My, how the future changes.

For whatever reason, these ten lighting grids did not end up in an office park in Poughkeepsie, but in the free pile at our local dump. Jessica picked them up and hauled them home, still wrapped in their shipping plastic. She thought they’d be perfect for greenhouse shelves and indeed they will be; since a grid allows spilled water, dirt, and organics to fall straight through to the ground. The poor grids huddled together under a tree all winter, awaiting their destiny, thinking, This doesn’t look like a cubicle farm. It looks like a real farm, with chickens and ducks and dogs and fruit trees and a garden and gung-ho kids.

Then along came a man in blue coveralls, hauling 2x4s and grumbling because he’d left his hammer up at the house, and then his speed square, and then his tape measure, and then his level. When things got all squared away, the grids were the only things that were square; because their destined greenhouse looks like it was built by Robinson Crusoe with nary a square angle in it. The man pounded together a rickety-looking frame, came and got the trembling grids, and dropped them in between the wood frames, three on the bottom shelf, three on the top, blip blip blip. (The other four grids are for frames on the opposite side of the greenhouse.) And hey, they sort of fit!

Now that’s not a bad destiny for a bunch of forlorn lighting grids. They’ll get used. They’ll support pots and trays for years and years, they’ll have dirt and weeds and roots dropped all over them, they’ll get water stained, and sure as shootin’, a kid or two will climb up on the shelves and break through one of them.

But they’ll be happy. Man shall not live in office cubicles alone.

This is how we make it work. I can get quite a few samples of women’s clothing at my job, and with a wife six daughters that’s a handy thing. Jess is able to create some concoctions that we otherwise could not afford, because she’s handy with a sewing machine (just visible in the background) and is not afraid to make do.

Some of the samples have been intentionally mutilated to prevent their resale. The “mutilation” consists of a slit in the lower backside that’s a couple of inches wide, one that’s easily stitchable and virtually impossible to see. (It’s there if you look for it, but who’s looking for little stitched-up slits in the backside of an erstwhile $90 jacket? Not you, I hope.) Under a jacket or cardigan, Jess will wear tanks and layers that have bigger holes than that in back, and nobody’s the wiser. She looks like we actually spend money on clothing. At church on Sundays she looks like a million bucks, but the cost was actually a million dollars less than that. Time wise, it’s maybe five minutes with a needle and thread. I’d say that’s a decent trade for a smashing wardrobe.

All I can say is that if you’re married and you want a lifestyle like this, both of you have to be willing to do what it takes. We’re cheapskates, but we live well because we make do. It helps that Jess is a wizard at stuff like this (it’s a learnable skill). See that picture of Christ in the corner? That’s a cross-stitch that she did. It contains over 11,000 stitches, according to my rough calculation. And she did three of them.

You don’t have to be that kind of superhero. It’s helpful just to make do where you can.

The nautical efficiency is carried on in our selection of a home for the kids’ computer. The only public spot we had available was in the dining room, in the corner by the table. Our tax return budget included money for a new computer, and we’ve wanted to put the old one downstairs in a public area where anyone could use it and we wouldn’t have to worry about what they were doing. (We’ll be purchasing NetNanny shortly to keep the porn epidemic out of our house, and Jessica will be the admin on all computers—just to keep it safe.)

But we didn’t have space for a computer desk—not to mention no money. So I bought this 2’x2’ sheet of plywood at Home Depot for about $6 (yes, it’s expensive for a small piece of wood, but it’s cheaper than buying a whole sheet that I don’t need) and ripped it in half diagonally to form a triangle. I also nipped a couple of inches off the angle at back to leave space for cords in back. I found a couple of 1×2 scraps at home and, after measuring and levelling, had Emma screw them into place. (She’s been wanting to use tools more.) Then she helped me screw the shelf to the wall supports, I stained it, and brought the old computer downstairs to its new home. Viola! (or was that voila?) The $6 computer desk.

It’s quite comfy; I’ve tried it. It’s not in the way, since people don’t make a habit of walking into corners. I’ve run a phone line along the wall and over to the kitchen phone jack so that we can get “internet access” from this computer. (I hope to have a wireless connection one of these days, but in the meantime we’ll enjoy having The World’s Slowest Internet Connection: one page every ten minutes!) Kids still watch movies, play games, and twiddle in Illustrator and Photoshop like they do now; but they don’t have to throng Dad’s studio while he’s at work. Mom can do her Facebeook, and everybody enjoys the screensaver slide show with its 15,000+ images I’ve taken over the years. As soon as I have 20 minutes to get the external hard drive moved downstairs, we’ll even have dinner music.

Screaming blue drums with openings designed by space aliens!

Out at our place I find that we have to jury-rig things a lot. That is, figure out a way to make stuff work. (Or is it jerry-rig? Or rerry-jig? Depends who you ask, I guess.) Making do makes for a lot of ugly stuff, but maybe that’s the reason homesteaders build their hodge-podge empires way out in the country, so that nobody can look down their noses at you as they cruise by in their expensive Snooty Cars. As for us, we can’t afford most of the stuff we do, so we make do.

Case in point: These lovely electric blue 55-gallon drums. One of them used to hold jalapeno peppers; the other, olive oil. What are we doing with them? Why, whacking their tops off and filling them full of chicken feed, of course!

Chicken feed comes in mouse-friendly woven sacks that weigh as much as a Volkswagen and don’t keep anything out as well as they keep the seed in. That includes not only mice but moisture, mold, and anything else calculated to waste your chicken-feed money. You need something else to keep the feed in, even if it’s ugly.

Viola. (=Joke. It’s a literary friend’s corruption of the French. Voila.)

A local outfit uses these drums for food ingredients, then sells them to local yokels for $5 each. Hey, a bargain! But the openings are two inches wide on  top,  and I have absolutely no idea how to wrench them open. Never seen caps like these; they look like they were designed by space aliens. How to get the drums open? Hmm, how ‘bout power tools?

I sawed the top four inches or so off of both drums last Saturday and left them out in the vague hope that they’d get washed out by the rain. No dice. The vinagery smell has diminished, but rain doesn’t wash out congealed olive oil. My solution? Well, maybe I’ll dump the oil out on the slash pile in the hopes that will help the wet wood ignite. (I’ve been meaining to burn that slash pile for several weeks. I’ll report on my success in this endeavor next week, if I survive.) Then wash out with soap, if the poultry’s water line  ever thaws out. Then reattach the lids with a cheap door hinge, and fill with chicken feed. Note to self: dry barrels out before filling with feed. Oh, and get the barrels into a dry location before filling. That would be splendid: trying to wrestle a screaming blue headless drum weighing 240 lbs. into the shoop. Yippee. I think I’ll try lighting a bonfire with congealed oil first.

Grate up the soap with a cheese grater, then throw it in the pot of boilin' water

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 made some more laundry soap on Saturday, and this time it’s smooth as silk. This is because I used a whole bar of Dove soap, which Jessica doesn’t like becuase it makes her feel greasy. Maybe because it’s one-quarter moisturizing cream? Hopefully it doesn’t make our clothes feel like that, but it’s SOAP for heaven’s sake. Soap is supposed to remove grease. How they ever make soap out of one quarter moisturizing cream I’ll never know. Of course I also add borax to the mix, and if Dove soap is sweet and fluffy moisturizing cream, borax is the sandblaster of the detergent world. (At least I hope it is.) Dove vs. sandblaster? Borax wins. I’ll let you know if I feel greasy.

Here’s the REE-sype (adapted from The Simple Dollar, thank you!)

1 pot boiling water

1 bar o’soap (as discussed above. Also, Jess and I save all those thin little soap slivers from when the bar of soap gets too small to use in the shower. They dry up and we keep them in a box until soap making time. Better’n wasting them.)

1 cup borax

1 cup baking soda

Grate the soap on a potato grater. (The grater gets all soapy, but you can just throw it in the dishwasher when you’re done.) Sprinkle the soap particles into the boiling water and stir them up into mush. Use a metal spoon—easier to clean. When it’s all stirred in, turn off the heat and go fill up a 4-gallon bucket with hot water in the tub. Throw in the borax and baking soda while it’s filling.

Leave enough space at the top for your pot o’soap, dump that in, and cover it up. Trent says to let it sit for 24 hours, but who has time for that? I used mine on a batch of laundry the same afternoon. Nobody’s mentioned greasiness yet.

This makes enough laundry soap for 64 loads of laundry if you use a cup per batch, but at our house we’re cheapskates who also have a front-loading washer so we don’t need much soap to begin with. Maybe 1/3 cup, maybe 1/4. The former will stretch the bucket of soap to 192 loads, the latter to 256 (1 gallon = 16 cups). Granted, with 9 people living in a house surrounded by animals and dirt, we probably do more laundry than some people, but still. Cheap covers a multitude of sins.

And thanks for your input on the frequency of posts. As you’ve noticed, I’m moving to three posts weekly for now. Thanks for your comments and support.

Ingrediments for windshield washer fluid

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 things have panned out.

Today: Homemade windshield-washer fluid. (Really.)

Every day for the past two weeks when I’ve started up the Jeep, it dings at me and flashes the cryptic sign “LOWASH.” No pending engine failure here; I faced a more catastrophic disaster: LOW WINDSHIELD WASHER FLUID!! Being penniless and besides lacking the time to slog over to my local Schuck’s (unfriendly salespeople) or Wal-Mart (twenty minutes to park, thirty minutes to find product, seventeen hours to check out), last Saturday I thought, “Huh. Wonder if I could make my own.”

So I did.

Here’s the recipe*:
2 cups white vinegar
1/2 cup rubbing alcohol
3 quarts warmish water

I used this much liquid because I was very low on LOWASH fluid. It’s springtime around here (sorry, you east-coasters who are still buried in snow), and that means our local dirt road is a swamp with potholes. It makes for filthy vehicles, dirty glass, and consequently lots of used LOWASH fluid. If you live in the Clutches of Suburbia, you might not need to make so much. Reduce ingredients proportionately, and you may want to add blue food coloring so nobody drinks it. Or to make it look store bought. I assume no responsibility if your vehicle detonates halfway down the driveway. (Or if anything else goes wrong. Just so we’re clear.)

How does it work?

Perfectly. It cuts the mud, grime and smear from the glass, and so far it does not streak. I am one happy (and smug) customer. The alcohol lowers the freezing temperature of the water, and this morning I used it to clear the frost from the windshield. Wonder why I never tried that before.

We’ll see how it works in the summertime, when the bugs are out. Since spring is sprung already, summer is right around the corner, bugs included. If it doesn’t work, I’ll probably tinker with the recipe before I try to buy more at Schuck’s.

*This word is pronounced “REE-sype” in our house, since it’s actually spelled that way. Now you know.

Clean the pipe

Warning: this is a messy procedure. Learn from my woes and surround your interior chimney with an old sheet before proceeding.

Well, since we never actually had winter around here I’ll detail this procedure and post the pictures from when I cleaned the chimbley around Christmas time. The principles are still relevant and I’ll do this same thing in the spring when I clean the chimney again, because it’s a pretty messy operation. It will be better when I staple a sheet to the ceiling around the chimney before proceeding.

Also, this operation only works if you can actually access your chimney from inside. If your chimney is on the outside and you can still get the brush up from below via the cleanout, you’re cleverer than me (most people are). If your chimbley has an elbow and you can access the vertical run from below, you can still do this. That’s how I did it in our last house. If you can’t, it’s up to the roof with you!

It’s as easy as 1-2-3. It’s almost as easy as cleaning a chimney from up on the roof, without all that life-threatening stuff. Unless, of course, you don’t surround the interior chimney with a sheet and you get soot everywhere and your wife threatens your life. If you don’t protect the environs, you’re safer to go up on the roof. This is pretty messy, did I mention?

1. Disassemble the chimney and screw the brush to the first rod.
2. Push the brush up the pipe, adding sections of rod as you go, brushing clear up to the chimney cap.
3. When all is sparkling clean, pull the brush out and reassemble the chimney.
4. Clean up.
5. Clean up.
6. Clean up.

Let the soot begin

Cleaning the lower stovepipe

See? Easy as 1-2-3. Of course the last few steps won’t be necessary next time when I hang a sheet from …oh yeah, I mentioned that. The advantage of cleaning the chimney from roof is that all the gunk falls straight down to the smoke shelf inside the stove. Then you take apart the stovepipe and vacuum up all the gunk from the smoke shelf. (The disadvantage, of course, is the risk of a short-term trip to long-term disability.) The inside method is lots easier. You just remove the pipe first instead of last, with the result that all the soot and pulverized creosote floats out and coats the room. If you hang a sheet first …oh yeah, I mentioned that.

You’ll need to get a wire brush to fit your chimney and enough fiberglass rods to reach all the way to the chimney cap. Both of these depend on your chimney setup. I use a 6” circular wire brush and three 4’ threaded rods. Your local fire department may have everything you need available for free checkout, like the library. Ours did, and I did that when we lived in town, but it’s less hassle to have your own.

And either way, you save yourself a $150 visit from the chimney sweep.

Well, here we are hanging yesterday’s popcorn strings on the tree. This was a hard shot to get; the kids were bouncing back and forth between Mom, The Dispenser of All Correct Ornaments, and the tree, tripping over each other in the process. So they’re a little blurry. But the tree is done, the rooms are decorated, and everything looks fantabulous.

I suppose that those who don’t actually live in the woods might romanticize our lifestyle a little—imagining us killing and eating our own bears; chewing bark when we’re hungry; and at Christmastime, chopping down some poor little tree in the woods (with a little red ax), dragging it home over the snow and propping it up in our log-walled living room.

Sorry.

Above all else, we have to be practical. We don’t have enough money to live a completely romanticized life. It’s the same reason we don’t have solar power: we do what works best for us.

I did ask Jess this year, “Why don’t we go get a tree from our property?” Her answer was succinct: “I don’t like killing little trees just for that.” Well, she’s got me there. So that’s one reason we use a fake tree.

I thought of another reason while I was out hunting with Tim the other day. We were walking along the power company’s easement, where the power lines extended overhead and all brush and trees were small because they clear them out every few years (to keep limbs out of the power lines, I guess). It’s like a giant corridor in the forest. I looked at all the little trees around me and thought, we could use one of these. But as I was looking at them, I realized a wild tree just doesn’t look like the plasticky ones at the store; nor like the real trees you can get at a Christmas tree farm. Those are so …full. A real tree growing in the shadow of taller trees will be scraggly because there’s not much light; and in the open areas like in the power line easments, the tiers of branches will be further apart, meaning the tree will still be …scraggly.

Our ancestors who hunted bears and chewed bark were used to scraggy wild trees at Christmastime, because that’s the way wild trees are. The moral of the story is, while we’re picking the bear meat and bark out of our teeth, we’ll be admiring the fake tree we bought years ago in town, because to our eyes it looks more Christmas tree-ey.

But they’ll be mowing the little trees out of the easement one of these years. Maybe, if it’ll die anyway, I’ll go borrow a little tree for our house next year.

Yes, it’s true; you can freeze milk. We do it every time we buy it, since we go through so much (about four gallons a week) and we’re so far from the grocery store. Local cow’s milk is prohibitively expensive ($4 a gallon!), and we’re not willing to spring for a goat we’d have to milk twice a say (I’m still emotionally damaged from milking cows day and night for three summers as a teenager). No, for now it’s store-bought milk for us, at least until I get the mortgage paid off and can be at home to milk. Better yet, unitl the kids start distance education and THEY can be at home to milk.

Milk jugs can freeze because of those circular doohickeys on the side of the jug. They’re put there, I think, to add some surface stability to the jug; but they’re also made to allow for expansion should the milk freeze. It works like a charm. The gallon jug freezes solid overnight; the contents turn somewhat yellow, and the expansion circle reverses, expanding way out. You can see that here, in a jug I just took out of the freezer. The whole jug bloats up, but it doesn’t burst. It just sits in the freezer till we’re ready for it. We’ve had some milk in the freezer in the root cellar for a couple of weeks. (I’m sure it would keep longer, but we do need our milk. Our Yahoo Granola just doesn’t taste the same with tap water.)

The trick is to get the milk out of the freezer the night before you need it. We put it on the counter to thaw at room temperature (we sit it in a plastic plate to catch the water from condensation), and in about fifteen hours it’s white and liquid again, ready to go.

I don’t know, maybe freezing store milk releases some of its chemisty-set additives they put in at the lab in Jersey City. But if so, it has’t effcted os viri muchh yetta;dlk ggggg