People are passionate about the shit they are passionate about. That’s cool. There are many topics that inspire crazy levels of excitement and dedication in me that other people find totally pointless and boring (“Let’s talk about succession sowing kale some more, can we, can we please?!”) On the other hand, fourteen seconds of polite conversation…
Productive Home
Eat From The Larder Challenge: Week Two Wrap Up
Well, here we are, two weeks into the Eat From The Larder Challenge. I’m starting to get resentful about constantly having to feed people. And this is weird, because I typically love feeding people. This past week was Spring Break, so the kids were home. It’s like they get hungry 74 times a day. I…
The Psychology of Limited Choices: Eat From The Larder Challenge Week One
“Mom, can we go to The Muffin Store?” asks my son, again. Visits to the local cafe he calls The Muffin Store – because the muffins are fabulous – had become something of a post-preschool tradition for us. A few times a week after I picked him up, we would walk the several blocks to…
Eat From The Larder Challenge
In February I wrote a post called Food Storage For People Who Don’t Hate Food. Most of the feedback I got on that post was very positive, but a few readers seemed skeptical of my claims that eating from the pantry for six months was reasonable, even if one had the food stored. This floored me…
Food Storage For People Who Don’t Hate Food
In the preparedness world, things like this list go around periodically: This is a guide to building your food storage on $5 a week. Ignoring for a minute that food prices have clearly gone up since this list was put together (5 pounds of honey for $5? I don’t think so), my reaction every time…
Relaxing Bed Time Bath Soak
Periodically, I have trouble sleeping. The reason for this is a certain three-year-old boy. I’ve vented about the challenges of having a hard sleeper before. My son’s sleep is better than it used to be, but on a typical day, he still wakes and gets out of bed two or three times between his bedtime…
Dirt-Busting Sugar Hand Scrub For Gardeners
I am the queen of perma-dirt. You know those lines of dirt on the edges of your index fingers and thumbs? With all the time I spend playing in the garden, that area on me looked like I’d gotten a dirt tattoo for about a decade. I once asked folks on my Facebook page how…
Toxin Free DIY Citrus Cleaner
As you may have noticed by my Meyer lemon obsession, it’s citrus season, and I couldn’t be happier. As I’ve mentioned before, any pretense of locavore principles goes out the door for a case of mandarin oranges or a perfect, juicy grapefruit. While I’m paying the karmic debt for the food miles it takes to…
Three Steps To Reduce Your Consumption
I’m not here to shit on anyone’s Target habit, but I imagine most of my readers agree with me that lowing our overall consumption is a good idea. Consuming less lowers our environmental impact. Less consumption usually means less spending, and most folks like having more money or less debt. At a personal level, many…
Oil Pulling: Never Again
Have you heard of oil pulling? It’s one of those things that’s all the rage in natural-living circles right now. If you read up on oil pulling, you’ll hear that this traditional Ayurvedic oral care technique naturally detoxifies, whitens teeth without chemicals, strips teeth of plaque, kills harmful bacteria that have taken up residence in…
Organizing Kids Toys: The Toy Closet Solution
If you have kids then you know how toys can multiply, especially over the holidays. Here’s how we solved the Kid Toy Madness issue our house. We took the vast majority of our kids toys and moved them into The Toy Closet. The Toy Closet didn’t start out as a toy closet. It started as the…
Habits, Not Resolutions. Here, Not There
It is January 1st, 2014 and I have no resolutions. Looking back at the past several years – what they were, not what I resolved them to be – 2012 was The Year That Knocked Me On My Ass, and 2013 was The Year of Recovery from 2012. And so here we are on the…