This is my recipie. You can tell because I don’t really use units of measure, but don’t worry- this will make the most amazing mashed potatoes and you don’t really NEED a recipie. We’re cooking them today because while you can make them earlier, they take up a lot of room in your fridge, and you can already tell that’s getting a little scarce. These potatoes are lacto vegetarian friendly, but can be easily altered for either a meat lover’s dish (put bacon on/in it) or completely vegan. You will need:

• Potatoes
• Onions
• Garlic
• Heavy whipping cream
• Butter
• Mushroom Stock, other stock, bullion (optional)
• Salt

Fill a large stock pot with 3/4 or more water, or any stock or bullion you might have handy. If you don’t have stock or bullion, don’t worry about it. With the amount of liquid we’re talking about, it’s not hugely noticable. Start the water to boil.

Slice up 2-6 large, sweet onions and toss them in the water. Peel and gently crush a head or two of garlic. Don’t worry about fine slicing them, this is supposed to go fast. Skin them and GO. The long boil takes the tart flavor out, leaving you with sweet, delicious, mellow garlic and onion flavors in your potatoes. Yum.

Slice up a lot of potatoes. Don’t bother skinning them, first it takes time, second there’s a lot of vitamins in the skin, and third even people who hate potato skins in their mashed potatoes love mine, so you’ll probably be just as happy. I usually use half a 15 lb sack to start, and rarely have leftover mashed potatoes, but you know the size of the group you are hosting better than I do. Pull out as many as you think you need, then add 5.  The size of the chunks you cut your potatoes into is not important, but it IS important to make them fairly consistent. Drop them in the boiling water.

Set a timer for 2o minutes and make your dinner for tonight. When the timer goes off, check the potatoes. If they are done, drain the water through a colander and toss your potatoes into whatever Tupperware they’re going into your fridge in. If you have multiple crock pots with removable inserts you lucky bitch, I want that SO BAD, use one of those, or optionally sacrifice and use your only crock pot for this. That way you can just pop the potatoes out of the fridge and dump them into the crock pot on Turkey Day and you’ll be SET.

Mash the potatoes whatever way works with you- a potato masher, a plunge mixer, a food processor, magic elves- it does not matter.  Mash the onion bits and the garlic bits in with them.Put in about half a pint of heavy whipping cream, or substitute some (or most) the cream for butter/olive oil and stock (if you’re going vegetarian with this).  I would use a mushroom stock instead of a standard veggie stock.

Salt to taste. These potatoes really do need salt to bring out their flavor.

If you want your potatoes extra creamy, keep mashing, otherwise you’re done.

Ways to spice up/fancy up these potatoes:

• Drizzle some truffle oil on top.
• Mix in some mozzerella cheese
• Fry up some bacon, and use the bacon fat instead of butter and crumble the bacon on top.
• Fry up some portabello mushrooms (in bacon fat if you like it, or in olive oli), tear them up by hand, and mix them in.
• Cut up some chives and sprinkle them on top
• Shape into the mountain from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and start telling your friends about the aliens.

You are done for today, and you should have been able to fit making these potatoes in with making a regular dinner. Pat yourself on the back, do a little happy dance, clean up your kitchen and maybe even feel a wee bit smug for getting ahead of the power curve.

It’s Sunday, you’ve had a day to take it easy yesterday, and today? Today is a good day to pie.

I’m afraid I am going to abandon you here a bit today. You see, while the pies I am going to help you make are good and quick, they are that way because they are lesser pies. I make an honest-to-goodness family secret recipe that was handed down from my great grandmother, so while pumpkin pie and buttermilk pie is awesome, they will never be the star of the show in my home. I thought about it long and hard, dear reader, but I just can’t hand out Great Grandma Mable’s recipe willy-nilly over the internet. If I do I just KNOW the ghosts of my ancestors would show up and make fun of my Ikea furniture, but let me just tell you this- it’s a coffee pie, on an Oreo crust. TO DIE FOR. You might be able to figure out something similar from that.

Anyway, I’m sorry to be a pie-tease, but I promise the pies you are going to make are not only delicious, but they are super fast and easy, because my family pie recipe is a pain in the ass that involves a double boiler (another hint!), and we didn’t want guests deciding they wanted lots of slices. They’d always load up on pumpkin pie first, so we’d get first shot at the good stuff. Anyway. These are the pies I make year round for nice meals, and they are a snap to put together. If you bake the pumkin pies today they will seperate a bit if you freeze them, and if you put them in the fridge, gnomes and elves will eat them before thanksgiving- but you can fill the pies and freeze them today before baking, or freeze all the pie crusts and mix all the fillings for the other two pies today and set them aside until T-day. Your call, depending on available fridge/freezer space.

We’re going to make at least five pies today, which sounds more impressive than it is, due to the joys of batch cooking.

We start with your favorite pie crust recipe- make enough for 5 pies. For me, that recipe comes from the back of the Crisco label. Honestly, with all the quiche baking I do, I have yet to find a pie crust recipe that I can make consistently come close, much less outperform that recipe. It’s been a classic since 1930 for a very good reason. This little YouTube video shows exactly how easy it is, or you can read about it strait from Crisco’s pie crust page.

The ingredients are:
1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup shortening (it does NOT have to be Crisco brand!)
2-3 tablespoons ice water

Mix the flour and shortening together with a fork until it forms pea-sized chunks. Roll out the pie crust (between sheets of wax paper or saran wrap if you like that sort of thing, I just flour my counter top), and then plop it in a pie tin.

You’ll want to do this 5 times. I don’t recommend increasing the recipe because pie crust gets tough if you overwork it, and this is such a lovely crust it’d be sad to ruin it.

You are going to want to make three pumpkin pies. I honestly, again, use the pumpkin pie recipe on the back of the can of Libby’s canned pumpkin. I would buy one can of their pumpkin puree, and then two cans of whatever the cheap generic on sale was, or if I’d thought ahead that year, I’d use homemade puree that I had made after Halloween when all the pumpkins were on sale.

* 3/4 cup granulated sugar
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
* 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
* 2 large eggs
* 1 can (15 oz.) LIBBY’S® 100% Pure Pumpkin
* 1 can (12 fl. oz.) NESTLÉ® CARNATION® Evaporated Milk
* 1 unbaked 9-inch (4-cup volume) deep-dish pie shell
* Whipped cream (optional)

Directions:
MIX sugar, cinnamon, salt, ginger and cloves in small bowl. Beat eggs in large bowl. Stir in pumpkin and sugar-spice mixture. Gradually stir in evaporated milk.

POUR into pie shell.

If you really want this to last until Thanksgiving, freeze them right now. If you are willing to sacrifice a pie to the pie gods today,

BAKE in preheated 425° F oven for 15 minutes. Reduce temperature to 350° F (and put in the buttermilk pies); bake for 40 to 50 minutes or until knife inserted near center comes out clean. Cool on wire rack for 2 hours. Serve immediately or refrigerate. Top with whipped cream before serving.

Now, for the other two pies, we are going to make a quick, simple, and delicious Southern favorite- buttermilk pie. If the name throws you off, as it did me, ignore the buttermilk thing. This pie is basically a custard tart, except unlike most of the custards I’ve dealt with, which were delicious but finicky little bastards, this is fast, easy, and hard to mess up. In fact, it’s so easy to make that my friend Brian, who does not reliably know which end of a spatula to use, made the first buttermilk pie I ever tasted, and it was amazing. He uses a family recipe that I keep trying to pry out of him, but this one is also good (from Chickens in the Road) and tastes pretty similar.

How to make Old-Fashioned Buttermilk Pie:

1 cup sugar
3 T flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 egg yolks
1 3/4 cups buttermilk
2 T butter, melted
3 egg whites
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
one unbaked single-crust Foolproof Pie Crust pie shell

Line greased pie pan with piecrust. Combine sugar, flour, and salt in a large bowl. Add egg yolks, buttermilk, and melted butter. Mix well. In another bowl, beat egg whites and cream of tartar until stiff. Fold egg whites into buttermilk mixture. Mix carefully and pour into the prepared pie pan. Bake at 375-degrees for 30-35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

The link has beautiful pictures of the pie.

If you make 5 pies there is a chance they will make it to Thanksgiving, because you can sacrifice one to the Pie Gods. Just to check and make sure it tastes right, of course.

Stuffing from a box or a bag is acceptable, as most people have never had the real thing. You can still use this recipe to fancy up your stuffing. That said, scratch made stuffing is far better.

If you are following the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day, and heeded the November 1st post, you’ll have made a loaf each of cornbread, pumpernickel bread, and a white or wheat bread. If you just went out and bought three loaves, don’t worry- this is still FAR superior to stuffing from a box, you just won’t get that feeling of smug self-satisfaction doing everything 100% yourself.

Slice the bread into thin slices and, if possible, recruit children to rip the bread slices into pieces, as they love being destructive helpful.  Halves are too big, sixths are about right, and don’t worry about getting them perfect. Arrange the pieces on a couple of cookie sheets and toast them in a warm oven. If you’re making a casserole for dinner tonight, that’ll be perfect. You want the bread to be a little crisper than toast-not burned, but somewhere between toast and crouton. The drier the bread is, the more juice it will absorb and the richer the flavor will be. Once it’s nice and dry, just put it in a paper bag in the pantry.

While that’s Doing It’s Thang, take a pan out and make some hahah I know a fancy French cooking word mirepox. Just dice one small to medium sized onion, and an equal amount of carrots and celery. Sauteed over a medium heat, with some oil or fat in the pan-butter or oilve oil works great. Make sure the mirepaux is fairly finely diced, because that really does make the texture lovely, and stir until the onions get translucent and lovely.

If you like, you can add as much garlic as your long suffering family can stand you like.  I know some people who adore the color pop of red bell pepper chopped into the mirepox, and if there’s another vegitable that you just adore, chop it fine and throw it in the pot. I will restrain myself from throwing in some lovely hot peppers due to the fact my husband is allergic to them, but only barely, and only because I don’t want to spend thanksgiving in an ER.

When you pull it from the heat, you can also chop and add canned water chestnuts or jiicima for some crunch. Throw in a good double handfull of the dried currants, more if  you like the flavor.This is the time to throw in the herbs- I personally like sage, rosemary, and a little basil, but do whatever you enjoy. I’ll throw in a tablespoon or two of sage, some chinese five spice powder, and whatever herbs get in my way happen to look good. If you’re not to the point in your cooking where you throw spices into things willy nilly, you can always cheat and simply look on the sides of your spice jars and throw in a dash of anything that says “Good with poultry”, or just stick with the tried and true sage and rosemary stuffing.

Take a half stick of butter and put it in a bowl next to your mirepox while cooking it, and every time you add an herb or spice, put some of it in the butter. When you’re finished with the herbs, mash the butter up with a fork, mix it nicely, cover it with saran wrap and stick it in the fridge- you’ll put this under the turkey’s breast skin when you’re done to make sure the meat stays tender, and to give some flavor continuity between the turkey and the stuffing.

When you’re mirepox is good and adultered enough that hard line cookbook cooks are right QUIVERING with anxiety seasoned to your tastes, you Put the toast in a nice paper bag, all dried and mixed up, and the mirepox in a baggie in the fridge. Mix them early in the morning on Thanksgiving day with a little (a cup or so) of stock, white wine, or some kind of tea (all will leave a distinct, gentle, and slightly different flavor), and let the stuffing rest for a moment. In about five minutes when you get boared of watching stuffing it’s time to stuff the turkey! Any leftovers that don‘t fit in the turkey, put in a piece of heavy earthenware corningware with enough tasty liquid to make it that lovely, soggy stuffing consistency that we all love.

When stuffing the turkey, gently fill the body cavity with stuffing, as well as the flap of skin where the neck used to be. Don’t overfill, as the stuffing WILL expand and if you overstuff it will be weirdly, inconsistantly dry when you take it out.. When the turkey releases its delicious juices mid-cooking, the stuffing will catch some of it and the flavor will be fantastic.

Now you have both parts of the stuffing ready and in your pantry/fridge, and you don’t have to think about it again until Thanksgiving day itself! HOORAY!

Thanksgiving is my holiday. The first meal I learned how to cook was a seven course turkey dinner (when I hit home economics in the 6th grade and we made pizza…on bagels…in the microwave I was underwhelmed) and it’s the psychotic stress-crazy-insanity bringing holiday in my family of origin’s house. While weddings can bring on Greek tragedy levels of psychosis in any family, Thanksgiving was the holiday that made all of the quirks of my extended family really shine. Truly, you can not understand how important Thanksgiving was in my family until you realize that the patriarch my my Mom’s family was not only viciously verbally abusive, but a professional chief who started a culinary school. Even after he died, the level of passion and dedication the women in my family threw at the holiday was both terrifying and addictive, and the whole point was to cook for two days strait while driving yourself (and anyone handy) insane, then have a dinner so delicious that heaven itself wept.

This was the holiday where, as a woman, you were judged by the entire family. Eight year olds would snark you if the food wasn’t up to par, and there was endless praise thrown down upon the heads of those who brought the delicious.

The thing that sucked about Thanksgiving, though, was that this was fueled by the fun that the menfolk would sit around and watch the Macy’s Parade or football with the kids (I used to think this was unfair when I was old enough to be drafted into slave labor help in the kitchen, but now I realize that it was a great way to not only get the kids, but the men, out from underfoot), and followed by an enormous stack of dishes to wash when everyone was sitting on whatever soft surface they could find, stoned on turkey.

No more, my friends and loyal readers. I am going to give you my new, improved, Thanksgiving schedule. I’ve been working on this all year, with little nudges and changes here and there. Here is the plan: every day this week, when you make dinner, you’ll make an extra dish. This should take no longer than 20-30 minutes. You can finish part of it and have it as a side for dinner that night, or toss it in the fridge or freezer and wait for T-day.

And when Thanksgiving comes, dear reader, you will be that calm, cool, collected Martha Steward-esq woman all your friends will hate as you lay dish after delicious, from-scratch cooked, home made dish on the table, without having to face a hideous pile of cooking dishes and not getting to spend time with your guests on Thanksgiving.

My recipes tend to be pretty…generous (they are delicious with a wide range of input), so I’ve included some of my recipes and some recipes from other sources. The things for my recipes will be in loose measure- make as much as you need (potatoes, carrots, and onions fit this bill). The recipes I’ve culled from other sources will have specific units of measurement, so you’ll be able to tell what they are just by the shopping list.

Here is the shopping list and list of dishes for this plan.

• Carrots   (one large bunch)
• Potatoes (large bag)
• Onions (large bag)
• Garlic (5-6 heads)
• Celery (1 bunch)
• Bread: 3 different kinds, on sale if you can get it- white/french baugette, pumpernickle, and cornbread.
• 1 can of water chestnuts
• 1 package of dried currants
• Dried Parsley
• Dried Sage
• Turkey, large enough to feed everyone and provide leftovers
• Flour, yeast (in a jar, not in packages), salt.
• 2 lbs(packages of 4 sticks) of butter. No margarine. We’re cooking from scratch, and you don’t do that and throw margarine in the mix.
• 1 large can of Crisco or lard/vegitable shortening
• Brown sugar
• Regular sugar
• Frozen cranberries OR canned cranberry jelly
• Canned, frozen, or fresh corn (whatever you like best/is cheapest)
• Sweet potatoes- they should be orange in the middle. Sometimes they are called yams. If they are white in the middle… oh well, the recipie will still taste good.
• Walnuts or pecans
• Buttermilk (large container)
• Heavy Whipping Cream (large container)
• Sherry (not the cheapest stuff, you can use cooking sherry if you have it on hand or an OK $8 bottle)
• I will add to this list as I finish adding and refining all the recipies.

I keep passive agressively non nagging gently reminding hubs to do things that will help make our blankets last longer, and he keeps ignoring me. Thus, his favorite blanket is starting to get ratty. It’s a pretty blanket and we got it on some ridiculous clearance price. When we were out shopping today we stopped and looked at what it would cost to replace it with much less nice blankets at Target, and boy was he in for some sticker shock.

I think we spent $20 on our king sized blanket, which is black and white with a beautiful scrolling victorian-esque pattern on it. It’s origional price was somewhere over $100. The crappy polyester blankets with cheap fiber fill in ugly colors were twice what we paid for the blanket we’re using right now.

There are things you can do to make your blankets last a lot longer.

1. Use sheets. Always, always, use sheets. Sheets are there to keep your blanket safe from you, and the oils your skin makes when you sweat at night, which get ground in. That’s what really gets things dirty. If you use sheets, you don’t have to wash the blankets nearly as often, and sheets are much easier, faster, and cheaper to launder and replace.
2. Wash in as cold water as you can take. If you wash the linens on my neurotic a schedule, (don’t laugh at me, I don’t know where my notion that I must change my linens on Monday comes from) regularly it’s not as much of an issue, but try to get to it when you can still get away with “warm” and well before you have to use hot water.
3. Use the oxygen bleaches instead of chlorine bleach. It’s a lot easier on the fabric. No bleach is easiest at all, but I don’t like not having my linens go through some sort of autoclave chemical sanitation.
4. If you can, use a spin dryer to get as much excess water out before you put it in the dryer, where the heat and the tumbling will damage the fibers and age the blanket more than anything else your are doing with it, including putting it directly against your oily, dirty flesh for hours at a time and farting through it.
5. Stop ripping it off me when I’m nicely asleep and rolling it around yourself like a burrito so that I have to yank a corner of it to cover myself. Seriously. If I’m tired, cranky, and COLD I will NOT be as gentle with our precious linens as I normally strive to be. When you do this and I then put my freezing butt on your to warm it up, don’t whine. Its your own fault, I was perfectly warm when I had a blanket.

I suppose that last tip really applies more to Hubs, but I guess it can be generalized out to “don’t play tug-of-war with your blankets”.

In the next few days I probably should get out a needle and do some mending on the edges of the blanket, as the self-bias edging is starting to disinigrate. It’s not that high on my to-do list, though.

I wish I could dry my clothes outside on a clothes line. When I was a kid and we lived in the house on Forest St in Denver, the dryer was old and horrid. It took three hours to dry a single load, so the things that tended to get uncomfortably crunchy went in the dryer (towels and jeans) and everything else was hung outside to dry in the sunshine.

Sun dried clothes are a little stiff at first but they smell SO GOOD, and there’s just something wonderful about the way white twin sheets look drying in the spring breeze, and you’re less likely to have static cling issues. Unfortunately, Hubs is seriously allergic to anything green, I swear he’s going to break out in hives if he hugs Oscar the Grouch every kind of pollen in the state, and there isn’t a week, much less a month, something he’s allergic to isn’t blooming. Drying the laundry outside so that it gets covered in pollen would probably not be the best thing for his health.

However, even air drying one load a week is good for the environment and your electric bill, so I try to hang a load on clothes hangers and set those up on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom when the time/inspiration/remember to do it all hits at once.  I had a little spin dryer from Laundry Alternative (who have fantastic customer service, by the way- I really like them, I had an issue with something, I don’t remember what, but I was just irritated as hell with it, and they not only fixed the problem but I got a very nice letter that was not a form letter apologizing!) which I used with the Wonder Wash when I lived in the dorms, and that was great, but the loads are tiny, and frankly I don’t have the attention span for small loads. One thing I did learn from doing nothing but small loads for a year, though, was that spin dryers are frikken GREAT.

What’s so great about spin dryers, Seannon? I am dying to know, and now that my curiosity is peaked, it must be sated with delicious knowledge!

Well, only since you asked so nicely. The great thing about spin dryers is that they cut the amount of time needed to dry a load of laundry to less the the time to wash it. Laundry day goes SO MUCH FASTER. Your clothes get cleaner and last longer, because the mineral deposits and soap scum in the water and shoved right out of the fabric, and the heat and lint damage from the dryer is cut down considerably. Black clothes stay black longer, delicate clothes dry faster, you get lower electric bills, and life is pretty damn peachy. It is a bit of a pain in the ass to move the load from the washer to the spin dryer, and then to the regular dryer, but given the benifits, it’s not so bad.

As a side note, there is also no way in hell I will do cloth diapers (which I’m planning on using) without one of these bad boys, just because it gets rid of all the gunk that can stay in cloth and impair it’s absorptive abilities. Anyone who has ever dealt with cloth diapers knows what I am talking about- having to do the random clarifying washes with baking soda because the hard water deposits on the fabric are making the diaper not work. Screw that. I want a spin dryer so I don’t have to deal with it.

Laundry Alternative has one for full sized loads, and I’ve also looked at the Spin X. The full sized spin dryer from Laundry Alternative is less expensive, but I’d kind of like to try both of them and compare them side by side.

I might pick up the larger sized spin dryer and try to hang a couple of loads a week in the bathroom this summer, if our electric bills keep going the way they’re going.

Have you ever tried a spin dryer? Do you have any questions? Feel free to comment!

For some people, gardening costs them a lot of money. Every year they go to the garden center, buy lots of beautiful flowering annuals, put them in, and follow with all kinds of expensive, exotic plants. Then they get bored and half way through the season rip out all the expensive flowers and move things around in their garden. The part of the garden that is not covered in impulse plant purchases is grass that’s either half dead with thirst, or been shocked with so many chemicals the air smells faintly of weed killer. There are no butterflies in this kind of garden, because while the insecticides kill the aphids, they also drive away the dragonflies and the ladybugs.

Personally, I think these people are insane. They spend so much time and energy controlling their yards and what do they get out of it? Something to look out of their windows at, perhaps?

I love food gardens. Give me a lawn that’s been torn up for a WWII style Victory Garden, or possibly a gently sweeping wildflower medow, over grass any day. If you need a lawn, give me a lawn that’s been planted with clover and creeping thyme over grass any day (especially in the Western states- we don’t have enough water to keep grass happy, yet clover stays green and lovely year round) and keep the grasses to the soft, decorative accents.

If I am going to spend the amount of money it takes to get a garden started, I am not likely to buy flats of annuals. I want a return on my money.

A top-quality fruit tree from David Wilson Nursery (who have fantastic info on starting a home orchard)  will run a little under $30 if you can get it locally. If you plant it well, you will be able to get top quality, organic fruit for less effort than it takes to drive to the grocery store and put up with the lines. If you don’t have the room for a backyard orchard (you would be surprised at how little room it takes) there’s always the beautiful plants from Edible Landscaping. I have wild plans for when I have achieved my goal of My Own Damn House ™ and they involve

1. Planting a blackberry/raspberry/other berries hedge along the sides of the property to give me a nice, tall fence against my neighbors, and to provide me the frozen berries for smoothies for the year. I had a peeping tom neighbor once, and while the elderly Widow McGuillicutty might be sweet as pie, if she sells her house to Pervy McTentypants, I want an 8 foot wall of foliage there BEFORE I dread going into my backyard.

2. Against the back fence of the property, plant myself a lovely little mini orchard. Backyard orchards need maintenence twice a year-trimming to keep them easy to harvest from, and thinning the fruit. If you have apricot trees you might need to prune twice a year. After that you can ignore your trees until harvest time. The flowers and scents are amazing, and once they are established you don’t need to do much for them. Most home fruit trees are killed by over watering- after the first year you literally just let them do their thing, and water if you see the word “Drought” in the newspapers.

3. Put in a 6 foot tall fence, and behind it put bees. Bees fly in a strait line, so if you have a high fence they’ll go over it and are much less likely to bother the neighbors, or my husband who is deathly allergic to bees.

All of these projects are less that most of the silly full sized palm trees I see at garden centers, and I’ll get honey, fresh fruit, and berries from them for less in-the-yard work than a lawn takes.

I don’t see how anyone would WANT a traditional lawn when the alternatives are less expensive in the long run, and have so many other benefits!

After reading all the fantastic blogs about doing your daughters hair I felt the need to feel pretty and be pampered myself. I have a few types of face mask left from helping a friend move, and a few face masks from various sales I’ve picked up, so I did two. Hubs noticed a difference, and my face feels better.

I have very dry skin and very sticky face-oil, so what little oil my skin makes does not get pushed onto the surface, like with regular skin, but rather sticks on the inside of the pores and gets dark. On my nose, that goes so far as to create blackheads, and elsewhere I’ve just been getting coarser and coarser pores, which blows. I know the cheap answer to that (aspirin face masks) but ran out of Aspirin a while ago, and when I ask Hubs to get some he keeps returning with ibuprofen, which doesn’t cut it.

To clear your skin up, take one to five of the cheapest aspirin you can get (you want the coating to be thin) and put a few drops of hot water on them. After they start to crumble, you can mix it with aloe gel (it will get watery) and apply it to your face. The gel will form a sticky mask and the aspirin won’t fall off. If you don’t have/like aloe (which I ALWAYS have on hand- between the amount of cooking I do and how easily I get sunburned, I need it regularly) , some people swear by honey but I find it maddeningly itchy.

Wash your face with a flannel washcloth and warm to hot water. Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. Salicylic acid it the ingredient in all the expensive anti acne face goop, it’s a great exfoliant and makes your skin silky soft.

Another cheap treat is to pour some powdered milk into a bathtub with a couple of hand fulls of aspirin tablets. The aspirin and the lactic acid in the milk exfoliate your skin gently, and the natural fat in the milk stops this process from drying your skin out way too much. Soak for as long as you can take it, and then rub yourself all over with a scratchy washcloth. Rinse in a shower and cover yourself with a thin layer of oil- olive oil will work, but I prefer jojoba or grape seed oil. Put a little extra oil on your feet and put on socks and  your feet will be lovely that evening. This makes your skin incredibly soft and lush and wonderful, and the last time I did this Hubs kept chasing me around the house to pet me. This was cute at first but after two days I started to get annoyed!

Anyway, those are my favorite cheapy little indulgences that really seem to make a huge difference on my dry, easily irritated skin. A little splash of oil wiped over damp skin is waaay cheaper than the expensive non-scented, anti allergenic lotions I can find (half of which STILL make my skin break out or do something horrible). I think, combined, everything ends up costing less than .20 for this little luxury, which helps me not feel deprived and then spend on something stupid like… um, clay based face masks on sale.

I have a pair of friends who are doing their best to make sure that their children are well-licked rats.

One of the interesting bits of research that can be done on nature vs. nurture is on rats. Mother rats will accept ratlings that aren’t hers for the first several weeks, so you can swap them out. They took neurotic(for a rat) rat mothers and swaped babies with well-adjusted rat mommas. Turns our the well adjusted rat mommas produced well adjusted rat babies and neurotic rat mommas made for neurotic little rats. The big difference was in how much time the mother rats licked the babies. There have been other studies done that show something similar- if you take the rat babies away for a little while every day and then give them back, the rat mommas will over groom the babies, and it turns out those rats end up much more emotionally stable, willing to explore, have fewer stress hormones, and all other kids of positive changes.

I’m not going to pull up the research here but I’ve read enough primate psychology to think that grooming is just as importaint, if not more, for humans. I also have a hunch that a lot of what we consider beauty in our culture is time spent grooming with extra points for time others spend grooming you (hence, salons).

Anyway, I want to make sure that the kidlets are well licked rats. I did Girl Child’s hair when she was here and she’s been bugging B, who can’t do hair AT ALL, for hair play time. I think I will be able to spend some lovely one on one time with her in the mornings doing her hair before school. However, I can barely do MY hair…so I’ve been reading several blogs that describe how to do little girl’s hair. Some of them are fantastic.

They also make me feel a little, I don’t know… melancholy? Sad? My Mom knows nothing of how to handle hair (she’s kept her hair in a variation of a pixie for over 30 years, and finally branched into… a bob) and never did mine as a child. My clothes were usually hand-me-downs from adults that looked ridiculous on me, so I learned early on not to care about what I looked like because frankly, it hurt to much. I was never one of the well groomed children. I was always clean, but my parents were a combination of poor, ashamed, and distracted (both of them have serious Absent Minded Professor traits). My Mom was also HIGHLY conflicted about me dressing up or trying to look pretty, since she’d been the target of a child predator.

I am reminded of the bit in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows where Snape is describing James Potter. Snape’s a scraggly, unloved but brilliant child who is exquisitely sensitive, and knows exactly what he does not have and feels an odd mix of shame and stubborn pride out it.  Out walks James Potter, the treasured only child of elderly parents, who glows with a patina of being a well loved and cherished.

I want my kids to be like James (though hopefully kinder), and I strongly emphathised with Snape.

Anyway, I’m going to start doing Girl Kiddo’s hair when she moves in, even though she’s 8 and a little older than most of the girls in these blogs, they are great and totally worth reading!

http://babesinhairland.blogspot.com/ I read all the archives and spent a whole day looking at the pictures. SO CUTE!

http://hair4myprincess.blogspot.com/ Very cute little girl, and nice, clear instructions.

http://cutegirlshairstyles.blogspot.com There are also pictures there of Dad’s work, which is nice, and some of the styles are really cute and inventive (I love the 4-leaf-clover St. Patty’s day hair and the plastic-eggs-IN-the-pigtails easter hair). Seriously adorable.

http://pigsandponies.blogspot.com/ Great photos, some of the stuff is too young for Girl Child, but still- adorable.

If you know other good blogs for little girls hair for 8 year olds, let me know!

Hubs and I did a no-engagement-at-all elopement. We had never talked about marriage before, and we were sitting in his car talking about various mortgage options, at 12:00 on a Friday night. We were looking at buying a house and had one we wanted. I lamented about the fact that we couldn’t use his VA benefits because we weren’t married and it wasn’t like that was going to happen.

“Why not?” he said.

“It’s not like we’re ever going to get married!”

“I would take you to the courthouse Monday.”

I was shocked. I had been in a long term relationship where I had wanted to do the forever thing with him and he was completely against it. Hubs and I had a bit of a whirlwind romance (I think I asked him to move in with me after we were dating for 3 weeks. When I say the man can cook, I mean it!). We’d only been together for 7 months. We’d only known each other for seven months- my usual modeous operendai was to be someone’s friend for 9 months before even thinking about romance.

We spent the weekend in our underwear playing video games, watching movies, and occasionally pausing the video games to mention pros and cons. He had to work late Monday, so we went to get the paperwork Tuesday. Texas has a three day wait law, so we were going to get married Friday… until we found out we could get an exemption to that by hanging out at the courthouse.

My Mom was with me just because I’d wanted to take her on some errands that morning. If I’d known I was getting married that day, I probably wouldn’t have had her with me. I was in berkenstocks, hand-me-down seersucker pants my friend Kempe gave me, and an old black button-down shirt that I’d spilled salsa on that morning, which had decided to stain the front of my blouse. I was wearing no makeup, my hair needed a washing, and I giggled through the entire ceremony. Herb Evans was our JP and he was AWESOME. He had a great sense of humor and didn’t lecture us, and when we had no idea what to say or do and I started to panick he just said “It does not really matter, honey, you’ll be just as married in 10 minutes no matter which one you pick.” Normally people I don’t know calling me honey make me want to stab them in the eyes, but Judge Evans was really cool, and it was just perfect.

So there we were, no one there but my Mom (who was forbidden from talking), I looked like crap, he’d arranged to go into work late and was dressed like crap, and we only got one picture of the whole thing, which I don’t even have.

I called everyone on the way home, many were shocked and thought I was pulling a prank on them.  I told them we were going to have an ACTUAL wedding on the 4th of July, 2009.

Well, it’s coming up. I’m starting my new job on Monday. Hubs is interviewing for a job he’s been trying to get for two years on Monday. B and Goddess Girl are moving in around that time period. Between three new jobs, two moves, and half my bridesmaids not being able to make it because they have professional obligations they can’t weasel out of, it’s pretty hopeless.

I’ve done crap for planning. I’ve done nothing for budgeting. I know what dress I want (I had the pattern for it before I met Hubs, actually) but I don’t have the time, energy, or money to make a mock up and then make the real thing. Wedding planning seems to be designed to drive people like me away, screeming into the night.

What’s so bad about wedding planning? Stuff like this.

Bridal hair styles must be the best looking hairdos at a wedding ceremony because she is the center of attention and will be remembered forever. It is the day of her life that she has waited for since she was little girl and she’s to make it the most unforgettable affair. There are so numerous additional concerns but bridal hair styles are at the most important. Bridal updos not only have to fit the person but also match the dress, the veil, the wedding colors, the shoes and the whole atmosphere of the wedding ceremony itself.

What the fuck hell is this? I have to match my hair to my shoes? My wedding day was not the day of my life I had been waiting for since I was a little girl. I wanted to get my first car, I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to run my own company. I did all of those before meeting Hubs and none of them involved depending on someone else of my happiness. When I dreamed of being married, that’s what it was- being in a healthy relationship, with kids, and having someone to love. My dreams had nothing to do with a big, expensive party full of waste (I will be damned before I spend $500 on a dress I’m going to wear ONCE) where most of my friends will be uncomfortable.

Here’s what I think I am going to do. I think I’m going to reschedule the  bloody thing for Haloween. I’ll throw a huge party at a nightclub. I’ll have a Zombie Walk towards the venue. I’ll have a cover charge and a VIP room- invited guests get to go to the VIP room where there will be food and not have to pay cover. I’ll have some kick ass drink specials for VIP guests, and all kinds of awesome local performers do their thing.

Ugh. I am just SO TIRED of the pretty, perfect, white wedding thing. I know there are women who love it, but it’s really, really, REALLY not me. I love the Offbeat Bride Tribe but I can’t do all the planning there, either.

Ugh. Just ugh.