The ceremonial jar of names.
The lovely assistant's hand impartially drawing a name.
The winner!
Amy, let me know what scent of soap you'd like. If I'm out, you can wait til some new ones are ready or you can choose a different one. I have one new scent not listed on my site and that is lemon thyme. Please email me at llmb95 at mymorningglory.com with your address and choice.
Thanks for commenting on my 500th post all of you!
bombycid
–noun
1. a moth of the family Bombycidae, comprising a single species, Bombyx mori, the Chinese silkworm moth.
–adjective
2. belonging or pertaining to the family Bombycidae.–noun
Note: I just realized I never did the 500th post contest drawing. I will do so tomorrow.
This morning didn't start well. I picked up my canister of coffee to lift it (by its lid) and as I did so, the lid came off and the canister dropped and knocked into my colander of roasted coffee on the counter, which knocked into my french press coffee maker, which crashed onto the floor and shattered the carafe. I quickly showered and walked the nine blocks to our local kitchenware store and they were sold out, as was our local health food store, which meant I was resigned to drinking inferior drip coffee. And I couldn't even remember how to properly make that. Sigh. The new carafe won't come in for six to eight business days.
I am unabashedly happy about this organizational tool I purchased yesterday from our favorite toy store, Hopscotch Toys. It is a Melissa & Doug puzzle organizer and you have no idea how much easier this will make my life. Large stack of puzzles + almost three year old=many spilled pieces or many trips by me to choose new puzzle. This makes our independent little girl more able to do it herself.
I'm down to the almost-bottom of my last jar of chicken stock. So, I pulled out some chicken backbones from Kookoolan Farms that I throw into a bag in the freezer after cutting the chicken into pieces and started some stock. I always use (meaning I pretty much follow the directions) the chicken stock recipe from Nourishing Traditions. Then I cook it down to a thick stock, pour into jars, cool to room temperature and put them in the freezer. Voila, homemade stock on hand all the time!
This is going to be a fairly dull update. I haven't done much in the way of gardening in the past week. My garlic is growing nicely. It is almost a foot tall. The chard bed is actively growing again. My mints are rapidly spreading. I killed two of my tomato seedlings. Who knew that water could evaporate so quickly from a covered box? It's weird, though. It was the two tomatoes in the very center of the box. I think it might get the hottest there (from the heating pad underneath) and just dry out faster. They are really dead. Not just droopy.
I haven't started any more brassicas, which I should have done on Thursday and I don't know that I will find the time today.
I do need to get outside and get some seeds into the ground this week. Peas, lettuce, cilantro...
In celebration of this momentous occasion, I am having a little giveaway. I'm sure you can guess what the prize will be. Yep. The old stand-by. A bar of soap. Anyone who comments on this post between now and Saturday, March 29 at 8:00pm will be entered into the drawing to win. My soap stash is shrinking and I am low or out of many, but I have been and will continue making more to build the stock back up. So, the winner may choose a soap that I have available, or wait until their chosen one becomes available.
nudnik
–noun Slang.
a persistently dull, boring pest.
[Origin: 1945–50, Americanism; < Yiddish, equiv. to nud- base of nudyen]
Benjamin Franklin has famously said, "Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. " I think that that isn't entirely true.
I think that rebirth is also a certainty.
Not only do we see it every spring, but we also see it in forests that have been devastated by fires, landscapes that have been flattened by volcanic blasts; even in radioactive Chernobyl there is rebirth.
Doesn't it seem a strange juxtaposition that in this season of rebirth and beauty that we must also file and pay our taxes (or more frequently, get back our interest free loan to the government in the form of a tax refund)?
I've been using the basement clothesline for three weeks now. The great news is that I have been able to cut my dryer usage by about 66%. The bad news is that laundry day ends up being a really long four or five days. I'm okay with that trade off. It's not terribly labor intensive or inconvenient. Here's the method I've devised, since I have only about 25-30' of line. I hang everything that takes up a reasonable amount of vertical space. I run about two loads of socks, underwear, wipes and diapers. I just don't have the line space to devote to those items right now, but I'm looking forward to better weather so that I can expand my line to the back yard!
Today seemed as good as any to revisit the issue of environmentally friendly feminine hygiene products.
Three years ago, when I was 8 1/2 months pregnant with Juliana, a group of friends and I got together for an old-fashioned sewing bee, after the sister one of the friends had a serious case of toxic shock syndrome. We all came with bundles of flannel or terry cloth, a pattern, a serger, two sewing machines and a few scissors and whipped out more than one hundred pads and couple dozen liners in an afternoon. We had old flannel found at thrift shops and new flannel. We just stuck the ugly flannel in the centers so it wasn't visible and used the new stuff on the outside to make them pretty.
How well do they work? It is probably what most women are thinking when contemplating using them. They work great. They are far more comfortable than paper pads. They do leak if worn too long, but so do conventional ones. These don't have any waterproofing material because all my friends and I decided that we didn't want to have plastic near our lady parts. I toss soiled ones either in the diaper pail or our family cloth buckets.
If you are of the tampon-preferring set, there are natural sea sponges and also The Diva Cup, The Moon Cup and The Keeper. The sea sponge is probably self-explanatory. The Diva Cup, The Moon Cup and The Keeper are cup shaped devices which fit against the cervix and catch your menstrual fluids; The Diva Cup and Moon Cup are made of silicone and The Keeper is made of natural gum. I've never tried any of these methods, but I've only heard good things about them. You can wash all of these in vinegar to disinfect.
When Maddy reaches the age of needing pads, I will be sewing a celebratory set for her. There are so many nasty chemicals in processed paper products that I don't want her (or myself) using conventional pads or tampons in such tender areas.
I got some more soaps made today. That's good because I am either low on or out of all my soaps. I don't know why I've had such a mental block against it for awhile. I enjoy doing it, it's not that difficult and it makes my kitchen smell divine. I think it is just having one more thing on my to do list can be discouraging sometimes. I made lemon sage, which is always one of my favorites and and also lemon thyme which inspired by the lemon thyme that I planted last week. You may remember that I wish I had a whole bed to roll around in, so I decided to make a lemon thyme soap. It looks pretty with dried thyme swirled into the bar. Here's the soap log before I cut it.
And here are the pretty lemon thyme bars:
Now I have to be patient and wait the two weeks for them to cure. That is the hardest part about cold-process soap making-the waiting. I need to whip out another batch today or tomorrow, because I have an order for plain soap that I need to get done. Then after that I need to get some other scented ones done to replenish my supply. I experimented with the suggestion of bergamot lime, but didn't like it so well that I want to make soap out of it. I will try some of the other suggestions soon.
On the subject of soaps, I found out today that Lawrence is cheating on me. In the shower today, I found a bar of old Sappo Hill soap that he bought before I started making soap. Hmm...are my soaps not lathery enough for him that he has to go looking for it elsewhere? I know that tea tree is his favorite scent and I haven't made it for him in a while, but I've run out of tea tree oil and haven't reordered yet, because I need a minimum order. Is that justification to use Sappo Hill soap?
Today's mail delivery concluded my most recent Amazon order. I ordered The Victory Garden Cookbook (thanks for the recommend Jana), National Geographics Desk Reference to Nature's Medicine (thanks to Angelina), Wild Fermentation (thanks to the recommendation of many people in blogland), Little Miss Sunshine (thanks to my Tivo erasing the one I had recorded) and one heating pad to supplement the heating pad I am already using to start seeds. I am very happy with all my purchases. I can't wait to delve into them further. And thanks to all of you (as if there haven't been enough already) I still have lots of other good books on my wishlist for the next time I have a gift certificate or money to blow.
Completely unrelated to these books or Amazon, can I just say quickly how much I love Scrabulous on Facebook. I may not be the greatest player, though I'm not bad, but I just love it. If you want to play against me, feel free to do so, because you can't ever have too many games going at once.
I was able to complete my lavender strip that I started planting last week. I planted two more lavender plants, which I had to purchase on Saturday, because I underestimated how long the strip was when I first bought plants. I also laid cardboard on top of the dirt as a weed barrier and then compost for mulch on the very top. I added a strip of bricks, which I hadn't planned on doing, but it was begging for some kind of solid barrier to keep the dirt and grass from eventually eroding, and a surface on which to put my lawn mower wheel. We have a lot of loose bricks in my backyard so I snagged some for this purpose. I think that I will add some bee balm and maybe some echinacea in between the lavender plants in the next several weeks. I can order bee balm starts through Azure Standard. Lawrence would like me to do the side on the other side of the steps, which you can see at the top of the picture below because he thinks it looks lopsided now, and I would like to do it as well, but I am grounded by the indecision of what to put there. I was originally thinking blueberries, but now I'm second guessing myself. They take a couple of years to produce and I don't know that I want to put the money into them if we may not be in this house in a couple of years. On the other hand, if we are still here, we can enjoy the blueberries. Still, I can't decide. I don't want something that is only ornamental. I want something useful, that will also be somewhat bushy and at least 3' tall to provide a bit of privacy to that area.
My seedlings are growing and new ones are sprouting. All of my tomatoes have sprouted, except one of the Gardener's Delight Cherry tomatoes. To recap my tomato varieties, I have: German Orange Strawberry, Koralik, Stupice, Cherokee Purple, Garderner's Delight Cherry, Opalka, and Black Krim. The varieties in italics are new to me this year.
Also sprouting are: Italian Large Leaf Basil, Derby Day Cabbage, Nutribud Broccoli, Oliver Brussel Sprouts and Red Russian Kale. No peppers, eggplants or chives have made an appearance yet.
I'm changing the way I will do the word of the week. Since I feel that I am exhausting the interesting vocabulary words that I have, I will henceforth turn to a page in the dictionary, choose a word I don't know and use that for Sunday's word. Enjoy.
cachou
n. A pastille used to sweeten the breath.
Look what we added to our household today:
It's a piano. We got it on our local Freecycle. We wouldn't have been able to move it without the much appreciated help from Philip (Angelina's husband).* Here are the guys hard at work:
The girls have been wanting a piano for a long, long time. It hasn't been at the top of our financial priority list. This was perfect. We only had to pay $21 to rent a trailer because the back of our truck was filled with sod and dirt from my gardening project from earlier in the week.
Isabel told me that this fulfilled one of her greatest wishes in life. The other would be to move into the dome house. Maybe we could find that listed on Freecycle next?
*Thanks for lending out your husband. I know you had work to do! There was also some talk of the guys taking the kids out camping and leaving us ladies behind...a girls' day in the future maybe?
Last year I converted a hodge-podge bed in my front yard into a semi-medicinal herb garden. I've wanted to continue the theme into other parts of the front, which are currently occupied by lawn. I want to keep some lawn because it creates an excellent, organic mulch for my vegetable garden. I purchased some lavender plants on Sunday when the weather was gorgeous, but my gardening plans were thwarted by emergency business errands.
See that strip of bare ground? That's the large strip of grass that Maddy and I removed the old-fashioned way...with a straight edge shovel and elbow grease.
Here's a side shot. It started sprinkling when we had about 3/4 of the grass removed, so we had to work quickly before we ended up in a mud pit. I still need to add cardboard and then mulch after it stops raining.
See my one of my pretty lavender de provence?
I also added a Roman chamomile and a lemon thyme to the established herb bed. The lemon thyme is so fragrant and smells divine. I want a whole bed of it that I can just roll around in.
I've never looked at how people find my blog, but after Angelina posted about search terms that lead to her blog along with a few other blogs that I read doing the same, curiosity got the better of me and I looked at pages of my site counter that I never knew existed.
Here are the Google or Yahoo search words that have recently pulled up my blog:
I find it fascinating that so many people search for some variation of baking soda and vinegar and find me.
I've also never looked at where people who browse/read my blog are located. I won't list all the locations because that would surely be a bore since I know where some of you are at because I know about you. However, it makes me wonder, who is reading my blog out there that I don't know?
I know people in places like Beaverton, Salem, Lubbock, but are the people I know the same ones reading my blog? Because I don't know that the people I know read it. Is my husband's stalker ex-girlfriend in Lubbock surreptitiously following our lives? If so, is she learning any good tips on how she can live a greener and more conscientious life? I spent half of my childhood in Clovis, but don't maintain ties with anyone there, does somebody remember me?
This is all very interesting to me, even though I didn't have any crazy search terms leading to my blog like other people have. Actually, it is a relief that crazy search terms didn't lead here, because I'm all about convention and orthodoxy around here...snicker, snicker.
I would have more gardening fun to share if it hadn't been for some unplanned errands yesterday. I had planned on planting some lavender and lemon thyme in my front yard and add some perennials to my hanging baskets. Those activities will have to wait for later this week, until the rain lets up. I did have some gardening tasks that I got finished this week.
And ended up with a medium fine powder of crushed egg shells, which, if my Mother Earth News is to be believed, deters snails because the egg shells cut their soft body.
Thursday, I finally got some seeds started. In the past I have had some measure of success with seed starting, but I need to make improvements, because I have used a northern window and my seedlings end up leggy and slow growing. They have survived and produced, but I would like to have hardier plants when I transplant them.
The best window I have is our southern facing guest room. This guest room is unheated. Great light, but no heat. This dilemma led to my seedling experiment. I don't have a lot of money to sink into this, nor the inclination to buy a lot of stuff so I decided to use what I had on hand to create a warm soil below with plenty of light above. Here's what I came up with: a heating pad (I have one more on order from Amazon, using part of my gift certificate), a card table, an inflatable baby bath tub, a navy blue Rubbermaid container, newspaper pots, bubble wrap, elastic and seed starting soil mix. Here's how it panned out. The card table is placed in front of the sunny set of windows. The inflatable tub and the Rubbermaid containers are the newspaper pot (made by Maddy) receptacles. The tub holds about 59 pots and the Rubbermaid holds all 14 of my tomato seedlings. The lone heating pad gets rotated under the three zones I have established: the two ends of the tub and the one Rubbermaid container. The bubble wrap seals them up to retain heat and moisture and the elastic is tied to make a giant rubber band for each container. Here's what they look like:
And look what I found poking up this morning!
See those teeny broccoli sprouts? Aren't they cute?
The only thing I had to purchase was a spray bottle, because all of my others where in service with various non-toxic cleaners and potions.
This word came to me last week in a Dictionary.com's Word of the Day email. It was so freakin' cool that I had to share. I've never heard it before and I would never have guessed its meaning.
amanuensis
noun:
A person employed to take dictation or to copy manuscripts.
Aren't these eggs beautiful? We buy them from my friend Jacki and her chickens range all over their vineyard and pop out these pretty brown eggs with gorgeous orangey yolks.
I can cook them up into these cheery, yellow scrambled eggs.
I was watching Rachel Ray's 30 Minute Meals about a month ago and she was making a dish that escapes my mind now. She wanted the eggs she was scrambling to be really yellow, so she said that her secret was to add an extra yolk. The girls and I just chuckled and said that she should just buy real, pastured eggs and then she would have them yellow with no hassle.
My girls are smart that way. A couple of months ago when we bought some chicken at our health food store, Isabel asked me who raised it. How many five-year-olds do that?
As mentioned before, I was going to implement a new way to organize the recipes for my weekly meal plan. Here are the recipes in page protectors, which are secured together by a loose leaf binder ring. 
And here they are in my recipe holder. It is so much tidier and less space-consuming than my giant three-ring binder that I used to prop up here.
My Isabel is missing a little something. Her top, left front tooth.
Her tooth started hurting several days ago and I couldn't see anything, besides the darkening that has been slowly happening since that tooth had a pulpotomy (a baby root canal) about a year and a half ago. Then it stopped hurting for a couple days. We were even at the dentist (45 minutes away from our house) yesterday for Maddy, but her tooth hadn't bothered her for a couple days and I completely spaced that it had been bothering her so I didn't have our dentist look at it. This morning she told me it was really, really hurting. I looked and under her lip there was a good-sized abscess. So, this afternoon, back we trekked to the dentist and yep, there was a huge abscess at the root. Recommended treatment: extraction. Our dentist kindly did it right then to save us another trip back over. Isabel was a super trooper, chatting through the injection and even while she (the dentist) was wiggling the tooth out.
Total dental expenses this week? Just under $600. Ouch. First it was my new set of retainers because I stepped on my old one two weeks ago. Second it was Maddy's sealants yesterday. Then obviously the exam and extraction. I hope we don't keep racking them up at this pace.
PS In between dental bills, I actually did get some gardening stuff done this week. More to follow...
I know these past two posts have been pretty boring. I was doing some seedling stuff today, so hopefully I will find a moment tomorrow to blog about it. I'm trying a funky method to get my seedlings to do better this year in the absence of grow lights.
I almost missed posting today. I made a unique but tasty chocolate orange cake today and ran all my normal Tuesday errands, remembering to pick up my CSA share, then had a few rousing games with my friends at our monthly mom's game night.
A post with more substance will appear tomorrow.
You all know me, I can't resist a challenge. As such, when The Growing Challenge came to my attention, I had to join.
I've had clotheslines on my mind for a couple of weeks. Ann Marie at Cheeseslave posted about them last week along with links that she found while shopping around, Lisa at Colors Outside the Lines posted about them as well as some super cute clothes pin holders that she made and she also told me that she got hers at Home Depot.
It never dawned on me that a conventional home improvement store would carry them. Since we don't have a Home Depot nearby, I looked online at Lowe's and found that they carried them online and in my local store. I headed over and they do carry them, but they were sold out! Who knew they were so sought after? I checked Bi-Mart, no luck. I was despairing that I would have to wait for Lowe's to restock or even order online, when I decided to try our local farm store/Ace Hardware. They didn't have them next to the clothes pins, so I decided to walk a few more aisles down and at the end of the paint aisle, they had a whole display of energy saving laundry devices. Retractable clotheslines, an umbrella clothes rack for outside use, a wooden rack for drying...you can't imagine the triumph at that moment! The retractable clothesline I decided on was more expensive than at Lowe's ($24.29 versus $15.88) but it was immediate gratification. So, I headed home with a bag of wooden clothes pins and a retractable clothesline and after a misalignment in the first installation attempt, look what I ended up with:
I just finished In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, by Michael Pollan. It was great. I recommend it to all of you who haven't already read it.
It is much, much shorter than The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan, as always, fills the pages chock full of good information with his typical wit. It was a real pleasure to read and made a lot of pieces of the food equation fall into place for me. I knew much of the information already, but sometimes there were still "Aha!" moments.
I love this from the next to last page: "...in our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts." I like that so much because I believe it is true and it's a sad reflection on our society that those activities are subversive and uncommon. I'm so glad that I have a set of real life and online friends who are subverts just like me and I think that if we can continue to spread our subversiveness, these arts will become more conventional again.
Need I say more?