Happy Consualia!

I'm a total nerd, right? In researching some things for Saturnalia, I discovered two other holidays that book end that Roman festival. December 15th is Consualia, the feast day of Consus, the God of the Storage Bins. It's one in a long line of harvest holidays.

It's a fun little holiday considering Roman holidays work good for texas because the seasons allign better than those of colder climates. My last harvest was two weeks ago when we finally got a hard freeze. I'm celebrating by putting some seed money in the silos and cleaning and refilling my flour/sugar/bean jars.

Always being one for a project, I've decided on my new year's resolution. 2009's resolution was a mixed bag. We wanted to save a lot of money. That was a mixed bag. We saved as much a we could before various things happened - major car repairs done only to have a car crap out completely. Then sulla started school. We had to replace a water heater and the windshield wiper motor on my car died while taking the boys to school during a rain storm. There went 400bucks.

So this year, rather than just saving money, I'm looking for something more holistic. It's going to be a DIY year, mostly based on home cooking. I've started reading ahead to get a jump on spring. There's been a lot of news and articles lately about food politics as well as "back to the land" recession reaction. This is nothing new to me, I'm just now feeling the fire. Lake Worth still does not have recycling and the white person in me hates throwing out all that trash from pre-packaged foods. So here's the plan of action:

• Grow more of our own food - always always
• No eating out at all! - this one is going to be a toughy, especially with the kids. when the weather is crappy, it's just easy to go to the local fast food place to play. But with many of the establishments still using STYROFOAM!? i cant stand it anymore.
• Staying away from packaged foods - this has lots of benefits. No artificial flavours/preservatives, less waste, no spooky plastic chemicals. I haven't decided about what to do about town talk - I can find decent food there.
• Crack out the sewing machine and knit more
• Reduce, reuse, blahblahblah
• Learn more about basic home repair and do it myself where safety and skill isnt an issue - like the damned fence in the back yard. Build a chicken coop so we can get chickens and guinea hens. And building that damned solar oven I've been wanting to do for the last two summers.

I'm even looking into recipes for condiments and basics like crackers - these will probably be more for fun than practicality. But what's life if you can't make it fun.

We will see how far I can take this.