Seclusion

You know, it occurs to me that there is a reason the "stereotypical" fairy-tale Witch is always depicted as living in a small, hard-to-find cottage way off in the middle of the dark black forest somewhere...
and, as a hint, it's not because we're known as social butterflies.

In fact, I might go as far as to say that part of my definition of what makes a person a Witch is that solitary nature, that desire and longing to go off somewhere private and do our own thing, separate from the group.  If one can find, as I have, that special person who can share in that life without compromise, that can be great, but otherwise, we would be content to live out our lives in solitude (though we would probably refer to it as 'peace and quiet').
It appeals to me to have "my own" holidays (or to omit the contraction, holy days) that I can honor the way I want, rather than having society (and rank commercialism) dictate the way I am supposed to mark the occasion, usually as part of some sort of perilously-stitched familial granfalloon.*
It similarly appeals to me to spend my time off from work in my home, rather than out and about at theaters, restaurants, or other such public places, much as the archetypal Witch might travel into town to trade her potions and produce for needed items but quickly returns to her cottage once her business is done.
Notice, in the stories, the Witch never does business out of her home, but rather travels into the public arena when interaction with people is required.  There are no signposts to a Witch's Cottage and no public address, and a private invitation is spectacularly rare.  The witch's Cottage is her safe place, and she takes pains to keep it that way.

So, if you stumble upon my Cottage-on-the-internet, I hope you will find me a gracious hostess, but please remember you have come into a private space of a private person, and be properly respectful.

*I admit this word borders precariously on actually being a real one, but given it's definition, in this case I think that's part of its charm.

Bright and Festive (belated) New Year

Carrying on from the last entry, the New Year's holiday was similarly pre-empted.  I am really starting to wonder why the World doesn't want us to be able to celebrate any holidays this year!  This time was a little different in that it wasn't my job that interfered... Despite our best efforts to clear the schedule and have the two days off, my sweetie got a rush project that she didn't feel like she could say no to, so the both of us were working on a huge and difficult medical transcription while the rest of the planet was having a party.

(Note:  Despite making for a lovely picture,
a box of chocolate-covered things and a
lamp that thinks it's a space heater aren't
actually compatible at all.  We didn't
leave them together for very long.)

It is done now, though, and we have our eyes on this weekend as a time to belatedly celebrate the New Year.  Tonight, we are enjoying our gifts to ourselves:  We lighted the Aladdin anniversary parlor lamp that was our major gift to ourselves and it is looking pretty on the bar at the moment.  Also, even though we had originally decided we weren't going to spend the money this year, after Christmas we found a clearance sale on the annual Lebkuchen-Schmidt Fettstags-Truhe {Holiday Chest} so I expect we will also be celebrating with either some cocoa or coffee and some delicious German lebkuchen, very soon.

I don't think I'll partake much in the "looking back at the past year" thing this time; there have obviously been many changes since this time last year, many of which we had no real control over.  I do have a few things I'd like to look forward to in the coming year--we could even call them resolutions, I suppose.

The first thing I will mention is to improve health, including losing weight.  As much as I hate to be 'on the bandwagon' with the masses, and as much as it is the most cliché resolution I could possibly make, it is something that I would like for us in the coming year.
After that, I want to try to work on having better focus.  My 'hobby-du-jour' was even more all-over-the-place than usual in the past year, which (now that I am being introspective) probably is an outward sign of being a bit unsettled internally.  I'm very much enjoying the Aladdin lamps right now, and given the fact that they are both beautiful and practical, and that my lovely wife can enjoy them with me, I think I'd like to stick with that for a while.
There are a few things that ended up going by the wayside as I adjusted to being back in the workforce; there is one of them in particular that I want to return to.  I think it's about time to get the wax off the back burner and get back to making candles, even if I never do end up selling any through the website and they are just for gifts and for us.  It occurs to me that the lamps and the candles tie together nicely into a larger "non-electric light" hobby, which feels nice to me.
I have a few other goals in mind to get our 'cottage' in order; there are some rooms that deserve to have their potential realized, and a few other things I'd like to get in better order to improve the flow of the house.  For the most part, though, I just want to keep our lives simple, elegant, and positive.  Here's looking forward to a blessed year!

Preempted

Or, "How the Holidays were Cancelled this Year."

One bad thing about having an atypical 'religion' is that the world is just not structured to recognize and/or accommodate your observances.  I expect even followers of Judaism, which is really not obscure in the least, run into this... whereas certain Christian holidays (like Christmas) are also national holidays, those "other" winter-solstice holidays like Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Yule aren't considered legitimate reasons to miss work.

I was thinking, ever since I started my new job, even though I only work an average of three days a week, I think I have been working on all the Sun holidays and maybe all but one of the Full Moons.  Lughnasadh?  I was at work.  Mabon?  Work.  The Blue Moon we had a while back?  Work.  Same for both the Blood Moon and Samhain.  So when I got my December schedule, I wasn't all that surprised to see I was working on Yule too.  I decided I would just move my celebration a few days earlier and celebrate the Night's Moon, and I was okay with that.  We planned to bake a ham and make the requisite trimmings, and have a nice little observance at home.

At 7:30 that morning, however, I got a call from work; one of my co-workers was in the hospital and I needed to go to work and cover for her.  So instead of the nice holiday in the kitchen that I thought I was going to have, I again had to work.  Oh well.  We'll still cook and eat the ham sometime, of course, but it won't be the same.


On the other hand, the good thing about having non-standard holidays is that your observances can be much more personal; I get invited for Christmas all the time, but I don't often have other people making plans for me for Yule.  I see other people requesting time off here and there all the time; I'm not sure why I don't feel like I can do the same thing.  Maybe if the powers-that-be know which days are special to me, they would try to accommodate them.  I don't even expect all twelve Moons and all eight Solar holidays, but a few of the special ones (like Yule or a Blue Moon) feels reasonable.  I'll never know unless I ask, right?

Preparedness

Well, the long-term forecast for the Pacific Northwest is for more winter storms than usual this year.  I'm still getting used to what a "winter storm" means here--unlike Missouri, where it's just piles and piles of snow, here, because of the geography of being between two mountain ranges it has much more to do with hurricane-force straight-line winds.  Beyond the direct threat of wind damage, more windstorms mean more extended power outages.

The normal state of our home is all-electric, both for heating and in the kitchen, which means that the house is pretty much disabled in the event of a power outage.  For lighting (and a not-insignificant amount of emergency heat), I do have a couple of Aladdin kerosene mantle lamps, and as a holiday gift from-us-to-us, we have a third one on the way, which we think is going to be the prettiest one so far.  I also have one flat-wick kerosene lamp, which if nothing else is nice for enough light to get the Aladdins warmed up by, along with a couple of mostly-decorative 'candle style' oil lights.

When the power went out a few weeks ago, I realized that while the kerosene lighting is nice, I currently have no way to cook without electricity, which is a major oversight to say the least.  I had originally looked at a butane single-burner thing, but the more I looked into it, I didn't like the short life of the butane canisters (only around 1/2 hour of burn time?) and how dangerous storing cans of the stuff around would be, and it started feeling like a highly inelegant solution.  It's the same reasons my sweetie and I are totally disinterested in having a gasoline-powered generator:  It's dangerous to store large quantities of gasoline, and between the engine noise and the limited amount of power produced, a generator is the very definition of inelegance, in our opinion.

Anyway, I finally found a solution that I was happy with--a kerosene cooking stove.  It has two burners of comparable power to my normal kitchen range, and both burners on full power can run for about 12 hours before it needs to be refilled.  Most importantly, the fuel of choice (kerosene) is extremely safe compared to volatiles like butane or gasoline.  I went with the wick-fed version... in a way, it feels like a kerosene lamp that you cook with instead of use for lighting.  I'm actually considering getting the big-burner one to use for canning even when the power isn't out, since it's not recommended to do it on my ceramic-top stove.  There's even an optional oven that would let me bake bread during an outage!  The basic two-burner one is on order and will hopefully be here by the next windstorm.

I don't think we'll actually need to worry about heating, with all those things running, but if it turns out we do, a kerosene radiant heater seems like the obvious choice, just to be using the same fuel for everything.

Next, I might need to think about making sure I have enough dry and canned goods, since in a truly extended outage the stuff in the fridge and freezer will eventually go bad.  A water filter would be smart too... but I feel like this is a good step in the right direction.  It feels nice to know that we are getting prepared to be able to just carry on in an outage, and nicer to know I am doing it in a way that feels simple, elegant, and true to who we are.

Disconnected

Since the first of August, it feels like there has been a bit of a sea change...  I have been working many more days and hours than in July, basically full-time (if not a little over).  September's calendar is even busier!  It has to have been at least two weeks since I've been able to do anything significant in the kitchen, and for the past Full Moon--a Blue Moon, by old world reckoning--I ended up working on both the Eve and the day, so I didn't have much of a chance to honor it the way I would have wanted.  I did at least get a good chance to see the Moon on the drive home from work, which is often hard to do from our heavily-wooded backyard.

Finding a balance has eluded me so far, probably because every time I think I have things worked out, then I have more days added to my schedule (for instance, those two workdays that were on the Moon were late additions).  I haven't given up trying though.  After working tomorrow, I do at least have a four-day weekend for Labor Day.  I'm hoping to be able to focus my energies and do some home cooking at least once during the weekend.  I want to feel like a kitchen witch again!

You Say Tomato, I Say No Problem

There is one food that I can point to as being the most detested, loathed, dreaded food of my childhood, and it's name is Tomato.  This was a problem for me as a child, because one of my mother's favorite foods was (again) Tomato.  She would serve it, sliced and possibly salted, on our dinner plates, and one of my earliest childhood memories--one that I have never forgiven my mother for--is of being forced to sit in front of said plate until I forced myself to consume said Tomato, despite the fact that the flavor of this raw, salted tomato was so loathesome as to invoke an involuntary gag reflex whenever I put a piece into my mouth.  The way my child mind remembers it, I had to sit there for over four hours--which probably means I was there at least twenty minutes.

So, I think it's a testament to how much my palate has grown that the ingredients for last night's dinner consisted of scarcely more than this:

Almost five pounds of lovely, not-sinister-at-all tomatoes!  They were less than $1 a pound, so I decided it was time to make some homemade Tomato Soup.  (The recipe is from Food Network Magazine, naturally.) I only made the tomato soup part of the recipe this time; I invented my own grilled cheese sandwiches, which ended up being muenster and gouda with bologna, on grilled garlic bread.  

It all turned out so delicious, and smelling so good, that I forgot to take a picture of the meal for the blog, so you all will have to settle for a picture of the leftover servings of soup.  My sweetie thinks I have ruined her for canned tomato soup for life!

As for me, I think I can say I have finally cured my aversion to tomatoes for life.  Though I doubt I will ever choose to serve them sliced and salted as a side dish...

Fire Moon

By my admittedly eclectic reckoning, as the second Moon of the Summer season, last night's sunset was the Fire Moon's Eve.  My sweetie and I did go outside after dark, but at our latitude, actually seeing the Moon in our heavily wooded area was a bit futile--even at midnight She hadn't quite crested the treeline.  It was a clear night and we did see a bit of moonlight through the trees, which was nice enough, since in the Pacific Northwest we often only see the Moon in spirit.

For today's Moon dinner, I couldn't think of anything better for the Fire Moon than to use my new(ish) charcoal grill!  I thawed out some pork chops from the freezer and rubbed them up with some sage-based Pork Rub from our local World Market, and also toasted some ears of corn on the grill, which I served just with butter and salt.  It was a simple meal, but it was very enjoyable.  I had forgotten how good corn-on-the-cob could be; it's been years since I had it, and I don't think I've ever had it off the grill before.

I'm going to try to carry the fire energy from this Moon forward into the coming month, when I have a fuller work schedule and the passion and productivity will certainly come in handy.  And of course, tonight during twilight will be an excellent time for a Full Moon Reading to get some extra insight to take forward with me.

No matter how you name your Moons, I hope you all had a blessed one!  I think I did.