How to Make "The Bread"

Combine in the bowl of a mixer with a dough hook or a large bowl:
1 cup warm potato water (cooking water from boiling potatoes)
2 cup warm filtered water
1 1/2 T yeast
1/2 C sugar
1/2 C oil
1 T salt

If you plan on adding "wheat berries" do it now

Let the above mixture rest without mixing until it looks kind of like this:



I do this while I grind my whole wheat flour.

Add flour alternating Whole Wheat and White flour. I start with 3 cups of each before beginning to mix. Add additional flour until it forms a nice smooth dough (about 10 C total). Knead the dough until it bounces back like so:



The dough should feel slightly sticky.

Place dough in a well-oiled bowl, turning to coat. Cover and let rise until doubled.


Shape the dough into either rolls or 3 loaves, allow to rise again until doubled in size.

Bake 350 degrees until the bottom of the loaves/rolls sound hollow when tapped with a fingernail.

Selfish crafting

So, my birthday is coming up. Having said that I've decided to take this week to make stuff for me. So often the things that I make are presents or items for sale on Etsy that I forget that I have this whole list of stuff that I'd like to make for me. Truthfully, if my poor dear husband wasn't working his fingers to the bone already I'd ask him to knit me a scarf out of this fabulous ball of yarn that I got for Christmas.

So, what am I making myself?
A scarf, specifically this scarf













A pair of socks to wear in the temple because my feet always get cold and regular socks just don't cut it.









and a pin cushion! I know the pin cushion doesn't seem all that great but it's pictured with my old one, I think that you'll agree that it's time for something new! (The new one is the pretty square one.)





And... for some unselfish crafting I did finally finish Al's apron.












We've been walking rather than riding lately. Rhys is getting pretty heavy and the walks wear him out a bit, which is appreciated. He's nowhere near road ready yet. The poor kid still jumps if we're walking on the sidewalk and a car comes up unexpectedly.

Where have I been? Not Blogging....

So, I haven't been blogging recently for a couple of reasons:

1: I primarily blog about cycling here (on the blog for those of you reading on Facebook) and until two days ago the bike was out of commission and has been for at least a month and a half. Derek had taken off the rear wheel and neither of us had found time to put it back on! Seriously! Every time we would remember it would be late at night or we'd be at least 15 miles away from the bike! I am not back in the saddle again yet but I hope to be soon. Instead we've been walking to the library with our friends down the street unless it was too cold or raining. I do still have grand goals regarding cycling though and hopefully will be getting moving on those soon.

2: I've been out of town a lot or have had company in. A few weeks ago I went down to help my MIL move out of her old house and into my old house AKA Grandma's house. Then we went back as a family to bring a UHaul up to Virginia with a load of furniture and a piano for my darling SIL. This was immediately followed by Rhys' birthday and Thanksgiving! Busy busy busy!

3: I've been crafting. I've been crafting a lot. Check the Picture:
There are:
2 fleece blankets
2 calendars
1 photobook
3 sets of fingerless gloves
1 scarf
1 headwrap
2 pair of socks and the beginnings of a third
1 pair of felted slippers with antiskid paint dots on the bottum
1 purse
1 Adipose Doll
1 lingerie bag with cute applique detail
1 flash drive with every digital picture ever taken of the boys (this doesn't sound like much but it was a days worth of work sorting through all of my pictures to just get them).
AND 1 Quilt which REAL quilters shouldn't look at too closely because it will make your head implode.

and this is just Christmas.... I made some stuff for Rhys' birthday to that's not pictured, not to mention all of the cookies and my failed attempt at homemade pretzels!

So, that's what I've been up to and where I've been. Rhys' hair is finally growing back in and Alistairs hair is overgrown again!

Head Lice

ACK!

So, Rhys bumped his head pretty bad on the swingset on Monday (DH's birthday) and cut his head open pretty bad. As it turns out this was a good thing. In applying pressure to his head (after finally finding the cut through his thick hair) I noticed something - LICE. I don't usually see Rhys' scalp due to the fact that he has extraordinarily thick hair and he hadn't complained about itching but there they were.

So, I checked Alistair and he had them pretty bad too. I know that they're pretty common around here but I just wanted to (and still want to) vomit just thinking about it. To think of tons of little parasites crawling around on my sweet little ones just thoroughly disgusts me.

It also partially ruined Derek's planned birthday evening as we spent our bedtime/post dinner hours coating the children with an essential oil and olive oil mixture, and then dousing their hair with vinegar to loosen the eggs, rather than getting to be cute married people. Rhys fell asleep before we could do the vinegar rinse and we had to wake him up. He babbled incoherently while we cleaned his head off and combed out as much as we could that night. Alistair screamed and cried, it was like torture to him.

On Tuesday morning I checked them and myself again and sure enough found that we didn't get all the lice. So, I went ahead and called the only two families that we've hung out with in the past week (okay so one we had to stop off by because we don't have their phone # but we kept our distance). I cut the kid's hair off pretty short and took the hair outside far away from the house. I cancelled our weekly trip to the library because I wouldn't want to infect every toddler in town, and then went to get some Mayo and the official "Lice Combs" - which work pretty well at catching those little buggers.

Well, I tried to comb through everyone's hair before using the mayo and Alistair cried bloody murder because it hurts to run a metal comb along one's scalp but he let me do it. Rhys on the other hand had too many eggs. I started to run the comb along his scalp and it hurt so bad that he was shrieking in such a heart wrenching way that I stopped to love on him and calm him down. We talked about it and in explaining the necessity for using the comb on him I said that it was either this or I had to shave his head. He begged me to shave his head. He was very sad to loose his pretty hair but there was no way that I could have combed all of those nits and eggs out without him shrieking and crying all morning. So, I got and old towel and shaved all of his hair into it. His head was scabbed and covered with these gross creatures. My heart just sinks looking at his head now bald and scabby.

We did the mayo thing (you apply mayo to the scalp and wrap your head in plastic for at least an hour - we did 1 1/2 hours just to be sure) rinsed with vinegar again and Al and I went through the nit-picking battle again. I felt so bad for him but it has to be done consistently and repeatedly if I don't want to put the chemical shampoo on his head - which I don't - since it's a carcinogen and he's only two.

I'm fairly positive that we've got them all. I've spent the past 2 days laundering everything that can be laundered and vacuuming everything else. My head itches but at least two people have checked it and I appear clean. Did I mention that we still don't have a functioning shower and thus are dealing with this in the bathtub? I cannot deal with this happening again. I just can't. I WILL have a nervous break down and I WILL shave off my hair a la Britney Spears or Sinead O'Connor if I have to deal with it again. SERIOUSLY!

So, how does this relate to cycling?.... well... helmets of course! Rhys' helmet is currently in quarantine as are mine and Al's. So, we're probably going to be walking for the next week to week and a half... which reminds me... I have to go vacuum the entire car out since we had to drive to get to the store to buy mayo and lice combs yesterday (no sidewalk for part of the walk). The work will never end!

So, here's Rhys with his bald head and some cycling shots we've taken recently to add something nice to this post:









Bald Rhys from the front and the back (notice the gash from the swings and the scabs - ouch)










Rhys the night we discovered the lice and my bike at the post office a couple of weeks ago









Produce from the farmers market procured by bike and brought home in my own reusable bags.









Hubby and the kids at a volley ball game (we rode there).










The kids enjoying some peaches at the farmers market.

Getting Political, Religeous, and Calling out the Hypocrits

Please pardon my current break in the usual broadcast schedule of nice fluffy happy sotries about cycling and how it's changing my life (I promise to put one of those up later after I feel better), but I just got blindsided by a political link on someone elses blog that sucked the spirit out of the room. So, here I am to address my opinion of politics at the moment. I'm not so vocal about it but I have to say that both McCain and Obama chill my blood and make me want to run to the bathroom to vomit. I will most likely end up voting either for Bob Barr (if he ends up having a chance) or McCain because he makes me want to vomit slightly less. The difference in overall vomit output is very slight.

We as a nation are going to an unnamed destination but I will tell you that our chosen vehicle is indeed a hand basket. We have GOT to start voting independent people! Do you want to know why? Because all of the corruption, money, and political backscratching is just going in a circle up there in D.C. We are Rome. We will fall like Rome and what will be left? We're not nearly as cool as Italy so let's not kid ourselves here.... nothing.

What we need is righteous uncorruptible leadership. We don't need promises of change and promises of no longer being depenant on forieghn oil. Raising minimum wage continuously isn't going to do anything when the quality of students our schools are putting out is so hideously lacking because we're standardized testing the life out of them. A raise in minimum wage is merely going to raise the cost of everything else. Continuously adjusting it for inflation is going to force us into a post WWI Germany situation where it takes a wheelbarrow of cash to buy bread. Oh yes and our current administration isn't helping by just putting more bills out there. Yes, lets put more out so that the dollar can be worth less than it was. Also, trickle down economics is going to take at least a generation to do anything and people aren't going to wait that long. That's why it's called "trickle down" not "money flooding down". You idiots! You fools!

We are on the edge of a precipice. If you're planning on the current candidates for office to bail us out you're wrong. Get your food storage together, stock up on the essentials, learn some basic survival skills because if things keep going as they are we're all going down.

Pull out your Book of Moromon and read Alma and Helaman... we're there! The Gadianton Robbers are leading the country and they have control of the media. If you don't believe me start watching the data and interpreting it instead of letting someone tell you what it means, the two haven't matched up for quite some time. It's happening all over again. If you don't have a Book of Mormon I would suggest getting one and reading. Open your minds, listen to the spirit and learn. If you're too closed minded to ponder the Book of Mormon, please ponder the fate of Rome.

Don't blame me, I voted for Romney. He may not be perfect, but I felt really good about him.

On another political note... I have some really great friends who champion environmental issues. I really do love you. However, those of you who are not practicing what you preach at home need to get your act together. If you're doing the things that you need to do to live a lower impact lifestyle, then I'm not talking to you. But if you're not, then I don't want to hear anything out of you regarding the environment until you get your own house in order. You need to recycle, get your butt out of your car and persue alternate transportation, cloth diaper if you have a baby, and quit wasting stuff, or shut up! I, your conservative, evil neighbor am doing these things to the best of my ability. Get up and get to the recycling center and stop being a hypocrit!

Change starts at home.

I once read a bumper sticker at Charis Books in Atlanta it said, "Men who change diapers change the world." In other words it starts here in our own homes. Teach your children to recycle and live with less waste at home. If you have no children teach your friends and roomates by example instead. Better yet, teach them morals and values through your behavior. Move out from there.

At any rate, the state of the country and our people right now really makes me sick. Quit being lemmings! I'm absolutely sick of political rhetoric, empty promises, the corrupt and the crazy leading us, and you people running off the darn cliff. I don't want to come with you but there are too many of you and you're dragging me down. Fix it people because I can't afford to move me and mine to a deserted island until this blows over.

Free Couch with Purchase of Toddler

Okay so I'm not actually putting Alistair up for sale but with his reaction to us putting the old couch on the road yesterday you'd think that I was. Derek and I finally had a free minute together to take the old messed up couch out to the road and Al had a fit. At first he thought that we were getting rid of the new couch and he ran to it crying, "no, not my special couch". Then, he did the same with the old couch, only this time he put together an all out protest. He sat down on it and wouldn't get off. We extracted an Al from the couch after a few moments but he continued to cry and attempt to block our progress out the door. We finally go the thing out and the crying continued until he ultimately decided that he did indeed want to go down to the curb and say goodbye to the thing. This was of course 20 minutes later... I think that my ears are still bleeding!

So, we have a new couch courtesy of the old church building (from our new branch) and our branch president who was kind enough to hang onto it for us. It actually matches my area rug! How cool is that?! This picture is from before I got the photo wall put up behind it. Yes, I've been here less than 3 months and I'm hanging pictures... I know it's a new thing for me!

I never did post pictures from our trip to story time here. A couple of weeks ago I rode the kids down to story time at the library. We had fun, met some other kids... They do crafts here so the kids had a blast. In the picture the kids are holding up some signs, that wasn't the craft. They made mice out of paper plates. I accidentally left my keys (bike lock key included) on the ground and the bike didn't get stolen, so that's nice.









It's also occurred to me that I didn't post pictures from the move. So, here are some of us moving in. In the picture with all the kids they're watching a train go through town at the crossing 2 blocks up the street (they're big blocks though).

So Busy

So, I've been a bad blogger lately.. no blog!

This is mostly because we actually have stuff to do here! Last week we rode to story time at the library and I totally lucked out because I dropped my keys while locking up the bike and forgot to pick them up and no one stole the bike. *phew* We made friends at the library, yea! Actual friends who have kids the same age and live close by! Not that my other friends aren't totally awesome but... sometimes you need to just walk around the block and let the monkeys loose.

We rode to the dollar store again and met some very friendly cyclists. These two older guys were hanging out and commented on the trailer as we rode by so we stopped and talked for a few. Most people around here seem to ride cruisers - old school cruisers. There are a lot of seriously stylish and cool bikes around here. I think that there are only like 2-3 families that actually wear helmets though. I'm a little concerned with the lack of obeying traffic laws as well but... not much that I can do about that at the moment.

I made it all the way down to the board of education and back the other day just before tropical storm Hannah arrived and messed with my joints for a couple of days. We literally got in the house as the rain started on Friday. Al fell asleep in the trailer again... very cute... although poor Rhys ends up with a face full of helmet when lil'bro nods off. I'm looking forward to getting some cycling in later this week but I've also got to make some trips out to Roanoke Rapids and Petersburg by car. I must start on Jedi costumes for the boys soon otherwise they'll be wearing the overpriced crumby ones from a department store that I don't admitt publicly to shopping at...