My first artsy-craftsy-thingie, possibly ever.

The helpful article on how to convert a chicken feed bag into a re-usable shopping bag begins like this:

"Making a reusable shopping bag from a polywoven feed sack takes about an hour."

(This is from backyardpoultrymag.com , where people were born to be craftsy, I'm sure.)

So far it has taken me more than a week. Possibly two. Will it go on forever? Nobody knows, yet. I am too deep into it to really stop to think much about what the rest of my life will look like.

Better get back to it.  I will post a picture. If I succeed with this, what's next? Etsy?   :)

See the ruler in the background? I'm measuring stuff, then cutting.
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Onions in Pioneertown

The male part of the family went to a camp-out, for men only, over the weekend. Five hundred of them. I had a peaceful time at home. Nothing broke, or at least nothing that I couldn't fix. I can't really remember. But there were several days in a row when I had my freedom to eat ice cream at midnight if I had felt like it. (As it is, I;m not very fond of ice cream, and I rarely make it until ten pm.

Those days led into the homecoming, and what it brought. We are the ultimate recyclers. There were hundreds of pounds left of food when the five hundred males broke camp. Yep, it came here.

Wouldn't you want to be a turkey and have a beautiful green salad with croutons and cherry tomatoes? Or, to be a chicken with biscuits and gravy for breakfast? The equids (that's horses and donkeys) were not forgotten, with lots of raw corn on the cob.

The glory lasted for three days. Now the only thing left seems to be onions. It's sliced onions in VATS. And they are starting to ferment a bit. Heh. The goats love them, and so do the chickens, but they can only eat so much.

Last camp-out I ended up putting some of the fermenting onions on my budding compost heap. It smelled badly enough to keep any rodents away, I'm sure. A good thing, because the cats were not to be seen near the heap, either.

So anyway, I was thrilled, and the animals were equally thrilled, and I was feeling good that nothing went into a dumpster.

And. there was really good stuff, too, I hear, and all that went to a women's shelter. Yeay!

Bad, bad bicycle!

Yes, this is a "go and stand in the corner, bicycle" post.  A few years back I bought a brand spankin' new bicycle (at Walmart, though I hate them but they are the only game in the nearby town) and all was happiness.

Then, since this is the desert, it got sunburned, and the tires went flat, which I fixed with "green slime" - yes, it's really called that - and with hard inner-tubes when the slime did not work forever.

I took a couple of long rides. Long, for me, is several hours, not Tour de France. Most of the time my trips go from the barn to the house and back. But I love my bicycle rides; they make me laugh!

Then, one day recently, came the big betrayal: I was merrily pedaling away (to the house) and the front wheel locked up! I wasn't thrown off, but forward, and the tire made a two to three foot groove in the dirt road. It was such shock and felt like so... personal.

I have no solution to that incident, but it hasn't happened again after the "bearings were backed off and it shouldn't happen again", but I still get that feeling that it could. Could it?

My cat Kansas is gone

He was fifteen years old, which I guess, in cat years is neither here nor there, but maybe mostly "there". He was one of the three original Malibu cats coming with us when we moved here to the desert.

Kansas was a skittish kitten, unlike the other hundred or more babies I raised. I decided he'd be better off staying at home with me. At about four months he came into the kitchen and slammed himself sideways at my feet, and - he was a normal cat after that moment.

There were no scary vet visits, just a slow weight loss and a peaceful slipping over, next to the barn water heater. He won't miss us, but we'll miss him.

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Sewing. SEWING?

Somehow I'm getting more and more tangled up in this country living. I mean, I was always horsey and outdoors-ey and growing things in the ground, and I did know, somewhat,  how to sew when I was a kid and found stray clothing to sew to fit my emerging body.  But this is beyond that, now when I can go five miles to the thrift store and get a dozen garments in a "bag sale" for two dollars plus tax.

Maybe I'm tightening my belt. Maybe I'm reading a lot of Occupy Wall Street stuff.  I'd prefer to think that I'm just learning something new. Or, yeah, I'm being creative. This could be a big one as I'm not at all artsy-craftsy when it come to gluing fabric to pipe cleaners or similar art.

Some years back, maybe six or eight, or so, I must have felt either really rich or very adventurous, and I bought a brand new (gasp!) sewing machine.

It is, as of today, threaded, and I have sewn a straight line through a paper napkin.

Maybe something will come of it? Like an apron. That looks easy.

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Hollywood...

My little electric vehicle "Evie", which is an Electra King from the sixties, was or is being rented by "Hollywood".  Some sort of a reality TV show.

Which started my own "reality show".  I got exited and washed Evie, wrote up a bunch of history and exchanged a dozen emails with Hollywood. Like pulling teeth I got from them a rental agreement and an insurance certificate. Made myself available a whole business day for pick up. Drivers showed up many hours late, and it turned out that Evie does not fit in a big truck with a lift gate, but needs a trailer.

So here I sit, next day, and nobody's shown up, called or emailed to follow up on this. Yes, I have been on them, nicely.   I feel a whole lot poorer, even though I never did see the money.

It's disappointing, and in an uncomfortable way it re-affirms the feelings about Hollywood.that I have built over the years.

Here's Evie:

 

Cute, isn't she?

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