Habia una vez, I taught school in rural Louisiana.  Which was crazytown for a variety of reasons.  Once, I was in the middle of punishing the whole class for something or other, and when I threatened just one more thing, one of the kids called out from the back: “Aw, is that lagniappe?”  I had no idea what they meant.  I was pretty convinced it was something rude.  Or dirty, because all of the other kids were cracking up.  But if I admitted that I had no idea what it meant, they would have destroyed me.  Later (and these were the days long before Urban Dictionary), I learned that it meant “bonus,” as in: “a little extra tossed in with your purchase.”  Clever, clever, bad children.

Anywho, in honor of yesterday’s Mardi Gras, I had lagniappe!

I was in the library when I saw a copy of Mother Earth News.  When I asked if I could borrow it, the librarian said: “You know what, that copy is outdated anyway.  You can have it.”

When I squealed with joy, she also told me I could have the stack of eight of them on the shelf.  OMG!  Christmas in February!

How have I never read this magazine?  I mean, I am seriously drooling over every headline.  You Can Build Your Own Home?  Improve Your Garden With Companion Planting? Living the Homestead Dream?  YES, PLEASE!

Friday, my boss asked me if I was going to start gardening this weekend.

“Start?” I said. “I’ve been gardening!”

That is the glory of Northern California… veggie gardening is a year-round project.

In addition to the sea of favas and crazy-kale, the cabbage and cauliflower (behind the cabbage) has been particularly lovely this year.  Except, you know, I also bought a cabbage at the store the other day, and was literally confused at how it was so perfect.  How are there no bugs?  Nothing raggedy?  And the farmer grows gagillions of them?  Oh, right, chemicals.  That’s how.

With this crop, I’m hoping to attempt my first sauerkraut.  Woo hoo!

While I was at the store picking up cabbage, I discovered this:

Oh, New Belgium Beer, you know me too well.  Digging is my favorite hobby!  I like New Belgium stuff anyway, but this one could have been made from dirt and snails and I still would have bought it.

They’re crafty, those marketing people!

This has been a crap week.

Monday afternoon, I discovered that someone filed federal taxes using my name, date of birth, and social-EFFING-security number.  That no good punk got their refund wired directly to their account today.  How nice for them, right?  You know what I get?  An estimated 77 clock hours trying to reclaim my own identity.  So far, I’m on day three of paperwork and phone calls to government agencies. YAY!

The biggest thing I’ve learned?  Nobody cares about this.  When I spoke to the IRS on Monday, they said that they had no plans to stop the deposit into the account that was fraudulent.  When I said to the man on the phone: “But they are STEALING!” He replied: “Well, it isn’t your money.”  This did not comfort me.  Plus, it IS my danged money!  I pay a shitton of taxes, and maybe I wouldn’t have to pay so much if the IRS wasn’t GIVING MONEY AWAY TO THIEVES!!

Today I spoke to social security (as I was instructed to do by the IRS), and they said that they couldn’t do anything about it, but I that I needed to contact the Federal Trade Commission.  I’m going out on a limb here, but I have a feeling they don’t care, either.

On top of that, work has been a real peach.  UGH.  I can’t even get into the crazy of that place, but there may or may not have been some door slamming on my part today.  Which helped, actually. And possibly prevented me from ripping someone’s face off with my bare hands.

On a good day, I can channel my rage into productivity, and having hit what I hope was rock bottom mid-morning today, I’m expecting to clean house tomorrow.  Figuratively, obviously.

Whew.  Okay.  I’m done now.

In happy, sunshiney news, check this out:

Look who grew two oranges!!

Superbowl Sunday, Westerman and I went skiing/snowboarding.

It was Westerman’s genius idea to go snowboarding on Superbowl Sunday, because look around me in that photo.  Do you see ANYONE else?  There were a few other people there, but not enough for us to EVER have to wait in a line of any kind.  It was glorious.  Plus, the weather was beautiful: sunny, no wind.  The snow was not great, since it hasn’t really rained this winter, but it wasn’t terrible.

I’m not a great snowboarder to begin with (this is the understatement of the year), and I didn’t go at all last year, so I am more than a little bit out of practice.  We started out on the green runs, with Westerman counting the number of times I fell (a number too high to report), and shortly before lunch, he talked me into trying a couple of blue runs.

On the blue runs, I become paralyzed with an irrational fear of turning.

If you don’t know the first thing about snowboarding, this is how it works:

Your feet are strapped on to the snowboard perpendicularly, as you can more or less see in the photo above.  If you were going directly down the hill, you would be facing sideways with the snowboard pointed straight down the mountain.  I ride with my right foot forward.  To turn in snowboarding, you either lean on your toes or your heels.  For me, leaning onto my heels turns me to the right, so that my back is to the mountain.  Leaning on my toes turns me left, so that I am facing the mountain.  A proficient snowboarder does heel-toe-heel-toe S-turns down the mountain.  Does that make sense?  Never mind.  None of it matters.

Anywho, I am quite comfortable turning onto my heel-side, and turning from my heel side onto my toe side, but turning from my toes to my heels gives me fits of insane terror.

In a good moment, when things aren’t too steep and I have a run that is plenty wide, I can self talk my way through it: “Okay.  Shift weight onto right heel.  Pick up right toe.  Slowly pick up left toe.”  And when I follow those steps, it works 100% of the time.  But the scary part about this turn is that for just a split second, you have to shift your weight forward, and aim directly down the hill.  This is where the freak out happens for me.  In that split second, I think “What if I don’t turn?? What if I pick up speed and fly down the hill?” And in that split second, I usually throw my weight backwards, causing my snowboard to catch an edge, inevitably causing me to fall right on my ass.

It was in one of those moments that I had a sudden flash of my riding teacher, and a very similar situation in my riding lessons.  “That poor woman.”  I thought.  “But at least she doesn’t have to teach me to snowboard.”

In riding, I have a similar moment of terror with the canter.  To get the horse going, there is a split second where he kind of picks his head up and then starts moving forward.  Usually around the picking-up-time, I feel like he isn’t going to canter, and instead he is going to run away, so I back off, and then he stops.  My teacher tells me again and again that I just need to get through that.  I need to keep my heel where it is supposed to be just for one second longer, and then he will go.  If I can sit through just ONE SECOND, literally, one second, of uncertainty, it will end up with the appropriate result.

Just exactly like the toe-to-heel turn.

So why can’t I do it?  Physically, I am able to.  Logically, I totally understand what I need to do.  But, lordy-lordy, do I freak out in those moments, leaving me to scooch-scooch-scooch down the blue runs on my heel side.

It is endlessly fascinating, learning physical-sporty things as an adult.  There is a cycle that involves first not being able to physically do anything, then learning what your body should be doing, then finally physically being able to do that, then having a mental meltdown about actually doing it.  At least, that is how it is for me.

On the last run before lunch, I both set my quads on fire from my sad attempt to scooch down the mountain, and also landed hard enough on my wrist to decide that I was officially done with blue for the day.  After lunch, Westerman humored me with a few more green runs before heading off to conquer the back of the mountain, leaving me with an overly chatty lift operator on the baby-hill.

Trip # 1:  “Looks like you got ditched, huh?”

Trip #2: “Did he head to the backside of the mountain?”

Trip #3: “Yeah, boyfriends and husbands always do that.” (At this point, I started with the: “He’s not my…” and then shut myself right up.  As I was on the learnin’ slope, It took me fewer than five minutes to get down the hill, and since there was no one there, the lift dude had a comment for me every time.

Trip #6: “You been on any other runs today?”

Trip #7: “How long you been riding?”

It was somewhere around that time that I decided to quit while I was ahead and have myself a beer and some people watching.

In other news, my utter lack of bloggery can be blamed on pure insanity at work.  Crazy-times will continue at least through March, but likely through May.  I did do a bit of gardening on Saturday before snowboarding, and I have photos to report, so hopefully I can muster the will do get that up before the weekend!

Oooh, this week. The garbage that is this week began on Saturday, when I started editing this giant project for work that was due this week.  It is a long and stupid story, but the conclusion is: nobody did what they were supposed to do, so my boss and I have been working on it for a million hours since Saturday.  BOO.  The week also seems horrifyingly long already:  someone was introducing me to a college intern today, and during the introduction, I said that I had seen his presentation from earlier this week.  “Yes, from last week!” he said, to which I literally responded: “OH MY GOD, TODAY IS ONLY TUESDAY!!?!?”  Sad moment.

It is also the kind of week where I shorted out the keyboard on my work laptop (why must I drink tea near the computer?), found myself wrestling with a 50 pound bag of chicken feed while wearing high heels (feed won), and thought about how thankful I was that I could just come home and Not.  Have.  Anyone.  Talk.  To.  Me.

Anywho, here is what I was going to write:

I like things neat and clean and tidy.  However, I sort of hate cleaning.  What I find interesting about myself is what I let slide, and what I don’t.  For example, I make my bed every day.  EVERY day.  Usually, it is the actual, literal first thing I do after putting my feet on the floor in the morning.  In fact, if I so much as go to the bathroom before making my bed, I feel sort of itchy about leaving it undone.

But you know what I don’t do?  Dishes.  If there is a dirty dish in the kitchen sink on a weekday, it is basically guaranteed to stay there until the weekend.  Unless it is a cast iron pan.  Those I wash religiously, and would never, ever, ever, ever, ever leave dirty.  So why can’t I make myself wash the dishes?  I hate having them in the sink, and once I start washing dishes, I don’t really mind it, and it only takes about five minutes.  So what is the problem?  I don’t know.  but I do know that those dishes will still be there on Saturday.  Guaranteed.

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.

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.

Today Molly, Westerman and Javier’s dog, goes back home after three weeks of staying here while her dads were traveling to assorted exciting places.  Three weeks is the longest I’ve dog-sat Molly, and after about two weeks, I think she just gave up all hope of ever going to her real home again and decided that she lived here for good.

Molly is a good dog.  But three dogs is a lot of dogs.

These photos don’t so much reflect the reality of three dogs, only the reality of when the camera comes out, which is when they have moments of extreme cute.  Anywho, bye, Molly!  And happy birthday Westerman!

After my shift walking dogs at the Humane Society, the remainder of Saturday was spent doing a glorious lot of nothing.

Well, not nothing… but lots of reading.

The weather has been very strange– it gets down to freezing at night, but is almost 70 during the day.  The plants are very confused.  My favas are getting super tall.

But the most confused of all is the sunflower patch.

My sunflowers dropped a lot of seeds, and in, I don’t know, November, maybe?  They all started to grow.  A bunch of cosmos popped up as well, but the frost eventually killed most of them.  The sunflowers have been strangely hardy, and now the biggest ones are getting ready to flower.

Fascinating.  I wonder if they’ll actually flower and produce seeds?

In other Saturday news, I found some baking chocolate in the back of my cabinet and made some delicious and super easy chocolate cookies yesterday.

They are the perfect snack for compulsively reading the Little House on the Prairie series!

Tomorrow I have to go back to work.  I’ve had a long time off (one of the many reasons my job is awesome), but still I’m not ready to go back.  Sigh.  However, the sun was out today, and that made a huge difference.  Yesterday was cold and grey and cloudy, and I spent the day moping on the couch and wearing ten sweaters.  Partially, I was moping because my jaw was busted and everything was achy, but I don’t think the weather helped.    Today, the sun was shining, and it was warm enough to be T-shirt weather, and I got a ton of stuff done.

I finally broke down and dragged my Christmas tree into my backyard (from its resting place on my front lawn) where I chopped it into three parts and shoved it in my yard waste bin.

I didn’t want to risk having the city not pick it up for the second week in a row.  That would just be too demoralizing.

It was so warm outside that I had to open up the greenhouse to let some heat out!

It is still dropping into the freezing range a couple of nights each week, so more and more plants have joined the greenhouse ranks.  The most recent additions were my water plants.  They did not seem to enjoy living under ice, so they moved into a bucket of water inside the greenhouse.  The citrus plants are very happy-  those two oranges are probably ready now, and the little lime tree is covered with baby limes.  I love the sun.  I can’t wait for it to be spring again.

I also did laundry today.  Which reminds me of the green sweater.   A couple of weeks ago, I was digging around in a sweater drawer, and found a green cardigan.  “That’s funny,” I thought.  “I could have sworn that sweater was in the laundry pile.”  I didn’t think too much of it, until I did my laundry several days later.  And there was the green sweater.  Again, but now in the laundry.  Oooooo.  Mystery!  I’m easily distracted and forgot about it again until I was putting the laundry away.  Holy crap, the green sweater is in the drawer again!  But it was just in the laundry!  GHOSTS! Ghosts are moving my sweater!

Then I had some sense and solved the mystery.

The colors are much more similar in real life.  I don’t really know how it happened that I purchased two nearly identical green sweaters, especially since pretty much every other sweater I own is grey or black, so a green sweater really stands out in my wardrobe.

Oh well.

The last task on today’s list is to clean out my computer bag before work tomorrow.  Oh, and make yogurt.  I didn’t start the yogurt in time to have it done today, so I’m going to start it later and let it sit overnight.  Because I know that minor detail is really important and worth reading about.  (No, no it isn’t.)

And then, something exciting:

I have been thinking of getting myself a copy of the Little House books for a while, but then I read the post on the Crunchy Chicken Blog about her next book (testing out some Little House livin’), and I went straight to Amazon and got myself a used set.  They arrived yesterday, and last night I read Little House in the Big Woods in its entirety.  Man, I love those books.  I must have read them several times when I was little, because even though I haven’t read them in at least 25 years, reading that book was basically: “Oh!  I remember this part!  Oh!  This is when they get the maple candy!  Oh!  It wasn’t a bear, it was a tree!”

You know, one of the things that struck me most in re-reading it last night is how few things they had, and therefore how valued and special things were.  Laura, in the first part, has “…only a corn cob wrapped in a handkerchief…” for a doll, while her sister has a real rag doll.  But it was a good doll, she writes: “It wasn’t [her] fault that she was only a corncob.”  At Christmas time, Pa builds Ma a shelf for her figurine.  Her one figurine of a fancy lady, the only decorative item in the whole book.

Anyway, it just made me feel sort of depressed about all of the meaningless crap we have today.  I have a lot of thoughts about that, but after writing and deleting a couple of different paragraphs here, I think I’ll just quit while I’m ahead.  Or at least even.

Tonight I’m going to read Little House on the Prairie.  I’m pretty excited about it.