Monday, September 28, 2009

Here, Fishy Fishy...

A few weeks ago we went to the Living Lightly Fair at Minnetrista in Muncie. A gathering of the birkenstocks (as my boss called it before she realized I was going and wearing birks) was a fair about all the different organizations in the area that support environmental issues. It was a fun time for us, free stuff that we like and can use. One of the booths there was one from the clay guild at Ball State, they were making fish to create a community sculture for the day. We made some fish and she took some pictures and emailed them to us. We also did some other fun activities like pedaling a bike to power a lightbulb to show how different flourescents are from incandesants and we got some free cloth grocery bags from the recycling part of the city dump. We ended up with some really good chocolate from a group selling it and two of the expensive twisty light-bulbs from the power company. We also found our favorite orange chapstick from a beekeeper for only a dollar and there are only 3 ingredients in it.







Monday, September 21, 2009

Farmers Market

Another thing that we have been up to lately is going to farmers market. This is my favorite time of year for veggies, it is when corn is going crazy and winter squash is super cheap and filling. We always buy apples, various winter squash, corn, tomatoes (if ours aren't producing), peppers for freezing, and a new veggie of the week! One week we bought a pie pumpkin, some weird tomatoes another time, and our most recent veggie was a cushaw squash (here for more info) this thing weighs in at a hefty 20 pounds and doesn't fit in my bike basket but does fit into a backpack. We often ride our bikes to farmers market and happened to ride them the day we bought our beast of a squash. It is still sitting in our kitchen waiting to be chopped, roasted, pureed and frozen in some cases.

Furniture

Okay it has been a long time since I last updated one thing we have been working on a lot lately has been furniture. We realized this summer that wow we don't have any of our own furniture. So we went out and got some so when we finally get our own place we don't have to go out and buy furniture . We spent one day searching for a new couch, which we found we got a very comfortable brown and beige leather and microfiber couch. We love it and with the owners' couch (that couldn't be moved into another room) we covered it with brown sheets and a cream throw. We also found a coffee table at Muncie Mission with some cool scroll work in the sides so we bought it for a whopping $9, we bought our first power tool (a sander) and went to work on the thing now it is a nice Bombay Mahogany. Next on our list of furniture splurges were our living room lamps, we found some guy in town who sells wine bottles with holes in the back for cords so we bought some lamp kits, marbles, and lampshade and made some really cool lamps with kangaroos on them. After finishing with the living room we noticed that we didn't own any of our bedroom furniture either (only a small problem) so we went to Salvation Army (much better than goodwill any day- better prices, less crowded) while there we found an old desk that was much to short to work as a real desk but just so happened to be the right height for nightstands. We ripped apart the desk into three pieces-2 nightstands that are old wooden filing cabinets, and 1 soon-to-be end table. The nightstands are finished and in the room with some awesome lamps we actually paid full price for (but the cheapest available ones). But believe it or not we are not yet finished. We were out at a garage sale, (yeah you can tell we get in trouble at these things) and we found an old desk that was really cool and had some interesting qualities. But I will write about it once we actually finish putting it back together and looking nice.