Libertarian Magic Dust.

Video shamelessly stolen from KCB at Redneck Mother.

Environmental Justice Activism.

It's a GREAT day to garden in North Texas, so I've been hitting my garden areas since before 8am, weeding, seeding, and getting some starts put into the ground. Typically, I garden for 30 minutes and come indoors for 10, garden for 30, come indoors for 10, but as the day goes on and my body becomes tired, I find myself gardening for 20, indoors for 20. If I encounter egregious personal injustices (like those which occur when one steps on a fire ant nest), I'm indoors for 30.

So, it was after my right foot stepped alongside the back fence to enable a fenceline weeding that I found Majora Carter giving a presentation at TED:



She's good, isn't she?

There's more to share today and tomorrow (another great gardening day, weather-wise), but this break's already been too long.

Em helped me decide what to do with my potato "apartment house" today. Reminded me of why we've been friends for so many years: "He's a GREAT listener!" There are two potato starts that are going gang-busters in the black garbage can that I call the potato "apartment house". There are also two vacant circles in the yard ... one intended to be a 5th sweet-potato circle and the other intended to be horseradish (neither of which survived).

So, taking another break from the weeding/seeding, etc. today, I came indoors and plunked myself down in a chair next to him and said, "Help me figure out what I should do about my potato "apartment house". I have two wealthy tenants who are rising stars. Accommodating them, I leave all the other apartment house residents behind. I'd like to move them out to give the other tenants a chance, and (it just so happens) there are two vacancies uptown.

I've spared you the other options I presented to him because (as is usual when I talk to Em), I heard myself talking. He didn't even need to respond; he could have been asleep in the chair. <-- Well, I don't think that would have worked, but he certainly didn't need to open his mouth (which he didn't).

I need to wait a few days before implementing this move because the wind that's been making garden work so desirable today will be making garden work desirable tomorrow, as well. NOT good weather for garden "circles" lined with wet newspaper & covered with wood chips. WAY too windy for that (which I learned when I saw today's efforts at a 3rd sweet-potato circle blow away).

No. 1's Wedding Shower and a visit from No. 2.

No. 2 came on a plane that set down at 1pm yesterday on a trip designed to both surprise her sister at her wedding shower and get a little face time with her mama.

She arrived hungry (like most travelers), and I had mixed success providing her food. I'd thought soup and a sandwich, but the canned lite vegetable rice number in my pantry contained chicken broth. Had a few slices left of really healthy sprouted wheat bread (not to mention all those home-made buns), and she decided on a sandwich of asparagus/artichoke/cheese spread with tomato, avocado, and hard-boiled egg with strawberries, purple grapes, and a bit of kiwi on the side.



We visited while I finished off the buns and potato salads & got ready to hit the road for the wedding shower. I made WAY, WAY too much food. I should have considered that the crackers, cheeses, grapes, and dipping veggies provided by the shower hostess would have at least cut the food requirements in half. <-- I know that now, for the wedding cooking which will also have a large mixed offering. Lessons learned hard are learned well.

The shower was attended by the usual mix and a few I hadn't met before. I think this was the "Have you known them 10 yrs or more?" photo.



Two more recent (UTA) friends showed up a bit later. In the pink on the left is No. 1's Wedding Planner. She was in the military before she became the leftist pinko for us. :-) On the right is the Mexican who worried, "Are you sure your mom won't care that I'm Mexican?" to which No. 1 replied, "I don't think my mom would care if *I* was Mexican."


It's always a good day when the girls and I are together, IMO.


For some reason I just love this next pic.



After the shower, No. 1, No. 2, and the wedding planner came back to our house for a while.



No. 1 tried on her wedding dress again for No. 2 and the wedding planner, as neither were here for the legal wedding in January.

Dave came shortly after the dress affair and mostly spent time with Em while the girls and I took advantage of being together.




No. 1 and Dave left to meet up with some folks at their place while we shared another hour or two with the wedding planner, ending our day past midnight sometime.

Today, it's all a blur already. Em went to work, No. 2 flew back to the midwest, and others are celebrating religious holidays. We'll be having pulled pork sandwiches with potato salad for supper.

Updated to add another pic, just because I love it and I just learned how to split screen and copy from one window's contents to another.

Milling Grain.

Finally got low enough on flour to warrant using my Family Grain Mill. I was hesitant to take it apart to clean before use, but the instructions were good and it went right back together and fit into the motor unit. It took a few minutes to get the fineness adjusted to my liking, but once we got that done the entire operation was a breeze.





Made 24 buns yesterday and making 24 more today for No. 1's bridal shower this evening.



Some of my bread bags go back to 2005. Watch someone think the buns are old. :-)

Saving Water.

"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water." - Benjamin Franklin

Droughts are fairly routine here in North Texas, but few people not associated with farming even consider the ramifications of reduced rainfall combined with increased populations. Kirk England in a recent newsletter mentioned the drought and suggested that we turn off the water while brushing our teeth. We're in a position to go further than that and it looks like North Texas could have severe water shortages in 2010 if we don't.

So, I bought a few shower shutoff valves ... two for our bathrooms and one for No. 1 and Dave. Em's brother installed the one in OUR shower:

and Em installed the one that's not shown (heh ... not because it wasn't installed correctly, because it WAS!). No. 1 is currently thinking that she likes to keep her butt warm while she washes her hair and shaves her legs in the shower, so theirs might get installed next year when there's not enough water in North Texas to keep her butt warm anyway.

Also, last evening I attended a class put on by Rainwater Harvesting in conjunction with my city's Make It and Take It.

Em had the season's "kickoff" to attend at Lone Star Park last night [he goes back to work tomorrow] at the same time as the class, but they were only 1 mile apart.

His orientation let out early enough for him to sit in on some of the class.



That's the woman who did half of the presentation, and next pic is me screwing around with our new rain barrel, which we drove home in the Mustang with the top down last night.



It wasn't so cold that we froze with the top down to accommodate the thing, and it does kindof add a grownup touch to the patio, dontcha think?



There's another 5-gallon bucket outside the photo, and we have no idea where to put the rainbarrel at this point. We don't have gutters and downspouts ... YET.

More links:
TAMU Water Edu,
Texas Water Info,
Texas Water Matters.

Other half of the presentation was done by Pam's husband, and he grew to become just a little OCD about saving water after learning about all this stuff. I can certainly see how that could happen.

Happy Birthday, No. 1!

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits - Hervey Allen

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday. - Thomas Arnold

After 30, a body has a mind of its own.- Bette Midler.

Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.- Georges Clemenceau

Time and Tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of thirty.- Robert Frost

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

Lookin' good, girl! - your mom.

Food Flight, food wrap, extermination, Em's famous catfish, gardening, etc.

Several years ago, No. 1 drove off to California with some friends. I made sandwiches for them to take in a cooler (which they left in California) and thought hard-boiled eggs might also be good for the drive. I started the eggs to boil, got busy with something else (as I'm wont to do) and eventually went to bed for the night. Em was working out-of-town on contract somewhere during this period in our lives.

I was awakened by what sounded like missiles zipping through the air and got up to determine the source of the noise. The water had burned off the eggs and they'd launched, flying all over the kitchen. Might have been 2 or 3 years later when we'd hired two guys to wash all the walls that I found myself saying, "Pay special attention to the egg on the ceiling over there, please."

Fast forward to last night. The garage freezer was pretty empty and needing a defrost, so I did that last week in order to take advantage of the seasonal sales being advertised. Yesterday's "haul" took many hours of separating and wrapping, so I might have been a little tired when I made dinner of garlic chicken, slightly breaded asparagus spears and sweet potato casserole for the convection oven. Tired or not, I set it to bake a few more minutes than necessary and the pecans atop the casserole turned black, as did a few asparagus spears. Using oven mitts (as is my SOP), I put the glass casserole dish and the much lighter racked chicken/asparagus pan on a cooling rack which I carried from the counter to the island for serving. The counter was only TWO steps from the island, but during those two steps the glass casserole dish launched, hitting the floor 8 feet away (I just measured), throwing sweet potato casserole as far (into the frontroom) as 14.5 feet! I cleaned up the obvious last night, but doing the routine Friday cleaning today, both of us found more sweet potato casserole in the weirdest of places. Projectile missiles come in many forms.

After our trip to the stores yesterday we came home to find an exterminator working on the house nextdoor. We're familiar with exterminator "talk" because we hired one once to help us get rid of pharoah ants. I'm pretty sure we still have pharoah ants, sugar ants, fire ants, and the latest addition is carpenter ants. We also have spiders EVERYWHERE, using the vacuum method to semi-control them. We don't expect to EVER be free of ants, spiders, or any other insects. We live in Texas, for goodness sakes. We're grateful we don't have the BIG ones or the scorpions.

But, Em was concerned because he's been watching a trail of large ants marching up the side of the house outside the TV room window, so he asked the guy to stop by and talk to us when he was done. The guy charges over $500 (every 6 months) for a complete "guaranteed" extermination and pointed out how we have spiders (DUH!) and fireants outside. Heh. They make their living scaring people, so I pointed out how our spiders are also brown recluses, but how we couldn't do a complete extermination because I'm growing food in places he wants to lay poison. I left them then to go wrap food and launch missiles, but we'll be taking a much more nuanced approach to extermination. I'm not opposed to using insecticides IN the house for immediate results IF that method doesn't result in breaking up a nest into 40 or 50 nests in the process. Carpenter ants don't tend to respond to insecticidal sprays like pharoah ants, so when I saw carpenter ants crawling up the outside of our bedroom today on the INSIDE of the windows, I gave them a spray. I doubt they have a nest here YET, because this is the first time we've seen them and right now is their "season". If we'd been seeing them year-around, it would be more likely that we have a nest in-house. We'll keep our eyes tuned to them, though, and approach them like we approach the other ants that seem to like living inside our house (baiting them with boric-acid in some form of sugar or protein).

I coulda/shoulda got a few pics of that mess last night, but I didn't think of pics beyond the fish wrap. Em makes the bestest ever fried catfish and we were down to one meal left at defrost/inventory time, so bought 15 pounds yesterday (which will make 13 meals for the two of us). I tried cutting our portions in previous packaging, but always felt cheated, so this year's portions are less what we should eat and more what we want to eat.


The gardens are doing well. 60% of the asparagus have sprouted, 2 of 3 rhubarb have leaves, the blueberry bushes are leaved and those from last year also flowering. Bought tomato plants from Home Depot because the seeds I'd planted sprouted and then withered before getting to the transplant stage, so we have 9 celebrity tomatoes and 9 better boy tomatoes outside along with maybe 20 strawberry plants that are doing well, along with 2 cilantro plants (also purchased, although seeds have been planted outside, as well), and one lemon balm. In addition, we have volunteers of maybe cantelope or cucumbers all over the place.

Haven't yet seen life on any other bushes besides blueberry and don't even know how to recognize life on the horseradish. Set the sweet potato starts out before the recommended date because they were drawing fruitflies on the bathroom window. Turned out one of them had died. Also got the regular potato "apartment house" going with more potatoes (white and red) that had been growing on the windowsill. Got some green bell pepper starts yesterday, but we're having a few days of cooler weather this weekend, so I won't put them out until next week.

Can't remember off the top of my head what seeds I planted around things in the past few weeks, but I wrote everything down. I know I started lettuces and spinaches, but didn't yet get around to kale or other greens.

Been doing much better moderating my time ... gardening, wedding planning, indoor activities, entertainment, chores, communication, etc. No. 1's wedding shower will be coming up April 11th and I'll be making pulled pork sandwiches (on my homemade buns) and potato salad for the group. That will be our next meat purchase and I'm thankful that I won't need to separate and wrap it.

White House To Plant Organic Garden.

I knew they'd do it! White House To Plant Organic Garden

Rain, worms, peach trees, and wedding dresses.

We've had more than our share of rain the past week (for these parts -- said with a John Wayne old cowboy movie accent). Officially, we're in a drought ... AGAIN.

We bought two more 5-gallon buckets (with lids) to put on the patio to catch the rain last week and they're now full (along with the two that were already full before the rain last week). Em moved them a little, I think, because when I asked if they were full ALREADY, he mumbled something about how I might not approve of him having moved them to where they captured runoff from the roof. We don't have gutters on our roofs here so much, so it's not as though Em set the buckets under a gutter downspout. He set them where he saw a lot of water running off the roof, much like I set the shower bucket where I see a lot of water hitting the floor.

. We're thinking about buying two more buckets (with lids) ... just in case it rains again someday, but we've had other concerns lately.

My worms came from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm. I ordered 2000 of them, but I'd be hard-pressed to testify under oath to 200 being in that little bag I got. I spread them about the yard in all the places where I want worms before I read the instructions that said to dump them all in one place because they like to live in societies. Heh.

My peach trees seem to be doing the opposite of what they did last year (respectively). This guy:
bloomed like crazy and produced 10 peaches last year while not being able to get the strength to open its buds this year.

The other one (which did absolutely NOTHING last year) is blooming its heart out this year.

Couldn't remember if they needed each other to cross-fertilize.

You can see some of the fence garden areas in the photos. I put wet newspaper up against the fenceline to deter weeds and set bricks to hold them in place. Took me 2 days to recover from that day of hauling bricks.

Been spending a fair amount of time lately working on No. 1's wedding plans. There's a lot of protocol to be considered and it's all been new to me. Dave's mom and I have been communicating and one of her questions revolved around what I was wearing. That's standard protocol, as the groom's mom is supposed to wear something that compliments the bride's mom's outfit. Who Knew? So, last Friday there was a 50% off clothing sale at the Thrift Store and I found a very comfortable dress to wear:


When Em took the photo to send to No. 1 and No. 2 for their approval, he said, "It's really not very flattering, you know." I said, "In what way? Style, color, fit?" He said, "Style, color, fit." So, over this past weekend we went over to Kohl's to see if I could find anything I liked. I found two white blouses that I tried on with a long black skirt. I hated the way EVERYTHING looked.

Today, we made a second stab at the Thrift Store. Wearing my first attempt, I found Em and moved him to right outside the dressing room. He didn't approve of the second attempt, either, so I went on to the third attempt. Whatdya know? He LIKED it:

It fulfills, IMO, the criteria of: being comfortable, as well as somewhat amenable to my brown birks. The terrain at the outdoor wedding location has the potential to be slippery/trippy, so I want safe shoes.

Next fashion concern will be for how to wear my hair. Tips are welcome.

Gardening (and HR 875?)

Spent MOST of the day yesterday working in the back yard. I really had a good time laying wet newspaper as a weed barrier along the fencelines, hauling bricks to ensure the newspaper stays in place, and then very slowly and carefully watering the fruit bushes, strawberries, and other things we planted last week.

Too windy today to plant seeds (my next step), so I cleaned up the back yard, set out two new water buckets (might get some rain this week), tended to the bushes planted last year, did a little laundry, ordered some shower-head shut-off valves and basically tended to other activities.

Meanwhile, No. 3 read this about HR 875.

I think many of us appreciate more oversite after salmonella in spinach or maybe tomatoes and salmonella in peanut products, but something doesn't sound right in this legislation, and it's certainly worthy of some chatter.