The toilet knife

You know you live in the country when you have a butter knife dedicated solely for toilet use.  I used to use a screwdriver until Papa B asked me why there was a flat head screwdriver in the bathroom.  I was honest with him - I was using it to clean the toilet.  He looked at me with a combination of utter confusion and a little anger.

A few years ago, Papa B decided to turn off the water softener.  He got too cheap to pay for softener salt.  Since then, I have been fighting a battle with lime scale on my toilets.  I liken my toilet cleaning routine to going to the dentist.  You scrub the bowl once a week or so to get the crud off, and once a month you get out the toilet cleaner and use that.  But about every six months (maybe more, depending on whether or not the "If it's yellow" method backfires on you), I fire up the big guns.  Here's where the toilet knife comes into play.  I will put CLR in the bowl and leave it overnight.  Then next morning, before anyone has a chance to do their business, I will get in there with a brush, pumice, and my toilet knife.  First, I have to chip the lime off the bottom of the toilet, the 'exit' if you will.  This is like the dentist bit - cleaning off the tartar off the toilet with my trusty knife.  It comes off in flakes.  Then I move on to the pumice to get the ring of crud/lime/mystery substance off, and then I finish it off with the brush to get the rest of it.

Oh, the SPARKLE!!  The SHINE!!  The lovely sight of a lime-less toilet is really something to behold.

All thanks to my toilet knife.  I really have some cleaning issues to work though, don't I?

Like a controlled burn.

When I was in high school, I took a gourmet foods class.  By then I knew how to cook, and I could cook a decent meal.  I definitely learned some things, don't get me wrong.  But what the teacher said during one lesson was pretty interesting.  Cooking was nothing more than a controlled burning of your food.

I was reminded of this yesterday when we had a snow/ice day and I got the bug to bake something warm and comforting.  Girl C helped me make some milk chocolate chip cookies.  She was very helpful and interested until I have her the beater from my KitchenAid mixer and her attention was quickly turned to licking the cookie dough off the paddle (not that I blame her).  I decided to put the extra rack in my oven and bake 3 pans of cookies at once.  Papa B is astonishingly cheap (which is totally fodder for scads of posts for the future), so to avoid a lecture on running the full size oven for one tray of cookies, I tossed them all in at once. I set the three pans in the oven, set the time for 10 minutes and waited.  After the allotted time, I had a pan of well-done cookies, medium cookies, and rare cookies.  It just amused me that I had controlled the burn to make everyone happy.  Crispy ones, soft ones, and gooey ones.

Un-Profound Post of the Day (UPPOTD)

My farts have nowhere to go when I wear skinny jeans.  I wonder if that's how it is in a space suit?

I told you it was un-profound.

Happy Thanksgiving, and never mind the burnt potatoes

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all!  As I write this, Boy C is in his crib letting me know he is not ready for bed yet and Girl C is beside me having herself a lovely tea party in the tub.

We spent our holiday with some in-town friends who can't go out of town due to medical reasons, so we had them over for a noon(ish) meal.  We had your standard fare - turkey, stuffing, corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, and sweet potatoes.  But the mashed potatoes almost were not.  Had Papa B not been paying attention, I would have burned the kitchen down in spectacular fashion.

Let's rewind to yesterday and get this story started:

Papa B took Girl C to go see Frozen.  She was SO excited, and she'd been talking about it for days.  I know, because I heard about it every five minutes.  They head to the theater and Boy C goes down for his nap leaving me about 1.5 glorious hours to clean and prep for Thanksgiving.  It was truly a thing of beauty, this time to myself.  On my list of things to do was wash, peel and cut potatoes.  Easy.  Mission accomplished.  I put them all in the pressure cooker and put the lid on and put it in the fridge for tomorrow.  Tomorrow comes, and I take the pot out (which has the lid on the pressure cooker) to come to room temperature before I cook it.  Now, if you've never used a pressure cooker, or even cooked potatoes ever, you may not yet have recognized my error.  If you have, I'm sure you know where this is headed.  I put them on the stove, fire up the burner and wait.  WITHOUT WATER IN THE POT.  Papa B sniffs the air and asks if something is burning.  I nonchalantly tell him it's probably something on the burner.  He says, uh, no, there's smoke coming from the pressure cooker and did you even put water in here?

Shit, I didn't.

So, thanks to Papa B's presence and quick thinking, I not only didn't burn the kitchen down, but we were able to rescue the potatoes and serve them!

I'm really not this funny in real life.

Or, Blog - the Resurrection.

On Facebook I always have people telling me how funny I am.  But I really don't think I'm that funny.  I mean, I can capture humor in 140 characters or less, but I really don't think I'm that profound.  I guess I'm as profound as the next girl on the internet (and there's a LOT of girls on the internet, doing, uh, un-profound things...).  I hear all the time, "You should start a blog!"  And my little inner voice laughs a little because I do have a blog.  I just lack the dedication and time to write.  And when I post these profound things on Facebook, I don't see how I can develop them into a meaningful, insightful, and profoundly funny blog post.  And therefore, you get my musings about whatever has struck me at the time.  By the time I think about what I would say in such a post, life has happened as it is wont to do, and my idea has gone out of my head, replaced by someone's need to find her Blankie, or a cat horking up a stick of butter onto the living room carpet, or a baby needing to be fed or changed.

So, I have decided to resurrect the blog and try to make a dent in my little corner of the interwebs.  Hopefully, I'll be dedicated and will amuse you all with the current goings-on at Beer Run farm (and there's lots!!)

Happy Internetting, y'all!

Walnuts: The squatters of the tree world

Since the arrival of Little C, it's polite to say that various things have fallen to the wayside.  Namely, weeding. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I love weeding as much as the next girl.  I love claring out a bed and having all my plants clear of invaders and interlopers.  Once things get out of hand, though, it is a daunting task that makes one want to bushog the entire flower bed and mulch the shit out of it and start over. 

I've been doing some side work that has taken up my naptime, and now that that project is finished, I have found I have oodles of time to devote to the flower beds.  If you've never had the honor of trying to pull a walnut sapling out of the ground then you're missing out.  It's as if these 2 foot tall wee little trees have a taproot that goes all the way to China.  It's a task that requires gloves, a pitchfork, a shovel, copious amounts of swearing and a massage from your husband when he gets home.  Imagine me in a full sweat, hair going every which way hacking at a poor walnut tree who, for all it is worth, is handing on to Mother Earth for all it is worth.  I stab it with a pitchfork like a fairy-tale peasant stabbing a warewolf.  I get a good chunk of root and I lean into the pitchfork trying to break the root free. 

*SNAP*  Not only do I break the pitchfork at the base of the fork, I break it at the handle, too.  Who does that?  Me, apparently.  I ceded defeat on this particular tree and went inside to spend the rest of the precious naptime figureing out a way to explain the pitchfork now in 3 pieces to Papa B. 

Why I'm glad we had a girl first

So Papa B and I were talking the other night about silly things he does to entertain Little C. She has a little toy that sings the ABC song and when she presses it, he will dance merrily while singing along. He hugs her, kisses her, and does wonderfully daddy things for her. He is a wonderful dad, and for that I am very lucky and thankful.

I asked him would he be so silly had Little C been a boy. He said, probably not. Papa B grew up with his dad and brother and needless to say, it was a manly, stoic, no-affection childhood.

To see him dote on his little girl and love on her and show her open affection and tell her he loves her is a wonder. I'm glad she arrived first, so he knows now how to love a child, and not just a girl child. Boys deserve the same love and affection from both parents. Boys need to hear that they are loved. Boys need hugs. Boys need kisses and cuddles. I'm glad Little C has paved the way for any more children, regardless of sex.