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...

I'm proud to announce the birth of my nibling ! Of course for his personal privacy we will not be posting his name, but in honor of his chubby cheeks, let's call him... Gus Gus.  This is my bio-brother's first kid, but the bestie I adopted as a sister about 18 years ago has three already so I'm old hat at the Aunt thing: Arrive at nap time with noisy toys, chat with Mom until the screaming hurts my ears, run away and let the parents pick up the pieces. That's about it, right? I'm unsurprised at how homesick this has made me. One of my biggest fears with moving far away from my hometown has been proven to be valid. It took me so long to do so because I knew it would mean missing major milestones in my families' lives, and every time it's happened so far has felt like a kick in the stomach for me. On the up side, technology has been progressing such that I now have multiple ways of video chatting with my family members back home. I've Skyped...

The last few months have been one of life's most ambivalent times. You know the ones, where good things are happening and you think you should be feeling guilty being happy when others or even ourselves are hurting over the pain and loss that life brings us. Navigating grief while planning a wedding has been on our minds a lot. We know that Mr. Moon's father's absence in our wedding celebrations will be notable, and trying to find ways to grieve and honor him in such a joyous occasion hasn't been easy. It's not even a situation to which we've found a solution that feel right, yet. But this entire endeavor I think has been good for me. Despite my lack of mental health care at the moment (which is a long story and a rant for another day), I've found myself navigating a lot of intense emotions and stressful situations with more grace and self-love than I really expected to experience. Mr. Moon and I have our spats for sure, but those even haven't been as ...

I'd like to start with a little announcement... Mr. Moon and I are getting married!! He popped the question at my birthday party and of course, I said yes. Now we're in the whirlwind process of wedding planning. Which brought me to finally having a reason to buy the book that started one of my favorite blogs, Offbeat Bride . So the book is $13.30 on Amazon with prime, 2-day free shipping. Or I could get it "used" but really new for $9-10 including shipping, but I'd have to wait longer. But let's check out the local book store? There's one I like a lot in town where they have a restaurant in the bookstore and a pub downstairs. But according to their website, they don't have the book in stock and it says it ships in 1-5 days. Plus I have to pay $17. Plus I have to put on pants, leave my house, talk to people, and I will probably buy a coffee or a beer while I'm there. Financially, for me, it makes sense to buy it online, even if I pay the ext...

Funny garden update: We have a grey squirrel that invaded my sage today, and I scared Mr. Moon by opening the door and yelling, "EXCUSE YOU!" at it (he thought someone was invading the house!). I had seen some digging marks before, but hadn't had the motivation or time to deal with it whenever I noticed on my way in or out the door. I mixed up a little sriracha and garlic and water, dumped that around the plants, and am hoping that will keep the little bugger from digging up my sage again. There is plenty of dirt around here, he doesn't need to go digging in mine! We are so far REALLY enjoying this twice a week menu planning. Much easier to account for perishable foods this way! Wednesday Stuffed Peppers w/ gorgonzola & bacon Sides: Sautéed summer squash, steamed green beans Day off, lots of unpacking today! We kept pushing off the stuffed peppers because when we were thinking about dinner it was too late to take two hours to make it. So we roasted ...

Once upon a time, I decided I wanted to make Gumbo. I'd never had gumbo before, and I wanted to try it. So I looked up about 100 different recipes, and figured out what they all had in common: Roux, especially a peanut butter roux Mirepoix Stock, mostly chicken stock Spice Andouille sausage (in most of them) Shrimp (also in most but not all) Well, I had no idea what half of that was. So I started asking questions.  What is a roux? It's a thickening agent for sauces and soups. It's a mixture of equal parts fat and flour. You melt the fat and mix the flour into it slowly so as to avoid lumps. Works best if you sift the flour directly into the fat. You can use pretty much any fat, but lard, bacon grease and butter are preferred. All purpose flour is best, but gluten-free websites have other suggestions with good results and you can use whole wheat for some things but you may have to adjust your proportions and thickening expectancy. It is great for anything you ...

We all have our strengths and weaknesses, our victories and failures, our blessings and our faults. Today we celebrate the good things our country has accomplished, take a break for a moment to appreciate the freedoms we are afforded by our citizenship, and renew our promise of stewardship of the American Dream.  Today we are thankful.  Tomorrow we wake up, alive another day, rested and free to roll up our sleeves to get back to the work at hand of bettering ourselves and our nation. Some people say we should be this patriotic every day. I say if we did this every day, we wouldn't appreciate it as much because it would be the new normal. Heck, some days I don't want to live in this country, let alone claim it as my own. Take a moment to appreciate the good parts, because we still have a lot of work to do on the parts that are still a bit broken. 

Glad my love made it to 31 years of life. We're having a fire pit party tonight to celebrate and wish him 31 more! I chickened out on baking a cake. Picked up a chocolate fudge cake from our favorite natural foods store, instead. Less stressful that way. Hope everyone has a weekend as blessed with friends and joy as our certainly will be!

This is my first year celebrating Chalica. I'd heard about it in 2008 in its second year, and been "meaning to" "get around to" celebrating since. When I first heard of it, I was so excited that my faith now has a holiday we can call our own! I know a lot of my lackluster commitment has been related to this crisis of faith through which I've been suffering for years. I wasn't even sure if I wanted to include anything about my faith here in this blog, because I don't want to push anyone away. I decided that I'd rather dip into this a little bit occasionally than try to ignore it altogether. My faith is so much a part of why I started down the path of urban homesteading that it feels wrong not to honor that place in the process. But that's a topic for another day. Today I want to celebrate, in all its imperfection, my first year celebrating Chalica.  I'd intended to ease myself into it. I put on some Celtic music, because it's...

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...

Morning and I, we are not friends. We tolerate each other well enough, as long as we don't spend too much time together, but the earliest I'm willing to wake up without complaint seems to be about 9am. This pretty much means that the earliest I'm willing to make appointments or plans is noon, and that's kind of pushing it. I'd prefer to be waking up then. That being said, for some reason when it comes to things like Celtic festivals and the like, waking up at 6am and out the door by 7am is a challenge but not a hardship. I usually pay for it, and two days in a row is nearly impossible, but it's worth it to walk through the dewy grass with a cup of coffee and the sound of bagpipes on the wind.  Lately I've been having a terrific bout of insomnia that even melatonin can't touch. Especially when I try to go to bed at midnight because I have to drive Mr. Moon to work for 9am. Neither one of us wants to be up this early, and both of us had trouble falling...

I told Mr. Moon that I would like to grow an aloe vera plant. He asked me, "what is its natural habitat?" "It likes water and dirt." Apparently this was not the right answer?

I think she missed the memo that I was craving Dad's scones and my sister-in-law's Guinness Brownies. Oh, well, I am ever so grateful for what I did receive! A t-shirt from the Summer Beer Festival in Depot Town's Riverside Park, Ypsilanti, Michigan. A CD from one of my favorite traditional Scottish music artists, Carl Peterson. Lightweight kilt socks in purple and green cotton, which feel absolutely delightful. A book: 1001 ways to use, recycle, etc, average household items.  Glancing through, I did see a few interesting points in the book, and I'm looking forward to reading it. This is right up my alley! Mr. Moon and I are considering the back of the shirt (shown here) to be a Bucket List of Michigan breweries that need touring, or at least visiting. No beer or baked goods, but definitely items chosen with care and love.

The last few weeks have been a chore. This was the beginning of the aphid infestation, around the beginning of July. It only got worse from here, as you will see. My one, lonely garlic scape. It was delicious! Mr. Moon would like you to know that the mint garden got as tall as his hip! It's started to die back in the heat since then, though.  Isn't it strange how our plum tree has purple sections and red sections? That's because of these new starts. All the new parts are green. I asked at the nursery and it was recommended that we cut all the new starts out--they will overgrow the older, likely hybridized tree that is actually giving us plums.  Sucker bugs! Why?! Took this picture for identification by the folks at the nursery, and they said it was likely the teenager stage of some sucker bugs. Best to get rid of them, suggested just using the garden spray I had tried for the aphids. Speaking of aphids... This is the garden as of August 3....

Pops had a military reunion this weekend, and Thursday night we had about 20 people over for a spaghetti dinner. I figured as long as I was making spaghetti sauce from scratch, I might as well make a nice big batch and freeze what we didn't need for the dinner. I managed to resist the idea of cooking the sauce overnight. Last time I cooked my sauce too long it got very bitter. So, we roasted the veggies up the night before and puréed with some of the tomato so all I had to do was throw it and some seasonings in the crockpot the next day. Simple! Nonetheless, about 2 hours before our guests arrived, I realized the sauce was VERY acidic. I knew that a lot of people used sugar to cut the acidity of the sauce. A tablespoon of sweet in this entire batch of sauce would probably have been fine, if I had realized that's all I needed. Still, the gut reaction of NO NO NO from my low-carb days persisted, and I decided I'd find another way.  I knew I could use baking soda to el...

I slipped on a wet spot on the floor yesterday and watched 4.5 hours of the olympics opening ceremonies in a less than stellar seat with no headrest, so today I'm nursing a whopper of a sore neck and hip. Let's just say, boredom has set in. I came across this brain teaser to count how many squares there are in this set of squares. A couple things to mention: * I did not make colors to account for colorblindness, something which I really should have done but I was just doing this for myself and the options I had were limited and the next thing I knew it was getting published. * Forgive the not-quite-square-ness of this, just deal with it, you get the idea. * I have no idea why this is opposite, it's not like that in the photo that got selected for upload!  So, the blank one. 17: 8 purple, 8 green, and their 4x4 perimeter friend. 10: 2 green, and the 4 inside each. [Total: 27] 4: 2 green, 2 purple [Total: 31] 4, all the same size ...

I've always wanted to like omelets. Quiche too, really. Veggies, cheese, eggs, maybe some chunks of meat... what's not to love? I spent two years when I went low-carb trying every omelet, frittata, quiche, and scramble recipe I could find. Nothing helped, nothing was good, even when other people were raving about the best of its kind they'd ever had. Ultimately, I gave up. I looked at my quiche one day and I just told it, I don't like you. I'm sorry, I want to, but this is becoming a waste of good food. I think it's that I'm not a big fan of scrambled eggs, though I love them when they're that liquid pasteurized egg stuff that restaurants use, and cooked gently so they're still just a little runny, but the runny-ness will have settled out in the carry-over cooking before my plate hits the table. I wish I could tell you this entry is some sort of epiphany and now I love these things. It really isn't. The only epiphany I had was that I could or...

The last month and a half seems like it's been a whirlwind of activity and taking it easy. Mr. Moon and I have been spending a lot of time together, and driving each other crazy. With his new job having fewer hours, I get less time to blog, and I spend a lot more time recovering from the busy days we have when he's off. I find I'm using a lot more spoons and taking longer to recover them. This week we spent a lot of time in the garden, and catching up on household chores that had fallen behind. I'm pleased to say, we have cleaned the kitchen to shining the sink at the end of the day for three days in a row this week. The laundry is caught up and put away, though I struggle with the desire to do only a load at a time and having 4 loads come up needing to be done at once. I'd like to be more mindful of making this a regular habit, since doing 4 loads at once just results in 4 loads of clean clothes sitting in baskets in the walkway of my bedroom floor. Mr. Moon a...

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...

While I was taking a nap the other day (yes, some days I feel like a toddler), Mr. Moon was a busy, busy bee. After he got the Heather beds planted, he took it upon himself to clean up our side patio. This area had been a dog run before, and when the 'Rents moved in the area was torn up and full of mud. Due to lack of sunlight, stuck in the small space between two houses with a privacy fence between, there was little likelihood of getting grass to grow back in, so they paved it. That's where the trash bins have sat for the last 9 years. Being out of sight, out of mind most of the time, the area was a bit cluttered. Leaves from the bushes and trees in the neighbors yard, blown dirt, moss, dampness from cement that wasn't poured with any kind of a grade so it just puddles up. Yeah, it's hit. But Mr. Moon really gave it a day of rehab! Now, you can open the gate and be met with clean, empty pathway. The trash and recycling bins are along the garage instead of the fence...