, Author at Summers Acres

Gun Tote’n Mamas’ Conceal Carry Zebra-Print Basic Hobo Handbag

Gun Tote’n Mamas’ Conceal Carry Zebra-Print Hobo Purse

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This is a fashion/safety post for the ladies. Some time back Jon and I took the conceal carry permit (CCP) class and registered for our conceal carry permits. Initially, I bought a belt style holster for my .38 Ruger. But a holster never really felt comfortable to me. This is probably because I do not usually wear a belt and I have right many “curves” so it always just felt like it was poking or rubbing me somewhere. I truly believe it is because of the shape of my body and not due to a lack of design of the belt holster I have.

So, for several months now I have been looking for a conceal carry purse. Like most women, my purse goes with me everywhere so it makes sense to keep my handgun there as well. What I found out is they are quite expensive! I do understand they need to be of stronger material for the liner as well as exterior. Conceal carry purses are made at a higher quality than the every day purse due to the need to securely support a heavy handgun safely. I really had hoped for something under the $100 range if at all possible.

I also am quite picky about the design of my pocket books. I need pockets and compartments in a functional size and design. While I always like a good looking purse I look for functionality first. That has always been a laborious task for me even before having a CCP and now having extra “functionality” requirements.

And lastly, well dangit I wanted something cute! I generally go with a leather bag of some sort. Leather tends to be more durable. But leather CCP purses were either several hundred dollars or were only in a biker or western style (neither of which I preferred).

So, after several attempts at looking I bought the Gun Tote’n Mamas’ conceal carry zebra-print basic hobo handbag from amazon for $75. Have I mentioned I love amazon? It is now showing for $80.

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Peroxide Mouthwash for Whitening Teeth

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I used to be a smoker and drink wine, coffee, tea, and grape juice. Although I quit smoking a few years back and rarely drink a glass of wine, I still frequently enjoy coffee, tea, and grape juice. These are all some of the worst things for staining or yellowing teeth. There are many products on the market that offer teeth whitening (Crest White Strips, Rembrandt, etc.). I have never paid for professional whitening, but over the course of my adult life I have spent countless dollars on the over the counter products to keep my teeth white and counteract the staining effect of some of my favorite things. Although over the counter, they can still get quite expensive. On top of the price, none of them are really enjoyable to apply or use. Some are abrasive gritty toothpastes, bleaching gels and plastic trays, plastic whitening strips, and brushing a liquid bleach onto the teeth.

About 4 or 5 years ago, a friend emailed me an article about various home remedies one of which was using hydrogen peroxide as a mouthwash. If I still had it I would share it, but that has been many moons ago. After that email I looked at some of the products I had been using and found that hydrogen peroxide was a key ingredient in them. The mouth rinse which is the last step in the multi-step system that Rembrandt has was pure hydrogen peroxide. So, I read the Hydrogen peroxide bottle I had at home (for wound antiseptic cleansing) and found it also said right on the bottle it could be used as an “oral rinse”. The bottle I currently have in the medicine cabinet says “oral debriding agent”.
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Gettin’ Down on the Mountain

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I guess everyone thinks Jon and I have just lost our minds. Well, my immediate family does not seem to think so, but they have probably already lost theirs too. Jon’s friends think so. A few of them have said so. One of his of buds texted him this youtube video a while back. He said it reminded him of Jon. Neither of us had heard of this song, but instantly fell in love with it. It is now my ringtone on my iphone for Jon.

Gettin’ Down on the Mountain by Corb Lund – CD Cabin Fever

Do your family or friends think you have lost it? If so, I’d love to hear your stories. We personally think anyone is crazy if they do not get back to some basics and learn to do for themselves some.

Gardening with Heirloom Seeds

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Yes, it is the end of January. Since I cannot get out there and plant the garden, and I have the soil all ready to go, I am starting to get cabin fever waiting to get my seeds in the ground. So, all I can do right now is talk about the seeds I have for this year’s garden.

Last year, we kind of threw the garden together in a quick hap-hazard fashion. We used whatever seeds we found. We used good seeds, purchased from local stores mind you, but we did not take into account any properties of the seeds, mostly because we did not know there was much of a difference.

We had decent success from our garden in the first year, all things considered. The onions were a complete failure. The corn produced little ears, tasty but small. We did get enough carrots to can half a dozen pint jars. The beans did good, except for the one row that never germinated (bad seeds). The zucchini went nuts, we still have a lot of zucchini in our freezer. The leaf lettuce did good, and the broccoli was almost a total failure, we got enough for one side dish at one dinner. The crowder peas did very good, and thanks to my wonderful wife’s advice, I now absolutely love crowder peas. We will be planting a lot more of them this year.

The majority of our problems were from low soil pH, and generally poor soil preparation. This year we believe we have done a much better job. We have raised our soil pH from around 5.0 to 6.5 which should be pretty close to where we need it to be for all of the plants we intend to grow. The soil has been tilled much, much better, so the weeds should be a lot easier to deal with this year. We have also added what we hope to be enough organic matter (horse manure compost) to the soil. We also have a fair amount of partially composted leaves and dry leaves to use as mulch. So, we feel ready for a successful garden this year.

Only one thing left to do. Get some seeds. We have been constantly researching any and everything we could think of for our garden. During our research we learned a lot about seeds. Genetically altered seeds seems to be rather prevalent in retail stores. I am not going to spend my time judging the use of these seeds. The advancements in seed technology has helped produce more produce to help feed the worlds expanding population, and has also allowed things to be grown in area that they could never have been grown naturally. But as for me and my house, we will use heirloom seeds.

Heirloom seeds are natural seeds passed down from natural plants. When you save a seed from a plant grown by heirloom seeds, the plant that will grow from that seed will be the same as the plant the seed came from. This is not the case with a lot of hybrid seeds. We did retrieve some seeds from our crowder peas this last year, and we are planning on trying them out. We have no idea if they will grow properly, but they are very hard to find and we are gonna take that chance.

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Making Beef Jerky

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This weekend I decided to dehydrate a batch of beef jerky. Store bought jerky is so expensive and is full of preservatives too. Since I just bought the dehydrator, I wanted to use the jerky seasoning that came with it first.

The directions had two options, ground meat and sliced meat. I am not a fan of ground, compressed, jerky so I went the other route.

I mixed the following together:

Contents of the Nesco seasoning and cure packets
1/4 cup of water.
Added a tsp of worcestershire sauce (just because I like it)
Added tsp pepper (jerky must have plenty of pepper)

I marinated 1 lb of sirloin steak that Jon had sliced in thin strips (less than 1/4 in) over night (approximately 9 hours)
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Joy of Snow

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In my last post I talked about being prepared with winter weather, thundersnow and power outages. It is important to experience the joy of snow as well. Preparedness should not be about a constant fear of the horrible unknown. Preparedness should not consume your life and prevent you from encountering the joy in each day of life God has blessed us with. Preparedness should help us react, handle, and adapt to difficult situations more easily so that we may hopefully have more time to experience the joy of snow and every day life. I generally think of being happy as more of a situational thing. Where as I believe joy is a state of heart, soul, and mind.

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Thundersnow and Power Outages

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Just 4 days after my post, Is It Spring Already?, we had snow, thundersnow to be exact. Have you ever heard of thundersnow? It is simply a thunderstorm with snow instead of rain. It is not a common thing. This one was a doozie! The thundering was loud and plentiful and the lightening was bright! Have you ever heard that 10 days after thundersnow there will be another snow? I always have. I guess we will wait and see.

It has been raining pretty much non-stop since Monday. Everything everywhere had standing water. Yards, field, and some roads were looking like lakes. Thursday afternoon the wind was really strong. It had the potential for some serious downed trees and power outages. The lights flickered a few times. So, I filled the upstairs garden tub with water and told everyone to charge all of their electronic devices now in case the power went out. We had one flicker long enough that the TV did not come back on by itself.

Then, Thursday evening’s temperatures dropped changing the rain over to sleet and quickly to snow. It was some of the biggest flakes I have seen in a long time. Several of my facebook friends within 30 miles or less were reporting power outages. Luckily, we never had any power outages this time, but it is good to be prepared.

Our primary source of heat is an electric heat pump. The home is also equipped with older electric baseboard heat that we do not use due to the lack of efficiency. I do check them once a year to make sure they are working in case we have to rely on them if there is ever an issue with the heat pump. I did rely on them for a couple of weeks about 6 years ago when the heat pump went out in February and had to be replaced. The power bill tripled from just 2 weeks of use! Still it was nice to have a backup and much better than freezing.

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Nesco American Harvest FD-37 400 Watt Food Dehydrator

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I have been in want of a food dehydrator for some time. I used to have one many moons ago, but I never got around to replacing it. Not too long ago I found a blog post for zucchini chips by The Creative Home and then shortly after came across a review of the Excalibur dehydrator. This rejuvenated my quest for a food dehydrator.

I had inevitably looked at Walmart first. I then turned to Amazon where I do a lot of shopping. I despise going to the store and shopping. I absolutely love shopping online if I can get a good product and deal with little to no shipping charge. I also happened to have a gift card for Amazon that I had received for Christmas.

There were so many options on Amazon that range from $28 to $385! Although the Excalibur received a glowing review I just cannot fathom spending $200 to $300 on a food dehydrator for the home. That just seems excessive to me. So, I set my limit in the $60ish range and started looking there. I like to read the reviews when available and there were many.

I opted on the Nesco American Harvest FD-37 400 Watt Food Dehydrator for the low low price of $30 and got a 2-pack of the easy clean screens to see how they worked. You can also get the fruit roll-up screens as accessories. All of us have outgrown fruit roll-ups so I did not purchase those.

Nesco American Harvest FD-37 400 Watt Food Dehydrator Packaging

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Is It Spring Already?

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In our part of northern North Carolina we do not have a harsh winter like up north. We do typically have four full seasons that I consider to be fairly mild and none of them too extreme.

Our winters are generally cold, gray, and brown with the occasional snow or ice. My definition of cold probably varies greatly from many of you. Our average highs are around 40 and average lows around 28. That being the average, we will have some warmer and some colder. We typically have a few teens and single digit days, but they are few. Those colder days sometimes we still do not get the snow. It just depends on when the precipitation and temperatures line up.

We do tend to get more ice than snow, because we teeter on the edge of freezing many times. I would much rather have the snow than the ice or freezing rain. I do enjoy a good large snow, but must confess after one good one I grow tired of it. I get tired of the shoveling, salting, scraping, and mess tracked in. Last year we had an extremely warm winter and saw no snow at all. And this year, it is halfway through January and all we’ve seen is a little snow flurry in late December. It has barely felt like winter. No, I’m not going to support the global warming topic. I personally think weather is cyclical and it cycles back around. Just two years ago we had so much snow at Christmas that I wondered if everyone would be able to drive back and forth for family celebrations. It was gorgeous.
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My First Crochet Stitch

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I have been telling myself that I was going to start crocheting for some time now. Like many other things, it just kept getting put off. A few months back I was on listia and saw a “Beginner Knit & Crochet First Projects” booklet including a crochet needle for only a few listia points. So, I bid and won the auction.

When it arrived it came with a 4/E needle, a tiny bit of pink yarn, and the booklet. I quickly flipped through the booklet and found it had a couple of project patterns and even a few pictures of how to stitching. But the problem was there was no helpful hints on starting! I knew nothing so I needed the very first step demonstrated. So, I was a bit disappointed and put it away for awhile.

Then I just recently started on pinterest and found the best pin ever!

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