Reusing a body puff?

I'm all for eco ideas, but I have trouble with even continuing to use body puffs after a couple of uses.  I like wash cloths for that.  You use them, then wash them.

So this idea seems cool... but gross to me.  Knitting a pot scrubber out of a used loofah?  What do you think?

Halloween Party 09!

Well some thought I was crazy to throw a party for toddlers and parents, but I did it and I'm so glad I did. WHAT FUN! I had TONS of help from my mom (& George of course) and we prepped all week leading up to the party. The best part -- both the parents AND kids seemed to really enjoy themselves, especially the kids! How amazing is that?

I was most stressed about arranging activities and then "emceeing" on party day. So I decided to have a few activities that kids could make their own way through (or not) in their own time. I had ghostie bowling (total flop), pumpkin decorating, and a tub of duplo blocks. And when in doubt, add balloons. Can't ever go wrong with balloons! The kids were all running around playing throughout the party. At one point an impromptu parade made its way through the house with kids with push/pull toys and one on a tricycle! What a shame not to have photos of that!

My sister JoAnn came and helped us set up the food, and George cooked the burgers (on Jack-O-Lantern buns, don't you know). MMMMmmm.

I have to say though that prepping for a week before your party only means you do more work. Instead of whittling down the list to needs and wants and tossing out all the wants, and spending 1-2 days getting ready, you do almost all the things on your list and you work for a whole week on the party! I think I'm more suited to last-minute. Sorry, it's just my way.

Anyway, here are some photo highlights. You can see the complete Halloween party album on Facebook, including all the kids' costumes and more decorations/foods.


I made those orange string balls (with heavy help from George -- only an engineer can manage to wrap a balloon a thousand times with string without the string falling off).


Ghostie bowling.



Regin was El Chapulín Colorado.  We had the hat and shoes to go with it, but he refused to wear them.  The shirt, however, he didn't take off for three days.  True story.

George stuck with his same costume, but I didn't have time to paint the eyeball again (or to make a new costume) so I did this simpler version:

I'm a starry night through a break in the clouds. I guess I could still be an eye of the storm, couldn't I? Minus the pun of course.


Preparations


JoAnn can tell you your future if you dare to learn it!

Pumpkin decorating table:


A couple of favorite decorated pumpkins:




My mom with one of Regin's creations. He decorated all the remaining pumpkins after everyone left.


My pumpkin threw up some dip. :)

Scared clementines and chocolate spiders.


Abby, Kiko, Palmer, and Regin playing with Regin's new Duplo blocks.


Reed, Evelyn, and Lucah at the pumpkin decorating table.


The kids wanted to see our snake. Missing here: Palmer & Lyric. Palmer touched the snake and walked away. Meh. Snakes, who cares? Lyric, kept her distance for other reasons!


Lyric has more fun with less animate things.  :)

Back-yard Ice-skating

I want to go buy a house with a bigger back yard so we can do this!

I stumbled on this blog, My Family Loves It, today and some instructions on how to build a back-yard, ice-skating rink.  Apparently the blogger's dad used to do it when he was a kid, so now he does it for his kids.  And pretty simple stuff!  Just some 2x8s and big sheet of plastic.  (His dad's version above looks a smidge fancier.) Apparently totally level ground is not necessary, though I suppose there are limits to the kind of slope you can do it on without some major building.

Building a green life, part 2

Here are some photos of some of the stuff I've been doing.

I've been doing serious clean up.  Our yard needed it badly after being neglected all last year.  And that included cutting back some trees/bushes.  I had all these amazing branches from that that I wanted to use, so I built Regin a garden fort.  I want to eventually train some vines or something over it, maybe even edibles like peas or something, but I wanted him to enjoy it right away, so I threw a sheet over it...

It was all I could do to convince him to get in there for the photo.  Then he rushed back inside to get on his new wooden tricycle that he received from his Abuela for his birthday.  Oh my gosh he loves that thing!!

Isn't it cute?  I love it.  It's so great.

Back to gardening... So I also bought a bunch of starts for indoor/outdoor veggie gardening.

This is batch one.  I have since bought batch two.  At first they seemed to be loving life, even after I moved them over our fireplace (behind our projector screen) and put grow lamps in there.  Now all of a sudden half of them are looking really sad.  I don't know if they are getting too much light from the lamps.  They are also getting natural light when I raise the screen and our blinds every day.  Maybe it's overwatering, which I tend to be guilty of when I get excited about new plants (later that shifts to under-watering, or no watering at all.)  Or maybe it's because I haven't made sure there was some air-circulation going on.  I need to put a small fan in there.

I have also started some seeds...

It's very exciting.  Most of them are purchased organic seeds, but one third, the ones on the left, are all from seeds I collected from our food.  Specifically those are butternut squash on the left.  I'm collecting seeds from everything we eat right now.  Especially the organic stuff.  If you're wondering about the red-brown powder all over, that's cinnamon.  Apparently it has fungicidal properties.  Sadly I needed it because my forest green thumb (that's gotta be somewhere between green and black, right?) caused there to be mold or "damping off" on these seeds.  And I already lost a few swiss chard seedlings.  Another natural fungicide is weak chamomile tea!  Go figure!

Building my green life

So I have been working on getting stuff ready for the indoor and outdoor veggie/edible gardening.  I have been watching/reading everything I can get my hands on that's related to food production on one's land and permaculture.  My indoor plans don't fit in with that.  I'm sure real "permies" would be dismayed that I'm using grow lamps and may even get a warming mat for the basement.  But you know what?  I'm not allowed a greenhouse, so this is what I can do.  Actually there's a lot I'm not allowed to do on my land.  Technically I'm not allowed a vegetable garden, green house, or compost.  I'm not allowed chickens which are so invaluable for self-sufficiency in food production.  Not only do they give us eggs, and possibly meat down the road, but they control pests and fertilize as they forage around the garden.  

In Colorado we're also not allowed to have a grey-water or rain-catching systems for various silly and outdated reasons.  Ugh!

I think it should be a basic human right to be able to grow one's food on their land.  In fact, I think it should be illegal for anyone to try and tell us otherwise.  I want to change things in this neighborhood.  I want to try and get the HOA to reconsider the limitations I've mentioned and other limitations such as not being allowed to hang my laundry out.  This community's rules are not eco-friendly.  That needs to be changed.  In my dreams I also go national and try and get a law established protecting the individual's right to grow food.  In a country that gives me the right to bare arms, I should also have the right to bare food on my land!  Of course there are all sorts of controversial things going on right now that suggest the possibility that food production will be strictly controlled in the future.  The Future of Food (a film I recently watched and want you ALL to see) shows how scary the situation is with GMOs and patents on plants.  Seems like pretty soon you will only be able to get GM seeds and only through Monsanto.  And the whole GMO thing turns out to be scarier than I thought.  It's worth looking into if you haven't already.

There is also supposedly some sort of bill trying to be passed somewhere right now that would effectively make it illegal to do backyard food growing.  Ack!  Can this be true?

One of my concerns beyond laws and HOA rules is that my neighbors are pumping my surroundings full of scary herbicides and pesticides.  I know they must be spraying my plants that start sending shooters to their yards.  And I get water runoff from the properties behind us.  How much pesticides then am I getting through that?  I became afraid to eat anything near the borders of our yard.  But the way our land is landscaped, it would be difficult to plant our edibles anywhere else.

I've also been reading Food Not Lawns.  As you guys already know, I am very interested in this idea that we are wasting the resources on this planet, and a lot of those wasted resources are going to our lawns, which don't even provide food.  So the movement is to replace at least part of our lawns with food-producing or otherwise useful plants.  I'm also reading How to Grow More Vegetables (than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine) and it talks about a 99% sustainable system (which is as sustainable as it gets) and the thing is EVERYTHING has to go back to the earth, (food scraps, and even human waste if possible).  And not only that, but something like 60% of your crop has to be for little more than soil-building.  Apparently grain fits the bill.  So I'm thinking of growing wheat instead of grass in the back.  We'll cut it short for part of the summer, since wheat grass is just like grass, then let it go to seed later in the season.  Too bad we can't use the grain since our diet is grain free, but I suppose one of you might be able to make use of it.  

In the front we're talking seriously about ripping out the smaller lawn and replacing it with a spiraled "flower bed" that will contain "ornamental plants" that just so happen to be edible.  We're also talking about taking out the ugly bushes in the front and replacing them with blueberry bushes.

Another part of this is putting in lots of fruit and nut trees.  But we have very established trees and bushes which I would hate to take out now, so I don't know we can do anything with that.  But I'm thinking of getting some nut trees to put on my parents' property.

There's a lot to do.  I hope I can produce a significant amount of food this year even though we started planning this really way too late.  Our food budget really needs to go WAY down and RIGHT NOW.  

Let's take care of the Earth we've got.

Happy Earth Day!

First things first. George did not get picked for jury duty (thank goodness). He was stuck there from 8am till after 6pm while they decided who they wanted. Thank GOODNESS it wasn't him. Anyway...

I have been watching YouTube videos on permaculture, locavorism, and hyperlocavorism. I've seen videos on homesteading, and tips for easy vegetable gardening. The big theme for me right now is that it is irresponsible, wasteful, and vain to use your land (only) for something other than food production. And part two of that theme is it's easy and very possible to feed many adults from a average-sized, suburban plot of land. Not only that, but the gardens that result can be lush and beautiful!

Did you know that the White House lawn once had sheep grazing on it? Did you know that "lawns" were invented by aristocracy who wanted to show that they were so stinking rich they could waste the land they had on something as frivolous and useless as grass? Did you know that Victory Gardens were planted in the US during the World Wars and that it was actually patriotic during that time to produce your own food? Did you know that there is a shortage of arable land in the world? Knowing that, how can we waste what we have and not produce any or much food?

There have been multiple recent movements for the White House lawn to be used for food production to encourage a change in the rest of the country.  I supported it. It actually worked! There is now a good-sized organic vegetable garden there. I personally wish it were bigger, but baby steps I guess.

Unfortunately I am not ALLOWED by my Home Owner's Association to have a full-on vegetable garden.  I have been bending that rule a bit over the years and incorporating vegetables and fruits into our landscape, but now I want something more extreme and it will not be allowed.  I'm working on getting up the energy to try and change that.  In the meantime I'm learning about indoor vegetable gardening.  It doesn't solve my problem of wasting the resources I have on a silly lawn, but it does help cut down my food bill (which is desperately needed right now) and does provide me with the possibility of home-grown food year round.

Here's some videos to inspire you.  I don't have the video on indoor gardening that really inspired me.  For some reason it was removed from YouTube.  If I see it again in the future, I'll post it.

Here's one of the movements for food to be produced on the White House lawn:


This one is SUPER inspirational.  Look how much food you can produce on .1 acres!

They feed 4 adults (up to 80% of their diet) plus sell surplus to local restaurants and caterers from their tiny plot of land!

More from this family:


It's so easy:


So, so easy:


And with a little more work, maybe some help from friends...


Activism:


More Activism:

This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.



As for me. I've started my indoor gardening. I have some seeds, a grow lamp, some established plants and motivation. I'm planning my attack for the outdoor gardening and how to green up our lives. What are you guys doing?

Knitting Urges

I'm a social knitter. If I don't have someone else to knit with, I quickly lose inspiration, motivation, and therefore momentum. I lost my momentum altogether less than a quarter way into my NaKniSweMo project in 2007! I have tried to motivate myself, but just haven't been able to knit more than a few stitches since then.

Enter Teddi! She just started knitting again recently and now I am too! Here are some of the things I want to knit. And no, the baby stuff isn't for any *particular* babies, but I'd definitely be knitting some if I had some newborns to knit for.

 










Since my boy is too big for those cute little baby things:




And if I were really crazy and had insane amounts of time on my hands:

Penang -- Week 31 -- 99 Ringgit 90 Sen

TUESDAY - THURSDAY, October 14th - 16th
Working more on Halloween stuff to try and be more positive.  It helps.  I enjoy it.  I look forward to when Regin and I can do it together.  For now I'm fighting him for the time to work on it.  Wednesday I spend the ENTIRE day working on steps one and two of making my paper mache pumpkin.  I don't even make it through step two.  I get through three of my 6+ layers, which takes me SEVERAL hours (Shanti's here so it's OK) and then I get pulled away when Regin wakes up grumpy from a nap.  It took so long I only did one of my planned three pumpkins, and I don't think I'm going beyond three layers.

After all that work, George and I go grocery shopping, only to find a Halloween candy section (what?? and where did they get those decorations???) and flipping CARVING PUMPKINS in the veggie aisle!?!?!

We ask someone how much they are.  The woman takes off without saying anything.  She eventually returns just when we're starting to feel truly abandoned.  She then tells us that the pumpkins aren't for eating, just for Halloween.  Haha!  Yes but... how much?  RM99.90!!!  That's almost $30USD!!!!!!  That's about the same as a train ticket to Bangkok!

We're doing further planning for Thailand, but even though we said we'd for sure be going there this weekend, there are still too many things up in the air.  So George decides we will take a brainless, weekend resort trip to Bali this weekend.  But then we don't have any info on Bali, so that's more complicated.  So we plan Thailand some more.  Then we buy a book for Bali, so then we're back to Bali.  No surprise though, we don't go anywhere.  Ugh.  We suck at this.  Wish we'd planned better and travelled somewhere this weekend.  Truthfully though, it would have been a bummer trip.  Regin and I are both sick.  Oh I love having a little germ-spreader son wiping his runny nose on my shirt!

Speaking of the little squirt.  Here are some photos from the week:

Happy Halloween -- Apartment Tour

Photos of our last-minute Halloween decorations.

I spent most of the day on Halloween making all of these decorations.  The mobile I'd made before became wall decorations when it fell down and became tangled.  I like them so much I want to leave them up!

Thanks for the hairy spider Mamma!  He arrived (with the Stevia, YAAAY!!) just in time yesterday.  I gave him a home on my yarn spiderweb, and the pom pon creatures on the web became his dinner.

Happy Halloween!