Classy Chassis

For a few weeks my husband and I have been messing around with trying to make and outdoor hot water heater. This was goal of ours to make our camping trips more luxurious. There is just something about a good shower that takes the dirty feeling away that camping gives you. Our shower relies on propane to heat the water. I admit I am nervous about propane for whatever reason. I wondered for awhile if we needed to look for the best term life insurance in case our project were to backfire. Thankfully, it did not! Tonight we were able to get the heater to work without a hitch and adjust properly. I am so very much looking forward to the end of my cold and dreary showers while camping! It will make other tasks like doing the dishes even easier as well. I love that my husband is so smart when it comes to building and making things.

Over the years our older son has attended many different types of summer camps. We have tried music, theater, basketball, outdoor and many others. He is drawn to outdoor and nature camps. His nature is to be inquisitive about the world around him. For years we have sent him to a nature camp that he loved. The problem was that every year the price went up and up and up. This year I put my foot down and explained that the camp was no longer in our budget. I found a camp at our conservation district that was 1/5 the price! I had my doubts about how good the camp would be considering the cost but I was sorely wrong. My son said the camp was the best experience of his life. That is coming from a kid who doesn’t say much about anything. This shows that not everything that is cheap is “cheap”. I need to write the camp a letter thanking them for the experience on behalf of my son.

Our dog is a miniature schnauzer. She is an adorable little dog and ever so sweet. I have to admit though that her breed probably wasn’t the best choice for our outdoorsy family. You see this type of breed need quite a bit of grooming. We tend to let her coat grow pretty long before we take her in for a clipping. This isn’t to say she is dirty or nasty but just long haired because we do keep her washed and combed out. I do love when we get her back from the groomer’s because she always looks like a brand new dog. It is as if she had been on some quick weight loss program because she always looks slimmer and prettier. I wish that when I went to the hairdresser my result was as miraculous as it is for our dog. Right now she is in one of her shaggy states and I do wonder at times what she sees from beneath her long eye brows. Fortunately, she is scheduled for a trim in the near future and her world should look considerably different. It makes me wonder about what the world looks like to dogs that permanently have long hair in their eyes?

In the last couple of years I feel like I have finally come into my own. I no longer feel the need to keep up with the latest styles. I no longer think I need to think like the people around me to be in the group. My world is a happy one and I am content with it. I grow things and make things and live a creative life. This isn’t to say I am an artist but I have a creative outlet. I feel truer to who I originally was as a child than I ever have. My role as a wife and a homemaker is good. I work but not for someone but rather for myself. We are rich but we aren’t in debt. Today a friend paid me a compliment that I hold dear. She called me interesting. I have never been called interesting and have always considered myself a fly on the wall type of person. I am happy to be interesting or even curious. I don’t need to be an oddity but I would rather not be boring. Interesting is good enough.

There are moments in time that I feel this need to just be alone with my thoughts. This isn’t to say I am not happy with my life. My life is often focused more on those around me than myself. Most people with families or children can understand this. There are clothes to be washed, lessons to be supervised, bills to be paid, and work to be done. In the in between moments I am thinking about my children and what they need or things about them that concern me. I often forget to think for a moment about myself and my own needs and dreams. In the quiet moments of the day that are all mine I often just sit and mindlessly stare into my backyard. The quiet of it all wraps around me. It is then that I think about where I am in life and what I want. Sometime I just read a magazine or book. It doesn’t have to be anything particular. Trust me I even would read a clinislim review if it took me out of the here and now just for a moment. Those little moments alone away from my present world are ones I treasure. They allow me to return to the here and now with better focus and patience for my family. I am learning to tuck my children in and take those moments for just me because ultimately it is better for them as well.

In our house when it comes to technology I am the one that handles things. My husband I am quite sure could handle setting stuff up and maintaining it but I prefer to handle it. I am a person who sets out to do something and does it. I read this week that you could stream Netflix to a Wii. Since we have a Wii the idea interested me greatly because it just sits there collecting dust. Our children just don’t get that into playing video games. Being able to use the Wii for something else is awesome. The process of setting up the system was pretty simple and Netflix zoomed a disc to me in record time. The children are not watching tons of videos that they love and I am loving that our investment in the system is now paying off!

I have mentioned in previous posts that the people across the street seem to have a never ending sale in their front yard. A couple of days ago I noticed that they put a really nice love seat in the yard. It isn’t really on the edge of road which makes it hard for people to see. This morning I see that there is a “for sale” sign on it. I thought that they would be hauling the love seat back inside today given the predicted rain but they did not. I don’t know if they were too distracted by visiting some online site like www.jointsupplementreviews.net or what but the love seat is still there. It has sat out in the yard through what was several hours of very heavy rainfall. I cannot imagine that the thing will ever dry out. Our rain barrels collect well over 110 gallons of water during this rainstorm so I can only imagine what has seeped into the cushions of the love seat. The smell should be quite lovely as it will undoubtedly take days or weeks to ever get near being dry.

About 6 weeks ago we removed our dishwasher. There wasn’t anything wrong with it but I wanted it gone nonetheless. Our water bills had gotten way out of hand despite what I considered frugal water use by our family. We have low flow faucets, toilets, and shower heads. When I looked up how much water our 22 year old dishwasher used I was surprised to find out that each load used 15 gallons of water. This seemed crazy to me. I do not mind hand washing dishes and actually prefer to do them myself. After having removed the dishwasher I am pleased to see our water usage went down 1400 gallons during the last month! I am not sure if that is all related to the dishwasher but I would have to suspect it played a part. I am in the process of considering a way to use our gray water from the washing machine to water the lawn and garden but haven’t yet worked out the details. When you consider that you are billed for not only bringing water into the house but also putting out into the lawn it kind of makes sense to put it to use in the garden if you can.

Many people I know complain about their in-laws. I happen to be lucky in that my mother-in-law “gets” me. This isn’t to say that she completely agrees with everything I do or think but she respects my ideas. She understands that I am on a quest to learn more about being sustainable. Last night she gifted me a book that I absolutely love! In fact it is a book that I have been hunting for and could not find. I hadn’t really told anyone that I wanted the book and that made the gift even more surprising. It is a book that details virtually everything you could want to know about living off the land and providing for yourself. I cannot put this book down and keep finding more and more ideas that I want to put into action. It is really neat that although my mother-in-law would rather just buy what she needs from the store she understands my desire to make it myself and my drive to teach my children the same self-sufficient skills. I believe there may come a day when very few people in the world still retain this type of knowledge and these will be important skills to have.

This weekend I am embarking on a pickling journey. I have been cutting up and saving some watermelon rind in order to pickle it. I don’t know why but the idea of pickling foods appeals to me. I believe it stems from my childhood memories of my grandmother making the most amazing bread and butter pickles. I could eat an entire jar of them. Whenever she ran out of pickles to eat she would buy me those baby gerkin pickles to snack on. The sweet and tart flavor of pickles just brings me back to a simpler time in life. I have already pickled some turnips which are rather interesting in texture and flavor. I don’t mind eating one here or there but they are certainly nothing I would gobble up an entire jar of. I will be interested to see if pickled watermelon rind lives up to the image in my head.

There are so many things that I love about my children. One thing that I particularly love about my older son is the fact that he loves to read. He will read anything and everything. The other day he took my food dehydrator manual in the car just to have something to read along the way. I have no doubt that if I left some colon cleanse product reviews lying out on the coffee table that the child would also read those. He just has this natural curiosity about how things work and why they work the way that they do. He has read the manuals for every device in our house from front to back. The manual for our car has not escaped his attention nor has the gardening magazines I keep in the bathroom. His brain is just overflowing with great information and ideas. I can only imagine what the world will be like when he is finally settled into a career. There is no doubt in my mind that it will involve science and building things of some sort. He is on a never ending quest to find the perfect parts to build a robot or some other invention to make life easier. You have to love a kid that would rather be building and creating or learning how to do so than one that sits and mindlessly stares at the television.

I realize there are people all over the world who live in a state of constant and unbearable heat. We in the Northeastern United States are not among this population. I suppose that makes us whiners when it comes to high temperatures. Either way it has been unbearably hot here for the last week or so. Today we FINALLY have had a break in the heat. The temperature here is now in the low 80s instead of hovering around 100 degrees. I have friends who live for the high heat we just had but I do not count myself as one of them. I suppose if you had and could afford the expense of central air conditioning it would be different than living with fans to cool the air. We had about 10 fans running in our house this week and the inside temperature was still right around 90 degrees with the windows, shades, and doors shut. Everything suggests that keeping these closed will minimize the heat but I am not convinced. I believe all it does is allow you to recirculate the already hot air. The rain today was a welcome change for the world outside and those of us inside sweating. Hopefully the temperature break holds on for a few days to allow us to feel normal again.

I believe that everyone has someone in their family who is exceptionally rigid in the way they do things. We are fortunate to have several people in our immediate family like this. I have to admit it kind of drives me just a little bit crazy to deal with them at times. Two of these people work in the computer field. I believe one of them works in managed IT services or something like that. He is really amazing at his job but when it comes to relating to people on a personal level he struggles. A prime example is sending email. For whatever reason he does not understand that we don’t read every single email we receive. We have half a dozen people who send us 10-20 emails a day. Most of these are political jokes or whatever that they find funny. We simply do not have the time to read 60 jokes or stories a day. This person could not accept it when we finally said that we don’t read most of the emails we get and many just end up in our spam box because we are sent so many. Between home schooling our children and working part-time from home I just don’t want to be on the computer any longer than I need to. I especially don’t want to waste time reading political jokes that don’t respect my value system.

It seems like every time I think I have a handle on what the weather is about to do it proves me wrong. We have been really wanting to put our rain barrels to works and save money on our water bill. Thus far this year we have yet to be able to use them. I really thought that today I would need to water the garden. We have 110 gallons of water in the barrels just waiting to be used. About the time I got ready to go out and water the garden a freak rainstorm appeared out of nowhere. It was such a powerful storm that it knocked out our internet service for several hours. I don’t understand exactly why our DSL is somehow connected to the weather but it is. I hate wishing that it wouldn’t rain because I know we need it but I love knowing that whenever it does finally stop raining that we will have a decent supply of rainwater to use. The rain is great for our garden at the community garden site because there is no water available there. We have to bring in whatever water our garden might need in containers. Our rain barrels were built for this purpose and to decrease the amount we use from the city. My hope is that at some point we recoup the money we spent on building the system. At this rate that might take several years.

For a few months I have noticed that my desktop computer just isn’t running like it used to. I finally spent some time looking through the files on it and realized that it has virtually no space left on the memory. When I bought the computer I was told that it should last me for a very long time. It came complete with a lcd monitor, printer, and everything I needed for my work from home job. I now realize that I should have given more consideration to how my needs my change over time as I continued to work from home. I didn’t realize all the manuals, documents, and guidelines I would need to keep saved on my computer. I also didn’t consider how much space the various software packages that I might need would detract from the capacity of my computer. Right now I have used 99% of the available memory on the computer and it is incredibly slow. This weekend I am going to have to spend time moving files to flash drives and cutting back the software that I have installed. This is only a short term solution until I can actually upgrade the computer.

We are in the process of setting up a permanent camp spot. My parents own a fairly large amount of land in a remote area and have said we can camp on it whenever we want to. We went up last week to scout out locations where we might like to camp. There are a couple of things that are holding us back on the project. One thing is the lack of accessible water. We will have to bring in whatever water we need. This can be a bit of a job when you consider bathing, cooking, and whatnot. The other thing is the wildlife. The area is full of wildlife such as bear, deer, and everything in between. We aren’t really crazy about camping where there are lots of bears. There have been bears in state parks where we have camped but they always seem to move through fairly quickly. I am just not sure that I am keen on heading to the bathroom and crossing paths with a bear. I am likely thinking to much about it and making a bigger deal than I should but I can’t help myself.

Have you ever seen one of those houses where there seems to be a never ending garage sale going on? I have always wondered how people get away with this sort of thing. It seems like there must be a point where having a constant sale goes beyond being a garage sale and becomes a business. I believe the people that live across the street are on the road to having a perpetual garage sale. They have had one every Friday for the last 3 weeks. The weird thing is that each time they have more stuff and different stuff. One time it might be mainly clothing and the next it is new stuff like brinkmann lights. I don’t mind people having a garage sale but am getting a little tired of people parking in my lawn for this sale. I am quite sure there will come a point where everyone in town realizes that this is one of those never ending garage sales and they stop coming. My mother is a frequent shopper at garage sales in our area and knows exactly which houses are not worth visiting. I hope they sell whatever they have to sell or decide to donate it to charity and be done with it for this year.

My children were very healthy throughout the entire fall and winter season. They might have had one serious cold each during this entire time. I am thankful for the fact that they have remained so healthy. I am quite sure it is due to the fact that they are home schooled and are not around all the germs that you find in a public school. For the last two weeks my older son has been attending summer music camp. This is a very large music program that is offered by the local school district. It is an absolutely wonderful program with tons of classes being offered. The weird thing is that since the first week my son has had either allergy problems or a cold. Today both of my boys have fevers and stuffed up noses. I guess this is not unusual considering they are now being exposed to so many different people all at once. I am hoping the fevers fade soon and this is just a little bug and nothing more. It does put a wee bit of a kink in our weekend plans but no worries.

Today I picked my son up from music camp and ran into an old friend from high school. It has been about 20 years since I last saw her and I was really surprised. At first I didn’t recognize her because she looks nothing like she did in high school. She is clearly a living example of one of those weight loss success stories we all like to hear about. She has lost at least one hundred pounds since high school and looks fabulous. You can look in her eyes and see the happiness that is there today that was missing so long ago. I know from personal experience how hard loosing weight can be and just wanted to jump up and down for her success. I wasn’t sure whether or not to say something about how she looked since I don’t really know her anymore and it has been so long since we last spoke. I simple said she looked wonderful and left it at that for now. If we should have a longer conversation I may let her know how amazing I think her accomplishment is.

Today we went up to my parents house to look for a place to camp. They own about one hundred acres of land near a national forest. We typically camp in national forest campgrounds. It occurred to us that aside from the lack of community that camping on our own property would have many perks. While my mother was giving us a tour of the places we might camp she showed us a camp that she bought at tax sale. The camp is small and in need of some serious work. The biggest project is going to be putting on a roof. It is however the perfect size for our small family and has many of the things that we would want. I just hope we are up to the task of putting a roof on since we haven’t ever done anything like this. I do think that after the expense of the roof we will save a great deal of money on camping in years to come. My children aren’t entirely sold on the idea yet because they can’t see past the cosmetic problems that the property has right now but I think that this will change as we improve the site.