Rusty and Gus are slowly making progress.  When Rusty first appeared on the scene, Gus-the-kitty was Freaked.  Out.  He stayed barricaded in the back room, and even if I locked up the dog in his crate in a separate, closed room, Gus would totally lose his mind if removed from his hiding place.  You can’t hold Gus down, though, and the two of them are working it out.

In other news, I had yet another horse incident on Monday.  It is starting to be just a little bit lighter for a little bit longer in the evenings, and since the weather was nice, I started my riding lesson in the outdoor arena instead of the lighted indoor arena.  The dusky time of night, however, is a bit tricky for the horses.  Things are extra shadowy, so there is more room for freak outs.  I had just started to get  into a good canter, when all of a sudden, the horse just took off running.

But I didn’t fall off! (for once)

The difference this time involved a few things.

* One, the horse didn’t have a sudden start.  We were already moving quickly, so he just increased his pace until he was bolting.

* Two, he was going in a straight line, more or less.  There were no twisty turns to make me lose my balance.

*Three: I broke down and bought a saddle that fits me (I found one used for WAY less than I thought I was going to have to spend), and I think the proper saddle fit helped me keep my balance when the horse was going nuts.

*Four: I didn’t freak out.  I mean, clearly I sort of froke out, but I was somehow able to keep my head about me.  Because he took off somewhat gradually, I didn’t get as startled as I did last time the horse bolted (different horse, btw).  Time slowed way down in my head, and as my teacher yelled things to me like: “KEEP YOUR HANDS DOWN!” and “BEND YOUR ELBOWS!” I was literally thinking to myself: “I am just going to keep my legs long and my heels down and keep my butt in the saddle,” as I tried to follow her instructions.

Eventually, the horse came to his senses a little bit, and I was able to slow him to a stop.

I was definitely shaken up (and, you know, literally shaking), but I was thinking about it on my drive to work yesterday, and I think it actually made me a bit more confident overall.  Since I was able to keep my balance and (eventually) bring the situation back under control, I fell like if it happens again, I’ll feel like I know a little bit better how to handle it.

Although hopefully, I won’t have to test that theory out any time soon.

As I mentioned before, my emergency bag for the car is more of an inconvenience bag.  As in:  “Let’s go for a hike!  I need some sunscreen!” Or: “UGH, I am SO THIRSTY after this particularly sweaty riding lesson.  I wish I had flip flops and some water!”

The car kit would solve each of those problems.

Stored in a little tote bag behind the driver’s seat (where I also store reusable grocery bags), it contains the following:

*Hooded sweatshirt

*Hat

*Sunscreen

*2 Liters of water

*Soup with pop-top lid

*Emergency poncho and emergency foil blanket

*Granola bars and fruit snacks

*Canned fruit

*Spoon and fork

*Old flip-flops

Voila!  Now that I have some minimal emergency prep, I can gradually do a bit more.  For example, I am now the proud owner of four food-grade five-gallon buckets, and enough rice and beans to fill two of them.  But that is a story for later!

Oops!  I started this post back in December, and then never finished it….

Anywho, over the holidays I was working on improving my emergency preparedness situation.  Besides my grab-and-go backpack, I put together three bins that contain emergency supplies for three days:

The bins are stored in my garage, with nothing stacked on top of them, so that in the event of an emergency where I need to get the snap out of here, I can quickly toss them in the car.

One bin contains six gallons of water.

That is about as much as I can lift.  Since water doesn’t have an expiration date, I labeled each jug with the date that I purchased the water.  I’ll replace it at some point, but I haven’t yet researched how long bottled water lasts.  A while, I’m guessing.  As for additional water needs, there is a surplus store nearby that sells, well, all kinds of things, but it also sells food grade bins and barrels, so I plan to get a couple of water barrels to store water for home-emergency use.

The next bin contains food.

Camping stove and fuel (though fuel is not actually stored in the food bin, it is stored in the next bin), cooking pot, beef jerky, canned fruit, granola bars, crackers, and fruit snacks, and the black bag is full of canned soup and tuna and stuff like that.

Bin number three contains everything in the “other” category:  candles, matches, first aid kit (plus tea tree oil and hydrogen peroxide), hand sanitizer, laundry soap, rope, metal water bottle, dog food, a blanket that has one waterproof side (the black thing at the bottom of the pile on the right), towels, and extra clothes in the red bag.

Above are the contents of the red bag.  Jeans, a couple of pairs of socks, a couple of tank tops, tshirt, wool sweater, and leggings.  Not pictured are extra undies, as I didn’t really think it made sense to post pics of my undies on the interwebs.  Anywho, this clothing bag wouldn’t exactly get me through a snow storm (which is fine, since we don’t get snow here), but if I was in a situation where I just needed fresh socks and a sweater, I’d be okay.  Plus, there are more warm clothes in my emergency backpack (which would also go along with the bins in an emergency), so between the two, I’d be covered.  Literally.

None of the bins are at capacity, so there is still room for more. I also plan to store my sleeping bag in this bin, since I rarely use it anyway.

Going forward, I plan to reevaluate my emergency goods every six months, replacing, adding and subtracting as needed.  Next up, the bag I keep in my car!

Yesterday I planted up a few more seeds to get a head start on early spring planting, and my little greenhouse is starting to fill up.

My current, preferred method of seed starting:  potting soil plus vermiculite mixed up, plus leftover six-pack plant things, plus masking tape labels.

They’re all shelf-ed up in the greenhouse.

My greenhouse is a little pop-up tent, basically, made of clear plastic.  The only photo I could find of it from the outside was from when I was taking it down last spring, so this is what it looks like partially disassembled:

It fits perfectly in the corner of my “patio” against the garage wall and next to the door.  Inside, I have shelves on either side.

The above shot is pre-seedling, but you get the idea.  It is jam-packed in there right now, since the seedlings have joined all of the plants that do not enjoy the freezing temperatures we’ve been sporadically having lately.

Yesterday I also attempted to dig up a former potato patch, looking for possible seed potatoes for the new potato patch.  I have proven to be a terrible, terrible potato farmer so far, so I’m hoping this attempt goes a little bit better.  Even though my potato plants never made it to the point of flowering, there were quite a few potatoes hidden in the soil!  I got tired of digging before the job was done, and now it is back to pouring rain, so the rest of the potatoes will have to be tracked down later.

That reminds me, I have a little patch where I grew a couple of tomatoes last year, and then after they were gone, tossed in a couple of seed potatoes.  There is now some borage growing like crazy in that area, so I was planning on leaving it up to nature to see what comes up there in the spring.  Sadly, potatoes and tomatoes are not supposed to grow well together, so we’ll see what happens.

In other, unrelated news, this is one of the dogs I walked at the Humane Society yesterday:

Besides the one brown, one blue eye situation, she had a puffy tail that really looked like a raccoon tail.  A raccoon dog!  She was a really nice dog, and whenever I walk the particularly beautiful and/or nice dogs, I think: “What kind of ass would give this dog to a shelter??” since most of the dogs there are “owner relinquish.”  So sad, right?  Two of the other volunteers were talking yesterday, though, about a man who had to bring his dog in last week.  He had a whole string of horribleness, including his wife leaving and his house foreclosing, etc.  When he brought his dog in, he was apparently crying and crying that he couldn’t keep her anymore, which in the current mess of an economy, is a pretty common reason for the animals to be brought in.  Ugh.  So sad.

The dogs spend their day in the smaller side-yard off of my kitchen.  Every couple of weeks, I hose everything off back there, and every couple of months, I tidy it up a bit more- rearranging the stepping stones and gradually replacing bark with rock.

I didn’t take before or after shots, because basically, it looks the same, just with rocks now.  My first plan included covering the whole area with bark, but there are two problems with that.  One, Casey-dog had some issues with boredom/anxiety induced digging when she first started staying in the yard by herself, and bark is far more pleasant for dogs to dig in compared to rocks.  The second issue is that in the rain, bark is still kinda muddy.  Rocks both make the area less fun for digging, and more mud-proof.

Over time, I also brought in stepping stones (from other, forgotten parts of the yard) to make less and less of the yard diggable.  And I’ve begun the transition from bark to rock, but only in the patch on the other side of the kitchen door, until now.  With the rain coming (and the rain is here!) I decided it was time to freshen things up and add more rocks.

The rocks are so heavy.  My back is still sore from all of that hauling.

Today was the first day the dogs stayed outside during a rainy day.  (Casey has before, but this is the first time with both dogs.)  I was worried that I would come home to soaked, muddy dogs, but no!  Both of them had completely clean feet (meaning there was no digging today!), and both were only a little bit sprinkly, which probably happened as they were waiting for me to let them in after I got home.  There isn’t that much of a dry area out there, so I’m really curious what they did all day.  Did they both hang out in the doghouse together?

I’m totally planning on sticking a webcam of some kind out there so I can see what they do all day.

Probably something similar to what they do in the evenings:

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

From Dlisted, from Gawker

I was just looking at the weather report (because it is SO COLD!  and it is finally supposed to start raining this week) and saw that on Thursday, there is a 100% chance of rain.

Really?  100%?

I don’t think that is actually statistically possible.  I mean, there isn’t even a 100% chance that the sun will rise tomorrow, so how can they say there is a 100% chance of rain?  99.99999% chance of rain, I have no problem with, but unless is is actually raining right this minute, and you tell me that there is currently a 100% chance of rain for the present moment, 100% is a crap prediction.  BECAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW!

Have none of these weather people taken a flippin’ statistics course??

Yesterday morning, it occurred to me that I had not washed my hair in over a week.

A few years ago, I religiously washed my hair every other day.  Sometimes every day, but every other at the least.  Day one, my hair could be worn down.  But day two, it was so greasy, I had to pull it back into some kind of bun.  Gradually, I went to every third day.  For a while, I experimented with not using shampoo, but had mixed results.  Over the past year, I’ve gotten into the habit of washing my hair every five to seven days.

Oh, and two months ago I quit shampoo.

This is my hair on eight days with no washing (and secretly, two days with no brushing…oops!).  While I would not have worn it down to work in this state, it was fine for a day of Home Depot, yardwork, and horseback riding.

When I do get around to washing my hair, I use baking soda and vinegar.  When I experimented with it in the past, I had mixed results, and ended up going back to shampoo.  But two months in, I’ve got the system down.  The trick, as I read somewhere in the blog world, is that I mix the baking soda with a bit of water ahead of time.  A couple of days if I remember, the night before if I don’t.  I think this is the genius. Before, I would make a paste of baking soda in my hand while in the shower, and it would sometimes leave my hair kind of crunchy.

I mix, oh, I don’t know, maybe a tablespoon or two of baking soda with just a little bit of water in a small jar.  When I’m ready to wash my hair, I pour about a quarter of a cup of apple cider vinegar into a my Nalgene bottle, which holds a liter of water.

In the shower, I add a bit more water to the baking soda jar, sprinkle it over my scalp (especially the underneath part towards the back), and give my head a scrub.  Then rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse.

Next step is to fill the Nalgene about half way or two thirds of the way with water (plus the vinegar that is in there already), and pour that over my head.  Once it is down to about two cups or so, I refill it for a more diluted solution, and pour the rest over my hair.  And then another rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse with regular water.

I find that if I rinse enough, there is no residual vinegar smell.

I’ve definitely noticed that the less I wash my hair, the less it needs to be washed.  It probably helps that I don’t use any product in my hair, but I think it is mostly that all of the crazy chemical shampoos strip your scalp of all of its natural stuff, and then it has to work overtime to make up for it, and then you’re in a vicious cycle of oily hair.  Where as when you basically leave it alone, and use much gentler stuff on it, it doesn’t freak out and have to work so hard.

The hair washing thing is probably one of my hippie-est qualities.  Yet while I have some serious hippie streaks, there is a lot that I am perfectly happy to leave in the non-hippie spectrum.

I mean, yes, I use an Amish washer for the bulk of my laundry, but I dry clean all of my work pants, and I have my work shirts laundered and pressed at the dry cleaner as well.  And I have no guilt about that.  Not one drop.  The chemicals and the badness are worth not having to iron a button down shirt.

The hippie side of me will tell you: “I don’t have a TV.”  Which is true.  I don’t.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t watch a ton of absolute garbage on my dependable little laptop.  I have zero desire to have a TV.  Where would I even put it?  And the laptop is plenty fine for watching even the biggest of the “Biggest Loser” contestants.

I also don’t have a microwave.  I don’t miss the microwave at all.  Most things can just be heated up in a pan in nearly the same amount of time the microwave would take.  For everything else, there is the regular oven. It may take a bit longer, but it turns out way better anyway.

I don’t use paper napkins.  For my own every-day use, I have a stack of cheap, white washcloths that I use as napkins.  I use one “napkin” for several days before I retire it to the laundry.  I have fancier cloth napkins for any time that I have guests.  And I do keep a roll of paper towels on hand, but generally those are reserved for dog barf, or anything I really would not want to put in the laundry.

I’m sure there are other hippie quirks I’m forgetting (I forgot about the napkins entirely until mid-post), but you get the idea.  I just try do do what makes the most sense for me and my life.  Sometimes it turns out to be the hippie version (yard full of kale), and sometimes not so much (I sometimes eat a tub of artichoke dip for dinner), but I figure it all evens out in the end.

It is that time of year, and all of the garden blogs I read are talking about seed catalogs and planning.  I’m thinking about it too, but in a much lazier way.  Last year, I carefully planned out where things would go, and planted the appropriate number of seeds, and long story short, my garden fell flat a bit flat.

I did make myself a few notes last year, but overall the main questions I’m asking myself for garden planning now are:

* What do I actually eat?

* What do I want more of?

I started this planning yesterday while picking some kale off of what are now two year-old trees of dinosaur kale:

As I was picking the kale (for this delish dish of pasta, kale, brie, and bacon by the way…yum), I was thinking to myself: “I need a whole TON of kale plants next year!”  I do eat a lot of kale, and whatever I don’t eat, the chickens will.  So, item number one on this year’s garden plan:

An absurd amount of kale.

I’m also going to give up entirely on lettuce.  I don’t really like lettuce, and prefer arugula, which is not only easier for me to grow, it can be cooked or used in salads.

I grew a lot of tomatoes last year, and a lot of basil, and I’m going to step up both of them this year, including a patch that I’ll be able to cover with my greenhouse, and make an attempt at year round tomatoes.  I also need to remember to grab some cherry tomato seeds, since little tomatoes somehow slipped my mind last year.

I also want lots more sunflowers and pumpkins.  Because they are awesome.

Oh!  And ornamental corn, because I am totally going to enter it in the county fair this year.

I grew amaranth, but didn’t end up eating either the leaves or the grain.  However, I think this year I’ll grow it as an ornamental plant (so beautiful and easy to grow!), and if I do end up eating any, it will just be a bonus.  Lagniappe, if you will.  The quinoa is in a similar boat, but even though I never finished processing it, I have it in a bag in my kitchen cabinet, so I suppose I still could.

Also, Scarlett Emperor beans will be grown everywhere.

Twice, now, I’ve failed with potatoes, so I think I’m going to plant a patch of them in the back corner of my garden, forget about all of this piling up the soil nonsense, and just see what happens.

I will be making another attempt at cucumbers and melons, neither of which went anywhere last year.

Mostly, I’ll just try to use up the seeds I already have, and then just pick up anything that catches my eye.

Overnight temperatures have been dropping into the low 30′s lately,  so here and there I’ve been closing the door of the Eglu at night to keep the chickens nice and snug.  The other morning, I headed out to the yard to let them out before work, and I saw all three chickens standing outside of the run, looking at the closed door of the run, and the closed door of the Eglu itself.

WHAT!?  How could chickens escape from a still-closed Eglu? I was so confused. So were the chickens, apparently, since they were trying to get in the run for their breakfast, and were baffled by the closed door.

Part of the mystery was explained when I realized that the back of the Eglu had opened up and fallen flat to the ground.  I have no idea how it happened, but I can only guess that the last time I opened it, I didn’t close it securely enough, and it eventually just fell over.  Thankfully, no predators made their way into the yard that night, because that would have been seriously bad for the chickens.

Anyway, ever since the escape, I’ve been extra paranoid about quadruple-checking the back door of the Eglu.  The chickens still aren’t laying, so I don’t even open it that often, but that hasn’t stopped me from checking (just one more time) every single time I go outside.