Noodle and the Goose Again

Maaf

Maaf, Sorry.

I like the Indonesian version because it feels less worn down than the English. Sorry.

I've been rather absent from this blog. Maaf.

Oddly I find myself, for the first time in a very long time, if not ever, somehow bereft of words these days.  I'm working on that. Because I do have lots to say.

Mostly I've been absorbing, I realize. Reading and reading and reading. Stacks and stacks of lovely books.

And I've been perpetually cold. Cold. I'm cold right now, sitting at a bookstore coffee shop using the internet ('cause we're changing providers and won't have in-house access until next week. Of course). It's rainy and somewhere in the 70's. And I'm freezing. I really had no idea how HOT I was all those days in Indonesia until now, when I'm always cold. It is amazing to not have to change my clothes several times a day because of sweat. Indeed, I'd never have to change at all, if  I weren't such a messy eater.

We're bumping along. We had a wonderful week at the Outer Banks with T's family. Yeah, yanked the girls from school and everything. It was lovely and sunny almost all week. Actually until the very last day when the rest of the family left for Ohio and we hung around watching storms come in over the ocean and eating leftovers in our beachside house. 

There will be photos. 

The other day T suggested that his lack of re-entry culture shock might be because of the internet and the shrinking of the world such that everything is pretty much the same here as it was there. And vice versa.

I took this statement to be an indication of the depth of his current re-entry culture shock.

Work at the hospital has been slow. Not nearly enough sick people right now. It feels pretty creepy to be kinda wishing for flu season to hasten along so that T can score some overtime. Or even regular time. I'm beginning to cast around looking for work. In between reading and reading. And knitting, of course. But that is to be expected. Bulky 100% wool. I can hardly bear it.

It's officially Autumn at last. One of the things on the list of things I was looking forward to (written last May) that I stumbled across yesterday:

- Public Library

-High speed Internet

- American traffic patterns

- Yarn

-Autumn.

I hasten to note that this was a list of THINGS I was looking forward to, naturally excluding people. Because people are always the best to have close and the worst to miss dreadfully.

And I leave you with a bit of eye candy.

Butternut squash stuffed with tempe, apples, dried cranberries, carrots and celery. Flavored with fresh thyme and real maple syrup.

And Goose showing off her new skirt.

I am so grateful that one of my children still allows me to make silly kitty skirts for them. 

Because that fabric was aching to be a fringed skirt with rick-rack and red jewel buttons.

Don't you agree?

 

You know....

all those pretty, pretty blogs out there with beautifully styled photos of people's handiwork and cooking?

Yeah, I love reading those, but this isn't one of them.

I do, however, have some 'crafting' to share. Though I will refrain from posting a tutorial for your edification.

Seems that along with my close attention to the state of my countertops, I may also be developing an even stronger aversion to plastic bags. Indeed, it has become my raison de'etre to keep the flow of plastic bags into my house to a minimum. I'd outlaw them entirely but someone (adult male) in my house tends to forget to take shopping bags with him and it would just be one more point of contention that our household doesn't need. So. I'm totally down with shopping bags. Lots and lots of cloth bags, several that scrunch up nicely to fit inside my purse (a growing edge of anxious consideration for me is to become one of those people, like my Mom's friend Marie Hershberger from my childhood who always had everything you could ever imagine wanting or needing right there in her massive black pocketbook with the golden clasp - I find my self longing for such a pocketbook). I'm not to be caught at the grocery or the farmer's market or target without my  trusty cloth shopping bags. But what to do about produce and bulk products that need to be corralled to be weighed and put into the cloth shopping bag? It is one thing to put a bunch of naked bananas into your cart, onto the check-out scale and then into your shopping bag. It is quite another to do so with green beans. Or flour.

I have been reusing plastic produce bags from the grocery store. You know, after emptying them at home, washing them out (or not), stuffing them back into cloth shopping bags to be refilled on my next shopping trip. This has worked so far. Though holes do develop and occasional fruits/veges/bulk goods escape.  A longer term solution was needed.

So today I whipped up these

bright blue and purple produce bags. They're made of something called "scrubbing nylon" with simple up the sides zig-zag seams. I thought about drawstrings, but decided I have no real beef with twist ties or with simply tying off the tops as I do with standard plastic produce bags.  Outrageously simple.

But what about flour and other bulk type goods that might slip or puff through the mesh, you ask?

And I answer, these

bright orange, 100% cotton bags to rival the unbleached muslin bags that the extremely expensive un-partial foods store near me sells for extremely expensive prices. So they are not "unbleached"? I doubt that my flour and brown rice and cornmeal will care all that much, given that they are, instead, bright orange. Again I pondered drawstrings (having had to narrow hem the tops anyway), but gave that idea up for too much work. And, you might note, since I didn't change the thread after the first set of bags, yes, these have wonderfully decorative purple stitching on them. Further, I went ahead and threw caution to the winds and didn't finish off the seams. If they get all messy I can always go back over with a decorative top-stitch all the way around. As it is, all these products took me less than 30 minutes to cut out and sew up.

And since we're on the back deck viewing them, I might as well give you an artful look at this,

my compost tub, state of the art composting system,

and this,

Our back deck clothes drying system.

We are all about bringing up property values in our neighborhood. (Actually? Our back deck looks out on an empty wooded lot, the only thing gawking at our undies out to dry are squirrels and the owl who likes to roost on the deck railing).