The Shinn Digs

My thoughts feel quite random, but isn’t that sort of what makes a great bouquet? Vibrant colors, flowers of different sizes, shapes and textures. Somehow, the random is put together to make a beautiful piece. I can’t promise this will be beautiful, but certainly random! The bouquet pictured here is my first of what I hope will be a weekly picking from our new “cut flower” garden. I love having fresh flowers in the house, so we decided to do one more (and there may still be another before the summer is through!) garden box. This one is simply meant to grow flowers to cut and bring in to the house or give to someone. The garden is pictured to the left.The last 7 weeks we’ve been a family of six, rather than just four. Our good friends, Matt & Amber Moran, have lived with us while their house was repaired following a dreadful flooding incident caused by the refrigerator! [These machines are dangerous, folks!] Today they moved back into their newly remodeled condo. I must say, I was more than a little sad when Garth moved the two extra chairs away from the dining table tonight. It’s been fun having them join us each evening, though I’m sure their thankful to finally be able to sleep in their own bed after 7 weeks! And our guest room will not stay empty too long … Rebecca’s parents move in tomorrow for the rest of their week’s vacation …

Tonight we had our first salad from our garden! The lettuce, radishes, parsley, and cilantro all were home grown! Oh, and my latest obsession is growing my own sprouts, so there were also some alfalfa sprouts and bean sprouts in there as well (you have to sneak in vitamins wherever possible!) My best guess is that right around FCA Camp time (2 1/2 weeks) is when everything will be ready to harvest … nice. At least we’ll have fresh veggies to greet us when we come home exhausted on July 5th! Enjoy the slide show of garden pics!

For all those that have encouraged me to post - well - here it is. Some thoughts from on my weekend:

1. Got to share a lot of my memories about my Grandpa (Archie Shinn) with Keaton today. That was a special few moments.
2. Gardening with JP all day Saturday. I was exhausted by the end of the day but it was a great day together. Did I mention it was all day… She is reading this book called Making Room For Life and ‘production hours’ are from 6 am to 6 pm - we were producing like crazy yesterday. Thank goodness for Sunday (Sabbath rest- I love Sundays!)
3. Ben Patterson taught about prayer - fabulous.
4. Friendship Manor: I volunteer some time at this low income retirement community and I took the family out to a BBQ at FM today. We met Emily who turned 101 today! Wow!

OK - enough for today. I’m all out of words - at least until I start talking in my sleep (in about 5 minutes) - maybe I’ll blog about that someday…

I don’t have time to blog… but this is too good. For those who are wondering - yes, the garden is progressing nicely. Maybe will post some updated pictures soon. We’ve planted something in just about every square foot possible in our front and back yard without using the car port roof and digging up the yard. More on the garden in a later post.

Reading someone’s blog is like reading an autobiography … it’s their own perspective on their own life or world around them. It’s such a fun way to keep up with people. Today JJ, a dear friend and four-year Huddle Leader veteran at FCA Camp, wrote a post about her visit last weekend to our house. What a treat to read someone else’s perspective on our life! Certainly times have changed! Last weekend we had friends over to swim - not an unusual happening at our home. But when Matt and Amber, our current house guests, walked in the door, their jaws dropped and they both said, “Your life is so different.” I looked out in the back yard and saw about 13 kids under the age of twelve swimming in the pool - not the typical college students which have made up the pool participants in the past. Times have changed! Thanks to all, like JJ, who have bravely entered in with me and experienced the changes and adapted to them!

Ok … this is therapeutic blogging at it’s best. For some of my readers, I know this will provide therapeutic laughter, so all in all, we’re saving thousands of dollars here. [Also part of my therapy in this particular situation is a small glass of red wine that I’m sipping.]

Going green … it ain’t easy, but as some of you know, we’re making an attempt here at the Shinn household on some small scales. Yes, this is my new kick. Slowly I’ve been educating myself, making some small changes and doing a few experiments along the way. Today, our house guests, Matt & Amber, offered to cook dinner, so I took the opportunity to do some extra cleaning. Having done some internet research on some homemade cleaning products that are more environmentally friendly and cost effective, I’ve been doing quite a bit of cleaning with simply a vinegar and water solution, which has worked really well. I have searched for a homemade wood floor cleaner, as what I’ve been using is expensive, and we go through quite a bit since most of our living space is wood floor. MANY web sites have suggested what I’m about to tell you, so cut me just a little bit of slack before you pee your pants laughing! The most often suggested concoction to clean wood floors is 1/2 cup vinegar and 1/2 cup … vegetable oil. OK … when I first read it I too thought it was nuts, but having found the suggestion on multiple sites from multiple sources, I thought there must certainly be some sort of safe chemical reaction between the vinegar and vegetable oil that would leave my floors to be clean, shiny and the envy of all of Santa Barbara. [Yes … I do realize vegetable oil is simply a nice way of saying “grease,” which is often the main thing I’m working so hard to remove from the kitchen floors, cabinets, and pendant lights, but again, my green web friends had not failed me to this point.]

So, off I went, polishing with my “almost a salad dressing” concoction. The floors looked shiny, the dirt was coming up easily, so I continued on … 1000 square feet or whatever it is we have. I finished all the floors and stood back with admiration … beautiful and very green, though slightly smelling of a deep frier. I then moved back to the end of the house I started in … and almost slipped as if stepping on a banana peel. What was that? I reached down to feel the floor and was (surprisingly) shocked at how utterly slick the floor was! Shiny, yes, but dangerously slick. I warned the kids to stay in the blue room (where there is safe, oil-free carpet), and quickly made some of my new staple concoction - vinegar and water. I went back over the whole floor with this mixture, sure the vinegar would do it’s grease-cutting magic. Once again, I finished all the flooring and went back for a closer examination of the starting point. Nope. Still law-suit level slickness. And Garth pulled into the driveway right about then.

Once again I thought quickly, grabbed the faithful dish soap and a bucket of hot water and went over the floor now a third time. As I write this, I’ve not yet examined the results. I needed therapy first.

So, as a good, green scientist, I must admit that failures simply provide an opportunity to learn. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. Oil is intended to make things slick. That property doesn’t really change with the addition of vinegar.
2. The advertised green living concoction of oil and vinegar to clean wood floors would only be valuable if our kids were training for Olympic speed skating (they are not … at least not yet, though I may time them around the pool table later tonight to see if either of them have potential).
3. There are limits to how green we can be. Sometimes it’s just easier to grab the Orange-Glo and take 20 minutes to clean, rather than spend 3 1/2 hours.

It didn’t seem fair of me to not share this seemingly disastrous event. Besides … I wouldn’t want you to make the same mistake. Please … let the comments flow. (I’m sorry if caused anyone to wet their pants in a coffee shop or other public place.)

Here it is … what you’ve all been waiting for … a new post! Both my parents and Garth’s have commented to us that they miss reading what’s happening at the Shinn household, and really … two months is long enough to not have anything to say. I hope this doesn’t disappoint (and someone - please comment that you wish Garth would blog … he has a password, username, and everything!)

If you drive by our house you may notice a light shade of green emanating from the property. I’ve found that once I gain a bit of knowledge about something, it’s difficult to ignore complacancy or injustice in that area. So, as I’ve done a bit of reading, enjoyed conversations with friends, and done some web research, I’ve found there really are (and probably should be) some small changes we can make to be more aware of our choices and the impact it makes on God’s creation.

Some small (and in some cases minute) changes that we’ve attempted to make are:

• using cloth/canvas grocery bags
• carrying our own coffee mugs (some former FCA Huddle Leaders - you know who you are - are still adjusting to this concept, though others we’ve converted very quickly!)
• not using bottled water (we’ve not yet graduated to the stainless or aluminum bottles, but maybe those will be in our future)
• walking to the grocery and Lane Farms
• composting (this experiment is still in it’s evaluation period)
• Garth is driving slower and tailgating big rigs in an effort to get better gas mileage
• I’m biking to campus as much as possible
• Planning errands to coordinate with kids’ after school activities to be more gas conscious
• Line drying clothes (this makes me feel like Laura Ingalls a bit, and I’ve now got some statistics that show this only saves $.14/load, so I don’t know this is something we’ll keep doing … imagine my disappointment!)
• Replacing light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs (thanks to someone’s vision of installing our entire house with recessed lighting, we have A LOT of bulbs, and therefore must do this gradually … yes - I’m the guilty party!)
• And lastly, our latest experiment … our “garden”

I put this in quotes, because I don’t know that you can yet consider what we have a going an actual garden (it’s a puny comparison to what my Dad & Mom and several of our friends have). But, if you’ve been to our house, you know there is VERY LITTLE free space to put a garden. The swimming pool in the back yard (and the concrete that fills the ENTIRE back yard) render that area not optional. We did have a few thoughts of taking out our front lawn and making a garden, but we opted for a smaller scale experiment.

After a bit of research, we decided to do what Mel says … Mel Bartholomew is the author of All New Square Foot Gardening and we are now disciples. This gardening method uses small spaces to gain the most productivity and variety possible (as opposed to the typical row gardening method). So, we built our garden in a space in our driveway that is basically dead space. We built three 4′x4′x6″ boxes and placed them two feet apart. In square foot gardening, you square off each box (we used string to do this) to form 1′x1′ squares. So there are 16 spaces in each box. You plant a different crop (or flower) in each square. We have mixed in some seeds, and some starter plants, along with some flowers. We figured since it’s right in the front of our house, it would be nice if this was somewhat aesthetic! It’s been a long time since I’ve gardened, unless you count the bumper crop of tomatoes from last year! We don’t really have any idea how much our garden will produce. Just this morning I spotted our first sprouts of broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. We’re looking forward to seeing how it goes. We have future expansion possibilities in mind … another available space on our property would be a roof top garden on our carport! I’ve added a new category (gardening), and we’ll update as things grow! Here are the very first pictures on Day 1 of the garden. The cardboard squares are supposed to keep the little seedlings from baking in the sun, but as of today I’ve removed them as (mainly because May Gray has officially set in and there is no sun!) Here’s to the possibility of some locally grown food in our future!