The Penultimate Day

"Penultimate" is one of my favorite words. We tend to use the more common phrase "next to last" here in the midwest, but "penultimate" conveys so much more I think. There's a sense of the impending end. Today is the penultimate day before travel. Tomorrow, I shall do a final load of laundry ("can you say baby?"), pack the last minute items (such as toiletries, et. al.), and get my hair done (that will have to be a whole different blog post). And then bright and early Wednesday, Jack and I will be on our way to see a dear, dear friend in Portland.

I love to travel and I have never been to Oregon. I can't wait to see it! Oh, and there's this little gathering I'll be attending as well: Sock Summit 2011. And while I won't be participating in the sheep-to-sock contest, I am thrilled to be in a building full of people with a passion for knitting that far out-knits my own. And that's saying something! In fact, the city of Portland has declared this Sock Knitting Week. Seriously - I think I'm in love.

So the blog will likely be dark for a while as I experience sock-love and everlasting-friendship (and perhaps a jet-lagged baby). But at least you'll know where I am & what I'm up to. If I get the chance, I'll try to post some pictures of the Summit while I'm there. Can't wait!

Jiggety-Jog

The worst part about vacation is the coming home. It's like the Sunday Blues multiplied by the days you were gone, plus the number of miles it took you to get home. It's compounded if you're driving. I call it the Home-Agian-Doldrums. I usually try to stem the tide by making sure we have clean laundry before we leave, and that things are not packed pell-mell into suitcases so that when we get home, the unpacking is as stress-free as possible. If we're driving, NPR helps, and having lots of snacks is always good too.

As you might suspect, my plan was thwarted in the largest of ways.

My darling baby has been fighting a rash for several days. The ride home was fractious, and although my oldest was helpful, the wee one just couldn't stay happy for long. This made listening to NPR rather near impossible, and much yoga breathing was necessary to keep my head from shooting straight off my body. And, perhaps to comfort himself, my eldest ate all the Chex Mix! Now that was just downright dirty. As were the grapes I packed, dirty I mean. Inedibly dirty.

Finally, upon arriving home, we were able to see a doctor - without breaking the bank. (Try finding a pediatrician in rural northern Michigan who's in your plan, or an Urgent Care for that matter.) And thankfully, it's nothing serious, just a bout of contact dermatitis, which means something we used on his skin, or our skin, or in the laundry made him breakout. He is now feeling (and sleeping) much better with the hydrocortisone cream the good doctor prescribed.

Unfortunately, this means I have to rewash everything. Not just the baby's items, which took 2 loads alone. No, we have to rewash all of OUR things as well. I am just now digging out of the 4 loads of laundry it took to rid our household of the mystery chemical.

We are home, and the garden still needs attention, there are random baby items that still need to be put away, the mail needs to be attended to, and the bedrooms have been ransacked by a series of back-to-back sleepovers for the big kid. But the kitchen is clean and the laundry is done and I even canned my kid some sweet pickles today. Perhaps the winds are picking up.

My Sacred Place

I love it up here at the lake, Up North.

I especially love an early morning with the fog coming off the lake, cool enough to need a sweatshirt with your coffee on the deck. This place is my church. Here is where I feel the presence of God and nature so strongly I can believe I am a part of it. In fact, Up North is really more like Due North, a purposeful direction, pulling me in the way I am meant to go. Up here I become more of myself. I feel more creative, more of an environmentalist, more active, more holistic. I believe more in myself when I am here.

This place is reliable. The sun always comes up with stunning beauty. The sleeping is always good. And the majesty of nature's sculpture is everywhere: the lakes, the dunes, the vast forests, the wildlife. Syncing up to that - it restores me in a way nothing else can.

I wonder if it will be the same when we live up here. Will it still hold that same pull, the same mystery? Will the everydayness lessen that feeling? I hope not. Because I love who I am here, and who my family is here too. I hope that never fades away.

Homemade Vanilla Extract

Vanilla extract is something we use a lot of around here. In fact, I am a big believer that you should always add more to the recipe than called for. Especially in waffles and chocolate chip cookies. That being said, it's hard to be extravagant with something that costs so much.

A few years ago, I spotted an article in a Martha Stewart magazine with a surprisingly simple tutorial on making your own vanilla extract. You split 3 vanilla beans, drop them in 1 cup of vodka (unflavored here, of course), and wait 3 months. We have discovered that the longer you let the extract steep, the more intense the flavor. Voila! Homemade vanilla extract! But I wondered if we were really saving any money. Here's the break down:

The price of pure vanilla extract can vary widely. I've priced it at anywhere from $0.81 to $3.25 a fluid ounce, with an average cost of $0.88 a fl. oz. Of course, this is one area where I firmly believe you get what you pay for. We spent a total of $33.00 for vanilla beans and vodka. I purchased Madagascar beans this time, which were a bit more than the mexican beans we used last time. We'll have to wait and see if the flavor is noticeably different. So for our $33.00 we got 50 fl. oz. of extract (or will have come October); that's $0.66 a fl. oz. I'd say that's a great deal, considering I know exactly what's in it (and NOT in it). At that price, and with 50 fl. oz. hanging around, I feel like I can afford to be extravagant in my baking. Well worth it.

Strawberry Season & the Plethora of Mint

So this year we haven't been out picking our own berries. Instead we unloaded the freezer of most of LAST YEAR'S berries and made jam. A perfect thing for frozen berries, I might add. And this year's strawberry jam is a little different than last year's.

We have a mint explosion in the back yard. I hate to call it a "problem," as I love the mint and find it is useful (unlike the grass). But you know how mint is, right? It takes over. Like now. And so I find myself pulling up mint every time I go out into the garden. I've been drying it like crazy, and if you happen to be on our Christmas list, I dare say you might be receiving some mint flakes this year. (We'll try to include ways for you to use it.) Then I had a brainstorm. What about Minted Strawberry Jam? It sounded good to me, so I did a wee little Google search, and low and behold, many others feel the same way! I added a tablespoon of fresh, finely chopped mint to the berries, and oh my word, it's heavenly!

And since it's been a while since I've done any design work, I went ahead and designed a faux vintage label for our jam, a la Trader Joe's:

I'm going to have to start getting the smooth sided jars if I want to keep labeling them this way, and as far as I'm concerned, that's just what I'm going to be doing! *Sigh* I love the start of canning season.

Wacky Wednesday: International Clothesline Week (Not Easy Being Green -5-)

I love the idea of the clothesline, the wash flapping in the summer breeze, the sun bleaching out the impurities in my linens, the fresh smell of the laundered clothes. But somehow, I never actually get out there and do it. True confession: we don't even have a clothesline in Indy. I'm not sure where we'd put it. And we tend to do our laundry at night; not too conducive to line-drying. And let's face it, if its not convenient, we more than likely won't do it.

But in researching this, and doing the math, in reality, we would only save $9 a month. (It seems like there are other things we could do that would make a bigger dent.) Honestly, it's worth it to me to use the dryer with such slim savings. Especially since I decided to practice Clothesline Week one week early, as we were up at the lake and would have the opportunity. Here's the deal: It took all afternoon (7 hours) for my clothes to be dry and then they were mostly dry. That $9.00 a month seems to be the cost of doing business with all the baby wash we do around here. I can't imagine using the line every day - and what do you do when it rains, or gets so humid your clothes won't dry?

To be frank, I'm more concerned with the impact of using all that energy on future generations. I was recently reminded of the Great Law of the Iroquois - which holds that any decision made must take into consideration the children seven generations in the future. It's a worthy world view, and high time the "white man" take this sort of thinking to heart. What will the use of all this energy mean for those people 200 years in the future? I shudder to think of what the world will look like then if we continue to use our resources as we do now. We could be bleeding ourselves into extinction.

Yeah, it's not easy being green.

It's Not Easy Being Green (4) - The Question of Grass

I have a confession. No, I didn't smoke grass in my youth. But as a girl dedicated to shrinking my carbon footprint, I have a love/hate relationship with the grass in our yard. I like having a place for my dog to play, for me to spread a blanket and enjoy the weather, and I like the color, but the hassle of the upkeep, not to mention the mowing drive me a little wild. Did you know, According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a new gas powered lawn mower produces volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides emissions air pollution in one hour of operation as 11 new cars each being driven for one hour? Yeah, gross. And the EPA also estimates that 17 million gallons of fuel (mostly gasoline) are spilled by backyard gardeners. That's more than the Exxon Valdez spill every year.

So I've made it my mission to remove as much grass in the backyard as possible. (I think our HOA would croak if we tried this with the front.) Over the last 8 summers we have put in four garden areas, planted trees, added raised beds for veggies, put in a patio, and now, I've finally laid out our garden path. I'll be the first to admit, I am hoping the grass will grow up between the stones (as you can see it has on the right side of the photo), but that can easily be taken care of with the weed-wacker, and it's electric. It's been a LOT of hard work to get the yard to this point, but for the first time, it's really shaping up the way I've envisioned it. We still have a sweet potato box to build, and mulch to put down, and plants to get in the ground and pots, but over all, I am so proud of what we have done. It's not carbon free, but our back yard is chemical-free, food producing, and low-carbon; and that is certainly a step in the right direction.

For a more detailed look, click on the photo.

Don't Be So Sure (of yourself)

There are many things about RJH being gone that don't phase me. I can get dinner on the table, get a kid to cub scouts, get a shower, keep up with the laundry, clean and make enough bottles to make it smoothly through the day. It's just not a big deal.

But there are things that shake my part-time-single-mom confidence and they always happen when he's traveling; like when the pilot light went out for the first time; or the time my oldest decided to spray the garage down with water; or all the time I spent battling with the school two years ago.

I had another moment.

Sunday RJH left for a trade show, returning on Thursday. This is some of the longest travel at one time that he does. I'm not bothered by it. Until I start hearing what sounds like a bird building a nest in the eaves above my studio. And then it starts to sound like it's in the laundry room. And finally it sounds like it's somewhere in the foyer. You know what this means. We have a critter somewhere in the duct-work. Shit. If there is one thing I absolutely hate, it's mice. And we seem to stir them up all the time. I'm sure all the digging in the yard didn't help matters.

So I call RJH, because really, I don't know what to do. We devise a plan to call the exterminator on Monday. I barely slept on Sunday night, and I don't mind admitting I brought the baby to bed with me as I had convinced myself the critter was in the kid's room.

Monday I went out to breakfast with some family that was in town and got them all packed up and on their way north. It was great to see them. In fact, I had forgotten all about the little critter. I went downstairs to retrieve my phone and call the exterminator when, I saw it. Dead on the foyer floor, as if it had fallen out of the ceiling vent, was a tiny little grey mouse. Blurg! This means I have to dispose of it (and before my whippet becomes aware that gifts of mice are falling from heaven). I poked it with the broom to be sure it was dead, praying that it wouldn't move. It didn't. It took all my courage to scoop up that carcass and toss it outside. Why do these things make me so wiggy?! But I did it. And there has been no more skittering in the ducts, which means I am able breathe and sleep again.

As RJH said, at least now I know where it is. There has to be an easier way.