A little nutty

The amazon gods appeared today. Not really, my local rural postal carrier appeared today bringing me a box from the amazon gods. I got a box of soap nuts! I know I wasn't supposed to start homesteading laundry until December but I may start early.

Although as I think about it, I will wait one more week. Gonna do laundry normally next week, then wash both sets of bedding and maybe even the pupper's blanket with soap nuts to clean out the washer like the soap nuts package says to do. Then soap nuts laundry week after next. Oh yeah and this week also gonna do a bit of pit scrubbing. Gonna give the soap nuts the best chance they can get.

Still not sure about this deodorant. On one hand, I don't seem any sweatier than usual. (Sweatier? I think I'm making up words) But I'm not sure about the odor control. But maybe I should shower more often.

Also, this post really is a bit nutty. I may or may not be drunk. In-laws are visiting. Teetotalling Jesus-freaks. They left me unattended for a bit. I had fruit loop milk. That shit is delicious. Now I'm trying to both pretend I'm sober and refrain from cursing at the TV. It's not going well. I have to stay on their good side though because they're the current owners of my Little Farm in the North. *sigh*

My Life in a Mason Jar

I'm seriously tempted to change the name of this blog.  Do you have any idea how many mason jars are floating around my life right now?  Let's analyze:

I just counted 181 jars of varying sizes full of food in my canning cabinet (no I didn't count them for giggles, I was doing an inventory) (I might have gone a bit overboard... we're never going to get through all that salsa...) (and that's not counting the 4 sitting on my kitchen counter to be used soon and the half dozen open jars in the fridge) (I like parentheses)
I use freezer-jam jars to make homemade yogurt, usually 6 jars at a time
I have two more freezer-jam jars in my shower to dilute the baking soda and apple cider vinegar to wash my hair
I have a half pint jar downstairs and a jelly jar upstairs containing my homemade deodorant
There is a pint jar with holes poked in one lid (covered with another lid to keep it fresh and from stinking up the place) in the spice cabinet holding hubby's rib rub

Also I don't currently have any of these jars but have in the past: homemade semi-instant oatmeal mix, chai tea mix, beef jerky, bits and bobs in the garage (actually there might still be some of those, I haven't looked) (although most of those aren't actually mason jars, somehow my hubby got a massive collection of baby food jars, I'm not quite sure how that happened since he has never procreated nor has he lived in the same state as a baby relative) and probably other things I am not thinking of right now.  There's another jar somewhere with more holes poked in the lid that I've used to hatch out butterflies and moths.  Entomology nerd.

And I want more!!!  I found these adorable little soap pump lids that go on mason jars for next to your bathroom sinks and whatnot.  And there will probably be other ideas as time goes on.  The more homemade things I make, the more I shove things in mason jars.  December's homesteading project is laundry, I have soap nuts sitting in my amazon cart just waiting for me to decide what else to put in there and punch in my gift card number and hit the free super saver shipping button.  I hear that soap nuts work best in hot water but I'm lazy and my water heater sucks so I'll probably be making them into soap nut liquid detergent which I'm sure will also go into a mason jar.

Also saw a cute idea for making candles in mason jars.  Safety first - make sure they won't break or damage whatever they're sitting on.  But it looked like a good idea!

Anyway, I should go be productive.  Just wanted to babble about my love for the simple mason jar. 

We put the "fun" in dysfunctional, only not really

I was with the fam last weekend, and we have TONS of family drama cropping up.  I'm not going into that here, not the time or place, and I really don't have anything to say anyway.  However, the interesting thing is that I had a little time to chat with my brother and this is at least the third time where he has mentioned something from our dysfunctional childhood that I had COMPLETELY BLOCKED.  Kinda makes me wonder how many other repressed memories I have tucked away in the grey matter.  And the most recent one was all about how the family has always hidden things from older generations.  And this has gone on for generations.

I've said for quite a while that for as different as we are, my brother and I cope with... whatever... in rather similar ways.  Both are self-destructive.  He drinks, I eat.  He's an alcoholic, I'm fat. 

And I'd repressed just how much the family hides things from others.  And I hide my eating.  Anything "bad", anything that's more than what is necessary, I desperately try to hide it.  Creamy cheesy fattening naughty foods, I eat when the hubbster is out of town.  Or in my car.  Or whatever.  Bags of candy hidden in my desk.  All that jazz.  But anything I eat in private shows up on my body in public.  How can I break the cycle of, well, dysfunction?

No, really, someone tell me.  Cuz I don't have a clue.  I keep thinking that recognizing all this will help.  And maybe it is, because I think I'm less bad than before.  I've managed to mostly maintain my weight (at least stick right around the same size) for like 4 years now, which is nothing short of a miracle.  I've never stayed the same weight for more than 2 years in my entire life.  Ever.  Always going up or down.  Mostly up.  Some down.  But the downs are always followed by more ups.  And never staying the same, at least not for very long.

But I hope someday I'll figure out how to use this information to my advantage and actually get to a healthy weight.  One thing's for sure, I've figured out a million ways that don't work! 

Speaking of homesteading

Guess where I am this weekend?  Hubby and I are playing farmer!



But it just made me want my homestead even more.  *sigh* 

It was sort of an accident

This was never a serious plan.  I didn't wake up one day and go "yanno what?  I should prepare for the apocalypse"  I didn't read horror stories of the end-of-days being upon us.  I never worried about preparing for the worst. 

And quite frankly, I've said for years that if a major disaster happens, I want to be sitting my fat butt right on the epicenter.  I want to be the first to go.  I don't have the drive or ambition to rebuild society.  I really don't care to learn how to build shelter in the wilderness and fight off the crazy people and all that jazz.  I want to die early if a major catastrophic event happens.

So none of the things I do now are born of a deep-seated desire to be a survivalist.  It was more just because I was a bored housewife.  I spent a few years as a single woman in her own home with a career and all that jazz.  Well, rental home, but home nonetheless.  I had to do everything, and I mostly had to do it all Monday through Thursday because I'd spend all weekend every weekend 4 hours away at my then-boyfriend's house.  But after a few years, the boyfriend became the husband, I gave up my job and my home and moved into his house.  And in a lot of ways it all went downhill from there.  Don't get me wrong, I love my husband and in the long run I am better for having him.  But in my day-to-day life, bleh.  I had no job, no friends, no sense of belonging, nothing to do, no independence, nothing.

So I started searching for things to do that interest me.  I like to bake.  Hubby likes the smell of baking bread.  Put one and one together, and I started baking all our own bread.  Sandwich bread, hamburger and hot dog buns, dinner rolls and breadsticks.  I can do it all!

Other things have come even more strangely.  When I had been searching for bread recipes or other meal recipes (I love to cook) I had seen instructions for making your own yogurt.  I ignored them at the time, as they were for plain unsweetened yogurt and we always ate the sweet fruit-flavored stuff.   And, really, yogurt's supposed to be good for you, right?  So, why bother.  But then one day as I was enjoying a cup of sweet fruity yogurt, I actually read the label.  It had BOTH Nutrasweet AND high fructose corn syrup.  The fuck?  That seems a bit much.  So I headed back to the googles and researched homemade yogurt some more.  Guess what?  Totally easy.  And, thanks to the GOBS of home-canned jams and fruits in my basement, my plain unsweetened homemade yogurt gets delicious with the addition of homemade natural jams and fruits. 

It wasn't any sort of "omg we must eat natural" or "organic is best" or "down with corporations" or "save the earth" or any of that crap.  It was more just "why not?" 

I'd been canning for years, I started that before I ever got married.  At first I just did a couple things, salsa and jalapeño jelly mostly.  After the wedding, the hubby was reminiscing about the canned cherries his grandma used to put up.  So I started doing cherries.  And the apple tree on my parents' farm had a good year, so I canned applesauce.  Still only did things that you could do in a boiling water canner.  I had a pressure canner, but I never used it.  We moved to our new home and there is a wild blackberry patch, so I started canning wild blackberry jam too.  Still just boiling water canning.

This year in addition to the bread and yogurt, I decided to broaden my canning skills.  I got my pressure gauge tested on my canner, I read my Ball Blue Book and a lot of websites.  I found recipes for things we actually eat.  No sense in making a bunch of stuff no one around here likes.  And as of right now, my canning cabinet is full of salsa, jalapeño jelly, strawberry rhubarb jam, blackberry jam, cherries, cherry preserves, maraschino cherries, strawberry jam, key lime marmalade, blueberry jam, peach preserves, maraschino cherry jelly, blackberry lemonade concentrate, pink lemonade concentrate, chicken, ham and beans, corned beef hash mix, pumpkin, chicken broth, apple pie filling, applesauce, apple butter, and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. 

When I told my mom about the adventures with apples recently, she made the comment that "wow if anything happens, you two will be able to eat for a long time!"  That's when I realized that I stumbled into semi-preparedness by accident.  I'm still not any sort of "I'm going to survive the apocalypse" person, but I have a hobby that I have a lot of fun with, and it provides us with a basic necessity. 

Did you miss me?

I love how blogspot lets you keep your site even if you only post a dozen times in a year.  Nice.

So... is it time for an update?  Let's go through my old posts and see where I am now. 

Still invisible.  I'm about 10 lbs down from my highest point, although that's 7 lbs higher than I had gotten to in the last year or so.  Struggling.  I've gotten away from the podcasts, and maybe that's part of the problem.  I've forgotten about Persistence, Patience and Practice.  Also not exercising regularly, although I have been working on finding workouts I don't mind.  More on all this later.

I have made progress on lunch though.  Lots of paninis and shit made up ahead of time and wrapped up and stowed in the freezer.  One goes into the toaster oven, and I have a good lunch that isn't a pathetic sad affair at home or a lonely expensive affair out.

And I've actually made progress on those Springtime Fantasies too!  No, I haven't started gardening (and we're coming up on November, so I'm probably not going to start any time soon) and I still don't look so good in a sundress (although, oddly, the hubbster seems to think I do.  weird)  I have canned so much I'm just about out of empty jars though!  I experimented with pressure canning this year.  And.....

I discovered "homesteading".

This is going to be a huge post (and well past my bedtime) if I go into all of it right now.  But I have learned that homesteading doesn't have to be off-grid self-sustaining Little House on the Prairie homestead.  Make your own homestead.  And I'm in LOVE with the idea!  So many things.  I'll be back soon with details.

I ate everything

The hubbster and I are on vacation right now.  I just wanted to document everything I ate because it was DELICIOUS and I'm 99% sure I can recreate pretty much all of it at home.  Of course I won't get to eat it on a patio with the ocean crashing on the beach right below me, but whatever.  (wait, is that why it tasted so good?  oh I'm screwed...)

First meal worth remembering: it was so simple, yet so delectable.  We went to a Greek restaurant and I had a veggie wrap.  It was just a pita bread, toasted, and filled with red and green bell peppers, onions, and these giant meaty mushrooms that had all been... umm... probably sauteed in 32 gallons of olive oil...  and then there was tzatziki and feta.  It was served with lemony potatoes and a bit of Greek salad.  Yum!  Also my permanent dining partner ordered a corn and crab soup that was out of this world.  It was creamy, and if memory serves me correctly (it's not on their online menu) I think it said something about Chardonnay.  But I might be crazy.

And then tonight.  I ate EVERYTHING.  3 hours later and I'm still stuffed.  We started with fried calamari.  And I had a local brew.  Then I had this bowl of stuff...  started with a base of diced mango and red bell peppers.  Shrimps.  Add some coconut rice.  And because I like to live on the edge, I had them add a big ol' hunk of sesame and wasabi crusted tuna.  Rare, of course.  My man loves his steak rare.  And he even makes medium-ish pork chops.  But he FREAKS THE HELL OUT when I order rare tuna.  So I do it every chance I get.  Because it's fun.  Oh yeah, and after I finished my beer, I had two-for-ones of their version of rum punch.  Mmmmmmmm rum punch.  But wait, I forgot the best part!

Crab
Mac
and
Cheese

Shut the fuck up.  That was awesome.

I munched on 4 different kinds of marine life in one meal.  Die, fishies!  Get in mah belly! 

Did I mention crab mac and cheese?  Seriously.  I kinda wanted to order 3 or 4 more servings and bring them back to the hotel for breakfast.

And we wrapped it up by splitting a piece of Key lime pie. Which I also wanted extras to bring back for breakfast. 

I slid off my chair.  Holy shitballs.