Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Things

From the Readers Digest Web Site

Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Things

Clean messes. Repair problems. Save money and time. 2,317 uses for common household products — all over your house. These household items have an amazing number of uses.

A - Adhesive tape to Aspirin
B - Baby Oil to Buttons
C - Candles to Curtain Rings
D - Dental floss to Dustpans
E - Earrings to Epsom salts
F - Fabric softener to Funnels
G - Garden hoses to Golf gear
H - Hair conditioner to Hydrogen peroxide
I - Ice cream scoop to Ice scrapers
J - Jar lids to Jars
K - Ketchup to Kool-aid

L - Ladders to Lip balm
M - Magazines to Mustard
N - Nail polish to Newspaper
O - Oatmeal to Oven mitts
P - Paint brushes to Pots and pans
R - Return address labels to Rubbing alcohol
S - Salt to Sugar
T - Talcum powder to Twist ties
U - Umbrellas
V - Vanilla extract to Vodka
W - Wallpaper to Window cleaner
Y - Yogurt
Z - Zippers to Zucchini
Browse Super Items: These household items have an amazing number of uses.

Found this on Bring Back Simplicity, one of the email groups at Yahoo, that I belong to,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bringbacksimplicity/.

Independance Days Challenge, week 2

1. Plant something - Nothing this time.
2. Harvest something – Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Green Peppers, Green Beans, Basil
3. Preserve something - Canned 2 batches of diced tomatoes, dried 4 batches of basil
4. Reduce waste – Accidentally ate the wrapper on a cupcake. Does that count?
5. Preparation and Storage – Stocked up on toiletries and paper products, double bought 1/3 of my dry goods
6. Build Community Food Systems - Nothing this time.
7. Eat the Food – Pickles, tomatoes, cucumbers, BBQ pulled venison sandwiches with home grown potato fry's

Killing Zucchini

Am I the only one who can kill 8 zucchini plants. They lived a short promising life until they committed suicide. And what promise they had. Such tender looking baby zucchini’s peaking out under lush leaves. Then a few days later they were as dead as a doornail. Haven’t a clue as to what I did. I can grow cucumbers, green peppers, greenbeans,and tomatoes. Except the expensive heirloom tomato plants that I ordered from the seed catalog. their outside soaking up the sun with a few flowers and nothing else. They don’t seem to get any bigger, add more flowers or drop the ones they already have, I’m beginning to think the catalog company sent me silk tomato plants instead of real ones. Maybe I need to get my glasses checked so I can tell if they’re silk plants, wait a minute my granddaughter’s has excellent eyesight, I’ll ask her to check.

Free Online Class

I spent the evening with the FoodSaver®, vacuuming up bags of dried rice, pinto beans and mashed potato’s for the pantry. I picked basil leaves from my garden and have the 1st batch in the dehydrator and now I have to can some relish and some diced tomatoes from my garden. I was looking around the internet for a diced tomato canning recipe when I came across this free online course on preserving offered thru

the National Center for Home Food Preservation,

http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/index.html##

I’m all signed up, I really need a brush up on the new canning techniques.

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Here’s the preview the first steps of the course.

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and the how to for signing up.
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Announcing a free, self-paced, online course

for those wanting to learn more about home canning and preservation.
Introduction to Food Preservation

1. General Canning
2. Canning Acid Foods
3. Canning Low-Acid Foods

This course is offered in the University of Georgia WebCT system.

UGA requires registration for you to receive a login.

I made this bread

I still can’t believe it. I’ve made bread the old fashioned way, and have a bread machine and use it often in the fall and winter. But I never thought I’d find a way to make bread as simple as, drop in all the ingredients, mix with a spoon, dump it in a large plastic container, then let it sit for a couple of hours, put it in the frig, and when the mood strikes me, scoop out a piece of dough about the size of a grapefruit and sprinkle it with flour then pop it in the oven and tadah you've got bread.
I saw the author, Jeff Hertzberg, on a morning show demonstrating his recipe from his book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and I couldn’t believe it was this simple.

I did some searching on the web and found his website at http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/. It still looked to easy so I searched some more and couldn’t believe all the positive comments I read about his bread. On top of that I found many websites and blogs that posted his recipe from his book, a blog I found listing the recipe even had a comment from Jeff Hertzberg in which he said this:

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jhertz10 said...
Wow Alexandra, beautiful loaves. Thanks for trying our method-- I'm Jeff Hertzberg, one of the co-authors of the book. Come visit us on the web at www.artisanbreadinfive.com, and you can post questions into any "Comments" field, or into the "Bread Questions" field on the left side of the homepage.

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I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t even to care if you posted the recipe out of his book on the web, hey, why buy the book then? Well after I baked his bread the first time I was on my way to the bookstore to buy the book and try our his other bread recipes. Since then I’ve baked more bread as loafs, artisan style and sticky cinnamon rolls, next it will be pizza and I can’t wait yum.
There’s a great tutorial with the recipe and lots of informative pictures at Alexandra's Kitchen blog, http://alexandracooks.blogspot.com/2008/06/artisan-bread-in-five-minutes-day.html

Who would have tunk it, Simple living this easy.

First Day at the County Fair

Women's Barrel Racing

My first pony ride

Can I keep him please

Please, can we keep him...pleeeeeeease?

This is fun, but I still want that monkey!

and it all ends with the rain :(

Number One Use For A Husband

Number one use for a husband at 1:45 in the morning. It’s funny, I’m a nurse who has in the past, worked in a maximum security prison. I turned 45 years old in Army boot camp and served 8 years in the Army reserves, Heck I even qualified as a sharp shooter. So can someone, besides my poor put upon husband, understand why I have to wake him up an 1:45 in the morning to get the poor little scared mouse out of the bathtub so I can go pee. Usually every fall our 120 year old house gets a few field mice as borders. It’s starts to get cold at night and the field mice pack their bags and move to Beverly, or in our case, my house. My cats get busy hunting and leave breakfast for us on the kitchen floor. Then my son or husband sweetly remove the deceased and maybe tell me about it later. But hey now, It’s freakin July. Our weather has been so weird. Usually the high for now is in the 90’s, so far this month we’ve only had 2 days in the 90’s, most have been in the low to mid 80’s with a few high 70’s tossed in, and that’s the highs. I had to bring out more blankets for our beds at night. This weather has my body clock so confused that for the last 2 days I’ve been doing my spring cleaning again. Which is probably good since I didn’t do it this spring. Oh well, at least my husband understands me, he’s my HERO.

My Obsession

What's your obsession? Mine’s composition books, you remember those black and white marbly notebooks we used in early grade school. Every year when the school supplies come out I just can’t resist them, they’re like candy to me. I always have visions of writing toothy tomes of great substance, yea right. They all sit lined up neatly, only thing neat in my house, on a shelf at my desk waiting for those toothy tomes. Right now I have 9 of them and that isn’t counting all the ones around the house with the first couple of pages jotted on.
They come in fantastic designs now
that call out to me every new school season.
As I was writing this I did an image search on the internet and found that I can do so much more with my obsession. On lindamollyellen's photostream I found this delight. Wow I can scrap book my toothy tome covers, a new obsession?

How about the fabric covers that I found at cerulean.viridian' s photostream , and I happen to be in a sewing mood.

Now I can bring my obsession into a new universe, hey from what I found on the internet, I’m not the only on who loves Composition books.
heeheehee

Independance Days Challenge, week one

I’ve been seeing a lot of Independence Days Challenge participants on blogs and started to investigate it. It is a challenge started by Sharon Astyk, on her blog called Casaubon’s Book. In her blog she’s stated that it is “ desperately needed that we do declare our independence from the globalizing, totalitarian, destructive, toxic, dangerous agriculture” She then challenged herself and everyone else to participate in a Food Independence Days challenge that she started. “That all of us try to do one thing every day to create Food Independence.” She then goes on to explain the how to’s of the challenge at http://sharonastyk.com/2008/04/29/independence-days-my-first-challenge/

I couldn't wait to start so here's my first week:

1. Plant something - Nothing this time.
2. Harvest something – Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Green Peppers.
3. Preserve something - I made some Gherkin pickles, and 2 batches of Tomato Sauce
4. Reduce waste – Bought my Pepsi in aluminum bottles and will recycle them by using them as water bottles.
5. Preparation and Storage – Home baked bread, Pickles, Tomato Sauce, Bought an old metal drip coffee pot at a garage sale.
6. Build Community Food Systems - Nothing this time.
7. Eat the Food – Pickles, tomatoes, cucumbers, venison steaks from deer season.

Pepsi And My Smaller Footprint

I love Pepsi, and I'm trying to minimize our footprint, so I fell in love with these new aluminum bottles put out by Pepsi. First I get to drink the Pepsi, then I'll use the bottles, with some cork stoppers I bought, as some great water bottles. Can't wait for our next trip to the zoo with my DD, the grand kids and our picnic basket filled with our new water bottles.