It’s trying to be Spring around here. My indoor greenhouse is sprouting all kinds of things, a bullfrog belches every now and then, the wood pile is getting lower and the Amish lady down the road has opened her commercial greenhouses for business, which leads me to some local things:
Sue’s Greenhouse is open! Now all my money will disappear because I have to pass her house on my way to…almost everything. The tricky thing is if you buy from her too early, you risk killing all your plants trying to keep them alive until you can plant them in the ground, but if you buy from her too late, then all the good stuff is gone.
After all the hoopla about the train derailment in Ohio, we went ahead and invested in an air quality monitor, just to have on hand if anything ever happened here we could get some hard data and compare it to a baseline. This bad boy was the result of my and Jim’s combined research and a phone conversation with one of my civil engineer siblings. We almost never research the same thing, and the first judgment our joint purchase has weighed in on is that the baseboard heater in our room is throwing off more toxins than our wood-burning stove. Oh, Joy.
On a happier note, I finally found earrings that I can wear for most of the day without my ears getting super red and inflamed. It was getting so bad that even increasingly more expensive earrings with titanium and pure gold were bothering me too. A friend mentioned super cheap earrings actually worked better for her and wha-la, she was correct. Turns out the super cheap jewelry is a often a zinc alloy which doesn’t bother my ears at all! I was feeling left out from the current earring trend that has kicked out my beloved necklaces of the 20-teens.
Shoes for my kids are a real problem. I totally understand why parents of yore made their kids go barefoot the second they were able to. Between the Ozark land beneath the shoes, and my boys’ feet on top, the poor shoes have no chance. Muck boots? destroyed. Cowboy boots? Destroyed. Crocs? Destroyed. Tennis shoes? …Ha! They might as well be disposable. At the moment I’m trying a new system where we continue to run around in the tattered ones for playing outside, and reserve one nice pair for church and other things that require not looking like a hooligan. Walmart used to be the only place that sold kids shoes around me, but now Ace Hardware in Mountain Grove sells kids shoes that are the same or cheaper than Walmart prices. So if you’re local… go there after you’re done at Sue’s Greenhouse.
Non-resident library cards. I didn’t know this was a thing until recently. I’ve been sweating bullets dreading when my San Diego library card would stop working because the Missouri library system is not super well supplied. It felt like the sword of Damocles. A Reddit search revealed to this old millennial you can now apply and pay for non-resident library cards. I just got the Fairfax Virginia one which came highly recommended (they aren’t quite as good as the San Diego County system, but comparable and sometimes the waits aren’t as long). I may start collecting library cards now as a new hobby.