First Day of School 2012-2013

She especially hopes you will notice the new high tops and backpack.

By the way, if you are looking for a really good school backpack, check the Pottery Barn Teen catalogs or website. I used to buy the kids each a cheapo backpack that would last a year if we were lucky, but then we bought Miss A a PBTeen backpack for the start of 4th grade and that thing lasted for 3 school years! Except for being tired-looking, it would still work for another year, probably, but she wanted something more girly (the old one was camo print). We just got this one, which should take her through 9th grade.

Dehydrated foods vendor Mother Earth Products recommendation

How could I not love them, they're from Iowa! Nevada, Iowa, to be exact. Quick service, good prices and a good selection of dried foods including veggies (both dehydrated and freeze dried),  fruits, and TVP pseudo-meat, and also a few select long term storage supply items. Take them up on their free sample offer. I bravely tried the TVP "chicken" and "beef" chunks, and they were really not bad. Mother Earth included an extra sample of the taco mix and it's spicy and hefty. I'll be ordering soon.

Now THAT is customer service.

Me:

We bought this textbook last summer for my husband's nursing classes. I
ordered it by the ISBN. We received the book and I never checked it
against the ISBN, just handed it off to my husband. He got through
nearly the whole semester before realizing that it was the wrong
edition, as it is missing a bunch of very important appendices in the
back that the new edition has. We just assumed that the ISBN had been
wrong in the Amazon database. But I was just looking up the newer
edition (because we still need to buy it for the 2nd semester) and
there's a big flag at the top of the page saying that we purchased this
book last summer. So we DID order the correct ISBN, the order was filled
incorrectly.

It is far too late to return the book, that window closed in October. I
am just letting you know that this happened. I realize it was most
likely an honest mistake, as we have ordered from you many times and
have always been entirely satisfied. If I had been the seller, and I had
done this, I would want someone to tell me.

Regards,
Maria Stahl

The reply:

Hello,

We sincerely apologize for the error.  We have searched our shelves for
a replacement copy of your book, and unfortunately were unable to find
it. We have therefore initiated a complete refund to you for this order.
Please, keep the book we sent, at our expense.

Again, we're truly sorry for any inconvenience this matter may have
caused you, and we hope you'll give us a second chance to earn your
business.

Sincerely,

Kat
Customer Service
OwlsBooks

 

That's Owlsbooks on Amazon. I'm a satisfied customer.

Really Cheap Phone Service, Part II

My netTalk device arrived in the mail today. There were very clear setup instructions with it. The first thing you do is go online and choose a phone number. I remembered being told that Lansing, Iowa, numbers were available when I first looked into this, but Lansing was not an option; the nearest exchange available was Decorah, and that's not very near. I checked the nearby Minnesota and Wisconsin exchanges, and again, nothing near, in fact it was worse. So I called netTalk Support and after an extremely short wait time, I was given a number in Lansing, which is about 12 miles away and is where the children go to school anyway. It's under a different phone provider, which is probably why it's available. Anyway, so now I had a phone number which would not cause our friends and neighbors to keel over at the thought of paying long distance charges to Davenport, Muscatine, Decorah, or someplace like that.

I connected it all up as per directions and about 2 minutes later I made my first call. I was able to call our current home number with no problem. MagicJack wouldn't let me do that.

So far so good! We're going to give this at least a week and see if we can find any serious downsides before canceling our Mediacom phone service. But I'm anxious to stop paying that $40 a month or whatever it is (bundled so it's hard to tell exactly).

Shopping expedition into the Northwood

Taking inventory at Northwood Country Market

I just realized, I'm coming up on a year of making almost all our bread here at home, from scratch (except for 2 loaves of store-bought that were sneaked in against my will, and hotdog/burger buns, which I don't always make from scratch). And I don't have a great source for flour yet.

After reading about Wheat Montana flour from Judy Laquidara, I determined that I would try to track some down. First of all, you can order it from the website, but the freight charges are a deal killer. So I called my friend Jan who has made her own bread for a long time and asked where she gets her flour. I didn't mention Wheat Montana in particular, but she told me she gets her wheat (sometimes flour, sometimes wheat berries that she mills herself) from a Mennonite market in Sparta, Wisconsin, and that it comes all the way from Montana. I asked if it were Wheat Montana brand and she said it was, and that it's great. My next question was how much is it? She pays just under $25 per 50-pound sack. Not bad.

She offered to have her husband pick me up a sack, since he works very near to the store, but then I realized I had to come into Onalaska today anyway, and that I had some time to spare - so we made a field trip out to Northwood Country Market. I took both the girls out there with me. I, at least, had a wonderful time. The girls didn't mind too bad. I bought 100 pounds of the white whole wheat flour. I also wrote down a few other prices:

• Mindoro Blue cheese (a local blue), 6.99/lb
• smoked swiss cheese, 4.49/lb
• local honey, $8.50/3 pound bottle OR you can get it in bulk if you bring your own container for about $2.65/pound - I forgot to note exactly
• very dark brown sugar, 91 cents a pound
• toasted wheat germ, 2.77/pound 
• farina (cream of wheat), 43 cents a pound
• fruit gelatin in bulk, 1.82/pound
• instant vanilla pudding, 1.65/pound, or chocolate, 1.80/pound 
• liquid caramel, 5.17/pound (like for baking or for dipping apples)
• red wheat berries, 60 cents a pound
• stick cinnamon 6.48/pound 

They have quite a bit of local produce (pie pumpkins!), an extensive meat section and do their own cutting, and they have a deli section with lots and lots of cheeses cut to order. Not all they carry is organic or even supposed to be healthy, but most of it is available at bulk order prices.

For the flour alone, it is probably worth the trip for us every so often. Not sure how long 100 pounds will last me, but if I make that trek a couple of times a year, it will probably be worthwhile.

P.S. - I just talked with Jan on the phone, and she said that they grind their own peanut butter at Northwood! It's done fresh every couple of weeks. Yum! I didn't see everything, obviously.

Journals from Vintage Book Covers at Bookjournals.com

Okay, I'm reblogging this for blatantly mercenary reasons as I want to win one of the journals, BUT this really IS a pretty cool idea. I stumbled on to Ex Libris Anonymous, and from thence to Bookjournals.com. This man takes old books and deconstructs them to make journals. And he finds cool stuff in the pages and preserves it on his blog for posterity: Doodles, dedications, love notes, mysteries that will never be solved.

Go check out both sites, the blog and the webstore.

Here are a couple of my faves.

My experience with Tattler Reusable Canning Lids

At the recommendation of my friend Mrs. Mac, I looked into Tattler reusable canning lids. They are food-grade white plastic lids combined with red (silicone, I think)* gaskets. You use standard bands to hold them on, and I have tons of those. Now these things are an initial investment. Including shipping, they are roughly 70 cents per set. BUT the payoff comes in that they are supposed to be reusable indefinitely, like many, many times. Years and years. (I saw some comments on a blog saying that the gaskets have to be replaced each time and that's not true, as long as you don't lose them down the garbage disposal.)

I'll say right now that I am very happy with the lids. I used them to make quite a bit of jelly this summer and had a 100% seal rate. My initial experience was not so happy, though, as I pressure-canned a lot of beans (refried and baked), and had a failure rate of about 50% on the seals. I was so mad I wanted to return the bunch of them. But Tattler's customer service is excellent; they encouraged me to try again and to make sure I was leaving adequate head space. I am guessing that's part of what I did wrong, I fudged on the head space. Also the instructions tell you to hand-tighten the bands and then back off about 1/4 of an inch. I think I backed off too much. Being more careful about these things, I did great. I still need to pressure-can something and make sure that's not really a variable in the equation.

One final caveat is that if you share your canned goods, you may want to use partly the old lids and partly the reusable ones, so that you have some to give away without losing your expensive lids.

* Correction: Rubber. I just checked the site again and the gaskets are rubber. Now that's a concern, as rubber will break down with repeated heatings. I guess that's why they sell spares.

Catherine's Vintage Style - a blog worth reading

I cannot remember how I found Catherine's blog for the first time but it's one I recommend. Catherine lives an amazing lifestyle in the Arizona desert, far from the conveniences I certainly take for granted. She and her husband live fairly simply, enjoying the beauty of the desert as their entertainment. And get this: They make their living by gold prospecting! I'm serious! How cool is that!!??

That's her current blog header photo there. She has such an eye. I would love to follow her around for a few days and try to see if she will rub off on me.

Oh, and I sorta left out the fact that she has a lifetime of knowledge of vintage linens. She was the one who got me started doing Saturday's Apron,which I out-and-out stole from her - and I'm not even sorry. She finds the most gorgeous linens and tells what makes them wonderful. I learn a lot from her posts.

Anyway, go check out her peaceful, quiet blog over here. Tell her hello from Maria. :o)

Lulu's Dress Shop and ecwid.com

I put a little link box over there ======> to show you my new website, Lulu's Dress Shop, but never said anything about it. It's in progress; I'm slowly working on stocking the shelves.

I just have to blather a little about the shopping cart I am using. It's a widget by ecwid.com. These are the same people who developed X-Cart, which is a full-function cart that I use at Sweet Gal Decals, but this widget is such a cute little thing! 'Widget' is a perfect word for it. You build it on their site, plug the html into your page and boom, you have an ecommerce site with a shopping cart. Seriously, if I can do it, anybody can.

I also added a blog version, same stuff, just a different location. It's amazing, because I just had to insert the same widget and there all the stock is, in two locations! If someone buys something off the blog, it will disappear off the website, and vice versa. There's even supposed to be a way to load the widget on your Facebook Page, though I have not figured that one out yet.

If you are even pondering opening an ecommerce webstore I strongly recommend you check out ecwid. I love their philosophy that everything must be simple. In fact, they don't even have a manual for ecwid, because they figure if it needs a manual, it's already too complex. These are my kind of software developers.

And I'll say it again: IT'S FREE. They promise there will always be a free version, even when they move up to a more professional version.

Pie cherries!

I love pie cherries! There's nothing like them. I find them delicious just as they are, and of course in pie, and crisp, or jam. Pretty much there is no way that I don't like pie cherries. The last time I picked them myself was the year before Lil Miss A was born, out in Door County with my sister-in-law Vania. I had no idea that there were sour cherries to be had less than an hour's drive from right here in New Albin, until our friend Sara tipped us off that she had found them in Gay's Mills and Richland Center, Wisconsin.

So last weekend, Lil Miss A and I grabbed our empty ice cream buckets and headed out bright and early to Kickapoo Orchard just outside of Gay's Mills. We were almost too late; nearly all the cherries had been picked. But we still easily picked about 25 pounds in less than 2 hours. Plus all the cherries I ate on the spot. Which was a lot. It was just a lovely day, very breezy with clouds scudding by and looking like they wanted to be a storm but hadn't quite made up their minds yet to get organized. It's also a lovely orchard, built on rather dramatic hillsides with astounding views. Nobody else was picking that day, just me and my little girl, so there we were all by ourselves, enjoying the day. Lil Miss A tasted one sour cherry and that was it for her; she said she'd wait for the cherry crisp at home. She was quite a good little worker! I picked the high ones and she picked the low ones.

I spent most of the rest of the day washing, pitting and freezing cherries, making one big cherry crisp, and then of course wiping up sticky cherry juice from every surface. I want to do this again next year!

I also bought a quart of cherry juice concentrate at the orchard. This is sour cherry concentrate, now, not Bing, so it's very, very tart. I think it's just delicious, but nobody else in the family agrees, so I can drink it to my heart's content. Tart cherry juice is supposed to be full of good stuff like antioxidants and some people swear by it for chronic arthritis pain. I just think it's tasty.

Broken dryer, broken washer - and some recommendations

Our Maytag Performa is about 7 years old, well out of the warranty period and has worked fine through rather heavy use by our family of 5. Just recently it has learned a new trick, however: It won't stop spinning. And since everybody in the family does laundry, it has run for hours, literally, without the right person happening to notice and check on their laundry. It has only done this on the delicate cycle, so far.

Trying to head off having to buy a new washer, I did some googling and found JustAnswer.com. I typed in my question and accepted the category that it had already selected for me based on my Google search (appliance problems). The site asked me how much I would be willing to pay for a good answer to my question. Possibilities were $14, $24 or $35. I went with the default of $24. It ran my credit card for that amount as a deposit. Then it threw my question out into its pool of expert answerers. I'm not kidding, less than 3 minutes later I had an answer from an appliance repairman with over 20 years' work experience. He told me what part I could replace to fix the problem - and also told me that I could just not use the delicate cycle anymore. Knowing that I don't have to buy a new washing machine - and indeed that fixing the problem is not even critical - was worth $24 to me, easy!

Now this caused a very short-lived crisis of conscience for me. You see, early this summer, our dryer (much older, a Kenmore that we bought at a garage sale and from which we have certainly gotten our money's worth of work) quit working. K opened the door to check the clothes that were in it and when he closed the door again, it failed to turn on. I checked with a website I already knew about: DavesRepair.com. Dave Harnish is a rather remarkable man: He's a very experienced appliance repair person whose philosophy can be summed up by the Emerson quote on the bottom of his web pages: "Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing." He also likes old appliances and sees no point in chucking them into landfills when a few tweaks will get them running again, saving the purchase of a big shiny new one that probably won't hold up anywhere nearly as well. I "met" Dave when I was researching Sunbeam Mixmasters. He's a fan of vintage Mixmasters, and we chatted back and forth about those. I signed up for his newsletter in which he passes on advice about appliance maintenance and how to choose a good machine to last.

Anyway, back to the dryer: I dropped Dave an email and he immediately replied, telling me that it was one of two things. It turned out to be the first: Something had happened to the door switch. That's all! Such a simple thing. Evidently it had gotten bent a little. Barry bent it back and poof, a working dryer. That was in May, I believe.

I just now sent Dave $24 by PayPal. I had never paid him for his help (and he had not asked), but if I was willing to pay a stranger $24 to give me advice on my washing machine, I thought it was the least I could do! Dave also carries the part that my Maytag needs if and when we decide to really fix it and start washing delicate clothes again. My conscience is (temporarily) clear.

If you ever go to the Dells, stay at the Dell Creek.

I like to recommend good service providers whenever I come across them, and the Dell Creek Motel is the best-kept secret of the Wisconsin Dells. Britta has stayed there twice now and reports that it is "cute, clean and cheap" - with very friendly service. It's convenient to all the attractions.
Britta and a friend just got back from The Dells. They spent the day at Noah's Ark, and then stayed at the Dell Creek for the night before heading home. They were the only guests. The proprietress had hot cocoa waiting for them when they arrived! 

If you ever get the chance, stay at the Dell Creek and tell them Britta Stahl sent you.