Family

Summertime And The Livin’s Easy

Posted on July 16, 2008 by Debora

This is my favorite time of year, foodwise. Preparing healthy meals is never easier than it is in midsummer when the garden and orchard are in full swing and everyone’s in the mood for light fare.

For breakfast this morning we polished off the last of the apricot crop, with the grain product of our choice on the side. I had granola, Elizabeth and Luke had cinnamon-raisin bagels. The plums are just beginning to turn color; I give them another two to four weeks before that feeding frenzy begins. Luckily we have one apple tree that ripens very early in the year, and while it’s still a month or so away from actual ripeness, its fruit has reached that tart/sweet green stage that’s not bad to munch on at all. So that’ll carry us from apricot season to plum season without total fruit deprivation.

Then there’s the berries. I have managed to produce actual blueberries this year, for the first time ever! Apparently the secret is to water them almost every day. Troublesome, but totally worth it when you pop one of those tangy little balls of goodness into your mouth. We also enjoyed homegrown raspberries and strawberries this year — yum!

Around noon I commented to the empty kitchen that a nice frosty milkshake sounded pretty good for lunch. Like magic, Elizabeth materialized out of thin air and began assembling ingredients. She has just recently mastered the art of making milkshakes, and fixes them for us almost every day.

Our recipe–

Add to blender:

About 1 cup frozen berries (strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, or whatever you like. We use storebought organic, since our own production from the new plantings is still pretty small).

Two ripe bananas

16 oz vanilla yogurt

About 1/2 cup milk

Blend well. Pour into glasses that have been stored in the freezer. Makes three or four shakes, depending on the size of your glasses.

For supper I went down to the garden and filled a basket with everything that looked good: an onion, a bulb of garlic, a zucchini, two tomatoes, some swiss chard, some kale, some carrots. I cooked a pound of ground beef with salt, pepper, the onion and the garlic. When it was browned I added the rest of the veggies, all chopped into bite-size pieces. Simple but very tasty. This is the sort of meal that absolutely requires the use of fresh, just-picked veggies, or it won’t taste right.

Between the heat (and marital stress) dulling my appetite, and all the fresh produce I have been eating, my winter weight has been melting away pretty dramatically. This morning I weighed in at 118 lbs! I have not weighed 118 lbs since before my first pregnancy! I love my garden. 🙂 (The marital stress, not so much.)

I was supposed to plant cherry trees and blackberries this fall, but I think that’s going to be out of my budget this year. Especially since Julie has invited me to a five-day horse-camping trip next month up in San Luis Obispo with a bunch of her friends, and I can’t possibly say no to five days of riding, camping and girl talk. What’s another couple hundred dollars on the credit card for a good cause, right? The cherry trees will still be at the nursery next year. Or, you know, probably different cherry trees, but whatever.

Then there’s the grapes. We have eight grapevines, each a different variety that ripens at a slightly different time. So from late July/August to October it’s a nonstop grapefest. Mmmmm, grapes.

Someday when we sell this place I’m going to need half a dozen U-haul trucks just to transfer my orchard to my next home, because leaving it behind doesn’t even bear thinking about.

What? Thirty-year-old apple trees don’t transplant well? La la la la, I can’t heeeear you…..

Categories: Family, food, Gardening, kids, Life | 4 Comments

Done

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Debora

So, last Saturday Steve and I reluctantly gave up and called it quits. He finally just said, “I don’t think I’m really cut out to be a married man.” The simple clarity of that statement pretty much summed it all up. In between the moments of passion and frivolous fun, being married to Steve has always made me feel so freaking lonely. He has a whole life going on that has nothing to do with me, and he prefers it that way. He is, by nature, a solo act that likes life in the social spotlight.

Like last time, the decision to separate has left me feeling relieved and liberated. Don’t get me wrong, I wish it could have worked out, but I don’t think it ever would have. No doubt the anger, grief, etc, will eventually make their rounds again, but for now I’m just breathing the free air.

Steve has always been such a weakening influence on the fabric of this family. Take Friday family movie nights, for example. This is a custom that the kids and I started during the first separation. On Friday nights we pop a giant bowl of popcorn, put on something from Netflix that the kids want to see, and snuggle up on the couch in a big pile together. Bonding time. Fun.

During the reconciliation, when Steve started joining us for movie night, it all changed. He didn’t care for the kiddie movies, so every week he basically turned it into a big inappropriate makeout session on one end of the couch, with the kids on the other end of the couch or in the big chair. The instant the ending credits rolled he’d pull me off to the bedroom for some “grownup time.” Fun? Sure. Family bonding time? Not so much.

In fact, he paid more attention to his kids during the first separation than he ever did before or after. When we’re together he has a way of making them feel alienated without even trying to. So, one more reason for me to not regret parting ways.

Shortly before we called it quits I happened to be with Steve when he received a friendly text message from his ex-girlfriend. Funny — he’d told me she’d moved out of state. He said he had no idea why she’d still be texting him.

I hate the way moments like that make me feel, and I hate how MANY moments like that — and much worse — there have been during the fourteen years I’ve known him. I just really want to never feel that way ever again.

So — I wish him the best of luck, but I need to walk my own path from here on out. Today me and the kids went to see “Journey To The Center Of The Earth” in 3D, and it was a hoot and we didn’t have to deal with Steve shushing the kids every time they laughed or shrieked as loud as every other freaking person in the theater was doing. And then we came home and it was too late to get anything done and too early to go to bed, so we popped a giant bowl of popcorn and put on a Donald Duck collection that had come in from Netflix, and we snuggled in a pile on the couch and made up for a lot of recent family movie nights that hadn’t felt like family time at all. And tomorrow night we’re going to take some sleeping bags and camp out in the horse pasture and roast hot dogs and marshmallows and sing goofy songs about great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts, and tell spooky stories and basically just celebrate the fact that the three of us are a solid team again and not a lonely, dysfunctional foursome.

Things don’t always turn out the way you want them to.

But I have to believe that sooner or later things turn out the way they’re meant to.

I have faith in that.

Categories: Family, kids, Life, Love, Marriage | 5 Comments

Still Here

Posted on July 8, 2008 by Debora

Poor neglected blog, all lost and cold and scared and hungry. I totally should be giving it more attention.

So…let’s catch up. We have a splendid apricot crop this year; we all (except Steve, who doesn’t like apricots–the commie!) have been gorging ourselves on those. I really need to get some into the freezer before they’re all gone.

There’s an annual tradition round these parts called “Anza Days,” which always falls on the weekend before (or of) July 4th, and in years past it used to be this enormous three-day celebration that everyone looked forward to with great anticipation. It’s gotten smaller and shabbier every year, and nowadays it’s usually just a small parade down the main highway and some vendors’ booths set up in the park for half a day. Normally the casino puts on a nice fireworks display the same night, but this year there was some disagreement about which weekend it should fall on, so the parade ended up being on June 28 and the fireworks were on July 5th. Turns out there was a dance at the Community Hall on Friday the 27th, but we didn’t even know about that until the next day. We were sorry to have missed it, because the Anza Days festivities are actually where Steve and I first met back in ’94, and all the dancing we did that night is a sweet romantic memory. Ah, the innocent days of youth.

We had fun though, because with no fireworks at the casino for Anza Days we ended up at Julie and Josh’s place for dinner and a long dip in their fantabulous jacuzzi. Julie and Josh are the coolest people ever — we have so much fun whenever we hang out with them.

Monday the 30th Steve and I had our second counseling session. It had become mildly troublesome to arrange babysitting for these appointments, plus we didn’t like the way it was cutting into our “family days,” so I did some research and found a place in Temecula that offers drop-in childcare services. The kids stayed there while we saw the counselor, and they LOVED it. The place offers toys and games and arts and crafts and snacks and all manner of fun stuff for an amazingly low fee. So next time I want to catch a grownup movie I won’t have to fret about what to do with the younguns! Score!

Anyway, by the end of this second session we were having serious doubts as to whether the counselor really had anything useful to offer us. He didn’t have any helpful insights into our problems that Steve and I hadn’t already talked to death on our own. He accurately identified our issues — but we already KNOW what our issues are. The suggestions he made were things we were already trying, or had tried in the past. Still, we optimistically made a third appointment, because we are Committed To Making This Work, dammit.

After the session we picked up the kids and headed over to the mall to see WALL-E, and I liked that an awful lot. Absolutely stunning imagery; Pixar never lets you down in the animation department. Although…I guess I might as well admit that I was expecting a bit more from the story itself. It was a very simple tale, without all the clever complexity of the previous Pixar offerings. Still totally worth seeing on the big screen, and I’ll be buying the dvd when it comes out.

Stormy came down with some sort of respiratory bug that had me worried enough to call the vet out, and he prescribed a round of antibiotics for her. She seems to be feeling better now, thank goodness; I get all woozy at the thought of anything happening to my old girl.

Saturday the 5th there was a cowboy thing going on at the local gymkhana arena, with cattle events like team penning and sorting and stuff. Steve and I didn’t enter anything (this year all our horses are either too old or too green), but we stopped by to check it out and socialize a bit. After sizing up the competition, we decided that Marshall and possibly even Mahogany probably wouldn’t disgrace themselves at next year’s event if we worked with them some between now and then. We didn’t see any really seasoned cowhorses there; maybe the money wasn’t big enough for the pros to bother with.

That afternoon we went to a small barbecue at the home of one of Steve’s friends. That was REALLY nice. Not a lot of people, just a small group of very friendly folks and plenty of good food. And from the front yard there was a perfect view of the fireworks, even better than we’d have gotten at the casino! We all agreed that we’d have to make that an annual tradition.

Sunday morning we dragged our sleep-deprived bodies out of bed and loaded up the horses and went to help out at the Wellmans’ roundup.

That is the nicest family. I love every single one of the Wellmans. :^)

Elizabeth wants to buy a toy that I don’t particularly want to spend money on in the middle of what has shaped up to be a spectacularly costly month for me. We debated the issue, and then compromised. I outlined a section of my garden and told her that I would pay her $5 to weed it. That wouldn’t buy the toy, but if she did a good job I would give her more $5 sections to weed. She did such an incredibly perfect job that she has duly secured the position and income of Official Garden Weeder. Money well spent and well earned!

Monday the 7th was our third counseling session. We dropped the kids off at the childcare place, put in one more hour with Doctor Obvious, and came away in perfect harmonious agreement that this guy has absolutely nothing helpful to tell us. No fourth session was scheduled.

I mostly try to leave the personal drama out of these updates, but there’s rather a lot of it going on. The highs are very high, and the lows are very low. We both WANT the marriage to work, and I can honestly say that what we have now is worlds — universes — better than what we had the first time around, but at the heart of things is still the fact that Steve and I have wildly different approaches to life itself. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, but from time to time it just is.

But when things are good between us they are so very very good. Good enough to make us temporarily forget all about the other moments when we hit that solid wall of conflicting sensibilities and stand there all stunned and shaken and convinced that this can’t possibly work out at all.

He hasn’t moved back in, and frankly neither of us are in a big hurry for that to happen. The scary moments are slightly less scary when you don’t feel like you’ve actually committed yourself to anything permanent yet. We’re still taking this one baby step at a time and leaving all the emergency exits open and handy just in case.

The kids are just wishing we’d make up our minds already, one way or the other.

Can’t say I blame them; I’m wishing the same thing myself. There must be SOME way of skipping to the last page and finding out how all this turns out in the end….

Categories: Family, kids, Life | 1 Comment

Summer Adventures, Part 2

Posted on June 25, 2008 by Debora

The last day of school was June 13th, and it couldn’t come soon enough for us! Steve and I picked the kids up right from school and took them down to Temec to see Indiana Jones, to celebrate. I was the only one who’d seen it before and I was a little concerned that Luke would have a hard time sitting still for the whole two hours, but both kids were completely mesmerized from the first frame to the last. Gotta say though, it didn’t help Luke’s fear of stinging/biting insects one bit. Curse those giant ants!

The following Tuesday, the 17th, we finally squeezed in our “spring” roundup.

It was wonderful to see the cows and calves all fat and happy again on the lush spring grass. Mahogany started out fidgety and spooky, but she settled down nicely as the morning progressed. And this was the first year that Elizabeth was able to really help with bringing in the herd, thanks to her growing rapport with Stormy. It was a good day!

It would have been a great day, except while we were there at the pasture the fuel pump on my car quietly died, and I ended up having it towed up to Idyllwild for repairs. They couldn’t find a new pump for it anywhere but at the Saturn dealership, ditto the fuel filter that they recommended I have replaced at the same time, so the whole thing ended up costing me just under $1000, including the towing fee. Yowtch!

Back when the kids and I were planning out our “Summer of Adventure,” we’d scheduled a trip to The Imagination Workshop for Wednesday the 18th. We weren’t sure what exactly it was, but it looked interesting and didn’t cost much for admission, so we wanted to check it out. When Steve heard about the outing he wanted to come too, so we made a family day of it. Which worked out well, since the guy at Idyllwild Garage said they were waiting on the parts for my car and I wouldn’t have it back until Thursday at the soonest. So we all went down in Steve’s truck.

The Imagination Workshop totally exceeded my expectations! It’s an amazing and delightful clutter of silly “inventions,” optical illusions, cool science and physics gimmicks, secret passageways and plenty of hands-on fun. I wish I had more pics to post, but something about the lighting in there confused my camera and almost all of my photos came out blurry. :^(

After we left the Workshop we stopped for pizza at a place we’d never tried before, called the Temecula Pizza Company. It doesn’t look like anything from the outside; just a featureless storefront tucked in between a Carl’s Jr and a Mobile station. But the pizza was INCREDIBLE! I ordered a personal-size piece of heaven with white sauce, smoked chicken, dried cranberries and two kinds of cheese (provolone and gorgonzola) that was freaking amazing. We will most definitely be going back there.

Thursday was the day I was supposed to leave for Laughlin with Julie and Josh, but they were having technical difficulties with their boat and weren’t able to get it fixed in time. They were still going to Laughlin, just not on the river part. After a lot of agonizing over whether or not to go anyway, I finally decided to bow out this time. The urban/casino scene isn’t really my thing, and I was afraid I’d feel so out of place that I’d dampen their fun.

The fuel pump didn’t come in on Thursday. The Idyllwild Garage guy said I wouldn’t have my car back till Friday. I told him that was fine, I didn’t really need it until Saturday anyway.

Friday Steve wanted to have a father-and-son day with Luke. They took a bunch of trash to the dump, did a couple of ranch calls (Luke likes to hand the shoeing tools to Steve as he needs them), and then they headed down to Hemet to get the truck’s oil changed.

While they were doing all that, Elizabeth and I saddled up our trusty (and not-so-trusty) steeds and went for a nice ride. It was fun to cruise along, go as fast or slow as we felt like, and talk together without Luke’s endless chatter constantly interrupting us. We might have to do this guy day/girl day thing more often!

All four of us arrived back home within twenty minutes of each other, and shortly after that I realized that somehow at some point my cell phone had fallen out of my saddlebag. Luckily the ride had mostly taken place on actual roads, so Steve drove me back over the route to look for it. No luck. When we got back we tried calling it, and it turned out that a friend of Steve’s had found it in the road near his driveway. He was nice enough to bring it up to our gate. Yay!

Since I was originally supposed to be in Laughlin that weekend, Steve had planned to take the kids to the Orange Empire Railway Museum on Saturday. With me not being in Laughlin after all, it was decided that we’d take my car and save some money on gas. Except! The fuel pump STILL hadn’t come in, and now my car wouldn’t be ready till Monday! Whee!

So we piled into Steve’s truck and headed to Perris. Steve’s parents met us there at the museum a bit later.

Luke was delirious with pleasure at being surrounded by all those trains and machinery. The rest of us were delirious with impending heatstroke. It was 107º in the shade that day, and we were not in the shade; we were in the broiling sun surrounded by hulking metal behemoths and often on black asphalt. I’m not normally bothered by heat, but that was like being in a toaster oven. And inside the trains it was even worse! Gaaahhhh.

Still, it was a great museum if you like trains. I forgot to bring my camera (!!), but Steve’s mom had hers so we got some nice pics. You can’t even tell how close to heat collapse we all were.

Sunday we all spent here at the house, hanging out and playing Clue. We just recently discovered that game, and it’s turned out to be oddly addictive. Simple enough for Luke to easily grasp the concept, but with enough opportunities for surreptitiously gleaning clues from other players’ careless remarks that Steve and I have begun to get downright cutthroat about it. Ah, the pleasures of clean family fun. 🙂

Monday my car was finally fixed, and we brought it home. Hooray!

During all of this, Steve and I have been doing the two-steps-forward, one-step-back cha-cha. Some days everything seems to fall effortlessly into place, and other days feel like one long struggle to mend an unmendable relationship. It’s…wearying.

We finally decided that it’s time to try marital counseling. So we picked a guy pretty much at random out of the yellow pages, and Tuesday was our first session.

We can’t decide whether that went well or not. The guy listened to our tale of woe, asked a bunch of questions, and finally said (rather dubiously, Steve and I both thought) that he could help us if we really wanted to try and make it work, and when did we want to start our weekly sessions?

Interestingly, the fact that a marital counselor appeared to be of the opinion that our marriage is probably doomed has only made Steve and I all the more determined to make it work. Apparently we both possess the “Oh yeah? We’ll show HIM!” reflex. Nice to know we have SOMEthing in common. ;^)

And now I need to get outside and get some work done in the yard, because it turns out that yardwork does not do itself while one is out galavanting around at museums and such.

It looks like the apricots will be ripe within the next week. Mmmmmm, apricots.

And that’s all the news here. I will attempt to get back to posting more than once or twice a month, so my updates don’t all read like novels. :^)

Categories: Animals, Family, Horses, kids, Life, Love, Marriage, Ranching | Leave a comment

Home-Milled Flour

Posted on June 14, 2008 by Debora

During the first month or two after Steve and I separated, I spent most of my evenings catching up on reading a big stack of Organic Gardening back-issues that people had given me over the the years. They date all the way back to 1978, and they were exactly what I was in the mood for at that point. Tons of great advice on how to enjoy a simpler, healthier, more self-sufficient lifestyle without all the expensive modern clutter. I was hugely inspired by stories of folks living on properties the size of mine — or smaller — and producing all or most of their own food at home. I started making a list of new fruit trees, berries and other perennial food plants that I want to add to my little homestead.

Then there was an article about how quickly the nutritional value of grains deteriorate after they are milled into flour. Apparently the oils start to go rancid very soon, and within a couple of days the flour is practically worthless for food value. The original grains, in contrast, remain fresh and viable (as in, you can plant them and they will grow) for years and years if properly stored. Up to twenty years by some estimates!

Considering how fast the cost of food is rising, the idea that I could buy a whole lot of wheat berries and dry corn, mill them into flour and meal myself as needed, and enjoy better flavor and nutrition for just a little extra work was very appealing to me.

So I did a bunch of research to find the best grain mill, and decided that the Country Living Grain Mill was what I was looking for. There was a three-week wait on it (apparently self-sufficiency is becoming a popular concept these days), but I added my name to the list and eventually it arrived.

When we tried to test it, we very quickly realized that it has to be bolted or clamped to a solid surface or it shimmies around too much. I wanted to set it up in a permanent spot, but I wasn’t quite ready to drill holes in any of my countertops, so after a bit of thought I decided it was time to pull out our old unused furnace and use that space for the mill.

Once the furnace was out, I cut through the inside wall to create access from the kitchen, cleaned up the space, put in an old cupboard from one of the sheds, and bolted the mill to that.

Today we gave it its first test drive! The kids wanted waffles, so I dumped a cup of wheat berries into the hopper and told the young-uns to start grinding. Luke was wildly enthusiastic about working the mill, but it turned out to be just a bit harder than he could really manage. Elizabeth took over the task, and we had our flour just a few minutes later.

One cup of wheat berries made about one-and-a-quarter cup of flour, which is exactly what my waffle recipe uses, but after I’d made the batter I realized that the recipe must be allowing for the settling that occurs in prepackaged flour. Freshly-milled, unsettled flour made a noticeably thinner batter. Next time I’ll use a bit more than the recipe calls for.

The flavor though — wonderful! You really can taste the difference. I will definitely be milling my own flour from now on. Now I just need to get some airtight storage tubs so I can start buying grains in bulk and stock up.

Next on my self-sufficiency shopping list: a a solar cooker!

Categories: Family, food, Health, kids, Life, Self-Sufficiency | 7 Comments