1.) Toilet Battles
My brave husband purchased a toilet snake to fix our slow flushing toilet in the kids' bathroom.
For whatever reason, the toilet in there refuses to flush at all half the time; the bowl just fills up and then it drains at a snail's pace. We've plunged and plunged to no avail. The other day, things came to a truly gross level and Chris purchased a drain snake a bit like this one (a much smaller, handheld version).
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| "Spring 2013 Drain Snake 2" by pauljoelhancock is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 |
A drain snake is basically a length of coiled wire that you twist down a drain to loosen up whatever it is that's blocking it. You feed it down the drain and then twist a handle that makes the thing writhe around and push stuff down or break it apart.
After a half hour of being elbow deep in the toilet bowl (have I mentioned my husband is awesome? My husband is awesome) it FINALLY flushed like normal.
Only to be slow draining and clogged again a day or two later.
Either our children are uniquely gifted in the density of their poo, or there's something else wrong with it. Chris is talking about taking the whole thing off the pipe this weekend and seeing if he can't figure it out.
2.) New (to us) Shower Curtain
On the upside in that bathroom, someone gave us a very pretty cloth shower curtain.
I think it looks MUCH nicer than the bare cheap plastic one we had by itself in there. That bathroom also functions as our guest bath (yet another reason to get that toilet fixed), and it's nice to have that space be a little more pleasant.
3.) Renewing the Advent Candles
The homemade Advent candles I made in 2019 melted pretty extensively during use this past year. Three of the four were so bad that the tops were completely gone or melted into strange thin pointy/crescent shaped formations that ran three quarters of the way down the candle.
So I cut the tops off until I got back down to where the wick was,
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| The top off of one of the less damaged ones. |
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| You can tell which one we lit on week 4... |
then melted some of the wax scraps and some crayon pieces (which seem to breed like destructive rabbits and regularly invade the living room) in a double boiler, much the same way I did last time,
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| I started with pink first... |
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| then added purple and blue once I'd done the first candle (the big chunks are from a previous attempt at using crayon pieces to make big circle shaped crayons in a muffin tin. The kids didn't care for them). |
and dipped the tops in several times, alternating with a bowl of ice water as I did so to harden the coat.
They turned out...less elegant looking. Kinda thick and lumpy, honestly. I think I did too many coats of colored wax.
I will have successfully avoided buying new candles for another year though. I think we can squeeze one last Advent out of them before I have to give up and buy new ones.
(What can I say? I'm stubbornly cheap).
4.) I Made Cookies out of Beans
I've come across recipes that use canned chickpeas for faux cookie dough, and I wondered if a recipe existed that used them for cookies. Lo and behold, such a recipe exists, and it uses ingredients that normal people actually have in their kitchens (no soy flour, mung beans, or tofu).
Chris and the kids were outside starting a campfire (the weather has been cool, but not too cool, enough that this has been a pleasant way to spend an occasional evening), so I had the kitchen to myself. I whipped up the dough in the food processor, made a dozen or so cookies, and had enough dough left over for about six more than I stuck in the fridge (and ate raw over the course of the next couple days). I stuck a few on a plate, then went outside to join the rest of the family.
They...weren't bad. They don't taste quite like "regular" cookies made out of flour, but they stay soft after they've cooled and they hit that "sweet" craving reasonably well. The kids enjoyed them, and I like that they're not made with refined grains and they're high in protein (both things I need to take into account as a pregnant mommy). I'll probably make them again at some point.
5.) The Library is Open Again!!
Hallelujah!!!
The other day I was over at my mom's house and she mentioned she'd been taking my younger brothers (I'm the oldest, she still has school aged kids at home) to the library regularly.
I thought they were still only doing curbside pickup and had stopped bothering to make the trip over after Little Boy started school. But no, turns out that they've been letting people back in to browse for the past couple months.
So a couple days ago, Little Girl and I went. It was wonderful. I didn't realize how much I'd missed being able to browse and just look and discover books, instead of having to have an idea of what I wanted going in, which is a necessity when you're requesting books online.
Some things were different: the checkout desk now has a huge Plexiglas window thing on top of it, and there's chunks of the stuff forming shields all over the computer area. And they still aren't doing any of the children's' story time or craft programs.
But it was still glorious to be able to go in and walk around, and Little Girl really enjoyed getting to pick out books to bring home.
6.) Angelina Ballerina
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I found some of the "classic" episodes on YouTube (the ones that are hand drawn animation, not the weird CGI animation that came later) and she's just fallen absolutely head over heels for it. She'll ask to watch it over and over and over, and I'm worried she might wear out the DVD we got from the library. It's this show about a little girl mouse who wants to be a ballerina, and her adventures in ballet class and with her friends.
It's less obnoxious than the Minnie Mouse stuff I can find (Minnie Mouse is her other great love...I don't know why she's got this fixation on rodents wearing pink bows) and I enjoy the British accents of the cast, but I do find it a tad annoying that it's one of those shows where the protagonist always gets the ballet part that she wants, and always gets the better of the bully characters in her ballet class alongside her really subservient sidekick best friend. Thankfully the story lines get more balanced when they focus on her life outside of ballet (she gets in trouble for and has to work to pay off something she broke in one episode, and learns to put her baby cousin's needs before her own in another), but I wish it was a bit more consistent.
I feel like, as things are, Angelina grows up to be a really awful, ballet obsessed, entitled queen bee teenager a la Pitch Perfect or Mean Girls.
7.) Someone Gave us a Dead Pig
Not actually the first time that this has happened.
A friend of my husband's hunts feral hogs, and sometimes ends up with more meat than he can use. He brought us some meat last night.
(A quick aside about feral hogs-- they're dangerous to people, REALLY destructive of the ecosystem, compete with (and sometimes attack and eat) ranchers' cattle and the local deer population, and are also VERY good eating if you catch them young enough (older hogs aren't any good for eating and are usually just shot and left for the vultures). They're an invasive species (descended from pigs that escaped from area farms) and there's no hunting limits on them. One of the local wildlife refuges around here even has hog weekends where they ask hunters to come kill as many of the things as they possibly can, and they're numerous enough in my neck of the woods that I've seen them on the side of the road as roadkill.
Babe or Wilber, they ain't.)
This time he brought us most of a hog, which means that the thing was already skinned and butchered into large pieces (as opposed to last time, where we had to hang it on the tree in the backyard to skin and butcher it). So when my husband gets home this afternoon, we're going to haul in the borrowed Yeti cooler on the back porch, divide it into smaller pieces, and package it for the freezer.
And I'll probably make something involving pork for supper.
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