Little fact about Jack...he knows no bedtime stories. No fairy tales, fables, myths, Winnie the Pooh or swashbuckles. He does know OF some of the more famous ones, but don't drill him on the finer points of the story of the Little Red Hen or the Gingerbread Man. But he does have a great imagination.
His night shift means that on his days/nights off, a lot of times he's not sleepy during normal nighttime hours...when I do sleep. That was the case last night, so he queued up Star Wars DVDs and settled in for a mini-marathon. I was sleepy and kind of hinted it would be nice to snuggle up for a while till I fell asleep...then he'd have all night to himself with The Force.
He came in to snuggle up, having paused one of the DVDs mid-scene. (That meant I'd better not take too much time falling asleep? ha) Turned the lights out and held me close.
Me, to Jack: Hey, do you know any bedtime stories? I remember you saying you don't remember many, but tell me a story, even if you have to make one up, k?
Jack: Sure.
Me: Ok, shoot...
Jack: (thinking)
There was a girl who was sleepy.
So she fell asleep.
THE END.
Me: Hey, no way, that's not for real, tell me a for real bedtime story.
Like the kind that starts with "once upon a time." Just make up something!
Jack: Once upon a time there was a little girl who got sleepy and fell asleep THE END.
(not even a breath between words.)
Me: JACK. You're cheating!
There need to be details.
As in details about the girl and some storyline between the Onceuponatime and the THEEND.
Jack: (again)
Once upon a time there was a GIRL NAMED ROBBYN who was sleepy and then she
fell asleep THE END.
(Now I can't stop laughing...)
Me: NO WAY are you getting off that easy!
There needs to be action, use your creativity...put in some stuff about swashbuckling or overcoming
incredible odds or castles and moats or throw in some mythical creatures that fly or something...
Jack: This is the last time.
(pause)
Once upon a time...
Me: Good, it's good so far...
Jack: ...there was...
Me: (...don't say there was a little girl...)
Jack: ...there was a little girl
Me: AAAAGGGHHHHH
Jack: ...wait! wait for it...
there was a little girl named
(still pausing)
... Little Red Robbyn Hood.
Me: who??
Jack: Little Red Robbyn Hood.
Me: Do you mean Little Red Riding Hood... or Robin Hood?
Jack: I mean Little Red Robbyn Hood.
Me: There IS no Little Red Robbyn Hood.
Jack: Yes there is. It's MY bedtime story.
Me: Well your heroine has a split personality. What does she do...steal from the rich to give to...Grandma?
Jack: No. No, you have to let me tell the story.
Me: Ok ... so what happens next?
Jack: (silent)
(silent)
(silent)
Me: ...hello?
Jack: So Little Red Robbyn Hood
Me: yes?
Jack: FELT SLEEPY AND WENT TO SLEEP,
THE
END
Me: (Silence)
Jack: What?
Me: I'm so grateful.
I don't know what I'd have done without that story.
Jack: You're welcome!
Me: (laughing my head off...)
Now GO...GO to her!!
Jack: Her who?
Me: Your dream girl
Jack: baby you're my dream gir...
Me: No! I'm on to you now. GO to Princess Leia!
Jack: Huh? I don't even like Princess Leia
Me: It's all about the braids. Princess Leia has mondo braids in weird intergalactic configurations all over her head. My hair won't braid long enough to wrap all around my head. I know you're secretly fascinated with her weird braids and can't wait to see what side of her head they're on in the next scene. Go! And may the force be with you!
And he laughed until he had a coughing fit and yes he did, he did go and finish the Star Wars marathon.
And I turned on the lamp and picked up a good spy novel to read...
Till I felt sleepy and fell asleep THE END.
:)
Showing posts with label Ramblings Undeserving of Their Own Category. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ramblings Undeserving of Their Own Category. Show all posts
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Things That Happened This Year
1. News! Passed CNA Test!! I took the Exam Prep course in early
2. A friend called and is giving us her Champion Juicer. WOW!!!! It's just sitting in a closet not being used. Well, watch out, I can't wait to get my hands on it :)
3. Job Changes. Backing up, for the past few years since losing my previous job in another industry, I began moonlighting as a security officer on the side to help with keeping our income steady. Sometimes moonlighting takes on a life of its own, and I worked nights and kept doing so for...years now. This year, as I was considering other options in the spring and was also considering the impact night shifts were having on my health, I asked God for guidance as far as timing and opportunities in different fields. I love being at home, but working night shifts made my time off at home feel as if I were in continual jet lag instead of being productive. My present job began drastically becoming less ideal (many factors) and about the month of May, my daughter offered to pay for me to be a challenger to the state CNA exam via a test prep course offered here locally...and the commute and gasoline, as well as being down to one vehicle shared between two working adults became an issue with my job. So...uncharacteristically of me...I gave notice in time to take the course. This was all with Jack's blessing, even though it may have felt a little scary for him, too. But it turns out with the money I saved being home and cooking everything here and doing it even more frugally than before AND minus the expense of gasoline I'd been using...it came out about even. WOW. So anyway, this bullet point should read LEFT MY JOB.
3. Saying it while I can....life is so short, and this has been underlined as some friends have died in recent months and years, and we've also lost Jack's mom a couple years back. It makes you consider all those things you wish you'd said while the person was still alive to feel appreciated. As I no longer want to have any regrets in that department, I said Thank You to people I've been remiss to thank throughout the years. I began writing retroactive thank yous to people who have really been there for me in the past, whether I'm still in touch with them today or not, especially those people who came to mind and I felt I'd not adequately told I appreciated, or some folks I've lost touch with. The divorce years were dark and not pretty, and a lot of people fell off my radar for reasons of my own withdrawal, not for lack of contact on their part. Privacy and isolation were part of my grieving process but there are so many things for which I am thankful before, during, and after that time. So I took the time to say some of those things, and am SO glad to have made this a more deliberate practice this year. I hope to continue to do it. I do feel caught up on many dear people I'd been remiss to thank, and now one of them is no longer alive. It underlines how important this needs to continue being as a focus for me rather than something I intend to do but procrastinate.
4. Some major cleaning and organization in the house got done. Certain areas were overwhelming for me...why, I don't know, but as they got tackled one square foot or box at a time, the momentum increased and it got finished. This impacts all the daily small things even if it's not a really big accomplishment...things are easier to find, less cluttered, prioritized and used or given away. A really GOOD feeling.
5. I've spent a lot less time on the computer. It just happened. There were other things I wanted to do not requiring being in an office chair. :) My blog may have suffered for it, but I gained a lot of involvement in things that needed to happen or be experienced in the moment. Yay!
6. And along that same vein, in the late winter and spring of early this year, I wanted to read read read books of all kinds and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say those may be up into the three digits in count by now. I had a voracious reader's appetite that needed to be filled, especially when I was working nights and had pockets of time with no mental stimulation that needed to be filled. History, fiction, Florida history, author series (I like to choose one I've never read and read several of theirs in sequence to get a good feel for their writing, suspense, espionage, biographies, gardening, cooking, writing, etc etc) I've slowed it down moreso since June. But I needed the recharge books give me that no amount of "screen time" can equal.
7. I've made Jack's health and schedule consistency a priority. Mine is, too, but with my being at home since June, I try to always send him off to work having had a really good hot meal, his supplements, early morning fruit/snack, etc etc. I try to keep the house quiet so he can sleep days...and so on and so on. Living around night work schedules is backwards and I know from having done it, too, that it's so hard on our bodies. There are certain supplements we take that radically help our bone and joint comfort and protects them from injury, so I make sure we have those. Jack is the partner/husband/soulmate/bestfriend of my dreams and prayers. Our goal is to get beyond debt so that neither of us has to ever work a night shift out of necessity again. The goal is close. In the meantime, I help keep his routine from having any complications other than the ones that are inevitable. And I really really like that. He does the same for me.
8. I de-stressed and slowed things wayyy down. I'm burnt out of being burnt out. I concentrated on fewer projects and did them better. I deliberately took the CNA practice time between the course and the test date, etc, at a very slow and relaxed pace because there have been SO many times I DIDNT have a choice other than rush rush rush and push push push before, that when it's not crucial I just simply refuse to fall into my Overachiever mode...it just comes at too great a cost. I have a tendency to be all-or-nothing, so this is sort of coming to center for me. I can't stand to having nothing in the works and feel unproductive. But I am so glad I took things a bit slower and didnt remain in the stress of driving myself faster in this area this time.
9. Thanks to the commisseration of one of my dearest friends and a great series of surprise packages in the mail, filled with spices galore from international markets she frequents in her area, I learned to cook some Indian food dishes on a regular basis (a few good dishes I have no names for but Jack LOVES). They begin with spice packets whose ingredients are not simply dry spices but are ground and packaged airtight and still moist with oils, and you roast them a couple minutes in a skillet and then add in your own ingredients...and so on. I played with spices, and even if it didn't turn out excellent every time, it did enough times to keep on having fun with it. The house smells delicious with the spices, so that is a winner EVERY time :) Now I have some tried-n-trues enough that I can fix a big batch of a masala to keep in the fridge and Jack can have it as his "fast food" when I'm not home, so all he has to do is reheat an individual portion...and it's better after a few days, anyway. So INDIAN FOOD is in the house!
10. We learned to eat our moringa and chaya. WHY it takes us so long to acclimate to the wonderful alternative plants that grow as perrenials (we have no garden this year), I do not know, but we did make an effort to begin learning with the moringa and chaya. They are delicious greens! We need more greens in our meals, period. Not only do they provide that but their nutrition content is higher than anything else we could grow. We'll expand our experimentation, but as fresh greens for half the year or longer, these rock!
11. I only sustained a weight loss of 10 pounds this year...up and down and up and down but now the set point is ten pounds less. While I'd like this to have been wayyyyyyyyy farther downwards, anything downwards is appreciated.
12. Prayer. I've been more deliberate about paying attention to praying for others and actively asking for prayer for things that arise with us. I feel very insular here, as we don't have schedules that encourage much interaction with people beyond the workplace or running errands. But I have dear friends elsewhere and online, and have tried to be more consistent about participating with them in the ups and downs of their own lives. There have been so many wonderful answers to prayer, and its' always encouraging! I'm also grateful for those who've prayed specifically for some of our concerns...and have shared in our joys and some of our disappointments. I'm so grateful! Anytime you have a prayer request, we are HAPPY to join with you it in...it is a joy to, and always brings us back to such a gratefulness for the goodness of God.
13. Hopes and Disappointments about land. This is the area I can't talk about, but suffice it to say that there has been a consistent process afoot to conclude a couple possibilities related to land, once and for all. It has required weekly correspondence and so on, an ongoing process. This has run on like a bad sitcom, with apparent 'breakthroughs" followed by sucker punches, all of which are just " a part of the process" but have so much of our planning and expectation attached that every reposition FEELS like a big shift back and forth. I've had bitter periods and ecstatic ones, but right now my focus is the things I do have some control over, whether any of these others materialize or not.
14. Paid off half our remaining debt!!! Thank you, God, and all who were praying! A couple properties (undeveloped lots, residential) that Jack had had for sale for a long time finally sold, for pennies on the dollar. But those pennies paid off half our debt...so we have the other half to go, but the amount it depressurized in our monthly budget is HUGE. THANK YOU to God and those of you who prayed for us!!
15. Have a Lap Top. This was something we deliberately acquired earlier in the year so that I could have a way to write and do communications away from home, since many of my hours at the first of the year through midyear were spent away from home. I have hoped to chip away at some personal writing projects and now am delighted to have files where I was able to jot copious jumbled notes in the moment instead of forever losing them. I hope someday to turn some of those into a book or two...we'll see. Still, for someone who loves to write, having a great tool handy is such a blessing. Thank you to Jack and my daughter for their contributions (birthday presents, etc) that made this possible for me! It will be a great tool for going back to school in what I hope is a not too distant future!
16. Aunt Jessie. Named for a dear friend's elderly aunt who was full of spunk and old-fashioned independence and kept her firearms handy and her pistol strapped to her leg beneath her ladylike skirt, I have a handgun for the first time in my life. Ever. This was big, as I was afraid of firearms. Jack helped me with a trip to the gun range and safety instruction, the internet and copious youtube watching helped me with some basic familiarity, and a book called the Boston's Gun Bible helped me learn terms and see comparisons and categories so that I was not totally illiterate and could find some recommendations, etc. I still have a healthy respect/fear of anything that can blow a person away. But we feel the times we are in necessitate responsible exercise of our freedoms and I'd rather be knowledgeable rather than ignorant. So WE bought ME a pistol. I still need a lot of practice. But this was a huge step for me, and a positive one. I do not feel like a sitting target on nights when there have been prowlers.
17. Refine, refine, refine. We are constantly refining things such as our longterm goals, our budget, our eating, the way we spend our time, and so on. The changes that have occurred in conjuction of where we see our goal to get to our "farm" are that we (I should say "I") really want to keep it simple and straightforward. Where before we felt we had years to finetune situations that could unfold mutiple ways over time slowly, now I simply want to Get There Without Complications. I do not want building or environmental restrictions, legalities that have to be solved, bargains that have things left unsolved or undone, timeframes with no definite dates, second parties who may or may not take their sweet time in making decisions or changing their minds. We are considering 4 season areas not in Florida, which is also a big change, but we're not leaning towards the colder climates as a permanent location. We are looking at the sustainability financially, too, and for different goals as far as location and siting. Our "dream" house now is very small...I have notebooks filled with drawings of houses that now are scrapped because our needs determine our expectations more and more. We feel empowered the simpler we think, because the smaller scale we can keep things the more freedom we have in other areas, and that's becoming more and more important to us, especially as the economy is looking dire for the longterm. I'm talking in generalties, but the specifics are too many to go into except to say we're running to try to get "set up" while there is still opportunity to. We do not see further economic downturns as "ifs" but as "whens." We've refined our eating towards nutrition and with an eye for learning to enjoy things that could be grown by us or kept in long term storage inexpensively. We've challenged our weekly food budget to see "how low can we go" while still staying free of processed food. We have a goal amount for our ideal lowest monthly overhead, and it's LOW :) We are ditching excess belongings and trading them for things we most need. We are researching what few tools can later help us without our feeling we have to acquire an array of technology, while also determining those few tools that will be crucial to staying productive without wearing our bodies out or making extra work.
18. We have found we want to be connected to people longterm who love the Almighty. We love privacy but still need to be part of a community, whether that's looseknit or family-like. We like to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, so whatever we do in the years to come, it will involve using our talents to further "the repair of the world"...something worthwhile that can help others, be a part of community in some way. We are seeing more and more that there is an inherent respect for people and for Creation that some people who really care about the Almighty share, whether they have much else in common or not, and others who have no interior values other than what are superimposed on them externally just do not have that. It's a paradigm that has everything to do with how sound a community will be...the basic recognition and respect for life and the Almighty....and how they will be able to rely interdependently on each other. Even if we are far afield and loosely-knit with such a community, while at the same time really valuing our privacy and autonomy, we do not want to be without our community at large. So we'll be aware of this in the midst of the other goals we have, and deliberate in cultivating it, and it will never be far from all the other considerations.
19. We didn't put in a garden. We did use multi-purpose "perennials." We de-bucketed Bucketville. What began a few years ago as an assumption we'd be moving soon to land, and thereby resulted in planting a wide array of plants in five gallon buckets, continued to expand and expand, while our available time to maintain them did not. And we never moved and those buckets...kept collecting. Since we're in a neighborhood where curb appeal will sell a home faster than will the sight of five gallon buckets as far as the eye can see, we stopped growing seasonal test plots on our vacant lot next door and only kept enough buckets as we need for Jack to continue experimenting with the best ways of keeping our perennial plants (chaya, cranberry hibiscus, gynura, papayas) and moringa trees productive. Those, and some trees, are all we have left at present of the Bucketville collection, and most of those are planted in-ground now...something we had waited on a long while as we wondered if we'd be able to carry them to our "final" land for transplant, but had to keep waiting, and finally decided they'd croak if we didn't go ahead and just plant them here. It's HARD resisting the urge to go ahead and do more with a garden, but there is a purpose...we're so near getting out of our debt and we don't need time distractions. We need to ready the house for sale so when the time comes we can immediately stick a sign in the yard and know nearly everything's done. And how we hope that day is soon! :) It's all good. But when we CAN finally have the garden and order those seed...WOO !
20. We're down to one car. This is huge, since we both commuted an hour to work on differing schedules. But we're adapting and one of the big considerations in my wanting this CNA job is that there are openings much closer to home, requiring less gas and meaning the probability of continuing to share the same vehicle is much more likely. This is something we're figuring into our choice of a permanent acreage, too...the distance to a reliable area for parttime employment. We figure saving on fuel is crucial to our budget...we no longer can justify working longer and harder just to afford the gas and same standard of living, and have no desire to do so. We're HAPPY being frugal because it's freeing us, not constricting :) Have a single vehicle for two jobs is worrisome on other levels. We're working to be debt free so that there is a cushion in the event we need to get even more creative later down the road.
That's about it...what were the main events of your year? What do you hope to include for the next one? what would you hope to do better and what were the "keepers"?
Thank you for being such an encouraging part of our lives with your comments here and the great sense of sharing and community that is very very real. We hope your year had some really positive lessons and your year ahead is your best one yet :)
June
2. A friend called and is giving us her Champion Juicer. WOW!!!! It's just sitting in a closet not being used. Well, watch out, I can't wait to get my hands on it :)
3. Job Changes. Backing up, for the past few years since losing my previous job in another industry, I began moonlighting as a security officer on the side to help with keeping our income steady. Sometimes moonlighting takes on a life of its own, and I worked nights and kept doing so for...years now. This year, as I was considering other options in the spring and was also considering the impact night shifts were having on my health, I asked God for guidance as far as timing and opportunities in different fields. I love being at home, but working night shifts made my time off at home feel as if I were in continual jet lag instead of being productive. My present job began drastically becoming less ideal (many factors) and about the month of May, my daughter offered to pay for me to be a challenger to the state CNA exam via a test prep course offered here locally...and the commute and gasoline, as well as being down to one vehicle shared between two working adults became an issue with my job. So...uncharacteristically of me...I gave notice in time to take the course. This was all with Jack's blessing, even though it may have felt a little scary for him, too. But it turns out with the money I saved being home and cooking everything here and doing it even more frugally than before AND minus the expense of gasoline I'd been using...it came out about even. WOW. So anyway, this bullet point should read LEFT MY JOB.
3. Saying it while I can....life is so short, and this has been underlined as some friends have died in recent months and years, and we've also lost Jack's mom a couple years back. It makes you consider all those things you wish you'd said while the person was still alive to feel appreciated. As I no longer want to have any regrets in that department, I said Thank You to people I've been remiss to thank throughout the years. I began writing retroactive thank yous to people who have really been there for me in the past, whether I'm still in touch with them today or not, especially those people who came to mind and I felt I'd not adequately told I appreciated, or some folks I've lost touch with. The divorce years were dark and not pretty, and a lot of people fell off my radar for reasons of my own withdrawal, not for lack of contact on their part. Privacy and isolation were part of my grieving process but there are so many things for which I am thankful before, during, and after that time. So I took the time to say some of those things, and am SO glad to have made this a more deliberate practice this year. I hope to continue to do it. I do feel caught up on many dear people I'd been remiss to thank, and now one of them is no longer alive. It underlines how important this needs to continue being as a focus for me rather than something I intend to do but procrastinate.
4. Some major cleaning and organization in the house got done. Certain areas were overwhelming for me...why, I don't know, but as they got tackled one square foot or box at a time, the momentum increased and it got finished. This impacts all the daily small things even if it's not a really big accomplishment...things are easier to find, less cluttered, prioritized and used or given away. A really GOOD feeling.
5. I've spent a lot less time on the computer. It just happened. There were other things I wanted to do not requiring being in an office chair. :) My blog may have suffered for it, but I gained a lot of involvement in things that needed to happen or be experienced in the moment. Yay!
6. And along that same vein, in the late winter and spring of early this year, I wanted to read read read books of all kinds and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say those may be up into the three digits in count by now. I had a voracious reader's appetite that needed to be filled, especially when I was working nights and had pockets of time with no mental stimulation that needed to be filled. History, fiction, Florida history, author series (I like to choose one I've never read and read several of theirs in sequence to get a good feel for their writing, suspense, espionage, biographies, gardening, cooking, writing, etc etc) I've slowed it down moreso since June. But I needed the recharge books give me that no amount of "screen time" can equal.
7. I've made Jack's health and schedule consistency a priority. Mine is, too, but with my being at home since June, I try to always send him off to work having had a really good hot meal, his supplements, early morning fruit/snack, etc etc. I try to keep the house quiet so he can sleep days...and so on and so on. Living around night work schedules is backwards and I know from having done it, too, that it's so hard on our bodies. There are certain supplements we take that radically help our bone and joint comfort and protects them from injury, so I make sure we have those. Jack is the partner/husband/soulmate/bestfriend of my dreams and prayers. Our goal is to get beyond debt so that neither of us has to ever work a night shift out of necessity again. The goal is close. In the meantime, I help keep his routine from having any complications other than the ones that are inevitable. And I really really like that. He does the same for me.
8. I de-stressed and slowed things wayyy down. I'm burnt out of being burnt out. I concentrated on fewer projects and did them better. I deliberately took the CNA practice time between the course and the test date, etc, at a very slow and relaxed pace because there have been SO many times I DIDNT have a choice other than rush rush rush and push push push before, that when it's not crucial I just simply refuse to fall into my Overachiever mode...it just comes at too great a cost. I have a tendency to be all-or-nothing, so this is sort of coming to center for me. I can't stand to having nothing in the works and feel unproductive. But I am so glad I took things a bit slower and didnt remain in the stress of driving myself faster in this area this time.
9. Thanks to the commisseration of one of my dearest friends and a great series of surprise packages in the mail, filled with spices galore from international markets she frequents in her area, I learned to cook some Indian food dishes on a regular basis (a few good dishes I have no names for but Jack LOVES). They begin with spice packets whose ingredients are not simply dry spices but are ground and packaged airtight and still moist with oils, and you roast them a couple minutes in a skillet and then add in your own ingredients...and so on. I played with spices, and even if it didn't turn out excellent every time, it did enough times to keep on having fun with it. The house smells delicious with the spices, so that is a winner EVERY time :) Now I have some tried-n-trues enough that I can fix a big batch of a masala to keep in the fridge and Jack can have it as his "fast food" when I'm not home, so all he has to do is reheat an individual portion...and it's better after a few days, anyway. So INDIAN FOOD is in the house!
10. We learned to eat our moringa and chaya. WHY it takes us so long to acclimate to the wonderful alternative plants that grow as perrenials (we have no garden this year), I do not know, but we did make an effort to begin learning with the moringa and chaya. They are delicious greens! We need more greens in our meals, period. Not only do they provide that but their nutrition content is higher than anything else we could grow. We'll expand our experimentation, but as fresh greens for half the year or longer, these rock!
11. I only sustained a weight loss of 10 pounds this year...up and down and up and down but now the set point is ten pounds less. While I'd like this to have been wayyyyyyyyy farther downwards, anything downwards is appreciated.
12. Prayer. I've been more deliberate about paying attention to praying for others and actively asking for prayer for things that arise with us. I feel very insular here, as we don't have schedules that encourage much interaction with people beyond the workplace or running errands. But I have dear friends elsewhere and online, and have tried to be more consistent about participating with them in the ups and downs of their own lives. There have been so many wonderful answers to prayer, and its' always encouraging! I'm also grateful for those who've prayed specifically for some of our concerns...and have shared in our joys and some of our disappointments. I'm so grateful! Anytime you have a prayer request, we are HAPPY to join with you it in...it is a joy to, and always brings us back to such a gratefulness for the goodness of God.
13. Hopes and Disappointments about land. This is the area I can't talk about, but suffice it to say that there has been a consistent process afoot to conclude a couple possibilities related to land, once and for all. It has required weekly correspondence and so on, an ongoing process. This has run on like a bad sitcom, with apparent 'breakthroughs" followed by sucker punches, all of which are just " a part of the process" but have so much of our planning and expectation attached that every reposition FEELS like a big shift back and forth. I've had bitter periods and ecstatic ones, but right now my focus is the things I do have some control over, whether any of these others materialize or not.
14. Paid off half our remaining debt!!! Thank you, God, and all who were praying! A couple properties (undeveloped lots, residential) that Jack had had for sale for a long time finally sold, for pennies on the dollar. But those pennies paid off half our debt...so we have the other half to go, but the amount it depressurized in our monthly budget is HUGE. THANK YOU to God and those of you who prayed for us!!
15. Have a Lap Top. This was something we deliberately acquired earlier in the year so that I could have a way to write and do communications away from home, since many of my hours at the first of the year through midyear were spent away from home. I have hoped to chip away at some personal writing projects and now am delighted to have files where I was able to jot copious jumbled notes in the moment instead of forever losing them. I hope someday to turn some of those into a book or two...we'll see. Still, for someone who loves to write, having a great tool handy is such a blessing. Thank you to Jack and my daughter for their contributions (birthday presents, etc) that made this possible for me! It will be a great tool for going back to school in what I hope is a not too distant future!
16. Aunt Jessie. Named for a dear friend's elderly aunt who was full of spunk and old-fashioned independence and kept her firearms handy and her pistol strapped to her leg beneath her ladylike skirt, I have a handgun for the first time in my life. Ever. This was big, as I was afraid of firearms. Jack helped me with a trip to the gun range and safety instruction, the internet and copious youtube watching helped me with some basic familiarity, and a book called the Boston's Gun Bible helped me learn terms and see comparisons and categories so that I was not totally illiterate and could find some recommendations, etc. I still have a healthy respect/fear of anything that can blow a person away. But we feel the times we are in necessitate responsible exercise of our freedoms and I'd rather be knowledgeable rather than ignorant. So WE bought ME a pistol. I still need a lot of practice. But this was a huge step for me, and a positive one. I do not feel like a sitting target on nights when there have been prowlers.
17. Refine, refine, refine. We are constantly refining things such as our longterm goals, our budget, our eating, the way we spend our time, and so on. The changes that have occurred in conjuction of where we see our goal to get to our "farm" are that we (I should say "I") really want to keep it simple and straightforward. Where before we felt we had years to finetune situations that could unfold mutiple ways over time slowly, now I simply want to Get There Without Complications. I do not want building or environmental restrictions, legalities that have to be solved, bargains that have things left unsolved or undone, timeframes with no definite dates, second parties who may or may not take their sweet time in making decisions or changing their minds. We are considering 4 season areas not in Florida, which is also a big change, but we're not leaning towards the colder climates as a permanent location. We are looking at the sustainability financially, too, and for different goals as far as location and siting. Our "dream" house now is very small...I have notebooks filled with drawings of houses that now are scrapped because our needs determine our expectations more and more. We feel empowered the simpler we think, because the smaller scale we can keep things the more freedom we have in other areas, and that's becoming more and more important to us, especially as the economy is looking dire for the longterm. I'm talking in generalties, but the specifics are too many to go into except to say we're running to try to get "set up" while there is still opportunity to. We do not see further economic downturns as "ifs" but as "whens." We've refined our eating towards nutrition and with an eye for learning to enjoy things that could be grown by us or kept in long term storage inexpensively. We've challenged our weekly food budget to see "how low can we go" while still staying free of processed food. We have a goal amount for our ideal lowest monthly overhead, and it's LOW :) We are ditching excess belongings and trading them for things we most need. We are researching what few tools can later help us without our feeling we have to acquire an array of technology, while also determining those few tools that will be crucial to staying productive without wearing our bodies out or making extra work.
18. We have found we want to be connected to people longterm who love the Almighty. We love privacy but still need to be part of a community, whether that's looseknit or family-like. We like to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, so whatever we do in the years to come, it will involve using our talents to further "the repair of the world"...something worthwhile that can help others, be a part of community in some way. We are seeing more and more that there is an inherent respect for people and for Creation that some people who really care about the Almighty share, whether they have much else in common or not, and others who have no interior values other than what are superimposed on them externally just do not have that. It's a paradigm that has everything to do with how sound a community will be...the basic recognition and respect for life and the Almighty....and how they will be able to rely interdependently on each other. Even if we are far afield and loosely-knit with such a community, while at the same time really valuing our privacy and autonomy, we do not want to be without our community at large. So we'll be aware of this in the midst of the other goals we have, and deliberate in cultivating it, and it will never be far from all the other considerations.
19. We didn't put in a garden. We did use multi-purpose "perennials." We de-bucketed Bucketville. What began a few years ago as an assumption we'd be moving soon to land, and thereby resulted in planting a wide array of plants in five gallon buckets, continued to expand and expand, while our available time to maintain them did not. And we never moved and those buckets...kept collecting. Since we're in a neighborhood where curb appeal will sell a home faster than will the sight of five gallon buckets as far as the eye can see, we stopped growing seasonal test plots on our vacant lot next door and only kept enough buckets as we need for Jack to continue experimenting with the best ways of keeping our perennial plants (chaya, cranberry hibiscus, gynura, papayas) and moringa trees productive. Those, and some trees, are all we have left at present of the Bucketville collection, and most of those are planted in-ground now...something we had waited on a long while as we wondered if we'd be able to carry them to our "final" land for transplant, but had to keep waiting, and finally decided they'd croak if we didn't go ahead and just plant them here. It's HARD resisting the urge to go ahead and do more with a garden, but there is a purpose...we're so near getting out of our debt and we don't need time distractions. We need to ready the house for sale so when the time comes we can immediately stick a sign in the yard and know nearly everything's done. And how we hope that day is soon! :) It's all good. But when we CAN finally have the garden and order those seed...WOO !
20. We're down to one car. This is huge, since we both commuted an hour to work on differing schedules. But we're adapting and one of the big considerations in my wanting this CNA job is that there are openings much closer to home, requiring less gas and meaning the probability of continuing to share the same vehicle is much more likely. This is something we're figuring into our choice of a permanent acreage, too...the distance to a reliable area for parttime employment. We figure saving on fuel is crucial to our budget...we no longer can justify working longer and harder just to afford the gas and same standard of living, and have no desire to do so. We're HAPPY being frugal because it's freeing us, not constricting :) Have a single vehicle for two jobs is worrisome on other levels. We're working to be debt free so that there is a cushion in the event we need to get even more creative later down the road.
That's about it...what were the main events of your year? What do you hope to include for the next one? what would you hope to do better and what were the "keepers"?
Thank you for being such an encouraging part of our lives with your comments here and the great sense of sharing and community that is very very real. We hope your year had some really positive lessons and your year ahead is your best one yet :)
June
Monday, September 21, 2009
Update Riddled With Gratuitous Dog Photos
Farm dog, sans farm...must make do with rawhide till there are more interesting things to chew.Update: We were just made aware that rawhide chews can contain carcinogens and other toxins. Nylabones and other safer alternatives have been recommended to us. Bye-bye, rawhides...
First it must pass the sniff test. From the looks of this rawhide, it made the grade in prior sniff tests.Speaking of tests, I've been catching up on my health stuff that was neglected while we didn't have insurance, and of course "they" have been running tests. Some tests came back good but my sugars didn't...ugh. Must. Keep. Daily. Journal. Yeahyeahyeah... Roger.
Mmmm...Kaleb goes for the prolonged back teeth gnaw.And I went for my first mammogram, ever. Which meant girlish things were subjected to what I suspect the above-pictured rawhide experienced, for the sake of Health. Ow.
I've been making homemade dog food to supplement Kaleb's kibble. I can already notice a bit of a difference in Kaleb's coat, but I'll give it time.
Meanwhile, I continue to subject the very Aussie-and-all-other-farmrelatedsubjects-savvy (and patient) blog friend at Trapper Creek to questions, and have been given great feedback as we navigate new dog ownership of this particular fellow...and breed. I can say I'll probably never go back to any other breed. Smitten, I am.
Had lunch with my daughter today, and I'm SO enjoying being the mom of an adult daughter. Plus I can count on uncensored candor, if I ask for it, on about any subject, so when I asked her if my silver/gray hairs that seem to be overtaking my formerly-brown hair need to be colored, she said "YES, mom, YES." When I reminded her it was SHE herself who initially dared me to allow it to go au naturale in the first place, she said "well, yes, it was pretty cool when a few silver ones were there, but I mean this is a little out of hand!" I love my daughter.
And to think I used to anticipate the days when she'd learn to talk...ha :) Anyway, silver/gray hairs notwithstanding, we had a great lunch together between my doc-visits-ugh.
We have some bleeps on the radar as go our efforts lumped under the general category termed Land Things, but we curb the enthusiasm till there's some finality. One thing we've learned is that "it's not over till it's over"...I really can't wait to write about some of the specific details we've gone through the past three years with all this, and some of the knocks that have come either just because life's that way sometimes, or sometimes from our own mistakes/lack of experience. But like I said, it's for another day.
I don't feel like I have my (rapidly-graying) head on straight right now in comparison with other years in which I had constant projects going and could post interesting (to me, at least) things here for fun. I'm feeling slowed down in general, though we are in a productive period if you look at things from a distance. For the past five years I've enjoyed good health overall, but this off again on again stuff since June of this year has kept me Sub-par. Today's news from the doc as to why my ears still hurt? They are still infected. I'm taking antibiotics again, which goes against my grain, and still haven't regained all of my energy back.
But having Kaleb means going for walks are fun (truly!) and even if that's all the exercise I get right now, it's incentive enough.
I'm trying to get a handle on my eating. During the summer flu/ear stuff/lung stuff, I had little appetite, which is uncommon for me, and so it trimmed some weight off. That's the good news. The bad news is that my practice of being involved in trimming the budget by cooking everything optimally (using the turkey for different dishes, freezing the leftovers, using the
Now I'm feeling better by comparison, but still have a ways to go to get back to being with it that way again. I haven't felt like doing craft or art projects, writing projects, or continuing to further research the alternate-use plants we have growing outside. I have a good many calabazas to bake and freeze, and some other foodie things pending. I have a backlog of things in the fridge that are cooked but need to be at least frozen for later. (true confession...I have been reading books and watching prodigious numbers of PBS mini-series and assorted collections of DVDs when my energy levels peak at the Potato level. I can quote you Jane Austen and Dickens lines. And Andy Griffith. And Chef. And Good Neighbors. And so on...)
I keep telling Jack the paid help never showed up ;-)
But on better news, I've started buying better quality meat, but less of it, each week. (Because Steak goes SO well with Couch Potato...) For some reason we both noticed the ground beef we were buying just wasn't sitting well with us the same way a bit of roast or steak would. I've got plenty of salad fixings and have taken one nice jar of bleu cheese dressing and extended it with active culture plain yogurt...and it tastes fantastic. Just a small drizzle of that over a salad chock full of finely-chopped veggies and herbs has been hitting the spot, alongside small portions of meat to go with it. It's my quickie cheat version of dinner while still feeling at 50%.
Also on the health front, we're trying Resveratrol. The claims seem inflated, but undeniably many people claim to have seen instant benefits. We need a good cleansing and boost to our immune systems, so went for the "free trial bottle" of one of the companies. Let's see how that plays out. I've only ordered one bottle, and had to get tenacious saying NO in a hundred different ways to the company's attempts to call me and upsell me other "youthful" products. The representative just didnt want to take No for an answer, and so when he asked me (in a somewhat astonished voice) WHY I didn't want the So-and-So Youth Formula that makes me LOOK YOUNGER...."You mean you don't WANT to look younger??"...I replied "NO. NO, I do not want to look younger"
He said "You must look very young, then. Nearly everyone wants to look younger." (THIS. On the day of The Conversation With My Daughter About How Ancient The Grays Make Me Look)
I replied "I DO look young. I don't want to look younger. (repetition, repetition, repetition??)" (Ok, so I'm not lying. I DO look young. When compared to someone ten years older than I am. I don't want to look younger, or Jack will look like he's perpetually accompanied by his grown daughter...ick) :)
He gave up and said "Well you do SOUND like you look young."
hahahahahahaha!
I'm going to remind my daughter from now on that I SOUND like I LOOK young...heeheehee
Then I called their customer service department to cancel further orders of the product. I got what sounded like somebody's teenage son. Confused, illiterate, and bored teenage son. I waited a total of three minutes while he sat there saying nothing and never was able to pull up my name on his computer. (I'm sure he was thrown off by how YOUNG I sounded, haha) But we finally got to the gist of the thing after a comedy of errors in which he kept re-entering eleven digits for my phone number instead of ten...asking me if the eleven were correct, I said no and repeated....and repeat. Then when he said "ok" I said "does ok mean you've canceled any further shipments?" and he said Yes and waited for about 30 seconds and then hung up. Weird. I'm chuckling!
All a nice diversion, in a slightly annoying way...
I don't know why, but I keep being afraid of one of us getting cancer, especially since the event of the skin cancer spot Jack had removed from his forehead earlier in the year. That's one reason I'm getting all my "yearlies" caught up. We REALLY need to be healthy.
I want this upcoming year to be the one in which we both lose most of our weight for good...the right way. I love this man so much and want us to have many years together. I remember the older women of my family on my grandma's side talking in a gaggle about their "old folk complaints," which totally repelled us younger ones back then...a laundry list of corns, bunions, the removal of this and that, repetition of the word "hemorrhoids," other terms like gout, hernia, high blood pressure, cataracts. Well, I'm on the Forties slide toward Laundry List Land, but am fighting it hard now. Jack's in the Fifties version of that and thankfully has been blessed with a strong constitution in most areas. It's funny but keeping all our components running well figures in largely to whatever definition we now have of Homesteading. It's funny how health is central to all other concerns.
Enough of creaks and squeaks..there'll be "funner" updates to come. I'm just feeling a little reflective after The First Mammogram. And sympathy for anything unmercifully flattened between two unyielding surfaces. And definately wincing at any sandwich referred to as a Hot Pressed Cuban.
It's time to end the post when you begin empathizing with fast food ;-)
Something hopefully more coherent to come, in future. I go now for my daily Aussie Walk Therapy...
Friday, June 19, 2009
Masterpieces
(Clicking on image will enlarge)
There are amazing worlds right before my eyes. Whether it's in a pot or in the ground, the beauty that surrounds me in what we often consider simple things mesmerizes me...and I feel like a child again.
I love the way leaves are patterned, and how the sun backlights stems, veins, tendrils, and petals of plants. I love the hiding places under umbrellas of leaf clusters...the places where lizards and shady things lurk in their busy semi-hidden worlds. I love the worlds of insects that go about their business, nonplussed by my presence, and the birds that fuss at me and then work up the courage to nip down to a favorite plant nearby for a juicy bug or chance seed.
I love how the earth drinks the water, from rain or from the hose, down...and how it pools slightly when it's had enough for the moment. I love the beads of moisture in the morning dews, or just after the rains, when all the blades of grasses and the leaf curves are jeweled with them.
I love the sounds, and knowing what birds are in the thicket even when I can't see them. I love the crunches, the soft swishes, the aliveness of walking among the garden, aware. I learn secrets. I learn where the velvet ants have their nests under the leaf mould, where the fire ants attempt to make towers of sand, where finger-sized lizards hide and play and court their mates. I watch tightly-rolled leaf blades unfurl as they grow towards the sun, and I see fuzzy pumpkin vines push past the limits of their boundaries, always questing for more places unknown.
I see where the armdillos rooted and tilled at night among the rows for juicy subterranean treats, without much consideration for my planting schemes. I also found the places, right in the middle of the nearly-mature pea patch, where two small deer must have nestled themselves one evening, content after the rain had cleared.
I hear the sticky, suction sound of tree frogs that climb our windows at night outside to make the most of the flying insects the light attracts, and their squeaky-toy songs.
The plants, the birds, the insects, the soil, the air currents, the moisture, the heat, the night sounds and smells, the fragrances...are a moving and living masterpiece, always changing.
I'm so grateful for such beauty, so thankful to God. It is all I need to know He is good.
I don't need much when there is so much to witness and be a part of, in these secret worlds in my own square of dirt...if it can even be said to be anyone's at all. Whomever's it is, I'm really glad to be welcomed into these moments. They feed me like the fullest table.
I hope you're finding the wonders in the worlds hidden nearby...the garden, woods, plants, animals.
I think contentment just may be the best sort of excitement around :)
Shabbat shalom
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Apologies to Mother Goose
This is the sprout
that 'll make the snap beans
that Jack grew.
This is the contraption that watersThe sprout that'll
Make the snap beans
That Jack grew
These are the rows
Beside the contraption
That waters the sprout
That'll make the snap beans
That Jack grew
That Jack grew
This is the stuff
That was raked into rows
Beside the contraption
That waters the sprout
That'll make the snap beans
That waters the sprout
That'll make the snap beans
That Jack grew
This is the poo
That became the stuff
That was raked into rows
Beside the contraption
Beside the contraption
That waters the sprout
That'll make the snap beans
That Jack grew
That Jack grew
And all for the sake of a mess o' beans...
-------------------------
I'd like to say a special hello to the HomesteadingToday readers stopping by today
....I'm so glad you're here! :)
-------------------------
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Pit Stop
Not exactly the most girly subject to write about, but I've tried one of those "rock" deodorants for the first time.
Hey, whether the homestead is a window ledge or a vast tract of acreage, we all sweat sometime.
For more of my thoughts on this "scent"-tillating (sorry! ha) subject, it's today's post over at NotDabblingInNormal.
Yeah, that's how to put regular readers to the test ...talk about body odor ...or the more elegantly spelled body odour if you hail from Across The Pond. The English do have a way with a word, don't they...even ones that stink ;-)
More later...I'm sooo tired. Worked last night and now it's shower time, and then to hit the pillow.
I watered in all the new seeds again before sundown yesterday. I love the anticipation that builds before the first shoots appear!
Have a wonderful day!
Hey, whether the homestead is a window ledge or a vast tract of acreage, we all sweat sometime.
For more of my thoughts on this "scent"-tillating (sorry! ha) subject, it's today's post over at NotDabblingInNormal.
Yeah, that's how to put regular readers to the test ...talk about body odor ...or the more elegantly spelled body odour if you hail from Across The Pond. The English do have a way with a word, don't they...even ones that stink ;-)
More later...I'm sooo tired. Worked last night and now it's shower time, and then to hit the pillow.
I watered in all the new seeds again before sundown yesterday. I love the anticipation that builds before the first shoots appear!
Have a wonderful day!
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Happy Birthday & Blog-aversary, Weirdo!
Yesterday we celebrated my birthday...late. Hey, these days we have to make an appointment just to get the three of us in the same location!
I also realized that my blog's anniversary came and went...oops! Then I discovered on my sidebar that no post archives prior to 2007 are showing...what?? I started blogging here in Spring 2006.
Well, anyway, Happy Birthday To Meeee, and Happy Blogaversary to TheBackForty!!!
If I were more together, I'd have a giveaway to celebrate. I'll have to search the stash and see if I can come up with some of those winter crafty things somebody might be interested in....dunno...some gift-giving seed packets??
Yesterday to celebrate my B-day, we had a relaxed breakfast at home and then hit the road to go about an hour away to a more rural area that has a couple good feed-and-seed stores geared more to the Ag people than city folks. I was in seed heaven as the owner measured out scoopsful of bulk crop seed into the metal hanging scale...pink-eye purple hull peas, fordhook limas, clemson spineless okra, snap bean seeds. And a couple tablespoons each of yellow crookneck squash and cucumber seeds...hooray!!! We wandered around browsing the open-air shed, and it was perfect weather...warm sun, bit of a breeze...and animal feed, tack, and equipment all 'round. There were handprinted ads for horses and dogs for sale tacked to the counter, and all the math at checkout was done with a handheld calculator...cool! It's a good thing they didn't have chicks in or we may have bought them, too, and then had to figure out the next step later. :)
Well, it's BIG HUGE news for me, but if I can slowly save my money the next few months, we've both agreed it would be feasible to purchase a dog. To some this is an easy matter, but we're being very VERY careful with our money just now and are unable to justify additional expenses because we have an actively-decreasing amount of debt, and do NOT want to lose our momentum in seeing it ALL go away by sometime next year. This is THE crucial year in that equation for staying consistent.
So there is no big rush, but it's nice to know that I can trim a bit here and there and sock it away in anticipation of getting a farmstead dog! (for the future farmstead, of course, and the present farm-girl-in-waiting)
On the way to the Feed-and-Seed, we passed a five acre family farm that has one of my favorites...Barbados Blackbelly Sheep. I'm not sure why I have such an affinity for this animal, but EVERY time I see them, I KNOW we'll be raising them if ever given a chance...the same way I know I want a Jersey cow and some chickens...I just know. Every time we've passed that way in the past, we've had to stifle the urge to just pull in and knock on a stranger's door and ask to see their sheep. In fact this was part of Jack's plan yesterday, but after we pulled onto the side of the road, I had an attack of shyness and insecurity and we had a conversation that went something like this:
Me: Are we really going to just drive up and go knock on their door?
Jack: Well, I know you really love those sheep. Don't you want to?
Me: Sure, I want to, but I wonder what they'd think of our just driving right up there and wanting to see their animals...after all, the sheep are in the back of the property this time.
Jack: Well, we don't HAVE to, I just thought you'd enjoy it. Y'know, like ask them questions.
Me: What kinds of questions? I'm not sure what questions I'd be asking at this point. But I'm sure I could think of some.
Jack: Well, I thought you had a lot of questions. Yeah, if you don't, we probably don't need to bother them.
Me: You mean it would seem weird to just stand there and say "hi, you don't know us, and we're not selling anything, but we were driving by and for her birthday, my wife would love to see your sheep"?
(this is when we both start laughing)
Jack: I just thought you'd love to see them.
Me: I would, I would, and I'm really glad you thought of it! I'm just worried this might be like the time we left a note with our phone number in it on the mailbox of the neighbor we don't know who lives a mile down from our house, telling her we love seeing her border collies always waiting for her at the gate every afternoon, and asking her if she got them from a breeder she could recommend to us. And then we never heard from her and noticed she was kind of freaked out for several days and had locked up her dogs??
Jack: (laughing)
Me: OK, I'm just feeling shy about approaching strangers and kind of barging in...
Jack: No problem. I just thought you had questions
Me: Well. I could ask them how they deal with the parasites down here and if they have to worm their sheep a lot or if they are bred to be highly resistant? Like "Hi! It's my birthday and I wanted to ask you if your sheep are parasite-resistant and by the way can I go look at them?"
Both of us: (Looking at each other for a second)
Jack: We're weird.
Me: Yes. We're freaks. But you know, if we lived in the country we wouldn't be having this conversation. People in the country like talking about their animals. The "country" here is too near the city.
Jack: So we'll stop here another time, right?
Me: (laughing) Yes, I think that would be better...
Jack: Weirdo!
Me: Freak!
And then we see it.
You know the type, the little church on the side of the road with the marquee that has some weekly phrase or inspirational quip to catch the attention. This inverted V-roof one sat in a neatly-manicured little pastoral patch of ground flaked by a small blacktop parking lot.
Beside the road, its marqee read
IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH?
FIND OUT THIS SUNDAY APRIL 30
We passed the church as we continued on down the highway.
Me: I don't know about that, y'know.
Jack: What?
Me: About that church back there. Did you read the sign?
Jack: Yeah...what about it?
Me: "Is there life after death? Find out this Sunday!" I wonder if Jim Jones tried that on his marquee. Y'know...with free Koolaid and refreshments in the fellowship hall before service?
Jack: You're sick (laughing)
Me: I'm just sayin'...
We spent the rest of the day hanging out together eating Mexican with our daughter at a local dive, and went home and planted all the poo piles with the newly-acquired seed stash and watering everything in. We sat quietly on the back porch at the end of the day, pondering the Great Questions of Life (such as Life After Death and its relation to sermons and Koolaid, ha!) and listening to the evening sounds approach. We passed a gallon of Spring water back and forth to each other for some long swigs. Tired, sunburnt, happy!
A perfect day.
Yeah.
We're weird.
;-)
I also realized that my blog's anniversary came and went...oops! Then I discovered on my sidebar that no post archives prior to 2007 are showing...what?? I started blogging here in Spring 2006.
Well, anyway, Happy Birthday To Meeee, and Happy Blogaversary to TheBackForty!!!
If I were more together, I'd have a giveaway to celebrate. I'll have to search the stash and see if I can come up with some of those winter crafty things somebody might be interested in....dunno...some gift-giving seed packets??
Yesterday to celebrate my B-day, we had a relaxed breakfast at home and then hit the road to go about an hour away to a more rural area that has a couple good feed-and-seed stores geared more to the Ag people than city folks. I was in seed heaven as the owner measured out scoopsful of bulk crop seed into the metal hanging scale...pink-eye purple hull peas, fordhook limas, clemson spineless okra, snap bean seeds. And a couple tablespoons each of yellow crookneck squash and cucumber seeds...hooray!!! We wandered around browsing the open-air shed, and it was perfect weather...warm sun, bit of a breeze...and animal feed, tack, and equipment all 'round. There were handprinted ads for horses and dogs for sale tacked to the counter, and all the math at checkout was done with a handheld calculator...cool! It's a good thing they didn't have chicks in or we may have bought them, too, and then had to figure out the next step later. :)
Well, it's BIG HUGE news for me, but if I can slowly save my money the next few months, we've both agreed it would be feasible to purchase a dog. To some this is an easy matter, but we're being very VERY careful with our money just now and are unable to justify additional expenses because we have an actively-decreasing amount of debt, and do NOT want to lose our momentum in seeing it ALL go away by sometime next year. This is THE crucial year in that equation for staying consistent.
So there is no big rush, but it's nice to know that I can trim a bit here and there and sock it away in anticipation of getting a farmstead dog! (for the future farmstead, of course, and the present farm-girl-in-waiting)
On the way to the Feed-and-Seed, we passed a five acre family farm that has one of my favorites...Barbados Blackbelly Sheep. I'm not sure why I have such an affinity for this animal, but EVERY time I see them, I KNOW we'll be raising them if ever given a chance...the same way I know I want a Jersey cow and some chickens...I just know. Every time we've passed that way in the past, we've had to stifle the urge to just pull in and knock on a stranger's door and ask to see their sheep. In fact this was part of Jack's plan yesterday, but after we pulled onto the side of the road, I had an attack of shyness and insecurity and we had a conversation that went something like this:
Me: Are we really going to just drive up and go knock on their door?
Jack: Well, I know you really love those sheep. Don't you want to?
Me: Sure, I want to, but I wonder what they'd think of our just driving right up there and wanting to see their animals...after all, the sheep are in the back of the property this time.
Jack: Well, we don't HAVE to, I just thought you'd enjoy it. Y'know, like ask them questions.
Me: What kinds of questions? I'm not sure what questions I'd be asking at this point. But I'm sure I could think of some.
Jack: Well, I thought you had a lot of questions. Yeah, if you don't, we probably don't need to bother them.
Me: You mean it would seem weird to just stand there and say "hi, you don't know us, and we're not selling anything, but we were driving by and for her birthday, my wife would love to see your sheep"?
(this is when we both start laughing)
Jack: I just thought you'd love to see them.
Me: I would, I would, and I'm really glad you thought of it! I'm just worried this might be like the time we left a note with our phone number in it on the mailbox of the neighbor we don't know who lives a mile down from our house, telling her we love seeing her border collies always waiting for her at the gate every afternoon, and asking her if she got them from a breeder she could recommend to us. And then we never heard from her and noticed she was kind of freaked out for several days and had locked up her dogs??
Jack: (laughing)
Me: OK, I'm just feeling shy about approaching strangers and kind of barging in...
Jack: No problem. I just thought you had questions
Me: Well. I could ask them how they deal with the parasites down here and if they have to worm their sheep a lot or if they are bred to be highly resistant? Like "Hi! It's my birthday and I wanted to ask you if your sheep are parasite-resistant and by the way can I go look at them?"
Both of us: (Looking at each other for a second)
Jack: We're weird.
Me: Yes. We're freaks. But you know, if we lived in the country we wouldn't be having this conversation. People in the country like talking about their animals. The "country" here is too near the city.
Jack: So we'll stop here another time, right?
Me: (laughing) Yes, I think that would be better...
Jack: Weirdo!
Me: Freak!
And then we see it.
You know the type, the little church on the side of the road with the marquee that has some weekly phrase or inspirational quip to catch the attention. This inverted V-roof one sat in a neatly-manicured little pastoral patch of ground flaked by a small blacktop parking lot.
Beside the road, its marqee read
IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH?
FIND OUT THIS SUNDAY APRIL 30
We passed the church as we continued on down the highway.
Me: I don't know about that, y'know.
Jack: What?
Me: About that church back there. Did you read the sign?
Jack: Yeah...what about it?
Me: "Is there life after death? Find out this Sunday!" I wonder if Jim Jones tried that on his marquee. Y'know...with free Koolaid and refreshments in the fellowship hall before service?
Jack: You're sick (laughing)
Me: I'm just sayin'...
We spent the rest of the day hanging out together eating Mexican with our daughter at a local dive, and went home and planted all the poo piles with the newly-acquired seed stash and watering everything in. We sat quietly on the back porch at the end of the day, pondering the Great Questions of Life (such as Life After Death and its relation to sermons and Koolaid, ha!) and listening to the evening sounds approach. We passed a gallon of Spring water back and forth to each other for some long swigs. Tired, sunburnt, happy!
A perfect day.
Yeah.
We're weird.
;-)
Friday, February 27, 2009
Little Changes, Self Cleaning Ovens that Can't, and What's Making Noise in My Kitchen??
It's time to move the furniture around again...
and let's see how I do or don't like the new web palette and graphics. The header's from a favorite pic of a peacock that I played with in the photo program a bit.
It's been a long week, and we're both tired and soooo glad to be together again tonight. I'm refreshing a few things in the house and getting some simple food together before we crash -- I want to have everything nice when Jack gets off work.
I've heard something lurking in the kitchen...or pantry...or...somewhere. It sounds bigger than a beetle. Maybe a mouse? If so, it's a first.
But I can deal with a mouse.
But if it's a snake, you can find me back in Tennessee, and making the commute from Florida to there in record time. We have a lot of choices of unwanted visitors here in Florida, and insects or mice I can deal with. But snakes...BELONG OUTSIDE.
Maybe it's a bunny? A possum? (I know, here we go, I'm in total denial) A raccoon? (nah, I know what they sound like, with that little "chirrrrrr" sound) A little lost kitten??
This means only one thing...spring cleaning must commence. But not till "It" has been found.
This means the stove must be unplugged, carted outside, plugged into an extension cord, and put on Self Clean till it's pristine on the inside. Why? (What do you mean, isn't this how EVERYone cleans their ovens?? haha!)
Well a certain SOMEone who helped (term loosely interpreted) when selecting the oven for this house, decided to buy a self-cleaning oven. Normally, that would be delightful, and handy. Normal meaning if you have a full wall, not a half wall. Or 3/4 wall or whatever it's called when you have a wall that doesn't go all the way to the ceiling because it's supposed to help make the area look open so it only goes up to about 2 feet from the ceiling, for decorative purposes. Therefore, if you put an OVEN on that wall, you cannot VENT it through the wall upwards through the ceiling (unless you want the pipe to show). So you get this vent thingy that circulates the oven air through the vent thingy that goes right over your stovetop, through a carbon filter. HOWEVER, do not test the limits of the carbon filter-thingy by trying to vent an entire self-cleaning oven cycle of fumes through it. It will not like it, and will protest by filling your house with roiling clouds of acrid smoke you will only brave long enough to turn the oven OFF and run like heck with a towel over your face to the great outdoors, kicking yourself all along that you forgot all about the fact it DOESNT VENT THROUGH THE ROOF like NORMAL ovens.
And you ponder the mysteries and ironies of life, such as the fact that it's commonly supposed that if you just went ahead and cleaned the inside of your self-cleaning oven the CONVENTIONAL way (by hand) it supposedly is bad for self-cleaning ovens and "ruins them."
And THAT is why you can choose to baffle and amaze your neighbors by running an extension cord to the driveway and getting a dolly and maneuvering your self-cleaning oven out for all to see, in full view, AND call the fire department to let them know not to worry if they happen to get any strange calls about somebody's oven sitting in front of a house smoking for about an hour.
Better yet, maybe I can charge admission...? :)
I dare not think of what lurks under that stove. I am now approaching the kitchen to find whatever lurks. No worries...I'm armed with a broom and one of Jack's steel-toed work boots. I hope it's a runaway kitten, lost puppy, a hamster making The Incredible Journey, or just my goldfish having learned how to throw gravel against his fish bowl.
Because if it's something slithery, or a palmetto bug that thinks it's a pony.....Tennessee, here I come!!
and let's see how I do or don't like the new web palette and graphics. The header's from a favorite pic of a peacock that I played with in the photo program a bit.
It's been a long week, and we're both tired and soooo glad to be together again tonight. I'm refreshing a few things in the house and getting some simple food together before we crash -- I want to have everything nice when Jack gets off work.
I've heard something lurking in the kitchen...or pantry...or...somewhere. It sounds bigger than a beetle. Maybe a mouse? If so, it's a first.
But I can deal with a mouse.
But if it's a snake, you can find me back in Tennessee, and making the commute from Florida to there in record time. We have a lot of choices of unwanted visitors here in Florida, and insects or mice I can deal with. But snakes...BELONG OUTSIDE.
Maybe it's a bunny? A possum? (I know, here we go, I'm in total denial) A raccoon? (nah, I know what they sound like, with that little "chirrrrrr" sound) A little lost kitten??
This means only one thing...spring cleaning must commence. But not till "It" has been found.
This means the stove must be unplugged, carted outside, plugged into an extension cord, and put on Self Clean till it's pristine on the inside. Why? (What do you mean, isn't this how EVERYone cleans their ovens?? haha!)
Well a certain SOMEone who helped (term loosely interpreted) when selecting the oven for this house, decided to buy a self-cleaning oven. Normally, that would be delightful, and handy. Normal meaning if you have a full wall, not a half wall. Or 3/4 wall or whatever it's called when you have a wall that doesn't go all the way to the ceiling because it's supposed to help make the area look open so it only goes up to about 2 feet from the ceiling, for decorative purposes. Therefore, if you put an OVEN on that wall, you cannot VENT it through the wall upwards through the ceiling (unless you want the pipe to show). So you get this vent thingy that circulates the oven air through the vent thingy that goes right over your stovetop, through a carbon filter. HOWEVER, do not test the limits of the carbon filter-thingy by trying to vent an entire self-cleaning oven cycle of fumes through it. It will not like it, and will protest by filling your house with roiling clouds of acrid smoke you will only brave long enough to turn the oven OFF and run like heck with a towel over your face to the great outdoors, kicking yourself all along that you forgot all about the fact it DOESNT VENT THROUGH THE ROOF like NORMAL ovens.
And you ponder the mysteries and ironies of life, such as the fact that it's commonly supposed that if you just went ahead and cleaned the inside of your self-cleaning oven the CONVENTIONAL way (by hand) it supposedly is bad for self-cleaning ovens and "ruins them."
And THAT is why you can choose to baffle and amaze your neighbors by running an extension cord to the driveway and getting a dolly and maneuvering your self-cleaning oven out for all to see, in full view, AND call the fire department to let them know not to worry if they happen to get any strange calls about somebody's oven sitting in front of a house smoking for about an hour.
Better yet, maybe I can charge admission...? :)
I dare not think of what lurks under that stove. I am now approaching the kitchen to find whatever lurks. No worries...I'm armed with a broom and one of Jack's steel-toed work boots. I hope it's a runaway kitten, lost puppy, a hamster making The Incredible Journey, or just my goldfish having learned how to throw gravel against his fish bowl.
Because if it's something slithery, or a palmetto bug that thinks it's a pony.....Tennessee, here I come!!
Sunday, February 22, 2009
The Prodigal Returns...
...only not just yet! ;-)
I'll be back shortly.
I'm regrouping, testing new recipes, getting some household things organized, moving my outdoor plants back and forth and back and forth since the weather doesn't remember how to not FREEZE periodically.
I may or may not change the look of the blog....any suggestions? I'm a creature of habit...it may stay the same, dunno!
Plants must be planted, meals cooked, finances continually kept in the black, job jobbed, and hopefully some cream of an idea or two shall rise to the forefront in the midst.
I'm having a love/hate relationship with my computer. There is so much living going on, and sometimes I just don't want to stop and journal. In fact, it's a funny irony....my mental processes are moving further and further away from "necessary" conveniences, and I'm getting used to the screaming silences....which now are quite full stretches of thought and contemplation, or of just listening.
I'm finding I quite enjoy the listening and sometimes just don't want to SAY anything. I think our culture has a problem being still or un-entertained. I'm now infatuated with hearing all the things I missed when I was "too busy." I marvel more and more how being without a TV has de-programmed Jack and me in many ways we didn't realize. I'm wondering if I'm flirting with pulling the plug on other things as well.....and how we'd fare.
My guess is that we're congenial hermits.
If you see smoke signals coming from our neck of the woods....well, suburbs anyway....it might mean we just deep-sixed our computer and cellphones.
Ah, to dream ........ ;-)
But in the meantime, I'll be back. Sometime.
I'll be back shortly.
I'm regrouping, testing new recipes, getting some household things organized, moving my outdoor plants back and forth and back and forth since the weather doesn't remember how to not FREEZE periodically.
I may or may not change the look of the blog....any suggestions? I'm a creature of habit...it may stay the same, dunno!
Plants must be planted, meals cooked, finances continually kept in the black, job jobbed, and hopefully some cream of an idea or two shall rise to the forefront in the midst.
I'm having a love/hate relationship with my computer. There is so much living going on, and sometimes I just don't want to stop and journal. In fact, it's a funny irony....my mental processes are moving further and further away from "necessary" conveniences, and I'm getting used to the screaming silences....which now are quite full stretches of thought and contemplation, or of just listening.
I'm finding I quite enjoy the listening and sometimes just don't want to SAY anything. I think our culture has a problem being still or un-entertained. I'm now infatuated with hearing all the things I missed when I was "too busy." I marvel more and more how being without a TV has de-programmed Jack and me in many ways we didn't realize. I'm wondering if I'm flirting with pulling the plug on other things as well.....and how we'd fare.
My guess is that we're congenial hermits.
If you see smoke signals coming from our neck of the woods....well, suburbs anyway....it might mean we just deep-sixed our computer and cellphones.
Ah, to dream ........ ;-)
But in the meantime, I'll be back. Sometime.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Of Crockpots and Sherbet Glasses.
Sherbet.
Sherbert.
Whichever!
For some sleep-deprived ramblings about crockpots and sherbet glasses strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more...a tale, told by an idio....(wait wait)
Well, here it is at today's WomenNotDabblingInNormal.
And now I'm off to get my day's sleep so I can work the red-eye shift ternite. I know how to spell tonight, but today, it's ternite.
(Wherein I will dream the dreams full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...)
Meaning in modern English I'm hoping for a NyQuil-induced near-coma in which I'll probably snore to beat the band.
And to think my English teacher was worried we'd never remember any Shakespeare, ha!
(I bid thee farewell 'til the morrow. And blah-thee blah blah) ;-)
Sherbert.
Whichever!
For some sleep-deprived ramblings about crockpots and sherbet glasses strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more...a tale, told by an idio....(wait wait)
Well, here it is at today's WomenNotDabblingInNormal.
And now I'm off to get my day's sleep so I can work the red-eye shift ternite. I know how to spell tonight, but today, it's ternite.
(Wherein I will dream the dreams full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...)
Meaning in modern English I'm hoping for a NyQuil-induced near-coma in which I'll probably snore to beat the band.
And to think my English teacher was worried we'd never remember any Shakespeare, ha!
(I bid thee farewell 'til the morrow. And blah-thee blah blah) ;-)
Sunday, January 25, 2009
My Little Procrastination Problem...
Yes.
I mean no, I have not made my 2009 New Year's Resolution list yet. I'm still deciding if making one at all is a good idea at the moment. But there are things I do need to get better at doing, and along those lines...
...my blog seems to be where memes and challenges go to die. I am often late responding to comments, though I read EVERY single one and do respond when I'm at last here for more than a minute or two. Yes, I do have a life, albeit a less intriguing one than some other bloggers who at any point in their lives may be
1. butchering various rare and heritage-ish farm animals before sunup
2. cooking home-grown organic and pastured slow foods for their family and an entire logging camp...before sunup
3. living on $5.00 a week like a queen/king
4. living self sufficiently in some remote location in a shelter hewn by hand using only a Swiss Army Knife, paper clip, and a roll of duct tape
5. living so lightly on the land that even the vapor from their breath is recycled and filtered for use as emergency drinking water
6. building so many raised beds and trellises that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon look amateurish in comparison
7. manufacturing their own gold from used car batteries using a secret family formula
8. going on yak-buying expeditions in the Himalayas while staying with indigenous families in their yurts
Um, our 5 gallon buckets somehow didn't make the list, but be it ever so humble, there's no place likehome Bucketville.
But I digress...
I really love my friends in the blogging community. Please forgive my procrastination, which is sometimes forgetfulness. Or unawareness! I catch up on different blogs as I can, but long pauses happen and I miss out on being very timely sometimes.
Thank you to Angie at Children in the Corn for this award...in November of 2008!!! (hiding head) How I missed it, I do not know, but er, ahh, I'm on it now! Thank you for this honor :)
I mean no, I have not made my 2009 New Year's Resolution list yet. I'm still deciding if making one at all is a good idea at the moment. But there are things I do need to get better at doing, and along those lines...
...my blog seems to be where memes and challenges go to die. I am often late responding to comments, though I read EVERY single one and do respond when I'm at last here for more than a minute or two. Yes, I do have a life, albeit a less intriguing one than some other bloggers who at any point in their lives may be
1. butchering various rare and heritage-ish farm animals before sunup
2. cooking home-grown organic and pastured slow foods for their family and an entire logging camp...before sunup
3. living on $5.00 a week like a queen/king
4. living self sufficiently in some remote location in a shelter hewn by hand using only a Swiss Army Knife, paper clip, and a roll of duct tape
5. living so lightly on the land that even the vapor from their breath is recycled and filtered for use as emergency drinking water
6. building so many raised beds and trellises that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon look amateurish in comparison
7. manufacturing their own gold from used car batteries using a secret family formula
8. going on yak-buying expeditions in the Himalayas while staying with indigenous families in their yurts
Um, our 5 gallon buckets somehow didn't make the list, but be it ever so humble, there's no place like
But I digress...
I really love my friends in the blogging community. Please forgive my procrastination, which is sometimes forgetfulness. Or unawareness! I catch up on different blogs as I can, but long pauses happen and I miss out on being very timely sometimes.
Thank you to Angie at Children in the Corn for this award...in November of 2008!!! (hiding head) How I missed it, I do not know, but er, ahh, I'm on it now! Thank you for this honor :)
And I resolve to get better about not procrastinating quite so much, or maybe just not getting quite so distracted or sidelined by early Alzheimer's and whatnot. Because I should always put off today what can be procrastinated till tomorrow...as Scarlett said, "Tomorrow is anuttha day!"
Wait, I mean...umm...
Oh fiddle dee dee. ;-)
Anyone seen my keys?
Friday, January 16, 2009
Just Thoughts
I've just about had it.
I'm at the precipice.
Seriously. I think I'm entering my Solitary Yurt Dweller phase.
I watched Story of the Weeping Camel...and I felt jealous of a family of yurt-dwelling shepherds in the Gobi Desert.
Wordsworth wrote "the world is too much with us."
He was writing about the burden of self-imposed "progress"...a society spinning out of control by the force of its own innovations.
I exist in a world of periphery, and have felt for some time that that's the actual world. It's where all the Scratch-and-Dents collect to catch their breaths or be Not Quite, or to patch their wounds. It's where the clean-up seems to never end, but there is a comradery of humanity and imperfection.
What of the speeding, bleeding blur of Modernism and Progress that spews out its casualties like so much flotsam and jetsam at ever-increasing frequencies? This is not the life I can endure....tried it, but it's not sustainable, that speed, that acceleration. On the sidelines is where the real action percolates...the slower sort beyond employee of the month plaques, easier this, more convenient that, disposable everythings.
I just got back from a quick trip to... (It's becoming more bizarre)...the grocery store. Right there, above the refrigerated eggs and next to the kosher sauerkraut, a sign above a vacuum sealed stack of packaged food, "Ready-to-eat pancakes...fresher than homemade!"
(Have we truly sunk to this subterranean low of marketing suggestability??)
These were not frozen pancakes, or pancake mix, or pourable pancake batter...these were refrigerated ones...in the gourmet fridge pickles section. And just how does one get something fresher than homemade? eat it at the source before any preparation at all??
I opt out of eating live chickens or anything else fresher than homemade.
I go now to my rebellious and quickly-vanishing world of stirring my own pancakes, having a conversation on one of those old fashioned numbers called a wall phone, to catch up with people before their last names, zip codes, spouses, presidents, diseases, or jobs change again.
Here are the things I'm getting sick of being convinced I "need"...
Computer.
Mortgage.
A certain level of income.
Packaging.
A college degree.
Phone, any sort, especially with gadgets and options.
All on-grid appliances. Time-savers. Things with electric plugs.
More than two changes of clothes.
More than two pairs of shoes.
Makeup (that's pretty much gone now, anyway, in my case)
Cars.
TVs, all electronics, including gaming and music devices.
House with mortgage. Oops, already said that!
Electricity.
Credit cards (even the paid-off sort), checkbooks, drivers' licenses, forms of I.D.
Entree and three vegetables three times a day.
Pharmaceuticals.
Lawnmower.
Lawn.
Mailbox.
Mail (with the exception of seed catalogs and snail mail from friends!)
Fashionable clothes.
Walmart.
Sheets, curtains, stuff. (Well...at least the stuff)
I think I can do pretty well with a good sleeping bag, a can of Sterno, and couple of good pots, a roll of clothesline and the dried contents of the bottom shelf of my pantry. A good water source. Something for soaping up myself or my clothes periodically.
Oh, and some sort of gun that shoots ratshot. So I can sit on the front porch and take aim at any IPods, GIS, Blackberrys, or other atrocities of progress that parade down my street.
I hope my husband gets home soon, before he finds I've hauled all our household belongings to Goodwill, traded our house via craigslist for a year's supply of good tarps, and there's a camel standing in the empty garage.
I'm in a mood, and just in time for shabbat (and some much-needed rest...can you tell??) Let's see if this, too, shall pass.
(I secretly kind of hope not...)
------------------------------------
Everyone have a restful shabbat...hug the ones you're with! :)
shabbat shalom!
------------------------------------
Brief update. I've had a few hours of sleep since writing this post.... Ummmm...?? Well, I guess I explored my inner ascetic? I'd make a "kinder, gentler" list upon more rested reflection, but I do often ask myself when all these "needs" became so concrete. Not that I want to work a pump handle or haul buckets when I need water, and I sooooooo love a hot shower or bath! And that soft bed came in really handy right now, ahhh :) Well, Yurt Robbyn lurks inside to tame the more spoiled version of myself from time to time, which is a good thing. And at last check I found one happy husband relaxing in the living room, and no camel in the garage...
;-)
---------------------------
Later note: Thank you to Latigo Liz for this Lemonade award for Attitude/Gratitude...I'm grateful!!
I'm at the precipice.
Seriously. I think I'm entering my Solitary Yurt Dweller phase.
I watched Story of the Weeping Camel...and I felt jealous of a family of yurt-dwelling shepherds in the Gobi Desert.
Wordsworth wrote "the world is too much with us."
He was writing about the burden of self-imposed "progress"...a society spinning out of control by the force of its own innovations.
I exist in a world of periphery, and have felt for some time that that's the actual world. It's where all the Scratch-and-Dents collect to catch their breaths or be Not Quite, or to patch their wounds. It's where the clean-up seems to never end, but there is a comradery of humanity and imperfection.
What of the speeding, bleeding blur of Modernism and Progress that spews out its casualties like so much flotsam and jetsam at ever-increasing frequencies? This is not the life I can endure....tried it, but it's not sustainable, that speed, that acceleration. On the sidelines is where the real action percolates...the slower sort beyond employee of the month plaques, easier this, more convenient that, disposable everythings.
I just got back from a quick trip to... (It's becoming more bizarre)...the grocery store. Right there, above the refrigerated eggs and next to the kosher sauerkraut, a sign above a vacuum sealed stack of packaged food, "Ready-to-eat pancakes...fresher than homemade!"
(Have we truly sunk to this subterranean low of marketing suggestability??)
These were not frozen pancakes, or pancake mix, or pourable pancake batter...these were refrigerated ones...in the gourmet fridge pickles section. And just how does one get something fresher than homemade? eat it at the source before any preparation at all??
I opt out of eating live chickens or anything else fresher than homemade.
I go now to my rebellious and quickly-vanishing world of stirring my own pancakes, having a conversation on one of those old fashioned numbers called a wall phone, to catch up with people before their last names, zip codes, spouses, presidents, diseases, or jobs change again.
Here are the things I'm getting sick of being convinced I "need"...
Computer.
Mortgage.
A certain level of income.
Packaging.
A college degree.
Phone, any sort, especially with gadgets and options.
All on-grid appliances. Time-savers. Things with electric plugs.
More than two changes of clothes.
More than two pairs of shoes.
Makeup (that's pretty much gone now, anyway, in my case)
Cars.
TVs, all electronics, including gaming and music devices.
House with mortgage. Oops, already said that!
Electricity.
Credit cards (even the paid-off sort), checkbooks, drivers' licenses, forms of I.D.
Entree and three vegetables three times a day.
Pharmaceuticals.
Lawnmower.
Lawn.
Mailbox.
Mail (with the exception of seed catalogs and snail mail from friends!)
Fashionable clothes.
Walmart.
Sheets, curtains, stuff. (Well...at least the stuff)
I think I can do pretty well with a good sleeping bag, a can of Sterno, and couple of good pots, a roll of clothesline and the dried contents of the bottom shelf of my pantry. A good water source. Something for soaping up myself or my clothes periodically.
Oh, and some sort of gun that shoots ratshot. So I can sit on the front porch and take aim at any IPods, GIS, Blackberrys, or other atrocities of progress that parade down my street.
I hope my husband gets home soon, before he finds I've hauled all our household belongings to Goodwill, traded our house via craigslist for a year's supply of good tarps, and there's a camel standing in the empty garage.
I'm in a mood, and just in time for shabbat (and some much-needed rest...can you tell??) Let's see if this, too, shall pass.
(I secretly kind of hope not...)
------------------------------------
Everyone have a restful shabbat...hug the ones you're with! :)
shabbat shalom!
------------------------------------
Brief update. I've had a few hours of sleep since writing this post.... Ummmm...?? Well, I guess I explored my inner ascetic? I'd make a "kinder, gentler" list upon more rested reflection, but I do often ask myself when all these "needs" became so concrete. Not that I want to work a pump handle or haul buckets when I need water, and I sooooooo love a hot shower or bath! And that soft bed came in really handy right now, ahhh :) Well, Yurt Robbyn lurks inside to tame the more spoiled version of myself from time to time, which is a good thing. And at last check I found one happy husband relaxing in the living room, and no camel in the garage...
;-)
---------------------------
Later note: Thank you to Latigo Liz for this Lemonade award for Attitude/Gratitude...I'm grateful!!
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Apologies to the Dreidel Song
I should be celebrating Hanukkah. I'm glad there are eight days. And I'm glad germs and whatnot are not communicable via computer screen.
I can't write inspirationally just now. But I can leave you with this song...or else what's left of it....
Sung to the Dreidel tune.
My little gift to you...
The Extra Strength Cold Medicine Dreidel Song
I have a little dreidel
I made it out of clay
And when it's dry and ready My fever and bronchitis
Then dreidel I shall play! have not yet gone away
chorus:Oh - dreidel, dreidel, dreidel
I made it out of clay
And when it's dry and ready I'm more or less contagious
Then dreidel I shall play! I'll cough the other way
It has a lovely body I want to light the candles
With legs so short and thin but breathing's no delight
And when my dreidel’s tired if I torched my inhaler
It drops and then I win! I'd conflagrate the night
chorus
My dreidel’s always playful my stomach's feeling playful
It loves to dance and spin an ache is in my head
A happy game of dreidel I quickly quaff my NyQuil
Come play now, let’s begin! and shuffle off to bed
I knew it....
you can't get the tune out of your head, can you??
Me <--------an ornery little cuss when I don't feel good-- but you can't hit me...I'm sick!!(heh heh)
I can't write inspirationally just now. But I can leave you with this song...or else what's left of it....
Sung to the Dreidel tune.
My little gift to you...
The Extra Strength Cold Medicine Dreidel Song
I have a little dreidel
I made it out of clay
chorus:Oh - dreidel, dreidel, dreidel
I made it out of clay
chorus
I knew it....
you can't get the tune out of your head, can you??
Me <--------an ornery little cuss when I don't feel good-- but you can't hit me...I'm sick!!(heh heh)
Friday, December 5, 2008
Home-centric Ramblings
I know there are people who juggle a heavy job schedule with all their home duties and projects every day, with great success. My hat's off to each of them!
I've done both at times, and when there were children in the picture, it was a wrenching set of decisions how to do justice to the privilege of motherhood (and in this case also fosterparenthood) and doing what it takes outside of the home to bring in a necessary income to meet the bills. The decisions difficult and personal, and I don't believe one solution fits all. No matter how far afield my responsibilities take me, inside of me is always the longing for home. For being at home.
Home is the ones I love. It's especially my husband, and a place for my child or children to always be welcome and understood. If I flop at other things, I hope I won't flop at those.
For myself, I know I'm not one of the wonderwomen. Not as a mother, friend, project-doer, volunteer, and employee. I do try to do well at each of these.
My personality does not feed on drama to maintain equilibrium, and I crave quiet movement and a more natural flow to days and doings. This has made me seem quite boring to a lot of folks, and it's the difference between my youth and my middle age now (I'm 42). Not that I've not risen to the occasion of life events and crises as they've come along...hopefully, I'm steady in those. But I don't crave them as my energy source or for meaning.
As a youth, my parents relocated on average every two years, and there was an excess of drama and time demands...in fact, it was nearly constant. The up side is that I learned to adapt and be flexible, and saw a lot of different places and situations. I nearly always hated school, though, especially when I was very young. I chafed at the long days spent in uninspiring schools, staring out the windows (if they had them) from my desk at the day passing by, so discontent. I wanted so much to be out There, having finished my work long since, and simply just doing busywork much of the rest of the classes. I love being outdoors, or fashioning a house to be a place of welcome. (I do better with that some times than others...my house is often TOO relaxed and not renowned for its ability to excel at white glove tests, ha!) When later I homeschooled my daughter a few of her younger years, it was interesting to see just how little time it took for her to learn the day's lessons, and how much free time was left for her to explore and extend her learning to all of her day, in a natural instead of contrived way, when there was not busywork to have to sit through.
Anyway, back to the topic -- As a young person, I didn't see myself wanting family and stability and doing anything but getting out there and seeing the whole world, being in constant motion, and changing the world. The flip side of this is that I quickly found that I had been in a sort of isolation much of my childhood, and that part of me craved quietness, room to think and sort things out, and stable friends who were not destructive.
I did get to travel the world, and what I found was that I most loved being with people...in their homes. I loved the roads off the beaten path, and would look at the people and their houses and wonder just how they lived their daily lives. The happiest memories I have of those travels are of the hospitality shown me on so many levels, and of getting to share the simplicity of a cup of tea and conversation in the heart of someone's home. Years later, a family of friends in Northern Ireland showed me that a sort of hospitality that exceeded my ability to comprehend when they had me over for two weeks. I'm so lousy with long distance correspondence, but I hope to return that hospitality to them someday. Those very real home moments and friendships were better than any tourist destination in a travel flyer.
I love other cultures, and traveling. I love learning about history. As an adult, there is still a part of me that loves new things, discoveries, some times of a lot of activity and excitement. But a greater part of me prefers that Home be at the heart of these, and that it be a quiet refuge and place of peace rather than stress. I'm not sure how exciting my own history has been or will be, but it has been and will continue to be Home-centric. My husband also shares this preference, and we both are slowly working to exchange the demands of an outside work schedule for being our own bosses, namely doing the business of keeping ourselves afloat from our efforts right here in our own backyard.
We're not yet there. It's our goal, though. I'm delighted to say that God has been gracious to us in allowing us a lot of forward movement, and the debt reduction continues. For those in the same circumstances of paying off debt before tackling further goals, it can seem an interminable journey, and the waiting can seem really long. Longterm friends of mine are probably sick of hearing about my dreams of living in the country and doing "country things"...it's an old song and I'm stuck on Repeat. The difference now is that Jack and I both want the same thing.
An important focus of our home is God. This blog is not a vehicle for writing about the specifics of our faith, but I'm also not going to "hesh up" about the centrality of it at the core of all we do and hope to do in the future. My husband is a Jew by birth and practice, and I'm one by choice, and we both have christian pasts that overlap into our presentday in ways we appreciate rather than not. I have a lot to learn, but we're a pretty pared down couple beliefwise. We believe in the written Torah and other scriptures contained in the Tanak (the OT, to christians), and do not have a heavy emphasis on tradition, though we have a reverence for wise men (and women) and their insights. We strive for a simplicity and straightforwardness in our faith rather than the esoteric, or any tendency to follow gnostic or mystical things, or any thing or person propounding "a higher knowledge" or "special revelation." We are convinced of the necessity for ourselves to not add to or take away from the simplicity we read straight up in the pages of the scriptures, and that puts us in an interesting No Man's Land where we don't exactly "fit." Nevertheless, we are delighted to be here...it took us a long time to pare it down to this. We love that Judaism allows for us to ask questions and quest in this way.
That's probably more than I've ever written on this blog about our faith. The only reason I'm writing about it now is because of its importance in determining our decisions daily and in the future. Our desire to love God and live according to His instructions figures into every area of our lives. Our attitude towards these things also is the same we have in other areas. We don't strive and find some relief in achieving things through work. We don't "earn" happiness or a right relationship, but that's not to say that in every area of our lives there's not an investment of time, focus, and elbow grease. The grace part is that we've been granted the fullness of life no matter how bumpy the process of living it gets. With us, there's no dichotomy of grace vs "works" because we do what we choose to do, and not against our will. This for us has been our process of growing up. Our choices don't always entail the easy road, but the journey is not alone. Frankly, I don't care where it leads, as long as we're praying for direction along the way and doing the best in each decision we can to follow the path God lays out for us.
Boy is this post rambling. Don't get the impression we have our act together. We don't. And don't mistake our willingness to walk this way as some religious thing. To us, separating life into categories that make "religion" something apart from the our everyday lives is contrived. Our heroes are not religious, they are godly...and flawed, and real.
Again, I digress. I'm just trying to clarify somewhat. The subject of the post is about whether to stay at home or go work at a different location for someone else regularly. We're at that transitional point of discomfort, both desiring to put our energies into our little homestead, right here at home. Running a household with a strong priorities of conserving resources, self-sufficiency, experimentation and constant learning, and producing what we need right here as much as possible really requires time...here....at home. It doesnt mean we can't work elsewhere, but our Elsewhere has been the biggest chunk of time and energy in the past, and we are transitioning it here.
I love being at home. I'm not a driven person, and I'm very relaxed (too relaxed many times) when I'm at home. There are times when we'll just have to discipline ourselves to a different set of tasks here, but evenso, I feel such a sense of fulfillment when we can actually SEE fruition of our attempts close at hand. I long for plantings and the tending of plants and animals, with all their joys and frustrations, and the final harvest that must then be put up in ways that extend our enjoyment of the fruits. I LIKE learning to be more self-sufficient and not having to depend solely on others. I LIKE paring down what we consider to be necessities to the fundamentals, and being very selective, and creative, about the "extras." This simplicity has infused all the areas of our lives. We enjoy this choice, this elbow grease...and the ability to work with our limitations. There will always be more to do, but we're not driven. I'm so grateful that simplicity can be inspiring rather than a deprivation. We enjoy our less, more.
I just returned to work after a long hiatus for most of the summer and fall. Initially, I was off work to be in hospice with Jack's mom in her last weeks, and I'm so glad we were able to do that. I'm enjoying getting back to a schedule at work...for a time. We don't know how long that will be, but we know the goal...the rest of our debt being paid off. There haven't been any bailouts for our family, and so we work :)
As I've been at home these past few months, I've thoroughly enjoyed it, and my productivity around here really picked up. My sleep schedule balanced itself, my health picked up, I slowly began losing weight without doing anything else differently. I was able to make better meals, made everything possible from scratch, learned a lot of new recipes and did some experimentation. I saw Jack thorough a lot of testing, driving here and there, and was available to my daughter and Jack for their uneven workdays. I got to be with my husband a lot more, and help him more (we help each other, and I love being with him). It was even nice knocking off whatever I was doing and just being with him as ran errands together...often that's the best "date" around. We did a lot of planning, organizing. We scrapped a houseplan that took us months to agree on...scrapped it in a day. Redrew one that we're now fleshing out the details of, and we're happier with. I'll write more about that soon. We got a lot of health things sorted. Saw our daughter through a lot of transitions...she's graduated the LPN program, begun the new fulltime job, enrolled in college for the first time, taken on meeting her own expenses and contributing to the household a bit, and recently has moved into her own digs. She's made good decisions and bad, and as her mom I'm the first Go-To in a lot of that. It hasn't been a boring year :)
Jack's knee is better right now, and we just got a call from the neighbor that he's going to drop off another load of horse manure for us...he's worried he's giving us more than we need, but we keep telling him bring it on!
There is news to report on the land search, but we're waiting till everything aligns and we're sure of what to report. When we do, you'll hear the whole enchilada.
Happy freezer update! We bought the small freezer not too long ago, and got about a dozen frozen turkeys for $.79/lb. The turkeys are small, about 8-10 lbs each. We ate on the first one for a week because we didn't amend meals with a whole lot more. I don't think we'll ever get tired of soup made from the turkey stock! We've since run across a few deals on other meats, and have slowly tucked a few buys into the deepfreeze as well...a couple of chuck roasts, some grouper, a couple of briskets.
I had no idea how wonderful it would be to have a freezer. I underestimated how less dependent on the grocery store it helps us be, now that I have all I need to make things from scratch at home. There's not much in the way of instant-presto food, but there are all the ingredients for whatever I need to fix (we still have some fresh veggies in the fridge...and of course a bottle of root beer. What's up with my craving root beer so much lately?) When I'm set up for pressure canning and can have more time at home, I'll be putting up a lot of meat that way, too, especially stock and soups. But for now, this step in buying the freezer is such a blessing! We're so grateful God has provided some more workdays for us both so we can afford to get a jumpstart on it. We're not eating into our debt-reduction this way...we're just finessing the grocery budget, and so far so good.
We were blessed with a modest windfall from an unexpected source this week (an endeavor, not a person), and it couldn't have come at a better time! This will take care of our property taxes and I got a pair of work shoes I was needing and a few other necessities. We are SO thankful to God for this, and for the added work days.
We go to work elsewhere in order to be here faster. I crave being at home. I've had a wonderful time being here the past few months! The faster we pay off the debt, the faster I can be here, and now it's gone from years to hopefully a countdown of months. I hope we do it fast!
We need to sell one property (we have vacant residential lots that are not moving at all, a handful total). If we can do this, we will be out of debt instantly, and can move forward with some totally new and exciting efforts. For now, we're in the countdown.
A year and a half ago when I started blogging our journey, if anyone had told me it would be this much later and we'd still not be out of debt yet, I'd have been really deflated and blue about it. Journaling here has helped me have a more realistic view of all that goes into the daily living of moving a certain direction. It's allowed me to compare my supposed wish lists against the realities of other homesteaders already "living the life" and seeing where I need to hone our expectations considerably. Other homesteaders (however that term is defined) have been our very real teachers, as we feel privileged to have a window into your lifestyles, preferences, and what works for you. We're so thankful for you! Many times, I even get intimidated. We're slower, aren't supremely driven, and our ambition stops short of what it would have been 20 years ago. But the changes have been real, if sometimes "real slow."
I'm already missing being at home as much. But my heart never leaves here. That includes my husband...it's not a house. Having Jack as kindred spirit and partner in crime (ha), and as a great strength in areas in which I'm not as strong is perhaps the greatest gift God's given to me besides my daughter (they are in separate categories, not competing ones) :) I stop all day, every day, to thank God for Jack. Sure, sometimes we need a break from each other, but only for a very little bit. I'm so glad our worlds came together into one. Someday I might write about how God brought us together, but for now, I'm just grateful. I'm slightly apprehensive about leaving my snug home and returning to a work schedule elsewhere, but I'm not less grateful for that opportunity, since it's not an end in itself.
God speed the day we can be on our land, out of debt, working hard at home and making it a place of welcome to others!
Sorry...this post was all over the place! I hope you have a relaxing weekend. We're now headed into another shabbat, and this time I'm lighting the stand menorah Jack had made years ago. I need to start us our own traditions for our weekly shabbat...someday I'll learn some other things to make it special, hopefully from observant folks who have been doing that a lot longer than we have. But whatever it looks like down the road to us, it'll always be a time of rest, refocus, family, homespun worship and gratefulness to God. It's to us weekly what christmas is to others once a year, minus the shopping frenzy :)
I'm so grateful for everyone who comes here, and always love reading your comments. Thank you for sharing yourselves and your perspectives so generously with us!
Shabbat shalom :)
I've done both at times, and when there were children in the picture, it was a wrenching set of decisions how to do justice to the privilege of motherhood (and in this case also fosterparenthood) and doing what it takes outside of the home to bring in a necessary income to meet the bills. The decisions difficult and personal, and I don't believe one solution fits all. No matter how far afield my responsibilities take me, inside of me is always the longing for home. For being at home.
Home is the ones I love. It's especially my husband, and a place for my child or children to always be welcome and understood. If I flop at other things, I hope I won't flop at those.
For myself, I know I'm not one of the wonderwomen. Not as a mother, friend, project-doer, volunteer, and employee. I do try to do well at each of these.
My personality does not feed on drama to maintain equilibrium, and I crave quiet movement and a more natural flow to days and doings. This has made me seem quite boring to a lot of folks, and it's the difference between my youth and my middle age now (I'm 42). Not that I've not risen to the occasion of life events and crises as they've come along...hopefully, I'm steady in those. But I don't crave them as my energy source or for meaning.
As a youth, my parents relocated on average every two years, and there was an excess of drama and time demands...in fact, it was nearly constant. The up side is that I learned to adapt and be flexible, and saw a lot of different places and situations. I nearly always hated school, though, especially when I was very young. I chafed at the long days spent in uninspiring schools, staring out the windows (if they had them) from my desk at the day passing by, so discontent. I wanted so much to be out There, having finished my work long since, and simply just doing busywork much of the rest of the classes. I love being outdoors, or fashioning a house to be a place of welcome. (I do better with that some times than others...my house is often TOO relaxed and not renowned for its ability to excel at white glove tests, ha!) When later I homeschooled my daughter a few of her younger years, it was interesting to see just how little time it took for her to learn the day's lessons, and how much free time was left for her to explore and extend her learning to all of her day, in a natural instead of contrived way, when there was not busywork to have to sit through.
Anyway, back to the topic -- As a young person, I didn't see myself wanting family and stability and doing anything but getting out there and seeing the whole world, being in constant motion, and changing the world. The flip side of this is that I quickly found that I had been in a sort of isolation much of my childhood, and that part of me craved quietness, room to think and sort things out, and stable friends who were not destructive.
I did get to travel the world, and what I found was that I most loved being with people...in their homes. I loved the roads off the beaten path, and would look at the people and their houses and wonder just how they lived their daily lives. The happiest memories I have of those travels are of the hospitality shown me on so many levels, and of getting to share the simplicity of a cup of tea and conversation in the heart of someone's home. Years later, a family of friends in Northern Ireland showed me that a sort of hospitality that exceeded my ability to comprehend when they had me over for two weeks. I'm so lousy with long distance correspondence, but I hope to return that hospitality to them someday. Those very real home moments and friendships were better than any tourist destination in a travel flyer.
I love other cultures, and traveling. I love learning about history. As an adult, there is still a part of me that loves new things, discoveries, some times of a lot of activity and excitement. But a greater part of me prefers that Home be at the heart of these, and that it be a quiet refuge and place of peace rather than stress. I'm not sure how exciting my own history has been or will be, but it has been and will continue to be Home-centric. My husband also shares this preference, and we both are slowly working to exchange the demands of an outside work schedule for being our own bosses, namely doing the business of keeping ourselves afloat from our efforts right here in our own backyard.
We're not yet there. It's our goal, though. I'm delighted to say that God has been gracious to us in allowing us a lot of forward movement, and the debt reduction continues. For those in the same circumstances of paying off debt before tackling further goals, it can seem an interminable journey, and the waiting can seem really long. Longterm friends of mine are probably sick of hearing about my dreams of living in the country and doing "country things"...it's an old song and I'm stuck on Repeat. The difference now is that Jack and I both want the same thing.
An important focus of our home is God. This blog is not a vehicle for writing about the specifics of our faith, but I'm also not going to "hesh up" about the centrality of it at the core of all we do and hope to do in the future. My husband is a Jew by birth and practice, and I'm one by choice, and we both have christian pasts that overlap into our presentday in ways we appreciate rather than not. I have a lot to learn, but we're a pretty pared down couple beliefwise. We believe in the written Torah and other scriptures contained in the Tanak (the OT, to christians), and do not have a heavy emphasis on tradition, though we have a reverence for wise men (and women) and their insights. We strive for a simplicity and straightforwardness in our faith rather than the esoteric, or any tendency to follow gnostic or mystical things, or any thing or person propounding "a higher knowledge" or "special revelation." We are convinced of the necessity for ourselves to not add to or take away from the simplicity we read straight up in the pages of the scriptures, and that puts us in an interesting No Man's Land where we don't exactly "fit." Nevertheless, we are delighted to be here...it took us a long time to pare it down to this. We love that Judaism allows for us to ask questions and quest in this way.
That's probably more than I've ever written on this blog about our faith. The only reason I'm writing about it now is because of its importance in determining our decisions daily and in the future. Our desire to love God and live according to His instructions figures into every area of our lives. Our attitude towards these things also is the same we have in other areas. We don't strive and find some relief in achieving things through work. We don't "earn" happiness or a right relationship, but that's not to say that in every area of our lives there's not an investment of time, focus, and elbow grease. The grace part is that we've been granted the fullness of life no matter how bumpy the process of living it gets. With us, there's no dichotomy of grace vs "works" because we do what we choose to do, and not against our will. This for us has been our process of growing up. Our choices don't always entail the easy road, but the journey is not alone. Frankly, I don't care where it leads, as long as we're praying for direction along the way and doing the best in each decision we can to follow the path God lays out for us.
Boy is this post rambling. Don't get the impression we have our act together. We don't. And don't mistake our willingness to walk this way as some religious thing. To us, separating life into categories that make "religion" something apart from the our everyday lives is contrived. Our heroes are not religious, they are godly...and flawed, and real.
Again, I digress. I'm just trying to clarify somewhat. The subject of the post is about whether to stay at home or go work at a different location for someone else regularly. We're at that transitional point of discomfort, both desiring to put our energies into our little homestead, right here at home. Running a household with a strong priorities of conserving resources, self-sufficiency, experimentation and constant learning, and producing what we need right here as much as possible really requires time...here....at home. It doesnt mean we can't work elsewhere, but our Elsewhere has been the biggest chunk of time and energy in the past, and we are transitioning it here.
I love being at home. I'm not a driven person, and I'm very relaxed (too relaxed many times) when I'm at home. There are times when we'll just have to discipline ourselves to a different set of tasks here, but evenso, I feel such a sense of fulfillment when we can actually SEE fruition of our attempts close at hand. I long for plantings and the tending of plants and animals, with all their joys and frustrations, and the final harvest that must then be put up in ways that extend our enjoyment of the fruits. I LIKE learning to be more self-sufficient and not having to depend solely on others. I LIKE paring down what we consider to be necessities to the fundamentals, and being very selective, and creative, about the "extras." This simplicity has infused all the areas of our lives. We enjoy this choice, this elbow grease...and the ability to work with our limitations. There will always be more to do, but we're not driven. I'm so grateful that simplicity can be inspiring rather than a deprivation. We enjoy our less, more.
I just returned to work after a long hiatus for most of the summer and fall. Initially, I was off work to be in hospice with Jack's mom in her last weeks, and I'm so glad we were able to do that. I'm enjoying getting back to a schedule at work...for a time. We don't know how long that will be, but we know the goal...the rest of our debt being paid off. There haven't been any bailouts for our family, and so we work :)
As I've been at home these past few months, I've thoroughly enjoyed it, and my productivity around here really picked up. My sleep schedule balanced itself, my health picked up, I slowly began losing weight without doing anything else differently. I was able to make better meals, made everything possible from scratch, learned a lot of new recipes and did some experimentation. I saw Jack thorough a lot of testing, driving here and there, and was available to my daughter and Jack for their uneven workdays. I got to be with my husband a lot more, and help him more (we help each other, and I love being with him). It was even nice knocking off whatever I was doing and just being with him as ran errands together...often that's the best "date" around. We did a lot of planning, organizing. We scrapped a houseplan that took us months to agree on...scrapped it in a day. Redrew one that we're now fleshing out the details of, and we're happier with. I'll write more about that soon. We got a lot of health things sorted. Saw our daughter through a lot of transitions...she's graduated the LPN program, begun the new fulltime job, enrolled in college for the first time, taken on meeting her own expenses and contributing to the household a bit, and recently has moved into her own digs. She's made good decisions and bad, and as her mom I'm the first Go-To in a lot of that. It hasn't been a boring year :)
Jack's knee is better right now, and we just got a call from the neighbor that he's going to drop off another load of horse manure for us...he's worried he's giving us more than we need, but we keep telling him bring it on!
There is news to report on the land search, but we're waiting till everything aligns and we're sure of what to report. When we do, you'll hear the whole enchilada.
Happy freezer update! We bought the small freezer not too long ago, and got about a dozen frozen turkeys for $.79/lb. The turkeys are small, about 8-10 lbs each. We ate on the first one for a week because we didn't amend meals with a whole lot more. I don't think we'll ever get tired of soup made from the turkey stock! We've since run across a few deals on other meats, and have slowly tucked a few buys into the deepfreeze as well...a couple of chuck roasts, some grouper, a couple of briskets.
I had no idea how wonderful it would be to have a freezer. I underestimated how less dependent on the grocery store it helps us be, now that I have all I need to make things from scratch at home. There's not much in the way of instant-presto food, but there are all the ingredients for whatever I need to fix (we still have some fresh veggies in the fridge...and of course a bottle of root beer. What's up with my craving root beer so much lately?) When I'm set up for pressure canning and can have more time at home, I'll be putting up a lot of meat that way, too, especially stock and soups. But for now, this step in buying the freezer is such a blessing! We're so grateful God has provided some more workdays for us both so we can afford to get a jumpstart on it. We're not eating into our debt-reduction this way...we're just finessing the grocery budget, and so far so good.
We were blessed with a modest windfall from an unexpected source this week (an endeavor, not a person), and it couldn't have come at a better time! This will take care of our property taxes and I got a pair of work shoes I was needing and a few other necessities. We are SO thankful to God for this, and for the added work days.
We go to work elsewhere in order to be here faster. I crave being at home. I've had a wonderful time being here the past few months! The faster we pay off the debt, the faster I can be here, and now it's gone from years to hopefully a countdown of months. I hope we do it fast!
We need to sell one property (we have vacant residential lots that are not moving at all, a handful total). If we can do this, we will be out of debt instantly, and can move forward with some totally new and exciting efforts. For now, we're in the countdown.
A year and a half ago when I started blogging our journey, if anyone had told me it would be this much later and we'd still not be out of debt yet, I'd have been really deflated and blue about it. Journaling here has helped me have a more realistic view of all that goes into the daily living of moving a certain direction. It's allowed me to compare my supposed wish lists against the realities of other homesteaders already "living the life" and seeing where I need to hone our expectations considerably. Other homesteaders (however that term is defined) have been our very real teachers, as we feel privileged to have a window into your lifestyles, preferences, and what works for you. We're so thankful for you! Many times, I even get intimidated. We're slower, aren't supremely driven, and our ambition stops short of what it would have been 20 years ago. But the changes have been real, if sometimes "real slow."
I'm already missing being at home as much. But my heart never leaves here. That includes my husband...it's not a house. Having Jack as kindred spirit and partner in crime (ha), and as a great strength in areas in which I'm not as strong is perhaps the greatest gift God's given to me besides my daughter (they are in separate categories, not competing ones) :) I stop all day, every day, to thank God for Jack. Sure, sometimes we need a break from each other, but only for a very little bit. I'm so glad our worlds came together into one. Someday I might write about how God brought us together, but for now, I'm just grateful. I'm slightly apprehensive about leaving my snug home and returning to a work schedule elsewhere, but I'm not less grateful for that opportunity, since it's not an end in itself.
God speed the day we can be on our land, out of debt, working hard at home and making it a place of welcome to others!
Sorry...this post was all over the place! I hope you have a relaxing weekend. We're now headed into another shabbat, and this time I'm lighting the stand menorah Jack had made years ago. I need to start us our own traditions for our weekly shabbat...someday I'll learn some other things to make it special, hopefully from observant folks who have been doing that a lot longer than we have. But whatever it looks like down the road to us, it'll always be a time of rest, refocus, family, homespun worship and gratefulness to God. It's to us weekly what christmas is to others once a year, minus the shopping frenzy :)
I'm so grateful for everyone who comes here, and always love reading your comments. Thank you for sharing yourselves and your perspectives so generously with us!
Shabbat shalom :)
Monday, December 1, 2008
Garbo Does My Dishes
Well, not exactly, but she kept me company in my kitchen The Day After Thanksgiving. And now we know why she never made public appearances. Seeing the state of my kitchen scarred her for life. But she did provide a memorable performance as I washed the umpteenth sinkful that had piled up despite my attempts last week to wash-as-I-go.
Dishwasher?
*I* am the dishwasher...
Jack had to work. I needed to wash. Sometimes I make it a game, but sometimes it's simply Ugh. This was one of those times.
I hauled my daughter's TV (the one that has a VCR tape thingy built right in) right onto the countertop and fished through a stack of old taped-from-AMC-back-in-the-day tapes to watch. I'm on an old movie kick right now, and we're not renting, nor do we have TV reception or cable (our choice, no complaints). I was in the mood for some company...and Greta showed up. (Not one of her smarter moves, ha)
She peered down from her queenly perch atop the one clear space in my kitchen and surveyed the dishware carnage below. She quickly grabbed for her bouquet of camellias to cushion the assault of her delicate sensibilities.
Oh drama queen of drama queens, she involved me in her intrigues, as my drying rack filled up and emptied time and again. (That's ok, I was up for it...I'm the mother of a daughter just past her teens, after all.) There was much movement on my part, a lot of scrubbing and suds flying and refilling of the sink with more water...and more dirty dishes.
This went on for some time, till both of us were a bit exhausted...she, of her Cukor-induced plot twists and I of my bottomless sink.
I got a lot done, but in the end, there were still more dishes. And you know what happens if you leave ANY dishes in the sink till tomorrow...you have to cook more food and then it begins again.
Tragedy, or comedy?
I laughed. Garbo didn't. Her Marguerite character died rather over-dramatically right there on the spot, of consumption, in the arms of her beloved. Though I have my doubts.
I suspect my kitchen was what did her in. Maybe there's only room for one heroine at a time in here.
I'm going to find out.
Yes, there are more dishes awaiting. I go now to the tragedy/comedy that is my kitchen sink...again. And I take some more old VCR tapes along as company. After all, I haven't yet killed off ALL the old silver screen greats...who will it be this time? So far I've made it through Greer Garson, Lauren Bacall, Mary Astor, Bette Davis...who else?
So many drama queens, so little time!
No More Gobble Left
We're sated. That smallish turkey fed our small crew a good many days. I got a load of meat, soup and stock off the little fellow (or gal) and can safely say we've had our poultry quota for the month. What a blessing how one bird can provide prolonged nutrition!
And now I'm ready for a good salad, thank you :)
I'm also learning it's ok to see the same ingredients in different incarnations (or not) repeat themselves frequently, and not always have to vary every meal. The most stretched foodstuffs? Turkey and pinto beans...they are finding their way into a lot of things. It's now that I'm appreciating the variety that some homecanned goods would bring to our same meals now, if we'd had a garden and canned up some tomatoes, relish, veggies, and fermented goods. It's a lesson I'll learn from, hopefully!
Just finished knitting my second cap with the Knifty Knitter, pics tomorrow. They're better than I expected for a first try, but still not very polished. I'm trying to figure out how to tie off the ends strings without it being visible. My daughter loved hers, though, and I bought some cheaper yarn to keep going with some more...I'll see if it's the type of yarn that makes a difference...hmmm.
I joined Facebook today and have no idea what I'm doing. I'm such a technology rebel. I wouldn't know a Blackberry from an Ipod. Maybe this is the stage where I sit down and declare that the world will go on just fine without my advancement any further in "progress." I was quite content never knowing how to program my VCR. Not having any TV reception for the past 5 years may have warped me into an odd old bird, ha!
Errrr, I said bird...
Hold the turkey, please...at least for just now!
;-)
And now I'm ready for a good salad, thank you :)
I'm also learning it's ok to see the same ingredients in different incarnations (or not) repeat themselves frequently, and not always have to vary every meal. The most stretched foodstuffs? Turkey and pinto beans...they are finding their way into a lot of things. It's now that I'm appreciating the variety that some homecanned goods would bring to our same meals now, if we'd had a garden and canned up some tomatoes, relish, veggies, and fermented goods. It's a lesson I'll learn from, hopefully!
Just finished knitting my second cap with the Knifty Knitter, pics tomorrow. They're better than I expected for a first try, but still not very polished. I'm trying to figure out how to tie off the ends strings without it being visible. My daughter loved hers, though, and I bought some cheaper yarn to keep going with some more...I'll see if it's the type of yarn that makes a difference...hmmm.
I joined Facebook today and have no idea what I'm doing. I'm such a technology rebel. I wouldn't know a Blackberry from an Ipod. Maybe this is the stage where I sit down and declare that the world will go on just fine without my advancement any further in "progress." I was quite content never knowing how to program my VCR. Not having any TV reception for the past 5 years may have warped me into an odd old bird, ha!
Errrr, I said bird...
Hold the turkey, please...at least for just now!
;-)
Friday, November 14, 2008
Cookies and Ramblings
Don't you love those 5-ingredients-or-less foods that can be put together in a jiffy and turn out great?Here's an easy recipe I tried this week for peanut butter cookies called Best Peanut Butter Cookies Ever, and I love it...no flour, no milk, and really delicious. (I think I could even back off the sugar amount some, which I'll be trying for my next batch.) Here's the link... and here's the easy recipe:
INGREDIENTS
2 cups peanut butter
2 cups white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 pinch salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets.
In a medium bowl, stir peanut butter and sugar together until smooth. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the baking soda, salt, and vanilla. Roll dough into 1 inch balls and place them 2 inches apart onto the prepared cookie sheets. Press a criss-cross into the top using the back of a fork.
Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven. Allow cookies to cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.
These were seriously the best peanut butter cookies I've had. You have to remove them carefully with a spatula to cool...careful or they'll fall apart. After they cool, they keep their shape really well. The comments section at their website states that regular peanut butter works better for this than hand-ground, for whatever reason.
On to other things...this is a rambling post and it'll be all over the place. I apologize in advance :)
Continuing to Make It at Home
Right now, since my regular job has not picked back up all the way, I'm at home more (yay!), which I really prefer. I've been trying to contribute to our budget, especially with the reduction of incoming money, by making nearly everything from scratch and really tightening the food budget a lot tighter. I still would like to get the numbers lower, without sacrificing nutrition.
We don't have optimal nutrition at the moment in this scenario.
We're working within our limitations. Yes, I know there are those out there with very good arguments for why it costs less overall and is preferable to buy everything organic. I'm sorry, I just don't have the sources or the income for that, so our answer to this will be to supplement what we can do right now with our OWN garden produce, something over which we have more control.
Our strategy is to slowly and deliberately begin substituting one for the other...our own home-produced foods to replace the store-bought ones.
Prices Still Climb
Has anyone noticed the price of simple things like rice and beans? It actually made me angry...I went to the store prepared to pay the prices for dried beans that I'd seen a year ago. We seldom eat beans, which is now changing, and I seldom had the need to buy dried beans. I'm used to their being the cheapest thing going as far as staple items. The price now compared to then is simply ridiculous....I really had a moment right there in the grocery aisle...I just stoood there and got really, really mad. (not something I usually do...)
So, I'll deal. You can believe beans and cowpeas of different descriptions will be on my garden list for next year.
Anyway, we hope to transition to our own garden produce, supplying our own staples, growing our own meat and dairy animals, and purchasing or bartering for organic supplies, including bulk purchase co-ops in the future...this is part of our Plan.
At the moment, I'm at the base of the learning curve.
I didn't realize how much we relied on processed foods to fill in the gaps, till now. Here at the very bottom of the learning curve, I'm having to learn for the first time how to bypass instant gratification. Yes, I cooked a lot at home. Yes, I used to cut corners. I still will on days I have to work, or if I'm not feeling well...I'm not a purist on this, nor am I critical of other families doing what works best for them. I'm just documenting my growing process here...which, for me, is more of a Growing Up process.
I've been pretty spoiled, even when I thought I wasn't...
While someday I hope to only cook using my own homeground grains, sugars that aren't processed white cane, and etc., at the moment, till I get some of those tools (grain mill, etc) and get set up for it or find better sources, I still do use them. I've experimented with the store-bought whole grain flour, and in comparison with the freshly-ground-at-home ones, there's just no comparison. Same thing for white sugar. There are my goals, and at the moment, my reality is in the early parts of transition. So regular unbleached white flour and white sugar are still here in my kitchen for the time being.
Reminding Ourselves of How Far We've Come
Debt-reduction is our Job One. All other things right now as far as the To Do list come second. It's easy to think we're making no progress whatsoever, as we trudge onward in this process of getting out of debt, locating a piece of land (and all the other stuff that comes with that), selling off a couple vacant residential lots we can't use (nothing is selling in our area right now, as you can imagine), scratching our heads over how (time, resources) to invest in doing for ourselves right where we are...namely, coaxing a garden from hardpan and all that entails...we just can't spend more money without careful planning, and it's difficult to decide when that same money's needed for more than one goal at a time.
For instance there's a real opportunity right now to purchase frozen turkey for $.79/lb. One small turkey could contribute largely to our meals in different ways for about two weeks, maybe more. Normally, the cheapest sale on meat of any sort (besides pork, which we can't have) is $1.99/lb, and the cheapest ground chuck normally runs $3.69 lb. And that's for what Jack and I term "the nasty stuff"...totally processed Big Ag chicken or beef...something we're trying to get AWAY from eventually. Oh, have I mentioned I just about can't take the chicken anymore? It tastes like bleach and chemicals to me, and I am trying so hard not to have to buy it anymore. We're incorporating more vegetarian meals as a result.
Anyway, turkey at $.79/lb is a real find for us, but we don't have freezer space. We can pick up a small freezer right now at a reasonable price, but of course that money doesn't come from a void, and is earmarked for other things. However, the impact it would have right now in SAVING us money on our meat and grocery budget is a real consideration.
Buying, to Save?
We seldom make snap decisions, and this is no exception. We've deliberated now for two weeks, "sleeping on it." We did decide to go ahead and get the freezer and to stock up with holiday turkeys on sale, and other items reduced for the holidays.
And here's what got cut from the budget...holiday gifts. All of them.
Happy holidays to us...we'll have something to put affordable food into and cut my grocery budget down down down, and pay those remaining debts off off off :)
What Gives
I'll write more another time about how our gift-giving and holiday celebrations have changed dramatically in the last few years...that's been our choice, frankly. This year, everyone in our household is working, and all of us have been very up-front about our financial goals. We have discussions and updates regularly, and encourage each other in these areas...so let's just say none of us is unaware of the big steps we're all taking in many areas. That takes the ouch out of adjusting to other changes such as reducing our holiday budget, and the pressure off of the rut we'd gotten into with gift-giving. A rut of gift-giving?? Is that a bah humbug sentiment? :) No...I'm not on a high horse here and not critical of others' gift-giving fun at all...in fact, I quite enjoy seeing the happiness others have with the fun of it all. And I do anticipate future years in which we'll have the extra to embellish family times with some extra indulgence in that area. We'll really be able to enjoy it then, without feeling stressed!
I am saying this:
1. We have no TV (we have a set for watching movies, but we have no TV reception or cable...none.) We see no ads. We don't know what we're missing! :)
2. We're giving ourselves the gift of being debt free. We're not willing to halt that, even momentarily, because we want to be FREE more than any other want.
3. We have what we need, and a whole lot of what we want.
4. We have more than what we need, and are still having to get rid of Stuff. We don't want to replace Stuff with More Stuff.
5. There are some tools we need to live the lifestyle we want, better. We try not to get caught up into thinking we can't live this life without those tools. As we Reduce, we only Replace with things that are Essential.
6. Holidays can be celebrated without gifts. If we don't think so, we've lost out on something very fundamental. BEING WITH our loved ones is the point...THAT is the gift. It's taken me a lot of years to "get" that.
7. Gifts don't have to be confined to holidays. We think most things are better when shared. Jack and I tend to be "giving" people anyway, and simple things such as homemade food, canned goods, handmade items are best when shared. Time spent together is still the greatest gift. A favorite meal together, singing songs, favorite music/movie/home movies/photograph albums/games...these are gratifying and fun. Making foods together...popcorn, caramel corn balls, taffy, cookies, a family recipe, grilling, a fish fry, a potluck buffet, a bonfire with roasted marshmallows or hotdogs...that's shared "giving" time that can't be replaced. My grandparents always had a wooden bowl of whole nuts, with nutcracker, and I remember lots of times the grownups would sit around and talk and crack nuts as they went. And don't forget snuggling with the kids or sweetheart, hugs, and reading aloud, or storytelling. I just don't know anyone who doesnt love a good story!
OK, I never know where things are going when I begin typing. This was quite a departure from Peanut Butter Cookies, ack!
I hope you've had a wonderful week, and will have a relaxing weekend.
As soon as I'm off the computer here, I'll be cooking up a storm and straightening some around the house for tonight and tomorrow. At sundown will come our weekly time of thanks, feasting, and simple comforts. It's not always an easy week, and it doesn't always end with a big meal or everything finished around the house. But it's always welcome, and a reminder that there's a new week for new starts just around the corner :) I do have some emails to catch up with over the weekend (says the procrastinator, lol) I'll especially enjoy re-reading all the wonderful replies to the Chicken Question post...so grateful for so many detailed answers... you have no idea how much this helps us get a more realistic idea for planning our own future! Thank you so much!
Quick Meal Recap
Some of our meals this week were Cabbage Rolls with Rice, Leftover Lasagne from last weekend, all sorts of things served with homemade bread, Tuna Noodle Bake, Cabbage and more cabbage with nearly everything, homemade cookies, red beans and rice with cornbread (and cabbage, what else, ha!). I'll get another batch of beans and rice going to slow cook in the crock pot for tomorrow's meals, make up some squash/spinach/noodle bake (sounds gross but it's delicious), and some beef enchiladas if my tortillas are still good to go. We have potatoes, so potato dishes will figure in largely for the upcoming week. I need to get a couple batches of breads going, too...some will be plain, and I'll probably try to use the calabaza I have in another batch and make it sweet, probably rolling it up with brown sugar and cinnamon for sweet loaves, mmmm :)
Jack treated me out yesterday at lunch to our favorite hole-in-the-wall Mom and Pop restaurant, where they serve homecooked food. I got my fish 'n chips fix there, and he had some corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes. I laughed when he was eating and he pointed to the cabbage and said "hey look honey...it's MORE CABBAGE!" heehee Obviously the man can eat it seven days a week ;-)
Kombucha!
As always, we're loving the Kombucha. Love, love, loving it! I don't even miss other drinks. It's kombucha, water, or sometimes milk. I'm noticing a difference in my health that I attribute to it, not the least of is more energy and a better sleep cycle.
Slow Mend
Jack is on Week Two of tendonitis in his right leg. Not much is getting done outside as far as the heavy stuff. So we're utilizing time together indoors, and there's been some fun in getting back to the drawing board (literally) in trying to finalize house plans/drawings. It's something we don't seem to get tired of, and we scout around online, too, for plan ideas. It's all budget-directed, so it's not the "dream house" of unlimited resources, but it's a lot of fun sharing in the formation of something that will hopefully serve us well, if we ever get to that point. That'll be the fun part of being out of debt :)
Bucketville/the Garden
We'll be getting into a bit lower temps here over the weekend. We'll be closely monitoring our buckets of semi-tropicals to see what we can do if they start looking puny. We have old sheets at the ready. The guava has fruits on it...hope it does fine. The soapberry tree babies look like they're going dormant. Hope they're not dying.
Ok, duty calls, gotta scoot. If I don't stop typing now, there won't be time for everything.
Have a great weekend, and shabbat shalom!
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