My Salt is Not Local

A relative just returned from a much-needed* vacation. The family went to Germany. You know how people wear those stupid t-shirts that say, "My friend went to (fill in name of exotic locale) and all I got was this t-shirt"?

Well, you won't see me whining like that. No sirree, Bob. (Who the hell is Bob anyway?)



I got me some salts straight from an actual salt mine in Germany. And I didn't have to go through airport security or customs, take a long international flight, or deal with screwed up itineraries to get them!

Do I care that they are not a locally-produced food item? No. They were locally produced ... across the world. And spices are an indulgence most locavores allow since they do not weigh all that much and a tiny amount goes such a long, long ways. (As opposed to, say, imported mineral water.)

I'm still trying to figure out what the salts are since the labels are entirely in German. Obviously, the one on the left is garlic salt. I think the one in the middle is an herb salt. The one on the right has a rosemary smell to it, so I'm guessing it's either a rosemary salt or another herb salt of some sort. Any German-speaking readers, feel free to pitch in and help here!

*Think my life has been hell this year? Theirs has mine beat in the stress level department, hands down. Carbon cost or not, I do not begrudge them their international airplane flight. Plus, I got salt!

As Grumpy as I Want to Be

The dogs got all excited this afternoon. The UPS man parked in the driveway and they know what that means: their mail-order dog food is here! But, wait. It came last week. So, "what," I asked the UPS guy, "did I forget that I had ordered?" He told me the name and I said, "Nope, not me...unless it's chocolate."

Turns out he had the wrong street. Happens around here with winding, twisty roads that change names constantly and people with mailboxes on streets other than what is indicated by their actual street address. We chatted for a minute ... Yes, I delayed the delivery of your package by treating a delivery man like he was an actual human being, not simply a robo-delivery system. I bitched about something, can't remember what now, and said, "but it's the holidays so I guess I should be happy and thankful."

He told me that all he wants for the holidays is the right to be as grumpy as he wants to be. He's tired of people telling him it's the holidays and he has to be happy.

Here, here! I concur completely. I get so tired of people telling me I can't be negative or whine and complain about all the shit that keeps hitting my fan. Well, fine. If you want to stand in front of my fan for a while and get pummeled by the flying shit, have at it. But do remember to keep a big smile on your face the whole time.

*snort* Yeah, right.

Editor's Note: several paragraphs of whining have been deleted. Along with a threat not to publish any comments telling me that things will get better, I just have to be positive and look at the bright side.

COLD!

OK, so all you readers who live in Canada, the northeastern part and other northern reaches of the US, and cold European and Asian countries just laughed your heads off when you saw the title of this post ... from a big ol' wimp living in the southwestern deserts of the US.

Well, stop laughing at me. It is cold here, at least for a born and bred desert rat like myself. We are higher in elevation than the city of Tucson and not that far from the foothills of the northern side of a mountain. Mountain ranges in southeastern Arizona tend to be small, rather than state-crossing ranges such as the Rockies further north. In fact, some of our mountain ranges are so small they are called "sky islands" here. This name mostly refers to the impact on animal and plant species. Just like animals and plants on islands in the ocean are restricted in their range by the available land mass, mountain-dwellers in the deserts are restricted to the higher elevations surrounded by a sea of low-lying HOT desert without the food and water resources they need to survive. (More on sky islands.)

But, I digress from my whimpering about the cold here. Before going to bed last night, I checked the weather forecast for our area, including nearby areas that are a little higher in elevation. It was supposed to get down to the mid-30s. We know there was a hard freeze the previous night because we came home yesterday afternoon to discover that all of our outdoor peppers and herbs are toast (except the mint which seems pretty damn hardy).

When I saw the forecast, I laughed. We have a remote thermometer outside on our steps and can check the temperature reading on the control panel inside anytime. As of 9:30 pm last night, the outside temperature was already in the 20s! My sweetie took the dogs out at 5:30 am this morning and it was, wait for it, not in the 20s. No, it was 18 degrees! This, for a desert rat, is COLD.

"How the heck is the weather service doing such a poor job forecasting the lows there?", you ask. Easy. The lows may very well have been in the 30s in some parts of our community. However, we have a big wash (arroyo in Spanish) running through our property and are in a low-lying part of the area. The washes provide drainage for rains from the nearby hills and mountains. They also provide drainage for cold winter air. This was something we did not even think about when looking at a property with a wash.

Not only do we get the arroyo effect cooling off our entire property, we live in a manufactured house that is not set on the ground. In addition to the engineered pad underneath, the house itself is set up on house jacks. This means all that cold air circulates under the house. Thankfully, there is insulation under the house but the floors are still cold (and no, we don't have the money to install a radiant floor heating system). If we're already hitting lows in the teens in November, I am really not looking forward to the colder temperatures in January and February - the only times we had hard freezes down in Tucson.

If we were planning on staying here for the long haul, it would mean completely rethinking our winter gardening plans. Cold frames and a greenhouse would be absolutely necessary, not just helpful. In fact, I spoke to one gentleman at the farmers market this morning that said he lost quite a few plants last night in the freeze where he lived because he didn't have time to get everything covered. I'm hoping to clear some space on the south side of the house in the next month so we can try growing a few things - herbs, lettuces - inside.

And I'm hoping I don't freeze my butt off this winter!

Things Change

Six months ago, if you had told me that I'd be serving Thanksgiving dinner from boxes, cans, and bags, I would have laughed at you. I would have told you that I make my Thanksgiving dinner almost entirely from scratch, roasting a locally-grown organic pumpkin for the pie, baking my own vegan cornbread for the dressing, and going to great lengths to make my homemade vegetarian gravy taste like it was made with turkey stock. Creating the perfect meal was a multi-day cooking affair and was well worth it.

Six months ago, though, I had just bought a house that I thought would be the last one I'd ever live in. I had visions of the gardens we'd plant and the outdoor kitchen of my dreams. (I did not dream of a fancy outdoor kitchen such as you'd find in the glossy magazines. No, what I wanted was an outdoor bread oven and rocket stove - built from salvaged bricks or cob, an outdoor wash station for produce right out of the garden, and a permanent place for my solar ovens.) I would have told you that I might even have my own chickens by Thanksgiving and use a few of their eggs in my mom's cornbread dressing recipe, even though we usually don't eat eggs.

It's six months later, though, and things have changed. The house of my dreams no longer has a porch with convenient outdoor cooking space by the outside outlet. There are no gardens other than a few pots filled with plants that are already wilting from the nighttime temperatures falling below freezing. There is no outdoor kitchen and certainly no chickens, not when the local government is prosecuting people for simple coops built without permits in the floodplain.

Six months later and I'm exhausted from dealing with code issues and zoning problems, the annihilation of our dream, my mother-in-law's broken hip and other health problems, four months of physical therapy, financial challenges resulting from all of the above, and other commitments taking more time than I anticipated.

As of last night, my schedule finally cleared up and I have no pending commitments for the next month other than taking care of myself. My calendar only shows appointments for physical therapy, my TMJ dentist, and the regular dentist. Of course, there is also a mountain of paperwork I need to catch up on, some of it very soon, but you still cannot imagine the relief I feel to have nothing on the calendar for a bit. Is my planned yard sale niggling at the back of your memory? It has been postponed until Spring due to exhaustion and lack of time to pull it together. I'm not even going to attempt to consolidate the two storage units before the end of this month either.

Sadly, this wrapping up of various commitments did not happen in time for me to plan my usual Thanksgiving dinner. I thought about it a few weeks ago and realized I just couldn't pull it off this year. Other than the year when we traveled on Thanksgiving day and I put together a quickie meal in a hotel room microwave, this will be the first year in at least a decade that I have not made it from scratch. And it is the year I fully expected - months ago - to do it locally and organically.

Nope. Things change. I do occasionally prepare a turkey on Thanksgiving, especially when sharing the meal with my mother-in-law. This year, I considered ordering one of the locally grown, organic ones but changed my mind when I calculated the cost of even a small turkey at over four dollars a pound. I also had no interest in spending hours cooking it. A couple of small - not local and not organic - Cornish game hens are on the menu instead.

The dressing will come from a box: add water and margarine; call it done five minutes later. If I feel energetic, I might slice some celery to add to it, but don't bank on it. The cranberry sauce, as usual, will come from a can. I can't stand homemade cranberry relish; I only like the jellied stuff even with its questionable ingredients. There will be no sweet potato dish this year, even though I got sweet potatoes in my final CSA share this week.

There will be no delicious homemade mashed potatoes with local, organic spuds. Nope, I'm boiling dehydrated potatoes in water for 10 minutes instead. The complicated gravy recipe? Ha! Try this instead: open aseptic package of organic chicken stock, mix with flour and soymilk, heat until thickened. Hey, it's organic! The green beans will be organic as well, but they will come from a bag in the freezer; a bag that came from Trader Joe's not from green beans I froze myself.

It took me years to cobble recipes together to make a really good, tofu-free, vegan pumpkin pie (and crust) entirely from scratch but this year, Marie Callendar did all the work. We originally called Sara Lee but found Marie made a better, albeit pricier, pie. Yes, this means we've already eaten two pumpkin pies to figure this out. And we'll be eating another one today. Surely I shelled out five bucks for a small can of soy-based "whip" cream, right? Yeah, right - to put on a non-vegan, commercially produced pie. Nope. Cool Whip to the rescue.

Appalled? Yeah, so I am to some extent. Do I feel guilty that I am abandoning everything you thought I held dear for this holiday meal? Nope. Not one bit. Okay, maybe a tiny bit, but I need to take care of me for a while and taking care of me right now means not getting stressed out over this stuff. Next year, I hope to be back to my usual homemade Thanksgiving plans but this year, I am going to enjoy having the entire meal ready to go on the table in under an hour from start to finish. I'm just thankful that my family is willing to forgo the usual delicious meal in order to give me a bit of a rest.

(And yes, I wrote this in the wee hours of the morning. Hopefully bad dreams and insomnia will disappear this next month with a more relaxed schedule!)

Bad Dreams

I awoke early this morning, my heart pounding, from another bad dream. This is the second time I have woken up this way in a week and the third time this month. I don’t like it. Unfortunately, I am the only one who can make it stop.

I don’t usually have particularly vivid or memorable dreams. In fact, my experience has been that when I do remember my dreams it is because there is some message there that my conscious mind is blocking so my unconscious (subconscious?) has to get sneaky and find a way to get the message to me. Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve been living with this body and mind for a while now and kind of have an idea how it operates.

I figured out the dream message thing some years ago when I noticed a strange pattern. I’d be having a normal, everyday, boring dream and then a very strange out-of-place image would appear, like a bearded man wearing a beautiful blue evening gown sitting at a booth in a café. The odd image would catch the attention of a non-dreaming part of my brain, essentially telling it, “Pay attention now. Incoming message.” When I woke up in the morning, I’d remember the dream after the strange image and it would usually offer some insight into whatever was going on in my life at the time.

If I didn’t “get the message,” the dreams would continue, becoming progressively more vivid. If I still didn’t get it, there was a good chance they would turn into nightmares; for me, the psychic equivalent of someone shaking me and saying, “Hey! Shut up and get the f*cking message already!” Once I figured out what I needed to know, the dreams would stop pestering me and my dreamlife would return to normal.

With all the stress in my life over the past nine months (scoring over 300 on life event stress scale), I have not had a good night’s sleep in ages. Turning the mind off to stop worrying about all the problems and deadlines has proved nigh impossible. Physical aches and pains have contributed to the lack of sleep, as well.

I’ve recently started wearing earplugs at night, hoping that blocking out the sounds of the cars racing up the street late at night, the braying donkey, the barking dogs, the snoring hubby and dog, and the other lip-smacking dog will help me get a decent night’s sleep. It has. And I think that’s when the bad dreams started.

So, what message am I not getting? The last two dreams I can remember involved me racing to get somewhere, knowing that I would arrive too late and there would be dire consequences to this. Before I even arrived, I woke up both times with my heart pounding in my chest.

I am not sure what I am supposed to gather from these nightmares. I already know that I am way overdue for a vacation and some relaxing downtime. I am trying to wrap up commitments affecting my schedule. The only self-imposed commitment on the calendar is a yard sale planned for early December. We wanted to have it last weekend but did not have time to pull it together. A yard sale is a LOT of work and I still haven’t even had time to finish sorting through everything to get rid of more.

I could push this yard sale onto next year’s calendar, but then it wouldn’t be worth having until probably March or April to allow the weather to warm up and people’s budgets to recover from Christmas shopping. The problem with putting it off is that the storage unit for all this stuff costs $60 per month and I really want to eliminate that expense. Without the shed, we have no storage at the house for everything we don’t want. Therefore, I really want to have this yard sale and be done with it. The leftovers can be crammed in the other storage unit we’re stuck with until we move since we can’t put a shed up here.

Does this mean I have to suffer through bad dreams for another two and a half weeks until my calendar clears up? Sheesh, I hope not. I want to go back to dreams that aren’t worth remembering or that gently deliver their message.

I could handle another dream like the one I had a dozen years ago that delivered a completely new and original recipe to me; one that included ingredients I never buy. I wrote it down and tried it. It was interesting and pretty tasty. Here it is for you to try, if you'd like something a little different.

Dream Salad

1 head butter lettuce, clean and torn
Pear, diced
Walnuts
Pickled beets, drained and julienned
Reserved beet juice
White wine
Sugar
Basil
Black pepper
Frozen phyllo shells

Bake phyllo shells and let cool.
Combine beet juice, white wine, sugar, and seasonings in small saucepan. Simmer over medium heat to reduce by half. Let cool.
Toss together lettuce, pear, and walnuts.
Fill phyllo shells with salad, sprinkle with julienned beets, and drizzle with sauce. Serve immediately.

Poof!

Giving Up the CSA, but not Local Food

I've wrestled with the thought that it was time for me to give up the CSA off and on since we moved out of town. Instead of being able to bike there if desired, I now have to drive and it's a long haul - over 20 miles one way.

I kept going for a number of reasons. The food is grown locally and organically by a farmer who pays and treats his workers fairly. The food is tasty and fresh, reminiscent of what came out of the family garden when I was growing up. I earn my share by volunteering so it is good for the budget. I've made friends through the CSA and enjoy a friendly casual relationship with many members whose names I don't even know but whose faces I enjoy seeing each week.

It's hard to consider giving this up. But, the drive lately has become longer and more challenging with the annual influx of winter visitors and increased holiday traffic. It often takes me up to an hour, each way, to get to and from the CSA. With my crazy schedule lately, it's been hard to give up that much time, especially when there is a farmers market half that distance from home.

Although I'll have to dig out my hard-earned cash for the farmers market, it will be much easier to get there. If I dig the bike out of storage and charge up the battery for the electric assist, it's feasible I could make the trip without burning any gas at all. After almost three years with the CSA, too, I'm looking forward to the opportunity to choose what I'm going to eat for the week instead of accepting - usually happily - whatever is available from the farm.

I hope to get to know the local vendors over time at the farmers market and perhaps form some new friendships with people that live closer to home. I also hope that I don't pass too quickly out of the memories of those I've known at the CSA. I've got several more weeks there to finish out this session and have already started letting the other volunteers and some of the members know so that my absence won't be unexpected. I am vain enough to hope that I will be missed, and not just because of the volunteer work I do.

Changes are Afoot

Going through a period of high stress and misery can help bring priorities to light. Being miserable and under constant stress are not among my goals in life, either short-term or long-term. I've made changes in the past when I've found myself unhappy with my daily life and am in the process of doing this again.

My eating is getting better. Less crap prepared by others and more fresh food prepared by moi. I'll be checking out the local farmers market more starting next month when my schedule eases up.

My exercise is set to increase. I've not had the time nor energy to incorporate aerobic exercise into my daily schedule. While breaking cement with a sledgehammer does build muscles, it has done nothing for my stamina. With the weather cooling, I'll be adding a walk or bike ride every day.

I want more nature in my life. There is a nice state park not too far from us; we plan to go hiking there at least once a week. We're also spending more time enjoying the birds in our yard. Can you believe there are still flowers blooming here and butterflies on the wing? In November? There are some advantages to being in the desert.

Moving is on hold. For financial and personal reasons, we are going to hold off on putting the house up for sale for at least a year. This will have the added benefit of easing up the schedule of decluttering, doing minor fix-up work, and finding an appropriate fifth wheel for our future plans.

I want less clutter in my life. In December, I will finally have the time to tackle the clutter that has built up in the house. I look forward to overhauling the files, putting away all the new paperwork and discarding old outdated files. I'll be sorting through absolutely everything in the house (and storage) to determine what adds value to our lives and what is just clutter.

I'm also tackling those same issues in other areas of my life: what thoughts and which habits are valuable and which are dragging my life down; what relationships bring joy to my life; and how do I really want to spend my finite time on this earth.

It won't be easy. I've never found change to be easy, but the pay-off should make it worthwhile.

How to Tell When You Are Too Busy

Your name is Chile and you let a bag of roasted green chiles, your favorite, go bad in the fridge.

You can't remember the last time you vacuumed. Or cleaned the toilet. (Oh yeah, that was this morning because it smelled so bad.)

You run out of clean underwear because you keep forgetting to do laundry.

It takes a month for you to realize you could return the unused roll of barbed wire to the store for a full refund, or at least store credit, rather than dealing with idiots on craigslist who don't show up to buy it for half what you paid for it.

You wear the same t-shirt to physical therapy each week, because it's one of the only ones without holes in the armpits and you haven't had time to shop the thrift stores for "new" clothes.

You haven't cleaned off your desk in several months which also means you have not reconciled the bank statement for checking since the beginning of September.

You really can't believe it's only a few weeks until the holidays already. You still haven't put away the suitcase your sweetie used when he went to his mom's house a week and a half ago. This is the same suitcase that didn't get put away after his trip to help her get settled in after her hip replacement several weeks before that. At this point, you wonder if it's worth putting it away since the holidays are coming up so fast.

It's 3:45 and you've just realized you missed the 2:00 funeral today for a friend you haven't seen in eight months.

Heavy Labor

Basic math principal: getting older + not staying in shape + too much hard labor to do + too little money to hire other people to do it = a sore, sore body!

This last week, we did our final push to finish up with the work deemed necessary by outside sources. Before the inspections this week, I wanted the place cleaned up. Not only would this forestall any issues with piles of (de)construction debris, it would increase curb appeal for putting the property on the market.

In just a day and a half, I pruned and shaped six of the mesquites along one side of the yard. For the landscaping crews that work in this area, that would be nothing to brag about, but they have at least a couple of guys wielding power tools. I have me wielding hand tools. Okay, I'll admit it. I enlisted my sweetie's help with cutting one thick branch with the pruning saw because I was getting worn out. And the kid we'd hired to do some weed-eating helped clean up the fallen branches while I went to physical therapy.

The next day, I tackled another three trees but did not make it nearly as far before running out of steam. I succeeded in opening up the view from the street, though, which was what I'd been aiming for. When a house is up for sale, potential buyers want to be able to see it when they drive by. They have a nice view now. Unfortunately, my dogs also have a nice view now ... of every single person and dog that walks by on the street!

My original plan was to do all the pruning - and we're talking a lot because these poor trees had obviously been neglected for years - and then rent a truck, load up all the debris and brush, and haul it off to the landfill. I'd done my best to get others to haul off as much as possible for re-use: building materials still usable and branches big enough for burning. However, by this time my brush pile had grown to almost 10 cubic feet, and the pile of broken block and concrete was up to at least a ton of material. It was time to call in the cavalry.

After browsing through the haulers in the area and dozens of ads on craigslist, I settled on some folks who live in my area. It seemed to make more sense to "hire local" than call in someone from the opposite side of town. They came by the same day and gave me an estimate. They wanted to charge an extra $100 just to take a cement pad the excavators said they'd be kind enough to haul off after their work (and then tossed in the bushes with their front loader when I wasn't home).

Now I understand that the weight would increase their tipping fees, but certainly not by $100! Part of their reasoning was the labor involved in hauling this off. The slab was 5 inches thick and measured 4 feet by 4 feet. By the calculations I did later on cement.com, it probably weighed approximately 970 pounds. The guys would not just be picking this up and tossing it in the trailer! It had a slight crack down the middle that we hoped they'd be able to encourage to break the thing in half.

After they left, with plans to come back the next afternoon to load up, I got out my sledgehammer to see what I could do with it. The crack, unfortunately, was not deep enough to split the piece and even using a heavy drop bar on it had no impact. Out of frustration, I slammed the sledgehammer down on the corner of the pad and Voila! A piece began to crack off. I nibbled away at the pad's edges, working my way in, and gradually broke the entire thing up. It took a couple of hours and a whole lot of sweat, but I got it done and hauled the pieces over to the other pile...which now looked huge.

I called up the haulers and asked for a significant discount for doing the labor. Sadly, they were only willing to cut the price by $40. Breaking that sucker up and hauling it the 50 yards to the other pile was not worth saving $40, a fact my body has been reminding me of for several days.

Now that the haulers have come and gone, though, it is so nice to have a cleaned up yard. We'll finally have a brief respite from all the hard work. More on our plans coming soon.

Our 1 Acre Garden

The extensive herb garden. This huge expansive space includes basil of two varieties, mint, marjoram, and another Italian herb. I constantly forget to utilize the fresh flavor in my rare episodes of cooking.



The crowded vegetable garden consists of three pepper plants. We used to have seven but the peppers are so hot, we couldn't begin to keep up with using them. I just repotted these yesterday to straighten them up and let their roots expand. Since I gave away all our pots already, they had to go into buckets and a plastic food storage bin. Hopefully the upright lid to the wood box will help buffer these plants from the strong winds that keep knocking them over and breaking off branches.

The banana tree on the left is part of our fruit orchard, of which the other member is an ultra-dwarf Fuji apple tree. We expect the banana tree to begin producing any decade now. The apple tree, finally planted in the ground (where the homemade doggie dooley used to be), might produce a few apples next year.


This is not quite the garden we envisioned when we bought an acre of land, but life rarely works out the way we plan.