The Halloween Costumes

Yes, it's way after Halloween, but I'm just getting around to sharing these pics.  I made the Things' costumes, and was pretty darned happy with them.

Here they are.  On the left is Thing 1 in his velociraptor costume.  Center is Thing 2 as Spongebob, and on the right is Thingette as a butterfly.  Spongebob was the biggest hit, by far.  It was the best Spongebob costume I've seen anywhere, if I do say so myself.  Thingette was a bit dissolusioned with the butterfly and was wanting to be Spongebob herself by the time Halloween rolled around, and I guess I can't really blame her.

I'm most pleased with Thing 1's velociraptor costume.  I came up with this one from scratch, and it looked *really* good.  I found some fab dinosaur-skin looking fabric, and it all just kind of came together without a lot of dicking around.  The first head I made was too small and I had to redo it, but the basic design was spot on so enlarging it wasn't a big deal. 

If I were to do it again, I'd use 1" rather than 1/2" foam for the body so it would have more body.  The tail got kind of floppy.  Still, it was great, and Thing 1 loved it. 

The butterfly worked pretty darned well.  I found some good quilting fabric for the wings and covered the body with velvet, like a fuzzy caterpillar.  I wanted to find a headband with some dingleballs on it for antennae, but couldn't find anything at all.  Just a few years ago. those things were all over the place.  They're no longer popular, apparently.

Here's the head in production.  I love working with foam rubber and making soft-sculpture pieces, and this was a really fun project.  I suspect that my messing around with soft-sculpture in crochet long ago really helped with putting this together.  You have to look at things in terms of semi-flexible planes, and the increases and decreases in shaping a crochet piece give a good sense of how things are formed. 


Although this year's costumes were a hit, Things 1 and 2 have told me that next year they want store-bought, gory costumes.  I let them know that this was okay with me, and that I'd help them put together some good zombiewear. 

So next year, I'll have the time to put together something fabulous for hubby and I for Halloween.  There's always a party somewhere...

FT

The wild grapes

We made our wild grapes into jelly and booze.  We need to remake the jelly.  The booze was excellent.

I tried to make a low-sugar jelly by just cutting back on the sugar and using a pectin that didn't rely on an abundance of sugar.  I've got 21 jars of really tart wild grape jelly.  It's a little thin, too, so I'm going to re-cook it with some more sugar and pectin and re-can it. 

I found the canning process pretty easy.  I used small jars - 8 and 12 ounce - but my canner was made for pints, so that was a bit of a challenge.  The small jars kept falling over on the rack.  I cut a piece of hardware cloth with a 3/8" mesh and put a bottom on the canner rack, and the jars stood up just fine.  It took some organization and coordination to do the canning, and three great big pots.  I've only got three working burners on my stove, so my options for what should go where were rather limited.  I thought I'd be clever and boil my jars and lids in my roaster.  I think that's what destroyed the roaster. 

It was really neat listening to the tops of the jars pop as they cooled.  That was the sign that I'd done my canning properly.  The jelly is really very nice for a first effort, I think.  I'm looking forward to doing some more canning.  Actually, I'll be doing it this week when I re-batch the jelly.

I'm not going to share any recipe, because it didn't really turn out.  With all of the diddling, I don't really know what the recipe is anymore.  When I try it again next year, I'll share the recipe, if it turns out.

The booze is another story altogether.  It turned out fabulous.  It's really good mixed with lemonade or lemon sour.  It's beautiful in the bottle - a deep, rich red-purple that coats the sides of the bottle.  It tastes summery-fruity and deceptively mild. 

Here's the recipe.  The amounts will vary with the size jar you have.

• Fill a large jar with gently crushed wild grapes.  You want the skins broken, but you don't want to crush the seeds.  You can substitute any berry for the wild grapes.  I also made booze from wild raspberries and from elderberries, and they were wonderful. 
• Add 1 Tablespoon of sugar for each pint of capacity of your jar.  For a quart jar, add 2 Tbsp; for a gallon jar 8 Tbsp, etc. 
• Fill jar with Everclear (grain alcohol - 151 proof).  You can also use vodka.
• Store in a dark, cool spot.
• Shake the jar and/or give it a stir every few days for the first two weeks.
• Shake or stir once a week for the next 8 weeks.
• Strain your booze, squishing as much juice as possible from the grapes.  I use a mesh strainer, then squeeze the grapes with my hands.  This stains my hands pretty badly, particularly my fingernails, but it washes out eventually.  You'll have a lot of grape goo left that you'll need to decide what to do with.  If you can get the seeds separate from the pulp, I think that the pulp (which will be boozy) might be nice mixed with jello for some party shooters. 
• Run the booze you've collected through a jelly bag to strain out any solids.  These can be added to the pulp for your Wild Grape Shooters. 
• Give your booze a taste.  You may want to sweeten it up some, or to add some water to thin it down a bit if your booze seems kind of "thick" (think juice concentrate) or too strong or some additional vodka if it's too weak (I don't know what your tastes are).  BE CAREFUL.  No matter what you add, it's going to taste funny if you taste it right away.  It will have to sit in order for you to know what result you've gotten.  You can always add more sugar and water and vodka later, but you can't take it out once you've put it in.  If you want to add both sugar and water, dissolve the sugar in the water before putting them into your booze. 
• Bottle up your booze.  Use glass bottles with screw on tops.  I use old booze bottles, since they're made for the purpose. 
• Store your booze in a dark, cool spot.  If you added any sugar, water or vodka at tasting time, let your booze sit for at least a month (shaking it up once or twice a week) before tasting it again so that the flavors can blend and mellow. 

It's hard to let the stuff sit for months before imbibing.  Ours is just about gone. 
 





FT

Distracted

I've been pretty distracted by the news lately.  That's why I haven't been posting.  Well, that and the fact that it's been a rather busy fall.  I only have so much online time and I've been using it to bang my head against a wall in the discussion sections of a newspaper or two. 

I don't know why I do that.  Most of the people who post to those things are cranky, ideological jackasses.  They don't want to actually talk about the issues, they want to argue about them, score points, win the fight.  Most of them don't know what the heck they're talking about.  They speak in logical fallacies and quote opinion pieces as though they were news.  They're utterly convinced that they're absolutely right about things that they know very little about. 

I'm cranky, too.  These folks are turning me into a cynic, and I don't like it at all.  I think of this quote - "A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset." - James Gould Cozzens.  That's not the person I want to be.

So I'm going to stay away from the comments sections and try to regain my faith in humanity.  If I feel strongly about an issue I'll write to my elected representatives rather than bang my head on the wall on some discussion board. 


FT

The Final Granola Recipe

I've made granola for hubby enough now that I've got the recipe down so that I can throw it together with minimum effort and get great results.  This recipe makes a lightly sweet, toasty granola. 

42 oz rolled oats (standard large, round container that oatmeal comes in at the grocery store)
1 pound of coarsely chopped nuts (we usually use walnuts, but any nut will do)
2 cups whole flax seed
1 1/4 cup water
1 1/4 cup turbinado sugar (or 1/2 cup brown sugar and 3/4 cup white sugar)
1/2 cup butter (1 stick) cut in small chunks
12-16 ounces dried fruit

Combine oatmeal, nuts and flax in large roaster pan*.  Bring sugar and water to a boil, stir until sugar is melted.  Add butter to sugar mixture.  Stir until butter is melted.  Pour sugar/butter mixture over oatmeal mixture.  Stir until well blended.  Bake at 325 degrees for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, stirring every 20 minutes, until granola reaches desired toastiness.  Let granola cool for a half hour or so, then add dried fruit.  Stir until well mixed.  Store in airtight container.

If you like a more nuggety granola, increase the sugar to 1 cup brown sugar and 1 cup white sugar, and increase the butter to 3/4 cup.

*  You want the granola spread out, and you need to have room to stir it up, so you want a big, deep pan.  I use the inside pan from our 18 quart electric roaster.  That's about the perfect size.

FT

Bill Came Home, but Things Were Different

It's been a while since I posted.  First thing I need to share is that Bill came home.  He was gone for about 10 days, came home a little slimmer but in good condition. 

He was not happy when he came home, though.  While he was away, we got a new family member.  There's a pic of her at right.  The last thing I wanted was another cat.  Well, not the absolute last thing, obviously, but really close to the top of the list of things I did not want.  The son-in-law brought her to me because she was about to become homeless, and he knows I'm a great big sucker.  We've named her Pita.  She is named for the acronym - Pain In The Ass.  She's cute as heck, but definitely lives up to her name.  She is a curtain climber, an ankle attacker, a beverage tipper-overer.  On the plus side, when I showed her the litter box, she knew exactly what it was for, she loves to cuddle, and has pretty good bed manners.

Bill disliked her on sight.  She went bouncing up to him, thinking that he'd find her as irresistable as hubby and I had.  He did not.  He put her in her place, then searched the rest of the house to make sure that there were no others like her hiding anywhere. 

Bill and Pita have reached an understanding.  That understanding seems to be that she is irresistable and he should just stop fighting it.  He eventually gave in, but he makes sure that she knows that he is the Head Cat In Charge, and is not to be messed with, leapt upon, chewed on, hissed at, or any other unpleasant thing. 

Looks like I'm going to end up a crazy cat lady after all.  At least I have hubby to help out.


FT

Bill Is Still Missing

It has been rainy and cold, and he's still out there somewhere.  I've talked with the neighbors and have asked them to keep an eye out for him.  He's very friendly, so if they call him he'll likely go to them.  The lady down the hill said she'd be out in the woods hunting turkey soon, and will keep an eye out for him.  We've been out along the edge of the woods and fields calling for him,

I hope that he comes back soon.  He's an old guy - 17 years old - without much extra meat on him.  He's all hair.  Some friends have suggested that at his age, perhaps he just went away to die.  I don't believe that's what happened.  He's old, but he was healthy and happy, and did not appear to be close to the end of his run.  He still has his moments when he runs around the house like a kitten.

He just isn't the type to stay out.  I don't think he's ever stayed out all night.  He's out there somewhere, wet and cold and lost.  The rain has kept the farmers out of the fields.  I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.  Would he get run over by a combine, would it chase him out of the field and toward home, would it get the corn out of the way so that he could find home?  They're not going to be getting the corn out any time soon.  The forecast through next week is rain, rain and more rain. 

Poor Bill.  If something got him, I hope it was something big and that it was quick.  I hate the thought of him out there cold and wet, covered with burrs and ticks, sick and miserable....  I hope he comes home soon. 

FT

Bill Has Gone Missing

I expected that he'd be hanging around the house when I got home from work, but he's nowhere to be found.  I called for him, walked around the woods, but there's no sign of him. 

I've been hoping he'd come home, but it's not looking good.  He goes out when he wants to, usually but not always sticks pretty close to the house, usually but not always is back in the house within 15 minutes.  He doesn't stay out all night, but he did last night.

I'm guessing he was out strolling around yesterday and either the lawnmower or the kids' dog scared him into the woods or into the corn and he got lost.  I hope that he makes his way home before it gets cold.

FT

Home Invasion

It's a part of living where we do that we just have to accept.  When they start harvesting soybeans, the Asian Lady Beetles will invade.  Today there are hundreds, probably a dozen per square foot of house surface. There are also dozens inside the house.  There will be thousands of them on the house when I got home from work tomorrow.  I may get lucky as it's supposed to be cloudy and cooler, then rain for days after that, possibly even snow by Friday. 

I'm hoping that bulk of the ALB will decide to lay low tomorrow, but I can't see how that will happen.  They like it when it's sunny, but the farmers are unlikely to take that into consideration.  They've got maybe 36 hours to get the beans out of the field before it starts to rain. 

I could still get lucky because the fields around me are corn this year rather than beans - these ALB are coming in from at least a mile away.  I'm hoping they'll find a place to stop before they get here. 

FT

More of the Busy Week

Last Saturday some friends came for a visit.  We were walking around the backyard, and one of them saw a patch of grapes that hubby and I had missed.  We went out Sunday to pick and got another 8 1/2 pounds of grapes.  I turned some of them into booze, the rest will be more juice for jelly. 

I had actually forgotten about the rest of the grapes.  I just put them on the stove.  Eesh, that would have been bad, all that work molding in the fridge...

I went down to the ditch this week and picked some more cattail leaves.  The ones I'd picked before are all dried and ready to try out some basketweaving.  I suspect that I'm going to enjoy it, so wanted to get more supplies laid in. 

I tied the first ones in bundles and hung them to dry, and that worked pretty well except that the leaves shrunk and the bundles fell apart when I took them off the wall. This time, I took a stout needle and some 1/4" ribbon and strang them together to hang dry.  There weren't really any problems with tying them in bunches, but this will make them easier to handle when they're dry.  Once the bunches fell apart, the leaves were rather cumbersome. 

Basketry is going to have to wait, though, because Halloween is coming up before you know it, and I have to make costumes for the grandkids.  Thing 1 is going to be a velociraptor, Thing 2 wants to be Spongebob, and Thingette wants to be a butterfly.  I've started working on the patterns.  I'm knocking out the butterfly first because it will be easiest.  Spongebob won't be too bad, but the velociraptor is going to be a real challenge. 

I'm really pretty excited about putting these together.  It's going to be fun.  I've really got to get busy, though.  I'm pretty good as a crunch player with this kind of thing, and there's really plenty of time to get these done, but the kid will be driving me crazy if she doesn't see progress.  She's a worrier.

FT

Busy Week

It has been a week since I posted anything here.  A very busy week. 

It's been cold and rainy all week, and it looks like it will continue to be cold and rainy.  Both the hummingbirds and the bees are gone, at least for now.  I'll fill the feeder again this weekend and see if any of them show up.

There was a threat of frost for Tuesday morning, so we went into the garden Monday night and picked all of the tender stuff.  It didn't actually get down to freezing, and that's a danged good thing.  There are a lot of green tomatoes still out there, and a lot of itty-bitty cucumbers.  I think that the cucumber is about a goner.  That's it on the far left in the picture.  It sure has been a producer this year.  This one plant has supplied me with probably 50 good sized cucumbers - the seedless, soft-skinned English kind.  It's leaves are all turning now, but it's still putting out blossoms.  What a trooper.

One of my pepper plants had just took off about a month ago.  It sat there doing pretty much nothing with it's brothers all summer, then this one just took off.  I got 4 peppers off of it when we took all of the veggies out Monday night, and it had a lot of little ones starting.  It's got all kinds of flowers on it, too.

I don't know what kind of pepper it is.  It's not a bell - its peppers are darker green and longer.  I haven't tried them yet, but I'm going to be making goulash this weekend, and will throw them in there.  I don't even know if it's a hot pepper.  If it is, the son-in-law will be pleased.

This is how dismal the weather is now - it looks like the picture of the pepper plant was taken at night, but I took it at 8:30 in the morning.  This is apparently all the sun we're going to get today.

We got a happy surprise in the mail on Monday.  Apparently, we made a mistake on our taxes.  The IRS sent us a check.  I went a little crazy and spent about $500 of it on new clothes and a haircut.  The kid came with me, and she was all kinds of excited about seeing me buy clothes.  She's tired of seeing me in home-made pull-on pants and hubby's Hawaiian shirts.  So now I'm wearing actual girl clothes.  It's nice that this year's colors are my colors.

My favorite purchase was a pair of Sorel winter boots.  It has been decades since I had a really good pair of winter boots.  My feet will be warm and comfy all winter long. 


 


FT

First The Birds, Now The Bees

The bees have taken great interest in the hummingbird feeder.  It makes sense that they would - the wildflowers are pretty much gone, but I expect that these guys still have some stocking up to do for the winter. 

Each of the little plastic flowers in the feeder was packed full of bees, with more trying to work their way in.  Hubby brought home some apple juice and has suggested that we put a bowl out for them.  He figures they'll like it better than the sugarwater in the feeder.  I'll have to stick it somewhere high to keep the grandkids and bees from getting too close to each other.

Some of the bees found their way into the house.  Not where they wanted to be, and not where I wanted them to be, either.  I'm employing a catch-and-release program with them, catching them in a jar and taking them outside.  I recall hearing on the radio recently that bees are having a hard time around here. 

I don't know anything about bees, so went out to the web to discover whether feeding them now was a good thing to do.  It appears that it may be.  They're apparently not seasonal migrators, and live through the winter on what they've stored, so the extra meals here may be helpful. 

I don't think that any remaining hummingbirds will be too jazzed about their feeder being full of bees, though.



FT

There are still some hummingbirds

I was surprised that they're still around.  The feeder had pretty much gone dry, and I wasn't going to fill it back up, but I saw a hummingbird hovering around it Sunday morning.  I restocked it a bit and it's been a polular site ever since. 

The fellow I took the picture of here is on his way to somewhere else.  He seemed awfully chubby as hummingbirds go, but I suppose he would have to be for the trip he's got ahead of him. 

I recall reading an article that suggested that an increased sugar content to the nectar in the fall, when the birds are migrating, would be a good thing.  I think I'll fill the thing up a bit and strengthen the dose.  An extra tablespoon or so of sugar might be helpful to them on their way south.


FT

A Nice Treat for Hubby

I'd forgotten all about the radishes I'd planted about a month ago.  They were obscured by a nasturtium that decided to start growing right in the middle of them.  Hubby loves radish sandwiches, so this will be a happy surprise for him.

I don't think that I planted the seeds deeply enough - they're kind of sitting on top of the soil.  The shade from the nasturtium kept them in good shape, though.  They're big, plump, beautiful things.


FT

Update On The Guest Cat

He seems to have gone away.  We haven't seen him for several days.  Last Sunday hubby found him in our bedroom, and once we got him out (by leaving him alone and waiting for him to find his way out on his own) we started latching the back door.  Our cats didn't like that too well, since they couldn't get in and out at will anymore.  The orange and white cat apparently didn't like it, either.  Hubby saw him at the end of the driveway (about 1/8 mile from the house) on Tuesday, but we haven't seen him since then. 

I doubt he'll be back.  It has been our experience that the dumped cats don't stick around if they can't get at some food and don't come back once they've been gone for a few days.  I'm guessing that he's going to go check out the neighbors' homes and see if they have any easily accessible eats for him, but I don't think he'll have any luck.  I know that the neighbor to the west won't have anything for him, and the neighbor to the south has dogs that aren't fond of cats. 

I feel guilty about the orange and white cat.  I wish that there was more I could have done with/for him.  I'm feeling guilty about not fulfilling some random asshole stranger's duty to this animal.  That really pisses me off.  Whomever's pet he was cared so little about him that they dumped him out here to fend for himself, and I'm the one feeling guilty.  I'm sure that the jackass is telling his-or-herself that it was giving the cat a chance at a better life or some such nonsense, but that's a pathetic load of self-deception.  When you dump a housecat in the country, chances are it's going to die.  If it's lucky, it will be killed soon after it's dumpage by a hawk or coyote, if it's unlucky it will die slowly of starvation, ravaged by parasites of one sort or another.  Only the lottery winners, like Bucky and Boo, find a happy home.

There are some country-folk who have a shoot-on-sight policy for dealing with dumped pets.  Considering the alternatives, I don't think that is unkind.  If I'd kept all of the cats that have been dumped here over the years, I'd have a couple of dozen cats now, and my home would be a health hazard. 

I've been able to find homes for some of them.  The family on the right here is a success story.  Mom - the beautiful calico - showed up here a few years ago.  She was incredibly friendly.  She'd been dumped along with a batch of kittens - a different batch than those in the pic.  Only one of those kittens made it up to the house with her.  We had seen a few others along the road, but they apparently fell prey to something along the way.

There were a couple of dumped tomcats up here at the time, one orange tabby and one grey long-haired, and they both appear to have impregnated Mom.  The pic on the right is that litter.  The grey kitten went to a friend who tells me he is the most spoiled and obnoxious kitty she's ever seen, but she loves him just the same.  The rest, along with mom and the kittens' aunt, went to a farm site that a friend was getting ready to move in to.  The kittens had been well-socialized - my grandkids saw to that.  There was a daycare center across the road from the farm site, and the cats moved over there so that they could play with the kids.  The cats and the kids are all happy with the situation, and some other cats have moved into the farm site outbuildings to replace those that moved over to the daycare.

There have been other successes, but for every success, there have been a couple of dumped cats who have disappeared - died of disease or hunger or predation.  It irritates the hell out of me.  I was taught that taking on a pet is a life-long commitment to a living being who is depending on me.  If I get a kitten, I'm making a 15-20 year commitment to care for that cat.  If I'm not prepared to make that commitment, I don't get the pet.

What were these people who dump their pets out in the country taught? 

FT

More Grapes

I thought I was about done with grapes.  There are some more on the vines on the dead tree we knocked down, but to get to any of the good ones that are left you have to reach through the buckthorn or Virginia Creeper, and I don't really like doing that.  I'd checked some other viny spots and hadn't seen too much.  Since the easy picking seemed to be over, this last batch of juice was going to be my last batch of juice, and I was going to start thinking about how to turn it into jelly.

I was walking home from my daughter's this morning and decided to check along the edge of the woods rather than come straight down the driveway.  I saw a bunch of vines strangling off what I think is an elm tree, and found another buttload of grapes.  Most of the clusters seem to be made up of ripe grapes.  Most are also a bit out of reach, so we'll have to get some kind of hook to pull them down or some kind of platform so that we can reach them.

I've got about a gallon of grape juice now, and I might get another gallon from the vines I found today.  There have to be more out there.  I don't think we'll keep looking once we've harvested these, though.

I'm going to have to get on killing some of the buckthorn and Virginia creeper.  I guess the buckthorn serves a purpose in that it keeps the kids from wandering off into the woods, but black-caps would do that just as effectively.  The Virginia creeper is a pretty red this time of year, but the berries are poisonous and the stuff makes hubby itchy.

FT

The Guest Cat

We have a visiting cat.  He (I think he's a he, but haven't been able to get close enough to know for sure) is in our bedroom right now.  He's a big orange and white guy.  We've propped the back door open and are hoping that he'll work his way outside pretty soon. 

He wasn't invited, and I don't think that he really wants to be here.  He's not really people-shy or he wouldn't be sneaking in the house, but he's not friendly.  He runs whenever we come near.  He looks pretty healthy and well-kept.  My guess is that someone dumped him out here. 

In the eight years we've lived out here, we've dealt with a couple of dozen dumped cats.  They were all obviously someone's pet, but not anyone around here or they'd go home and get something to eat.  I've found homes for about half of them.  The rest have been too skittish to socialize and find homes for.  They look okay when they get here, but before too long they start looking pretty skinny and scruffy, then eventually we just don't see them anymore.  I assume they get sick and die or a coyote or hawk gets them. 

My cat, Bill, pictured at left, is 17 years old.  He was an only cat for about a year after my cat, Bob, died about 3 years ago, of diabetes at age 15. 

While Bill missed Bob, he enjoyed being king of the castle after Bob passed on.  His face changed - he'd always had this sweet, wide-eyed look, but he developed a kind of regal scowl and a bit of a strut after a year of being in charge of the household.

While we love Bill and are doing what we can to keep him healthy and happy, hubby and I are way tired of the cat box and having cat hair all over everything.  On top of that, I have a mild cat allergy.  When I pet them I have to wash my hands right away.  We were looking forward to being cat-less when Bill was no longer with us. 

This was not to be.

In March of 2008, a kitten showed up on our doorstep.  I'd guess he was about 3 months old.  He was sweet and friendly, and just kept hanging around.  I tried to ignore him and rather hoped he'd just go away.  He didn't. 

One day I came home from work and he was sitting on the stairs at my daughter's house (halfway down my driveway).  It was sleeting and he was covered with ice.  I tried not to look at him, but told hubby about it when I got to our house.  He went down and picked the poor little thing up and brought him home. 

That's him - Bucky - on the right, taken today.  He's a big, sturdy, handsome boy.  He's got lovely bed manners.  When he stays in the house at night he curls up by our feet and just stays put.  He likes to lay by my feet when I'm sitting in the living room and is a wonderful footwarmer.  He helps me in the garden and accompanies me when I'm hunting wild berries along the edge of the woods.  And he's a fabulous mouser.  We got through last winter without seeing a single mouse or hearing any in the walls.  That was amazing. 

Bill wasn't too happy about it, but Bucky seemed to respect Bill's supremacy inside the house, so they reached a kind of truce and managed to get along.

Hubby and I talked about what we'd do if another cat showed up.  We had run out of homes for them, we didn't want them dying or getting killed, and we felt really bad for them.  It wasn't their fault that their owners were low-down scum, and they didn't deserve to suffer.  On the other paw, there was a limit to what we could do.  We can't feed feral cats without attracting racoons and possums, so we decided that any cat who was friendly and wanted to be part of our household could join us. 

Then we met Boo.  He showed up here a week before Halloween last year.  He was just a few months old, and uberfriendly, loving everyone and everything.  He's sable, but looks black.  A pretty boy.

He's also a huge pain in the butt.  He doesn't understand anything about social interactions in either the cat or human worlds.  When he wants cuddles, he will not take no for an answer and will cuddle up to anything with a pulse to get some loving. 

He got himself all kinds of beat up here a while back, I assume cuddling up to some critter that didn't want to be cuddled up to.  We found him covered with mud with a mangled tail and ripped up toe out on the back porch.  We cleaned him up and fixed him as best we could.  He got himself beaten up to a lesser extent quite a few times after that, coming home with gashes on one part of him or another.  Fortunately for us, he didn't object much to the application of peroxide.  Any cuddling is good cuddling in his world, and holding him down was just a snug cuddle, I guess.  He seems to have wised up a bit and hasn't been injured in a while.  I wouldn't have thought he was capable of figuring this out, but I guess he's smarter than I thought he was. 

So we're trying to get friendly with the orange and white guy before winter.  If he will get social and let us pet him and such, he'll have a home for the winter.  If he doesn't get friendly, he's probably going to die.  That he's getting skinny and keeps sneaking into the house to eat leads me to believe that he's not much of a hunter.  I'm going to work on him some, but I don't have much hope that he'll get friendly.  He's an older cat - a couple of years, at least - and they just don't form new attachments that easily.  We'll see what happens with this guy.

FT

Today in the Garden

I got some nice stuff out of the garden tonight.  The tomatoes are ripening up nicely.  I'll be making sauce again pretty soon if the weather stays nice.  It looks like it should - the forecast says sunny and 80's for the next four days.  No rain, so I'll have to get on the watering. 

The beans (Kentucky Wonder pole beans) are starting to flower again.  They'd pretty much stopped producing for a while.  It may have been too cool for them to set blossoms.  It looks like I'll have a nice crop in a week or two.  I'm going to let some of the last pods mature and dry, and save the seeds to plant next year. 

I'm starting to contemplate getting the garden beds ready for winter.  I didn't clean one of the beds up too well last fall and had a batch of cutworms this spring.  They're disgusting.  They eat through the stems of small plants at ground level.  That's it.  They don't eat up the leaves, just eat enough of the stem to completely destroy the plant.  I lost beets and romaine to them. I'll be collaring my young plantlings this coming spring, but seedlings are a bit tougher to protect.  I found that the best method was to dig out the roots of the plant that was severed the previous night, find the little bugger - he'll be close to the roots of the plant - and squash him.  It's definitely a satisfying thing to do, of a little gross.  They're fat, juicy 1.5" furless catepillars.  I understand that cleaning the beds well in teh fall will help prevent this.  The bed that got infested had quite a bit of detritus left in it.

I'm going to be looking at where I want my new beds pretty soon.  I want a big bed for strawberries.  I've got a couple of June-bearing plants that are lost in a bed of grass and weeds, and they need a better home.  I want a few more beds for veggies, and some room for pumpkins, gourds and sweet corn.  I've got room for at least 60 square feet more of raised beds inside my current garden space, and as much of a couple acres as I want to use outside of it.  That would pretty much double my space.  I've got two 4 ft x 4 ft beds, a 1 ft x 16ft bed and a 1 ft x 8ft bed - 56 square feet in all.  It produces a fair amount of stuff.  Right now I've got 7 tomato plants, 5 feet of beans, one cucumber, 5 peppers, 100+ carrots, 5 dozen beets or so, a couple of potato plants, some lettuce...  We've got a variety in that small space, and enough coming out to provide for our veggie needs for now, but not really enough to put any up. 

Next year I'll have space to grow veggies for storage, so I'll be making some different choices.  It's fun to ponder what next year's garden will look like.


FT

What I've Learned About Wild Grapes

It's been really interesting working with the wild grapes.  Here's what I've learned.

5 pounds of grape bunches yeilds about 3 pounds of usable grapes.  While there are some bunches that are full of ripe grapes, most have a combination of ripe grapes, green grapes and rock-hard little former raisins.  Occcasionally there's an actual raisin.  In any case, there is a lot of detritus.

While it only takes minutes to gather up 5 pounds of bunches, it takes a couple of hours to pick the ripe ones from the stems.  They stain fingers blue and purple.  It comes off after about a half-dozen hand-washings or so.  My hands were really pretty after squeezing the pulp while I was making juice, but that's another story.  The blue is mostly from that.  That's from the skins, I believe. 

It's a really pretty blue.  I've got some white cotton gauze material that I haven't decided what to do with.  I have a hard time with white - it always ends up with some food stain or other.  I might see if I can dye it with the grape skins.  Then again, it's not like I'm looking for a new hobby just now...

There aren't many bugs in the bunches, nor is there much bug damage on the fruit.  I suspect that this is because any nice, well-packed bunch of grapes is going to have a little spider silk at it's center.  There were little white/yellow spiders still in the grapes as I was pulling them off the stems, having a hard time deciding whether to try to hide back in the grapes or take off and look for new digs.  I don't kill them.  I'm not a big fan of spiders, but they eat bugs that I'm less fond of.

The grapes range in size quite a bit.  It's wonderful to find a bunch of big, fat juicy ones.  They're about the size of a plump blueberry.  On the other end of the scale are some that aren't much bigger than elderberries.

I've made some of the grapes into liqueur - about 2 pounds of them - and the rest are being turned into juice that will be turned into jelly as soon as I have all of the necessary equipment to do it. 


FT

Labor Day, But Not Much To Celebrate

A study came out this past week - Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers.  They looked at front-line workers (not including managers and supervisors) in low wage industries in New York, Chicago and LA.

We found that many employment and labor laws are regularly and systematically violated, impacting a significant part of the low-wage labor force in the nation’s largest cities.

I'm reading the study now, and it's pretty disturbing.  I'm not surprised that this stuff is going on, but like most folks, I assumed that this was one of those "few bad apples" things.  There are many employers in low wage industried who don't screw their employees, but the magnitude and pervasiveness of the problem is shocking.  Of the people they studied, 3/4 of those who worked overtime were cheated out of some or all of their overtime pay.  Half of those who had a serious workplace injury experienced a violation of workmen's compensation laws by their employer.  43% of workers who complained about a workplace issue or tried to form a union experienced retaliation from their employer. 

Rebuilding our economy on the back of illegal working conditions is not only morally but also economically untenable. When unscrupulous employers break the law and drive down labor standards, they rob families of badly needed money to put food on the table. They rob communities of spending power. They rob state and local governments of vital tax revenues. And they rob the nation of the good jobs and workplace standards needed to compete in the global economy.

They're right about that, of course, but I don't suspect that we're going to see anything done about it any time soon.  Our country has a really weird relationship with it's low-wage workers.  We'd be completely sunk without them, although we don't like to admit it.  They're the grease that keeps our economy moving.  But we don't really value what they do, nor do we value them.  They're "not like us".  They're lazy, unmotivated, probably not very bright, probably not very honest.  We resist any attempts to raise their wages to an amount sufficient to pay for food, shelter, etc. because what they do isn't worth a decent wage.  We resent having to expend tax dollars for public assistance programs to make up the gap between what they're paid and what it costs to live.  

We stack the deck against them then tell them it's their fault they're losing, and that they'd be greedy and ungrateful to ask for a reshuffle, and disrespectful of all of the work their betters did in putting the deck together for them. 

It's a heck of a world...



FT

More Grapes

Hubby and I went back out tonight and got about 3 pounds of wild grapes in about 15 minutes.  Now that I've got a lot of grapes, I'll have to figure out what to do with them. 

I hadn't planned on working on jams this fall, but maybe I'll have to.  There are a LOT more wild grapes out there along the edge of the woods.  If I got busy collecting them, I could make a buttload of jam.  Yummy!




FT

Today In The Garden - 9/5

There was nothing to harvest in the garden today.  I took some newspaper and covered up the bits of the boxes where I'm not going to be planting anything else this year.  The newspaper should kill the weeds underneath, and help get the spot ready for next spring. 

There's still some lettuce in this bed, both some soft stuff, which I don't really like all that much, and some romaine, which I'm rather fond of.  There are a bunch of beets, too, although they''re still pretty tiny.  I hope that the weather holds out until the beets are a bit bigger.  I really like beets, particularly little, sweet ones.

I've got a lot more tomatoes coming.  There are a lot of green ones, and quite a few starting to turn red.  I'm really happy with the way our trellis system worked this year.  We have the tomatoes, beans and cucumbers planted in a narrow raised bed with a beam about 6 feet up.  The beams were the outline of the garden our first year.  We got some 4' x 8' galvanized repanel (used to reinforce poured concrete) and attached it to the planks on both sides of the raised bed and to the beam at the top.  It's got a 6" x 6" grid, so it's easy to reach in to weed or harvest.  It was seriously cheap and much easier than putting up string to support the crops.  It may be a bit tough to clean off this fall - the beans in particular have wound themselves tightly around the mesh, but I figure that a wire brush ought to clean the stuff off once it's dead and brown. 

It's been a good year in the garden, despite the rather cool weather.  I'm already looking forward to next year.


FT

Too Late For Gooseberries, But...

I went out today to look at the gooseberries.  I'm too late - they're all gone.  It is the season for wild grapes, though.  They're mighty pretty right now.  I got a whole bunch of them that are nice and ripe - more than a quart once I've got the good ones picked - in about 10 minutes from one small group of vines.  There's a lot more of them out there.

I haven't done anything with wild grapes before.  The grandkids were fascinated - they tried them out several times, followed by much spitting to get the sour things out of their mouths. 

I am going to look for some more out there and look into making some wild grape jam.  And some wild grape liqueur.  I'm not going to try wine - that looks like a lot of work.

While I was picking grapes I discovered that I have a wild plum tree in the back yard.  At first I thought that it was crabapple, but the fruits were kind of squishy and plum-looking.  Hubby tasted one.  It was pretty astringent, but he said it tasted pretty plum-like.  I'm not going to get too excited about it - it looks like the grapevine has pretty much killed the wild plum tree.  It's singing its swan song this year, I think. 

I thought that we could collect some pits to try to grow some more wild plum trees, but hubby thinks it would be better to get some non-wild plum trees.  He's probably right about this. 



FT

Tomato Sauce

Hubby won't be home until late tonight, and I've got a bunch of tomatoes that need some attention, so I guess tonight I'll make tomato sauce.  I've got to make it work with the stuff that I have and hope for the best.  That works for me.

I thought I had some fresh garlic, but it was far from fresh.  Do you remember the part of the movie where the mummy disintegrates into dust?  That's what my fresh garlic was like.  I had a jar of garlic with about a teaspoon left in it, but that also has been in the fridge too long.  Rather than resort to powdered garlic, I think that I'll just do the maters and some herbs in the sauce and worry about sauted onion and garlic when I go to use the sauce. 

So here's what I'm doing...

I cut up about 6 pounds of  fresh sauce tomatoes (mine are Romas and Opalkas) into larger bite-sized chunks and out them in my big wok-like fry pan (I don't have a dutch oven at the moment or I'd be using that).  I've turned it on at low heat (about medium-low on my stove) and put the cover on.  I grabbed a handful of basil, thyme, chives and parsley out of the herb garden, crushed it up and threw it in there.

After about a half hour, I took the cover off.  The tomatoes are heated through and getting mooshy, and I want some of the liquid to evaporate.  I cooked it for about 2 1/2 hours, until I had to leave to go pick up hubby.  A good deal of the liquid evaporated, and I've got a pretty chunky sauce. 

It's Saturday morning and I just took the sauce out of the fridge and put it back on the stove.  I'd like a little more of the liquid to evaporate, but I think I'm going to leave it chunky rather than squish it through a seive. 

After an hour on the stove (med-low), it's looking pretty good.  It smells pretty good, too.  I've turned it off so that it can cool down.  I started picking the herbs out.  I didn't chop them up, just scruntched them up and threw them in there.  The thyme leaves all fell off the twigs, so they're still in there.  The chives are rather stringlike and the parsley is just big gobs - looks like of like canned spinach.  Some of the basil will stay in there. 

Once it's cool, I'm going to put it in freezer bags, about 2 cups to a bag.  I wish I had a silicone muffin pan.  Freezing the sauce in that would make it really easy to pull just what I need out of the freezer.  I'll have to try that next time. 

FT

Cattail Update

The bundling and hanging is working pretty well.  When I do this again, I will do smaller bundles - 8 to 10 leaves per bundle.  They're drying up really well, other than that the butt ends in the big bundles were a bit damp.  They're holding their colors pretty well.  They're still a nice green.

I'm going to have to go cut some more cattails.  This looks like it's going to be fun.


FT

Granola Update

Hubby is pretty happy with the granola.  I cooked it for about an hour and a half, and that wasn't quite enough.  This made a LOT of granola - a little too much to fit in the jar.  I used the liner pan from my 18 qt roaster oven for this.  It holds all of the granola, but it's a trick getting it in and out of my oven. 

When I do this next, I'm going to use 10 cups of rolled grain and more nuts and fruit.  Hubby wants me to try honey instead of sugar.  We'll see how that goes. 


FT

Recipe - Hubby's Granola

Hubby is a big fan of granola, but not the stuff that they sell in cereal boxes at the grocery store.  As is the case with so much of our food-life, he likes the stuff that I make best.  So tonight, I'm making granola for him.  Here's the recipe I'm using tonight.  This is one of those things where I just throw together what I've got, so the recipe isn't consistent from one batch to the next.  I'll let you know if this batch is a good one.

Ingredients
   18 oz turbinado sugar
   18 oz water
   1/2 cup butter
    6 cups rolled oats
    4 cups rolled wheat
    3 cups rolled barley
    2 cups oat bran
    1 1/2 cups flax seed
    18 oz dried fruit, chopped small if neccessary

   Combine sugar and water and heat until sugar is completely disolved.  Add the butter and continue heating until the butter is melted and the mixture is bubbly.
   Combine the grains in a large roasting pan.  Pour the sugar mixture over the grains and stir until well blended.  Bake at 350° for two hours, stirring it all up every 20 minutes. 
   Take out of the oven, let sit for 10 minutes or so stirring occasionally.  Add the fruit. 
   Let cool, store in some sort of storage container.  We use a big cookie jar.

I'll let you know how this particular recipe turns out and what adjustments I'll be making next time.



FT

Today in the Garden - Mon 8/31

Only tomatoes today.  I picked the big one I was nervous about.  It weighed just shy of one pound.  A couple of the Romas I picked might not have been ready, but they were sitting on the ground and I didn't want some bug to get to them before I did.

There weren't any beans tonight.  I saw a couple of blossoms, but not many.  I think it's just too cold.  They're not happy, so they're not reproducing.

My peppers are really unhappy.  I just don't seem to do too well with peppers.  Right now I've got 5 pepper plants and 3 peppers, and it looks like that's all I'm going to have.  That's just not right.  Although it does square with my experience with peppers.  The two years prior to this that I planted peppers I got one fruit per plant. 

Next year I'm going to set aside a little pepper bed and coddle the danged things, and see if I can get them to set more than one fruit per plant.  If I can't, that will be the end of peppers in my garden and I'll use the space for something else.  This isn't that big a loss, really.  None of us would really miss them if we didn't have them.  If we got a bumper crop of them we'd end up giving them away, which, while a nice thing to do, doesn't fill up the freezer for the winter.  And that is my goal - to grow enough veg to feed the family year-round. 



FT

More on Health Care

I was cruising the news today and found this - Until Medical Bills Do Us Part   The article itself was pretty disturbing, talking about couples who divorced due to medical bills, but there was a comment on the story that shook me up a bit.  Here's a chunk of the comment -

What I learned, after a colleague was diagnosed with late-stage cancer that would require aggressive, long-term treatment, was that after 90 days out of the office on sick leave, an employee is placed on long-term disability and, if he is unable to make COBRA payments, has no further health care coverage. That's right; if you get too sick to work for three months, you lose your health insurance -- right in the middle of chemotherapy, or while you are recovering from a serious accident or stroke. That's because, once you are on long-term disability, your employer has no further obligations to you, including regarding benefits, and you are consequently dropped from the employer's plan. I was made to understand that the transfer to disability and cancellation of insurance benefits are required by the disability and medical insurance policies issued to all employers, and that no state or federal law currently can prevent such cancellations.

Even if you can afford COBRA (which is very expensive), your benefits will be extended no longer than 18 months. That means that eighteen months and 90 days after you fall ill, or have an accident, you no longer have any health insurance at all. You're on your own. No "government bureaucrat" will come between you and your doctor because, unless you have the money, you won't have a doctor.

This news shocked me, and made me wonder whether all those who oppose health claim reform on the ground that they prefer their employer plans, realize that they are not covered if they become chronically ill, or have a catastrophic accident, regardless of whether they are employed when the illness or accident occurs. Nobody has health care coverage in such circumstances. We are all uninsured.

That's pretty scary stuff.  I'm the primary breadwinner in our family, and our health insurance is provided by my employer.  If something were to happen to me, we'd not only lose my income but both hubby and I would lose our health insurance.  We couldn't afford COBRA if I was bringing home my regular paycheck, we certainly couldn't afford it if I was on disability pay.  We're not (yet) old enough for Medicare, so we'd be screwed. 

On the other paw, at present we have very little by way of assets, so we'd get to skip the gut-wrenching, soul-crushing step of liquidating our nest-egg and selling off everything we'd worked all our lives for in order to pay our medical expenses and be able to move right on to the humiliating process of joining the public assistance roles.  Somehow, that doesn't make me feel much better...


FT

Cattail Basket Update - Day 2

They seem to be drying out nicely hanging in bundles in the work room.  I'll need to unbundle and rebundle them so that the ends of the leaves will dry out.  I won't be using the very bottoms of the leaves so I'm not too concerned with aesthetics there, but I don't want them to start getting moldy.  There is some goo that looks very like aloe vera gel at the base of the leaves, and I probably should have wiped that off before hanging them up. 

If they seem like they're not drying well, I think I'll take a big needle and some strong thread and string them together.  I can hang them back over the pegs in the work room and spread them out a bit.


In case you're wondering, I won't be posting an update on the cattails every day.  I'll only post when I think there's something interesting to share.  I don't expect that to happen too often in the next few weeks, until the actual basket making starts.



FT

Cattail Basket

We collected some cattail leaves today.  I've got them hanging from pegs in the store room.  They should dry out in a few weeks and I'll be able to try making a basket.  This isn't the way that the instructions I've found suggest that it be done, and I will probably find that I would have been better off making a frame and laying them out to dry, but I don't have room for that.  This will have to do.

If I find I like making cattail baskets, I will likely put together a frame of some sort so that I can dry my vegetable matter properly.  I'll bet it will be a good place to dry herbs, too.

I've only collected enough cattail leaves to make one practice basket that I can learn and screw up on, then one medium-sized first real, usable basket.  At least I hope it doesn't take me more than one practice.  I probably ought to collect more cattail leaves, just in case...

And that's how it starts.  I always have good intentions to begin with.  I just want to get a little bit of stuff, just enough to try it out.  But if I like it, won't I need more stuff?  Shouldn't I be getting the stuff now, when the getting's good?  If I don't get a full range of stuff right from the start, I won't get the complete experience, and migt not be able to figure out if I really did like it or not.  I'll live my whole life not knowing whether I could have really rocked cattail baskets because I didn't really go for it.  And if catails do it for me, or even if they don't, maybe rattan will be more my style.  .  Pretty soon I'll have to find room for a couple of big containers of basketry supplies. 

So anyhoo, I have mixed feelings about starting up with basketmaking.  Really, the last thing I need is a new hobby.  I have a quilt that's not quite half done, a blanket on the knitting loom, a bag on the big bead loom, a project I want to do on the small bead loom, and I need to make some pants.  And a new purse.  On the other paw, baskets will be very useful in my world.  I can use them to attractively store all of my other projects.

FT

Today in the News - Insurers Poised To Gain From Health Care Reform

I've been following the news on the health care crisis pretty closely.  A story in today's Hartford Courant is a bit troubling to me.  Insurers Poised To Gain From Health Care Reform

    Insurers want any reform to maintain what they call a "level playing field" on which companies are able to compete based on efficiency and service — something they say a government plan would undermine.

    "They would have a huge price advantage over us," said Mickey Herbert, chief executive of ConnectiCare, the Farmington-based health insurer. "And over time, you'd expect individuals and employers to migrate to lower rates."
   Private insurance would be forced to compete with the public plan payment rates, Herbert said.
   "In fairly short order, private insurance and our employer-sponsored health insurance system end up atrophying greatly, and we're on a slippery slope to a single-payer system," Herbert wrote recently to Congress.

The insurance companies themselves are saying that government can provide insurance at lower cost than they can.  Their arguments against a public option are centered on the fact that they will lose business.  Mr. Herbert fails to say why a single-payer system would be a bad thing, just beware the dreaded slippery slope.  In the realm of logical fallacies, it was more an Appeal to Consequences than it was a Slippery Slope. 

Reading the Building a Sustainable Health Care System document from WellPoint, it appears that a good part of their solution is for insurance companies to get more involved in the delivery end of health care - determining what is available, from whom and for how much.  This sounds very much like the getting-between-you-and-your-doctor stuff that people are concerned about. 

It appears they want the government to take on more responsibility for individuals with chronic conditions, as well as keeping the responsibility for the elderly and the poor.  Apparently the dreaded government-paid health care is good enough for those who aren't going to make a profit for the insurance companies. 

They don't start talking about reforms that are needed within the insurance industry until page 10 of the 16-page document.  It seems that all we need is more government money to fund the more expensive high-risk folks,  fewer regulations on insurance companies and changes to the tax code to give individuals and employers more money to pay for insurance premiums. 

This just doesn't sound like any kind of solution to me.  WellPoint appears to want more of a voice in care decisions.  They want to take the healthiest and most profitable of us as customers and leave the rest of us to government to care for.  Those of us who pay taxes would pay more to cover the increasing number of high-risk people getting government care and so that the low-income among us can afford to pay their insurance premiums.  The only winner I see coming out of WellPoint's plan is WellPoint.

I don't blame WellPoint for taking the position that they're taking, but their plan is all about sustaining their business model, not creating a sustainable health care system. They're as much as telling us in their document that they can't do anyting to improve the health care situation other than point out what providers, taxpayers and consumers should be doing.  I don't know that we need them to do that. 

I'm pretty sure that we don't need to be paying them to do that.  I think that if there needs to be some agreement on acceptable levels of service, that health care providers, patient advocates and government health officials can come up with something without help from the insurance companies.  If tax dollars are to be spent on health care, I want that money to be in the control of the taxpayers, through our government.  We have a lot greater chance for transparency from government than we do from the private insurance industry. 

I understand that the health insurance companies want to protect their profits, but in the big picture, this really can't be our primary consideration.


FT

Yesterday in the Garden - Saturday, 8/29/09

It's sunny out today, but windy and a bit chilly.  It's 11AM and not yet 60 degrees out.  I didn't spend too long out there weeding this morning.  Bucky the cat came along, as he usually does.  He likes to patrol the garden.  There was a hummingbird in there that wasn't too happy to be sharing the space with us, but he moved on.

I did get some nice stuff out.  Here's today's load.

The cucumbers are really taking off.  There has been a lot of rain recently, I imagined that helped.  I really like the seedless, burpless, soft-skinned nature of these cucumbers.  I don't remember what variety they are - I'm sure the nursery tag is around here somewhere.  They don't have a whole lot of flavor, though.  They're almost too mild.  They miss a bit on the nice, fresh cucumber-y aroma, too.  I think that next year I'll plant some of these and some regular cucumbers, too, and see which I prefer.

The beans are Kentucky Wonder pole beans.  They're slowing down a lot recently.  I think that the cool weather isn't encouraging them to keep setting flowers.  I let the vines get a little too tall.  I'm going to have to get a stool out there to pick the beans or cut off the tops or I'll have some of them getting too mature up there.

Only a couple of tomatoes today, but I got a bunch yesterday.

 I think that I have enough Romas to make some sauce.  And enough cherry tomatoes to make the family happy at Sunday dinner.

I have one big Celebrity tomato that's just about ripe -

He's got to be getting close to a pound.  I  just have to make sure that I get to him before the bugs do. 

From now on, I'm going to start my tomatoes myself instead of buying plants.  This year I started some, but I was inconsistent with the grow lights and they got to be kind of spindly.  I didn't think that they were going to do very well, so I bought some plants, too.  The plants that I started are doing better than those I bought.  Big, fat healthy stems, and they're setting lots of fruit.  Next spring I'll start all my own plants, but I'm going to have a timer on the lights so my seedlings should do better.

FT