Quick Takes: Heavy and Light

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I just didn't have the heart to talk about the election the other day.  I had always expected President Obama to be re-elected, or at least for quite some time now.  I had a good talk with a friend the day after about what it all means.

President Obama has declared war on the Catholic Church with his HHS Mandate.  I know that lots and lots of people, and even a majority of Catholics, just don't see this.  We voted for this state of affairs, and the gloves-off attack on religious freedom that's sure to come is entirely the consequence of our lukewarmness.  The President is trying to force division:  Do we choose the unborn and let Catholic service in the public square disappear, or to serve the poor and the sick at the expense of the lives of our smallest brothers and sisters?  It's an impossible choice.  We can't abandon any of our brothers and sisters and still be Christians.  Do we choose to follow the laws of God, or the unjust laws of Caesar?  There is only one choice. 

But it's going to require even more heroic grace than ever.  We are a weak people.  And there will be many souls lost in the battle.  Lord have mercy.

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So new political strategy:  Be a saint.

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While I try to figure out #2, I still have the everyday domestic things to attend to.  (Actually, those are my means to sanctity, as I've talked about a little bit here.)  Oh, yes, happy belated Feast of All Saints!

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The garden is finished for the year, except for five lonely heads of lettuce in the cold frame.  I'm going to miss our little (?) friend, the praying mantis who lived in our green bean plants and kept away all the bad bugs.  I can't count how many times I've thought, "How did I miss that big one?" only to find I was trying to harvest the praying mantis!  Anthony always had to look for him each time we went out to pick some green beans.  He called him his "pet" and would in fact pet him.  Katie Rose thinks he's funny too.

 

 

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We pulled out all of our carrots, even though we're a ways from a hard freeze.  Most of them would have been respectable radishes, but they probably weren't going to get much bigger at this point.  Some of them were getting eaten by clusters of little grey bugs, so I thought it's probably better to take away their food source.  We'd been pulling them up periodically, so this final haul is probably about 1/4 of the total carrot yield.  I'll definitely grow them again next year, but I'll try harder to space them properly to begin with.  Thinning carrots is a sad job, and I mostly left them too close together to really get to be a decent size.

 



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14 pounds of green tomatoes.  Most of them went to make green tomato relish.  That project took up half of the day on Tuesday, so I wasn't just fretting about the election.  It's quite good!  This might not make sense, but it tastes old-fashioned.  Green tomato relish is the embodiment of the old-time idea of never letting anything go to waste. It looks really Christmasy, green with bits of red.  The recipe yielded over a GALLON of relish, so I think some of these jars are destined to be Christmas gifts.

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There's a runaway train of clean but unfolded laundry behind me as I'm typing this.  I should get Anthony down for his nap and deal with that.

 

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Quick Takes!

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My parents and younger sister were here visiting all last week.  It was super super hot, so we did a lot of indoor things and splashed in the big fountain at Sawyer Point.  But we didn't take many pictures.  Or at least Teresa hasn't e-mailed them to me yet. By far the most exciting event of their stay happened on the Fourth of July.  A power line burst and was shooting sparks all over the sidewalk directly in front of our house.  Our guardian angels were taking care of us, and our neighbor's bushes, which miraculously did not go up in flames in the heat and dry weather.  But that wasn't the most exciting part.  The exciting part was that there were fire trucks, police cars, and power company trucks all RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR HOUSE!!!  Then the line burst again and they all came back!

This photo is after a solid hour of truck watching.  We couldn't tear Anthony away.

Aunt Teresa.  Anthony calls her "Essa."  Now so do I.



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I took Anthony to see even MORE TRUCKS this week.  A nearby township hosted "Touch a Truck."  Kids can climb onto garbage trucks, construction vehicles, a city bus, a Medivac helicopter, a fire truck, etc.  There were probably about 20 vehicles.  And 200 charged up preschool boys.

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2 1/2 months old!

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I've noticed that I'm in much better shape now than I ever was before children, even though I used to conscientiously work out then and never now.  I'll spare you the photographic evidence, but certain areas of flab I thought were just facts of life are gone!  It could have something to do with the daily walks/trots around the neignborhood wearing the baby and either chasing Anthony or pulling him in the wagon.  Or bringing the dirty laundry down two flights, a clean load up two flights, back down one then right back up again because I forgot something, then back down, then up again because the baby's awake.  Or scrubbing the dried-up jelly off the chairs.  I could do a whole post about how motherhood IS exercise.

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Eight cucumbers today! And lots lots more coming very soon.  I need to learn how to make pickles, and fast.

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We had a great summer menu last night:  Grilled porkchops and peaches, corn on the cob, cole slaw, and watermelon salad.  The watermelon salad is a recipe from my mother-in-law.  All it is is watermelon chunks, a handful of chopped parsley, feta cheese, toasted pine nuts, and a splash of lemon juice.  Fabulous.  Tonight will be chilled cucumber soup.

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Here's another quote from Abandonment to Divine Providence.  This one hit me hard yesterday:

"Faith is the mother of sweetness, confidence, and joy.  It cannot help feeling tenderness and compassion for its enemies by whose means it is so immeasurably enriched.  The greater the harshness and severity of the creature, the greater by the operation of God, is the advantage to the soul.  While the human instrument strives to do harm, the divine Workman in whose hands it is, makes use of its very malice to remove from the soul all that might be prejudicial to it."

Jean-Pierre De Caussade is a genius.  The first line is a good litmus test to see if I am really trusting in God:  Where am I on the "sweetness, confidence, and joy" scale?



For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Radishes!

Our second batch of radishes is ready.  We've got lots!  I didn't really know what to with them besides slice them into salads, but emboldened by my success in April I planted a lot.  If you leave them too long, they get tough and bitter instead of the delicious mild peppery flavor they are now.  They don't keep long once they're pulled, but that's not a problem!  I've been snacking on them all day.  I've learned the French like to eat them with butter and salt.  I tried it, and it's good, but I definitely think that eating a plain handful that were in the ground five minutes ago is the way to go.

Marketing Self-Sufficiency

There’s no denying that more and more people are interested in doing things like growing vegetables and raising chickens in their backyard, reducing their energy usage, and playing with fire so they can tell their wives they’re working on alternative fuel sources.  And most of them, like my husband and me, are total wannabes.  May as well face the facts. Last year we mostly grew weeds.   We’re not moving out to the weed farm anytime soon.

The raised bed is now (mostly) planted.  Pole beans are in the very back.  Peppers and tomatoes will fill in the middle.

BUT.  But, you will never see us purchasing cedar raised bed kits or “authentic vintage” copper garden tools.  I’m seeing so many unnecessary products being sold through mass retailers to the self-sufficiency wannabes it’s laughable.  Does nobody else see the irony here?  Self-sufficiency is all about using what you have and buying less.  It’s the antithesis of the mass retail chain.  

Most ludicrous was an antique French washtub being marketed as a planter.  Of course it was very expensive.  Apparently people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to look like they’re cool using old junk.  But not just any old junk!  French junk!  It’s silly.  

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The marketing of “vintage” has been going on for quite some time now.  A lot of people are nostalgic for “the good old days” without ever having known them.  That sort of unfulfilled, ill-defined void in people’s souls is exactly what marketers look for.  

Last year's unmanagably massive space. Ryan's going to experiment with "The Three Sisters" (corn, beans, and squash) as companion plantings once the weeds under the plastic cook a little longer.

They also exploit our desire to see ourselves as a certain image.  We all want to be the cool kids.  And right now all the cool kids are growing tomatoes.  What they don’t want you to know is the ones actually doing it are more likely to be using old sour cream containers than their hydroponics for dummies kit.

You can’t buy self-sufficiency at Williams-Sonoma or Lowes.  It can only be bought in what my dad calls “sweat equity.”  Our consumer culture is really, really bad at it.  So far I’ve been bad at it, too.  But it’s good for the soul.  

More like mammoth popsicle stick.



The thing about vegetable gardens and such is that they require you to stick with it consistently, if you want anything edible out of them.  They don’t care how fancy your set-up is.  If you don’t put in the work, you won’t get results.  Mother Nature doesn’t negotiate, regardless of extenuating circumstances (We just had a baby, it’s just too hot out, whatever.).


All the actual plants are in our front yard. I got impatient waiting for the raised bed to be ready.

I’ve done enough to know, however, that even modest successes are extremely rewarding.  Stick with it! 

I’m definitely pep-talking myself here.  If it helps you at all, dear reader, great!  And I must confess I was agog over a dehydrator I saw in the Williams-Sonoma catalog.  Maybe to reward myself when I have enough produce to require drying it for winter…

Thank goodness for mesclun mix.  If the world falls apart, we'll probably have to live on mesclun.

Sick Day, and Why I Love My Husband

Stomach flu. I was all set to be out and about in the first snowfall today: Children's Adoration, some errands, and babysitting a friend's kids for the afternoon. But instead my dear husband took care of me today. Thankfully he was able to work at home while I was sound asleep until 1:00! I can't remember a time I ever slept that late. And thankfully Anthony was mostly content to play with toys so Daddy was actually able to work! Ryan does NOT like dealing with illness. Once when they were teenagers his sister had a stomach bug and Ryan slept in the car so he didn't have to be near her. But he hugged me for a long time this morning to help me feel better. Not to mention rearranging his work schedule for me. He did go to work this afternoon, but Anthony's napping now, so I'm free to post a picture of them both on the internet before I do something more productive:

Also, this was waiting for me today:

They're sprouting already!!! It's baby salad mix. Our salad was by far our most successful crop this past season. We were harvesting it all spring and fall, up until Thanksgiving. We had saved some seeds in the summer. I was missing our fresh salad, and didn't like buying it at the store. So Ryan suggested just growing some in the basement through the winter. We put this together under a shop light on Saturday. It seems to be working!

Weekend Photos

Happy Monday. We had a gorgeous weekend; lovely sunshine and warmth all day on Saturday and a bit on Sunday afternoon. Spring is definitely on its way! (Click the pictures to see them larger.)



We have deer in our yard all the time! The same three are often seen around suppertime and in the early morning hours; two does and a baby. This is the baby, not really a baby now. Saturday morning Ryan took apart the raised bed he built last year, and we moved the dirt to cover the area for our new expanded vegetable bed (about 16x18 feet). It was a workout, since our soil is very clayey (a word?) and it was very wet from all the rain we had.

Which brings us to Sawyer Point on Sunday. There were so many people out taking pictures of the high water!



Anthony wasn't impressed by the river, but he had a great time with all the dogs that were there! He absolutely loves dogs; he's going to be asking Daddy for one for sure! He's not afraid of them AT ALL, even this Great Dane that lives in our neighborhood. They'll sniff and lick his face and he just laughs and gets so excited!


Finally, here's a sneak peek at a quilt I started! This one's going to a silent auction to support an alternative Catholic school that a lot of our friends' children attend.