Well a few months back I mentioned my homemade laundry detergent and bragged about what a great job it did getting our clothes clean. There was only one problem: it was lumpy. This must be because I used half a bar of Fels Naphtha soap ( which I completely forgot to use this time). I …

Actually I can’t make weeks at home, so I can’t truthfully advertise homemade weeks. If I could, I would have made about a thousand of them already and quit my job. In the absence of that, however, I’ll document all the homemamde stuff I made this weekend. I’ll also try to document how those homemade …

As I write this I’m eating homemade butter on homemade wheat & buckwheat bread. (What is buckwheat? If you can tell me without Googling it or looking in Wikipedia, you win! I have no idea what buckwheat is. Jessica ground some to put in muffins the other day and there was still some buckwheat flour …

Steller’s jay? Jeller’s stay? This is English; you can never tell how something is supposed to be written. I used to pride myself on my spelling capability (even though I lost the 6th grade spelling bee on “asterisk”, a word I’d never heard before, but I’m not emotionally damaged, waaa!). But now that I’m getting …

This is about a week’s haul in the winter—2 dozen eggs, give or take. (I can’t see through Abby’s hand.) In springtime, it will be about one day’s worth. We will have so many eggs floating around that we’ll have to find a way to freeze them, or something. Can you freeze eggs?
Jess took this …

But you really should have sent some of your snow our way. If everybody goes outside right now (you’re all home from work and school anyway, right?), takes a deep breath, and blows as hard as they can, it should push the storms all the way to, say, Ohio.
We’ll have to make do with our …

My gallery in Calistoga, California (Stix and Stones Gallery, wish they had a website) called some time ago with an announcement that they were running low on original artwork by me, and that they would like some more, please.
This is a good thing.
So I have created four new originals which I will be featuring in …

Jessica’s surprise birthday present for me was, by the way, dinner and tickets to a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Fabulous! The performance was inside an Episcopalian cathedral and the sound was heavenly. It was a wonderful evening, but it’s not my birthday yet. I’m not 40 for a few more days.
On the …

I hate to keep braying about this, but I don’t hate it so much that I won’t keep doing it. This is (Ta-daaa!) our first all-homemade meal. At least that I can recall.
Milk: neighbor’s cow. (I won’t be getting a milk cow anytime soon.)
Waffles: homemade from wheat we ground, oats from our storage, and various …

Homemade butter

Friends of ours are now up to four cows and milk hasn’t been selling well for them lately, so their milk is piling up. They’ve agreed to sell it to us for $2.50 a gallon, about what you’d pay at the store. But this is Jersey cow milk, so there’s a lot of cream. …