This end of November is a Big Deal - 2014

You know how there's always those weeks that sort of are bonkers every year? Ours is in November.

The bro took me to see Margaret Cho for my Christmas present. We were SO CLOSE, but being that close made it impossible to sneak a pic of the set. It was awesome though.

Then:

My niece turned 15! How the hetch (as the baby says) did that happen??

And then one day later:

Her mom had a birthday! I won't say how old, because that's rude.

Our sister from another mister's accidental album cover.

Punkin was like eff sports.

I looked squishy.

My favorite thing is using Hipstagram on random to take action shots during parties.

And then, of course, there was Thanksgiving:

Which I mostly forgot to take pics of because I was eating.

The end of November is always a Big Deal. On Tuesday, we've got the baby's birthday--though he's turning four so he's now the kindergartener...but that doesn't flow off the tongue as well, and he doesn't mind being called baby (so long as we don't put him in a corner).

I'll probably have pics of that, too. It basically counts as this expanding Big Deal Week, now that he's old enough to ask for stuff and look forward to it.

End of November Garden Report!

That right there? That's about it for now! All these little seed-babies under the light on the end table, pretending it isn't near-freezing overnight these days, waiting for us to move them to the new house.

The apples and the sea buckthorns have sprouted, and I'm super-excited about both. 

The buckthorns are from Biodiverseed in Denmark (did I mention this before? I can't remember.), and of the five seeds I planted, three sprouted so far and two have finally lifted their little heads. They almost have leaves!

The apples were from Braeburns, and I'm hoping they're true, because Braeburns are my favorite, but even if they aren't, they'll be, what, probably crabapples? Which I can handle. They flower pretty and make a nice jelly. Or! Maybe they'll be some other neat new kind of Apple from a mutation! Who knows! Future-me will! Anyway, they were already sprouted in the fridge when I went to check on the stratifying babies, so I planted them. One has the very start of first leaves, and there's I think two others, just straightening up toward the light.

No word yet from the vitex, elders, mimosas, or my one little moringa seed that I feel like should have sprouted by now. Also no word from the avocado or the mango.

I just planted nine fat honey tangerine seeds today, so I hope they come up! They're yummy, and one of the few things I miss from Florida is the super-easy-to-get citrus.

Outside, the mums are doing okay, all the saplings have lost their leaves after putting on their first ever fall colors, and the various bulbs are all waiting for spring.

Inside, I have two sprouted onions I found cleaning out the pantry, the jade plant and the prickly pear are resting and not freezing, the strawberries an peppers have decided to die back after all, and I'm collecting seeds. I got some from The Snarky Gardener for free (two kinds of tomato and some seven-top turnips), and from Trade Winds Seeds (tomatoes I've never seen before, okahijiki, sweet datil and aji dulce peppers, some neat looking beans, and NOT seven million exotic trees I wouldn't get fruit from for a decade). 

I have plans to hit up Harris Teeter for grow-ables soon (they have sunchokes, itty bitty potatoes, pomegranates, citrus, root veg, and I'm hoping, soon, chestnuts). And I'll just be sprouting seeds left and right all winter until, like, February, when I give in and start growing the annuals for the actual food part of the garden--you know, the lets-not-starve main point of expanding the garden.

The new garden will be shadier than the current one--we're going to be almost at the end of the building by the little patch of woods, rather than at the far other end, by the open space of the playground. I think it'll still get sunshine though, and the lack of a hedge should make up for some of the loss from the trees. 

I'm going to see if there's edibles I can forage in that little woods--there's supposed to be hickory trees all over the place here, and who knows what herbs and greens and stuff. Maybe even some raspberries hiding; they're all over town, inconveniently close to the road, so maybe I'll find some hidden back there. Or I can plant some.

The stuff in the fridge is doing alright. Some of the stuff I gathered myself got moldy, and I think it was because I let it be too wet, so I cleaned, saved and replaced the baggies with much less moisture. I want to plant them! Oh! And my share of the Kent State study's pawpaw seeds came in--I'll be answering questions about how they grow and how I plant them and how they do in my climate. Which is cool, because they're US native, and maybe I can save them a little.

I missed the chance to plant a fall/winter crop this year, but I'm hoping to get greens, at least, growing into next winter, and hopefully some overwintering herbs, root veg, etc, so I can still eat from my garden when it gets cold.

So that's me. How's your garden growing (or not) right now?

Danielle Laporte has launched her new Truth Bomb Cards, and they look awesome!

This woman is a wonder. I've been getting the Truth Bomb emails for ages, and sometimes they're exactly what I need to hear for the day. Sometimes I use them as journal long prompts--a place to start when I need to say something or work through something, and I'm not sure where to start. Sometimes I print them up or copy them down and hang them on my wall.

Now, she's taken 134 of the best ones, and made a deck of cards of them! Think about drawing one each morning. Think about drawing three and using them as a sort of sentence-divination. Think about letting guests draw one to see what the world is trying to tell them. 

You can get them here: http://www.daniellelaporte.com/?dlap=11701 (note: this is my affiliate link to the front page, where they are right now) or here: http://www.daniellelaporte.com/shop/truthbomb-card-deck/ (the actual page).

The stats:

• 134 #Truthbomb cards
• Box: 4 1/2″ x 4 1/2″ x 2 3/4″
• Cards: 4″ x 4″
• Gold, foil-embossed icon on back of every card
• Black satin ribbon for easy removal of deck

What would you use these cards for? I'm so all over the divination idea!

Baby sprooolings!

Yesterday, there were no signs of life, just like every other time I've looked over the last few weeks since I potted these little sea buckthorns up. I was worried. Should I have stratified them anyway? Should I have scarified them? Is our (admittedly cold) house too cold? 

It's been a study in not freaking out. In just waiting and watching. And this morning there was one little white root. By dinner time, there were two! Even if the three other seeds in there don't sprout, I've got two awesome little berry babies!

I'm not super good at being patient. But being a gardener is forcing me to suck it up and wait, because all the fretting in the world won't speed up a seed that isn't ready to sprout.

And I think I'm also waiting on metaphorical seeds, too, that I'll wait on through the winter and see what they're like in the spring, and I'll get back to you. 

What're you waiting on?

NOTES:

- The seeds are from the lovely Lynsey at biodiverseed.tumblr.com -- she sends out bundles of neat seeds if you pay shipping, and there were so many wonderful things in my bundle. Most are stratifying, and I'll plant them after we move.

Psst, Yarrow Tea looks like pickle juice, pass it on

This may be TMI, but I've had a recurring UTI thing and so I decided to look at herbal home cures for it. Because I remembered that I used to have a collection of, like, fifty herbs that I could cure almost anything with, and did, and I have no idea when I stopped using them.

Anyway, so I looked up urinary issues and everyone seems to agree on yarrow, uva ursi, and elderflower, so I got those three--and also elderberry and vitex because I've been meaning to get those. And I thought, why not do profiles of them on my blog?

So here's yarrow, good for UTI, also on the list for balancing hormones, and a bunch of other things. Like, yarrow is so useful for everything that I think I'm going to add it to my garden next spring so I don't have to pay for it.

As you can see, it brews up way greeny-yellow--just like dill pickle juice, as the title says, though it thankfully doesn't taste like that.

It tastes...well, herbal. It tastes like the air in an herb shop. It's only a little bitter, and even te end of the brew that had been sitting with the leaves longer, wasn't bitter. It tastes green, a little grassy, but not more than a good green tea. It's a little savory--like, if I was going to cook with it (I don't know if you can, but if), I'd avoid sweet dishes unless I can get that savory-sweet balance right. There's no sweetness here, but it's also not astringent or anything else. 

So, all in all, not bad. I've had much worse herbal wellness teas (they tend toward super-herbal, bitter, weirdly-combined flavors). And it feels smooth and useful when you swallow it, like it can actually do what everyone says.

I don't know how often it's safe, but I had about a teaspoon in two cups of boiling water, and it came out good. Next I'll try the uva ursi, also called bearberry, related to cranberry and supposedly with the same chemicals in the leaves.

Have you tried yarrow? What do you use it for? How? What're your thoughts?

On community

I recently joined the community that grew up around Emilie Wapnick's Puttylike.com, the PuttyTribe. I've been reading her blog almost since it started, and I've been on the waiting list to joint for, like, two years. Every time the doors opened, it didn't feel right, and since I'm working on getting back to paying attention to my intuition, I never joined.

Until last month. Last month, when it came time, it felt right and I signed up almost without thinking about it. I've been having trouble with my computer and the Internet (which seems to be a co stand thing since I moved up here), so I missed the intro video chats (called huddles), and the one for people writing a book, but this past weekend I made it to the first ever 24 hr collaborative Puttython. 

It was amazing. I had so much fun.

And it felt like a community.

I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of my life looking for communities to belong to, places to go and groups of people to join where they just get me--when I don't have to pass or hide or pretend, and I can just be my own weird self. When I was a kid, we moved around a lot, since Dad worked for the military, and so I was always having to make new friends. I wasn't very good at it, but it was easier when I had a class to belong to and a small, close town to live in. When I got older, it got harder--as I think it probably does for everyone, except we were starting over so often that none of us had those old friendships to fall back on.

I'm not complaining, though. That's just how it was, and sometimes it was lonely, and so I've always spent a lot of time thinking about communities, and the sort i'd want to belong to. I'm pretty sure I'm meant to found a country somewhere, or a colony on another planet, but that's not really feasible right now, so...

In college, I had my LobbyGirls. We were like a commune, different, with different goals and beliefs, but we somehow worked all together to be something like heaven, for me, anyway. We were all in weird places in our lives, and we were all emotionally compromised, but for those years, we worked and we had each other.

And then people started graduating and it fell apart. For maybe two years after that, I mourned that group like a lost friend.

In grad school, I found a new group--a place full of weird, wonderful, people who took the stuff I was doing and was interested in seriously, and it was like heaven again. Sometimes it was so great I just wanted to cry. But again, it was too fast and constantly in flux with people coming and going, joining and graduating, and I can't afford to travel there twice a year and be a revered alum and try to recapture some of the magic.

I've done a better job of keeping in contact with them, but now I'm looking for people who won't be graduating and leaving, a situation where I won't be the one graduating and leaving. I feel like this group might be one of that sort, and I'm so glad I finally joined.

But I think I still want friends I can see face-to-face. I'm looking for an arts lab I could join, or a writing group, or both or either I could start myself. I want to take classes, and soon as I have more money to pay for them, so I can learn some of this pile of stuff I want to learn, AND make friends. I want a life based on creativity with a heavy dose of collaboration, and I think the Puttytribe can definately help with that.

And I'm tired of moving on against my will and floundering for years afterward, so I'm working on ways to build the communities I want. If I build them, they will come, right? That's how they keep telling us the Universe works.

So what communities and groups do you belong to? How did you find them? If you built them, how did you do it? Let's talk about this.

Video - A quick primer on Synaesthesia

I'm a Synaesthete. So are two of my friends--which is neat, because we met randomly in a group of less than 200 people. I didn't know for a long time that there were people who didn't see colors when they heard music, or that there were names for people who did. I think it's a big part of my creativity and my writing ability--this video says it naturally creates metaphor, but I think it also gives me a sort of...already saturated world. Things are already linked, juxtaposed, given extra layers.

Plus, it's cool.

Some of my associations:

• Wordsworth poems are predominantly green
• A German accent is green on the bottom and sort of grey and brick-red on the top
• 7 and 9 are the same
• Bendict Cumberbatch's voice sounds like deep purple and gold when he's Sherlock, and a brighter, bluer purple that's less hard-edged when he's in interviews
• Guitars are always somewhere on the red-orange-gold spectrum, and sort of jagged--so that sometimes, if they're too jagged, I don't like them
• Crickets look like readouts on those old 1950s oscilloscopes
• My ideal mate would look like light through the leaves

I don't think about it much, because it's just how it is, But I am fiercely interested in this and other sorts of minority perception-states. Any of you synaesthetes? Lets talk!

Tasting ALL the yogurt! -- Dreaming Cow honey-pear

This one has the same nice, soft gesture as the last one, with a good yogurty taste but without that excessive sharpness fancy yogurts sometimes have these days. But it doesn't taste like honey OR like pear. Maybe if they kicked up the percentages of both, but right now, it's just mostly a plain yogurt flavor with the slightest hint of sweetness and only the vaguest amount of fruitiness.

I like the other one better for just eating, but I think this one would be good with fruit, or granola. It won't get in the way of those added flavors.

Dreaming Cow

Grassfed, non-homogenized milk with cream

1.25 at Target

Tasting ALL the yogurt! - Dreaming Cow maple-ginger

Yum!

I didn't realize it had agave in it until I was halfway through, and I was a little worried because I'm allergic to tequila and I think it's the same plant, but it didn't make me sick, so yay!

This is a looser yogurt than most around, the opposite of Greek yogurt, really, but not watery, slimy or stringy at all. Reads as yogurt when you're eating it, which is nice. I think the texture comes from the mix of thermophilis and bulgsricus in with the usual acidophilus and bifidus cultures. 

It smells like yogurt, but the taste on this one is ginger first, then a round, soft sort of sweetness that doesn't really ever taste like maple, doesn't have that caramelized sugariness I associate with maple, but is still pleasant.

I've got three more flavors to try, so I'm glad this one was good!

Dreaming Cow

Unhomoginized, pasture-fed milk

1.25 / pack at Target

Things I've had to accept about my weight

I will never be as skinny as those charts want me to be, as I was, or as society deems appropriate.

Even if I somehow managed to starve myself to the weight those charts want, I'd still not be healthy--I'd be anorexic again.

Anorexia will always be there, a threat waiting for when I obsess too much.

I tend toward round; even when I'm thinner, I'm curvy. I may as we'll run with it.

Health is only part of what's made me so round. Aversion to exercise and depression helped a lot, as did ultra-poorness. All of these need to be overcome.

If I'm never thin again, i can still be okay.

What have you had to accept?