Life Turned Topsy-Turvy

...yet we need to keep it in perspective. Without going into too much detail, our lives have taking a rather shocking and upsetting turn. It's very much like the shifting kaleidescope: you are looking at one pattern and in the matter of a few seconds, the whole view changes into something else. More details will follow in the coming weeks. But to quote Rachel Lynde from Anne of Green Gables, "You're never safe from surprise until you're dead!"

To put it in perspective though, my co-worker and I were talking to one of the nurses on the unit we both used to work on prior to working in the Peds clinic. She told us some very upsetting news about another nurse we have known for years. Her teen daughter was in a terrible ski accident over spring break, has a head injury, a spinal injury, and is on a ventilator.

Here is the story that always helps me through the tough times, that is so applicable in this situation:

The Cross Room (author unknown)

A young man was at the end of his rope. Seeing no way out he dropped to his knees in prayer. "Lord, I can’t go on," he said. "I have too heavy a cross to bear."
The Lord replied, "My son, if you can’t bear its weight, just place your cross inside this room. Then open that other door and pick out any cross you wish."
The young man was filled with relief. "Thank you Lord," he sighed, and he did what he was told. Upon entering the other door, he saw many other crosses, some so large the tops weren’t even visible. Then he spotted a tiny cross leaning against the far wall. "I’d like that one Lord," he whispered. And the Lord replied, "My son, that is the cross you just brought in."

Such A Deal!

Paul and I went on a woodwork hunt this past Wednesday. We were searching for Victorian-style baseboards for the Julie/Tyler room as well as porch railing to replace the rotting handrails on our front porch. In our new financial mode, we went to several places to find the best deal while still finding something we like and something Paul will find easy to work with on the porch.

As usual, the Home Depot in Glenview answered our need. We found a gorgeous baseboard that this store was discontinuing, and we found enough for the one room! In fact, the supply they had left was just a little more than we needed, so we bought them out (it never hurts to have a little extra, in case of mistakes). Usually oak woodwork such as this can sell for anywhere from $2.80 on up per linear foot. The price on this sale was $1.29 per linear foot. We looked to see if any of the other Home Depots in our area are also discontinuing this. Then we would have baseboards for our bedroom (oh delight!). But sadly, at this time, none of the others are discontinuing it, so their prices are $4.50 per foot. But no concern - we have so much to keep us busy, so maybe by the time we're freed up to work on our room another store may have a sale.

Today Paul worked on an icky window in our upper hall. It's way up high, not really functional because you'd have to stand on a stool to even try to get it open. But it lets in light, so is useful in that. Anyway, it has been sitting there, without any woodwork, the sash weights in view, and the old cracklin' paint right out there. Paul removed the sashes so they can be scraped and painted. He scraped the inner part of the window where the sashes slide, and he leveled off the side with some thin wood, so the new woodwork will lie flat when installed. Tomorrow is more scraping and then priming.

It's almost time to buy the paint! I decided that I really wanted a sort of cream yellow for the foyer, stairway walls and and upper hall. I have dubbed the color I have in mind "crellow", and I found my crellow on a paint chip sample from the paint store. This is all very exciting!

While Paul did that I took care of Tyler (Julie was at work). He ended up falling asleep, so I cleaned my dining room. Boy did it need it. I did a "deep clean", getting every part practically, dusting washing, vacuuming, mopping, and uncluttering. It took so long. But it looks divine.

My New Best Friends

Ah, Rubber Gloves

All I can say is - Eureka! The splinter has come out. After two weeks and two days, it finally, finally worked its way out. Now all that's left is for the wound to heal. But I was honestly starting to think that the pain would never go away, that the wound would never heal.

I employed my rubber gloves very well this weekend, cleaning up after Paul and Kristin bashed out the falling down plaster in Julie's walk-in closet. Besides moving Tyler's chest of drawers and a large number of his toys in the closet, we hope to have enough room left even for a little play area for him. This closet remodel is the first step in our aforementioned newest home remodeling project: having Julie and Tyler together in Julie's room. Julie is choosing paint colors for the walls. We have all of the casings, the plinth blocks, and the rosettes for around the doors and windows ready. We need to purchase and refinish baseboards and quarter-round for the edge of the floor. Paul is going to extend the cable for the satellite TV so they can watch in their room. The closet, of course, needs new wallboard to replace the awful plaster. And we are saving up for the bunk beds, with drawers underneath, so Julie has extra room for her clothes. I can't wait!

Various Things

I feel very scattered these days. I long for several days of not much going on just to get things accomplished. Here is what is keeping me so scattered:

• Motivating Robert, who is working to finish his Eagle Scout requirements before his 18th birthday - which is in April (gulp!). He's almost done, just needs the cattle prod to get him to finish up.
• A finger injury that has been incapacitating me harp-wise for the past 10 days. The moral of this story is - never, NEVER clean without wearing rubber gloves. I made this mistake and got two badly embedded splinters. I can't tell if Paul was able to get them all out completely. one area is doing really well, finally, but my index finger is still very problematic. I've been to the doctor and the orthopedic doctor. I'm on antibiotics now (finger ended up red, warm to the touch, and throbbing in pain on Sunday). The plan is to soak the finger in warm water, use vitamin E oil on a cotton ball covered by a band-aid, and to call if not better by the end of the week. In that case he may need to go in and dig it out (eek!). Needless to say, but harp is gathering dust.
• Our uncluttering of the basement and Julie's closet meant a lot of fairly good stuff that we decided to sell on e-Bay. I've had some good sales, some duds, but I have a whole batch of costumes and other sewing related things to put up for auction. The extra cash is most welcome!
• Sticking to our commitment not to incur any more debt and to live within our means. This is a challenge, but in a really good way. Being blind to one's financial state is no way to live. However, this means some needed creativity by the whole family and a willingness to eat pasta, beans, and rice those couple of days before payday when we run out of money.
• The next step in our home remodeling. This is a cheapie: we are painting Julie's room and our foyer and upper hall. We are also finishing up the woodwork in the basement to put up around the doors, windows, and floorboards. This will make the room very nice, and all we need to buy at this point is paint and bare wood baseboards we will refinish. Eventually, with our e-Bay money, we are going to buy bunk beds so Julie and Tyler can be together in the same room (instead of Tyler being in the over-sized closet/nursery that is really supposed to be mine and Paul's walk-in closet!).

The happy news is that I have two weeks vacation time coming in May. So that's a pleasant thought. Truthfully, I wish I could be home again full-time. That is a goal for me, once we are out of debt. I do long to be here, to spend my time being a homemaker, supporting the family by being here all the time, planing meals, gardening, making the house lovely, spending more time with spiritual devotions. I've started reading The Tightwad Gazette again for some ideas on cutting costs. The happy thought is that there is an end in sight, and I will be done with working outside the home in the foreseeable future.

The Tale of the Furnace and the Harp

It all started on a frosty winter day in December. I had brought my harp down to Lyon & Healy (conveniently located right here in Chicago) for an overdue regulation. Regulation is where the technicians at Lyon & Healy check the harp over, adjust all the mechanical parts so they are working well and so the harp is in tune in all pedal positions, and change any strings that need changing (usually all the lower strings, the wire strings, are changed at this time). I love to look around the showroom when I am there, looking at all the lovely harps, dozens of them, and in particular, drooling over the Style 11 Gold Concert Grand with it's 1919 style, flower motifs, and all that gold! (Well I can dream can't I?!)

I happened to notice a large vent that appeared to be pouring out humidity into the room. I asked Steve, my favorite harp salesman who took care of my regulation details, if that was the case. He explained about the need for humidity for harps so that the wood does not get too dry, and reminded me to be sure our humidifier was on now that it was winter. I went home and asked Paul to have a look and turn it up.

This is where the trouble began, and what followed was almost a comedy of errors, with Paul realizing that the valve to the humidifier water was apparently clogged (he replaced it), me scheduling furnace maintenance on a Friday in January (never do that!), the repair company basically killing our furnace but refusing to do right after that, and us needing to replace the furnace and having to go the whole weekend without heat!

We were blessed with the following:

1. A warm January for Chicago (meaning - temperatures about 25-30 degrees, as opposed to the below-zero January weather we often get).
2. Two propane heaters that Paul and Robert used on Boy Scout camping trips. These heaters travelled about the house with us. In the sitting room and dining room during the day, upstairs at night.
3. Our bathroom heater-fan (at least we were warm when we showered!).
4. New electric blankets.
5. A warm stove.
6. The fireplace in our parlor. And Snugglewood.
7. A temperature inside the house that stayed above 40 degrees even though it was much colder outside.
8. Robert's friends, who let him sleepover all weekend, so we could shut off his room and not have to worry about heat in there.
9. A heating pad, used to warm cold feet while watching TV, afghans for the rest of the body.
10. Hot tea.
11. An excellent experience with the Home Depot in Glenview - we went there on a Saturday afternoon and spoke with a really nice staff member, got a man to come give us an estimate at 5:00 that evening, got the new furnace installed Monday morning.

Finally the world has recalibrated itself, and we are warm and toasty, with humidifier working well. I sure hope my harp appreciates the trouble we went through!

Homemade VS. Store-Bought Ice Cream

Paul and I have been working very hard to reduce expenditures, stop using credit cards, and to get out of debt. This is going well, but it is an adjustment. Now if there is only $40 in the checking account before payday on Thursday (our situation this week!) it is a lot easier and well, completely necessary, to be inventive for things that have to wait to be bought. We are already doing a lot of baking of bread and cookies, not going out to eat or getting take-out, and we have run out of coffee so have been going without it for a week (ah, tea, thank you for saving me!).

Anyway, we're all getting a little tired of chocolate-chip cookies, so, on Saturday night I realized we had ingredients for homemade ice cream. We already had an electric ice cream freezer tucked away on a shelf in the basement, and still had the freezer bowl in the downstairs freezer compartment of our old fridge, so we were all set. I used a very simple recipe:

2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups whipped cream or heavy cream
1 cup milk
2 tsp vanilla

Mix eggs and sugar in a mixer. Add whipped cream and milk, then vanilla and mix well. Pour into ice cream freezer. Let ice cream maker run for 20-30 minutes, until ice cream is frozen. Makes 1 ¼ quart.

But it all got me wondering - is it really a savings to make your own? I had my doubts, given that whipped cream is not all that cheap. However, being the fussy ice cream gourmets that we are (only Edy's or Oberweis ice cream is good in our books), I thought it just might be a savings. So I took a look at a grocery receipt and did some online price comparing. I won't bore you with all the details and math calculations I went through, except to note that I buy pure vanilla at Sam's Club in the 16 oz bottle which is gazillion dollars of savings over buying the little 2 oz. rip-offs at the grocery store (to the tune of 1/10 of the cost of grocery store vanilla), but I found that homemade ice cream is much cheaper than full-priced Edy's and only slightly cheaper than even buying Edy's on a Buy-One-Get-One-Free deal:

Total for Homemade Ice Cream Ingredients, for the recipe's yield of 1 ¼ quart: $2.53 per 1 ¼ quart. However, I needed to figure this based on the amount in an Edy's Ice Cream tub so it is $3 per 1 ½ quart
Edy’s regular price 1 ½ quart: $6.49 (or $3.24 if you find it for a buy-1-get-1-free)

The other advantage to homemade ice cream is the all-natural ingedients. So, I have decided to mainly do homemade, but in a pinch, I could get Edy's as long as it's on the Buy-1-Get-1. Can you tell I love ice cream?

Vintage Baking

...well, sort of. I used the Bosch mixer with dough hook (from my previous post on Modern Baking) this year for some Christmas baking. I made two recipes that were taught to me by Paul's grandmother (Babi - pronounced Bubbee) around the time we were married. Paul absolutely loved Babi's cooking and baking. She had given me the recipes for Rohliky (crescent rolls) and for a Czechoslavakian bread that is so yummy. There's also a recipe for a coffee cake that Babi didn't teach me, but Paul had the wisdom to jot it down so we still have it today.

Babi had demonstrated the kneading and had given me explicit instructions on the procedure for making these. It was very labor-intensive. I had made these early on in our life together, but once we had all three of our children, I never tried it again. The thought of all that kneading/resting/rising was hard to imagine with little ones running about. However, with the new tool of the mixer and dough hook (which was not available, at least in a useful form for heavy doughs, back then), I felt emboldened to try again. However, I did do at least one thing that was vintage - I sifted the flour. Babi had specifically told me to sift the flour, even the pre-sifted kind. I had broken my sifter years ago, so needed to buy a new one. The best reviews (at least in my judgement) came for this type of sifter:

Hand-crank Flour Sifter

I set Paul and Tyler to the task of being my sifters, to Tyler's great delight, what fun! I had mixed success. The Rohliky: I think I over-mixed it, and, in spite of all the butter already in these, I needed to use more in the part where I brush the rolled out dough with butter! Here's a photo of some of them (I would have taken a photo of a whole pile of them, but by the time I thought of it, most of them had been eaten!):

The bread, which is a raisin-almond bread came out very nicely. The recipe makes three loaves. I brought one loaf to Christmas at my sister's house, and gave a loaf to my in-laws (Babi was my mother-in-law's mom, and she was very happy to have this again). The last loaf was for our house, and it went very quickly. Here's a not-too-in-focus photo of our loaf (and it is really terrible focus - don't click on this photo, unless you want to feel dizzy!):

I was very happy to do this again and in a simpler way.