jack.

I don't know what my life would be without him in it, but it would not be the life I have, nor would it have the same colors, depths, heights, and enjoyment that comes in sharing it with him each step.

Our crazy dreams have meshed into one delightful journey.  No, it has not always been full of joyful events.  We have had years that could have been categorized as personal tragedies at deep and visceral levels.  We've experienced loss and grief and disappointment and depressions.  And setbacks, and stupid decisions, and heart sucker-punches.  And misunderstanding and frustration and railing at iron ceilings and needing answers in times of silence, and needing silence in times of clamor.  And too much stress, and too little industry or too much to do.  And STRESS.  And falling down and having to get back up again and again and again.  And seeing the best and the worst and the boring and the exhilarating.

And having God together.

And counting our blessings that all those things, those felt things and remembered things and the forgotten things and the asleep things and the alive things...all were mostly TOGETHER things.

And it's been surreal and REAL and ..........ours.

When our journey together began incorporating impossible dreams into a co-conspiratorial best-friend-ness-filled patchwork of sharing and imagination...paired with practical to-the-bone changes and the comfort of nearness in all of it.....it didn't  have to make sense to anyone but us.  As long as we pray and ask for direction the whole way from our wonderful God......and follow His wisdom as we best can ascertain it as we walk these things out....

this nutty life of ours is something anyone on the outside looking in would nod heads at and declare CRAZY.

And I love that Jack is the best part of the journey and the crazy sharing even if no one else in the world understands the whys of our decisions and that black is not white and up is not down and our race for simplicity and survival OUR WAY makes some sense to us, if no one else.

I don't say these things often enough, but Jack is...so much more than I deserve, my miracle, and the gift from God's hand to me.

That he has dreams that mesh with mine into this fine and glorious mess we adore, I marvel!

Why does our path look so crazy in this upside-down world, though?  Why are our SIMPLE ideas so against the tide?  Why is grasping at sense and simplicity so crazy to our culture today??

One of my favorite children's books is The Jumblies by Edward Lear. I highly recommend adults read the really fun and good children's books.   I think I picked this one up at a yard sale or a library book sale somewhere, and it has the original Gorey illustrations.

It's really short.....in fact, here it is if you care to take a read.....The Jumblies

Please have a read, and laugh!

And....if this is YOU......if you know the way that is right for you and if your favorite person or people are with you on the journey

even though it looks like sheer craziness to others around you (which to us sometimes indicates we're on the right track, ha!)

then maybe they'll say of you someday

"They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
  In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
  In a Sieve they went to sea!"

Thank you, God, for my Jack, and all the others who dare to go "to sea in a Sieve..."

Birthin' This Baby

Peace River skies

When it came to the conception of the Grand Plan of self-sufficiency and a rough sketch of a big ol' dream towards living on an acreage wherein we are able to pull off some nutty things otherwise scorned in a more citified setting...

we thought it would take, Oh, A Year Or Two.  Maybe.

And so, of course, the winds blow this way and that, we proceed to live life and life has its little jokes and all the while we experiment Right Here Right Now and...

when the Getting Of The Land happened, oh, about six or more years had passed.

That's a LONGGGG first trimester.  Or first and second trimester.  Or somethin'.

But I'm getting all Braxton-Hicks-ish (for the women out there who've been there before) and now that we have the land, we can drive TO the land, we can see/feel/smell/hear/walk on and otherwise do everything but LIVE ON the land, I'm feeling those warmup contractions.

(If I start going on a cleaning tear, this might get ugly fast, ha!)

Anyway, next up, the survey!!!

Surveys make things official-- they make borders possible, they make building departments and other minions of the industry happy, they make boundaries for fences and No Trespassing signs and define areas that should now be off limits to wandering tractors in search of free topsoil or fill dirt.

They mean the possibility of drawing an actual MAP of the place, siting structures and trees and plants and raised beds and low areas and high areas and retainment ponds and entrances and exits and paths and wildflower patches and animal areas and food forests and...and...and...

(gonna birth this baby, gonna birth this baby...)

And well, maybe we don't know squat about "birthin' no baby" like this one when it comes right down to it, but the anticipation keeps jumping ahead of each step, adding fuel to the fire!

Survey, survey, gettin' the survey...

Another step!!!  Map my joy and measure my happiness, it's another step!!



What's taking its time being born in your neck of the woods, and what's the next step?

Catching the Bug

The end of another week, whew!
I miss my husband terribly with this new work schedule.  When we're together, I just want to sit close to him or just steal looks at him.  I'm homesick for him.

I hope we can accomplish what we need to in order to get off this spinning wheel faster.  If it will "buy" more permanent time together faster, which is the goal and hope and possibility, I hope it's worth it.

Jack said he's caught the same bug I've gotten, and for a second I thought he meant he might have the flu...eek...but I haven't had that recently.  He was instead referring to my "I want to be on The Land tomorrow, even if it means bucket showers and shotgunning rattlesnakes" determination.  As he's gathering information and cost estimates for projects now on the nearer horizon, maybe it's becoming more real?  Hope deferred makes the heart sick, or so says the Psalmist...so perhaps hope renewed makes the heart delightfully refreshed :-D

That's our hope for so many others as well, for you... of renewal and refreshing, and good things in God's right time.  May your rest after a hard day's work be sweet.  Tomorrow night begins Shabbat, our time of week when we get a day to rest and be together and savor the moment with gratitude.  I'm so very, very grateful for every element of these days that can be wearying.  It's not work without purpose or reward, and those both go far beyond the scope of my actual duties or employer. 
I've got "the bug" alright.  The hope bug.  And it's what helps get me through the day, sometimes even singing and with a reappearing smile!  I hope it's contagious and spreads with epidemic speed.  And is maybe incurable :-)


Shabbat shalom from our household to yours!

What Most of My Unwritten Posts Here Would Say

...on most days, with time at the computer snatched from the remaining hours necessary to wash clothes, eat, sleep, and repeat.

They would read "Tired."

"Tired tired tired tired tired tired tired TIRED."

And then perhaps "Thank you, God, for really hot showers, a fully-operational washer and dryer, a husband who knows how to roll with the ever-changing schedule demands (both of ours) and order-to-chaos cycle the housekeeping around here perpetually is in all the while."

And then "Whew!!!" as I slip into the bed at last, thinking "I hope I have the energy to get up and do this all again tomorrow."

And THAT is why there are  not more posts here regularly on the blog!

But it's also why we can pay our bills and hopefully keep making forward progress on our Getting ON the Land Goals...

Got a 12 shift tomorrow...just enough time here to read emails and jot these scintillating thoughts down (haha!) before, you guessed it, going off to sleep.

And to think of all the years of childhood when I loathed naps and an early bedtime.  Ah, life's little ironies ;-)

What do your unwritten posts usually boil down to (not) saying?