Monthly Archives: May 2007

make your own…

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Last week Kaia asked me why we didn’t chew gum. I told her it just wasn’t something we did. I was a huge gum addict when I was younger. I use to have a drawer in the fridge that I kept my gum in. My mom hated it! Mostly because it was chewed gum that I believed would regain it’s flavor if you cooled it down and then tried chewing it again. Anyway, at some point, I just stopped chewing gum. Now, with having Kaia, I think I didn’t want to get into it because I wasn’t ready to deal with gum in the hair, in the bed, stuck to furniture…

Anyway, last week when she went to play at her grandmother’s, Kaia came home with a pack of gum and she has been chomping on it for dear life. She loves it! Any chance she gets she asks me for another piece. And get this… She found a little corner in the fridge and stores it there… new and used gum! Now she wants to know how to blow bubbles (gum in the hair, here we come)!

So, looking at the ingredients in the gum (the pack she had was loaded with artificial sweeteners) I decided we were going to learn how to make our own and come up with our own special flavors. So, I ordered this and also got the ingredients to follow this recipe. We’ll see how they all turn out!  (Oh, by the way if you ever happen to get a wad of chewing gum stuck in your belly button, Q-tips work really well to get it out.  Just keep twisting it around and it will get it all out… :-)
After looking up how to make gum, I got in the ‘makin’ mood. So, we decided to make some ice cream. Since we don’t have an ice cream maker, we followed both of these recipes for Pumpkin Ice Cream (also from the Leener’s site we got the gum recipe from… cool site!) and for Fruit Ice Cream (we used a frozen fruit mix at the end). They both turned out fantastic!!! Kaia is bouncing off the walls right now while Toby tries to get her into bed! (Mental note: no more ice cream right before bed!)

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Kaia, smiling like the nut she is, mixing the pumpkin ice cream.

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Here we are kneading the bags of fruit ice cream. Kaia has a cloth over hers to keep her hands from getting too cold. You can see the pink ice cream in the bag I am holding.

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Savoring the fruit ice cream. (No, she didn’t eat all of that! We put most of it back in the freezer.)

I think I am going to order her the “Play and Freeze” ice cream maker for her birthday.

When the cat’s away, the mouse will clean!

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Why is it that when Toby goes out of town I get things done?  Maybe it’s that I don’t expect to have help with anything, so I do what ever needs to be done.  Which, in this case was:

  • Get the car completely detailed as it hasn’t been washed in ~4 years
  • Wash the dishes
  • Deep clean the kitchen
  • Clean Kaia’s room
  • Put away Kaia’s winter clothes and tidy her clothing drawers
  • Tidy/organize the whole house!
  • Organize the front porch
  • Take everything out of the house downstairs, sweep and mop the floors
  • Bring all the food compost scraps covering the kitchen counter to the compost bin
  • Bring the dead snake (thanks Suki) and the bird carcass (again, thanks suki) to the compost bin
  • Take off all the recycling and trash
  • Strain the kefir
  • Spend the afternoon with Kaia at a school picnic
  • There’s more, but I can’t remember it all!

And that was just today!!!

Tomorrow, we have a birthday party, hiking, maybe we will start planting her flower garden…

If I just had a little help (to lift the big beams), I could have the new house done by the time he comes home! :-)

OK,

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I also get furious about mandatory vaccinations.  I think we need to invest more money into education of the public and less into things like a mandatory HPV (herpes) vaccination for teen and preteen girls.  Especially when the results of the vaccination are like this:

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And we want this why????!!!

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It’s hard enough trying to fight the current stereotypes of todays world when trying to help my clients feel positive about their femininity and their monthly cycles… now we have this.  Tell me why I would want to stop myself from ever bleeding again, forcing my body to constantly think I am pregnant, and pretending that I don’t cycle with the moon?  And with research results like this, it sounds just peachy!

“Women who use Lybrel would not have a scheduled menstrual period, but will most likely have unplanned, breakthrough, unscheduled bleeding or spotting,” Shames said. The bleeding can last four to five days and may persist for a year…”

second floor

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Toby was hard at work while I was away this past week. Here’s the engineering feat he has been constructing:
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here you can see the beginning of the joists that will hold up the second floor.

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this is the view from the inside! The flooring will go on top of these joists, so the will be an exposed part of our first floor ceiling. Does that make sense?
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this is looking down on the girders from the second floor, right above the main post.

progress

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Here is this weeks progress.  All but two rafters are up on the first floor.  Next, the floor joists for the second floor (which will come up from the smaller inner circle).

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All the blue stuff is insulation that is a part of the living roof.

Mark your calendars

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Would everyone please mark you calendars to email me next year to make sure I get my butt into the woods the first week in May.  The woods are bustin’ out!!

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Kaia and I went to the annual WNC Herb Festival  today and shopped for 4 hours!  I gave her 25 one-dollar bill in a little purse so that she could buy the herbs she wanted in her garden and keep track of her money.  She did a great job, and so many of the vendors thought that she was so cute with her little purse, that they cave her stuff for free.  For her garden she got: Sweet Annie, Lavender, Wood Betony, Dill, Fennel, a roma tomato, a bottle gourd, and sweet grass.  For my garden, I got:  Stevia, Wood Betony, Two Tomatoes, basil, Feverfew, Rue, Marigolds, Blue Vervain, Motherwort, … I think that is it…  Oh, I also got a hops vine… but that will go in near the house once it is done.
Sunday I leave for a week of studying with Rosita Arvigo so I can learn (professional) Maya Abdominal Massage.  It won’t be in belize, unfortunately.  It’s in NH, but that will give me a chance to see relatives that I haven’t seen in many years!

Woo Hoo!

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Howdy!

Ok, so I wrote an article yesterday about harvesting herbs/weeds from your back yard that can help you with seasonal allergies and sent it in to BackHome Magazine to see if they might be interested in it. Today, I got an email back from the editor saying that they are interested and would like to publish it in their Sept/Oct issue!!! Woo Hoo!! I’m goin’ national, baby!! No, really, the biggest boost to the ego isn’t that I want to be famous, it’s that feeling “yeah, you know what… you do have something good to say that others might benefit from”. I’d better go renew my subscription!! :-)

In other ‘big’ news, check out this mondo egg! The one on the left is our standard xtra large variety egg!! One of our Americaunas (poor thing) laid the one on the right. Toby had it for breakfast this morning and said it was a double yolker! Ouch!
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Here are the latest house pictures I’ve got. The first two are of the rafters that have been going up. The third is from our party this weekend when we had a center post raising! It weighed ~600 pounds, so we needed a bunch of hands! It’s so amazing to see this progress and to know that this will be our home and that so much friendship and love has gone into it!

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