Okay, So, Classic Snow Day Story:

The four year old has no boots because he threw them in the pond back in the spring, ostensibly to "wash the mud off of them." He also has snow pants that are two sizes too small and a pair that are two sizes too big, but none that exactly fit. The intermediate pair must have gotten destroyed before they made it to "hand-me-down" stage. So today we opted for the two sizes too small pair in light of the fact that he will be wearing hand-me-down snow boots that are two sizes too big. No, not because we thought that snow boots would average out snow pants, but rather assuming that he'd probably like to have at least a snowflake's chance in the Sahara of being able to walk.

It worked out okay. The boot tops just met the pant bottoms, but this made him feel like his knees were vulnerable. So, welcome the solution of all true hill-billy snow warriors: duct tape. As I was taping around his knees, Abraham gave me the most dubious look I have ever seen on the face of a four year old.

I asked him, "Are you sad?"

Charlie, with his usual comic timing, chimed in, "Are you sad because you're never going to see your knees again!?"

Abe gave us both a look that could melt rock. "No," he deadpanned. "I just look weird."

It's these moments I live for.

Something you don't see every day: frozen mushrooms on the side of a tree:

 

And in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and... Blessed Christmas!

Fun With Cisterns

Today's lesson about Kentucky living, kids, is how much fun can be had with cisterns. When houses are designed correctly, by human beings and not trained chimps, they are built with wide enough gutters to accommodate moderate to heavy rain flow off of the catchment surface, i.e. the roof. Gutters should be covered with mesh of some kind to keep leaves and spinny dillibobber seed thingies (scientific name) out of the pipe system leading to the cistern. These catchment gutters then lead to large diameter pipes which have been fitted together in such a way as to direct the flow of water to the cistern without leaking all over the dang place, but also can easily be taken down for cleaning. As you are about to see, children, my house was built by trained chimps.

The gutters have no mesh covering, so the pipes are constantly clogged with spinny dillibobbers which I am convinced are directed there especially by pernicious fairies. They also overflow when it even thinks about raining, causing us to lose half the water we might otherwise have caught, cleverly keeping the cistern from ever actually getting full. We wouldn't want that, no sir. The pipes leading to the cistern, when not clogged, have been fitted together backwards, creating impressive shows of back flow during heavy rain. Imagine a giant toddler back washing into his cup. Yeah, like that. Anyway, the long and short of this story, dear reader, is that our catchment system is a general wreck. But! Inspiration in desperation, my friends! Which leads me to...

How to catch twice as much water as your crappily designed catchment system would otherwise be capable of in a moderate to heavy rain:

1. Gather two lawn chairs, an aluminum ladder, a wheel barrow, a small tarp, and some twine.



2. Jury rig that sucker for all its worth.



3. Practice mad scientist chortle.

Other lessons in this series include:
How to Make a Cat Shelter Out of Household Junk and Duct Tape
10 Uses for Coffee Filters That Don't Fit Your Coffee Maker
and

Hang It All, Let's Move Back to the Suburbs

And Now For Something Completely Different

You never have to break into the mall at midnight again to satisfy your Auntie Anne's craving, because these pretzels are better.

Step 1: Dissolve 2.25 tsp of active dry yeast in 2 Tbsp. of very warm (110-120 degrees F) water. Let mixture froth for 10 minutes. Optional: stand over this mixture in a pointy, black hat chanting, "Double, double! Toil and trouble! Fire, burn! and cauldron bubble!" and cackling in a stereotypical witch manner.

Step 2: Mix in 1/3 cup brown sugar and 1 and 1/3 cups warm water and let that stand for 10 again. Repeat chant, if you haven't grown bored of it, but don't get carried away. This recipe does not call for eye of newt, wing of bat, or skin of toad.

 

Step 3: Slowly add 4 cups of flour, stirring constantly until the dough comes loose from the sides of the bowl. Flour your hands and knead dough until it is stretchy and nonsticky. Give that dough some tough love. Even dough needs to be kneaded. If you have any kitchen apparatus with a dough hook and don't believe in kitchen displays of affection, this works too.

Step 4: Let the dough rest for 30 minutes. While the dough is resting (and really, why does it need to rest when you're doing all the work?) measure cups of water into a low sided pan, keeping count until the pan is 3/4 full. For each cup of water, add one Tbsp of baking soda. Start this heating up to a gentle boil.

Step 5: Preheat the oven to 475 F. Grease a couple of baking sheets with spray butter or cooking spray and sprinkle them lightly with coarse salt, garlic salt, cinnamon sugar, or whatever coats your boat... your pretzel, I mean.

Step 6: If your lazy teenage dough is done "resting," begin tearing off pieces about the size of a large egg and rolling them into strips about 14 inches long. Now comes the fun part.

 

Step 7: Biting your lip hard to contain your urge to swear, twist the dough strips into a pretzel shape by crossing the ends about three inches in from each tip, giving the resulting loop a single twist, and then folding this over on itself. Or, if that just seems like way too much of a pain in the pretzel, make them into twist sticks, circles, hearts, or whatever shape your giddy 'eart desires.

Step 8: Is the water gently boiling? Good. Take a slotted spatula or other implement of kitchen torture, and dip the pretzels, one by one, into the boiling baking soda water for about 30 seconds each before removing them and plopping them on your prepared baking sheet. Sprinkle the still wet, randomly shaped dough with more coarse salt to taste.

Step 9: Bake your lovely creations for about 7 to 8 minutes until they are golden brown.

 

Step 10: Remove your pretzels from the oven and sneak away to the laundry room closet with a bowl of melted butter, ranch dressing, hot cheese sauce, or cinnamon cream cheese (or whatever) and hide while eating both pans full (about 12 medium sized hot pretzels) before your family can discover them and descend upon them like a flock of attack-trained, rabid vultures.

Or share, if that's your schtick, but I don't recommend it. You might have to resort to stabbing small boys with tooth picks just to get to keep one pretzel for yourself...

Halloween!? Zoinks, Jinkies, Ruh-roh!

As you may have guessed from the title, we went treating this year as characters from the new movie: The Avengers.

No, wait. That was the cool mom with the gym membership (or else how was she going to look like Scarlett Johansson?) and the matching store bought costumes. I was the mom who subjected my children to my belated attempts at creativity and sewing. My plan for some time was to make Charlie into Scooby Doo, Abe into Shaggy, and myself into Velma. For one thing, I figured I could swing it like the hip 1950s moms used to, with stuff found around the house, and for another, it gave me an excuse not to cut Abe's hair for about the last three months. If you need an explanation as to why I would want such an excuse, you have clearly never tried to cut the hair of a not-quite-four-year-old boy.

So we went treating as the abbreviated Scooby gang. We could've had a complete set, but I couldn't find a purple dress big enough for my husband, or a blonde wig for my dog. When people asked where Daphne and Fred were, I just said they must've sneaked off somewhere to make out. Don't think too hard about that, or it might get frightening.

Here's the thing: people knew perfectly well what we were supposed to be. And someday, my kids will think I am somewhat gauche with my home-crafted, matchy-matchy ideas... but for now, I like being a set. And as I looked around us, I saw lots of adorable little lions, bumble bees, fairies, and ninjas... but not much innovation. I don't mean to criticize other parents. They may not have the time that I have, and it is definitely easier to buy a cool looking costume than to try to fabricate one at a moment's notice. And in all probability, most moms would likely rather not let little details like cooking meals for an entire day fall by the wayside in order to turn a fuzzy brown warm-up suit into a spotted, blue collared dog. You've gotta have priorities, is all I'm saying.



What Happens When I Get a Song Stuck In My Head In October

(In case you're confused, the song stuck in my head was The Cars- You Might Think. How the zombies got involved is anybody's guess....)

Trips to Indiana Apparently Make Me Wax Poetic

After reading that title, I suggest you take this opportunity to quit reading now....

Still here? Don't say I didn't warn you.

Boys

Boys will be boys.

They bangs on thei' toys

and makes lots of noise.

Thei' clothes they destroys

cuz mud they enjoys.

They makes plots and ploys.

They trucks in convoys.

I just can't disgoys

that they are my joys;

my boys who are boys.

I figure you can either react to grass stains with a scrub brush, despair, or poetry.

Borage

Bee's borage hot.

Bee's borage cold.

Bee's borage in October

still bright and bold.

I am going to plant Borage in my garden next year. Apparently, it is a good companion for tomatoes and strawberries. But mostly, it just looks really rad.

Alice

Okie, okie, Tiny Monkey,

go on; scamper free!

Alice do it!

Alice have it!

Tomato for me?

Thank you! Chase me!

Daddy: rain!

High up in the sky!

It's your world, Monkey Girl,

Flitting Butterfly.

It didn't take Alice long to figure out the right way to handle Charlie.

I predicted when my wonderful niece was born that she would be three before I got to meet her. But she's almost two, so we beat the odds by more than a year. I love you, Monkey Girl! You are a total delight! You be good to your mama. She is the World's Best Mom, and a lovely gem of a sister-in-law. My brother is a lucky sonuvaduck.

Thoughts of a Dog

The indescribable cruelty of humans

who lay blankets

on which I am forbidden

in the grass on which

to eat food which I am denied

in front of me.

I will go lie down in the shade.

This is a tribute to beloved dogs still with us and beloved dogs gone on before. No, you still can't have my bacon. Go lie down.

B'bye now.

P.S. If anyone knows anything about other blog engines... I have just about decided that I hate  Blogger so badly as to make the effort of moving to another site worth the effort. Anyone intimately acquainted with any other lovely free blog hosts?



Gathering

Fall has come with especially fantastic color this year, and for some reason I find myself channelling my inner Katniss Everdean. No, not shooting people with arrows. I mean we've been experimenting with gathering the food available at the roadsides and wood edges. Among the roadside possibilities are walnuts and acorns. Of course, with us, what starts out as an expedition to gather walnuts and acorns, becomes an all-out menagerie. We come home with walnuts, acorns, mushrooms, caterpillars, and at least one box turtle. My children are the scourge of box turtles countywide.

While Charlie and Abe were diligently gathering the walnuts we actually set out to gather, I was getting distracted by white things in the grass. This has been a particular Fall for mushrooms. The meadows are ripe with three kinds of puffballs, as well as the occasional "Pinky" Meadow Mushroom and the more common Destroying Angel Amanita. It makes me wonder who the first person to mushroom hunt was. One ancient tribesman says, "Hey, look at this pretty thing with the pink gills on the underside. Let's cook it up!" It turns out to taste mild, and nutty. So he goes and gets more. These are white-gilled and almost mesmerizing bright. Seems legit.... Tastes pretty good too... until the liver failure sets in. Mushroom hunting is like that. This mushroom that is a "choice edible" looks exactly like that mushroom that will destroy your liver, bounce your checks, and kidnap your grandmother. Oh, and by the way, the choice edibles are still indigestible and contain no nutritional content. Sounds like fun! So you can see why I'm drawn to it.

The white things distracting me in the grass turned out to be those accurately, if dramatically, named Destroying Angels. So of course I had to pick them and take them home to make spore prints. I might be less glib about it if I thought there was the remotest possibility that either of my children would pick up a random mushroom off of the counter and take a nibble. But since they both act like I'm trying to kill them if I offer them anything that originated in the dirt, I'm not that fussed about it. I did, however, show my lovely mushroom of death to them and explained that, "This is one you never eat. It will kill you dead." At that exact moment, off in the woods we heard a shotgun blast, to which Charlie replied, "Well, that'll kill you dead!" His comic timing is impeccable.

Having gathered our haul of walnuts, we headed on to the oak tree where we first took up the idea of gathering acorns. I know what you're thinking, "Why acorns? Are they squirrelly or something?" Contain yourself, now. It turns out that if you bite into an acorn fresh from the shell, it tastes a lot like.... well, wood. Bitter, bitter wood. But I have read that if one is insane enough to gather, shell, grind, soak, dry, and pulverize acorns, it makes a nice, nutty flour. Am I insane enough? Yep. Inner Katniss Everdean, remember?

So home we trekked with our nutty haul, plus one confused turtle, one stripey woolly-pillar, and one killer mushroom. It never ceases to amaze me how my kids can whine that they're tired for the entire mile-long walk home (or, in Abraham's case, the entire mile-long bike ride in his underpants pulled by mommy using his bib overalls as a tow rope) and once we hit the yard, they're instantly up trees and zooming around on scooters. I shall coin a phrase: You're only as tired as you think you are.

Once we were home and Abraham was happily climbing hay bales while Charlie forecast the weather based on a cloud-type poster, I collapsed in a heap in the yard and found a friend. And I tell you now, it's a good thing for caterpillars, butterflies, and box turtles that they're not edible, because I am just crazy enough to try it.

I said it's been a good year for mushrooms, and also implied that you'd have to be daft to want to hunt and eat wild mushrooms. There is one easy exception to that rule, which is the Giant Puffball mushroom. I remember stomping them as a kid to watch them geyser spores, but they are also a nice edible, if you discount that pesky lack of any nutritional value. And since there is nothing that will kill you dead that looks remotely like a Giant Puffball, they're a safe bet for people who do like mushrooms and don't like playing Russian Roulette with liver failure. Now, you may have to do a little trespassing to find the perfect specimen, as we did, but where's the excitement, I ask you, in an afternoon of rambling if you don't break a few arbitrary laws? (Please don't report us...) Our perfect specimen was on a nice sunny embankment in a cow pasture, looking like a big white rock, visible from the road. No rock, it was a six pound, two foot wide Giant Puffball mushroom. I originally intended only to photograph it, but I was overcome by its awesomeness and ended up doing a little fence ducking.  I believe that a good mom introduces her children to criminal activity early!

You can, of course, eat these mushrooms, or, if you're like me, you can cut them up and try to convince your children that they're giant marshmallows. It never works. Kids are canny little buggers. But you have to try.

As Usual, Pictures of Children and Plants...

I never cease to be captivated by Chicory blooms in the fields.

Also enjoying the goldenrods and asters this year.

My hedge rose got happy out of season.