Busy little bee...

SOOOOOO much is happening right now.  It's all fantastic stuff, but it's all happening at once, and making my head spin a little bit trying to give everything the attention it deserves.

~Next Wednesday the Farmers' Market begins for the season.  I'm so happy to finally get to be face to face with so many happy, smiling customers again.  I've missed you all over the Winter!

~The day after opening day of the farmers market, I'll be packing up all the inventory I've been building over the last few weeks and heading off to Brooklyn for the Renegade Craft Fair.  Pretty stoked to be taking myself on a little mini vacay to NYC, but it's not exactly coming at an opportune time to be leaving home for several days.  Because...

~We're right in the thick of trying to buy a house.  We found our dream piece of property with our not-so-dream-but-not-all-together-awful house on it, and we're trying really hard to make it work.  But it's a foreclosure, now owned by and out-of-state bank, and it requires some serious diligence on my part to get the necessary hoops jumped through.  Getting local people matched up with non-local people, and making this deal work out for us is proving to be a serious challenge.  This, Folks, is why I still bank at the same bank where I opened my first account with a jar of change when I was 9 years old.  I can walk in there, speak to a human, who knows my name and I know hers, and usually before any transactions take place she asks me how my kids are.

~So I'm also trying to get all the little miscellaneous projects done on our current house.  Even if our deal doesn't go through on the house we're tying to get right now, we're still going to keep looking.  So, eventually our current house will need to go on the market to avoid having to pay 2 mortgages for any great length of time (yikes!).  All those little no-big-deal projects that were started without a deadline to finish... Those all add up and become a bigger deal when faced with finishing them all at once.

~Somewhere in the midst of all of that, I should probably throw a birthday party of some sort for The Baby (Holy crap!  Where the heck did a year go?!).

~And yesterday I got an email from the manager of another farmers market, asking me if I'd like to be a vendor.  Yes Please!

So... not one, but TWO farmers markets this season, PLUS Renegade, PLUS buying a house, selling a house, and some fantastically cute kiddos that deserve my attention as well...   I believe I'll now treat myself to another cup of coffee (or 12), and be thrilled with the fact that all of my "problems" are pretty great.


Thanks for stopping by,
-Lindsey  

Wide open spaces...

I'm about half way through this book, and the more I read, the more I dream.  The same thing happened when I read The Dirty Life.  Hubby and I have been pretty firmly on board with the grow-your-own-food movement for quite some time now.  It doesn't mean that we don't still get take-out, but it means that we think more about what we're eating, and how it got to our plates.  And it plays a huge part in our search for a new home.  The property we have now is the perfect size for urban farming.  It's just right for growing veggies and raising chickens.  But we want a massive garden, more chickens, lots of fruit trees, bees, some berry bushes, a couple pigs, and maybe even a cow.  I also want to be able to start growing a lot of the ingredients I'm using in my products, instead of having to buy them from other people.  So the search is on for a new, slightly less urban, and quite a bit bigger, but not unmanageable for 2 people, homesteading property.  Shouldn't be too hard to find, right?  Vermont is known for its picturesque, rolling farmland.  Meadows dotted with black and white cows are what sell postcards that no one even mails anymore.  But this land doesn't come up for sale very often.  And when it does, it's usually thousands of acres, and being sold with the entire working farm.  This is not only way more than Hubby and I can handle on our own, but it usually puts the price tag somewhere around a small mansion in the Beverly Hills.
A different photo of this place was pictured in one of my previous posts, and I just discovered, is up for sale... for the bargain tag of 2.9 million.  Folks, that's a whole boatload more lotion and perfume to sell.

So this afternoon we're supposed to be going to take a look at a property that's quite a bit smaller than the one in the photo, but larger than the one we have right now, and most importantly, nowhere even remotely close to the million dollar price range.  Fingers painfully tightly crossed right now that it works out...


Thanks for stopping by,
-Lindsey

Short hair. I need it...

Ugh.  I just can't...

Every single time.  I tell myself I'll grow my hair out, and have pretty beachy waves, and everything will be blissful.  It's true to a point.  If I did manage to get my hair past my shoulders, then I'd actually have pretty epic hair.  It's one of the very few features on my bod that I can confidently say rocks pretty hard.  But I just can't function as soon as it starts touching my neck on a hot day.  I've made it farther right now than I have in years.  It's past my chin, and long enough for a pitiful ponytail.  So that's what happens with it every single day now.  It gets all pinned up off my face and off my neck, and ripped out of my forehead by the endless pulling from bobby pins.  What's the freaking point?!  Seriously, some chick somewhere is screaming at me right now, because she spends hours a day trying to get her hair to do that effortless (ironically) undone, natural wave look, and mine does that on it's own when it's long, and i'm going to do this to it...

2 weeks from now, I'll have a date with my hairdresser, and the ballance of the Universe can be restored.  My husband can have his wife back, instead of this wacko that goes all Jim-Carrey-floppy-freak-out every time her hair touches her neck.  And, as a mega added bonus, the baby will no longer be able to grab chunks of my hair while riding in the Ergo.  Sold.  Done.  Game over.  Locks be gone!


Thanks for stopping by,
-Lindsey

Operation Use-Less-Paper: The first 3 steps...

I've become hyper-aware lately of how much paper is still being wasted in our household.  Some of it isn't our fault.  I'm usually appalled at the amount of extra paper that comes to us in the mail.  Like sheets of printed invoices for online orders.  This is the reason why, when I send you an order from House 54, I don't include the printed receipt with it.  I figure you got it in email form already anyway, and there's no sense in wasting the paper just to be redundant.  But as far as what I have control over, here's what I decided to make some tweaks to...

1.  My calendar.  This is a biggie, folks.  I'm seriously attached to this thing.  I get the kind that's in book form and lasts like 2 years worth of monthly calendars.  A LOT of info goes into that thing over a 2-year period.  I can have it open on my counter and see the whole month worth of stuff, or close it up and take it with me.  BUT, I can do the same thing with my iPhone.  And use zero paper in the process.  So when it's life is up by the end of June (it's one of the ones that goes based on the school year), it won't be replaced.  *This is me making quite a pitiful sad face, but understanding that it's worth it for the greater good.

2.  My kid's artwork.  The Kid likes to sit down at the kitchen table and crank out pages worth of drawings.  It helps him focus some of his wild energy into something quiet and creative.  That's pretty much a win-win in our house, except for the amount of paper he can blow through in an hour.  So I've started making him draw more than one thing on each page, and then turn it over and do the same thing on the other side.  This is why crayons rock.  They don't stain my table, and they don't bleed through the paper so that the other side is rendered useless.

3.  In-store receipts.  These are pretty small, and, for the most part are not our biggest offender.  BUT they're a huge offender for another reason.  Did you know that register receipt paper contains a huge amount of BPA?  It's what gives it that smooth, glossy feel.  YUCK, right?!  So unless I'm making a purchase for a home improvement (which I need the receipt for documentation to claim on my taxes if/when we sell our house), or something for my business (also for tax/accounting purposes), then I refuse the receipt at the register.  I tend to be pretty picky about what I open my wallet for and don't buy things that I'm not madly in love with, and I hardly ever buy clothing without trying it on first.  So the likelihood of me needing to return something is pretty low.  But if I do, I'll take my chances that I'll be offered store credit for my item without a receipt, or I'll just go on my merry way being happier that I'm stuck with an unwanted item, than with fingers covered in BPA.  Hopefully enough folks will catch on, and with enough refusals of receipts, companies will either change the paper they're printed on, or better yet, offer people an electronic option instead.


Thanks for stopping by,
~Lindsey      

Simplifying: Taking stock of the STUFF in your life...

There's been a lot of chit-chat in my house recently about finding our dream piece of property and building a new house.  Giant garden, small house.  Simple...  But all this talk has me thinking a lot about our stuff.  Building a new home sounds exciting, moving everything into it does not.  So when I went down into the basement this morning to do a load of laundry, for the first time in a long time I just stopped and looked around.  We have a boatload of STUFF.    

Just to clear something up, I'm not viewed as a great collector of stuff.  My mother is forever accusing me of not being sentimental enough, because I get rid of things that should mean something to me.  I'm famous for taking carloads of my belongings to Goodwill and never having a twinge of regret.  But somehow it still accumulates.  And this morning it gave me a good reality check about excess.  Excess crayons, chairs, rolls of wrapping paper, food storage containers, sets of sheets, kid's toys, boxes of fabric scraps waiting to be made into a quilt that will probably never come to be...

This gives me a whole new perspective on shopping.  If I think it would be more trouble than it's worth to pack it up and move it to a new house, then I probably don't need to be bringing it home in the first place.  So, this weekend, I'm taking this gift of clearer, unbiased vision, and taking stock of my stuff.  If I wouldn't be sorry to leave it behind, or if it's been in the same box, untouched since we moved here 5 years ago, than it's going in a pile.  That pile of stuff will be sold off and/or given away.  Then if we stay in this house forever, it'll be a cleaner one to live in, and if we move, we'll have less stuff to deal with.  Win-win, if you ask me.  Clutter be gone!


Thanks for stopping by,
~Lindsey        

        

A Good Day To Be A Duck...

Here in Vermont it's what they call a "good day to be a duck."  A few weeks ago we were all asking for rain.  Apparently enough of Mama Nature's children all asked a wicked lot for the same thing, because she pulled one of those "FINE!  Here's some rain!  Now Quit your whining!" things.  I'm sorry Mom!  I get your point.  You can turn it off now.  However, there was a tiny blessing along with this curse.  Hubby and I just learned that our basement stays dry enough that when I move HOUSE 54's shop back home, that it can move into our basement.  This means not having to build a workshop outside on our property.  Yay for all that excavation work we had done around our foundation a few Summers ago!  I'm pretty ridiculously excited about only having to buy a new stainless steel work table (which I was going to buy for the new workshop anyway), instead of spending thousands of dollars building a whole new structure on our property.  Yippee!!!

And, AND!  It'll also help keep our yard clear and pretty, in the off chance that we want to put our house on the market, should we find an awesome piece of rolling farmland to buy in the near future...

Something like this?

Vermont Farm by Paul Wyman

A girl can dream, right?


Thanks for stopping by,
~Lindsey

Natural pain relief...

I'm a tad addicted to learning about new ingredients, and the concoctions I can create with them.  But I'm a one-woman show here at House 54.  So not everything that I make can go into production for the company.  Some of it is just made in tiny one-jar batches, to satisfy my curiosity, and give me and my family a new jar of goo to play with.

One of those recent curiosities is Arnica.  It's a plant in the sunflower family, and has been used for centuries for pain relief.  Supposedly, it can relieve pain from sprains, bruises, and muscle soreness.  I was admittedly skeptical of the claims, but intrigued enough to want to try it out.  So I've had some Arnica-infused oil for a while now that I've been tinkering with.  Up until recently though, my batches of All-better-balm, or whatever you want to call it, were coming out pretty lack luster.  

Apparently yesterday's muscle pain was the motivation I needed to make the ultimate concoction though.  Between being dragged around my lawn like a rag-doll while my dogs chased my neighbor's cat, and an unreasonably strenuous workout, I had pretty perfectly sore muscles to use as test subjects.  So I finished my batch, and hesitantly slapped a bit of the new goo on my bod.  This is always the part where I'm hopeful, but wince a bit, because I'm not quite sure if whatever new ingredient I just tried out will be the one thing that finally burns my skin off.  As an added, super fun bonus, the cream I made turned out a really magically weird color, sort of like if you mixed an avocado with traffic-control-vest yellow.   So it added a whole other element of terror to the trial.  Well, let me just tell you, HOLY-WICKED-AWESOME-INSTANT-RELIEF-OF-THROBBING-MUSCLE-PAIN, Batman!!!

So I really have no idea if this is something that the general public would be interested in having.  I may just have a few jars of florescent yellow goo in my medicine chest at home.  But this stuff is so amazingly awesome that it may need to go into production.  Your thoughts???

Thanks for stopping by,

~Lindsey