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Once a month I get a little, well, shall we say, insane.  I like to think of myself as a pretty easy-going person.  I like to be flexible.  I like to take it easy.  On the other hand I am, well, a little insane, so occasionally this side also manifests itself.  Usually it manifests in a helpful, but frantic way.  I will stay up late organizing a room, doing an art project, scrubbing the house on my hands and knees.  At these times my priorities just get completely skewed.  One thing becomes all-encompassing.  Case in point:  our couch.

Our couch had gotten gross over the last 13 years.  Kirstin told me not to buy it; “It’s not a washable fabric,” she said.  I didn’t listen to her.  How can a fabric not be washable?  We bought it anyway.  Since then it has faded, gotten stains, and then gotten new stains every time we tried to clean it with water.  What kind of couch can not be cleaned with water?!  That is ridiculous.  Anyway, it has slowly come to look uglier and uglier.

A couple years ago it seemed that maybe now that we were in a new house, the time for a new couch had come.  Brad then helpfully pointed out that we definitely should NOT get a new couch while we have snot-nosed kids around.  We already do not allow food to be eaten in the living room, but it seems that the primary problem with couch cleanliness really is mucus.  They run around the room with snot hanging off their faces and then plunge said snottiness right into the comfortable cushions on the couch.  Each cushion was smeared with whitish-yellow snot stains, and as I mentioned before, these don’t seem to clean up.  (If you are thinking, “Why don’t you wipe their noses?” then you obviously do not have kids, so I will leave you to continue to think that you can wipe noses to keep them free of snot.  I don’t know where you got this idea, but it is fallacious.  Snot is the alpha and omega.  Around children, you can not find a place where it is not.)

I started hating our couch.  I started just looking at it and obsessing about how ugly it was, how impossible to clean, how distractingly awful and college-flop-housey it looked.

Last night, round about 8:30pm, I was suddenly and totally obsessed with fixing the couch… right then.  I pulled on my shoes and headed off to the store to find good old RIT dye.  My plan?  Wash the cushions, dye the covers, and then paint the couch.

I did it.  I put the clean covers (you know, the un-washable ones?) in the washing machine, then dunked them in a hot sink full of dye.  I wrung them out by hand and then ran them through another wash to rinse them.  Meanwhile, I took hot dye and sponged it over the sun-faded bottom of the couch.  It looked questionable at midnight.  This was either brilliant or really stupid, I thought.

I knew that I couldn’t run the rest of the cushion covers through the drier.  They would certainly shrink.  I had to let them dry overnight.

Things that are dark blue look pretty good while wet, but I was unsure how they would turn out in the light of day.

Turns out, it is all pretty good.  There was significant shrinkage, but nothing that a few pillows can’t hide.  And the blue looks a lot better.  It isn’t perfect, but it is enough to pull a couple more years out of the couch.  And it doesn’t look gross anymore, so that is an improvement.

All in all, a success, I say.

5 Comments | In: projects | | #

I am writing this halfway underneath a plastic drop cloth.  Our house is being foamed, and as some of the surfaces are sloped ceilings, they have to foam from the inside instead of the outside.  Let me tell you what I mean.

First our house had hardie planks pried off at about the 4 ft and 8 ft levels.  Then holes were drilled in the old siding.

What they are trying to do is to drop this crazy, expanding foam down into each of the cavities.  Apparently, judging from the way the owner of the company runs in and out of the house looking at our window frames, it is a sort of stressful operation.  If walls are not completely tight, foam will seep over through the holes and into your living room.  I guess that is not ideal.

This foam is amazing stuff.  Unlike “Great Stuff” which I sometimes wonder about its greatness, this stuff is made of nitrogen.  It doesn’t off-gas, (it actually doesn’t smell at all), it has a 5.1 R value, and it cleans up with water.  The guy said that my chickens could try to eat it and would still be fine.  It is messy though, and our house looks crazy.

Hmmm.  Foam on little wing.

8 Comments | In: projects | | #

Our house is a hard-working lady.  She is from 1906, and let me tell you, sort of shows her age.

When we first moved in here, the house looked like this:

Then we replaced the door, ripped out the single-pane broken windows, tore off the LP siding and it looked like this:

Next, we had hardie plank put up (6 inch, 2 inch lap, smooth!), and it looked like this:

Finally, we had it painted purple.  Fabulous Grape actually.  It looked like this:

Now any normal person would say, “Hey, you might want to INSULATE THE WALLS while you are at all that ripping apart and doing over.”  Maybe someone did say that.  Did we listen?  Oh no.  We are just now having insulation blown into tiny little holes that very dedicated and frustrated men are drilling on the outside of our house.  They actually aren’t frustrated with the drilling; they are frustrated trying to pry up planks of hardie plank without breaking it.  The stuff is like flint: tough from the outside but liable to snap into shards of… I don’t know, what is this crap made of…cement?  Anyway, it doesn’t bend well which means that it definitely doesn’t “pry” well.  It is a laborious job and they have to treat our stupid siding with kid gloves.

Why didn’t we do this earlier?  We wanted to “save money”.  Ha!  I’ll write a check to that one!  If I actually saved money all the times that I tried to save money, I would not be spending so much money wishing I hadn’t tried to save money!  (Unravel that one for me please.)

In other news, the attic insulation is done, the new furnace is in, the wall insulation should finish up in a couple days, and I am feeling WARMER!  It is an interesting sensation because it is not so much that I am warm as that I am not noticing being cold.  Unfortunately, I also feel like I can not get enough fresh air, like I am oxygen deprived.  I have often felt this way in hotels and places with newer construction.  I think I am not accustomed to all the drafts being sealed up.  I am sure I will get used to this in a couple days.  I feel like someone really needs to open a window around here!

I’ll put up pictures in the next couple days of what our house looks like now.  It looks like…. someone attacked it and ripped boards off it here and there.  Poor old lady.

5 Comments | In: projects | | #

Thanks to Kirstin’s blog post, I’ve been thinking about Dorothy Day again.  Man, I love that woman.  Back when I was a more active Catholic Worker, I would read her writings and just ponder what she put forth.  Dorothy had an uncanny way of talking about the exact issues that tear me apart sometimes— what are we suppose to do for the poor?  What about when people are crappy and mistreat you?  What about when you are tired?  How do we avoid war?  How does one small person stand up against injustice?  What did Jesus mean by….

Me and Dorothy need to get together to pray sometimes.  Here she is talking about St Theresa’s “Little Way”.  Yeah, I think I need to meditate with Dorothy a little more and maybe I can figure it all out.

“Paperwork, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens—these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.”

1 Comment | In: Music and philosophical musings | | #

I like Squash.  By popular demand (thanks Laura!), I am re-posting this “recommendation” for Stuffed Squash.  I wish I could tell you that it is super, super healthy, but as the key ingredient is sausage, I am not sure I could stand by that claim.  Maybe if you eat more squash per bite than sausage…  I did make this vegetarian once.  Note that this is all I will say about that.  I did it.  It wasn’t terrible.

Stuffed Squash

Cut squash in half.  Scrape out seeds.

Place halves in a baking dish with 1/2″ water in the bottom.  Bake at 375 for about 30 minutes or until the squash is softened.

Meanwhile, raid your fridge for random things to stuff that beauty with.  Start by saute-ing chopped onions and garlic in olive oil.  Throw in a bit of soy sauce, maybe some celery, chunks of mushrooms, bits of kale or any other greens that you might find down there.  Huck in some amazing sausage… like the breakfast kind or the stuff you can buy from the real, live meat counter.  When all of this is an amazing, bubbling mess, add torn up bread chunks or crumbled crackers.  Stir it all up and throw in a bit of shredded cheese (just enough to help all this stick together).  Weirdo variations that I have tried: nuts, raisins, grated carrots, grated zucchini, blue cheese, dried out parmesan, swiss chard (good!), beets (not so good!).

Pour off the water that you cooked the squash halves in, and flip them over so that they look like little boats.  Pack each half of squash with the stuffing mixture, pressing down to fill the fruit and then firmly mounding the additional stuffing.  Cook it all another 15-20 minutes or until it smells awesome.

1 Comment | In: food | | #

One of the hardest things about living in the city is just getting rid of things properly.

A lot of things have changed drastically about my life in the last few years.  First of all, I have these kids and people in their misguided kindness want to give them cheap, plastic crap.  Plastic is truly an amazing invention, and there are wonderful uses for this miracle invention.  Unfortunately, those wonderful inventions usually do not come from the Dollar Store or have “MADE IN CHINA” written on the bottom of them.  This stuff flows into my life at an alarming rate, especially considering that I don’t buy any of it.  It is prizes at school, presents from kid friends, stuff strangers give my children in stores because they were particularly cute that day.  The end result is all the same though.  I trip over it, pull it out of Inez’s mouth, pick it up from the yard or the bathroom floor one too many times and it is banned to the Salvation Army box.  Once there, I must covertly smuggle it out of the house and trundle it into the trunk of the car.  It has to be in a box WITH a lid on it, not viewable by child eyes, as the minute they see it they wail, “But I LOOOOOOVE this!”.  Love my ass.  I just found it in the toilet.

Once in the box, in the trunk of the car, the job is still not done.  First of all, my husband is fighting me every step of the way because he doesn’t want stuff in the trunk.  He takes it out, I put it in, he takes it out, I put it in, he takes it out….  Once it goes in, I really need to get to a donation site quickly to make sure that it doesn’t end up in the front foyer again, but this is hard considering my daily schedule.  I also have to get the box to the proper donation site without kids looking in or seeing a donation receiving person looking in.  ”But I loooooooved that!” will ensue if this rule is breached, and even worse, the person receiving the donation has been known to take out the PIECE of GOD DAMN PLASTIC and give it back to my child!

Second thing that is hard about city living is living without a farm truck.  I don’t have one.  I don’t know anyone who has one.  Every other week we have a 33 gallon container of yard debris that we can put out, but moving into a largely unkempt house on an unkempt lot, there has been a ton of weeding and pruning and yard work to execute.  There is bamboo, which is a plant from the devil.  You cut it, it grows, you cut it, it grows,  you…. anyway, I think you understand.  Throughout the last few years, I have created way more than 33 gallons every other week of yard debris.  I compost, (two different bins!), I cut it up, I mulch as much as I can, but still I have too much and no way to haul it away.  When it does start to overwhelm the yard, I can rent a pick up ($35 for 3 hours), and haul the stuff to a yard debris place (between $10 and $20 a load).  If I got a babysitter while doing this job, that is $11 an hour.  As you can imagine, it adds up and it wasn’t much fun in the first place.

The third thing that is hard to get rid of is just plain old wood waste.  It isn’t legal to fire up a big old bon fire like we used to do in Sheridan.  Around here you have to haul stuff away to a specific facility (see above).  Currently I am trying to get rid of our old chicken coop.  Rather than sawzall it up and hope that my Dad would haul it off when he comes to visit, I thought I would Craigslist it for free.  Poor choice.  Although I found a taker, and waited for her all day, she never showed up.  It turned out she didn’t have a pick up.  So the old coop sits in my front yard, waiting for a taker… hopefully with an F-10.

6 Comments | In: General bitchin', projects | | #

I’m getting organized.  Scientific even.  I bought a white board at SCRAP and nailed it to the wall in the chicken coop to keep track of number of eggs per day.  I am even sort of trying to track who is laying what.  So far the results are dismal.  It seems that we are getting three eggs a day from the same three chickens–Rita, Hasty, and Evelyn.  Hmmmm.  That would mean that Agnes and Rosey aren’t laying at all (old ladies), Hildy is on sabbatical (I don’t know what her excuse is as she is only 1 1/2, Bella is molting, and Frankie is just a lazy, good-for-nothing chicken, eating a lot and not pulling her weight, sort of like Inez except that Inez is not a chicken.  (I don’t know when I decided that it was funny to joke about babies not doing their part, but it still cracks me up.  It seems to be the only acceptable way to talk trash about a baby.)  Frankie, like Inez, might just be too young as she was hatched at the end of June last year.  It is hard to tell with chickens who reach laying age right as the days are short and the rest of the flock is not laying anyway.

Evelyn might well be my hardest worker around here.

She is laying almost every day.  This last week she popped out this MASSIVE egg.  It was the second of its kind to be presented by this lady.  When I told Brad that it was a double yoker, he was unduly surprised.  ”Those are real?” he said.  Of course they are real!  Even though he had heard about them all his life, because he had never seen one, he didn’t really believe they were real.  Weird denial of reality is what I call that.  I hear that the sun is made of gas, and you know what?  I believe it.

This is a comparison photo:  normal egg from Hasty, giHUGIC egg from Evelyn.  This worries me a bit actually.  It is fairly common for chickens who produce these huge suckers to get egg bind, a condition where the egg literally gets STUCK inside them.  A friend on our street lost a chicken to egg bind lately.  I am freaked out that I might have to reach up in a chicken and break an egg to get it out if this were to occur with one of our hens.  Here is hoping it doesn’t.  A friend of a friend also told me that she gave her hen a warm bath when she had egg bind.  The egg came right out.  Hmmm.  I guess I like baths.  I’ve never had one with a chicken though.

More photos to impress and (in the case of Anne) disgust?

Ahh yes!  Look at those old lady hands!  (It was because I was working with clay all day; I got a lot of terra cotta stuck in the cracks in my hands.)

We need to hurry up and come up with a use for this egg as it does not fit in the carton.  Really.

3 Comments | In: How strange, chickens, food | | #

I hate to admit it, but I have become sort of house-wifey in some ways.  Cooking is one example.  In general, I love to cook, and get all sorts of ideas from wandering the aisles of the grocery store.  I also LOVE to grocery shop (and I mean that!), because I like food and feel creative looking at the endless possibilities of things to make.  It is fun to go out to eat, but only because I like to taste things and think about what is in them in the hopes of replicating that recipe at home.

As much as I love to cook, I don’t care for following recipes.  I am distressed by food waste,(hence the compost, hence the chickens, hence the less packaging), and I try to manage our household to make the most use out of what we have.  I am not the type to go out and shop for specific things for just one recipe.  I struggle with recipes that tell you to use a quarter cup of onions when you are going to end up cutting the whole onion.  And no way am I using just half the can of tomatoes!  What will happen to the other half of that can?  In general, I make vast quantities of food, often freezing the left overs for another day or tweaking the ingredients.  In our house you find squash and chard for dinner day one, beef burritos day two, and squash, beef & chard enchiladas day three.

Here is a good website on trying to avoid food waste.

The truth is that I sort of hate following directions anyway, so recipes and cookbooks are used mostly as loose recommendations around here.  Even so, I still occasionally need a loose recommendation just to keep cooking foods that are interesting and to break out of my cuisine rut.  Here is a “loose recommendation” that turned out SOOOOO GOOD, even with me making it sort of following the recipe!  The kids loved it, it is pretty healthy, and I had most of the ingredients (and the ones that I didn’t have were easily substituted out).  I recommend it highly, especially served with rice.  Super good.

West African Peanut Soup

Ingredients:

1 cup cooked, skinless, chicken breast, diced

2/3 cup onion, diced

1 1/2 teaspoons garlic, minced

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

3 cups reduced sodium, fat free chicken broth

1 6-ounce can tomato paste

1 (14 1/2-ounce) can stewed tomatoes

1/2 cup reduced-fat peanut butter

Directions:

1. In a large pot, sauté onion in sesame oil until translucent; add garlic

and chicken and stir to heat through.

2. Add seasonings and sauté 1 minute longer.

3. Add broth, paste, tomatoes, and peanut butter.  Stir until well

combined.

4. Heat over medium heat until hot but not boiling.

5. Serve immediately.

6. Refrigerate leftovers within 2-3 hours.

7 Comments | In: Awesome!, food | | #

I am trying to play more.  I am trying to relax and just be more fun.  My TSPC requirement classes made me sadly realize that I sometimes look at my kids as one great big bother, a source of stress and distraction that I must struggle to escape.  And that’s too bad, because it seems to me that I CHOSE to have these kids, right?  Why the crappy attitude?

I am such a do-er in my daily life.  I feel massive satisfaction from what I accomplish in any given day.  When Brad asks how my day went, I immediately catalogue what I achieved that day as though that justifies my whole existence, as though I am not worthwhile at all if I didn’t complete the siding on the chicken shed, plant lily starts, hang art, finish laundry and clean the kitchen.  I’ve got to fix this I know, because obviously the simple, quiet things are important too— maybe more important.  So I am going to play more and maybe do a bit less.

I’m not going to change too much– I will always love working, achieving, feeling the accomplishment that comes with being physically exhausted because you just mopped the floor on your hands and knees– but I am trying to find a little balance.  The work of mothering is a wide skill set, and the things that kids note at the end of the day are not the same things that I might catalogue to Brad as “accomplishments”.  So these are the things I am trying to do more of:

• Snuggling up with Zephyr at nap time (I would curl up with Inez if she would quit tweaking my nose)
• Reading books with kids (no, my books do not count, although once I had Francis fooled when I read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan out loud to her a few days in a row)
• Art projects (like kid ones, not the ones where I tell them to go away and let mom work)
• Dancing around
• Playing instruments and singing
• Cooking projects where they get to make a mess and maybe even lick stuff
• Baths midday (with bubbles!)
• Setting up train tracks

Part of my goal with this year is just to calm down and not achieve anything, because you know, I think I am a good enough person just sort of sitting on my ass… and playing with trains.

9 Comments | In: Current musings, My super freakin' cute kids, family | | #

This is up above Brad’s parents’ place in Grand Ronde.  I think it is beautiful.  Eerie, but beautiful.

There is a dirt road through the woods and when you run down the hill, the ground is soft and cushiony with fir needles.  I took this picture in the dark, looking back up the hill at where the light shines through.  The kids love to race down the hill into the darkness.  I do too, that is why it is the best.

2 Comments | In: Awesome! | | #