Runaway October

No, I’m not in the fam­ily way again.

Re-Nest is one of my favorite “green” blogs. They always have such awe­some finds and thought pro­vok­ing options. One of their most lat­est posts as got me think­ing about our water usage. This is Ari­zona after all and we need to be more con­scious of how we use it.

We have a gravel back­yard but I hate it. The whole thing is dirt and rock. This means mas­sive amounts of gravel through my vac­uum and dirt bun­nies form on every sur­face within 20 feet of the back door. While we save a ton of water by not hav­ing a lawn, part of me still really wants a soft sur­face in the back­yard. I think it would be a place that we all spend more time.

• Wild­flower Farm has drought tol­er­ant wild­flower mixes, as well as Eco-Lawn which seems like it could be well-suited for even the dri­est climate.
• Zoysia Farms has a zoysia grass that is also sup­posed to be able to sur­vive Ari­zona heat, but needs far less water than con­ven­tional grass.

We also still dream of hav­ing a pool some­day. Not only do they require a large amount of water to begin with, but the evap­o­ra­tion rate is super high here and repairs can lead to drain­ing it often.

• So, I have my eye on one of these swim­ming “ponds”
• Aren’t they awe­some? I don’t know if they would cut the use of water, but at least we wouldn’t be swim­ming in chlo­rine or dump­ing it into the reten­tion basins.

We typ­i­cally wash our dishes by hand, but that’s mainly because Declan could wash our dishes and get them cleaner than our “inex­pen­sive” old dish­washer can. There have been stud­ies that show that using a dish­washer is more effi­cient than wash­ing by hand, but not just any dish­washer. It also seems hard to believe that a dish­washer uses less energy and water than a water-conscious man­ual washer. The only prob­lem is we use a high vol­ume of water hand­wash­ing because Declan insists on helping.

Another one of our biggest water wasters is well, Matt. Most of the men in my life have been quick shower-ers. I’m talk­ing like 5 min­utes or so. Not Matt. Some­how it takes him 30 min­utes to wash the 2 inches of hair on his head. Some­days he takes 2 and 3 show­ers a day! Even with the 2.5 gpm shower heads, that’s 75 gal­lons a shower times 3. What I really need is a way to con­vince every­one to stop using so much water. (Though here I am talk­ing about a swim­ming pond.)

Any­way, any other water con­serv­ing ideas or stud­ies out there?

So the cam­era is not a fan of any­thing that moves. Keep that in mind.

Mr Rowan is just grow­ing right along. He’s a lit­tle over 3 months old and get­ting big. We weighed him at home and he seems to be just over 12 pounds. Here he is try­ing to sit up!

Click for a larger version

He’s just full of smiles and lit­tle coos and is finally get­ting to the point where I can put him down for longer then 30 sec­onds with­out squalling his head off.

Unfor­tu­nately the boys seem to be catch­ing some­thing from my day­care boy. Because of some stu­pid doc­tor we recently took Declan to, Matt doesn’t want me giv­ing Declan any­thing but Vit­a­mins. That doc­tor said that Vit­a­min C will just makes things worse. How bogus is that?

I’m try­ing to get some nice pic­tures of Declan. We’ll see how that goes.

To be hon­est, I’m not even sure what Hominy is. To me it’s kinda like corn but more of a grain. It was hard to try and explain it to Matt. Actu­ally I just looked it up and it is corn, it’s just been treated in a cer­tain fash­ion. Check it out. It actu­ally sounds kinda… scary?

Any­way I made this up tonight and it’s got a few of my favorite things, such as cilantro and hominy. The Cumin is really what makes it though. Matt would like me to try it with chicken but I think pork is part of the magic and it goes much bet­ter with Cumin. We served it tonight along with my Light Oat Bread which came out lighter and fluffier than nor­mal — must be because of the cold humid air tonight. Either way, they were both deli­cious.

Matt states that I may add it to the rotation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, so there’s not much to say about this recipe. There’s not much you can say because well, your mouth fills up with drool too quickly.

My mom got an awe­some deal on a huge pork shoul­der so we decided to cook it up on her birth­day week­end. We used an 8 pound roast and dou­bled this recipe. Sadly there was lit­tle to no left­overs. Again, no pic­tures. I’m get­ting really frus­trated with the loaner cam­era I have bor­rowed hence the lack of pic­tures. Sorry Guys. I should start a dona­tion fund for a new cam­era, huh? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been need­ing a new purse for a long time. Noth­ing in the stores really catches my atten­tion, and the purses that do — à la Etsy — are expen­sive, though so worth it. I see so many cute designs and think to myself I could make that!

Since money has been tight I pushed those thoughts away for the time being. Last week I was hem­ming some Ikea cur­tains, includ­ing a set whose fab­ric pat­tern I just absolutely love. I should have bought like more sets before they were dis­con­tin­ued. Then I came along this cute and super easy pat­tern by Lula Louise. I knew then that I was going to make me a purse.

I started to put the pat­tern together and real­ized that it made a very large bag, so scaled it down to 50%. For me a larger bag means more unnec­es­sary stuff to tote around. I did keep the orig­i­nal strap length though.

Once I fig­ured out the pat­tern and got some spare time it took about 2 hours, tak­ing fre­quent breaks to quiet the sleep­ing new­born fuss­ing in my front car­rier. It’ll be super quick to make any additi­nal bags.

Because I scaled it down so much some of the top­stitch­ing was very dif­fi­cult to reach but the size ended up being per­fect.

Happy Craft­ing!