Handmade soap for sale

Handmade cold-process soap for sale! It would make a lovely mother's or father's day gift. My soap friend Ruth Nellis and I have a few options available for you, $4 for a 4ish ounce bar. Current kinds are:

-Nourishing Butters Soap - an extravagant experience of nourishment with the comforting aroma of chocolate. Cocoa and shea butter moisturize and soften the skin and the soul.

-Honeyed Ale with Citrus - this handsome soap is made with beer and barley. It is a masculine scent with exfoliating barley and honey.

-Cedar & Saffron - an earthy aroma with a spicy note. Joel's current favorite.

More to come!! Talk to me for more details!  I could possibly even ship places, if you pay for shipping too.

Thaigers

Oh my GOODNESS. Just LOOK what we got to do yesterday!

There are very few things left that I ask of life. This was probably one of the best 3 days of my life, including my wedding day and the day I gave birth to a precious baby (who did not get to pet the tigers).
Big tiger. Actually only 19 months old! She liked the belly scratch.
This adorable baby tiger was the same age as my little baby, and about the same size. They both have orange hair, and they are both so cuddly and adorable!!!!!!!! Can I take it home?? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I love it.

first things first

Joel's first day of school!

Joel started his new job today - Adjunct English Instructor at Green River Community College. Our home is full of thankfulness and peace right now, with the timing of his job being so perfect (and so last minute! A rushed syllabus was created, a commute quickly established, and a chair at home with the cat is now empty during the day).

The transition of the seasons, with the blustery comfort of autumn just setting in, is really reflected in our life right now. Joel's new job, the baby coming soon, me settling in to the wonderful idea of a long (by American standards) maternity leave... many changes, but all such comforting and peaceful changes.
Joel found today that he likes, enjoys, appreciates his teaching position. He is fulfilled and satisfied in his role, which is such a surprising thing for the both of us after years of uncertain times in academia. None of you in the academic world will see his job as particularly spectacular, but it is exactly what we have been hoping for and needing. An entrance, an opportunity, a chance for Joel to do what he has felt has been his passion - teaching introductory level courses. And a step towards us being able to transition from relying on my salary to relying on his. That is something, however old fashioned it may seem, that we've both craved for some time.

This is a celebration, friends! Have a dram of scotch in honor of Joel today!(Other photos are from our annual trip hiking at Mt. Rainier. Oh, out of town friends, we must take you there.)

Our Contribution to Society

I believe that all of the appropriate family members, family friends, church family, etc. have now been personally notified of this event and that it is now safe/appropriate to document it on the blog and facebook. Here is the e-mail Heather sent out a couple of weeks ago:

Hello dear friends,

Joel and I are delighted to tell you we're pregnant!

We're 13 weeks along, and the baby is due October 21st. Everything looks great so far, no problems at all. When we saw the baby on the ultrasound at 7 weeks, it looked very much like a seahorse. Despite how adorable seahorses are, we're rooting for the end product to be a baby.

Incidentally, we found out we were pregnant the same day we found out Joel passed his PhD (One labor ending, another beginning...).

We are beyond grateful for the love and support you all have given us in our lives and marriage so far. We welcome you to celebrate with us as our lives change once again!

Love,
Heather & Joel Shaver

Biggest Kitchen Table -- Food

I appreciate the comments on the last post regarding Living Deliberately and Money. So many of you comment on Facebook, I wonder if you realise I actually haven't been on facebook for over a year, and this is actually a post on our blog! But I do get and appreciate the comments, all the same.

I relate so much to D and T, who both related to how living a transplanted lifestyle makes simplifying life and belongings a lot more... easier? necessary? A little of both, I suppose. Moving to a different country is one of those things where you do begin to realise you are not defined by your possessions. We don't collect much unnecessary junk. We don't buy lots of things, because we realise we'll just have to get rid of most of it again when we leave here. Any spending decisions are truly intentional - is this worth shipping back to the states?

I love that T brought up her intentional choice not to have a TV. We're the same. I think it's been so good and I highly recommend not having one, at least for a while, especially at the beginning of a marriage. That is such a magnificent, underrated way to simplify life, begin to establish what is important to you, and think about spending your time intentionally instead of letting it get sucked away by the wires.
Biggest Kitchen Table -- Food
Today's discussion is on food. I am intimidated to start this blog post, because I want to keep it short, and food is probably the one subject I think the most about. There is so much to say! So I think I will focus on my accomplishments in this area in the past year or so, and my goals for the next year or so.

Things I am glad I've changed in the last year:

• I've begun growing! I have my two tomato plants, and lots of spinach. I planted lettuce but the aphids enjoyed those and as such I have had to abandon them. I'm doing it the good old fashioned way without chemicals.
  
• I've learned to like: mushrooms, tomatoes, plain yogurt, Greek yogurt, green olives, balsamic vinegar. (I know, I know, how could I not like those things before?)
  
• We make lots more homemade.
• I make our breakfast granola. I feel like this improves my day so much! I love doing this!
• Read Nourishing Traditions. I've started applying her ideas more to our cooking and eating. She really gives convincing arguments for fermentation, sprouting seeds/beans, etc.
• We cook mostly everything from scratch.
• We buy local a lot more, and are a lot more conscientious when it comes to this. It's fairly easy to do here, besides the issue of citrus. I definitely draw the line when it comes to foods from south africa or south america; that's pretty much the furthest away you get here. We can get everything we need from the UK or Spain at the furthest. Except limes.

Goals - in the next year or as soon as possible:

• Clean and reorganise our cupboard. It's shameful, really. Full of all the pots/cooking things, as well as all our grains/cans/pasta/flour/etc. So haphazard.
  
• Defrost our fridge. I don't even want to talk about why we have to defrost our fridge. Sometime I think I'll do a post on our fridge, to show you what we have to work with here. It has about 3 cubic inches of space. I'm exaggerating just a little.
  
• Try growing a couple new vegetables. I expect that during the next growing season, we'll be living with the parents. My growing capacity will still be limited although I will have a lot more outdoor space, at least for pots.
• Grow garlic
  
• Buy predominately organic dairy products
• Research & start composting. It's just impossible in this flat, but I'm trying to research a bit more and figure out what would be feasible to do once we leave this place.
  

Future goals - long term:

• Use open-pollinated / heirloom seeds. In other words, the way our grandparents used to grow things. Keep the same seeds from the same produce year after year. The books Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore's Dilemma convinced me of this. I might start this with tomatoes next year.
  
• Grow zucchini/courgette, more tomatoes, rhubarb, beans, squashes, onions, garlic, cabbage, lots more veg.
• Learn more about taking care of soil.

I think I'll cut it short from here. Food is one of those subjects that I can go on and on about. I think many of you are passionate about it as well. Let's keep encouraging each other and learning from each other in this area! A few of us have become fairly proficient at living in a small place while still trying to live within our morals when it comes to food and food systems.

The sky... this is one thing I will miss about living here. Not that this particular photo is award-winning, but the sky here tends to be quite outspoken. During the summer, the sunsets last for hours. The winters have very abrupt, very magnificent sunsets and sunrises. In the winter I find joy in watching the sunrise from the bus stop on my way to work. In the summer, the closest we see to a sunrise is the dusk after the official sunset. Clouds. The clouds stretch, reach out, exist, and when they aren't dominating the sky, they showcase lovely light and colour. I will miss Scotland's sky.

Tonight I went to a friend's birthday night out, came home pretty early, and sat on the hospital's ledge at the corner of our street, watching the sky change colours. Joel is at a gig, so I had the luxury of independence and loneliness. Who can feel lonely when watching such beauty? (no offiense to Joel's company!) While I was sitting quietly, an old Scottish woman walked by and started talking to me (as they so often do). She told me she was going to pick some grass for her cat, that it helped her stomach, and went on to tell me about how she so would love to let her cat outside, but the Cat Protection said there was too much traffic. So she settles for bringing her cat grass. The woman told me she often gets grass from Bearsden (just outside of Glasgow), that's how spoiled she is! I love these people who share their life stories for no apparent reason. I will miss that too.
This is Joel, with the rhubarb cake I made on his lap. I don't want to gloat over the fact that he's slowly beginning to like rhubarb, I really just want to show how sacrificial his love is, to be prepared to like rhubarb, for my sake. This is truly a wonderful man, folks. Seriously, have any of your partners been prepared to give up a lifelong adamant detestation of such an assertive food?

Okay, now let's address the matter at hand: The Biggest Kitchen Table discussion. Today is on Living Deliberately, and Money.

Living Deliberately: This is about living with intention, having your life goals in mind in your everyday actions. It is a departure from living for the moment. For me, I first began thinking about this and practicing it in high school. My close friend who acted as a spiritual and personal mentor to me, Lori, taught me about what it means to live intentionally, and caused me to really meditate on this. I believe we do fairly well at this. It is about a balance - not living fully in the future, but living the present while thinking about and preparing for the future. My goals are varied, alive, and I like to think simple. I want to grow my own vegetables - I've started that this year, with windowpots full of spinach and tomato plants. Just a small step, but a step nonetheless. It helps me learn some things slowly, and hopefully in the future I'll have access to some real dirt to grow things in.

Money: Joel and I do well managing our money, out of necessity, and a conviction that 'your money is where your heart is'. We have been given hard lessons to learn in our married life, centred about being dependent and accepting help from others. I hope this prepares us for a future in which we are able to help others in the same way.

We're very careful with our money, and apart from bills like rent and electricity, and my student loan payments, the only thing we really spend money on is food. Food is an area we would like to spend less money on, by making more things ourselves, and growing things ourselves. The spinach has been a success. The main hindrance to making more things homemade is the time factor. As we both essentially work full time, it is difficult to live up to our aspirations We often experiment with this; we were making our own bread for a time earlier in the spring; Joel has made yogurt on occassion; we were in the habit of a weekly from-scratch pizza night.. but when things get busy, these things fall away and we end up buying bread. In that case, we buy nice bread - we tend to buy Polish bread that doesn't have any preservatives - but of course buying things is more expensive, and often not as good quality, as homemade. Both of us look forward to a time when Joel is working, and hopefully I'll have a bit mroe time in the home to do things like this. Food is very important to me (you may have notices). So I look forward to tomorrow when Rhonda looks at the food issue.
Our money goals are essentially: -to eliminate debt (all of the student loan nature) -to have a savings account

I hope this isn't too much information, I know we don't usually share so much on the blog. Anyone have any thoughts about any of this?

This evening I got the chance to do some things in the kitchen. I made a lasagne which is now in the fridge ready to be baked for tomorrow's dinner. I made rhubarb crumble (Nigella's recipe from Feast) with some early rhubarb from Yorkshire I got for cheap. The crumble is is cooling on the stove now. I also had time to put away the clean dishes and wash all of the newly dirty ones I created tonight.

Being able to do household tasks, particularly food-related ones, really gives me contentment. I feel confident that I am coping with life well when the flat is reasonably tidy and the food situation is not completely erratic. I do find it very difficult to keep up with domestic tasks when I work full time. Weekday evenings are notoriously bad for being able to cook a dinner as well as tidy and still feel like Joel and I get some time to talk to each other. So often, things are not as tidy or organised as I would like. However, those things are less important than building up our marriage and ensuring we are on the same page and don't feel neglected by each other. Often, we leave the housework (but probably not as often as Joel would like :-).

I was able to do so much this evening because -we had leftovers for dinner -Joel went over to Michael's this evening to get advice on fixing his bass -my evening event was cancelled.
So you can see this is not generally possible to get to accomplish so much on a weekday evening.

I consider this evening an energising break. Does that sound strange, when I spent it doing tidying, cleaning, and cooking? That is what I enjoy doing. Mostly the cooking part, although I do really enjoy washing dishes when I am not rushed and overwhelmed by lots to do.

I came across this article that I had read a couple of months ago, and thought it was worth sharing with you. It is about the value of homemaking/householding. Another excellent read is this article from Rhonda at Down to Earth (which incidentally would be my most recommended blog).

In the last couple years Joel and I have become more and more wanting to be responsibly domestically. This includes eating food we make ourselves, so we can avoid additives and get more natural flavour and nutrition; cleaning with natural ingredients like baking soda and lemon juice to we don't use unnecessary chemicals in the home; and making it recreational to cook. Incidentally, all of these things not only ensure we are healthier, but they also save money. There are loads of areas we have to improve in, mostly because we don't have time to do all the things we would like, like baking all our own bread (although that was working well for a monthish in the late winter).

The challenge we have at the moment is that both of us are 'working' in some form or another, and thus we do not have a homemaker. We hope that in the future I will be able to stay at home, and this will be a priority for us. I look forward to being able to focus more on making wise household decisions and building my skills in areas that are often forgotten these days.

I know many of you who read (women and men) are very skilled at various aspects of homemaking. Do you find contentment in it? Fulfillment? Joy?
Of course if you have any tips of easy ways to make our lives simpler and more homemade, do share!

Okay I suppose I better get started on the rhubarb crumble, seeing as Joel doesn't like rhubarb!

Update: Mm that rhubarb crumble is delicious, with custard (storebought, not homemade!) over it. I think Joel may even like this one (though he will never admit it!).

PS Grandma B, I would have used your rhubarb crisp recipe but somehow have lost it. :-)

My Muse is a dud

There is among poets a time-honored tradition of writing one's best work in dreams; the most famous example is Xanadu, which came to Coleridge in (what we will call, for argument's sake) a dream. Apparently, the very plan for Kubla Khan's pleasure dome was itself inspired by a dream (this from the all-knowing Wiki).

Upon waking this morning, I realized that my muse had struck in the night, and I immediately called Heather to pen down the lines I had been given in my sleep. The poem that appeared on the page suggests to me that the muse enjoys a greater synergy with subjects who, like Coleridge and John Lennon, are willing to invest the extra capital in chemical aids. It is possible that the historical pattern will hold true, and that this will be my greatest-ever work of poetry. Fortunately, my career depends solely upon my prose skills.

I'd like to add that my muse seems to have been consulting the works of Isaac Watts, which collaboration I fear I may have brought upon myself: his hymns are the subject of a large portion of my thesis.

It is with mixed feelings that I submit, for your edification and for posterity, my dream-poem, which I wrote upon a phantom chalk-board below my friend Tim Petersen's composition in Icelandic, a work of incomparable genius which is lost forever in the mists of slumber:

I am the earth.
The earth was a tree.
Its people were happy
'Til I sat on a bee.

They cried out with one voice
To object to the thing,
And I found that their noise
Was as bad as the sting.

Ready for another dream?

I dreamed that someone made us all (at UCU) some kind of orange drink for lunch and we were all drinking them through straws, trying to see how fast we could drink them, and at the same time trying to discover/climb some kind of mountain that was either in Greece or Essex (I was having trouble reading the map that for some reason was displayed in my head) and had some kind of shrine on/near it that was supposed to give us experience points. Meanwhile, Josh (Holly's brother) came over to see about delivering or filming some kind of claymation for which we were going to possibly use Ringo Starr as a voice actor. When Josh noticed that we had straws he wanted to have a battle with them (by rolling them up and popping them, then hitting each other). I wasn't too excited about that. Then I noticed that I had a TON of mail. And for some reason Coldplay was playing through the whole thing.

Let me know when you've had enough...

Dream Trend

Let's all jump on this bandwagon!

Last night I dreamed that I was asleep, and my sister came in the room and woke me up, and asked what I dreamed. I smiled because I had had a really awesome dream, and I knew that when I woke up I'd be able to put it in my blog and it would be way more awesome than everyone else's dreams. I had her type up my dream for me so I could copy it and paste it later into my blog. She laughed the whole time because my dream was so funny. Then she left and I realized that it was still pretty early, so I went back to sleep.

That's all I can remember about my dream. I had another one, too, and it was something about monocles (I blame that on my discovery of this jewel yesterday). I don't remember what, though.

Man that dream in my dream was funny, though.