These days I mostly try not to write. My life is so full of work and family and weeding. But every now and then, my brain starts to itch and the only way to scratch that itch is writing. This is where you will find my most recent scratchings.
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Punk Housewife Tip: Ditch Garbage Bags
A few months ago I solved a small problem in my own head. It was gratifying. Now everyone who comes over can say, “Why the F do you have two bags in there, what am I supposed to do with that?” I had always wanted to use old shopping bags for garbage because, despite my best intentions, they do pile up in our house. But I was too afraid of the occasional leak making the bin gross and stinky. Then it suddenly occurred to me I could just keep a backup liner in there. Of course. This only works because…
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The Carbon Free Home
Before I move on from January’s Quiet Riot focus of electricity, water and garbage, I want to review a great energy book– The Carbon Free Home: 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Reduce the Fossil Fuel Habit by Stephen and Rebekah Hren. I had looked past this book several times, something seemed too fad-ish about the cover and I expected the projects to be along the lines of ‘replacing your incandescents with CFLs’ and ‘setting up a recycling system.’ But when I finally bit the proverbial bullet and got it out from the library, I realized I had been duped by a good…
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Cloth Diapering, vol. 1: Getting Acquainted with Sh*t
There’s no point mincing my words. If you are going to use cloth diapers (or actually have a baby at all) you are going to have to flush any remaining primness and decency down the toilet right now. There will be shit. It will be disgusting. You will have to deal with it. I am a pretty stalwart lady. I have gutted and butchered many an animal, trimmed the poop encrusted hairs from around a sheep’s ass, reached up into a hen’s vulva to release a stuck egg, and scraped the maggots from home smoked fish so I could eat…
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Potty Training: When, Where and How
I set out today to write that cloth diapering post I promised. But before I knew what was happening I was writing about potty training. Wow, is that ever a subject. It all started because someone mentioned Infant Potty Training, also known as Elimination Communication, in a comment and I thought it deserved a plug in the diapering post. The idea behind EC is that by putting babies into diapers we train them to pee and poop in diapers. Can’t really argue with that. Then we try to re-train them to pee in the potty typically around the age of two, a…
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All Us Critters Got a Place in the Choir
Listen up, y’all. That big ole’ flagrant housewifey propoganda has been a bit of a thorn in my side. I labored over writing it, feeling a continually growing discomfort that it was exclusionary. I tried to re-work it several times, attempting to include everyone, but it just didn’t work. Dilution made it weak when I wanted it to be strong. So I settled on just saying it out straight how I myself needed to hear it and hoped that in the context of the rest of this blog, and the usually very inclusive nature of my writing, it would work…
calamity jane 