Category: Happy @ home

In which she discovers the effect of a roll of toilet paper on a load of laundry

Have you ever wondered what might happen if you throw a roll of toilet paper into a load of laundry? Or moreso, a roll of one-ply paper on a load of dark dress clothes? Well wonder no more, bloggy peeps, because there is NOTHING I will not do in the name of scientific examination and blog fodder.

Le voila!

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Impressive, eh? And of the irony of sitting on the can just minutes before making this discovery, looking at the empty toilet paper holder and thinking, “That’s funny, I was sure I had an extra roll around here somewhere.”

My black dress pants, which I always wash on delicate and hang to dry. There are not enough lint brushes in the world to deal with this.

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And to complete our scientific journey of exploration, here is what a roll of one-ply tissue (more irony – we use one-ply because it breaks down easily, better for the septic system) looks like after an encounter with a high-efficiency front loader:

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Do you think having a wardrobe that looks like a snowstorm barfed on it is a decent reason to miss work on Monday?

Our first CSA share from Roots and Shoots Farm!

Yesterday I picked up our first CSA (community shared agriculture) share from Roots and Shoots farm. I was supposed to pick it up Wednesday in Manotick, but apparently I can’t read simple directions and managed to miss the first pick-up entirely, but they were nice enough to let me come out to the farm for the Manotick Station pick-up day and let me get my share on Thursday.

Not only do they offer yummy, organic, seasonal, local vegetables, but they send out an amazingly helpful e-mail with suggestions on how to prepare and enjoy food that may be a little exotic for families who subsist on a diet of vegetables you would mostly find in a 1970s garden salad with French dressing. In the brown faux-wood bowl, of course.

In this week’s share we got:

  • Garlic Scapes
  • Radishes
  • Hakurei Turnips
  • Arugula
  • Spring Onions
  • Lettuce
  • Swiss Chard
  • Zucchini

Look! Not scary at all!

CSA share storyboard

With the exception of Hakurei turnips, I had previously heard of all of these things, and the only one that continues to intimidate me is the Swiss Chard. I picked up my share after work and with grilled peppercorn steaks already planned for dinner, I was excited to dig in to our bounty. I used the head lettuce in a salad with tomato and cucumber, just to ease the family in to the idea, and scrubbed up the Hakurei turnips and tossed ’em on a plate as Roots and Shoots suggested they taste best raw.

Thanks to a suggestion on Facebook, I put the garlic scapes into some tin foil with some butter, sea salt and pepper and grilled ’em up with the steak.

garlic scapes with butter

Oh! My! Good! God! The roasted garlic scapes were the highlight of the meal. Considering I’d never heard of them before our farm visit two weeks ago, they’ve shot to the top of my summer must-eat list. I dropped ’em on top of my steak the way you’d eat fried onions or fried mushrooms with a steak and they were divine!!

So on our very first share collection day, we ate our way through three of eight items, probably no more than 20 or so hours after they were growing in the field. How awesome is that?

But even after noshing our way through more than a third of our bi-weekly share in the first hour, I had a bit of a problem:

CSA share in the fridge

These vegetables are much, um, larger than I’m used to. The Swiss chard alone needs its own fridge. Clearly this whole CSA thing is going to lead to more lifestyle changes than I anticipated.

I’m already excited about my next share, but in the interim I’m headed out to the Manotick farmer’s market on Saturday morning to stock up on more garlic scapes. And I might need a little more mouthwash, too!

This may be the most excited I’ve ever been about vegetables

I‘ve been hearing about community supported agriculture (CSA) for quite some time, and meaning to do it for a while. The way it works is that you buy a “share” in a local farm early in the year, and then you get a regular selection of the fruits and/or vegetables harvested from the farm at a lesser price than you’d pay at the farmer’s market or roadside stand.

I am a strong believer in buying local food. I’ve blogged before about how much I like the Manotick Butcher for their local, sustainably-raised meat. I will drive out of my way for SunTech cherry tomatoes (oh my, have you tried them? They’re like candy!) But I have been reluctant to get involved with CSA before now for one reason: we are not adventurous eaters. I really don’t know what I’d do with a box of kale.

I’ve been hearing about Roots and Shoots farm since we moved to Manotick (they’re also behind the new Manotick farmer’s market I mentioned earlier), and a few times I stopped by their weekly farm stand in the village. It was serendipitous clicking that brought me to their website on the weekend, where I finally dispelled the “box of kale” myth by reading the anticipated contents of a weekly share in July: arugula (ok), pak choy (um, what?), beets (Beloved and my mother love ’em), carrots (check!), Swiss chard (sure, why not?), radish (yes please!), green onions (yum!), zucchini (love it!), peas (see above reference re: candy), lettuce (mmmm) and herbs.

Nothing too intimidating there, and it only gets better in August (add cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and beans to the mix) and September (add spinach, potatoes, and mini-watermelons to the mix). Yummity yum yum.

I love this for so many reasons. First and foremost, I love the idea of having a steady supply of fresh, local healthy produce for the summer. There are enough familiar foods to satisfy my comfort level, and enough new foods that I won’t be too intimidated to try something new.

I’ve been struggling with one boy in particular who doesn’t like vegetables, and I think this is a terrific way to engage him. I don’t seem to be quite organized enough to build that backyard vegetable patch I’ve been dreaming of, but this may be the next best thing. How fun is it to be driving past “our” farm regularly, talking about what’s growing and anticipating harvest time? And Roots and Shoots is open to visits, so we can bring the boys to see where and how the vegetables actually grow.

245:365 Summer harvest

As if fresh, nutritious foods that come with built-in teachable moments is not enough, I have to give props to Roots and Shoots for following organic farming processes: “Certified Organic protects not only the health of the consumer, but also the health of the farmer, the ecosystems that produce the food, the waterways on the farm, and the biodiversity of the farm. It is for this reason that Roots and Shoots Farm supports and adheres to Certified Organic standards.”

Although we’re pretty excited about our farm share, we simply weren’t sure if we’d be able to consume the full weekly share of produce. Lucky for us, there’s also a half-share option. With a full share option, you get a share of produce each week for the 16 week harvest season. We chose the half share, so we get one share every two weeks. At $290 for the summer, I think that’s an amazing deal.

Aside from everything above, I think it’s the idea of co-commitment that most enamours me. From the share contract:

You as the Shareholder, commit to understanding the challenges of growing seasonal vegetables. If the forces of nature make certain crops less available, you will accept that with grace and understanding. We the farmers commit to working with a large variety of vegetables so as to minimize any potential effects of losing a crop or two. We commit to using our many years of experience, good techniques and equipment to provide you with the best quality of vegetables for the duration of the season.

You as the Shareholder, commit to reading all of the CSA information found on this website, to educate yourself about what being part of a CSA is like. We the farmers commit to providing you with information from the farm throughout the season through weekly newsletters. We commit to providing you with opportunities to visit the farm and take part in vegetable growing should you want to.

Together we commit to contributing to a more healthy, safe and sustainable food system that is locally-oriented, and that inspires community interaction around food. We, the farmers, look forward to getting to know you and enjoying the season together.

And very best of all, it provides me with a season worth of blog fodder! Come along for the ride as we answer pressing questions like “what exactly is pak choy and what do you do with it” and “who will win the dinnertime bean battle”? I’m thinking we need a new category for these posts, but my Muse must be out hoeing the back 40. Feeling inspired, bloggy peeps? What can I call a series of posts based reaping the benefits of a CSA harvest?

The garden that wasn’t to be

In the dark, cold days of January, I wrote this ridiculously optimistic list of things that I couldn’t wait to do this summer, and at the top of that list was a garden. I’d imagined tilling up a meter or two of grass (we can certainly spare it) to put in a little kitchen garden. As winter melted into spring, I watched the light travel across the yard, carefully selecting the spot that would get the most sun exposure. By this time of year, I’d speculated back in the deep cold of January, we’d be heading out to the yard before dinner to pluck our own carrots, harvest juicy tomatoes, and slice fresh-from-the-vine cucumbers into our evening salad. My mouth still waters when I think about it.

The idea of the tilled square of garden fell by the wayside early in May when I realized that the vast majority of my spare spring hours were to be spent taming the rampant growth of the lawn. As the torrential spring rains gave way to a warm, dry summer, I adjusted my expectations accordingly. I’d clear space in the existing beds for some tomatoes and cukes, and maybe next year I’d have more time to cultivate the verdant kitchen garden of my dreams.

With expectations appropriately tempered, so far this year I have planted:

  • two cherry tomato plants
  • one beefsteak tomato plant
  • three cucumber plants
  • one green pepper plant
  • one jalapeno plant
  • two packages of sunflower seeds
  • one package of pink coneflower seeds
  • two potted pink coneflower plants
  • one potted black-eyed susan

As of today, we have harvested exactly one jalapeno pepper. There is one malformed yellowish cucumber the size of a pickle trying to turn itself into a doughnut shape. The sunflower seeds, including one seedling we sprouted in the house in a pot, never made it beyond two inches tall. The coneflower seeds were absorbed by mother earth never to be seen again. Not one but TWO potted coneflower plants turned black and shrivelled up for no reason I could see except that I completely forgot to water them. And I accidentally snapped the stalks of the poor black-eyed susans as I was planting them. I guess now they’re black-and-blue-eyed susans. And the tomato plants are still the exact same size they were when I planted them in May. They have neither died nor grown, but exist in a perpetually frozen flowering state.

I mean seriously, who can’t grow sunflowers and tomatoes? Now when I go to the garden centre, I can see the plants leaning back, scurrying into corners, trying to hide from my sight. “Please, lady, don’t choose us! We want to LIVE!” Hell, even the produce in the grocery store trembles on my approach, so far-reaching is my reputation for plant-based cruelty.

Did I mention I also failed to sustain the potted basil plant I bought in mid-summer when I discovered tomato-basil-bocconcini salad? We had two great salads within the first week, then the plant withered up and died — and I even remembered to water that one!

Clearly, my entire allotment of nurturing has been expended in the effort of sustaining three boys, two pets and a Beloved. It’s a good thing they’re almost old enough to be self-sustaining!

Crazy garbage-picking wife

That’s what Beloved called me last week when I returned from errands with yet another car-load of other people’s junk, rescued from the curbside. “I’m going to start calling you ‘crazy garbage-picking wife,'” he said, while helping me pull the old, probably antique desk out of the car and carry it down to Simon’s room. I shrugged and said that was fine with me, I’ve been called crazy over worse things.

Last weekend was the spring giveaway weekend in Ottawa (I’m only mildly perturbed that they’ve repurposed my “Ottawa’s hidden treasures” phrase) and treasures is exactly what we found. The aforementioned desk, for example. It’s a kid-sized version of an old secretary’s desk, with two wooden drawers and a pull-out typewriter table. You can tell by the dove-tail joints and lack of particle board that it’s a vintage item, probably older than me at minimum. It also happens to have itty-bitty tole flowers painted on it, but it’s nothing that some sandpaper and a good coat of clean paint won’t cover. And Simon loves it, flowers and all.

We also got a couple of nice green reclining patio chairs complete with pads, one of which is rocker, and a matching umbrella. The green and white in the umbrella and pads bring the pieces together nicely with the white extendable patio table complete with removable leaf I also filched from the end of someone’s driveway a couple of weeks ago as I walked the boys home from school. (I was glad to have Tristan around to help me carry it home, and I’m sure we only looked a little strange walking down the street carrying it.) And just yesterday, I found a set of four green stacking patio chairs to complete the ensemble. All free!

And that’s not even the best deal I got in free outdoor furniture this season. One day I noticed a gorgeous wicker settee, chair and table at the curb and immediately pulled over. There was an elderly gentleman in the open garage as I stepped out to inspect them, and I asked how much he wanted, sure he’d say $50 or even $100 for this lovely, sturdy set absolutely oozing with character and in near-perfect condition. “Help yourself,” he told me with a smile, and laughed at my whoop of joy. When they wouldn’t all fit in my car, he even pulled the table and chair back away from the curb so I could make a second run and come back for the rest of the set. It’s like they were made for my porch, don’t you think?

170:365 My happy place

Beloved thinks it’s a little bit redneck of me to stop and collect other people’s junk with such unbridled glee, but I can’t help myself. Other than completely tricking out my porch and back patio this year, I’ve also scored a basketball and on a separate occasion, a Little Tykes basketball net, and a set of a dozen or so hockey sticks of various sizes. (Sadly, the snow plow crushed our hockey net — also a curbside treasure! — this winter, but maybe I’ll be able to find another one!) I’ve also found an adorable kid-sized wicker chair that is just crying out to be a photo prop. Through the years, I’ve also collected bookcases and shelving units (I simply cannot leave those behind, one can ALWAYS use more shelves in life), fireplace tools, flower pots, books, and outdoor toys.

Right now, four driveways down, there’s a really quirky metal CD stand in the shape of fishbones that I am trying hard to resist. At least, I think it’s a CD stand. Either that, or a really weird sculpture. What is it about found treasures that make them so appealing? I would never look twice at this thing if I saw it in a store. Regardless, I’m having a hard time not putting on my shoes and going to see if it’s still there.

And to tell the truth? It’s not just on giveaway day that I’ll stop to check out the discards. I have been known to peruse the curb on the morning of garbage day, scanning for treasures.

So, I’m okay if Beloved thinks I’m crazy. Erm, crazier. Crazy like a fox, I say. A garbage-picking, thrifty fox. When you see me on that TV show about compulsive hoarders, you can say you saw it here first.

Are you a crazy garbage picker too? What’s the best thing you’ve ever collected from the curb?

In which the house of her dreams continues to vex her

We’ve just put the final bit of shiny wrap and silky ribbon on our first Christmas in our new house. It was, by all accounts, a lovely Christmas.

Now with the insanity of the season more or less behind us, I thought I’d bring you up to speed on the ongoing saga of the house of our dreams. Oh, this house. Like a mischievous child, it finds ways to vex me and endear me in equal measures, so I can never quite give in to adoration or exasperation, and instead vacillate rather constantly between the two.

In the love column, we’ve discovered we’re a quick five minute walk to a lovely river-side park with not one but two outdoor rinks that are very nearly ready for seasonal (and free) skating. A five minute walk the other direction is the public library and a ten minute stroll is most of the rest of Manotick, which I love more every time I venture outside the house.

Also in the love column is the way the light bounces off the snow and into the house, radiating from every window. Truly, the way the light floods in is like a love letter from the house to me, a song sung in the key of my heart.

And truly, how can you argue with a house that allows for a winter afternoon of tobogganing right in your very own front yard?

Frontyard sledding

Oh, how I love this house. At least once each day, I find a reason to love it all over again. The house, the property, the community — it makes me happy.

And yet, it finds ways to vex me. We’ve pulled out the mouldy drywall, and installed more vapour barrier. We have a pretty good understanding of why the old vapour barrier failed, mostly due to problems the previous homeowner caused when he rebuilt the walls. Once we get someone to rebuild the walls properly, and put in new insulation, we can finish installing the carpet, and Tristan’s bedroom will soon be habitable and in fact practically new. That, together with a new dehumidifier (which died last week – a blog post for another time) seems to have taken care of the musty smell in the basement.

The furnace is fixed, and we have a new dual system sump pump with backup and alarm. The electrical eccentricities that some former owner installed have been rewired. We’re well on the way to being back where we started — in fact, better than ever. Beloved has taken to calling it the Six Million Dollar House, not so much for financial reasons but because of the Steve Austin “We can build it — better, faster, stronger” reference.

In fact, I’d be downright content about things — if I hadn’t just been completely unnerved to discover a big square of melting snow exactly overtop of our septic tank. The melt over the tank is in itself not so troubling — were it not for the faint but discernable scent of sewage wafting up. Sigh. I’m afraid to even think about it.

Apparently, this house needs a whole category of its own on the blog, as this is a saga that shows no sign of ending. I’ve been ruminating on it for a while, but haven’t come up with anything clever. Postcards from the Poorhouse, maybe? This Crazy House? See, not so much. What say ye, my clever bloggy peeps?

Today’s cautionary tale brought to you by the letter F, for furnace. And failure. And f*ck.

So here’s my nickel’s worth of free advice for you.

When your 19 year old (but only two months old to you) furnace starts making odd squeaky noises when it starts up, you should not ignore it. You may wish to ignore it, especially if you are in the midst of a newly identified mould remediation project which will cost you in the neighbourhood of $2,000, and a sump pump replacement that will cost you $1975, and the laying of new carpets which will cost you $1,300, and electrical work that will cost you just shy of a grand, and the ripping out and replacement of the basement shower, to fix the cause of the mould problem, whose cost has not yet been addressed, all of which makes December an incredibly expensive month already. Not to mention the $975 for snow tires. You may try, as we did, to deceive yourself into thinking that “Well, maybe that’s just the noise that a nearly 20 year old furnace makes.”

That would be a mistake. Because when you come home from work on a Friday afternoon to find out that your furnace has died, the labour costs to replace the blower (not, as you were so desperately hoping, the heat exchanger, that was replaced 10 months ago and still under warranty) will be double the rates they would have been if it were not Friday night.

So. That’s water, electricity, air and heat. That just about covers it, don’t ya think? Wait, don’t answer that question. I’m afraid to ask what else there could possibly be.

The good news is, at least I don’t have to lie in bed at night, listening to the nauseating squeak of an obviously ailing furnace and fretting the worst, right?

Five things I couldn’t throw away

As I’m packing, I keep having these great ideas for blog posts that will never get written, because they’ll either be no longer relevant or (more likely) completely forgotten by the time my life slows down enough to allow for regular blogging again. Some ideas that will likely never see the light of day:

  • Five things we won’t tell the new homeowners
  • A love letter to my packing tape gun
  • Five reasons to never hire my real estate agent

Today, I’ve been packing the stuff from my dresser into boxes. (Sidebar: does this seem as ridiculous to you as it does to me? Every other time I’ve moved, I’ve simply removed the [full] dresser drawers, carried them out to the truck, put them down in a stack, carried down the frame, put the drawers back in the frame, and repeated the whole process in reverse at the destination. Now I’m told that I’m supposed to pack the drawer stuff in boxes. Meh.)

Anyway, ahem, yes, I have been packing the contents of my dresser drawers into boxes. My dresser has three big drawers for t-shirts and jammies and stuff, and four much smaller drawers, perfectly-sized for underwear and scarves. One of these drawers is full of the little bits of memorabilia and nostalgia that I’ve been keeping for so long that I couldn’t possibly part with it now, regardless of how ultimately useless it might be. I know for a fact that when we arrive in the new house, I will take this stuff out of the shoe box in which it has been transported, put it back into its little drawer, and mostly never look at it again until we move in 15 more years. I don’t need this stuff, but I can’t part with it.

From the drawer

Here’s a selection of five random pieces from that drawer:

  1. John Olerud rookie card in plastic shield

    2. This is, in fact, but a single card of the many, many baseball cards I have. They are left over from another life, some from my childhood and some from the practice marriage, when I thought the most interesting thing about me was that I knew a lot about baseball and watched nearly every televised Blue Jays game in the 1993 season. I also have a cap on which I collected the signatures of most of the World Series winning lineup in 1992, and a full set of McDonalds ball cards circa the early 1990s. And I’m about six cards short of the full set of 525 Topps cards from the 1971 season.

  2. My Carleton University student card

    3. I attended Carleton from September to December 1988, before I unceremoniously dropped out to work full time as a cashier at Zellers. Definitely not one of my more inspired life choices, and yet even after graduating magna cum laude through the University of Ottawa, I can’t part with this old student card.

  3. The key to my first car

    4. It was a little black Mazda 323 hatchback. I loved that car to death, literally. Did you know you can drive a car more than 60,000 km without an oil change and it will still go? Even though we traded it in for a fancy red Sunfire with a sunroof in 1998, I like having that key around. It reminds me of how far I’ve come.

  4. An old Watchmen bumper sticker

    5. I have no idea why I have this. But I’ve had it for close to 20 years, so it must be at least valuable if not actually important, right? (C’mon, you remember the Watchmen, right? Boneyard Tree? I got this when they played the front lawn of the Supreme Court building, about a million years ago.)

  5. A card from my mom, circa 1989

    6. For my practice wedding, I carried a bouquet of stargazer lillies. One day in the months leading up to the wedding, my mom send me a silk version of my bouquet in a little vase, and this card was in the box. The flowers and the first husband have long since been relegated to the junk heap of history, but I’ve kept this little card for no reason whatsoever except my mom gave it to me.

Five things that I didn’t take a picture of but also didn’t throw away: the letter spelling out the drug protocol for our infertility treatments, the paper where we kept track of Tristan’s diaper contents for the first three weeks of his life, a little keychain with a viewmaster-like picture of my friends and me at Canada’s Wonderland in 1986, a cassette tape my grandparents recorded for me in 1977, and the slip of paper where Beloved wrote his mailing address out for me on the weekend we met and fell in love, just before I made the six-hour drive back to Ottawa in the aforementioned little black Mazda.

Surely I’m not the only sentimental fool in the room. If I rifled through your secret cache of memorabilia, what would I find?

Moving experiences

We’re in the home stretch on the big move now. We take possession of the new house in Manotick on Thursday, and we move the week after that. We’ve got the basement and the garage mostly packed up, and boxes piled in every corner of the house. I think we’re on track, but still vaguely anxious to just be done with the whole thing.

It’s interesting to see the move as a sort of Rorschach test that illuminates each of our personalities. My middle boy is happily oblivious to everything. New house, old house, whatever. As long as there is a house, with a kitchen and a TV, he’s good to go. The littlest really has no clue, but will happily tell you he’s getting his own room full of his own toys if you ask him about the new house.

My oldest is taking it hard. As much as he loves the idea of the play structure and the tree house in the new house, and of having his own room, he plainly misses the old house already and we haven’t even left yet. He’s not enthusiastic about moving, he’s regretful and anxious about the change. It’s hard to watch, because I feel for him and with him. Each time I enumerate the wonderful things about the new house, the new neighbourhood, the new life, I feel like I’m giving myself a little pep talk, too. It’s great fun to go, but oh so hard to leave, yanno?

Beloved surprised me by expressing my own feelings rather succinctly the other day. In moving, he noted, we have the unique opportunity to reinvent ourselves. We’re excited about the possibility of the people we might become when we live in that new house. Maybe those people are better at keeping on top of the clutter (I hear you snickering, don’t think I don’t) or maybe they are braver socially or maybe they’re a little less likely to yell when stressed. It’s a different kind of house than our little townhouse here in Barrhaven, and we’re both excited and intimidated by the life that the house in Manotick offers. Like our life, but different. Us in an alternate universe, if you will, just up old Highway 16 a bit.

I sympathize with Tristan’s fear of change. It was me who got us here, me who saw the online ad and started the snowball rolling down the hill, picking up speed and passers-by until it was an avalanche of moving mess, and yet I still wonder if we’re doing the right thing. As much as I’m tap-tap-tapping my feet in gleeful impatience waiting for Thursday when I can finally stop slowly driving by the house and yearning for it, when I can actually get out of my car and sit contentedly on the porch and say, “This is MY house” finally and definitively, I still feel sad and regretful when I think of leaving this house behind. We’ve outgrown it, no doubt, but it’s a good house and treated us well.

Every time I’m feeling particularly anxious, I just have to think about that delicious feeling of reinvention, and the optimism creeps back in. The possibility of being wrenched out of our comfortable routines, of being forced to be more and better.

Interestingly enough, it also helps to think about the family moving in here. They truly seem to love this house, and I’ve seen them sitting out front in their car by the curb, simply admiring it. They’ll love the house like we did, and that’s good too. (And? They have FIVE kids. FIVE! And I thought the house was full to the rafters already!)