Where This All Began

I woke up early this morning! I went to bed at about 1:30 am and then this morning at about 5:15 am I woke up. I considered going back to sleep but decided I wanted to stay awake. And now here I am an hour later, blogging.

When I was little, we lived on a ranch in Southeastern Arizona. Originally we lived in the antique-pioneer house. It was adobe and the ceiling in the living room was gone. My dad has always been a pack rat so one of my earlier memories are of a little trail through the living room to the woodstove in the back corner. My mother tried many times while they were still married to de-junk it and make more space for living. She also tried to make it more livable and prettier since it is, and always has, been falling apart.

My dad still dreams of buying the ranch (he owns a small share of it) and renovating what we now call "the old house," but he has never really done anything and probably never will.

When I was a few months shy of my second birthday, we moved to Salt Lake City for awhile where my sister was born (exactly one week after my birthday, ironically). Then we went and lived with my grandma for awhile. My mother refused to move back unless my dad got something better to live in. He found a trailer. The house was bigger (but not really living standard without some work and money that we didn't have), but the trailer was better.

I liked living on that ranch. We had a garden, dogs, goats, and horses. The neighbors (the only other inhabitants of the ranch) had the same as well as cattle and chickens. My best friend (she was born a few weeks before I was and was the daughter/granddaughter of said neighbors) roamed everywhere. We played in the creek when it ran in early spring (from off of Graham Mountain) and in the hot summer we would run barefoot from shade spot to shade spot (since we went barefoot almost year round due to the short, mild winters).

There was an outhouse off to the side and back of the yard which we never used because for some reason bees lived there (no idea why...). My dad's kids from his second marriage would come to visit and of course my best friend and I would follow my older sister and her friend (my friend's aunt) everywhere which of course annoyed them no end.

I loved it when we got to bring the baby goats in the house (for whatever reason) and feed them milk from calf bottles and following my dad around as he did the "chores." (Feeding the animals, watering the garden, milking, straining the milk, etc.) When there was a day when we butchered, I would go inside and sit under the cooler where I couldn't hear anything. Then when it was over, I would come out and watch my dad chop up the goat (hung from an obliging mesquite tree) into tasty bits of chevron.

I remember one night when I was three or four, my dad was going to go out to the outhouse to get honey from the bees and I wanted to come with. He didn't want to take me, so he told me that the bogeyman would get me. I knew he was teasing, but even if I hadn't I wouldn't have been afraid (my idea of the bogeyman: man in all black wearing a ladybug suit). I insisted so he took me with him (the bees were all asleep, I think), so he finally gave in and we came back with lots of tasty honey.

When I was almost seven, my mom decided she was fed up with my dad and moved out. We moved to a less secluded (the ranch was miles from any kind of neighbor and I loved it) place with two acres and a trailer. From then on out, all the places we've lived, we've never had much more than a garden, a few cats and the occasional dog. So I would pretend. When I was younger I would go out to bring home the (imaginary) cows with my imaginary older siblings (I'm the oldest of my mom's kids) and ride my bike pretending it was a horse. My sister wanted to play Barbies. I wanted to play Farm.

When I got older, we moved to Northern Arizona and when it snowed, I'd go and check on my pretend farm animals to make sure they were safe from the snow. I wanted to plant a garden but I never could remember to water anything I planted and when I wanted to do more than plant a seed and water it once or twice, I had no idea where to start anyways. I devoured the Mother's Children section of the Mother Earth News (we have years of back issues).

After I got to be 12 or 13, I kind of forgot about it all until just before my sixteenth birthday when I started looking at our old Mother Earth News issues. That's when I decided "that's what I want to do." And when I ran out of issues, I decided I wanted to see if there was anything on the internet. I googled all sorts of phrases containing the words "country," "farm" and "rural," but I never found anything until I googled "homesteading." That's when I found Homestead.org and A Homesteading Neophyte. I was so excited when I discovered people still do this and that, even better, they blog about it.

And after reading through two or three blogs, I discoverd that no one ever really started blogging until after they'd been doing what they were doing for awhile or they bought property. I wanted to know about it from before all that. So I decided to write my own blog. And here it is. :)

Mmmmm...Raw Milk!

I had forgotten how good raw milk is! My mother has done a 180 with her stance on milk. Before, we drank soy and she drank almond. Now she's drinking raw milk from the local dairy. Just barely, I decided to have a cup to see if I still liked it. And I do. Pasteurized, homogenized milk is another story. From time to time, our neighbors gift us with a gallon. And it sits in the refrigerator and rots unless we pass it on to someone who doesn't mind the 'dead' flavor. Drinking soy milk is different from drinking cow milk. The animal milk tastes more alive, for one thing. I don't know how to describe it any better than that. My future plans definitely include a cow or a goat or both for milk.

You see, I was raised on goat milk. My dad raised goats. His preference is French Alpine/Saanen crosses. He would butcher goats and although I would disappear for the actual killing, once they were dead, I would come out and watch.

Then my mom left my dad and so we switched to pasteurized, homogenized cow's milk. From there, we moved on to rice milk and soy milk. Then we were drinking raw milk, then back to soy milk and then my mom switched to almond. Now my mother is drinking raw milk again while my sister and I continue to drink soy.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it SNOW!!!

The Weather lately has been insane. I went to bed at 5am this morning and consequently did not awaken until 3pm. Part of the reason I woke up so late (aside from the late night) was that it was very cloudy. When I woke up, it was snowing! It rained last Sunday, so I figured that was what we would be getting from here on out. Instead, it snowed a half inch or so. Then, it sleeted another half inch ('sleet' is what you call those tiny little balls that fall from the sky that look like fairy snowballs--as opposed to iceballs that we refer to as 'hail'--right?). Now it's snowing hard and fast and we already have a few inches of it and more is coming down.

My "L" key only seems to work every other time I press it, so if some words don't seem like words, try inserting an "L" at random and see if it makes sense.

My little sister bought the newest Fablehaven book four days after it came out and now she's finished it, so I get to read it now!

With my Garden buried under snow, I don't think I'll be working on it much right now. I should be starting seeds right now, and I should be planting the cold weather stuff. I have 1001 reason why I'm not, but that would make this post too long LOL. The main reason, though, is that I've never had a real garden. As a child I would plant seeds in the ground, maybe dig some canals for irrigation, fill up the canals, and for the most part forget about it, returning to water perhaps two more times. Naturally, living in the Gila Valley in AZ, nothing ever grew. Even when I moved to this climate, it still didn't grow...probably something to do with the billions of weeds choking my "garden."

So to prevent abandonment, I am planning to have just a few different plants: some fruits veggies, herbs and flowers. Once I see how I am with a garden (now, at my grand old age of 17 :P) and make all my beginning mistakes, I will add more plants a little at a time so I don't overwhelm myself and abandon the whole project out of confusion.

I made enchiladas. Yum! I wanted to post a picture but my mother's camera is MIA, so I can't post beautiful pictures of corn tortillas marinated in red sauce and cheese... :*( Oh well.

Something Useful

I figure I may as well post something useful. To start, maybe I'll talk about chickens. When I was little (before my mom left my dad, but after we moved out to Spear Ranch), our neightbors had chickens. One day we had no food because my dad did not do things like give my mom money to buy food. So my mother begged a chicken off of them. They were kind enough to oblige and even to butcher it (the killing part).

Then my mom dipped it in boiling water to get rid of the feathers. I remember all this clearly, regardless of the part where I was between the ages of two and six. It's after that where I can't remember what we did next. I know the feathers were removed and put in a plastic grocery bag because either my older sister or my mom (I can't remember which) was going to do something with them. Of course they just went in the bag and put under the counter. There they stayed until they smelled so awful that they had to be thrown out.

The feet went to my best friend's cousins (her Grandpa was the one who gave us the chicken). The bird was gutted and who knows what we did with them because I can't remember. I remember removing the gullet and my mom sliced it open and showed us the beans, rice, dog food, etc that was inside (the birds were free range and so ate all sorts of things). And then we had some food.

When I was little (after my mom left my dad, but before we moved anywhere else), my dad had chickens of his own which someone hatched out for him. I don't remember the man's name, but he had a ginormous incubator (one of those commercial ones that looks like a refrigerator) in the back of his store (not a feed store, it was called "Treasures and Trinkets" and it sold all sorts of little 'treasures' and trinkets--like the name says). The chickens were Araucanas which are my dad's favorite birds, I think. He kept them in a little coop with his pigeons.

When I was about twelve, my dad took me and my little brother and sister to Mesa, AZ for a pageant. And there we stopped at a feed store and bought some chicks (Rhode Island Reds and Barred Rocks). We kept them in Motel 6's tub. My mother was pissed because we had nowhere for them to live. When they got old enough to be outside, my dad built a little coop which we kept in the only fenced part of the yard, and let them run around. My mom had someone butcher two of them and we processed them. I got mad at her because they were our chickens and she decided to eat two of them without asking our permission. We kept my dog out in their yard on a chain and stake. One night we let my dog run loose to work off extra energy and someone shot him and he died. Soon after, something ate all the chickens.

Then, last year, someone was getting rid of their chickens and even though we'd told them we didn't want them, they brought them over anyway. Long story short, I spent several hundred dollars on their fenced yard as well as feeders and waterers and they were all very sick and slowly dying off one by one (I told my mom I didn't want hand-me-down chickens for that very reason), so I gave them to my dad. All the birds died over there instead. And I didn't get the feeders or waterers back because my dad and his evil fiancee broke up (and her birds were kept at her house). Sad thing was, those were the only chickens we had that I even liked.

In the future, I plan to have chickens, but not until I'm on my own and can make the decisions and buy the birds from a hatchery, etc...