My Lil’ Fairy

This past Sunday, we took our daughter Lilly to her second RenFaire at the Arizona Renaissance Festival. The reason we take her is for her Second Annual Twig Sighting, to go see the wonderful and delightful Twig the Fairy.

When I was a child, all I ever wanted to be for Halloween was a fairy…. okay, who am I kidding, all I ever wanted to be every single day was a fairy.  One of my favorite dolls as a child was the Herself the Elf doll. I had her books, cardboard cutouts, dolls, her companion dolls, I watched her cartoon, you name it. Yeah, Herself the Elf and unicorn My Little Ponies were my thing. And every year, I wanted to be a fairy for Halloween, but alas, I usually ended up a witch or a clown or a ghost or something.

So when I first spotted a picture of Twig on the AZ Renaissance Festival’s site I thought “OH WOW! HOW COOL IS THAT?!” and I think I yelled it too.  It was like having my inner child awakened in an instant.

She visits several states each year, so please take a moment to check out her site and see if she comes to a festival near you, because it’s totally worth it to go meet her, whether you’ve got kids or not!

Found a quick video on Youtube of her if you want to check out what I’m talking about!

I had either just had Lilly or knew I was pregnant with a girl when I spotted Twig looking up the ren-faire info and I thought to myself that I would make sure we took Lilly to see her every year. Even if we move back to Iowa (which we are considering), we will make the trek up to Minnesota to see her. As long as she’s performing, we’ll be there.

I have to admit, I’m more keen on taking Lilly to see Twig over Santa or the Easter Bunny to be honest, not that I have anything against Santa or the Easter Bunny but I don’t have to worry about explaining why there’s 20 million Twigs at the mall, now do I? She’s one of a kind!

There’s just something truly magical about Twig and I’ll tell you another thing, even when you have a line behind you, the world disappears when she focuses her attention on your little one. She speaks in sign language instead of verbally and she uses her flute to communicate through song and quick little blips to show emotions and excitement.

She has several (adorable) books, and in her first book, the story tells of how children could visit the fairy realm by putting her baubles under their pillow to sleep. At the end of the book, the children give her a sock to try and bring her to the human world. So you guessed it, this year we brought Twig a sock (with a little note in it and some gratitude to help offset a replacement book that Twig sent to us when goblins at the post office destroyed the package of her last book and lost it. We have all the Twig Books for Lilly which are delightful wonderful stories and Lilly loves the pictures and I use the Twig Calendars to track major milestones for Lilly and keep them.   What can I say, I’m a total ham.

Twig gives Lilly a green heart-shaped bauble stone.

As for Lilly’s costume, well, Lilly’s Great Aunt Julie gave it to her when we were on our last Iowa visit. Yeah, Aunt Julie get’s it!!!! She knows we’re a geek family and we like to do things a little different than tradition. This is actually the second fairy costume she’s sent Lilly off with so Lilly has a backup.

When Lilly is older, I will actually make her a full costume but she’s too little to manage wire wings.

Oh, and just for kicks- last years (First Annual Twig Sighting) outfit and meeting Twig. Wow has Lilly grown.

Lilly’s first fairy costume, which I used way too much tulle. Her Onesie said “I BELIEVE IN TWIG” which I wrote in puffy paint.

Lilly’s First Annual Twig Sighting-

So for anyone who happens to come across this post, remember… Fairies are real!

Life is busy, as always. I took on a part time position as the webmaster for a non-profit which takes up most of my evening time, Lilly takes up the rest.

School is going okay, I have a couple classes that I’m really struggling in, of course there’s a ton of math in them and I suck at that.

I started a walking/running group with the other 3 people that I did the color run with (which was awesome!) and we are trying to plan out fun events. Our next two are the Firefly Run (not Whedon related, unfortunately) and the Neon Run. Both are night events, Neon Run involves paint too.

Ranch life is pretty much as usual except my chickens keep figuring out how to get out of their run and we lost 3 more due to wild animals. It really sucks when this stuff happens. So this weekend we have to resecure the coop and figure out how they’re getting out.

My friend Zel is going to start her own chicken farm this spring, she’s getting her hutch ordered soon, and I’m going to send my “chicky bunker” to her to get her started on securing the little ones. We’ll both be starting up again in march with new babies. (that’s when it starts warming up enough here to keep them outside, I will never again try to raise the little ones inside. That was too much.

Other than that, Lilly’s growing up so quickly (she’s out for a nap right now, so I’m taking a quick moment to blog). Everything is funny to her, and in general she’s a really happy little girl. Except when she’s tired… or hungry… and then she’s just like her Daddy. lol.

Tonight, our team met up at Olive Garden and enjoyed carb-loading for the run tomorrow and one of our peeps told us about a couple more upcoming off-the-wall races that we’re going to look into. One is a 5K race like the color run but done at night. That one is in a couple months. The other is a SIXTY MILE walk, over the course of 3 days, walk for the cure. That one is thankfully not until November which gives me time to prepare.

I will post pictures of the Color Run event tomorrow after I get back home. I really need to go get my iron-on decal that Jenn made us for our team put on my shirt, and call it a night. gotta be up early early early tomorrow morning to be at the event.

So EXCITED!!!

My husband is off looking through the “Pope Scope” (The vatican’s observatory here in Arizona), Lilly and I were headed to the feed store to get food for the chickens and what do I see? A massive spray of water coming from the pole-barn’s water pipe. CRAP!

This leaves it up to me and Lilly to fix. Well, just me.

Got Lilly loaded into the car to stay warm first and then I went to investigate.  So I went out to it, slushing through a bunch of mud and when I went to twist the faucet handle it flew right off the wall and the “spray” turned into a full on fire-hose effect, spraying water all the way into the center of our round-pen.

Uh  oh.

Luckily, we’ve been through this before so I drove down to the end of the road and turned off the main water supply. I attempted to wrench off the top faucet so I could run to home depot but the pipe below was twisting along with the faucet and I already know that’s not good, last year we broke off a full pipe trying to do the same thing.  So I stopped and tried to see what tools we had because I was going to need two wrenches at least and I have no idea where my husband stores all his tools. All I had was an adjustable channel lock plier. Craptastic.

So off to Home Depot I went, took the piece that broke off, picked up two pipe wrenches and the store clerk sold me the wrong size ball faucet. Realized that when I got home, and I had put Lilly down for a nap so I had to wake her back up and head back.

Got back home with corrected ball faucet, got that on and got the water completely shut off at that faucet. Phew. This let me turn the water on back to the house at least!  However, still don’t have the right part that I need to complete the job but realized I might be able to salvage the neck pipe off the old faucet (above).  There’s no way to turn off the water out to that faucet close to the ground so I went ahead and wrapped the hell out of it with insulation.

But main thing is, I didn’t break the ground pipe thankfully, there’s no running water anymore and I have water to the house.

Here’s a quick way to save yourself $50 or more that could better be spent on a Christmas present or something fancy for yourself.

I make my own dish-detergent, it’s super fast and easy to do. Regular dish-detergent which if you’re lucky will last about a month is on average about $5.50 x 12 months, that’s $66.00. More if you fill the pre-wash part which you’ll never have to do with this recipe.

Instead of wasting that money, I spend $14.11 and get about a 1.5 year supply of detergent. (The bucket is like 5.00 and reusable, I don’t count that.)

My Supplies

What you need:

1.) AIR TIGHT container- Do not buy the cereal containers at Walmart for this, they have little tiny holes at the top near the flip lid and it will harden the heck out of the mix.  I lost about 5 months of my mix because of this.  Learn from my mistake!!! Our walmart carries air-tight buckets for food storage for like 5 bucks, go find that or use a large tupperware container.

2.) Supplies.

• 1 box of Borax (20 Mule Team is what they have at our walmart). 4lb 12oz box. $3.38- Laundry Aisle
• 1 box Arm and Hammer Super Washing Suds, 3lb 7oz box. $3.24- Laundry Aisle
• 1 container of LemiShine $3.66- Dishwashing Aisle– The LemiShine IS A MUST. Don’t skip it.
• 3 cups of Epsom Salt- The container is in the deoderant aisle at Walmart for $2.86 but will last for TWO mixes
• 24 packets of unsweetened generic lemonaid koolaid mix. (it’s not sticky, that’s only if you add sugar to it and there’s no sugar in our list. $2.40  (10 cents per packet).

I mix mine right in my bucket and then seal it up.  You use ONE, and I mean ONE tablespoon of mix per load. That’s it, you won’t ever need to use more than that.  You won’t need a rinsing agent either, the Lemishine and the Koolaid takes care of that, so whatever you spend on JetDry, won’t be needing that anymore either.    Bonus bucks!

Figured I’d share it with my chicky-readers!

I learned this recipe from: http://beingcreativetokeepmysanity.blogspot.com/2011/01/dishwasher-detergent.html and can’t thank her enough for posting it.  If you get a chance, go to her blog and read the rest of her posts. She’s a great blogger!

Things are crazy with school, Lilly, and home-life.  I’m (currently volunteer status) also working on helping maintain Astronomers without Borders website which is a huge undertaking. I’m enjoying doing it, there’s just a lot to keep up with.

My winter garden is doing really well, striving on it’s own thankfully because I have not had the time to get to it. (I have it set up for automatic watering, or else I’m sure it would have been dead by now.)  I really should take a picture of that!

Finals are next week, one class has been a particularly troublesome class for me and I’m barely hanging in by a thread on that one. We’ll see what happens with it after the final, that’s all I can really do.

After that, I have to prep for us to head back to Iowa for Christmas. It will be good to be home for the holidays.

Somewhere in there, I also need to start working on a novel that I have in my head that’s begging to be written. I haven’t written like that since 2005. Maybe this time I will get the guts up to try and get it published. Who knows.  Or maybe it’ll end up sitting in the filing cabinet like my other one where I was never satisfied with the development or the ending. This time I’m writing the entire outline, beginning to end, so that it has purpose as it goes.

Let’s see… anything else? Wow, for someone who thinks she’s busy, this sure was a short post.

Leave a comment below if you come across this post and tell me what you did for Thanksgiving!

Last night I was up till 4:00am defrosting a turkey in a cold-water sink bath. Fill sink, set timer for 30 minutes, go play CastleVille until the timer went off, rinse and repeat.

I cooked up a full size meal that would usually be consumed by a family of 10-15 people but just for Ray, Lilly and me.   I couldn’t help it.

Thanksgiving has always been a favorite holiday of mine and the only thing lacking I think was my Aunt Connie’s spinach squares which I cannot seem to replicate the yumminess of so I don’t even try.

I taught my daughter to stick olives on her fingers (of course!). We handed her an entire drumstick just to see what she would do with it. She wasn’t sure at all, she just kind of waved it around.  My husband played with his mashed potatoes, I ate too much, and when all was said and done, Ray started cleaning up the kitchen after the huge disaster I made cooking.

This is the first time I’ve ever done a big meal like that when it wasn’t for a bunch of people. *edit* – exception was when I cooked with my best friend Jeni for just 4 of us and that was hilarious though a little stressful-

The thing I realized about it though was that I had FUN. I enjoyed cooking things up and prepping when I wasn’t worried about having a bunch of people over, what if I burned something, what if the house wasn’t clean enough, what if  this, what if that…

Without those thoughts, it just became fun and relaxing.  Ray woke up to a fridge full of prepped food and coffee-cake muffins for breakfast. Throughout the day, I kept pulling things out to snack on and he would say “oooooh”.

I enjoyed sitting down with Lilly and watching her dig into her Thanksgiving meal, and I pictured later on down the road, teaching Lilly how to cook.  My life sure has changed in the last 15 months, and I am ever so thankful for that.

Happy Thanksgiving Chicky-Readers!

Horses and chickens are doing well, garden is going well and most of everything has started to come up green. I have a couple patches of nothing where I’m not sure if I missed the spot or if something didn’t grow!   But it’s coming along nicely. I am happy that we can grow stuff almost year round out here.

My next big plan is to work on an evening “moon” garden.  These are gardens that have typically white or silver iridescent foliage that catches under bright moonlight.  It’s kinda hard to take a picture of a midnight garden.  I’m guessing it’s pretty much impossible to get a photo of it in the moonlight without a flash of some sort which light everything up anyway so here are some evening photos of the types of flowers you might see in one.

There’s some more information on these types of gardens here: http://www.realsimple.com/home-organizing/gardening/outdoor/guide-to-gardens-that-look-best-after-dark-10000001611432/index.html

Real Simple- Guide to Gardens
Photo by Richard Felber

I actually came across the idea of it it the Sunset Western Garden Book, a fabulous garden guide for the Western States. I’m using it in a horicultural class I’m taking at ASU and stumbled on the moon-garden section and fell in love with the idea. Obviously we don’t get nearly the green foliage as the pictures above, but the Western guide has other plants available to use for a moon-garden that are specific for our region so I want to try it out.

My overall plan is to get the garden boxes set up on a timer so that it is watered twice a day on a drip-line like my front garden, but since a soaker hose won’t work for this, I’m having to run 1/2 inch pipe with 1/4 inch drip line hoses.

Don’t get me wrong, it might sound like I’m complaining, but I’m not. I LOVE figuring this stuff out, even when I run into snags.

I had a grand plan for how I was going to keep it in place, which was foiled by a few issues. I had these pipe holders that I was going to connect to the boxes with hook eyelets. (I figured I would use the hook eyelets for string for viney stuff to crawl up). However, the wrong size drill bit (and a lack of desire to go buy another one) prevented me from using that idea completely. I couldn’t get the eyelets down enough to hold the pipe holders securely in place.

Then I realized that the pipe just barely fit through the eyelets if I pulled really hard, so I started to do that. It would have been an excellent way to keep the pipe in place, nice and tight.

Until I damn near ripped my back out trying to pull it through the loop. Okay, so scratch that idea!

So one box has the pipe holders. The second box has the pipe going through the loop….

The rest of the boxes, screw it, I’m just gonna zip tie the damn things to the loops.

So I got most of that done, and hooked up a couple sprayers so I could test where I want to lay things out. I was running the water on the test when all of a sudden the water pressure went down, I heard a “POP” and then gushing of water.

The brand new timer I got for the water line broke. Apparently the makers of that specific brand decided it was a good idea to use a light amount of glue to hold together a piece that is under a lot of pressure when water is on.  DUH!!!!

So I gave up for the night, went back to Home Depot and returned that and got the other brand of timer that I already use in another faucet and trust.

I will have to tackle the rest of it tomorrow but I will get it done and then get the seeds finally in.  It’s cool-season crops so I will be doing a lot of leafy greens, spinach, lettuce, kale, brussel sprouts, brocolli and cauliflower.

Oh, and I am also going to plant some bulbs for the spring if time allows. Irrigation part is more important with the timer because I’m heading out of town Monday and I need that in place.