Relearning How To Cook. A humble beginning.

Smallest Child and I are embarking on a mutual project of learning to prepare more mate-friendly suppers.

    Her reasoning is that she and her husband work different schedules and she's often the one closer to home at a reasonable supper-preparing hour. She also claims she is tired of eating the same six things she knows how to cook over and over and over...
    My reasoning is that I work a four day weekend, so I have three whole days off in the middle of the week. A girl can't spend ALL her time just having fun, so I ought to resurrect some useful domestic skills. I am also tired of eating things that invariably start with "take a lot of olive oil and add a lot of garlic and sprinkle liberally with hot peppers" and rather than teach Someone Else to cook things the way I like them it seems more practical to just cook them myself and let Someone douse them with Sriracha to his heart's content.

   The beginning of our project was a lot of food related texted messages and a good bit of wallowing around in various recipe files and cookbooks. (I like reading cookbooks, even when I have no intention of cooking the things described therein.)
Then we remembered Queen Dot's chicken broccoli casserole, a mid-century classic, and I agreed to try and recreate it and to share the results with Smallest Child, who when I emailed the recipe to her promptly suggested I share the joy with the rest of the known universe. Or at any rate My Known Universe, which is rather smaller than the main one.

   Herewith is the email I sent her, because I'm too bone idle busy to re-write the whole thing when it is easier more fun to cut and paste.

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Dear Sweetie Pie,

   Here's Queen Dot's Chicken Broccoli Casserole, a good "old fashioned" recipe from the 1960's, as made by me this weekend. It is a highly tweakable recipe.

   I started with 2 rather large humanely raised and undrugged chickens (not raised by me...I'm not killing my laying hens!)
   Queen Dot always used one chicken, but I wanted an extra casserole for the freezer so we could eat it on a day we don't want to cook.

    I washed the chickens, (removing the giblet packets) and plonked them in my big stew pot with a handful of carrots, about half a big celery, two fist sized onions and a spoonful of peppercorns.
    This I brought to a boil, then reduced the heat and simmered it for a long time.  Maybe couple of hours? Till the meat falls right off the bone.  Then I hauled the meat out of the pot onto a baking pan (the jelly roll pan with a good edge) and let it cool for awhile.

    As the meat cooled I strained the bits of veg out of the broth and set the broth to cool so the fat would rise to the top. I spooned off as much of the fat as possible and put it in a pyrex cup in the freezer to chill. The sediment sinks, and then the fat can be saved in a jar in the fridge for cooking.

   Next I greased my baking dishes (with chicken fat since I had plenty available) and layered chopped broccoli over the bottom and and added some of the cooked carrots just for a bit of cheery color. 

   I took the chicken off the bone, and layered the dark meat on top of the broccoli.  I was using two 9x13 inch pans, and just the dark meat really was enough to cover all the veg. They were big chickens.

  On top of the chicken I poured and spread out a can of diluted cream of broccoli soup (I found some with no MSG!). One can per 9x13 pan, and I diluted each can with about 3/4 c of chicken broth. Aunt Dot always used milk because that's what the original recipe says, but to me broth gives more flavor. You could also use cream of chicken soup, cream of mushroom soup, or a homemade white sauce.

  I made stuffing (also while the chicken cooled) of a loaf of whole wheat bread (dried in a 250 degree oven, just keep turning the slices till they're crunchy dry.) with broth to wet it good and chopped celery and onion. I also chopped up one chicken breast and mixed it into the stuffing.

    The other three breasts I double wrapped and tucked into the freezer for later use in soup, casserole, chicken salad or whatever. Queen Dot always used the whole bird, she must've had scrawny chickens.

  Next I put the stuffing on top of the soup layer.  It was thick, not something you can pour on or spread with a spoon. I formed it into flat blobs by hand, layed the blobs on and smooshed them together. (smooshed is a sophisticated culinary term.)

    Then I baked the whole thing at 350 degrees for about a half hour.

    And I put the second one in the freezer.

(Note pyrex pitcher with fat rising to the top)

    THOUGHTS: (Aunt Dot would write "Thots", as she felt the whole 'ought' spelling was a waste of time, space and ink)

    One chicken would make one 9x13 pan full, plus leave you an extra breast for something else. Or you could leave the breast meat out of the stuffing (it really wasn't necessary) and have two breasts for another supper.
     Soup Base or boullion cubes jazz up the flavor nicely if you have any on hand and like them.
     You could make it with canned chicken, thereby making it a good recipe for a not-shopping day since the rest of the recipe is stuff that is typically in the pantry.
    You could leave out the chicken entirely and add more vegetables (but then you couldn't rightly call it a chicken broccoli casserole so you'd have to think of a better name.)
    You could top it with commercial stuffing, which keeps nicely on the pantry shelf (but I don't because around here it has MSG in it)
    You could top it with savory cracker crumbs instead of stuffing if you had any around.
     You could layer in some shredded cheese somewhere.
  Anyway, there it is. Give it a try and let me know how you like it.

    Love you!

PS-  You could leave out then chicken, use chopped apples and pears and pineapples and maybe bananas instead of veggies. Then drizzle melted butter over it, top it with a mixture of oats and brown sugar, and after baking put some cream or ice cream on top. It wouldn't be a casserole, but it would be good.

Thus endeth the lesson.
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   While things were simmering, and baking, I sorted a bit more in the loft and loaded up the truck for a happy jaunt to my favorite Goodwill store.

There I very happily parted with the old iron bed I've slept in for the last twenty years or so. I love the bed, but I love having less stuff even more.  I kept the mattress, not a modern innerspring sort but a simple cotton futon mattress that I inherited from Smallest Child many years ago. She was moving to New Orleans and as I recall it wouldn't fit on the very overcrowded moving van.
    A long happy summer of sleeping on the front porch on the futon mattress from the livingroom has taught me that I like sleeping at floor level better than up on a bed. I like the way the world looks from down low or something.  Since the decluttering began I've hauled off five truckloads of Stuff I Did Not Need, and so I no longer need under-the-bed storage space.
I'd like to hear an Amen!

I've learned that I like not having boxes of things stored underneath the bed when I sleep. It was nice for a few weeks to be able to easily sweep under the bed.  It is easier yet to have the mattress on the floor and not have dust bunnies get under there, and not have to sweep them away. Middle Child (who is an avid de-clutterer) reminded me that with the bed down low I'll have to wash the bedding more often, but with two adorable doggies who like to sleep on the foot of the bed and who shed and occasionally walk in the creek I wash bedding pretty often anyway. Sometimes quite suddenly. So I don't see this as a hardship or a drawback.

    Here's the bed as it looked about 90 seconds ago. I love digital cameras. I could not get either Daniel (left) or Lilly (right) to face the camera. I was lucky to get them to hold still., having awakened them by pulling out a camera.

   Now you know I didn't drive all the way to Goodwill in a pickup truck with ONLY A BED FRAME to donate. That would be a waste of space and gasoline, wouldn't it?  I also took along nine computer paper boxes full of miscellaneous, not photo worthy as the boxes are identical.  They contained extra sheets for twin beds we don't have, craft supplies, shoes, boots, more books and too many other things to remember. And with so much more stuff out of the way I also happily parted with a five drawer dresser, which adds 7.5 square feet of  useable floorspace to my loft. Yay!

    I see in the above picture another thing I did this past week. I sawed the legs off my mama's antique sewing table. The antique police will no doubt come arrest me any minute now.
    It's a small folding table with a measuring ruler carved into the front edge. Very useful for a person who sits around hand sewing a lot (as I do). I hadn't used it literally in years though.  Since I do most of my hand sewing whilst sitting crosslegged on the bed (look, another happy occasion to use whilst!)  I have been using my little black plastic useful-but-disheartening lap desk all these many years in the valley.

   I was thinking one day as I sewed that it would be tres useful to have a desk that was a bit bigger than the lap desk, and that had its own legs so that I didn't actually have to hold it on mine the whole time.         
    I thought the little sewing table would be a lovely size (it is 19x36 inches) but of course the legs were of sitting-on-a-chair height.  As I was raised by antique loving collectors I do truly know it is a mortal sin to whack the legs off an antique. Then I mused that Mama, who bought the table, has been dead a great many years, and she never used it much herself as it was.
      Next I considered that in the sin department I've been unapologetically divorced since 1993, I'm "Living In Sin" with the Manimal, and I covet my neighbors ass. (Miniature donkey actually.)
      So I thought In for a penny, In for a pound, and I measured where my knees come to when I'm sitting crosslegged, got out the Manimal's little Japanese chop saw and whacked approximately 13 inches off each leg. Of the table. 
    I say approximately because that is how I am with sawing things. Since the table when in use is sitting not on an even floor but on a mattress piled with quilts approximate is plenty good enough.
   I've used the table every day since I shortened it. Yay! It amply holds whatever I'm sewing, or designing, or drawing. It has that nice built in ruler so I don't have to get up and fetch one. My little mini computer fits neatly on one corner of it too, in case I want to watch The Vicar of Dibley while I sew or have the need to Google a stitchingn technique. Perfection!

   In other news (and I use the term very loosely)  on my days off my friend Candy "decorated" the front of my work locker with all sorts of random bits of cheerful rubbish she's collected in the dorms. Students tend to wander through life leaving behind them all sorts of peculiar things. Also in dorm living there's a tendency to come up with projects and festive occasions that require "one for everybody" which means if you find a wierd little cast off useless item in the dorm you're quite likely to find sixty more of them.
    One Two of the items inelegantly scotch taped to my locker were little rubber smiley face figures (I will not dignify them with the term doll). One green and ugly, one purple and ugly.  Funny. Ha. Ha.

    On my lunch hour yesterday, as a sort of counter-joke to Candy's decorating efforts, I decided to dress the smiley figures.  I've got the green one done, (I also made a peaked hat for her little bald head) and am just getting started on a gold suit for the purple one, Because of course you can't dress one and not the other, that would be mean.
     One of the guys at work, upon seeing miss purple dress, tells me he "has the whole family" in his supply closet, by which I think he means one of each color.  I wonder how many that is? I wonder if I could sneak in there and put clothes on them? Hmmm.
   Here's something about us  Blue Collar Workers: we are easily amused.

    I am able to do this sort of daft thing to amuse myself because happily somewhere along the rolling of the years I have gotten over caring whether people think I'm weird or not.  Very liberating, that.  If  "they" think I'm nuts, that is fine. I think they're nuts too. Which worries me not a bit. In truth I think the entire universe is just a giant can of mixed nuts, rolling around in space. And I'm happy to be here.

   



    

RAIN...Day Three.....

      Yes, my lovelies, it's been raining here for three days now. I am tempted to post pictures of our grumpy wet hens, but they look so pathetic it might spoil your appetite. Not that they were thrilled with the drought this summer either, but they seem to like the steady downpour even less. 

     Instead I will post pictures of an old friend. I cannot remember when it was that we got Blue Bunny for Daniel, but he has been getting alternately chewed and resewn, patched and repatched for several years now. He is starting to look like art. Recently he was found by Silly Puppy and somehow lost his eye and a good portion of his face. Luckily my scrap basket is always at the ready and I recently received a box from Smallest Child that held the perfect stuffing for dolls and creatures.  (Thank you Dollbaby!)

    When she is not busy being an adoring wife and affectionate kitty-mama or dressing up as a young man and firing cannons at historical reinactments, or lindy hopping in the street with her mister, Smallest Child is New Orleans finest shop girl, and she sells shoes among other things, (Check out Trashy Diva online for vintage inspired adorableness.)  In the shoe shop they use little nylon footie stockings for trying-on, and on account of germs they're used once and thrown away.   Smallest sweetly installed a bag for collecting them for me. Queen Dorothy (my father's sister) often used her old worn out stockings to stuff rag dolls, and now I've got a fine collection of them to use myself. They're much nicer to work with than that nasty fiber-fluff stuff that is sold for stuffing things. Stockings can be packed in firmly which makes a much less floppy creature and that is most important if the doll is going to be embroidered and otherwise embellished or the creature is going to be hauled all around the house and out into the forest by rough and tumbly dogs.

Here's bunny with his face patch, and I'm putting in footie stockings to fill out the shape of his face and replace the original fluff (which was all over the lawn). Does the fabric I'm patching his face with look familiar?

  

When Professor B.  designed his series of three dimensional angels he hired me to hand sew the fabric panels he printed onto the welded frames.  The blue one is just behind me, you can see the wing over my right shoulder. Naturally I saved the scraps because the fabric he made is so interesting, based on a scan of a pile of glistening glass shards.  While I think it would be unethical to use another artists art to make my own art..... I figure it's ok to use it for a patch on something that will only be seen here at home.  It's a very sturdily woven cloth, so the patch may outlast the rest of the bunny.

Looking better, but needs a smile.

That's better!

All spruced up and ready to face the world again.  His eye is needle tatted, his neck is Grandpa's old chambray work shirt and his ear is a scrap from Grandma's old muu muu.  It looks better on the bunny.

While I'm thinking blue, here's the lovely yogurt cups the Manimal brought back from Paris. We use them to drink out of, which is something you wouldn't want to do with American yogurt cups.

This is the afghan I'm making for Onlyest Son.  His old one was wearing out (I think I made it a decade ago).  I happily crocheted the squares on my lunch breaks all summer, then procrastinated putting them together. In a drought with temps above 100 it is too hot to have a lot of afghan on your lap stitching it together. Three days of gray, chilly rain has been perfect for stitching all the squares together. I'm working on the edging now and hope to mail it this weekend.  He's probably not reading this, so don't tell him ; )

The Manimal leaves for London on Saturday morning very early.  I'll be working my usual three day weekend, but come Tuesday I'll be up in the loft sorting and packing joyously.  I'll return and report!

Here Lately....

  My darling Middle Child is a splendid essayist (find her at www.jauntydame.com) and her bloggery is a continual delight to me. I look forward to her thought-provoking analytical musings.
   I, on the other hand, am more of a catch-up-on-the-news blogger.  I live in an isolated valley far from my dear ones, and this is how I let them know I'm still alive.  Here's what's been going on in the valley the last couple of weeks:


I've packed a good many boxes of stuff in the loft. (I wish I could rotate this picture for you)



I've loaded up the pickup truck and hauled the boxes off to Goodwill.  For a long time I was stuck in the decluttering process because I kept remembering how much was spent on my heaps of un-needed things. Shouldn't I sell them to get some of the money back?  Shouldn't I personally give each and every item to someone I know will take good care of it?  Then I began studying Ebay and other online sales venues. There's an awful lot of stuff in the world and most of what gets listed never sells. Things I don't want to keep other people probably don't want to pay auction price plus postage for. And I honestly don't want to have the troublesome task of listing, selling, packing and hauling things item by item to the post office.    Finally, I hit upon my new mantra: That money is Already Gone.  I repeat this to myself often as I pack stuff to be given away.  Yes, I've given the thrift shops a lot of things that are "actually worth  money."But isn't that the point of thrift shops? I estimate this summer I've saved YEARS of time by giving things away by the boxful and truckload instead of trying to sell them or personally find adoptive homes for them.  The way I see it, I've spent half a century accumulating these things, and it could easily take that long to get rid of them if I do it one item at a time.  I feel I haven't another half-century to waste on the same darn stuff.

Here's a pretty sight--empty floorspace in the loft. It makes my little heart sing.

 

And look! There's some in the other direction too!

I've also been stitching up a doll.    She's number ten in a series of embroidered and embellished cloth dolls made in the 1940's-50's and every one of them start out really showing their age.  When I get them they look like this--generally stained and with some holes where the 60-70 year old cloth has worn out or been  moth bitten.   Sometimes they have limbs missing.

Mouth stains are very common, children like to feed their babies. 

The hair is usually moth nibbled as it's made of wool yarn which is apparently delicious to moths. It also is generally wonky looking.
There is a  secret to making good looking rag doll hair, and this secret is unknown to most home sewers, so wide  and crooked parts and bald spots are par for the course. Not a problem to me since I'm going to take the hair off anyway.

As you can see, she's got an odd torso. Not sure why her head is bowed like this.

A trip through the washer will take off a lot of the staining and eliminate any musty smells. This girl wants to float, so I had to pin a heavy bath towel around her neck to drag her underwater.

Once she was through the wash I found three holes in her, two in her neck where the seams are and one on her forehead where her hair was stitched in.  I had open her up and  empty out her raw cotton stuffing in order to get her dry. While she was gutless I patched her gaps with some pink gingham from Grandma's old bedroom comforter. It doesn't match her skin very well, but for my purposes that matters not a pins worth! When I put her back together I added a dowel inside her to strengthen her neck. Cloth doll necks so often become floppy, which weakens the seams.

Here she is with a bit of her embellishment done.  There's a lot more stitching to do before I put her back together.  I'll get back to her next week.





This week I've been busy stitching up some clothes for First Granddaughter's Lalaoopsy doll.  For sewing enthusiasts interested in decluttering their fabric stash I must warn that making doll clothes for grandchildren's dolls is the slowest way of getting fabric scraps out of the house.
 A box and a truck is much quicker.

Fleas Be Gone! or Taking a Little Fleacation.

  Whilst Smallest Child and her Handsome Husband are taking a little Hurrication in New Orleans as "Isaac" does what he must do, I am similarly occupied here in the valley.

Today I am flea bombing in the house.

 Every summer there is a 'flea season' in the country. They breed like crazy, can live for 2 years without food, and there is no way to completely kill them all off without killing ourselves as well. (probably not even then...)
   So...there are flea baths for the furry beasts, flea medicine, and occasionally when those don't work well enough there's "the real poison", the flea bomb automatic spraying thingy, which you set off in the house and leave. As we've had a hideously hot summer and fleas thrive in heat we've had to resort to the bomb. Which is why I am now justified in hanging out on the porch on this pretty day, with my blog and my sewing and my coloring book and haven't a single guilty thought about all the work I "should be doing" in the house.

     Aside from the pleasure of being liberated from 'shoulds', the Manimal is teaching his twice weekly bookbinding class tonight, so I am free to do as I please till he comes home around 10pm. A nice big swath of time for me to fill with happiness, thats what.

   Especially For Ember:
 Here's me early this morning in my favorite outfit.  Manimal took the picture for me. He thought it a rather strange early morning request, as I actually have never liked having my picture taken.
    It is quite a roomy dress, which I did not make, and the apron over it which I re-made. I got the dress and apron at different times at the thrift store, or actually I got a burgundy square necked dress and a somewhat larger blue round scoop necked dress at the thrift store. Both are of sturdy all cotton calico, both flower prints, both home sewn not factory made, which appealed to me. (You seldom see homemade clothes at the thrift stores here.)
   I added pockets to the burgundy dress, which you can't see because of the apron. Then later I cut the sleeves off the blue dress and cut out the back except a bit of a bridge at the top, and sewed it up neatly to make it into an apron very nearly like my favorite style. 





Notice the enchanting morning-sun squint. Also bare feet, my preference as often as possible.



Here's what I did to the dress back, just cut out a big ironing board shaped piece all the way down to the hem, then turned the raw edges under twice and stitched it neatly by hand. (too lazy to get out the sewing machine, fill a bobbin and thread the machine,)






Here's one of the two pockets, made of  1950's scissors fabric from Grandma Pat's stash and a bit of blue flower print from a long ago quilt project. The scissors fabric was a wonky shaped bit left from cutting out a blouse or something, so I had to piece it together to make pockets. Which just makes it all the more fun.



       While we're on the subject of fashion or the lack of it, here's a pic of Molly My Love.
  She is my fashion icon.  I do not own her, and I have no idea who she belongs to or where she came from, or who made her, I was watching her on Ebay and she got boughten while I wasn't looking. She's a happy sort, does things her own way, keeps her chin up. When I grow up I want to be just like her. But taller.  She's on my computer screen because  saved her as wallpaper.

I adore handmade rag dolls, possibly because they look more or less like the real people in my life. Teehee.

Oh-here's a true story sort of about that. And sort of not.

 Yesterday I cleaned shower drains in the dormitory. during lunch hour we had gotten a call that the furthest west shower drain on Foster-Martin building's 3rd floor was running slugishly. Martin is my building, and I was taking care of floors 2 and 3 for the day.
The dimwitted children I work with  male custodians had themselves a hearty laugh about this, and one "kindly" offered to "teach" me "how to fish", guffaw, guffaw. To which I replied "I've been a single mother since 1993, it takes a lot more that a wad of soapy hair to scare me."  And I trotted off to snake out the drain in question.

Now Martin building hasn't had it's very own custodian for  more than a year, and has had to make do with a series of temporary hourly employees who really aren't trained yet. This is because the custodians who were in charge of this building fell sick (one in  mind, one in body) and because they have neither one actually QUIT their jobs, and because the company can't fire anyone when they're out sick (even for a year) their jobs cannot be taken by someone else. Job security issue.  I imagine the drains have not been cleaned over there for more than a year as I gather from the grapevine neither of these workers were the type to do more than the minimum anyway.

I got to floor 3 and found in the custodial closet the long thick wire that our maintenance man had bent into a hook at the end. I took out the shower drain cover and sat down on the damp shower floor as there was no other way to see or reach into the drain. After I had poked around in the drain a while I dragged up enough soapy stinky old hair to build a fair sized but smelly and unattractive kitten. 
My grasp of logic is good enough that I supposed the other drains would be in similar condition, and I was right.

 I am newly assigned to Martin.  The other hourly custodians are, shall we say less inclined to hard work than I am.  Two of the three are large enough I seriously doubt them capable of fitting into the shower stall in the position necessary to clear out the drains. This being the case, and since I like to deal with life As It IS, not as it 'ought' to be, I went ahead and gave my afternoon to clearing all the shower drains in the building. Twenty of them. The final two were in good condition, I imagine because they were in the basement where the suction power is stronger than on the higher floors. I think the basement showers drain more quickly, so hair doesn't have a chance to hang up and make a clog.

--------->  Here comes the loosely related to personal appearance part of the story  <----------

Picture me in a loose blue polyester smock, pockets bulging with toold, blue jeans just beginning to fade with a splotch ofnpaint below one knee. (from painting pedestals at the art gallery)
 Short hair, no makeup, pink in face and sweaty. Figure like a comfy granny. Sitting flat on my derriere on the wet floor of an unflatteringly beige tile shower stall, legs wide spread, right  foot sticking out of the shower displaying my worn-out black tennis shoe.
I'm studiously poking around with a long hooked wire, dragging up fistfuls of stenchy old rotting soapy black and red hair and plopping the wads of hair on a paper towel by my left foot.

In walks a Greek god.
Ok, a college student, but not the pimply dork kind. This one was tall,(at least from my seated position) tan, well muscled, with a stop-and-stare handsome face. Wearing naught but a periwinkle blue towel casually slung around his six-packish mid-section.

"Hi," he says in a warm strong but silky voice. "Wow! Thanks for doing this. Will it bother you if I'm in here, or should I come back later?" (oooooh, a gentleman!)

"No, go ahead," I say, "The one on the end is draining good now."

"I really appreciate you doing this," he says, and  goes off to launder his marvelous figure.

Dang!

Never seen something so purty up close in my life, and there I am not a poshy well primped 18 year old, but a comfy little granny parked on her wet backside hauling big smelly gack clogs out of a drain.

Like I tell my kids, Life is all in the timing.

(thus ends the exciting part of the story)

As I was making my way down from 2nd floor to 1st I ran into the chap who had offered to teach me to fish. He asked what I was doing, and I told him I was clearing the drains. Both floors? He seemed astonished at that, and I replied No, all 4 floors, explaining I'd rather take care of them now, while I had free time, than wait until I was busy and have to do them as emergency calls.  He told me I didn't 'have to' do them, and I said I wanted to (quite true). He went away shaking his head.

Apparently he not only was surprised, he told the boss and the rest of the staff.  When it was quitting time I went to the office to clock out and as I came round the corner my co-workers and boss stood up and CHEERED waving their arms in the air and fist-pumping happily! Which was really funny, and very sweet of them. They're a good hearted bunch of people.

Funny thing is I didn't expect any praise, I just thought it seemed logical to do what needed doing when I had free time to do it. Plus, clearing really yucky drains is kind of fun.  It's the sort of job where you can see that you've accomplished something. I like that kind of project.




Here's how the porch looks at bedtime. You will have to imagine the songs of crickets and bullfrogs.

And how I look at bedtime.

 And how I look in better light at bedtime I think I'm beginning to look like Hugh Grant. Probably it's the floppy hair and pointy nose. (the current Hugh Grant, not the twenty-something one).

And here's the dogs ready for bed, or parts of the dogs, I couldn't fit them all in the picture. And my feet being happy to not have shoes on (although I love buying shoes I love taking them off, too.)

Here is where I sit writing this today, although obviously I'm not sitting here as I took the picture. Nice breeze, not to hot. A good day for occupying the porch.

Meanwhile on the clohtesline a nice striped cotton is drying. This will be the binding of a quilt that will live with  Smallest Child. I'm going to cut in on the bias, so the stripes will be diagonal around the edges of the quilt.

The hollyhocks we brought from the house in town are huge this year, topping twelve feet high. I suspect this is because we planted them where Manimal has been chucking the coffee grounds for many a year. 



The flowers are the size of my palm and are a deep somewhat purplish red.

They're just beginning to go to seed, and I'm saving the seeds if anyone would like some to try in their own garden.

And there you have it folks, all the news that's fit to print, And More!



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!