MFA Mama

turnip, sprouts, worms

Figure One: NBD, just holding a turnip THAT I GREW!

   Today I weeded, amended, and turned a row in the garden, and found that not ALL of our turnips had failed! Look at that perfect root vegetable (pictured without its largest leaves, which I immediately pulled off and handed to Hotter to give to the rabbits). And just like that, for the first time our garden fed our bunnies (I have already planted a ton of bunny-fodder that'll replace hay in their diets when this bale runs out).

   The cover crops are already sprouting. Yeah, the ones I planted like, the day before yesterday. I don't even know.

   I was reading about rabbits and vermiculture, and had a moment of "wait, I paid good money for some worm poop, and I have rabbit poop..." and the next thing you know I was improvising a worm box with some alfalfa stalks the bunies had scorned layered with organic potting mix and rabbit poop...we'll see. If nothing else it'll make feeding our wormsnake easy when it's super-cold out. It would be awesome if I could make my own potting mix next year with MFA compost and worm casings, along with store-bought peat moss, and vermiculite.

   Work was fantabulous today and I have picked up an additional side-job, so all in all things here are going well. It's nice.

so tired, but!

   I planted turnips, beets, onions, leeks, fennel, Scotch kale, and butterfly bush, for the bees (the tiniest seeds you ever didn't even see). Garlic chives and triamble squash, all indoors in plug trays salvaged from the recycled pots bin at The Botanical Garden. A whole row outside weeded and vermiculite, kelp meal, worm casings and rabbit poop turned into it before I sowed it with vetch, alfalfa, and clover and covered it with clear plastic row cover tenting. If we're going to have a creepy warm winter, I might as well make use of it to enrich the soil with stuff that's good bunny fodder: in the words of my friend K, this is the year I go VIGILANTE JUSTICE on my soil! 

   In case you couldn't tell, I'm pretty excited about that. My new hoe is so amazing. My new hoe may even be my own personal non-girly version of a red dress.

   Good night.

 

plant all the things!

*   Y'all might get sick of it, but now is ze time on Sprockets ver ve list vat ve planted: Red clover, white clover, common vetch, and alfalfa, separately, in pots, and everything but the vetch as a cover crop in the two large containers I use to grow lettuce when it is warmer (you are not supposed to use vetch as a cover crop before lettuce; I have no idea why but read it in several places so ALRIGHTY THEN! Vetch has much larger seeds and needs to be planted deeper than the other stuff, which is all wee bitsy seeds that you can broadcast onto loosened soil, so it would've been a pain in the arse ANYWAY). I figure that stuff'll all make for good bunny-fodder as well as fixing nitrogen into the soil and aerating it. I also planted Premier kale and repotted my ailing dwarf Meyer Lemon.

Figure One: No, YOUR desk is covered in plastic and pushed up against a South-facing window being used as a plant hospital!

*   Today I overheard something I wasn't meant to at work. I was lost in the cubicles (it happens at least once a day still; I try to orient myself within the building by remembering which side I can see the river from at my desk but end up lost on the way back from the loo on a regular basis) and two young Turks were conversing and one of them said "OHHHHH you know The One Who Dislikes MFA Mama? Who works in X department? Yeah!" and made an obscene gesture that I believe was meant to convey carnal knowledge thereof. Which, well, the fellow wasn't bad-looking, but mostly I felt a) scandalized by the vulgarity, because apparently I am eighty now and b) bad for her that he was bandying it about in such a manner. I even made a mental note to add "kissing and telling" to the round of "YOU DO NOT DOs" next time I'm lecturing my boys on The Importance of Being Non-assholes, because yeesh!

*   Speaking of star-crossed lovers, the bunnies are eight weeks old now and I decided it was time for them to go all Heloise and Abelaard and move into separate quarters to avoid a too-early breeding stunting anyone's growth. I kind of hated to do it, since they SNUGGLED and it was ADORABLE, but it's for their own good and I positioned the cages so that their food-loft platforms are next-door and they can visit through the bars. Has is enjoying having a clear shot at the food and water. Pfeffer the Heifer didn't want to move cages and I ended up hauling her out by the scruff. She was pissed! Poor bunny. I gave each of them an old sweater to snuggle up to, and they took to those immediately.

*   The new hoe is all I'd imagined, and more. I arrived home and immediately shouted out "WHERE MAH HOE AT?" It's so excellent for both hoeing and cultivating; I <3 my new hoe.

*   How are all of YOU?

the one with the stomach bug

   I was sick today, which pretty much killed my plans to DO ALL THE THINGS. Middle Child is FIRED for bringing this into the house. Now accepting applications for the position of emo middle child!

   In a way I'm almost glad I was getting deathly ill, because all last night I had the most intricate, baroque, fucked up nightmares...like the kind where you can't move or tell if you're actually awake afterward, or whether you actually managed to make a sound or not (Hotter reports that I was talking in my sleep, so I guess I did). Fevers are weird. Anyway, I've had issues with those kinds of bad dreams being a regular occurence for long periods at various points in my life, and so it was kind of a relief to be able to say "aha, the fever was just baking weird things out of my brain" as opposed to worrying that the nightmares were coming back to stay a spell.

   Hotter took good care of me, bringing me Zofran and ramen and riding herd on the children so I could rest. I was very grateful to have him, because if I'd been on my own today would have been very, very ugly. So in a way maybe this was at least partly a good thing, my being felled by the Middly-virus, in that it reminded me how lucky I actually am?

   Tomorrow if I am capable of being away from my own bathroom I need to go into work, even if I'm not feeling 100%, because it's my boss's first day back after being out of the office for an extended period and I have another Big Meeting. I'm sure it'll go fine; after the absolute success of the last one I'm not worried, I just hope I'm not distractingly ill. 

   How are all of YOU?

upping my dirty hippie-cred

   SO! I felt like my dirty hippie-cred was somewhat diminished after a conversation that happened on my wall over at the Facespace (basically I admitted that while I knew good and well Splenda was already showing up in our waterways and having unknown effects on the feeding pattern of key bottom-of-the-foodchain small critters, I found powdered Stevia in coffee to be utterly repulsive and resorted to some sweet, sweet molecularly-muddled sugar product instead like a damn ecoterrorist and then a bunch of friends weighed in until finally a friend of mine from a third-world country pointed out that were were all a bunch of overly-precious assholes, although not in so many words), plus we were almost out of laundry detergent. So today I followed some instructions I found in several spots around the innernet, added my own little twist, and made us some at home.

 

Homemade Laundry Detergent

  You will need Ivory soap: 

washing soda:

borax:

and (optional) an essential oil of your choice to scent your detergent (I used lavender):

Step One: gather your ingredients. You will also need a large pan or mixing bowl, a grater, and a whisk, as well as something to put your detergent in (I re-used a laundry detergent box that already had a scoop of the right size--you're supposed to use two to four tablespoons of this stuff per load of wash).

Step Two: grate one bar of Ivory per "batch" of detergent that you are making. I found that five "batches" filled our detergent box to about the same level as its' original contents, which was important since I wanted to do a price comparison. Use the fine side of the grater; the soap is very easy to grate and ends up looking a lot like something you'd want to put on top of spaghetti.

Step Three: add one cup per "batch" apiece of the washing soda and borax, blend with the whisk until you reach a nice "scoopable" texture. Then add a few sprinkles of essential oil and blend some more.

   And there you have it: homemade laundry detergent. Here is my box with four of five "batches" in it.

   I did a test load of wash, and in my opinion the homemade detergent works at least as well as what I had been using before (in fact, I think it works BETTER for removing odors--included in the test load were some hand-me-down sweaters my co-worker/friend at PseudoCorp gave me, and she is a smoker so to me they kind of reeked going in but smelled nice and clean coming out). But does this actually save any money? Here are the prices I paid for the ingredients.

Ivory: $18.06 for 32 bars = $0.56 per bar
Washing Soda: $5.97 for 55 oz = $0.87 per cup
Borax: $7.88 for 76 oz = $0.83 per cup
Lavender Oil: $8.75 for 0.5 oz* = I figure I used about $0.10 worth of this per batch

   So one "batch" of homemade detergent costs $2.36, and it took five batches to fill my detergent box. Therefore, the per-box cost of the homemade stuff is $11.80. How does that measure up against the retail equivalent (green-friendly, scented)?

   VICTORY! I saved $2.25, plus there's the intangible value of being insufferable and saying I make my own laundry detergent any chance I get, which you really can't put a price on. Probably I could get the cost down a little further if I bought my ingredients from an actual store (with the exception of the Ivory I ordered mine from Drugstore.com in order to use eBates and get cash back at the rate of 12% as of when I made my purchases, plus "Drugstore dollars" [5%] and accounted for my savings in the prices I listed), but I prefer shopping online, and pretty much ONLY do so when I can score free shipping. This saves me time and schlepping. Plus to really save I'd most likely have to patronize a Soulless Corporate Megalith store, and I don't like to do that; I don't know for a fact that Amazon and Drugstore.com treat their workers well, but I DO know for a fact that Soulless Corporate Megalith treats their workers like SHIT, and that's to say nothing of what they do to small businesses when one comes to town. So I'll take saving the $2.25 and earning bragging rights and call it a day.

   And how are all of YOU?

 

*  If you're looking at what I paid for lavender oil vs. the price listed on the Amazon Affiliates widget and wondering if I be cray, the answer is yes and no. The lavender oil I used was what I had on-hand, which was organic and therefore kind of pricey, but I prefer to use organic essential oils since I mostly use them for bath and body products and other things, like detergent, that will come into contact with human skin. We have sensitive skin here. So I didn't overpay, but I did consciously choose a more expensive product.

well, crap

   So work was good today and the MFA Minivan received a clean bill of health when I took it in for an oil change, tire rotation, and "what fresh hell?" check and I was getting ready to come home, eat dinner with my family, and come on here to talk about how IT'S FINALLY GETTING BETTER, I AM SO TOTALLY LESS MISERABLE, YOU GUYS but then...well. THEN I spent nearly an hour at the pharmacy, where they were trying to charge me more than triple the usual amount for one of Hotter's immunosuppressant meds that he takes to maintain his transplants, and finally paid out of pocket for ONE DOSE of the medication in question (which was $30) for him to take while he called Medicare to straighten stuff out.

   But apparently there's a deductible now. Which would be fine. Except I hadn't planned for it, and we do not have an extra hundred and some bucks just lying around collecting dust, and I have to pick that prescription up TOMORROW (somehow).

   So yeah, big ol' thumbs-down for today.

   Sigh.

blah day

*   Today I had to go into the office late because our pharmacy doesn't open until an hour after I typically start my workday and I had to get a prescription for someone at home before leaving for the day. This made me cranky, and I realized that I am officially an old person, because I seriously did some fist-shaking over the damn pharmacy not opening at 6 a.m. Hello, I am MFA Mama and I am apparently in my eighties!

*   Work today...ehhh. It was a productive day, which was good. The main guy helping me with IT for my project is really nice, and we were able to solve a major problem that was holding up progress on my work-project, so that was a happy thing. My co-workers all asked after Middly, which was sweet of them. I don't know what my problem was though, because I had this overwhelming feeling of "GET ME OUT OF HERE" all day long...this may have been because it was GORGEOUS outside and I wanted to start digging in my garden. 

*   Speaking of which, I ordered all of my seeds this morning while I was waiting for the dadgum pharmacy to open, and also some kelp meal, some worm castings, and a new hoe. What's NOT to love about a new hoe, AMIRITE? I ordered my stuff from here, and I am very, very excited about it. They have organic seeds! THEY HAVE TRIAMBLE SQUASH SEEDS! Also, hoes shaped like squids. You know I got that one, because come on: SQUID!

*   Also ordered today? Hotter's Valentine's Day gift. He's going to love it. He's going to cry real tears of gratitude, and I'm going to have to tell him to pull it together and be a man. I can't wait.

*   BUNNIES! Has (pronounced "Hoss") is the sweetest thing. He's super-cute and likes to be held and petted; I swear he purrs. Pfeffer, a.k.a. "Pfeffer the Heifer," is less cute. She pretty much just eats and gives you the pink side-eye. One of her ears is kind of messed up (the one with the rabbitry tattoo on it--the tattoo goes ALL THE WAY THROUGH HER EAR which I don't think it is supposed to do), and I guess maybe she was struggling when the guy did the tattooing and injured the cartilage or something? She doesn't seem to be in any pain from it, but the one ear is permanently at a rakish angle. It makes her look cranky. Pfeffer doesn't care if you pet her. She don't give a shit! She's like the honey-bunny. Naturally, she is Hotter's favorite.

WFH

   That was my work gchat status for much of the day today. Because while I got up and out the door on time, and arrived at the office in a good mood and tackled my project with renewed enthusiasm after yesterday's fabulous meeting, I had to pick up and leave after only a little over two hours.

   Middle Child woke up puking, puked up the Zofran Hotter gave him, and wouldn't take another dose or let anything near his mouth. Hotter messaged me at work to wave the white flag, and initially I was all "the kid can't be dehydrated yet, what am I going to do that you're not," but then he came back with "I think he needs his mom."

   Ooof.

   Fortunately, my new job is portable and my new managers are some seriously nice people, and I was able to bring my work laptop home. I knew I'd made the right choice when a pitiful little voice greeted me with "fanks for coming home Mommy, I'm rillwy sick." I put The Fear of Mom into Middly by presenting it as "you need this medicine to help you feel better and if you won't take it at home with your mouth I'll have to take you to the hospital to take it with a needle so how about we try one more time," crushed the Zofran to a powder that I mixed with sugar and water, and got it into Middly with a syringe. Less than an hour later he was sitting up and eating ramen and I was dialed in and working from home. YAY!

   In the end I only lost an hour out of my workday, and the best news of all is that Middly hasn't thrown up again and never did run a fever, so I think he'll be okay to go to school tomorrow (it's Pajama Day, which he would have hated to miss) (also, the last time he threw up was riiight before the school-day started, so technically he will have been twenty-four hours vomit-free when he walks into his classroom).

   I love a happy ending!

good day

   I don't want to blow my own horn, y'all, but...actually screw that YEAH I DO!

   Today's work-meeting thingy went as well (from my standpoint) as it possibly could have. I had to "sell" a group of people on the importance of proper document formatting in relation to end-user absorption of written technical material, which is a nit-picky thing that not everyone can appreciate, and to make this extra-hard I was addressing a group of people who are about as far removed from the language arts discipline as you can get. I came up with an analogy, though, that I think helped it "click" for them (it also helped that I was addressing a group of super-smart people; I don't mean to sound superior by implying it was a challenge to convey the information--I'd be equally unlikely to intuitively grasp concepts from their area of expertise) and saw real excitement over the concepts whose importance I was trying to call to everyone's attention in a couple of faces. It was really neat to see that, and also means good things for my work-project, so I'm feeling pretty satisfied about the whole thing. That's kind of a new experience for me, taking pride in my professional performance in a capacity relating to my years and years of higher education (I always take pride in my work, whether it's constructing a well-made sandwich, watering an acre of seedlings, or being the fastest female worker on the job-site with a ratchet tool--it's just EXTRA-neat to feel like my studies contributed to my success in a work environment...teaching, while something I was qualified to do and sometimes did very well, isn't exactly what I studied so that wasn't quite the same).

   Today, despite my catching my stiletto-heel in an elevator-door gap and torquing my bad ankle unpleasantly, was a good day. My stockings even stayed in one piece!

   And how are all of YOU?

tomorrow...

...I have to put on fancy clothes and cloppy high-heeled shoes and makeup and jewelry, and do something with my (freshly cut and colored myself for the occasion) hair and in general try to look like I did not just get an overdraft fee or anything like that and take part in a Very Important Meeting about my work-project. It's not a "maybe if it goes well I'll be hired on permanently" type of meeting, or a "if it doesn't go perfectly my arse is history" type of meeting or anything like that; I am not RUNNING said meeting but rather supporting my boss and standing ready to answer any technical questions that may arise vis a vie The Project, and am confident that it will go well, because I am very good at what I am doing and everyone seems tickled to death with me. So there is no need to be nervous about the actual meeting's outcome or anything, but if you wanted to think some good thoughts for me, that I don't spill coffee down my front or get a ladder in my stockings until AFTER the meeting, I'd appreciate it all the same!