Ambergris

Wouldn't it be nice if a different angle of broom head or bent handle would take care of that?  Like a scythe handle maybe?

Coincidentally, I had a horrible dream...I will spare you the details, on second thought.

Ironing is a health thing.  You have to iron the seams of clothing to kill lice, and while you're there, you might as well iron the flat both to finish the job and to show you did the work.

I watch the Canadian guy once in a while too.  Good luck on the solar well power system.  We kept making appointments for the solar people, but if it wasn't a $30k job on the whole house, they didn't want to make time for us.  The house in question was a twenty-year-old double wide, so ...right.  Also, the well is a magnet for lightning, so you need humongous lightning rods and overload disconnectors (I forget the names of those) for the system.

$10K windfall?  I'd probably split it between my sons so they could each get a whole-house generator ($3500) and a major house or car repair of their choice each.

$10k windfall for me specifically?  That's about what it would cost to fly roundtrip back to the States to do some new packing and ship a container here with some of the "stuff" I abandoned, including books and canning jars (empty--can't bring home-canned food here) and other things neither of the boys would likely ever use or eat on their own.

Mmm... cranberry scones...

Egg #2 showed up today.  Smaller, rounder, and browner than the first, so certainly a different hen.

I love these pictures.  What grows here is what we in Florida called Cuban oregano, with leaves the size of the palm of my hand.  It's heavily fuzzy and a touch resinous for most table-oregano uses, but has a strong medicinal tradition here.  After some laughable tries (I know--they got laughed at in disbelief) I got a nice healthy little plant in one of my citrus planters.

The chamomile is called manzanilla here and is also an important traditional medicine and tea component (being part of the horchata mix, for example).  I always remember it as the tea Mrs. Rabbit fed to Peter after his adventures in the McGregor garden.

What he was trying is spelled S_C_A_M, not S_C_A_R_E.

My last ex-husband started going through those kinds of tactics after he got to smoking "K2," which he described as artificial weed and which is apparently a lot closer to ice/meth.  Prepare for things to get a lot worse in his last weeks.  Cornered rats, you know.

Here and there, remember to take a phone-picture of the mess before you start cleaning.  This will come in really handy when they start hounding you again about letting him stay another month (and then another, and another).  You know this is going to happen.

Can't fight it, but I can let this help answer the question of whether to stay another year or move.  Also, I can move with two months' notice before the end of the lease.  I'm going to look at a place this afternoon, and might give notice this week.

My hens aren't even big on clucking.  No egg song yet, for example, and no rooster.  Certainly, they make much less noise than my only close neighbor.  If I were certain someone had in fact complained, I would have to conclude it was this neighbor.  

  Normally they are dried and then the berry part is either ground/milled off or pounded off.  A friend wants to try a pound or two of fresh berries in a tincture.  I've been freezing these for him.

I have just now been notified of a neighbor complaint, and as a result I have to get rid of my hens.  I am livid.  My lease says I cannot have animals such as dogs that bother the neighbors. 

This morning's harvest of coffee berries.

One of my chicks, no longer little, is acting like she wants to lay an egg.  She spent a lot of yesterday sitting in the egg room of the hen house and house-cleaning it.  She'd leave and come right back.  The gray striped hen (called a Mexican here) keeps following her in and out, like a kid sister or a midwife, or something.

I have two baby cuy this morning!  Clearly the first breeding didn't result in babies, but they took care of a second on their own, and here's the result.  They are shockingly cute, but I have to remember the babies are presumptively meat animals. 

Sounds good.

One of my chicks ... young hens ... keeps getting in and out of the egg room of the hen house, rearranging that room, and settling into a laying position.  The gray hen keeps following her around and mimicking her position, acting kind of like a midwife.

Today's groceries:

Red bananas, avocado, and salad.

A lock costs and awful lot less than the locksmith's time to work on a damaged lock or doorknob. 

If you think it might be compromised, you should probably assume it has been, and treat it accordingly.

My preference is a deadbolt that is more than one inch long, but not all doors will allow this.  Also, they are hard to find and cost more than the standard deadbolt.  

The kind of deadbolt that requires a key on both sides is more secure, but if you have to leave in an emergency, like a fire or your house filling with poison fumes that confuse you, or a tornado, looking for a key that your confused mind hides the location of can eat up precious quarter-seconds that you need to be using to get outside with.  I normally buy the type with a twist lever on the inside and a key slot only on the outside.  I ALWAYS buy a deadbolt, even if it means I have to drill above the doorknob to make a place for it.  (No landlord ever referred to this as damage against my damage deposit, but I'm going back more than thirty years with this information.)

All those.

It  ebbs and flows, like all things.  Don't despair.

With my housekeeper doing most of the actual work, transplanting out into the garden and generally moving plants around. 

Also getting three chicken carcasses broken down, repacked, and frozen, moving yesterday's broth from the fridge (defatted) into the freezer, and putting a new pot of broth on to cook until tomorrow evening.

I have another batch of chicken-foot broth in the slow cooker now.  Chicken feet come in the giblet bag here.  This has feet, neck, liver, back, a store bought carrot, some carrot greens, plantain (the green weed), onions of various kinds, a knob of ginger, a little vinegar, salt and whole pepper, and recycled bones from yesterday's broth.

It's great for onions that are going to be caramelized and then dried

I liked to keep sprouts, especially sunflower sprouts, going in my office until I retired.  Sometimes I had three jars going at once. I have tried to start bean sprouts here, but the tiny ants got into them and so they became chicken food.  Not that the chickens objected.  I also had a rat who particularly likes (or liked) sunflower sprouts.  I might be rid of the rat, but if so it's not thanks to the still-set trap.

My seedlings are doing much better this time than the last few times I tried to start them out, as they are out of reach of chickens and cats alike and are in seedling-friendly media.  I was able to order what seems to be some of the tiniest peat pellets known to man.  The two sizes I used in Florida are both marked "not allowed to import to your country," even though the only difference appears to be size.  Sigh.  I need to order more of these tinies.  As the sunflowers and marigolds are outgrowing the peat pellets, I hope to get the housekeeper to plant them out when she comes for her weekly session tomorrow.  (She's begun taking an English class on Fridays, so her Friday day with PM has become Saturday and her usually-Saturday with me has become Sunday.) 

The 40 tomato seedlings are growing in two-inch coir-filled cells, except for a few in paper cups filled with alfalfa pellets.  They're all too small to fend for themselves in the ground.... or are they?  I feel really protective of my babies, but tomatoes do grow amazing root systems if they survive being put into the ground right off.  By too small, I mean they still have mostly just their seedling leaves, with no sign of their first set of true leaves.  I've up-potted some of the tomatoes to paper cups using alfalfa pellets as a soil substitute, and I could do that with the rest of the tomatoes tomorrow, or I could just set them out in rows with the sunflowers and marigolds to keep them happy, and see what happens.   There would be some attrition of course, but is that bad? Do I really want to deal with the production of forty healthy tomato plants?  I mean...without a canner or a chest freezer?

Something nibbled on and apparently killed all my naked-seed pumpkins, but I had given some paper twists of seeds away and hope to get back some grand-pumpkins from at least one of those.  Some of the other type of winter squash, I forget what it is, sprouted, but not many of them.

Today I picked up what appear to be okra seeds.  My housekeeper, who plants by the moon, would throw a fit if I started them here in the last quarter of the moon, so I'll have to hold my horses for a week.  On the other hand, I need to cut and soak my new yucas (tapioca roots) tonight so they will be ready to plant tomorrow, as they need to be planted when the moon is fading.   (Short break taken to cut them and stash them in a five-gallon bucket of water.)  The yacon and turmeric can be planted tomorrow too, and the new fruit trees and the flowers I've picked up this week can be set out tomorrow.

I guess they can throw stones.

Depending on where you want to go?  You can rent a small three-bedroom house in a pretty good (but not close-in) neighborhood for $1500 a month or less in Tallahassee. If you want a one-bedroom apartment or cottage, your options expand a lot. The south side of Tallahassee is not the "good" side of town, but the northwest is the "cop" side, where police officers tend to live.  It's much cheaper than the east side and safer than the south side.

Here's a Zillow search for the zip code 32303, the northwest pie slice, with a filter having the maximum rent at $1600.  https://www.zillow.com/tallahassee-fl-32303/rentals/?searchQueryState={"pagination"%3A{}%2C"mapBounds"%3A{"north"%3A30.630298851197193%2C"south"%3A30.407888461533087%2C"east"%3A-84.1900540571289%2C"west"%3A-84.47501194287109}%2C"regionSelection"%3A[{"regionId"%3A71914%2C"regionType"%3A7}]%2C"isMapVisible"%3Atrue%2C"filterState"%3A{"fsba"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fsbo"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"nc"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"cmsn"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"auc"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fore"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fr"%3A{"value"%3Atrue}%2C"mf"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"land"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"manu"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"mp"%3A{"max"%3A1600}%2C"price"%3A{"max"%3A321219}}%2C"isListVisible"%3Atrue%2C"mapZoom"%3A12} You can see there are a number of options, most of them pretty nice-looking.  You can adjust the rent upward or downward if you like, or otherwise fiddle with those options.  Zillow lets you do this with any geographic area in the US.

The ones in Loja paid for themselves long ago and are going strong, generating roughly a quarter of the electricity used in the region.  Bear in mind, the area has a strong tradition of metal tinkerers and fixit people, so maintenance is different here.  Electric needs are different too, between the lack of need for (much) heating or air conditioning and the huge windows and skylights everywhere.