Nursery decor

My computer still isn't fixed and I find Andy's seventeen-inch Powerbook less comfortable to use, so I've been enjoying a reduction in the amount of time I've been spending online. It's been kind of awesome.

I think this weekend I'm going to drag the old, hand-me-down nursery nightstand out to the garage, strip it, and repaint it. In order to know what color I'm going to paint it, I have to know if we're going to paint the walls in there. I really, really want to paint the walls - our whole upstairs is covered in pine panelling,  Andy and I agree that the panelling isn't a look we love, and to be frank it's not likely to be in style again for a very long time. But it is kind of an irreversible thing to do to a room, so we haven't bothered in the nursery yet.

I want green to be the focus in the nursery. If I had my way, I'd do the walls a nice dove grey then decorate with emerald green. I doubt I'll be able to talk Andy into grey, though, so we might do the walls green. Which would make a green nightstand overkill.

Either way, I want to get or make a giant print like this to hang over the crib. I've actually had that Pinterest page open and shrunk down on Andy's computer for four days, so I don't forget about it. The only art we have on the walls in there right now is a wooden elephant carving my sister gave us, which is gorgeous but is just about impossible to see against the wood panelling!

Any recommendations for affordable, positive-message, kid-friendly art sources?

How to be a domestic goddess

1. Leave work 17 minutes late, to make up for arriving at work 17 minutes late.
2. Stop at weird small-town grocery store on the way home. Go to the complete wrong side of the store on a hunt for milk. Who the hell keeps milk way over there? Realize as you wander through the meat department that you have absolutely no idea how much meat is supposed to cost, as Andy is in charge of all meat-buying decisions in our home. Find the milk. Balk at paying $1/gallon more than you would have if you planned an actual grocery shopping trip.
3. Get home. Preheat oven. Peel several quarts of peaches. Do cobbler-type stuff to them. While they're heating, make bread-type portion of cobbler. Split bubbly, delicious peaches into several pans, as these cobblers will be shared.
4. While cobblers bake, halve and pit a few quarts of plums. Clean out weird lidded container that will have to do for storage. Dump plums into container, top with a gallon (!) of brandy. Shake carefully, as lid hasn't given any indication that it's watertight. Put on bar in basement. Cross one more item off mental list of Christmas-type things.
5. Start cleaning kitchen. Take cobblers out of oven. Keep cleaning kitchen.
6. Take one cobbler to neighbors. Wrap one cobbler with tin foil to take to coworker whose daughter outfitted our nursery. Put lid on final cobbler to take to housewarming party tonight.

I'm on Step 3. So far, I've done really well with leaving work late and taking forever to find the milk in a weird grocery store. So, you know, we'll see how much of a domestic goddess I am when it's 8 pm and I'm supposed to be walking into the party with a perfect cobbler.

I don't smell like patchouli, though

Ways I am becoming a weird hippy:

• I have made my own granola. On purpose.
• I've been washing my hair exclusively with a solid shampoo bar with natural ingredients (warning: laughably bad website, which a friend is redesigning to be paid in soap and shampoo bars).
• I don't wash my hair every day. I rinse well, though, so I can assure you that I don't smell.
• I've been canning stuff. Pickles, peach butter, salsa - and I have a date with a friend who owns a pressure canner to attack a bushel of tomatoes together.
• I've switched to Tom's of Maine for my toothpaste needs. (I still use hardcore aluminum-salts-may-cause-cancer deodorant, though, because I am not down with pit stains or stink, and I can tell you that every natural-deodorant-wearing hippy I've ever met stinks by the end of the day.)
• I use lavender Dr. Bronner's soap for myself and will likely buy a giant thing of their unscented stuff for any kid in our care.
• I switched to all-natural lip balm a few years ago when I realized how much petroleum I was probably ingesting.
• We are members of a CSA and buy any additional produce from local farmers whenever possible.
• When we finish up the last of this set of eggs Andy got at Sam's, I'll start stopping on my way home from my weekly CSA run to get a dozen brown eggs from a farmer who happens to live on my route.
• I listened to part of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, but I absolutely hated the narrator so I stopped. I did read all of Food Rules, though.
• I compost. And recycle. Enthusiastically.

None of these feel at all like a big effort. It's just I didn't realize the extent of how hippie-ish I'd become until pretty recently, so I started making a list. And it kept going.

What hippy things do you do? (I'm considering starting using "natural" cleaners around the house, but don't really believe that anything will work as well as Tilex on our awful hard water!)

I'm a Domestic Goddess, Parts One and Two

Part One: Yes I Am. I finally got around to making refrigerator pickles. Here are my notes, so I don't forget  by the next time I do this, and so you can learn from my experiences, or something:

- I read somewhere that it's helpful to make your brine in a pitcher, so you can pour it easily into the jars. I can say for sure that this was an awesome idea. It helps if you use a pretty glass pitcher you sometimes use as a vase, so you get the whole ridiculous shebang done as sweetly as possible.
- I doubled the amount of garlic she suggests and probably came close to tripling the dill.
- I thought at first glance that the amount of brine wasn't anywhere near enough for all the pickles I had, but I was only about a cup short for four pint jars. So, you know, don't double the batch until you're sure you need to. (To make the extra cup, I just divided the recipe in thirds. Duh, I guess, but I felt pretty clever.)
- I cut two jars' worth into spears, one into slices the long way (SANDWICH PICKLES!), and one into slices the short way. One of the spears jars got a serious shake of red pepper flakes.
- I used a total of eight gherkin (? The CSA sheet just said "pickles") cucumbers of varying sizes, so it averaged two small-ish cucumbers per pint jar.
- I have no idea how I'm going to wait 48 hours to try those things.

Part Two: No I'm Not. I just unearthed my smallest Pyrex bowl from the back of the fridge, where it has been hidden since I last made couscous. I have no idea when that was, but I can tell you that it took solid seconds of thought to realize that the black lumps had once been mushroom. There was also an interesting growth of grey mold on the top that seemed to be binding the grains together somehow, as that part of the stuff in the bowl stayed in a big clump even after everything else around it sort of shattered apart. My next-size-up bowl is holding the beets I finally cut up and steamed yesterday, and the bowl up from that is holding shelled peas. Neither of us particularly like peas, so those will likely sit there for a few more days then get eaten out of a sense of obligation and not because we do something delicious with them.

Holiday weekend yeah yeah

Gardening is the worst, isn't it? I really like flowers and plants, but I really hate having to mess with them. My end goal is that my gardens will be sort of self-sustaining. I don't want to have to water them, much, or weed them, or do extensive pruning sorts of things all the time. So to make that work, we're re-doing our front garden.

When we bought the house, we put in a lilac shoot from the house I grew up in, two small rose of sharon bushes, a bunch of tulip bulbs, and some hens and chicks. We covered all of the bare dirt with a layer of red rubber mulch, so we wouldn't have to re-mulch every year. Since then, the rose of sharon bushes have quadrupled in size, the lilac is much bigger but still looks a little like we stuck a stick in the dirt, and the rubber mulch has mostly sunk into the sandy soil and has done precisely nothing to keep the grass and weeds from taking over.

Today we pulled out the two rose of sharon bushes and sent them over to live in my parents' yard, where they will thrive. I spent several hours (and several fingernails) pulling up as much of the rubber mulch as I could, so we can put it on Craigslist and try to get rid of it. Over the next days and weeks, we are planning to relocate the lilac, lay down landscaping fabric, and add several varieties of native-type flowering perennials that won't require too much maintenance. We're going to get some landscaping stone to border the whole garden thing, so we won't have to spend so much time cutting the grass that always creeps up around the edge (which right now just lines up near the front walk.

I'm going to go relocate the hens and chicks to the backyard (we have this weird gap between the house and the patio that we filled in with flagstone, and the hens and chicks are going to fill in the cracks), then I'm going to take a shower, then probably a nap. Because it's a holiday weekend, damn it.

Are you with me that gardening is the stupidest of chores??