Chickens Unite!

This weekend the weather was beautiful and we wanted some outdoor time with the kids, so we went to Hilltop Hanover Farm, a lovely farm owned by Westchester County. Yes, Westchester County owns a farm - who knew? We drove up and met some friends there, and it just couldn't be prettier. It's amazing to find something like this so close to the area where we live, where people build houses practically on top of each other. So nice to see fields and open land.

The kids picked carrots and sugar snap peas (The Professor's FAVORITE). You could also pick leeks, scallions, and chard, but our refrigerator is rather full at the moment, so we stopped with what we had. The people who run the place were fabulous, and walked the kids through how to do the picking. They also had some cute activities for the kids like weaving and potato stamping (if I could figure out why my pictures won't correctly rotate, I would have some on here, but sadly they are all upside down and refuse to cooperate...).

We saw baby ducks and baby chickens:









After picking our vegetables and enjoying the cuteness of baby animals, we decided to sit at a lovely, shaded picnic table and have some lunch. Apparently baby chickens are acceptable, but adult chickens posed something of a problem.

As soon as we sat down at the table, the chickens (who must be used to receiving tasty morsels dropped or thrown by lunchers) immediately swarmed up to the table. Miss Serious was beside herself, and immediately slapped her feet onto the picnic bench (which posed rather a problem, as she had just been trodding in chicken poo). I thought, in a somewhat misguided way, that if I threw some crusts of bread far away from the table they would let us be, but of course this only encouraged them. Chickens have a surprising amount of attitude, and I was afraid Miss Serious was going to have a full-blown anxiety attack right at the table, so we wrapped up the lunch leftovers, scraped the chicken poo off the bench, and vamoosed.


The kids had just had chicken two nights in a row, and you know what they say about payback.....

Tiny Shiny, Big Difference

Hello all... The Professor here, chiming in as "guest blogger" today. Mother Necessity has informed me that she has right of refusal on any and all posts I write, no rights reserved, the comments presented here are the sole opinion of the author and do not indicate the opinion or endorsement of the management, objects in mirror may be larger than they appear, and any other warnings and disclaimers that spring to mind.

Earlier this afternoon, we were running the numbers on Quicken to see how having a new car has impacted our fuel bills. Our little 2007 Hyundai Elantra, "Tiny Shiny" (everyone gets a pseudonym in this blog), is turning 1 at the end of July. Sigh, they grow so quickly these days, don't they? Seems like just yesterday we were... But I digress. We purchased the new car last year before our annual summer car trip to Cape Cod. The minivan we owned was costing us a lot of money in maintenance and gas. So it was farewell to "Big Red" and hello Tiny Shiny. Bonus green fact about Tiny Shiny: It's a Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle (SULEV) and the greenest car we could afford.

Here's the lowdown on how Tiny Shiny has helped us go green and save a little money:

1) This year, we filled up at a gas station 43 times. The year before, we filled up 40 times. Now, before you get on our case about wasting precious natural resources, Big Red had a 20 gallon tank and Tiny Shiny has a 14 gallon one. While we don't know exactly how many gallons of gas we bought the past 12 months, I'm sure that it's a reduction over the previous year.

2) Despite the insane increases in gas prices (we're paying around $4.40 per gallon these days), we've actually spent $243.56 less fueling the car this year. Some of it is driving less (about 1000 miles less this year) and some of it is driving differently (see Mother Necessity's post on hypermiling). But a lot of it is the improved mpg.

Mother Necessity still has "Prius Envy," but the Elantra is doing well by us.

Weathering the Weather

June has definitely been odd this year. After the 4 day kick your bottom heat wave, I was so grateful to get back to normal temperatures, but lately we've been ending the day with these really spectacular thunderstorms. We have an area in front of our building which has a tendency to turn into a lake when presented with very heavy rainfall over a short period of time, and for some reason none of the drivers around here know how to drive when confronted with large (or small for that matter) pools of water. It got so ridiculous that we finally took some pictures:

There's a car under there, even though it can't be seen. They go tearing through the water so fast that the cars going in the other direction all have to stop because they can't see a darn thing. I can only hope that they are all on their way to perform emergency surgery somewhere, and not just trying to beat the red light.

However, there is a silver lining from all these wild storms - the grass and flowers are beautiful, and every once in a while nature sends us one of these:

Movin' On Up

Even though Miss Serious' last day of first grade is tomorrow, her class had a celebration this morning. It was so cute I almost couldn't stand it - I swear these things are planned by sadists to make us all tear up instantly. The kids read stories and poems they had written, and there was a wonderful slide show (of course set to music designed to bring out those sappy tears) and everyone did a terrific job. If I could figure out how to fuzz out faces, I would post pictures, but unfortunately my photo editing skills are basically limited to actually getting them off the camera and onto the computer.

I can't believe how the time flies, and next year Big Trouble will be joining Miss Serious at school. I can't really say it feels like yesterday that they were babies, but it really doesn't feel like 7 years. Congratulations on a wonderful year, Miss Serious. We couldn't be prouder of you.

Driving in the Slow Lane

In my never-ending quest to squeeze dollars out of pennies, I've been trying to figure out how to get better mileage on the car. Gas is now well over $4 a gallon (on my last fill-up I paid around $4.40) and the experts are talking about it reaching $5 before the summer is over.

Even though I'm as cheap as they come, I'm not actually too upset by these new gas prices; living in an affluent area, most of the cars on the road around here are SUV's - and not the little SUV's, the big earth-shaking, taking up 2 parking spaces kind of SUV's. I've actually noticed a decrease in the hugest of these cars (the shameful Hummer) on the road, and the other day saw 4 Prius's in a row waiting at a stoplight.

Last year we traded in our mini-van for a more fuel efficient car. We were looking at the Prius, but it was out of our price range, and the trunk was too small for us, as we have just the one car. We got a SULEV (super low emission vehicle) and have been getting around 25 mpg on local driving and have surpassed 38 on the highway (is it sad that my life has become so mundane that this got me really excited?).

We've now entered a new phase, and this phase is called hypermiling. I ran across some articles about this on the web (the web continues to amaze me - articles, message boards, groups for ANYTHING you could want) and was somewhat intrigued. And, just like anything, there are some real nutjobs out there that call this a sport and take it to the extreme. But, if it will save gas and money, why not give it a try?

Basically it boils down to altering your driving style in such a way that you use the brakes less and use the momentum built up in the car as much as possible so that you don't need to accelerate so often. The basic things we have been trying this week are:

1. Driving 60 mph on the highway with cruise control
2. Driving as if your brakes don't work as well - I used to drive this way when I drove a stick because it was such a pain to work the clutch from a full stop. You basically leave more of a buffer between you and the car in front of you so that you don't have to adjust so much to their stopping and starting
3. Coast when you can

There are a lot of other wacky suggestions that the hypermilers have come up with, and the real serious ones have special gauges installed in the car so they can always see their fuel consumption. We decided to just employ the above suggestions, which seemed to be the safest and easiest to implement. We've gone through 1/4 tank of gas doing only local driving, which usually ends up being around 80 miles. We've gotten 110 out of this 1/4 tank, so I think it's having an effect.

The only drawback is that now I am the person that I would have been really annoyed getting behind in the past. I figure we eat at the same time as the elderly now (5:30) why not drive like them?

Lesson Learned #4

This is actually a lesson learned by Big Trouble, but I think it has important applications for us all: When drinking a bottle of Snapple (or any wide-mouth bottle, I suppose) don't try to drink so much at one time that you suction your lip to the bottle and cause bodily injury.

Thank you for your pioneering experimentation, Big Trouble. You may have saved future generations from unnecessary face defacement.

Spin Me a Yarn

I've decided that yarn is a gateway drug. I learned how to knit about 4 years ago, and it has taken over many hours of my life, an enormous number of my brain cells, and not a small amount of my apartment's closet space.

Lately, because I don't have enough nonsense going on, I've become somewhat obsessed interested in the idea of spinning. I blame this partly on the internet, because you can type in any subject you're interested in, and the most fabulous information and pictures are at your fingertips. A friend said that she knew this was coming as soon as she heard that I had dyed my own yarn.

So, I gave in to temptation, and because I have neither limitless funds nor space, I decided to try the whole thing out with a spindle rather than a wheel.


I purchased both a kick spindle and a regular spindle from Heavenly Handspinning, a company that comes very highly praised by those in the know, and my experience with them was excellent. In only a few days, my precious package arrived; I had also ordered some lovely roving, which arrived the following day.


I unpacked my treasures, and began to "spin":


Hmmmm...not as easy as it looks. There are tons of videos available about how to do this, and some of them look like magicians as they spin - it's really amazing. I am not a terribly coordinated person (I often bump into walls trying to take a corner too quickly) so I thought the kick spindle would be a good fit for me. It works pretty well, and I have been doing a little every day. I rolled my attempts onto a cardboard tube, and you can see the progression from really lumpy and uneven on the right to less lumpy (but still uneven) on the left:


I've been doing a little bit every day, and I know I'm improving. I don't know if you can call the finished product yarn, but it's definitely more yarnlike than the fluff I started with, so I guess we'll call that progress!