As winter approaches, the pile of warm clothing adjacent to my front door drifts like snow, heaping against the wall and over the sofa; obscuring every available flat surface.
Faced with these mounds of boots, fleece, and Gore-Tex, I chose to fight back. I decided it was incumbent upon me to contain these fallen mittens and scarves in a manner both organized and accessible.
Problem was, I didn't have a containment system up to the challenge.
..........
Last year, I attempted to perfect the use of the big plastic box (AKA: BPB). In this scenario, all scarves, hats, mittens, and other warm gear got tossed pell-mell into the BPB, where they jumbled in a heap; intermingling with no regard for ownership.
It was - in almost every way - an imperfect solution.
When a child queried, "Where's my scarf?" I would answer, "Did you check the big plastic box?"
Inevitable answer: "No."
Of course not. Why on Earth would they look there?
One symptom of my kids' abhorrence of organizational schemes is their firm, unfaltering resistance to even acknowledging the existence of such schemes. They are organizational agnostics.
Like a missionary, I attempted to bring them the truth. To show them the light, the way, the mittens: "Well, go check there. That's where they should be."
The child would go off to check, disgorging the full contents of the BPB onto the floor in the process.
Inevitable result: "It's not here."
"If you put it in the box when you took it off, it should be there. Did you put it there when you took it off?"
Inevitable answer: "Uhhhh....."
Further investigation on my part would usually reveal that the scarf was, in fact, in the BPB, or on the floor next to the BPB where it had been disgorged by the child attempting to find it amidst the chaos.
Alternately, the mitten was often declared "lost forever," and the subject of much weeping, consternation, and rending of other garments.
Usually we would ultimately discover the item in the car, or at school, or stuffed into a shoe next to the door, or in a jacket pocket, or on the floor next to the toilet, or in a box of crayons, or frozen into the snow on the front step.
Pretty much anywhere other than the place it should have been.
And, on rare occasions, winter accessories apparently achieved translocation to whatever dimension socks, scarves, and mittens abscond to for vast portions of their use lives.
Which all goes to say that even I - the BPB evangelist - found the strategy lacking. It was just a container for our mess, not a remedy for the mess itself. We needed something better.
I briefly considered buying some new sort of entryway furniture. Target carries hallracks with benches, and there are a lot of things from Ikea that would probably work.
But I don't want to spend more money. Even reasonable amounts of money. And I really don't want to buy more stuff.
We already have plenty of stuff. The drifts of hats, scarves, and mittens, for instance, are stuff. And stuff, no matter how desirable, always somehow requires - through it's very existence - the acquisition of more stuff that can be used to contain the stuff.
It's mind numbing. It's too much. It's driving me insane.
We have so much stuff.
When I thought it through, it occurred to me that one nice thing about all this stuff is that, somewhere amidst the clutter, we probably already had a containment system that would work.
So I looked around my house, to see what might be repurposed.
..........
When I think about my father working in the garage, I envision him standing at an antique piece of furniture that was central to his work space. I don't know what it's actually called, but "sideboard" seems probable. It has some shelves above an oblong, beveled mirror and a bunch of drawers that he used to hold screws, nails, and wrenches. One drawer was set up with partitions - they were intended for silverware - and was lined with a soft, blue velvet. When I opened it, it exuded that pleasant, oily smell of tools and hardware.
I love that smell.
I have been told that this sideboard was originally part of my parents' collection of living room furniture, which - the story goes - was sort of a motley assortment of pieces. As the current owner of a sort-of-motley assortment of furniture, I can understand my mom's desire to have things kind of match each other a bit, despite having varied origins. She accomplished this by painting her motley collection of furniture white.
Viola! Matching furniture!
In these, the days of Antique Roadshow, it seems obvious that this constitutes some sort of crime against furniture. Leigh and Leslie Keno rail against painting antiques on an almost weekly basis. But back in the olden days of the early '70s, I'm sure the white-painted sideboard and matching shelves looked super fly with my parents' zebra-striped faux-fur bean bag.
I love my father's repurposed work bench so much that, after leaving home, I offered to trade him the piece for an actual work bench. It was a tactical error to ask after leaving home, though, because over the past dozen years I have never had a chance to get it. I can only hope that, one day, there will be a way for it to get moved up to join my current sort-of-motley assortment of furniture. And I have always dreamed that - by that day - I would have acquired the necessary skills to make it something other than white.
Crimes against furniture notwithstanding, I'm a natural-wood sort of gal.
So when I looked around my home for possible containment systems for hats, gloves, and scarves, and my eyes settled upon an old, white-painted, hand-me-down dresser covered in stickers, I saw both a containment system and a learning opportunity.
..........
If I have learned one thing from this learning opportunity, it is this: It is probably not worth the time, effort, and - more to the point - loss of brain cells it takes to refinish something about which you do not care deeply.
Somewhat conversely, I have also learned this: It is best to start your refinishing career with an item about which you do not care deeply.
In that sense, the little dresser was the perfect first project. It was small, not special or particularly nice, and it didn't belong to someone whose memory I cherish.
My husband and I acquired it in grad school from a guy who was leaving for another program and didn't want to get a U-Haul. A nice guy, but not someone I'm as sentimental about as, say, my grandma.
Over the years, one of the drawers developed a crack and the white paint had been embellished with crayons, markers, and some of those stickers that they give to kids at grocery stores. It was a mess.
I was using it to hold random scraps of paper. Yeah. Really. Let's not talk about it.
Suffice it to say that it was ready to serve a more noble purpose.
So, we purchased a bottle of CitraStrip "Safer" Stripper and some other random scraping tools and I got to work.
The bottle of CitraStrip alleged that it was safe for indoor use, so I figured I'd be good in the garage, which isn't airtight. Given that I've never used anything other than CitraStrip, I can't tell you if it is actually any safer, less toxic, or less likely to induce hallucinations than any other stripping product. What I can tell you is that for about 12 hours after stripping concluded, my heart was racing, I had funny thoughts, and my head felt screwed on all wrong.
This, in my opinion, might be the best reason not bother with too much more furniture refinishing. If I do find a reason to try again, it will be outside, in the summer, on a day with a nice breeze.
Fume high aside, the CitraStrip worked pretty well, bubbling up most of the paint with the first application. Everything that wasn't worked into a nick or crack.
Removal of the paint revealed another truth about refinishing furniture (and a lot of other endeavors): You can spend a lot of time with some stripper, and peel back a lot of layers, only to discover that what lurks beneath isn't all that appealing.
In retrospect, I'm not sure what I expected. It's a little wooden dresser. Not awful, not beautiful. Functional. It'll do. But once I'd scraped it was clear that the dresser wasn't worth spending a lot more time on. The law of diminishing returns pretty well predicted that further effort would not be rewarded with vast improvement. It would still look like an ordinary little dresser.
Like Kenny Rogers says: "You've gotta know when to walk away. Know when to run."
Even buzzed on "safer" fumes, I knew it was time to fold 'em.
I glued the cracked drawer, stained all the visible surfaces, and put the hardware back on. The dresser now stands by our front door, ready to accept our gloves, hats, and mittens. It generally matches my other wood furniture.
Success.
..........
The kids are dazzled with my mad skills. They can't believe that this is the same dresser they used to draw on. They were excited to lay claim on their individual drawers. Kids always love to feel like something is theirs.
My husband, on the other hand, almost laughed himself into a hernia at the notion that our family would manage to maintain our stuff in our individual drawers.
He's probably right. But, what can I say? Hope springs eternal.
..........
I realize now that, when I took on this project, I wasn't thinking about this little white dresser, I was thinking about the large, white sideboard in my father's garage - a project I've been pondering for years. It would have taken a lot more (not to mention less "safer") fumes to transmute one into the other, though.
But I now know that, if ever there is a day that I can undertake the task of peeling away the paint on that sideboard, I should enlist the help of someone more skilled in the process than I am. And perhaps that's the most important thing I could have learned from this project: how not to mess up when it really matters.
Knowing is half the battle.
In the meantime, I can get to work in our battle against the drifting outerwear. Will this be the moment our family actually achieves organizational zen?
Yeah. Well... I didn't inhale that much stripper.
Showing posts with label construction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label construction. Show all posts
Monday, November 29, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Boxing Day
If there is one notion that underpins my self-sufficiency project, it is this:
There's an awful lot of important and useful stuff I didn't learn when I was growing up.
With this project, I'm setting out to learn those skills now. Better late than never.
And I thought (don't laugh!): "Maybe my kids would appreciate having the chance to learn some of these things while they are still young. It'll save them from having to acquire these skills later!"
Seriously. Stop laughing.
Before I had children, I had this idea about what my kids would be like. Sort of the Platonic Ideal of children. Clean. Well-behaved. They would listen to everything I said. Always fun to be around. Psychic (Yeah. Really. I mean, I realize now that that would really screw up the whole Santa thing, but what did I know back then?).
Perhaps you will observe, based on this list, that I was completely unfamiliar with the entire concept of children prior to becoming a parent.
We can add that to the list of things I didn't learn about growing up.
Now I recognize that I was envisioning my then-nonexistent children as extensions of myself. They were smaller, more perfect (and psychic!) versions of what I wished I could be. They would do what I asked because these fantasy mini-mes would want the exact same things.
Several thousand reality checks later, it's abundantly clear that neither of them is a small version of me.
Which is a fantastic thing.
My kids are great. They are funny and interesting, they have cool imaginations, enjoy reading, and don't complain too much when forced to listen to music that I like while we are driving in the car. Their listening skills are lacking... but if I weren't the one who has to clean up after them, force them to eat healthy foods, disappoint them daily with my failure to provide them with an endless supply of plastic toys, and nag them both into bed and out of it on school mornings (because, helpfully, they are always up that the crack of dawn on weekends), I think we'd be friends.
But we aren't friends.
I'm their well-intentioned (but often sorely mistaken) mom.
And sometimes things don't go quite as I'd planned.
..........
So, I wanted to bring them along on this journey to self-sufficiency, and I cast about in my mind for a while to come up with a project that we could share. Eventually, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to give each of them a garden box in which they could plant whatever (legal) plans they wanted to grow come the spring.
I still think this is a really good idea. It is a way that they can be invested in a project, see it from beginning to end, and enjoy the literal fruits of their labors. Yes, I know that the odds of inducing them to consume veggies without an undue amount of angst are approximately 3,720 to one. Never tell me the odds!
A connection to the plants. A sense of pride in ownership and production. These will be the tools I use to facilitate their peace with the peas.
When I told them of my plan, they exhibited a great deal of excitement. They are super-cute when exhibiting a great deal of excitement.
Excitement! Fantastic! It was time to figure out how to make a garden box. And then, after I completed them with the loving assistance of my children, I'd blog about learning to make a garden box. Score.
If you have read my Projects post, you will already know that I have absolutely no experience building things, and that garden boxes were first on my list. It was a good choice for first project because it was - even for me - really simple.
Especially since someone else did the hard work.
I feel like I should talk more about the fantastic landlord that I have these days. The rental experience in which I was embroiled immediately prior to this one would have made me appreciate a simple scenario wherein we had a landlord that took our money in exchange for providing decent, safe, pleasant housing and a reasonable response time to problems.
We had a low, low bar.
It appears that I paid off some vast karmic debt with that last one because we have lucked out now with Lou and Don.
Among the many fantastic bonuses that come along with living here is the fact that, when I asked Lou if they had any wood from which I could build some garden boxes, I ended up receiving expertly sawn wood (and, yeah, I don't know what kind - 2-by-somethings? - probably a fact I should figure out if I'm going to build something else), screws, and the loan of one heck of an awesome drill.
Once everything was delivered to my back porch (yes! delivered!) it took about ten minutes to get everything screwed together. My son even helped with the drilling part, exhibiting a four-year-old's innate love of dangerous power tools.
It didn't take much longer for the whole kid-participation part to go to Hell.
I could tell you all the different topics about which my children fought over the course of the next hour as I tried to get the boxes positioned, weed-free cloth placed in the bottom, and horse poop piled inside...
Okay, actually, I couldn't tell you all the topics because after a while the different topics just all sound the same. And - since I didn't go into this part earlier, I'll tell you now - I had started the day by asking my daughter to fold her clean clothes and take them to her room ("That's so unfair, mom! Why should I have to do that?"), a request that culminated in an argument about chores, followed by a denouement of cleaning out her room (to the tune of my endless rant about endless piles of little plastic toys), before we even made it to Lou and Don's to get started with the garden boxes.
So, it hadn't been the best morning ever. And, from an interpersonal standpoint, it still had some downward spiral to travel.
The culmination came when I heard my daughter sobbing from inside the house (I'd given up on getting them to help shovel poop). I went inside to find her dressed in a bridesmaid dress I wore at a cousin's wedding over a decade ago and crying over a dead monarch butterfly with a crumbling wing. Her father had given her the butterfly years ago and she has treasured it since. The wing damage, she alleged, was due to her little brother - but it is hard for me to tell how hard one would have to joggle a butterfly that has been dead for years in order to get it to fall off.
In any event, both children had devolved to a state of tears and hysteria.
There was approximately zero interest in garden boxes at that point. And no interest in family activities. Or in what we might or might not grow the following summer.
Eventually I got both of them settled, to my chagrin, in front of the TV and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was the one thing they seemed to agree on during the course of the day.
I got the boxes to a good stopping point and threw in the towel. The remaining horse poop will have to go in later this week.
It felt like a pretty big failure. Not the boxes. They are great. But the attempt to involve my children in this larger project that I would like to use to connect us to each other, and our environment, and our larger choices as a family.
..........
Then, on the way out for the evening, my daughter got to talking about what she was going to grow in her box. Apparently it's sugar cane. And flowers.
My son chimed in, excited about tomatoes, carrots, and peas (all things he would disdain if I placed in front of him for dinner).
I realized then that this project that I am undertaking is not an event: it is a process.
So they lost interest after the first screws went in. Maybe they just felt more like bickering that day. But there will come a day when we choose the seeds to plant, and start them inside in their little peat pellets. There will be days when we plant the seedlings out for the year, days when we water and pull the weeds. And then there will be the days when we harvest our crops and I have to force the kids to eat them.
There is a long road ahead of us: with this garden, with this project, with our lives together. It's important that none of us let the bad moments define us.
Let it go. Focus, instead, on the coming miracle of sugarcane in Vermont. And how I'm lucky to get to share this project with two wonderful, funny, annoying kids.
..........
I've edited to add a picture of the final product, filled and ready for the spring.
There's an awful lot of important and useful stuff I didn't learn when I was growing up.
With this project, I'm setting out to learn those skills now. Better late than never.
And I thought (don't laugh!): "Maybe my kids would appreciate having the chance to learn some of these things while they are still young. It'll save them from having to acquire these skills later!"
Seriously. Stop laughing.
Before I had children, I had this idea about what my kids would be like. Sort of the Platonic Ideal of children. Clean. Well-behaved. They would listen to everything I said. Always fun to be around. Psychic (Yeah. Really. I mean, I realize now that that would really screw up the whole Santa thing, but what did I know back then?).
Perhaps you will observe, based on this list, that I was completely unfamiliar with the entire concept of children prior to becoming a parent.
We can add that to the list of things I didn't learn about growing up.
Now I recognize that I was envisioning my then-nonexistent children as extensions of myself. They were smaller, more perfect (and psychic!) versions of what I wished I could be. They would do what I asked because these fantasy mini-mes would want the exact same things.
Several thousand reality checks later, it's abundantly clear that neither of them is a small version of me.
Which is a fantastic thing.
My kids are great. They are funny and interesting, they have cool imaginations, enjoy reading, and don't complain too much when forced to listen to music that I like while we are driving in the car. Their listening skills are lacking... but if I weren't the one who has to clean up after them, force them to eat healthy foods, disappoint them daily with my failure to provide them with an endless supply of plastic toys, and nag them both into bed and out of it on school mornings (because, helpfully, they are always up that the crack of dawn on weekends), I think we'd be friends.
But we aren't friends.
I'm their well-intentioned (but often sorely mistaken) mom.
And sometimes things don't go quite as I'd planned.
..........
So, I wanted to bring them along on this journey to self-sufficiency, and I cast about in my mind for a while to come up with a project that we could share. Eventually, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to give each of them a garden box in which they could plant whatever (legal) plans they wanted to grow come the spring.
I still think this is a really good idea. It is a way that they can be invested in a project, see it from beginning to end, and enjoy the literal fruits of their labors. Yes, I know that the odds of inducing them to consume veggies without an undue amount of angst are approximately 3,720 to one. Never tell me the odds!
A connection to the plants. A sense of pride in ownership and production. These will be the tools I use to facilitate their peace with the peas.
When I told them of my plan, they exhibited a great deal of excitement. They are super-cute when exhibiting a great deal of excitement.
Excitement! Fantastic! It was time to figure out how to make a garden box. And then, after I completed them with the loving assistance of my children, I'd blog about learning to make a garden box. Score.
If you have read my Projects post, you will already know that I have absolutely no experience building things, and that garden boxes were first on my list. It was a good choice for first project because it was - even for me - really simple.
Especially since someone else did the hard work.
I feel like I should talk more about the fantastic landlord that I have these days. The rental experience in which I was embroiled immediately prior to this one would have made me appreciate a simple scenario wherein we had a landlord that took our money in exchange for providing decent, safe, pleasant housing and a reasonable response time to problems.
We had a low, low bar.
It appears that I paid off some vast karmic debt with that last one because we have lucked out now with Lou and Don.
Among the many fantastic bonuses that come along with living here is the fact that, when I asked Lou if they had any wood from which I could build some garden boxes, I ended up receiving expertly sawn wood (and, yeah, I don't know what kind - 2-by-somethings? - probably a fact I should figure out if I'm going to build something else), screws, and the loan of one heck of an awesome drill.
Once everything was delivered to my back porch (yes! delivered!) it took about ten minutes to get everything screwed together. My son even helped with the drilling part, exhibiting a four-year-old's innate love of dangerous power tools.
It didn't take much longer for the whole kid-participation part to go to Hell.
I could tell you all the different topics about which my children fought over the course of the next hour as I tried to get the boxes positioned, weed-free cloth placed in the bottom, and horse poop piled inside...
Okay, actually, I couldn't tell you all the topics because after a while the different topics just all sound the same. And - since I didn't go into this part earlier, I'll tell you now - I had started the day by asking my daughter to fold her clean clothes and take them to her room ("That's so unfair, mom! Why should I have to do that?"), a request that culminated in an argument about chores, followed by a denouement of cleaning out her room (to the tune of my endless rant about endless piles of little plastic toys), before we even made it to Lou and Don's to get started with the garden boxes.
So, it hadn't been the best morning ever. And, from an interpersonal standpoint, it still had some downward spiral to travel.
The culmination came when I heard my daughter sobbing from inside the house (I'd given up on getting them to help shovel poop). I went inside to find her dressed in a bridesmaid dress I wore at a cousin's wedding over a decade ago and crying over a dead monarch butterfly with a crumbling wing. Her father had given her the butterfly years ago and she has treasured it since. The wing damage, she alleged, was due to her little brother - but it is hard for me to tell how hard one would have to joggle a butterfly that has been dead for years in order to get it to fall off.
In any event, both children had devolved to a state of tears and hysteria.
There was approximately zero interest in garden boxes at that point. And no interest in family activities. Or in what we might or might not grow the following summer.
Eventually I got both of them settled, to my chagrin, in front of the TV and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was the one thing they seemed to agree on during the course of the day.
I got the boxes to a good stopping point and threw in the towel. The remaining horse poop will have to go in later this week.
It felt like a pretty big failure. Not the boxes. They are great. But the attempt to involve my children in this larger project that I would like to use to connect us to each other, and our environment, and our larger choices as a family.
..........
Then, on the way out for the evening, my daughter got to talking about what she was going to grow in her box. Apparently it's sugar cane. And flowers.
My son chimed in, excited about tomatoes, carrots, and peas (all things he would disdain if I placed in front of him for dinner).
I realized then that this project that I am undertaking is not an event: it is a process.
So they lost interest after the first screws went in. Maybe they just felt more like bickering that day. But there will come a day when we choose the seeds to plant, and start them inside in their little peat pellets. There will be days when we plant the seedlings out for the year, days when we water and pull the weeds. And then there will be the days when we harvest our crops and I have to force the kids to eat them.
There is a long road ahead of us: with this garden, with this project, with our lives together. It's important that none of us let the bad moments define us.
Let it go. Focus, instead, on the coming miracle of sugarcane in Vermont. And how I'm lucky to get to share this project with two wonderful, funny, annoying kids.
..........
I've edited to add a picture of the final product, filled and ready for the spring.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Projects
A few months ago, I was at the doctor's office. The sleep doctor. I snore.
Or, I did snore: now I have a CPAP machine. The woman scheduling at the front office informed me that I would need to make an appointment for six months in the future.
"What," she queried, "is a good day for you in December?"
"Uhhhhhh...."
How on Earth, I wondered, could I say with any certainty what day I would have free in six months? Does anyone know what their schedule will look like that far in advance?
I feel the same way about coming up with a list of projects that I'm going to do over the next year. How on Earth can I speculate with any accuracy as to what I'll have time for next August?
Oh, yeah. I'll have time for it next August by planning it now. Right?
Without making a to-do list, I won't have anything to work towards, and I won't have any way of measuring my progress.
Plus, there are things that I know I want to try, and maybe some of you have insight you can offer on doing them.
So, with the caveat that this list is sort of a moving target and things might get shifted around somewhat, I am hereby presenting a list of planned projects.
Updated to add: I have changed the text of the projects that have been completed to green and, when I have also blogged about the results, I added the individual post title. Enjoy!
Construction:
Garden boxes - see Boxing Day;
Duck pen;
Shoe shelf/bench;
Entryway furniture;
Futon frame.
Playhouse?
Gardening:
Grow veggies from seeds;
Try growing some new veggies/fruits;
Save seeds.
Food Prep
Cook the food I grow (a topic ripe for exposition);
Make kids eat food I grow and then cook (dream on, mom!);
Preserve food (I have a dream of organizing a class - another topic for exposition).
Try making some cheese?
Get back to making yogurt?
Beer/wine/spirits?
Sewing/Mending
Learn to fix holes in socks - see Fixing a Hole;
Sew next year's Halloween costumes;
Make NPS junior ranger pin banners (long story, but the short story is we're dorks);
Figure out how to mend Rick's pants, or what I can do with them (long story);
Make something for each member of family to wear;
Improve crocheting - I've done some - see The Chain.
One big project, to be determined...
Animals:
(I know I want to try some of these things, but it is hard to say what I am going to be able to make work).
Try beekeeping?
Raise ducks?
Maybe chickens or guinea fowl?
Find someone with other animals and learn from them about care.
Learn about slaughtering/processing?
Hunting?
Try dairying with goats?
Try to get some wool or fleece?
Weird and random stuff:
Wild food investigations;
Preserving hides;
Take a fleece from sheep to final product (except not a sheep because of the lanolin);
Use up all my basket-making material;
Alligator wrestling (because Gavin said it was inevitable);
Should hunting and butchering go here?
Loose tons of weight (because it goes on all my lists).
Writing:
Finish three short stories, shop them around;
Blog at least once a week.
Okay.
I am sure that there is more. I know there is. But this is the horizon thus far. If there is something you think I'm missing, let me know.
Now I should probably go and find out when I scheduled my appointment with the sleep doctor. December, and the date when I alleged to be free, is almost here.
Or, I did snore: now I have a CPAP machine. The woman scheduling at the front office informed me that I would need to make an appointment for six months in the future.
"What," she queried, "is a good day for you in December?"
"Uhhhhhh...."
How on Earth, I wondered, could I say with any certainty what day I would have free in six months? Does anyone know what their schedule will look like that far in advance?
I feel the same way about coming up with a list of projects that I'm going to do over the next year. How on Earth can I speculate with any accuracy as to what I'll have time for next August?
Oh, yeah. I'll have time for it next August by planning it now. Right?
Without making a to-do list, I won't have anything to work towards, and I won't have any way of measuring my progress.
Plus, there are things that I know I want to try, and maybe some of you have insight you can offer on doing them.
So, with the caveat that this list is sort of a moving target and things might get shifted around somewhat, I am hereby presenting a list of planned projects.
Updated to add: I have changed the text of the projects that have been completed to green and, when I have also blogged about the results, I added the individual post title. Enjoy!
Construction:
Garden boxes - see Boxing Day;
Duck pen;
Shoe shelf/bench;
Entryway furniture;
Futon frame.
Playhouse?
Gardening:
Grow veggies from seeds;
Try growing some new veggies/fruits;
Save seeds.
Food Prep
Cook the food I grow (a topic ripe for exposition);
Make kids eat food I grow and then cook (dream on, mom!);
Preserve food (I have a dream of organizing a class - another topic for exposition).
Try making some cheese?
Get back to making yogurt?
Beer/wine/spirits?
Sewing/Mending
Learn to fix holes in socks - see Fixing a Hole;
Sew next year's Halloween costumes;
Make NPS junior ranger pin banners (long story, but the short story is we're dorks);
Figure out how to mend Rick's pants, or what I can do with them (long story);
Make something for each member of family to wear;
Improve crocheting - I've done some - see The Chain.
One big project, to be determined...
Animals:
(I know I want to try some of these things, but it is hard to say what I am going to be able to make work).
Try beekeeping?
Raise ducks?
Maybe chickens or guinea fowl?
Find someone with other animals and learn from them about care.
Learn about slaughtering/processing?
Hunting?
Try dairying with goats?
Try to get some wool or fleece?
Weird and random stuff:
Wild food investigations;
Preserving hides;
Take a fleece from sheep to final product (except not a sheep because of the lanolin);
Use up all my basket-making material;
Alligator wrestling (because Gavin said it was inevitable);
Should hunting and butchering go here?
Loose tons of weight (because it goes on all my lists).
Writing:
Finish three short stories, shop them around;
Blog at least once a week.
Okay.
I am sure that there is more. I know there is. But this is the horizon thus far. If there is something you think I'm missing, let me know.
Now I should probably go and find out when I scheduled my appointment with the sleep doctor. December, and the date when I alleged to be free, is almost here.
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