Make the world a better place, 30 seconds at a time.

30 things, 30 seconds « The Inadvertent Gardener    This blogger has some great ideas on how to improve the world around you in 30 seconds!!!  Read it and get some inspiration!!!

2. cut back your electricity bill

Only run the dryer once per load of wash.  If the clothes aren’t dry- hang them up or lay them out.  They will dry in no time.

Buy the new fluorescent light bulbs for rooms in your home where the lights are on more than they are not.  Fluorrescent light bulbs are initially more expensive but truly do last longer- if – they are turned on and left on for long periods of time. 

the larger the television and the more technologically advanced it is (i.e. plasma and led type) the more electricity it burns.  check with your local electric company for details.

Only open your deep freeze once a week or even less often.  Use the freezer on your fridge to place items you will need throughout the week from your deep freezer.  Every time you open the deep freeze, you let out a lot of cold air which in turn makes the freezer run.

Keep your deep freeze at least 3/4 full if possible.  It is less efficient keeping air frozen than it is keeping food or ice frozen.  If you know that you will not be getting more food to fill it right away, you can place gallon milk jugs filled 3/4 with water in the freezer to help fill up the empty space.

Run your dishwasher on a the no heat rinse or the no heat dry option.

In the winter, encourage natural light and heat into your home by opening the curtains during the day.  Keep that heat in at night by then pulling your curtains closed at supper time or dusk.

1. Use half – use twice

Using half of a scoop of laundry detergent will work just fine in most cases.  Even with my  husbands greasy, dusty, clothes- a half of scoop of detergent and a half of scoop of laundry booster works just fine.

A half of a dryer sheet keeps static cling at bay in non-winter months.  Save your dryer sheets and use them twice, also works.

Swiffer pads can be flipped over and the back side will clean nearly as good as the front side.

Add water to the cleaning products that you use on a regular basis.  If you are cleaning something regularly, the dirt doesn’t build up that much anyway.

 Use half of the recommended amount for dishwasher detergent also.

Use one squirt instead of two with your toilet boil cleaner.

Try using half or less than your usual amount of shampoo and conditioner and see if you can tell any difference.

When you print something from the computer for temporary purposes, put the paper back into your printer backwards so you can print on the back the next time you are printing temporary stuff.  Or you could put that paper with writing only on one side in a special place for the kids to use for scrap paper art work and coloring.  My parents business reuses its paper by putting it in the fax machine.  Most faxes received are not something to be kept in perfect condition for any length of time anyway.  If it is, they usually photo copy it anyway to get a better print quality.  This same paper could also be torn into quarters and used for notes at the phone, at the computer, in your pocket, etc.

Don’t throw away those stained t-shirts that your baby or older kid ruined.  The main body of the shirt is the perfect size for dusting or other rags.  cut the arms and collar off and you are ready to go!

Kids jeans have holes in the knees?  Cut them off at the knee and you have shorts for next summer.

Cottage cheese containers and other #4 or #5 plastics that are not recyclable make great leftover containers or dishes to take something  to the neighbors.  You don’t have to worry about getting it back!  Our church has a monthly carry-in dinner and the ladies of the church use these containers to package up leftovers to take to the shut ins in the neighborhood. 

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Burn

 We decided to give a trial run to not having a garbage pick up at our house anymore.  Being in rural America, choices are very limited on who will come out here in the boondocks at pick it up and the company that offered doesn’t keep their end of the bargain (we pay them for weekly and are lucky to get every other week).    So I sat the kids down and had a lesson in all things politically correct regarding the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle) and then added rural America’s 4th concept: burning trash.  We had already been giving table scraps to the chickens, dog, and cats and the boys knew, from school, the basics of recycling other stuff.  So we set up an area on the back porch and an area in the laundry room for reducing our trash.  We will be recycling paper, glass, aluminum, steel (tin), cardboard, and food scraps.   We will be burning dirty cardboard and paper (pizza boxes, kleenex, paper plates, food wrappers, “bathroom” stuff, bottle lids, etc).  Things that might be used again will be put in our reuse drawer (glass jars, plastic containers, pringles cans, etc) Things that cannot be put in any of these categories we will bag up and will pay our local landfill to drop if off there. 

 While figuring out how we were going to manage all this,   I fell upon www.eartheasy.com and they have some truly easy concepts on composting and recycling and all other things worthy of tree huggers!!! lol  I printed out their instructions for a compost bin, a basic 2x 4 frame that is staked direct to the ground and has no floor.  They also have a list of compostable things and what category they are in (carbon or nitrogen etc) with suggestions (actually easy sounding to me) to actually get the thing working.  Things like: keep a plastice cover on to encourage heat and to deter animals.  And: put kitchen scraps on and cover them with your pile of leaves/grass that are kept separate from the actual compost pile specifically for the purpose of covering the kitchen scraps to make things less appetizing to the curious creature looking for a meal.  Now, truly I am no radical tree hugger, so don’t go thinking I’ve jumped my political fence or anything!!!! LOL (God forbid- LOL)  I just cannot stand the waste that we Americans go through even in a day’s time!!!  That above website gives some awful statistics like how much energy one pop can equals and how many water bottles are in the landfills etc.  The other day I was talking to mom about rice pudding, of all things.  She wanted to know if I made mine from leftover cooked rice or raw.  I said that I used the leftovers and said, “why else would someone make rice pudding if not to use up leftovers?”  She was so excited that, if I had said this in a church, I swear I would have heard an “amen”.  She said I had truly been raised right! LOL  So many people see their leftovers as exactly what they were the first time around (food, containers, the news, etc) and if we would look at things a little more open minded we would have some wonderful dinners (technically made from garbage because most leftovers end up there), some great bug jars, drop cloths for the kids art projects, and some wonderful “tupperware” that when taken to the neighbors, nobody cares if it makes it back home or not.  If each container that cannot be recycled were used just one more time, that would cut the garbage in half!!!!  And when that same container gets too nasty to use again, I can burn it without guilt, knowing that I am burning one container and not 2,3,4, or 5 containers (the number of times a cottage cheese container might make it through the sink and reused without cracking).  Radicals might disagree with my burning but I know that my idea is still better than just sending it all to the landfill, which is what is done more often than not by the general population.

thoughts on suicide and God and mental illness

So many good Christians don’t understand the impact of their words and I’m sure families of suicide victims have heard many people say the wrong things (In my humble opinion) regarding what God thinks of suicide.    Hearing that your family member is probably not in heaven, which I’m sure many have heard over and over again is far from comforting or even helpful.  Before I worked with the mentally ill I would have probably said the same things.  Mental illness is an illness, just like diabetes, cancer, etc.  No one (no one who truly understands God , anyway)  would ever say that victims of those illnesses were not in heaven if they were Christians prior to becoming ill.  Because mental illness affects the brain’s ability to reason, think things through, and even tricks the brain into believing things that are not true- it can make it appear that the person made a decision based on their own free will.  I do not believe that is true.  Mental illness causes the brain to malfunction, just like lung cancer causes the lungs to malfunction.  Our brain, malfunctioning, will cause one to “decide” to do things that under a normal functioning brain, a person would never do.  The brain is broken and sometimes this fracture is not noticed as the serious break it is until it is too late.  The brain can also trick someone into believing that telling someone how much they hurt or their plan would be harmful to them.  Because of this, bad things can happen to good people afflicted with mental illness.  If you or someone you know is struggling with coming to terms with a suicide, please pray for them.

Cuts of Beef

Cuts of Beef   Go to this link to learn more about the cuts of beef before you talk to the butcher!

My philosophy

My girlfriend emailed the other day asking me about what my boys did as far as chores and stuff.  She had realized that her boys were probably capable of more than she had given them credit for and wanted to start a chore/reward chart.  Well, I replied and gave her a lengthy list of what all my boys were capable of (not necessarily what they actually do to help out but what I know the know how to do).  She then replied back to me that I had just won the Mother of the Year award or some mumbo jumbo like that.  I replied back with my philosophy of life: 

 Anyway, the more I live the more I have relaxed.  We are messy people.  I don’t like to pick up after everyone, I hate laundry, I hate sweeping the floor (my dh did this last night bTW), etc  I feel guilty when someone comes over but I have to give myself credit that I am doing more than I was 6 months ago.  And 6 months ago was doing more than the 6 months before that.  The more I live the more I realize the effects of  being simple minded.  Knowing basic things like:

1.you are loved, no matter what                           

2. forgive and forget

3. making messes is fun, cleaning them could be 

4.life is good if you decide that it is, no matter what. 

The more I think about my life and how mine is different than it used to be the more I am glad that it is different .  Simple is simple and that is good.  Christianity does not have to be and should not be, in my opinion, about specific doctrines or even about thinking deep thoughts on the subject.  To me, Christianity is simple. 

 It is this:  God made everything including people and He loved ALL of it. 

God was upset with how people were disrespecting Him and His stuff. 

God made Jesus. 

God loved the people He made so much that He willingly gave up His Son to save us from our own selves. 

There is heaven waiting for those who accept this all powerful love. 

Life should be based on these same principals.  With that, my boys have learned what they’ve learned because they want to learn it.  Life is good because we decided that it would be.  Teaching my boys how to do stuff is also teaching them how to take care of God’s stuff (because it all truly is God’s stuff: our bodies, our homes, our animals, etc)  Make it simple, make it fun, make your child’s way of doing it good enough!!!

Self-employed budget making

I created a budget!  I am so proud of myself!!  Below you will find the process I used.  You can get more information on budgetting through Crown Financial Ministries or by typing in words like,  budgetting, create a budget, get out of debt, etc into your search engine.   There are tons of financial help websites out there! 

 It was time consuming but not difficult!  Being self-employed, we have to go about things a little backwards because of the “I don’t know how much money we make plus I don’t know how much is mine and how much is for the business” problem.  So, because my credit card payments are almost always entered into the computer under “misc” I had to do things manually.  I filed everything, collated according to date, separated the receipts in each file by ‘paid by check’, ‘cash’, mastercard, discover.  Then I used accounting paper and divided everything up according to what account it went in.  The Meijer and Walmart (etc) receipts had to be divided up into grocery/personal care, clothes, gifts, and misc- that was the time consuming part.  After I totalled each account, I totalled all of them together which was my income for last year!  Then I could divide things out to see what percentage of the income went for what.  Then I could adjust the total income for my guess at this year and get new totals (the budgetted amounts).  If you are good at keeping better tabs on things in your computer, it will go alot faster- the computer will do the math for you

Buying meat direct from the farm

A question came through on one of the groups I’m part of wondering about buying large quantities of meat for the freezer.  We buy direct from the farm and below are some things that I have learned about this. 

  Basic procedure: You pay the farmer for the actual weight of the cow (or your portion) and they take it to the butcher/processor.  The farmer lets you know the date the cow will be at the butcher and you then contact the butcher to tell them how you want it cut/processed.  The butcher then calls you when it is ready and you pay him for processing. 

Advice: Don’t buy “natural”, “pastured” or “organic” unless you are willing to pay up to double the price of beef that is not labelled that way.  Small farm operations do not use that much antibiotics, if the animals are in a pasture they do not need much medicine to stay healthy, they become immune to things just like we do.  There are no regulations on what those terms actually mean anyway. 

If you don’t know the people you are buying from,  ask to see their farm.  Do the animals look well fed?  Is the place fairly well-kept?   There should not be huge piles of manure( “poop”) in with the animals (more than ankle deep, in dry conditions,  is bad).  Keep in mind that if it is muddy in your driveway, it will be messy in with the animals.  A well cared for animal tastes better than one that is not well cared for.

Tell the butcher you want all cuts trimmed (fat cut off around the edges) and the hamburger extra lean (the more fat in the hamburger, the more shrinkage you get when cooking).  You will not be paying for the extra weight of the fat that is removed either.

Last year,  totalling what we paid the farmer and the butcher, we paid around $2 / lb for our meat.  This sounds expensive for ground beef but when you average that in with rump roast, chuck roast, and even T-bone:  Your average price is at a much reduced cost compared with the local grocer. 

Also, buying direct from the farm, there will not be additives in your meat either.  Many grocery stores put CO2 in their ground beef now to keep it “pink” longer. 

Most farmers will want you to purchase a whole cow, unless you get lucky and they have someone else interested in purchasing less than that also.  One processed cow will not completely fill a large chest type freezer but it will be close. 

Another thought- hog prices have been going down.   Pork is very good direct from the farm as well.  The same principles apply except for one:  Beef can be kept frozen in a chest freezer for more than a year.  Pork can be kept for less than a year.  Old frozen meat will not hurt you as long as it has never been thawed or partially thawed but the flavor will change as it ages past the above mentioned dates. 

More than you ever wanted to know, I’m sure!

Supporting the farmer and sustainable agriculture as much as I can,

ruralmomof3

Getting rid of things you don’t need/Getting free things you do need

I have not been asked or received permission to advertise or promote this but I have found it to be useful and worthy of promotion.  Freecycle is a grass roots web organization that starts up small groups in local communities to give and receive good usable items for free!  You can learn about this group via www.freecycle.org or search for freecycle groups in your area.  We have several groups in my area but many of them are not associated with “freecycle” but their goals are the same or similar.  Many of those groups can be found by searching in Yahoo groups  (or other web group communities) for key words like: freeshare, recycling, recycle, etc.  Include the name of your city or community and this will narrow the search for you.  

These work on the honor system.  I have given away many items and received a couple too!  I have given away clothes, household goods, toys, wallpaper, etc.  I’ve received similar items and once I even got to pick grapes and apples from a neighbor’s orchard that they were not going to be able to preserve themselves and didn’t want them to go to waste. 

Check it out!