Trunk Show in Lafayette (Eek!)

Hello, blog-o-sphere! I'll be at the Yarn Boutique in Lafayette next Saturday (12/8) from 11 AM to 3 PM for a trunk show. Stop by and say hello! I'll have samples of my designs that you can try on, and I may even sneak a cat hat or two into the mix. Although, I don't know how people will react to a pimp hat. For my cat. And I'm not sure I'm up for explaining it, so I may just bring the beret and the fez and call them "baby" hats.

If anyone has tips on what makes a fun trunk show, please share! I'm such a noob. I'll be offering pattern support and I can demo a couple of stretchy bind-offs like the k2tog and the sewn bind-off. 

As a bonus, if you buy yarn for any of my projects, you'll get 10% off! Doesn't someone or some cat you know need a hat or scarf?

So, if you feel like inhaling some yarn fumes and you are curious if a person who designs cat hats for fun is as weird as you think she is, then come on over and introduce yourself! I can't wait to meet you.

La La La, Gualala!

The ridiculously peaceful view from our cottage

To celebrate the passing of another up and down year, some friends and I trekked up to Gualala for some quality time together. It's so easy to become engulfed in day to day existence and to not spend time with the people you never seem to see enough, and after losing Vespa, I didn't want that to continue. Life is too short, and we'll never regret taking "too much" time off. I made reservations at a cottage, and then sent the email out to some of my close friends, not expecting anyone to be able to have a weekend free so last minute. Much to my surprise and delight, almost everyone and every dog came!

Roula enjoying her dogness

It was a rainy weekend,  but when the main attraction is being together, the weather doesn't really matter. We cooked breakfast and dinner together, played games, knit (OK, so only two of us knit), and simply enjoyed hanging out around the fireplace.

Fritatta in progress, onion-free per my request

 Communal cooking and dining is my favorite part of vacation. I love cooking for my friends and setting a big table for all of us, even if it is a bit hectic in the kitchen before we sit down to our meal.

Roula and her person 

Next year, they may not all fit on the couch together

Jabba the Bunny. He has a real name, but I forget it.

How could I not be happy with all that freshly picked kale?

This looks like a photo from a lifestyle magazine

Mingus singing the blues or yawning. Or belching.

A makeshift vase for our rustic bouquet

There is something about the Northern California coast that centers me more than most places. The beaches are rugged and deceptively quiet, but I wouldn't dare take a swim in the ocean unlike the user-friendly warm and sandy beaches to the south. The Mendocino coast would be a fantastic place to retire, but until then, I'll happily spend any extra time there.

The New Normal

So, it has been 1 month since Vespa was last here, and we're all adjusting in our own way. Thank you for all the kind comments - it was comforting to read them and I would often find myself reading them over and over when I was having a particularly hard moment. 

Mingus was in a funk for a few weeks, which gave us something to focus on other than our own grief. We bought him a bed of his very own instead of the pathetic old bath towels that we place around the house for him. The bed was a hit... With the cats.

Greaseball, now the undisputed lord of the house, especially enjoys the bed and is quite pleased that we abandoned the raggedy old towels.

These tiny woofers also enjoyed Mingus's toy box and his bed. One thing that we couldn't do when Vespa was around was have guest dogs to our house. She was very territorial, and we could think of few things less awkward than having to apologize about our dog beating up a friend's dog. Mingus isn't territorial about anything or anyone, so he's been a perfect host.

Perhaps because he is still not in his right mind, the boy volunteered to go to his first ever college football game. Cal lost (OK, we got slaughtered), he got heckled by a rabid Duck fan (but thankfully since he didn't care, the lady lost interest and moved seats), and he found it curious that I was singing fight songs and pumping my fist in the air at what seems to him random intervals. Being scrutinized like some sort of sociological experiment while doing things that I know are silly and stupid somehow makes the experience of the college ball game diminish, but at least my friend was there to look silly and stupid with me. Go Bears! We'll do better at basketball this season.

Crisp winter weather brings kimchi cravings front and center. I let my last batch age until it was really sour, and then made kimchi stew 3 times in the past couple of weeks and tried my hand at kimchi pancakes. My first pancakes were too loose, so my second try involved adding an egg and some cornstarch to make the pancake extra crispy. While version 2 was better, it's still not quite right. When I suggested making kimchi pancakes for brunch last weekend, the boy sadly asked if we could eat normal breakfast with regular pancakes and bacon and if we could please not have any kimchi in our brunch. Since my stock response is that I will eat anything he makes, we had pumpkin pancakes that day. How boring, but I guess we have been eating kimchi at every meal since I'm in experimentation mode.

This kimchi pancake only looked good in the pan. It fell apart when I flipped it.

Have you ever been to the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley? They have free tours once a month, so as long as you sign up early (we're talking months ahead of time), you can observe some cool classroom action and check out a sweet garden. The tour is mostly aimed towards the program policy, and while I was hoping that it was more about  the plants, I still found it all fascinating.

The man in the corner is made of playing cards

I have compost bin envy. And I want an army of children to help me turn it.

My knitting needles have been on fire lately. This hat was hastily knit because while trying to slink by the local pedicure place (I haven't been there in months), one of the owners saw me and followed me to the next door cafe. Although that soundes really creepy, she was being very sweet because she wanted to invite me to a baby shower that was in 2 days. Since I cannot bear to give babies store bought things, I whipped up a vanilla, stockinette cap and added a couple of crocheted flowers to jazz it up. Those flowers probably took me longer than the hat since I've been really tense, and crocheting was a challenge since I had trouble pulling my hook through the loops.

Another reason my needles are smoking is because I'm knitting samples for an upcoming trunk show! I was contacted by the owner of The Yarn Boutique in Lafayette to see if I'd be open to the idea, and since I was, I picked out some yarn and have been knitting away. Date is TBD since my crafting time has been rather limited due to work and life, but I'll let y'all know when it goes down. Stay tuned...

The End of an Era

This is a post I never wanted to write, but I feel that so many people got to know her on this blog that I owe it to all of you. Ms. Vespa Mamacita has left the building.

It turns out that her body was busy making a brain tumor or something else in her noggin, and last Thursday she went suddenly, leaving a huge GSD sized hole around us. Knowing that she had a good life for a 10- or 11-year old dog is little consolation right now.

It's too quiet here.

Catlandia

This is all kinds of awesome! It's such a spot on spoof of Portlandia.

Expanding the Worm Digs

The flurry of canning activity resulted in tomato skin and seeds that overwhelmed my worm bin. Although I contemplated buying another worm bin, the bins on the market were sporting $100+ price tags, and that seemed like a lot to pay to house creatures that prefer to live in garbage. Plus, since the whole point of this is to be more green, it didn't make sense to me to purchase another hunk of plastic.

I rummaged around the house and found an old plastic storage container with a lid. Perfect! A little (crooked) drill handiwork to make air holes, and I had myself a homemade worm bin that cost nothing but a bit of time, and not much time at that.

Once the lid had holes, in went some cardboard, fruit and vegetable trimmings, and a few scoops of worms. Yes, I made worm lasagna!

Now, in a few weeks, this bin should be established and I can start adding more scraps to it. Done and done!

Take a Bite!

Don't mind if I do, said the asshole deer.

I walked Mingus and Vespa around the garden perimeter, actually encouraging them to do their business on the nearby bushes to hopefully discourage future deer visits. The dogs thought it was a trick, but it's better than the other suggestions I saw on the web, one of which included having your husband (yes, it said "husband"!) pee around the perimeter. Perhaps that would be a viable suggestion if our garden was in the backyard, but I really don't feel like risking the boy's status as an upstanding citizen just to repel a deer or two.

Don't mind if I do, said the dogs.

What kind of dog mauls an eggplant? Could it be the same dog that ate about 10-pounds of tomatoes and then leaked tomato pee for the next 24 hours? Perhaps.

Fall (!!!) is almost here, and with fall comes a flurry of last minute food projects. Pickles? Check. Sauerkraut? Check.  Sour beer started? Check, but it won't be ready until next year. 110-lbs of tomatoes turned into sauce? As of last night at 2 AM, check.

My canned tomato sauce results are as follows: 17 quart jars, 14 pint jars, and 25 half pint jars. This is a grand total of 121 cups of local, organic sauce! Last night, I did a tomato sauce marathon with the last 44-pounds because I was ready to be done and because some of the tomatoes were becoming soft. Plus, I didn't want to wash all the sauce pots and cutting boards only to use them again the next night. With all of this behind me, I cannot figure out if I canned too much or too little. I used up every last drop of the tomato sauce I canned last year, and I started out with 50-lbs. Still, instead of a warm feeling of a job well done, I see all the jars of tomato sauce lined up in the pantry and I think of the television show Hoarders.

Tomato Days

Vespa, don't worry. This pot is not for dog stew.

I've long given up my Animal, Vegetable, Miracle dream of canning a year's worth of my home grown tomatoes, however, with a few tweaks, I can still get close. Since joining the Full Belly Farm CSA two weeks ago, I've scored 44-pounds of tomatoes for the sole purpose of canning. Last year's 50-lbs of tomatoes didn't last long enough, so I clearly need to up my game. One case a week is about all I can process, and my goal is 100-lbs of canned tomato goodness for 2012-2013.

Due to the new brewing habit, we have giant stainless steel pots scattered about the house (if anyone can think of a way to display these things in a tiny house, I'm all ears just like Vespa). One case of quartered tomatoes fits into a 16-gallon brew pot. The problem was that this pot is really thin, leading to my first batch of tomato sauce being slightly smoked and me having to spend most of my time scraping burnt tomato skins and seeds from the pot.

Separating the worm food from the sauce

 Lesson learned. Today's sauce is split into two batches using my trusty, heavy bottomed Staubs. No burning, minimal stirring, and easy clean up.

Two cauldrons of sauce

After a long hiatus from buying kitchen stuff, I purchased a pressure canner specifically for my tomato sauce endeavor. Unfortunately, the pressure canner is still in transit, so I won't be able to use it today.

Today marks the day I pulled up the first credible carrot. It's large and sweet, but since it was in heavy clay soil, I snapped of the top when trying to pull it out. Hopefully, no one heard me swear like a sailor. I had to dig the rest of the carrot out. The other carrots are bedded in sandy, loose soil, so hopefully this is the only carrot casualty. I noted in my garden journal that I need to double dig that bed and add some more compost so this doesn't happen again.

 

The garden candy, i.e. sungold tomatoes and sugar peas, is abundant. We're having salads every other day with greens and fruit all from our tiny garden. I started weighing the peas, and we're getting about 1 pound a week out of our 6 plants.

Pickle obsession, something I'm sure I'm not suffering from alone during summer, has hit hard. Kosher dill pickles, pickled eggs, and dilly beans reside in our refrigerator. There's still crazy amounts of homebrew laying about, I just made 3 cups of spicy beer mustard, and I have a crock full of red cabbage sauerkraut. All the pickles can be pieced together to form dinner, especially when paired with a roasted chicken or pork stew cooked over the weekend. 

Due to summer food canning activities and a concerted effort to eat in more often, the two sweaters on my needles are hardily touched. I only have 1.5 sleeves to knit on my Vitamin D, so I should really have at it this weekend. Also, to tempt me to eat and drink in more, I bribed myself with a pretty Japanese mixing glass and bar spoon from Umami Mart. Yeah, I never heard of a mixing glass until recently, but the obsession with Japanese barware came fast and strong. The boy had to listen to me agonize over the mixing glass purchase for almost 2 months, so he was happy when I finally bought one. Am I alone in torturing myself so much before actually making a purchase? My fear, especially with things I become obsessed with, is that the fascination will fade and the purchase will just sit there unused and unloved. Yeah, it's probably just me.

Startled!

Since I was feeling so clever after amending my neglected compost bin, I decided to tackle the worm bin because it has been hanging around the house 6 years, and during that time, I haven't harvested the casings once. My regular routine was to use the compost tea as a fertilizer for houseplants and the garden, but recently the worm bin's spigot has clogged, so I couldn't even do that. 

I was ignoring the worm bin because I am easily grossed out, and because our bin is plastic, it retains a lot of moisture, which results in worm casing sludge. Being easily grossed out is not a good trait for a gardener. I swear, in the past two months I have had to slaughter so many slugs, snails, leaf miner larvae, and caterpillars that you'd think I'd just chill out and become one with the nature, but my acclimation to all things slimy and disgusting is slow. The boy almost fell over backwards off the garden's retaining wall because I startled him when I began yelling and flapping my hands when I went to grab a bean and instead came into contact with a baby snail. Why do I flap my hands? Do I think I can fly away? Thankfully, I have not encountered any Zombie Bees, because I think I would totally lose it if that happened.

Before lifting each tier of the worm bin, I steeled myself. Tier 1: so far, so good. Tier 2: a little slug action that had to be dealt with, but still good. Tier 3: Ack! (Hand flapping!) Ack! Ack! Ack! Two salamanders (newts? I've been told before what these things are, but I push it out of my brain each time) looked up at me and tried to slip into the sludge. I had to walk away from the bin to stop myself from screaming, and I gave myself a little pep talk. Ok, I can do this. All I need to do is to shovel the sludge into another container to dry it out. These things are more scared of me than I am of them, and it is illogical for me to freak out. This is such a first world problem, suck it up! Breathe!

I shoveled the sludge onto a cardboard box, restored the worm bin with the creepy things securely in place, and the sludge is now drying in the sunniest part of the yard. Surprisingly, the sludge does not smell like it looks. It smells like wet earth, and nothing more. I should probably let the boy know that I've done this so he doesn't step in it on his way into the house since it's not in an obvious place, especially if one is walking up the side of the house to throw away a full dog poop bag at night.

I have to remind myself that I'm doing this for the radishes and the carrots, because I want to grow my own food, and because I'm curious how much work it takes to grow said food. In conjunction with growing veggies, I've joined the Full Belly Farm CSA, the only CSA I've found that can work into our schedule.

I'll offer up the next two photos as palate cleanser for those of you who just endured pictures of worm poop and newts or salamanders and continued to read on. Above is a pissed off Fifty, pissed for obvious reasons, and below is a nectarine cake (inspired by the Tipsy Baker) that looked much better than it tasted due to my substitution of whole wheat flour in place of white flour and over baking it. I've had one slice, and I would've tossed it, but the boy is tackling that thing one slice at a time since he insists that its edible. I think he's trying to use positive reinforcement in order to convince me to bake cake more often.

How to Get Rid of a Yellow Jacket Nest

Two Thursdays ago, I was roasting coffee in the backyard. My coffee roasting routine consists of putting the beans onto the rotisserie, and then tidying up all the chaos in the backyard until the beans are done. Experience has taught me that if I return inside the house while the beans are roasting, something will go wrong like the rotisserie will stall leaving me with burned beans on the bottom and green beans on the top. While abating the chaos, I angered some yellow jackets who nested near the rock wall. Then, a series of unfortunate events occurred: angry wasps flew into my hair and got stuck on my scalp due to my ponytail; I tried to run from them, but since they were all stuck in my hair this was futile and resulted in riling up the wasps even more; and then I got stung at least twice. I had to channel some inner zen to undo my ponytail to release the wasps and stop the stinging. Yeah, that wasn't my best moment.

My poor dogs were in the backyard with me, and all my waving around made them think we were playing a game of chase, so they were running around with me, and unfortunately were also attacked by the ruthless yellow jackets.

This. Was. War.

When I told the boy about my nasty encounter, he was ready to fight. However, he also was determined to do it himself because I made the mistake of telling him that a friend called an exterminator and it costs her around $100 and only took 10 minutes. In my mind, I was thinking, $100, what a bargain! In his mind, he was thinking, $100 for 10 minutes, what a rip-off! 

Eradicate the Yellow Jackets 1.0 consisted of a trip to the hardware store to acquire the cheapest wasp trap, a $7 fake flower that attaches to the top of a 2-liter soda bottle. The wasps walk in, attracted to the soda, and they never walk out. After setting the trap at dusk, we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, we went to sleep, thinking that we'd wake up to find half the nest drowned in the Mexican Sangria soda. Apparently, yellow jackets hate sangria soda, although they were definitely interested because they buzzed around the bottle during the day, terrifying our already-stung dogs who refused to go into the backyard to do their business due to the evil wasps.

Again, I wanted to call up an exterminator. Again, the boy thought he could fix the problem himself, so Eradicate the Yellow Jackets 2.0 started and he set about making a homemade anti-wasp suit out of a mosquito net, a mechanics jumpsuit, and 2 rubber bands. Although I warned him that I wouldn't let him back into the house if he had a hoard of angry wasps at his back (I had just listened to Sigourney Weaver talking about her character Ellen Ripley), he was still irritated that I left him outside until he was wasp free. Or maybe he was irritated that I took a video of him as he was making an adjustment to the wasp trap?

2 days pass, and still no wasps are in the stupid trap. Not only that, but the amount of wasps going in and out of their nests is increasing. Our whole backyard was abuzz! So, again, I wanted to call an exterminator. Again, the boy thought he could fix the problem himself.

You may recall from previous posts that he has been actively brewing beer since January. Our living room, in fact, is full of beer brewing equipment like this giant 11-gallon pot with a ball valve at the end. The boy's next idea was to wait until the wasps were sleeping, set this pot full of boiling water onto a step stool, aim the valve at the wasp nest entrance, open the valve, and then run like hell back into the house.  So, at midnight on a Saturday, Eradicate the Yellow Jackets 3.0 commenced. I went to bed in protest because I thought it was an elaborate way for the boy to get burned and stung.

No more wasp nest!

But you know what? Eradicate the Yellow Jackets 3.0, a.k.a. Yellow Jacket Sting, was a success! Apparently, it took 2 pots of boiling water, a shovel to mix the hot mud into the nest, and a strong stomach to look at the squirming wasp larvae.  The dogs can now safely do their business in the backyard in peace.

The boy was most proud that this was a chemical free way to take care of the wasps, although I'm not sure I'd recommend this solution to anyone else.

The next day, we took a field trip to the Petaluma Seed Bank (purple fava beans and German radishes!), Hallie's Diner (poached eggs had a hard boiled yolk, but the cornmeal pancakes were the best I've had), and the Lagunitas Brewing Company (meh). We also stopped at a hardware store to look at compost bins, but since they were over $100.... Well, you know where this is going.

The compost bin on the left is made from old IKEA patio furniture, and the compost bin on the right is from the boy's stick collection and some wire.

We have to add some netting to the twiggy compost bin because the leaves won't stay put. Also, rodents like the kitchen scraps, and the last thing I want to do is have a rodent nest in my compost bin. I already filled the IKEA compost bin with some leaves from our backyard layered with the gross compost soup I had brewing for over a year in a garbage can. We called that can's contents poop soup since I did a poor job managing that bin. Now, however, it just smells like dirt. I'll let it sit for a year to do its thing.

Is there a moral to these stories? If there is, it would have to incorporate persistence and, ahem, being cheap.