My First Robot

Since we've been working so much in the yard, we haven't gotten very much done inside the house lately, but here is one of the few updates we did do recently:

From April 17th:

www.instagram.com/charitychain

 

We now have AI in the house. I do not take this lightly.

I was hoping my first household robot would be the kind that vacuums. ;)

But who knows, maybe this one will save us enough money to buy the other one.

 

This is the Nest "smart" thermostat, put out by some of the geeks over at Apple. The coolest AND creepiest thing about this guy is that he *learns our habits* and starts to program himself around our schedules. Also, he has a motion sensor and if he detects you are Away, he lets the temp get lower/higher than usual to conserve energy, then automatically resets himself when he *sees* that we are home. Also, he is connected to wifi, so I can change the settings from my phone no matter where I am, he's able to see weather forecasts, and potentially receive software updates automatically. He shows what the temperature in my home will be in 10 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, etc., based on the current settings and the weather outside.

 

Big brother is totally watching. No really. This is his eyeball.

 

But I guess it was inevitable, right?

 

P.S. I just creeped myself out by calling it a "he" for this entire post.

 

Anyway... next time we get a robot, I want a Rosey Jetson or at the very least a Roomba. ;)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Video here ,if you're interested.

 

 

 

 

Springtime update

Dear friends,

So much to catch you up on! I remember reading recently, "when you feel like you have 'too much' remember to be thankful you have SO much." Sometimes I am overwhelmed by all there is to do or be or plan or cook or clean... but, while I am trying to learn to prioritize and let go of the lesser things, I am simultaneously thanking God that I have SO MUCH in my life.

Caleb is wrapping up his year in preschool. Part of me wants to plan fun, creative, educational things for the summer. And a second part of me laughs at the first part and says Give it a rest, woman, and enjoy the break! They only get like 2 months off for summer nowadays anyway. I think I will just appreciate those two months for what they are, and look forward to not having to drive him twice a week, or lug the carseat in and out and in and out, or finding Shares or doing homework or packing snack. I think this summer, more than any, both mommy and Caleb are ready for a break.

Little baby Ben is 6 months old now and quite a handful. I won't even attempt to fill you in on him right now. But you'll be seeing him here more often, for sure. :)

Right now, I am very excited about the garden! I have lots and lots of things to share so I plan to post quite a bit the next few days just trying to catch up with myself. HaHA! Be prepared! ;)

So, about two months ago, I took this photo of my seed babies in the sun and thought about sharing it with you.

 

But before I had a chance to do that, a week later I took this photo of my pea plants shooting up and thought I might post it also:

 

A couple weeks later, I still hadn't blogged yet and didn't have time to because my peas were begging to be transplanted and I needed to have a trellis built to support them. Keep in mind, I have to do all these projects in about 15 minute increments, since that's about how long the baby will afford me at a time. He *really* prefers to be held all day. :P

 

 

 

And so it went on and on. There are so many photos I was gonna share of our progress, but now here we are at pretty much the end of the winter garden and I'm just getting here... oh well!!

 

Maybe you remember when I began this garden a couple of months ago, I had a very scientific mindset. I was going to take meticulous notes for my future reference. I was going to practice crop rotation and moon gardening and learn how to start my seeds indoors and do fun experiments to see which plants grew better and...and...and... how often things do not go as planned!

At this point, I've lost track of when I transplanted this or that. I have carrots in three different places, including intermingled with my lettuces (a mistake, I know!), I started some seeds much too early and I'm thinking some of them are going to be very late,  the irrigation system I was hoping would be set in place for less than $40 ended up costing about twice that and took me nearly two weeks to complete in itself (post on that in the future, I'm sure!). I'm starting to think my neighbors view on gardening might be much more healthy. She says Why can't we just throw seeds on the ground and see what grows? She has been an inspiration to me not to STRESS too much about it, not to over analyze, like a can do sometimes. But work with the earth and just see what happens.

So at this point, I think I will just give you a little tour of the garden as it is now. Maybe with a few older pics mixed in just for fun. Hang in there! ;)
_____

This is the same bed you just saw, but a few days later, with some more seed babies transplanted into it: lettuces, broccoli and onions. Also, carrots, onions and garlic were directly sowed.

 

 

This is actually a photo of the brush pile we made when we cut a couple trees down. But to the side there, you can see the thrifty way I covered my babies to help protect them from bugs. Not a 100% seal, of course, but it seemed to be effective against most things that fly. I kept it on for a good month or so - only taking it off when the plants started outgrowing it. It let in sunlight and the irrigation was underneath it, so it worked out well.

Do you know what I used? It's wedding tulle! It was like $2 a yard on sale, so it was much cheaper than agribon and seemed to work fine for my purposes.

 

 

 

 Happy broccoli under tulle:

 

 

Same bed two weeks later!  

 

 

 

And this is that same bed just this morning! 

Notice the pea plants in the background, climbing the trellis.

The Big Thing in front is my broccoli. Right now it is all leaves and no fruit, so I think I must've accidentally bought some kind of "flamboyant" species.
 

 This is the other side of the same bed today - Carrots, onions, spinach (which is going to seed) and one kale plant to the left there that I received as a gift. :-) More on that later.

 

 

Here is a picture I took of my son's "Giant Pumpkin" he got at the seed swap.

I took this about a week ago - it's already twice this size.

 

We decided to put strawberries in the tops of the cinder block bed walls. We'll see how it goes. They were neglected for a little while and I lost a couple of them, but I'm trying to nurse them back to health.  

And here is my SECOND veggie bed! We just started planting in this one so I'm very excited (again)
Left to right: zucchini, market cucumbers, and "green fingers" (small cucumbers) These were all just planted last week, so I'm surprised to see how big they are.

 

This is my lone garbanzo bush (another gift) and I am stoked about that little white flower bud you might be able to see in there.

 

We have planted three types of beans. This is a purple pole bean.

 

 

Somehow I ended up with FIFTEEN tomato plants and almost all of them are of a different variety! It will be so neat to see their various fruits (assuming they live that long. haha)

Here are five of them, along with some marigold buddies. The mari's aren't too happy, I might need to get replacements. :(

 

 

 

and these are some of the other tomatoes, begging me to get them in the ground.

 

 

My neighbor had some surplus, so she brought these over for me today:

two watermelon plants and two LUFFA plants!

"Like the kind of luffa you use in the shower?!" you ask. Apparently! She got the seeds here.

 

This is my boogin...

bouga...

bog...

This is my pink plant:  

 

 

I didn't plant these but they are pretty nonetheless, aren't they? :) 

 

 

And I will end this LOOOOOOOONG post on a hopeful note. This is my first sort-of-decent harvest that I just brought in this morning from those pea plants you saw.

There are sugar snap (which were SO good with lunch) and a few regular peas. :)

 

 

 

 

Believe it or not, there is much more to share! Back soon!

 

{Almost} Wordless Weekend

Finished this on March 7th for my older. He started the whole thing by becoming infatuated with a very soft light blue minky at the fabric store. So of course we had to make a whole blanket to go with the minky. :)

He helped me picked out all the fabric. Which would be why it is a *very busy-looking* modge-podge of his favorite characters.

http://instagram.com/charitychain

A little visitor

Today I saw a bird in the brush that was rather plain looking but had a beautiful song. I watched him perched on a branch, his throat rolling up and down as he sang his heart out. I tried to memorize his coloring and his beak shape, although as I said he was pretty plain. Once inside, I became a little frustrated, because all my bird books wanted me to believe it was a bushtit,

 

photos via Cornell Lab of Ornithology

and I thought it looked like one too but when I researched it online, the bushtit didn't have the same lovely song I had heard.

A little more digging revealed the wrentit, which is much more rare, but has the lovely song. If you visit this page and scroll down, you can click and listen to the second of three songs listed. That's the one.

~~~

This little bird brought a big thought to me today. How sad it must be, I thought, to have no distinguishing features. In fact, if it wasn't for his song, I would've marked him off as a bushtit and called it a day. But he would've been quite misunderstood.

Sometimes I can feel like my life is pretty non-descript, or even that I might honestly be labelled as plain. I'm a pretty simple person and I don't have the exciting lifestyle that so many of us dream about. But I also believe that each person was made uniquely by God for just such a time and place as they are in now, that each person has a destiny. And our destiny is to, in our various ways, sing our heart's song to the world. What a lovely thing it would be to stop our work every once in awhile, lift our eyes from the task at hand and just listen to someone else's song - their life story, their passions, what makes them unique. I think we will find that no one can ever truly be described as plain. We each have a part to play in a Great Symphony.

Easter Wheatgrass

I remember seeing in a magazine one time these Easter baskets with live grass in them. And I thought, "Oh that's cute and folksy and eco-friendly and old-fashioned. And I'd probably love to do that but who knows if I ever will." In other words, I filed it away in my mind. I don't even think I had kids then. And Easter has never really been a very "big" holiday in our family, so I had no need to use it right away.

A couple of years ago my mother-in-law gave my older son a basket with real grass and I told her how much I loved it. The mental file was brought to the front of my mind.

This year, we are going to be visiting some of my nieces and nephews for Easter. So my basket tally went from maybe 2 to a possible 6. Obviously I started thinking about what kinds of things I would want to include in these baskets, the first I have ever made, by the way: healthy treats and small books are a nice alternative to too much candy. Maybe a toy or two but I like to keep things simple in the baskets so that it doesn't distract too much from the meaning we find in the holiday. 

Then there was the grass! I finally had a reason to attempt it, but I wasn't sure where to begin. A quick call to my mother-in-law revealed that she had bought a whole bag (albeit the smallest one available) of actual lawn grass from the home improvement store. She figured she could always use the extra in their landscaping. Well... I would've been down for that. Except the smallest bag I could find was $15 and I knew I could figure something else out. Also, I wasn't in the market for leftover lawn grass at the moment.

I researched other grasses, and I finally decided on wheatgrass. If you are interested in doing something like this, you can easily buy wheatgrass at your health food store already grown and just pop it in. Easy peasy! But it was gonna cost me about $5 a pop so maybe $30 for all. Plus, you know I like doing things the hard way. Haha. So anyway, I decided I could probably grow my own. I walked around the corner to the next aisle over in the health food store and found hard wheat berries or wheatgrass berries in their bulk food section. Grabbed a few scoops full, up the the register and bam - 65 cents! That's more like it...

I found several versions of how to grow wheatgrass, but I went with the instructions I found here.

Here's how we did it:

Soak berries overnight. I read to make sure you don't soak longer than 24 hours as they may go rancid after that.

Line a basket. You can use an old plastic grocery bag or saran wrap. Or anything else that's water proof. If your basket is somewhat loosley woven, you can lay some fabric down first to hide the plastic. Add a layer of soil to about 1/3 the height of the basket. You don't want too much dirt, because it will make the basket heavy.

Spread seeds (or "berries") in a single layer across the top of the basket. I found a handsome helper to assist me with this step.

Then we soaked the seeds with a water bottle and left them in a sunny spot with a little saran lid to keep the moisture in. I'm told the trick the first few days is to keep the seeds moist.


Boy, you know what? If anyone ever feels like they have a black thumb or gets discouraged in their gardening endeavors, growing something quick like wheatgrass sure is encouraging. :)

We were very excited to see this is what we had on day 3:

And only one week from when we planted the seeds:

Ten days old here:

 

Wow, that grew faster than I thought! At this rate, my problem is too much grass! I will have to trim it before Easter and I hope it will still keep growing in green and lush and not turn yellow on me or something! That would figure. If I do it again next year, I will wait a bit later, like 2 weeks before Easter instead of 4 weeks.

But, that also means that you still have plenty of time to try this out if you want to. ;)