Congratulations

To my sister. Who ran a 50k today in under 7 hours. And acts like it's no big deal.  For regular people this is like running to the moon.

50k. 31 miles.  I'm proud of you. 

Bubble soap

The bubble soap we've been getting from the store lately really stinks.  As in, it doesn't make bubbles in spite of the fact that it's the one job the stuff is made to do.  So today, thinking we had nothing to lose, the oldest and I whipped up a batch of it ourselves.

We used the recipe we found here.

2 cups warm water

1/3 cup dish soap (Aldi)

1/4 corn syrup (the back of the baking cupboard, not even sure why I own it)

Shake!

It really does make excellent bubbles.  I wanted to post it here because I'm sure we'll be making another batch again very soon.

Curiosity cabinets: dream rooms

I spent some free time this morning cleaning a snapping turtle shell and skull for my curiosity cabinet.  Unfortunately they're so fragile that when put into a peroxide bath they totally fell apart and will need to be re-constructed.  Which I'm willing to do but will be a painstaking process.  I also checked on the fox skeleton.  It's coming along well enough and may be a winter project for my husband and I; after I clean and sterilize it we might try to articulate the skeleton together.

If you are at all interested in natural history preservation, please visit this site: Jake's Bones.  Jake lives in Scotland.  When he was blogging he was still barely a teenager.   This kid is an amazing wealth of knowledge.

Later in the day I was stuck in the driveway, both kids sleeping in the car, unable to take them in because we were in the middle of a severe downpour.  I used that time to browse Pinterest to look at images of curiosity cabinets and rooms.   I really like these ideas and hope some day we have a library room where *one* wall can be dedicated to this kind of thing.  My collection is 90% natural history finds.  It's great to be able to watch a nature program with the oldest and then go pull an object out of the collection to discuss together; skulls, fossils, beetles, stingray egg cases.    i'll have to post about our collection at some point.

Anyhow, these are some things that I really like:

I like the order to this along with the globes and the clocks.  My father is a clock collector and some of the early ones are so very interesting.  My husband and I have seen the great astronomical clock in Prague.  It would be fun to add an old clock to our collection.

I don't know if these are paper cuts or what but they're very beautiful.

I've collected and cleaned a large collection of eggs from domestic birds from friends and family.  Everything from ostrich (my aunt and uncle raised them) to quail.  A domed frame like this would be a treasure.

The pressed ferns here are a nice touch.

Our Native American artifacts displayed like the frames at the top, from the Warther Collection in Ohio.  The bottom two rows are made of buttons.

I love a lot of things about this; the seafoam green color of the display, the red coral, whale prints and oh, yeah, the giraffe of course.  Probably not going to get a taxidermy giraffe any time soon but it's always fun to dream isn't it?  

Oh... crap

Our new roommate.  Yes, it's that big.

I had an entirely different post in mind for tonight but life has a way of intervening sometimes, doesn't it?

All four of us were outside this evening by the backdoor when, mid-sentence, I spied this huge beetle on the foundation of the house.  We quickly picked it up, took some photos and I carted it away into the house in the bug cage belonging to the oldest, under the guise of "looking at it later".  What I really had intended to do was put it in the freezer to humanely kill it so that we could add it to our collection of insects we've found on the propriety.  But then I got distracted, mainly because the kids were driving me nuts so I went out to spend half an hour in the camper with a book and a cold beer.

Inside, and much later, I picked up the bug cage to try to identify the beetle.  But.... the beetle was missing.  There was no beetle in that bug cage.  Going into the living room, holding the cage in the air, I hesitantly asked "Umm... guys? What happened to the big beetle we found outside?"  The oldest  "Oh, I lost it."  Beg your pardon? ' I was playing with it and I lost it."  Where?  I asked.. "Oh, I don't know".  "What the actual H?"  I said, half-joking, panicked.  "Are you all serious?  There's a huge, angry dung beetle loose in out house?  One that's the size of a small pony?"  No one else seems bothered by this.  I can only picture it crawling on me in my sleep.  It was suggested to me that I calm down and look under the rug.  No, it's not there.  It's hiding and plotting an attack.

Also tonight I stabbed myself in the toe with a fork.  We had "breakfast for dinner" and in the hurry of trying to get hot eggs on the table, with forks perched on plates, a fork slipped off of one plate and fell.  I felt it hit my toe, yes it hurt, but seemed like no big deal until the bleeding started.  Two of the tines had gone into my big toe.  Blood was everywhere.  It looked like a crime scene.  Yes, I'll live but my toe hurts. 

 First-world problems.

It just occurred to me to worry of the huge beetle roaming loose in the house will be attracted to the band aid on my toe.

. 

Post script: after writing this we saw our cat Elyse doing her "pointer dog" pose at a corner of the living room. The beetle has been found.  Thank God.  

Happy Birthday Mom

Happy Birthday to my mom, who would have been 65 today.

Crock pot freezer meals

Last week I went to a ladies' night hosted by one of the wonderful women from book club.  It was an evening where we all came together to assemble meals to take home and freeze.  The idea being that these could later be thrown into the crock pot for easy meals.  We also all took home cute insulated bags.  And there were margaritas.  It was fun for me to learn to assembly-line meals in this style.

I was looking forward to trying this one because it sounded like the strogonoff my mom used to make when we were growing up: ground beef and mushroom soup. It didn't, but more garlic salt and onion powder helped.  I made homemade egg noodles.

We were instructed to write the directions on the bags before we filled them but I didn't so here are the rest:

I can see these being used as time-savers on busy days so "yay" for that. It was fun and I'd do it again.

Aldi Thai Chicken!

 

I just had to share this awesome thing we got from Aldi this week because I know for certain of at least one other person that loves both Thai food and Aldi as much as we do.

It's this.  The chicken and sauce come already cooked in the packet and you just heat it up.  I added zucchini to ours as it simmered to heat.  Made some rice and sprinkled cilantro on top.  If you added another vegetable (peas or potatoes?) and served it with naan it could absolutely serve 4 for dinner.  And it cost about $5!

Next post: our friend got married this weekend and the oldest was a ring bearer.  We all took another long walk this morning.  It's been a good weekend.

Morning walk

The oldest had spent the night with his grandparents so my husband and I loaded up the baby and went for a walk this morning on the Rails to Trails path. 

Blue Jay feather.

Male Monarch Butterfly.

Identified as a Splendid Earth Boring Beetle.

His (?) underside was a bright metallic blue.

The rains had washed some slag glass free from the old railroad bed.  These were a by-product of the iron furnaces in the 1800's. They're now decorating our bird bath.

Cutting boards

Before my grandparents' farm house was auctioned I helped myself to the two wooden cutting boards in the island cabinet.  I'm positive Grandpa made them as I can't imagine a man who cut his finger off with a table saw to save me a few bucks would have purchased them new or even second-hand.  They are beautiful but they hadn't been cleaned in, well, years probably.  Soap and water just wasn't cutting the years' worth of accumulation of grease and whatnot that was so thick that you could scrape it.  So they got stashed in a cupboard here until this week when I got tired of chopping vegetables on plastic and decided to do something about it.

I pulled out the big guns: the steel wool Brillo pads embedded with soap.  When the boards were good and wet and the gunk loosened I scraped them hard with a bench scraper taking off all of the yuck along with some of the wood.  

Look at how pretty they are.  I love to think of all of the years' of Sunday meals being prepared on these.

They probably should be sealed with some kind of food grade oil.  

So here are all of our cutting boards.  The largest is for making homemade pizza and pasta.  The smallest one (Ohio) is mainly used for cutting the tops off of popsicles.  Now that they're out on the counter and not out of sight they do get used more.  I'm thinking of some kind of rack to hold them... maybe like one for dishes?  Does anyone know more about taking care of wood in the kitchen?

Birthday, KOA camping & what's new around here

Balloons!

Last weekend the oldest turned 4 years old and we had a sweet little party here at the house.  

The theme was PBS's Wild Kratts, a great educational nature program that we all love.  There were leaves, creature power discs, animals all over the place and a cake shaped like the Tortuga (the crew's turtle-shaped ship headquarters).

I made the Tortuga out of a mini bundt cake pan, after it was baked I filled the center with candy so that when I cut into the cake, M&Ms spilled out.  Children were very impressed.  "I want to eat the HEART!" the neighbor boy exclaimed.  I gave him all of the red M&M's.  Too funny.

It was great fun with family, the cousins and a neighbor boy.  The kids had a blast.  Trampoline bouncing, swinging, sand box digging, wilderness exploring, pizza eating.  The whole food side of the affair was catered by Domino's pizza delivery, a great relief of work and cleaning because the very next day we left to go camping.

Here we are at the McKean KOA.  We've never been to a KOA before. Ours was the smallest  camper by like, oh, 15 feet.  Seriously, the place was filled with huge rigs with slide outs.  Massive $50K motor-homes. I think one of the huge 5th wheel rigs even had a second story, is that even a thing?   Honestly, the last thing I want to worry about when we are "relaxing"  is scrubbing a toilet or vacuuming a carpet.  To each their own.  I wonder if some of these owners work remotely and are able to just travel all of the time and see the country.  That would be a wonderful lifestyle.

Here we are.  12 feet, circa 1960-something, $1,700.  It suits us. 

Raiding the fridge.  They love camping because it's all treats all the time: gummy bears, hot dogs

Spaghetti-O's, Fruit Loops.

The KOA was great for families, beyond anything we'd hoped for.  There were two pools, one of which only came up to my waist and both kids absolutely loved swimming.  There were tears every time they had to get out for a break.  Also there was a pond, a playground, a bounce pad, movies every night and goats.

Goats?

Goats.

I won this guy in the arcade in the laundry room.  I needed to have it.  We also won a big, glittery stuffed unicorn which the oldest presented to a girl that was staying the next site over, who had sweetly befriended him.

They had goats at the KOA too.  Adorable, pet-able goats.

Everyone slept snugly.  The camper has the original canvas hammock that goes over the back bunk for additional sleeping and we might get it out for the next trip.

The second day we spent some time in Erie.

The water at Presque Isle was too choppy to wade in but it was still a beautiful day.  The baby protested loudly and adorably every time we put him down (feet! touching sand!)  It was good fun though.

We went to the welcome center at the park entrance, kind of a nature center.  When you walk in there is a two-story tower of hand carved wooden animated sculptures of people and wildlife.  The same person carved all of them and by spinning a wheel you could set them all in motion.  Wooden people rowed boats, swam in water.  Birds flapped their wings.  The sculptures were really lovely.

A play room with lots of puppets.  Honestly, the whole place is much nicer for out kids than the Children's Museum.

I really liked the way these insects were displayed.  I've started collecting insects in the back yard again and need to find a nice box to display them in.  I'm hoping to find an antique frame that my husband can put a deeper backing on to accommodate the insect pins.

The adults were ready to leave the next morning but the children were not.  Here the oldest is trying to hide under the awning as we were taking it down.  I just remembered that the awning rail has come loose and lifted  the last 6 inches or so, so we'll need to repair that.

The rest of the days have gone by quickly.  We've been mostly playing in the yard.  I've been working on getting the chicken coops painted "barn paint" red. We lost two more birds while we were gone.  The oldest has been going to more stores with me and is doing well with it.  It will be a busy week with a friend coming for lunch tomorrow, a freezer meal party on Thursday and a friend married on Saturday with a rehearsal to go to on Friday.  Thank you cards to write.  Pre-school workbooks to complete so it doesn't seem like the oldest is starting from square one next month.  He's been showing a lot of interest in adding lately.  I'm also staring to think about picking up some hours part-time somewhere in town.