Great Googa Mooga

Who knew I would be so tired? I love love love the new job. I mean really really love it. The environment is awesome and the people are nice. And yet, I'm worn out. The problem seems to be not getting to bed early enough. Go figure.

We've been second shift people for many, many years now. It works for us. With the flexibility of homeschooling and me being a stay at home mom, things ran smoothly. Of course we weren't trying to run a farmstead all that time, either.

So, a quick update before I fall into bed to be awoken...or is it wakened?..I should know but my brain is already out for the night...by not one, but two shrieking alarm clocks. (I always overdo it.)

Homeschooling is running a lot more smoothly than I expected; Little Sis enjoys the challenge of getting more done on her own.

Big Sis has been a huge help, both in helping out with Little Sis' schoolwork and the housework, on top of working at her own job.

Hubby is wonderful. I can't even say how wonderful. He's keeping me stocked with firewood on top of the zillion other things he has to do before trudging off to work.

As for me, after work I run home and then run errands. It seems I've been running all week. Thankfully, by the end of the week we should be in some sort of routine. I've also been working on the garden. I'm preparing the potato and onion beds for the seed I just bought - 50 lbs potato and 10 lbs onion (red and yellow).

The real downer to my new job is that I miss my DH. We are like two ships passing in the night - to use a really tacky, over-used metaphor. [ETA: Simile!! I meant simile!! That's what I get for posting when suffering a lack of sleep.] For a lot of people, this would put a huge strain on their marriage. I don't think that will be an issue for us. My job is seasonal, for starters, but the real reason is that Dh and I go way beyond the average relationship. And since I'm sure he's checking to see if I've updated the blog: a note to my beloved - Once I had the rarest...

And now...I'm off to bed!!

Grocery shopping..egads!

We have just about run out of the stuff we put up from last year's garden. I had to go to the grocery store. Little Sis was so funny, gasping in shock when I actually bought vegetables.

This year's goal is to put up enough garden produce to last from harvest this year to harvest next year. We were oh-so-close-but-not-quite with what we put up last fall.

Somewhere I have a list of what and how much I planted last year. I plan to at least double everything, and maybe triple the green beans.

Oh, and guess who is now gainfully employed? Yep! I gots da job! It's a great job at a great place - working outside, getting dirty, and having fun. (That's all I'm gonna say out of respect for my employer, who, by the way, is awesome!)

Now the challenges: to get the garden in, to keep decent meals on the table, keep up with homeschooling, and get enough rest. Oh yeah, and laundry...lots of laundry.

I'm open for some new crockpot recipes. Anyone??

Lehman's...

...is amazing!

And who knew...we are less than an hour from the store!! I had no idea we were so close!! Ack! I can feel the envy!!

We were there yesterday for at least four hours, including lunch. The place is so much bigger, and modern, than I had expected. I guess I was thinking small country store. Wow, was I ever wrong! I thought we'd looked at everything, but once we got home we realized we forgot to go back to this or that section for a second look, so of course we'll have to head back for another trip.

There are a lot of neat shops in the area, as well. We visited a nice antique shop right across the street and a bulk foods store just down the road. Just behind Lehman's is another row of shops we plan to hit next time.

Little Sis was transfixed by the rows and rows of Amish buggies. Sure, we see one now and then drive right past our house, but we'd never seen so many in one place. They were all next door to Lehman's at the auction building (livestock, judging by the smell).

Did you know Lehman's also has their own brand of soda? Little Sis was thrilled to get a bottle of that plus some 'penny' candy, and then a bit more candy from the bulk food store. Add all that to perusing Lehman's awesome toy section and she had the time of her life. She can't wait to go back!

DH says if you have any interest in wood carving or quality hand tools, take a napkin, and thank the people walking by not to step on your tongue.

Here's what I bought:

It's a Roma Food Mill. I got the accessory package, plus extra gaskets. I can't wait to use it. I have a friend that has something similar, and she put up 80 quarts of tomato juice in one day, all by herself.

Now if the weather would just warm up so I can get the garden in!

Hubby's taking me shopping!

My wonderful, dear, sweet husband is planning to take me on an all day shopping extravaganza! Can you guess where?

Not to the mall...

I'd rather be hauling firewood

...to buy new clothes

up hill

...which I would have to try on

in the snow

...or to shop for swimwear

make that a full fledged blizzard

...which I would have to try on


while being chased by rabid coyotes

Nope!! We are going to Lehman's!!! We are planning to spend most of the day (or more) browsing and picking up a few things that we need. We'll even have lunch at Lehman's own cafe. I'm so excited!!

Another step toward the goal of self-sufficiency

We just got an incubator!! **does happy chick hatching dance** Complete with automatic egg turner. Can I get a 'woot woot'? ;)

The plan is to hatch our own chicks to raise for meat, as well as restock our layers as needed.

I bet you are asking how the heck will we be able to use this electric hen once we move to our off grid home, right? I'm way ahead of ya. DH found plans for a 'junkyard power station' in one of the many homesteading type magazines he enjoys. It involves marine batteries, a solar panel, and an inverter. We'll have one hooked up and running before we leave the grid, or we may find another solution. Either way, the incubator is an investment we hope to utilize for a very long time.

We'll be loading the incubator this weekend, and, with any luck, in 21 days we'll have some peeps.

The incubator purchase is one thing now checked off our 'two year plan' list.

The next step, which will be an ongoing one, is downsizing our possessions. I do not want to haul all this stuff to our new home.

We downsized quite a bit when we moved here from the city. We went from well over 2000 square feet (not including attic and basement), to a home that is a little less than 1500 sf, with zero storage (no attic or basement). Yet we still have too much stuff.

I finally got started by setting a goal to get the laundry room shelves cleaned off during this cold snap. It's too wet and cold to get anything done outside, so I thought I'd better take advantage before the weather cleared and I was spending all of my time working on the garden.

Yes, I did clear out the laundry room when I painted it, back before Christmas. But that was more of a straightening up and less of a cleaning out. The laundry room shelves are full of craft projects, scrap booking stuff, fabric, sewing supplies, and small counter top appliances.

So far I have cleaned out the fabric shelves, organized my fabric by color (I'm dying to start a new quilt and this will make it so much easier to find what I need), and disposed of at least three huge garbage bags full of things I will never use and have no idea why I even have them.

The hardest part of this purge will be letting go of mementos. I still have pictures that my oldest son drew before he even started kindergarten. Some of these things I will hold on to, but many of them will be passed on for him to share with his family.

Other than the mementos, I'm having a surprisingly easy time disposing of things. I used to be one of those people that never really threw things away because I may find a use for it later on. Now I realize, if I have had something for a while and not used it, I know that I probably never will, so off it goes to a new home.

Enough blogging. Back to work! ;)

Welcome to Puppet Theater!

Our granddaughter adores puppet shows. DH got her hooked, and now every time she sees him, she expects a puppet show. Usually, he hides behind a sheet hung between two chairs and brings her stuffed animals to life. He has a talent for that. Even the grown ups love to watch his puppet shows.

Granddaughter just had a birthday, and we thought the best gift for her would be a puppet theater. We looked at the ones available online...yikes they were expensive! So we decided to build one, but it had to be stable enough to keep from tipping over if the little sibling pulled on it, and lightweight enough so that no one would get hurt if it did tip over, and not too expensive.

We considered building one out of pvc. In fact, we were at the hardware store to get pvc when we came across this:

It cost around $14, saved a lot of time compared to the pvc plans, and is even on wheels. Big Sis put it together in about five minutes. Then DH added this:

Sorry that pic is blurry. It's basically two pvc connectors (one on each side; only one is pictured) and one piece of pvc pipe cut to fit the width of the garment rack. The connectors slide over the side posts of the garment rack to hold the pvc pipe; they rest just about halfway up the rack on the adjustment screws that were part of the rack. In the pic of the rack, that's right about the top of the black side poles. This cross bar forms the top of the curtain that hides the puppeteer.

I had a bit of this lovely purple velvety fabric that someone had given me, which turned out to be exactly the amount I needed to make the curtains. The lace was also something I had on hand. The whole puppet theater ended up costing less than $16, a little time (mostly sewing), and a lot of love.

We bought her some puppets to go with it since I never got around to making any. She LOVED it, and immediately demanded a puppet show. ;)

The Peepers are Peeping!

I heard a few peeping Friday night. Then a few more last night.

Soon, they will be deafening.

I can't wait!

We all have spring fever so badly! We have had highs in the 60's, the daffodils are coming up, as well as the invasive wild garlic mustard. But even that is a welcome sight after such a tough winter.

Today we are doing some outside cleaning up, wading through several inches of muck and mud. I'll take mud over snow right now, thanks. ;)

We're plotting the garden today, as well. Wooohooo!!

Harbinger of spring

Guess what I saw today!!

Three of them!! Turkey vultures!!

Oh yes, spring is here!!

**does happy springtime dance**

Someone tell the peepers it's time to start peepin'!

(pics from enature.com)

Easy as bean soup

This soup is a favorite in my house. It's a bit like the Campbell's bean with bacon soup. I use a one gallon crock pot, start the soup before bed, and it's ready by lunchtime the following day. I don't soak or boil the beans, just rinse and add them to the pot.

NOTE: Do NOT try this with kidney beans!! Please read here about kidney beans.

Ingredients:

• Canned tomatoes (I use one quart of home canned tomatoes)
• 2-4 cups of dried NORTHERN and/or PINTO beans (use the lesser amount if you prefer your soup extra soupy, the greater amount if you prefer it beany; we prefer beany)
• 1 tablespoon vinegar
• Salt, onion powder, garlic powder, chili powder, red pepper flakes (these are all to taste, but I recommend at least one Tbs of chili powder to start with.)

Directions:

• Rinse beans
• Add all ingredients to crock pot
• Add water till crock pot is full
• Cover, cook on HIGH at least 12 hours or until beans are very tender (this is what it takes in my crock pot, but if you have a newer one it may work faster)
• I usually add more water to this after several hours as the beans soak it up.

I always make a fresh batch of homemade bread to go with the soup. Recipe is here. To make the herb bread pictured here, just mix 1/4 cup olive oil with the herbs of your choice. I used about a tsp of rosemary and a tsp of basil, plus a dash of onion powder. When you have the bread dough ready for the second rising, just brush this on and sprinkle with a dash of kosher salt. Let rise and bake.

This is a very frugal meal. I can't remember exactly how much I paid for the dried beans. It was $1.29 or $1.79, so I'll round it to $2.00 for all of the soup ingredients. It would cost a bit more if I had to buy canned tomatoes, but the point of growing our own is to save money and have better quality. I know I could do this even cheaper if I grew and dried the beans, but we are all HUGE green bean fans, so none of the beans we grow last long enough to be dried.

With a one gallon pot, you get 16 8oz servings of soup. That's about 13 cents per serving. The bread costs about 89 cents for two loaves (one batch of dough). Two loaves easily divide into 16 servings, which brings the total cost of soup and bread to about 19 cents per serving.

A meal for less than 20 cents per serving? Frugal!! Woot!

Before you even ask, I don't add in the cost of electricity to cook the meal. No matter what we eat, I'd most likely have to cook it, so it's the ingredients that really add up. I do plan to try making this on the wood stove in a cast iron pot, but not as an overnight thing.

Making laundry soap

Homemade laundry soap is now all the rage, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I haven't had much luck with store bought laundry detergents. We have hard water, and we get our clothes very dirty; it seems only the expensive stuff works, or the inexpensive stuff with a ton of add-ins, which still makes it expensive.



I found this recipe online, but I tweaked it a bit to compensate for our hard water by increasing the borax. Here's what I used:







A clean five gallon bucket

One cup borax

One cup washing soda

One bar Fels Naptha soap





I chopped up the soap with my ulu instead of grating it as recommended in the recipe. The plus with the ulu is that you can use it as a scoop and it's much easier to clean.



I dissolved the chopped soap in a saucepan of hot water. I just put it on the wood stove and stirred it occasionally until it was melted.

In the meantime, I dissolved the borax and washing soda in some hot water in the five gallon bucket. Once the soap was melted, I added that and then topped it off with more hot water to reach the five gallon mark.

And this is what it looks like the following day. Sort of a goopy mess.

The instructions at the Duggar site suggest mixing this in a gallon container, half concentrate mixture and half water. I skipped this step and just use it right out of this container. I use 1/4 cup concentrate (as opposed to 1/2 cup diluted) for each load of laundry.

A few notes on the detergent:

• It doesn't suds up at all, but it works great.
• A five gallon bucket of water weighs 40 pounds, so if you can't lift that, be sure to put the bucket where you want it to be and carry the water to the bucket in smaller portions.
• A five gallon bucket of mixture, using 1/4 cup per load, will yield about 320 loads.
• Fels Naptha smells really strong as it melts; be sure to have adequate ventilation.

Now for the price breakdown:

Fels Naptha soap: $1.29

Box of borax: $3.99 - 76 oz; one cup weighs 9 oz, so one cup costs about 47 cents

Box of washing soda: $2.99 - 55 oz; one cup weighs 11 oz, so one cup costs about 60 cents

Total: $2.36

Price per load (using 1/4 cup of the concentrate per load): $ .007 per load. Or, ten loads for 7 cents.

Less than a penny a load. Not bad at all. The least expensive detergent I've bought was six cents per load, and it didn't clean very well. Doing what we do, we get our clothes extremely dirty, so even if I have to use double the detergent, it's still a great deal.

I am curious to see if the concentrate will get moldy. We don't have chlorinated water, so if it does mold, the next batch will get 8 drops of Clorox bleach per gallon of water.

Fels Naptha does contain, according to wikipedia, mineral spirits. Probably why it works so well on stains. I don't think it's any more of an irritant than regular laundry detergent ingredients, but you won't see me washing my hands with either. However, you can make this same recipe with other soaps.

Another note on Fels: Although the soap is recommended for poison ivy contact, don't use it for that. It's a very strong soap, and it's not necessary to use something so irritating to remove urushiol. Any soap will do; it's water that's important. Here's a handy link for poison ivy info.

ETA: I'm having a blogaversary giveaway: three bars of Fels-Naptha soap. Drawing to be held Oct 31, 2009.