Experimenting with a new platform

I am going to go try out blogger for awhile. I have had problems with this current platform for a while but there is the additional disappointment of having to purchase things that I think of as artistic control of my layout.

I don’t know if blogger will have less technical difficulties or not, so I am trying it out to see. Here is my new blog: Hello, its me Its a work in progress so bare with me.

Maybe now I can use gadgets in the sidebar and easily follow the rest of you on blogger?

Gift #1=Fail

I didn’t have enough yarn for my dads socks. I had finished the first sock and got about halfway through the second one when I realized I was in trouble. I could have bought more yarn but that is the last thing I wanted to do. I don’t need to add half used balls of yarn to my already ample stash of half used balls of yarn.  So I frogged it and started another pair of stockinette stitch socks with a long cuff. I will have enough but this experience led me to another problem.

I don’t like the colorway of the Noro when knit up in stockinette stitch. Simple as that. It took me one full sock to come to that conclusion. Now what? On to another project. Maybe the colorway will grow on me in the meantime. Maybe my dad would like it anyway. But I don’t and I am the one working with it.

Can you say “anal”? I admit it.

I continue to spin and nearly finished a neck warmer for my sister. I had to dye some yarn and I have to finish up the warmer before take a photo.  At least I am being productive.

Navajo spinning video

I tried to learn Navajo spinning but ended up feeling like an idiot…just couldn’t get it down.  However, I learned alot from this lady just the same, way back when I was completely confused about everything to do with spinning, she kept me sane and inspired me.  I may have already posted this before but here it is again anyway.

Why We Stopped Going to the Beach

Our children loved the beach when they were little. The beach in this case was a lakefront, in the city. I don’t have digital images on the computer of the place in summer but we went down there recently to see if the lake was iced over.

It wasn’t iced over but the sidewalk was (in the foreground). This is perhaps the cleanest our beach has been in years though.

When the children were babies, we would spend some time cleaning up our immediate surroundings before letting them loose to walk barefoot on the warm sand. The place was fairly clean in those early years but stuff always washes up on the shore. Stuff like shards of glass, pen caps, cigarette butts.

Gradually, we figured out that if we went very early in the morning, we would benefit by arriving just after the work crew had cleaned the sand and emptied the garbage cans. This became a Sunday morning summer long tradition for us.

Fast forward a few years and the beach was getting dirtier and dirtier. It was getting really crowded on Sundays and loud! Entire neighborhoods would show up to picnic and bring along gigantic stereo equipment. We would be privy to competing musical tastes in this way because one PA system isn’t that much of a problem but when everybody brings one? Forget about peace and tranquility.

The homeless began to camp out there. I didn’t mind them since they tried to keep the premises clean at least. The toilets began to reek. The garbage cans began to overflow and more and more stuff was washing up on the shore.People were blaming the homeless when in fact, it was the average middle class citizen that was helping turn this once beautiful shoreline into a dumping ground.

I was very proactive at the time. The kids and some of their friends wanted to do something about this! We volunteered as a clean up team.

It was me, Jasmine and her best friend, the boy and three of his best friends. Two of the boys best friends were dubbed Che and Gabrielle Garcia Marquez by me. They both had the respective personality types. Both were from families that were good families but poor and hard working so never around to do much with the boys. Both grew up in very rough neighborhoods  and yet avoided the pitfalls that such areas provide for latch key kids.

We tackled our job one morning in teams. We were tracking the trash we collected. Jasmine and her best friend approached me to complain that some “yuppie” male was laughing at them for even trying to clean the beach. They ignored him but chose to clean a circle around his little sun bathing island.

Another woman with a baby approached them and offered them babywipes to wash their hands periodically. LOL! She commended them. Baby wipes went onto the “trash collected” data sheet.

The boys were having a ball. I had one rule. Do not go within a few feet of beach goers. Respect their privacy. They were doing this as we picked up dirty disposable diapers thrown just a few feet away from garbage cans. We were finding buried toys, used condoms, broken beer bottles, cigarette buts, chicken and rib bones, discarded “to go” Styrofoam containers from local restaurants, lighters on and on.

“Gabrielle Garcia Marquez” picked up a plastic toy as I watched. He was well away from a family that were enjoying themselves. Gabe approached me all excited about another find. The family had been watching us all along so there should not have been any doubt that we were cleaning up the beach. We looked official with all the data collecting and latex gloves.

But this family……they decided that Gabe was stealing one of their toys. They sent their scrawny preteen punk of a son to make the accusation along with a threat. He reached to about Gabes shoulders. The little macho turd approached with his fists raised. Gabe laughed and the mother who was sitting on her ass close by started to shout encouragement to her son as she bared her own fangs at me. Gabe threw the toy back to the family dirt pit and the boy tried to keep instigating. The mother was too lazy to get her ass up to come over and deal. The boy finally slunk away when Gabe put up his own fists ( I wasn’t going to let it go there).

We walked away, picking up one more dirty disposable diaper discarded just a few feet away from a trash can and one more water bottle  just a few feet from a recycling bin.

We didn’t go back to clean up again because I was responsible for the safety of these children and I felt that I needed more adults around for backup.  I tried to drum up interest. I turned to other beach clean up volunteers. I had met the leader of another clean up crew who told me that he had no problems getting volunteers at his beach. His beach is where all the well to do go. They simply want their own environment to be clean for them. They were so successful that they created a bird sanctuary. Job well done, I said. Would he care to send some of his crew to help out at my beach? I explained what had happened and he said, “We get lots of support from beach goers at our beach.” Of course you do. Can you help us though?

He said he would put the word out. I gave him my information. Nobody ever called me.

We stopped going to the beach because it’s a pigsty. It looks sometimes like the garbage dumps we see in images of third world countries. People continue to blame the homeless and the “immigrants” and even the city for not cleaning the beach 24/7. But who puts the trash there in the first place? We do.

I had a teacher who used to say, “I”d hate to see what your house looks like” if  a student left garbage on their desk.I’d hate to see the homes of people who can’t walk a few feet with a dirty diaper to a garbage can.

As for the mother with the punk son, I hope he isn’t hanging around on the corners with street gangs but what else could have become of him?

Mock Meatloaf Recipe

I’m experimenting with non meat replacer (including tofu) recipes for mock meat loaves.  I have found many recipes already exist but many of them have a great deal of added hard cheese or they rely on lots of nuts. Both cheese and nuts are great but I wanted to try something with less of each. Cheese because I don’t always want it in every dish and nuts because they are expensive around here. They are a great protein source though and so I wanted to keep them in the recipe without having them be the main ingredient.This is the result of the first experiment:

Garbanzo loaf with a side of sauteed onion and zucchini

I must say it came out pretty good…..a little suspiciously like falafel, but still good. I do not recommend that anybody try this yet though because even though the flavor was great, it was also on the dry side. I need to work the recipe a little bit more. If you are going to serve with gravy or if you like a dry loaf, then go ahead and give it a go. I think that I need to add one more egg to get the moistness. The egg that I used was really very small….so maybe a large egg would suffice.

I started with dry garbanzo beans and used the short soak method: bring beans and water to a boil for 1 minute then cover and let sit for 1 hour. Change the water and add more to cover the beans by an inch. Boil again then lower heat and simmer for around 2 hours. You can use canned beans well rinsed instead.

Garbanzo Bean and Cilantro Pesto Loaf

2 cups cooked garbanzo beans

1 cup cooked millet (or other cooked grain)

1/2 cup shredded carrots

1 cup cottage cheese

1 bunch fresh cilantro or 1/2 cup frozen cilantro, thawed and squeezed of all liquid. (Parsley for those who hate cilantro)

salt

black pepper

3/4 cup of walnuts

1 egg

2 cloves garlic

3 Tbsp of olive oil

Method:

In a blender, chop one bunch of fresh cilantro (1/2 cup frozen), 2 cloves of garlic, 3/4  cup of walnuts and enough olive oil to make a paste. Add the two cups of garbanzo beans, cottage cheese and egg slowly.Process until well incorporated.  You will have some whole beans and this is fine.

Transfer the bean mixture to a  large bowl.  Add the millet,  shredded carrot,   salt and pepper to taste.

Mix all ingredients together.

Grease a loaf pan, pour in the mixture and smooth the top. Bake for 45 minutes in a 350 Fahrenheit oven until firm.  Let cool slightly before cutting. Serve as you would any meat loaf…with a side of veggies, gravy potatoes or whatever floats your boat.

Not bringing back thrift week

Not this week. I’ll try again next week. There has just been too much bad news with the Queensland floods for me to warrant writing about something so seemingly trivial as our thrifty ways. Nobody has died that we know of but I’m taking this hard enough to not be able to focus very much.

The same with Abundant Pantry and the photo blog and though I have done some more spinning…who cares? Other than trying to motivate myself into knitting comfort toys for the little ones who suffered as the result of the floods, I just don’t feel like doing anything blog centered at all.

I can rattle on of course. I do that very well. But that isn’t going to appease me. I really want to do something. Feeling powerless is not one of my more comfortable states of being.

The flood in reality has made me feel wholly irrelevant. And this passes on to what we try to do as well. We are irrelevant in the wake of natures wrath. Global warming deniers be damned. You all know that we can’t hide the cookie jar by covering our eyes, right?

Learning to survive

I’m both aggrieved and relieved at the same time. Our family and friends in Queensland Australia are okay but they are not  really okay. Knowing that they survived the floods is one thing but the emotional turmoil of the ordeal itself? That is quite another. I am praying for all of them.

Which brings something to mind. I don’t think that having an emergency supply would have helped many of my friends in that case. The flood waters led to many leaving their homes and some (not my own acquaintances) lost their homes entirely…that would include emergency supplies if they had them.

Some had emergency bug out bags ready. And that helped to a point. Some were trapped in areas where they knew hardly a soul. Some were separated from their families because they were on business trips. One cousin and his wife were visiting their daughter on higher ground. They were trapped in place…but they had power and running water.  The cousins wife is very ill. Nothing happened to her…..but if it had?

Floods are probably one of the worst things to have to endure and to prepare for them is  even harder. Do you prepare to leave? Yes. And you prepare to stay if its safe to do so. But if you are on safe ground (not directly affected by the flooding) ..you also have to prepare to be cut off from supply routes, power and emergency medical attention.

That is the one thing I worried about last summer as we drove down from our perch in the mountains of Wisconsin after heavy rains. We noticed that roads were flooded out. I wondered how the people who lived up in the hills were faring. Did they have enough food? Did they have enough water? Did they have power? They couldn’t come down to buy supplies if the main roads were the only outlet. They are not the only outlets but were back roads safe to take? Were helicopters dropping down emergency supplies? Would they if need be?Could the helicopter medvacs get to the residents in an emergency?Would they? And what about us? We are on very high ground as is our local town…the one with the hospitals, gas stations  and grocery stores. The entire town could feasibly be cut off, leaving us untouched by the water but suffering the consequences.

What happened in Queensland is the situation I saw but a million times bigger. What I saw was minute though it brought up lots of “what ifs” for me.  Queensland is beyond terrifying. Its Biblical in its proportions. Its worse than even that. There are no words when  a flood zone is described as the size of Germany or France or both.

Yes, we saw flooding in Brazil and in Sri Lanka at the same time. Yes, those images were horrifying and the death toll sad. But…I don’t know anybody in either of those places. I know people in Queensland. That makes a world of difference.Not that loss of life  is cheapened if I don’t know anybody who suffered…..but its much more real and heartfelt when we are familiar with the place and the place is close to our hearts, when we have visited and thought to buy a home in the flood zones, when my husband grew up there……….and our loved ones are suffering to one degree or another.

I know that a lot of Australians are rethinking the idea of preparing for an emergency right about now. Let me take a moment to warn you all. There are people who exploit fear for monetary gain. It happens all the time in the U.S. Companies sprung up and sounded alarms after the financial crisis for example. These companies wanted to sell survival foods to crazed consumers. As we near 2012, I’m sure we will see more of the same. The process works well for the companies.

There are already a few places online using the idea of prepping to get more readership if not monetary gain.  I don’t think this is a bad thing. But I also think that when we prepare we assume ideal conditions. The floods are proof that  there is no guarantees.

The main thing that I noticed is that friends who suffered the most had no power. No power means no running water. When people ask, “Where do I begin in preparing”…the answer is not in food but in water.

One gallon per person per day plus another gallon per person for washing up. Nothing less than that. A person can survive without food for awhile but water is critical. Treat the water with a bit of bleach. Here. Scroll to the bottom for the ratios of bleach to water.

If you have to leave this behind…then so be it. This is where prepping takes a turn to surviving or survivalism. That is a dirty word because of the political connotations but don’t discount the usefulness of the thinking and skills. I don’t believe that prepping would have gotten many through the floods…but survivalism would have come in handy.

Lets just say though that a person doesn’t want to learn survivalism (because it seems like a fantasy life with all those guns and radiation pills), where does one turn?  Online, I’d start at the Chatelaines Keys …..this is the site formerly known as Causobans Book.  Author Sharon Astyk writes about adapting to climate change and peak oil. She has lots of entries on food storage and preparing for an uncertain future. If you are going to read anything, join any challenges at all, this is the one that others model their own challenges on. Nobody does it better to my knowledge. If somebody does, I’d be interested to know. Don’t take this suggestion lightly.

There are those who think of preparing as a part of simple living and I have to agree to a point but its not so simple. Its not a matter of having a few bags of rice and a few of dried beans plus some home made jams.  If you are really serious about food storage, the Latter Day Saints have a publication that might interest you. Preparedness. That is a pdf and should give a more realistic idea of the scope necessary to keep a family fed under long term emergency conditions.

I’m not sure if its in the booklet but it is mentioned in LDS pamphlets that the calorie intake will keep a person hungry but not starving.  One can store enough foods to be full on…..but if you study the above pamphlet, you will see how hard it really is to be prepared. I put that link here because it tells the truth. On this topic, don’t settle for anything but that.

When I was a small child, I found myself in the middle of a war zone complete with bombing overhead and soldiers on the streets, smoke in the air and gunshots in the distance. Our home which was built into a hillside (an earth home of all things) served as the area bomb shelter. I don’t want to say that life was never the same again for me as I was very young and there have been good things since then that overshadow the bad, but I don’t believe that the experience had no impact whatsoever on me either.  I use that experience as the ultimate “disaster” even if my memory is fuzzy…its never going to be fuzzy enough to forget what it was like.

From eyewitness reports of the Queensland floods….the victims stories remind me of being in a war zone. Thinking on your feet is the key to survival in such dire circumstances but being prepared helps you to do that. At the same time, after all that work, you have to be ready to leave everything you have worked so hard for behind and you have to do that without batting an eye. Cut your losses and move on fast.  This is not so simple. There is a lot to be said for psychological preparation as well. I am not going to get corny and say things like, “The human spirit will prevail”…..because it might not for some.

Its hard to suggest humor for example but its a key to survival. Its hard to say, “don’t dwell” but we have to be able to move on as fast as situations will dictate and we have to do so with a level head while fueled on adrenaline. I don’t think many have given enough thought to this aspect of prepping and the only reason I see for this is the hatred there is for survivalism. Big mistake.

I am not a political leaning survivalist…but I have learned more from them than any other source. Survival blog is a good place to start. It has the advantage of worldwide readership all of whom make contributions based on their own experiences. I will warn you to put aside your political differences….we can’t afford to make these kinds of judgments if they mean our own survival.

I hope that this post is food for thought at the very least. I don’t believe that I have the answers. I do think that prepping is still a good thing but we are talking about a world in which the climate is attacking us in ways we have rarely seen in our lifetimes. We can only do our best but to do so, we have to know which tools work best in which situation.

Spinning away

Coriedale Wool from a local source

The coriedale wool was my second purchase after a spinning kit that came with un-named wool and a spindle. I used up the kit fairly fast  and was wondering where to proceed next when I came across a woman on ravelry who posted that she had saved a flock of sheep from the meat truck but that in order to be able to keep these sheep, she needed  to raise some cash. Would anybody be interested in buying fiber from her? When I found out that her farm was just around 100 miles away, I decided to do just that. Her prices were reasonable and she was kind enough to help me pick out “easy” for beginners fiber from her wide selection.

This resource happened along at another crucial moment for me. I had started to read about the Fibershed project around then. This project is about using local resources and raw materials from close to home for clothing.   I think that is one of the more unique and difficult challenges a person can undertake.  Initially, I thought, “I couldn’t do that.” Which doesn’t mean that I don’t find it admirable or even adaptable to my local area.

Because  here was an offering of fiber from a source only 100 miles from me. I had not made an effort until then to look closer to home for raw materials though I knew that the resources existed. I was just too new to using raw material at that time and learning the ropes took up most of my thought process.

Long digression….but I do think that wise use of resources should include locally produced materials whenever feasible and if affordable. I have another digression on my mind too…taking clothing that is already here (in thrift stores or in the closet) and using these as a jumping off point for cutting down on the environmental cost of clothing…..nothing new really.

The commitment for January was to spin up all the fiber I had collected since beginning to spin. How’s it going?

I have so far finished the Shetland (not local) and now I have finished up the Cordiele. I had dabbled in both on and off since purchasing them. The next steps for both is to set the twist. The Cordiele has to be dyed before calling it a wrap.

I could use Koolaid which I have done in the past. This gives a rather psychedelic color that I’m not especially fond of. I could mix up colors and get something less electric but I worry about muddying up the pot. This is a cheap and easy approach. No mordant necessary.

I could buy commercial dyes that are widely available in art supply stores, supermarkets and fabric stores. These would be easy enough as long as they don’t require a washing machine since I rely on the laundromat. Can’t leave the machine uncleaned for the next person to ruin their clothes in.

Or I can go to the herbal store and buy enough plant materials and go the natural dye route. I do have some marigold that could work but I have seen some of the resultant colors. They are lovely but I’m not feeling a pale earthy yellow for the cordiele which might end up being a pair of mittens. Winter seems a time for brighter colors to me.

I’m  feeling indigos, violets, reds……..

I’m going to take on the black dyed Merino while I think about color.

 

Winter Repose?

It almost seemed like we were lulled into complete inactivity just after Christmas. We were tired! It took a while to catch up with us but the long summer of working on our farm, trying to juggle life between country and city, planting, harvesting and storing foods…, we put in a great deal of energy and labor to these efforts. We earned the right to do nothing. We needed to slow down and do very little.

But as we come to the harshest part of winter…it gets colder if not wetter in our area until March….cabin fever begins to set in. There comes a moment when resting is not a cure but a habit. The sun doesn’t shine enough to make us cheerful. We feel listless.

What to do? Things. Those projects that have been waiting can keep waiting but not if one is serious about them. For example….a few months ago, I said I would make a hard cheese for the first time. I  needed to wait until the temperature in the pantry reached a low enough point to age this cheese…which will take 3 months. The temperature in the pantry will be ideal for a cheese cave for that long.

I also needed a cheese press….an improvised one….and Garry produced it for me. He needed to do something just like I needed to do something. I am impressed with how simple it all really was. Left to my own devices, I’d of complicated the project.

This is a 6 inch PVC pipe with holes drilled all around. A vice and a wooden platform set in a baking pan to catch drips. A wood follower is inside. Our first cheese is covered in cheesecloth and in its final pressing…to be revealed later tonight. Real cheese presses come with a pressure gauge to determine the weight of the press. But we have seen antique ones that don’t have a gauge too. We plan on adding a second vice for the other side as it seems that our cheese might be slightly lopsided in the end…live and learn.

We spent hours on this yesterday! I chose to make a stirred cheddar recipe which meant that I had to stir the curd every five minutes for an hour while holding it in a water bath at 100 degrees Farenheit. The recipe called for lots of other steps attention demanding steps too.  What I had failed to understand when initially reading the recipes for hard cheese is that they are not heated on a stove top. Instead, they are set in a water bath and kept at a steady temperature. This was hard labor for winter!

We both went to bed exhausted. Not the “bored to death and must escape into sleep” kind of exhaustion…but the good kind…the “job well done, reward well earned” kind of exhaustion.And I finally slept deeply…for the first time since October!

Housewife Macgyver

Thank you Toria! I needed something fun like Housewife MacGyver… Today, I’m unable to link to a URL for the button…or even add it to my sidebar……but the tag line is : “achieving self reliance through wise use of resources”. It a year long challenge with new ones every month.

The first step for January: Commit Thyself

Looking around me and at previous chats about what I aim to do….I have a long list to tackle. LOL!

But really, when I said that I’d start on hand made Christmas Gifts early…(knit socks for my dad) and the reasons for it (Start making handmade gifts really early in the year) I meant it. I’m committed. Each person on my gift list will get at least one handmade project.

Since my idea involved using up the materials I already have on hand…….the real commitment is not the making of gifts  alone but also involves  using what already  is  on hand as much as possible.

So I am going to commit to that in general but more specifically,  I’m going to dedicate January  to spinning all of the fibers that I had bought last year. Fiber=yarn=finished objects=gifts.

I have silk, hemp, shetland, mohair and cordale wool to finish up this month. Spindles are a quick way to spin some of these fibers but the silk, hemp and mohair are a bit trickier than wool and I’m still a newbie at the craft,  so productivity  slows down considerably when working with each of them.

I’m working on the Shetland first…its easy enough and half spun already.  I should have it finished this week.

Finishing doesn’t mean that it is spun…… now add it to the stash….Once spun the twist needs to be set, usually through gentle washing but sometimes through steaming.  To determine how much yarn I have produced, I also have measure the yards and keep track of this.

The Shetland is a natural brown….so no dying involved.

The Cordale and the silk are natural undyed. I had thought to dye them myself when I bought each.   I look forward to doing that this month. Then these will be “finished”.

Hemp

The Hemp is also natural and can either be dyed or simply left as is. I haven’t thought of a project for it yet ( I thought of a sunhat, a shopping bag or wash clothes) and so am undecided about the color. Its a beautiful blond on its own. I might just leave it alone. Spinning hemp is said to be hard, but I didn’t find it too hard to figure out…it just required some adjustment in thinking.

The mohair is already dyed black. I have yet to learn how to set it once its finished. Another research project!

Steps!

1. Finish the easy fibers first (Shetland and Cordale)

2. Tackle the hemp

3. Tackle the mohair

4. Spin Silk

5. Dye the silk and cordale

6. Find projects to knit using these yarns….

It will be a sad day when I finish this project and not have anything left to spin! Though I’d like to commit further and move on to stash bust my ample fabric supply….I know I’ll be on the lookout for more raw fiber to process some time soon! Its a pleasant pastime, with ample challenges depending on the fiber but nothing so frustrating as to be a turn off.