This Week At My Urban Homestead

Before I go muck out the chicken run (a very dirty job during the wet season) I wanted to get a few things out of my head and into yours.

I have officially accepted the truth that I am a person who breaks glasses. Philip has been accusing me of it for years and while I never wanted to accept that this is a part of who I am...dammit...it's true. I just broke one of my two liqueur glasses a couple of days ago. There are four glasses in my life that I have treasured: these two that my dad gave to Philip and I for an anniversary, and two gorgeous red antique glasses my sister gave us for the same occasion. The ones my sister gave us got broken on our move to Oregon. Now I have but one of these. So, I'm sad. But as Bonnie* advised the other day: "just get over it!" (Advice referring to my need to move on from the failed business crap and blah blah blah...)

I hope Bonnie isn't in the mental health business. I think she'd be better off as some kind of high school sports coach.

Or maybe she should become a self-help guru!

Because I seriously never considered "Just Get Over It" as a strategy for dealing with my life until she just said it the other day. If only someone had been clever enough to tell me to "just get over" my mental illness. Jesus! Think of all the years of agony and pain I could have avoided!!

Seriously, I know you meant well Bonnie, but that's not a very helpful thing to say to anyone.

Except maybe teenage boys.

Maybe.

Remember that weird thing above (and attached) to the mantel? I took it down last night. It is such a relief to me to take that first step to redoing the living room . Have a look for yourself:

Yes, that is a new hole in the wall. I put it there. By accident. Apparently I am the ruiner of many things besides beautiful glass ware. Oh crap- that almost sounds like self loathing. Sorry!

I made a weird branch thingy yesterday which will miraculously turn into a gorgeous holiday decoration that you will be jealous of when I'm done and I show it to you. It required screws, wood, more wood, scraps, a saw, a hammer, clippers, two cats, and a dog's help to make. Very impressive. (I don't understand why everyone is always lecturing me about how mean I am to myself when I obviously have so much self-admiration. Are you all HIGH?!)

I would like to entreat all of you to refrain from using the word "musings" for an entire year. Yes, please do. It doesn't sound how you think it sounds and it's a word that needs a little break from circulation.

Another little thing...low-riding aprons are not pretty. Do not wear them around your hips no matter how thin you are. Half aprons (cocktail aprons) should ALWAYS be worn around the waist. If you are entirely too stout to wear anything around your waist, then opt for an full apron. This is sound advice if only you will take it. Which you probably won't, so I will be forced to silently ridicule your slouchy schlumpy style.

Does anyone else believe that word verification is sending them secret messages?

Might be time to save up money for another visit to a psychiatrist. (Right after I pay off the last bill for which I am about to be sent to collections.)

Using the word "delight" in a recipe name should not be encouraged. I discourage everyone from doing so.

Another thing I need to release from my head is my yearly objection to the existence of eggnog. Not a good idea. I have tasted eggnog exactly once and nearly hurled on the hopeful friend who served it to me. The idea of a beverage of milk and eggs is repulsive to me. Eggs and milk is something that should be made into breakfast, on the stove, or in the oven. Viscous milky beverages have always made me queasy (milkshakes, for example) or kiefer (the kind that is like runny yogurt). Add alcohol to it and I just think all you eggnog fans have gone over the edge with regards to your stomach. So let's make a deal right now: I will not make immature faces at your beloved beverage as you drink it if you promise not to offer me any. Deal?

I have come to the decision to end my extremely shallow brief affair with Facebook and have also made the executive decision not to join up with twitter. I have been tempted to do so by friends with whom I am sure I would love to twitter with all day long, but I have realized that not having two more places to divide my attention from other things is important. I remain steadfast in my love of blogs and flickr. My computer social life will end there. I decide this in order that I may keep my life from becoming more complicated than it already is.

Another thing: I came very close to offering myself up to help with something because I always do that without thinking- but kept my mouth shut. I did it. What's better than having to say "no" to someone? Not having to say anything at all. So you just try getting me to do a favor right now- you might be surprised at how strongly I am withholding them!

I have some great posts coming up: one about how I have finally started composting at the new house and a suggestion for those without compost bins (like me). I will also be showing off my holiday decoration. There will also be a post about how long you can keep food before it goes bad.

Now it's time to pick up the sturdy rake and remove every last scrap of chicken poop/hay bits and replace it with fluffy clean hay for my girls. This time of year is tough on chickens in the Pacific Northwest. I am wearing dirty clothes to start with and this is most certainly a job for boots.

Have a great Wednesday at your own urban homesteads!!

*Someone who commented here the other day.

Choosing Fabrics And Colors
plus some lip balm math

I have been going through my fabric for reupholstering choices. I don't have enough of any wool besides this pretty orange to recover my couch. This (as some of you may remember) was supposed to be my new winter coat. That never got made. Sometimes you have to make some hard choices like- do I pay my electricity bill so it doesn't get turned off today or do I pay my mortgage...do I recover my couch in my winter coat fabric so I won't be depressed sitting in my living room or get depressed making a cute coat that I'm too big to look cute in?

Seems impossible to decide sometimes. However, I can probably make a winter coat out of some of the other wool I found. The flower fabric is what I'm thinking about using for the arm chair. It does occur to me that it may give a slightly British chintzy look to my living room but it matches the orange for the couch perfectly. I will have to investigate my stores of fabric just a little more. Most of the fabric I buy is suitable for aprons and quilts and cute projects and not really for a big armchair.

If I use the orange for the couch I think I'll be using the "fern shoot" green for the walls as we did in our last living room. I had finally decided on an antique yellow color but I don't want lots of orange with yellow. Orange with green is much nicer I think. Mixing cool with warm. Balance.

Meanwhile our main computer has a virus. So I'm doing everything on the laptop. Not particularly ideal. But it makes one terribly thankful to have a laptop at all at a time like this. I'm wondering if I should have Philip install InDesign on this dinky machine and work on the magazine from it or wait until the main computer is cleaned up? I'm afraid my magazine launch keeps getting pushed to later and later. I hope you'll all still be interested if it takes another couple of months to get the first one out. I bet most of you don't even think I'll do it. I don't blame you. Personally I think it was a little over enthusiastic to think I could produce something in one month using a program I don't understand.

I have today off. Having at least one day a week off from work is pretty nice. I could get used to this. I can do whatever I want!

What I'm working on right now is making lip balm. I am also preparing oils for using in solid deodorant. If you want to learn how to make both I'm definitely going to tell you here eventually. What you should be doing is saving your used up lip balm tubes and tins, clean them out using the tip of a knife, then a q-tip and/or a paper towel. If you feel more comfortable disinfecting them before using again- wipe them down with rubbing alcohol. For the deodorant, save your tubes because you can use them for your home made version, clean out the residue in the same way you do with the lip balm tubes. This way you don't have to buy containers for this project and you keep some plastic out of the landfill a little longer.

I've been saving up lip balm tubes for a while. I think I've mentioned here before that I go into a full panic attack if I go anywhere without a tube of it. I have a tube of lip balm on me at all times. And OF COURSE I'm very picky about what lip balm I use. I don't like it to be too slick. I don't like the slick sensation (which is why I hate it when magazines say punchy little things like "...with a slick of lipstick on her lips..." Dude. Gross.) The perfect lip balm is the regular Burt's Bees lip balm. It's usually $2.79 a tube around here. I buy lip balm fairly often. I mean every couple of months I buy a couple of tubes. That may not seem like much but think about it: I spend about $16.74 a year on lip balm. That means I also toss out at least six tubes of it a year.

I know what you're thinking: that is so insignificant it doesn't matter.

You're wrong. (if that's what you were actually thinking)

Just think: If only half of the US population uses lip balm (150 million people) and each of them only used and tossed out one tube of lip balm a year, that means that every year 150 million plastic lip balm tubes get tossed onto the landfills every year. But then you have to multiply that number by the probable number of years we're all tossing empty lip balm containers in the garbage, most of us are lucky and get to be adults for at least twenty years. Twenty years have already gone by that I have been using up lip balm and throwing the empties away.

That means that I have already thrown away 120 tubes of lip balm and spent approximately $334 dollars on that product. See how such a tiny little thing can add up?

So if even half of the adults who use lip balm in this country live as long as I have so far there have been about 180 million plastic tubes of lip balm tossed onto the landfills.

I'm being conservative on purpose. Most people who use lip balm probably use more than one tube a year. Can you imagine what 150 million tubes of used up plastic lip balm containers looks like in one heap? Huge. That's how the little things add up. Fast. It's not just you in this country doing whatever you're doing. There are about 305 million people in the United States. So whatever you're using up is being used up by millions of other people too.

But I can't control what other people do. Maybe my desire to reuse lip balm and deodorant containers and make my own sounds insignificant, but every tube of lip balm I don't throw on the heap is one less thing that will take a million years to decompose.

The thing is, it's cheap and easy to make your own lip balm. Obviously that's what I'm going to show you. It's not complicated and doesn't take much time. Plus, you get to have complete control of what goes into it and what it tastes like. It's also cheaper than buying it. I promise, it's cheaper.

Math is so cool.

The Blindness Of Proximity

It is truly amazing to me how blind a person (me) can be to the potential of her own home. Our living room has not worked well since the day we moved in. It presents a lot of challenges and we gave up early on trying to come up with a really comfortable and pretty arrangement. Mostly we gave up because a few months after moving here we were running our little store downtown which pretty much took every single drop of energy we had. The house floundered.

Of course, oatmeal and white are not colors that inspire my imagination and on some days they make me want to stab myself. This is why we ought to have ripped up the carpet and painted the house immediately. We should have known there was no way we could live with it. I see what we have achieved this week and if I was a masochistic person this would be a juicy moment to get busy hurting myself. Luckily, I don't go in for that kind of malarkey. All there is to do now is enjoy the phenomenal results.

These results, by the way, were not brought about by Philip and I and our amazing decorating skill. The color choices, the furniture, and the art are all ours, but the arrangement of our things is not always our strong point. We had to call in the professionals; my mom, and Angela. I have to admit that my feminine skills and talents took a couple of major hits yesterday. There are two things that have become very clear to me and there is not point in trying to hide it anymore:

I suck at spacial arrangements.

I would never, no matter how rich I was, let someone else pick my furniture, my lighting, my paint, my art, or my tchotchkes. No one can decorate my house better than I can and I take pleasure in it. Except that when I get furniture into a room I find it excessively difficult to figure out the most amenable way to arrange it all.

The other hit I took was to my stature as a capable modern do-it-all woman. I almost buffed Philip's foot off with the big buffing machine we rented to shine up our hardwood floors. It took only moments to confirm that I cannot control a buffing machine. Philip, on the other hand, took two minutes to figure it out and claim mastery over it.

Apparently I was wrong when I believed that if I could learn to use a circular saw (I did) that I could do anything.

It doesn't look that hefty or complicated. As a matter of fact, it isn't. It's super easy to operate, in theory. However, the slightest movement of the handle up or down will send the buffer careening either left or right at top speed. It takes the tiniest tightest control to keep it steady.

Chick was suspicious of the buffer and Max thought the whole thing was ridiculous and we should have left the room exactly as it was. Where did this child come from anyway? Did I really grow him myself? He also doesn't want to get rid of the dark 1970's wood paneling in his bedroom because he likes it. Who wants to keep dark wood paneling these days?

You can see the shine Philip achieved. Can you believe that someone would cover up such a gorgeous floor with wall to wall?

Now for the "Before" and "After"s.

Before:

After:

(We haven't put the family pictures and the art back up yet so it's a little bit bare.)

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Does anyone out there prefer the "before"s? I think the transformation is incredible. Remember last week when I was not feeling so good about my house? That's because I hadn't invited my mom and Angela over to work their crazy magic or done those things I knew I needed to do to let the energy loose in this house. It isn't just that it looks prettier now, or more like our style, it's that it flows better. Our house was experiencing energy constipation. (I'll bet you've never heard anyone use that word in relation to decorating before, huh? Just leave it to me to bring the crass into everything.)

Incidentally, some magic and change was worked in our dining room as well, but it isn't complete so I'm not going to share that until it is. I was excited this morning to wake up and see my living room; a place that actually reflects mine and Philip's taste and spirit. You can't underestimate how important that is for your daily life and mental health.

The Great Carpet Exorcism

Evil Incarnate. See that carpet padding? It's real rubber. Real rubber has a way of sticking to things, has good traction. So if you ever remove a huge piece of carpet and get the bright idea of rolling up the carpet and padding together in one big dirty ball? Don't do it. It's actually a very stupid idea. That wad of synthetic fiber wrapped in real rubber doesn't look all that large in this picture, yet it was almost impossible to budge the few inches we got it moved: from the living room out the front door.

Now, we tend to buy houses from people who go the extra mile with their carpet laying. This is a good thing if you love wall to wall and you like what's in your house when you buy it. Artisan work is a bitch to undo, however, and this carpeting was not only stuck in place with rubber padding and the usual carpet tacking, they also felt it wise to staple the carpet in place about every six inches of the parameter of the room. So not only did the carpet not want to budge because of its excellent traction and the fact that it weighed ten thousand pounds, but we had to be very careful not to impale ourselves on the six hundred staples.

I managed to be VERY careful until we made one final push of the damn uncooperative mound of filth and a staple caught my hand. At first it seemed like a little scrape. I put pressure on it immediately. But when I got to the bathroom I almost passed out when I saw that the injury was a two inch SLICE in my hand. It started bleeding a lot.

This is literally as far as we could get it. Right there in the middle of our path. We never did actually lift this bundle. We managed to get it out of the house by kind of rolling it. Kind of. It would take at least four burly full grown men with huge balls to move this piece of rug.*

Philip worked late into the night. I LOVE IT. I know it's bright. I LOVE THAT IT'S BRIGHT. He still has some areas to paint over where the paint was a little thin. But that's fine. I have to take up all the carpet tacking today. And all the staples. Then I have to clean the floor. Then if I'm very lucky I can borrow Angela's hand buffer and buff the wax finish out. Then tomorrow we can move stuff back in!

By the way, if anyone has a medium sized set of mounted antlers (without the animal head attached) that you don't want anymore-send them my way. I have a project in mind for them.

I was going to go take a shower but I don't want my bandage to get wet. I think I may have to take a bath instead. How luxurious. I never take baths because there doesn't seem to be enough hot water to fill the tub, and the tub itself is too shallow to be really satisfying. However, sometimes you have to overlook the little challenges and just enjoy yourself anyway. This will give me a chance to use some calming bath salts. Ohhh! And I get to play lots of loud music while I work today. All the Halloween tension is just drifting away.



*I had no idea just how dirty that sentence sounded until I just reread it. Oh my. That's really quite raunchy. Sorry. I hope no kids were reading.

Update: Yeah, the tub sucks. It's the original and there's value in that, in a way, for someone. But if it isn't a nice soak then I'll never use it. If a day ever comes when I can afford to, I will replace that tub with a taller one. And a water heater that can handle the burden of producing enough hot water for three people.

We Hate White

(on walls)

I have been in homes with white walls where I didn't hate it. Our friend Misa has a very different decorating aesthetic than we do and her white walls seem totally appropriate for her. In my own house they make me depressed. Everything feels cold and flat. So why haven't we painted our walls yet? Shall I recap the last year and a half for you?

Nah. Let's stick to the present. These are my before shots. I want you all to notice the oatmeal colored carpet too, because in just a little while I'm going to rip it out. There is always a little risk in pulling carpet up. We don't know if the hardwood floors underneath are hiding some terrible secret, like maybe there's some crazy hole in the middle of the floor that's been filled in with plywood.

The risk is worth it. Every dog that's come in my house has peed on it in all the same spots Chick peed on it when she was a puppy and we were trying to potty train her. I loath wall to wall carpeting in my own house. I know, you've all heard me say it before. Is all this repetition and the use of the word "hate" making your ears bleed? How about I spread some love? I LOVE hardwood floors with throw rugs. I LOVE color!

Ah, but the agony of choice!

My hunger for color on the walls is clouding my judgment. We tend to love green. So I think we're going to go with the green on the far left in the picture. We've painted every living room we've ever had green. We've always been so happy with it. It's warm and cozy, calm and pretty. Philip is going to do the actual painting tonight. I'm the pro carpet ripper and carpet tacking remover. Philip is the pro painter.

You know what else I have to do today? Make Max's costume and take pictures for a new header for my website redesign. Plus feed the chickens. Oh, and buy paint. And carve pumpkins with Max when he gets home.

I have found out that our Downtown Association is definitely putting on their Holiday Craft Fair this year. It runs for six weeks. What this means is that I have a chance to sell some of my things-make a little money, perhaps? Does anyone have a spell that can conceal from the public my MONEY-REPELLING-AURA? I just got a call back from the Health Food Store too. Isn't that ironic? The chance to sell my own goods is important and I'm not going to miss out on that which means I can't actually get a job until after the holidays. To be honest (and I doubt you'll be surprised) this has lifted some depression from my shoulders.

I also got a booth at the Crafty Wonderland craft show in December that I'm going to be sharing with Lisa E. The booth is tiny, so tiny that we can't both sit in it at the same time, but it's a great event to be included in.

All of a sudden I need to get busy making things to sell. I do have some merchandise all ready to go, but not enough. I'm not sad about it, just wondering how to fit it all in.

I knew that the first thing to do was to ignore everything to fix up the living room. Actually, this living room project is important because it's a good spot to photograph my aprons in, if only the walls were painted. I need a good spot for this because my studio is too cramped for taking pictures of anything but the small items.

So, I had better get my lazy ass moving, huh?! I hope to be able to show some "After" pictures tomorrow. At least of the wood floor. Hopefully of the walls too. We'll see.