Goal for August - Just One Makes a Difference

I'm about a week late on my goals, but that's okay.  My new goal for August is getting 30 mpg in my wagon, as opposed to the 29 mpg I get now. It seems a really strange goal, but that would give me another 11 miles to drive before fill ups. That one mpg difference saves me $1.28 each fill up, or about $7 per month.

How Will This Work?
Slow down. Since I live in the metropolitan area of not one but two major cities, I have a lead foot. I must admit that I regularly travel 15 mph over the speed limit. I've tried a number of times to slow down, but my speed always creeps up.

Better maintain the car.  My brother taught new how to change my oil... 8,000 miles ago. I am more than due for another change. This one will be all on my own. I'll actually post on this when I do it.

No more idling. Miss F has always fallen asleep in the car on the way home from my stroller-based exercise class. No one ever wakes a sleeping baby, so I often sit in the car with her in my driveway, sometimes leaving her there while I pick weeds in the front yard. Once it started getting warm out, I worried abut those stories about babies dying in hot cars. So I'd let the car idle with the air on. It was a lovely side effect that she'd stay asleep longer when idling than when just sitting. Since the weather is unseasonably cool, I'm now turning the car off and opening the window. I won't leave her alone anymore so that I can monitor the temperature.

Drive like there's an egg on the pedal. My dad taught me this when I first learned to drive, but I blew it off once I became more confident. By driving this way, you're less likely to accelerate and brake hard. Fewer changes in speed equals less gas consumption.

Fill up at halfway empty rather than waiting for the light. There are mixed thoughts on whether the level of gasoline in your tank affects your mpg. But it's irresponsible of me to transport a baby in a car whose emergency gas light is frequently on. So if it helps my mpg, great, but it's not my major motivation.

"Can Do": Overcoming Canning Fears

I have a very hard time canning because I have a small kitchen and no dishwasher.  But I desperately want to have the shelves lined with gorgeous home-processed canned goods.  Every time I get large quantities of food, I end up vacuum sealing it and freezing it because it's easier than sterilizing jars, filling the canner, finding unused lids, and processing the jars.

But now we have a cow coming in.  My freezer is FULL.  I have no room for the meat we're about to pick up.  So I put my big girl pants on and got to canning.  I started out easy, with half of a bushel of peaches.  They were on the seconds rack at our farm market.  I only lost four or five out of the whole batch to mold, which is a big deal for me.

 

I also reprocessed the strawberry preserves that I had made.  It didn't have enough pectin the first time around.

Canning those were so easy, that I asked my brother to pick up some more peaches.

With 16 quarts of peaches under my belt, I moved to tackle a big fear and source of anxiety:  pressure canning.  My mom gave me her old Mirro pressure canner a while back.  It has a weight instead of a gauge, and I had no idea what I was doing.  But I consulted the internet and my Ball canning book, and voila!

There are still some green beans in the fridge from the half bushel I bought.  I think that 6 quarts is enough for storage (for now) and that these will become ham and green beans for an easy dinner.

If You Give a Mouse Some Chocolate...

...it will want to live in your pantry forever.

We've been seriously deep cleaning and decluttering our house for about two weeks now.  There are a lot of items that haven't had a place in the rooms we've been clearing out, so they ended up in the pantry.  Namely, three large bags of gift bags, some mason jar boxes that I wanted to keep to organize the freezer, a winter blanket, a mattress pad, and some bulk kitty litter, baking soda, and vinegar.  They make it difficult to get into the pantry, but we've been eating a lot of fresh food, so it didn't matter too terribly much.

I went down to get some rolled oats for Oatmeal Pancakes a la Momzoo, and I saw something very disheartening:  two chocolate bars had the corners gnawed off.  I was just down there getting a bar of chocolate the other day and they were fine.  A closer look showed mouse-sized teeth marks.  It could have possibly been our cats, but I doubted it.  The door is always shut and latched.

Then I saw this:

And this:

We do in fact have a mouse (or mice).  When I started pulling things out of the pantry, Wicket got excited.  She jumped all over everything, sniffing it.

And when she had her fill of that, she visited the back of the pantry itself.

We left the door open for the cats to peruse the pantry at their leisure.  I expected to wait a few days before anything happened.  But *B* and I were watching TV tonight when the cats were pouncing around, and we heard a squeak.  There he was!  In our living room, a whole floor above the pantry.  *B* and I sprang into action and scooped him into an empty kitty litter bucket.

He is so CUTE!   *B* liberated him in a strategically distant location.  I'm hoping that he was the only one for two reasons.  One, I don't want to have to worry about having mice in the house.  Two, if there are more mice, there is a greater likelihood that the cats will finish them off before

The "Sweet" Smell of Chemicals

It's been about three months since we got rid of the chemicals in our house - poisons, cleaners, shampoo, non-natural soaps, etc.  I haven't really noticed how the smell of our house has changed in that amount of time.  But apparently, my nose has been noticing.

Thanks to FlyLady, I've been decluttering my house for the past week.  I'm finding things that I haven't seen in years (and we've only lived in this house 3.5 years).  In particular, I found three little TSA-approved bottles full of soap, shampoo, and something unidentifiable (more soap or shampoo?).  Since we aren't using these products anymore, I dumped them down the drain in the tub so that I could reuse the bottles.  Immediately, the smell of these three little 3 oz bottles overwhelmed me.  My bathroom smelled so bad.  It was a sickly sweet and decidedly chemical smell.  I couldn't wash the stuff down the drain fast enough.  The bottles have been soaking and drying for the last day and my bathroom still smells bad.  It gave me a pretty bad headache.

I'm now acutely aware of other people's perfumes, soaps, and deodorant.  When ever my future sister-in-law (*A*) holds Miss F, she smells like *A*'s perfume for the whole day.  There are some women in my exercise class who reek of deodorant - not perfume, deodorant.  I never would have noticed that smell before.

Housework with FlyLady

The other day, I had casually glanced at a friend's frantic plea on Facebook.  Her house was out of control and she needed help.  Many women who responded to her said "FlyLady.  She changed my life!"

So I decided to check it out.  I popped over to FlyLady's website.  It's really overwhelming if you take it in at once, but I wandered over to the BabySteps section.  BabyStep One:  shine your sink.  So I did.  And wouldn't you know, it felt great.  Once my sink was shiny and clean, I started cleaning my stove top.  Then the counters.  Then the cabinets.  That one little shiny sink spurred a clean kitchen revolution.

BabyStep Two:  Get dressed all the way down to lace up shoes.  Again, I didn't think this would be a big deal.  But I was MUCH more productive after putting on those shoes than I was before.  Maybe it's because I couldn't feel the crumbs on my feet, or I didn't mind walking out onto a hot deck to do laundry.  Or that I felt like I was doing a job rather than hanging around my house.

There are many more BabySteps (31 in all) but those two have been the most influential for me so far.  As proof, this is what I did today:

• Washed and dried bed sheets and bathroom floor mat
• Put out recycling for pick up
• Washed outdoor trash can
• Washed indoor recycling can
• Made breakfast
• Scrubbed toilet
• Scrubbed tub floor
• Cleaned bedroom
• Vacuumed bedroom
• Washed and dried diapers
• Sorted dirty laundry
• Put stain remover on stained clothing
• Put frozen onions into jars
• Made and froze peach pie filling
• Froze peach peels for future jam
• Made the bed with clean sheets
• Baked bread
• Made black bean soup for lunch
• Got a shower
• Ate lunch
• Did lunch dishes with Miss F
• Colored with Miss F
• Read with Miss F
• Swept the kitchen floor
• Picked up Miss F's mess
• Put clothes away
• Made dinner
• Went to work for four hours
• Scrubbed half-bath toilet

On top of that, I probably did five loads of dishes throughout the course of the day.  Compare this to my normal day: maybe a load of laundry, a couple of loads of dishes, and cooking/reheating three meals a day.  If I was lucky, I'd sweep the kitchen floor as well.

I don't know if it was thanks to FlyLady, but I'm very optimistic about all that I can do in the coming days, weeks, and beyond.

Finally Over Ants

I was desperate.  Every year, around June, we get ants in our kitchen.  We've tried commercial products, but we didn't like having them near the cats and the baby.  So I ignored them as best as I could and kept the counters clean.  But they were persistent.  I was flicking off of me every time I worked in the kitchen.

Finally, I decided to make my own traps.  I had asked *B* to make some, but he hadn't gotten around to it.  So I googled it, and wouldn't you know, there were tons of recipes.  I used one from Stacy Makes Cents: sugar, water, and a little borax melted together, cooled, and poured into jar lids.  I let the lid sit there for a little bit and nothing happened.  But I accidentally trailed some on the counter, and they came swarming.  I made a long streak for them

This is just a little bit of the ant activity we got yesterday.  You can see the outline of the trails given how the ants are distributed.

And today?  I've had very few ants.  It's not perfect, there are still some wandering around.  But it's no where near as many as I had before.  I'm very happy with the results given that it was made out of things I had lying around the house.

Who's Having Seconds?

A local farm has a fruit market out of which they sell mostly their produce, a small amount of produce from other farms (near and far), their baked goods, and some housewares.  There are three things I LOVE about this place:

1. They have the best peaches ever.  My mom makes peach cake out of them.  Drool...
2. They have a snowball stand in their parking lot.  It's a ridiculous cup full of shaved ice and chemicals, but it reminds me of my childhood.  It is different from a sno-cone in that it is mostly sugary chemicals, not mostly ice.
3. They have an amazing section full of #2 grade produce.

*B* and I decided to go visit them today, which is about a 25 minute drive from our house.  It was totally worth it.  He bought me a snowball as a treat (he doesn't like them).  It might have been my last snowball ever.  They were exactly what I remember, but no longer as appealing as they used to be.  All I could think of was the names of the artificial colors that went into it.

This is the produce we bought.  None of it was full price.  We got 11 bags of produce from the 50 cent rack. 

In those bags, we got 7 heads of cauliflower, 3 ears of corn, 2 green peppers, 1 head of lettuce, 4 celery bunches, 3 bags of carrots, 5 onions, 3 lemons, and 2 large bags of apples that weigh almost 15 pounds.  All of that food cost $5.50.  The onions, carrots, peppers, and celery will be chopped up and frozen.  The cauliflower will be blanched and frozen for vegetable curries in the future.  Apples will become applesauce and apple butter.  I'll can them for use in the future.  The corn, lettuce, and lemons will be used in food in the next week.

There are four five pound bags of potatoes on the right front corner of the table.  Each of those five pound bags cost $0.99.  I'll be cutting, blanching, and freezing those in the next couple of days.

On top of all of that, we also bought 2 half-pecks of #2 grade peaches (white plastic bags).  They were the most expensive at $4.95 per half-peck.  But that is much cheaper than their normal peaches.  The girl at the counter dropped the peaches when trying to get them into the bag (oops) so they were more than badly bruised.  I had to deal with them right away.  So I peeled them and sliced them as best I could.  I have three bowls:  peach flesh, peach skins, and inedible parts.  Out of the peach flesh, I'll make pie filling and other tasty treats.  Out of the skins, I'm going to try to make peach skin jam.  And the inedible bits go out in the compost.

My back was starting to hurt from standing over the sink about halfway through the peaches, so I took a break (ha) and chopped onions instead.  I put all of the onions in a rough flat layer on a cookie sheet.  It went into the freezer tonight, and will be transferred into a jar in the morning.

Grand total for all of this food:  less than $20.  Our total bill was $28 after buying a ton of no-sugar pectin (to fix the strawberry jam I made a month ago), a knife for Miss F, and a treat for *B* since he didn't like snowballs.  The knife was a little bit of an impulse buy.  It's a small, blunt, crinkle cut knife with a black handle.  I saw it just today on How We Montessori.  There was only one there, and I had never seen it before, so we decided to pick it up.

So...wasn't your goal for the month to not buy groceries?

I'm learning a lot out of this month's project.  If I were still buying groceries every week (or more often) as I had been, I probably would have stopped to think about it.  *B* and I have talked about it, and we've determined this:  we want to market as people used to do in "the old days."

Weekly, we'll purchase fresh produce.  We're determining whether or not milk falls into this category.  We consider this the same thing as going to the market.  

Monthly, we'll go to the grocery store for sale items.  Our grocery store has sales that last a month instead of a week.  For the month, we'll make up a list of items we need that are on sale.  When we go, we stock up for our pantry.  We think of it as going to the general store to fill our larder.  Our first trip there at the end of July will include things that are not on sale to help fill voids we've discovered in our pantry, but we will then stick to sales-only in August.

Bi-monthly (or longer term), we'll go to Costco to get big bulk items like kitty litter and toilet paper.  And even then - toilet paper?  Talk of family cloth has been bandied about, but we'll see what happens with that later.