Off-farm Day

In order to keep your sanity in rural life, I think everyone needs a few off-farm days a month.  Not too many, heaven knows this lifestyle requires we be on-site to water crops and tend to animals pretty regularly, but the occasional vacation, weekend trip, or just a day away is important.  You need to realize your farm is not the center of the universe, and mingle and mix with all sorts of different types of people.

That's because rural life can be isolating, and if the only voices you hear are the ones from television or the ones you read on the internet, and the only sights you see are the ones within a few miles of home, it seems like your perspective on life and other people will grow smaller as well.  Sure, living in the country brings you peace and quiet, but I'm convinced there are times you need to get out there and see how the rest of the world is doing.

Yesterday Big Ag and I did a road trip to the coast (about 20 minutes west of us, as the crow flies) and took a four mile hike along the headlands.

It certainly puts things into perspective, walking along the edge of the continent, along the ocean which was here before you showed up and will be here long after you're gone.  

The four-mile hike worked up an appetite, plus it was kind of chilly up on the headlands, so we stopped at our favorite beach hang-out and ate outdoors, in the warm sunshine.  If there is not a place in Heaven that looks kind of like this one, I am not sure I want to go lol.

And, as if my Gardenburger and fries were not enough to replace the calories we'd burned hiking, our next stop was for pie.

Mmmm.  Pie. Perspective restored. Back to farm life.

January Tasks

With the new year often comes a renewed sense of organization, routine, and normalcy, which I'm always thankful for after Holiday Craziness. I've spent the last couple of days cleaning out closets, getting rid of things we don't need, thereby making more room to consolidate and put in order what we do have.

January is also the perfect time to get back to canning, taking advantage of fall and winter's bounty to replenish your stored goods.

This month, for instance, is when I usually put up orange marmalade and lemon curd.  Both are useful in a wide variety of dishes and desserts, and both have a place in my pantry.  Well, the marmalade goes to the pantry, the lemon curd goes to the freezer because it keeps better there.

There used to be four.  I have no willpower.

This morning, I used the last of 2012's lemon curd to make some lemon pies.  Don't they look good?  

While we're on the subject of citrus, this is also a great month to start some Limoncello, using fresh lemons.  The recipe I like to use is here: Tramie's Kitchen -- Limoncello

I am currently also dealing with the last of fall's pumpkins.  We've had soup and pumpkin spice bread since December and are all about bloody well sick of it about now, so I will puree our remaining pumpkins, plop the puree into a Mason Jar and then forget about it in the bottom of my freezer use it later. 

 

Someday it will look good to me again.

While I don't anticipate any more calls for pumpkin pie, we may get a wild-hair urge to have some pumpkin bread come October or so, before next year's gourds are ready, so this is a perfect solution.

Tiny Lions

Some people have decorative stone lions sitting at either side of the entry way to their homes.  I have real ones.

Enablers

At the end of my shift at the winery last night, my neighbors David and Ray stopped in for some drinks and to drop off presents for me.  I had watched their chickens and cats while they were away for the holidays so they brought me,among other things, a box of divine chocolates from Amsterdam, where one member of their family had been traveling.

Of course I protested the box of chocolates, saying it was the New Year and, oh my, I didn't need the calories.  Once I got home however, I will tell you that within four hours, the top layer of chocolates in the box was gone, and I was probably the biggest consumer of it.  And they were delicious.

Likewise, I gave them a cookie tin last month for Christmas, filled with chocolate toffee bars and maple cookies.  At the time they protested, but told me yesterday that they polished the whole tin off within a day as well.

Bottom line is this:  We are all enablers.  And, most of the time, that's OK.

But there is a serious side to this, too.  Friends, family and even people you don't know can often be the worst influences in our lives. Sometimes, like with the chocolates and the Christmas cookies, it's a fairly harmless thing (well, except for your waistline).  But in the world of your acquaintances or internet friends, enablers can be your cheerleaders, causing you to think bad ideas are good and destructive tendencies are healthy.  They can cheer you on to make the most horrible decisions, merely because where there's no accountability, there's often no morality.

Want to see if you can survive for a year eating only McDonald's?  Bet you'd get plenty of "likes" for that if you created a website documenting it. Want to quit your job and live in the city park?  Someone will want to see you do it.  They may even send you money to help encourage you to go for it.

But really, the only true enabler is yourself.  The old adage your mother used to say, of, "if your friends told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?" is true.  If that is the basis upon which you make decisions, you will make crappy decision after crappy decision.  Other people cannot always be relied upon to tell you what is best for you. Only you can do that. 

Consumption of chocolate and Christmas goodies are places where allowing yourself to be enabled can be OK.  As long as you know where to draw the boundaries.  Because, bottom line, all enabling begins at home.  You are, really, the one holding the scepter, king or queen of your world, making the final decision for how your life is managed.  Rule wisely.

Removing oil from boots

Tried a home remedy for removing oil (olive oil in this case) from distressed western boots, and it worked extremely well!  Of course you have to start by actually spilling the oil on your boots in the first place, so my instructions will begin there:

1.  Help with clean up after a work event, and lift several plates off a table with a olive oil-filled ramekin atop it.

2.  Have ramekin slip and spill said olive oil-filled ramekin on nearby customer, getting it all over their shirt and one large drop on your boots.

3.  Apologize profusely to customer, wipe them up as best you can and comp their meal. (He was very nice about it; I was mortified.)

4.  Come home at day's end and put a large blob of cornstarch on the spot on the boot.  Leave overnight.

5.  The next morning, brush off cornstarch; the spot will be barely noticeable, definitely not the black spot it was before.

(If you do this at home, you might want to get the cornstarch on sooner, and I'm thinking that would be even better.

You know me. ...Always willing to share helpful hints with other homesteaders, especially klutzy ones like myself.

Sleep -- Nature's First Homeopathic Remedy

So on New Year's Eve, I started feeling puny about 10 pm or so., while driving home from a party we'd gone to at a coworker's house.  Thinking it was something I ate, I went to bed and suffered from an upset stomach all night, which left me tossing and turning until morning, at which point I felt even worse than before.

So needless to say, New Year's Day was not fun for me.  And realizing that, I took to my bed -- first from 11 am until about 1 pm that day, and then again at 7 :30 pm until 8:30 am the following day.  For those of you keeping track, that means I slept approximately 15 hours within a 24 hour period.  And, not surprisingly, I awoke yesterday feeling like the walking wounded -- still not 100 percent, but leagues better than I had been the day before.  I was even able to go into work, and found my energy had returned to about 100 percent of normal by noon.

In our modern society, where we are always going, going, going, we lament illnesses not so much as alarming physical symptoms that mean the wonderful machine known as our body is fighting off some kind of microscopic invader, but rather as inconveniences, impediments from going to work, from accomplishing, and from doing ever more.

And because of that, we miss out on nature's most powerful restorative, that of sleep.  Sleep, where the body quiets and our immune system can fight, unhindered by stress.  Sleep, where damaged cells are rejuvenated, and where the body lies still enough to heal.

We don't like sleep much in our society, in fact, get a group of hard workers together and it often turns into a brag-fest about how little sleep each one thinks they need each night.  But, ultimately, I think lack of sleep results in nothing but illness, both short and long-term.  And especially when we're ill, I think the worst thing we can do is take some kind of pill to enable ourselves to keep going when our body is telling us, in clear and simple language, that we just need to STOP.

So my advice to my homesteading friends who are going to suffer from colds or flu this year is this:  Get your farm chores done (or better yet, have someone do them for you), go inside the house, tuck yourself into bed and sleep.  Just sleep.  Let your body manage your healing the way it best knows how to do.

Because somewhere deep down inside you, as you snuggle under the covers and fall into the exhausted sleep we only get when we're truly ill, your body will fight the good fight and you will awake,  weak but healing, slightly drained but on the path to restoration.  

Sleep is the best medicine, and is truly the first homeopathic remedy, used for as long as mankind has been mankind.

Blech

Slept for 13 hours last night.  Symptoms:  General feeling of malaise, fussy stomach, chills.  It started New Year's Eve, which I attributed to something I ate during our dinner out at a local Italian place.  Now I'm not so sure the tiramisu was to blame.  I may just be fighting off a bug of some sort -- the same one that has waylaid several of my co-workers recently.  I'm not well enough that I feel good, but not really sick enough that I can definitely say I've got something.  It's weird.

But either way, blech.