Announcement!

It has come to my attention that I am being charged with neglect of my blog.

I must plead "guilty."

This summer and autumn have been intense, and I have done a lot in the way of personal and physical decluttering. I hope you don't take offense, but I kind of withdrew in multiple venues, not only in blogging.

See, it started quite some time ago, a little over five years ago, when I moved back to Michigan. I moved into a tiny little house, and we (Little Boy and I) re-collected and re-grouped and I started to figure out where I was and what was going to come next. I threw everything we didn't need in everyday life into a storage garage and paid to keep it there.

Three years ago we moved into this larger house, with on-site storage, also known as "garage" and "basement" and I continued to ignore and procrastinate on the Stuff. I couldn't park in the garage, and I couldn't use the basement for anything but doing the laundry, but I managed to ignore it anyway.

This spring I decided I'd had enough. All summer and fall I've been decluttering my life - in terms of time, stuff, space, hobbies, stuff, wardrobe, and fiber. And did I mention the stuff? I had more stuff than I could possibly need in this lifetime, and I got tired of it.

I'm still tired of it, but I've been incredibly successful at selling it, giving it away, and tossing the junk. Only last week did I turn the corner, and start finding empty shelves and drawers around the house where I've gotten rid of so much stuff that there's spaces where I don't have anything to put there...and I LOVE it. An empty drawer in my desk! A shelf in the kitchen! Empty floor in the basement!

And I've been so focused on this process, so involved with living instead of planning that I kind of lost track of some things. Like my blog. And some friends...

And for all of this, I apologize.

I have to admit that the lack of blogging at some point went from being a case of neglect to a case of conscious choice, and it was mostly that I wanted to focus on me and my little family, and not on what I wanted to tell all of you or what would make a good blog-story.

And the truth is: I missed you. I missed all of you! And I don't want to quit you. I want to keep blogging, in some capacity. I can't get on a tight blogging schedule right now, as I am again doing NaNoWriMo (I love it!) and I am not going to let blogging compromise my novel-writing.

So maybe, in between chapters, when I'm going cross-eyed from writing fiction, I'll sneak in and update you on some of the wonderful projects and things we've done since last I filled you in.

Can you forgive me??

Accounting

Kiddo's been gone since Friday afternoon...and I've done nothing on the list of things I wanted done while he was gone. Instead, I have played, spun, visited, watched movies, slept, eaten out, and drank too much (once, last night at dinner. My gin and tonic was made as a double when I asked for a single. And I drank most of it before the food arrived. Glad I wasn't driving!)

Then today I woke up with a massive headache, and have spent most of the day fighting off the migraine. now that it's nearly bedtime, I might be finally winning. Of course, the 2.5 hour midday nap doesn't make bedtime come any quicker.

So I guess the accounting for my time indicates that I am unwinding. And I assume I will eventually get around to being productive at home...but doesn't finishing half an ounce of frog-hair and finally setting up for bobbin #2 count for something? (The first bobbin has two ounces on it, and it's not even 2/3 full.) And for kicks, Jofran tried to use a McMorran balance on the frog-hair, to see if there would be enough for the Peacock shawl, and a plyback nearly 8 feet long didn't even move the balance. She's guessing there'll be enough.

I've had it. I'm heading to bed. Maybe I'll crawl into the bath first... and hope that tomorrow I can be a bit more useful and maybe find the vacuum. I might even use it!

Loading up the Etsy Shop

I'm getting busy again, and have been getting a backlog of fiber and stuff for the Etsy Shop. So tonight I finally started taking pictures and getting them online. Thus, no delving into history tonight. (But since the Kiddo will be gone for a week, biking across the state with my mother next week, I should be able to throw up some more philosophical stuff and get deep again! Be sure to stop by her blog and encourage my Kiddo in his first big, multi-day ride!)

But if you'd like a sneak preview...

One new Batt Boy Batt: "Darkened Rainbow"And handmade crayons. Three sets of three crayons each, all made from Crayola wax, each unique and special! (only one set is shown here, the rest are in the shop.)

I have a huge box of vintage hats and purses I will be posting in the shop in the next week, and some of that fiber I've been taunting you with will be showing up, too. I'll be sure to let you know.

Thanks, as always, for coming by.

Oh, and Sara? The cheese tastes good - like farmer's cheese, sweet with a little tang. Very yummy. And I make yogurt all the time, and bread, too. It's all experiments in microbiology as far as I'm concerned! The trick is making sure you've got the right microbiotics in the mix - as anyone with sourdough starter gone bad will tell you!

Ghost Stories!

Antonia started it, but Alwen put my attention on it - ghost stories.

Unlike them, I am somewhat sensitive, but don't really see anything. I feel things, and get "that feeling" on occasion, but certainly don't walk around seeing auras and ghosts all day! But oh, that house in Indiana!

We bought an enormous brick house on Ohio St., in Terre Haute, Indiana in 2002 from the son of the owner. The owner, Virginia, had fallen down the stairs and died later in a nursing home. Virginia moved into that house when she was 9 years old, and lived there with her grandparents, and later her husband and children, until she died in 2001 in her 90s. Her son wanted nothing to do with the house, or the contents, and lived on the east coast. He and his daughters cleaned out some personal effects, clothing, and papers, but left everything else in there, and we bought the place, as-is.

This was an enormous house - 3600 sq.ft, not including the full 7' tall basement and the ballroom-like attic. And every inch of it was stuffed with the remnants of 90 years of one family living there. I found the grandmother's junk drawer and utensil drawer in the kitchen right next to Virginia's junk drawer and utensil drawer. Nothing ever got removed or replaced unless it was complete trash, and even then it might stay.

We knew from stories from the son, and from neighbors, that it was not always a happy house. Virginia's husband had died when he fell down the stairs some years before. Her grandmother had died in her bedroom on the second floor. (And if you're into architecture, this house was where I learned about the Coffin Door on Victorian houses, as it had one, as one of the FIVE exterior doors I was paranoid about locking every night.) I didn't get evil vibes from the house, though, and so we moved in. On top of Virginia's Crap, as it became known.

The first night I was in the house (my now-ex-husband moved down there 5 months before me to rewire and properly plumb the house) I was in Virgina's old bedroom, which we had decided was to be our room, and I was setting up the baby crib for our then-2 son. While I was working with the hardware and such I saw a bright light out of the corner of my eye, and then there was an explosion next to me. I screamed as bits of glass flew all over me, and he came running up the stairs to find that the ceiling fixture had "fallen" off the ceiling and landed next to me on the footboard of our bed where it shattered. We figured it was Virginia saying "hi."

Turns out it was her grandmother. Over the next two years we had many encounters with the grandmother, particularly in her bedroom, which became my sewing room. She didn't like my then-husband one bit, and would flutter in his ear and appear in the corner of his eye while he was removing the wallpaper from the walls (that was what passed for household division of labor in those days - he had to strip the wallpaper and wash the ancient paste off the walls, and I would repair the plaster, skim coat them, then finish.) She unnerved him a little, but never bothered me except for the one time when she fluttered in my ear. I said hello, and she left me alone after that, in what became my favorite room in the house.

The house had lots of walking noises, several roving cold spots, and eventually was the final straw in my already-failing marriage. The grandmother finally stopped pestering us at all after I asked my parich priest to come bless the house and he performed a release of spitits ritual and blessed the room.

When my step-father, Pop, died suddenly, I cried myself to sleep. The next morning I felt he was bugging, pestering me, and he wasn't stopping. Finally I ended up sitting at the piano, and he made me play Fur Elise for him, and I felt him leave about halfway through, after I'd played his favorite part. He used to sit and listen to me practice for hours on end, and would encourage and critique and be my number one fan, and I learned Fur Elise for him, and worked on getting the style the way he wanted it. I haven't played it since that morning. he has been known to play pranks and leave notes, too, like the time we came home to find the thermostat turned up to 90F right after we booked a trip the the Caribbean. And when Mom was having some woodwork done in the living room, she was worried about matching the stain since he had custom-blended it himself back in the day. And a ragged slip of paper showed up in his handwriting with the recipe on it, and nothing else.

I know there's more, but that's it for now. But if you think about it, pretty much every religion in the world acknowledges some kind of a spirit world with which we can communicate in one way or another. Just the fact that the priest was prepared and unsurprised, and had multiple levels of alternatives surprised me! I suppose it shouldn't have, but it did.

We don't know everything yet, but we sure like to pretend we do!

If you have a story of your own, feel free to add it to the comments! And Dan, if I missed any good ones about Virgina's house, please chime in!

Inadvertant Cheese

Little Boy came outside to tell me that the milk tasted like cream and was thick. OK, I figured, he's 9, right? It's only milk, right? I'll make it into yogurt tonight, since I just bought fresh milk today.

Not happening. Milk in its way to being yogurt does not look like this. This should be a pot of bubbling frothy white stuff, not chunky white stuff with yellow in it!
The scientist in me was interested...I couldn't ruin it any further, so why not play? I tried to stir it.
Ick. Curdled milk.

Wait a minute...! ould Great Grandmother's mother have thrown this out? It smells sweet, not sour, and it curdled up all by itself, so...

Following in the steps of our Foremothers, right?

I boiled it, then ladled out the chunks.
Left behind was yellow, pus-colored liquid. I believe this would be the whey?
So what to do with it? Ricotta!!

I added 1 Tbs of citric acid, and got more curds!!
Poured that through a makeshift cheese-cloth of linen napkins...
Hung it up to drain...
And I'm still waiting for it.

I tried to follow some online instructions to make the curds into mozzerella cheese, but I cooked them too long and got hard curds (and burnt my fingers something fierce!), so I packed it into a bowl, and we'll have farmer's cheese instead.
In the end, there's about 1/2 cup of ricotta and 400mL of farmer's cheese. Not too bad for the last of the "sour" milk!

So the interesting thing I found, after getting the mess in the kitchen mostly cleared up, is that if you do a search for cheese recipes, they all seem to call for fresh, new milk without the slightest hint of being "off". Makes sense, right? But did our foremothers really throw away or feed the pigs with imperfect milk? Or did they have some good use for it? Is this a case of lost knowledge or of my refusal to accept anything as "spoiled"?

Turns out, if you go check the old cookbooks, all the cheese recipes I found call for starting with sour milk!

Learned something new/old today.

Remember when you were a kid, and it was so hard to keep track of time? You hadn't internalized "time" yet, and summer days sometimes felt like a week, and a week felt like a month?

I've had a few days like that lately.

Friday night, after working all day, I visited a few local garage sales, and discovered that there were lots of garage sales that weekend. So on a whim I decided to drag all the stuff out of the garage that was waiting for donation and slap a sign up.

It worked. I got rid of half the junk stacked in the garage and made a decent sum, as well as knit lots of rows on Gansey, Jr. and got sunburned. All the big stuff disappeared, and I'm not disappointed. Not to shabby for not planning!

Saturday afternoon we went to Mass, since Sunday morning we had to be on the road by 5:30am, which came awfully early. We were scheduled to be water safeties during the triathlon my mom was running Sunday morning (which means we paddle around in kayaks and spot people who bit off more than they could swim). Sunday morning didn't dawn...it thundered. And lightning-ed. And rained.

The race started late, after several "all hands to cars" calls. When it finally started there were 2-3 foot tall rolling waves on Lake Erie, 60F water, and 60F air. I got rolled by the waves twice, another safety got rolled by his own wife (who was swimming and grabbed the side of his kayak) and the double with Kiddo and his Grampa was the only one that stayed upright. Kayak skirts might have helped a little - the waves were rolling over the bow and into our laps! Both times I rolled were from waves washing over the side of the boat and into my lap, swamping the kayak. Fun.

By Sunday afternoon I was whupped. We came home and read on the couch all afternoon before going to bed early. Kiddo slept like a rock.

Yesterday was back to work, then down to my cousin's house to pick up this year's llama shearing!!!!!! I got almost all the crias this time, so keep your eyes open for some wonderful spinning fiber coming soon!

I'm loving the sunshine and cool weather, and happy at the progress on my projects. I managed to get the Kiddo to start clearing out his toys to make room for some new Legos I bought at a garage sale last Friday, since really all he needs is Legos, books, and K'Nex to be happy, and not piles of random stuff he's outgrown. He believes it, and wants the new Legos and I want the space cleared, so we're on the same page, sort of. (And the new Legos were an incredble bargain! A couple of $100+ sets for $14 each!! I bought a bunch...we both like Legos.)

Thank you SO much for all the wonderful stories you've been sharing! If you haven't seen them, please go read the comments from the last Home Arts post - you won't be disappointed! I'm working on the next post in the Home Arts series, and am having so much fun with this! I'm glad you're enjoying it, too!

Pass It On

I chatted with my mother this evening, when I picked up the Kiddo from her house. (She had taken him on a 30 mile bike ride today. He wasn't tired out.) I told her what I had written, and my point of view on how I was raised: that when young the home arts were emphasized and when I was older I was encouraged to go to college, get a degree, and be able to support myself.

When I was young, I wanted to live like that forever. I have wonderful memories of juicing tomatoes out on the picnic table, getting them ready for canning. I thought cutting the corn off the ears was the coolest thing ever, watching the sheets of kernels fold away from the cob. And it tasted amazing in February. I used to love to look at the rows and rows of jars neatly lined up on the shelves in the pantry down in the basement - every one of them packed by us, grown by us. Dad would sometimes let me drink some of the tomato juice with him (that, and the butterscotch candies on the mantle were his, and were untouchable without invitation) and I learned to love fresh (or jarred) tomato juice with a bit of salt and pepper. (V8 tastes so fake to me)

We lived in a farm house, but didn't keep the farm. We rented the house from the owner, who lived elsewhere. So the fields around us were farmed, sometimes wheat, sometimes corn, occasionally soybeans (this was before they were such a big crop), and the barns stood big and white around the property. It was a lot of yard, and dad mowed it.

We had two gardens - one behind the house next to the field, and one across the driveway perpendicular to the road. They were HUGE, and covered far more square footage that the house and garage combined. We grew potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, and all kinds of good stuff. We had a Concord grape vine that make awesome grape juice (I didn't like to eat the skins, so I would peel them with my teeth and eat the sweet insides). I certainly can't forget walking long rows of potatoes with a jar of gasoline in my hand, picking off the potato bugs and dropping them into the jar. I hated killing them, but they were killing our food - the food we were going to eat until next year. Later in the season, Dad would walk along the row with a pitchfork and turn over each plant, and my sister and I would scramble to dig in the soil to find each and every potato and put it into the bushel basket, making sure that we didn't put any in the bushel basket that had been cut by the pitchfork.

We would pick raspberries in the summer, strawberries from the U-pick farm, more grapes from Grandpa's house, pull long straight carrots from the soil, and eat from this bounty all year. (Somehow, the cherry tree that I so loved to climb never seemed to yield much fruit...)

And then, of course, there was The Deer. (It's still a bit of family legend) The Deer ran across the road in front of the car (full of kids) driven by Mom's cousin, it jumped the ditch, hit the fence, and broke it's neck. we drove home, Dad called the DNR, and they gave him permission to kill it and keep the meat, if he wanted. He did, and split the meat with the cousin who was driving. That's when I learned how butchering works, and the different cuts of meat, as I assisted by sorting the cuts into the yellow buckets on the floor while Dad did the cutting up, in the basement. (I don't remember how he carried that thing down those steep stairs!) And it was my job to pick the hairs off as I sorted.

All this, and more, was "normal" to me. And it still stands as my example of how to live sustainably and self-sufficiently. And it's what I still am striving to return to.

From my mom's point of view, this was how she was raised. She loved it, staying home with us kids, gardening, sewing our clothes (I didn't mention that part, did I? She sewed most of our clothes for us) For her, this was the way to raise kids. She learned how from her mother(who learned from her mother, and so on, I'm sure, though the centuries, since that's how that kind of information usually gets passed on.)

Mom was very good at...being a Mom. She taught me to sew, to bake, to can, to garden. She showed me how parenting can be a relaxing, wonderful, happy occupation. We would play with cousins, roam the yard, try to peek in the barns that were always locked, and generally explore the outdoors around us. It was this example of motherhood and raising children that instilled in me the desire to be a mother myself.

I hear stories about and from women who never learned these things from their mothers. Some of them actually refused when asked, and told their daughters "no." They didn't want their daughters to grow up to be housewives.

And that's where I think Women's Lib went wrong...instead of offering the business world as an option, an alternative to being a housewife and mother, the business world became the only choice for many women, simply because they never learned the home arts from their mothers.

One of my (random) hobbies is reading old homekeeping manuals and cookbooks. They started appearing in about the 1830s, and are still being produced today. These books offer an amazing peek into the lives of women of the age, in what they assume you know, and in what they presume to teach. By reading through a cookbook from a different era, one can read between the lines and infer so much about the life they led - does the cookbook have recipes calling for exotic spices? Powdered sugar? sugar? honey? How about eggs, milk, butter? Does it have recipes for making butter? Some even remind you to wash the cow's teats prior to milking, using a blue cotton washcloth, not a white one (intended for kitchen use only). You've really got a gem on your hands if it tells you how to make the washcloth!

By following these books through the decades, you can actually see the transition away from knowledge passed on from mother to daughter, and to young women in need of education in the home arts. As the decades progress, the information becomes more and more basic, more fundamental and less "icing on the cake", until finally you reach a modern cookbook or homemaking book, and we are taught how to make a bed and hang clothes on a (plastic, machine-made) hanger. Reading between the lines (and in a few other references on history and the industrail revolution), we see that the need for this information comes about because young women are no longer staying home and learning this from their mothers; at about age 16, many young women left home to live in dormitories and work in factories until they got married. Then they would set up households with their new husbands, and take up homekeeping, some as late as their mid-twenties.

Fast forward a hundred years, and mothers are refusing to teach their daughters how to keep a home. And hence we need a book to tell us how to make a bed and handwash dishes. (Not me, personally, Mom - you gave me lots and lots of practice at those!)

What was your experience? Did your mother teach you how to keep a house? Garden? Sew? Or did she refuse? I'm finding the comments from Tuesday's post to be fascinating and engaging...I hope we can continue to converse on this.