Homemade bliss

(FYI - I'm using my Treo to post this, since I'm not likely going to have my computer on today at all. Apologise in advance for the typos...for lo, I am agèd, and the wee keyboard, it bemuses me...)

I spent the morning working like someone a lot buff-er than me. Set up a trellis for the peas (trimming and wrapping wire is a new skill for me) (and my 'trellis' really shows it), trimmed the hedges, mowed the front lawn, rotated the compost, then took a pickax to the <strike>concrete</strike> hard-packed clay in the front garden bed.

THAT nearly killed me. Now, I know in my heart-of-hearts that this kind of work (kept within reason) is actually VERY good for my back. It hurts at the time, but OVER time I'm finding my overall pain is much better.

That said...OY! M'BACK!!!!!!!!

But, I now have a nicely 'fluffed', amended and currently taking a nice 30 gallon soak in laundry gray water - ready for me to plant some spinach in a couple days.

Then I came inside for some breakfast. Er, lunch. Whatever! FOOD, NOW, PLEASE!!!!!!!

I made a sandwich on bread I just made last night, soft, sweet and nutty with just a hint of 7-grain meal. I smeared it with a little mayo, then started to reach for the yellow sauce (a.k.a. French's mustard) when my eye fell on the zesty zucchini relish I made last week. Hmm, sweet-tart zucchini-onion-bell pepper relish, all (except the spices) from my own garden. {slather-slather-slather}.

A bit of ham finished the sandwich. Then a big glass of homebrewed iced tea with a dollop of lemon juice from my own little tree washed it down.

Ahhhhhhh...satiated...well, nearly anyway...some kind of FINISHER WOULD be good here...hmmmmmmmm...

A refill of tea, and a ramkin of homemade strawberry ice cream, made with the 'unwanted' foam skimmed from my homemade strawberry and blueberry jams.

Perfect. Tart and sweet, blessedly cold for my over-heated body, just a few small spoonfuls of bliss. Not so much that I feel bloated or guilty, more than enough to make me feel as rich as a queen. (And enough left in the freezer to make the Denizens a good snack after school.)

I am a wealthy woman, y'all. I am a TRULY wealthy woman...

Cheaper Bulk Pectin

OK, my order has arrived and been used and the results were awesome soooooooooo…

Pacific Pectin has bulk pectin at very good prices. They have everything from their ‘Pacific Pectin Blend’ (which is what I got, and it does indeed work just like the boxed stuff) to the low-sugar type, powder or liquid, rapid set, slow set – whatever you need.

The ten pound box of the basic stuff I bought cost $63, and that included the shipping (I love a company that works shipping into their base price – it always unnerves me when I get to the checkout and only then get told to add $27.52 to my total for shipping). In my area, the standard 1.75 ounce box goes for $3.29, or $1.88 an ounce. At $63 for ten pounds, that’s right around $0.39 an ounce, nearly 80% less than the supermarket price!

Of course, it’s also the equivalent of NINETY of those little boxes, so if you’re a casual, ‘just this once’ jam/jelly/gummy chef it might be a bit much.

If kept in an air-tight container in a dark, cool place it will hold full gel-strength (I’m sorry, I just had a ‘hair products in my JELLY?!’ moment…) for two years; after that (they tell me) (because I asked) it doesn’t go rancid or anything, it just starts to lose potency. You can still use it, just add a little more to your recipe…how much more? Uhhhhh, well, ahem. See, there’s a science to jelly making, and then there’s an art to it, and this would be the part where the scientist puts down the precise measuring devices and starts dabbling in drabs and pinches and dollops. (I suspect my jelly in 2011 may have runny batches, and batches that could be used as a concrete substitute, and then some perfect ones…)

Not that anyone probably cares, but since I’ve been hearing a lot of uproar about Such Things: This isn’t a paid or solicited endorsement. I found them during a regular old search, ordered up and gave their stuff a try and it worked great – so I’m sharing.

Because Lord knows I share about everything else with y’all (would you like another post about inappropriate places for poop to end up? no? how about a lengthy rant about why anybody, even a young child, would ever use a wall instead of a Kleenex for their boogers?), a little direct ‘here’s an actual store with actual cheap prices for an actual product that actually works’ once in a while hardly seems out of character for me…

Money Monday: August 24, 2009

The last seven days have been really tough for me. There was more than the usual amount of crazy with the Denizens (bus is late, school out early, appointments, “sickness”, etc. etc. etc.), but that wasn’t the part that shoved me over the edge almost to the point of wanting to just sit down and cry for a while.

It was running out of soda on the same day that both my Scooba and my Floormate decided to have parts fail / break off / crack / spew / collapse, relegating me to cleaning the floors around the Den with a hand towel and the incredible cleansing power of cuss words.

So there I was. I’d just cleaned the kitchen, playroom, downstairs hallway, and four frickin’ bedroom floors with a hand towel. It was 101 degrees outside, and 80-something inside. I was hot, tired, sweating, my back was throbbing in a new and exciting way, and I decided that darn it, I needed a soda. For the good of mankind.

Because the mood I was in right that moment? I could have chewed somebody’s head off.

Soda hath the power to calm the savage beast…

And then…as I was lifting the cold silver can out of the fridge…a certain emptiness struck me…hmmm…fridge looks…powerful empty…no…no!...nononononononoohno, NO! DEAR SWEET $DEITY IT CAN’T BE SO, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, no! NO!

The last soda!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The world…turned gray…

And I woke up half an hour later in Turlock with a new tattoo and several yards of barbed wire wrapped around my ankles.

OK, not really.

But Dog is my witness, I did have a moment of vertigo. How could this be? So soon? SO SOON?! Because didn’t I just…I mean, I know I said ‘when it’s gone, it’s gone’ but I thought gone would be…you know, later than this…

And then I started wheeling and dealing with myself, trying to find a way in which buying soda would not count as totally breaking my own rules.

After all, I can’t exactly make soda, right? And I’m saving soooooo much money elsewhere, on strawberry jelly for example, that surely I have saved enough to buy myself some soda, right?!

I even went so low as to pull out the “well, but HE’S getting…” card. The husband is getting Kleenex THAT’S RIGHT!! Even though I could totally whip him up dozens of cloth hankies, he insists, in no uncertain terms, that he will not use a hankie, not even one that is 100% cotton, tie-dyed in cool, vibrant awesomeness and hand-sewn by his doting wifey-pooh.

Just as I was making the decision that diet Pepsi would be “my” thing…I tripped over the second half of the case on my way back inside the Den.

Oh. Heh heh. Yeah. That’s right. I, uh, sort of didn’t put all of it into the fridge, because there was, hee hee, zucchini…ahem, never mind! Just kidding! I wasn’t having a panic attack over diet Pepsi, just, you know, havin’ a little fun with y’all…

Sigh.

This right here is going to be the really hard part of my little project, especially for this early phase where I’ll have to be going out fairly regularly to get the things we need. I need butter, milk, eggs, soda, flour, sugar, cream and waitasecond, what was that middle thing again…?

I’ve already started imitating a helicopter at Costco, circling around and around and around the store, retracing my steps to put back the things I grabbed out of habit that are no longer on the Allowable Purchases list.

The list never was particularly long. The whole middle section of the store has been mostly off-limits to me for years, along with most of the right side aisles as well. One thing I do not need is sixty-four cases of pens and a filing wall system, you know?

But there have been other things I’ve cheerfully bought that are purely and only for my convenience. Chez-Its, chewy fruit snacks, goldfish crackers, Triscuits and tubes of roasted nuts.

None of them are horribly expensive, and the kids love them, and they make for fast lunch-making in the morning. C’mon. Six bucks and I’ve got a month’s supply of Chez-Its! Five bucks to refill the treat basket with gummy fruits!

Versus, having to make the cheese dough and roll it out and cut it and make my own version of Chez-Its. (Basically, pie crust dough with a whack of cheddar mixed into it, rolled a little thinner than usual and baked at a high temperature.)

Or having to make my own gummies, which I totally can but meh, I just don’t wanna and besides! It’s only FIVE BUCKS.

And of course…the soda. My precious, precious soda. I’m already rationing it, and cursing the fact that my poison of choice is the diet. (It has a use-by, and they aren’t kidding around. It turns into weird tasting bubbly water almost immediately after the use-by date.)

When I start telling myself how little whatever the lusted-for item is, I know I’m up against one of the weirdest of money-related human traits: The “but it’s such a little thing” syndrome.

For years, I thought it was Just Me who did this. I’ll give up cable TV and the gym. I’ll steel my soul and say NO VACATION THIS YEAR. I’ll resist the new Lexus and even the expensive dinners out.

But…not going through the Taco Bell drive-thru on my way home from Costco for a Victory Burrito and Super Gigantic Diet Pepsi of Doom? Seriously?

Not getting a shot of dark chocolate mocha from Barista’s before the farmer’s market (or any other time I happen to be downtown)? Not even a small one?

…seriously?...

Through the years, I’ve been relieved to note that I am so totally NOT the only person who does this.

Oddly, the feeling of deprivation can be far more intense when you’re saying no to something small. It’s just two miserable bucks for the Victory Burrito, you know? Just two crummy bucks.

Aren’t I worth two bucks?

Am I that bad off? Two bucks is extravagant for me now?

Geeeeeeez…

Now the truth is – two bucks is not too extravagant for me. I can afford to get myself a burrito after overcoming the perilous odyssey that is a Costco trip.

And I suppose I can even argue that I “deserve” something for my trouble. I’ve just hefted fifty pound sacks of flour and sugar and heaven only knows what-all else not only onto the cart, but then off it and into the van. And now I’m headed home to heft them yet again, and wrestle their contents into bins and buckets…followed, of course, by the cooking part…

Sure. I deserve a little treat for all that work. And blowing four bucks on a burrito and a soda seems like a pretty small thing, fully within my rights as a citizen of the civilized world.

But you know what else I deserve?

I deserve to live my life in the way that gives me my best shot at happiness.

Sure, I could fork over the money for a burrito stuffed with beans and rice and guacamole, and it would taste good and I would be happy…at least for a little while.

But I could also keep that two dollars and put it toward something else – like, say, being out from under the debts we’ve racked up these last few years. Toward being able to say we own the Den of Chaos, free and clear.

Being able to say, “Check out this beautiful little ranch, ten acres of good land not too far from everything…”, and instead of being trapped because we don’t have the capital to buy or the ability to sell the Den in anything like a Timely Fashion, we could snap it up. Sell the Den at our leisure – or not at all.

We’re not going to get that kind of happiness buying overpriced burritos and sodas, no matter how much we may deserve them. We’re not going to get it by rewarding ourselves every time we do something we need to do. We’re not going to get it by deciding that gosh-darn-it, we’ve been working so hard, we deserve to…spend every dime we managed to save by doing all that work ourselves on a day at the carnival.

We deserve to go right back to treading water and wishing it were otherwise. We deserve to have a great time for a few hours, so that we can continue being miserable the other 95% of the time due to that terrible gap between actual income and what we need to make some headway.

The larger things are obvious. The smaller things…are subtle, and harder to put down. It feels so awful, putting down those itty-bitty things.

It can feel like the ultimate defeat, saying that a $2 latte just isn’t in your budget right now.

But it’s actually the ultimate victory. It’s a moment when you take your eyes off now and acknowledge that what you really want isn’t impossible. It isn’t beyond your grasp – it’s there. You can have it.

You just have to choose it…not merely in the abstract moments when you’ve had a little too much wine and are pondering what you woulda if you only coulda, but for real, for keeps.

Am I deprived? Nah. I’m living in and for a dream, that’s all. It may look like deprivation from the outside, but then it’s hard to see what I can see from out there.

I see not having credit card statements coming in each month. I see having a net worth back in the black again. I see having equity in this house no matter what the market decides to do. I see money in the bank, and the ability to let go of that month to month worry about it.

Am I willing to give up on all that for a burrito, or a soda? A latte, maybe, or a just this once pizza delivery?

Nah. I’ll patch an awful lot of jeans, plant peas by the hundreds and eat nothing but zucchini before I give up on it.

Because I’m totally worth it.

I totally am.

The week in review

The Short Version: First, I went, “AAAAAAAAH!” Then, I was all, “ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!” After which I said, “OH, you are @*^&@in’ kidding me!” Then, “Oh-no-you-di-in!” And then there was this lull where I just curled up in the corner and whimpered quietly to myself.

The Long Version: There were interruptions to the Usual Schedule this week. Monday is an early release day for the girls and Captain Adventure’s bus was Late – I think I had two hours before I had to drop everything and go get the kids. Tuesday was almost normal, except that people kept calling me. I finally stopped answering the phone, because it was always something complicated, stupid, insipid or just plain irritating.

Wednesday, I took Captain Adventure for an appointment wherein we decided we’d go ahead and try a new medication for him – but first, due to this incredibly rare side effect that occurs in something like 0.000000008% of the folks who take this particular stuff, and furthermore due to his lack of speech skills which would lead to him not saying something like, “Gee, my heart feels funny” if he actually did have a pre-existing condition…he’s supposed to get an EKG.

Hilarity ensues!!!

For some reason, he took one look at the EKG machine and decided it looked like the kind of thing that would burn him. So instead of finding the stickers cool and the “computer’s crayons” interesting, he kicked and screamed and fought and cried and guess what? You can’t do an EKG on a child who is kicking, screaming, fighting and crying.

It sort of throws off the whole test.

SO! I need to drug him up and take him back later. Now watch, the way my luck has been going lately, I’ll give him the “peace, my child” liquid and he will be in that 0.0000005% group which, instead of feeling warm, luscious waves of relaxation flowing over him, turns all spastic-hyper-crazy and stays up for six days straight wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!

Yesterday, Boo Bug stayed home “sick.” She said her stomach hurt and she threw up “a little” in their bathroom. Within an hour, she was just fine – and that meant that she started talking to me. Constantly. Non-stop. Incessantly. To the point where I was half ready to just take her to school and drop her off even though technically I’m not allowed to do so once she’s been called in sick – but seriously, what are they going to do? Chase me down the street?

I assure you my minivan can drive faster than the school secretary can run.

Speaking of the minivan – three hours at the shop for routine maintenance this week. Three. Hours. Granted, it was the 30,000 service and all but still. THREE. HOURS.

My hair practically fell out of my head in disgust.

But I did get a bit of inch-age done on the scarf I’m working on, so I’ve got that going for me.

And then today, I took Eldest and Danger Mouse to the dentist – for two cases of sealant and two fillings, both of them on Danger Mouse.

It was her first time under the drill. She was very, very brave and did a bang-up job and I’m extremely proud of her. She even wanted to go to school, after she’d been home for a little bit getting over the Novocain and letting the Tylenol work its magic. (Friday is not a day they like to miss – that’s when the fun stuff happens.)

Eldest announced on the way back to school this morning that if she didn’t have Appropriate Gym Attire today, she was going to be executed. Or have to go to detention. Or eat worms. She couldn’t remember exactly what. Anyway, it was something unpleasant.

She didn’t have appropriate gym attire because they sold out of appropriate gym attire and we were then on our own to find a plain gray shirt with no printing on it and plain blue or green shorts with no printing on them, either.

Good Freakin’ Luck. Especially if you’re shopping for a girl who is eleven years old, nine years tall but only six years around the middle. Gah.

So I did the only responsible, adult thing I could: I stalled until I was dropping her off after her third period gym class. Problem solved! (Temporarily, anyway.)

Meanwhile in other news…I have not had time to do any of the things I’d hoped to get under way this week.

And now I’m late picking up the first of the girls.

Gah.

Eventually, this is going to get better, right? Eventually, we’ll all find our groove and people will be in school when they’re supposed to be in school and I’ll actually have a couple hours each day to do something other than tread water, right?

(Just say yes. I can’t handle the truth, people, I just can’t handle it…)

Emotions, now with subtitles

Captain Adventure came home from school today with a plan, and it was this: To immediately get on the computer for a game of Rollercoaster Tycoon.

He's frighteningly good at it, actually.

But! What's this? The mouse is missing! {sinister music!}

"MoooooMEE, air mine ouse go?"

"Ah, no games until you go poop in the potty, mister!"

SEE, this is the thing. We are in the window where nature usually calls. Yesterday, after half an hour of torturing the kid to use the appropriate household object, I let him take a break...at which point, he promptly deposited his compost all over the upstairs hallway. ARGH.

So, new strategy. He's obsessed with this game. Great! Show me some potty use, and THEN you can have some Game Time!

He regarded me with dismay. He REALLY doesn't want to take time out of his busy day for The Stupid Potty Thing. But he also REALLY loves that game.

"No game?" he wavered. Then he screwed up his face and began to cry - big, heaving and oh-so-fake sobs.

Then he stopped in mid-sob, gave me a stern look and said, "Mommy, what I am doing? I CRYING! A-caus I SAD for mine game! Wah-huhn! Wah-huhn!"

New, Improved Emotions: Now with subtitles for your convenience...

(This is actually a very encouraging development overall - emotional awareness is huge for autistic kids. But it still made me laugh so hard inside it was all I could do to hold it together...a-caus I SAD, you sad-making monster, and I hope you're pleased with yourself...)

Money Monday: August 17, 2009

*sniff-sniff!* Ah! That new project smell!…smells like a need for seed money…hmmmmmm…yes, I am definitely detecting the piquant undertones of a spending fast…

OK, all kidding aside, this is both part of the whole project and a means to get to a certain end, to wit, having the extra capital I need to buy the raw materials I need in order to start replacing the ready made with the home made.

A spending fast is a lot like the detox phase of a diet. There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

The wrong way would be to spend the whole time thinking about what you’re going to buy the instant this spending fast thing is over. I’ve watched people succeed and fail at diets through the years, and I have to admit one of the common threads in the ‘failed diet’ group has been that the person dieting spent the entire diet obsessing about what they would eat at the diet’s end.

As soon as I’ve reached my goal weight, I’m going to plow myself face-first into the very things that got me into this overweight state in the first place and never come up again even if I LITERALLY drown in the pudding!

Same thing goes for a spending fast. If you spend the whole time thinking about all the stuff you can’t wait to buy, you’ll spend yourself right back into the mess you’re trying to escape within days of lifting your spending fast.

The right way (at least if you want the change to stick) is to embrace it as the first step of a brave new way of life.

For me right now, you know, duh. I’m talking about really stepping off the consumer treadmill, and getting into a kind of…modern day homesteading, I guess. Using my natural resources, from my land to my time and talents, to provide for our needs. Making money more by not spending it than by actually having cash flowing into our accounts.

A spending fast is only natural.

Generally speaking, you do a spending fast because you’ve got somewhere else you need the money to go. Debts or large purchases are the usual suspects.

I need the money to go straight into things like a second-hand tiller if I can find one (or renting one if I can’t), packages of seed, fruit tree saplings, more Mason jars, raw materials for crafting…in other words, I need to be shaving money out of immediate consumption to put it into another immediate need.

So, I’m fasting in the midst of plenty. I’m avoiding the supermarket, and convenience foods in all their forms. No quick hot dog at the Costco after an exhausting battle with fifty pound sacks of flour and sugar; no throwing a box of macaroni and cheese at the problem of what to make for dinner after a particularly insane day.

As those things are used up, they aren’t being replaced.

Instead, that money is going into those other things. Buying raw materials to make the things we used to buy, and some of the tools I need to do that. Buying the food we hope to be producing ourselves next year, in the same form we’ll be getting it from our own backyard. Raw, ripe and desperately needing to be eaten or preserved immediately.

Logistically, the spending fast is nothing new to me. I use them all the time to get things I want that I otherwise couldn’t afford. Sometimes, I even use them just to remind myself just how few things I actually need; it’s an excellent way to put the brakes on a rampaging case of the Gimmies.

But it still feels very different, probably because if I succeed at what I’d like to do, it’s not a temporary kind of thing this time.

If I succeed, I won’t be buying many cans of corn in the future.

If I win, all the things that are “give ups” now will be “not needed anymores” next year.

It still charms me…but at the same time, as each empty can or box hits the recycling bin and I find myself contemplating how, exactly, I’m going to replace that food with something I’ve grown at home or bought with other things produced here in the Den…I feel rather like I’ve decided to eat an elephant.

I’m really not sure I’m woman enough for what I’ve so cheerfully put on my plate.

But, having very little common sense and perhaps an over-enthusiastic confidence in my ability to at least give whatever crazy thing I’ve undertaken a good college try…I’m still game.

And as we eat what we already have here in the Den and I avoid automatically replenishing the boxes and cans and bags, already cash is starting to magically appear in my checkbook.

It really is true, you know…the fastest way to double your money is to fold it once, and stick it back into your wallet…

Good jam to be in

One of the things that is changing immediately in the Den is that we won’t be buying things we could make ourselves – that includes jams and jellies, which as you might expect we tend to go through at a fairly rapid pace around here.

In practical terms, this means I’d better get hopping on laying down what we’ll want over the winter – berry season will be over before we know it, and I’m pretty sure the kids will mutiny if we run out of jelly in January and I refuse to buy any more.

Next year, it’ll be our own berries I’m turning into jams and such, but for this year we’re getting most of them from roadside stands. This is part of the flat I got from a farm stand near Byron – they were super-super ripe, so the nice lady practically gave them to me. I paid $6 for a box that usually runs $20…but they were in use them NOW! condition.



A few weeks ago, I made a smaller batch of no-added-pectin strawberry preserves. They’re great, but the Denizens don’t like them much on their sandwiches. They’re too thick, almost chewy, and extremely concentrated in flavor. (Needless to say, the grownups are ecstatic about them.)

They also took forever to cook down enough to set.

This time, I wanted to make a more store-bought-like jelly and wanted to be done much sooner – so I used store-bought pectin. It makes for a reliable set, almost idiot-proof (real handy around here, let-me-tell-you), and reduces the cooking time from an eternity to less than five minutes.

First I ran the berries through the food mill to remove the seeds (diverticulitis flare-ups and those little tiny seeds don’t play nicely together). This left me with what was practically just strawberry juice – albeit a rather thick juice.

Then I did a Super Basic Jelly Recipe (almost right off the pectin box, but with a little more lemon juice, less sugar and a lot more volume), and ended up with these (plus another half-pint in the fridge…and already half gone…):



It came out awesome. Smooth, sweet, and oh-so-spreadable.



It may set a little more firmly over time, but I think I’ve hit it with this one. It’s enough like store bought to get past the Denizens’ cute little noses, but is just different enough to start their adjustment to homemade staples.

One flat strawberries: $6.
One box of store-bought pectin: $2.49 (ouch) (I’ve found much better deals online)
6-1/2 tablespoons lemon juice: Free from the tree in the backyard
10 cups sugar: $2.00

Total cost: $10.49, to make six and a half pints of strawberry jelly. That’s roughly 104 ounces, or $0.10 per ounce. Not too bad, compared to the on-sale supermarket price of $0.17 an ounce.

Now, the next time I make this jelly, I’ll be using backyard strawberries ($2.25 for the season’s starting plants, with a guesstimate of about fifty cents in growing costs for this many berries) (it’s a pretty un-educated guesstimate…we’ll see how it actually works out…if I can actually track things to that kind of level, which I likely can’t), and bulk-bought pectin ($0.39 an ounce instead of $1.88).

While I could do without the store-bought pectin, I think I’ll stick with it. The time savings alone is worth its weight in gold, but adding in the “sure set” part just clinches the deal. I’ve tried using none, and I’ve tried grinding up an apple or two for a pectin-boost…the results are good, but again there’s added time to cook and uncertainty around how much pectin that particular apple might have had.

I’m really enjoying the benefits of modern science right now. Woot, perfect set!!

The total out of pocket cost of that batch will be $3.25, or $0.03 an ounce. Righteous!

We can easily go through a pint of jelly a month; actually, I think it’s closer to every three weeks. (If I turned my back for just five minutes, we could probably go through a pint in less than that same five minutes around here…)

If I buy the cheap jelly when it goes on sale, I’m spending $2.99 a jar at the supermarket, which works out to roughly $50 a year.

Making it this way, with the supermarket-bought pectin, I’d be spending around $30 a year to make it. Making it from homegrown berries with the cheaper bulk pectin, I’m spending only $9 annually on it…thus “earning” around $40 for my trouble.

And I know exactly what’s in it. Nothing I can’t pronounce. No corn syrup, high fructose or otherwise. No dyes, no extra flavorings, no long chemical names that mean ‘keep it looking bright pink for six years if need be.’

I’ll be making a smaller batch of grape jelly (from store-bought grape juice I have out in the garage), and hopefully I’ll get out there pretty soon for a serious berry-picking day and get enough blackberries to make some seedless blackberry jelly as well. (Mine. All mine. Back off, man, just back off!!!)

These are exactly the kinds of steps I’m looking at taking – the steps we tend to dismiss as being too small to be worth even doing, too much work for the return they give, too much bother to, well, bother with.

At the moment, it’s fun. I’m sure it will become work soon enough…especially when making the jelly is coming on the heels of getting out in the heat to pick all the berries.

Pam, to answer your question from yesterday about the pressure canner – not for these. I only use the pressure canner for low-acid things like corn or green beans (although frankly, I prefer to freeze those – less fussing around to get the job done, and I think they taste better).

These were done with a boiling water method; the near-boiling jelly is poured into hot jars (sterilized in the canner while I was cooking the jelly), the lids and screw bands applied, and then the jars are all put back into the canner (any pot big enough to hold them and their “rack”, which can be something as simple as extra screw bands tied together, without crowding, with enough room at the top for at least an inch of water to cover them) and processed in boiling water. These went for twenty minutes under the boiling water, then five minutes to ‘rest’ in the pot off the heat, then twenty-four hours to cool undisturbed on the kitchen counter.

Half pints would take about half the time; quart jars would need a little more.

I don’t use wax to seal the jars – I just make sure the seal is good (the lid is pressing downward, and doesn’t budge when I take the screw band off and push on it), then label and put them away in the cupboard. They should be good for a full year from the date they’re made.

Whether or not they’ll actually last that long is another question entirely.

If you give a Tama a short task list…

…she will probably get started on it first thing in the morning. Clean the front room, no big deal!

And then she will notice a big fifty pound box of cocoa powder by the front door, and she will want to move it to the garage storage where it belongs.

When she drags the box to the garage, she will notice there are many, many empty boxes sitting there waiting to be broken down and put into the recycling.

After she breaks down the boxes, she will want to put them in the recycling bin.

When she goes to put the boxes in the recycling bin, she will probably notice that the trash and greens bins haven’t been brought all the way in yet. And she will want this rectified.

When she takes the greens bin back to the garden, she will want to check and see how it is doing.

When she checks to see how the garden is doing, she will find aphids!!! are suddenly all over every single leaf in sight. And she will definitely want this rectified.

With. Extreme. Prejudice.

So she will have to find the old vegetable oil, and mix dish soap into it, and then mix that with water and spray it all over the aphids. She will also want to laugh like an insane person while she does this, because death to aphids, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Then she will notice that the neighbor mowed his half of the lawn recently, and now her lawn looks extremely disheveled. So she will want to mow it. Or at least she will feel a social obligation to do so. Anyway, she will want to get the lawnmower.

Which will need more gas, so she will start searching through the garage to find it.

While searching the garage, she will unearth a large bag of toys that were flung out there at some point and start digging through them wondering if the missing Nintendo might be in there.

But she’ll come to her senses and return to the gas pretty quick. Right after she grabs that first handful of spider web.

Then she’ll fill up the mower, and mow the lawn. The lawnmower will blow a bunch of cuttings all over the walkway, SO, she’ll want to get the broom.

Which is in the shed.

Somewhere.

Many hilarious adventures involving spider webs and ill-advised stuff-stacking techniques later, she will take the broom out to the front yard and start sweeping.

Then, she’ll remember the ants, which were trying to colonize under the driveway pad. So she’ll want to be extra thorough in the cracks of the driveway, so she can check for ants.

She won’t want to think what the neighbors think she’s up to as she sweeps, then crouches, peers intently at the crack, and then delicately brushes at the crack a few more times…and peers at it for another long moment…

FINALLY, she’ll put the gardening tools away and realize that she’s hungry and wants a snack. So she’ll go to the kitchen for some peach pie. (Breakfast/lunch/dinner of champions!)

And then she’ll notice that the floor in there is really, really dirty. So naturally, she’ll have to sweep and mop that before she can have pie.

And then as she’s taking the pie keeper out of the fridge, she’ll notice that the flat of strawberries in there are getting mushy and had better be used immediately.

So she’ll set down the pie and get out the food mill and the berry strainer and several pots and pans and pint-sized Mason jars and lids and tongs and all sorts of other implements, and she’ll make six (and a half) pints of strawberry jam. (Eating a big slice of pie during the processing time, which is the first time she can take her hands completely off the whole thing for more than a few moments.)

And then it will be time to pick up the children, so she’ll grab her knitting and get in the minivan, and alternate frantic activity with sitting around waiting for a little over an hour, knitting intently because what, just SIT here?! I’d go MENTAL!!

And then she’ll come home.

She’ll walk through her front door.

She’ll look at the still-messy front room that was her only task for the day.

And she will think, and for a few moments honestly believe, that she has gotten absolutely nothing done all day. She will begin trying to pinpoint where she went wrong. She will retrace the steps that led her to this moment.

And then it will dawn on her that actually, she got rather a lot done today thank you very much, and that she deserves not only a nice hot shower but an early bedtime.

Because tomorrow…she’s got another very short task list.

Whew!

Ya, ya, innaminute…

I need to go clean the kitchen. I mean, really…breakfast dishes, still on the table, at this hour?!

Shameful!!!!!

But first…just, you know, one more minute of this stillness. This almost-silence. This ability to read an email, actually read it, all the way through (I have 212 messages in my inbox I’ve set aside as needing at least some level of reading, that have been waiting for just such an occasion).

One more minute of this blessed time of nobody is telling me how booooooreeeeeeeed they are…

I don’t know who was happier this morning, me or the Denizens. They went happily to school, dressed in their Specially Chosen Outfits (oh, the terrible dilemma this was yesterday, what to wear, what to wear!), with tie-dyed socks and in one case, wearing a wool hat (good grief) (it is currently 94 degrees outside) (wool hat) (sigh).

They were (in case you missed it) horribly, near-FATALLY bored these last couple weeks. The games had all been played. The art projects done. The friends visited. Grandmothers seen. Trips taken. Fairs attended. Video games played. Cartoons watched. Books read.

Everything on their checklist had been done, and in some cases done practically to death.

They were bored. B-O-R-E-D.

It’s a funny thing about kids. Kids who are otherwise awfully good about not being a nuisance will, when bored, turn into kids that strongly resemble Other People’s Horrible Brats.

Seriously. Who are these rotten kids, and what have they done with my precious angels?!

The pestering, the fighting, the squabbling…argh, I loathe squabbling, with the high-pitched whining about nothing and the way it will just sort of keep rolling on downhill…you took my thing, no I didn’t, yes you did and also you did that other thing, did not, did too, oh yeah well YOU did blah blah blah, did not did too did not did too MOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!

I don’t know why they insist on trying to make me a judge and/or jury on these things. My solution to these problems is to simply say, “Fine. Nobody gets the DS, then!” and I take it away.

This is because I am way too lazy to try to figure out who actually did have ownership rights at that particular time trying to teach them the skill of working together, and how to handle conflict resolution on their own, which are valuable skills greatly needed in the adult world.

Gosh golly, but I am such a great mother…(shut. up!)

Seriously, though, these last two weeks were hard on all of us. My ability to plop down a project in front of them (here kids, it’s a cheap latch hook kit!! knock yourselves out…) and get an hour or two of relative peace and quiet was gone. There was nothing left to hold their attention for more than a few minutes at a time.

Even the Electronic Babysitter had lost its charm. “Seen it…seen it…seen this one too…seen it…yeah, this is totally a rerun…”

I had gotten so desperate that the time limits on video games had gotten longer and longer until by yesterday (when I was patching the holes in Boo Bug’s backpack) (I did use a denim patch on the inside, but it was a tricky spot and it kept peeling up…I think the thing is now more Mighty Mender glue than backpack), I no longer cared. Go ahead! Stare at the flashing pictures on the computer screen! Stare at them all day long, if it will just make you SHUT. UP. for a danged minute, I don’t care if your brain liquefies and pours out your ears…just don’t get it on the carpet or the keyboard, ‘kay?…

They were sick of me, too. Did you clean your room? Did you do your chores? Did you put away your socks? I’ll set the timer, I’m going to check in five minutes, do NOT bother me right now!, no you can’t have a snack I just gave you snack and it is not my fault you’ve suddenly decided you don’t like apples, do you see a nametag saying, “Mommy, Head Short-Order Chef” on me? I didn’t think so!

Nag-nag-nag, quiet-quiet-quiet, don’t-don’t-don’t. I was pretty sick of me, too.

I hopped into Homer the Odyssey a little bit ago to pick up the CSA box. Just…grabbed my keys, slipped on some shoes and went. Just like that.

No fighting. No lost shoes. No thousand questions. Nobody picking at anybody else. Nobody arguing about who got there first, or who got to close the door, or who had won the race to the van. Nobody asking realllllly long involved questions, or telling realllllly long, involved tales.

In? Question? Form? Because there was this guy? Who wasn’t a guy we knew? And he did this thing? And also? Mommy? It was? Really? Funny?

None of that. Just me, my keys, a quick and quiet drive, grab the box, back in the van, back home, done. Less than ten minutes.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

I’ll go clean the kitchen in a minute. I swear I will.

But right this second…I’m just going to sit here and listen to the lack of sound, and cherish it…(for lo, it is fleeting…the pickup process begins in less than an hour…)

This message brought to you by the first week of school…

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!

I can’t wait for tomorrow. Seriously. These last two days? CRAZY. Captain Adventure started kindergarten on Monday. (I still have trouble accepting that my baby is in kindergarten, but let’s not start down that road again…)

Eldest had her orientation for middle school today. This managed to take up about four hours, even though it was only a two hour orientation.

The middle two are peppering me with questions and demands. Is ‘that’ dress clean? No, that’s MINE! Nuh-uh! Uh-HUH! Shriek! MOMMY I NEED A HAIRCUT! Did you wash my socks? No, not those socks the other socks!

And, my personal favorite so far, uttered about twenty minutes ago: “Could you knit me a new pair of pink socks for school tomorrow?”

But tomorrow, all four of them will be in school. Granted, Captain Adventure has an early release day and thus will be home three hours early, but for at least, uh, two hours…all four, in school, at the same time…

If you need me from 9:00 to 11:00 tomorrow, I will be taking a nap.

With the door locked.

And the phone off.

So, uh, don’t need me.

‘Kay? OK. And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out how to patch a backpack…

Me wannit…

Right now, my gray water collection goes like this:

1. Dip bucket into tub to fill

2. Heft bucket out to garden

3. Pour bucket of water onto garden (I use this mainly on the roses, trees and front lawn, not so much the veggies because I am [probably needlessly] anxious about having soap-flavored tomatoes)

4. Repeat…repeat…repeat…repeat…the bucket holds about two gallons (and I am somewhat girly, so that’s all I’d be willing to attempt anyway), and the average bath around here is forty gallons (but does often get two kids clean before being ‘recycled’ so I suppose I can’t complain too much) (except that I do anyway because, well, what fun would self-inflicted back pain be without the vigorous complaining?!)

5. Lie on couch and complain vigorously about sore back

6. Vehemently and indignantly reply, “Don’t you know we have a DROUGHT ON RIGHT NOW?!?!” when loved ones hesitantly bring up the possibility of NOT hauling 3,000 buckets of water out to the garden each day because seriously – who does that?!

But the truth is, I don’t collect nearly the water I could because yeah. My back hurts and it’s late and I don’t feel like it and then somebody pulls the plug in the tub because I didn’t get around to it and I would get all huffy except that I’m secretly relieved because gah, hauling that bucket is a pain in the neck. And back. And elbow. And shoulder. And, well, everywhere else, too.

While continuing to plan out the Greatly Expanded Garden Project, though, I recognize that I need to do better, sore back, bad attitude and laziness notwithstanding. California is (as usual) in a drought year. While we don’t have water rationing here in town (yet), it is my duty both civic and frugal to reduce how much water I suck out of the potable water system as much as possible, as soon as possible.

Because I am a tool user, I started thinking about better ways to do this.

The first thing that popped into my mind was something with, you know, wheels. Like, say, a smallish garbage can with wheels on it. I could put a few gallons at a time into that (because filling it all the way up would be too heavy for me to move, and would probably snap the wheels off the tote [which is not designed to carry water, but rather garbage that will be mostly loosely-packed things like packaging], which would then pour $DEITY only knows how many gallons of gray water all of my carpet), and roll it out to the garden…and then I’d get the water out again with, uh, well, let’s see, how do people do that gas-siphoning thing, maybe that would work…

And then I go wildly off-topic because I start thinking about gray water getting in my mouth and trying to decide which would be worse, gasoline or gray water. Not from a ‘taste’ perspective but a ‘germy’ one…let’s put it this way, I consider the gray water from Captain Adventure’s bath to be a two-hit wonder, kind of an all-in-one water recycling and composting adventure.

That boy loses about five pounds in dirt with every bath, I swear he does.

So today I started looking at the possibilities. Rubbermaid makes some nice things, and oh! Look at this rain barrel thing, yes, that might work, I could rig up a high-to-low flow thing from the wheeled totes to a rain barrel with a spigot that would then allow me to water things, although I might need a pump which would mean I’d need to actually filter the gray water which, you know, sigh, now we’re getting into the complicated and expensive stuff which is largely why my methods to date have been a bucket. Oh! And a small plastic cup I use to get those last bits into the bucket.

I know. My technological advances are stunning. A bucket! And a plastic cup! Whoa! Somebody call NASA, this girl is smokin’…

BUT. As I was clicking through sites with $6,999 ‘whole garden rain and gray water collection Solutions’, I found…oooooooh, I found… the EnviroWaterBoy .

And then I went like this: “Ooooooooh! Aaaaaaaaaaah!!”

And then I spent $500 in my head. $400 for the 24-gallon unit, and $100 for the solar charges because people?

We have sun.

Lots and lots and lots of it.

Please to note that it has wheels. And a sprayer. And no plumbing skills required, can I get a ‘hallelujah’? Just dump the suction hose into the bathtub and it goes “slurp! slurp! slurp!” and sucks the water in, and then you wheel it out to your garden and it goes “sssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh!” with the sprayer and you can spray the water where you want it to go and I waaaaaaaannnniiiiiittttttttt.

And thus do I realize where my children get their Gimmies from, because I sound just like a five year old in the toy aisle of Target. Please? PLEASE?! PRETTY PLEASE! But I WANT IT! I WANT IT I WANT IT I WANT IT GIMMIE! GIMMIE! GIMMIE!! NO! NOoooOOooooOoooOOOOOOO, we CAN’T LEAVE.

I.
WANT.
IT!!!!!!!!!!!

Obviously, I don’t get one. My petty cash at the moment is a whopping, uh, well…I think I’ve got twenty bucks in my wallet. We have had six solid months with one big ticket item or another hitting us for anywhere from $400 to $900.

I need a few months (or years) with minimal smack-downs to get us back on track.

I don’t get any $400 gray water solutions. {quivering pouty lip}

Oh well. The world is full of such things. I’d also like a $30,000 solar system on my roof and six more drum composters. I’d also like a well. And to annex a couple acres from the ranches behind me (think they’d notice if I just sort of pushed my fence out? Maybe only a few feet at a time?).

Still.

I’d really like one.

Eventually.

…but for now, I’ll settle for something water tight, with wheels…

…hmm, you know, actually? Maybe a wheeled cooler…one with a valve to let the melted ice out…wheel it out where you want it, open the valve, and walk away while it drains…hey, that has possibilities! Also, I think I already have one out in the shed...

It takes less planning to go to the moon…

…than it does to get four kids back in school.

I am hating this week. Hating. It. All the Denizens start school next week, which means that this week is the week when I start getting enormous packages in the mail – or worse, tiny postcards telling me to come on down anytime between 8:15 and 8:45 / 11:15 – 2:45 Monday, Tuesday or Friday (except every other Friday, which is Furlough Friday) (why no, we can’t put actual dates on that…it’s just every other Friday and you get to find out whether this is an ‘on’ or ‘off’ date by showing up and finding the doors locked! Or, not!), or, 9:00 – 11:27 Wednesday, OR, failing that, 1:29 – 3:18 Thursday, to pick up the packet.

Pickup truck with 8’ bed recommended.

Each of these packets contains approximately 62,000 pages I am supposed to fill out with the same information. Name, age, address, phone number, emergency contact information, mom and dad name, phone numbers, employer, blah blah blah . {flip to next page} Name, age, address, phone number, emergency contact information, mom and dad name, phone numbers, employer, blah blah blah.

Huh? Didn’t I just give you all that?!

Now, it may occur to one that this is stupid and also lame and that one is not going to enable the Crazy here by filling out the exact.same.information fifty-seven times.

One had better not act on this thought. One had better dutifully fill out each and every single line. Do not write “please see above” or “same” or “for the love of Mike, why don’t you people just look at the previous page?!?!”

They will send you a whole new packet OH YES THEY WILL!, telling you that the previous paperwork was not filled out appropriately and thus was discarded and/or lost.

It’s like they’re punishing you for attempting to shirk your work by making you write, “I will not attempt to apply common sense to the school enrollment process” six hundred times after school. Seriously.

Did they see a dentist? Dentist needs to fill out this form. Vaccination report, with scary flyers about how many kids in our district contracted Vampirism last year due to LACK OF VACCINATIONS ooooooooooh, SCARY!!! Pediatrician needs to sign here, here aaaaaand here. (The pediatrician’s office charges me $15 to do this, by the way. For each child. Sigh.)

And I have to do this for each Denizen. PLUS, of course, Captain Adventure has all kinds of extra fun and excitement. Copies of his IEP. Bus schedules. Last second teacher changes. Asking me fifteen times if he is potty trained yet - like the answer is going to change if they just keep asking. (If. Only.)

I guess my problem is that know that it is possible to put together an online form where I could go input all this information, for all the Denizens, one (1) time and have it populate out to all those flip-flangin’ forms for them to print at their convenience (and far more legibly, I might add) (but without my occasional artistic doodles, which would of course be a sad, sad loss to the art world).

But think of all the other things they wouldn’t have to put up with…like having to figure out what I mean when I say that the language my children speak at home is “American.”

Oh, it may have its roots in English, but the language we speak in these here parts ain’t no proper English no more. (Ugh…OK, that actually kind of hurt me to type…casual relationship with Proper English and all, ‘ain’t no…no more…’? Owies…)

Anywho, and be that as it may, I suspect the middle school will understand perfectly when I say the language Eldest most often uses at home is Long Suffering Sigh, with a secondary languages of Eye Roll, Shrug, Grunt…a.k.a., American Pre-Teen.

And then we have the added fun of the Swine Flu thing…oh wait, I forgot to say that properly…the SWINE FLU AAH! H1! AAH! N1! AAH! SWINE FLU! AAAAAAAAAAH! thing.

If I see one more flyer about the seriousness of how seriously they are taking the serious business of serious sanitation and serious planning for the serious probable school closures, I may just puke.

Oh wait. Better not. They’ll think I have SWINE FLU AAH! H1! AAH! N1! AAH! SWINE FLU! AAAAAAAAAAH! and then the Den of Chaos will be under quarantine for sixty months or something.

I appreciate the head’s up that the school may be closed without warning for three weeks or more if a “serious” outbreak occurs. But seriously – you can stop now. Anybody who hasn’t gotten the memo at this point isn’t going to get it because they live in a cave.

Meanwhile, in spite of having sixteen pickup truck loads of paper stacked up all over the house, do you know what I do not have?

Room assignments. Classroom supply lists. No way of knowing which kids will need binders and paper, and which will need notebooks, and which will need composition books. #2 pencils? Dry erase boards? Pens? No pens? Colored pencils? Crayons?

I don’t even know what time Eldest will be starting in the morning. Or getting out. She’s in GATE, which may (or may not) have a different schedule than the regular student body, which apparently may also vary depending on each individual’s class schedule.

I also do not know what time Captain Adventure's bus is going to swing by to pick him up Monday morning. Can they give me a clue, a hint, a sign, A TIME?!

Oh no. The driver hasn't done her "trial run" yet. She has until Friday.

You know, the last weekday before he goes back to school...?

Sigh. They just love giving my poor, drab little life a few splashes of color. Isn't that sweet of them? (At least I was able to confirm that he IS on the list and WILL be picked up, unlike summer session where they sorta-kinda FORGOT him...)

Still. You know. Only six more days to…

Money Monday: August 3, 2009

A couple weeks ago when I posted about my crazy self-sufficiency idea, Pipney Jane mentioned The Good Life . I hadn’t thought about that show in years, but I used to love it (although they called it The Good Neighbors here in the States).

For those who haven’t seen it (and I imagine that’s a lot of people, more’s the pity), the basic story is that these two people decide to drop out of the rat race and go to a life of nearly complete self-sufficiency. The catalyst for them is husband Tom turning 40 and starting to ask himself why he feels so…well, just…well. If he could just figure out what It is that bothers him, he’s sure they could do something about It.

After yet another frustrating / unfulfilling day at work, he comes home…and comes to this (the first five minute are the crucial ones):



I find it completely hysterical that, having forgotten all about this show, I’m in just about exactly the same place as Tom – forty, sick of the cycle and willing to work ten times harder at farming my “homestead” rather than face reentering the commute-work-commute-sleep-commute-work-commute-sleep cycle…especially since doing so would mean barely breaking even after paying for commute and childcare costs.

NOW. When it comes to what I’m planning to do around the old Den of Chaos – it’s nothing like The Good Life. What I’m after is not complete self-sufficiency. What I’m after is more of a self-sustainability concept.

I don’t expect to break us free of a paycheck. We still have a mortgage, and car loan, and credit card bills to pay. We have four kids who are going to get nothing but more expensive as time goes by.

I don’t expect to be completely free of the supermarket, either. We don’t have that kind of space, for one thing. Wheat alone would be a deal-breaker for us – we’d need double the space we have to grow enough to keep us in flour. For another thing, the definitive word from the city on keeping livestock is this: NO. The line between ‘suburban housing’ and ‘ranchland’ is literally my back fence, and I’m on the wrong side of it.

Which is probably actually a good thing. I’m flying solo on this deal and probably already biting off way more than I can chew just with the garden, harp and hand crafts. And being the primary caregiver for the Denizens. As well as being in charge of all maintenance of Den and Denizens.

Yeah…I think chickens wouldn’t stand a chance for survival around here…

I also don’t expect that I’m going to earn an actual paycheck-as-such doing this. This is not a replacement of money…it’s replacing the things we use that money to buy, by either growing or manufacturing them ourselves, or by selling things we can make to buy the things we can’t.

This obviously isn’t something that’s an instant-start kind of deal. Oh, the work can start immediately, sure – but the benefits are months away. A supermarket carrot can be had in under thirty minutes, even given the time it takes to find your keys…a carrot you grow in the backyard can take three months from seed to soup.

And in terms of having any actual income, either from selling the excess from the garden or from me peddling my handcrafts at fairs, well. That’s going to take a while, too, and again – it’s not going to be oodles and gobs of money. Twenty bucks here, a hundred there…hardly enough to keep four kids in jeans and tennis shoes.

But over time, as we settle in and figure out what works and what doesn’t, the ultimate goal would be to have the household endeavors provide for the household needs. Instead of using the paycheck to buy things for immediate consumption, we either make it ourselves or dip into the petty cash we’ve acquired by selling our excess to others.

I can lift up to $20,000 of post-tax spending off my husband’s paycheck, if I could provide all the food, clothing, entertainment and “etcetera” we currently just buy because that’s how it’s done, you just BUY it.

It’ll be work and plenty of it – but hey. Life is work. Most of us work in offices wishing we were somewhere else doing something else all day; I’ll be working in my backyard all morning wishing that seeds planted themselves, coming inside to make some soap for the next craft fair, or can some jelly or get some corn in the freezer.

And 2:00 is going to come around brutally fast, each and every single day. I’ve got four kids with four different schedules at three schools this year – that pickup ordeal is going to put gray hairs on my head, I just know it is!

I’m sure I’ll get sick of it sometimes, and wish I’d never started this twelve-layer Crazy Cake. I’m sure I’ll do something stupid and watch an entire crop die, or spend entire days watching the fish not bite my bait. I’ll go to craft fairs and not sell a thing, or find myself caught up in stupid politics at the farmer’s market.

Life is like that. Whatever we do to keep body and soul together is full of things that are fun, and things that aren’t fun at all. I tend to make my own fun wherever I am, much to the annoyance of more adult people who think offices are not playgrounds. (Two words for such people: Poopy. Head.)

But I think I’d like to take a page from The Good Neighbors for a little while, and work at the business of life for a while.

Knowing me, I’ll have a pretty good time doing it…and maybe, just maybe, the Denizens will learn a little something about where jelly actually comes from, and how much work goes into a jar of peanut butter…

The things I start wondering, when the sleep aid is finally kicking in

I wonder…if there will ever be a time when I have fewer than three knitting projects on needles at the same time. Or fewer than three hobbies in simultaneous play, for that matter.

I wonder, if I actually did force my Denizens to eat only what is in season or what was preserved while in season…would they appreciate strawberry jelly more? Because dudes, the strawberry season is about over and I did not lay down even one (1) pathetic half-pint of the stuff. They'd be out in a month and whining for eight more before the very first berries of the season appeared.

I wonder if my mother is lying to me when she says, “No, you were just as awful about banging on the door every eight seconds when you were little,” because in my memory, my brother and I would never, no NEVER, have been the constant source of distraction, noise and request-for-less-of-same-ignoring that my Denizens are on a daily basis.

…of course, when it comes to my Denizens, the problem isn’t so much that they individually are so awful – it’s the sheer volume that gets to me. Individually, they’ll go away for a good hour when told to scram!, but there’s always three more with new crises to announce.

I wonder if there will ever be a time when I do not have laundry piled up on my grandmother’s beautiful, too-fancy-for-this-house dining room table. I swear, I put the stuff away…and yet the next morning holy crap!, there’s more!!

Speaking of laundry, I wonder if Captain Adventure will ever be potty trained.

Also, I wonder why $DEITY has to be so cotton-pickin’ mean. “Well,” I said, long long ago. “Whatever we decide to do, I have to have the last kid before I turn 38. Because I don’t wanna be forty and still! changing! diapers!!”

Ha. Ha. Ha. OK, yeah, good one, $DEITY…now please, the kid just turned five, can we have some potty usage from him now?

Speaking of potty, I wonder which of those girls is the one who keeps using the thing and not flushing when she really. should.

Also, I wonder which one of them still keeps using the cardboard from the empty toilet roll, even though it has ended in disaster every.single.time. Besides, that just can’t feel good or work properly, you know? Seriously.

I wonder how it is that I read faster than most people I know, and still can’t keep up with my bloglines…and yet if I’m shirking my duties, I find myself constantly hitting “refresh” hoping someone has said something…

I wonder if I’ll get any time to work on all those simultaneous projects next week. It would be nice to reclaim some of those needles. Oh, and having finished socks and vests and sweaters and scarves and gloves and…well, you get the idea…

I wonder if I’ll get one last chance at that strawberry jam this year…one last farmer’s market booth with one last flat of ripe but not rotting berries for me…a lady at WalMart (grrrr…WalMart, how I despise ye…and yet, the low-low prices on Mason jars, they summon me to you…) watched me loading another dozen pint jars into my cart and asked, “Oh, are you doing some canning? That’s practically a lost art…”

And I thought to myself that my whole life sometimes feels like something out of the annals of Lost Arts. I play a Celtic harp and tell the old myths and stories to my children, with great seriousness, as though I am handing down great and sacred Truths that must be preserved. I bake our bread from scratch and haven’t bought potato chips in I don’t know how long. I spin and knit and am slowly learning to weave (although at the moment I’m playing with barely-warped projects because of the difficulty involved in getting Uninterrupted Time around here – I don’t know how vital it really is yet, but the books all say things like “turn off your phone and ensure that you will not be disturbed until you have finished dressing the loom” and as a novice, I don’t care to argue with them and say, “Naw, I’ll be able to figure out where all those ends go, easy!!”).

I mean, thank Dog we have cable and the Internet. We’re at least that normal…although we still don’t have a Wii or a Playstation or a Game Cube or, uh, whatever-all else has come along since the Atari.

I wonder if I’ll actually get a full night’s sleep tonight. Just once, it would be nice.

But it can’t happen if I’m sitting here.

Good night, Blog-o-Sphere. Good night, sleep tight, sweet dreams…I’ll see you in the morning.

Good night.

Most Excellent Coolest Thing EVAH

OK, SO! This last weekend, the husband and I went down to Laguna Beach while my parents watched the Denizens. My mother-in-law, see, had gotten tickets for us and four of the sibs-in-law for the Pageant of the Masters down there.

It was very cool. But it wasn’t the most excellent coolest thing EVAH.

The next day, we puttered down the Pacific Coast Highway looking for someplace that wasn’t crazy swarming with people.

I don’t know why we thought we’d find such a place. But eventually, we ended up at Mission Bay in San Diego. Which was still with the crazy and the swarming of people, but we found a parking space and furthermore, you know, next stop Mexico!, so we figured we’d better just, you know, stop.

Now, let me remind y’all that I am from Northern California. In my mind, beaches are on the cold side, usually more rocks than sand and loaded with sharp shells, broken glass and other flotsam and jetsam, and did I mention the cold part? You dip your toes in the water, you might just lose a couple of them to frostbite.

I know soft, sandy beaches with warm, inviting water exist. I’ve been to Hawaii, twice, and greatly enjoyed being able to just frolic right on out into the water, la la la, and start swimming.

But in my home state, I associate “swimming in the ocean” with wetsuits, or a verrrrrrrry long adjustment period before you get waist-high and decide that discretion is the better part of valor.

So when we took off our shoes and started walking through the sand, I was already tripping out because it was so soft and warm. It was like walking on hugs.

And then we swerved down to where the waves were rippling over the sand and when they hit my feet I jumped twenty feet straight up in the air and came down screaming because ohmygah, the water was so warm!

Thoroughly freaked out by this most un-California like behavior from a beach, it took me a good long while to be talked into going swimming. Almost thirty seconds, in fact.

So I’m out there body surfing and having a grand old time with some pretty intense waves, yippee! Ha ha! I taunt you, Death By Drowning!, it’s only been twenty{mumble} years since last I went body surfing!...when something very large and gray suddenly shot out of the next wave over, arced in a graceful half-moon over the water, splashed down, curled around itself, and popped its head out of the water about ten feet away from me and grinned at me.

I swallowed about fifty gallons of salt water, squealed like a girl and backpedaled like an idiot.

It’s funny how your brain reacts to something like that – it was like a series of clicks.

Close! Large! Close! Fish! Close! Teeth! CLOSE!!!! TEEEEEEEETH!!!!!

…hey…dolphin!…

If I’d been a little braver (did I mention the teeth?), I probably could have swum to them in a few strokes. There were three of them, and they wanted to play; I was pretty slow and boring, so they moved on before I could work up the courage to approach them.

They circled the surfers (who were a few swells further out from me) like puppies. One of them reached over to stroke them as they went by – the first dolphin flinched away, the second nuzzled closer and turned its belly up for a rub.

Then another surfer took off, and all three of them shot after him. They danced around his board (which must have been damned distracting), weaving through the waves. Two of them liked to lace their jumps over each other; the third was a big clown, always flipping upside down to make a big splash when he hit the water.

When the surfer inevitably went down they kept on going, leaping further and further away from the shore as they went.

We all stood there, dumbstruck, and watched them go.

It was one of those big-time WOW moments. They are some seriously beautiful animals, and to see them that up-close was…not something I ever thought I’d experience.

Not without shelling out loads of cash, anyway.

Life is funny that way, you know? You can spend thousands of dollars for a Perfect Vacation that leaves you with nothing but a pile of bills – or be on a Hotwire-hotel-and-hot-dog-dinner kind of vacation and be handed something like that.

What a world we live in, huh?

What an awesome, awesome world!

Where my treasure lies

I got royally pissed yesterday. SEE, I was trying to put some polish on my oh-so-wise words about in-season produce and various ways in which it can be stored for future consumption, thus saving tens of THOUSANDS of pennies and possibly the ENTIRE WORLD because a Mason jar can be reused indefinitely, whereas cans of corn from the supermarket must be manufactured and then (hopefully) recycled into something new, and blah blah blah…and my Denizens were making me a Crazy Person.

Every eight seconds, it was something. She’s touching me. She’s not touching me. Yeah, well, it IS a problem, we’re supposed to be playing TAG! She won’t give me the DS. She won’t let me have my latch hook kit back. Well yes, technically, I traded it for the Mickey Mouse cross-stitch kit, but it turns out that cross-stitch is hard and I don’t wanna do it anymore. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I don’t want water or milk, I want Kool-Aid. Or lemonade. Or something-else-aid. Whatcha doooooooin’, mommy? Mommy? MOMMY? WHATCHA DOOOOOIN’?!?!

I feel as though I’m just waiting for summer to be over, so I can get back to my life, you know? Waiting for school to start, so that I can get back to business.

Boo Bug bounced into the room and started nattering on about something inane as I was trying to figure out which box was supposed to be checked on the bus form for Captain Adventure, and I snapped at her.

Which is a lot like kicking a puppy.

And then, as I was hugging her and trying to explain that gee whiz, I’m only a person and you guys have been pick-pick-picking at me not just all day today, but all day every day for the last two months, it struck me: Isn’t it ironic that I’m annoyed with the children for keeping me from taking care of the business that is all about ensuring that those same children are kept in food, shelter and clothing?

They are, after all, kind of the point.

They are the things I wanted most. They’re my hope, and my reward. The greatest gift I’ve ever gotten, and my greatest gift to the world – my masterpieces. They are my sacred duty, my delight, my pride and joy.

Ironic that they can irritate the skin right off my nose, huh?

Parenthood is full of these kinds of minefields. There’s the dewy-eyed expectations we build up from the time we’re young, and then the harsher realities.

Sure, there’s still all the unicorns and rainbows and giggles and cuddles and lovey-dovey blah blah blah, but there’s also retching noises from the top frickin’ bunk at 2:15 in the morning. There’s an autistic five year old bellowing, “MOMMMMMY!” while you’re on the phone with a potential client – now a lost client. There’s a constant stream of messes, and there comes a point where you swear you’re going to just belt the next kid who says, “Sorry, Mommy!” – because seriously, I’d like a lot less sorry and a whack more not offending in the first place.

But they’re still my pride and joy. I’d rather live my life in second-hand jeans eating homegrown meals with them than, well, anything else without them.

They’re my real treasure. I’m already the richest woman I know, and no matter what may happen financially, those riches are mine for keeps.

Now, if I can just remember that when I’m back in the trenches trying to get Something Important done, and then somebody comes skidding in with their hair on fire and a sibling or two hot on their heels and starts their side of the tale with the phrase, “I wasn’t even doing anything!”

Tough as room temperature butter

Did Boo Bug and Danger Mouse want to go blackberrying yesterday? {SQUEAL!!!}

It was possibly the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them in the last few days!! So we put on jeans and we rigged some buckets (Costco-sized margarine tubs with rug-wool yarn handles) and we leaped into the Homer the Odyssey and drove the 3.7 miles (with them demanding if we were there yet every fifteen seconds) to one of many tributaries of the Sacramento River – the nearest spot where there were blackberry bushes meeting my requirements that they be not too close to the water nor too close to the road.

Talking a mile a second, giggling, swinging their buckets, my two assistants jumped out of the minivan and charged at the bushes. They were going to fill both buckets all the way up! And mommy’s plastic shopping bag, too!! They were going to pick every single blackberry on the whole river, THAT’S RIGHT!!!!

Two seconds later, they were scrambling up the hood of the van, squealing like, well, little girls.

“What?!” I shrieked, expecting them to scream, “snake!” or “rat!” or “hedge fund manager!”

“Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod,” Danger Mouse panted.

“Mommmmmmeeeeeeee…” Boo Bug whimpered.

“WHAT?!”

“There’s…{giggle}…mommy? {giggle-giggle} there’s a…ohmygod…{giggle}…”

“Spit. It. OUT.” At this point, I’m expecting Jimmy Hoffa’s zombie corpse to rise from the delta muck and shamble toward me menacingly.

“It’s a…spider!” Danger Mouse finally erupted. Boo Bug let out a long, low moan of pure terror.

“A…spider…”

“A BIG spider!” Danger Mouse asserted, pointing a quivering finger at the fourteen mile long by twelve mile high by sixty mile deep mass of blackberry bramble.

Sigh. Yeah. Like I’m going to be able to see a little bitty spider she’s pointing at from twenty feet away in that monster!

“Now listen, girls,” I began sternly as I approached the bushes. “There are going to be spiders out here. That’s par for the course. This is the delta, they grow pretty big out here, so you just have to watch where you put your SWEET MOTHER OF MERCY!!!”

The first spider was about the size of my thumb, and was sunning itself on a web that stretched a good two feet across the brambles. Below it was a slightly smaller one on a bigger web, and above it was, hmm, their grand-pappy I suspect because dog-dang, the sucker was huge. If I’d put it on my palm (which was so not going to happen), it’s legs would have gone from my wrist to the middle knuckle of my fingers. It’s body was the size of the palm beneath the thumb the other spider was the same size as.

Massive. And very much not alone. They were everywhere, webs glistening in the sun, stretched out like tourists soaking up the rays and waiting for some hapless bug or other to wander into the web.

Eventually, the girls got over their initial quivers and approached the bushes again. They squealed with horror as I reached in to pluck berry after berry from the vine.

“Watch out for spiders!” Boo Bug would scream, every.single.time. Even though believe you me, I was watching out for spiders.

And if a spider happened to scuttle out or start jumping up and down on its web because it thought my actions meant dinner was forthcoming, she would scream even louder and run back to the van.

Sigh. Yeah. I breed ‘em tough, people.

Danger Mouse hovered at my elbow and coached me. “Ooooh, mommy, there’s a whole bunch of big ones! You should get them…no, no, there! Right there!”

“Why don’t you get them? I’ve got plenty right here!”

“Welllllllllll…I just think you should get them…”

Ten minutes after we had parked, Danger Mouse began complaining that she was too hot. Hot. So hot. Toooooooo hot. Could she go sit in the van? It’s even hotter in the van right now, babe. Oh. Well, maybe you could turn it on, and then the air conditioning would keep it cold?

Speaking of cold, ice cream should would be good, huh? Huh, mommy? Wouldn’t ice cream be good right now? Iiiiiiiice creeeeeeam…oh! Hey! Here’s an idea! How about we stop picking blackberries (Excuse me, ‘we’? What’s this we, huh? I do believe I’m the only one with stained fingers and bramble-scratched arms around here…), and go to Baskin Robbins instead…?

A few moments after that, a bird ran through the bushes. Twin shrieks of panic went up, two pairs of feet sent up clouds of dust, and a pair of little girls were huddled on the hood of the van again.

“Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod…!” Danger Mouse chanted.

“Mommmmmmeeeee…dere’s somefink in dere…{whimper}…” Boo Bug was about to faint. Somefink! Was! In! Dere! Possibly a flesh-eating MUMMY or a purple-breasted BRAIN-SUCKER!!!!!

“It’s. A. BIRD! Geeeeeeez…!”

Five minutes later: I need to go potty.

Thirty seconds after that: So…thirsty…must…have…water…no, not that kind, the REALLY COLD kind…you know…from…{dramatic gasp indicating death from dehydration is nigh}…Starbucks…

A split second after this: OH! Are we going to Starbuck now?!

Thirty seconds after that: Can we go swimming in the river? We don’t mind getting our clothes wet…

Two seconds after that: SCREAM! SCREAM! SCREAM! THERE’S A SNAKE IN THE WATER! OHMYGOD OHMYGOD OHMYGOD SNAKE SNAKE SNAKE!!!!!!! (It was a branch. An admittedly snake-y looking one, but it. was. a. BRANCH!

But the final straw came when the same duet of ear-splitting shrieks went up over an…wait for it…orange.

Yes. As in, the common orange-colored citrus fruit. Someone had dropped an orange by the side of the road, where nature had run its course (probably with a little help from a passing vehicle) and the orange had splattered all over the place.

Scream-SHRIEK! OHMYGOD, Mommy, it’s an ORANGE, and it looks like its BRAINS are all SPLATTERED!!!!

Ewwwwwwww, orange-brains! GROSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!

Less than half an hour after we pulled in to start picking, we were packing it in. I just couldn’t take the constant screaming, the cries of panic, the fear that Boo Bug was going to lose her mind and run straight into the road because ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod, a butterfly almost landed on her!!!!!

My youngest daughter is terrified of pretty much all bugs, regardless of their friendliness. The butterflies most of us find charming and sweet, she thinks of a terrifying, irrational, fast-moving insect that is probably intent on biting her somehow.

They were looking into their buckets at our haul as we marched the few feet back to the minivan, discussing how many we’d gotten and exhibiting the magical ability most kids have to completely forget Plan A ever existed. Fill up the buckets all the way? Both of them? Pffffft, nobody ever said anything about that. There’s gotta be a hundred pounds of berries in these two (barely a quarter filled) buckets.

And then, another scream.

And a thud.

And a whole bunch of plink-plonk-plink-plink-plink…plonk!...plonk…

“Um…mommy? Uh…look at what Boo Bug, erm, did…”

Half our haul was hurtled into the water because there was an ant on one of the berries.

Oh. My. God. Oh. My. God. Oh. My. GOD.

An ant. Oh. Horrors. Save us, somebody, please, save us.

Oh Mighty River, take the blackberries, just spare our lives from the Dreaded Little Black Ants, which come to eat our soooooooouls…

I took a few deep breaths.

I reminded myself that they were awfully cute, when they were babies.

And that California law takes a very dim view of people who throw their seven year olds into a river with instructions to get back every last berry, missy.

I then took the surviving bucket away and set it on the passenger seat beside me – the last thing I would need is a bucket of blackberries hurtled at the back of my head at 50 miles an hour on a levee road because OH MY GOD AN ANT.

We drove, calmly, back to the Den. I washed the ants off the remaining blackberries (discretely), and set them aside.

Barely four cups of beautiful berries. Enough for a pie, anyway, but pretty far short of the gallon I was hoping to get yesterday.

Oh well. There’s still a fair amount of season left for them.

Next time, I’ll go alone.

…geez Louise, what a pair of pansies…

Money Monday: July 20, 2009

I’ve got about nothing right now…mostly because I’ve got an idea trying to happen, and I’m just not sure whether it’s brilliant or laughably childish.

It has to do with increasing our self-sufficiency. We have a larger-than-average chunk of land under the Den, and frankly almost all of it is just kind of…sitting there. We have a vast stretch of dead-zone that used to be the back lawn, we have bare patches stretching along both the front and back sides, a massive bare patch in the front and a weed patch under the front window.

We’ve been looking at these areas and saying, “We ought to garden in those. We could be growing an awful lot of the food we need.”

Then a couple weeks ago, I was having an idle conversation with my parents. My mom said something about how much hard work was involved in growing your own food, and I pointed out that really, there wasn’t an easy way around that whole hard-work thing.

I could either spend three hours a day out in my backyard growing it, or I could spend twelve hours a day commuting and working in an office to pay someone else to grow it for me, right?

And frankly, well, I’d rather take the three hours of admittedly physically demanding work. I don’t mind the dirt and frankly I find it kind of therapeutic – and I don’t think it’s doing my back any harm, either. Sure it gets sore by the end of the day, but at the same time I feel better, overall.

Exercise in the great outdoors is funny that way. Even if it does kick up the aching joints, the whole body rather appreciates it.

ANYWAY. We’ve been looking at growing only what we could actually eat, but more and more I’ve found myself wondering just how far I could take things around here.

Could I grow enough to not only feed us, but to stock one of the quarter-sized booths at a farmer’s market? And could I make enough there to not only pay for the costs of raising the food, but to perhaps buy what we can’t grow for ourselves? Eggs for spinach, beef for tomatoes? (Heh, OK, and here’s some proof that I’m way too easily amused: I’ll trade you this beefsteak for that beef steak…HAHAHAHAHAHA! Get it?! Because...beefsteak is a kind of tomato, but it's also...ahem...nevermind...)

But seriously…could I micro-farm enough to actually feed this family?

And hey, how about this: Could I build up enough of a business selling my handcrafts to turn around and pay for the regular street clothes we wear – especially given that I buy about 80% of it second-hand anyway? Maybe I could work up to a full booth at the market, offering everything from zucchini (please, buy the zucchini…GEEZ, the Giving Tree has nothing on our zucchini bushes…I’ve taken to sneaking them onto the neighbor’s porches at night, I’ve grated them into bread and baked them in casseroles and I think my skin is starting to turn green PLEASE, is the zucchini-season over YET?!) (…but I can’t dig them out and plant something else because, gosh, they’re so giving…) to hand-woven kitchen towels, jars of jelly to bars of soap.

When I look at what I do with my “spare” time right now, holy smokes, I’m an old-fashioned general store! And I’m pretty darned good at it (if I do say so myself).

I think I could make things people would want to buy.

And I think I’d have fun doing it.

And if the point wasn’t to replace a paycheck but purely and only to provide food and clothing for the family…if I weren’t worrying about how much I was making an hour or how much more I could be making if things were different…it might even stay fun.

See what I mean? It’s either the lamest duck I’ve ever hatched, or it’s the best idea I’ve ever had.

And I honesty don’t know which it is.

So instead of worrying about it any more, I’m going to load up the Denizens and we’re going to go blackberry-ing.

A couple hours of play-work, and I should be able to lay down six full pints of seedless blackberry jam, and fill up our freezer with plenty of Summer for when this season inevitably ends.

Wait, was that blur a whole WEEK going by?!

I’ve had another one of those weeks. Almost every day had one “little” thing tucked into it that somehow managed to cause the entire 24-hour period to just…vanish.

Took Boo Bug for her well-child checkup. Poof! There went Monday! Trying to put in an order for some new merchandise took the lion’s share of Tuesday. Wednesday I managed to get a few items listed on Etsy.

Then there was the comedy of errors that was getting Homer the Odyssey’s air conditioning fixed…extremely long story short, it appears a rock or some other road hazard managed to puncture the compressor. As it turns out, getting this repaired for under $800 is pretty much impossible around here; and in an extremely rare turn of events, the dealer was actually the cheapest route.

I know. Next we’ll have dogs and cats living together, and possibly a man may become pregnant. Who knows? If a dealership service department can be offering the lowest price on anything, well, anything is possible out there…

That took up half of Thursday and about all of today.

I feel as though I’ve been running a marathon this week, and yet at the same time I feel as though I’ve got a net-zero on forward movement.

It’s weeks like these that cast a pleasant glow around the idea of simply cutting out of the Civilized World and living on some kind of self-sufficient farm in the middle of ten acres. No having to worry about appointments or meetings or deadlines. Things have to be done, sure, but not necessarily by no later than 4:00 this afternoon or else!

But then again, in that scenario, I would not have found a beautiful pair of earrings jammed improbably under the front passenger seat, which matched the shirt I was wearing perfectly.

Because I’m pretty sure that if I were living an entirely money-free self-sufficient life on a farm somewhere, I wouldn’t have bought the earrings in the first place. Or had a minivan to lose them in. And I certainly wouldn’t have been clearing it out before taking it to the shop so nobody would know the shameful truth of just how filthy and cluttered that vehicle can get, given a few days of inattention or one average road trip with all four Denizens aboard.

So, uh, the suburban Californian housewife lifestyle...it, um, well. It has that going for it, right?

...yeah, no, um...I really don't know what "that" is, exactly...

Dear Beloved State of Mine

In response to yours of July 9 and 13, 2009 reminding me – twice – that you would like me to send in my use tax by no later than July 31, 2009 via your convenient, online service, please find enclosed my payment.

Sort of.

Sincerely,
MotherOfChaos, occasional yarn dyer