good morning! today i have to work on sharon's Christmas card--it is coming along nicely so far. and then i have to get our costumes for a friend's halloween party pulled together. the theme (you can follow the theme if you want, but its not mandatory) is "the wizard of odd". so i have an old curtain downstairs and we will rig it someway to wrap it around rob, so he can be "the man behind the curtain". as for me--dewayne is lending me a hat and i will carry 2 five gallon buckets--making me a 10 gallon hat.
i know that sounds weird--but i don't really like really elaborate halloween costumes--i prefer to take simple things and use them to make something up. i remember when i was in college a sorority sister once dressed up in a white sheet and had a sprig of parsley from the cafeteria in her mouth. she was "the white dove of peace". that totally cracked me up.
today is treadmill day--usually its wednesday but i got off to a late start and ended up just doing leslie and an hour-plus walk at the park with marianne.
and my water kefir experiment is bubbling along. i threw the first batch away because i had used white sugar and you have to add raisins and molasses to white sugar--i didn't care for the flavor, and i didn't really want plain white sugar as the "food" for the grains. so i found organic evaporated cane juice, which is what the person i bought the grains from recommended.
took the kefir out of the white sugar solutions and drained them--the kefir grains look like little wads of gelatin--and then put them back in clean jars with the organic sugar and water. then you cover the (mason) jar with a piece of paper napkin or a coffee filter--to let air but no cooties into the solution, and set it on the counter. it is supposed to take 24-48 hours for the fermentation to take place. this morning i saw lots of bubbles and the grains looked bigger--so the process is working! then you strain off the liquid and put the kefir water mixed with fruit juice in a stoppered bottle. leave it on the counter again for 24-48. the fermentation continues and builds up bubbles in the solution, so you end up with a "carbonated" fruit drink that is a probiotic! my hope is that we will no longer drink soda of any kind, but instead use this--which will be more nutritional and beneficial. i know the calories in the fruit drink will be higher than a diet soda, and it may take me a little while to decide that kind of fruit juice works the best--today it will be organic pomegranate. i just grabbed something off the shelf at the store--i need to be careful of sugar content when i buy juice--but for right now i am just on the learning curve. my main hope is that rob will like it--he is a really hard core soda drinker. he has found some sugar free sodas he likes, but in many ways i think sugar free soda is worse than regular--i really dislike the idea of drinking "pop" at all. so we'll see what happens. thinking i will decant the liquid later today and get the fruit drink working.
have a great day everyone!