Sara with No H

The Gluttony of Potential Green

2012-01-30T20:47:00.000-06:00

They arrived just after the snow flew. Or maybe before, I don't remember now.

I remember the first one. It came and I stared at it. I paged through it and marveled at the glossy color photos of the impossible reds, the improbable purples, the glowing yellows. This was not the catalog that promised glossy boxes, it promised potential.

My eyes glazed over. My fingers twitched. Gone was my previous logic. All I saw were the dreams. What could be.

I started a list. What I would need. What I wouldn't.   What I wanted to try.

Nevermind that I didn't need half of these things. Just a few dollars, they cooed. So cheap.   So easy.

Catalogs like this are porn, smut of the kind that only appeals to those who look forlornly though the frosted glass into the white below and sighs heavily. Those who wish the ground outside was black instead of cold and bleak.

My books tell me seeds are perfectly viable for years. I don't need to do this. Still I do. I have so many seeds now, and more on the way.

Tough decisions need to be made. Maybe we don't plant that this year, maybe not at all. And that other seed, does it really need to be planted at all? Broccoli, cauliflower, these things didn't work last year. Why try? Brussels Spouts? I don't even really like those.   There's no point. Celery? I got one viable stalk out of my attempts last year. Besides, I'd rather eat beans or peas than celery.   My carrots didn't come up; my chard was swamped by weeds. I should learn. Concentrate on my strengths.

But, the catalogs have shown me the error of my ways. Next year will be different. You'll see.

The Analysis

2012-01-28T21:59:00.000-06:00

I was thinking about checking out Pinterest. It seems the new hot thing. It's yet another Web 2.0 tool out there. And then...I started thinking about the web 2.0 tools that I knew about.

Twitter: useful for writing a short statement and adding a link, browsing your friends
Blogs: useful for writing statements, adding commentary and links.
Facebook: useful for writing a short statement and (maybe) adding a link, playing games, browsing your friends. Based on networks of friends.
Google+: useful for writing a short statement and (maybe) adding a link, browsing your friends, playing games. Based on networks of interconnected people.
Pinterest: linking to pictures and making a statement. View others statements based on interests rather than friend networks.
StumbleUpon: Hm...linking to sites based on interests. Some ranking involved. Essentially random, you don't see your friends stuff, you see your favorite topics. Like Pinterest?
Flickr: Post your own pictures. Add a statement. Share.
You Tube: Post your own videos. View others videos.
Delicious: post your own links, share them with your friends. Add keywords. Allow ranking.

Sometimes we are seeing variation in a few random qualities across the entire landscape, like someone is putting slips of paper into a big hat and pulling certain ones one by one and then shaping that into something on the internet.

Want to be an internet pioneer? Get a hat, and make your own Web 2.0 technology. It's the new hip thing to do. Then sell it for millions.

A Turn of Phrase

2012-01-25T20:04:00.000-06:00

J says I say old sayings.

"Dime a Dozen"
"An Old Wives Tale"
"Close but no cigar"
"Two shakes of a lamb's tale"
"Come Hell or High Water"

Maybe I do have a strange collection of strange sayings....

it could be that my parents were older when they had me.
it could be that I was a crazy avid reader as a kid and read all those things somewhere.
it could be that I'm just incredibly hip and retro.

I'm going with the later.

Progress!

2012-01-17T21:34:00.001-06:00

It started like this....

...spare windows that I framed with some scrap wood to make a frame.

Then the frame got some spiffing up with more scrap wood to make a skeleton. The skeleton got some plywood sheets next.

Then there's more framing of the windows and figuring how to make it stay in place.

It's not perfect, but it will work...a cold frame.

A Study in Contrasts

2012-01-12T20:06:00.001-06:00

So I had Wednesday off from work. Just a vacation day. Took the kitties for some shots, ran a few errands. Then I came home and realized that it was *OMG* 50 degrees out and sunny and I turned off the heat and flung open the windows and danced outside like a crazy woman.

Well, not exactly.

I moved some slate that the previous owner left into the garden to start to plan the path that I'll build with them. So, not so much dancing, but more lifting and placing. Still. 50 degrees. I worked without a jacket, in a t-shirt, on January 11. Fantastic!

Fast forward 1 day. Today. Thursday. Snowstorm Day.

It's 22 degrees out and the snow is coming down fast. It's slick as hell out there and we have to drive home on a rural highway with fast winds blowing drifts over rolling fields, and crazy people who forget the rules of the road.

J picks me up and I strap myself in and grab the "oh shit" bar. You know the one. The one on the passenger side, near the top of the window. The one you grab when you don't want centrifugal force to plaster you against the window, or for when you don't want to die and your grip on this tiny little piece of plastic is going to actually help you. That one.

Every corner, we slip a little. J tells me that this car slips a lot more than our previous one, or even any of his previous ones. That's why you are driving. Not me. We creep along at a snail's pace, give ourselves plenty of room, and I keep eyeing cars suspiciously if they get what I perceive to be too close.

I tighten my grip on the Oh Shit Bar. My fingers are losing feeling. J's really a very good driver. He learned to drive in the Army, on giant Army trucks. Trucks so old their top speed was 50 mph. He always says they were Korean era, and I imagine those old trucks being shipped all of the way over to Iraq or Afghanistan and dying in a desert somewhere, and the local populace looking at them and shaking their head, and saying, "Geez. These Americans drive some crappy trucks."

We get on the highway, and J tells me that he's going to take it up to 40, and I decide that at 40 mph the Oh Shit Bar isn't going to help me and I try to relax.   We try to pick the clearest lane and stick with it. People are passing us and I see he's edging to 45. We are still being passed. It doesn't matter to these people that you can see brake lights ahead, or that we can see a big pack of cars all bunched up. Nope, doesn't matter. To this I say, good riddance. Keep away from my car. Kill yourself well away from me. Enjoy the 20 seconds you've gained.

The sides of the highway look steep, and I imagine slipping off the edge of the highway and into a tree. Back comes the safety of the Oh Shit Bar. I know there's only two more exits, and a lot of people will get off there. Less people, good. Then it turns into a winding country road, and only two lane. Bad.

We get into the lane that we should be in for bypassing the last highway exit, prepped to enter the two lane road, and someone leans on their horn and zooms by on our left. Because on normal roads, you could pass someone quickly on the left and merge right. Or maybe because we were in the lane and they didn't understand that you had to be in that lane to go straight and that the left lane ended. I don't know. The mysteries of the angry car horn. I almost wish they'd given us the finger. At least there's no dispute when you get the finger.   You know that they think you are at fault, and it's not a situation you can reasonably fix.    A car horn could be a simple "hey! watch out!" or a friendly "hey there!".

The folks on the two lane part have slowed down, semi-responsibly, but I feel like we still need to be cautious. There's a part when you go over a hill, and there's this cross road. It seems there's a lot of accidents there. I see brakelights, and tell J "Lights ahead."

Now, he does this to me, all of the time. So it's not just me being a nervous rider, you see. We are looking out for each other here. And I don't want to die on a slippery road in the middle of a snowstorm two days before my birthday. Besides, I already know how I'll die. I'm going to sneeze so hard one day that my brains are going to jump out of my nose. Quick and violent. Sneeze related. I have it all planned. I shall die as I have lived.

Side note: I recently sneezed so hard that I accidently hung up the phone while I was leaving a voice mail. I then had to call back and apologize. The salesman that I'd called told me that it was from eating food that was covered in other location's pollen. So, if I could just not eat food from other places, I could get some relief. Yeah, maybe. But it's January, so the likelyhood of me getting local oranges or lettuce are pretty low. But something to think about. Come July, I'll lock myself up with just my garden and give this theory a try. Until then, Claritin!

We were getting closer. Up ahead there were police lights. Some guy had his car on the side of the road, and there were two cops near him. Cop cars always have the effect of making everyone extra good, so there were model snow driving behaviors. Seriously, if they want to teach driver's ed classes, they should make kids ride in the back of a cop car for a while. They will start to understand a lot about pack behavior, about safety belts, about car crashes, and about how difficult puke must be to get off those little plastic shields. I tell you, kids could learn a lot.

Meanwhile, I'm concerned about the van behind us. He's been following way too close. When we pass the cops, he's backed way off, but I know that 1 1/2 mile ahead there's our turn, and it's sharp and we usually can pull a bit off the road to make it, but not today. Hell, I'm not even sure we'll be able to stop. And on the other side of the road is a stable with horses, and I really don't want to hit a horse.

J tells me that he's going to wait until after the hill to signal, and that's less than a 1/8 mile. Now, I'm an early signaller. I confess. I'm one of those people who wants to make her intentions known in plenty of time. I want people to realize I'm slowing down so they can slow down, and the car behind them can slow down and the car behind them.   I do this in GOOD weather. J's driving, so all I can do is white-knuckle the Oh Shit Bar.   He does his thing, the van behind us pulls over into the LEFT lane to pass us. Best of luck, my friend. I hope you find a quicker car to tailgate next.

I'm 42 on Saturday, and I drive like a 72 year old. Or maybe, I ride like a little old woman. Sorry about that.

We have foot high drifts in our driveway. The snow is piled in ripples that are pretty and pristine. I'm sure my beautiful slate garden path is covered in snow until spring. We are home, safely, slowly. Finally home. I let go of the Oh Shit Bar.

J told me that J's cousin Corey knew some Turkish cooks at a former job.    Turkish? Indian? Muslim? Maybe I'm getting the details wrong.   Anyway, they said, "He who travels slowly, travels far."

I like that. I may be pokey, but I'm still here. Beat that.

Visions of Spring

2012-01-03T21:44:00.000-06:00

The seed catalogs are here.

I have one beef with seed catalogs. They don't explain themselves well. What does determinate versus indeterminate mean on a description? Why aren't perennials marked as such in bold letters, vs. annuals, which might as well SCREAM "we are only temporary, sucker". The whole zone thing too...I'm on the edge of zones 5 and 4...depending on where you look. If it says Zone 5-9, that means that I'm rolling the dice. It might work, it might not. Are you going to pay $5 to see?

Nonetheless, it's a pleasant diversion, especially as we suffer through the cold.

I am keeping my seed catalogs nearby, for gazing at when there's nothing good on TV, to murmur and plan, and dot with post-its, to sketch layouts and groupings. If I ever become a famous artist, I'm convinced that these tiny sketches will fetch large sums, for they are tidy and tiny and bring such light to my dark winter days. I've dug my colored pencils out yet again.

I planted more tomato seeds (from Burpee) today. The thought is that these are container seeds, and I can grow those inside as long as I have southern exposure until it gets warm out. I'm ever hopeful, but truthfully, I'm itching to plant and any justification will do.

We are redoing out outside "island" and that will mean transplanting divided hostas and interspersing those with other perennials. It's dream plant shopping every time I open the seed catalog...as long as it is a perennial, and as long as it's easy to tell it's a perennial.

Oh winter! Be gone! I have work to do!

The Ides of Winter

2011-12-30T11:44:00.002-06:00

I think of Ides as the middle of something. That's probably not the correct interpretation of it, but that's my definition. And ever since we've lost the last of our greenery, I've been thinking of getting it back. Whether it is discussions on what to do with the weed overrun "island" in the middle of the grass, or thinking about techniques to deal with the garden NEXT year, I'm thinking hard about what's next.

First, while visiting Ma and Pa Z for Christmas, we asked for and received some of my Dad's clamps. This is to help me move forward in the "cold frame" project. I started yesterday, measuring the wood that I will use to frame the old windows that I picked up from a curbside. It's funny, years ago, I made fun of my Dad for having so many clamps. But now, I'm using those same clamps in my own projects!

The windows will then be the top "doors" on the cold frame, which is the next step in the project. The wood was left for us by the previous owner of the house. Much of this is recycled materials.

I've also been growing some indoor greens, just to have something to munch on. These are microgreens and spinach.

I'm not sure when to harvest the microgreens, but I've been pulling off leaves and tasting them to see. The spinach are proceeding slower but they like the cool of the workshop pretty well.

I bought one of those upside-down tomato planters and am growing some tomatoes from seed to start them and hopefully have indoor tomatoes hanging from the ceiling of the workshop soon. (Maybe by March or April?)

I'm also looking for ideas for keeping the weeds down in the big garden come summer of next year. There's this...

(from HGTV)

The idea of laying down stones to make paths is really appealing to me. I have a few rocks to start with laying about the property, so I can really experiment with this idea.

Of course, I can't really claim to be sick of winter yet...we have gotten hardly any snow to get sick of! It's been hovering in the low 30's most of the time. Maybe winter will assert itself these next few months but right now it's just been an extended fall. Still, I'm eagerly anticipating the work I can do outside!

Squeaks in the Night

2011-12-14T17:33:00.004-06:00

When you live in the country, some things you have to get used to. One is that you'll probably have planes flying low over your house, another is that you'll likely almost get run over while trying to get your mail, and another is that you are going to see mice. Mice inside your house. Your house is warm, outside is cold. Mice aren't stupid, they know that if they can get someplace warm it will be better.

Now, I have 3 cats. At least 2 of these cats have proved themselves able to kill a mouse, which effectively takes care of these situations. I don't have to worry about it too much. The cats are too well fed to kill to eat, but they like to play with these little furry things. And sometimes they play a bit too rough.

So, last night, I woke up to squeaks. I know those squeaks. They are squeaks from a mouse that is being used as a plaything. It's 4:30 in the morning, and those squeaks are not enough for me to get up and cheer on the cats...they are having their own fun, and I need my sleep. I ignore them. The squeaking stops. I think the mouse is dead. I sleep more.

I get up at my normal time and turn on the lights, carefully looking for a mouse carcass. Nothing. I go get the cats their food, which they eat, which means there was no tasty mouse appetizer at 4:30am. So what happened to the mouse?

And then I see a cat looking very intently at the door between the workshop and the foyer.

Look carefully at this picture. Can you see the mouse?

Yeah, we have ourselves a smart mouse. He's figured out a way to evade the most talented of my mousers.

J usually sleeps in a bit more than I do, so I stared at the mouse with the cats for a bit. It didn't seem injured. I had gone through that door without noticing it already once today. I shivered to think about what would have happened if it jumped down on my head.

The cats had eaten so they weren't too interested in pacing around the door, but they were still intrigued.

When J got up, I pointed it out to him. "It's too smart to live. If it lives, it will learn how to live in the house and evade the cats and it must die. The last thing we need is a mouse infestation."

He got the broom in one hand and my shoe in another. The cats stood at his feet waiting. He swept it down and the cats started swirling about trying to catch it. The thing is...they had just eaten. They weren't really in it for the food...they wanted to play. Bella actually sniffed it rather than pounce on it. I know that she's got other mice before, so it must have been she wasn't hungry enough to care about a possible food source. Georgy was more interested, but after a couple of catch and releases, it became clear that he wanted to play instead of kill the thing, and we really wanted it dead.

J hit it with my shoe and it died in a miserable heap on the floor. The cats rushed in, sniffing excitedly. While J searched for a paper towel to dispose it, Georgy actually started to munch on it. If that was allowed to happen, there was guaranteed to be cat puke in my future, so J grabbed it from him and disposed of the body outside.

And maybe because of the excitement, there was STILL cat puke in my morning routine. All I can say about that is now that Georgy has an empty stomach, maybe he'll get some real mousing done today.

Adventures in Cookie Making

2011-12-08T22:01:00.001-06:00

I am bringing pre-made cookies to a cookie making party of my friends this weekend so there's something to frost and decorate. I like the decorating part best anyway. So I chose to buy the decorations and just make simple sugar cookies for my canvas.

When we stopped at the cake decorating store, J came in too. As I collected different gels and frostings, sprinkles, little sugar flowers and the like, he wandered around and picked out things he'd like to try too. He worked as a baker for a few years, so he's always remembering things he liked to make there.

So, as I'm collecting my bits, he shoved a couple of things into my basket. I hardly noticed. We checked out and went home.

Tonight, I told him that I had to make the sugar cookie dough so it could chill overnight and so we can bake them tomorrow. He was very happy, because he had added little vials of different oils and extracts to the basket to add to the cookie dough for a different flavors of cookies. Peppermint, Orange and Pistachio.

He was so excited and was chattering away about having used these oils on cookies at the bakery and how good it was. Now, I was thinking of plain sugar cookies, but since I was just going to decorate them all with tons of sugar and bits, I guess it didn't matter.

I put him to work measuring and sifting while I got the materials together. He looked at the vials and asked which one we should use first. I picked one at random. "Er...peppermint."

He dumped the entire vial into the cookie dough and started mixing. I could smell the cloud of peppermint from across the table. As I prepped the next batch, he handed me a tiny ball of dough and we both bit down.

Imagine the strongest, most bitter peppermint Altoid baked in a sugar cookie. Now double that, or triple that.

"I guess maybe we shouldn't have used the whole vial".

Yeah, I guess. You know, these are not cookies for me. They are for my friends and coworkers. And I'm a good cook. I'm not going to kill my coworkers with a cloud of Altoid sugar cookies. He's used to making giant batches in a stand mixer for a bakery. This is not a bakery.

"We could make a plain batch of sugar cookies and mix it with the peppermint," he suggested. "To dilute it."

Hmmm...hmm....except for the part that each batch is 2 sticks of butter and 3 cups of flour.

On our following attempts, we cut back. The following batches of pistachio and orange were good, even with half a vial, and I don't regret those.

"Maybe they'll burn off the peppermint when they cook!"

We take a sample from each kind of dough and cook them up. The oven smells of peppermint, easily overtaking the other flavors. Maybe they WILL burn off their odour.

The cookies are done now, and crisp with golden brown edges. The pistachio and orange are delicious and light. The peppermint is a little less like a bitter Altoid but still have quite the minty edge to them. It evens out after a few bites, so you don't get overwhelmed, but it is still quite strong.

Oh well, they'll have a lot of frosting on them anyway, so maybe it won't be so noticeable. I hope it won't. And there are peppermint candy canes at Christmas, right? It's a seasonal thing.

But I want people to know. Those cookies are not my fault.

Terror of the Territory

2011-12-04T22:11:00.000-06:00

Our cats occasionally get to go outside. They don't go very far, usually chase a squirrel or a chipmunk and come back in after about 30 to 45 minutes.

Well, except for this weekend. It was rainy and cold, but that didn't stop Georgy.

Georgy was no where to be found after Bella came back in. J went out to look for him, and came back in a few minutes later. "He's eating 2/3rds of a mouse."

There's so much wrong with that sentence that I don't even want to think about it.

J had to pull him away from attacking another mouse outside and he sulked inside all day Saturday.

And then, on Sunday, we found him squaring off against a neighborhood stray. And as we watched from the comfort of our window, they got into a cat fight you wouldn't believe. This was not a play fight, like he does with his sister, but the kind where someone loses an ear.

J hurried to find his shoes and his jacket and I stayed out of his way and yelled out the window to scare the cats. I quickly went out after finding my jacket and we combed the yard for him. Bella was easy...she was so scared, she ran right inside when I opened the front door.

When J found him, his tail was still puffed up in anger and fear. After a couple minutes of petting him and reassuring him, I picked him up and we inspected him. He had the stray's blood on his ear, but he looked none the worse for wear.

In he goes for now, and hopefully the stray cat is okay...

For a spoiled inside cat, we have a scrapper.

Christmas Tree

2011-12-02T23:24:00.001-06:00

going for a green/gold thing...

Suet!

2011-11-19T11:41:00.002-06:00

Last year, I forget when, Kirstin suggested that I make suet out of accumulated fat that I shouldn't throw down the garbage disposal. (In a facebook comment, maybe? Don't remember.)

So we've been saving it in the freezer ever since. It was a giant disgusting heaping mound of fat. So much fat and gristle and disgustingness that everytime I opened the freezer looking for treats, I'd have to notice that instead.

Today we made suet. We melted the pile of disgustingness in a iron skillet. Then we mixed the liquid fat into things like millet, raisins, sunflower seeds, and some cut up limes that were going unused.

Then we poured them into saved plastic suet containers from ones we purchased.

This was not a tidy process.

We got 9 containers of suet out of our giant pile of disgustingness. I hope the birds enjoy it! Now to clean the kitchen!

On the First Day of Deer Camp...

2011-11-19T10:44:00.002-06:00

We have just enough land to hunt on. J thinks about hunting all year round.

...from the time we plant...

..."the deer might eat our corn and get used to coming here"

to the time we had downed trees...

..."hopefully, it won't spook the deer"

to our nature walks...

..."there's lots of places where it looks like a deer might sleep"

to the lack of water in the pond...

..."maybe the deer will get their water someplace else"

Today was the 1st day of the gun deer season. Two days ago, he started to gather his things together. He found his blaze orange, collected his gun, and got his safety harness for the deer stand all ready to go. The deer stand had already been up for 6 weeks, waiting.

This morning, J snuck out of the front door of our house, and started to follow a predetermined path around the edge of our property; down by the pond, through the forest, and towards the deer stand. Last year, he'd spooked a pair of does, and didn't get a shot off. This year, well, he was going to be prepared.

I, of course, climbed back into bed after he left, and was already well into unconsciousness when I heard two sharp snaps. I opened an eye to peer at the sleeping cat next to me, and wait for more, but didn't hear more. I thought, "Well, he either missed or he'll be running in to tell me he got one."

Well, after he joined me about 2 hours later, I found out that he was proceeding through the very dry forest leaves, *CRUNCH*, *CRUNCH*, *CRUNCH*, when he stopped to listen. He heard other things crunching and then saw a deer's head from behind a bush look at him. And then it took off running, with another one following it. He was pleased he was able to get a shot off, and was excited to see more.

There was another hunter in a nearby field who took what J thought were poorly chosen shots at another group of deer that were too far out of J's range and not on our property.

As J climbed the deer stand and waited for another pair of deer too dumb to sit down and wait out the hunters, a chickadee approached, and hopped on his gun barrel. It squawked, then jumped on his gun strap, then on his HEAD, then onto a nearby tree, chirping its warning all the while. Talk about being close with nature!

After he came in, he saw the bird feeders were completely empty. Maybe that's what the chickadee wanted to tell him! "Feed me, human!"

So no deer on the first day of deer camp...but there's always tonight and on the next 9 days...

one thing after another

2011-11-16T21:26:00.000-06:00

We got home at 5:45. The cats were demanding food, and I got it for them, with J telling Adam he was hungry and we'd be preparing food right away. The kitchen's a pig sty, we haven't done dishes in 3 days, and I can't find the non-stick skillet. When I finally do, I realize it's dirty. Sighing, I clean out another one that is less disgusting.

The ground turkey is still frozen and we have to start defrosting it. I start the defrost and then J asks if we should be defrosting in the styrofoam and decides to restart the defrost on a plate (another dirty dish, great) instead of the package.

I start assembling the contents of the turkey burgers, and throw the greens, the mushrooms and the onion into the food processor. Which won't start. We turn it and we twist it and we rearrange it and it won't go. I run downstairs to find the other one, which isn't there. Where did I put it?

I run back up to find J examining the safety mechanism which seems to be somehow flawed with poor quality plastic, and he decides to fix it with a bit of cardboard. I continue to plow through the mountain of dirty dishes.

I check the defrosting turkey which is now cooking around the edges. I pull it out and clean out a dish so I can have a place to mix the turkey for the egg and breadcrumbs that I'll be mixing with it.

I reach for the breadcrumb bag, and find it still sealed. My attempt to open it causes a cloud of breadcrumbs to explode all over the damn kitchen. So I guess we'll have more breadcrumbs than we thought.

J figures out how to make the food processor process the greens the mushrooms and the onion. He adds it to the turkey burger mix. I get a now clean skillet ready for him to start cooking the stupid turkey burgers.

He tells me to settle down. How can I? I've got a landslide of dirty dishes and nothing is going right. I tell him that I'll concentrate on getting the dishes clean and he can cook dinner. Except the skillet is now too hot, doesn't have enough oil, the spatula he's using is floppy and he can't tell when the meat is done.

I mutter something about a dishwasher. He asks why we haven't done anything about that yet. I try to explain about how I really want to get the kitchen fixed but right and that I was hoping to get the money from the tax refund to solve the kitchen problems but that isn't until February, at least. He reassures me that there will be kitchen remodeling in our future. We could just get the dishwasher done, I know that. But there's other things that bug me about this stupid kitchen and the lack of a dishwasher is just one part of it.

I keep having to change the water in the sink and the scrubbers really are gross. We really need new ones. I haven't even taken off my work clothes and I'm up to my elbows in water. I really should have done this two days ago. Stupid dishes.

I put the buns in the oven and start trying to put away dishes that I cooked. Some of those stupid little plastic containers won't fit into the plastic container cabinet and they KEEP FALLING OUT.

J takes the plastic containers from me and starts to fit one inside the other, suggesting again that I just go sit down.

I can't. The dishes are now mocking me. I keep plowing away. J's figured out the turkey burgers.

I finally finish the dishes. I go and sit down in the living room, and what do I knock over? A dirty dish sitting on the edge of the sofa. I say bad words, lots of them, mutter a lot and start throwing more dishes in the general direction of the sink. J is scared. I run the water and glare at it.

The food is done and the last of the dishes are sitting in water. I feel bad for getting all frustrated and mad but ... there's dishes everywhere and they are multiplying. Every single surface is gross, and we are out of paper towels and I can't find the Formula 409.

It's only Wednesday, and I didn't mean to turn into a mean old ogre. It's the chaos that gets to me, you know? Too many things all at once, happening in quick succession.

I'm not even hungry anymore. I eat something anyway, watch some TV and go and jump on the exercise bike for a bit. The sweat helps me feel better. A little better.

Maybe even good enough to do that last dishes currently soaking in sink. So 3 days from now we won't have a repeat performance.

update

2011-11-13T12:05:00.000-06:00

Picked up black walnuts from one of our black walnut trees. This is just 1 tree's worth.

I dumped these in a place that J thought was bad, so he went out and moved them again...that will teach him to be inside playing video games. I picked the old rotting apples up too, and dumped them in the same area. Hope he doesn't get stung by the bees that were all over them.

Now, what exactly should one do with this many black walnuts? I remember my dad making some sort of stain for wood with them, but really? This is one tree's worth, and there's more than one tree around here. I'm told you can make an insecticide too. Can you eat them? Can you put them somewhere where they'll rot and not take root?

The plants are inside and now Lulu's got a jungle to sleep in again.

A full full freezer. We picked up our CSA meat delivery on the same day that Adam decided to load up on frozen convenience food. If J kills a deer, we might need to get another freezer.

See this crabapple tree? I've picked crabapples and I'm making juice for crabapple jelly. With no cat though.

Never regret

2011-10-23T21:46:00.000-05:00

A ride mapped on 10/23/2011

Find more Cycling Routes / Bike Rides in Brooklyn, WI

This was my busy weekend; the 19th annual fake Thanksgiving, and the prepping of the food, the frenzied rush for the festivities, and the frenetic rushing of the errands that accomplished all of them.

Somewhere in there, J decided he would only eat at the party, but I couldn't resist sampling this or that along the way. After all, it's important the food is seasoned properly so your guests are sufficiently content is it not?

(Forgive me please, I'm reading a Mr. and Mrs. Darcy mystery and just finished watching Masterpiece Theatre's Persuasion, and I'm quite sure that J never realized that I could be so caught up in the early 1800's as I quite clearly am. That Captain Wentworth...he's so dreamy. Ahem.)

So anyway, back in the real world, I was eating a lot this weekend, and with J being all good and trying to only eat a little bit, I felt a bit guilty. Saturday, I went for a run, a 3 mile run, and did 11 minute miles, so I felt pretty good about that. And the party went great; I was so busy chatting, I didn't overindulge at all. (Well, except for those glasses of wine. ;) )

After a wonderful morning brunch, I noticed the sun peeking out of the clouds on the ride home, and I immediately resolved to go for a bike ride. "I want to ride hills," I told J.

I checked out Map My Ride.com and tried a few local roads until I found one with a bit of variation in elevation. And I wrote down the route on a bit of index card and prepared to go. I was immediately put out to discover my headphones seems to have come to the conclusion of their natural life. In the way of many other in my position, I tried and failed to make them work by hammering them hard against a wooden table. I tried to redo the black electrical tape holding them together. I shook them and slammed them, and the resigned myself to a headphoneless ride. RIP bluetooth headphones #2. You lasted for 2 years in all, so a worthy investment indeed.

I headed out, and found the wind in my face, and whistling in my ears. I found that I have a subtle rub from where my front tire rubs against my brake, and I never would have noticed that with my headphones feeding me sweet pumping melody. So, ... good? Should I be glad I have to get bluetooth headphones #3?

The wind from the west, and my plan was to head to the west, to a road that I knew to have large hills, then turn south, and turn east again. The map assured me of hills. As I started to climb the first big hill, perhaps 5 miles from my house, it started to sprinkle.

When you are 5 miles from your house, and it starts to rain, you only briefly consider returning home...after all, you'll be just as wet upon your return as you would be from continuing onward. So I started my ascent, and got wet.

The good thing about riding like that is that you are warm and the rain really doesn't bother you when you are warm. Of course, it was over 60 degrees, so it wasn't a cold rain and the wind wasn't as biting as it is sure to be in a few months.

I topped the hill, headed down at a breakneck speed (always the reward for enduring a slope) and turned south. The rain fell harder. I passed tractors and pickup trucks in the fields processing the end of the corn harvest. I'm sure that they were thinking "Who on earth goes riding in the rain?"

My plan to turn back east was thwarted, however, when I discovered, much to my dismay, the road that I had intended to take had a sign "Loose Gravel". Gravel! On a rainy day, on hills. No, this would not do. Gravel is suboptimal in most biking and I just had my tires fixed.

So a detour it was. And I found another road, a paved one, parellel to the other and proceeded to head east. Here I was rewarded by a series of great hills, each larger and longer than the last. My heart pounded and my breaths came in heaving gasps as I pushed to the top. My slippery soled shoes kept slipping off of the wet pedals, smacking the small bones of my ankles in a most unpleasant way. But the scenery, even with grey skies and rain was breathtaking. In the tiny hollows, the leaves had not yet been blown away and there were reds and yellows and oranges alongside the green and gold fields.

While others might be miserable in such conditions, I felt content.

The road abruptly ended at a highway and I was perplexed. I felt that I should be headed east, but the road I was at was not what I expected; another east to west road. It should have been a North to South road. But I recognized it nonetheless, and decided to take it back in the direction that I came, sure that I'd made some sort of an error. I don't care for this road on bike; but it does have bike lanes and I didn't need to ride it very far. All of the same, I was vexed that it wasn't the route that I had chosen, and was likely less mileage and hills than I anticipated. I got home in plenty of time for the football game and was even blown partially dry by the wind as it pushed me all of the way home.

All in all, I never regret a bike ride. No one ever should.

The Inverse of Red Ruby Tomatoes

2011-10-10T10:51:00.001-05:00

There's a point in the fall, when the cold creeps over the land, blowing icy winds, dropping temperatures, and at some point before the sunlight returns to the land, the garden trembles on the edge of death. After that moment, you have nothing to do but clean up the errant fruit still hanging on the vine.

Which means you go out and pluck an awful lot of green tomatoes. Green tomatoes are things that people agree you can use. Some people use green tomatoes to fry up for some sort of tomatoey fried food. My mother told me that you can make mincemeat for making a mincemeat pie using green tomatoes.

To be honest, neither of these options are terribly appealing. I think of fried green tomatoes as being a conduit for oil, and mincemeat pie comes in a far second or third in my choices for making pie. I have dozens of ripe apples that I'd rather use to make pie.

There are recipes for green tomatoes. There's this green tomato chutney, but it calls for 18 cups (!) of green tomatoes. What if I spend a bunch of time making this and discover that I don't like it? I'm stuck with 18 cups of food I don't like.

There's this recipe for pickled green tomatoes. I'm imagining a soft soggy pickle that just depresses me.

I came across this recipe for a green tomato relish for hot dogs. This is something I might actually use; although I don't make hot dogs every week or anything like that. It is only 6 cups of green tomatoes and some other vegetables. It seems easy, and it only will make 6-8 pint jars. If I want, I can give out little pint jars of this relish to friends and family.

So I started to cut up green tomatoes. They sometimes are red in the middle, like the inside hasn't caught up with the outside. Or sometimes they are long and have symmetric beauty, yellow and pale green inside.

My relish has green peppers and red peppers in it, so it's not just unripe tomatoes. It's got a long prep time; you need to salt it and let it sit in this salty mix for hours. Maybe that's how to make the green tomatoes taste "normal".

You rinse off the salt, and make a spice bag. You create a vinegar solution, and sugar the hell out of it. The spice bag goes in the vinegar, boiled and the rinsed unripe tomatoes go in it. More boiling happens. This seems like a lot of work for some unwanted fruit.

The result was this. It's tangy; vinegary. Sort of like chunky green tomato ketchup. I ended up throwing my little sample into the food processor to smooth it out a bit. It might be good on a very spicy polish sausage. Can't say I love it, but it is an interesting sauce. And it only made 4 jars.

Hmmm...still have more green tomatoes to use. Maybe chutney is next?

Just for Fun

2011-10-09T13:46:00.000-05:00

Halloween isn't that far away. I can't say that I have a good use for this, but ...

1 stryofoam ring from craft store. $1.99
Aluminum wire.
2 t-shirts, one L, one XL. $4.99 (L), $7.99 (XL)
Thread, needle
Ribbon.

Not done yet.

(What is this?)

SWAP Sale

2011-10-08T13:38:00.003-05:00

I visited the UW SWAP Shop today. It was the semi-annual UW athletics equipment sale. This meant weight machines, free weights and athletic clothing.

I like to go to this sale because of my crazy monkey feet. Have I mentioned my crazy monkey feet before? They are skis. You know those feet that orangetangs have that they can use to grip branches? My feet are evolutionarily so near them that I don't doubt Charles Darwin at all. I have this problem with one of my feet that makes it difficult to find shoes. I can't wear Jimmy Choos or anything close to a heel because of my crazy monkey feet and this problem. I just sigh when I see a normal person with cool shoes, and I go back to my Birkenstocks, my Keens and my boring men's athletic shoes.

But...

...it seems like the student athletes of the UW also have crazy monkey feet. Because I find great shoes among the sale items, every time. (This is the second time I've gone to this sale.) Yes, they are flashy and almost always have something red about them, but they are great shoes and they fit the crazy monkey feet.

And since I can't find pretty Jimmy Choos to fit my crazy monkey feet, I'll have to find another way. I also got a sweatshirt, running pants, and spandex shorts, but those pale in comparison to the great deal I get on some flashy pretty red crazy monkey feet shoes. Rock on!

The Beep of Death

2011-09-21T18:32:00.000-05:00

I work in several different buildings around campus and I have little closets and purloined spaces where we store different things in these different buildings. In one of those buildings, we store all of the equipment we don't want anymore, and I was heading there in search of a USB keyboard. As I approached, I heard this beeping sound, and computers don't normally make this beeping sound unless something is VERY VERY wrong. This particular room also houses a server, and this server could be making this very bad sound.

I opened the door and was relieved to see the server still staring blankly at me. The sound was still going, and after turning off another computer and rooting around, I found the source of the horrible beeping. It was a long-abandoned uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

The point of a UPS is to keep a server running through a power outage, or keep it up long enough to gracefully shut down in the case of a long term outage. The beeping is intended to tell you, hey, I'm running on battery power here! Do something about this!

The problem with that? It wasn't connected to anything. The server in question wasn't using it. It was an abandoned (but still plugged in) UPS. I unplugged it. It still kept beeping, because of the battery. I pushed every button I could in every configuration that I could. The infernal beeping continued.

I looked around wildly. People were going to start to complain soon, if they hadn't already. I put it in a file cabinet. I could still hear the beeping, muffled but persistent. I couldn't leave it in the file cabinet.

I tucked it under my arm, and ran outside, away from any classrooms that might be disturbed. I briefly considered throwing it over the chain link fence into the building site next door, but then decided I should really talk to the guy who runs the server in that room to make sure he wasn't using it.* That meant putting it somewhere near both of our offices should we need to look at it.

The problem is that I work in one of the heavily "studentified" buildings on campus. There's 60 classrooms in that building, and the place where we do a lot of our work ("the shop"), is also surrounded by classrooms. It couldn't go there. I thought about other places to take it. My office was out of the question (too many classrooms/offices nearby) and while there are closets scattered here and there, they aren't out of hearing range from a classroom. One sits on a stairwell, and I briefly pondered the echo effect of the trilling noise in the cavernous stairwell.

Meanwhile, while pondering this, I was moving back to my building though class change traffic. I kept hearing this..."What's that noise?" "Is there a fire alarm?" "Dude, is that your phone?"

I kept my head down, UPS tucked under my arm like a football, and kept walking, trying to keep a low profile.

While moving, I thought of a solution. We have a few rather sound-proof studio/recording spaces attached to some parts of my department. I eventually headed up there, dropped it off, and shut the door, unable to hear the squealing any longer. Of course, no one can use that space while the beeping peters down and the battery dies, but it's a small price to pay for blessed silence. I let the appropriate people know this.

*The server guy wasn't using it. It was yet another piece of abandoned equipment, and it is destined for SWAP.

Just wait

2011-09-14T21:42:00.000-05:00

I put tarps and a paintcloth on my tomatoes tonight, hoping desparately for a reprieve from the rumored deep freeze. We have a lot of green tomatoes on the vine, and I keep hoping we can still get more of them off the vine.

We have so many apples too, and I've made a chunky applesauce on Monday that tastes amazing. Tonight it was apple muffins. I've got more already picked and maybe I can dehydrate them, but I'm really losing steam dealing with the apples...I have already made so many apple pies!

Still waiting to be harvested, edamame, cabbages, potatoes, parsnips, squash, pumpkin.
I really hope the frost passes us by!

Thinking back, there are some things have been more successful than others in our garden.

Successful:
beans, peas, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, potatoes, edamame, onions, garlic, tomatillos, apples, zucchini

Not successful:
carrots (too close together), cucumbers (too weedy and the vines caught something and died), cauliflower (bugs), broccoli (grew okay, but not a lot of production), beets (too weedy, too close together), radishes (too close together)

I think we did too much. It got away from us...the harvesting, the weeding, the planting, the pruning, the thinning, everything. Next year, we'll scale back.

Isn't that what every garden says? Just wait until next year? This year's not over with yet!

Becoming a Cliche

2011-09-10T15:52:00.001-05:00

One of the first things that I was asked after I announced a move to the country "Are you going to buy a pickup truck?" I scoffed at the notion. My Santa Fe held everything we'd ever need to get, right? And it wasn't like we were running a farm or anything?

Well, the first time we stopped to buy bales of hay and got straw all over the car, I started to reconsider. My parents lent us their truck "Big Red" and it was great. We got the rototiller and the sod cutter rentals and could just zoom quickly here or there not worrying about how to fit something into the Santa Fe.

But the 'rents truck had it's issues. It was a 6 foot bed, a low rider, and had an extended cab. We came to realization that it would be nice to have a truck but a truck better suited to our needs. Something cheap, something we could pile full of garbage for a dump run, or pile up with hay or mulch. Something we could hose out if it got too gross. It might need to make the occasional trip to town for pickups or errands, but it would mostly live in the garage. It didn't have to be pretty or fancy, just functional.

We found it on Craigslist. A former municipal truck, used to drive the same 32 mile stretch in northern Illinois. Only 61K. The tires were worn, but the brakes worked, the engine was smooth and it was the right price. $2200.

I was told, as a teen, that cars are horrible investments. I've never forgotten that advice, but nothing really prepares you for how horrible of an investment it is. Let's see...$279 in fees and licensing. $149 for 6 months of insurance.

And then we look over one day and see a flat tire. Not a little flat either. Big horrible flat. We knew the tires would need to be replaced, but it went from "someday" to "right away".

We didn't have an air compressor, and J knew someone who had one for sale, so we waited for that to come to fruition. His friend delivered it to our house on Wednesday, and on Thursday we visited Menards for air compressor parts. Total $67.

Today we got the tires filled with air and made the decision that, if we wanted to use this car until it died, we might was well have decent tires on it, and that meant buying a set of new ones. The best place for that was 24 miles away. I had J follow me in the truck, me watching nervously at all of the tires, looking for bulges. (J later chided me for driving so slow.)

$576 later, we have 4 new tires. (And while we were waiting, we found a flea market, and J got a new toy to play with.)

All of this means that...if you live in sufficiently remote place with enough land, trust me, the purchase of some sort of truck is likely in your future, and said purchase promises to be a money pit. You will become the cliche.

The Wright Stuff

2011-09-04T19:16:00.003-05:00

I moo at cows. I mean, when I'm out biking, by myself. They give you confused looks and stare. It's hilarious. But when you go on an organized ride, like the Wright Stuff, suddenly you get strange looks and laughter for mooing at cows. And the occasional biker wearing a holstein jersey.

I did the Wright Stuff ride on Sunday, just the 30 mile one. It was really a beaut of a ride; coolish, a wind out the northwest, but on the hills just to the west of Mount Horeb, you didn't notice.

Those hills aren't like the Dodgeville Dairyland Dare or Horribly Hilly hills; they are tiny little incremental hills... up a bit, and turn the corner. Up a bit more, squeeze around that bend. And after you do this a bit, suddenly you are near roads named Pinnacle and Knight Hollow.

It was cool, and when we hit the downhill part of these hills, the temperature in the "hollow" part was 10-15 degrees cooler and the wind had a fall chill. A chill! I'm not ready to have a chill!

I was wearing my Speedy Bike Club Jersey, and got a lot of comments on it. It says "London" on it, and someone asked if I was from there. I laughed and said, "No, Brooklyn. Brooklyn, WI."

It was the longest bike ride I've done all year; I just haven't had time to do more. And I was nervous about it; what if I struggled up the hills? The only hills I've had are the ones along my commute into work.

I shouldn't have worried; the legs haven't forgotten and I still have enough lung capacity to power on through. With my iPod and bluetooth headphones, I blasted the tunes loud and pushed into high on the downhills and into low on the uphills. I even sang in parts where I had an especially great song.

I didn't get passed much, and I'm glad to say that I did a fair amount of passing. The path was well marked and I didn't feel the need to hang out long at rest stops; 30 miles isn't so much.

I always say I'll do the longer course next year, and I never do. Maybe it's time to change that. Because I have such a high after I'm done...and I enjoy myself so much in the process...maybe it's time to ...push harder.

And next year, J will be there with me.

A ride mapped on 09/04/2011

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Preparation

2011-09-02T21:24:00.000-05:00

We planted a lot of tomatoes. Too many tomatoes?

There's a sign outside of Janesville that says "How can you say there are too many children? That's like saying there are too many flowers!"

I'm not sure about that. But there are a lot of tomatoes. And they are very very red.

Canning tomatoes is something that I was scared of. I have tried canning, last year, and it didn't work. My pickles were soft and didn't taste good. My beans were grey. It just didn't work.

K let me borrow a cookbook, a great one. Lots of wonderful recipes in that one. I know. I know because...I've cooked a LOT of them.

4 kinds of salsa.

Spaghetti sauce.

Tomato sauce.

Chopped tomatoes.

Applesauce.

Marmalade.

Oh, yes, I've been busy. And I'm not done yet.

Out There

2011-09-01T19:39:00.000-05:00

Last night, about 1:30am, J stirred and said, "I think there's cats fighting outside."

I think I responded with something like "Feuop eaugh."

He got up, grabbed a flashlight and went to investigate. I blinked my eyes and he was back. "There's two of them. Two Wiley's. They look the same. They are fighting outside." He mentioned Lulu growling and Georgy attentively watching from inside the house. Figures. We think they are females, based on their colors.

I let that settle onto my barely conscious brain and said "soti rutaph jfhah."

J couldn't get back to sleep for 2 hours, he told me the next day.

There's a feral cat group here in Madison that will fix the cats you bring it. When we first thought we had one feral, we discussed a live trap to get the cat and bring it in. Now two?

And today, we came in and saw a glimpse of another cat; did it look just a little different than the other two? How many feral cats are actually around here?

I think that our "inside" cats are spending a lot of time looking out the windows at the feral ones. Bella isn't eating as much, and last week she scratched J (on purpose) for trying to pick her up from outside and bring her in. Are the bad habits wearing off?

J and I are discussing stopping feeding them; maybe they will go onto the next farm. But then I come back to...they need to be fixed. I'm not sure I can stop feeding them. I like have them around. I feel for them. I'm a big softie, I know.

Maybe the trap, fix and release is the way to go. Maybe it's a big waste of time. Maybe they'll just all die during the winter. I just don't know.

Choking Point

2011-08-31T21:38:00.014-05:00

There's an absolutely insane amount of traffic on campus these days.

It's move in time at the dorms. It's also the beginning of the semester, and people have to come back to work.

There was a 20 minute traffic jam to get off campus yesterday. Today, I rode my bike and it took me 3 minutes. Are you really saving so much time by driving? The line I passed was 3 blocks long. I laughed the whole way.

There's a nationally televised football game on campus tomorrow and they are trying to get people to leave early. Bike, people! Bike! It's the way to get out of campus fast, fast, fast!

Here's another picture from campus; I like this one because it looks like a half-submerged face, coming out of the hill. Just past this is a bird effigy mound. This is behind Ag Hall.

Beautiful there, isn't it? This is looking down towards the Lakeshore Dorms.

This picture is from Library Mall, taken the day the first paychecks with the state cuts were received. They gave away free brats. I understand there was a protest much later, and they walked to the Capitol.

I didn't receive my check until just ... now. And the cuts were not as deep as I thought they would be. It's fine. We'll be fine. Do I like it? No. Can I live with it? Yes. Do I wish politicians could just get along and quit with the rhetoric already? You betcha. I'd also like to win the lottery, and I probably won't get that either.

This picture is of my dinner; brushchetta melted with fresh mozzarella cheese, topped with fresh tomatoes with basil, onions and a little vinegar. Yes, it tasted as good as it looks.

Wait until you see all of the stuff I've been making with my tomatoes! Let's just say...no shortage of salsa in this house!

The Invader

2011-08-27T12:22:00.001-05:00

Lulu generally likes to rush outside as soon as we come home. She would rush outside and scratch a nearby tree. In fact, here is a picture of her scratching post.

At least she did until recently. We left the door to the workshop open for her when we let her go outside so she can get back in when she's ready. Sometimes this would be hours.

One day I went down after it got dark to close the door and check to make sure she made it back in. She was, in fact, she was crouched near the door to the rest of the house, someplace she doesn't normally do unless she's really scared.

And nearby was a pile of poo....something she doesn't do unless she's really scared. I knew immediately what had happened...

We had been putting out leftover cat food outside, so it doesn't smell up our garbage. J told me that I was just feeding the local coyote population...but I ignored him.

We saw the culprit though, and it wasn't a coyote. It was a cat. Feral we think, but he could just be a neighbor cat too. We've been calling him Wiley, like Wiley E. Coyote, only Wiley E. Cat.

Wiley knows exactly when we throw out the compost and the extra cat food, and he/she/it has been hanging around.

We think that Wiley came into the workshop, scared the shit (literally) out of Lulu, and went to her cat food and ate her food. Her dishes were licked clean, and she NEVER does that.

She's been less excited about being outside, but she'll go out if we go out with her. She's a very paranoid cat...someone suggested we could get her happy pills. I think she just needs time.

The Turtle

2011-08-21T14:14:00.000-05:00

After J's mom died, we were awash in her stuff. I got J to get rid of some of it, and some is still here, and since I can't use the excuse of lack of room anymore, I pretty much ignore it. And to be fair, some of her stuff is kind of neat, but some of it is ...not my taste. Like the mannequin. Or the beaded curtain for putting into a doorway. Or the chicken catcher....don't ask.

Anyway, on one of the last trips we made to pick up her stuff, her partner gave us this resin/plastic turtle with some sort of platform on its back. The feet were broken, and his mom had used it as a plant stand.

What on earth do you do with a plastic turtle with broken feet? I don't have plants...my cats would chew on them. In fact, the only plants I have are either "this tastes horrible to cats" or "this is my porch plant that the cats don't chew on because there are birds to watch".

For a while it was in Lulu's room, and she would sit on it...the little pedestal perfect. Then we cleaned, and I put it outside our front door. Sort of a "Hey! I'm a plastic turtle!" welcome mat. You saw it as soon as you pulled in. I'm sure we were getting a weird reputation with the delivery drivers.

But J had other ideas. It's now a birdbath. We moved into the yard, found a flatish bowl, weighted it down with rocks and filled it with water.

This turtle gets around.

The Route

2011-08-17T20:54:00.000-05:00

A ride mapped on 08/17/2011

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I saw an ad, looking for women bikers, earlier this year. They wanted to graph some sort of health stat, and the only qualifier was someone who rode 60 miles a week.

And I hung my head in shame, because I didn't.

In July, I started biking from where J works to my place of employment. And I LOVE it! This is the route that I've discovered is best; it's quiet, it's residential, and I don't have to fight too much construction.

Back and forth, every day, 5 days a week. How about that ... 80 miles a week? Oh, yeah! I missed my bike commute!

Now you see it...

2011-08-14T17:14:00.001-05:00

I bought a wireless network camera. Since I do work as a techie, and I know how networks and network protocols work, I figured this would be a pretty easy thing to setup. Well, it wasn't. I didn't take a good enough look at the protocol.

Protocol? There's a group of engineers that classified how wireless network connections work. Way back when you first could connect via radio waves from things like laptops, they used something called IEEE 802.11b. One of the E's in that IEEE stands for Engineers. The B part basically said, it's the second kind of wireless connection ever invented, and it's a particular speed, and the IEEE meant we approve it. It was actually the first ever commercially viable one.

And then there was 802.11G, which was a different (more improved) speed. And then there was 802.11N, which was yet another speed (even faster). So most kinds of wireless support B & G, which covers about 95% of all wireless connections. At some point, the IEEE may run out of letters, which will be a very weird day. Maybe we'll switch to hexadecimal or something.

Back to the camera. When I bought the camera, I bought an camera that communicates using N. Which I can't "read" with my wireless access point, which understands B & G. This is a problem. Now, I can "read" the camera fine if I connect it with a cable to a wireless repeater that understands B & G and communicate with my router. And that worked. So then I just had to set it up to look at something exciting.

How about the compost pile? There's regular visitors to our garbage heap, and that might be good watching.

So, today I set up the camera to watch the area near the compost pile. And I set the camera to take a picture when motion was detected. And I set it up to email J and I that picture. And then I went out to work in the garden.

I came back to 281 pictures compiled in about 2 hours. Most looked like this.

Another showed J mowing the lawn.

Basically, everytime the wind blew, I got a picture.

In terms of network connectivity, it works. In terms of sheer number of contacts, it works too well. I think there's a bit more work in getting this figured out...

You'd think I'd just break down and read the manual, but that's not what techies do.

100 apples?

2011-08-14T16:56:00.000-05:00

We have two apple trees near our house. This winter, we went to a garden expo, learned about how to prune a fruit tree, and proceeded to prune our two little trees within an inch of their life. They were pretty pitiful looking. I was sure we'd hurt those poor trees so badly that we'd have to hang our heads in shame, wearing placards that proclaimed our ineptitude, and bought our own apples, clandestinely, from people who actually know what they are doing.

Well, come August, we have 100 or so apples waiting for us to do something with them. At least 100. Probably more. They are sour small little green apples, but they are ready to go.

And we found another pitiful forgotten apple tree on the edge of our property with buggy nasty looking apples that needs a lot of pruning. Those apples, where you can find a less wormy sample, are at least sweet, eating apples.

So I made apple crisp, and then an apple tart. And I proceeded to eat them entirely myself (over the course of several days, but still). I dehydrated some. What else could I do?

How about freezing some apple pie filling? Here's the recipe that I found....

You need 18 cups of apple to do this. 18 cups of apples is about 36 apples. I cored and peeled 36 apples, today, oh yes I did.

It filled up my 6 quart dutch oven.

You just keep cooking this until the apples get soft.

Then you package it up and get it ready for the freezer.

Those little brown sticks are vanilla beans. The idea is that I'll pull out this come December or January and have homemade apple pie. Or 5 homemade apple pies.

So, that's the fate of 36 apples. Only about 64 to go. There's only so much apple pie filling I can make. I like the idea of having apple trees, but the production part is a bit more of a problem. There's a finite amount of space in the freezer, but I guess we have a way to go before we hit it.

Curb the Chaos

2011-08-07T22:21:00.000-05:00

This week, after a bit of a rough day at work, I went out to weed. There's nothing unusual about this; weeding is very relaxing, except when it's August and it's bloody hot out.

J came out to find me, and I think he realized just how out of control our garden is. The weeds were taking over. "This weekend," he vowed, "we'll do a lot of work in the garden."

Well, very good. Pip, pip. My idea of going out every day and pulling weeds wasn't going so well, and since we had a plan, okay....see you Saturday, handsome. (We are newlyweds.)

So, Saturday. After an initially slow start, we headed out, but the weeding had evolved. There were potatoes to dig up. We tried to find out what had happened with our tire potato plant. You remember; I planted some potatoes in these tires we found laying around after reading about this on the internet? Because, well, the internet wouldn't lie, right?

Well, turns out that after much digging and scratching of our head, we removed the last tire to find a mouse, which made J go "Eek!" and which probably meant that any potential potatoes in the tires was probably mouse food. Good thing though that our regular red potatoes went just fine. Maybe 20 lbs worth? Not bad for just a little plot.

And then we attacked the tomatoes. They were flopped all over the place, resting too many possible tomatoes on the ground and making it impossible to traverse the rows without stepping on little green tomatoes. We gathered every scrap of possible stake material, every piece of string, and started to corral the errant plants into tidy rows. And then we found more, in the way of some bamboo steaks, more twine and some more stakes and we staked them some more.

And don't forget weeding. So much weeding! We must have spent 5 hours out there and it was much needed.

Now at least our garden has rows instead of a crawling acre of foliage. Success!

We ran out of string and stakes, but it was an improvement.

Among Nature

2011-08-02T19:30:00.000-05:00

We've been to this place before, but never with the purpose we have now. This will be J's mom's final resting place, well, at least her ashes, and at least one of her resting places. We camped over the weekend to complete our task, along with her partner of 28 years, and her friends who came to join in the ceremony.

How do you do such a thing? In our case, we said a few words, shared a few memories, cried a little, and hiked around a lot. In my case, I wore the wrong shoes, and am still suffering the blistering consequences. But then we swam too, enjoying the spots that she called favorites. She was well remembered.

The lake was like glass, the day warm, and the water refreshing. It was a soothing reminder of J's mom, but a unpleasant reminder that our backs need better padding when sleeping in a tent.

Our last night there, the storms were brewing. J is something of an amateur weatherman, and we'd already battened down our tent's hatches, ready to duck in at the first sign of trouble. At the very last minute, the ranger came striding up, and "highly suggested" that we head for a nearby water tower to wait out the storm, adding "I've had to cut trees off of tents before." We ran there as the rain came down.

J was philosophical about the change in plans; said it reminded him of the military, prepare for one thing, and end up hurrying to do the another thing at the last minute. For all of the ranger's warnings, it was remarkably dull...a few wind gusts, some rain, and that was about it. We would have had more fun in the tent.

By that time the ashes had already been scattered and all that was left was to sleep and pack up to go. We were already looking forward to our soft bed, and the release of knowing we did what we set out to do.

Confittura

2011-07-27T12:14:00.000-05:00

When you have a ton of onions, you start to think about ways to use them before they go bad. Not that they go bad quickly, but they will start to go bad, at some point.

I have had, on occasion, delicious oniony jams. Like a savory spread for sandwiches that heavily emphasizes the onion. So I do what everyone does in this situation. I google "onion jam".

The first link is a blog that I sometimes read where they test out 3 recipes for "onion jam" and one of them (the winner of the 3) is called a "confittura". Here's that link if you want it.

Now, I don't like when things get called what they are not. Potato chips aren't fried potato slices, and meatloaf is not ground beef surprise. If you are going to make an onion jam, then call it an onion jam. Don't make up a fancy sounding word for it.

I made it, despite my philosophical differences. I should point out that in order to make this, I had to spend an hour cutting onions on our porch. I had to do this on our porch because inside the confines of the house, the onion gases were getting to me, and I was weeping uncontrollably. At least on the porch the squirrels could share in the onion gas.

I should also point out that my obsessive purchases of herb plants was really a good thing in that this calls for 6 sprigs of rosemary, and I've got 4 plants that I can choose from, so yeah!

The other fun thing about this recipe is making a bouquet garni to hold all of your herbs! I feel so...french...when I do stuff like that. So I pulled out my cheesecloth and string and made a little herb bundle, plopped it in the simmering onions and realized that I didn't have any honey. Sub in maple syrup, and keep stirring. Memo to self, buy honey when in Door County this weekend.

At some point, Adam* came home with strawberries, shortcake and whipped cream. Unfortunately, the kitchen was a morass of simmering onion smell, which I really like, but which probably doesn't mix well with strawberry shortcake. He had to postpone his craving for my project....only one thing at a time in our kitchen.

This recipe is one of those "stir and stir and stir and stir some more" recipes. This meant that I had to go back to the kitchen multiple times and this meant that Adam's strawberries kept getting drive by snacking. I hope there's enough for his shortcake later.

So, approximately 4 hours after I started, I got this.

Yum! Had some on toast and crackers, and it's tasty. Good for a roast beef sandwich, I think. Totally worth an hour of weeping.

* Adam is the guy that J knows from college who is renting a room from us. When people ask me why I'm not upset about the pending shrinkage of my paycheck by forces outside of my control, I'll point to Adam. Hopefully, he'll want to stay here in perpetuity. Probably not, but hey...so far, so good.

Weekly Wrapup

2011-07-23T20:20:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting here, watching the cats paws twitch and suddenly I realize, I haven't blogged in a week! After a fantastic meal right out of my garden, of potatoes and green beans. I don't mean to brag, but DAMN was it delicious.

It's been a trying week; the temperatures hovered just south of 100, and this new-fangled "heat index" was just as bad as the "wind chill" it mimics in the winter, except the other direction. The University, in it's usual forward thinking manner, managed to have 2 of the 3 cold water chillers out during this week, which meant that "non-essential" buildings had no AC. For a good part of Monday and Tuesday. I understand that Wednesday things improved, but I didn't take any chances. I worked from home. On Tuesday, when I was there, the walls had dew on them; the halls reeked of sweat and god knows what else. I worked in a cooler room from a laptop, and got a fair amount done. And then I got out.

Plus, there's the little issue of presenting something at conference (okay, really a camp). It went fine. I talked too fast. I do that. I felt engaged to some, not to others. I think that's par for the course. I liked the topic, and I liked it went "mostly" to plan. (Forgot a check box.) Good questions afterwards, talked to some nice and interesting people. This particular event is always interesting in that things get brought up that I never think of. And then I usually spend the next several weeks trying out new stuff.

J's got yellow and red tassels on the corn, and we have a lot of green tomatoes soaking up the sunshine. But what I did on Monday? Picked the rest of the garlic and onions.

We got a dehydrator for a wedding present and I've been dehydrating anything I can; so far that means mangos, and more recently, onions. I figure dehydrated onions will keep well into the winter. There's also an onion jam recipe I'd like to try.

Oh, did I mention that J's signed us up to get half a cow? Did I mention we might end up buying another freezer because of having a huge garden, lots of stuff to freeze and not enough room? No? It must have been the heat.

On thing about this garden though; I can't keep up with the weeds. Next year, we vow, to heavily mulch and keep the weeds down. Yeah, we'll see about that.

Next week promises to have a somber end. We are scattering J's mom's ashes in the 1st of 3 locations on Friday. Sigh. Can't put this off forever. It has to be done. It was her final wish, and we've got to do it. Luckily, the 1st location, one of her favorite places, is one of ours too. Rock Island State Park. Camping ahead!

Photo Update

2011-07-16T09:34:00.001-05:00

On Wednesday, the campus had a goodbye party for Biddy, whose tenure as chancellor was both salty and sweet. I will miss her no-nonsense attitude, saying what she thought, and her chatty twitter feed. There were free brats (of course!) and ice cream. I didn't have any, but it sure was a great time and Biddy was such a good sport; posing for pictures.

Also on Wednesday, I saw this camel outside of the UW Vet School on my bike ride to work. The bike path near campus goes right behind it. There is an MRI machine for imaging horses parked nearby, and I suspect that this camel needed an MRI too; maybe of its humps! (I tweeted this, sorry for the replication.)

I'm still mourning the loss of two big branches on our tree. Probably because the tree is still there. J's been feeling sick all week, and I gave him a pass on removing it...until today. Today, we are cutting it up and getting it moved, that's it! I hope to get this done today before it gets crazy hot tomorrow and next week. It's a paper birch; maybe I'll peal the bark for some little kids that I know...canoes for everyone!

Do you know what that is? That is a wireless repeater. To expand the range of your wireless network. Why?

To add areas where you can put a wireless camera, like maybe your front porch to watch what might come up to the porch and chew on your boxes as they get delivered.

Like this box. Whatever chewed on this box, it's big. Big enough to drag a fairly heavy box (containing a computer power supply) several feet. We still aren't sure what was so attractive about a box from newegg.com, except maybe the delivery guy had food on his hands or something.

There's also a semi-large hole in my front door frame, but there by something, and I found a HALF of a snake in my garden too. No, just half. We suspect the rumored coyote population has had a good meal.

So this is what living in the country feels like. LIke the fireflies at night though.

Storm!

2011-07-11T19:46:00.000-05:00

This morning we woke up to storm warnings. Now, everytime we've had any kind of storm, we've lost power. It's just how this works. We should know that we are going to not have electicity. The problem is that our water pump is electric. No power, no shower. I did mention this was this morning, right?

We lost two branches off of our front paper birch tree; blame winds of 70 mph. Our corn is flattened too, and there's branches all over the yard.

We each had to take showers at work; J's work has a gym, the University has plenty of locker rooms all over the place.

We had the chainsaw out this afternoon, and we are trying to tie the corn back upright. Maybe it will help. And next time, we'll just take the shower before the rain comes.

Art Fair on the Square

2011-07-10T13:42:00.001-05:00

I had a mission yesterday. My visit to Art Fair was meant to improve our collection of high walled plates; J likes to use them for our meals to corral drips. I'd gotten a couple here and there, and I knew there'd be pottery artists here.

And as I prepared, J chickened out. It would be crowded and hot and he's just not one for doing something just because everyone else is...so he decided to stay home and putter like he always does. Sigh. Fine. I'll go myself.

A lot of going to the Art Fair is just getting up close and looking at these objects that have turned into something ethereal and rare. Or wondering how they got there from a lump of clay, or a blank canvas, or a few bits of junk.

There's a lot of people watching too, and a lot of the swimming in the sea of people as you try not to step on the heels of the little old lady who is taking tiny steps ahead of you, or murmurring "excuse me" when confronted by people stopping abruptly to have an extended cell phone conversation. There should be a Miss Manners guide to traveling in crowds. How, if you are going to go slow, you are to one side or the other, and how you don't just stop in the middle of the stream, and how to gracefully and thoughtfully elbow your way past the people who aren't playing right.

Ahem. Got that off my chest.

Anyway, I bought a lot of high walled plates, and assorted platters. Plenty more to fill up the cabinets. I got home to find J content and myself exhausted. I love the spectacle of the Art Fair much more than I love the mechanics of it. Perhaps with age, I'm becoming a grumpy old lady who knows how to make her way though a crowd, murrmurring pardon me under my breath while my eye is fixated on the next visual conquest.

Garden Bounty

2011-07-07T20:43:00.003-05:00

I got 4 avocados in my CSA fruit share last weekend, and they were finally squishy enough to consider using. So I made guacamole. But it isn't just any guac.

I pulled two little onions from my garden, and I cut those up and doused them in a little cider vinegar. (Vinegar takes the bite out of anything. Onions are less "ONION" and more "onion". Jalapenos aren't so crazy spicy. Plus vinegar can act to keep your guac looking green.)

I cut up a jalapeno (also from the garden), and put it in there.

I cut up cilantro and basil finely, which grew up alongside the workshop.

I cut up five garlic scapes, from our garlic circle. I put the whole mix into a food processor and ground it up fine.

I put the halves of avocado into this mix, and mixed the vinegar/onion/garlic scapes mixture into that, seasoning with some salt and pepper. I mashed this up finely with a fork.

Then I mixed some plain greek yogurt into it. Maybe a 1/2 cup.

I squirted lime juice on top. Mixed well.

We ate this in one sitting. So so so good.

Ditch Lily

2011-07-06T09:32:00.000-05:00

J and I were walking around our land, and we found a single beautiful tiger lily. We both commented on it, and made kind of a big deal about it.

And then we started driving to work, and we kept seeing them.

And J at first was "Oh look! Tiger Lilies!"

But then there were more and more and more of them.

They aren't called ditch lilies for no reason. (I read up on them.)

And now, when he exclaims (and he still exclaims) "Tiger Lilies!", I can only laugh because they are everywhere!

We've started talking about all of the wildflowers on the sides of the roads actually, because we've been noticing so much of them on the drive, and it's just a perfect time of year to do so.

But nothing beats an excited exclamation...."Tiger Lilies!"

The 1st Big Harvest Weekend

2011-07-03T14:56:00.000-05:00

First, I looked at my peas, and I knew I'd be doing a lot of picking.

Because they looked like this:

But I had messed up with trellises; and only some of them were easily picked off of the wire and stakes that I'd created. The rest of them were a gnarly mass of vines. Some of the vines were 6-7 feet tall! When did they get so out of control?

So I grabbed a single strand and pulled it loose, pulling the peas off. Repeat about 1000 times. Soon I had a big pile of pulled pea vine. And there's still more to go.

Other things that we noticed:

Jalapeno!

Also, mulberry, raspberry!

Plus, getting blooms on the zucchini, tomatoes, and tomatillos.

And I'm frankly scared of the potatoes.

Using hay as mulch here to shield the developing potatoes and keep them out of the sun, and we are going on our fourth bale of hay.

Anybody want some peas? We have sugar snap and something called Little Marvel, which is more of a shucking type pea.

Add to that the fruit CSA, and I'm looking for recipes. Good thing its a long weekend!

Banana Seat

2011-07-02T15:35:00.000-05:00

I had my cousin's bike when I learned to ride a bike. It was my cousin's Steve's bike. It didn't bother me that it was a BOYS bike. Maybe it was foreshadowing that I'd be consigned to boys bikes for all of my life; with my long legs few women's bikes fit. I liked it because it had big handlebars that rose a foot from the cross bar, and it had a banana seat.

This is the bike that I first learned to ride on, and it was the bike we had until I got my first 10 speed at about age 10.

So the point of this is ... I usually don't post pleas for money, or try to convince people to donate money, or even try to sell anything.

But I like my bike, and I've liked having a bike, my bike, ever since my first bike. I think there are others out there like me.

So this is actually about this:

There's this kid, Aaron. Aaron has a disease that doesn't allow him to flex his joints, and Aaron wants a bike. There's a bike he could use, but it's a special bike, and costs $3800. Aaron's mom is hoping to raise enough money by appealing to interested people out there, maybe getting 380 people to donate $10 each. And ever since I first read about this, on this blog, I've been thinking about this kid who has been told that he can't do things so much because he's different, and how he just wants to be a normal kid and ride a bike like normal kids do.

I gave $20. If you want to, there's a facebook group for this or you can send money via Paypal to mousejunkie@att.net.

Maybe I'm just a big softie, maybe I'm just a bike obsessed marshmellow, whatever.

It's my blog and I can post about a kid wanting his very own banana seat if I want.

Hope you get your bike soon, Aaron.

Summer Commute

2011-07-01T21:35:00.000-05:00

The idea of the new car was mine. My old grey car was making noises, and doing weird things, and had rotten gas mileage. Certainly, something small would be more efficient and with us commuting back and forth to work everyday, but I wanted to be able to still throw my bike in the back for the occasional bike ride.

It's a little unrealistic to expect J to commute 27 miles (or more) from our house to get to work. Even for me, 24 miles means a multi-hour commute.

But, maybe when there is perfect weather, maybe I could commute from his work, leave the car with him, and bike my way to my work. After all, me dropping him off and driving the rest of the way adds 12 miles to the car, costs me $6.00 in parking and deprives me of a nice bike ride? All I need to do is take the wheel off my bike and it fits perfectly.

A ride mapped on 07/01/2011

Find more Cycling Routes / Bike Rides in Madison, WI

The first day I did it was Tuesday. There's bad construction on Old Sauk, so I had to make my way through this residential neighborhood, one of those old ones with winding roads that don't seem to go in straight lines. That day, I took a road that I thought I knew. But it turned and twisted in directions that didn't make sense. The name of it I knew. It said it went north. But why then was my compass pointing anything but?

When I finally figured out where I was, I'd gone way out of my path. And when I did my mapping of my ride, I realized that there was a simpler way.

Day 2, Wednesday. And this time, I had it. Except for the part where I ran across roundabouts where there shouldn't have been roundabouts. But I saw a pool that I saw before, so maybe I was getting to someplace familiar. Still took me way too long. My tire seemed a little mushy; had J pick me up at work.

Day 3, Thursday. Okay, this time we were going to do this right. And I did, except I should have taken a shortcut and cut my trip a little shorter. And the hills; well there's some elevation change this way, but they aren't crazy hills. And if I could take Old Sauk, there's an 11% grade on that, and this isn't so bad.

Day 4, Friday. So it's supposed to be crazy hot; like over 100 degree heat index. It rained in the morning, so the trip in wasn't bad, just wet. But the trip back, it was hot. But the good news is that I stuck to the route I was supposed to, and I climbed those hills, and I made it in record time. Sure, sweaty as all get out, but I made it.

So...assuming each trip is 8 miles, I did 7 trips. 56 miles. Saved $24.00 in parking. And since our new car gets around 31mpg, I saved $6.50 or so in gas. $30.50 saved, and 7 nice tips back and forth. Feeling pretty good about that.

Late to the Party

2011-06-28T12:39:00.000-05:00

I learned last week how to email myself photos from my phone.

Yes, last week. I've had this phone for about 15 months now. It's not a "smart" phone in the strict sense of the word as I'm being cheap and not paying a lot of money for this, but it can do things like take pictures and send me emails and twitter msg that people send me. (Don't know how I managed to get that set up.)

Now, I haven't taken GOOD emailed photos from my phone. In fact, here's a picture of some sort of giant engine thingy that I think is for my work building's elevator.

Sorry to inflict that on you. I like machinery.

I've not learned how to use my phone because I haven't read the manual. I'm a tech support person, or at least I oversee people who do tech support, and one very famous tech support mantra is "RTFM"*. But I can generally figure things out and I dislike reading as a learning experience, but enjoy it if it is fun reading. If I have to, I'll use an index to look up what I need. I have whole books on SQL databases that I use strictly for their indexes. I'm a kinesthetic learner. I learn by doing.

In fact, I recently bought a tablet that runs the Android OS, and the reviews suggest flashing the software in favor of another type, and I'm all...what? I have to do something? But then I get into tech mode and read the headings (and only the headings) on the instructions and realize that this should be pretty self-explanatory. If I get into trouble, I might actually read the steps under those headings too.

Or I'll be spending money on something that I'll figure out how to actually use in 15 months or so.

* Read the F***ing Manual, for those who don't know.

Apple Trees

2011-06-27T20:04:00.002-05:00

our apple tree, with lots of fruit.

Strawberries!

2011-06-26T15:07:00.002-05:00

"I don't want to go to work," J said. "It's too nice outside."

J's work is constantly busy and he's been feeling stressed out and going to work on the weekends. Just to catch up. And he would have gone this weekend too, but the day was just too nice.

We started out with the best of intentions. J would do some maintenance to the lawnmower. I did more weeding. And then J started to mow. And the wheel, well, it didn't quite fall off, but it got so wobbly that J stopped the mower and found out that a couple of essential pieces for holding the wheel on weren't ...there.

Of course this happened after the lawnmower place closed. Not to open until Monday. I guess no more lawn cutting this weekend.

And then...Sunday and it's again a gorgeous non-humid, sunny day. Those are extremely rare.

We elected berry picking. We went to
the place we've been before. We would have gone to a place closer, but it was closed on Sunday. Rows and rows and rows of beautiful strawberries. As you can see, we weren't the only people there, despite the heavy construction on their road. (Call for directions to avoid most of it.)

J and I were not getting much, a couple of flats, and we were only out for 45 minutes or so. Of course, how much you pick depends on how much you eat. And how long you are in the field. One person near us confessed to being there two hours. She had a couple quarts.

Berries were thick on the plants, and it didn't take very long. And we were choosy. No signs of softness, discoloration, even overripeness, were allowed in our flats. Surprisingly, the best tasting ones were the pinkest, not the deep red ones.

Families clustered around the rows, picking and trying to instruct their little ones in the finer points of berry picking. "Can I eat one?" I heard a little one ask.

"Yes, you can eat one. That's the fun of this."

We got our flats home and started up on our first batch of freezer jam, and we froze about 6 more quarts of berries for winter use. We still have an entire flat for eating and cooking with during the week.

If you are interested in doing your own berry picking, the guy at the u-pick said they'd only be open for 1 more week. So get in while there's still time!

Long List of Outdoor Stuff

2011-06-24T19:59:00.002-05:00

1. My garden is OUT OF CONTROL. We've had rain for the last 5 days or so, and there's growth everywhere, and that means I'm spending most of my upcoming weekend dealing with weeds. That also means that it is crazy green outside. I've never seen so much green! Look at this tree; that neon green is new growth.

2. Mulberries! The previous owners have mulberry trees everywhere. They are starting to come to fruit right now. What is a mulberry, you ask? A bush with a purplish misshapen raspberry. It has a very mild taste, not too strong.
In past years, I lived near another bush, and I collected them to make a crisp. You'd have to collect a lot for any dessert worth eating, but we might have enough for a couple crisps.

3. Strawberries. We sometimes drive past a strawberry picking place on our way home and I hope to have time to go and pick. I love strawberries. But sadly, my experimental strawberry patch seems to have no joy. Only a few little shoots of seedlings, nothing too exciting. The weeds are taking over, reclaiming that back patch for its own. I bought an 8-pk of strawberry plants for my strawberry pot, but it's not the same. Maybe there will be more purchases of actual plants to try to kick start the hoped for berry patch.

4. Blueberries. Stupid rodents dug up two of the plants. I don't think anything else has really been touched. We think. We don't know. 4 left. Not doing much, even though we acidified the soil. We might have to keep doing that.

5. Apples. Our two highly pruned trees are covered in little apples. I need to research about how I'm supposed to deal with all of these; am I supposed to thin them? Am I supposed to use that nasty smelling oily stuff on the bark when the apples are on the tree? I have no idea.

6. I found this near my broccoli and cauliflower plants. (This is not my picture.) This is a cross striped version of a cabbage worm larvae. I moved this far away, but this may be a problem. I've planted marigolds near some of these plants, after hearing that the worms don't care for the smell of them, but I might have to invest in some organic anti-worm spray. There's something called Neem that I hear might be good. I've only found one, but where there's one, there's more. (My broccoli and cauliflower leaves look okay... for now.)

7. Potatoes. I went and bought a few more bales of hay from a neighbor farmer and I put down a whole bale on my potatoes on Sunday. The rain all week pounded it down, which is good, because I'm trying to use straw to mulch around the roots, which is an alternative method to mounding dirt near the base of the roots.

8. J's cousin, C., suggested we buy this.
Buy Morels.com
Again, this is not my picture.
C. said he had a dream of J as a truffle farmer. Yeah, we'll see. We ordered a kit. Why not? It can only fail, right?

9. Now eating: Still eating lettuce, the occasional radish, but now we are eating garlic scapes, and I couldn't resist a pea pod. The peas need more time, but it won't be long now! The radishes should have been thinned better and so a lot of them are not edible. The radishes are all blooming. I have to find out if that is bad or not. I think I'm not supposed to let that happen. I'll have to plant farther apart next time.

10. J planted about 40 corn "mounds" some with multiple corn stalks. On each side of each mound, we planted two bean seeds. On either side of the mound, we planted some kind of squash. It might be acorn, or pumpkin or winter. We mixed it up. This is called "three sisters". You might have heard about the Native Americans doing this; although they usually buried a fish in the mound for fertilizer first. (We skipped this step. We have high nitrates around here.) So far, the corn are well past the knee high by the 4th of July rule, and we've not seen the beans climbing the corn stalks yet, but it is starting to look like a real garden and less like a bunch of piles of dirt.

11. I went and bought a tree identification and wildflower identification book. Now I wander around paging through the book trying to figure out what is what. Someone needs to create an app so I could hold it up to a plant and it will tell me what it is. I planted some pretty "snow on the mountain" in a bare area. A co-worker tells me he's removing goutweed all weekend and covering those areas with mulch. Guess what? Goutweed = "snow on the mountain". But it is so pretty! A weed can't be pretty! I need to figure out what is what so I'm not planting weeds and pulling good plants.

theNgame

2011-06-18T21:23:00.000-05:00

I went to a conference. I'm not going to write about that here, as it is kind of a niche topic, but one thing happened that I thought was pretty neat. One of those presentations was actually a presentation and play test of a game called the N game. The thing about the N game is that is actually an educational game couched in a really cool fun way to learn about the nitrogen cycle.

You know, like when you need nitrogen in your soil and it gets deposited by various methods into the soil?

Yeah, I'm not a biology or soil science major either. In fact, the professor who helped design the game said that even her students had problems learning the nitrogen cycle.

The game is cool. It uses a "magic the gathering" type of set of cards to help the students/participants move through the nitrogen cycle. You can use a "fixer card" to pull nitrogen out of the air. You then use a decomposition card to allow the nitrogen to become a different form (nitrite) and then another card to do denitrification (nitrate).

The last step is a return to the air, and that's the finish line.

The card uses resources like carbon and carbon dioxide, just like Magic uses land. There are events, like a flood, or things like bacterium that eat the nitrogen and help it change forms. Or lightning that fries the nitrogen to move it out of the air and into the soil. Or a coyote peeing. Because, well, you know.

Of all of the conference presentations (and there were some pretty fun ones) this was my favorite. I even think my nephews could play and enjoy this game. And learn a bit without intending on it.

All the Same

2011-06-17T20:56:00.000-05:00

I was dropped off by J early. The conference's "continental" breakfast, which was less continental and more global, did not start for a bit. I decided to visit a nearby coffeeshop to pass the time. The coffee at the breakfast was served in tiny ceramic coffee cups, hardly enough for a hard core addict. I needed to premedicate, to get through the less engaging sessions ahead of me.

I walked in, and got a supersized cup of the blackest roast they had. I then indoctrinated it with milk and splenda, and settled in for a pleasant morning with two of my favorite papers, the Onion (always ready back to front) and the Isthmus (always read front to back).

I got settled in the comfy chair, found a place to put my bag, my coffee, and was surprised to see a scruffy old man stairing right at me. I'm not pretty, but I'm also not a monster, so I found this unsettling. I immediately shifted my gaze to some point behind the old man's head, near where the dirty dish cart was located. Thus relieved from the locked gaze, I lowered my head to my newspaper. It was strange to be watched so intently. As I read my paper, I occasionally would glance up, to see if he still had me fixed in his gaze. He moved on to other targets, I found, with some relief.

And now I stared at him. He was an unshaven man, with a full beard that was more white than dark, and was wearing a camoflage cap and jacket. The result was a third world dictator; all he needed was a cigar to complete the costume. He looked dangerous, although he was currently thinking intently, twirling a few of the strands of his beard in his fingers absentmindedly. He was remarkable because he had no accoutrements. No coffee. No laptop. No paper. Just a guy sitting at a chair in the middle of the coffeeshop staring at people. He's just so clearly out of place.

I read the paper a bit more, sipping my drink, and kept looking up. He was gone at one point, and I was a more than a little relieved. Maybe he never existed. I laughed at myself, and kept reading. And then he was back again. I looked about to see if anyone else was noticing this. Everyone else was either deep into whatever was on their table, or they were with someone chatting away. He is staring at me again. I look down quickly, trying not to be freaked out. "Don't be ridiculous. He's just an old man," I tell myself. "He might be homeless, but he's not dangerous."

I look up again to see him hobbling over to the bathroom. "See? Just an old man. Resting near a bathoom." My thoughts turn to pity. If I were in his shoes, where would I try to spend my time, out of the way of others? Would people stare at me and judge me, or would they quickly look away so they couldn't see something they did not want to see.

He came back and said something to the older couple sitting next to his table. I can't hear what he said, but the woman's hand tighten around her purse on her lap. The man just looks uncomfortable. The old man thrusts out his hand and the man reluctantly shakes it. The woman follows suit, looking incredulous.

He then shuffled out, heading to his next stop.

I wanted to ask the couple what he said, but I don't I don't want intrude. They've just settled back with a sigh of relief. I don't want to scare them again.

It's rare that I notice the homeless. It's rare that homeless people make themselves noticable. I'm struck by how alike we are. The last thing I wanted this morning was to be stared at, and yet, I was. It was as if he was daring the people in the coffee shop to acknowledge his existence.

In the end, that coffee shop encounter woke me up more than the coffee ever could.

A postscript: I got to the conference, ate my breakfast and shuffled off to the bathroom before the first session. I found I'd been wearing my shirt inside out that entire time. Maybe he wasn't staring at all, but laughing silently at me the whole time.

Matchy Matchy

2011-06-12T10:06:00.003-05:00

I'm not an interior designer. I buy things I like and then after years, I decide, you know...that doesn't really go together. I should have bought the another color. Or...I can't believe I've lived like this for this long.

Now...the house we moved into has white walls, some strange and hastily attached woodwork and fixture choices that I didn't make. I like a lot of them. Like the master bathroom...

...bronze trim, copper accents on the lights.

There's also a copper shower curtain hanger (is there another name for that?).

Coppery colored tiles. I've even bought a copper colored shades for the tiny bathroom widow. You get the idea.

The previous owners really liked copper.

So, when I eyed the horrible round towel hoops, in silver, I not only would shudder at the choice, but mourn for the lack of places to store important things like toilet paper and vitamins.

They don't make coppery bath shelves and towel racks. They just don't. You can get wood ones, or glass ones, or chrome ones, but bronzey-coppery ones? Nope.

I found something I had high hopes for, at Target. It said oil-rubbed bronze. I opened the package to find black. Not brownish black either. Black. I returned it, sure I could find something more suitable for a fair price on the Internets. I visited store after store. I looked in non-traditional places. I investigated IKEA. Nothing.

I returned to the Target one. It was an okay style, plenty of space for storage, and two towel racks...and there was spray paint. J's something of a spray paint connaisseur. I told him my plan and he advised me on what to buy...primer maybe, what kind of spray paint I'd need.

I went collected the parts, and started.

The end result...not bad. Coppery, utilitarian, matches the trim.

Now we just need to do something about the toilet paper holder. I feel very Trading Spaces-esque.

Routines

2011-06-11T21:16:00.000-05:00

The cats wait impatiently for us to awake, and then shadow our every move. Each morning starts the same; cats get fed, the litter boxes dealt with, the coffee started.

The only difference between weekends and weekdays is the time that all of this occurs. We do try to sleep late on weekends. Of course, there is the persistence of the cats, who want to try to get us out of bed much earlier. This may involve strategies such as licking of our hands, chewing on our hair, standing on top of us, pushing through with his paws with what seems fifty pounds of force.

The cats can't tell time.

The only way that they can tell if it is a weekend is if J proceeds to start his weekend chores; to start to fill bird feeders. If this happens, the cats get very excited. For with J home, they know one thing. J will let them outside.

They do love the outside. I just put a dose of Frontline on each, after finding a tick on Lulu. They run outside, impervious to the rain and dew. Bella usually heads straight for the woods, where she can get lost in the heavy cover of garlic mustard and raspberry canes. Georgy is not quite so staid, preferring to meander about sniffing the ground, and searching for targets like the spare field mouse or the slow chipmunk.

Today it was drizzling, and they both moved out in their standard mode. J looked about for them, after finishing with the bird feeders. He couldn't find them, but as we discussed where they might be, I looked down to see Bella huddled from the rain, under the cover of the hostas, great big leaves dripping with wet.

We open the door, and the poor girl darts in. Soaking wet and damp. A few minutes later, Georgy is batting at the door, requesting admittance. Soaked, his fur hangs about him in clumps, but he's thrilled to have us home and to be inside.

J's Supernatural Talent

2011-06-09T20:01:00.000-05:00

I tell J that he doesn't realize his talent. Storms avoid him. We live in a condo in Verona for 4 years together, and nothing.

We move, and less than 9 months later, Verona gets hit by an EF1 tornado.

This picture was from one of the streets that was near our old condo.

I tell you, Miami or New Orleans need to hire us to come and live there. He'll get those hurricanes to veer off course.

Maybe he's secretly a mutant, like one of the X-men. : )

***

We also learned that poor Lulu doesn't like storms. She doesn't like them so much that she left us an unpleasant surprise on the basement stairs where she was likely huddling during afternoon storms. Poor little kitty.

Economics

2011-06-08T14:02:00.000-05:00

I've got a bit of an obsession right now about anything about economics.

This from the person who basically coasted through Econ 101 by getting the lecture notes from Studentprint and proudly used "opportunity cost" to explain why napping was so much better than about any other activity during college.

But now I'm kind of obsessed.

There are economics podcasts coming from my iPod on most lazy weekends. There are economics blogs on my RSS feeder. There are economics books in my bathroom.

I kind of wish I'd paid closer attention the first time.

Big Red, Interviews, and Lulu

2011-06-07T21:26:00.002-05:00

1) My parents have a big red pickup truck. It wasn't being used, and J and I are constantly needing to haul stuff from point A to point B, so we have it right now. Truthfully, it's been very handy. J calls it Big Red.

It's the hugest thing. You know those moving vans with the high seats? The ones with the bouncy bench seat and the big steering wheel? It's like those. It's got analog gauges for things like oil pressure and engine temperature. To turn on the lights, you have to pull a knob. It's old school.

It's long with an extended cab, and I make bass whale sounds while driving it to emphasize the giant nature of the vehicle.

When I park it at a store, I park in the very back of the parking lot because I feel like I can't park it normally.

I back it into the garage, and it fits ... barely, but much better than it ever did in my parent's garage. But backing it in, that sometimes takes several tries. I've gotten much better at it, and I've yet to hit the garage. I accidentally backed it into one of our trees though. I wasn't even going fast, just a tap, and the tree has this huge mark on it. The truck doesn't have a scratch on it. Poor tree.

After using Big Red for a while, I'm thinking of trading in the Santa Fe for something small and fuel efficient and just using the truck when we need to haul something. After all, I don't need two vehicles for transporting stuff.

2) I've been serving on an interview committee at work, and am in awe of some of the stupid ways that people can shoot themselves in the foot while doing a phone interview.

"Fake it until you make it" is not a strategy you want to use to promote yourself. I suppose it's like thinking on your feet, but it just sounds super dumb.
And when we ask about your experience, don't recite your resume back to us. We've got that in our hand.
Always, always identify gaps in your resume and explain why.
Always, always know when you worked somewhere, and don't give an answer like..."I dunno...maybe 2008?".
Don't say "I've been applying a lot and haven't gotten a lot of interviews". The interviewers aren't interested in your job search.
Know your weaknesses. They are going to ask that question. They just are. You do have weaknesses. Admit to them.

3. Lulu, the half-shaven cat. We ended up partially shaving Lulu because she was just getting too taggy and out of control. I'd go and brush her and she'd shed so much hair that I'd fill up a wastebasket of gnarled fur. So, I got out the shaver (the same one I used to cut J's hair) and talked to her in soothing tones and petted her.

I started out by trimming the longest hairs, and then turned on the shaver, which hummed slightly. She didn't mind, in fact, she purred. I had the guard on, and so we didn't take her down to her skin. I was afraid to go too close and hurt her. She was a little wiggly, so I didn't get all of the parts that I probably could have, but I did get the worst of it off of her.

I don't know if it was the shave or not, but now she runs outside as soon as I open the door when we get home, and she loves to follow me when I go out to the garden. She's become more adventurous too, walking around sniffing plants, trotting around, always nearby. If she gets startled, she waddles very quickly, almost a run, back to the door that she uses, which we usually leave open for her. It's hysterical, she's such a wide cat!

so much popping out!

2011-06-05T18:18:00.001-05:00

The former owners of this property planted a lot of stuff, and we are constantly amazed by the stuff popping out of the ground.

Add to that the weeds (like this milkweed growing out of my ice plants) and the plants that I planted, and we have a very colorful place right now.

Despite the weeds, our garden is getting along well enough that I've been harvesting salad mix lettuce and the occasional radish. I planted them too thickly, so we have a lot of very skinny ones right now. I'm thinning them and I'm trying to weed too.

That's a broccoli! They shot up when I least expected it! I really overplanted those. Low yield on half the garden.

But what I'm really looking forward too...

Peas. Not quite yet.

Sadly, J had to work all weekend, so he missed all of the garden work and weeding. Hopefully, we can get a head start on it this week.

No, not a wedding post yet...

2011-05-29T09:50:00.000-05:00

...there'll be one. I took the 7 disposable cameras to Target yesterday. The poor film counter guy, who must be harried all day by people who expect instant turnaround on their work, told us the machine was broken.

We have all of the time in the world. Really, we do. We'll get around to those pictures sometime. Doesn't have to be today, even. We don't even want regular prints. Just a CD will do. Weird to think that paper pictures are not what you need anymore, but we only post things up on Flickr and link to them, point people to them, and move on. I've occasionally sent pictures to Walgreens for prints, but 1? maybe 2? But this morning, as I try to upload a picture of an ORIOLE (!) that was right by our window...Flickr has hiccups. Um....fix it! Fix it! Fix it!

This may have something to do with the fact that my Wordscraper/Scrabulous partner has been on vacation for several days and I have no progress on my boards. Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Get back soon, LeenGreenBean! I desperately need to be beaten at this game, and you are the only one who can do it!

Hmmm...maybe I'm more like those people who scream at work at me when something goes wrong than I thought. Maybe it's just electronic stuff that I get all bratty about.

Oh, Flickr's back up. Behold the pretty oriole.

Semi-related to Target trip; this is what happens when you have a cat infested house.

It's sorted because J decided to go OCD on me. The cats favorite is the green kind, can you tell?

And then maybe because I'm sick of trying to keep Lulu tag free, I decided to cut her hair. Maybe I have less patience than I thought. She LOVED it though. I used a number 3 guard on the clipper, but really, I could have gone shorter. She really is much better, even though she wiggled around too much, so I couldn't get her upper body, just her lower body. I'll never be a pro cat groomer, but ... no tags!

I tried to give her a little bath, because she really needed it, but she didn't want any of that.

And then we went out and made more progress on the garden. Yeah!

Hoeing is the new yoga

2011-05-26T21:18:00.000-05:00

I admit it...I enjoy hoeing. And the whole making rows of dirt to plant stuff, and digging in the dirt. I find this all very relaxing. So much so that I spent the first two days on vacation this week doing garden stuff. A lot of garden stuff.

I will go out and dig a row or two up after work, then hoe it, and then make a trellis for the hell of it. J comes to find me pulling apart signs that were created with stakes and spare pieces of wood that I can use for staking up things. He feels guilty when I'm puttering around like this and not helping.

I went out and harvested salad greens, pea shoots, beet greens and turnip tops to put into my salad. I even pulled up some radishes that looked like they might be crowding the other radishes.

However, we've not yet begun to deal with the problem of the weeds. I've been putting down straw and we'll be working to mulch more with straw. The weeds are everywhere and I anticipate a lot more hoeing in my future.

Okay, a little too much

2011-05-17T09:05:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, J and I worked in the garden.

To be exact, I

spaded a bunch of dirt for a bed
hoed the bed
spread topsoil over several beds
planted potatoes
planted cabbage seedlings
planted bok choi seedlings
planted lettuce seedlings
planted celery seedlings
spread straw as mulch over new beds
pulled hose out for watering
pulled hose back and coiled it for storage

And after that, I started feeling weak, nauseous, lightheaded, and short of breath. I took puffs on my inhaler. I took antacids. I ate a banana. I drank water. In short, it felt like I was bonking.

Bonk: In endurance sports such as cycling and running, hitting the wall or the bonk describes a condition caused by the depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles, which manifests itself by sudden fatigue and loss of energy.

And I haven't had problems breathing since I ran the Sarasota Half Marathon in February 2008. After I ran 13.1 miles.

J insisted I rest while he headed out to do the lawn stuff, and trim the big pine tree. And I did. Everytime I moved, my lungs hurt something horrible, and I felt about 90 years old. I slept. Didn't help. I tried to do laundry. I had to stop to gasp for air.

I tried to make dinner. J came in and ordered me to sit down. He made dinner.

All I can think is that the stress of the wedding, coupled with me overdoing hauling dirt and gardening probably was a little too much for me.

Monday was a furlough day for me. J ordered me to not do anything strenuous, but I felt much better anyway. It was hard for me not do things that I wanted. I tried to busy myself with little things, and that was enough, but boy, we that a really horrible experience.

Pea Please

2011-05-10T19:00:00.000-05:00

When I was eight, we moved from one side of our City to the other side. In May. With about 6 weeks of school left. I had to move to a classroom where I knew no one, with a new teacher, in a place I'd never been. And I was pretty unhappy. The kids already had all their friends, and I was the new kid. My teacher thought I was stupid because I didn't grasp greater than or less than symbols. I had to sit in the front of the class, because by then the seats in the back had all been assigned.

The one thing that was good was that the first day I was there, the teacher helped me push a tiny pea seed into a milk carton that had its top shaved off to make a planter. And any time those evil greater than/less than symbols had me down, I'd get up, out of my seat, and water my pea plant.

And with all of my extra attention, my little pea plant grew fast, and bloomed first among all of my classmates, even though it was planted last. For this reason, I love pea plants. And they are super sweet eaten raw.

Fast forward to the present, our house was built upon...among other things, depending on who you believe...a Union Army campsite, a junk heap, a old watering hole for cattle, and a former pea field. Maybe that's why I'm seeing some crazy exciting things happening to the insane number of pea plants that I put in the ground just a couple of weeks ago.

I love love love peas. J just sighed and said, "That's a lot of peas." That's okay. They helped me though a difficult time once, and I'm nothing if not loyal.

Yeah peas!

Get Ready

2011-05-09T19:06:00.000-05:00

The wedding is less than 12 days away.

My co-workers are giving me a potluck to celebrate it. I'm not sure how to best handle all of this attention. When one of them said "I won't be able to be there for the potluck," I replied that it is okay, and I'm not all that comfortable with being the center of attention.

"Well, you better get used to it."

I've never been the kind of person to fantasize about the perfect wedding or the most wonderful reception. It's hard for me to think about all eyes being on me. I'm much more of the behind the scenes sort of person; the kind of person who gets the credit after something successfully happens, and not standing out to get acclaim. In fact, when a professor mentioned me during an award ceremony for helping him out, I think I blushed.

This is weird because I have no problem typing up my thoughts in blog form and broadcasting them for the world to see. Maybe it's because I can air out my thoughts and then go and hide. I've censored my posts a lot after a few rather strained conversations because I don't want to debate my thoughts, I just want to put them down on somewhere.

So the wedding. We'll be the center of attention. Nowhere to hide.

Yikes. 12 days.

Programmed

2011-05-07T09:23:00.000-05:00

I made wedding programs yesterday, and then promptly freaked out and ordered more supplies for wedding programs.

I used this as my inspiration; the folders and inserts idea really appealed to me. I still need to figure out a way to make our names on the programs all snazzy. I love the font she used, but I don't want to spend $$$ for a FONT. Looking at free fonts now.

Bought a inkjet printer for the printing for the programs, though. I despise inkjets; the ink is expensive and the amount you can get out of a cartridge is low, but it does colors well and for $35 you can't go wrong. Of course, the printing I've done so far is black and white, but that will change as I continue to develop more material for the programs.

Since you buy the folders online, you really don't get a good sense of how vibrant the colors are. I love the purple; I'm not thrilled about the blue. I've ordered two more colors, green and a very light green. I don't want all one color.

I'm starting to get very excited instead of the preoccupied state of terror that I've been dealing with for last couple of months.

The plantings

2011-05-02T11:58:00.001-05:00

I'm home sick today; my head is plugged up and I feel oogy. But it's sunny out, and it's a good day to take a walk outside and take pictures of the good things happening outside. Especially since it's supposed to be cold enough for a hard freeze tonight and though I'll try to keep my new plants safe, anything can happen. I'm digging out my painter's tarps for my newly planted beds.

The apple trees that we severely pruned, have rewarded us with buds! A recent look at them with K. cast doubt on their health. One has some sort of weird peeling bark issue which could be its death knell. We are watching it to see if it produces fruit despite its condition. We can only hope. I sprayed it, earlier this spring, with something supposed to help with bugs.

These are some full sun plants called "ice plants", and a sampling of wave petunias. I've invested a lot into wave petunias because they are super easy to grow and spread over large areas. We've pulled the grass away from the foundation of the house and put in these beds for plants. Most of the wave petunias are some shade of purple too...I'm not sure why, but there's a lot of purple in my gardens. Well, maybe something to do with green and purple being a big part of my wedding.

I was very surprised to see the number of daffodils coming up; this must have been planted by the previous owners. I see buds emerging in lots of places; I can only guess at what will be next. The previous owners have lots of ferns planted, and so some of them are starting to uncurl, but I've pulled up some others to clear out the space for a little more variety. There's also a lot of hostas pushing up; lots of hostas! So many that I could probably divide them in the future and spread them around.

I've got no idea of what I'm doing really. I go to the greenhouse with little more than a color pallette in mind. I end up buying things like this. This is something called creeping jenny. Evidently it's a spreading weed and there are large groups of people (on the internets) who call a weed and a scrouge. Now, I'm buying large amounts of plants and I like the ground cover, spreading kind. I put this in a corner pretty far from any grass or anything that might be "infected" by this "weed". I'm hopeful it will spread, but not too much. It's pretty, and I am cheered by the color.

Our lilacs are budding! I have this idea that it would be really great if the lilacs were in bloom during the wedding, with that incredibly smell. I'm hopeful...the buds are just coming out right now, and it will likely be a while before they'll be in bloom. I have no idea if they are white or purple.

We'll see if our plants survive the frost, and I've still got TONS of planing to do. But I think the rest of today will be reserved for reading, resting and recuperating.

Dinner by Candlelight

2011-04-20T11:40:00.003-05:00

The roads were really bad last night, and we got rerouted from our normal way, and crawled home, extremely cautiously. Well, someone wasn't as cautious as we were, and they slid and took out a power pole along the highway. Our power.

We got home and the garage door opened, but when we got out, there were no lights in the garage and the control wouldn't shut the door. And then, we walked in the house and the grow light was off and Lulu looked expectantly at us. "Fix it."

Um...we can't.

J took off to see what was going on; the road crew was only a few hundred feet down the road. I started washing dishes. It was an emergency dish washing....we had only a few implements clean enough to eat out of.

As I did them, I started to think about what wasn't working. The internet. That was out. The computer would work (because it's got a battery) but no internet wouldn't do much. The toilet still flushed. The house was still warm. We'd be okay.

J came back and told me that they had to put up a new pole. He didn't get too close, but he told me the farmer from across the road was there demanding answers from the road crew guys. It looked like a lot of people didn't have power.

I lit a candle and suggested we find his camp stove to make dinner. The camp stove is what we've taken on our camping trips. Little, compact, run out of a gas cylinder. After a quick rummage in the garage wearing our head lamps, we found it and J started to heat up water for macaroni and cheese.

I looked for more candles as the twilight fell. J knelt by the stove and cooked us our rustic meal from the confines of the (wet) screen porch.

As I continued to do dishes I learned that the water was controlled electrically because the water pump was no longer working and water stopped coming out of the faucet. You just don't realize what doesn't work anymore. We have an alarm on our septic that is electrically controlled and THAT was beeping every few minutes. I started to wonder about brushing my teeth and taking a shower. Going to use the bathroom. What would we do?

We sat at our table and gazed out towards the highway, where we could barely make out the flashing lights of the road crew. I called a nearby friend to find out where exactly the power worked.

Because I'd been using the garage as a cold frame for hardening my seedlings, I suddenly remembered that I had to move them into the house. (The garage door wouldn't close with no electricity. It was supposed to be really cold last night.) As we did, while wearing our head lamps, I saw EYES out by the badger hole. Flashing animal eyes.

Now, if you aren't freaked out enough by having to rough it in your own home, you can really get freaked out by the thought of being approached by wildlife who would like to do nothing more than gnaw on your exposed skin and would think nothing about charging you and biting you and being generally nasty.

I told J about the eyes. What did he do? Started walking out to see if he could find them. Um...how about we leave whatever animal with the EYES to whatever that animal wants to do and huddle with gummy mac and cheese in our own house? No...this is too exciting!

I trailed after him, getting snow on my already frigid feet, shivering and looking about for more eyes, ready to run. Badgers are ferocious beasts! I say we leave them to their own devices and not charge out and try not to poke them with sticks!

Well, the thing with the flashing eyes decided he didn't want to be near us either and fled. It probably wasn't a badger. It probably was a coyote or racoon or something. But still. First thing you know, power goes out, then the animals close in, and then all civil order fails and you have to get out the shotguns. And the roads are bad and you can't just order pizza!

J and I sat at the table a bit more and finished off more gummy mac and cheese. I think camp stove prepared food tastes better when you are camping.

And just as we were starting to talk about going to bed, the lights jumped back to life, scarying the dickens out of me! I think we were without power for about 5 hours, but it just wore me out!

Okay, I'm exaggerating this all for sake of humor, but it really was a very strange evening. The end.

Chasing the Wind

2011-04-17T09:08:00.001-05:00

J lets the cats outside any chance he gets. Bella and Georgy have been trained to wait at the door on weekends; they know there’s a good chance that J will slip out of the uniform of t-shirt and shorts and into “outside clothes” to lead them on adventures.

J often will see the squirrels at the feeder as an opportunity to let the cats out. He tries to be stealthy but the click of the lock and the swish of the opening door gives the squirrels a head start.

Bella was in the lead today, and the squirrel bee lined it for the woods. Bella was only feet behind. The woods are the safe haven for the squirrels, but the cats have lost their fear of climbing the trees too. Sometimes they’ll chase the squirrels right up the trees, only to find that the squirrels can jump between branches.

The chipmunks are way too skilled to get caught by the cats. J thinks that cats see mostly motion so the chippies know to stand perfectly still. The cats have passed within feet of the statue chippies, and not noticed them. J tried to attract their attention to one, only to have it drop into a hole as soon as the cat looked away.

The wind today is harsh and the springtime temperatures are not much different than a month ago. The only difference is the grass greening and the buds on the trees. J would pick up a leaf, toss it in the air, and Bella would tear across the lawn, chasing the phantom animal. He did the same with black walnuts; Bella will chase anything, given the chance. She doesn’t know what to do with them once she’s caught them; after all, a leaf or black walnut doesn’t squirm or fight back.

It is easy to collect the cats should they be in hidden locations; J grabs a stick and drags it along the ground. Suddenly, he’ll find two cats crashing into the earth where the stick just was, tearing along, ready to give chase.

The previous owners planted catnip in a couple of corners; places where the cats have been known to stop, drop and roll. Lose a cat? Check the catnip.

Georgy was stalking a bird down by the pond yesterday. He got closer and closer to it as it pecked the water near the edges, but as he could taste victory, the bird got wise and split. He watched it fly away and then sat and pondered the situation. We have ducks and geese in the pond that honk and complain loudly when they notice a cat remotely nearby.

We are far enough away from dangerous roads or neighbors that the cats roam free, but we’ve been trying to teach them to steer clear of cars (like Adam’s) or the driveway. Georgy has headed up the driveway a couple of times, but we caught him and distracted him. Bella will tire and want to be let back in, huddling at the back door patiently, for someone to please let her in.

For days when the “real outside” isn’t good enough, there’s the upstairs screen porch, overlooking the yard and the feeders, which is enough cat television to make them happy.

Spring Cleaning

2011-04-13T20:21:00.000-05:00

Last fall, I did some raking of leaves. When I told someone at work that I did that, she said, "Why did you do that? You live in the country now!" And so I didn't do much more raking.

Well, there's a good reason why you'd do your raking in the fall. Because after the snow melts, there'll be more to remove. Much more.

Today, I got out the rakes and started to collect twigs. Two big tubs of sticks! And then I started to rake up the leaves, another two big tubs of leaves! And that's only a very small portion of the yard. If we are going to have a wedding here in a few weeks, we have a lot more to clean up.

And then you have to find a place to put them; we have big piles of twigs all over the property from the previous owners. I've even brought up the idea of a chipper/shredder with J...we have so many twigs that would make great mulch.

At least it was a beautiful day, so it was great to be outside. And even better, I got to drive the lawnmower with a cart attached. It goes about 3 mph total. Speed demon!

Lessons Learned

2011-04-11T09:29:00.000-05:00

1. Don't mess with a familiar food and expect children to like it.

I made this for a brunch, and I thought it was pretty good. Most of the adults did too. The kids, not so much. Oh well, I'm not sure I would have liked it as a kid either. There was other food there that they could eat.

2. Forcing Lulu to do anything she doesn't want to do isn't going to work.

This is the door to the workshop. It came with a cat door, and we thought when we moved here, that the cats might use it. And we tried. Georgy and Bella sat in wonder as we pushed open and closed it over and over again. They have no clue about it. It's a mystery to them.

So, after Lulu and Bella basically had the mother of all cat fights in our bed at 3am, we had to separate the cats again. This time Lulu got to stay in the workshop, the other side of the door, and we placed a box in front of the cat door.

And things went okay. One day, I was inside while J took the other cats outside, and suddenly Lulu was by my side. The door to the workshop was closed. She must have used the cat door. I looked, and sure enough, I hadn't placed the box of cat litter in front of the cat door, and she used it.

Now, we have Lulu still separated, but this is her choice. She comes and goes through her cat door as she pleases. Like a magician, the other cats approach the workshop very cautiously; they never know if she'll come out or not. It kind of freaks them out, actually; they can smell her, and they know she's nearby by the mystery nature of the cat door means they don't understand that she's just behind the door.

She seems to enjoy the workshop a lot. She loves to sit under my grow lights, near the seedlings, often on the heated mat. When I work outside, I open the door to the outside and she'll come out and sniff the wind. That's about the extent of her outside enjoyment.

She's a smart little cookie; I'll give her that. She has no intention of joining the other cats; she's happy where she is.

3. The sound of the country is LOUD

They say that frogs are dying because of the environment, but you couldn't tell me that...the frogs are waking up and it's croaking frogs all of the time now. It's soothing, and it's funny when you walk up to the pond and they suddenly all go silent. J and I snuck down when the wind was really tearing through and they couldn't hear us. They just keep chirping away. They are birds too; so many birds! Honking geese, ducks nibbling on greens at the bottom of the pond, flocks of blackbirds up in the trees, fearless woodpeckers, giant bluejays, little fine boned finches.

4. Working a garden is hard.

This was a view of our garden a few days ago. All of those rolls are sod. We had rented a rototiller this weekend, and my job was (because I don't really like mechanical things that can take my feet off) moving the sod rolls and creating a walkway. Which meant that had to work and lift and unroll and cajole these heavy rolls into new places so we could actually have something like this:

Yes, I'm in pain. This is hard work. I don't think I've done my "normal workout" in several days because moving sod around is such hard work!

J planted Asparagus and Raspberries yesterday, in a corner, and I bought more raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries (!) and rhubarb from Jung too. The weather was too frightful for me to plant those things, but I'm hoping maybe tonight or tomorrow we can get them into the ground.

Yes, J's in pain too. He was moaning about his back this morning, while I whined about my jellofied arms. It will all be worth it right?

5. Fake flowers are cheaper than real flowers.

Yes, for the wedding.

I emptied out the inventory of blue and purple silk hydrangeas at two different craft stores on Friday. There may be more purchases afoot too. And I ordered little folder things for each table to have a menu, a schedule, and a map. Getting all crafty, don't you know. It will be awesome.

That is all.

The Sweet and the Savory

2011-04-06T21:45:00.000-05:00

I work with a guy who doesn't like sweets. He really doesn't. I can bring some pretty bad ass sweet stuff and he's not even tempted.

Like Tuesday, when I brought in a triple chocolate cake balls to work. That is...chocolate cake, crumbled, mixed with chocolate frosting, then frozen and then dipped in milk chocolate. I've had people stop me in the hallway and whisper about getting "hooked up" with them again. There's talk of a petition to get me to make them again. I've had people talking to other people about them, and then those other people show up in my office. Yes, they are that good. They were very popular. I brought them to work because well...I was bored by them.

And the thing is...I like to cook, but ... and I hesitate putting this out there...I've kind of lost my taste for chocolate. And I'd almost rather eat the savory stuff that this guy who hates sweets prefers.

I know. My favorite treat nowadays? Crackers and butter. Carby buttery deliciousness. Yum. Savory wins. For now.

Super Garden

2011-04-03T17:55:00.001-05:00

So, J and I went kind of crazy with the whole gardening thing this year. We have a huge area set out for gardening related stuff, and we've got a LOT of seeds to plant, and seedlings started.

(Lulu like to sit under the grow light.)

So when J was talking with someone at work, they said, "You should rent a sod cutter. That's a lot of grass to move, and at roto-tiller probably can't do it all." I'd never seen one of these beasts, but it has undulating blade that you lower on the bottom and it scalps any lawn you have, leaving long strips in their place.

When I got back from book club yesterday, J was almost done, and I started rolling up the long strips. By the time we collapsed and had to stop, our garden area looked like this.

This was a LOT of work. I kept looking at the area we had left to do and groaning. We back today, and completed the rolling part. It was misty and windy, and generally yucky out, but it wasn't cold.

I took some ibuprofen to keep myself from being too achy, but I'm not sure that was a good idea; I may have just injured myself more. Of course, when you are feeling no pain, that's the time to start building sod walls.

You can see our onion circles and our one garlic circle here. We found this metal sculpture in the grass; it belonged to the previous owners. We have it up, and there's others buried in the grasses too that may be dug out and set upright at some point.

The work was worth it; I can start to envision the garden and even though we are a long way from being ready, I feel we made good progress. Now, I need to take more ibuprofen. And a nap.

Planting, Peppery, Personal

2011-04-03T17:33:00.001-05:00

J's is super excited about springtime planting. I am too, but J's taking this to an extreme. We have room for a big garden. I get that. But we are only a couple of people. We can only eat so much. Take the onions. We have started a couple of trays of onion seedlings. And they are doing well.

But J wanted a lot of onions. To be fair, we use a lot of onions. But he came back with 3 bags of onion sets. White, yellow and red onion sets. And this weekend, we created 3 more stone circles of dirt, and planted all 3.

J pointed out how much I enjoyed some vidalia onion spread that I bought and now I can make my own an that will use up a lot of onions. And we don't know how much will actually survive to harvest, so maybe he's right. But it seems like a lot.

Like our tomatoes. We have over a hundred tomato seedlings. Now, not all of those will survive. I know that. But a lot of them will. And I may have a lot of tomatoes on my hands.

***

I made this recipe last week: Spicy Dr. Pepper Shredded Pork. In the slow cooker. I made it overnight, and fished out the meat in the morning. I strained out the juice/sauce/Dr. Pepper and put it in the fridge to allow the fat to separate, but as I did, I tasted an onion piece.

*HOT* *HOT* *HOT*!

It was blindingly spicy. The recipe, if you check it, suggests a whole can of chipotles, and I put in a whole can. It also suggests toning it down to a half of a can. Now, chipotles are not the most extreme as peppers go, so I didn't think anything of a whole can.

I quickly got the chipotles out, and the onions out and packaged THEM separately too. I didn't want to throw them out (they were hot) but I put them in a separate bowl in the fridge and spent the day trying to figure out how to cool off the gravy enough to salvage it.

Except our roommate Adam came up looking for an easy breakfast and decided that this bowl of goo was a good one. And he took a big bite of ...pepper? onion? It doesn't matter. He was scarred. I was mortified. He told me after we got home.

Just so you know, you can save a too spicy sauce. Get that fat off of it, put a couple teaspoons of peanut butter in it and a pinch of sugar. The fat in the peanut butter helps absorb it and gives it a great flavor.

It was delicious. Spicy, yes, but not blinding. And in tacos, the sour cream and cheese further assist in making it palatable.

Ride #2: The Other Side

2011-03-20T11:29:00.000-05:00

A ride mapped on 03/19/2011

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I live near a fairly busy highway. It's only one of those two lane ones, but it is busy enough for me to gauge traffic problems by looking out my window. Snowing out? Traffic on the highway is moving normally, must not be that bad.

I want to be able to continue to occasionally ride my bike either to or from work. J thinks I'm insane, but I think it won't be bad. This is why I spend lots of time huddled over mapmyride.com, plotting strategies for low-traffic country roads.

This weekend, J and Adam were discussing doing a networked game of Civ and I was contemplating the best time to hop on the bike and enjoy the sunshine that we'd been lacking for so long. I dressed again heavily; so many clothes that J told me that I'd be uncomfortable. I told him that I'm always cold, and you just can't know about what the wind might do.

It was so sunny, and I jumped on and headed out. The wind was harsh as I headed east, but the road was soon enclosed by tall trees. This is a hilly land, not the OMG hills of Dodgeville, but the rolling boops of a country road. Evidently I live on the not so nice side of the highway, because there are so many McMansions out here. They almost always have big dogs that must be controlled by invisible fence, because they chase me only as far as the edge of the property before they make a right turn away from me. Ha ha! Gotcha!

Another thing that is out here is lots and lots of horse stables. There must be famous horses housed here, for I kept seeing signs like "Home of Sir Jules Mac". I think that's probably a horse. It would be weird if people painted that sort of information on their house, but on a stable, it's prideful boasting. The horses were out munching away, but instead of staring a passing bike like cows, they look up, and then return to the ground. Nothing to see here. Palominos, shaggy little horses, shetland ponies, and finely boned quarter horses, swathed in protective jackets were everywhere.

The roads are not bad; a few patches here and there, but no sod or manure clumps, and far fewer discarded beer cans. I saw other bicyclists, including one white haired man that could have passed for Santa if he wasn't on a red road bike and if he had another 100 pounds on him.

There's a couple of quarries out here too, and one of them had an auction going on. There are lots of houses for sale out here, and I'm seeing that the auctioneer (who happens to live near my house) is doing a lot of business with foreclosures.

The hills never stop. Take a look at the elevation in the map above if you don't believe me. Up and down, up and down. I wasn't going fast, this I knew. In fact, I really have to work on my speed.

I kept riding and passed a house of an artist, I think. Whoever this way was the kind of art where they take junk and make sculpture, and scatter it around their yard. And that art might be taking an old van and gluing stuff to it, adding and adding until it's a layered collage of chaos. Or it might be welding bits of metal together until hulking metal beasts dot the landscape. Even his workshop was a collection of little sheds and houses glued together. Sometimes these things can look ramshackle, and sometimes they can look cohesive. This leaned in the cohesive camp, I thought.

I crossed a little creek and noticed the hint of green watercress, and felt a surge of happiness for seeing spring. There were vast fields of winter wheat, green and lovely too, and they took my breath away.

I passed both a taxidermist and a rotting carcass of a female deer, not far from each other. The juxtaposition was interesting to me; the deer was just a head and a spine. I'm not sure the taxidermist could do anything with that.

There was even a house selling spinach; I'm thinking that they might have some takers, so starved for fresh produce this time of year.

The route crosses several somewhat busy roads, and for that I might have problems, especially if I'm trying to ride home or to work during the commute hours. However, on a Saturday afternoon, I had no trouble. I rode only for an hour before I turned back, and felt the trip went faster on the return trip. Maybe I'd have to time my commute very early or late to avoid those roads at that time.

This trip was really just a scouting trip. A exploratory test of the waters. I didn't feel it was a dangerous ride, but my idea of not dangerous is someone else's idea of downright perilous. It's not a bike path, and it's not perfect, but it might be okay to get me to work every once in a while.

What it was was slow. And that is just because I didn't really care about how fast I was going and I was in full sightseeing mode. In the future, I'll have to fix that.

First and Furlough Day Ride

2011-03-19T00:00:00.000-05:00

A ride mapped on 03/18/2011

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A furlough day is supposed to a day without any work, no checking email, no sneaking onto the server to tweak something. It's hard. It's like a weekend except no one else seems to have it off. It's good for errands, doing paperwork stuff, taxes, cleaning but if you are like me, you end up at some point looking outside and saying "It sure looks nice outside."

After all, after doing a weekend worth of chores in a morning, you start thinking maybe you deserve a treat. And that treat might be the first bike ride of the year. When I moved here, I knew nothing about the land. I knew that we lived on a quiet country road with big oaks lining it. I saw the snowplow get stuck because of drifts and I saw the slippery roads, but I knew that my road would be good biking when the chance came.

I dragged my bike out, pumped up the tires, strapped on a compass, quickly examined a map, and threw on my winter clothes. This is because I know that the first sunshine can be deceiving. There's almost always a wind and it's almost always cold. Double socks, long underwear, a scarf, a hat, lobster gloves, a helmet and a winter coat. Yeah, I was ready.

The sun was shining as I crossed the muddy driveway onto the road, and headed west. There were the giant oaks, and the giant ponds of water in the fields, threatening the road. In the ditch, I noticed a LOT of aluminum cans. Almost all of them were aluminum beer cans. Was my little road the place where kids came to drink? I've never noticed this, but maybe this is accumulated garbage over years. I started thinking about how I could pick up some of them, maybe recycle them, maybe plant some wildflower seeds in their place. Then started thinking about being confronted by some angry farmer about me poking in his ditch. And then thinking about how I might explain it, and what I'd do with the money from the aluminum beer can collection; maybe donate it someplace so the angry farmer wouldn't get too mad. Yeah, my mind meanders a lot while I'm biking.

I turned down yet another little road near my house, one that runs south. The wind was coming from the northwest. Which means I had a nice tailwind. I came up along a little subdivision and noticed some large oaks that had broken either from high winds or the horrible blizzards we'd been dealing with. But then I wondered what the ditch would look like with flowers? Wildflowers?

You know, once I get my mind working on something, I'm pretty hard to distract.

The day felt much warmer than I bargained for, but I knew it was going to be harsher than this on the way back. I'd just have to put up with it.

I rode along, dodging clumps of what I hoped to be only mud, but what I suspected was manure. I rode past where some fallen trees had been burned, a weird corner of ashes. I waved at the postman, driving on the wrong side of his car, and wondered at how exactly that is done, and if it feels weird to move back to the other side.

There are mostly farms out this way, most of them peeling paint and smelling much like you'd expect a farm to smell. One farm greeted me with a barking dog behind a fence that followed me for a quarter mile. I was grateful for the fence. One farmer walked out on his lawn, tapping down gopher holes with his boot. I know they do this in polo, crushing pieces of sod back into the earth, as a part of ritual. I doubt they'd recognize the same thing coming from a hog farmer with a sense of pride.

The land out here is not flat, although that is how a cursory glance might judge it. There are rolling hills, and they aren't easy to climb up after months off the bike. I wasn't going fast, but I slowed to a crawl to inch up the hills.

Last fall, our house was beset with clouds of chattering blackbirds. This spring, we steeled ourselves for the horde to return. So far nothing. But along my ride, I noticed whole trees where the volume of chirping was little less than thunderous. They are coming back, slowly, but might actually have different stops on the return trip.

My destination was the Evansville Public Library. The road goes all of the way to within 500 feet of the town outskirts, an easy ride of 6.3 miles. I found the library easily. It's one of the ancient libraries built in the earliest years of a town, brick and ivy covered, with old fashioned iron-wrought fences, dark polished wood, and heavy oak doors. I knew, in the back of my mind, I wouldn't be able to get my library card. I probably needed some form of mail with my address on it. I had spent my morning filing everything of the sort, and as I was leaving for my ride dismissed digging out a bill for this purpose. When I got there, my fears were confirmed. No card without some piece of mail. This would have to be an errand for another day.

I hopped back on the bike for the return trip. Evansville cars were kind, motioning me on at the stop signs, and giving me a wide berth as I chugged along, with an unzipped coat now, but feeling the wind slap my face. Gone was the sweat I was feeling on my ride down, replaced with the exhilirating thrill of coasting down the hills that I'd so tenaciously climbed.

The return on any trip always seems faster to me. I look for landmarks, and I'm always surprised to see how quickly they come up. Like the little yellow house that marks the stop of one road and the beginning of another. Or the big red barn with a name and the year 1848 proudly emblazoned on its end. The farm was for sale, and the name on the mailbox was different than the name on the barn. So quickly do such traditions change. What had happened here? Had the original owners sold to someone unable to maintain a farm? Had the farm been sold many different times?

There were other farms, and I kept seeing hay bales. I happen to need hay bales, as mulch for our garden, but I am afraid I'm too much of a city girl to know what to buy. Craigslist has alfalfa, and marshgrass, and straight up hay bales. Which is which? One farmer might be selling for a $1.00 a bale, and another is selling for $20. Are those just normal fluctuations or is the $20 bale actually one of those giant round bales? And how much do I need? If I stopped on my bike to ask a farmer, would he judge me as a city slicker and raise his price artificially? Would I begrudge him if he did? Would I know?

Like I said, my mind tends to wander on these bike rides. Yes, I'm a little afraid of farmers.

Soon enough, I saw the end of my road, and there was the turn back onto my little beer can strewn country road. The whole trip wasn't much, 12.7 miles. It took a little more than an hour. I could probably do better than that if I put my mind to it. But I felt good. I felt alive.

The wind wasn't battering me anymore, the compass had held on as I expected, and I halfway considered biking in another direction for maybe a bit more time. But furlough days don't come often, and I had dinner to make, so I turned back home, excited, and looking forward to tomorrow, to test out the next big route.

Friday Furloughing

2011-03-18T13:10:00.000-05:00

What you see there is my first successful germination; onions. Walla Walla, Spanish, and Green onions. I've planted broccoli, pepper and tomatoes too and yesterday I noticed sprouts in the broccoli and tomatoes, so YEAH! I've been using grow lights and warming mats, and I believe that the warming mats are what make this work. They are hooked into a timer and for 12 hours a day are on with the lights. The mats heat to 70-75 degrees, and keep the roots warm. It does dry out the plants though, so I've been watering them every day. The workshop is really good for this because of a southwest facing window, and a big sink for watering. Next up? Celery, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Pumpkin...and other stuff that I forget.

This morning, Lulu got out of the room we have quarantined her in, and got into an altercation with Bella. But...it wasn't as bad as former altercations. I believe we might be reaching the point where we can start limited interactions and reintroduce her to the other cats. I feel bad for shutting her away, but I've made her room very comfy, with pillows and blankets and toys and a scratching post. The picture is blurry mostly because it's very hard to get a picture of her when she isn't in movement. I go there everyday to spend time with her, and allowed her outside a bit this weekend while we were working on a project. I don't think she likes outside very much, but she did like the fact that she could see the other cats behind a window, unable to go out while she could!

Our friend Adam has moved into our basement bedroom and is paying us rent. This is great because it helps offset any cut in pay I'll see from the insanity at the Capitol. It also is helping with wedding expenses, which is great. He's been getting along very well with our cats, and he seems to have become Bella's favorite. He's a great guy and a very considerate roommate; in fact, I think he's cleaner than either J or I, which is a good motivator.

Wedding planning is going well. I made Jason come with me to JCPenney because I had a coupon for 30% off. I had deemed it necessary to purchase him a ring (titanium) and a suit jacket and pants. All of that together only added up to about $150.00. I kind of forced him into the clothes shopping, but it was over so quickly! It's so surpising to me that the guy in the store too one look at him, and handed him the EXACT size of sport jacket, shirt and pants. That would never happen in women's clothing where the size is merely a suggestion. And he looks very handsome in his navy jacket and grey slacks. We are using a red tie that he already had and we bought two shirts because they were on sale. One is cream, to match my dress, and one is white, in case he needs to dress up for work some day.

And then I made J try cupcakes at the caterer's that I'm hoping to use, and he consented. (I know, such sacrifices!) We have food picked out, but it's now just a matter of getting a concrete count of the people coming for the caterer. (And paying the bill, of course!)

The tent, tables, chairs and linens are ordered too, and that should be good to go. And we even have the music for during the ceremony and the cocktail hour figured out.

Now, just the drinks, the flowers, the centerpieces, maybe a photographer, and a thousand other little details. But we are much closer than we once were, and I think J is getting more involved in planning, which is great.

I even tested out my *ahem* undergarments and shoes at my recent "wedding shower dealie" hosted by E, with L. and K. We went to Restaurant Muramoto and I had this thing called a Godzilla Roll, which was just amazing! (See left). Even if you are not a sushi person, you'll love this roll!

I was so apprehensive about having a wedding shower; I'm just not one for big celebrations that feature myself. I love to do this for other people. I don't know why it is so hard to accept that my friends wanted to throw a wedding shower for me. They gave me great gifts, but the best gift of all was a girl's evening out. We don't do that often enough. Plus, no toilet paper bride games!

J is trying to get our friends organized into certain "roles" for the wedding, and I'm not sure I like this idea. Oh, in theory, it's great. Someone to deal with the caterer, someone to help point people towards things, someone to intercept questions before they come to us. It's just the execution. You see, it's one thing to appoint people to be in charge of things, but it's another thing entirely to make the decisions that they'll have to execute. I'm worried about people having a good time and not having to WORK while they are at our wedding. And I'm worried about sneezing a lot. And the weather. And what to do with the cats. And what to fix before the wedding. You see? I should have just gotten tickets to Las Vegas. I totally get why people have wedding coordinators now.

I just finished an amendment to my taxes; I forgot to deduct an extra form for mortgage interest, and that triggered me having to print 26 pages of paper to send to the IRS and the State Government. I tried to do J's taxes, but with his mom's estate and the IRA he currently has, I'm not sure I'm doing it right. I might just have to have him take it to a preparer. TurboTax is usually pretty user friendly, but if I'm confused, I'm not sure it's worth chancing it. Of course, we have a friend who actually WORKS for the IRS, so maybe we just need to ask him some questions about how to claim certain things.

We are seeing such signs of spring here, with the pond melting and the birds coming back. I'm just thrilled to see winter in the rear view mirror!

Wedding Markup

2011-03-08T21:13:00.000-06:00

In a book that I purchased about Bridal Bargains, there's something called the Wedding Markup. Unfortunately, I didn't read about this markup until after I did things like book the tent for the backyard. The theory is that you say the word "wedding" and prices go up 20-50%.

I don't know if that is true, but it sure is expensive. But at this point, we have committed to the backyard wedding, with a tent, and it's too late to back out now. Vegas would have been cheaper. I don't know what we were thinking.

And we end up having discussions like this.

"My mother thinks we need a portapotty."
"That's not a bad idea."
"I can't believe you think this is a good idea."
"80 to 100 people flushing our toilets. Lines for the bathrooms. It could get bad."
"And we need a portapotty? Here is a beautiful tent with flowers and decorations and a ... portapotty."
"Do you want a backup of sewage instead?"
"I just don't want a portapotty out there."
"We don't have to put it out there. We can put it...by the parking."
"Welcome to our home. Here's where you can poop."
"Not like that."
"We have three bathrooms."
"They all empty into the same septic system."
"We could get the little truck that they got for the gym when they had to do renovations. That was nice."
"How much do you think that will cost?"
"I have no idea."
"Don't tell them it's for a wedding."

Yes, once the wedding comes, we'll have the poop bucket problem sorted out. Probably.

Baking by the Book

2011-03-06T20:04:00.000-06:00

I was a pretty nerdy little girl. I'd spend hours at the library each Saturday, riding the bus downtown and back for a quarter each way. I'd come home with a stack of books, and read them all. The next weekend, repeat.

I loved to read. It appalls me to hear how some people have to work to make their kids read. I just don't understand. Books are magic. I'm now learning that girls have an easier time adapting to books than boys, so I guess I shouldn't be so appalled; I have 4 nephews, soon to be 5, and so I'm fairly certain I'm only hearing half of the story. There are successes. Little girls like me, for example.

I loved cookbooks too; they are just another book after all. I loved recipes and pictures in cookbooks and thinking about the things you could create. After all, isn't a cookbook another kind of fiction? Only a very special kind where you can jump through the printed word and into a land where flour and sugar and spices can create wonderous things?

My mother didn't get this. She told me that cookbooks were just utilitarian, and she didn't understand my fascination. We didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things.

I loved to bake. Cook...that's okay, and I'm a pretty good cook, but baking is where the fun is at. I've gone from following the recipe slavishly as a kid to being more improvisational. After all, once you've separated eggs about 10 times, you don't have to think too hard about the steps.

Now, this is bad for baking, because baking is all about precision. And since I've become less rote in my recipe following, my cakes haven't been the same. One area where I've never really had any success is carrot cake.

I love carrot cake. I may have carrot cake cupcakes at my wedding. (Yes, going for cupcakes!) Cream cheese frosting and the moist dark cake? Forget about it. The absolute best.

And I've never been able to do a decent one. It always comes out wrong. Too dense, not sweet enough. Because I've been acting like I knew the steps. Cakes aren't about your knowledge, cakes are precise.

Convinced that was my problem, I pulled up the recipe and proceeded to WEIGH my ingredients as they specified. This would be a different animal, I decided. The recipe was going to allow me to make a perfect carrot cake.

Except or one thing; I wanted to cut back on the sugar. One thing I've noticed in my journey away from so much sugar is how sweet things are when they do have sugar. You bite into something and immediately it floods over you. I've made other recipes where I cut back on the sugar with no ill effects.

So I had a choice. I could put in the sugar they specified or I could dial it back. I could do the baker precision and maybe get the cake that I quested for, or I could cut back, just a little, maybe sub in something else, and maybe it would make no difference.

I cut it back. Yes, this flies in the face of the precision that I was going for, but I did sub in maple syrup instead. Now, maple syrup is a sweet ingredient too, but it is liquid. Sugar? It's kind of a liquid ingredient...you often mix it with the other liquidy things. I hoped this wouldn't matter too much.

Alton Brown's famous for his exactitude; his recipes are like roadmaps. You follow them because they work. Was I tempting fate, doomed to carrot cake pudding yet again?

Well, I'm happy to report that I have conquered carrot cake. Carrot cake can quake before me! I am the queen of carrot cake! Because I've just eaten two delicious NON-pudding pieces and they were yummy.

Fear me!

For the birds

2011-02-26T12:34:00.000-06:00

We just watched an interesting episode of Wisconsin Gardener. It was about attracting birds to your land; what plants birds like and how to keep them around over winter.

J and I are pretty sure the previous owner's planned their land for maximum bird habitat. There's the prairie part of the yard with little shrubs and prairie grasses. There's the woods by the pond, full of old growth trees, some dead wood but more high branches. There's the crabapple near the house and the shrubs that the birds love so much next to the front door.

J has been feeding the birds religiously since we got here. He's got six hanging bird feeders from the eaves and then several different ones outside off of posts and trees. We have such a variety of birds! I don't know 80% of them!

When J was little, his mom would feed the birds; she would throw out seed on the grass and the birds would come. He's continuing the tradition here.

I think it's just a matter of time now before the snow leaves us and we can start to really change our landscape the way we want it.

For right now, we have to be satisfied with what the previous owners did. It's good enough....for now. I'm getting impatient for spring.

Update of Updates

2011-02-24T21:23:00.000-06:00

It was suggested to me that I try a hormone therapy collar for dear Lulu, which arrived today. I'm not sure what I expected; I was halfway prepare to be worried about a lethargic drugged cat. I put it on her and let her be for a while, and then went back a few hours later to check on her.

Before, she was nervous, pacing, demanding that I stop goofing off and PET HER NOW.

Now, she's a little less nervous, not quite as demanding, and she STILL wants me to PET HER NOW.

The collar is coated in some sort of white powder that acts as a carrier for the pheramone on the collar. It smells a little like baby powder. It's actually kind of pleasant, a totally non-cat smell. It smells like baby.

Maybe this is more of a gradual change ... she'll slowly come to grips with where she is and those other vile beasties that steal her food and might attack her in the middle of the night. We have two months worth of hormone therapy collars. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. So far, J has not returned to her side to pet her. He's still traumatized.

***

I signed the papers on the rental of the tent for our backyard for the wedding. I also had the discussions where we determined tables and chairs and lights and some sort of arch thing for us to get married in front of. This is all very expensive, and I haven't really gotten to the meat of this proposition; the catering, the photographer, the cake. She asked me what my "colors" were. I mentioned a green theme, as you know, getting married outside and everything. And I'm a little worried about the slope in our backyard for the tent, but she shrugged and said, "That's not a problem for us". Okay then. As I was sitting there, I started to think about centerpieces and how to decorate the arch. It's starting to get in my head; all of the details are starting to gel. All I want is simple, nothing fancy.

All of these things are in motion; I meet with a caterer tomorrow to get a quote. I have another caterer that has said we'll meet in early March and I'm certain there'll be more meetings related to how much food to provide in my future. I may try to find a highly recommended cake place and try to find out how much a cake that feeds 80-100 people might cost. Everything costs so much.

***

I've got a toothache everytime I eat something hot or cold, hard or crunchy. The right side of my mouth twinges in pain, just for an instant, and I'm wondering if I have a burgeoning problem there. My next dentist's appointment is the end of March, and I'm wondering if I should wait for it to get worse...it just seems to minor to complain about right now. Plus side, it's a great diet. (Kidding, mom! It hasn't stopped me from jamming food in my maw!)

***

I'm really happy with my first week of the Chalean Extreme DVD training system. It's weight training, but not pumping iron, but doing the exercises extremely slowly with perfect form. I'm not probably following the instructions right, but I feel so tired after I'm done. It's a great feeling of accomplishment. And Lulu just loves to sit and try to get me to pet her while I'm doing them. She's a bit of a clown when she sits up on her hind legs and gestures at me with her front legs for attention. Not now, honey, I'm doing my lunges.

***

I had a really nice experience with Ebay recently. I had purchased a DVD set of P90X training videos; for only $40! I promptly sent my money and got an email that the videos would be sent sometime in the next couple of weeks. And so I waited....and waited. Ebay noticed something odd about the posting and removed it; and that made me a little more nervous. I got an email from Ebay telling me that they removed the item and if I didn't get it I should tell them so they could refund my money. What? I emailed the seller, and asked again about my P90X videos. She replied that "they had been sent out from our Worldwide Headquarters" in Singapore and gave me a tracking number. I'm sure this meant that someone had sent something out via Singapore air, but I couldn't get any more information about it. You see, Singapore Air tracking numbers aren't the same as USPS tracking numbers. Smells fishy. I waited a bit more then sent out a final request to the seller. Nothing. I complained to ebay and, within a week, I got my money refunded. It's only $40, but it's nice to know that they'll cover the cost of some of these things. I spent the money on my Chalean Extreme DVDs, also ordered from Ebay.

***

There's exactly one item in the vending machine at work that I can eat which isn't horrible for me and doesn't contain obscene amounts of sugar and fat. A little plastic baggie of raisins, sunflower seeds and nuts. Good news though, I've lost 5 lbs. Woo!

Redirect

2011-02-20T11:52:00.000-06:00

On Tuesday, Lulu had a spay surgery.

On Thursday, I let her out of the room we'd cooped her up in, and let her mingle with the rest of the world. And I thought everything was normal.

In the middle of the night, Thursday evening/Friday morning, Bella jumped on Lulu, who was sleeping between me and J in bed. Bella and Lulu have never really gotten along. Hissing, growling. I didn't think that they'd ever discend into full fledged catfight.

Until 3am that evening. Lulu was awoken out of a deep sleep, probably still in pain because of the surgery. She flipped out. She was scratching and hissing and screaming in a way that just is horrible. J got really scratched up just trying to get away from her.

At one, point, she redirected her terror on the nearest target which was J's legs. I grabbed her, and ran for safety; the room where we closed her when she first came to live with us.

And then I went to help with J. He was really scratched up. And pretty upset.

And I wasn't really too good either. I googled redirected aggression. Which is what I thought was the problem. After all, she was lashing out (understandably) at whatever came closest.

And the next day, when I tried to feed her, she got out, and charged at Georgy scratching and screaming and spitting. And this was not a provoked attack; Georgy was nearby.

I dragged her back to the room, and I fed her and petted her and tried to calm her down.

And then Friday, I tried to get her to calm down. I went in to the room, petted her, and I thought we had managed to make things normal again.

So, we kept her in the room again, by herself all day yesterday, and I thought that because she didn't hiss at me or J again that she was okay.

Today, I let her out. She came up to me, sat on my lap, and proceeded to notice the cats sleeping on the cat tree. And started hissing and spitting and howling. I tried to calm her, but she just got worse. I quickly took her down to the room again, and let her down. She batted my leg in frustration.

She's not better.

Desparate, I googled cat and aggression, and came up with this...

Fear Induced Aggression in Cats

So we have to start all over. She gets her own room for a couple of weeks while we try to work out this. J wants to get her declawed, but that just protects us, and doesn't change her base behavior.

We need to get her able to be in the same room as the other cats without flipping out. I'm extremely stressed out by this situation, probably a little less than Lulu though.

Cooking Theory

2011-02-15T10:34:00.000-06:00

In almost any recipe, there's the turn back moment.

For those that regard home preparation of food as anathema, let me clairify. At some point, you realize that if you just stop now, you can salvage your recipe into something you recognize, something you know. When you are following a recipe you don't know, there's the moment when you combine the first ingredient with the second; the second that flour and sugar combine, it becomes something else. The second that baking powder and baking soda are added, it's a powderkeg waiting to go off. The addition of salt will sweeten the sugar; this I know. I sometimes gaze into the goo that I'm constructing wondering if the ingredients will go to waste. I hate wasted ingredients.

There are variations on standard recipes that use these ingredients, and if you get into an especially complex one, it's easy to say...it's just like that other one, and finish it the other way, chucking the new recipe out the window. Or even worse, stop before the flour hits the sugar and back slowly away from the mixing bowl. Don't be afraid.

A good cook has had the bad things happen already, and is not swayed by directions like...mix the lemon juice into the heavy cream and eggs. Curdled chunky milk custard? They might think, but they do it anyway. Because they put all faith in the recipe, the direction, the guidance.

J calls a recipe a spell in a spell book, and a sorcerer is one that ventures out of the spellbook, and does what their gut tells them. I think most cooks are a mixture of both; the comfort of the familiar with the excitement of something new. Cooking is a lot like driving ...there are many things to do, and it's a matter of doing them all in the correct order, at the correct time.

The real reward comes from seeing the blossom of the ingredients morph into the glory of something new, something exciting. I may not have all of the answers, all of the techniques, but I've got the heart to not be swayed by a turnback moment and trundle on.

This post is really about my thoughts as I threw together these lemon scones. A little sugar, but not a lot. Tart sweet. Delicious.

Touch of Spring

2011-02-13T14:01:00.002-06:00

One of the reasons why J and I decided to move to the country was so we'd have room to garden. My gardening was confined at the condo, and J's only had one place where he could grow a very small garden ever.

As part of our planning for the garden, we went to Farm & Fleet last week, and "seeded up". The guy who ran us through the register must have thought we were crazy. We got a grow light and we'll get working on starting things inside soon.

However, yesterday we went to the Garden Expo down here. I'm not one of those crazy people who plan on hiding gnomes in their garden (yet) so I'm afraid a lot of the garden decor was not for me. J and I were more interested in
vermiculture, compost, and what to do with our overgrown apple trees. The place came with two, and they looked like they'd just been ignored for several years.

The Expo was extremely crowded. There's a lot of people sick of being cooped up and dying to start gardening, evidently. I really enjoyed the seminar on pruning apple trees, which we came late to. The speaker had quite the accent, but he was patient and showed the best way to prune an apple tree. "The trees are very forgiving!", he insisted. He explained about standing under the trunk of the tree and looking up to do a "sky test". That is, looking up to notice how much light is available to the branches. Then removing crossing or "water branches" that stick straight up.

He gave J and I the confidence to try to do this on our own. The same tree after we were done pruning today.

Gosh, I hope he was right about the trees being forgiving! We removed a LOT!

We didn't really buy much, but now I'm coveting the Cobrahead tools that K and E bought. K tells me that I can get them from a local greenhouse, and there may need to be a trip there in my future!

There was another lecture on growing fruit which was more "spray with this, spray with that" which might be absolutely what you'd do if you were going to be raising fruit for sale, but for us? I'm not so sure about that...J and I anticipate getting enough to eat, some to freeze, some to can, and that's about it.

It was also warm enough so we could traipse through the snow and measure for the garden and the tent for the wedding.

I'm covered in snow! I just hope that May is warm!

Pondering

2011-02-11T19:12:00.000-06:00

* how does J eat so much pizza at lunch that he has no appetite for dinner?

J's work gives it's employees pizza days. Where they buy pizza for all 200 employees. This is just one of the special days they have; some days they have treats, one day they had Qdoba cater a taco bar. I'm jealous.

* Scott Walker sent state workers a letter. He said some stuff. It made me sad, and again made me consider non-state employment. If he wants me to be paid on par with people in the private sector, maybe he needs to give me an 8% raise instead of an 8% paycut. But I've got 12 years in, and I've got some good earned benefits, so I'll probably stick it out.

* My nephew will be 16 in March. When did that happen?

* J's trying to teach Lulu that her food is moving towards where the other cat's food is. Yesterday, I went down there to see her sitting where her food used to be waiting. I tried pointing her in the right direction towards where she could find the food. That didn't work. I'm not sure how we'll get her to join the other cats for a meal ever.

* It's going to be in the high thirties next week. I'm wondering where our 3 feet of accumulated snow will go. It's time to see how big the pond actually will get.

February Fun

2011-02-09T20:53:00.000-06:00

I think I've reached the preachy phase of low/no sugar. I don't really miss chocolate. I thought I would. Or at least caramel. Not really. I can't say that I've lost any great weight, but I don't miss the sugar. I've switched to Stevia for my oatmeal, which is just a natural no-cal sugar, and that tastes the same. In fact, I put a little honey in the last batch and J called it too sweet. I've been making breakfast cookies and muffins with low-sugar and J's been scarfing them down; they don't look like normal cookies. J calls them lumps.

I think I've been compensating my lack of sugar with quantity, which is hard. If I could just temper both. I know that I've lost a lot of weight in the past as soon as I learned to balance both, but making that adjustment is really hard, especially when J has the munchies and has the food out for me to sample.

I'm tempted to make a low-sugar ricotta cheesecake this weekend, just to have something for Valentine's Day all ready to go. I've been searching the web for recipes and found a couple that I think I might try.

Also this weekend! Garden Expo! I've been reading this super old book that I saw at my co-worker's Christmas party. From 1975, Jerry Minnich publised the definitive book on gardening called the Wisconsin Garden Guide. The book is great because it has all of these charts, but better yet, pictures of people circa 1975, long hair, bell bottoms, free daisies. I love the picture of Jerry Minnich on the back cover too...muttonchops, a goatee, classic. Since it is my co-worker Dennis' book, I found another copy on Amazon and soon will have an updated verison of my own.

We went and bought a grow light for starting seeds. The Minnich book has dates to start planting seeds inside, and recommendations for when to move outside. They involve a cold frame; and I'd like to make some sort of container for our compost, so there may be some building of these things in my future. The former owners of this house left us with a fair amount of wood to be played with, so I just need to sketch out what I want.

At this point, we have grand plans...and our proposed garden is under 3 feet of snow.

I've been calling about renting a tent for the wedding. We could get a couple different ones, but I need to pace off the size of the backyard where it will go. And there's 3 feet of snow there. I might just bite the bullet and do it anyway. I've got snowpants, I should use them. Maybe this weekend.

Lulu goes to the vet tomorrow for getting spayed. We only had to go through the yowling of heat once to resolve to make that happen sooner rather than later. I have no idea how my sister put up with that! It wore on my nerves something terrible! Poor Georgy, our neutered male, kept getting propositioned by Lulu who didn't know that the only male around didn't have the equipment anymore. He kept coming to me all annoyed. "Make her stop!"

We got a little snow.

2011-02-02T18:33:00.000-06:00

We think it was about a foot, maybe 14 inches.

It took me 2 1/2 hours to remove it from the sidewalks.


Before I shoveled	After I shoveled

I'm going to hurt tomorow!

Random Saturday Update

2011-01-29T21:24:00.000-06:00

I worked 12 hours yesterday. Not on purpose. It just kind of happened.
Everyone should be a Packer Fan because even Pat Morita was.
A group of turkeys is a rafter, or could acceptably be called a gang. We know this because we saw a group of turkeys today, and had a conversation about what to call it. I love the internet.
We went to Home Depot to register for stuff. They don't have anything fancy like a gun or anything; just a clipboard and some forms. Still, we managed to find quite a few items that would use in general projects around the house. It was fun to have conversations like..."Do you think we'd need an arc welder?"
I did my taxes today. I love TurboTax. E-File is the greatest thing ever.
Lulu the cat got some catnip and started to mellow out. (I know, big surprise.) She's now able to come up and down the stairs easier. We hope this bodes well for the future.
The dress came in the smaller size, and IT FITS.
J put up another part of the cat walk, a board across the top of the office doors. The cats were placed up on it, and even were able to get down over it, but I think they need more impetus to actually use it; and we need to get farther on our project than wood and screws. We need to carpet, put sisal rope on and secure it.
J and I bought squirrel feeders today. That's right, feeders. You see, if we give them a sacrifical feeder, maybe they'll leave other feeders alone? Okay, I confess. The bird feeders are actually for the cats to have fun things to watch, and watching squirrels is even more fun than watching cats. So, what does a squirrel feeder look like?

One looks like this. The squirrel can lift the cover to get to the cheap corn inside.

But I like the other one better, mostly because it amuses me to no end.

I can't wait to see this in action.

No Sugar!

2011-01-26T20:57:00.000-06:00

J has decided to join me in doing no sugar; he decided after seeing his triglycerides after our insurance physical. Which we passed with flying colors, but his numbers were higher than he'd like. So while I'm feeling pretty happy in non-sugar snacks, he's enduring a bit more temptation. He works in a cube farm with temptation in the form of candy dishes and free food and treats tempting him every day, and he's been really good. In fact, I put sugar in his coffee this morning (by accident) and he barely touched it.

So, everyday he gets in the car and tells me how good he did, and I am so proud of him!

And last week, I went to work in an office and there was a big tub of chocolate. And I put my hand in it and pulled out a candy bar, then looked at it and then put it back. I didn't want it.

I've been eating fruit and that's about all that is sweet. J and I have been over-compensating with carbs and salt, I think, but hopefully we aren't constantly eating sugar and sweets all of the time.

J was bemoaning "candy season" today. Valentines Day, and Easter specifically. "I won't buy you any candy," I promised. No candy for us. No sweets!

I've been trying to do low-/no- sugar breakfasts; which is hard, but I've found a couple of muffin/bread recipes. They are just okay, so I'm still looking for good recipes.

Homemade Tomato Soup

2011-01-26T07:30:00.000-06:00

I made this delicious Tomato Soup this weekend, and here's how I made it. I had some of the stock that I made from the turkey that I had roasted over New Years, maybe 3-4 cups of it. Into that, I dumped 1 can of Contadina Organic Tomato Sauce and a pinch of thyme. I heated that until it simmered, then added a 1/4 cup of sour cream. That got well mixed, and for finish, and to get rid of the little sour cream chunks and ran my immersion blender through it. It was super easy, delicious and didn't have that weird taste that canned tomato soup has. I made grilled cheese sandwiches out of leftover dill havarti cheese and it really worked!

Snow! SNOW! snow.

2011-01-25T20:10:00.000-06:00

I had Monday, Martin Luther King Day, off. And so I sent J off to his job, and settled in. His parting words to me were..."maybe you can figure out how to run the snowthrower.". We were due 3-5 inches. I had all day.

I'd been avoiding learning how to operate the snowthrower. Not for J wanting to show me; he kept offering. I don't learn by watching someone else do something; I learn by doing it myself. And I didn't want J standing over me pointing out this and that. I know how I learn and that means figuring it out myself. Plus, I secretly think he likes using the snowthrower and every time I decline using it, I think he cheers a silent "Whoopee!" as he loads on his clothing.

I actually semi-like the idea of shoveling. There's something rewarding about moving a large mass of the white stuff by hand, and feeling like you've accomplished something. Even the day after; you feel your muscles ache and you know you did it. Now, our new driveway is 300 yards long, so shoveling that would be a ridiculous task. You have to have some sort of snow-removal device. I shovel out the sidewalks and that's about it. It's enough.

We bought a snowthrower attachment for our riding lawnmower, which came with the place. It's 44 inches wide, and is just a beast of a snow thrower. It's heavy; it takes me two hands to raise and lower the part that chews up the snow. And I only once actually used the lawnmower, so using it as a snowthrower basically makes me learn a whole new machine.

I put it off until 3PM. I worked out, ate lunch, watched Days of Our Lives (who are these people?) and even made cookies for work. And I looked outside to see white, white, white.

I dressed in my warm clothing, and stepped outside. There was a wind, and the snow was drifted. In fact, when I got into the garage and opened the garage door, I found a foot of drifted snow piled up.

I sat down on the riding lawnmower and examined the controls. There was a choke and a throttle, a brake and a gas pedal. There were controls to control the chute that throws the snow and that was frozen in place. I turned the key. The machine chugged a bit and then roared to life. Okay, step one. Turn on the machine. Good. Now I lowered the thing that has the churning blades that pull in the snow. Only the blades weren't moving. I knew this because when I tried moving forward into the foot drift, it didn't do anything.

And when I got off the seat, the whole thing shut down. I remembered J telling me about a safety, but I didn't remember what you had to do to make it stop doing that.

How was I supposed to get the gears churning to pick up the snow if I couldn't get off the seat to see it working? Well, it turns out there was this manual power take off that had to be engaged to actually turn the blades. Once I figured that out, I thought I'd beaten this thing. I've finally gotten the blades spinning, the chute lowered and I started moving forward.

The drift in front of the garage was too big and the snowblower, which had thrown out some initial flakes to one side, seemed stuck. And when I tried to go into reverse, the entire thing stalled. And then it wouldn't start, and I pushed it back into the garage.

Now NOTHING happened when I turned the key. Had I flooded it? Had I broken it? What would J say!? Oh...I've got to be missing something!

I shoveled a bit, and then went back and tried it again and again. It worked, it worked! I know it did! What did I do to make it not work?

I wish that the people who think I am so smart at work could see me puzzling out these things! That would make them stop saying "Oh, I'm so stupid when it comes to computers!" You know, I'm sometimes so stupid too. I just am stubborn enough to not give up. So very stubborn.

The break I needed came after the 4th or 5th attempt. I had the power take off still engaged. The machine will not start with the power take off on. It must be off. Ah HA!

I got in and started in on the area that I'd been shoveling. And I went about 4 feet and got stuck because we didn't buy the extra weights for the back of the lawnmower to give us traction and the wheels were spinning on a slick spot. And when I put it into reverse, it stopped again. It took me a few tries to get out but I realized that you can't have the power take off that spins the teeth in the chute on while backing up. It doesn't like that either.

I was learning so much here! The power take off is very picky. No starting with it on, no backing up with it on. And backing up goes so much better if you lift the chute off of the ground and actually lean back to provide better leverage!

It wasn't long before I was actually making headway. But then I noticed that I was actually only getting stuff thrown out of the left side of the chute; the other side was just pushing the snow around.

We'd seen this before. J had it happen to him, and it had turned out to be a pin that is specifically designed to fail when under stress. Maybe one of the big drifts had caused it to break but one side was no longer working and I wasn't nearly done, and J was going to need to come home soon. Now this setback meant that I only had 22 inches of the 44 available to blow, but I could try replacing the pin myself.

Oh, how I wished I'd watched when J had done this! I turned off the machine and looked and looked but couldn't see where it went. I finally decided to finish the rest of the driveway with 1/2 of the blower working and get J to fix it when he came home. It was a light snow, and it easily was removed, or I wouldn't have done it this way, but I really wanted J to be able to drive into the driveway when he came home.

And about the time I was ready to call it quits, J called and said he was about to come home. He tried to explain exactly where the pin was over the phone, but I just didn't care at that point anymore, and I returned the blower back to the garage to wait for his return.

I returned to shoveling, and went back a couple of times to look again at where to put the pin. I just wasn't seeing it. I had finished the shoveling, returned to the house and was in the shower when J walked in. Sometimes you just need someone to show you how to do something, and he did just that.

He finished the rest of the snow removal; and cleaned up the stuff I didn't do quite right, but all in all, I figured out the snow blower!

Old Technology Review

2011-01-25T01:26:00.000-06:00

Over Winter Break, at work, I did some organizing.

When's the last time you used an Opaque projector? I think it was about 5th grade for me.

Or a film projector? Wow, for actual film.

What about a cassette recorder? I used to record TV themes with something much smaller, but holding it up to the speaker of my television.

Look! A VHS camera!

Isn't it strange that the technology that I used to love playing with as a kid or teenager is now outmoded and barely used?

Creepy Mannequin for Sale?

2011-01-24T06:25:00.000-06:00

You know how, after someone has died, you start getting offered weird stuff? Well, when J's mom died, we were offering all sorts of weird stuff to people. For some reason, it was very important to J and M (J's mom's partner) that this stuff be given to people who would use it. So, on our trip up at Christmas, this was foisted on us because M thought there was someone we knew who might want it. It's a mannequin. And it turned out she didn't want it. So we have this mannequin.

Now, it was packaged in black plastic trash bags. We brought it into the shop, and I didn't like seeing black plastic trash bags with feet and hands hanging out of them, so I set it up. And J didn't like a mannequin staring at him, so we pushed it into a corner. And then I didn't like this naked mannequin in the corner, looking all shameful and naked, so I put this jacket on it. And then J needed a place to put his test chainmail coif, and so he put it on it.

That being said, neither one of us likes this thing. I think I just need to get this on craigslist or something and get it out of our house. It's creepy. Anybody know anyone who wants a mannequin?

This is what happens when you are trapped in your house for too long.

2011-01-24T01:22:00.000-06:00

I've been learning more and more about gardening and compost. I want to build a compost container of some sort and I've been trying to "map" out our land to determine what I want to put in various places. Here's my initial "map" of our land...

and I'm starting to investigate the seed catalogs for plants to put in particular places. Like maybe a hydrangea down by the pond; they do like water and the water table would probably give it plenty of water. We have lilacs in an area near the driveway, and when those bloom, I hope to see what color they are so I can plant similar or complementary plants nearby.

Starved for Nature

2011-01-23T11:21:00.000-06:00

We've been noticing tracks in the snow, and we've spent a long time speculating about what kinds of animals might be leaving them. Bird tracks are light and small and easy to detect. Rabbit tracks; you'd think those were easy, but I seem to mistake them for other things. Muskrat tracks have a tail between the legs and usually those are heading for the pond. Squirrel tracks are usually on set paths, and the squirrels take the same paths over and over again. We noticed these larger tracks, and got initially excited...until we came to the conclusion...
it's a dog. A big dog. Maybe stray, maybe local, who knows. Also, the badger hole has no activity around it in the snow, and we think we scared away the badger by using the chainsaw nearby. Oh well. Maybe he'll be back someday.

Cat Walk Construction Update

2011-01-23T06:20:00.000-06:00

Inspired by this book, J and I have embarked on building cat walks for our house. A friend asked if I'm purposely setting out to become a crazy cat lady. It's a short trip, my friend. I am already there. The idea is that this is a sort of on ramp. This will lead to a platform that exits to the "cat highway". We'd like to do things like carpet the plywood, and buy sisal rope for the pole, so we have a bit more to do.

This was also complicated by the fact we own a couple of saws and a couple of drills and that's about it. I'm hoping J wants to go with me to Home Depot to register for stuff there, because we have NO tools, and doing a project like this makes me realize that my dad's collection of tools makes this sort of thing much easier. For example, a radial arm saw? That would make the cuts we made in 1 hour in 1 minute.

We've discussed cutting through a couple of walls to thread the cat highway through our bedroom and into the foyer, which is easily 12 feet tall. Imagine a cat walk along the 12 foot high section! I think they'd love that.

Kitty Update

2011-01-22T18:20:00.000-06:00

Little Lulu:

Lulu got another round of anti-ear mite medicine at the vets and yet another shot. She's adjusting to life here, and even came up from her "room" in the basement yesterday to get petted. She's not enjoying the attention of the other two cats, but is content to just sit while they eat her food, play in her room and generally try provoke her.

Gorgeous Georgy:

Georgy is very much the alpha cat. It might be good for his ego that there are now two girl cats around and they don't like each other very much. But Bella is his sister so he feels pretty comfortable in grooming and playing with her. He seems very curious about Lulu, and she doesn't like the attention.

Belligerent Bella:

Bella is upset about this new cat being here, and she will occasionally act out and take a swipe at Georgy for just having something to attack. This is called displaced aggression and we're hoping this behavior moderates as Lulu becomes more comfortable and settles in. Bella is actually a very sensitive soul who will still come up and cuddle with me, so we think she'll calm down.

Can't find the salt? I'll show you salt!

2011-01-22T15:19:00.001-06:00

J was complaining of our lack of salt shakers. After we moved, I couldn't find my salt shaker, and so we were using the salt right out of the Morton Salt cylinder. Well, we never did find our salt shaker, but I found myself at the penzeys.com website with a little time on my hands, and this is the result...

Now we have plenty of salt.

Revelations on random topics...

2011-01-22T11:44:00.000-06:00

1. I just discovered my feed reader wasn't working right and I missed about 14 posts from my sister's blog over the last 8 months or so. It was like reading a novella this morning. This inspired me to write a blog post, something that I have to say is hard sometimes lately. Facebook & Twitter are more my speed sometimes. Sometimes it's so easy to say something in 140 characters, and 140 characters are only two or three lines here. Well, it turned out something like 8 blog posts, but I'll space them out over the next few days...

2. Yesterday, J and I were at Costco. We were buying all sorts of crap. We went to check out, and they informed us our membership had expired and it was time to give them $100. J said, "I really don't like the idea of someone charging you $100 for the privilege of buying something". And I had to agree with him. We left without our stuff.

And I started to think....the whole reason we got a Costco membership was to get cheap tires for my car. We did that. That did make it worth it. What else could we possibly buy there to justify the $50-$100 membership? We now go for a few things and end up buying a lot more junk than things we need. These places exist to just get you buy spur of the moment stuff. And then we went to Aldi and bought a lot of what we wanted there for much cheaper.

Compare:

Pineapples at CostCo $2.79 This is a good price compared to grocery stores. Pineapples at Aldi: $.99.

Fresh Pizza at CostCo $9.99 This is a very big Margarhita pizza.
Fresh Pizza at Aldi $6.99 for a Deluxe pizza, which I am pretty sure I'll like better.

Case of 48 cat food cans at CostCo: $14.49
Case of 24 cat food cans, 30 cents each, $7.20, at Aldi. I'm sure the cats won't care. Very comparable in price.

Package of 8 soups for J's cube at work at CostCo. $8.99, about 1.12 each. He was bummed about only two types in the prewrapped package.
12 soups from Aldi, larger cans, in 4 different types, $1.19 each.
I think that was worth it simply for the variety.

And none of this required us to buy a membership. I'm not saying I won't get another membership; but when I need something that makes it worth it. Going there because you have the membership and need to use it to justify it seems weird.

If we need something from Costco, we could probably even ask a friend to bring us on their membership. Like stuff for the wedding or something. Do we need this membership?

It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least. It reminds me of one of my favorite comics:

I'm being haunted by a wedding dress.

2011-01-19T19:55:00.000-06:00

So, I may have found one. And I ordered it, and it arrived. And when I tried it on, it was way too big. Someone could have mentioned that they have hugely overcompensated in sizing on these things. Maybe they want the bride to really buy their dress so they size them hugely and I'm supposed to sigh and immediately buy it because it's 2 sizes smaller than I normally wear? When did the wedding dress business get into pandering to bride's fragile emotional states? (It's a rhetorical question; please I really don't want an answer. Really I don't. Especially since I can see myself getting very wrapped up in planning this already.)

Anyway, back to the dress. I have to send it back. It's too big.

So, I got the paperwork together, and it came with a self return tag. And I brought it to work. We have a shipping point for most of the big carriers there; and all I have to do is leave it for the mailroom lady and it will taken care of.

But I had to seal the box and while I was in the main office, a couple co-workers asked what was in the box. "My wedding dress." I replied. I told them why it was going back.

"OOOh! Can we see it?"

It's somewhat shapeless on the hanger, but they were really excited. Other people seem way more into this than I am. It's pretty, it's not too white, it's the right length and I'll be trying hard not to spill anything on it. J suggested that I might want to change out of the dress before the reception.

They were very complementary, which made me happy. It is a beautiful dress. I do like it a lot. And then I dropped it into the box and slapped the return label on it. I'm nothing if not practical.

So, later, I was riding somewhere in the elevator and the mailroom lady waved to me. "I sent your wedding dress!" she told me.

"Um...thank you." I replied.

So, they told her about the dress too.

And then I had a salad that had olives on it for lunch and I hate olives, so I took them to B's office and left them for him on a plate.

He was returning to his office as I left it, and I told him, "I left you a present on your desk."

"Is it a wedding dress?" he asked.

You see? I'm being haunted by a wedding dress!

Birthday!

2011-01-14T21:18:00.000-06:00

So I would make a really great assistant to someone famous. Because my idea of spending my birthday is the totally banal. Give me a list of errands and a car and I'll hum happily around, from place to place, doing this and that, and letting the world happen around me.

I took today off of work so I could run errands. And I LOVED it. I started off by dropping J off of work and then going to get an oil change. J has repeatedly offered to show me how to change my own oil. That's really not something I'm interested in; I like paying big strong men (and sometimes women) to do it for me, thus keeping myself clean and unfamiliar with the undersides of my car. I also don't like the idea of crawling under a hot car (that has been running a while) and poking around in tubes of boiling oil. I rank that right up with soldering (which is basically playing with molten metal). This sounds potentially dangerous. I have enough danger in my life; J tells me that I don't rinse the dishes well enough and this can cause gastrointestinal distress

They usually have pretty good magazines and totally understand when I tell them that no, I don't want all of the little other stuff you say I should go get, and I can go buy my own windshield wipers, thank you very much.

And then, hold onto your seats, I went to the gym on campus and worked out. Yep, I like to work out. 25 minutes on the treadmill, 20 on the stationary bike, and then some weights. Oh, I had a ticket on my car when I came out, but who cares? It's my birthday.

I went to the bank, tried to find this place that might rent us a tent for the wedding, and went to Noodles & Company for lunch. I ordered a salad and then later someone came up and asked me how my salad was. How did they know I had the Chinese Chop Salad? Is there some sort of chart that says that this table had a Chinese Chop Salad? I got a little paranoid.

From there, I headed to Target. In the terms of my grand errand running, going to Target might be my favorite time waster. It's just that they have the best specials. I got two long sleeved thermal shirts for $3.74! I got a whole refill of Formula 409 for 3.50! I got 4 Indian curry mixes for my cooking experiments! They have these endcaps that fill with anything on special and I just walk from endcap to endcap, browsing. It's one of my favorite places to go, and J thinks that I need a reason to go, like we NEED something. I don't need no stinking reason!

And I did get useful things there; like TurboTax! That will be here before you know it.

Now, my unfocused day needed someplace to spend the rest of the afternoon...and so I went to see Harry Potter. J's never followed the books, so he's not too interested in it, and I have. It was bleak, just like the book, and when I explained this to J later, he said, "So it's the Empire Strikes Back of the Harry Potter series?" And in a way, yes. This is where it has to get a lot worse before it gets better. And it does. For a movie with very little resolution, I really enjoyed it. I don't mind going to movies by myself; really, why do you need another person with you at a movie? You aren't going to talk during it. There's no need.

I'd put it off long enough. I drove over to David's Bridal. I opened the door and walked into a white tulle wonderland. There were lots of harried looking people with tape measures around their necks. "Can I help you?" I was asked about 3 times. "No," I replied. I really just wanted to see what was there. 99% had no straps or spaghetti straps. Not everyone can wear a strapless or semi-strapless dress. There were only a couple that I'd even consider. I was glad to see it was almost time to go pick up J for our planned birthday dinner at ...

...the Melting Pot. I went to this a few years (? is that right ?) ago with some of my book club folks. It was a lot of fun, and I had a Groupon to use, so we went there for my birthday. Fondue, fondue, fondue! Cheese Fondue, Salad, Broth Fondue (aka Shabu-Shabu), and then Chocolate Fondue for dessert. I could barely finish a few pieces of the dessert plate; I was so full. J had a lot of fun, and I enjoyed showing him different combinations of spreads and things to dunk. It's kind of a pricey place, but a lot of fun.

And even thought J had to drive home in a snowstorm, I enjoyed my day so much that I feel completely relaxed and ready to tackle just about another 41 years!

Frosty Morning

2011-01-13T19:38:00.001-06:00

Do you have a dress yet?

2011-01-12T19:21:00.024-06:00

No, I don't have a dress yet. I have looked. There are dresses out there, but most are too long, too swoopy, too lacey, too frumpy and I won't do sleeveless. I've never been the person who has planned a wedding since a child. A few years ago, I started to think I'd never have a wedding. Now I have to plan an event where I have to wear a dress and be the center of attention and I'm terrified.

I mean this one (left) is way too ruffly. And strapless. Anyone for a flamenco dance?Shades of the Godfather. I'm so not wearing a veil.

Do I really have to wear a dress?
This isn't bad, but it's too long and too white.

You see? I'm in hell.

Worth it

2011-01-12T10:49:00.000-06:00

J and I have to go have insurance physicals. If you have ever thought about getting life insurance, this is where you have to answer insane questionnaires about every little thing, and then go in and subject yourself to tests in order to convince the insurance company that you are never ever going to die.

So, I'm a pretty healthy person. I work out. I have had issues with cholesterol, which is down, and I'm not the skinniest person on the planet. J too has had issues with cholesterol and is not the skinniest person on the planet. But I like to think that we have at least 30 years ahead of us; and by that time, the insurance would have gotten their money's worth, right?

We went there this morning, and I'm pretty sure my blood pressure was pretty high because I had to find the place, hidden deep in industrial park wasteland, and the roads are terrible and J is a slowpoke in the mornings.

We both had our blood pressure taken 3 different times; twice before we had our blood taken, and once after. And then we had to pee in a cup and sign a bunch of papers, and it was done. It was actually pretty quick and painless. J's blood pressure actually went down after the blood draw because he was a little more relaxed after it being done. My blood pressure was actually pretty stable, which is probably good.

So now we wait to find out if we are worth insuring. It was like the fastest physical that we've ever had.

Random Snippets of Discussion

2011-01-08T23:03:00.000-06:00

I really wanted to take a picture of this and post it here, but my co-worker beat me to it. I stole this from his Facebook page, but will willingly attribute it to him. Doug took it with his iPhone. He takes fun pictures, has fuzzy slippers, a cool phone, and an office far from the madding crowd. I suspect he's been paying someone off. No one has it this good.

I made stock today. Rewind; I made a turkey last weekend and finally ended the carcass in a boiling morass today. It smelled semi-heavenly here, and now I have two gallons of stock freezing. Why did I ever buy stock?

There's a street near where I park that has a no-left turn sign that got put up sometime in the last few months. The thing is... if I disobey the no-left turn sign and turn left anyway, I can start going west on University Avenue in 2 stoplights, and usually less than a minute. However, if I obey the law, and turn right, and instead make 3 rights in order to start going west on University, it is 5 stoplights and usually 5 minutes to get to the same point. (I only did this because there was a cop nearby.) I'm not sure why left-turns are forbidden there; it's certainly possible to make a left turn. I wonder if there is an east-side vs. west-side bias going on.

J and I purchased materials to start making catwalks around several walls of our house to allow the cats yet another means of control.

It would be nice if our newest cat Lulu wanted to join our little party, but she seems perfectly content to sit in the basement suite on the blanket that I have provided for her and be a ball of fur. Either she's just a very low key cat who doesn't want to interact with other cats or she's not getting along with the other cats.

J had me turn off the downstairs light that I'd been leaving on for Lulu..."She's a cat", he said. "Yes, but she's still adjusting and her hair's just starting to grow back and there's hissing..." I replied, realizing that I'm sounding crazed. Maybe she'll just be the cat that lives in the basement. If anyone stays with us, we'll just warn them, "By the way, your room is also occupied by a cat that refuses to leave. She'll probably want to be petted, but she'll move over when it's time to sleep."

J's been making pasta lately and he uses not enough water to boil it in, and this kind of makes me crazy. It tastes okay, so I guess I shouldn't complain, but it just seems wrong. I don't need gallons but a couple cups doesn't do the job.

J asked me if we are going on a honeymoon. I want to go somewhere warm now. Maybe we should go somewhere now. We can't; J's got stuff happening at work and I might not even be able to take my birthday off from work in a couple of days.

I got these gardening catalogs and I'm just dying to start ordering things; I'm thinking of diagramming the yard and planning zones of color. And making a map with colored pencils to designate the zones.

Oh, been trying to plan a wedding. A not quite finished website: saraandjasonwedding.com. Yeah, we're getting there. There'll be some sort of party here on that date. We hope. Fingers crossed.