Maebius Musings

Well, I must sadly admit we missed the festivities this year.   Not sure how it happened, but here I find myself glancing at the calendar, and thinking, “Hey, it’s already August 3rd?!..um,  Yay harvest! …um  w00t for seedy goodness gone to grain!  We won’t starve this winter!”

We did have a busy weekend, with a birthday party for the 4-yr old twins, followed immediately by one of the most rocking Wedding receptions in the history of awesomeness (blog post to follow soon).  Our friend got married, and at the reception we ran into another friend of hers we hadn’t seen in years, and jsut really enjoyed ourselves.  I’ll consider that event a serendipitous Celebration of the harvest, because there was good food, good music, and a semi-magical event involving kids and sparklers.

So, not much in the way of deeper musing today.   I’m thinking I’ll toss together something fun and festive tonight for dinner, then go outside and launch off a bit of meditation on our many and varied skills we’ve trained this summer.   Horray for Lugh of the many skills!

From gleaning & canning beans, to jellying rhubarb, to drying Nettle for infusions, this year has been the most productive we’ve ever had in terms of stocking the pantry with garden-goodies.   All this, and our actual personal garden on our property has not actually produced anything except a continued stream of fresh rainbow Swiss Chard!  Granted, the beets and corn are setting up nicely, and the ubiquitous potatoes are still not quite ready, but it’s a good year so far.

I’m thinking more and more each year that the traditional celebrations described in most wiccan/pagan calendars are not entierly accurate for our climate, so need to be celebrated more in spirit than in practice.  Only Mayday and the maypole seems to work for us as “traditional” events. 

I’ve started another batch of random liqueur bottles, from raspberry, to elderflower, and am waiting for my local hops to flower later this month to try a batch of True Homebrew beer (local barley & honey, our well water & hops!). Once the elder berries are ripe, we’ll make our annual gluttonous pile of jelly again, plus a bottle or two of cough syrup and cordial, since last year’s got used up faster than we expected.

On other smithy crafts, I’ve gotten much more comfortable with blogging software, and macros.  Also have been spending much more time at the Vernon Park where the kid is now swimming underwater with confidence.

It’s not really earth-based spirituality, but skills are skills, so I’ll celebrate what we got. 

Happy belated harvest to all of you!

((PS:  Now that I’m back off the horrid swing-shift night schedule, I’ll be sleeping and actually musing a bit more.  Feel free to suggest any topics of interest to spur on my imagination!))

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Not much to report on the musing department lately, other than quite a lot of swirling half-thoughts that so far have failed to coalesce into something concrete enough to post here.   In a good way of course, which basically means life is pretty good and I’m enjoying it, without being inspired or stressed about any one particular topic.

This past weekend, we discovered the nearby green bean fields were being harvested, and set out with our bags to glean the leftovers for canning.  (See last year’s post here)  Quite a contrast, since the farm must have gotten better machines, or tuned them up, since there were remarkably little leaves/stems and other chaff beyond the main stalks of bare plants leftover in most places.  That I consider a bonus too, since it means much more efficient harvesting and less waste for us to pick up.

That being said, in just under 20 minutes of picking (quite a lot of which was where they apparently filled the trucks since there were lots of beans pre-picked in little piles) we managed to get enough collected to last us the entire days worth of effort in snapping, washing, and canning.

As of this morning, we have 14 pints, 17 quarts, and enough beans-in-a-bowl to do probably another 10-12 quarts.  The ones remaining, however, are the larger almost over-grown beans, and are being hulled for “dried beans”.  We’ll try to save some for an experimental crop next spring, but most will become stew-fodder.

It’s a bigger bounty, mainly due to more experience with canning, and better access to a pressure cooker to help process things.   As it stands, we were joking how we now have enough beans to eat one pint a week, for the entire year, not counting the dried/pickled ones getting processed over today and tomorrow.  Plus, there are two more fields unharvested yet, which we might just get some gleaning in with later this week for extra dried-beans.

My wife and I were feeling all self-sustainable last night.   Wonder why?

/rubs tired fingers  

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Not much to report on the Daily Outdoor Zen project, other than it’s starting to be a nice habit (though I forgot one day already).

One nice thing I did today was have a wonderful breakfast entirely from our backyard. I snipped a small asparagus plant into little teensy bits, added some Garlic Mustard and Chives from the literal backyard, and then collected three eggs from the chicken coop. Sauted the greenery in a pan with some olive oil, then de-yolked one of the eggs (3 eggs, 2 yolks).
Other than the olive oil used to grease the pan, everything for that breakfast was from my yard, which tasted YUMMY and felt really healthy and natural. Great way to start the day!

And in other garden news, this year’s hops bine[sic] is doing much more vigorous growing than it did it’s first year. The tentacle-beast (as I call it now) is well over 8 ft tall as it wraps around it’s support pole, and has a lot more tentacles, plus is a good deal thicker than a pencil, approaching sharpie-marker thickness on the main tendril! Should be a great Hops harvest this fall. Woot!

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Warning: Wall of text crits you for ###### Long post ahead, so I’ll split it with a page-break. (Sorry to you RSS readers, you’ll have to visit the site for a full story).

UPDATE – apparently, this post is TOO EPIC for wordpress, and it cut off. I’ll re-write the last two days andmay have to split it into two entries here. Sorry for those you of you brave enough to read the entire thing and gripped by the apparent cliff-hanger ending here!!

The various Youtube links are NOT from our trip, but are provided in case you want to sorta-experience the ride yourself. Everthorn Website is not responsible for content or quality of these random videos.
We flew out towards Florida on Wednesday morning at around 6:30am. Sleepy kid, but we were all very excited to be leaving the cold weather and foot of snow all around us. Brief (VERY) layover in Cincinnati, Ohio where we literally ran off the first plane, and immediately scrambled into the next one which took off minutes later.

The arrival in Florida was wonderful, and immediate observation was full of warm weather, green palm trees, blue skies, and flowers outside the terminal stations.

We took the shuttle bus to Fort Wilderness campgrounds, which had a really big butterfly garden outside it. Monarchs and little yellow cabbage butterflies dances around it, which made us all smile. We met up with my in-laws around noon, where we camped along the ‘Jackrabbit Run’ loop of campsites. That first day we mostly wandered around the campsite, and got together a rough plan for the next few days visiting the 4 main Disneyworld parks: Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Epcot, and Hollywood Studios. Continue Reading »

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It is the holiday time of year again, here at Everthorn Farm, and that means COOKIES!

This year we tried one of my family’s recipes for “Sand Tarts”, which is a traditional thing from my grandmother. Each winter season, my mother and aunt have a mini-contest to see who gets over to Nan’s house first, and then call the other one to say “I ate three Sandtarts! Neener-neener!”

It’s a simple recipe, but was quite a lot of work. If you’d like to replicate the adventure, see below:

• 2 lbs all-purpose flour
• 2 lbs granulated sugar
• 1.25 lbs (5 sticks) butter
• 3 eggs.

Mix everything up in a big bowl BY HAND. Apparently the By Hand is extra-important and is repeated twice, underlined, and circled on the original recipe from my Great(x2) Grandmother.

So mix everything together well, toss flour on the table, then roll out ultra-thin. The contest is to get the dough transluscent-thin. Thick cookies are not Proper Sand Tarts.

Cut out shapes using your favorite cookie-cutters. We like stars, bells, holly, etc.

Brush the top of cookies with egg prior to baking.

Accent the tops with sprinkles, coloured sugar, or crushed nuts (or a combination)

Cook at 350F until done. This is highly dependent on the thickness of the cookies.

The best Sand tarts are thin, and get crispy-cooked in about 5 minutes. Watch for them to just start turning brown around the edges.

Let cool.

Eat! Enjoy! Brag you your siblings.

Happy Holidays!

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Over on another site, where a particularly Clever-like-a-Crow blogs, there in an interesting discussion regarding being Green, hair-shirts, pineapples, and fancy lamps. Go check it out!

My own thoughts are deep and varied, but I’ll take two quotes from the Viridian Design page and ponder them here…

What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

Hmm, interesting way of defining the term, and sounds pretty accurate, assuming a long-term scale of Time. Guzzling fossil fuels is not sustainable, obviously, since we are using them faster than they got made, and will eventually run out. But this article specifically focuses on “things” rather than “practices“. The CrowClever Meme makes a good point to this, with his images of the lamps. I’d definitely prefer the slightly more expensive one to keep around. And in actual reality, we just bought two fancy lamps for the living room of our house, to replace the cheap one that we were using. So, I can support a facet of this movement, where quality matters over economy in some things.

Do not “economize.” Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It’s melting the North Pole. So “economization” is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

And here we get to the crux of the matter. Specifically the bold-ed portion (Highlighted by me, not the original article). Viridian Design tends to slant more towards personal accountability. It describes a method of paring down our belongings to only reflect those important to us. Not just important, but REALLY necessary to our continued happiness and survival. As such, it is quite different from how most perceive the Green movement.

It’s a fascinating read, but one that seems almost to gloss over the global accountability angle, and trivialize anything that is not immediately Here-Now in our lives. It almost feels like the ultimate Local-centric worldview. Far too insular to affect widespread change.

If everyone began acting according to the Viridian Design lifestyle, I have no doubt that there could be widespread change. Walmart would close down, or be forced to drastically alter their items in stock, since most do not fit the criteria of necessary or Truly beautiful. They could possibly eke out an existence as “experimental stuff” and Multi-tool dealers though.

Yet, the main points of reducing, tossing out, and minimizing the items we own is one that goes completely against popular culture, thus would be incredibly difficult to implement in any short time-frame. And shorter time-frames are what seems needed if we are to sustain the current culture.

We do need a shift away from vapid consumerism, but that (I think) will come regardless of our actions. Either willingly or out of necessity when the cost of “stuff” outweighs our means to purchase “stuff”. The trick is to ease into the new paradigm.

Viridian Design tries to show a way through that shift, but I think will ultimately fail since it strives to be too different, and too self-sacrificing. Most people are not willing to give up the quality of life they have. Society as a whole has moved beyond the local village-mentality. I doubt anyone would go back there, other than small fringe communal groups.

The main issue I see with the Green movement (any shade of green) is that it seems to revolve, at least in part, around this sacrifice. There is a distinct layer of guilt or shame that often is found in sub-texts of many sustainability debates, or with the adherents of Greenwashed projects. Do this or the planet will be destroyed!

However, I do see the necessity of such things, even while I take offense to the connotations. Mainstream culture, myself included, is not usually willing to make Changes of any sort without a pretty serious motivating factor. The planet’s pretty big, and cessation of my current life is rather serious, after all.

What the final answer will be, to both continue our current society, and yet still keep it viable in a sustainable future, no one really knows.

My own theory, unsubstantiated by research, and merely emotinally rendered, is as follows.

As gas prices continue to rise, along with other commodities, we will be forced to consolidate our belongings. WalMart and the Dollar stores will see a huge boom in business, as people gravitate even further towards Cheap/easy things. Rental properties will start to be more popular, rather than folks locking down a permanent mortgage, and the current foreclosures will make McMansions available as apartments.

At the same time, there will (continue to) be a slowly growing acceptance of more sustainable protocols, projects and procedures. Folks who -can- will start gardening more, and learning proper canning/preserving of foods. Windmills and other renweable resources will slowly grow more popular, and hybrid cars will match pace with other models. Diesel engines will see a minor come-back, paralleling an increase in economy petrol-powered vehicles.

Cities will initially begin to show a huge dichotomy of Have/Nots and slums will expand into the suburbs. Eventually, however, those suburbs will retract and form smaller communities. It remains to be seen how inclusive/exclusive the new clan-cities are.

There’s plenty more to describe my vision of the future reality, but I don’t tend to gaze too far forward. I’m more interested in the near-term where things get over-inflated or under-appreciated during the shifts. After all, history shows that we probably won’t self-limit ourselves, and thus will continue along our current track until the economics of such paths begin to shift. Only then will the alternatives and Druidic-types start to step up and fill the gaps where necessary.
Viridian Design seems too limiting. Moving to the country and growing our own food is not feasible for the masses of people currently in our cities. I’m not sure of how the middle path will work out.

It’s an interesting thing to ponder though!

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Autumn has struck again, and with it a more formal shift in my mind to introspective stuff. It’s rather amazing how, if you pay attention, our bodies and minds react to the shifting seasons in subtle ways.

Whether it be force of habit, instinct, or a deeper change in our spirit, this time of year makes me crave stews and soups in hearty amounts. Summer is the time for salads and sandwiches, autumn means beef gravy, and thick rootstock veggies for dinner. Truly the “Meat and potato” season is upon us!

I’m not sure if it is entirely based on the availability of local foods either. With today’s supermarkets, I could eat strawberries all year, and have a pumpkin pie at will from the bakery counter. But I don’t favor those flavours heavily, except at seasonally appropriate times. Interesting!

In other news, I’ve decided to dedicate my meditation time, and part of my work-break-minutes to the art of Pendulum Divination.

I have a lovely little pendulum I made years ago, with a silver acorn ‘plumb-weight’, and seed beads along the ‘string’, comprosed of emerald, Carnelian, and moonstone threaded on black waxed-linen thread. It hangs a mere 7 inches (18cm) long, which might be too short according to some sites I found online, but is just perfect for keeping in my shirt-pocket at work.

I will make brief comment on my progress, throughout the month, which currently stands at “I made a nifty pendulum and plan to learn to use it“. Brief experimentation with a few other pendulums that I made or found lying around the house have led me to believe this particular one will work best and feels more natural to me.

Second pick of mine is a length of almost yarn-thick cotton string, 13inches(33cm) long, with either a bronze-dipped acorn on it, or a really cool hunk of quartz-like mineral on it (not a crystal, just a “hunk of whitish and grey rock” from the backyard.)

While the more formal gemstone bead and silver weight feels good for everyday practice and convenient carrying, the longer “cheap knock-off” one is almost calling for itself to be dedicated for Semi-Big Questions and at-home-only ponderings.

Perhaps those with more background in gemstone correspondences, and metaphysical hanging-weights can comment with thoughts on this finding?

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I’m sure by now all you readers have been rather inundated with the media’s marketing of “little steps” to help save the planet. Green-washing aside, there are plenty of smaller steps you can do which may not single-handedly save every human on our little ball of dirt, but can help out a little bit and “make a difference to that one“. (ie: Loren Eisley‘s “The star thrower“)

Without stepping on too large a soapbox, I’ll propose a challenge-tagging to you all. I’ll list 5 small very tiny steps that I’ve taken this year, which have managed to stick in my routine for over two months now, and thus become “habit”. They are not huge things, but I’m fairly proud to have wrangled them into reality.

1. Started drinking less soda and coffee (still do on special weekends and during night-shift to help stay awake though!). It may not seem like a huge thing, but in prior posts, I’d been fairly addicted to Mountain Dew. So in addition to losing weight, I save a bit of money, and feel less sugar-drugged at work.
2. Canning our own food. Be it veggies, 40+ quarts of marinara, fruit jelly, beans, or liqueurs, the products of our garden and local farmstands now adorn our cupboards more than years past. We’ve saved money already, even buying new jars/lids/etc, and cemented in our habits a valuable sustainable kitchen-practice. While not being “green” in a more eco-mainstream sense, it does reduce the energy-cost of food we’d normally be buying at hte store shipped in from remote areas.
3. Garbage Reduction. All of our food-scraps gets fed to the chickens (recycled into EGGS!). Our paper-trash is collected and burned periodically, and plastics/cans are thankfully recycled each week as part of our regular garbage removal service. While I realize burning paper-trash releases CO2 and may impact global warming, I’ve yet to see research showing it makes MORE of a problem than hauling the trash to a landfill where it will rot and fume for years. Less trash, and recycling/refeeding of some trash reduce our impact in the long-term as a healthy eco-habit.
4. The CF lightbulb switch. Yes, it’s been mentioned to death, along with the haz-mat scare of containing mercury, but we’ve done it in most rooms. They honestly do last longer than incandescent bulbs, and are cheaper on electricity.
5. Started folding instead of crumpling. Sorry if this is a squeamish comment, but it deserves mentioning (at the very least for eccentric-maebius factor). Regarding bathroom tissue (TP), I used to unroll a good long bunch of sheets, and then crumple them up for posterior usage. Then, I read a report about the average number of sheets and realized I was far above that. So I started just using 5-7 sheets and folding it before using. I avoid paper-cuts at work (they have crappy TP, pun intended) and cut my usage almost in half. 4 sheets saved each time, = many more trips to the thinking chair before buying more rolls!

What have you done? (long-term habits from years ago are allowed, if they still make you feel a bit happier and secure knowing they count towards “helping the planet”.)

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A short little blurb here about my nightly musings before bed, and was inspired by my friend Varulv. I’m going to try to lose weight and get more in shape.

*Gasp* Shock, Horror, I know. Maebius turning into a health nut and improving his Crunchy Hippy factor by eschewing (and not chewing!) junk food and such?!

To be truthful, I always knew my diet was fairly healthy, yet with a big dose of sweets and treats thrown in for proper soul-health. I periodically drink sodas, but unless we go out to eat, it’s one can a day, and I simply have to induge an ice-cream habit lest I go crazy.

Yet last night at dinner, my friend (who, by the way looks fantastic and works out, and does proper portion control, and is, by many definitions of the word: Hawt) made a simple snarky comment that stuck in my brain and gave me troublesome dreams. He had brought over a copy of his Abs Diet book, which at first glance seemed quite informative about portions, basic workouts at home (requiring no heavy machinery!) and recommending stuff like using whole grains instead of bleached rice and bread. Stuff I thought about but never really buckled down and got into myself. Still, even seeing each other frequently, I noticed such a shift in eating and lifestyle gave noticable results. I periodically would joke how I needed to do that sometime, but never really buckled down to get into it. (yes, I repeated that phrase, intentionally)
We had chicken and Norman Kabobs, with salads for dinner. Varulv browsed the basalmic vinegrette dressing I used, commenting on the not quite low-calorie nature of it, compared to the home-made stuff I sometimes use. (EVOO and herbal vinegar is much cheaper, yummy, and healthy than commercial “light Vinegrette stuff, which is loaded apparently with sugar, salt, and bad oils).

Granted, I never personally got in the habit of checking labels, and just buy what sounds tasty, if we decide to get dressing of any sort. Still, it was enlightening to hear the numbers from a friend who did practice such reading activity.

The kicker came thought, when it was time for dessert. Pudding (a rare treat!) topped with fresh fruit/berry salad we made up the night before. Served in fancy pudding glasses, with local or at least freshly purchased fruit, which was a bit better than canned processed fruit. Still, I decided it needed something extra…this was my downfall.

Out came the Ready-Whip whipped cream. *SKWWWWWWW* went the nozzel, and my desert was topped with a decorative white ruffly cloud. Whole milk cream, and sugar! YUMM! With his awesome snarky smile, Var commented on the necessity of the topping, especially in light of the moments-ago salad dressing conversation.

We laughed, I squirted Whipped Cream into the sprogling’s mouth (because you all know kids and whipped cream-mouths are a matched pair). And I ate my dessert, topping and all. It was yummy, but the amount I used had no real effect on taste.

…and there’s the disconnect I had.

My own pudding tasted pretty much exactly the same as the leftover dessert I finished from the kid. I ate the remaining leftovers today at work, and it was yummy. Plain low-fat pudding and fruit was no less yummy for lack of a big squirt of fatty sugars. I did not NEED it, but my brain and sweet tooth demanded it last night.

I realzied, in that one simple comment, something that I think I’ve said many times. I KNOW I’ve heard it many times, but not totally internalized yet. “Do you need that?“

It’s the same voice that helped curb my milk chocolate cravings, and get me to experience and prefer small nibbles of really good expensive dark chocolates. Not only is it better for me, but it’s a tiny treat that essentially avoids unnecessary chocolate-munching on big Hershey bars at work. I used to bring a candybar or bag of candy to work. I now bring gum, (and sometimes unsalted sunflower seeds in the shell). They were tasty, but not necessary in the longer term.

It’s these little steps that stick for me better than any Official Diet Menu. So this month, I am going to re-focus my eating meditations on food choices. I already made a commitment to myself to limit portions for my bento lunches, now I think I’ll try to fine-tune those lunches with smart choices for “fluff” items.

Whipped cream is still a wonderful soul-happy-food, but it’s not really needed except when I’m feeling extra cravings. After all, ice cream sundaes pretty much require it, but regular bowls of ice cream for average meal desserts, not so much.

Here’s to not so much of Maebius, in the coming months!

*pats tummy appreciatively*

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While I always manage to avoid finding the time to properly setup a lunch before work the following day, and wind up cramming random leftovers from the fridge into my lunchbox before work, I’ve always been intrigued and fascinated by the concept of making bento-style food to eat.

I subscribe to RSS feeds of bento blogs, I even one attempted a bento in a prior posting, but I never wind up finding little containers to use or fiddling with ingredients to aesthetically define my lunches. …until now!

For the past few months, my lunchbox at work was the subject of friendly teasing, and smiles. I got it as a gift from my 4yr old sprogling who, in a wonderful display of sharing and Love4U, used his Chuck E cheese tickets to buy me the superman lunch box to take to work. He’s awesome, isn’t he?!! Yep Yep!

Unfortunately, the “sport bottle” got forgotten under the couch once with fruit juice, and not discovered until a few days later when it had turned black and fuzzy inside. It’s gone now.

But, while this humble box (Maebius strikes a heroic pose as he types ‘humble’) contained many a tupperware tub, or cool-whip container, it was never truly the “Bento Supreme” that I desired.

Luckily, my dreams and wishes were answered, with a trip to WalMart. (I know I know, *shudder* but we had to go there to get a specific something for the kid’s school. They simply do NOT sell Kinder-Kare play-sleep-mats in the heavily specified and required size/config elsewhere we found except online with horrid S&H.)

There, at Wally World, while shopping for his own Lunchable Packaging, we ran across a line of Crayola lunch things, which drew our little one like hungry moths to a S’more bonfire! They were thick-walled, not at all flimsy, and easy to open. The Bright colours were eye-catching, and we just HAD to get a set for him.

….And of course since he got a set, and we noticed it fit perfectly in my own lunchbox, then yours truly needed to go BACK to the store later that week and pick up my own!

For the record, our sprogling has a set of “Gold” and mine are, if you’ll forgive the pun, so very cherry (red)!

Inside our lunchboxes, there is just exactly enough room for one thermos, one ‘bowl’ thingy, and two sandwich flats stacked together. For our little lunches, he only has one sandwich container, but I found that I can add a second “orange” one that mom got but doesn’t really use.

The Thermos, in my own lunches, gets filled with miso paste, and random things like spices, rice, beans, hiziki, nori, soba, and/or fresh picked lambs quarter-tips. At work, I can use the hot water from the drinking fountain which makes a lovely soup du jour.

The Bowl gets filled with fruit salad, macaroni, veggies, or whatever side-dish we had leftover from dinner previous evenings.

Likewise, the sandwich holds just the right portion of entree (or even *gasp* a sandwich!). Secondary sandwicher is perfect for dessert-type scraps, or additional side-dish leftovers or veggies (carrots and such work awesome for crunch-factor festivities)

You know you think they’re cool! Admit it!
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