Love, Erika

Food Changes

Weird things sometimes happen for a reason. This week, I started watching this program that I found on the DVR called The Blood Sugar Solution which aired on PBS not long ago. I thought Dave had recorded it, so I started watching it. He later asked if I had recorded it, and I said no, I thought you did. He said no. So nobody claims to have done it. It must have been a child mishap with the remote control. Weird, huh?

Anyway, this is a program by a doctor who outlines various (negative) changes in the modern diet which have resulted in most of our modern day health problems like obesity, diabetes, etc. The things he talks about in this program are not suprising, not new information to me..... it was all things that I have heard a million times before (way too much sugar, not enough fiber, too much processed food, too many preservatives, etc). We KNOW this. We've heard it all before. But for whatever reason, that particular day I was in the right frame of mind to watch the program, pay attention, and feel ready to even make some changes based on what he was talking about.

So these days there are 1001 things to watch out for in the foods we eat.....saturated and trans fats, pesticides, hormones, genetically modified this-and-that, sugars, gluten, glycemic index, you name it. One of the things that struck me the most from that program was high fructose corn syrup. Gross, in its modern day Frankenstein chemical makeup (and did you know what a rotten, pest-infested crop corn is (and therefore one of the most heavily pesticide treated crops???).

I decided to take inventory of the things we regularly eat and see if they contain HFCS and see what the alternatives are at the store when I go shopping. Reading all the food labels, I am shocked and disgusted about how it's in everything.  But there are a few particularly bad offenders: some juices (particularly lower quality and store brand juices), jelly, pancake syrup, applesauce, ketchup, and BREAD (really?? bread? why they gotta put that crap in bread?).

Luckily I was easily able to find alternatives for many of those things. Ketchup was easy-- ALL of the Hunt's products do not contain HFCS and Simply Heinz does not also.  Jelly was fairly easy too, as long as you read the labels.  Bread was a little harder, but you do just have to stand there and diligently read all the labels. It appears that all the Arnold's brand breads are HFCS-free (which I can get at BJs for no more than I was paying for our regular brand).  Applesauce was easy as long as you get the "Natural" kind or "no sugar added" which means it's nothing but apples and water..... the standard regular version is loaded with HFCS.

I was relieved that a lot of the major things that I feed my kids are good to go....... 90% of their juices (which I have always watered down by at least 100% anyway), waffles, cereals, etc.  I'm still having trouble with pancake syrup because there does not seem to be a LITE HFCS-free option...... Log Cabin brand does not contain high fructose corn syrup but they don't have a lite version. I'm not sure which is worse. I'm sure the kids can stand a few extra calories.

The more you know, the more you should be afraid of everything. Ugh. It's a messed up world.

It's not even DECEMBER yet!

What is going on with Christmas this year? Was Thanksgiving early this year or something??  I can't even believe how far into the Christmas season we are already and it's not even December. Oh well. I guess we need something kind of special and magical to get us through these dark months of winter, so it must be a good thing.

I took advantage of a RARE moment today to take a picture of our "fireplace" with the stockings up. Believe me, it does NOT look like this normally. Our chimney and woodstove are being cleaned/inspected tomorrow, so all the crap around the woodstove has been removed and pulled out of the way for that. Normally it has a baby fence all around it, with all kinds of crap piled up on the inside around it. Classy. It's  been about two years since I've seen it so clean and nice, so I took a picture so it would last longer. :)

Bird! Where bird?

Today we had the pleasure of being visited by a homing pigeon. It was the coolest thing. I had gone out on our front deck to water the tomatoes, and was clanking around doing my thing, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye a beautiful white bird in the driveway, in the shade of my car, drinking out of a puddle. I thought, "ok, that's weird. Birds in nature aren't usually all white like that."  And then I realized it was a white pigeon.... must be a homing pigeon!!! And sure enough, it did have a little cuff on its leg.

I was beyond delighted!!!  I secretly hoped it made a mistake and thought this was its home and was going to stay. :) It was so tame, and not scared of me in the least.  I walked right up to it, and talked to it, and gave it some fresh water (which it drank) and it never flinched. It was a little lethargic but did not seem hurt. I think it was just tired.

I went and got Dave and he came out and we looked at it for a while. It wasn't scared of us at all. Then I went inside to check Google and see what we were supposed to do with it, and how we could help it. By the time I had learned that I should give it water (which I already did) and was about to go across the street to ask our neighbor for some bird food, it was gone. :( I guess it was just stopping for a quick rest.  We miss you, Pigeon #807! Come back any time!

Parker had been watching it out the front door, and later went outside calling sweetly, "Bird?  Bird?  Where bird?"

Let's Go Fly a Kite

 
Let's Go Fly a Kite
Up to the highest height
Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring.....
Up to the atmosphere
Up where the air is clear
Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring.

I remember singing that song in 5th grade, I think...... still to this day. :)  So we had a nice day recently and it was really windy so we remembered a kite I had bought on clearance last spring probably and I happened to remember that it had fallen behind a chest of drawers never to be seen again. Dave fished it out, and we went up to the field (the pumpkin patch field) to see if we could fly it.

 
 
This field is quite a hotspot of activity lately and we're all enjoying it until the approximate June 1 day of plowing and planting pumpkins. The past few days we've seen a herd of 6 deer hanging out and enjoying nibbling the only green vegetation in the world there, their big white tails flicking in the sunlight. I'm happy to see how fat they look. Other times I look over there and it's covered in turkeys.

And also, another touch of spring..... here's Parker with his fresh buzz cut. He looks so much older now! :(

Holding our breath and waiting....

We've had major road construction going on AROUND us for more than a week now...... we know what the plans are and we know exactly what they'll be doing to our yard. They've done our across-the-street neighbors already, and are working two houses down currently. Tomorrow they'll probably do our next door neighbors and then we'll be up. I'm nervous.

They're digging a trench all along the outside of both sides of the road to install drain pipes beside the roads underground. The problem with our yard is that we have 4 beautiful large mature maple trees in a row along the road, maybe 3 feet in. Not to mention an entire landscaped bed that runs the length of our property along the road. This was not my choice, it was how it was when we bought the place and I never would have put it there if this had been my house 30 years ago. For exactly stuff like this. But it's there and is in the path of destruction. I'm not so concerned about the landscaped area because that can always be fixed, but the root damage that is sure to happen to the trees is disturbing. I can only hope that it won't kill the trees, but I do not have high hopes about it. They will be digging VERY close and VERY deep next to the base of the trees. 

So here we are posing in the scoop of the backhoe, the very one that may kill our beautiful trees. It's a bittersweet picture for me. The new road that they're building is MUCH needed and it will be wonderful not to go thru the roof of the car as we drive down our road. I am pretty sure this road has not been paved or repaired in the 33 years since it was built.  But I will be beyond sad if our trees die--they are really beautiful. I hate to see mature trees destroyed. 

The Pumpkin Patch

I remember the day. It was back in the very early spring of this year, I think. Dave came up to me and told me there was going to be a pumpkin patch right next to our house. What?  SHUT UP!!!  I won the lottery that day!  It was only just last fall that I lamented on this blog post that I had not been able to find a "real" pumpkin patch in this area, although I knew there had to be some somewhere! Well, somebody was listening because they brought me a pumpkin patch right out my front door!  "They" being Deveriendt Farms on Mast Rd in Goffstown. We've been getting our mums and pumpkins and stuff from them for years now, so it was awesome that they're using the field next door to grow some of their crops.

We were thrilled all year as we watched the tractors coming and going (they really didn't get started until right around June 1st) and heard all the plowing and whatnot going on over there. Then suddenly, there were little plants. And things were quiet for a long time (in terms of the farm, anyway.  The loggers, now--that is a whole 'nother blog post). It was a looooooong, hot, dry summer so we wondered if they would even live. But farmers have ways around that, I guess, and one day in early July we went up there and saw this:

At this time, we would just tell Drew that we were going to look at the "plants." One time we made the mistake of telling him we would look at the pumpkins, and he was very confused -and disappointed- because obviously there were NO pumpkins to him. LOL. So we didn't start using pumpkin terminology until there were actually some forming on the vines so he could understand (sort of).

 

The next time I went up there to take pics was August 19th, and things had BOOMED!  I hardly recognized the place. It was beautiful! (not to mention, look at the difference in the light. This is pretty much the same time of day, but the difference in light between July and August is remarkable. About 6 weeks and maybe a couple of degrees of the Earth's axis makes for some much prettier light!)

 

Just barely starting to turn orange!

Things were coming fast and furious at this point, so it was fun to walk up there every couple of days to see the changes. The pumpkins were turning orange by the day!  Here we are on August 31st...... still with so little rain!......

 

  

 

And I was so interested in the pumpkins that I paid little attention to the other crops going on there too: they also have summer squash, cucumbers, beets, and butternut squash and white squash.  The folks from the farm have been coming by every day now that we're in the heat of harvest time, many times twice a day, to pick things right from the field and take them back to the farm stand. It's amazing. You don't get any fresher than that! From field to farm stand all in the same day. Here we are at September 6th.

 

 

 
 Beets!!

And lastly..... one of the last times I went to the field was Sept 9th. I took pictures of the whole field full of pumpkins. And I'm glad I did because just two days later they started coming to harvest the pumpkins. I saw them drive past my house with pickup trucks full. And now the fields are mostly picked over, so I'm glad I got my photos when I did!

 
 

 

"Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He's gotta pick this one. He's got to. I don't see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there's not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see."
--Linus, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

So.... what's next?  This bizarre summer has seen months on end of farming, logging (which is a whole 'nother post in itself), and now that those are over with..... now comes the ROAD PAVING. In a couple of weeks, they are digging up my entire road and rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. And GOD knows it needs it.  Including digging up our culdesac and making our front yard much bigger! It's a strange thing when they actually REMOVE pavement instead of adding more. But they are!

The NH wind storm of Feb 2010

On Thursday night we experienced the most violent wind storm that I ever hope to witness ever again. I remember in the evening sitting in the living room watching tv while Dave was in the basement, and hearing the wind and rain whipping around. I IM'd him and jokingly said "OMG we're going to die!" But that was early in the night. As time went on it got worse, and worse.... and worse. I went to bed, but did not sleep. Finally by midnight I leapt out of bed, couldn't lie there any more feeling like a target since the bedroom is on the end of the house that is right up next to the woods with tall trees all around us. I heard trees popping and snapping, and got that sick feeling you get when you hear a tree break, and the few seconds of waiting before you hear the crash of it hitting the ground (and hopefully not the roof). And then finally the power went out.

When our power goes out, the first thing that happens is that the basement starts flooding immediately. The water table around our house is naturally high, but especially with all the major rains last week, the sump pumps were running nearly constantly. So when the power went out, the water just kept pouring in with nothing to pump it out. Dave had to run out and try to start the generator right then and had a little trouble with it, but finally got it. Meanwhile we ran around downstairs sloshing through 3 inches of water and got everything off the floor that could be damaged. So we were picking up boxes, toys, cat litter bags, anything that we could pile up on a table or raised surface. 

That night was a long night. Neither Dave nor I slept with the wind still screaming around. It seemed it would never die down. And the kids were sleeping fitfully since their white noise machines were no longer working, they would hear every squeak and crack in our crackly house. And of course the temperature started falling.

Anyway, to make a very long story short....  our ordeal that seemed like 2 weeks long was only 3.5 days in reality. But in winter in New Hampshire, not having power is not really a cake walk. 

We were lucky. There were 269,000 people without power and that is about a quarter of the entire state. While we were among some of the last that got their power back, we didn't have any of the tragedies that you always hear about in storms like this. We didn't asphyxiate on fumes from the generator, we didn't burn the house down, we didn't freeze to death. In fact, the worst things that happened to us were that we were cold at night, we melted a plastic bucket and table from hot ashes, and Parker got a nasty diaper rash from improper cleaning and lack of bathing. And I had to throw out a nice meatloaf that I made Thursday night because we didn't get to eat the rest of it until Tuesday and  by that point we figured it was best to just toss it.

We have a small generator and its #1 primary function is to keep the sump pumps running. And additionally Dave had it rigged up to have the refrigerator plugged in, and also a lamp and it kept our iPhones charged. it's funny how after a while you just don't hear the roar of the generator anymore, that thing is so loud. Thank GOD for the iPhones, they were the only thing that kept us in touch with the outside world. We were madly stalking the PSNH Twitter page for updates.

Dave was kept so busy the whole time, hauling firewood in and out of the house, keeping the fire going, and trying to dry out the wood since the wind had blown the tarps off the woodpiles and everything was soaked. Also he was going out to refuel the generator every few hours (even throughout the nights), and making trips to the gas station a couple of times a day for more gas. It turned out to be an expensive weekend with all the gas, and all the takeout we bought since we couldn't cook or fix anything.

I'M SO GLAD IT'S OVER.

News Stories:

http://www.wmur.com/news/22686255/detail.html

http://www.wmur.com/news/22689993/detail.html

 

Fire & Ice

Looking back on January I found a few things I forgot to blog (no big surprise there, since I'm lucky to get anything up at all.)

Dave's favorite day of the whole year (much like my Mulch Day) is Fire Day. We start making the stick pile in  mid-summmer and pile it up and pile it up and by late fall it's huge although this year was the biggest one yet since Dave cut down a couple of pine trees. It easily towered over our heads by the end of the summer. Drew and I used to run around it in circles..... Wow, really??? That feels like years ago since we were able to play outside. But anyway, Dave waits until there's a real good solid snow cover on the ground before doing the burn pile to reduce the fire hazard. There hasn't been as much snow this year as he would have liked so he finally did it on January 9th which was a good call because there wasn't much snow prior to that, and it's pretty sparse right now too. Uncle Dan came over to assist and as we all know men can't resist a huge fire so he wouldn't have missed it for anything. And it was a HUGE fire (I took these photos from within the comfort of my living room with a huge zoom lens). The stick pile alone towered over their heads, and the flames were enormous. The guys chucked shovels of snow onto it to keep it in control.

 

 

 

Later in the month, on January 18th which was MLK Day (or Civil Rights Day as they call it in New Hampshire...)  there was a pretty good-sized snowfall. It was (if I remember) one of the prettier snowfalls since it stuck in the trees and was nice and fluffy. For a few hours the sun came out and it seemed picture-taking was in order (was probably a moment of insanity)

 

This is my dogwood tree..... I think it must be some kind of hardy variety. Seems to be doing well so far.

Dinnerware

So for the first time in our married life we have a set of matching dinnerware. It's about time, right? And since there's 8 pieces of everything, that means everybody will match at all times!!  Right now we have this crazy mishmash collection of dishes and lately so many of them have broken that our selection for plates has gotten pathetic.

So anyway, I got this set of boring ol' solid white dishes at Kohl's for a great price and I think it will do us just fine for the next couple of years. We'll see how many we can get broken in a short amount of time. Christmastime isn't a likely time to be buying things for yourself, but I find the sales to be so great that it's actually the perfect time to get stuff you need for the rest of the year.  The eight mugs that it came with will be going directly to Goodwill on the next trip. I already have all the coffee cups that I like to use, and we don't have room to hang on to that many mugs that we'll never use. Ever. 

And Dave.... ever the realist, says "I don't know why you're all excited about "table settings" when what exactly is going to go on them?? Fish sticks?" LOL. I could have been offended, but he's right. One thing at a time.

Happy 1 Year Anniversary - RAV4!!

It's been exactly one year since we brought the Rav4 home and I still love it as much today as I did when we first got it. I have never been in love with a car before, but I love my car. I've always been completely ambivalent about a vehicle, I mean, who the hell really cares??  But I love this car.  I still get sad on days that I don't go somewhere and don't get to drive it. I can honestly say that our lives have been made better and more convenient because of it.

It was incredible this winter. In my old car, I would regularly spin out, slide off the road, etc etc. But in this car, I only slipped ONCE this winter.... and it was the tiniest little eeeek. That in itself is a huge load off my mind, to not fear for my life anytime I need to go somewhere in the winter.

It's also fantastic to not have to fold myself up like a sardine to fit into it, and that is still something that I notice every single time I get into it. I can just slide right in and have plenty of leg room and not have my knees hitting the steering wheel. Love that.  And it's EXTRA good for being massively pregnant, nice and comfortable (as much as anything can be, anyway).