Such is the tale at Chez Siberia. Earlier this spring, I hauled out the garden fork, the shovel and the hoe, only to find that only one of them was in one piece. Since the hoe is put together differently, I’m doing this post on the garden fork and will handle the hoe as a separate issue. Basically, the garden fork itself (that is, the metal tines, the collar, etc.) is in great shape, so it is worth putting a new handle on it.

First task (and the one that actually took the longest) was finding a handle that would actually fit this garden fork, which the DH and I bought from Smith and Hawken sometime in their early days, in the early 80s, when they were concentrating on garden tools and had not yet gotten into the ‘we sell lifestyle’ thing. The old S&H actually no longer exists; the brand is now licensed to Target (and I think readers can figure out what that means in terms of where things are going to manufactured). But at this time, S&H had their garden tools manufactured in the UK by the worthily famous Bulldog Tools. Solid forged steel, with a solid wood D-handle, as you can see from the broken off bit in the photo above. I tried everywhere I could think of to find the same sort of handle in the right size; no luck. I finally found a D-handle replacement at our local feed store. It is not a perfect fit, as you can see from the process photos, but it was a good deal cheaper than replacing the entire garden fork with an equivalent quality (if I were able to find it in the US) and puts the tool back to work again.

As you can see from this photo, the original wooden handle was held on with a rivet, which for those of us who are not familiar, is a nail-shaped piece of metal with a mushroom shaped top at one end and a slightly hollowed out end at the other. The way riveting works in general is that you put the the rivet through a hole holding two things together, flip the business over onto a hard surface and give the hollow end a couple of good hard smacks with a hammer. The hollow end will flatten out over the hole and hole the rivet into the two pieces. Voila!

To take care of this garden fork, we will need:
1) The DH – I don’t have a workbench with a bench-vice to hold things in place while I work with them, so this is a two person job.
2) A big nail and a hammer.
3) A drill of some sort with a bit that matches the hole in the metal part of the fork that the original rivet was in.
4) A handle that comes with another rivet.
5) A stone (not a wood) chisel.

Step one: Get the old rivet and the rest of the old handle out of the business end of the garden fork.
Brace the metal part on a work surface where you will be able to get the area with the rivet out into the open.

Step two: Taking the nail, put that over the non-mushroom-y end of the rivet and keep hammering it until it comes out the other side. It will probably be rusty; there will undoubtedly be left over wood handle in there. if you’ve got a bit of oil (3-in-1, olive, old auto lubricants, whatever), put a bit of that around the rivet and that will help it come out.

Step three: Turn the metal part of fork over until you see the seam in the collar which attached the handle to the pointy bits of the fork. It will be partially opened by the original handle. Taking your chisel and hammer (make sure the fork is secured with a bench vice or another person), put the chisel into the seam and give it a couple of good ‘clouts’ (as my mom used to say) with the hammer; this will loosen the rest of the handle and you can shake or pull it out.

Step four: Putting the new handle in. Take off the rivet which will probably be attached with tape or a little plastic bag to the handle. Look at the shape of the collar (it will be either straight or have a slight curve). Look at your handle and the bottom of the handle should have the same sort of curve as the collar. Slide the handle into the collar. Holding the two things together, slam the metal part of the fork on top of the collar – do it on something soft like grass, an old towel, etc.

Step five: Taking your electric drill with a bit ‘chucked in’ that matches the size of the hole in the collar, secure the fork and drill through the hole in the collar and the wood handle to the other side.

Step six: Take the rivet and put it in. Flip it over on a hard surface, making sure that the mushroom-y part of the rivet is flat against that. Take your hammer and pound down on the slightly hollowed out end of the rivet which should be facing you.

Done.

I’m here to shake the pompoms for vinegar as a utility item. If you are concerned about chemicals in the house (and I’m not even thinking about some little person getting their hands on oven cleaner out from underneath the sink), then Aunt Toby is here today to tell you that you all you need to clean stuff in your home is baking soda (another topic for another time) and vinegar.

And I’m not even going to tell you that you should be using one vs. another. I’ve used cider and white vinegars to clean with and they really are the same. Same strength, same result. Some uses I’ve put vinegar to which have worked amazingly:

Toilets, bathtubs, showers: We live in a hard water state. Stains the toilets, holds that nasty detergent/calcium deposits on the floors and doors of showers, etc. Vinegar, because it is acid, dissolves calcium (remember earth science and the whole thing with stalactites and stalagmites – same deal).
How to clean a toilet: You’ll need 1-2 gallons of vinegar for this, so buy the cheapest jugs of the stuff you can find. You’ll also need a bunch of paper towels. Do this when it is NOT freezing outside because you will want to open all the windows (it’s just that the smell will make you go bald, ok). Empty out the toilet. Yes, it’s gross. Use a yogurt container or something else that you will not feel guilty about throwing away to empty out the last bits at the bottom (yes, the last bits. OK?). Put a gallon of vinegar in the toilet bowl. Put paper towels all around the toilet bowl so that the surface above the vinegar to the top of the bowl is covered. Carefully pour more vinegar into the bowl so that the paper towels wick up the vinegar. Make sure the paper towels are clinging to the sides of the bowl. Close the lid of the toilet, close the bathroom door. If you have family members (ahem, teenaged boys) who would not think about using the bathroom while this operation is going on, take something like masking tape and put a big slug across the door, like crime scene tape and a sign: “Bathroom out of order” or something like that. Go do something else elsewhere for 30 minutes. Then come back, take out the paper towels and throw those away and using a toilet bowl brush (or if you are brave and have lost your sense of smell by this time, 3M ™ pads work great for this, scrub the inside of the toilet. Clean as a whistle. This even works on those nasty blue stains in the bottom.

It’s harder to perform the same trick on tubs, but you can dilute vinegar and scrub the tub and showers with that – 1/2 cup in a couple of gallons of water will do the trick.

DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT MIX VINEGAR WITH ANY COMMERCIAL CLEANING PRODUCT (or ammonia or chlorine bleach or anything like that), THINKING THAT SOMEHOW YOU WILL PRODUCE SOME SORT OF SUPER-CLEANER. My mom tried that, and we found her unconscious on the kitchen floor. vinegar and water is great. Period.

Cleaning stained aluminum pots and pans: I love my heavy cast aluminum pots. They will outlive me, but sometimes you end up with stains on them or you burn something in them (yes, yes, I know) and you feel they are ruined. Au contraire, mes amis. Just take a half cup of vinegar, put in the pot, put more water in the pot, put on the lid and put on to simmer for 30 minutes (and yes, open the damn windows…). Stains gone.

Want to clean dishes and glassware and don’t want to use ammonia (and you shouldn’t you know) – put a little vinegar into the rinse water (takes the spots off if you live, as we do, in hard water country). Even if you don’t rinse it enough, no one will be poisoned by it. Little ones might end up making a face such as the one on the young lady above, but it is not poisonous, won’t freak up the environment or melt your pipes.

Great stuff. And oh yeah..it’s great for a lot of cooking, too, but that’s another topic for another time.

There are certain times of the year when I can do and demo certain activities in more efficient ways. It’s not that I can’t demo canning in the middle of winter, but it’s a lot easier at the height of the summer when I have a lot of veggies available. But there are certain rhythms to the year so for readers who might have an interest (or who might want to ask for something specific), here is what I’m planning over the next couple of weeks:

Gardening: I’m going to have to transplant all the seedlings in a major sort of way and move them to our unheated greenhouse. I’ll probably be starting more seeds. I also am thinking about cleaning off one of the beds out in the garden and setting up my own mini hoop house out there, to see how fast the soil warms up and how quickly I can get things into the garden this year.

Chickens: We’ve got a broody hen. Between about Feb. 19 and the 25th, either we’re going to have chicks…or not. So I will be covering that. But in the meantime, we have to move them out of the room where she is nesting with the other much larger chickens. The nest needs to be closer to the ground and we need to have them acclimated to that and the heat lamp and so on.

Cooking: With all of these storms and power outages, I have offered that using a backyard grill to cook on is a definite option. I’d like to offer some experiments to show what we can do. Any specific suggestions for what people would like to see: pizza, baking bread or cookies, soup/chili/stew, pasta? Testing regular kitchen cookware vs cast iron? Just let me know.

Sewing: I have the rest of a wardrobe all planned out (green wool jersey dress et al.), but one thing I have never done with a home sewing machine is work with leather. I have a simple handbag pattern and some scrap leather and want to experiment with how this will work.

Anything else? We’re open to all sorts of questions and ideas. We’re here to serve you guys – anything that will complete the following sentence is up for grabs:

“You know, I’ve always wanted to learn how to …………………..”

Go for it! Leave your ideas and questions in the comments or send me an email at: aunttoby@kitchencountereconomics.com

First: If you look at the top of the page, above the header, you will now see a row of tabs. Although every post we’ve ever done here will not necessarily be found under one of those tabs, those are the major topics and the most popular ones. Readers will still be able to search on a word in the search box or by tags, but we feel this will help readers find what they want in a more direct way.

Second: If Aunt Toby has any resolution about the kitchen for this year, it is to make it as useful to readers as she can. And to do that, we will be doing a survey sometime soon so that all of you who visit can tell us what you’d like to see more of; what you find especially useful (and what doesn’t work for you whatsoever). So, stay tuned for that.

Third: Earlier this month, KCE’s page views reached 30,000. That’s in less than a year. I’d like to thank everyone and anyone who stopped by, read something, commented (or not), and visited us. When we started this site, we had no idea where it was going to go, what we’d write about, or if anyone was actually going to visit. We’ve had readers from as far away as Japan, Africa, Indonesia, Australia, Norway, and South America. A lot of our readers are from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. All of you, wherever you are – thank you so much. We want to make the kitchen an even more useful and welcoming place this year and with the survey, we hope to hear from you soon.

Many hugs and kisses from Chez Siberia (and by the way, it was minus 9 degrees F. this morning when we got up. But by the afternoon, it got to 27, which means (cue triumphant music) spring is coming). Hang in there.

Until the next time.
(Newly hatched chick courtesy of Jim Deane)

This year, as we are reminded by our favorite weather prognosticators winter has come to the entire country. So, today I’ve got something for everyone.

Aunt Toby figures that by this point, most of the people in the US have got whatever form of heat they use cranked up about as far as it can go (or, everyone has unearthed their sweaters, hats, mitties, and long johns and are wearing them 24/7). And it has been that way for a while (for those of us who have had the heat turned on since November, this is not news; for those folks in the South, we feel your pain, truly). The air inside your house is dry and your eyes and your lips might be feeling dry too. Don’t forget to do what you can to put humidity into the air (hang laundry on racks, put out pans of water on registers and wood stoves, etc. etc.). And don’t forget to drink plenty of water.

But you might find that you or other family members are developing something that we refer to here at Chez Siberia as ‘Winter Itch’. When we had all the little Siberians at home, all it took for the first outbreak was for us to turn up the furnace (and the forced air heat). After about a week the kids would start to scratch. Our younger daughter was in such distress that we had to get a special lotion Rx’d for her which frankly had a little bit of cortisone in it.

What is happening (and I realize this hovers into “no, duh” territory) is that the dry air is wicking the moisture out of the skin, which starts to flake and that causes the itching. The trick here is to do two things:

First: get as much moisture into the skin (both internally and externally) as possible.

Second: Put a barrier in between the moisture on the skin surface and the dry air.

Getting moisture into the skin and keeping it there can be as simple as doing one or more of the following:

Take fewer showers and the showers you take, don’t use really hot water and use as little soap as you can (or a moisturizing gel or something like that; in a pinch, you can always use hair conditioner). If you swear you stink like a stevedore in August, you can always just rinse off/wash off those areas (you notice that no one gets winter itch in their armpits, right?).

After showers and baths, don’t rub every last bit of moisture from your skin; just pat dry and slather on cream or lotion that has a good component of oils in it. Cocoa butter is good; any product that calls itself ‘body butter’ is good. In a pinch, believe me you can use really light olive oil. Mix a couple of teaspoons in a spray bottle with warm water, shake up and spritz all over and smooth on.

When you buy products, check the labels:

Any product that claims to help with dry skin should contain stuff that does the following:

Water — this should be the first ingredient on the list.

“Occlusive” – these are things that block the evaporation of the water. Common ingredients that perform this function are petrolatum, acetyl alcohol, lanolin, lecithin, mineral oil, paraffin, and stearic acid. Popular silicones that act as occlusives are dimethicone and cyclomethicone. I am not particularly fond of petrolatum, mineral oil and paraffin – these all come from the processing of petroleum. If you want to just make lotion, use something that is liquid at room temperature such as a nut or fruit oil.

“Humectant” – these are things that attract moisture from within and without and are usually combined with the ‘occlusive’. The most popular humectant is glycerin.

Now, almost everyone has a tube, tub or bottle of some sort of lotion or cream at home that when they get dry skin they can smooth on. When you have winter itch, however, these do not necessarily have enough of one of those items listed above to really produce the effect you need. Most of the time, the issue is that the ‘occlusive’ is not thick enough or there is not enough humectant. Here are a few items that people many times have at home that can improve the result:

Vitamin E and lecithin capsules: If you are taking either of these, just take one, take a needle and poke a hole in one end of it ad squeeze it into your hand. Put a glob of cream on top of that and a little bit more water and rub your hands together. Smooth that over the effected area.

Let’s say that you want to make your own and don’t want to deal with chemicals. Well, hike yourself to the local drug store and look for a small bottle of glycerin and a small bottle of liquid Vit. E. Or, if they don’t have that, ask for Vit. E capsules. If you want to get fancy, ask for Lecithin capsules too. Put a drop of glycerin (teeny) in your hand, the Vit. E and/or lecithin and as much water as you can hold in the palm of your hand and rub your hands together. If you want to make up a bottle, fill a bottle that can hold up to three ounces of water half way with water, squeeze in the Vit. E and/or lecithin and fill the rest of the way with glycerin. Close, shake up and use. This will be like oil/vinegar dressing — you’ll have to shake it up every time you use it.

If you really want to go all the way, check out your grocery store in the international foods section for rosewater or orange flower water (this is used in Greek and Eastern European cooking). You can use this instead of the water in the bottle (or substitute as much as you want for the water, up to 100 percent, though they really have a very strong fragrance so you might want to go 50/50 with water) along with the glycerin, etc. and you will have produced a very traditional hand lotion that has a lovely fragrance. You may find that you need more Vit. E. as an occlusive, but this is the basic stuff.

Let’s say you want something with more ’staying power’ – then you will want to make a cream rather than a lotion, which means that you will want to use something as an ‘occlusive’ that is at least semi-solid at room temperatures, such as cocoa butter, coconut oil or beeswax. If you can find a beekeeper source, you can ask for beeswax cappings that still have honey in them. Honey has the added benefit in moisurizers that it is hygroscopic, so it fulfills the humectant role and the wax is the occlusive so you have natural products there. Depending on the type of beeswax you can get, the honey will have a different fragrance, so you will be getting something that will add fragrance to the hand lotion or cream you make. If you use beeswax, you will have to warm it up in order to mix it together with your other ingredients. Do this in a double boiler (beeswax melts at about 140 degrees F – it actually has quite a high flashpoint but I would take the melting process seriously and not turn on the stove and leave it there).

A basic formula for this would be:
1/4 cup beeswax
1 cup of oil (you can just use one oil, such as almond oil, a very light olive oil, coconut oil)
1/4 cup of water (or rosewater or orange flower water)

Put in the beeswax and melt first and then add the oil and stir together. Last, add the water or rosewater or orange flower water and stir together and pour out into whatever glass or ceramic container you are going to store this in (an empty small jar with a screw on lid is a good choice). The mixture will harden up and then you can use it when you need it.

So, now you have products to use on the dry skin. You can get an improved result with the following: Just before retiring for the evening, take a light warm shower and pat dry. Smooth on as much cream or lotion as you can and put on something to wear in bed. This will hold the moisturizer next to your skin for a longer period and it won’t rub off on the sheets. If you have cracked hands or feet, do the same thing and put on socks.
( Dry earth photo courtesy of Martin Knaapen)

As the kid says in the old New Yorker cartoon from the 1920s, while poking dubiously into a plateful of something set in front of him, “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.”

It’s not that your dear Aunty does not believe in being organized, or having goals, or even of making lists. I just think that making lists that stretch out aimlessly to a distance of what actually constitutes YEARS has a built in failure factor. The thing that appears to be missing from all of these programs is some sort of moving it back to NOW.

What can I do now? What can I do THIS week and next week and the week after that to get that thing off the damn list?

Your Aunt Toby (and I believe a lot of people are just like me) is really good on what is coyly referred to in golf as ‘the short game’ – getting stuff done now is always easier and actually more satisfying than looking at a whole mess of long term global goals and responsibilities. I once made a list of ‘stuff I want to do’. Better to do stuff I wanted to do now while I still had the health and energy to do it, so I sat down and made this list.

It went on for damn near three pages. Single spaced. Numero Uno was: Learn how to play the fiddle. Guess how many of the rest of the items I got accomplished or even started on?

Yep – zippo. That was 9 years ago. And I’m still taking fiddle lessons and enjoying playing music but I really do feel that I probably won’t be getting around to many of the others. I used to feel bad about that.

The point of making these lists is basically to prevent people from waking up at the age of (insert your lightbulb moment here) and saying to themselves, “Oh, jeeze..I haven’t done anything with my life.” Now, Aunt Toby would never, ever say that to anyone, that they had not ‘done anything’ with their lives. People tend to get caught up in ‘living’ and the stuff they really wanted to do, dreamt of doing sort of got left by the roadside, like so much excess baggage.

And we all tend to cling to our baggage.

Aunt Toby has put a LOT of thought into this whole thing – I am at the age where the horizon in front of me gets a whole lot shorter every single day. What I concentrate on now is this: what is it that is going to make me feel good about me? What is it about me that drives me nuts and makes me feel bad? Everyone is different. For some people, it’s the feeling of being out of financial control, not knowing what they’ve got, being in debt and not seeming to be able to change that. For other people it’s the seemingly endless ability to procrastinate. For others, it seems to be this ability to not be satisfied no matter what they do, where they live, what their circumstances are, or having the fear of taking risks so they do nothing.

For Aunt Toby, it’s the ability to start all sorts of projects that would never, ever get finished. Here is a technique (and I don’t know where it comes from, otherwise I’d give credit where it is due) that I use to organize ideas, thoughts, projects, goals, etc. in a way that breaks them down into chunks that I can do in the short term, in short bursts of ambition (my ambition tends to come packaged that way), and I seem to be able to get more things completed this way.

And that, my friends (as John McCain and Martha Stewart would say, if they were doing this together) is A Good Thing. I always feel better when I can tic one of these items off the list because I know I am moving forward, an important part of the thing is getting done, and I don’t feel like some sort of slug.

I call this technique: The Thanksgiving Dinner Method (you can call it whatever you like). Think about it this way: When we face some huge family holiday dinner thing, we have one goal in mind. Get everything on the table hot, in the bowls or platters, ready to go, AND ALL AT THE SAME TIME. That requires thinking through the problem in this way: Where am I going and how am I going to get there? In the Thanksgiving Turkey illustration, where I’m going is: table all set, and turkey done/sliced/plattered, veggies cooked and in their bowls, salad made, etc. etc. ) and the thought process for how I’m going to get there is this:

1) What takes the longest – if it needs to be all ready and on a platter at 4:00 p.m., when does that have to get put into the oven?
2) What’s next longest and when does that have to get put into the oven (if it’s baked potatoes, I can tell you that in a 325-degree oven, they take a lot longer than they do usually – trust me on this one)?
3) Do I have room in the fridge for a big bowl of salad? If so, then I can make that as soon as I put the turkey in and put that in the fridge. Depending on the time of the year, I can also make it, seal it up and put it out on the deck in the shade or something.
4) When do I start the veggies? If I’m scheduled to dish up at 4:00 p.m., I’d better have the water at the simmer by 3:45 so that they can be done, drained, and in a dish ready to get out on the table in the right time.

So, what does this have to do with your own list which has been staring you in the face for a while and about which you feel rather poorly?

Let’s go back to the number one item on my old list: “Learn to play the fiddle.” Now, Aunt Toby knows herself pretty well – I’m no good at all whatsoever at learning how to do things from books or tapes. I definitely require hands on demonstration, a little bit of coaching and harassment and so on. So, for me that process started as: Find a teacher who is willing to work with beginners. After several frustrating weeks of working with a guy whose experience of beginners was in working with children under the age of 10, I changed that goal to “Find a teacher who is experienced at working with adult beginners.” Whole different ballgame, that was and I found my teacher through contacting a guy who had a radio program of traditional music.

You see, it is not enough to setting down goals – it’s what is going to work for you in terms of how you can achieve those goals. Another example — what I really wanted to do originally was learn to play the Uillean Pipes (sometimes referred to as ‘parlor pipes’), which are the small pipes from Ireland, not the big bagpipes that most of us are familiar with from Scotland). Could I buy a set? Yep – over the internet you can get anything. I asked all over the place for contacts for a teacher for Uillean Pipes – nice try. The closest person at that time is 3.5 hours travel away – one way. I knew there was no way I was going to achieve THAT goal with that sort of barrier. Finding a fiddle teacher was going to be a lot easier – and it was – so that made achieving the goal a lot less taxing for me. It’s got to be convenient. Am I disappointed in myself that I’ll never play the Uillean Pipes? Only a little bit – but a lot of the music itself that is played on those pipes are tunes that I can play on my fiddle – so I’m a pretty happy camper.

Another on-going goal I have is health-related. Aunt Toby hates, hates, hates socalled “New Year’s Resolutions” – they just do not work for me. I don’t even believe in ‘Doctor’s Office Resolutions” – I used to leave my practitioner’s office feeling that she’d hammered me – again – with a list of stuff she wanted me to do about my weight, my exercise, life in general, my medications yadda, yadda, yadda. And I KNEW what I needed to do. And I KNEW that she was right. But I always kept putting off the exercise and other stuff because it just was not convenient to make those changes. So, for years, every six months, I’d go back to my practioner and my cholesterol did not go down, I did not get the exercise, and I ended up feeling like a slug and a failure (yes, I realize this is shocking to read but I’m not a superhero). I also felt somehow I was letting everyone down – and not holding up my end of things for some reason (I’ll have to examine that at some point).

I used the Thanksgiving Turkey program with that, too. I have to go see my practitioner every six months so that she can balance my meds and check my lipids anyway, so I know that I’ve got six months to get the turkey done. And that turkey is: regular exercise. And I know that I have to work that back to right now – this week on an every week basis. I am really no good at exercising at home except that the DH rigged a platform on a treadmill in the basement so that I can put a laptop on it and can do email, blog, etc . while I am walking (you will start to notice a trend here..). I also check the next week’s weather to see if things will be decent enough for me to ride my bike to work (sorry, I do draw the line at riding when it is absolutely awful but that has to do with safety issues). On the days when I can’t ride, I cheat. I carpool in with the DH and I have him drop me off at a point about 20-25 min. walk from where I work. Once I get on my bike or I’ve been dropped off, I’m stuck – I’ve got to get to work, so I have to get the exercise. In other words – make it convenient to do it..or make it really inconvenient to NOT do it. But in the end, it all comes back to working that goal back to right now – this week. That way, the goal does not get away from you and stretch out and out and out until you feel you aren’t getting anything done on it.

What are you going to do this week that will move that goal forward? Research resources where you can take lessons or classes in Mandarin Chinese or Taiko drumming or ballroom dancing and make a phone call to register? Call and make an appointment to have your doctor look at that funny spot on your cheek that is waking you up at night because you are afraid it’s cancer? Take a walk at lunchtime to take care of private banking and get some exercise? Research whether your local area has any musical organizations that you can join? Call your local school district to see if they need volunteers to come help tutor kids in reading and math?

Doing one thing that moves your goal forward is actually better for you and reduces your stress a lot more than making a huge list that you can’t see over the top of. Because in the end, the goal is NOT to make ourselves feel bad because we aren’t doing what we want or should be doing – it is finding ways so that we can. And that makes us feel good.

Much better.
(turkey photo courtesy of tm22)

This has all come to mind because the DH has had a death in his family recently – and it certainly is hitting him quite hard because this is a brother who is very close to him in age and was not the eldest. But the DH has a Mrs. Briggs-Smith in his family too – his mother’s father, who died extremely young of a heart attack. His mother had to leave school at the age of 13 to go to work to support the rest of the family because of her father’s death. There were four original children to live to adulthood – two have already died from heart attacks.

The point here is this: We come into this world with no choices over what DNA cocktail we’ve got. And we now have more information and analysis than ever about what long term effect choices concerning exercise, work environment, types of foods we eat (and their inflammatory effects or not), smoking, drinking, and drug use can have. But the DNA – your genetics – is the environment that has the ultimate effect on how those choices effect YOU.

On the other side of it, however, we tend to not discuss ‘family health history’ a whole lot, especially with siblings and cousins. People are afraid to even know what is out there – and that makes things very dangerous for us. There is always a certain amount of delusion that we all play with, especially when we are young. For the young, people who are not young are old. There is no stage in between ‘my age and how I feel right now’ and “old, sick and ready to die’. Young people do not understand that the decisions they make today and tomorrow and the day after that are going to effect who they are and how they feel when THEY are no longer young. As Satchel Paige said, “If I’d known how long I was going to live, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

And this is where ‘family-based healthcare system reform’ comes in. No matter how all of the broohaha settles out in terms of national healthcare system reform (and goodness knows we need it), we still all need a big dose of family-based healthcare reform and that starts right from the point of looking at our families as far back as we can get, putting it all down on paper and plotting out the possible connections. Do it like a genealogical diagram, with the folks farthest back at the top. Call, write, email, FB..whatever it takes to find out as much as you can so that you can put it all down and look at it from the dispassionate position of a researcher. What happened? Who ‘touched’ whom? It is not just “I’ve got Grandpa’s chin” – it is also “I’ve got Grandpa’s crappy knees and his disc disease and perhaps some other things as well.” Or, ‘Great-grandma died of breast cancer in her 40s; she had three daughters and one died of ovarian cancer in her 40s, one died of colon cancer in her 50s and one died of breast cancer in her 40s. The one who died of ovarian cancer had a son who died of prostate cancer in his early 60s.”

It’s all connected. But if we don’t know about it, there is no way to share the information with our families so that we can help our kids with early choices at home and help them make decisions later on that will help them have better health as adults. We are part of ‘healthcare reform’ too – and we are the part that has a certain amount of control over what happens..but we can’t make informed choices if we don’t know what’s out there.

And that I was DEFINITELY loath to replace by going out and buying new curtains or even making a whole new set of curtains. I figured if I could find something that I could use to ‘freshen them up a bit’ it was a winner. I needed something I could pull everything together with and I found it in the fabric section of Ikea.

Now, Ikea is definitely not for ‘girly girly’ décor fabrics – the designs are very strong on bright colors and Scandinavian feel, but I found some striped fabric in the same weight as the curtains that had the same aqua in it and a good dark brown. Eureka!! I had my color scheme. I got a dark brown cover for the futon and as you can see from the photos, used the striped fabric as a border of the curtains. With the rest of the fabric, I’m going to make cushions for the futon.

So, here is how I dealt with the curtains without taking them apart (The Lazy Aunty’s Method):

1) How to figure out how much you are going to need: Measure one of the curtains and estimate how wide a border you will want to put on and then add two inches on all sides for the fold over. Most home dec fabrics (except for the extra wide ones but this method works for them also) are 60 inches wide so make a sketch for yourself on a piece of paper and call the width 60”. Divide up that 60” by the amount of you borders. Let’s say, to make it easy, that the borders plus their fold overs are 20” wide and 60” long. So, on your sketch, break that up into three sections across the width – you’ll be able to get three of those border across. But you also need 60” long – that is 60/36” or 1 2/3 yards. Now, how many borders are you going to need? For anything over 3, you will need another ‘width’ – another piece that is 1 2/3 yards long. Out of two widths, you will get 6 borders – enough for three windows. So, you trot down to your local fabric store(and I do hope you have a local fabric store..there are so few of them left) and you buy 1 2/3 + 1 2/3 yards of this stuff – that’s a total of 3 1/3 yards. If you want tie backs or valances or anything extra like that, you’ll need more and we’ll discuss that at another time. If you are buying 100% cotton fabrics, buy some extra – like instead of 3 1/3 – get 3 ½ yards because they will shrink.

2) How to make the borders: First, wash the fabric in the hottest water you can get with a little bit of soap to get out any sizing and dry it. This will take any shrinkage out. Then iron. Take out your yardstick and measure across the width of the fabric and mark the borders and cut them out. If you have regularly woven fabric, you will be able to literally snip at the marks and rip them down to size, but if you don’t feel brave enough, mark with pins or a pencil and cut along the marks. Iron down the fold overs.

3) Lay out a pair of curtains on the floor or your dining room table or any large flat surface and decide if you want the borders on the inside or the outside. Lay the new borders on the curtains where you want them (hey, you might even want them smack in the middle – who knows?) and pin them right at the top below whatever header you have (tab tops are easy – if you have pleats at the top, you will need to take out the pleater hooks, etc.). Then, carefully smooth them down the length of the curtain, pinning the two together as you go, until you get to the bottom. If you get to the bottom and it’s a little bit short, then unfold the fold over you ironed down and pin it to match the bottom and re-iron that. If it’s too long, you can refold the bottom, pin and re-iron that. Sew along the edges of the borders and there you are.

4) Question: What do I do if I have lined curtains? Well, unless you want to sew through the linings (which I don’t recommend), then what you do is this – undo the stitches holding the lining at the bottom and on both long sides of the curtain and flip that up at the top before you pin on the border. You’ll need to be a little bit more careful when you run the curtain through the sewing machine to sew on the border so that you don’t catch the lining, but once you have the new border sewn on, you can then catch stitch the lining back onto the back side of the curtain and no one will ever know that your newly refurbished curtain did not always have the colorful border!
5) Question: What do I do if I get tired of the border? Ah – well one of the issues with curtains (unless you are using some of the Sunbrella fabrics or something like that, which is UV treated), is that even with a lining, you will get fading and if you are tired of the border but still want to use the curtains, if you take off the border (easy enough, just take out the stitches), you will find that the fabric that was underneath the border is now a different color. But Not To Worry!! If you are using cotton curtains, you can go down to your local store and buy some RIT dye in a color you like and using the washing machine method on the back of the box, you can take off the borders and dye the curtains a completely new color! Voila!

The best part of the job, though, was when we were able to place people into jobs. Most of what we did in those days was what was coyly referred to in the jargon of the agency business as ‘temp to perm’ (of course now, it’s more than likely ‘perma-temp’), so I knew that when I asked someone about their business and what was the one person I could find for them that would help them grow, that if I was able to find that person, I was doing a definite ‘good deed’ – I was getting that person a job.

A paycheck. A way to buy groceries and get health benefits for themselves and their family, pay the bills, pay their rent or mortgage. A way for someone to maybe even get a promotion and a raise in pay.

Despite the pay (which was actually not the greatest), I loved that job. I saw it as a homely combination of ‘good deed’ and ‘local economic development’. No matter how frustrating the cold calls or unanswered phone messages were, I always felt that what I was doing was good. At the end of the day, there were people who were genuinely better off for what I was doing.

Right now, there are a tremendous number of people in this country who are NOT better off than they were a year ago. For some of them, their bad times started several years ago and their jobs got offshored someplace or downsized out of existence. And they’ve had to take whatever they can get and it’s probably less than what they made before. And to pay the bills and the mortgage and the orthodonture, they’ve taken on huge levels of debt and whatever job they could find. And for a lot of them, an increasing number have lost their homes and are wandering the countryside, like high tech (and sometimes low tech) Tom Jodes.

And I know there are people out there who feel that it’s ‘all their own faults’ or ‘if they’d kept up they’d still have a job’ or ‘if they’d been smart…” or ‘if they’d worked harder’ or …and so on. And I can tell you, because I come from a place where our local economy was run on the fly-wheel of a huge high tech wonder..which decided one day that they no longer wanted to be in the business that they ran in our little place (and thereby causing over 20,000 people to lose their jobs), that for many many people in this country, they did work very hard, and were very educated and smart, and they did keep up with training, and they did the best they could for their families and their community.
And it didn’t make any difference because it was decisions made thousands of miles away by people who did not care about the families and the community – that is what caused them to lose their jobs.

And for many people at the top of the heap out there, that is an appropriate thing – free market competition, movement of capital and assets to the lowest cost areas and so on and so forth. But for the millions of people who are either now out of work or who have not been able to get a job in their fields for the last 5 years, it is not an appropriate thing.

It is bitter and it is demeaning and it sucks the very life out of the soul of people and of a community and out of the country.

And right now, we have an administration which really is struggling to do something right. It might not be what all of us admire or believe in or accept or agree with. But they really are trying to do the most good for the most people, because that is what is required now. But the economy is not responding, at least at the community and personal levels, the way people need. Because..people need jobs. There are millions of people out of work already..and this spring, there are millions more young people who are graduating from colleges and graduate schools..and they don’t have jobs either.

And maybe Aunt Toby’s readers do a lot of charity work already, and for that I thank you sincerely. But at the moment, charity is not just what we need. What we have the greatest need for right now are industrial and commercial patriots.

The greatest, most patriotic thing anyone who owns or manages a business can do right now is not to lay off workforce – ask your employees to find ways to save money, work smarter, to keep everyone working and paid. Additionally, if you can find a place in your operation, an even greater good would be to find one person who can help you grow and hire that person. Even if it is a young person with little experience but a lot of energy. Even if you are a plumber and all the young person could do would be to crouch next to you and learn. To give one additional person a job, teach them a skill, give them the opportunity to help you grow and be more productive and competitive – that would help your business..would help the economy…would help the country.

And all you bankers who got the bail outs – it’s time for you to step up and start lending to business. We all know that you are hoarding the money that the tax payers gave to you. Many of you are using it to buy up other distressed banks. The country needs you to be patriotic too – help business grow – give them credit.

A lot of talk out there about patriotism revolves around the phrase ‘love of country’ – we need to love the people in the country, too. And for that, we need to help business grow, so that they can hire people HERE so that payrolls flow out into the community and help other businesses in the communities. That is when people at the local level will honestly know..in their very bones..that the recession is over.
(photos courtesy of diP and Joan Thewlis)

Well, sometimes, Aunt Toby feels that way about KCE. I have to make sure to keep some of the ongoing things up in the air and revisiting them from time to time before they..well, they won’t go smash on the floor, but the story may not be fresh or interesting any longer and all of my little buggers might lose interest.

So, this post is a bit of a catch up.

Chicks: Well, as we saw last time, they stopped being chicks a very long time ago and are now pullets and cockerels and are now behaving a lot more chicken-y. The cockerels are getting quite annoying for the pullets now, and by the end of July, the pullets will have turned, magically, into hens and will start laying eggs, which means that they need places to lay those eggs IN..nesting boxes.

The DH, having gone through the experience of building the first chicken ‘tractor’ felt that he’d worked out the bugs from that and was now ready to build a ‘new and improved’ tractor complete with nesting boxes. No white wall tires, electric windows or automatic watering devices. In any case, no matter what, we would have two tractors and could theoretically pick and choose our way through our little flock to find the boys and the girls so that we could for sure get the girls into the ‘condo’ with the best roosters and leave the rest of the boys in the first tractor. You would think that knowing a boy chicken from a girl chicken would be the easiest thing going, and for the most aggressive and sexually mature cockerels, it is pretty easy: they are the biggest ones with the combs and wattles. It is a lot harder to select out the least mature cockerels, whose combs have not really started to develop and who do NOT have wattles. But we had to do it, if only for the space factor. There are all sorts of types of combs; our chickens because they were bred for cold northern winters, have what’s called a ‘pea comb’ which is teeny and lays close to the head. In the photograph, you have what people think of as a rooster with a comb – the farther south the chickens are, the better it is for them to have a big upstanding comb like this one because..combs radiate heat out of a chicken’s body. Those red things under the rooster’s chin are what are called ‘wattles’ and I have no idea what their function is, if anything.

As lonely as that sounds, it is not a whole lot of fun to be the cockerel who is NOT the biggest or best because that means that you are constantly being picked on, being shouldered away from the food, and being pecked. You are, as the saying goes, at the bottom of the ‘pecking order’. The ‘last guy’ as it were, is really in tough shape. So, by taking out the biggest (which turns out to be the most aggressive, most sexually mature, nastiest and so on) roosters out of the flock to put in with the pullets, it was as if we had completely reshuffled the deck for the rest of the roosters. They immediately got a lot more room than they had been able to occupy before, had less competition for the food, and a whole new pecking order had to be established. This did not, however, help the little guy at the bottom of the heap; frankly, he is still at the bottom of the heap but he will be able to avoid being pecked a bit more, be able to get a bit more food and will grow a little better and a little bit faster now.

It will also mean that he will probably be the last to go ‘a la Pepperoniville’ as we say at Chez Siberia. But I’m sure that being the last to ‘turn off the lights’ is not going to be much of a compensation for a lifetime of being the guy at the bottom of the totem pole.

The Garden: One of the things about gardening here in Upstate New York is the telescoping nature of time. We really do not get a very long spring, so keeping up with harvesting early things like lettuce and spinach becomes a race against the plants’ bolding as the days get longer and warmer. Needless to say, we have eaten spinach in as many permutations and combinations as I can think of, though I think I might just blanch and freeze the rest to use during the winter when I make my own pasta.

Pick Your Own: Aunt Toby and Elder Daughter will be returning tomorrow to the strawberry farm to pick…snap peas, actually. They are rushing in and are still nice and flat and not woody. My plan is to pick several pounds, blanch a little bit and freeze them in seal-a-meal pouches for use in asian dishes this winter.

The Economy: I don’t care what the pundits are saying – it’s still stinko.
And that is all you need to know.

Anyone who has a child who graduated from college this spring (as we did at Chez Siberia)knows that the overwhelming majority of these kids (unless they are engineers, computer programmers or accountants) are unemployed at the moment. My son’s estimate (backed up by a college intern we have at our office) is that only 1 of his friends had a job by the time he left school and that most of his friends opted to try to get into graduate school to sit out the recession. The Boy has a job for the summer but is looking…and competing with people with much more experience than he has.

We have assured him that Chez Siberia will not be going into the boarding house business any time soon and that he still has his bed to sleep in. However, by the end of the summer, we will no longer be able to cover him with our health insurance (hey people; write your Congressional Reps and Senators and DEMAND health care reform with a public offering). Luckily, New York State has a program that will allow him to buy his own insurance coverage at a not horrible rate.

If you have a child who graduated and is not going on to graduate school, you will need to check out what is available in your state to keep your kid covered — they are only covered for 90 days after their date of graduation. Trust me – for some reason, they can go through an entire four years of college with no more problems than an attack of acne…and as soon as their coverage lapses, something will happen and they will need major healthcare or dental work.

(rooster photo courtesy of nal in miami Juggler photo courtesy of Robbie Veldwijk)