HJ Waxing Moon

I have a jar collection. It's a habit that borders on hoarding, in the sense that I compulsively save them because it seems a shame to get rid of something so useful, except that I actually use and cycle through my jars doing various projects. This is one of those projects. Since I'm allergic to grapes, we simply omit vermouth from any cocktails that call for them. Of course, it means the cocktails are not quite right. I got a wild idea one day to figure out what it would take to make our own, and discovered... it's actually really easy. It just required a lot of small jars. Which I happened to have on hand. There's plenty of recipes online, but it boils down to: Steep some flavorful things in a spirit. Carefully add the flavored spirits into some sort of dry wine, tasting as you go, until you get a flavor you like; the final result seems to be a goal of about 50/50 wine and vodka.  Of course, it's more complicated. For dark drinks, like Manhattans, a...

Mr. Moon is the first to admit that he's scatterbrained and unfocused. And he'll be the first to tell you that if he doesn't have a list, it doesn't get done. However, making lists isn't exactly his strong suit. Thankfully, he married a woman who lives by her love of lists & structure. The hard part is struggling with falling into stuffy old gender roles. Ultimately though, we have to do what's best for each of us and our partnership, utilizing our strengths and working around our weaknesses, even if they're the ones we learned through a society that taught them to us based on our perceived genders. Recognizing where they came from doesn't negate their existence and the reality is that I'm both a lot more organized than him, and have a lot more time to BE organized. With the wedding out of the way and staring down the moving target of daily parenthood, we had a long discussion about priorities and what we want the rest of our lives to look like...

All my life, I have struggled with planners, calendars, hand-held organization devices, computers, smartphones... All in the name of Getting Organized. It usually lasts about 3 months. Part of the struggle of course is that I will start a system and then circumstances will change. When I was scheduled so tightly that I needed to remind myself when to eat and sleep, a planner with multiple lines for every 15 minutes of the day was essential, but sharing it in that kind of detail with others wasn't as critical. When organizing a household of computer-users who had smartphone access, Google Calendar worked wonders. The hardest thing for me to learn is that no system will ever do everything I want it to. I have to pick what's most important to me. Is it having everyone on the same page instantly? Is it having information synced to multiple locations without me re-writing things? Does it need to be color-coded? How far out do I need to be able to see? How much do I care about scribb...

I am not a flower person. I used to have a flower bed as a kid that I shared with my brother, and then we split that as well as the long bed that spanned the front of our house. My brother had a tendency to just pick things and put them in sort of haphazardly, but I would very carefully check to see how far apart each flower needed to be planted, how far it would spread, how much sunlight it needed and how tall it would grow. When I had two squares diagonal from each other to do, each of my squares would be completely covered in plant-life that was colorful with contrast, balance, symmetry, and cascaded down from the tallest plant in the middle to shortest in the corners. Why no one realized with this project that I had OCD, I'm not sure. But not knowing anything was wrong with it, the resulting order brought me peace. Even if I did occasionally throw dirt at my brother because his half of our shared garden was messy. As an adult with chronic fatigue and anxiety (which is an exhaus...

Prepping the garden beds today took a lot less time and effort than I expected. We only had two hours to begin with. I was having an OCD attack and CRANKY!tired, so I supervised and was busy getting a Vitamin D supplement. Mr. Moon decided half an hour in that I needed to eat and he was cooking for me, so hewashed his hands and we both got some breakfast. Then back to it, digging out dead plants and weeds, aerating soil, and evaluating the dirt. I didn't get any before pictures, and I'm sad for it because it's a very VISIBLE change! These pictures were all taken at about 11:30am, and the rear of the house faces west-ish. Here you can see the bed on the right, that used to have a couple tomato plants and some garlic, as well as a tiny bush of oregano. Everything got sacrificed to the compost pile, since there wasn't any good compost for using this year anyway. Not pictured, behind it is the shepherd's hooks with upside-down planters. The left bed got to keep the ga...