Lincoln and Washington Never Dreamed of The Galleria

There are a lot of places on my favorites list. The mountains of Tennessee, when the fog drifts through the trees at dawn (yes, I’ve been up at dawn before). The mountains of Colorado, where the wildflowers blow gently in lakeside meadows, high above civilization. My own sofa, with a good book, a cuppa joe and my hubby. The craft room with my kiddos. The Snooty Pig with my friends. Hobby Lobby…

One place ranks so far down on my list that…wait, no, not even on the list. One place I tolerate and happen to have to visit occasionally is the behemoth Galleria mall. I don’t love it. I barely like it. The Galleria and I wouldn’t even be friends on Facebook.

I mention this because I was at the place today. The traffic was not even part of the headache for once. I guess enough people had Presidents Day (or Presidents’ Day, depending on how you roll grammatically) off and didn’t want to be at the mall.

One reason I dislike The Galleria is because the majority of the people there are snots. Also, they jack up the price on everything just…because. The reason I disliked it today was that it broke up my Downton Abbey screening. I watched last week’s two-hour episode this morning but I have to watch last night’s season finale tonight-before any more spoilers ruin it for me online.

So there we were, my middle and youngest children and myself. I gave the oldest child a buy because our main objective was the AG store and she does not dig dolls.

We made our getaway from American Girl with newly-pierced doll ears as the only damage. Well done us! They girls did not have enough money for the new “Doll-of-the-Year” Saige, that was for certain. I offered the suggestion that they pool their money and buy Saige. Then they could share her.

**This is the part where you snicker behind your hand at the idiocy of my suggestion**

They actually discussed this. Then quickly, the reality of “sharing” hit them and they declined.

“I’ll just save my money for Saige,” the middle child said in a very dejected manner.

“I’m going to get my doll’s ears pierced and THEN save for Saige,” said the youngest, triumphantly. She had more money.

We got out of there, as previously stated, and headed into the mall. The first store was The Pottery Barn where I inched them through with bated breath. “Pleeeeeease don’t break anything!” As we walked through the doors, it was like the “may I help you” riff in Wayne’s World. Magically, four women appeared from far corners of the store simultaneously.

“Have you been helped?” a nervous woman in beige asked.

“We are fine, thank you,” I said and smiled.

They didn’t look like they believed me. They looked like they thought we were ready to kick into high gear at any moment. Maybe they shouldn’t have constructed elaborate towers of apothecary jars and blown-glass terrariums within inches of the walkways.

By the way, we broke nothing.

You’re welcome.

We moved through the mall, stopping here and there, bypassing the coffee mecca-yes, I said we bypassed it! We walked around the center court and their eyes got huge.

“They have a skating rink?”

“Yes.”

“Can we go ice skating?”

“No.”

“Awwwww…..”

Onward we pushed, to the other end of the mall. We passed one store and the youngest read, “Steve Madden Shoes. Why are all his shoes here?”

The middle child said, “Mommy, you could totally rock those heels!” Ha ha ha ha ha! But flattering, all the same.

As we walked by one store, the middle child turned to look up and almost shrieked,

“Does that say LUSH?!?!”

It did, in fact, say LUSH.

“What is LUSH?” I asked in my ignorance.

“It is the most awesome store that sells all kinds of homemade and organic cosmetics and bath stuff and they have these shampoo bars that you rub between your hands and lather and then rub it into your hair and they don’t use bad chemicals or do bad things to the environment and they have the coolest stuff and I saw reviews online for all their stuff and I want to go in can we please go in please?”

“Ohhhhh, you mean that LUSH,” I said. “I guess.”

We went in. And were assaulted. Not by people, by scents. Lots of patchouli-esque and lavender-y scents. The walls were lined with shelves, bins and baskets full of handmade body products. It was like Bath & Body Works on hiatus at a commune.

The visuals were beautiful, I won’t lie. There were bright colors and natural elements. Fruit and herbs and grains were abundant. I felt like I was in a familiar place and everyone was smiling. They clearly weren’t looking at the prices-well, at least the other customers weren’t. That’s probably why the salesfolks were grinning though.

The middle child strode into the shop with authority, found a cute 21-ish saleslady and began grilling her on the differences between bath fizzies and bath balls. The lady looked at her with rapt attention because she’s nine.

“I have heard that the bath fizzies are really good and smell nice and make your skin soft but why are they different from these bath balls over here?”

“Well,” the lady said. “Those are for bubble bath and those fizzies are just a little bubbly. They have baking soda and lemon in them. Would you like to see a demonstration?”

Oh, boy.

Yes, they wanted to see a demonstration. Of a lot of things. Her fault for opening that door. I wanted to tell her, "Hello! These people have no money-they couldn't even buy an American Girl doll or lunch!"

30 minutes, seven bath fizzies and several free samples later we were back on our way.

We decided to leave through Saks Fifth Avenue because I must be masochistic or something. The middle child looked around in awe.

“I love this whole place! Can we come back here this summer?” I think she meant for vacation. Sigh…

I needed a few things from the Kiehl’s counter and grabbed them quickly. I walked up to a very high-tone lady at the perfume counter and asked if I needed to take them to another cosmetics counter to check out or if she could do it. I got the full once-over, Pretty Woman style.

“You want to buy those? Right now?”

“Yes.”

Do you also want any fragrances?”

“No.”

“Just a moment. CAROL!”

Carol came over and relieved this poor woman of her burden of having to wait on suburb people. You’d think we were strumming Deliverance music on a banjo. We were dressed simply, the girls holding AG dolls and I even had a Coach bag. Wow. I had to hold back from saying, “You just made a big mistake. Huge!”

So we thanked Carol, got in our domestic SUV and trucked on back to suburbia. I plan to recover in one of my favorite places-my sofa, with a decaf cuppa joe, my hubby and the season finale of Downton Abbey. Ahhh, perfection!

Frugal Fails

It has been a few months now since I left my part-time job at church to stay home. I have had time to get Christmas pulled together and volunteer obligations fulfilled. I even joined a Bible Study and bought a Groupon for yoga classes. And yes, I said bought the classes, not started them yet.

I cleaned out the garage and attic, organized our master bedroom closet, hall closet and laundry room cabinets. I sorted the kids’ clothes and cleaned up my craft room. I bought and laid down half of a pallet of sod in the backyard.

I am easing into some more writing and running a rudimentary Etsy store and trying to do better with eating out. I’m saying no to things that will fill up the space that work used to occupy-or at least trying to whittle down to those things that truly are the best thing for me and the fam. Dominating this stay-at-home thing, right?

Hold your applause. I’ve also eaten too much junk, ignored too many loads of laundry, adopted another dog, spent too much time on Pinterest and let the garage and craft room get messy again. 

C’est la Vie! I am undergoing growing pains in my life, and I kinda want to see where things go.

In navigating the new normal, I’ve tried to be more frugal. I also like less chemically options for our family. I figured I could put some of those Pinterest hours to good use and make some products myself. I already use vinegar, borax and baking soda to clean so I fancied myself well on the way to self-sufficiency.

I found about 650,000 tutorials to make your own dishwashing soap and laundry detergent. Considering that we do about 12 loads of laundry and 8 loads of dishes each week, that sounded like the place to start. The fact that these were “natural” recipes was even better.

I gathered my arsenal:

Washing Soda (it’s like baking soda on whatever Lance Armstrong took)

Borax

Castile Soap (grated a bar into powder)

Lavender Essential Oil (optional)

Sea Salt

Citric Acid (from the canning aisle at Wally World)

White Vinegar (for use separately as a rinse)

Supplies with some of the finished product in the center 

Allegedly, the $15.00 in supplies I bought would make 60 dishwasher loads and about 6 months of laundry detergent. Stellar!

I went with this tutorial for dishwashing soap. I mixed everything but vinegar. I added ¼ of a cup of the mix to the soap dispenser and poured white vinegar into the rinse reservoir. Good to go. I cranked the dishwasher and waited.

If this was a Vlog, you would see me in high-speed, fast-forward running around my kitchen preparing dinner, letting dogs in and out, trundling kids through the room and so forth and so on while letters at the bottom of the screen said “40 minutes later…”

It is not a Vlog so you saw none of that.

40 minutes later…

The dishes were clean and sparkling and smelled faintly of lavender. Ahhhh! As they dried, I noticed the teensiest bit of white film. Not too bad. The next load, I added a cup of vinegar to the bottom of the dishwasher instead of the rinse reservoir. Much better outcome. I think in the next batch of mix, I will use less castile soap.

Pleased with myself, I told the girls “This is so fantastic-we are going to make our own laundry detergent!” Enter Frugal Fail Numero Uno.

The girls were skeptical. Turns out, they were right. Here is a picture of the detergent:

Would you put that in your very lovely, space-age-ish, front-loading washing machine? I didn’t want to do it, but I had a bucket of the stuff so I felt obliged.

Note: I will not include the recipe here because it did not work. I will let you search the interwebs for one of the many recipes that turn out NOT to handle three active kids, a gardening mom and a running, basketball-playing dad. When you find a recipe you like try it for yourself-it may work for you.

So, back to the world of the ineffective homemade laundry soap. Even with the vinegar rinse, there were still stains, stinkiness and general dinginess after the load ran. Bummer. The plan seemed great. At least it didn’t cost a lot. I hope it did a better job cleaning out our disposal because that is where it went.

A few days later, I was looking for a great project to do with the girls. It was a Monday off from school but daddy still had to work. Enter Frugal Fail Numero Dos.

We had a bunch of Kool-Aid packets (remember the Easter project last year?) and several long-sleeved white t-shirts. I had the bright idea to try a dip-dye t-shirt project using just those. Now that our bucket was free from detergent I filled it with water. The girls picked out colors of Kool-Aid to dye their shirts. The fact that Kool-Aid always stains everything it touches made it seem like the best medium for shirt dying.

  

The middle child even volunteered, “Do you want me to use some of this mixed in Vaseline to make you a lip stain?”

Ummm, no. I’m good. Thanks.

For a twist, I used white glue to “paint” a design on my shirt based on a few tutorials I had seen. I let it dry and then submerged my shirt in the Kool-Aid. The idea is to mask out the design, dye the rest of the shirt and then let it dry. When you wash the shirt later, the design should be white. The problem is that the tutorials all used real dye, not Kool-Aid. This turned out to be a key difference.

Two of the girls opted to dip-dye their shirts so we hung the bottom six-inches into the Kool-Aid and hung the rest over the edge of the bucket. Overnight, the color climbed up the shirt and created an ombre effect from the hem up.

The youngest child did an elaborate glue design and then dunked her shirt as well.

 Fast forward to the next day. When everything was washed, we wound up with some pretty faded, slightly pink shirts, not the dark maroon they had been. The middle child’s shirt was washed-out blue.

The gluey shirts were not great. Mine barely had any design and the youngest child’s actually got darker where the glue had been instead of holding the white. Weird. At least they smell nice and fruity.

Where did the glue hearts go?

Not exactly the plan

Lessons learned?

1. Some modern conveniences can be bested by old-fashioned basic materials and elbow grease.

2. Some are better handled by nasty, harsh chemicals.

3. If we want subtly-tinted fabric, Kool-Aid is the way to go.

4. My garbage disposal is really clean.

Have you tried any ways to save money or be green that juuuuust didn’t pan out? Let us know!

Ninjas, Potato Sacks and Garden Stalkers

So what’s going on? I have been pretty wrapped up in helping the middle and youngest children figure out their talent show skit. The event is over, the skit complete, success achieved. Besides a small prop placement issue, it went well. I was sweating it, due to the fact that the music had never worked prior to the actual show night. The kids and their friend did a skit/song/dance to the Barenaked Ladies kids’ song “The Ninjas” from the cd Snacktime. It was very cute.

Well, while focusing on the budding talents I was not paying attention to my garden. So it was with great consternation, while driving home from gymnastics Thursday night, that I saw them. The perfectly symmetrical and, more to the point, in the ground onion sets in HIS garden.

Side note here: My name is Emily and I have a problem. I stalk another gardener’s garden. I’m not proud of it but I don’t deny it. Plus, he leaves his garden lying around without a fence where anyone can see it. At any rate, I have known this guy since he was a teacher at my middle school and he has been gardening since I was knee-high to a pig's eye. This qualifies him to be a “master gardener” in my book (that and his dominating rows of tomatoes every year).

I tend to spy on the garden often as I drive behind his house to see what’s new in his world. What was new in his world on Thursday was hundreds of tiny onion seedlings. Ack! I had not even gotten mine yet! I was on the phone to Calloways as soon as I saw them.

“Yes, we have onion sets,” the lady assured me. “We have potatoes too.”

This was great news. I had a new method for growing potatoes that I was dying to try.

“Oh, yes! Potatoes are in,” I inadvertently blurted out.

“Yeeeees,” she replied cautiously. I doubt she gets that reaction to potatoes very often.

Off I sprinted on Friday morning as soon as the kids were at school. I was rewarded with three types of potatoes: Kennebec White, La Soda Red and Yukon Gold. I also got super-sweet Texas onions, white onions and red onions. There were a few chard plants and plenty of herbs. I bought those too.

My next stop was the Argyle Feed store for a bale of straw and, joy! They had more veggie transplants! Hooray for me! I picked up broccoli, collards and a few lettuces. Add those to the broccoli plants already growing in the garden (that actually survived the three hail storms we’ve had since Christmas) and a few sweet pea vines and we would have a solid winter garden.

For the total cost of $50 I had veggies and straw for both gardens-ours and the elementary school Garden Club garden. Excellent. I needed only to get things in the ground.

Fast forward to today. I decided to wait until a little warm-up to get everything done. I have mentioned before that I am a baby when it comes to cold weather. Yes, 48 degrees is cold. Yes it is. So, since today was warm, it was time to put my new potato plan in place.

Red, Yellow and white potatoes

I got out nine of the burlap coffee sacks I ordered a few months back. The bags were originally used to haul green coffee beans. I have used them to line the area around the school garden and top with mulch for weed control. I plan to fill a few with soil to make raised tomato planters. Right now though, I was going to use them for potatoes.

Here was the plan: A few years back I made a wire circular bin. I added a few inches of straw and buried seed potatoes. As the potatoes sprouted and grew plants, I added straw every week or so. After about ten weeks, I could pull new potatoes out of the bin. This year, I wanted to make potato planters out of the coffee sacks. I figured it should work the same way and be slightly portable if I needed to move the potatoes to a different location for sun or shade.

First I cut the seed potatoes into chunks, making sure a sprouted “eye” was in each piece.

I then rolled the sides down on the coffee sacks to make shallow sack-trays. I added about four inches of straw to the bags then tucked several potato pieces in each sack, eye-side up. I covered each piece with about four more inches of straw. As the plants grow and I add straw, I can roll the sides of the bags higher and higher.

Roll down sides

Fill with 4" of straw

Add seed potatoes

Cover with more straw

Planted bags

Once I carried the bags to the garden, I arranged them near the fence. I plan to plant the sugar snap peas alongside the bags, growing up a trellis. Our new fence is taller than the old one and now blocks some of the sun. I have to grow the onions in as much sun as possible so the potatoes can go here with no problem.

In their new garden home

I watered the sacks well and crossed my fingers. Experiment underway.

The whole garden has wintered under a thick layer of alfalfa hay and oak leaves and is so perfect for veggies. With the rows of onions, collards, broccoli and lettuce going in tomorrow, I can’t wait to see how much better our diets will get in a few weeks!

Check back to see how the planters work out and my new sugar snap pea trellis ideas!

I love being back in the garden in my boots!

******Update 4/17/13*******

After a very sad dog-got-in-garden-and-dumped-every-potato-sack-upside-down-and-ate-some incident, I had to get some new potatoes and replant the ones I could salvage. to try to speed things up, I added a small bit of organic compost and potting mix to the hay to help the potatoes germinate quicker and catch up. We are still a bit behind the control potato I put in the ground, but I don't know if it is due to the extra cold we had late here, the burlap sacks or the great canine injustice of 2013.

Here are some new pics. You can see the first leaves poking out of the bag on the lower left. So they are all growing. Will keep you posted!