My Garden

Aaahhh...my garden.  I love my garden.  Even more this year than normal because I'm fully invested in making the most out of everything I can grow.  I put up food every year by drying or freezing things but this year I'm adding canning to the list of ways to preserve the bounty.  I want to make my own pickles, salsa and dilly beans (just like Shannon's)...not to mention tomato sauce, canned tomatoes, relishes, applesauce, pie filling, etc. etc. etc.

Please note my extremely stylish scarecrow...made out of old Levis (too small unfortunately) and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt that I was giving away to Goodwill.  Best dressed thing on our farm...


I began planning the garden in March and started all my plants from seeds I ordered from Territorial Seed Company...awesome!  It smelled like a greenhouse in my kitchen for about 2 months...not awesome.  But we put up with it knowing that the end result would be worth the extra can of febreeze.

I want to start saving my own seeds as well so I chose seeds that came from only open-pollinated or heirloom plants so they will reproduce correctly.  Wonderful varieties with names like Indigo Rose tomatoes and Burgundy beans and Country Gentleman corn.  Yummy!

I've been diligently trying to keep the weeds at bay...weeding by hand and using a hoe.  No, not a Kardashian, just the garden implement.  It's time consuming but I enjoy it because my hands get dirty and my mind gets clear.  I like that I am being active and proactive all at once.  My physical labor will help us eat better later this season and for the whole year to come.  Plus, because its such simple work, my mind has time to run.  And run it does....it runs through my to-do lists (yes, lists plural), work stuff, house chores and the projects I have to finish.  And, if I work long enough my mind will get clear of all those things and actually get to that place where my creativity gets buried.  And that's when I come up with some of my best ideas.  And all because of dirty hands.

Tonight we got the first spoils from my hard work:  a mix of heirloom lettuce, spinach and arugula.  Wa-freakin-hoo!  Oh, and the first of our strawberries too.

So, here's to a bountiful garden, healthy eating, stocked cupboards, dirty hands and creative minds!

Defective Lady Bits...

The warranty on my lady bits has run out...I think my particular model only came with one good for 35 years because at that age I began to fall apart.

Three years ago this month I found a lump in my left breast.  Nothing big, just a weird little lump hiding down on the underside of my boob.  I went into the doctor and she could feel it too.  Great.  After an inconclusive ultrasound I was sent for my very first ever mammogram.  Aces.  As if my boobs weren't flat enough after nursing three kids, let's squoosh them some more.  And there it was, a little white spot looking back at me from the tech's computer screen.  I didn't even need her to point it out to me, I could see it from across the room.  Superb.  So, over the next three weeks I had more ultrasounds, more mammograms and a failed biopsy.  It was finally determined that it was not considered cancerous and I would just need yearly mammograms to keep an eye on it.  Sweet...and this time I really mean it.

Later that same year I decided to finally have an uterine ablation.  It was either that or a hysterectomy and I chose the lesser of the two evils.  For those that don't know what it is, it's a procedure that cauterizes the inside of your uterus into charred barren wasteland.  Like the post-apocylptic set of The Road or The Book of Eli.  Ok, right here would be a perfect spot for some kind of a joke about Viggo Mortinsen or Denzel Washington being inside my uterus, but I digress.  I'll just lob that one up there and let you hit it out of the park in you mind.  Anyway, I know the doc used some thing more high tech than this but I just always pictured him with a blow torch and welding mask.   Oh, also, if there happen to be any guys reading this...right now would be the time when you should bow your head and thank God for giving you your manly bits and not lady bits.  Seriously, your upkeep & maintenance program is so much better than ours.  And you can pee standing up.

Fast forward to last Friday and my yearly mammogram.  Same old, same old...15 minutes and a pink carnation later I was on to other errands and the rest of my day.  It didn't cross my mind again until the hospital called Tuesday and said I needed to come back in because they had found something 'abnormal' in my right breast.  But, she said, "you have young, dense breasts so it can be hard to diagnose"... wait, did she just compliment my boobs in the same sentence as telling me they were abnormal?  Um, thanks, I think.  Maybe I'll use that next time I'm trying to flirt with my husband:  "Hey  babe, get a load of my dense breasts."  Hubba hubba.

This morning I went back to the imaging department to have more squooshing done.  After the doc reviewed the images he determined that it was just normal breast tissue and no need for any further testing.  Quite good news for my boobies.  And good news for my husband too...since he has grown rather fond of them and I've always said that if they ever do find something serious I want them taken off.  Really...I'm not attached to them.  They have done their job:  I caught myself a husband and they have fed three kids.  Now their main goal is to just offset my hips and make me look somewhat proportional.  Without them I strikingly resemblance a pear...or a raindrop...or something else that is much heavier on the bottom than the top.

So, it's all good for now.  I'll keep up on the maintenance programs for all my lady bits and hope they don't all go defective at once.  And even with the expired warranties, I still got flirted with at the grocery store on my way home today...well played, defective boobies, well played.

Not quite a foodie...

Today is my last quiet day for several months.  My husband is at shift, all 3 kids are at school and I am enjoying it.  It's rainy & windy outside so I don't feel guilty for spending the day indoors, my office work is caught up for the moment and I figured out how to play my iTunes through the surround sound!  Bonus!

So...what am I doing with these few precious hours?  Baking.  Cuz I like it.  I enjoy being in the kitchen and creating good (hopefully) things for us to eat.  So far today I've made individual apple pies with carmel icing and apple cinnamon rolls with the same carmel icing.  I really like the icing, ok?  Well, truthfully, only half the apple cinnamon rolls have icing because I ran out.  And I may or may not have run out because I was eating it on graham crackers while waiting for the dough to rise.  Or maybe the cats ate it.  But probably it was me.

The apple pies were supposed to be homemade pop tarts but I figured if I called them that the kids would want to eat them for breakfast and while I have fed my kids some interesting things for breakfast, I do have standards people!  Although, in a valiant effort to offset the icing, I made the crust whole wheat with flax seed.  On the great nutritional balancing scale that has to be worth something, right?  Plus the applesauce filling was my homemade low-sugar applesauce.  See, that's nutrition!  Maybe they will be breakfast tomorrow morning...

The apple cinnamon rolls turned out really well.  It's a new recipe and the dough was really soft so I thought I had messed it up but they turned out nice and light.  Again the filling was my applesauce with grated apples added to it and then cinnamon sugar sprinkled over that before rolling them all up.  Nummy!

I posted my food pics but I'm not really a 'Foodie".  I don't spend my days experimenting with new cooking techniques and ingredients.  I just like to bake.  And I make a mess when I do it.

No Martha Stewart kitchen here...there are no perfect plates of carefully shaped cookies or vases of flowers or bowls of fruit too beautiful to eat.  Almost all of my plates are chipped and my favorite vase is an old molasses bottle and we have an empty fruit basket at the moment (payday is tomorrow...yeah!).  Mine is a small kitchen with minimal storage and comically sloping formica countertops.  And there's a melted spot in the linoleum where I spilled hot candy syrup two Christmas's ago when making hard candies.

But my kitchen can produce lots of great and imperfect treats and meals.  It's where I put up countless quarts of applesauce and corn and berries and jam.  It's where my kids are learning to cook and bake.  Every Thanksgiving it's full to the brim...every inch of counter space is covered with pots and pans and platters.  And, most importantly, it's where we all hang out.  Even when we have company over,  everyone seems to just hang around the kitchen and visit.

So eat your heart out Martha...my kitchen is awesome.

Weird and Cool Coincidence

We take my mom around to clean up and decorate the family headstones at area cemeteries each Memorial Day.  It's become a tradition and my kids actually look forward to it each year.

Our first stop is for my mom's brother Dean who passed away in a car accident before I was born.  His headstone is a military issued metal one with the raised lettering.  Each year the kids argue over who gets to paint the letters with gold paint....and each year they each get to paint a portion of them.  Wyatt, who thinks he's military bound when he gets older, likes to walk to rows with flags and read the military references on the headstones.  

Our last stop is our local cemetery which on a hill behind our house.  It has the most breathtaking views of the valley and foothills!  You have almost 360 degrees of unbroken vista from the top of the hill.  It really is as peaceful a resting place as I can imagine.  And it's got the coolest, historical feel to it as soon as you walk through the stone gateways and see the old headstones that are so worn you can hardly make out the wording.

This is where our ancestors are buried, right back to my great-great-great-grandfather who crossed the Oregon Trail (twice!) and settled the family farm in 1851.  And all the generations following him are represented in the family plots.  And our people aren't alone, there are numerous old headstones with dates from the 1800s.  The kids like to walk around and try to find the oldest ones or try to piece together the stories of families.  

While they where looking around on Saturday they found a small flat headstone that was overgrown.  It was sunken at one end and didn't look as though it had been cared for in awhile.  They decided to 'adopt' it and Wyatt set about cleaning it up with the grass clippers.  The girls made a pretty vase out of the flowers we had left over and placed it on the grave.  Satisfied, they sat for a moment before we packed up to head home.

I took note of the name and dates of our adopted headstone so I could do a little research when we got home, as the last name was not one that was still in the community.  She was only 19 and nothing was noted on the stone about her cause of death.  When I typed it into the Google up came a picture of the headstone with a notation that she was a sister-in-law to a family name that I recognized.  Now I could start to connect some dots about who's family-line she belonged in and maybe find out a bit more about her.

I emailed the information to my mom, thinking she might find it interesting.  She responded with some of the coolest information I could have imagined.  When she had mentioned the name and family connection to my dad, he recognized it right away.  No shock there...he's like a walking community history encyclopedia.  

But what he added to our bit of information was that the young lady who's headstone the kids had cared for used to live right here at our house.  Her old house has been long gone, I don't remember ever seeing a stick built home on this property in my lifetime, but she had lived right here at the beginning of the last century.  How much of a weird, and cool, coincidence is that?

The kids loved it...they thought it was creepy and freaky and awesome.  I thought it was a bit Twilight Zone but found it very cool.  I love things like that!  And now I am on the hunt to find out more about her and why she only had 19 years.  It's like our own Nancy Drew story.

Needless to say, we'll be taking care of that grave each year on Memorial Day as well as the others.  Because it's kinda like we're connected and that's pretty cool. 

Riding on busses

I spent Thursday on a field trip with my kids' classes.  We went to the Timber's soccer game in Portland.  Now, for those of you who may not understand the ins & outs of chaperoning field trips let me just explain a few things.

First, the field trip encompassed grades 4-8 which covers all three of my kids' grades so I technically volunteered for all three classrooms at once.  That is what's known as looking like a good parent without exerting too much time & energy.

Second, it was to a Portland Timber's soccer game.  Come on people...a soccer game for a field trip?!?!  That's the best field trip ever!  And believe me I've been on some serious field trip snoozefests.  I spent an entire day walking the Oregon Gardens with a group of third graders.  A group of third graders who live on farms...they already knew what the plants were and what animals made the 'neat-o' animals tracks.  You should have seen our guide's face when all the kids finished identifying their plaster molds of tracks in record time and then threw in a few stories about killing some of them.

Let me recap:  I volunteered for all three kids at one time and got to see a Timbers game.  That's golden...in fact that, my friends, is what's called 'Winning the Field Trip Chaperone lottery'!!!

So, we arrived at school that morning on time (which already made it a stellar day by my measure) and I found out who my group of chaperone-ees was to be:  all the 6th grade girls.  Which sounds like a lot until you understand that this is a little country school that has 185 students in a K-8 building.  The grand total of my group was 8 and that included my daughter Kate.  A wonderfully manageable number and, knowing all the girls fairly well, I was stoked to see that my job would be an easy one.  Sweet!  Off to the game!

We loaded onto the busses...one for the 6, 7 & 8 graders and one for the 4 & 5 graders.  (My bus contained Kate & Wyatt while Abby rode with the other 4th graders)  And then we sat.  On a bus.  For about 20 minutes.  With roughly 52 kids.  Not fun.

Let me rewind 26 years to when I was 12 and tell you why it was particularly not fun for me.   When I was a 7th grader at Victor Point I developed a bit of a phobia.  It was like claustrophobia but not quite.  I was always self conscious and afraid of being made fun of by other kids.  That morphed into being afraid of being somewhere where I couldn't get away from people if I was too be sick or have something equally embarrassing happen.  It became a fear of being in overcrowded places, from concerts to the mall to Costco...they all became places I hated.  And it became a big fear of riding the bus.  I was afraid of being sick on the bus and then having to endure the rest of the hour long ride with that granule-covered puddle beside my seat and the jokes and pitying looks of my fellow students.  But where we lived, the bus was the only option.  So every morning and afternoon I faced that yellow monster and gutted out (no pun intended) the ride and tried not to let anyone else know how hard I was struggling.  Because for my friends to know that I had this phobia was almost as embarrassing as the original fear itself.  I mean really, how do you explain that your afraid of the bus?

My Mom took me to some kind of psychologist or psychiatrist or counselor or something...I don't remember the guy well but Mom says I pretty much clammed up and wouldn't talk to him except to be snarky.  Hhhmmm...doesn't sound like me at all.  Anyway, she read up on stuff and then decided the best way to handle it was to make me face it.  She didn't alter our day to day living to pander to my fears, she just taught me how to work through it when I was somewhere that I felt panicked.  And God bless her for that.  She would make me go to Costco with her and then distract me with conversation or silliness so that I wasn't focused on the fear.  I was still encouraged to go to concerts where I would loose myself in the music and only have to get through the intermissions when I could see how many people were actually in the arena with me.  She taught me that the mind is powerful and you can talk yourself through difficult situations instead of giving into panic.  Over the years, it's become a valuable mental trait that I'm indebted to her for making me develop.

So, I made it through 7th grade and two hour-long bus rides a day and the fear started to ebb.  It was never as bad as it was that year.  I would still have momentary panicky times later on in high school when I would have to ride a team bus to games but I could always get myself through them.  By the time I was out of high school, it wasn't an issue anymore.

And then 26 years later I found myself sitting on a bus full of 12-14 year olds in front of my old school.  Nostalgia is a powerful thing.  All of a sudden I was 12 again and facing another hour long ride in front of the most judgement people in the world:  junior highers.  And this time not only would I embarrass myself but also my kids.  I began to panic a little.  I was about two seconds from standing up and telling the teachers I would just drive my own car and follow them to the stadium.  And from the cobwebs in my head came the phrases I would tell myself when I battled this feeling so long ago.  "I'm fine, I will get through this" and "I'm OK, just breath".  I let go of the seat in front of me and sat back.  I cracked the window to get some fresh air and breathed deep.  "I will face this and I will be fine."

The bus began to move and I had one more surge of wanting to bolt for the door.  I texted Mike that we were headed out and that I was having a harder time than I thought.  He responded with "if it gets bad call me and I'll come get you".  He was willing to drive to Portland to rescue his ridiculous wife from her fear of busses...that's love, people!   As I put my phone away I turned toward the back of the bus and caught Kate's eye.  She smiled her silly smile at me and that was exactly what I needed to ground myself.  I settled back into the seat and resolved that I would make it through this bus ride.

An hour and 20 minutes later we were pulling up in front of Jeld-Wen field and while I was anxious to get off the bus, I was OK.  I gathered my 8 chaperone-ees as we got off the bus and made our way into the stadium.  The game was great with the Timbers winning 4-0.  I even managed to keep my usual yelling-like-an-idiot-at-sports-events self under control for the sake of my kids.

Because I had made it through the ride up, I wasn't dreading the return trip and even had a nice visited with another mom while we rode back.  When we exited the bus back at the school I felt good.  It was nice to know that even though I still had that irrational fear lurking in the recesses of my mind,  I also still had the ability to conquer it.  Funny how something as silly as overcoming a childhood fear can make you feel invincible...even when you are middle aged when you do it.

Lá Na Gaeilge

Dia duit!  Conas atá tú?

(Hello!  How are you?)

I'm learning Irish, or Gaeilge, and I'm driving my family a little nuts with it but I'm having a blast!  I've been listening to podcasts from EasyIrish.com for the last few months.  I listen to them in the car, when I walk, while I'm waiting for the kids at practices.  And even though I haven't retained more than the first two lessons it doesn't stop me from trying to sharing my new language with anyone who will listen.  When I pop off with some of the words & phrases I've learned Mike just looks at me with raised eyebrows.  "Are you sure that's even a real language?  It sounds like gibberish."    

I realized that my brain was having a hard time remembering which phrases were which so I set out to find a way to really learn from Irish speakers.  That's how I found Lá Na Gaeilge at Marylhurst University.  It's their annual Irish Language Day and it was great!  I spent my Saturday learning all kinds of great stuff about the language.  I learned about the structure of the language, of the differences between Cork and the rest Ireland and lots of other cool stuff.  

The best part of the day was definitely a workshop called 'Tea with Grandpa'.  I signed up for it on the recommendation of one of the attendees and I'm so glad I did.  The first cool thing was that it was just the teacher, one other student and myself.  Pretty much a personal lesson.   Brían uses a way of teaching that is like immersion.  He spoke mostly in Irish the entire time, except when explaining certain rules, etc.  And he uses signs, like sign language, to help enforce the absorption of the words.  He took us on a walk outside and presented us with very obvious situations so grasping the concepts and words was easy once I caught on.  Before I knew it I was understanding things like take & give, here & there, old & young, tall & short...it was so cool!  To see an example of it, you should check out Language Hunters on YouTube.  

So, now I'm all excited to keep learning and get better at the language so that when I go back to Lá Na Gaeilge next year, I'll be able to talk to the others and maybe even move up to the Intermediate classes.  I'm just so glad that my brain can handle learning something like this!  After three kids, I was beginning to think that all my college learning had been replaced with grocery lists, 4th grade math homework, game schedules, 6th grade science, permission slips, 8th grade field trips and, oh yea, maybe some work stuff too.  Good to know there's still some room in there!

Slán go fóill!

(Goodbye for now!)

My Smartass Daughter

Both of my girls have some quick wits on them.  But, my youngest daughter is particularly talented in the smartass category.  

When I picked up the kids at school today, she climbed in the car and told me that a boy had slapped her across the face today.  My first reaction was shock...what the hell?!?!  My next reaction was 'uh oh'...what had Abby done back to him???  So after I got the story of what exactly had happened I asked her, "what did you do?"  She said, very calmly:  "I didn't hit him back mom, don't worry.  I told him I couldn't hit him because I'm not supposed to hit women."  Then she proceeded to tell him that he better sleep with one eye open because her big brother was coming for him.  

Ya....I don't think I'm going to have to worry about that girl.