mad-tante

If 50% (thereabouts) of the population of the world is affected by this for what is usually decades on end, we can all talk about it, right?

Are the squeamish gone yet?

I started at age 9 and I'm still going strong. Fertile, we are, the women in my family. I use the standard complement of tampons (unscented), pads and mini-pads or "panty-liners" as they young kids call them.

Many, many years ago (I'm thinking back in my Young Miss reading days), I heard about this cup thing you could insert and um, rinse out now and then. It brought an end to the need to purchase yer monthlies, which appealed to me. -hey, when I started? I had to use the thing that you could attached to your pants front and back with safety pins and city-girls wore a belt with...WHAT THE FUCK?  I liked the idea of not having that surfboard (1" thick and 10" plus length-wise) sliding around -pins worked only minutely better than the belts, from what I've heard  with subsequent "accidents." The article said they had to be mail-ordered. I couldn't afford it at the time and forgot about it.

I stumbled upon The Keeper -damn, just restocked the monthlies and it's apparently the same thing or at least basically the same. They're available in latex and silicone and pre-birth or post-birth sizes. It's interesting. I don't know if I want to use it and my fear would be it leaks. -thereby rendering it useless  It offers a 3 month return policy (ew) but I saw one review where some woman found hers uncomfortable and has waited 5 months so far with no refund.

There are some other brands, too, but they seem to all come from something originally designed in the early 1900's.

Hasn't caught on much, eh? Consider, you can buy reusable, washable "glad rags" but the women in my family just called them "rags" -hence "on the rag" and literally used old fabric that was soaked in a bucket and washed for reuse. If you're going to be washing your own, it sounds to me like one of these "cups" -if they really don't leak could be a good buy.

Citric acid

Okay, I'll admit thinking, "vitamic C!" but I think, now, that's actually ascorbic acid. And I think I just miss-spelled that. I'll check later. -don't interrupt my train of thought, it's hard enough to keep me on topic

I noticed a bunch of home-made shampoos mentioned using citric acid and water as a rinse. In the first 47 mentions, it all seemed to be used as a conditioner. Finally, after reading pages upon pages -including books; no, I'll not give attribution because they're all so slim in information and they all say exactly the same thing  I thought to stop looking at it from the health and beauty side and go at it from the more science/ chemistry side. Please remember, gentle unscientific or science-y friends, I got the Special Test in school and came away "under par," shall we say: I didn't test into Chemistry 101 or anything harder that Botany, which was set aside for the stoners.

Using only the internet, I pounced upon WikiP as everyone does, and promptly came to the realization that it was a bit over my head, too. I think it's designed more as a reminder for post-Chem 101 students. I'm "pre-Chem 101" so, I looked elsewhere and found this. -with a name like wisegeek, how could I go wrong?

In MT-style, here's what I've gleaned: citric acid, even diluted, doesn't sound like something I want to pour over my head. Sure, I get that it's acid and I think we "do" that to reset the ph level after a Borax-based "shampoo" (really Borax with water poured over it then use the water, NOT including Borax at the bottom of the mixing container). I read somewhere that lemon juice nor vinegar is strong enough to reset the ph after your Borax quasi-solution... This makes Borax not sound like something I want to pour over my head.

Granted, both of these substances seem very safe for the environment and that's important if you live on a farm like I do where our water supply is directly affected by our sewage as in "right there."

Scared yet? Oh, bonjour les pompiers! Check out what's in a common bottle of shampoo from the salon. Um, that's like everything.  I'm not promoting products from this distributor but they have a super-quick list of common products and some of the ingredients you wouldn't want to use on your body or in your body.

I'm just not ready to try Borax on my head. The thing is, knowing myself, I'll probably try it on a whim and certainly once use isn't going to harm me... I don't like the idea of using citric acid, though. It really seems to me that vinegar would be a suitable rinse, if it's really needed. This is when I really miss not having any chemistry background because I love trying to do things myself.

MT cut the asparagus."

When I wasn't trying to fit in a week's worth of home-cleaning -failing into one day along with the charity H4H stool thing and writers workshop, I decided to cook a pot of beans. My father came to me and said the asparagus needed cut so, I ran out and did that, too. -I'm a good doobie...and he's Pa Kettle

•For city-folk, here's how asparagus grows (in spring, later it grows up over my head and gets all feathery-looking).

Cut it with a bit left sticking out of the ground.

Then, take your "mess of asparagus"don't know if that term is used outside of the Ozarks or not but it basically means enough food for a meal; ie: "She brought a mess of fish to her mother." inside and proceed to look for anything untoward.

Particularly in our area (perhaps everywhere), there are these

wee black things on some stalks of asparagus; they're bug eggs or something and they're really stuck on well. It's better to cut them off or toss the whole thing, as shown.

Cleaned and ready to cook: I like to cut mine down farther but it ruins the "prettiness" of the whole stalks so, I stopped taking shots there.

•And here's the state of the herbs (and lettuce):

1. the paint

I'm really hoping that link works because it's to all the "Habitat for Humanity" project I'm posting updates about at my creative tinkering joint at lj -not to be confused with a separate project of creativity that's only iPhone photography

2.  cooking beans

Take dried beans (or peas, home-dried or store-bought) and put them on the counter to pick through. You'll find bits of broken beans, dried up seed pods and even stones. Remove them or anything that isn't somewhat consistent with the majority of your beans to the side.

Cover with cold water and bring to a quick boil for 5-10 minutes. You want to soften the outside of the beans but not split them. -ahem, like I did because I was doing other things instead of minding them

Drain and cover with fresh hot water and place back on your stove-top.

 

Add salt to your taste and seasoning. I like to put in 1/2 strip of bacon but since beggars can't be choosers, I was gifted this big-arsed hunk of smoked ham. I gladly received it and dunked it in the batch.

Cover, bring to boil and back off the heat -- cook covered for an hour or so and then take off the top to let the water reduce. Cook for about another 30 minutes or hour -- you can take out a bean or two and taste. If they're al dente, that's bad. Cook longer. You're not going for mushy, either. It's a hit and miss. Some days take longer than others. It's not you, it's the beans you started with. By the way, this is about pinto beans and certain other types take longer or shorter.

Butter beans, for example, take shorter and will cook up into porridge, if you're not careful! The finished product was very steamy! Serve as desired and remember to let cool before putting in the fridge.

mariser

to complete the meme,

bold the ones you've read on your own,

underline the ones you had to read for school,

italicize the ones you started but didn't finish,

bold and italicize the ones you hated,

bold and underline those you'd recommend

strike through those you'd like to/plan to read
~~~~~~~
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi : a novel

The Name of the Rose

Ulysses (partial and gave up, I was 13)

Don Quixote

Moby Dick

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

The Tale of Two Cities

The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler's Wife

The Iliad

Emma

The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations

American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian : a novel

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible : a novel

1984

Angels & Demons

The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (partial, think I was about 14)

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Dune

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes : a memoir

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake : a novel

Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

The Hobbit

In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers (plus the rest of the series)

-My high school had no required reading list per se. I was shocked by all the other students at university who had read "all these classics." Since I worked my way through school, and graduated highest in my class, I didn't have time for anything that didn't pay a bill or go toward credit. The year after I graduated I took a "recommended reading" list from a magazine and read all that I could find and others that weren't on this list. I'm actually not a "great reader" but I was that year. It helped that I didn't have a television.

What are you most looking forward to this weekend?

Writers Workshop with SLWG! ...and sanding, priming and doing test-painting for my new charity project.

I don't know what the fruck they're doing with him but he's so cute I almost died watching it -- and re-watched 3 times!

May Eve: sister tilled, Pa Kettle cast seeds.

Get yourself one. Pa Kettle was freaking out because with our late spring, seeds weren't in the ground yet. I got a call at work demanding that I cancel all plans and come straight home to till for the family farm -- it was May Eve and to Hillbillies from the Ozarks, your seeds had BETTER be in the ground. La knows what could happen; the gods or the Good Folk might go away ne'er to return.