Adventures in SLO Homesteading

I just read in Shannon Hayes Radical Homemaking book that you start being a Radical Homemaker when you make a home-cooked meal for your family.  From that perspective, I have been a Radical Homemaker for quite some time.  Numerous homemade pizzas, roast chickens, pastas, etc. have made their way to my family's table.  I'm not bragging; cooking is something I find an immense joy in and the fact that I have a husband who appreciates a home-cooked meal and a daughter who occasionally finds Mommy's cooking tasty only increases my enjoyment of the process.  Whether or not I get to enjoy said cooked meal at the same time as my husband and daughter is up to my son Max.  At only 3 months, he has yet to understand the subtle pleasure of sitting down with family to enjoy good food.

I have designated today, September 15th, as the day of my own Radical Redux.  It has not gone well.  Max has decided that today is the day he will not nap without being in a sling.  He has also decided that sleeping for more than one hour is absolutely absurd.  So, the grand plan I had of dropping Evie off at school, going for a pleasant walk with Max, and then embarking on Radical Redux step 1 (see below) has been thwarted.  No walk.  Just lots of bouncing with Max and taking care of some work-related business.  What was my Radical Redux Step 1?

I want to make chicken stock from the leftovers of the chicken we had on Sunday night.  I want to have beautiful chicken stock awaiting my whim in the freezer - lovely, silky stock for cooking rice, couscous, soups, veggies....oh, the blessed possibilities!

I have never made stock.  I've never picked the carcass and skin of a chicken to bits, thrown it all into a stock pot with a couple of carrots, some chopped onion and celery, and a little bit of parsley.  I long to fill the house with that lovely, soul-soothing scent. 


Radical Redux step 2:  Composting.  I am going to attempt to procure the supplies for backyard composting today.  I've been contemplating the best composting method for our family.  Vermicomposting (composting with worms) sounds so exciting, and something I think my daughter would totally dig.  Bin composting, on the other hand, is attractive for a number of reasons - the least of which being that my husband can direct his weekend-only backyard pee onto a compost pile, thereby supplying it with moisture and nitrogen.  Ah, decisions, decisions.

Radical Redux step 3:  Grow most of our weekly veggies.  My lovely hubby has gotten us off to a great start with this step.  We have a bounty of beautiful tomatoes (pear and cherry), summer squash, and late-season lettuce.  He's also fostered healthy crops of basil, rosemary, and mint.  I want to keep this going.  Fall-shmall, winter-shminter.

So...day 1, not going as planned.  But we're trying, and that's the important thing.

Good Night California...again, and again, and again.

I've read Good Night California 1,253,682 times to my daughter.  It's a cardboard, or "board book," meaning it's designed to withstand the strangely powerful destructive capabilities of members of the toddler persuasion.

Whatever.

Tonight, while Evie sleeps, I will be mending this book for the second time.  She's successfully removed the back binding, torn a chunk from the front page, and frayed one of the corners with excessive sucking.  Luckily, the folks who make board books understand that the binding is apparently annoying to toddlers (because they remove them), so the pages of the book have been reinforced.  She's close to removing the back page for the second time.  The only thing holding it to the rest of the book is a strip of packaging tape and fleeting hopes of a strand of paper linking the tape to the cardboard.

I can repeat the book by heart:  "Good morning, Pacific Ocean.  Good morning, surfers and pier.  Good morning, gray whales, spouting in the distance.  Are we ready to share a wonderful day?"

Last night, Evie and I went through her nightly ritual (brush teeth, wash face, play with sink faucets, disrobe, change diaper, put on pajamas, read three books, rock in rocking chair).  She usually picks which books she wants me to read to her.  Good Night, California is always on the reading list, but the other two books vary.  Sometimes we read Good Night, Moon, then Noah's Ark, then The Belly Button Book.  It changes. No matter what, Good Night, California is on the list.  However, last night Good Night, California was nowhere to be found in her little box of nighttime books.  I swear, I had nothing to do with it.  Maybe her babysitter hid it from her because she was just as sick of reading it to Evie as I am.

Evie went on the hunt.

She searched high (well, nothing over two and a half feet) and low for her beloved book.  I had no idea what she was doing.  She looked under her crib, around her toy chest, by her diaper pail, and in her closet.  It was no where to be found.  The funny thing is, she didn't complain.  There was no whining, no pointing to the air, no grunting in expectation that I'll understand what she wants.  She was methodical in her search.  She squatted to look underneath things. She got on her tip-toes to look on top.  And I just sat there in the rocking chair, no help at all.

Finally, with her chubby little hand on my leg to help her steady herself, she squatted next to me and ducked her head low enough to peer beneath the rocking chair.  She bobbed up and down a couple of times, then walked around the back of the chair one way, then the other in search of the best way to capture her prey.  Turns out, the best way was through the front.  With all the might her little body could muster, Evie pushed my legs out of the way, got down on all fours, and retrieved her beloved book.  There was no ceremony, no particular celebration to recognize the capture. She simply placed the book on my lap with a grunt.  I lifted her into my lap and we read her tattered Good Night, California, again.

Strunk & White's Rule #17: Omit Needless Words

"Vigorous writing is concise.  A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.  This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
-Strunk and White, The Elements of Style

The trouble is, how does one omit needless words when one has been unable to write?  I'm working on it, but finding the time has been difficult.  I forgot how exhausting the first week of school is, particularly in Fall Quarter.  The inevitable amount of loafing that occurs over the summer atrophies all of those mental endurance muscles built up during the academic year.  The compartments in which one sorts duties to work, family, and sleep weaken.  I've done myself the huge favor of adding an additional responsibility:  blogging.  What I really need to do is find balance.  A warning about this came this week:  Find balance, or your body will stop you.

I woke up at 1am this Thursday with the sensation that a grain of sand had wedged itself between my left eyeball and eyelid.  I took out my contacts immediately (I know, I know...you shouldn't sleep in your contacts, but my O.D. gave me these nifty "Night-Day" contacts and said they'd be fine) and tried to go back to sleep.  Instead, I spent an hour alternating between flushing my eye of whatever foreign body was trapped in there, and trying to convince myself that I was just imagining things and my eye was perfectly fine - just really dry from wearing my contacts for too long.  Eventually, I did fall asleep, but spent the next hour of sleep dreaming that my eye was somehow keeping me from getting something accomplished.

My daughter woke me up twice that night - at 3am and again at 5am - and each time I checked my eye in her bathroom mirror.  I must have been rubbing it in my sleep, because each time it was progressively pinker.  By the time my alarm went off at 6:30, my eye was a bright shade of scarlet.  Foolishly, I put my contact in (the grain-of-sand sensation was the same, with or without the contacts) and went to school.  Ten minutes after I logged onto my computer, the pain became nearly unbearable.  I ran to the bathroom to check my eye yet again.  This time, I noticed something off:  two cream-colored spots on my cornea right in front of my iris. 

So I called the doc.  He took a picture of my eye.  It looked something like this: 

Corneal ulcers, otherwise known as the reason you shouldn't sleep in your contact lenses.  And, just like an ulcer, corneal ulcers are exacerbated by stress.  There was no balance this week, thus I have two ulcers on my eye.  They are also a pain in the ass.  I have to put antibiotic drops in my eyes every two hours.  My eye hurts if I stare at a computer screen for too long.  It's also incredibly sensitive to light, and when I look too quickly in another direction, the entire left side of my face hurts. 

Lesson learned.  I can't wear my contacts for a week or so anyway.  Long story short, this is one of the many reasons why my writing hasn't been as normal as it should be.  It's all my fault - no one to blame for this temporary handicap but me. 

Take care of yourself, take care of your eyes, and find balance.  I'm sure there are plenty of words in this blog that should be omitted, but my eye is tired.  I'll edit later.