OK, gonna try again. It's getting to be summer here, and I'm feeling a new surge of ambition and productivity. I think in the winter I get the lazies, and just really want to hunker down in my house and wait out the cold. Now that it's getting warmer and the days are longer, I find myself getting excited about new projects, trying new things, just getting out there and doing stuff.
I've been investigating food storage- canning, freezing, once-a-month cooking. I think part of it is this new economical turn that we've been taking as a society- reducing the costs of everyday living while still trying to live well. The husbeast and I have been doing this for years, but it's only recently that we find ourselves with adequate space in our house to do it more efficiently. Tip? Side-by-side freezer/fridges are useless for this venture. They hold nothing. They look cool as hell, but they are USELESS. Currently we save what we can in our skinny-ass freezer, but every time you open the door, things come cascading out on you in a frozen food avalanche. I'd like to start buying what's on sale, storing it and then cooking from it when money gets tight (and it will, 'cause it always does), but we've only been able to do so much with our limited capacity. I have been saving up for a freezer chest so I can start really storing things.
So where would this freezer go? Hopefully in my basement where the washer and dryer currently reside. We've been remodeling our mudroom to be an actually functioning room and not just a lean-to filled with insulation and random crap. One side will be a laundry area and the other? ANOTHER BATHROOM!!! HUZZAH!!! We seriously require another bathroom now that the husbeast has been getting early-morning gigs. Also, we have a potty-trainer now (another HUZZAH! for that) and hauling ass up the stairs to get her to the loo before we have an accident is going to just get harder and harder. All the structural work is done, thanks to my husband, father-in-law, and rockstar good friend who was a finish carpenter for years before she settled down in the insurance world. This past fall, they knocked down the existing structure (kept the roof on it, which was in pretty good shape), rebuilt the foundation (part of it was being held up by a rusty metal pitchfork, no lie) and framed and walled it all in. Husbeast ran the electrical, and now we're just waiting for the stars (or, in our case, the money and time) to line up so we can get a plumber in there to run the pipes. Hopefully that happens soon...
...because I'm pregnant again. Not an entirely horrifying turn of events, in fact, we're now quite happy about it. I did freak right out when we discovered this, mostly because of the money. We're living pretty close to the edge now as it is, and weren't really planning on having another kid until we were in a more financially stable position. But hey, who doesn't say that about nearly every big step, right? I said it before we bought our house. I said it again before we started trying to have Boogie. I was in the middle of saying it when we were contemplating buying a 4-door car. And I'm saying it now, even though I'm not only OK with having another child, but actually getting pretty excited about the fun part of pregnancy starting soon. I'm only at the 14-week mark, so only a little preggo belly and hip discomfort so far, none of the really cool moving around and seeing what gender it is yet. Financially, it is going to be a challenge. Especially right now, the way things are going with the economy (or should I say, "THE ECONOMY," as it's often referred to in "THE MEDIA" as some sort of independently sentient being that demands the attention of all). But it can't be any worse than when the husbeast came back from tour and had to re-establish himself with this area's entertainment companies in order to start getting gigs again, or when we first bought the house and had to take on a tenant to help make ends meet. It's probably why I'm all about yard sales, and home gardening, canning, once-a-month cooking and deep-freezing items bought in bulk right now. Everybody's kinda freaking out right now, right? We're no different, unless we let it get us down and keep us from surviving. Now husbeast and I have not one, but two little people depending on us. But if you hear me start talking about building a bunker in the basement to protect us from the mayhem of an eventual financial collapse, please feel free to sit me down and re-introduce me to reality.
It ain't all bad, it's actually pretty great. That last paragraph sounded bleak as hell, and really, I don't feel that way. It's just that whenever I find myself in a new obsession, I like to try and figure out what spurred it. When I was a kid, my mom did lots of canning and freezing-- tomatoes, strawberry preserves (the most awesome ones ever), sweet corn. I still have flashbacks of sweating in our kitchen, slicing corn off the cob to put in freezer bags, stealing some of the blocks of corn kernels that got stuck together, which tasted so sweet and good because they were only just a little bit cooked (blanched, really) and still had a bit of the starchiness in them. One year she tried pickles, both the dill kind and bread and butter pickles. I think she even did beets once. We had a pantry in the basement filled with all these goodies, and even to my trivial childlike mind, I used to think it was pretty cool to have this stuff in the middle of a dreary Maryland February when nothing was fresh. I want to do that. I want to have our sour cherries in December when the tree's been bare for months already. I want to start making our tomato sauce with tomatoes I peeled and canned in the fall. They have a warmth to them that even a few months in a canning jar can't quite take away. When Boogie says, "pi-kul, mommy!" I want it to be one of the pickles we pickled together on a warm early fall day (or maybe even early summer, if I can gather up enough pickle jars). I want to be the one who gives away jars of preserves and bottles of homemade hooch for Christmas (we did that one year, made cherry liqueur from the cherries on our cherry tree).
Maybe it's 'cause I'm crafty. Maybe it's 'cause that's how I was raised. Maybe I'm just insane and overly ambitious to think that ANY of this is going to happen given my current to-do-list overload. Who cares? I want to do it. Let's see if I can.
