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  When I asked if I could borrow it, the librarian said: “You know what, that copy is outdated anyway.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!

“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!

View from the back barn. Not too shabby!

I can’t remember if I mentioned that I broke down and bought my very own saddle for horseback riding.  My teachers had been telling me it needed to happen, and I just didn’t really think I was a good enough rider to warrant the expense.  Luckily, I found one that fits my monster-femurs at a local consignment store for about 1/3 of the price I thought I’d have to pay.  Yay!

The saddle has been quite a process.  Once I got the saddle, I had to decide on stirrups.  Did you know there was a whole variety of stirrups?  Me neither.  The school saddles have these cheap versions, and that is all I’ve ever used before:

I also tried out these fancy ones:

I didn’t like these, even though they are quite fancy.  That tube-ey looking part bends and my feet were continually slipping out.

Finally, I tried these guys:

The good news is that I love them.  They are also bendy, but have metal “cheese graters” where your foot goes, so your foot stays where it needs to be.  I am particularly fidgety with my right foot, so it is nice that I can squirrel my toes around but not have my boot slip out of the stirrup.

The bad news is that those things are insanely expensive.  Like nearly $200.  (For comparison, the “regular” stirrups are about $30.)

After ordering them, I had a mild panic attack and considered sending them back.  But Thursday was the first day that I rode in my new saddle PLUS the fancy new stirrups, and holy crap, it really makes a difference.

My other saddle project was “oiling” my saddle.  The flaps of my saddle were basically totally flat and hard, and so I went out on Saturday to hang out with the middle school girls and learn to take care of my saddle along with them. I also got to hear stories about their drama teacher (“Her hair looks like a fried egg.”), and other relevant middle school topics.  Saddle cleaning takes a LONG time!

I didn’t take any before or after pictures, because I didn’t think of it, but after about two hours of rubbing leather conditioner into the saddle and bending it all over the place, there was a huge difference.  Today will be the first day I ride in my newly-conditioned saddle, and I’m curious to see if I notice a difference!

Aah, three day weekend.  There are no words for how thankful I am for an extra day off.  On the downside, Sunday afternoon I started to panic that I only had one more day off.  Ugh.

Back on the positive side, I did a lot of gardening Saturday and yesterday.  My spinach plants were ready to be moved out of the greenhouse and into the garden, so I had to clear out some insanely old radishes.

I don’t really have an explanation for that.

I also got my first carrot!  Hooray!  I have a hard time growing carrots for some reason.  These guys I actually started in the greenhouse and transplanted.  I know transplanting carrots is a no-no, but I put them out in the garden when they were really tiny, and they seem to be okay.  Last weekend I direct-seeded a patch of carrots in another garden plot, and I’m crossing my fingers for good results there.

Purple outside, orange inside.  Fancy!

I planted a bunch of potatoes, weeded some areas, thought out where the new beehives are going to go, saved some spaces for tomatoes, and generally puttered out there with the chickens.  The chickens discovered a chair yesterday:

They were up there for a good, long time, eventually settling in and claiming it as their own.  I took about 100 photos, but I like this one the best since they look tough and gangster chickens are highly appropriate for my neighborhood (and the graffiti on the fence behind them).

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!!

In the words of Camille: “They look like something out of Dr. Seuss.”

Since December, the plants have grown even taller and even crazier.

They’re starting to grow side shoots, and are over five feet tall.

Behind the tallest of the kale-trees....

Just when I was convinced that these were going to become everlasting kales, I noticed this:

They’re starting to flower.  I was planning to just hack off the flowers on top to see what would happen, but flowers are starting out of every joint and branch on them.  Super sad.  I’m trying to eat all of the remaining leaves while I can, and then I’ll just hope that my kale seedlings hurry up and grow!

I specifically went in there for: mangel beets, small tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, and kale.  In addition to all of those (including two kinds of kale), I also came out with cowpeas, leeks, onions, kohlrabi, sweet peas, calendula, and they threw in some morning glory seeds as bonus.  How nice!

I’m particularly excited about the mangel beets.  These guys are giant, huge, crazy beets that you grow for livestock feed.  I’m hoping that they are easy to grow and that the chickens like them.  I planted a few up today, and we’ll see how they do.

I also planted up the tomatoes and more kale in the greenhouse.

I had a bit of a tragedy in there that required some attending to (slugs! NO!), but things still seem to be moving along.  I ran out of recycled seed six-packs, so I turned this flat into a fancy planter for my onion and leek seeds:

Yep.  Lined with cardboard, filled with soil, and then planted up with onion and leek seeds.

Hopefully, everything will be as happy as these spinach seedlings in no time!

In many of my garden photos, you might notice random tomato cages.  I use the flimsy kind of tomato cage to protect plants from dogs.  More delicate plants might get their own tomato cage, and I plunk them in the centers and edges of garden beds to prevent the dogs from running through at top speed.  They have been strangely successful.  Whenever I plant a new bed, like the one above, tomato cages are used both upright (anti-dog-running) and horizontal to prevent chickens and neighborhood cats from digging in the soil.  Tomato cages certainly don’t animal-proof the garden, but they are surprisingly effective for what I need!

I planted a ton of fava beans this year.

Fava beans are great because they grow in the winter, are a nice cover crop, produce beans I can eat, and are also super easy to collect seed from.

Oh, and they’re super pretty.

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!