Linkdump (or: I have discovered Mother Earth News)

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1997-08-01/Make-a-Pine-Needle-Basket.aspx

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/2002-06-01/Milking-Stanchion.aspx

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1983-09-01/Make-a-Rabbit-Blanket.aspx

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1982-05-01/Make-a-Stove-From-Mud.aspx

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1981-05-01/The-Owner-Built-Adobe-House.aspx

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/2008-08-01/Recycleable-Solar-Dehydrator.aspx

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1982-05-01/Heavenly-Hammock.aspx

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1975-11-01/Sheepskin-Rugs.aspx

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/1973-09-01/Cutting-Bottles-The-Easy-Way.aspx

Possible New Direction for the Blog

It's been almost a month since my last blog post, and let me tell you, it's been a month filled with interesting happenings.

For example, I now have a goal for my adult life. I know! Who does crazy things like that, right? And it's not one I would have figured for myself, either, until my grown-up years.



Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internets, I want to be a farmer.



Specifically, I want to live on a small, organic homestead of about 5 acres. I want bees, and chickens, and goats, and sheep, and miniature donkeys, and cows, and lots and lots of space for growing things. I want to grow and preserve my own fruits and vegetables. I want to raise and butcher my own meat. I want to milk my own dairy animals, and turn it into cheese and butter and awesome creamy soap. I want to suit up and steal from my own hives, honey and wax and pollen and royal jelly, and then figure out what to do with those last two.

Ideally, I'd even like to build my own house on those 5 acres, but since construction is not my strongest point I may pass on that one.

I'm not sure if these urges are a continuation of my love of spinning and knitting and making things in general, or if they all have some kind of ultimate root in wanting to live a simpler life, closer to nature, taking part in all the steps of production from start to finish, but I think it's all connected back to my early memories of my great-grandmother who lived up north.

I remember going up every winter to Granny's house in Indiana, and catching brief glimpses of The Basement, a magical place where little kids were not allowed to wander, a place full of shelves lined up like the stacks in the library where I work now, all of those shelves full to the brim with jars and jars of different things Granny had preserved. Apple butter, green beans, pickled cucumbers (the cucumbers were grown in an old claw-foot tub that lived in the back yard), and other things that I never found out what they were. I'd never had apple butter before, and no other recipe tastes as good to me as the one made by my Granny, and that I never thought to ask her for.

At Granny's house, I found crocheted turtles she'd made ages and ages ago, and tried to read the stitches and make her a new one (I couldn't figure out why mine turned out so much smaller - they had the same number of stitches!). At Granny's house, I had my first taste of horehound candy, which tasted sort of like cough syrup, but I loved it anyway. Granny's house was full of strangeness to me - homemade quilts; racks and racks of salt and pepper shakers that her daughter, my grandmother, had collected before she passed away; old-fashioned porcelain-faced dolls; strange almanacks and for some reason rooster-themed memorabilia all over the place - and I loved it. There was a park in easy walking distance from her house, with a lighthouse we used to sneak into, whose rickety stairs terrify me now that I'm older and wiser. There was a river with a bridge for the railroad tracks that my mom told me she and her brothers used to race across, while telling us in the next breath we were under no circumstances to ever do.

My Granny was born in 1902, and to the last she didn't take shit from anyone. When they made a law that you couldn't burn leaves and trash in your yard anymore, she still did it. When the cops came by to tell her it was illegal, she told them she was over 90 years old and had been doing it all her life - were they really going to take a lady her age to jail? She told me stories about growing up in that house, and while I could tell her memories were not all happy ones, I was glad to hear them anyway.

So when I think about farming, and having a home to call my own with its own shelves of apple butter and preserves, maybe its own claw-foot tub full of cucumbers if I can find one, it makes me feel happy inside. I've been making a lot of friends this past year, many of whom have chickens of their own (and let me tell you, trading leftovers for fresh eggs is a pretty sweet deal), and one in particular of whom has goats, sheep, and miniature donkeys. It's been making me realize that yes, this is really what I want to do, and I want to do it soon, and in this area.

To that end, I've decided to buy a goat. My friend (we'll call her Sunshine) has a bunch of pregnant mamas right now, and in the recent snowstorm three of them had their kids. Two of them froze to death in the night, but one of them made it, and I'm pretty sure I've fallen in love. Uno was intended to be a meat goat, but I think she's going to be the start of a milking herd for me.

She's even cute enough that I'm breaking one of the Cardinal Rules of the Blog, and posting my face for the first time. Enjoy it, folks. (p.s. the lady in the black shirt is not me, she's a friend who's crashing at my place until May, and wanted to come down and visit Uno. I'm the one in the glasses.)







I think it's a pretty good start.

Gardening Like Whoa!

So, a bunch of LSGers were talking about getting ready for gardening season, and that got me thinking that you know, I sure would love to grow some things this year. Maybe even things that I could can, since after my last post I seem to have gone on a .... slight canning binge. Maybe. Just a little.

If by 'just a little' you mean a dozen pints of marmalade, 6 pints of jalapeno jelly, and a dozen half-pints of candied jalapenos, ALL of which have all found homes and a good portion of which have been devoured by yours truly in the past month. Then, yes, just a little bit of canning.

So, anyway, I have all these extra jars now (I may have gone and bought 4 dozen more half-pint jars and a dozen quart jars), and I am all out of produce, so hey, why not try growing some?

There's a community garden set up through the university, so I tracked down the email for that and called up a few friends to see if they'd be interested. And now? Now, I may have asked for a 4x20 foot plot, that we've already planned out the setup for, and are just waiting to get the seeds in. Yeah, this is going to be interesting :) The Library Overlord said he might help me get the actual land ready, but I think I'd really prefer to build the plot up instead of try to dig into the clay that is our local soil.

I'm excited, though. I'm actually going to be working with people who can touch plants without killing them, and all the ones we're planting are heirloom and organic. I can't fucking WAIT for spring!

I made motherfucking MARMALADE!

Shit yeah, bitches, and it was EASY! Here is what you do:

Buy a bunch of canning jars (12 16oz jars for $8 at HEB)
Buy a bunch of oranges (18lb bag for $7 at my farmer’s market)
Buy a bunch of sugar (The Library Overlord went out and got me some kinda crazy 20lb bag of sugar, I really hope I use it all making jam because I don’t have anything I can store this in)
(optional) Buy a set of canning tongs ($10, The Walmarts)

Get a big cooking pot, like for making a bunch of soup.
Get an even BIGGER, GIANT stock pot, like for making chili for a very large party.

Peel some oranges. I find it’s easier to quarter them first, then peel the quarters, because then the peels are all the same size, instead of all kinds of crazy sizes. Cut the peels into little strips and put them in your pot. I did 8 oranges per batch.

Tear the orange-quarters into little bits, and put them in the pot. You can do this over the pot, so the inevitable juice drips go in with the rest of it. Toss out any seeds.

Pour in water, 1 cup at a time, until it barely covers your oranges. For my pot, 4 cups did it. Then, add as many cups of sugar as you did water. THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO ADD!

Bring that bitch up to a boil for like a minute, then take it down to a simmer. Simmer it until you can take some of it out, put it in a clean bowl, and it kinda starts to gel up when it cools. That’s when you know it’s done. The recipe I was using said that should take about an hour, but I had the heat on low at first so it took a lot longer than that. Just keep setting the timer for 20 minutes, after that first hour, and eventually it will be jam.

NOTE: MARMALADE HAS A BITTER BITE. If you don’t like that, don’t add the peel, and DO add pectin. I didn’t do that, so I don’t know how to tell you how to do it. Me, I like the little bit of bitterness, and the texture of the peel.

TO CAN: Get your big-ass stockpot, and put something on the bottom so the jars don’t rest directly on the bottom of the pot. I used a vegetable steamer thingy. Put your jars in, put your lid parts in, fill it with water, and boil that shit for at least a minute to sterilize. Then, USING YOUR TONGS BECAUSE THAT SHIT IS HOT, remove the jars and fill them with your nice, hot marmalade. Oh, yeah, baby, just like that. Fill me with your orange goodness. Put the lids on the jars, the screw-thingies around them, and screw them on tight. Do this to all the jars, or until you run out of marmalade.

Put the jars back in the boiling water, and boil them for another 15 minutes. Take them out, and let them cool down slowly. If you can still poke the top of the jar and make a clicking sound as the top comes up and down, then it hasn’t sealed yet. If it doesn’t seal by the time it’s room temperature, boil it again, and see if it goes that time.

It should probably wait overnight to cool down, and it’s supposed to take a couple days to really thicken up in the jar. But let’s be honest, you’re going to be eating it with a spoon by breakfast time, and there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.

FUN VARIANT: CHOCOLATE ORANGE MARMALADE!!!

When the marmalade is cooked, but you haven’t canned it yet, add in a bunch of chocolate chips. I didn’t really measure it at all, but maybe 1 part chocolate to 2 or 3 parts jam? Mix it up, and the heat of the jam will melt the chocolate. Can as per usual. It’s so good, your mouth will orgasm with delight.

Time for the Big Guns

Last night, I hit 50 rows left to go on my Persian Star Shawl. I posited that if I knit 5 rows a day, I’d be done in a little over a week! Then I remembered that the rows? Are over 1000 stitches each at this point.

I did some math. I have knit 124,592 stitches on this shawl. There are 51,200 left to go, PLUS the edging that I haven’t figured out yet what it’s going to be.

Galveston was only 125,128 stitches. If I’d done another shawl with that size yarn, I’d be almost done right now, instead of having 29% left to knit.

So, either way, I think I'm going to try it. I'm going to try and knit at LEAST two rows a day, and stop if I hit five in one evening. If I work on it during my lunch break, that should help. If I work on it during D&D games, dinners with friends, anything I can think of, that should all help. I'm getting into the point now where more and more of it has patterning every row, instead of every other row, and that is not helping. But as bob is my witness, I will get this done before my arbitrary deadline of April Fool's Day!

State of the Union

Well, it's a new year, I'm in a new home, with a new cat, and it's time to figure out my plan for the upcoming spring. So far this winter break, I've gotten the cat fixed, made kebab, henna'd a friend's hair, cleaned and scrubbed the entire bathroom and kitchen, baked a gross of cookies, weeded my bookshelves and sold the extras to HalfPrice (made a good amount, too!), gone through the last of the boxes from when I moved in, sorted my renfest stuff into keepable and unkeepable items (stuff that doesn't fit any more, mostly), had the dishwasher at Casa del PenName replaced, and gotten rid of a bunch of stuff I don't actually need. I even started making the bed every day! What's up with all that, right? It's almost like I'm living like a grownup.

I'd really like to cut down my possessions to the bare minimum this year, and it's time to admit to myself that this may have to involve a significant bit of destashing. Some of it I'll be putting up for sale, but some of it I may be posting here for free, so keep a lookout. Now that I have one completely-cleared-off bookshelf at my disposal, I find myself wanting to store my various non-fiber crafts there. Once there's actually ROOM for everything I own - or, rather, once I've cut down what I own to just what I have room for - I think I might even start decorating. I'd like to finally hang my creepy mask collection, and maybe do a little bit of painting to hang up. If things turn out well, I'll take pictures and show everyone :)

Things in my personal life are going well, too. I've gotten used to living alone, and I'm starting to really enjoy being single. It's fun to flirt, but it's even better to go home to my quiet house at the end of the night. I'm secure in my home and my finances, I've gotten confidence in my ability to take care of myself, and all in all I'm happy. I know part of that has to be the brain drugs, and I'm so thankful that I'm finally on them. My weight hasn't really gone down a whole lot (I waver between 190-195), but I feel good, so it's hard to care that much.

I have another spinning wheel that I got off Craigslist that I'm still in the process of fixing up, but the drive wheel itself is a bit of a mess. I need to figure out exactly which spoke goes into which of 12 spots, so that the come-apart rim will come back together AND fit on the too-loose-for-my-tastes center. Once I've got that figured out, I am gluing that bitch together like you would not believe.

And hey, if that doesn't work, I can replace the whole thing with a bicycle wheel.

Eyes - Check!

Remember Me?

Well, well, well. We meet again, old friend.

I am talking, of course, about the Cuddlefish, who decided to hop into my knitting bag this morning and insists that I get his eyes down and cease this silly procrastinating, and who am I to argue? He's got a razor-sharp beak, and he knows how to use it.

So tonight, I'm finally finishing up this old project, or at least getting to the part where it's all coasting from here.

Organization Times! (a.k.a. Settling In for Winter)

I have decided that, since Casa del PenName is all mine, I'm going to pretty it up real nice. So far, this has consisted of hanging up some Sound and Fury posters, and pinning Galveston up over the window (something else will go there eventually, but this works for now).

I think I need to do something more for at least one of the walls in the living room. I don't know if it needs paint, or stencils, or art, or what, but something is definitely needed. It's just a big, blank, empty space, and something needs to be going on to open it up and give it some visual interest.

Maybe I'll post some photos, and scribble ideas on them.

Dear PSS Prime

Every row on you takes forever and a day. I've been knitting on you for a hundred million years. Why aren't you done yet?