Random pix

Random pix from the last couple of weeks.

I have a small collection of those large pretty glass gems you sometimes see. They've been in a bowl in my office collecting dust. So I washed them clean and put them on the windowsill in the sun - pretty!


Chickens picking through some old rice I threw out for them.


Attention from my dad.


What a life.


Cute ear ribbons made by a friend. Lydia doesn't think much of them.


Someone gave us one of those pink flowered leis.


Lydia didn't think much of this either.


Chickens curious about a human barn.


A morning of rare spring beauty. I say "rare" because it's been a nasty rainy chilly spring.


This is a better example of what the spring has been like. Notice the nifty beam coming from the clouds?


Taking over Younger Daughter's bed. Shameless.

Romping dogs

Just some random and cute pix of the dogs romping. Awwwww.....

Survival cookies

We were having tea with our friend Enola Gay last week, and she had a platter of cookies on the table. Older Daughter, enjoying tea with us, took a cookie...and just about went ballistic over the taste. Enola called them "survival cookies" because they can be made entirely from storable ingredients - nothing fresh.

Older Daughter has been begging Enola for the recipe ever since. Enola kindly posted the recipe on her blog, so today I made a batch at Older Daughter's request (well...more like a plea). I won't post the recipe since Enola has it on her blog.

It's a messy, messy dough. Be liberal in the use of flour on the cutting board.


Rolled thin and cut with a cookie cutter (well, an upside down tumbler).



A dollop of fruit preserves (raspberry in this case):


Sandwiched over with another cookie cutout:


Lydia lies faithfully at my feet while I work (just in case I drop something, don'cha know):


Enola's recipe called for 8 to 10 minutes at 350F, but it took me about 15 minutes per batch:


I doubled the batch so we got quite a few!


These are hearty, filling cookies. Nothing light and fluffy about them! One is plenty for a snack.

Handing out nuggets of gold...

It's funny how blessings happen unexpectedly.

As usual, I've been running short on canning jars. I've been making it a policy to check every thrift store we enter for any jars, and have picked up about three dozen quarts so far.

Then early this week, a lady from our church named Daina called. She had a friend who was helping an elderly woman clean out the junk in her home prior to moving into a retirement center. The friend had found some gallon jars. Did I want them?

You bet! Daina said she'd bring them to church with her on Sunday.

Well, she called later in the week and warned me there were more jars than she anticipated. In fact, I might not be able to fit them all into our car in one trip. No problem, we could leave the excess jars at church and pick them up later.

So this morning (Sunday) as I walked into church, Daina amended her story once more. "Did you look in the back of my truck?" she asked.

"No, why?" I replied.

"There aren't too many gallon jars after all..." she began.

I started to make noises of disappointment when she added, "...but there are a lot of pint and quart jars. Is that okay?"

I stared at her. Okay? Did she just ask if that was OKAY?? It was all I could do to keep from jumping up and down!

We went out and looked in the back of her pickup, and my jaw dropped. It was packed, absolutely packed, with canning jars of all sizes!

And Daina didn't want them. I know this because I asked over and over again, "Are you SURE you don't want them?" But, being a bit older as well as single, she was scaling back and simply wasn't canning like she used to, so she honestly didn't want them.

So there they were, dozens of dusty dirty jars filled with old dead spiders, gleaming in the morning sunshine like nuggets of gold. And she was giving them to me FREE! I felt guilty, like I was taking advantage of someone somehow.



At home, I unloaded them into the barn for the time being, and took a tally. Five gallon jars, six half-gallon jars, 86 quarts, 83 pints. WOW!!

What a total and complete blessing!

Mending a blanket

My husband and I have had this one particular blanket on our bed pretty much since we got married in 1990. After so many years of being daily tugged as I made the bed, the ends had ripped. Uh-oh, it's time to do some (ominous drum roll) sewing.

There was nothing else wrong with the blanket except the frayed ends. I figure it was perfectly salvageable with a minor hem job.



I cut off the frayed ends...


Folded it over and pinned it...


And gave it a quick stitch on the sewing machine. Start to finish, the project took 40 minutes (part of which was taken up winding a new bobbin and finding a fresh sewing machine needle after my usual one bent).


I washed the blanket and hung it to dry.


The blanket is obviously shorter than it was, so it wouldn't tuck under the mattress like it used to. I had to turn it sideways, where it's still a bit short. But you know what? Who cares. I have a feeling we'll all be mending a lot of things in the future, so this is just practice.

"Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without."

Ghost malls

I had an interesting day on Thursday.

Thursday is our "city" day. It's the day our Younger Daughter has fiddle lessons in Spokane, so naturally we run around doing a multitude of errands as well. Last Thursday the kids were hungry after music, so we stopped at a grocery store where I bought them some deli food.

Upon leaving the parking lot, we noticed a Dollar Store with lots of "Going out of business" signs on the windows. A Dollar Store, going out of business in this economy? Go figure.

I keep a master list in my purse of preparedness items we need to stock up on, and the Dollar Store was on the list as one of my stops. So, even though I wasn't planning on stopping there that day, in we went.

We half expected the shelves to be stripped, but they weren't. I came out with handkerchiefs, leather and canvas garden gloves, petroleum jelly, a few cheap calculators (for schoolwork), etc., all for about 30% off. Nice haul.

As the clerk was tallying our purchases, I asked why on earth a Dollar Store (of all things) was going out of business. She said the chain had been bought out and the new owners chose to liquidate. Ah, that explained it.

As the girls and I got back in the car, we noticed that all the other store fronts along one arm of the L-shaped strip mall were vacant except the grocery store and the Dollar Store...and the Dollar Store was going out of business. The other arm of the L still had businesses.

Later, stopped at a red light, I noticed another long strip mall that had two businesses left - that was it. I wasn't counting, but I'm guessing there were six or seven other store fronts that were vacant.

It reminded me - eerily - of the Trend Research Institute's Gerald Celente's prediction that we were heading for an era of "ghost malls."

The government can bleat all it wants that the economy is "improving," but those of us living on the ground floor sure as hell haven't seen it.

In about six weeks I'll be taking my once-a-year jaunt into Portland, OR for a very large retail show. This will be my fifth year doing it. For the first three years, sales were superb. Last year sales were down 20%. We'll see what this year is like.

Sorry for the silence!

Sorry I've been so quiet, everyone. It's just been a loony-tunes week. Nothing bad, just busy. Run run run. Good thing I'm living the (cough) simple life.

Rural chic

I have a new column posted on RegularGuy.com called Rural Chic. Come take a look!

A compliment

The weather is finally starting to moderate and we're finishing up planting the garden. Yesterday I planted green beans, tomatoes, and started planting onions before taking a break. Later, Older Daughter and I went out and finished planting the onions, as well as pumpkins, cantaloupe, and two types of watermelon.

But this left a good-sized space in the garden still unplanted. "I was thinking on planting herbs there," I told Older Daughter "What do you think?"

"Yes!!" she said with great enthusiasm. So we went into the greenhouse and planted those minuscule herb seeds in a starter flat.

As we planted the herbs and talked about how we were going to save the vast majority of what grows for future seed (since all the garden plants are nonhybrid), Older Daughter paid me a very nice compliment. She said, "I've said it before, but I'm so glad to be born into this family."

My kids read this blog so both girls will see this posting at some point. Just wanted to let them know we're awfully glad they were born into this family too.

Scrubbing buckets

Saturday evening I did something I've been meaning to do for quite awhile, but kept putting off. I scrubbed our storage buckets.

Prior to Y2K, we purchased 24 five-gallon food storage buckets and have pretty much kept them full ever since. Some of them we rarely open (we still have five gallons of black beans and five gallons of split peas we rarely touch, for example) but others are opened frequently, most notably rice, popcorn, cornmeal, lentils, navy beans, sugar, brown rice, oatmeal, etc.

Trouble is, we really don't have a convenient place to store these buckets in the house. As you can imagine, two dozen five-gallon buckets take up quite a bit of room. So, somewhat by default, we put them in one of the stalls in the barn.

It really was a stupid place to put them. They regularly got pooped on, knocked over, kicked, and otherwise banged around by cows and the horse. The insides stay clean and dry, of course, but the outsides were filthy.

Plus it was just plain hard to get to them. If I suddenly found myself low on rice for dinner on a winter evening, it required me to put on my rubber boots, coat, scarf, and take a flashlight through the mucky corral into the barn. I'd shoo aside the livestock, try to find (by flashlight) the bucket I needed. The labels faded more often than not, so I frequently had to open several buckets before finding the rice. Then I had to try and keep the dirty top from contaminating the clean insides. I'd fill my rice jar, re-screw the buckets (they have a ratchet-screw arrangement), go back into the house, divest myself of my winter gear, and then start dinner. A lotta hassle.

So, since preparedness has been on my mind lately, I knew it was time to get those buckets out of the barn, clean them, inventory the contents, and find someplace more convenient to store them.

So far I'd gotten to fourteen of them. These are already cleaned and inventoried, though I still don't have a convenient place to put them (right now they're scattered hither and yon around the house, but at least they're properly labeled). But it was drawn-out and boring work, so I kept putting off the remaining ten.

No more. Saturday night I hauled them around and prepared to clean.

Each bucket holds about forty pounds of standard beans or rice, or about 25 pounds of oatmeal (which is lighter). I used the dolly (hand truck) to take two buckets at a time out of the barn.


Scrubbing.


I put the buckets on a pallet as I scrubbed, otherwise dirt would splash up from the ground and get the bucket dirty again.


As I was scrubbing one particular bucket, I noticed the screw-ratchet top didn't look like it was on properly, so I opened it up. Sure enough, the contents (oatmeal) had gotten wet and contaminated. (Yuck!) I dumped the rotten oatmeal on our burn pile and invited the chickens to pick through what they wanted, then cleaned the bucket.

But this illustrated a couple of things. One, it's important to inventory dried stored foods every so often for damage or spoilage. Two, while oatmeal is fairly cheap (we buy it in 50 lb. bags) and easily replaceable, this may not be the case in the future. Should the time come when food is more costly and/or scarce, losing 25 lbs of oatmeal would be devastating. So check your food stocks, folks, and rotate. If you intend the food to be sealed for long-term storage, you may prefer to use mylar bags and oxygen absorbers so critters don't breed in your wheat or oatmeal.


The cleaned buckets, stacked to dry. Later on I'll bring them in the house, inventory the contents, attach some better labels, and find a place to store them.

Random pix

On the radio again!

Yes, once again I'm putting my head in the noose and going on the radio this afternoon (Sunday June 6) at 4 pm Pacific time. Specifically I'll be on Blog Talk Radio (here's the link). Paul Wald of SaltCreekLife.com will interview me as he did before, and the topics of discussion will include craft businesses and self-sufficiency.

If you can tune in, welcome!