HJ Waxing Moon

The rule in our house has always been, "Those who don't believe in Santa don't receive gifts for Christmas." So it stands that at 30 & 33, my brother and I have never uttered words that might indicate Mr. Claus might possibly be imaginary, and certainly not in front of our mother. Magic, bringing gifts for parents to wrap (those overworked elves, you know), possibly non-corporeal, maybe even formerly-a-person but currently just an idea. But not real? NEVER. Sometime when I was in middle school and my brother was in high school, my mom had a kind of genius idea. Instead of taking the time to write tags on gifts for us from Santa, she grabbed (what I'm assuming is like 12 rolls) some wrapping paper that clearly related to each of our interests. In our case, it was the Tazmanian Devil & Winnie the Pooh. We each got a couple gifts from our parents and some years even each other, but all Santa gifts to a person were in their own wrapping paper with no tags. I...

The lawn! It's been cut! I know it seems silly to be so joyful about something so simple, but the lawn had gotten OUT OF CONTROL the last two weeks. It drew quite a bit of attention to the fact that our front yard is half overgrown with clover and moss, when the grass was getting a foot high in some places! But, finally, FINALLY the rain had stopped for a long enough period of time at the same time Mr. Moon had time off work, and he was able to get out and hack the top off the greens, making them at least all the same height out there. It's still a bit long, and will need to come back a bit more later in the week, but it's bad to cut the grass too much in one go so he left the mower at the highest setting which seems to be about 6 inches. I know. Shameful. The back was and still is worse, and the flower beds have had so much grass-creep that they look horrible. Looks like edging the beds is going to have to be our highest priority project. The day even started early t...

When the weeks get long and busy, when the world seems like it's creeping in to keep you from housekeeping, focus on the kitchen and the bathroom(s). As long as you have someplace to cook a good home-cooked meal, and you can take a shower and brush your teeth without stepping over clutter or having to stare at globs of toothpaste, everything else can wait until next week. But if the next week and the next come around and you're still "just having a busy week," it's time to accept this as your life and start finding ways to get the rest of the house onto a cleaning schedule and back into rotation. Maybe it's letting go of the idea that you have to do all of something at once--wipe down the mirror while you're thinking about it, scrub the toilet later, sweep the kitchen without mopping or run the vacuum in one room at a time if that's what it takes. For us, having a set schedule is what's really helped. Occasionally, the vacuuming gets put off lo...

When I was in culinary school, one of the other students showed the class a trick to peeling ginger without losing any of the flavorful fresh. She used a teaspoon to gently scrape off the papery peel, leaving all of the flesh in tact. This is the same person who taught me to peel hard-boiled eggs. Crack the shell thoroughly on the counter, peel off the large end where the air bubble is, and stick a teaspoon between the shell and flesh. Move the spoon around the shell, separating the membrane from the egg white, and you may be able to pull the shell off completely, still attached to the membrane. Sometimes you have to break the membrane down the side and peel off in a flatter piece rather than an egg-shaped one, but that's ok. It saves your thumbs from little poke and slices peeling the shell by hand! Tip: When rotating the egg, lift the lead edge of the spoon into the shell. You may break the membrane early and have to slip the spoon between the shell and egg again to get the ...

Halloween in my favorite holiday. I love the decorations, I love dressing up in costume, I love the fall air and the parties and the traditions. Growing up, my family had a tradition of making a crockpot of chili and hot dogs on Halloween night. I remember spending the month ahead of Halloween hanging out in the living room for frequent fittings while my mom sewed my costumes and watched Tigers baseball or the World Series. I remember the year my mom made my costume in August and then discovered two days before Halloween that I'd had a growth spurt and she had to let it out (oddly I don't remember what the costume was!). For some reason I'm just not feeling it this year. I don't know why. Part of it could just be the crappy situation we're in. Some of it I'm sure is probably this underlying depression and the funk I've been in. A lot I know is frustration with my body and not being able to wear the costumes I want to wear, or have the energy to do a lot of...

I'm late to the party, but not TOO late! I saw on one of my favorite blogs ( A Slob Comes Clean ) about this 31 days challenge from The Nester . Pick a topic, write on it for 31 days. With all the menu planning around here, I thought perhaps pictures of meals were in order. I've been focusing so much on homecooked food, it just seems right to share more of it with you guys. I'll still be tossing up a menu plan on Sundays, and discussing such things as Building Healthy Relationships and the Latest Dirt in the garden. But I'd like to also focus on the #1 goal we've been working toward for ages (homecooked meals) and combining it with a goal of less-wordy posts. So I hope for this 31 day challenge to also be a big boost to my Quick + Dirty category, short little snippets of posts that whet your appetite without being too heavy. (I have no idea why that says there are no posts while simultaneously saying I have a bunch of them, but I'll have to work on that.)...

As I mentioned before , Mr. Moon and I try to do a weekly date night. We're pretty lax about what Date Night entails, sometimes it's bowling with friends, sometimes it's a movie out, and sometimes (especially when the money is tight) it's a movie in with a "fancified" dinner. As long as it's intentional, mindful, and spending time together. This week, we managed to make a really nice spread with all things we had in the house (except I ended up having to buy a loaf of french bread). We turned the couch so it faced the TV, threw in a Blockbuster by mail DVD, and had a spread of finger foods. So much easier to eat when sitting at a coffee table! Plus I'd been wanting to do an appetizer dinner at some point. Counter-Clockwise from Left (for reasons which will become clear): Grass-fed, all-natural Painted Hills sirloin steak, cooked in olive & truffle oils with garlic, basil, oregano, and crimini salt.  Bruschetta: french bread, toasted with o...

It's small, but it's a start. Top to bottom: Kale, Radishes, Broccoli Raab. These are the ones that demanded lots of sun on the package, but I admit I didn't plant in rows or pay attention to how far apart they should have been planted. Of course I saved the packages, and intend to thin out to the appropriate spacing and eat the micro/baby greens.  This is mustard. There are tiny beet sprouts, but the red against the dirt just isn't terribly visible with a camera. It just occurred to me that the mustard and broccoli had been attacked by aphids but are not near any protecting companions, so I'm going to either have to get some garlic into these beds STAT or be diligent with the garlic-pepper spray. I refuse to put mint into my raised beds, because then I'll never get rid of it! This is the mint we harvested from the mint garden, to make room for cauliflower and carrots. Since there is absolutely no way we were going to get ALL the mint out forever...

See that? That would be Mr. Moon taking his blind date to the prom. Apparently. Anyway, when this plant started growing, we thought it was a thistle. It got so tall, growing there in the drainage flow of the compost pile, and we were so excited to see how big the thistle flower would be on a stalk that is 1.5 inches in diameter, and then suddenly--YELLOW! [Get it? Blind date, because it was an unidentified plant and he's wearing a silly tuxedo shirt? Yeah, I find myself funny, it's ok, you don't have to laugh. As long as Mr. Moon does. It's required for him to laugh at my jokes.] Our friend growing next to the compost pile was apparently not a thistle, so I took this picture and posted it on my Facebook soliciting advice. My mother-in-law (except not really because she's my sister-in-law's mom but whatevs) piped up right away to tell me it is apparently called Prickly Lettuce , but that it is in fact not edible. Also very invasive, so we needed to get tho...

Did you ever hear the tip about using old beer as slug bait? I hadn't, until I had something eating my cauliflower leaves and saw one on my garlic. 2+2 probably = 4. Enter: the beer that's been skunking around in the garage for a good long while, which Mr. Moon and I are too afraid to taste test in case it has in fact gone bad. A couple cups of beer set near the cauliflower and broccoli, removal of any chewed leaves, and we haven't seen any more damage to them. I did, however, have to snag Mr. Moon to help me save the garlic yesterday, as I went out to pick some herbs for the fish and saw at least a dozen munching on the garlic scapes. We used a skewer and a chopstick (I recommend the former rather than the latter) to pluck them off and drop them into the beer. Later, I stuck my head out and watched another one crawl its way into the bowl. I want to feel bad about killing living creatures, but as far as I'm concerned there are worse ways to go than drowning in beer...

I saw this around somewhere and had to try it. The idea is that you can put the white-ends of scallions in water and they will grow, and that you can just keep cutting them off and letting them regrow indefinitely. Last week sometime I took all the white ends of some scallions and put them in water. A few days later, I added some other scallions I'd used. Kept the water changed every few days, used some as needed. This is the result! It seems like it takes about 4 days to grow from nubbins to a full, useable stalk. I'm considering getting another bunch of stems to use and make starts, because what I have here I use most or all of at once and then have to wait. I'd like to have at least a couple different batches going so that I always have some available to use. *Tip: Cut them all the way down into the white part of the onion, past any spots where they split off. Otherwise they seem to grow slower and not as sturdily, the tips get brown, and you end up with some spot...

It seems like time gets away from us, we look ahead at what we have yet to do and we forget to appreciate what we've accomplished already. Some of my favorite blogs have a feature where they re-cap their month, but it's usually just a re-cap of their posts. You can scroll for that. Five little things we accomplished in April that are really kind of big: * Mr. Moon and I re-affirming our commitment to each other, our relationship, and ourselves. * So many little moments that culminated in creating good habits. Evidence: The kitchen scrubbing today that only took 45 minutes, including cleaning up from breakfast. Mr. Moon getting lunch today before he walked out the door to work, and it was even a healthy lunch at that! * You can see 50% of the floor in the garage. * Nothing falls out of the freezers when you open them. * The laundry hampers don't have a single full load, there's only one load of clean stuff sitting around to be folded, and I haven't done m...

Isn't she so precious?? My first chive blossom. Well, bud. I'd read that they make pretty purple flowers, but never seen one. Looking forward to what becomes of it.

A couple weeks ago, I was so fed up with the playlist I'd been using in my car that I switched to a different one. And promptly skipped through every single track until iTunes told me I didn't have anything else in that playlist. I almost threw my phone out the window. Then I went to switch out my music to something else and I couldn't find anything that wasn't so overplayed in my head that I could even listen to it. Sounds like it's time for some new music. So I posted to Facebook, asking for some non-American artists to try out. I enjoy listening to super-poppy music in the car and while I'm cleaning because it gives me energy, so I was looking for something similar from other countries. Unsurprisingly, I got a lot of British artists in the responses. I also spent some time looking for Australian top 40 hits to find some of their artists. I love Pandora for this reason. I may have only gotten a few responses, some of them even similar artists, but I coul...

In our neighborhood, there is a little fairy door I drive past every day (usually a few times). It's right at the base of someone's driveway, and the flowers have filled in and bloomed over the last few days so I finally got down there to take a picture of it. My Dad built my mom a fairy door, and he is just tickled by them, so every time I see this one it makes me think of him. We got down there and realized that beyond just a fairy door and a few flowers, there are also these two ADORABLE tree gnomes! You can only see one here, but it looks like he is supposed to be climbing down a rope held by the top gnome, so they can abscond with a few fairy mushrooms. Problem is, the rope itself has frayed and broken in the wind, so now it looks like the rope broke in the middle of his buddy rescuing him from the fairies and he's falling back down! Too funny. Little things like this make me smile. Oh, did I tell you we named our garden gnome? His name is Mr. Mustard. Because he...

If there are two phrases I've heard most over the last month, it's these two. One of them is a disaster in the making, the other is the number one way to organization in our home. "Where does this live?" -- If it's in your hand, or on the counter, or on the floor, ask yourself this question. But baby steps! Pick one! I started organizing The Bachelor Pad of Mr. Moon's when I moved in by simply asking this every time I had something in my hand. Eventually, I had to pick something up off the counter or the floor, and then it would be in my hand! And then I would ask, and it would go there. If I hadn't picked it up to move it yet, then it obviously wasn't a priority yet. * Tip: If you have something that doesn't have a home, make one that's logical for it. Some blogs will tell you to designate a basket for these things, and then find homes for them when the basket is full. Problem is, I never found a home for that basket! I seemed to do much ...

There are plenty of tutorials for cast iron care across the internet, I'm not going to re-invent the wheel here. I had a great system for caring for my cast iron pans, and they have lasted me for years, and will likely get passed onto my kids. But when switching away from paper towels, I had a few hiccups in my system. I used to wipe the vegetable oil onto my cast iron with a paper towel, and though it gave me lint issues, it was how I was taught and I didn't know a better way. I tried to delegate one washcloth to being soaked in oil, but it got black and I put it in the pile with the dirty towels to get washed. Then before it got washed, I needed to season my pan again, and I ended up with three different cloths that were saturated in oil and nothing would clean it out. Worse, they had mingled with the rest of the towels and I have a bunch of towels that still don't absorb very well due to the grease content. (Cleaning those is a project for Future Heather.) Insert som...

My partner and I hate top sheets. Neither of us has used them since we were old enough to stop putting them on the beds. I had a tendency to kick them off in the night, while keeping the comforter firmly in place. But of course, when you buy sheet sets, they come with this huge piece of fabric. Bonus fabric! What do we do with them? Curtains: If the "head" end is sewn on the sides, just snip a couple threads and you have a curtain panel that matches your sheets. Pillow cases: A few seams and you have extra pillow cases or even a body-pillow case! Cut it up for "family cloth" or cleaning rags or whatever else suits your fancy. Face cleaning cloths! Couch covers--when you have OCD and three cats who shed badly and a flea infestation (though we got both those figured out, phew!), you want couch covers you can remove to wash easily and regularly. And my newest favorite: Bed skirt. Put the flat sheet under the mattress, on top of the box spring. If you have a f...