This weekend

Okay, here's the deal.  I am going to very, very publicly proclaim Those Things What I Will Do This Weekend(tm).  You, in turn, will publicly shame me until I actually accomplish at least half of what I list.  No, you do not get to shame me until Monday.  Yes, flogging is approved (but only with wet noodles).  But I draw the line at being put in the stocks--how am I supposed to finish my list then?!

So, here's the list:

• Finish the temporary pen for the new chooks.  (No, I'm neither British nor Australian, I'm just a snob and I like that bit of slang.)
• Create a new water-feeder for the baby birds using the water nipples (damnit, one set of birds is gonna figure this thing out if it kills me).
• Make a new wheel of cheese--my husband has selected Wensleydale (Hi Wallace!!!).  I shall be following the method a la Monsieur Gavin, my new favorite cheese blog.  Okay, my only favorite cheese blog.  But if there were more than one cheese blog out there, and even if lots of them were my favorites, I think that Gavin's would still be my most favorite.
• Weed-whack the garden paths.  Again.  (Godsdamned crabgrass.)
• Get my blackberry canes back under control.

I pulled my first potato out of the ground today.  Lunch tomorrow!

And hey, did I tell you guys that I've made my first Cheddar?  It's true!  At least, I really hope it's my first Cheddar.  I guess we won't know until we actually try it.  It might be my first, "Dear, I'm not sure this is Cheddar."  (Sort of like "I can't believe it's not butter" but ... well ... not.)  Right now it's in a little cooler in front of a fan, sitting on top of a plastic thingy of ice, developing a rind.  I'm then going to vacuum seal it (unless my mom gets me cheese waxes for my birthday, in which case I'll wax it), and put it into *da da daDUM* The Cheese Cave.  What's with the cooler?  Well, it's like 85*F in our house right now, which is well and truly too warm to be letting a cheese sit out to develop a rind--it will start leaking oil everywhere.  So I've tried to put it somewhere that it will stay at least in the mid-70's.  And the cheese cave?  What, do you think I did major excavation on my house last week?  *snort* If you haven't figured out how much I suck at DIY yet, you haven't been around long.  I scored a sweet little dorm fridge off of Craigslist for $30.  I just plugged it in and set it at its warmest setting, and we'll see where that leaves us.  Cheddars should age at ideal temps of around 50*-60*F, which I sorely doubt the fridge will achieve.  I may put it on a timer and only run it for a few hours a day, see if that works.  If I get both desperate and dedicated to cheesemaking, I may spring for the $75 external thermostat.  And if I get dedicated to cheesemaking and my husband gets re-dedicated to beer & soda-making, we might spring for a full-sized fridge for our basement (which is also about 70*F).  

Hm.  There were a lot of "and"s running around that last paragraph.  In italics, even.

I'm having a great deal of fun at work these days.  We've got a great group of new interns who are all completely keen to learn whatever we have to teach them.  We'll be doing farm field trips, breadmaking and cooking workshops, environmental philosophy seminars, spiritual direction meetings, and oh so much more!  I'm completely psyched!

And, in my final story for the night, I'm reasonably sure I've been given approval from my boss to become our resident herbalist.  SCORE.

The List

Well, for those of you who know me, you know that I am currently adjuncting at one of our local Universities. I've got two classes worth of finals sitting on my couch right now, which is probably why I'm sitting here typing. I've noticed, over the past few days of grading, that I have an ever-growing list of "things that I'm gonna do once I'm done with my grading." It's worth mentioning that this list starts almost immediately after grades are due at noon on Tuesday. So far, it looks something like this:

• Tues, 2:30: pick up Alex from school, make chocolate-oatmeal cookies (at the request of Alex & Ian--I'll just have to figure out what "chocolate oatmeal cookies" actually are)
• Mulch in the entire side-garden for more medicinal herbs
• Mulch the current herbs
• Plant my new herbs from the local herb fair in pots (the ones that go in the ground are already there--I had to de-stress from grading, after all)
• Sweep up the ghastly mess of little branches & rotting leaves that are all that remain of The Evil Gumball Tree. Put leaves in leaf mold pile (which I built a couple of days ago). Sticks will go... um... well, we'll figure that out later, now won't we?
• Clean the ever-lovin' bejezus out of my house. It has been Far. Too. Long.
• Finish up the rain barrels, which I've got mostly installed now.
• Probably take some pictures of all of this for the blog.
• Get some vegetable glycerin to make kid-friendly herbal tinctures. It's not that the kids would ingest so much alcohol if I just used vodka-based tinctures (probably no more than half a teaspoon for an entire formula dose). But something about sending my 7-year-old to school smelling of Smirnoff seems like a bad idea.
• Bar-b-que. Yeah.
• Look into making a really awesome solar water heater predicated on long loops of black hose slung up on my roof.
• Finally write that "bug-out bag/bucket" post I've been swearing I'll write for so long now.
  

So that should get me through till Friday, right? *smirk*

Adventures in Herbalism

Hm. I seem to have found myself a new project. I have now thrown myself (somewhat violently) into medical herbalism. I have a lot of reasons for doing this:

1. Herbs are, mostly, cheap and widely available.
2. You don't need to have medical insurance to afford herbal cures.
3. I have a strong dislike for much of modern allopathic medicine. I recognize that it is incredibly powerful and useful in a lot of situations, and I'm certainly not going to spurn it altogether, but the basic methodology of it (single-cause ideation) seems not only mistaken but patently stupid to me. The methodology of herbalism jibes far more with my own sense of how bodies work than allopathic medicine does. For a lot more on single-cause ideation and the problems with it, check out my husband's post on same HERE.
4. Herbs are a good way to help keep my family healthy, rather than just treating sicknesses.
5. Some members of my family are experiencing problems that are better dealt with by herbs than more powerful medicines, at least for now.
6. Herbal knowledge could well become a tradeable commodity in the near future, especially as people in my country are increasingly unable to afford conventional treatments.
7. It gives me an excuse to plant even more herbs than I already have.

How did I get kick-started here? Leave it to the LDS people, ya know? ;-) One of my friends here is LDS; her church was having a "Back to Basics" event, and she invited me to come. Much of the stuff going on there I was already familiar with (e.g., whole kernel wheat storage, dry beans, cheesemaking, etc.) but it was still fun and I picked up all manner of little tips & tricks. But I got totally stuck at the herbalism booth--I monopolized the book she had for probably the whole time, and she ended up just loaning it to me. That was last week, and I've been spending most of my free time ever since working on it (except for when I was working on my garden or fighting with my plumbing). I located our local Herb Store (which is also our local Homebrew store, so I hadn't realized the stunning array of herbs & associated goods they carried) and bought a small supply of herbs to get started. [NB: I'm not sure my husband would call my supply "small".] I'm working through a few books, plus a nifty online course you can find at www.learningherbs.com.

Anyone who knows me knows that I go on kicks like this every once in awhile. Sometimes they stick, sometimes they don't. More often than not, my overwhelming enthusiasm wanes after a bit, but some changes stick, and some of my behaviors are modified. Our style of eating & food prep is a great example. I'll go on, say, a mega-organic kick, which will eventually wane, but some of my habits will have been permanently changed in the intervening time. I suspect the same will go here. I'll learn a bunch, and have a lot of enthusiasm for a few weeks, which will eventually wane. But some of my habits will be permanently changed, and probably some new herbal things will become permanent residents in our lives. These will likely continue to grow over the years, spurred on by other bursts of enthusiasm. So expect sporadic posts about new herbal stuff over the years.

Right now, I'm working on stocking a basic first aid kit, as well as investigating various long-term methods for dealing with depression. The first aid kit is a great place to start, because it will contain a representative of almost all of the basic preparations--salves/ointments, tinctures, oils, capsules, etc. I can learn the basics of making these, and then I'll have the preparations made for when we need them. For depression, I'm looking at various tinctures & teas that can be taken on a maintenance schedule, rather than on a "quick fix" schedule. Ginseng, which has been working very well, is an addiction risk--after a few weeks your body acclimates to it, reducing its effectiveness. So I need to find something perhaps not so powerful that can be taken indefinitely, and save ginseng for more acute episodes.

Anyway, so that's what I'm up to. I've now completed the Adapting in Place course, and I'll be putting together a "Where do we go from here" document for it before too long. Of course, I'm also gardening up a storm, and I'll post some pics from that soon. Ta!