Hippy Dippy Earth Mother

Today was my second day off in a row.  Yesterday I spent recuperating from a week-long vacation coverage and hanging with the kids.  I downloaded a couple books - one on goats and one fiction book and I took my iPad out to the blackberries and read, and played with goats, alpacas and dog.  It was lovely.

Today I worked toward becoming a hippy-dippy-earth-mother.  I made two loaves of bread.  I was testing bread machines.  The machine on the right is mine, the one on the left is my mother-in-law's. I used the exact same recipe and ingredients.  It appears her bread machine does a better job.  Now I can blame all my failed loaves of bread on the machine. Yay.

I also went to the grocery store.  I looked at pork sausage and was utterly appalled at the ingredients list.  Corn Syrup? Dextrose?  BHA??  Propyl Gallate??  What the heck!?!?

Since I have my brand new meat grinder attachment I decided to try my hand at making my very own sausage.  I bought a big "family pack" of pork chops and divvied it up into portions.  Some pork chops I left as pork chops - but the rest I ground up.  Then I added onion, garlic, pepper, chili powder, kosher salt, thyme and a few other ingredients.  All things I know how to pronounce.  I ran it through the grinder a few more times and produced a fine home made pork sausage.  I'm quite pleased with myself.  

The goats are doing well.  They explored their future pasture today.  Eventually they will be hanging with the alpacas in their pasture, but right now the alpacas are very curious and very big and scary to little baby goats.  That meant the goats got to play awhile with out the alpacas.  They ran and jumped and spun and had a ball.  

Just to make you jealous, here is a glimpse into my new morning routine:

My little GOAT shop

Just to get it out of the way - my new meat grinder, Kitchenaid attachment arrived.  I shall never buy ground beef again!  The process was efficient and non-revulsive and the end product was far better in texture, fat content and possible mystery ingredients than anything you can buy.

Now!  To the real story!  A couple weeks, while I was at work, Peter had gone to visit some friends of ours,  Angela and Mark, the people we got Chupa and Cadbury from.  The very people that had the two baby goats I was trying not to fall in love with.  He came home with 6 Muscovy ducklings and 2 goslings.  Because you can never have too many ducks and geese!

Coincidentally, that very afternoon Angela posted on Facebook that she had sold the two baby goats.  I told Peter and said it was just as well.  I wasn't ready for goats and then I laughed and said, "YOU didn't buy them did you?"  He looked me straight in the eyes and said:  "No."  I was actually fine with someone else buying them because I'm NOT ready for goats and if they found a good home somewhere then I didn't have to work so hard not to get them.

Fast forward to yesterday.  I was doing my job, putting mail in a neighborhood mail box, while the people in the house right in front of the box were unceremoniously ripping out about 6 feet of very crowded iris and dumping in the garden recycle box.  In horror I asked why and was told the owner just didn't like iris.  Crazy I'm telling you!  I love iris. They are some of my favorite spring flowers.  I was told I could have them and I made arrangements to come back after work to fetch them.

When I got home from work I went in search of Peter so he could go with me to retrieve my salvaged flowers.  I wasn't sure where to start.  We do have acreage and he could be hiding in a thousand different places.  As I cast my glance northward I saw Peter's mother traipsing across the tundra toward the Alpaca pasture.  She never goes out there.  There had to be a reason, most likely in my mind was that she TOO was looking for Peter and had probably spotted him.  So I followed her.  As I rounded the bend by the blackberries there were Peter and his mom watching  Een (Ayn) and Twee (Tway) feast on the blackberries.  He HAD bought them.  He HAD lied to me about it.  Hmm... now I have to be suspicious of  the things he tells me.

Hey!  Are you our new mom?

Goats like to climb on things

Chupa has to investigate her new neighbors

Een and Twee are LaMancha/Boer crosses and are about 3 months old.  They are not fiber goats.  I have alpaca for fiber.  These are going to be milk goats. LaMancha goats are easy to pick out because they have tiny little ears. Boer goats are often meat goats - but we will NOT be eating these goats or any of their offspring.  Sometime this winter we will send the girls back to Angela and Mark's for a "date night" with their little buck, Caspar the friendly goat - then about 5 months after that we'll have even MORE goats.  Sigh.

Things are coming together...

 

The daily grind

We should live off the land!  Says I.
I need to go out and slaughter a pig!  Says I.

All this junk that get's put in our food.  It's just crazy.  I don't want to eat chemicals and hormones and alien babies!  I don't think the time will come when I can ever slaughter a pig.  Or a chicken for that matter - but it doesn't mean I don't want to take what steps I can to eat healthier.  We don't eat packaged food around here (except on very rare occasions), we don't have a microwave and we grow much of our own produce.

I decided to start the journey to eventually slaughtering a pig with baby steps by grinding my own ground beef.  Ground beef at the grocery store was $4.99 a pound.  Roast was $5.49 a pound and buy one get one free.  That made quality roast about $2.75 a pound.  Roast was much cheaper than hamburger and I knew additional fat and gunk was not being added.  It still was not grass-fed beef - but I had to start somewhere.

So I set up the grinder:

 I cut a piece off the roast:

I tossed it into the grinder opening and cranked on the handle for about 5 minutes.  The grinder slipped and shifted.  The meat squished and squashed.   Stuff oozed and goozed.

My result:

The process was totally off-putting.  The results were most unappetizing.  Plus the labor-intensiveness of the process did not seem at all a good investment.

I might just turn vegetarian.  Except I like bacon.  And I like ribs.  And I like fried chicken.  Perhaps I need a newer grinder - this one was from the 40's or 50's.  I need something electric and with a tad less personal involvement because this did not work for me.  In fact - I just went to Amazon and ordered an attachment for my KitchenAid.

I should have the attachment in about three days.  I'll report back on how it goes with this tool...Wish me luck.

I enjoyed work today.

But don't tell anyone!

After all the complaining and moaning and groaning I've done I'm loathe to admit it, but today was fun.  Today was the first day I drove a for-real rural route.  My regular route, and the other one I'm trained on are called rural routes but they are in new subdivisions (that most certainly were farmland not that long ago).  I drive from neighborhood mail box unit to neighborhood mail box unit.  Because the Post Office likes to have  all their substitute carriers cross-trained on all the routes I was forced into training and delivering on this route this week, Taking a third of it each day.  This route is 28 miles long.  The first two days I was delivering in subdivisions but today I took to the open countryside.

The weather wasn't REALLY nice today but the rain held off and I got to take a drive in the country.  I delivered mail to dairy farms and blueberry farms and assorted other farms.  I even delivered mail to my own house!  I saw horses and sheep and cows.  Lots of cows.  I saw one cow licking it's newborn calf.  I had to stop the mail truck and admire the spectacle.  I talked to the cows and horses too ~ but they didn't talk back.  Too bad, I bet they'd have fascinating stories to tell.

For those of you who don't know how close to the border I really am.  I delivered mail to this mail box today:

The road on the right is in Canada, the one on the left is in the US.  Only a ditch separates the two.  Don't get any ideas though - there are cameras all up and down this stretch of the border to keep out those pesky aliens!  I even delivered to the border crossing station.  They certainly seem to be more pleasant to the mail carrier than they are to travelers...

The one bad part about this route is that a portion of the rural part is on a busy highway with speeds around 50 miles an hour.  It is two lanes and has no shoulders, with ditches next to the highway.  One wrong move and... SPLASH!    It was a little nerve wracking to be stopping to deliver mail along that stretch.  There was no way possible to completely get off the road.  I just kept hoping people were paying attention to the little mail truck with flashing strobe lights.

Welcome to Sharontopia!

I lay claim to this 264 square feet, formerly known as the "Future Fiber Studio" in the name of Sharon, the Queen.  I name this space: "SharonTopia."

Visitors are absolutely welcome in SharonTopia. I shall have an open border policy. There will be strict import laws, however.  Anything brought into SharonTopia to stay shall have to be approved by The Queen.  Placement of imported items to SharonTopia must pass a strict approval process.

SharonTopia is a work in progress.  The Future Fiber Studio was a dream.  SharonTopia is real.  It is now. It is there.

Here's the scoop.  I got married a couple years ago and now share my life with someone else.  That someone else, who I adore, seems to think he rules the roost.  I'm (mumble mumble mumble) years old and for most of those years I have been the roost ruler.  I have been master of my domain, Queen of my realm and the final word on anything involving anything around me.  Not having that control has been a frustrating element in my life for the last couple years.  We live in a house smaller than I'm used to and Peter has stuff.  He has lovely stuff, and I'm not complaining about his stuff, but it just doesn't fit and I've slowly gotten squeezed out of the house.  Originally our home office had two desks, one of which was mine.  We still have two desks in there, but his files and papers have slowly migrated over.  I had my spinning and weaving stuff tucked into the pretty spare bedroom, but now his stuff is sneaking in there.  He lives here too and he has every right to put things wherever he wants.  My problem is that I can no longer find any of my things - and when I can - I usually have to move 'stuff' to get to them.

Before we got married, even before he came back into my life I stated loudly and proudly that I wanted to live in a house that had enough room, or as little stuff, that I could ride my bicycle in it.  Clutter makes me crazy!  I want to be organized and clutter-free.  I NEED to be organized and clutter-free.

Saturday I planted my flag in SharonTopia.  The future fiber studio needed doors, but to do the job properly, the floors and sheet rock should go up first.  But before sheet rock, insulation needed to be installed, but before insulation wiring needed to be added.  That was the problem.  Although I can do insulation, sheet rock and flooring, I needed Peter to do the wiring.  So - toss out the future fiber studio and embrace SharonTopia.  A less-than-perfect but perfectly serviceable world I can control.  I decided to install my interior french doors.  Peter was busy installing a pump and filter in the fish pond so I snuck off to SharonTopia and started cleaning, straightening and installing the doors.  I wrestled them into place, and tacked them up.  Then I found out that there was a board fastened to the bottom of the doors to keep them from opening.  I removed my temporary nails and tried to tip the doors.  Unfortunately, they weren't fastened at the top so the  doors started to separate and pull the frame apart.  I stood there holding up the doors and keeping them together and unable to move.  I was in a pickle.  I managed to get them to lean against the doorway and propped them up on blocks, then I tried to use a hammer to remove the board attached on the bottom of the doors.  Problem was, it was screwed in, not nailed.  Sigh.  My only choice was to lay the doors on the floor.  I started to move them into the position to lay them down when one door flew open, the frame twisted, and I was again left stranded holding my doors at a wonky angle.  Unable to put them down, unable to lift them back up.  This time I was truly stuck.

I stood pondering my predicament for several minutes when Peter poked his nose through the doorway.

Our conversation went something like this:

He, very nonchalantly: Whatcha doin?
Me:  Nothing
He:  Are you installing the doors?
Me:  Apparently not.
He:  You know it would be better if we installed the walls and floors first.
Me:  I realize that.  (about ready to buckle from the weight of the door)
He:  Need some help?
Me:  No.  I'm fine.
He:  Are you sure?
Me:  Well, maybe I could use a little help getting this thing off the bottom...

Peter helped me get the board off the bottom and then helped me maneuver the doors in to the doorway opening  and left me to my own devices (good man!)

So here are photos of SharonTopia as it stands today..  I am happy has a clam for electricity via extension cords, walls made of boards leaning against the studs and peeling floors.  It is mine.  I shall soon remove the outdoor furniture (for it never to return) and I will make other changes as I see fit but for now it is perfect.