Scary House Searching Adventures

Perhaps you have had the oh-so-good-fortune of being someone on the adventure for searching for a new house.  If you haven't, well, let me just tell you - you are missing out.  (Kinda.  Not.)

This takes the word "adventure" to a new level.

So we would love to move away from our ghetto in the hood and live where I can walk around leading a cow to pasture while I yell at the offspring  to stop chasing the chickens.  This would be lovely.

We expressed this interest to our realtor who had to work hard to stay in budget, but who finally called us up with something.  It was a lovely lot of five acres, right in the area we'd love to be in.  

We made an appointment and happened to show up a couple minutes before the realtor did, so we walked around the property and around the outside of the house to get a feel for it.  It would need a desperate amount of work, but it had very charming aspects - for example, a greenhouse built onto the side of the house.  Wow.  Totally love that.  My hubby walks into the backyard and it is so gigantic spacious humungous that he starts gleefully commenting how he's going to be able to hunt this property.  

The realtor pulls up and we start our adventure (she literally calls it this), up to the lockbox we go.  On the front door is posted a sign of eviction from the bank.  This property has stood vacant for a very long time.

So it is a bit peculiar to me that when we enter the house that I see, in the corner of a completely empty room, a quilted pillow and small blanket curled up in the corner.  I say, "Is someone sleeping here or something?" in a half-joking, half-weirded out way.

The realtor assures us that it's fine and that there are a lot of strange things left behind when people are evicted.  

Strange is a total understatement.

We walk around the corner to the kitchen and look at the counter.  This is getting weirder.  On the counter is a box of framed pictures of close ups from the 1970's - these may have been a girl's high school pictures or something.  Weird.  I look to the right and see...a golf putter (?!).  What the heck!

As I notice this, the realtor turns and in the other corner of the kitchen, we see what was once a pantry and the doors have been removed.  There is an enormous piece of ceiling (maybe 8'x8') hanging downward as if little trolls were using it for a slide and it is covered completely (more than a foot deep) with asbestos.  She says, "Oh!  It's asbestos!  Let's get out of here.  This house is not the house for you!"

We hadn't seen any of the rest of the house, and I really wasn't that interested in wasting my time, but I did want to at least peek down the hallway that had the bedrooms just to satisfy my curiosity.  

Everyone else was standing at the door, ready to exit and I quickly just walked over to the hallway entrance to peek my head around the corner.  The hallway had a room at the end of it and doors along the sides of it, so I could only see what was visible from the open door at the end of the hallway.  

Do you know what I saw?  Do you have any idea what creepmonster thing was there?! I looked to the opening of that bedroom door and inside of it was a hospital bed.  Um, getting weirded out.  My eye scanned the bed.  There was a messy pile of quilt on the bed.  There was a messy pile of quilt that resembled the shape of a body.

I said, "You guys, there's a hospital bed in here."

The realtor nearly squeaked out, "Oh gosh, get out of here!"

We quickly ran out of the door, locked it and got into the cars.

Our vehicles were in a circle drive - hers was facing the front of the house, ours was facing the road.  We are all seated in the car when we see her motioning wildly with her arms and with a panicked look on her face.  Hubby rolls down the window.

"There's a man in there looking out the window at us!!" she screams.

We didn't have to be told twice to get the heck out of there - neither did the realtor as we watched her black luxury car kick an enormous amount of gravel behind her as her fancy tires spun out, spitting wild showers of gravel in every direction.

Child 1: "I am NEVER EVER EVER going in another house again!  I'm going to have nightmares for years!"

Fan-freakin-tastic.  Especially considering this was the first house we've seen.

It's gonna be a wild ride, folks.

In case you're wondering, we didn't put an offer on it.

Peace, love and hang on tight!

Ms. Daisy

Run Update: It Was Horrid

Little update - you know my fat, weak and out of shape post a couple days ago?

Well, I just did my first run.  Oh.  My.  Good.  Ness.

Easy category: Worst Run In My Life

And it was about one mile long, maybe just over.  Don't ever get fat, weak or out of shape.  It's horrible.

Peace, love and I'll catch my breath sooner or later,
Ms. Daisy

Rant: Volume 5 (?)

Hello and welcome to yet another rant.  I'll be your host, Ms. Daisy, and we'll get started right away.  Please have a seat and make yourself comfortable.

Let's begin.

1.  Hoochie mamas.  I live in a place where hoochie mamas live.  These hoochie mamas are like 13 years old and they are totally sketch.  They walk up and down the street (well, sidewalk, but dude, they probably will be walking the streets in a few years) in their mini-skirts with their booty hanging out and yelling inappropriate things that you would start screaming "la la la la lalalaa!!!" if you heard it coming out of your idiot box TV in front of your children.  Then high school boys leap on their hoochie-ness and compound the inappropriate-ness by tenfold and exponentially soar it to never before seen heights.

I love my neighborhood.  I may prefer the rats after all.

2.  When someone dies in your family, this is the response that you DON'T want to hear: At least you have ______________________.

Really?  REALLY?  Who in their right mind thought this would be a good comforting comment?  Let's try it.  Let's say your parents just died.  Let's pick the correct response.

Response A: I'm so sorry.  Please let me know how I can help you.
Response B: I'm so sorry to hear that.  What day would you like me to come over and bring you a meal?
Response C:  Well, at least your brother is still alive.

What the stinky bungholes!!  When you don't know what to say, either just say "sorry" or shut your mouth and give the person a hug.  

Yeah.  Can you try to remember that for next time?

Okay, good.

I feel better already.  Phew.  Thanks.

Peace, love and inhale, exhale,
Ms. Daisy

Fat, weak and out of shape

I found out today something I've wondered for ages.  The quandry was this:

Why, oh why, do some people hate working out and not do it?  (Excused are those who do manual labor daily, of course.  I only wonder at this for the sedentary suburbanites and/or urbanites.  I suppose some people who live in rural areas may be sedentary, and if so, fine, they can lump in, too.  Heck, throw the whole world in.)

I discovered the answer today.  Perhaps it is not shocking to you.  Perhaps you already know.  Perhaps it was something you hope the government will not spend $4.5 billion dollars to find out.  (I am among those in the latter category.)

The answer is shockingly simple.

I surmise the reason people hate working out and don't do it is threefold - it is because they are fat, weak and/or totally out of shape.  Don't be offended.  Let me tell you why not - I just found this out because today I found out that I am this pathetic person.  

I have been forced to live a very sedentary (one step up above bedrest) life for the last five months or so.  My exercise included difficult things like turning the pages of books, walking from the couch to the bathroom to the kitchen table and back to the couch, and lifting my tea cup from the table up to my mouth.  At first I thought I might poke my eyes out with a wombat at the torture of it, but I decided to make the best of it (studying grammar, reading more intensely, researching crazy topics, etc.) and the deep disturbance left me and I began to accept it as what must be.

But now I've gotten the green light to pick back up again and go back to life as usual.  Mostly.  So today I began what would have been a day in the regular life of Ms. Daisy back before near-bedrest set in.  This means that yours truly was up with the chirping birds at 5:00, off to the the pool to swim for an hour with my dear friends and fellow masters swimmers.

I love swimming.  I mean, LOVE.  And thankfully I swim with some absolutely fantastic swimmers.  Several of them have their names plastered on university natatoriums across the country.  We've even had the rare and lovely pleasure of swimming with Sheila Taormina, the olympic swimmer and olympic triathlete/pentathlete.  These people are beasts in the pool.  I am not them, but I happily trail behind my friends the sharks, chasing them down the lanes in good guppy-fashion.  

They have inspired and challenged me to kick it up a notch (or fifty) and before I had to sit on the couch for five months, I was swimming like I was my old high school swim capitan self.  Last year I participated in a fun (husband's translation: insane) swim that was a 5k through a chain of lakes.  I may have even lucked out and won first place for my age division.  I say this not to boast of my fabulous accomplishments, I am telling you this so you have an understanding of my mindset and to show you how pathetic I've become.

I used to run 5 miles three times a week (interspersed with the swimming on the other 3 days a week) and play volleyball once a week in a league.

So it was through these eyes that I looked at the participants on the show The Biggest Loser and said, "Why don't they just like run a marathon or something?  Or maybe they could swim a 10k and just get it over with!  Or maybe they should sign up for those cross-state bike races.  I don't get it."  (I said this while doing pull ups on the kitchen pull up bar...of course.)

How.  Ev.  Er.

Sitting on the couch for five months KIND OF CHANGES THINGS.  (This capitalized part should be read loudly and dramatically, in case you were wondering.)

So my brain was this brain who went with my newly pathetic body off to the pool.  Let me just tell you, they weren't getting along.  I swam three laps - THREE LAPS - and my arms started to feel it.  My previous self would have many days of not feeling anything at all after swimming the full workout for an hour.  So it was my in-shape brain who started yelling at my arms.  "What are you doing? What on earth is wrong with you??" The arms whimpered something pathetic, "We're tiiiired.  Waah."

The brain went back at it again, "Well I don't care, GO FASTER."  
Arms:  We caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan't.  Waaah.
Brain:  Do you even see your 50 split time?  You are seriously like the most wussy swimmer anyone could imagine right now.
Arms: Go night-night.  Tiiiiiiiiiiiired.  Owie.

Yeah.  Good news is there's nowhere to go but up?  

I got home and the hubby asked how it was.  After I told him, he said, "Now you know how I feel about swimming!"  He had this gleeful look in his eye, perhaps from him remembering how I smirked and guffawed when after I explained the warm up to him, he said he wouldn't be interested in swimming with me.  Ever.

Yes, well.

All I can say is that I'm thankful that my brain is stronger than my arms.  

And now, for a quick nap on the couch...

Peace, love and I just can't wait for my first 5 mile run,
Ms. Daisy

Haircuts = child torture?

Just finished up yet another child torture, oh wait - I mean - HAIRCUT session.  Really?  Is it really that horrible to get a haircut?

Is it painful?  No.

Does it take a long time?  Only if you wiggle off the chair and fall onto the ground.

WHYYYY is it so torturous to get a haircut, for the love of all that is good and decent, someone please tell me!?  Seriously.  It's like this:

Me: Your hair is getting long, I'm going to have to give you a haircut soon.
Offspring:  Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, whyyyyyyyyyyyyy, nooooooo!!!!! (Falling onto the ground, writing as if in pain.)
Me: Seriously?
Offspring: (no answer, still writhing around on the ground)

Yeah.

So what I usually do is make them sit on the front porch and get a haircut.  This means that they will have an audience of neighbors and are not quite as apt to pretend the act of having their hair cut is going to put them into a state of anaphylactic shock or straight on to death and paralysis (or whatever that is).  Downside: neighbors think I am torturing children out on the front porch due to the large amounts of squalking and flailing.

I used to try to console them and encourage them that their hair was going to benefit baby birds everywhere, yes!  The mommy and daddy birds would love to have some soft hair in their nest to welcome their baby birds!  Isn't that sweet?  Your hair will help the poor unfortunate wildlife.  But meh, they can't even hear this explanation anymore over their hyperventilating panic at the thought of getting a haircut.

When I gave haircuts to my eldest as a wee tiny itty bitty tot, I would have to do acrobatics to get this little yet strong-willed person to sit still.  This usually involved me straddling the said offspring over a folding chair with half of that mini-body through the opening in the back of it.  Ah, such fond memories.

Although the offspring are much older now, it is still quite as unpleasant.  I don't have to do straddling anymore, just a lot of, "Look up.  Sit still.  Turn.  Sit still.  Look up.  Sit still."  

It's more "sit still"-ing than you'd use in 90 minutes of church.

I do ponder taking them for haircuts, would that make it less horrid?  I suppose it would for me, but would they act like goofball sauce to a stranger?  It's less likely (although it is possible).  But paying for a haircut, yeeks.  The thought keeps me enduring the torture.

I suppose I am quite the only person in the entire world who has children who respond in such a way toward haircuts so I will end my rant and now suffer quitely in a dignified manner.

Sigh.

Peace, love and sit still,
Ms. Daisy

EIGHTY-THREE pairs of socks

I have been pondering a bit on that same subject of minimalism.  While I am not a true minimalist (I have things in my life that go beyond the practical - like sparkly bracelets, for example, and I don't think true minimalists have sparkly bracelets.  They have like...a tattoo of a bracelet or none at all.), I do relish, enjoy and agree with the tenets of minimalism.  I suppose if there were a spectrum of hoarding/consumerism on one side and minimalism on the other, I'd like to place myself 75% towards minimalistic.

Here's why - as part of my whole philosophy on organization and life, I believe that you either own your stuff or it owns you.  I have worked with a lot of hoarders in the past and the problem isn't a physical one (well, it is - they risk their lives as they walk down their hallways of towering boxes and junk and can't sleep on the other side of their beds because their pile of clothing might wake up and attack them or their cat is living in it).  It is completely a mental issue.  Even if - EVEN IF - you were to go in with a team of expert organizers for five days straight and fill seventeen dumpsters of utter crapola, if you left this suffering person to themselves without helping what's behind it mentally, you could walk back in in 90 days and find things were how they were before you cleaned it all up.

This, I think, has two sources.  The first source comes out of the philosophy of what happened during the Great Depression.  Everything that could have a possible use was saved, from scraps to cardboard to only partway rusty nails and the rest.  People didn't know if they would be able to make it and so they scrimped beyond what was normal up to that point in history.  The adults and children of this generation had their lives severely changed and molded because of this traumatic experience.  They had children and some passed on that "save" mentality.

This coincided with the second source - the birth of ultra-consumerism.  In the 1950's, people lived with a lot less than what we do now.  I have personal proof of this in my house.  Our house was built in the early 1950's.  It is about 950 square feet and the closets are 36" - 44" across.  There is no pantry.  In this neighborhood, pretty much everyone has 3 bedrooms: one for the parents, one for the boy children, and one for the girl children.  The amount of children could be 3, 6, or 10.  Some people slept in beds with their siblings.  And those 3 children in one room SHARED that 36" closet.  

If that were a situation someone had to be put into now, they'd cry out as if they were being tormented and abused.  Where on EARTH would they put their laptops, ipods, fifteen pairs of jeans and 300 articles of clothing!?

As the decades chugged on, house sizes got markedly bigger.  The average house size for homes built in the 60's was much larger than those built in the 50's; the 70's showed averages larger than the 60's; the 80's continued the pattern and it increases until today.  Why?  Were people just turning into giants and they needed more room?  (Well...some were getting a bit fatter, but that's not the why, I don't think.)  No.  People wanted to jump onto the bigger, faster, more bandwagon that they bought into as they watched their new favorite family member, the TV, and the commercials therein.  There was no cause to scrimp - people in the United States were not living in a war time (men did go off to war, but that's the thing, they left and war wasn't here and present around us, so those who stayed back, although affected somewhat, were not as affected as let's say those who lived in London in the times of the air raids.).

Then the fish tank thing happened.  You know how fish grow in proportion to the size of their tanks?  Yeah, well, that was people and their homes.  They got a larger home and they filled it up to the top until they decided they needed more room and built a larger house and moved in and filled it up too.  

I had a client once who, after I asked him what he would do if he started noticing he had too many things in his house to live comfortably said, "Oh, that's no problem, I usually just build another storage facility."  SUPERB.  Yes, great.  Pay money to build storage and house your stuff.  I might say that somewhat owned him rather than the other way around.  

So this brings me to yesterday.  Ever since I wrote the post about the minimalist dude, I have been purging my house like a madwoman.  I attacked the basement, the kid closets, my own closet, the hallway closet and the linen closet.  3 giant black garbage bags filled with crapola are gone.  There was something else that was nagging me in the back of my head, though.  There was this pit, this black hole...and it was so prolific and there were...socks...climbing out of it.

It was my dear husband's dresser.  He has a thing for socks.  I left him to himself in this area and I've never purged this for him in our entire life together.  

Until.

Last.

Night.

Oh he did not like this, not one little bit.  I was on a tornado-ish path throughout the house and when this little lightbulb went off for this area, it seemed as if I had hit the jackpot of purging.  It seemed as if I had struck gold.  The joy of purging these depths filled me with excited estatic joy!  It filled my husband with tiredness and dread.

But being the lovely he is, he succumbed to my torture.  I dove in.  I began pulling out sock by sock by sock.  I counted them and piled them on the top of the dresser.  I began hysterical laughter as I got to 50...then 60...then SEVENTY (?!) and finally we toppled over everything and found the last pair, #83.  And a half.  (One of the little guys didn't have a partner.)

Those socks had a death grip on him, though.  He wanted to keep this one because what was wrong with it, it was perfectly fine!  This one was soft and you can't get rid of a soft sock!  What if this other one gets a hole?  Are you going to get rid of this other one that could be a backup?

*cough* sock hoarder *cough* *cough*

Now wait just a minute.  You may think, "Oh, what a naughty boy!"  If you do, I challenge you to go count your socks, or articles of clothing you've saved since you were a freshman in college.  Unless you are a minimalist, you have no room to talk and if you talk smack on my hubby, I got his back and you betta check yo-self befo' you wreck yo-self!!  (I'm the only one allowed to call him a sock hoarder.  You know the drill.  You can mess with your bro, but if someone else does, they're gonna get it.)  Ahem.  Yes.  All I'm saying is, don't diss.

This example is to bring to light for you a possible area you may have neglected over the years.  Are you a sock lover?  Do you just rue the day that anyone suggest to you that you throw away a book?  Do you keep CDs like you're hoping you'll one day DJ a frat party?  Are you saving that entire half-wardrobe of clothes that "might fit one day once I lose x pounds"?  Get real with yourself.  You AIN'T gonna wear those, baby.  By the time you lose your weight, you'd rather go to Salvation Army and wear those than your hoochie mama mini-skirt you flaunted to the club when you were 19.

So get going.  What has a hold on you?  Don't let it own you.  Purge, baby.  I don't want to picture you as you crouch over your crapola wide-eyed whispering, "My preciouses..."  Yeah.  Go on, Schmigle.  You can do it.

Be the boss of your stuff.  It shouldn't control you.  Fight ultra-consumerism.  Live right, live simply.

Peace, love and go fill up a garbage bag (or twenty),
Ms. Daisy

A Song for Today

Hey my peeps.  I just wanted to share a song today.

David Crowder Band's "Come Awake"

Happy Sunday, lovies.

Peace, love and DCB,
Ms. Daisy

A Minimalist Dude

I think a good way to go in life is to live simply.

I found a dude who is doing that to the max.  Or is it more accurate to say minimum?  Anyway, you know what I mean.

I found him when I googled "how can I convince my hubby not to buy a new TV" and his blog came up.  Why was I searching for that phrase in the first place, I suppose you may be wondering - well, I'll tell you.  We had this TV, it was new-ish (4 years old?) and this last week or so it started smelling like a meltdown electrical burning toxic puddle of explosion.

Yay, hooray, I say!  The TV is dying!  Finally I can rearrange my living room furniture! GLORY!  No more TV!  Freedom, freedom, freeeeeedoooom!!!

But somehow that was lost in translation.  A broken, un-fixable TV to my hubby meant that he was going to buy a new one.  Wha?  A new one?  We don't even have cable, my peeps.  We HAVE AN ANTENNA.  We get something awesome like 19 channels.  Five of them are PBS.  So you can see how vital TV is to my life.  When The Office was on, I watched TV once a week.  Now the series is over and so is my TV watching.  

So, back to the minimalist guy.  He certainly doesn't have a TV.  He has 416 things that he carries around in his RV.  He has a kid, a wife and they have a Jeep.  His blog is called http://manvsdebt.com/.  He advocates selling all of your crap, keeping minimal stuff (see the difference between crap and stuff?  I do hope so.) and doing what you love, in a debt-free manner.

He literally inventories all of his stuff and takes a picture of it.  (Or I think his wife takes the pictures.)  He has nothing superfluous whatsoever.  I do not know how he makes a smoothie (since I don't remember seeing that he had a blender), but I suppose it is a small price to pay for his care-free life.

What would you get rid of if you were going to really think about all of the things you needed - and just kept THOSE things?  He has 5 pairs of socks, 10 undershirts, 2 or 3 pairs of pants, a minimal amount of books, 17 total silverware pieces.  His daughter has two coloring books.  His wife has one dress.  (This I could not do.  Are you really going to wear the same dress to church every single week?  What about your girls night out dress?)  I like this, though, however nose-wrinkled I get on it.

Some people I talk to sometimes say they live (or used to live) in a small house.  (Okay, I'm not talking about people who lived in China in a 12x12 room or my friends who went to the Peace Corps and lived in a hut.  I'm talking about people who are mentioning their house here in the U.S. of A.)  Then, after I furrow my brow a bit and ask them to clarify, they say something like, "Oh, yeah.  Not as small as this."  (p.s. "This" = my house.)  No, it's not the 234 square feet at Ikea, but it's an itty bitty cute cozy home and if it isn't organized and minimalized, it looks like a cross between those hoarder people and the world's largest trash dump.  Let me give you a glimpse - I have 22" of closet space (half of it is behind a wall).  The depth is exactly one standard hanger.  My hubby gets the other 22" (although sometimes I squish him to 20" and I take 24", sorry honey.) and we make it work.

But even with what most would consider keeping a minimum, I know we could do with a lot less.  

As I've been reading about this, I've (obviously) been inspired to purge (how could you not!).  I bagged up some books I know I'll never read again (off to the Friends Of The Library they go), some kitchen utensils I don't use, some decorative candle holders, some magazines I thought I'd re-read (but didn't), and the purge continues.  I'm going to hit the undies drawer for all the peeps in my fam because when I thought about it, unless you're in the very middle of toilet-training (which, imho, should be done way earlier than most people do it), you don't need more than 5-7 (you are doing laundry more than once a week, no?).

So what could you do without?  Would you like to be more minimalistic?  Do you long to live more simply?  Or do you think it's bunk?

Gotta go pitch some undies (that's knickers and pants for my Brits).

Peace, love and cheers to making it easy on yourself,
Ms. Daisy

Your Free In-Home Lie Detector

I am sure that this never happens to you, but in my house, I have some littles who sometimes lie to protect their hides and they can look at you and promise up one side and down the other that they are telling the truth.  This would be great except for they are telling the complete opposite story.

What to do?  Yes, I mean after talking to them about the abomination of lying (when they still hold up that they are telling the truth).  Wouldn't it be great if you had this little lie detector you could just hook them up to and find out what was going on?

You do.

This is so weird.

I mean WEIRD.

But after you try this experiment, you will freak out. 

The Lie Experiment
What you need:
1.  another person who is not a hardened criminal 
2.  arms

(It has been reported that hardened criminals have some messed up brain link and this doesn't work on them.  If it doesn't work on you, you're a real sicko.  Go sign up for an honesty class.)

Okey dokey.  So, here's what you do.  
Person 1: put your arms straight out in front of you
Person 2: put your hands lightly on top of their hands.  Ask them, "What is your name?"
Person 1: as you answer, press upwards toward them as hard as you can
Person 2: press downward, trying to make their arm sink down

Usually, it will be very difficult to push the person's arm down (unless you are Hulk Hogan and shoving down the arms of a 99 year-old great grandma.).

Now repeat the experiment, this time person 1 answers in a total lie and makes up a different name (ex: "My name is Mickey Mouse.").  For some totally weird reason, when person 2 presses down after person 1 lies, it will be about a jillion times easier to do.  I don't know why.  You lose muscle strength when you're lying apparently?

Weirdsauce.  Now try it with questions you WANT to know, like "Did you punch your brother in the stomach?"

Useful, really useful.

Peace, love and honesty is the best policy,
Ms. Daisy

Making Mayo

Hey dearies, how the heck are ya?  Guess what I did today?  I made mayonnaise!  

Did you just say I'm so weird?  Well, like that's a surprise.

Anyway, my mayo quest began as I dove into the horrors of safflower oil and canola oil.I knew about the evil-ness of canola oil first, so I sought after a mayo that didn't contain that ingredient.  Let me tell you that there is about one whole product on the market that fits that criterion.  

It was safflower oil mayo.  I bought it to try it out to stray away from the dangers of the other man-made oil, but shortly after that, I discovered (quite disturbingly) that was also horrible.  So, what to do?

Stop eating mayo?  The thought crossed my mind.  But I know the hubby would not have that.  He can't live without saucy things (like me).  And what about forever saying goodbye to potato salad?  And egg salad?  And oh, sad.  No.  I must forge on.  So I looked online.  There was this family (I think?) that made homemade mayo and it was approved by Sally Fallon!  Holy smokes, Batman, get me on this!  Two problems, though.  One - it cost about $10.  (This is not going to be so great, especially after the shipping cost.  How am I going to explain THAT one to the hubby?  "Yes, this $15 mayo is so good for you, we need it, even though I could have purchased about five jars of mayo twice the size...um...")  Two - it was completely and utterly out of stock and it seemed that it had been for about oh, a year.  Even if I wanted to throw my $15 their way, I couldn't.

Back to the drawing board.

We had forged through a couple meals without it (the poor burgers looking all pathetic without their mayo and ketchup combo), but today the hubby was coming home for lunch and he wanted a turkey sandwich.  It would have been me out on the streets if I didn't come up with something - and fast.  (He's oh-so-mean.  You can imagine.  "Your Honor, I had to put her out.  There was no mayonnaise.")

So I grabbed one of my flavorite books on how to make things that you didn't even know you could make (like marshmallows!) and opened up to the mayo page.  (By the way, you need this book.  It's called Can It, Pickle It, Cure It and it is by Ten Speed Press - and can I just say that Ten Speed Press has THE BEST BOOKS out.  I love these people.  My favorite tea book is published by them - The Story of Tea among several others that are amaze-tastic.  Seriously, ya can't go wrong.  Or at least, I haven't found a yuck one in their whole pile yet.)  Now, being that they are not me, their mayo recipe has (bum da baaa) canola poison oil in it and that was obviously what I was avoiding, so I had to improvise.  

Yeah, that's the whole thing.  Recipes, to me, are kind of like general suggestions.  I look at a recipe and say, huh, yeah, that would work.  But I'm going to do it my way like this instead.  So that's what I did with the mayo.

They called for a cup of canola oil (oh my gosh! bleaaah!), so I switched it out for a combination of two actually heart healthy oils - coconut oil and olive.  (Are you making yuck faces?  It actually wasn't that bad.)  I didn't want to be too olive-y because that is such an overpowering taste that you have to be in love with olives to go full-blown on a solely-olive oil mayo.  Even the ones that are on the shelf that say "olive oil mayo" are mostly canola with a hint of olive in them.

Okay, so here's what I did.  

1.  In a food processor, put in: 1 egg yolk (from those chickens you know down the street, if you're using CAFO junky crap eggs, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself, those things are as bad as canola oil - no seriously, do yourself a favor, go online and find a local eatwild website and get yourself some eggs.), a splash (ish) of lemon juice (not the kind with sodium benzoate and citric acid in it, you don't need benzene, your dearest carcinogen, in your mayo) - I guess they said 2 tablespoons (if you're into measuring stuff), a couple rick-ricks of sea salt (that is the sound I make when I'm grinding salt out) and a mini-squirt of mustard.  Turn on your food processor until everything is a glorious yellowish messy puddle.

2.  In a warm pot, (77 degrees or warmer) put in your blend of olive oil and your coconut oil (mine was a solid so I had to get it to liquid).  I think I did about half and half?  It came out to something like a cup all together.  Who knows.  I don't measure.

3.  THIS PART IS SO IMPORTANT.  Add the smallest bitty drop of your oil mix into your spinning processor.  Let it work with your oil for an inappropriately long time.  Then add another drop or two.  Like for real.  DO NOT add more than a tablespoon at a time.  It will wreck it and you will have to start over.  It has to emulsify the oil by getting plenty of air bubbles and mixies going on a little at a time.  This takes the longest part of the time in your recipe, but if you screw it up, it's over.  I've screwed it up many times.  If you have a puddle, it's because you poured in too much oil at once.

While you're mixing it up, you can sing a song like, "I'm not eating poison today on my saaaaandwich, I'm soooo fancy I make my own maaaaayo..."  I am not 100% sure but I think it helps.

And then, blamo.  You have mayo.  It's not going to be all canola oil-y tasting (thank the LORD), and it is going to be good for your body.

If you want, you can add some garlic in the mixins for some garlic mayo or whatever kind of fancy stuff you like (some of that dill from out of your garden, maybe?).  The possibilities are endless.  Well, sorta.  Probably don't want to put watermelon in there. That would be weird.  But maybe you like mayo on your watermelon.  That's weirder than me, man.  You totally win the weird award.

So that's it!  Go have yourself a merry little turkey sandwich time!

Peace, love and spread the mayo,
Ms. Daisy