Thursday was a sad day for me, and for only me, I’m sure. Before we get to that, let’s talk about a couple of other things.
First, my desktop photo.
On Wednesday morning we woke to ice coating everything. I went back into the house for my camera. I spent quite a long time and many, many shots, trying to capture the rays of the morning sun reflected in an ice droplet. This is the best shot I got and looks great on my desktop.
I walked around and got a few other shots and although you really can’t tell it’s ice and not rain, I know and I like them.
The kittens followed us, as usual. Spitfire chased a twig across the ice on our pond as he batted it around. Ginger, ears perked up, was curious about what he was chasing and went to investigate. Her leash was too short so she had to content herself with just watching.
Other pictures I’ve taken this past week include these red berries dripping after a recent rain.
Burdock against a branch.
A culvert ice-fall.
Waterfall over the beaver dam in the Kipp’s side yard.
Logs destined to be a home, musical instrument, maybe a boat or just a fire to keep someone warm.
Speaking of keeping warm…
Ginger hasn’t been enjoying the freezing temperatures lately. When her little paws get cold she’ll hold them off the ground, one at a time, then when we head back in, she walks like she’s walking on sharp pieces of glass. I guess ice crystals can be as sharp as glass to a little doggies feet.
Silly me! Our friend Margaret, in Missouri, gave Ginger a pair of boots a few years ago. I dug them out and suited Ginger up and took her to the mailbox with me. At first she tried to shake them off but soon realized they were a good thing and took off running as fast and as far as her leash would let her go. I laughed to see such spirit in a little dog.
I took a picture of my shop window when we came back with the mail. It’s almost as cold in there as it is outside. It’s not heated, don’t ya know. My glass suncatchers will have to wait for warmer weather. In the meantime, my newfound love of wire weaving is rattling around in my head with my long time love of glass. Who knows what that will produce. Something beautiful and unique, I hope.
I took another crack at Shrinky Dinks. This time I used the correct numbered plastic, number 6, and the end result is so stinkin’ cute!
I put Tigger beside the original picture I traced so you can see how much they shrink up when you put them in a hot oven for a couple of minutes. Tigger started out at three and a half inches tall and ended up just under an inch and a half.
I pulled the images from the internet but you can totally freehand something if you want to. The oven temp isn’t as important as the kind of marker you use. They have to be permanent markers or it’ll just wipe right off.
This week I made a baby bracelet.
Smudge helped.
“What’s that for?” Mike asked when I showed it to him.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I had a little piece of braided blue and thought I’d like to make it.” I have no idea what I’m going to do with it. I guess I’ll just add it to my inventory.
I made homemade dish soap this past week too.
“Peg, it’s easier to buy that stuff,” you say.
I know right! That’s what Mike tells me too! I like things that are whole and natural, or at least as close to that as I can get.
I made this soap with Ivory, borax, and hot water. I added a few drops of lavender oil to make it smell pretty and a few drops of food coloring to make it blue. I put it in my recently emptied Dawn bottle. So now, instead of having just a dish soap and a hand soap living on my kitchen counter, I have a second dish soap living there too.
“How do you like it?” you ask.
I don’t like it as well as I like Dawn. For one thing, my dishes, which are air-dried, dry spotty. For another, I don’t get all of those lovely bubbles.
I know! I know! Bubbles aren’t what makes your dishes clean. Bubbles do, however, make me happy. So what I do is add my homemade dish soap to the dishwater, then add a few drops of Dawn. Voila! I’m happy now. I’m even considering just adding the Dawn right into the homemade mixture. I want my glass soap dispenser to sit on my counter and not the big old ugly plastic Dawn bottle. So until the glass one gets empty enough that I can do that, this is how everyone is going to live.
“You could put him under the sink,” you suggest.
Yeah. No. I like it better when he’s within easy reach. I’m not trying to impress anyone with an uncluttered countertop and it doesn’t bother me.
I posted my picture of homemade soap on Facebook. You may have seen it there. Then someone said it can cause gunk to build up in your septic tank. I replied that I heard Rid-X will cause gunk to build up in your tank. The article went on to say that every time you make a ‘deposit’ into your septic system, you are adding the bacteria needed to break down waste, so you don’t need to add anything else.
But now I worried. I don’t want gunk in my septic tank. So I tested my dish soap. I added a liberal squirt to a bowl of water and let it sit overnight. It didn’t congeal so I’m guessing it won’t when it gets into the tank either. Then I tested my laundry soap. I filled the washer with the smallest amount of water and added the amount of soap I use for a full load. I let it sit overnight and in the morning I checked it. It wasn’t congealed either.
I researched it online and can’t find anything that says homemade soaps are harmful to our septic system. There are lots of things that are bad for it though. Food scraps and grease are two; they’ll clog the drain field. Lint from your washer and dryer will clog your system and the backwash from your water softening system will interfere with the settling process inside your tank.
All in all, I think I’ll keep using my homemade soaps.
<<<<<>>>>>
I waited in the Jeep one day while Mike had his hair cut. I keep a New Testament in the center console for just such waits. As I read from the book of Hebrews the rain gently fell against the windshield. I picked up my camera and took a few shots.
I like this second one best. I can see the buildings reflected upside down in them.
A few days later, sitting in the car wash, I took a few pictures of the different cycles as the soap ran down the windshield. I like this one best. I like the bubbles in the soap veins. I like the soft colors in the background and I like how the pinks edges the veins in the upper right-hand side of the photograph.
I know.
I’m weird.
Remember.
If you look at a photograph for forty-five seconds you’ll find something in it to like.
>>>>><<<<<
Our friends and neighbors, the Kipp’s, made an unusual discovery.Out beside their shed a whole bunch of little bottles made their way to the surface. Fifteen of them, I think is what Lamar told me. These bottles have Eagle embossed on them and look like little milk bottles.
“We found them online for $4.95 but couldn’t find out what they’re used for,” Lamar said.
I looked for them online too and found the same eBay website that had them for $4.95. I found another website that talked about identifying old bottles by style. These definitely are a milk bottle, but what good is two ounces of milk to anyone? I wondered. Maybe they were for cream.
The next time I talked to Momma on the phone I asked her about them.
“We had a dairy so our milk didn’t come to us in a bottle,” she told me. “Once the cream separated, Ma would dip it off for Daddy and Clarence’s coffee. I don’t remember if Ma ever put cream in her coffee or not.”
Clarence was her older brother.
“So do you think that city-slickers got their cream in this size bottle?” I asked her.
“It could be, or maybe the restaurants used them.”
That sounds very reasonable to me. My mother is the smartest, most beautifulist mother in the whole wide world!
“The schools would get milk in the half-pint size for school lunches,” she told me.
I thought back to my school days and a small cardboard carton flashed in my mind's eye. “In glass bottles?” I asked.
“Dah! Peggy,” you say.
“Yes,” was Momma’s more polite answer. “We could have either white or chocolate.”
“How much is a half-pint,” some of my younger readers might wonder.
A half-pint is one cup.
<<<<<>>>>>
My sad day was Thursday.Mike and I normally break for lunch around twelve or twelve-thirty. After lunch I walk the girls, taking them with me to check the mailbox.
Our back driveway is wet in all but the driest of conditions. Add winter and you get ice. I bet that doesn’t surprise you.
Even though the temps were warmer for a few days prior to my sad day, there was still plenty of ice there.
On this morning, after navigating the minefield of ice, I navigated the minefield of mud. Stepping into the roadway I see a lot of little white needles scattered everywhere!
They look like porcupine quills, I thought. I looked a little closer and saw the black tips. They are porcupine quills! I’m going to pick up a few — didn’t the Indians use quills for decorating their clothing? Looking at those skinny little quills I couldn’t see how they could thread anything through that. Maybe they had bigger porcupines back then.
Then my mind turned back to the conundrum of how the quills came to be on the road. As I crossed the road to check the mailbox I wondered, Did he tangle with an animal? I’d heard the coyotes singing last night. Even if he did, he wouldn’t drop his quills like a pine tree drops needles, would he? I’ll go home and get my camera. Maybe you guys can help me figure out what’s going on here.
Stop laughing. I’ll get there.
My story-maker’s mind made up a short video. Super Quill Pig Strikes Again! And I see his tail lash out at a passing car.
Car.
Car tire.
I bet he got hit. See! I got there!
I tucked the mail into my jacket and heading back across the road my eye is drawn to the quill trail as it tapers to the right. I walk the girls a little ways down the road as the trail peters out and then stops altogether. I look in the weeds on both sides but don’t see him anywhere. I turned the girls around, even though Ginger was enjoying stretching her legs and she didn’t want to go. We get back to the end of the driveway and I see the trail of quills is even thicker in the other direction.
There’s a whole clump! With fur!
I glance down the road and don’t see anything. Then I scan the weeds at the roadside and…
There he was.
I’m sad, I thought as I recognized the feeling that washed over me. I know lots of people think it’s a good thing when these oversize rodents get killed, but for me, I just liked knowing he was around. He didn’t bother us. Ginger getting a face full of quills was most certainly her own fault.
Now that he was dead, my mind changed gears. How can I keep his bones?
I contemplated it the whole way back to the house. On the breezeway I unharnessed the girls and opened the door for them to go in first. Inside, I shut the door. Mike is on the couch, watching the TV.
“It’s a sad day,” I told Mike.
“How come?” he asked.
“My quill pig got hit on the road last night.”
Mike grunted.
I went on. “How can I keep him?”
“You don’t want to keep him!” Mike said incredulously.
“Yes I do! It would be cool to have a porcupine skull.” My mind already developed a picture of what that would look like and it was very much like this photograph I found online.
Why are their teeth orange? I wondered. I Googled it. ‘Their teeth are orange or red because they are coated with iron-rich enamel,’ it says, ‘not white like ours.’
Another mystery solved.
I stood there, in our shit-hole, as Mike affectionately calls our apartment, and waited. I’d assumed he was thinking about it, but in hindsight I realize he’d gone back to his program.
“Well?” I asked.
“What?”
“How can I keep him?! I don’t want the animals to scatter his bones!”
“Put him in with the apple tree,” Mike said.
“Yeah! Why didn’t I think of that!” We’d planted four fruit trees and caged them in to keep the deer from stripping off the tender young bark. But three of them died in the first year and the cages are still there. I took a bucket and a shovel and I collected my quill pig. I carried him up into the back field and dumped him over the top of the wire cage. I wondered how long it will be until the insects have scrubbed his bones clean.
“Months? Years?” I asked Lamar when he and Rosie stopped on their last walkabout.
“Probably not long after the bugs come out.”
I know, I’m weird.
And with that, let’s call this one done.
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