Work on Monday, Wash on Tuesday, Iron on Never.

        School started Monday here in Indiana, and for those of us who are humble blue collar dormitory custodians that means the summer work schedule ended and the winter work schedule has begun. I'm an hourly employee in my first year with the university (as a staff member, I was a student for eight years). This means from now until May 2nd I'll be working the weekend shift, 7:30am to 4:00pm Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
   The rest of the week is Mine, All Mine!!!

    Tuesday was warm and sunny with a nice breeze. I celebrated my four-days-a-week freedom in a homesteadly manner by scrubbing down Maybelle,  my beloved vintage Maytag wringer washer and doing laundry The Fun Way.  She has been sitting idle since the beginning of last winter, poor girl. The whole summer I've been working a 40 hour week and not had the time or energy to clean up the porch and get her going.  Yesterday, however, she got a good scrub, as did the double utility sink that serves as my rinse tubs.  I got a new, much longer garden  hose awhile back, so I don't even have to carry water to fill the washer and tubs anymore. Yay!

     Maybelle lives on the porch because the laundry room is already occupied with The Manimal's washer and dryer.  He got here first.  That's ok, there's not enough room in there for a wringer washer and rinse tubs anyway, and if Maybelle were inside I'd miss the whole working in the fresh air and sunshine part of laundry day which is so fun.

In winter, when water in Maybelle's insides might freeze and burst something I use the automatic washer in the house, but even then I don't use the dryer. I prefer hanging things to dry. I have clotheslines in the loft which is very warm in winter.(it's very warm is summer too, come to think of it.)  I've also got three wooden folding drying racks that I can set up by the wood stove downstairs. Clothes drying adds moisture to the air, which is especially nice in winter when the house is heated and closed up.

   Here's a pictorial tour of my fun, fun first day off of work.

The double utility sink is from Manimal's oldest son's old place. It was sitting unused in a store room. Both sink drains are linked together with a y shaped pipe, so you can pull one plug and drain either side or pull both plugs and drain both sides at once. I haven't got the sinks piped to the septic tank, I use nontoxic soap (homemade) to wash with and drain my gray water into a bucket for use on the gardens,or sometimes I use it to scrub the front porch and back deck.

Here's a long view of my "laundry room".You can see the hose, which comes from the faucet around the far side of the house.  The blue mover's blanket hanging on the left is to block the sun, we've had an excessively HOT summer here in the midwest.
 The little old cupboard was abandoned in the shack up on the other side of the creek and I've adopted it. You can also see the chairs I made new seats for by weaving strips of the heavy plastic sacks our animal feed comes in. They're pretty sturdy, and when eventually they wear out I can always weave new ones. I found the chair frames with torn seats on the curb at hippie Christmas a few years ago.
       (Hippie Christmas is the end of the spring semester. All the university students pack their cars and go home, leaving piles of furniture and other useful things on the curb, allegedly for the trash man, but most things are "adopted" before the sun goes down.)

The utility sink makes a great set of washtubs, and the price (free for the hauling) was perfect for my budget. It had the kind of drains that take a rubber plug. I had two, but one has gotten mysteriously lost.



So I cut the turned edge off a lid from a plastic cottage cheese container. When I put water in the tub suction holds the lid in place, making a leak-proof plug.  After I'd done the washing and was draining the tubs I found the ring on the rubber plug for the other sink hurts my finger as I try to pull it out, so I've decided the homemade plug is better and have made one for the other sink from a pudding lid.



On the way to the clothesline you would do well to stop and have a few cherry tomatoes, sweet and warm from the sun. Yum.



This skimmer is meant for cooking, to get foam off the top of beans or jelly as they boil. It's also a good laundry tool for removing dog hair from the top of the water so that it doesn't just go right back onto the clothes. It's also great for catching bugs that have the misfortune to fly into the washer or rinse tub. Bugs sometimes do not realize what they're getting into. (Like us all.)



A drain plunger with holes in it makes a good agitator for doing small loads of wash in a bucket. There are fancy versions of this available online and from catalogs, but the homemade version works pretty well.



Years ago when the Manimal was courting me he would bring me out here for the weekends. As we worked in town all week  at least part of the weekend was catch-up on household tasks time. I began doing the laundry because I didn't like the way he did it. He did it the"normal" way, of course. Automatic washer and dryer, toss clothes in, take them out,shove them in the closet.

          First I brought some clothesline rope out here, and a package of clothespins.  I strung the line up between a triangle of stout trees, and gave the electric dryer an extended vacation.  The Manimal found he liked  his shirts line dried, fresh smelling and crisp.  Next I found a canvas bank bag and stitched him up his very own clothespin bag, probably the manliest clothespin bag anywhere.  The JRC is his initials.
       If I'd known I would be coming out here to live and would become the permanent  primary laundry-doer I might not have made this thing, haha. My thought was that he could now properly hang clothes in my absence.    HA! Manimal, bless him, lacks the clothes-hanging gene. He will only hang clothes on the line if the dryer is on the fritz or the electricty is out.  If forced to line dry clothes he hauls the sodden clothes out of the washer and flings them higgledy-piggledy onto the clothesline. They don't "need" clothespins as the weight of the water holds them down. They take forever to dry this way, and when they are finally dry they are all dried solid in pleats, crimps and clumps. Which DOESN"T BOTHER HIM!!!
So I do it myself (said the little red hen) so he doesn't look like a bum.

Manimal's shirts on the line. I hang them by the collar band, with three clothespins, and they dry smooth enough to not need ironing. I think the valley breeze must work as a wrinkle preventative.  At any rate I DO NOT IRON.  I figured out doing the Plain Dress Project that I could spend 5-15 minutes of my time ironing each dress or blouse and within 10 minutes of putting it on it would look about like it had before I even ironed it. So being the wise woman I am I just stopped ironing.  I now consider the iron to be a tool for pressing seams when making clothes, not for maintaining the daily appearance of clothes. Anything that looks too awful un-ironed does not stay in my wardrobe.

Notice the travel trailer in need of refurbishing, the rumpled blue tarp over the hen's straw bales and the henhouse just behind the laundry?
     One end of the clothesline is tied to a basketball hoop post. The other end is tied to a schoolbus. I see no reason to pretend to the world that I live anywhere other than a supremely rural ramshackle valley. Manimal's best friend Cowboy calls this place "Little Arkansas", and I think he does not mean it as a compliment.



Here are my four extremely boring polyester blend work smocks. I know I'm fond of plain dress, but this is an entirely different level of plain.   Worn with the mandatory blue jeans this "uniform"  serves to make the custodial staff  recognizable when needed. We're all blue, you can see us from 50 yards away.
 At the same time it serves to make us easy to ignore. Many of the students walk past us as if we didn't exist, the uniform is a sort of cloak of invisibility.  I will spare you my rant concerning class distinctions (and the denial of them) in America Land of the Free.  Also my rant concerning foreign students and how they view/treat servants (which is what they see us as).
    Not that all or even most foreign people are unanimously bad to servants.   It's just that the only way an 18 year old student gets here from the other side of the world is by coming from a wealthy family, and the behavioral programming of persons who are brought up to be served  is as different as night and day from the behavioral programming of persons brought up to work for a living.  Between the students and the staff this job is quite an education in human nature. Honestly, I often feel like I don't "belong" in this job, like I'm working undercover or part of the witness protection program or something. But I enjoy the job, it's great fun to tidy things up, and I find my co-workers fascinating.  Not movie-star-fascinating, more as a study of personality types and psychological quirks.  In private conversation with me once our boss referred to our workplace as The Land of The Misfit Toys, and it is a very accurate appelation. Not that I'd tell the other toys what he said.

To the left, our schoolbus. Someday to become a home on wheels.

Cloth napkins. I hang them neatly folded in half over the line, and they dry  not needing ironing. I just fold them two more folds and stack them in a basket.



Now, since I think I"ve figured out how to download them, lets go to the  movies!

WASHING MACHINE AGITATING- unlike the automatic machine Maybelle has not got a tall center post, so straps and sleeves and long lengths of cloth have nothing to get twisted and tangled around.

WASHER SOAKING- you can pull the lovely aqua knob on the side of the machine to stop the agitator, and soak things for as long as you like.

HERE'S HOW WE SQUEEZE THE WATER OUT WITH THE WRINGER.  When Middle Child was eleven or so we had ,my grandmother's  (Mom Rodgers') wringer washer. Poor Middle Child was doing laundry and got her fingers caught and her hand went through the wringer. Our visiting neighbor girl ran screaming from the house, and continued screaming all the way home.  We popped the wringer open (there's a safety release) and put ice on Middle Child's hand.  She is clearly not the hysterical type.

The trickiest part of a wringer washer is getting the clothing started through the wringer without catching your fingers. My other grandmother (Mamaw Williams) taught me to chain the clothes through by laying the edge of the next item onto the one almost through the wringer, nose to tail. Much safer for the fingers, and fun to do as it's a sort of challenge to keep up to the speed of the wringer. (note: the wash water is not orangey yellow in person)

BUCKET AND PEFORATED PLUNGER - this is useful for small loads, and takes no electricity which is excellent. It's of course more work intensive than the wringer washer, but somewhat less so than using a washboard.

Sharing the cherry tomatoes with the hens.

Lastly, just for fun, a nice wedge of watermelon for Pollock and Schmutzy.

Hope your laundry day is sunny and fun!



Whilst the Owl is away the Pussycat shall play

        The Mighty Manimal is away for a week, and  we have been busy,busy, busy here in the forest valley. By busy I mean sorting through the loft and packing up boxes and boxes to be taken to Goodwill. By 'we' I mean me. The dogs and cat have been laying about as usual. Supervising, they call it, but they're supervising from the front porch while I slog away upstairs, so they're not supervising too closely are they?
     I worked on packing things on my last days off, and a bit after work during the week.  I also brought more boxes home from work to further the project, which looks like it will be ongoing for awhile.

Doesn't the truck look pretty half loaded with useful things that  are of no use to me personally?

      Today is my day off again.  This is the last week before school starts, and I will be switched from my summer job of 40 hours a week to my "real" job, which is weekend shift plus one day which equals only 24 hours a week  It will be less money, but also less gas to get to work and more time at home which I intend to invest in continuing to declutter my part of the home.
     Be The Change you want to see in the world, right?    
     I spent this splendid Friday morning hauling boxes out and loading the truck, and when it was full I drove it to the Goodwill in Martinsville.  Although I seldom listen to the radio as I drive (I prefer the noise in my head) I switched it on as I started up the road and the song playing was Dust In The Wind, which seemed quite suited to the occasion.

We live halfway between two towns, so halfway between two Goodwills, but gasoline in M'ville is several cents a gallon cheaper than elsewhere, so I went there and filled up the tank and got groceries all in one trip. The difference in price on a full tank of gas more than pays for the drive there and back.

    The Goodwill unloading guys complimented me on how I had everything boxed up neatly, and in categories even! Well of course I did.  I'm a tidy person, it was organized in the closets and drawers and cupboards...I just transferred it to boxes. 
     After Goodwill I stopped by Traderbakers, my favorite flea market, to wander around happily, marveling at the enormous amount of useless junk there is in  the world. Naturally I didn't buy anything. I felt positively giddy with virtue (ok, imagined virtue).
     Then I got groceries and came home to my happy doggies (It was not just trooooo love, I also brought them biscuits). There was a message from Manimal, saying he's going to a Parisian Flea Market tomorrow morning. He's eager to see what french junque is like. Haha. I messaged him back requesting that he Please NOT buy me anything! I do not recall that I mentioned what I'm doing with my free time this week....

      After lunch and a nice phone chat with Smallest Child, who called from New Orleans, I realized I still had several hours left before Goodwill closes, so I scampered up the stairs, slung a great many more things into boxes, and hauled them down to the truck. In the process of hauling, and casting my eye about (there's a pretty image) for other things that could be hauled away, I realized that with eleven boxes fewer books in my life I don't need two bookcases, so as I adore the big one (and the men who gave it to us when I was a teenager) I hauled the skinnier white painted one to the truck. (Quickly before I could think of anything else to put where the books had been!) I figured out I don't need a sewing machine cabinet with no sewing machine in it, or that cleverly designed wheeled wicker file folder organizer now that I have a big desk with file drawers. Or some baskets that were storing junk in a posh looking way, now that I've got rid of the junk. Or three drawers full of  video tapes, or a box full of music cassettes from my dear departed mama. Or my huge wheeled book bag now that I'm a college drop-out. I haul hay, straw, manure and vegetables these days, and use a wheelbarrow.
       The second trip to Goodwill was even more fun than the first. I truly love decluttering. As I drove I made up a song for the occasion all about how happy I am to put useful things back into the world, and how I don't want to have to take care of anything I don't care about, and how I like having space for the good things to breathe, and a bit about the joy of saying Goodby to things that were once a good buy.  It was a verrrrry happy and spritely little song. It may or may not have had the words 'useless crap' in it somewhere, I can't quite remember.  As songs go I'd say it was right up there with Ballerina Corner and The Cricket In The Lamp, and was quite a bit better than Little Elvis.
       Then I came home. Happy. I went up to the loft (which it is too dark now to photograph) and gazed benevolently at the empty spaces where boxes and overloaded shelves used to be. I came downstairs and studied the big homemade calendar that covers half the fridge door and realized that The Manimal will be home in two days, which gives me two evenings  after work to tidy up and do laundry so he doesn't come home to something resembling a bomb site.
    I also realized he will be going away on business again in a month. That gives me four weeks to collect some more boxes, sort some more corners of the loft, and discover all the other things I can happily live without. I'm hoping to get to tghe back of the second closet on the next go-round. I got one side of it done today, but there's a lot more in there, most of it mysterious and as I haven't needed it in 4 years I imagine it can mostly GO.

      I promised Ember to get pics of me in the dresses that made it through the closet sorting.  I've no one here to take a picture, will persuade The Manimal be photographer when he returns. Meantime here's a very bad picture of me in his bathroom mirror this morning (before I hauled boxes and got the whole front of my dress filthy ,which is what I get for deciding it was too hot to wear an apron.)

On the one hand it is true I didn't hold the camera very still, but even if I had, I AM kind of fuzzy looking. This is my "I don't need to see anything" look. There's also a variation that involves wire rimmed glasses.  Modern peasant, that's what. I tend to be at the outer extreme of low maintenance. The Manimal likes this just fine, which is fortunate as it's unlikely to change. I don't fancy becoming fancy to please anyone.

    Between sickeningly hot weather and a ghastly flea infestation that required smelly sprays the dogs, cat and I have more or less taken up residence on the front porch the past ten days or so. Not something we could do in town where people are expected to sleep in bedrooms and eat in kitchens or diningrooms and bathe in a bathroom.
      It's been quite fun, really. The necessity to sleep out there honestly lasted just two nights, the rest of it has been simply because we're enjoying it. Especially during thunderstorms.

Here's Daniel lounging on the summer bed (aka the futon mattress from the livingroom)

Also of note, and also related to the flea infestation, Daniel has gotten all his dreadlocks cut off. He hates haircuts, which is why he had dreadlocks.  He WILL BITE if you wave scissors about in his vicinity. His only GOOD haircut in 12 years was the summer Smallest Child and her Sweetheart (now her handsome husband) visited and gave him a playful and cuddly (and sneaky) haircut on a blanket on the front lawn.  It took an hour, but was amazingly peaceful.  They have serious skilz.
        Not having an extra pair of hands or any charming helpers I muzzled the poor lad with a  thick strip of plastic shopping bag (soft and drool proof) Then I sat on the bed with him, holding him down gently with one leg across his body. Then I chatted to him and sang songs to him.  He started out not liking it, squirmed like crazy and vocalized his complaints (echoing through the forest valley). Eventually he got tired of wrestling with me and fell asleep, and I had to wake him to turn him over and do the other side. Fairly peaceful. His second best haircut behavior-wise. AS far as appearances go, his haircuts are always ghastly looking. He's half Miniature Schnauzer and half Toy Poodle, bad hair is just part of the whole package deal.

    
   
   













    



Here's Sir Daniel sleeping peacefully the morning before the scissoring. Longest dreads he's ever had.  Without them of course, he looks like a small grayish rat.  Still, he's my bestest pal ever.



No longer dread-ful.

That's about it for news at the moment. For those in the family who are sentimental, bid a fond adeiu to this. I once spent a couple of weeks working on this paint job because the idea of a plain old brown magazine rack was just appalling to me.  Turns out we are not the kind of family to keep our magazines in a rack anyway, and those spindles are foul dust catchers.

More When it happens!

XOXO !

Lofty Thoughts or What I Did This Summer (and am still doing) A jumbledy bit of writing but I'm too yawny to properly sort it, so I wish y'all luck making sense of it.

Years ago when I moved in with The Manimal I sorted through my little rented house like a mad woman and got rid of nearly everything I own. Hahahahaha!    

   Ok, I got rid of a whole lot of stuff. Sofas, chairs, tables, boxes and boxes of books, half of my  clothing, more than half of my dishes, pots and pans and so on. I gave things away to family and friends, then I donated the rest of it all to Goodwill and moved down to this valley with a happy heart and a great deal of optimism.

        Optimism, of course, is a far cry from Clear Thinking.

.    The Manimal built this house, and raised his 3 sons here long before I came to this part of the country.He has a long history here, a history full of adventures and collecting.

   Because I did not want to take up too much space or be a burden I thought the best thing would be to move my belongings into the loft of the house. My reasoning is that the loft was not 'really' being used.  It just held things in boxes and random bits of furniture belonging to the 3 grown sons who were all off living on their own. Junk actually....at least close enough to junk that none of the boys wanted it in their own homes.   After a couple of years the boys moved their stuff out (or threw it away or whatever) which you would think would give me more space, but I got another sewing machine, and set up my quilting frame to finish a quilt, and my brother gave me a spinning wheel.....so it stayed crowded up here.

This is what happens when you move 5 rooms of stuff into one room.

    The loft had been 2 bedrooms not-very-large-bedrooms before the addition was built, with one bedroom having a half wall, open to the great room below.  A year or two before I met The Manimal he had taken out (chopped out might be a more accurate term) the wall between the bedrooms, turning this into a large open room. Brilliant idea, much more useful than two little pokey rooms.   STill, once all my giving away was done I still ended up essentially  moving 5 rooms of belongings into one room.



I managed to get all my vast wardrobe into the closets, but it certainly took some doing.
 WARDROBE CONCERNS
  My dilemma with wardrobe issues is this-I really like clothes and have far too many of them.  Like most people I had by this time accumulated different kinds of clothes. Everyday clothes such as jeans, sweaters, t-shirts; dressy clothes for special occasions with matching uncomfy footwear and little bags that won't hold anything; Sunday Best dresses and suits; painting clothes (with my history of painting all over them); school clothes (I was in college for a decade. Oy.); play clothes; shorts and tank tops for hot weather; thermal underwear for cold weather;rather nice and properly stylish office type clothes (for business occasions and interviews);. Costumes for dress-up (we're that kind of family), and lastly I had a set of handmade clothes from The Plain Dress Project.

Here is one overstuffed closet. Behind the crammed together clothes are 10 plastic snap-lid storage boxes (6 large, 4 small).Necessary because mice love dresser drawers, and chew into cardboard boxes.



As a Textiles Major at university I'd become interested in the functionality of clothing on several levels. Why do people dress as they do? How do we judge/evaluate one another by our clothing? Where does clothing comed from? Who makes it and how, and in what conditions?    These and a dozen other clothing related questions filled my head.

Someow when I started working 40 hours a week I stopped tidying and putting things away.   Beneath the clutter-an ironing board, a desk, two sewing machines, two dressers, a sewing project. a bookmaking project, and afghan squares waiting to be stitched together. Oh yeah, and a spinning wheel I need to find a part for.

As my Thesis work for my degree in Textile design I chose to do an exploration of very fundamental clothing.  As it happens, in the middle of the year I ended up dropping out of college to go live in the forest and take up a Back-to-the-Land lifestyle with my darling  long-haired bookbinding teacher, so I've not actually completed the Plain Dress Project.

     But I haven 't given it up either. 

The idea of the project was that I would design a simple functional outfit, make multiples of it, and live a year wearing these plain-ish dresses exclusively. I would carefully document what this did to A-the cloth, B-my head, and possibly C-my relationships. I chose simple homespun cotton, which to my delight turned out to not need ironing after the first few washings. I chose to make dresses because I was double majoring in religious studies and spent a lot of time in places where a woman appearing in pants would have been disrespectful. (I couldn't think of anywhere wearing a dress would offend anyone). I designed the dresses to have large pockets so I could forgo carrying a purse, and I calculated the size of the bodice and neckline so the dresses would slip easily over my head simply because I hate putting in zippers. Because I would be wearing aprons much of the time (very practical) I chose checked and print fabrics rather than plain colors to avoid being taken for a member of our nearby Amish communities.

    Not that I'd be offended to be thought Amish, but that I would be going places Amish women do not go, and I didn't want to cause any confusion or undue curiosity about them.

    I did actually learn quite a lot from The Plain Dress Project, about the properties of different fibers, about commercial clothing construction, design and marketing. I learned a bit about how clothing functions as an identifier for groups. I learned about clothing styles in different countries, and about how various cultures view concepts such as modesty, propriety, stylishness, vanity and humility.
    I learned things about myself too. I learned I honestly prefer simple handmade dresses to any other type of clothes (and believe me I've tried them all).
    I learned by buying and wearing some that actual Amish/Mennonite style dresses are Not for me. They're too structured for my taste, too complicated to construct, and are these days generally made of polyester which must be a godsend to a mother with 8 or 10 kids to clothe as it's so easy-care, but I just really hate wearing polyester. (My poly work shirts are bad enough, I'd hate to wear the stuff from neck to knees!)
     I learned that I dislke having anyone else tell me what to wear and what  not to wear. Muleheaded, what?
     I learned that I'm happy making clothing. For my family. I can't imagine wanting to take up doing it for the general public. I prefer to just be my very own sweat-shop.

    I learned that with a dozen or so types of clothes to choose from each day I kept reaching again and again for the same few dresses, the ones I made in the summer of 2007. Consequently when it came to decluttering, that is what I opted to keep.  The plain dresses for my personal wear, and the work uniform for when I'm "on the clock".

  As I'm in my current job most likely until I retire I won't be needing office clothes EVER AGAIN for office wear or for job interviews. No more Dress For Success, from here on people can just take me as they find me. What a Huge Relief! (for me anyway, I don't know how 'people' feel about it.)



     With only the plain dresses I of course could easily part with all the pairs of shoes of various styles and heel heights that don't go with plain dresses. All the stockings and undies of a style to not work with plain dresses.  All the coats and jackets and sweaters that don't work with the dresses.
    Box after box filled up and my smile got bigger and bigger.
    My closets have plenty of breathing space between hangers now.  I still have enough of an assortment to play around with a little (blue dress with aqua apron? purple dress with pink flowered apron? brown striped dress with brown flowered underskirt?)  This pleases my artistic inner child without taxing my frustration level. I like having more wiggle room between things.











Second closet.  Behind these clothes are boxes of stuff that 'came with the house' which I therefore cannot get rid of. Not my stuff, not my perogative to jettison it. I compromise and hide it from myself for now.

 So here are my two closets jam packed with many many kinds of clothes. Too many.
   As I am now employed in town as a humble custodian I wear to work the required uniform of a pair of jeans (I own 3 pair) and a pocketed polyester smock (the company supplies us with 4). I wear these clothes in rotation day after day. Actually although I own 3 pair of jeans I don't like wearing jeans, so I've been wearing the 1 most comfortable pair day after day (washing as needed) and haven't gotten around to taking the other 2 pair off the shelf in 12 weeks now.

My work is as custodian in a "quad" of university dormitories. This past week we had some early students move in. It is a program for inner city kids, they come to campus 3 weeks early to get a head start on living away from home and having a drastically different lifestyle.

As I'd been threatening to seriously declutter the loft, hauling empty packing boxes down from the upper stories of the dorms put me in mind to let these boxes serve humanity one more time before being recycled.

   I got my co-workers to help me accumulate a few decent sized boxes, bit enough to hold a good deal, small enough for me to carry when full.  When The Manimal picked me up from work I hurled them in the back of the pickup truck and I spent my two days off this week sorting out a large bookcase and one and a half closets. I am not yet decided what to do about some of the not-mine things in the back of the second closet. I may address that issue on my next days off.

Here's the first closet again. My work clothes (ho-hum) hang on the door here, but I later moved them to the second closet when I'd emptied out the unworn stuff in there.  Behind these rows of clothes the mouse-proof storage containers are all sorted out. Lots of clothes, shoes, blankets, sheets, and craft things packed up and ready for the charity shop and the "free" shelves at our local recycling center.

As I have a zillion (estimate) too many books I;ve decided to only keep the ones I really read/want as reference books, and my favorite of the children's books for reading with grandchildren.  The rest of them can go to the library book sale where they can make someone else happy. I've had my turn.

Here I've taken the books from a large bookcase (to  move it, it weighs a ton)

Here the books are all in boxes, as is 85%  of my previous wardrobe.

The secret of the success of this decluttering project is that The Manimal will be traveling soon. Due to his collecting nature it is tricky to get an unwanted object of any description out of the house without him pointing out that
A-we may need it someday
B- we have another one alike and we shouldn't break up the pair
C-they don't make them like that anymore
D-we could use it for parts if something breaks
E-we might know someone who needs one and if we keep it then we'd have it to give to the future imaginary person

and while I understand the logic (ha!) of all these points, my answer in this case is It is MY STUFF and I AM GETTING RID OF IT. PERIOD.

To avoid un pleasant conversations therefore I am secretly plotting to haul these boxes of goodby things to their various destinations while my beloved is in France enjoying the bread and wine and cheese. We each shall thereby have our own favorite pleasures.

Like any large project  the Loft Clearing is looking a whole lot worse before it will look better. That seems to be the nature of life. Fixing often looks like disaster for a brief while.

I'll post you some after photos when it gets to looking better.

In the meantime, look at these:

And lastly here's a picture of eggs because the girls lay such pretty eggs and looking at them mkes me smile.

Here Lately

The nice thing about Facebook is it allows us to keep up with some of the doings of our friends and family.  This can, of course cause us occasional jealousy and consternation, but I suppose overcoming such difficult emotions helps us build character.

Recently Cousin Mary moved again. Her husband Adam is in the military so they are obliged to move about every time she gets unpacked. Kidding really, Mary's a very motivated wife and mom and she gets her house settled in record time.  She posted a picture of her basement storage space, which I swiped to post here. There are three occasions for greeeeen jellybeans here.

1-She actually has a basement.
2-She has food storage shelves to die for. Front-loaded canned goods shelves that automatically rotate your cans. I aspire to such shelves myself, but have no idea where we would put them.
    Plus, when I spoke to The Manimal about it a year or so ago, he thought it was a dumb idea. He stood the position that :
A-they are pricey.
B-we don't eat much in the way of canned goods.
C-he could build shelves of wood that would be cheaper and work well enough.

At the time I accepted his arguments because it's his house, he built it and I am dumb at least part of the time. So we've been going right on as usual with the green pantry cupboard and a bit of kitchen shelf space, and with no plan or rhyme or reason to our food system.

I have now had a full year to think this over and have formulated some reponses to the arguement that has been continuing in my head this whole long time.
 To wit:
A-Yes, the shelf system is pricey, but I have a job now and can buy them with my own money and for that matter fill them up with my own money too, so it will be no strain on his budget, all he'll have to do is eat the food.

B-In the pantry right now we have in the way of canned goods: Beans, six different kinds. Fruit, three kinds. Pasta sauce. Tomato paste. Coconut milk. Canned veg for soup making. Plum tomatoes. Diced tomatoes.
Artichoke hearts. Black olives. Cranberries. Tuna. Canned chicken.
    No, we're not an 'open a can and heat it up' family, we do actually cook for ourselves. But cooking implies ingredients, and in our temperate climate much of the year there is not a lot in the way of ingredients growing out our back door. We have a freezer, but the space there is limited and they take electricity/cost money to run.   Plus if the power goes out for any length of time the food is ruined. (I don't mind this so much if it's mushrooms from the forest, I don't like them anyway and there will be more next year)
    Clearly we use more canned goods than he realizes. The canned items we do eat would be better used  if they were neatly organized and were used in order of purchase rather than our current situation which involves everything being shoved onto the shelves higgeldy piggledy and things occasionally going bad because they were lost somewhere in the back.

C-He could build more shelves, but he hasn't in the 25 years this house has been here. It seems unikely to rise to the top of his mile-long project list anytime soon. Were a big carton of shelf components to arrive at our door I could put it together myself, and then we would have it. This year, not in 2037 or beyond.

   So. Thinking about it.  Thinking about it. 
   The canned goods moving to a nice rotations shelf would free up the whole big green pantry cupboard for home-bottled fruits, gallon jars of pasta and such. (I put the pasta in jars or tins to foil the wiley country mice) And the pantry shelf height is more suited to quart, pint and half-gallon canning jars than to cans. With cans some of the shelves are a half inch to an inch short of the space needed to stack two cans, so there is a lot of wasted space. Of course if you double stack cans that multiplies the effort to get to things in the rear, so mostly you don't bother.

   What has got me interested in food storage?
    Well, my stalward Mormon upbringing for a start.  Being a people of isolated mountains and deserts the Mormons figured out long term food storage generations ago and have consistently taught its value to the membership. No, they don't believe obeying the principle of storing a year's supply of food will get you into heaven. Quite the opposite....in times of disaster and hardship a good larder of food may just keep you from knocking on heaven's doors ahead of schedule.
   
    When I was a child my parents had a good food storage system going. Nice shelves my daddy built in the kitchen, closets fitted out for cans and jars, and my bed frame was built to accomodate 50# bags of wheat beneath a deep girly frill of polished pink cotton.
    Our Catholic neighbors thought we were daft, as did my daddy's Protestant family members. They could see nothing but goofiness in following the counsel of church leaders who "taught hoarding".  Despite their opinions we went on daftly storing up food, a bit extra in the grocery cart week by week.
      Then one day the national truckers union went on strike. No trucks laden with groceries were leaving California or Georgia or Idaho. No food was speeding its way to the midwest. Within four hours of the strikes announcement the grocery store shelves were being cleared out. By morning there was nothing left in the stores but bubblegum and bug spray. No food. Not a can of soup, not an egg nor a loaf of bread.
    My mama shared  our food with the neighbors until the strike was over. Our little neighborhood caught the vision of preparedness.  Extra shelves began to pop up in the kitchens around us, and the weekly grocery ads were perused more carefully and the housewives planned out their purchases, "one for myself and one for the shelf".
    
     Years later I was a housewife myself, and I happily embarked on working out a food storage system of my own, working it out all over again each time we moved. On one occasion, when we lived in Warsaw, your good dad was Home Teaching a young man new to the town and the church and on a suspicion/inspiration he peeked into the young man's kitchen and found there was no food at all except half a can of sodapop.  The young man had just started a new job, and payday would not be for two weeks. We were a week away from payday ourselves and had no money, but we had food on all those fine shelves in the basement the Millers had built before they sold us the house.  Your dad came home and "shopped" in our food storage for enough food to tide the young man over till payday. It felt good. Food storage is meant to be for times of need, and not specifically OUR need either.

    When "the little girls" and I were in Loogootee at the height of single-mom and kids- too-young-for-jobs poverty we survived for several weeks one winter on food storage. I had a job, but the gas company had given an 80% rate increase, which we could not afford. Unable to use the furnace or cookstove we heated with a kerosene heater and cooked in a crockpot and electric skillet. The Methodist Church, where I worked as custodian, allowed me to borrow the kitchen there to bake our bread a couple of times a week. Between our 5 gallon buckets of wheat and our canned goods we got through the winter.  It would have been a much darker winter without our well-stocked pantry.

   The LDS idea of a year's supply of food of course stems from the time when America was primarily agrarian.  Growing your own food was what you did then, and when Autumn came and you harvested your crops you "put by" as much as possible to hold you over until the next year's harvest time.
    Because flood and drought and other natural disasters were not uncommon if you had enough land to grow more you would put by a supply of food to last two years, to allow for the possibility a year's crop failures. So when "The Brethren" began counseling families to be prepared with food, clothing and other needful things they weren't suggesting anything weird, or anything most people weren't already doing anyway.
    What was weird was that our culturen changed, people started moving to cities and not growing food. Our enormous highway system was built. Trucking food thousands of  miles across the country became the thing to do. The population became food-dependedt primarily on a small group of people we'd never met, running agribusinesses we could not comprehend, so far away from home we would never even see the plants our vegetables grew on or see who slaved in the sun to pick the food and pack it in crates for shipping.
    What was weird was generations of kids growing up thinking of strawberries and tomatoes as sturdy red nearly tasteless year-round even-in-winter foods instead of tender flavorful summer season foods.

     There is wisdom in being prepared to eat, as long as we plan to keep alive. 

      Having not given my attention to serious food storage since I  moved here four and a half years ago I am now calling my guilty self to repentance.  Winter is on the way, although with temperatures in then high 90's to low 100's it doesn't feel like it yet.  I am fixing to get us into a better position of preparedness before the cold winds blow. A years supply is too much for me to tackle at one go, and a years supply of say wheat and cooking oil but nothing else is not practical.  I'm aiming to get together a 3 month supply of basic foods first. When I've got that I'll aim at another gathering another three months worth. When I've got a six month supply of basics I'll begin to add in extra non basic items.

     What are your food storage/preparedness related memories?  What are your favorite foods to have on hand?  As always, any good advice is much appreciated too!

   XOXO

  
    

Random Pleasures

   Having been gently reprimanded by half my children for completely neglecting my bloggery I have come here to repent. My lame excuses are three: Firstly, I am very slowly adjusting to having an actual 40 hour a week job, which means there are 40 hours each week when I am not writing, nor even thinking about writing. Secondly, we have had three weeks of temperatures in the high 90's to 100's range and it is too darn hot to think at all. Thirdly, I forget what the third excuse was. There may have been something about not remembering where the camera is.

   I have been specifically requested to tell stories about Aunt Madeline and Aunt Marian. I will do that when I can remember some.

   In an effort to give my adoring audience something to look at and think about in the meantime, I herewith present some pictures and some explanatory text of original and extemporaneous thought.

This is the cover of what I call my colorbook.  It began life as an interior decorating book by Dorothy Rodgers who was the wife of Richard Rodgers the famous songwriter. No relation at all to my father and his sister of the same names.  It is a thick book with lots of illustrations one or two of which I like. It also has hundreds of pages of lovely heavy paper, suitable to be colored or painted on and pasted to.

Which naturally brings us to leaves cut and colored from a stack of dilapidated choir music for the purpose of pasting them into my colorbook. 

this is as good a time as any to open the book and show the entry page to this odd volume of randomnicity. It is not a book with an overall scheme, it is just a place to play with images, colors, and anything else that strikes my fancy.

This included cutting out an entire page I didn't care for, slicing it into strips and weaving it into another page I wasn't keen on. Probably this was more fun to do than it is to look at. Lots of things are like that. Making soup and giving birth come to mind. Also dog washing.

Awhile back some nice person on Ebay sold a vintage Sunshine Family,although not to me. These were Mattel Toys nod to the back-to-the-land movement of the 60's-70's. Papa Steve seems to have lost his burgundy turtleneck sweater, olive trousers and  stout brown boots. Doesn't he look cheerful in wife Stephie's little apron? Reminds me of a scene from the romantic comedies of my childhood.  As a current back-to-the-land person I confess my wardrobe bears a strong resemblence to Stephie, but The Manimal clothes himself not at all like this particular Steve. For which the Saints be praised!



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This lovely lady is my new computer screen background.  She's also my fashion icon.  I admire her carefree hairstyle, her colorful dress and her perky and functional apron. She shares my fondness for colorful socks and simple flat shoes as well. I do think she needs a pocket.

It is time to feed a certain puppy and get some sleep before dawn. Another fun filled day of custodial work awaits me.  I will use my scrubbing time to try and remember stories. Ok?
OK!



An Orderly Life. ( Ha! )

        Like Jules Verne's Passepartout I adore ze tranquil life. I adore it the way I adore Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin...in a far off, timeless, we-never-met and it-ain't-gonna-happen sort of way. Magical and impossible.  Meanwhile in our ramshackle valley I am feeling slightly victorious about the spring cleaning of the back deck and the front porch.

The porch was once buried in tools, various equipment, a couple of fancy stove ovens, and a few ricks of firewood.  Plus all the random junk that accumulates on porches during the winter when no one wants to haul stuff further than the front door.

Now after a week and a half of work nearly half of the floor is visible. This is real progress and we're not done yet.  Good things have been hauled to the newly built workshop. Yucky things have been burned. Recycleable things have gone to the recycling center.

 I propose to make this a habitable porch, since a few days working on the sunny back deck convinced me I'd rather have a shady place for mid-day.

This kitchen hutch belonged to The Manimal's grandmother. For twenty years or so it has held a hodge-podge of oil cans, small tools, and such.  These are soon to be relocated to the new workshop. Then I'm going to "steal" the hutch and also the charming little baker's table, and use them in my porch reclaiming project.



What I have in mind is something akin to my Mamaw's front porch, which is where we did a lot of visiting and stitching when I was a child.  There were windows on three sides of Mamaw's front porch, and a nice glider to sit on, plus a couple of rocking chairs. There were shelves along the fourth wall, with calico curtains hung across them to keep sunlight and dust off the books and magazines stowed there. Reader's Digest Condensed Books and National Geographic featured heavily in the collection along with Papaw's many cowboy novels. He was a big fan of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour.

. Mamaw and the aunties would sit and mend or embroider on pleasant afternoons, enjoying  a nice breeze but safe from the burning sun.  My cousin and I would sit on the floor where we could spread out our work.  We hand stitched outfits for our dolls. We stacked together book-pile furniture for them. We also overheard fascinating conversations of which we understood very little.
       If you are a child it is useful to developed the ability of being very quiet.  Despite what they think this is not for the grown-ups benefit.  When you are very quiet  sooner or later you will become invisible to the adults in the room.  When that happens you are bound to be rewarded with fascinating adult facts and fancies from which you can puzzle together a charming misunderstanding of the world.

Well then.  Our porch is not windowed or screened, but it is big, and I'm a good scavenger so I imagine I can make it habitable without too much trouble.  I haven't a glider, but we have plenty of chairs and my Mama's little rocking chair can go out there.  It isn't upholstered, so being outdoors under roof won't harm it.  I think I'll put the little child-sized rocker out there, too. Grandbaby has finally grown into it. If I can't ever have a truly orderly house, perhaps an orderly porch will suffice.



ORGANIZATION: THE DREAM THAT WILL NOT DIE

I have spent (invested, wasted) a big chunk of my life organizing things. I find this to be great fun. I like to sort things. I like to create tidy systems for storing things.  The one thing I'm not good at organizing is TIME.  Many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the Ohio River I got my first Planner. I was married, housewifing, and mothering a brood of four precocious offspring at the time. It seemed to me that a planning system was just what I needed to make family life more orderly.  This was partly sensible and partly a pathertic attempt to control the uncontrollable.

Over the years I've had four or five variations on the perfect-your-life-via-paperwork theme. This picture shows about 1/3 of the pages and forms available for my Franklin planner, which is typical of the genre.
Yes, an organizing planner helped to a certain extent, when I was up to my pretty little ears in family life.  Yes, it was also useful post-mommyhood when I was awash in a sea of academia for several years (although it did constitute one more ghastly heavy thing to lug around in my bookbag.  It is abundantly clear to me that the whole planner idea would have been much more useful to me if I had a more planner friendly personality.
  I like creating systems, but I don't like living a highly systemized life. 

The story of Rapunzel and planners runs like this:
 With a hearty heartful of excellent intentions Rapunzel buys herself a lovely planner complete with monthly calender pages, weekly calender pages, chore sheets, goal-planning sheets, car mileage sheets, meal planning sheets and a zillion forms for tracking everything else  imaginable.
She sits herself down at her desk reading the instructions and filling out forms to create a unique and workable system for running her life and her household.  She becomes terribly, terribly organized and runs her home like a well-oiled machine for about two months, then she wearies of writing things down then whole darn day, wearies of looking things up before she can decide anything, and her enthusiasm begins to lag. Then it dwindles. Then it is gone. And she is left with a great supply of task-specific paper that only fits a particular binder.

Perhaps there are certain personality types who really take to having a well-planned-down-to-the-last-moment life.  I am not one of those personality types. I am a see-what-the-day-brings person.  I have finally come to realize I do not want to know today  what I'll be having for supper two weeks from Thursday.

For awhile now my latest and fanciest planner has been sitting on the desk open to the same single page absentmindedly unused whilst life chugged on all around it.



The La-di-da Planner



Free IU Alumni calendar

Meanwhile I have been using this, the IU Alumni association calendar that arrives for free in my mailbox, unasked, every stinkin' year.  IT weighs aproximately nothing, and fits into a pocket or purse. In my new drastically simpler life this is all the planning I really need. The lack of structure suits my flighty temperament more too. I could even use a smaller one, but hey-this one is free. When I tire of the picture of the front of the Alumni Hall I can cover it with pretty paper.

Since I have a great lingering affection for my old planner, and also have a great honking stack of paper and forms for it (not to mention a purpose-made seven-hole punch and a huge storage binder for extra pages) I've decided to reincarnate the planner as a playbook. More commonly known as a sketchbook or artist's journal.  However inconsistent I've been over the years at using planner systems for my daily life I've been very consistent in my inconsistent way at jotting down ideas and inspirations in my sketchbooks.

a small sample of my years of jottings

The drawbacks of regular sketchbooks though is that all they are is bound paper.  They're either plain paper or lined paper or graph paper, but not all three.  You can't add or remove pages, and there's no place to put your pen or pencil. They don't fasten shut either.

My playbook on the other hand has the superior virtues of being user-friendly to persons of an artsy nature. It is a ring binder, and the pages are half of a letter-sized sheet, so it was easy use my 7-hole punch to add pages of drawing paper, graph paper, colored papers, etc.  I can add or subtract pages at wil, rearrange to my heart's content. It has plastic sleeves to hold other papers, cards, etc. It zips shut against inclement weather, and the gusseted outer pocket easily holdspens, pencils, scissors, a set of watercolor pencils and a glue stick. Portable art kit. What could be a better resurrection for a languishing planner?  No longer consigned to the shame of desktop disuse, it now gets to go places and do things.

  In going through my stock (overstock really) of planner pages to set up my playbook I observed that the Task Sheets for January, February and March are all quite blank.  I also observed that in all these years I haveset very few goals and have never Formulated A Mission Statement.  I think this speaks volumes about my Committment To Excellence.

   I have read a good deal on the subject of goal planning and success in life. What does it mean that all really successful businesses have a mission statement to guide their decision making, and that marvelously successful persons in every walk of life have a mission statement to keep them on course, and I little Rapunzel have got no mission statement at all, nor have ever had such a thing?

  It means that I have been seriously remiss.
 And I truly do repent.
 Clearly I cannot go on with my life without  properly defining what I am about in this world.  I have thought about this for days. Thought and thought and thought some more.
   And then in a true Eureka! moment it came to me that I DO Have A Mission Statement.  I have had one since I was a very young girl, since I first heard Rick Nelson sing Bob Dylan's "She Belongs to Me" and thought he was singing about myself.

       SHE'S GOT EVERYTHING SHE NEEDS
                        SHE'S AN ARTIST
                  SHE DON'T LOOK BACK.