Not out of the weeds yet, and still pouring

Although there has been much grace from God, including the glorious orange and golden sunset we had this evening.  There were also rainbows...in February.

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Another household improvement from last year that I'm appreciating now is a clean laundry sorting area I established in our basement laundry dungeon.  Formerly I did a week's laundry, stored it upstairs, and then sorted and put it all away at once--sometimes ten loads' worth, and caffeine definitely helped.  

I realized with my children getting older and my time less constrained by littles that they could fetch their own laundry and put it away.  I had just gotten a start on the new system when a neighbor Providentially set a shelf out by the curb, the kind with four big square cubbyholes.  That holds clean, sorted laundry for four children now, and on top are improvised containers for the other family members I do laundry for.

On the floor in front of the shelf I put a wire closet organizer shelf, six or eight inches high, from another neighbor's curb, for baskets or bags of laundry waited to be sorted--or taken upstairs, in the case of towels and such.  

I only just realized or remembered the other day that with all this within reach of the dryer, I could just sort laundry straight out of the dryer. 

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Eldest Child led a final effort to use up the remaining apples from the fall.  They were beginning to taste more like pears than apples, and still had to be checked over every week or so to remove the rotting ones.  They lasted a lot longer than I expected.  Very few perfect apples this time.

Storms it is

The snow somehow held off until we had finally gotten the yard stuff taken care of.  Since then there has been a whole series of domestic disruptions.  I've only just now gotten the house more or less in order, aside from the washer being broken.  

I happened to have picked up a short RV water hose from someone's curbside a few weeks ago, and so I  experimented with siphoning water out of the washer.  It sort of works if I get all the air out of the hose and bring the lower end down to a basin on the floor; it needs the difference in height to create enough suction for that size of hose, and it only worked for the top half of the water.  

After that, I experimented with using a short hose from the dehumidifier as a flexible water container:  lower entirely into the water, and then lift by both ends.  This worked, but the amount of water it can carry is very small.

I did wash a load of laundry in the bathtub using my antique Rapid Washer-style metal laundry plunger, and experimented with setting wire shelving over the laundry room sink as a place for draining water out of the laundry.  However, really, a stronger force than gravity is needed.

Future loads are waiting until the landlord deals with the washer in one way or another, or until I finish recovering from this cold.

I am appreciative now of two projects I did a while back, which was to take some free-from-a-neighbor bathroom tiles, and two wooden panels from a deconstructed TV armoire, and make two tiled panels:  one for the kitchen behind the wastebasket, and one for the bathroom between the toilet and the side wall; both protecting the walls against family members with bad aim.  Both panels are just leaning against the wall, not attached.  One I finished with grout in the tile joints, and the other with white caulk and a band of paint along the top edge.  Both are much easier to scrub clean than the wall paint, and being speckled white instead of weary beige, they help to brighten the rooms.

The painted wooden frame in the living room now has large red Christmas bells hanging from it.

The apples are for the most part keeping far better than I expected, given their condition when we picked them.  I haven't done much more than sort through them every week or so to pick out the ones that are going bad, and cook up the ones that are partly salvageable.

I realized a year or two ago that the purpose of food is not to be eaten, but to be available to be eaten.

Set

I found several Georgette Heyer books at the thrift store, and remembering Practical Conservative's love of the author bought them.  Not my usual genre, so we'll see.

My life this fall has been apples, election, and hospital.  An acquaintance with a backyard orchard had a bumper crop this year, and we easily picked thirty bags' worth.  I learned how to make apple butter, and that is what I'm doing with most of them now.  It turns out to not be so easy to dispose of quantities of apple scraps in the city when you are stubbornly refusing to order and use the organics bin that you are being forced to pay for.

The hospital was for my oldest child, who is doing well despite taking a Grand Tour of the medical system across seven different sites this month, for a congenital issue that suddenly became a problem.  There is some lingering non-obvious aftermath, but she is chugging through most of the functional tests faster than I would. 

A neighbor gave me an old table leaf that is more or less the right size for our round living room table, and I put two coats of polyurethane on it.  I plan to have Thanksgiving dinner in the living room again; the house has no dining room and it is much more memorable than crowding into the kitchen as usual.  The next challenge is the table base:  it is a pedestal base--for an oak top that can be six feet long.  Someone in the past tried to reinforce the weak point by pounding in a lot of nails.  I think I can repurpose the frame of my old homemade dinner table, if I shorten the legs.  The hard part will be getting it into place around the pedestal and up under the table top's rails, but it shouldn't be too bad because the frame's legs are attached with removable pegs.

Thread goes fast

I used up half a dozen spools of thread in making the coat, and almost three more since then in other sewing.

I cut fabric for two corduroy skirts, one of which is ready to assemble, once I finish doing some embroidery along the hem.  The handwork is delaying the skirt by only two days, and is visually striking.

I also turned a pile of old clothes into kitchen wipes and baby wipes and a pair of fitted leg warmers for me.  The leg warmers would have been easier if I had sewed the seams first, and then cut the fabric, because the edges of the knit fabric curled up a lot.  I use a zigzag stitch with knits.

I've been transitioning sock styles recently, from homemade knee-high tights with ankle sock feet, to wool blend hiking socks, because I'm not happy with the ankle socks.  The leg warmers are working well in conjunction with the hiking socks, and I will probably make more.  They are just tapered tubes with casings for elastic around the top.

I've also been transitioning my sleepwear toward clothes that resemble my daytime clothes, and I altered a few of my older skirts so they have just elastic at the waist, and not ties that are knotted, and they can be used for either purpose.

A few weeks ago we had a big snowfall of fluffy snow, just what I was waiting for for cleaning my old living room rug, since I never quite had the energy in the warm weather to haul it out and scrub it on a tarp.

Supposedly fluffy snow is best for rug cleaning.  I've read that if you spread a cold rug over the snow, and sweep snow across it, and perhaps dance on it, that the snow will melt slightly and release just enough water and ammonia into the rug to loosen soil.

In practice, I've found that the rug will not get clean, but it will get a little less dirty.  In this case, the rug started out fully dirty, because I didn't clean it at all before I put it in the garage.  Lots of sand came off, and the snow underneath it definitely got dirty.  I moved the rug to fresh snow to do the other side.

We made two large bowls of clean snow into snow ice cream, by adding sugar, cream, and vanilla, and they didn't last long.  I noticed just a slight ammonia taste, so it seems the source of my rug cleaning information was correct.

Cozy cottage

I made progress on the mending pile.  It is not the easiest or most fun kind of sewing, but it is gratifying to see an entire garment ready to wear again, after putting in much less work than making a new item would take--or than shopping for a new one would take, either.

I also was able to fix a zipper.

I'm been putting off most of my Christmas crafting, aside from a knitted towel experiment, and I'm giving some already-completed projects as gifts instead.

Today is Yooper Scooper weather:  shovel early, shovel often.

I have a pile of used materials to make into a coat.  The most challenging part will be fitting the arms so that the recipient has enough freedom of movement for sparring with siblings. 

Our second mannequin torso was released from dress form duty, so I found an outfit for it and put it back with the other one.

I couldn't find a good place to display Christmas cards, so I've been putting them on the Christmas tree.

A child found a doughnut maker at the thrift store--it's like a waffle iron, but with two doughnut-shaped cavities.  This one was brand-new and unused, and at least forty years old.  An elder sibling bought one at a yard sale a decade ago, and has used it occasionally.

Braided rug repairs

Both of my braided rugs had spots where the lacing was breaking.  Not surprising in the larger one, which spent most of winter outdoors a few years ago, while I was deciding if I wanted to keep it.  The wool in the braids came through that fine, but the cotton rug warp yarn that I used to lace them together didn't.

The repairs were simple, but tedious:  pull out the lacing back to where it is good enough, tie on a new piece, thread the other end into a blunt yarn needle, and re-lace until the other end can be tied.

_________________________

We have a door where the doorknob assembly has a loose plate that won't stay up against the door like it is supposed to.  There are no screw holes, just two tiny spikes on the back, which won't hold at all, unless I pound on it.  I figured out a way of winding leather lacing around the doorknob shaft so the plate can't slide.

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I also began working on the edge of the living room rug.  I'm doing a row of whip stitches along the worn edge, using crewel-weight wool yarn, to cover and protect the bare threads. I happened to have yarn that goes well with the rug.  A lot of our things are survivors from the '80s when country blue was a trend, and they coordinate well.

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We had a good Thanksgiving, just ourselves, and then on Saturday Grandma came in with ten dozen homemade sugar cookies and everything needed to decorate them in a well-planned operation. Those cookies are in her garage in tins now, waiting for Christmas. It will be fun to see them again and recognize who decorated what. She also brought some cookies just for eating on the spot--store-bought cookies that she mostly bought for the tins.

Easy bird feeder, breadsticks

I was looking for DIY bird feeder ideas, and found lots of cute ones.  Then I had an idea for re-purposing a plastic hanging lantern that I've had for some years.

It looked very suitable, which turned out to be because it actually was a bird feeder.

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A child and I have developed a tag-team approach to making cheese-topped breadsticks:  I make the dough, and the child puts it onto the pan, does the toppings, and bakes it.

The dough is very simple, 6 cups flour, 3 cups very warm water, 2 tablespoons yeast--I usually use 1 and 1/2 tablespoons.  This covers a large cookie sheet thickly.  Halving the recipe or doing one-third of it is advisable.  

The lack of salt in the recipe and the relatively high proportion of yeast (best bought in bulk) helps the dough to rise more quickly than most bread doughs.  The recipe's source recommended 10 minutes of rising time.

We've been topping it with melted butter, mozzarella cheese, and garlic powder, and maybe also Parmesan cheese, and then baking it for about 20 minutes at 375 degrees.  It's good hot out of the oven, not so good cold.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Activities

Dehydrated some cabbages.  Sewed a shower curtain.  Replaced the covers of various chair seats, re-using tacks from earlier armchair.  Put a second bar across a closet to support a laundry basket holding all of the family swimming gear.

Have also been watching the squirrels chew up all of the black walnuts and spit the shells onto the driveway.

The local homeschool association has been putting more effort into the diversity statement on their website than into providing accurate information about homeschooling laws or keeping the membership sign-up page updated.  Doubt that's going to end well.

Mother-in-law has been doing some interesting experiments with natural dyes...avocado pits to produce a rose pink.

Where's the beans??

I don't know when the cheaper brands of baked beans started being canned as a big lump of beans swimming in a sea of liquid, but now I have encountered it twice, once in a store brand, and once in a brand from one of the largest ag companies.

In the latter case, I pulled out a strainer and measured:  just about exactly half of the can's contents by volume were pourable liquid.

I hate washing strainers.

This reminds me of early in the pandemic, when dried pasta suddenly started taking much longer to cook for some reason.

In other activities, I was able to repair watchbands for two children.  I took a toy apart and pulled some dust out of it that was getting in the way of the mechanism.  I altered a swimsuit so that it would fit for another season.

I knit a dishcloth from acrylic yarn rejected by a child, who also went through a substantial fabric stash and burn-tested samples to separate out the ones with synthetic fibers.

I finished one section of crochet for my curtain project.

Several pairs of pants were retired for being too far gone in the seat, and there is at least one more that needs to be retired, now that I think of it.

My husband dehydrated some cabbage.  I learned that you can freeze tomatoes whole.  Children have been growing mint.

My husband also brought home a vintage metal-frame chair similar to three that we already own.  They are very child-resistant, except for the vinyl seats.  My longer-term plan is to redo them in sturdy leather.

A family from church is making big changes to their diet, and they gave us several boxes of food from their pantry that they could no longer eat.  It was good to get a change from our usual and somewhat tedious simple foods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making do

I've been doing lots of sewing, organizing, cleaning, and optimizing.  Mending towels. Cutting up worn-out fabric for kitchen wipes. I found that scrap paper is also not so bad for wiping out greasy pans.

I unearthed some items that have been wanted for many months.  Still looking for the extra sheet for my bed, which at one point I stored so cleverly that I haven't seen it since. I've been borrowing a sheet from my fabric inventory.

The big universal pot lid of my husband's fits my mixing bowl very nicely, which is handy for when there's bread dough rising.

I have finally more or less pulled together enough seating for the whole family to have a sit-down meal in the kitchen, all at the same time.  (The second refrigerator is needed, but is very much in the way.)

I made a list of low-cost family activity ideas, which we have not drawn on much yet, but it is there.

Thanks to the cold weather, I've not had to do much with the yard yet.  Many of the black raspberry canes were mowed down over the winter, so I'm expecting fewer berries this summer.  Waiting to see if the bulbs we planted last fall are going to come up.

A big load of Easter breakfast leftovers were sent home with us on Sunday.  We have a secondhand vacuum sealer that no longer vacuums but still seals, and I bagged up most of the leftovers for the freezer.

I messed around a bit with painting paper coffee filters and making flowers out of them.  They turned out well.

Eggs cost $7.99 for a flat of 30 now, roughly double what they cost before, but a flat weighs nearly four pounds, so they are still relatively economical.

I've been thinking a lot about a window covering for the library, to replace the temporary paper one I put up.  I've made a number of experimental samples, but haven't found anything that I like enough to invest the time into making in a full-size version.

I knit a dishcloth from the crochet cotton left over from one of the experiments.

Place-making

A neighbor was giving away some pieces of furniture, and gave us a small table.  I cleaned out a neglected corner of the laundry room, and made a quiet little place to sit and work on something. There were also two small shelves that were claimed by family members.

A child was working on making a face shield for sledding, and decided to use the side of a 2-liter bottle.  Since it was curved, the child decided to iron it under a piece of kitchen parchment paper..  Turns out that what this plastic does when heated is to immediately shrink and make large, smooth blisters.  But this worked out in the child's favor, because three of the blisters were placed just right for the eyes and nose of a pair of goggles.  Child went on to build a full face mask off of that.

Later on I did my own experiment with another cut-up 2-liter bottle.  What came out was a smoothly pebbled (with bumps up to about 2 inches across) otherwise flat surface that is about five inches by seven.  It looks very nice, but it would take a lot of bottles to cover a surface of any size.

I also did an experiment into making flatbread.  Cooking it on the griddle and in the oven had very similar results, except that the griddle was better for browning it.

Alternatively

The claim here is that major food shortages in 2022 are likely to be limited to urban areas.

In 2020, the pattern was often that rural stores were last to be stocked; the trucks were sent out from the cities to the nearest stores first.

And the likelihood is that if food becomes very scarce, it will be used to keep order in the metropolitan areas.

It's as good as it gets here...

 ...in terms of getting the house organized and decluttered in between the busiest seasons.  I washed many of the windows before the weather turned cold, and have been able to conquer most of the messy areas.

I started an embroidery project for a Christmas gift.  I bought an embroidery hoop for it, but already had everything else.

I also have a couple of woodcarving projects in mind.  My husband brought home a woodburner, and we've been trying it out.  From looking at comic series art, I think the way to go with that is to do the shading first, and then add the fine lines and details.

The Twin Cities had some protests following the Rittenhouse verdict, but nothing near us.

We are well-supplied for Thanksgiving, and are thankful for what we have.  

The children have requested six different kinds of pie.

Deployments

Still working on settling our things into place around the house:  putting things on the walls, inserting the largest rug as an underlying layer to the three rugs in the living room, putting re-purposed hooks up in my closet/computer nook so my long skirts can hang on the back wall, covering a panel with fabric so I can place it in front of a window.

I also got some kale and more onions into the freezer.  And I made some kale chips that turned out well.

An apparent package thief made the mistake of dumping empty boxes in our yard while a child was looking out the window.  I don't know if the police will catch up with them, but the Holy Spirit will.

Abiding

I cut up an old skirt, hemmed the pieces by hand, and made a bunch of washcloths, which have been handy to have around.

I'm eagering awaiting garbage day, since there is a dead squirrel in our trash.  It died of natural causes.

Blackberries are done now, but we still have mulberries.

Fruitfulness

We have ripe mulberries and blackberries, and yesterday I got out into the farther reaches of the blackberry jungle, and picked enough berries to make two pints of jam.

I almost didn't make the jam, but it seemed like a good thing for the children to see where jam comes from.  It turned out very well, and we used some of it to make blackberry lemonade.

My turn, part 1

My turn to haul out the sob stories, I mean.  Aren't we all a bit tired of hearing them from the left for the past four years, and also the eight years before that, and the eight before that as well....

There was something in the newspaper from a week ago Sunday that set me off a bit.  A Hmong woman was telling about how when her mother was admitted to the hospital for COVID, for her first meal the nurses ordered a special meal for her that is the first meal that they serve to Hmong women after they give birth.  After that. her family brought in "culturally-appropriate" meals for her every day.

When I transferred to the hospital with my first baby, after giving birth at home, it was in the wee hours of the morning.  The baby needed some medical observation, nothing too worrisome, and I had lost somewhat more than the usual blood loss--but not so seriously as to need to go to the hospital by myself.

I may or may not have been given a breakfast that morning in the obstetric ward, after being up all night, but at lunch time I was given a tray, and I also had a bunch of doctors coming in and out, and I didn't feel comfortable eating in front of them.  When the tray-collector came around, I told her I wasn't finished with it.  Which you can take as meaning that I had had practically no free time for eating at all, because I'm not a slow eater.

When time was coming on for supper, I remember remarking to the nurses about 6:30 pm that I was looking forward to dinner, because by then I was quite hungry.  Two or three hours later, a nurse came in, found me slumped down (with baby safely tucked in at my side) and despondent, and asked, "What's wrong?"

"Starving," I murmured.  Supper had never arrived, and my blood sugar was falling.  My husband had been away dealing with home and things, so I had been alone in the hospital for several hours at least, and not wanting to bother the nurses.

She went away, and came back with a skimpy little sandwich, and an apple.  There may have been a little juice as well.  But that was it--no tray, and no dinner.

I called my husband after I had perked up a little, and told him to BRING REAL FOOD.  He eventually showed up, bringing me a meal from Wendy's--Wendy's, after being up all night and all day giving birth and then being in the hospital.

It may be of interest to some readers to know that my hemoglobin level was 7, and all they did for it was give me some iron pills.

I think we were able to go home the next day, but before that they did a jaundice test on the baby, which led to us returning to the hospital the following day for an even bigger s***show.

This time, the baby was an official patient, as I was not, but they gave me a room to sleep in, and the baby went to the nursery.  We got there in the evening, having had to drive very slowly through crowds from a sporting event who were unsportingly blocking the streets to the hospital, and who may have received some unsporting hand gestures in return. I sat up the whole first night with the baby; apparently one of the effects of higher blood loss while giving birth is that the post-birthing hormones are concentrated within a smaller blood volume, so I felt that this was within my capability, and I wanted to stay with my baby, and bond.  At 6:30 am, however, I was very tired, and went to bed.  At 7 am, while I was still awake, a very loud noise started up outside the window, my boarded-up window.  On a Saturday.  The hospital was building an addition, and just had to have the Giant Jackhammer going right outside what should have been my window, for several hours.  I don't even know when I was able to go to sleep.  I hadn't slept much the night before, either.

As a non-patient, the hospital was not even pretending to feed me, but my husband brought me little meals from the cafeteria, mostly hard-boiled eggs and hot dogs, and at some point my mother-in-law brought in two or three meals' worth of chicken stew, which I was able to refrigerate and microwave.

The baby's medical treatment was an additional s***show, and so was dealing with the rest of the dozen obstacles to breastfeeding that I haven't yet described, but we were able to go home again toward the very end of the third day.

So maybe you can understand now why I am triggered by that newspaper article.  It's no use complaining to the hospital I was at; it closed a couple of years ago.

A correction...

...has been made to this post (2nd post before this one). 

And I have to say, some of the links that I saw when I was trying to find an answer were rather confusing:  Nitrates in preserved meats are carcinogens, but nitrates in beans and in vegetables of the Brassica family are considered very beneficial, and you should eat them every day, because they have a "vasodilatory" effect?

These are the exact same nitrates chemically, as far as I know.  Or at least, I think they are in terms of what gets released from them into the body.  I could be wrong!

But I think the answer might lie in how these foods are eaten.  Traditionally, a high-nitrate plant food is eaten with a very moderate amount of meat, which was probably preserved by salting, drying, smoking, and/or some other traditional method.  In modern times, the meats have been increasingly preserved using nitrates--even the "low-nitrate" products typically use extracts from high-nitrate plants for preservation.

So if you eat a meal of say, regular bacon, beans, and collard greens, then you're getting a "triple dose" of nitrates.  That must be a shock to the body's systems, although perhaps the bacon fat slows down the nitrate uptake.  If you replace the bacon with something like a bean-based "meat substitute", then you still are in the same place...unless it is low fat!--in that case, you get the full nitrate load all at once.  This may explain much of the physical weakness and ill-health among some of the country's most careful eaters, as well as some of the country's most careless.

This merits further investigation, but before you go off and experiment on yourself, consider the tragic example of Seth Roberts, who I would call one of the greats of self-experimentation; I used to read his blog daily.  He died suddenly of something that was more or less a heart attack, while out hiking (in several ways it was very similar to the death of George Floyd, now that I think of it:  clogged arteries plus enlarged heart plus significant exertion), in the middle of a self-experiment that involved eating a diet that was very high in butter.

The way to do this more safely is to make a small change--such as taking a few small bites of a food--then wait for it to take effect, observe the results, and only then decide whether to take another small step in that direction, or to back off.  We are far too ungentle with our bodies in this culture.

Acceleration

The past few weeks have been educational in many ways.  Just yesterday, I learned that 3 tablespoons of the liquid from a can of garbanzo beans (chickpeas) can be used as a substitute for an egg in baking.  I knew about the substitution using soy flour and water, and I guessed that grinding up dried beans and adding a little water would work about the same way, but using canned bean liquid--that was new to me.  It worked just fine in the corn bread, though, and I've been told (but have not yet confirmed myself) that chickpeas have much lower levels of nitrates than other beans, for those who need to avoid them.

[ EDITED TO ADD:  I believe now that I was mistaken above, and that it is black-eyed peas that are low in nitrates, but I have not been able to confirm that yet.]

I've also come across references to chokeberries and aronia, which I hope to look into in more depth later, and a very interesting (and probably out of print) book called Curious Customs, which gives a wry and educated look at many of the traditional American customs that underlie our modern culture. 

I've also uncovered some small modifications to my eating habits which seem to be producing good results, but really, it is basically the same as someone else's "Eat food, but not too much."  I'd add, "And not too quickly,"  especially in respect to fluids and carbs.

Preparations

The little papier-mache birds that I made took a day or two to dry.  Then I took the two best of them, drew eyes on them, and left the rest in a primitive, unfinished style.  I put them up on the wreath and I like how they look there.

Jackie Clay's Pantry Cookbook has a recipe for dipping chocolate made of chocolate chips and food-grade paraffin that I am going to try out before the holidays.

I whittled another cedar branch coat hook, but haven't put it up anywhere. It only took a few minutes to make.

Things around my house are coming together in various ways, and it has been nice to see things looking pretty.