Living an all-natural chemical free lifestyle is hard to do when the grocery store in my town is the shell station up the road. So, i end up buying all my shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, perfume, and makeup online. However, amazon is not always cost effective. Each person listing an item can decide what they want to price it at and if the buyer wants that item badly enough, they will pay it. I have in the past seen one bottle of the shampoo i use listed at 55 dollars + shipping. I will wait until i am almost out of an item trying to see if someone will list it at a reasonable price. If they don’t, i have to dedicate a weekend to driving into a big city for a supply run. Whether i buy online or in the city, i generally buy in bulk to save on shipping/gas money/wear and tear on the car. I try to have at least 3 of the large items, 6 of the medium items, and 20 of the small items in the box under the bathroom sink following a successful supply run. It’s important i stay stocked on the day-to-day items and keep inventory of what i have because i can’t just run down the road and pick another one up if i’m out of something. Its a long drive back to the products i was brought up with.
My favorite time of the day is dawn on a weekend. I’m at work long before sunrise on the weekdays so i generally miss this time throughout the week. However, on Saturdays and Sundays i can catch the quiet. The quiet is the time right before the sun comes up, when the sky is lightening but nothing is awake yet. The time when the nocturnal animals have turned in for the night and the daytime ones haven’t woken up yet. Not a bird sings. Not a cricket chirps. It’s just quiet. It is light enough to see your hand but not yet light enough to make out colors. Everything is either shadow or other. There is no red, green, or blue. It is my favorite time of the day. It is best experienced in silence, with a good dog at one’s side.
When i lived in apartments i had separate rooms and if something was off limits to the cat i could just close the door. In the tiny house, everything is open. So i had to come up with a way to cat-proof my grandmother’s rocking chair. I stretched trash bags over the cushions and put them on top of the free standing closet when not in use. However, there was still a square of felt stretched across the seat of the rocking chair. The cat would definitely christen this if given a chance. I decided a piece of wood would be the way to go; a flat piece of wood i could slide in place when the chair was not in use. Just to make sure she abhorred it, i would rub it down with lemon oil. I bought a piece of plywood at home depot. I knew from past experience that they did not do diagonal lines. They could only cut things into perfectly straight squares and rectangles with their jigsaw beast. So, i watched a youtube video and taught myself to use a circular saw. I laid the board of wood on an overturned bucket and marked where i wanted it cut. I anchored the piece with my knee and made the cuts. Then i sanded all sides and edges of the piece of wood and drenched it in lemon oil. Once it had dried i blotted the excess oil away with paper towel and tested it out. As soon as the lemon scented piece of wood came within 3 feet of the cat she squinched up her nose and ran. I slid the piece of wood into place on the rocking chair and my place was officially cat ready. Eventually our cat would pick something else to pee on (the stove burners) at which point she would join my friend and her family. However, at this point in time we were still moving mountains and air trying to make sure the environment was set up for her best level of success in our family.
One day Sili emerged from behind the shed with this in her mouth. Now, my dogs are diggers, so it would do no good to give the poor bambi a proper burial. It would essentially be like putting the skull in the refrigerator for the dog to snack on later. I didn’t feel right throwing the skull of an animal in the trash. It was once a deer with a promising young life. Its story didn’t deserve to end in a white forceflex trash bag. So, i put it on the fence railing of the porch. We had a couple windy days and it blew off the porch railing, so now it sits amongst the pots in the herb garden on a chair. Every so often from winter all the way into autumn a dog would show up on the porch with a femur, a vertebrae, or a rib. So proud. Just beaming, walking around with their prize in their teeth. I put the other bones in the trash. They were not especially clean bones and it appeared other animals may have had a turn before the dog chewed them. I didn’t want any dog of mine eating after a coyote or fox whose vaccination records i couldn’t check. So, every time i found a bone it went in the forceflex trash bag for weekly collection. But, poor bambi’s skull sits on the porch surveying the land of its scattered remains.
I’m sure the a/c – heating unit was broken a long time before i realized it because it hadn’t been heating since i moved in. However, i didn’t know how strong this little unit should be. I thought maybe the weather was just too much for it. I didn’t realize i needed a repair man until the day we skirted the house when the handyman pointed to my block of powdery ice in the yard and said, “you know that’s broken right?” I turned and looked where he had pointed. He dusted some of the powdered ice off of the unit and said, “it’s not supposed to be like that.” I had thought the ice had come from the sky, as we were standing in the freezing rain, but he assured me it had nothing to do with the weather. So i called a repair man. He gave me a very fair price but i would have to wait for the part to be ordered and shipped from out of town. For a week my daily routine involved de-icing the a/c unit with a butter knife. There were some metal tubes coming out the back of the a/c unit in a loopy motion that reminded me of a hotwheels track. The repair man said this was a problem. It would have to be cut and sautered back together in a straight line. The a/c repair guy was an honest guy that came highly recommended and did good work. The job was done earlier than expected and the unit has worked great ever since. The minute hot air came out of that thing i had an ah-ha moment. I had been cold all winter because the heater was broken.
There is no beauty like a horizon void of buildings and framed by trees. I like to think of the sky as God’s canvas where he paints with all the colors at his disposal and no 2 works of art are the same.
There were multiple reasons for purchasing the boots. I was having a problem with ants and spiders getting in my shoes when i walked through the tall grass and i worried ticks and scorpions would soon join the list as the months passed. I also dropped a very heavy box, shipped ups freight, on my tennis shoe, crushing a couple toes, which made the whole “steel toe” idea sound pretty nifty. So i bought myself some tall, lace-up, steel-toe work boots and had them shipped to me in the mail (my feet are small so i usually have to buy online). I did not take to them right away. Boots with steel in them are heavy. I felt like my feet were strapped to blocks of lead. It did not suit my preferred speed in life. In the beginning i rejected them and set them in the cabinet. They were too stiff. They didn’t bend when i walked. They were insanely heavy. I was not immediately fond of them. It would be months before i figured out what i had done wrong. There was nothing the matter with the boots. I just didn’t know what to do with them.
My supervisor at work mentioned that she had some rolls of fencing they had once used to corral chickens. She asked if i might want it to use on the land. She said there were two rolls and she’d give them to me for free if i could get the suv to Floresville to pick them up. It was a 2 hour drive on a work night but the offer was too good to pass up. That amount of fencing would have cost me a pretty penny in the tractor supply store and it was tall too. If I couldn’t use it to patch the fence, i could use it to keep the deer off of young trees. So i scurried home from work and loaded the dog in the car. I turned to Sili and said, “we’re going on a road trip. You and i are going to go pick up some fencing. Okay?” Sili looked up at me with her soulful brown eyes and wagged her tail. She was ready to ride. So, as the sun set, we set off in the direction of Floresville. I still had my scrubs on and Sili hadn’t even eaten dinner. We would do all those things when we got back. Right then we were on a mission. When we pulled into Floresville it was already dark. My supervisor’s daughters loaded the fencing into the suv while Sili checked out their property. They still had the youth and strength of teenagers. They got it done in half the time it would have taken her and i. I thanked them profusely, loaded Sili up, and waved goodbye. Then we headed for home. We were making good time until i hit what i thought was back-up from a traffic accident on the main highway. We sat patiently for a good half hour, not moving an inch. Then i began to get curious. I pulled out my smart phone. I googled the highway we were sitting on and attached the words “traffic accident”. The search produced nothing. The semi driver in front of me turned off his truck. Then the van to the left of me did the same thing. The words came out of my mouth in slow motion as i realized what was going on, “oh no”. The highway was closed. It was not a traffic accident. It was planned and scheduled construction. My smart phone confirmed. The phone indicated that there would be a detour, but people don’t always do what google says they did. There was no detour. It was beginning to look like we were sleeping in the car. I had plenty of gas and a little water. I used chewing gum in place of brushing my teeth and made a pillow out of a wadded up jacket. However, i did have to pee. The highway was shut down. Nobody was going anywhere. So, i got out of the car, opened the back door, and grabbed one of the ozarka gallon water jugs. I drank some, gave Sili some, and poured the rest in the grass. Once the jug was empty i used a box cutter to take the sloped top portion off. I always kept a roll of emergency toilet paper tucked in the cubby in the wall of the trunk. I retrieved that and climbed into the car where i peed in my home-made travel potty, tied my spent tp into an HEB bag, and emptied my ozarka jug into the grass alongside the car. Vwalah! Problem solved. I made a little pillow for Sili out of my purse on the passenger seat and reclined the driver’s seat. I cracked the windows a tad and we went to sleep. I was awoken by the sound of a truck horn. Hours later they reopened the highway and the semi behind me wanted me to move. I turned the car on and hurriedly shifted into drive. The highway was open and we were going home! When we finally arrived at the property i was so exhausted i left the fencing in the trunk. In fact, i left it there for a couple days. Then one morning i decided it was the time to get the fence rolls out of the car.
They were a lot heavier than i thought they’d be. It had taken two strapping young people to put them in the trunk. Now one tired 30 year old would need to get them out. I picked a spot for them behind a mulch pile in a flat area near the fence. I backed the car up to the spot, put it in park, and opened the trunk door. Then i climbed into the trunk and pulled one of the rolls, inch by inch, until it was sticking out of the trunk enough to tilt towards the ground. Eventually the thing just ended up on the grass where i dragged it the rest of the way towards the designated spot i had picked out. Then i climbed back into the trunk and repeated those steps for the second roll of fencing. Once they were out of the trunk and on the land i dusted my hands, closed the trunk, and drove the car back to the house. We now had fencing.
I am a gluten free pescatarian. I eat fish and quail eggs but no meat or poultry. So, all the meat products you see here are plant-based. Most of them are manufactured by the “beyond meat” company (and pretty darn tasty if i may add). The alternative noodles are made from peas, lentils, or rice. The yellow cubes in the second to last picture are mangoes. Right now i’m budgeting, so i’m not cooking anything complicated or fancy. I just make what i can with what i’ve got on hand.
