Green Washing

If my plastic-related guilt complex were a book, and its phases were chapters, they would look something like this:

1. Whether to pleather
2. Down on Downcycling
3. Bye, Bye, Bottles
4. Oh, Fork
5. Doing Water I Can

Chapter 6 (today's blog post) is really just Chapter 1 all over again—but this time, instead of just fake leather, I'm expanding my guilt to encompass all types of synthetic fabric.

Fabric is a topic very close to my heart, as you might expect of someone who relishes in having a constant stream of new clothes cycling in and out of her wardrobe.

The problem is, as I have been increasingly made aware, every time you wash your clothes, microscopic bits of those clothes get separated from the fabric and washed out into the sewer system, and thence into the waterways. If the clothes are made of synthetic materials, as most are these days, then the bits that come out are actually tiny fibers of plastic that don't decompose. Once in the waterways, those microplastics float around and get swallowed by animals, which is detrimental, to say the least, to their health.

So back to my conundrum, which is really everyone's conundrum: as a person who likes to wear clean clothes, how can I avoid polluting the world's water supply with the plastic effluent of my laundry habit?

Well, one solution is to eschew all synthetic fabrics. This is not easy. Since falling in love with online thrift shops, I have almost stopped buying any new (as in, not pre-owned) clothing whatsoever, but on those occasions that I'm tempted to purchase something firsthand, I do try to avoid anything that's not a natural fiber. If all consumers were to do the same, eventually, we might have an impact on the supply chain.

But in the meantime, most of the used clothes that are available are still made of plastic-based fabrics, and I'm not ready to stop wearing or washing my clothes entirely.

So what's the solution for the problem of clothing-related plastics? One word: filtration.

I can no longer remember how I learned that it's possible to filter your washing water to capture most of the plastic fibers, but I did! And once I did, there was no going back. I simply had to start filtering my laundry.

While they do sell little (plastic!) balls that are designed to be tossed into your washing machine to capture the microfibers there, I decided that wasn't enough. The best a little plastic ball can do is grab the fibers that happen to touch it, but with all that water spinning around in your machine, there is surely a much larger percentage of loose fibers that never come in contact with it.

So onward to the big guns: drain-hose filtration devices. With a filter that sits between my washing machine and the sewer system, I could be assured that every drop of water in my laundry load would eventually go through the filter, resulting in a much higher capture rate for microplastics.

According to my research, there are really only about 2 options for post-wash filtration devices, and I went with the Wexco Environmental Filtrol 160. I thought it would be a simple addition to my laundry room: Unplug some hoses, stick the filter in between, reattach, and run my washer with abandon!

Well, as with all of my home improvement projects, it was naturally a lot more complicated. There were some wall-mounting woes (not easy in a basement with cinder block walls), some hose-incompatibility issues, and some requisite laziness, all of which caused the installation process to take me about 4 months (2 if you don't count the time it sat in the box while I felt too daunted to start the project).

Finally installed!

Fortunately, once it was set up, it was smooth sailing. I planned to blog about the filter as soon as I finished, but due to the magic of procrastination, it has been 2 months since I installed it. In that time, it hasn't leaked so much as a drip, and it's filled probably about 1/5 of the way. At this rate, I can last almost a whole year on one filter bag (and then I'll probably empty and reuse it, because that's the eco-cheapo way!).

The bottom line for my faithful readers: If you had any qualms about the environmental impact of your clothes-washing routine, installing a filter is a good solution! It's relatively inexpensive, as far as home improvement projects go, and easy enough that any bumbling DIYer can tackle it in 2 months!

Dog Mom Level: 1000

You want to know something ironic about pet ownership? "Cat people" are typecast as antisocial loners who are perfectly content to stay at home all weekend life with a book, while "dog people" are characterized as active, energetic, friendly sorts who are always looking for a good time with good friends. Yet cat owners, with their low-maintenance pets who only require a feed-dispenser and weekly litterbox cleaning, are much better equipped to actually go out and be active and energetic with their good friends; while dog owners, who are (often literally) tethered to their pets and their rigid feeding and pottying schedules, can barely leave the house!

It is really hard to be spontaneous and social when you always have to worry about whether your dog is too lonely at home without you, or about to relieve his bladder all over your bed. These problems are mitigated when you can bring your dog with you everywhere you go, but that is a lot easier said than done.

Even assuming you are lucky enough to know of a gathering place or two where dogs are welcome (it's usually a bar with a patio, and they sometimes even host genuine "yappy hours!"), there's still the matter of transporting your pooch.

Sure, you can drive your pup everywhere in style (or in my case, in a worn-out old utility vehicle), but just try parking a pickup truck in Washington, DC. Just try parking anything in Washington, DC. Really, I dare you! Also, try driving your pickup truck out of DC after you've had a yappy hour drink or three (rhetorically only; I don't dare you on this one!).

There has to be a better way, and that way is public transportation. I'm a huge fan of public transportation (my love for the Metro was one of the things that kept me from ever returning to Ohio), but it has one problem: No pets allowed.

At least, that's what I thought, until I decided to actually check what the pet policy on Metro is. As it turns out, you can bring your pet... as long as it is  "carried aboard in a secure container from which it cannot escape." Well, now, that's a dog of a different color!

Upon learning that tidbit, I spent many hours trying to concoct ways to bring my dog on Metro so I could take him to places in DC without my car. I have been informed that people routinely bring their dogs on the New York Subway in bags from which their heads poke out, but I've never seen such a sight on the DC Metro, so I decided a full enclosure was a safer bet.

Now, my Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit of a dog, but he is by no means a featherweight, so I wanted a carrier that I could wheel around, rather than have to lug in my hand. I contemplated trying to attach a dog crate to a wheeled walker; I considered modifying a large wheeled suitcase to accommodate a canine; but ultimately, I decided what Bilbo needed for both his and my comfort was a stroller. They're already designed for transporting a living being; it should be a cinch to convert one for a dog instead of a baby!

I bided my time, waiting for a stroller at a good price. I actually ordered a ready-made dog stroller on eBay for 14 dollars, but it was too good to be true. It never arrived, the seller closed their account, and I received a refund. But before too much time had passed, a neighbor put a perfectly good Graco out on the curb, and I was in business!

I won't bore you with the details of how I actually made the stroller dog-ready, but it was a process that spanned a few months. In short, I affixed the canopy with a mesh screen that attaches under the seat and to the sides with Velcro. I extended the seat back so it reclines to a full horizontal, to make more room for a dog to lie down comfortably. I also removed the footrest, though I can no longer remember why I felt that was necessary.

After it was done, several more weeks passed, during which I trained Bilbo to hop into it, sit in it patiently without trying to escape, and eventually travel around in it while it was moving. I'm pretty proud of the effort I put into this part; it was so successful that now he jumps into his stroller whenever he gets the opportunity, just because he seems to enjoy being in there!

Our first real-world trial of the stroller happened last Friday. I wasn't really prepared (I had wanted to do a few more test runs around the block and experience some encounters with real people), but one of my Meetup groups was holding a dog happy hour, and it suddenly occurred to me that this is probably the last month of the year that I'll be able to tolerate a happy hour outdoors!

So I rushed home after work, and set out for Metro with my dog and stroller firmly in hand. I let him walk to the station to burn off as much steam as possible, but then I bundled him into his stroller and boarded the train.

The trip passed entirely without incident! Bilbo wasn't as enthusiastic about the arrangement as I was, but I plied him with lots of treats and was able to pet him through the loosely attached mesh, so he didn't try any heroic escapes. I had been girding myself for a confrontation with Metro staff, but I guess women with strollers aren't that odd of a sight on transit. No one said anything, except for one floor cleaner, who, after a second take, told me, "Oh, I thought that was a baby." And then he amended himself: "I guess it is your baby."

So if that's not evidence that I've ascended to a new height of dog-mom-hood, I don't know what is!

Because that is silly

It's been quite a long time since I wrote a blog post about music. OK, it's been quite a long time since I wrote a blog post, period! I make no excuses. But jeez, you guys—writing is hard!

You know what else is hard? Life.

Yeah, life is hard, and one thing that makes it easier is a healthy dose of harmless escapism, in the form of pointless music that refuses to take itself seriously. So today, in an attempt to hop back on the blogging wagon  as well as to impart cheer and levity to a depressing world, here is a list of thoroughly ridiculous tunes that I enjoy. 

I hope they serve to make you laugh. Or at least crack a grin? Awkwardly bare your teeth at me? I'll take anything! I've also compiled them all into a YouTube playlist, which I hear tell is an excellent way to help readers become listeners! Here you go: enjoy all the yuks in rapid succession. Or read about them below:

Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio (John Denver)

Back in the previous decade, when I was last on the online dating scene and meeting lots of strangers unfamiliar with the great state of Ohio, I found that most people only knew one of two things about my hometown, Toledo: a) It's where Corporal Klinger came from, or b) nothing. To introduce them to my fair former city, I took to sending them this unflattering little ditty sung by John Denver. For whatever odd reason, I never felt prouder of Toledo than when I could claim that a famous musician had singled it out to rhapsodize on how boring it is. Not every boring city gets a whole song written about it!

Dead Puppies (Ogden Edsl)

Of all the Dr. Demento songs that I am privileged to know, "Dead Puppies" stands out as a clear winner. It's a stirring adaptation of Pachelbel's Canon in D, complete with dramatic organ harmonics and lyrics about...yes, dead puppies. Most people who I coerce into listening to this song find it morbid and can't understand why I like it, but if you've been hearing it regularly since you were an impressionable youth, it's perfectly normal. And it makes great fodder for derivative works, with which you can serenade your own dogs! Come on everybody out there, sing along, OK?

Short Attention Span (Fizzy Bangers)

If you can only listen to one song on this list, listen to this one—it will only take you 9 seconds. And that's the punchline. I was introduced to this song through the CD "Short Music for Short People," which my mother gifted my brother as a humorous nod to his attention deficit disorder. (Yeah, as a family that routinely makes fun of each other's psychiatric diagnoses, it's not so surprising we're also amused by tunes about dead puppies!) This song kicked off the album and stuck in my head (perhaps ironically?) for pretty much ever after.

Dugong (Mr Weebl)

If you haven't noticed yet, the songs on this list are arranged in chronological order, and we have finally reached the YouTube era, when all manner of ridiculous music began making it onto the Internet in video form. One of my early favorites is the tune "Dugong," which is not only a cute little cartoon with a tune, but also a veritable lesson in marine biology! Listen and learn!

Brodyquest (Neil Cicierega)

Introducing the category, "Songs that are also internet memes," now comes my pick for the silliest song on this list—as long as the video counts as part of it. It's a goofy upbeat electronic composition, which stands alone as something fun to listen to if you like beeps and boops and the lyrics "Adrien Brody," but it really comes into its own when enjoyed with the accompanying animation. Who doesn't want to watch a bouncing starfish follow a handsome Hollywood actor as he wobbles his cheerful way around the planet and beyond? I know you do!

The Fox (Ylvis)

The first time I heard this song, I thought it was stupid (It gets off to a slow start, and the childish lyrics don't even rhyme!). But by the third time I heard this song, I knew it was going to be one of my favorites! Its catchy dance beat is enough to put it on any list of fun songs, but when you stop to think about its central premise (all the completely implausible sounds that a fox might hypothetically make), it becomes fun and hilarious. That is, if you're easily amused by nonsense words.

So there you have it: six silly songs that make me smile! I'm sure there's more out there! Readers, what did I miss? Share with me your comedy music masterpieces below!

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

Did you know that there actually is a song out there called "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins?" There is, and it is sung by none other than Star Trek's Mr. Spock, so if you're a sci-fi/fantasy geek, please rejoice and enjoy!

However, if you're not into song and dance, then you may prefer to just hear a less musical tale, the one about the Bilbo Baggins I call my own.

It's quite a saga in itself, beginning sometime early last spring, when my boyfriend's friend decided to get divorced. Naturally, when you're going through an acrimonious divorce, the first thing you want to do is get the kids on your side, so the wife in this story took the only sensible course of action: she went to Korea and bought them a 5-month-old cocker spaniel puppy.

She discovered quite quickly that caring for a puppy was beyond her skillset, so the work was outsourced to the husband (as were most of the responsibilities in this marriage—you begin to see why it was ending!). But of course, the husband was overwhelmed with other tasks — tasks like getting divorced — so he began searching for a new home for his puppy.

The first (and let's face it, probably only) person he asked was Mr. Dog Person himself: my boyfriend. At this time (late July), he and I were knee deep in raising a puppy of our own (Kodiak was only 5 months old himself), and I was not enjoying it. However, the worst (peeing every 30 minutes!) seemed to be over, and I was actually starting to feel pretty confident in my puppy-rearing abilities. So I told my boyfriend, who relayed to his friend, that if he absolutely could not find anyone else to take the puppy, we would do it.

And so we did it. 

 

Here's one of my first and favorite pictures of him.

For some unfathomable reason, the wife had chosen to name this beigish-whitish creature "Cocoa" (or maybe Coco or Koko, which were equally terrible names since he was a male), so the first thing we did upon acquiring our new charge was to saddle him with a new name.

There is no particular reason we chose "Bilbo Baggins"—Al simply threw out a couple of suggestions that I didn't like, and this happened to be one that I did. But over time, he grew to suit his name. As his hair grew out, his paws became shaggy and enormous-looking—just like hobbit feet are supposed to. 

The first few weeks of owning him were rough. Although he was supposed to be 5 months old according to his papers, he acted much younger than his brother Kodiak. We suspect that his vital stats had been fudged in order to clear him for export to the United States. He was a hyperactive whippersnapper with too much pep in his step for my taste, and he wasn't even remotely house-trained. I was all in favor of passing him on to yet another family, but my boyfriend would only give him away if it were to a person he already knew and trusted. That left us precious few options, and everyone who claimed to want him got cold feet soon after. As the months passed, it seemed unfair to uproot him for the third time in his short life, so I accepted him as a permanent part of mine.

Although I still wasn't terribly fond of the little fellow, when my boyfriend and I went through our own divorce of sorts, I offered to take full custody of Bilbo. At the minimum, I think I disliked him less out of the two of us.

But he grew on me slowly. Having a dog around was something of a consolation prize when I suddenly had to face up to being single after almost 7 years of near-continuous couple-hood. And although I'm still not keen on Bilbo's insatiable desire for constant activity, I do enjoy being the recipient of his also nearly insatiable desire for companionship.

 

What's sitting still?

Although he's a lot of work, he's also my buddy, and I'm sure we'll have many stories to come!

Texting for the brave and true

Today, I'm supposed to be writing about text messaging, a topic that provokes much anxiety for me because it's a form of social interaction, which is never my strong suit. So before I get into that subject, let's digress a little bit about the title of this post!

"Texting for the brave and true." Where did it come from? Well, at first, it just seemed to pop into my head, but it wasn't long before I realized that I had lifted it from a session at a conference I attended a few years ago. The session in question was "Testing for the brave and true," and please allow me give it a shout-out. While I completely missed it at the conference, I was so fond of the title that I found the video after the fact and watched it, comprehended almost nothing, but still remembered it well enough to title a blog post after it.

But where did that title come from? Well, I  fed "for the brave and true" into Google and was overcome with results, every single one of which was about some book called Clojure for the Brave and True—Clojure apparently being some sort of programming language. I find it extremely fitting that the title for my blog post on one the traits most commonly associated with dorks, geeks, and nerds (an ineptitude with common forms of communication), was quite accidentally modeled on two separate titles also on topics commonly associated with dorks, geeks, and nerds (software development and testing).

And let's not forget the semantics of the whole thing.  If "brave" were a synonym for "completely terrified," and "true" could be substituted for "socially awkward," then "Texting for the Brave and True" would be the perfect title for this blog post. But since neither of those are the case, it becomes a hilariously ironic title that no one will laugh at except for myself.

And thus concludes my digression. I suppose I should get on with the actual subject, which is still (although I'd forgive you if you'd forgotten by now) text messaging. Over the past few months, I've made a concerted effort to be more social, which has mostly played out on the field of textual communication. Consequently, I've learned a lot of things about texting, including some techniques to make it all bearable, even when just looking at your phone is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies.

Pre-texting rituals

When the mere thought of reaching out to another human makes you weak in the knees, you can minimize texting's stressful impacts through the time-tested (and more and more time-tested!) technique of  procrastination. The entire first four paragraphs of this post are a prime example of this classic strategy—I avoided having to think about texting by instead droning on about entirely unrelated topics.

Other ways to indefinitely postpone the actual sending of a text include:

• Embracing your inner perfectionist, composing and recomposing the message in your head until it conveys every nuance of meaning that could possibly be wrung out of it.
• Planning a schedule for sending the text (such as "when the recipient is likely to be off work," or "when the recipient is likely to be sleeping"—you know, depending on whether you prefer them to be able to read the text immediately or further extend the procrastination period through their own inactivity), preferably at a point far, far in the future.
• Typing out the text and then suddenly getting caught up in a very important task that just occurred to you.

Post-texting rituals

Let's suppose you've run out of procrastination techniques and have somehow roped yourself into actually shooting off a text message. In the immediate moment, you'll probably notice an immense feeling of relief. After all, that wasn't nearly as hard as you thought it was going to be. Why, it was nothing more than the push of a "send" button (plus hours and hours of preparatory anxiety, no biggie!)! But that rush of good feelings will soon fade (probably in just a few seconds), so what is your next step? Why, it's nothing other than Self-recrimination! Misdirection!

At this point, you might be tempted to immediately regret the text that you sent. You might worry that you came across sounding stupid, or you might wonder why the recipient would ever want to hear from you. You might now start to worry why you haven't received a response, or if the response you are about to receive will be a rejection. You might be coming to the conclusion that sending this text was a bad, bad idea.

The key to derailing those thoughts is to immediately lose all interest in the text that you sent. Forget you ever sent it! It's out of your hands now! The past is past, what's done is done, and you have a very important task that needs to take up every iota of your concentration (I hope you held at least one of these in reserve during the procrastination phase!). Whatever you choose to do to distract yourself from the horrible tactical error that was your text message, do it with gusto! As long as you keep busy, then you won't have any time to regret your actions.

With these pre- and post-texting rituals firmly in hand, you — yes, even you, you quivering bundle of perennial anxiety — can overcome your fears and dash off text messages with the lighthearted nonchalance of an honest-to-gosh extravert. You might even begin to feel a small, glimmering smidgen of self-confidence!

Texting for the brave and true—maybe it wasn't such an ironic title after all!

Palak Paneer, the wimpy American way

What do you do when you love Indian food, but you can't tolerate spiciness?

Well, for one thing, you can never buy pre-packaged Indian food or seasoning mixes, because they will burn your tongue off on the first bite. You basically have two options: 1) You can order all your Indian food at a restaurant and request that they prepare it "mild," or 2) you can learn to make it mild yourself!

After many years of trying Option #1 with varying degrees of success, I finally moved on to Option #2. But like any good wimpy American, I imbued the process with my close-held values of laziness and ingenuity in equal measure. The result of this  Adventure in Cooking! is a recipe for one of my favorite foods, palak paneer (spinach with cheese cubes), with 90% of its Indian-ness stripped out and modified for an unadventurous palate!

The hardest part of developing this dish was getting over my fear of Indian recipes, which always seem to have 1,001 ingredients, most of which I don't even possess. I realized that the most daunting part of almost any Indian recipe was compiling the vast number of spices required for that distinctive flavor, so here's where the ingenuity comes in. If I were to mix all the spices in advance, I would have a seasoning blend (you know, something like "Italian seasoning" or "Chinese 5-Spice") that I could just toss into my spinach and be 50% of the way there already!

I surveyed a number of palak paneer recipes on the internet, and came to the conclusion that most of them had several spices in common. I figured out a sensible relative quantity for each of them, and then mixed them all together.

So here is Part 1. Prepare in advance and thank me later!

Part 1: Palak Paneer Seasoning

• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp coriander powder
• 1/2 tsp garam masala
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp ginger
• a pinch of cardamom

Feel free to adjust the amounts of each spice to your own taste. Being an allium-hater myself, I was very sparing with the garlic and onion, for example. Some recipes also called for curry powder, and while I think that's actually a spice blend of its own, you could throw it in if you were so inclined!

I found that one bowl of palak paneer required about 1/4 teaspoon of this seasoning mix to acquire sufficient flavor, so this mix recipe should get you through about 16 servings of palak paneer! Labor-saving at its finest!

Part 2: Palak Paneer

Once you have the seasoning, making actual palak paneer is a cinch! I happened to have some creamed spinach that had been – you guessed it – sitting in the freezer for over a year, so that saved me lots of bother cooking spinach, mixing it with cream, etc. All I had to do was reheat the spinach and add some cheese.

Naturally, being an American, I did not have paneer lying about, but I did have some Grandpa's Cheese Barn grilling cheese, which has a texture very similar to Indian paneer, with the added benefit of being more salty. Much better for my blood pressure!

So preparing the dish is now a simple 4-step process:

1. Put creamed spinach in a bowl
2. Mix in 1/4 tsp of palak paneer seasoning
3. Toss in some cubed pieces of paneer (or grilling cheese)
4. Microwave for approximately 88 seconds.*

*Pro tip! No Indian curry would be complete without a side of flatbread. You can put your bread plate upside-down on the curry bowl while cooking, to minimize the inevitable splattering that will occur.

I have to say that I'm pleased with the way this recipe turned out. I will probably keep the palak paneer seasoning as a regular resident of my spice cabinet, so I can throw together a curry in record time whenever the mood strikes!

Musings of a Dog Mom

I've come a long way since I reluctantly made room in my life and home for someone else's cute but annoying canine companion.

Since then, I've cared for one dog through his final days, raised another dog from puppyhood, and dog-sat so many friends' furry friends that I've lost count. I've written about them so much that I gave them a dedicated tag in my blog, held a dog-themed housewarming party, and finally admitted that I like my dogs more than I dislike them. Although the only pet I ever really wanted was a cat, it has become clear over the years that I'm proud of my role as accidental "dog mom."

Dog-mom-hood is not for the faint of heart. Dog-mom-hood means getting way too comfortable with every bodily function you could ever imagine, and accustoming yourself to the unflinching cleanup of the results of every one of those bodily functions, when they inevitably get performed in an inappropriate place such as your lap or pillow.

Dog-mom-hood means adopting a vocabulary that sometimes consists of nothing more than "Sit," "Stay calm," "Good boy," "Look at me," "Stay calm," "No jumping," "Good boy," over and over again until your world has narrowed to just you and the dog-child you are desperately trying to coax some manners into. When you leave home with your dog-child, you can expect your only conversation with other humans to consist of apologetic one-liners such as "I'm trying to teach him to meet other dogs without freaking out!"

Dog-mom-hood is waking up at the crack of dawn to the sound of your dog chewing on a piece of furniture, and dragging yourself out of bed so you can take him to the park to play fetch before work starts, and falling asleep before 10 every night because you're so exhausted from your weirdly early morning (dog-mom-hood is very hard on those of us who need 9 uninterrupted hours of sleep every night!).

Being a dog mom is a lot of work, and sometimes the only reward is a faceful of stanky dog tongue that you'd probably be happier without! But sometimes, your consolation prize is a holiday dedicated just to you.

Today, apparently, is both Day of the Dog at Congressional Cemetery, and National Dog Mom's Day, and I'm celebrating by taking my dog on a long walk through the city and having a picnic with other dog-loving women, because there's no better way to shun traditional motherhood than by making a huge deal out of your lesser – but much cuter and furrier – responsibilities. Dog moms unite!

Being a dog mom is quite a task and quite an achievement, but you haven't truly become a dog mom until you've become a single dog mom—when all the work is doubled. Such an honor was bestowed upon me back in early March, when my boyfriend of nearly six years ended our relationship, but told me magnanimously, "You can keep a dog."

I had two dogs to choose from, one of which was the aforementioned puppy we raised together, and one of which was Bilbo Baggins, who has never before been mentioned in this blog! We acquired Bilbo thirdhand back in August when he was around 5 months old, (and one of these days, I'll tell you more about that story and the dog himself, because he's the one I kept!).

Since my breakup, with no one else to lavish my love upon (cue the sad music!), I've devoted myself whole-heartedly to the care and maintenance of my sole companion. I have clocked countless hours training him, exercising him, policing his behavior, letting him interrupt my yoga sessions, walking him aimlessly around the neighborhood just to feel less like a homebound loser, and of course grooming him. Oh, the grooming! I could groom him all day and all night, and he'd still look scruffy. It's totally pointless, but I do it anyway, because he is my sole companion! I perform all these many duties without complaint (in fact, with some degree of enjoyment), and feel guilty when I can't be performing them—for example, when I need to be out doing normal single-woman activities, such as finding Bilbo a new suitable dog dad.

Being a dog mom makes dating so much harder! But it looks like there is hope for me. As I was researching National Dog Mom's Day, I found out that our glorious festival of self-congratulation was actually invented by Dig, "the dog person's dating app." I'd never heard of it before, but it sounds just about right for a newly single dog mom. Whenever I'm ready to dip my claws into the heretofore uncharted waters of dating by app, guess which one I'll download first!

Adventures in Cooking: Oyster mushroom tacos

You know what they say: Behind every great taco is a great story, and behind every great story is a great mycelium. Here is the story of my mycelium.

One day recently, a friend called me from a farmer's market, and asked me if I wanted to grow my own mushrooms. Sure, I said. I couldn't see why not.

An hour or so later, said friend showed up at my house with a large plastic bag filled with an unsightly gray-and-white mass. It did not look appetizing, but it was, apparently, the substrate upon which I was destined to grow my own oyster mushrooms. It did not come with instructions. I asked my friend how it was supposed to work, and he said something about putting the bag in a humid spot like the bathroom. That was all he had.

I looked online for further information, and eventually discovered a couple of tutorials that featured mushroom bags similar to my own. The mass inside, supposedly a mixture of sawdust and mushroom spores, was supposed to be a mycelium (immature fungal colony) which would sprout when exposed to the the right conditions—namely a lot of humidity and just a little bit of indirect sunlight. I was supposed to cut a few slits in the bag, place it somewhere shady, and mist with water twice a day.

The home I chose for my mycelium was on top of a wardrobe. About a week of spritzing later, the first fruiting bodies sprouted from one of the slits. I was excited. Over the next few days, my oyster mushrooms grew in size until they could be ignored no longer, until I harvested them with great pride.

Then my excitement promptly turned to anxiety. How on earth was someone who never cooks supposed to eat these mushrooms?

As usual, the Internet was my saving grace. I found a couple of oyster mushroom recipes, and among them, one for oyster mushroom tacos. Tacos would be the perfect food, since I have lots of taco ingredients stockpiled over the course of several visits to Mexican restaurants!

Once I had skimmed over the recipe and gotten the gist of what comprises a mushroom taco, I decided to wing it—that's how Adventures in Cooking are born! So without further ado, let's see the recipe:

Mushroom Tacos Taco, Rube Goldberg style!

Prep time: a few months + 1 week + 15 minutes + 1 night + 5 minutes

Servings: four one

Ingredients:

• Oyster mushroom mycelium
• Taco seasoning...or any old bunch of miscellaneous spices
• Olive oil
• Flour tortillas
• Maybe some nutritional yeast, why not?
• Cheese? Sure.
• Something green and leafy to put on top of the tacos
• Sour cream would be nice, but if you don't have it, NBD.
• Guacamole

Steps:

1. Visit some Mexican restaurants and acquire the following: a huge collection of tortillas because your boyfriend always orders fajitas but doesn't eat carbs; guacamole; some of those black beans that always come as a side dish but that no one ever eats except the vegetarian (you). It would be nice to get some sour cream during this process, but if you don't, NBD. I hope you're not hungry yet, because this step will take a few months.
2. Grow oyster mushrooms from mycelium. Ripen for 1 week.
3. Cut mushrooms from mycelium.
4. Pour some olive oil into a heated skillet—no need to measure, just put in as much as you think you'll need to properly sauté whatever quantity of mushrooms you have.
5. Dump mushrooms into skillet.
6. While the mushrooms are cooking, sprinkle with taco seasoning. If you have taco seasoning, but are worried it will be too spicy for you, you can use some taco seasoning recipes from the internet as inspiration. These recipes seem to all include the following: ground chile, onion, garlic, oregano, cumin, paprika, salt, and pepper. Sprinkle the mushrooms with a small amount of each of these spices according to your taste. If you don't like spicy food or alliums, put hardly any chile powder or garlic or onion, but go heavy on the oregano.
7. By the time you're done sprinkling spices, the mushrooms should be basically cooked. Taste one, and immediately realize two things: 1) Despite barely using any chile powder, the mushrooms are too spicy, and 2) they are almost uniformly as tough as leather!
8. To solve #1 above, rinse all the mushrooms under running water to wash off as much of the spiciness as possible.
9. To solve #2 in Step 7 above, cut off and discard the stems of each mushroom. By this point, you will have barely enough mushrooms to fill one half a taco. That's OK, it just means you'll need less spice for step 10!
10. Re-apply all of the spices as in Step 5 above, but in smaller quantities...and leave out the ground chile.
11. You had originally planned to mix this taco filling with corn and cilantro to make it a proper Mexican dish, but you have since realized you do not have any corn. To help fill out the really pitiful amount of mushrooms, sprinkle them with nutritional yeast, which you just happened to find in the spice cabinet. It's a vegan cheese substitute, so it should add a little oomph to the recipe!
12. As a base for your tacos half-taco, you will need one tortilla. Unfortunately, all of your tortillas have been in the freezer for a few months, and they have become desiccated and inseparable from each other. Find a different frozen tortilla that was stored singly and still has a little give to it, and hope for the best.
13. Pack up all your ingredients and store for later consumption. The next day, bring the ingredients to work, because the best lunch is one that needs to be assembled on top of the office mini-fridge.
14. Upon arriving at work, realize that you have some black beans in the fridge from Friday's visit to the taqueria that you had totally forgotten about! Heave a sigh of relief. Between the mushrooms and the beans, there should be enough food to make your half a taco into a whole taco!
15. Spread the beans and mushrooms on top of the tortilla. Add a dollop of guacamole (also left over from Friday's taco run) and some shredded cheddar. It would be nice if you had some sour cream, but you don't, so NBD! Garnish with arugula.
16. Attempt to eat your taco, but find that even this slightly-less-desiccated tortilla is too crunchy for human consumption, so instead eat the filling with a fork.

You survived your first foray into making oyster mushroom tacos! Now you just have to wait for your mycelium to produce more shrooms (it's supposed to fruit about 3 times before it's depleted), and then you can try it all over again!

Sunday Chef

You might be surprised to learn, since one of the recurring topics on my blog is Adventures in Cooking, that I'm really not a fan of cooking. It's time-consuming, and the results are never as good as what I'd get from even a box of something frozen, so why bother?

Theoretically, there are financial benefits to cooking for yourself, but only if you diligently and consistently use up all your ingredients and cooked meals before they spoil, which is apparently really hard for people to do. Some folks find a creative outlet in cooking, but while I consider myself creative in many ways, gastronomically is not one of them. I do not enjoy the process of cooking—food is for eating, not for laboring over. And lastly, there's the simple problem of time management. By the time I'm ready to think about a meal, I'm already too hungry to endure the long effort of converting raw ingredients into something fit to eat. I want to eat now, and cooking first is not a viable option.

So for many years I've been content to live off restaurant food, leftovers, packaged dinners, and zero-prep foods like nuts, cheese, and fresh vegetables...but a lot of things have changed over the past few months. 1) I decided to reduce the amount of cheese in my life and replace it with low-fat protein. 2) I decided to stop eating protein bars for breakfast every day, and mix it up sometimes with vegan whole foods. 3) I haven't been eating in restaurants as much.

These things have necessitated a change in the way I provide for my nutritional needs: I have been cooking a lot more.

Well, "cooking" is not entirely accurate—most of what I've been doing is not so much cooking (which has to involve the application of heat), as just mixing a couple of ingredients together and calling it a day. But I am making my own food, and it hasn't been that terrible. Still, terrible or no, food prep is something that I'd rather not spend my time on, and as such, I have found ways to make it as quick and efficient as possible.

Like many other people on the internet, I have come to embrace Sunday as the optimal day for food prep for the week. In this way, I can assemble all the foods I will need for the foreseeable future in one fell swoop, and I can do it first thing in the morning, before I'm too ravenous to think straight.

The fruits of my labor

This past Sunday was a real marathon of food prep.

I whipped together a batch of chia pudding (mix chia seeds with coconut milk, shake and put in fridge!) — a batch of quinoa (dump quinoa in water, boil for ten minutes, put in fridge!) — a batch of no-bake cheesecake (blend cream cheese and condensed milk in mixer, put in fridge!) — and even a very ambitious (though small) serving of mushroom taco filling (which I put in the fridge).

Of course I have bloggable thoughts about all of the foods I made on Sunday (if there's one thing that makes cooking for yourself worthwhile, it's being able to brag about it in a blog!):

• I am becoming a real chia pudding connoisseur. Since sharing my recipe for pista-chia pudding, I've made the dish with all sorts of different liquid bases and mix-ins, but my favorite variation yet is a coconut milk base. It gives the pudding a thicker consistency that makes it more fun to eat, and look less slimy too!
• My mission to find appetizing ways to prepare quinoa continues apace. Since my first adventures with the ingredient, I tried mixing it with fruits and beet powder as a breakfast food, but that was also a no-go. Finally I threw in the towel. The one and only way to make quinoa enjoyable is ... to mix it with cheese powder. Yes, this totally defeats the purpose of quinoa as a low-fat, non-cheese protein source, but at least it will help me get through my remaining supply of uncooked quinoa (how does one quart of quinoa last so long!?) without cursing its very existence.
  

  

  This is as good as I've ever seen quinoa look.

• No-bake cheesecake is hardly the kind of healthy food that one should be meal-prepping on Sunday, but I still have a sweet tooth that will not be denied. Since I learned how to make this very simple mixture, I have been unable to eat real cheesecake (unless it's from the Cheesecake Factory and has a ton of mix-ins), because this version is so much better! So creamy, and not dry at all, and versatile! You can toss any kind of candy or fruit into it to enhance its flavor and texture profile! It is one of my favorite treats to have waiting for me at the end of a long day!
• Ah, now we get to the mushroom taco filling! Can I condense this all into one bullet point? No! Should I make it into an Adventure in Cooking all its own? Sure! Stay tuned, readers! My next post should be lots of fun(gus)!

Adventures in Cooking: Quinoa

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but this year was, kind of coincidentally, an exception. A few days before 2019 began, I took stock of my eating habits and concluded that the largest portion of my protein intake came from cheese. Now, far be it from me to knock this most wonderful of foods, but I did decide it wouldn't hurt to cut down on the cheese and focus more on lean – ideally vegan – protein sources.

And thus began my relationship with quinoa. While I was cleaning out the kitchen cabinets in a post-Christmas organizing frenzy, I found a 2-quart carton of uncooked quinoa, a holdover from one of my boyfriend's many brief flings with ambitious cooking. I don't recall what recipe he tried to make with quinoa, but he never made it again, and the quinoa has been sitting in the cabinet for at least a year since then. Quite convenient for me, since quinoa is practically a vegan superfood. It has one of the highest protein contents of any grain, and it's a rare vegetarian source of all 9 essential amino acids. Unfortunately for me, it is also unappetizing to the extreme.

When prepared, quinoa resembles nothing so much as a bowl of coarse sand. It has no flavor to speak of, so consuming it is only slightly more appealing than eating said sand. It's slightly more chewable than sand, but being likewise comprised of tiny particles, it doesn't provide anything satisfying to bite into.

There are many recipes on the internet for quinoa, but like any good Adventurer, I decided to go my own way. The first time I prepared the stuff, I followed the simplest cooking instructions (1 part quinoa, 2 parts water, boil until the seeds have absorbed all the water). I figured I'd flavor it with cumin and fresh cilantro and have a quick 15-minute sort-of-Mexican meal. And I did! But it was so boring, I could barely choke it down. In spite of all the spices and all the salt (and more salt! And more!), my healthy dish was as bland as health food is reputed to ever be.

The next time I made the quinoa, I followed an actual recipe. It called for sauteed greens and curry powder. The greens added texture (a slimy, stringy one, of course), but I still felt like the soul was being sucked out of me with every bite.

The third time I made quinoa, I decided to really rock the boat and mix it with cashews! While not as low-fat as pure quinoa, at least a few cashews scattered throughout the bowl would give me something solid to bite into from time to time. The spice rack did not offer any inspiration as to how to season my delicious dish, so I consulted Google and came up with a mix of garlic and turmeric. I threw in some more dried cilantro leaves for the heck of it. And salt. More salt! 

 

 

The turmeric gave the quinoa a bright yellow color, so at least it looked fun, even if it wasn't going to be any fun to eat. And it wasn't. But it was better than my first batch. Either the turmeric or the cashews or perhaps both imparted a slightly sweet flavor, that made the eating interesting, if not exactly delicious.

The going has been ploddingly slow, but I'm learning something about cooking quinoa. The best way to enjoy quinoa is to just make sure you eat it with a lot more stuff that's not quinoa! My next Adventure in Cooking is totally going to be quinoa-sprinkled ice cream!

Ms. Fix-It

In the nearly 3 years that I have owned my house, I'm pretty sure I've become a contractor's nightmare.

While I originally approached even the most basic of repairs with extreme trepidation, I have evolved to take a very cavalier attitude towards the maintenance of my home.

You might recall the series of jury-rigs that were necessary to make the place fit to live in. After the first seven months, I'd basically gotten the essentials under control, so all that was left to work on were the "nice-to-haves"—things like a bathtub faucet that doesn't spew water while the shower's running, a kitchen sink that isn't warped away from the countertop...maybe, you know, a picture rail...and perhaps, an interior door that opens against the wall rather than right into the middle of the kitchen.

For these things that are hard to do right, but not exactly necessary for survival, I felt like I should Don't It Myself and enlist the aid of a professional...but then I thought about how many other things would have to be fixed concurrently to really be done right...and how much that would cost...and how many people I would need to interact with in order to make it happen...and I decided that maybe I'd just take another stab at self-sufficiency.

So over the past few months, I've tackled a number of things on my House Things To Do list. Usually with very little forethought other than a sudden impatience to get things done right now.

First there was the bathtub faucet. It didn't leak...much...but the water did run out the spigot when it should have been all diverted to the showerhead, and all I could think about was how much money was literally running down the drain with every shower. So, with the help of a couple of online resources and a superhero of a friend, I took apart the faucet and reassembled it with new washers. Naturally, that sounds a lot easier than it was. It required two trips to Home Depot, the purchase of a special tool I'll probably never use again, and most of a day of my time. After my friend left, I learned that while the diverter and handles were no longer leaking, the fixtures were actually leaking from the back, behind the wall, and I had to take it all apart and do it again on my own. Eventually I got the faucet working, and the shower diverter is completely leak-free. Of course, now you have to crank the handle with the force of a titan to get the hot water to shut off completely, so I'm just waiting for the day when the whole process needs to be repeated. Next time I'm just buying a complete new faucet assembly! Trying to find the right replacements for an ancient plumbing fixture is just more trouble than the money you save.

Then, there was the kitchen sink. Whoever designed this kitchen apparently did it (much like I do all my housing projects!) with a bunch of scraps that were definitely not meant to go together. You are fortunate that I'm going to spare you the details of exactly how messed-up this kitchen setup was, but I will tell you that the sink was warped in several places, which made the handle wobbly and allowed water to leak into the cabinet. To fix it properly, I determined that we'd need to completely replace the sink...and the countertop...and the cabinet underneath. Way too expensive! So I did the next best thing. I got a 3-inch metal plate with holes in it—it happened to be a scrap door hinge, but that's irrelevant—and slid one of the holes over one of the bolts on the underside of the sink faucet. I was able to brace the plate against the underside of the counter and, with the magic of physics and a couple of nuts, muscled the most warped part of the sink down into a semblance of flatness. Again, it works, but I cringe at the thought of having to explain that setup to a plumber!

And that very setup is one of the major reasons that when the kitchen faucet started dripping, I decided to fix it myself, even though my last experience with faucets (see above) had been a trial I didn't wish to repeat. Sigh. I repeated it. I disassembled the sink faucet, drove around to three separate plumbing and hardware stores to find replacement parts that looked about right, and reassembled it. Several times. Today it works and doesn't leak...as long as you remember to turn the handle slightly up and left of center when you close it. Next time I'm just replacing the whole faucet with a new one (this time, I mean it!), and keeping the model number in a sacred file!

Moving aside from the struggles of plumbing, there was the relatively straightforward issue of the attic ladder. Or, to be more precise, the lack of one. I store a lot of stuff in the attic, and I was constantly risking my neck on a rickety old 5-foot stepladder to get up there every month or so. It was clear I was going to have to put in a permanent ladder. For months, I debated if I should get a professional builder to re-cut the opening and install a proper folding ladder (and maybe some lighting, while they were at it!). But I'm saving my money for a basement remodel that keeps getting delayed, so ultimately I decided I'd make do with a cheap ($110 from almost all sellers), do-it-yourself ladder that's especially designed for small openings. After the requisite delays (such as the kit I first ordered from Home Depot being a damaged customer return), the requisite amount of unplanned purchases (a box of screws, to secure the floorboards before I could start), and the requisite amount of cursing and crying (let's not even get into the details of that part), I got the ladder set up.

The second part of the project was to install a trap door so that the ladder can be easily accessed. But the instructions required re-framing the attic opening, and I was pretty certain I wasn't going to be able to do that without ruining something. So instead, I set up this ridiculous pulley system with a couple of metal rings and a length of Paracord. It is absolutely unintuitive, and if anyone were to buy this house from me, they would think me a crackpot...but it works, and I can get into my attic without needing to drag a stepladder anywhere. The downside, which I never considered until it was too late, is that the ladder takes up so much space, it's almost impossible to fit anything else through the hole. I might have been better off falling to my doom from the stepladder.

But I never did get around to falling to my doom, so I was obliged to continue looking around for things to fix. This time, it was the kitchen door. As with many of the other features of the kitchen, this one was poorly thought out and sloppily done. The doorway was in a corner of the kitchen, but the hinges were on the opposite side. So every time you opened the door, it swung out directly into the room, rather than into the wall where it would be out of the way. I tolerated this for years, but imagine trying to release two extremely antsy dogs through this door multiple times every day. It was like being in the middle of an evacuation gone very wrong. I thought that whenever I contracted someone to remodel the basement, I'd ask them  to reverse the swing of this door. But, as you recall, the basement remodel is interminably delayed, so, over the past weekend, in a fit of frustration, I took matters into my own hands.

It isn't actually that hard to reverse the swing of a door...as long as you're willing to reinstall the door upside-down. Apparently, doing so means that you're the devil incarnate, but your soul is a small price to pay for convenience! I took my time with this project (meaning I did it in a rush while the dogs were safely sequestered in my boyfriend's room) and tried to do everything right (as right as can be when you're doing something so inherently wrong!) and managed to get the door back on its hinges, facing the other direction. It still works, but I'm sure it would make anyone with a lick of carpentry experience roll over in their grave.

Notice anything odd about this door? Of course you don't!

And such is the way of my home stewardship. I get things done, but I get them done in a way that will never stand the test of time. Should I be proud of myself, or should I slap myself on the wrist and tell myself to stop being so cheap and antisocial and call a pro next time? I don't know what you think, but I bet you can guess from the fact that I wrote a whole blog post about my handiwork, that I've decided to go with the former. From now on, you can just call me "Ms. Fix-It!"

Confessions of a Smell Collector

I have a confession to make. I am a hoarder of good smells.

You know those jarred candles that people buy for other people as gifts? I have one of those. I received it around 7 years ago. I burn it, once in a blue moon, when I happen to notice it sitting on my shelf, but in all those seven years, I've been careful not to burn it too far too fast. I have collected scented candles from every imaginable source. All of them reside in a drawer in my living room, which I occasionally open up to gaze at them before closing it securely once again.

 

My boyfriend's mother seems to be fond of good smells. She used to regale us with scented lotions and shower gels, before graduating to Glade Plug-ins, and finally these little bags of air freshener that she gets in Indonesia. I still have a tube of body lotion that she must have given us the first year we were together. I love it, and I use it, but clearly I use it sparingly! The other tube she gave us that same year still hasn't even been opened!

The Glade Plug-ins were a lifesaver when I moved into a stinky apartment in 2015. But when I moved out again, all but one plug, and all of the scent vials, disappeared. I bought some half-off no-name replacements at a dollar store a year ago, but they now feel like such a precious commodity that I have never plugged one in!

The Indonesian air freshener? It has sat, helpfully, unopened on top of my dresser for the past 5 or 6 months! I'd like to use it, but it's the only one I have, and once it's opened and its scent depleted, it can never be restored!

 

When I was about 12 years old, my mother gifted me an aromatherapy kit called "Making Scents," which started me on a path of lifetime love for essential oils. I still have the notebook, hand-decorated by Yours Truly, containing all the instruction cards that came with the kit. I also have a few of the original, miniscule (5/8 a fluid dram, if that means anything to you!) vials of essential oil. Yes, in 23 years I still have not used 5/8 of a fluid dram, but I have to conserve them, because once they're gone, well, I can't even bear to think about it!

Several years ago, my then-boyfriend gave me a hand-me-down. It was an Americana-themed Scentsy wax burner and 3 or 4 packets of Scentsy wax. I don't know if you know (I didn't at the time), but a Scentsy is a totally cool little gadget that uses a light bulb to melt a puddle of scented wax in a dish above it. Because the wax doesn't actually burn off, it can be used over and over again and never run out! It sounds like a smell-hoarder's dream, right!? Unfortunately, my Scentsy fell on the floor and perished before I'd been able to use it even a handful of times, so for months I had all this Scentsy wax I was loath to part with. Fortunately, I saved the light bulb and cord, and before long, I had acquired a smaller potpourri burner from Freecycle that just managed to contain the light bulb and enable my wax-melting once again. Confident that I'd be able to use my new pseudo-Scentsy on the regular, I then proceeded to invest in a sizable collection of scented wax, in fits and starts over the past two years. But did I ever melt the wax? Not much. I put the burner in the basement as a deodorizing tool for my Airbnb guests last summer, and I haven't seen it since.

As you have probably ascertained, my smell-hoarding tendencies are a force to be reckoned with. Once I acquire something with a pleasant scent, I won't let it go without a fight! I could be proud of my unwavering tenacity, but let's be real—it's a little excessive. A whole drawer full of barely touched essential oils and unopened Scentsy packets, six scented candles in various degrees of un-use, some plumeria incense I bought in September but want to save for summer, an adorable garden-eel car freshener I bought in Japan and have now refused to open for the past year and a few months? What's the point of having all these scents around if I never actually smell them? This has to stop!

So I did something about it. I had eight unused Scentsy packets and nothing to melt them in. A lesser hoarder would throw those all away, but I am both hoardy and crafty! I went to the thrift store and found a bag of electric candles for $2. I disassembled one candle, replaced the bulb with a 40-watt globe, stuffed the whole shebang into a drinking glass, and then topped the contraption with a plate full of lavender wax. Soon I had a brand new, uber-ugly Scentsy burner ready for business! 

 

 

Since the scented wax lasts well nigh forever, I'll likely never actually deplete my supply, but at least it won't be gathering dust any more! And I can rest assured that if my new ghetto-Scentsy bites the dust, I have four more electric candles I can use to rebuild it.

Because I feel so confident that I'm in very little immediate danger of running out of good smells, I have made a promise to myself. When my banana-nut-bread candle starts to run low, I'll suppress my instincts to lid it and shelve it and pretend that it's a completely scentless piece of decor. Instead, I'll bravely soldier on, and keep the candle burning it until it burns out!

How to DIY a Picture Rail

 
If you're like me, you can't stand having the same pictures on your wall for very long before wanting to change them up for something completely new. You can't just keep hammering new nails into your wall to accommodate all the different sizes of art, because pretty soon your wall would be all holes and no art. That's where a picture rail comes in!

We've all seen it, mostly in restaurants: an unobtrusive rail on the wall, from which any number of pictures of all different sizes can be hung and switched out with ease. The picture rail allows you to slide the art along its length so you can position it anywhere on the wall, and you can use any length of wire to adjust the height. A picture rail sounds like your dream, right? But how do you get one?

Well, the cheapest and longest pre-made picture rail I could find was nothing more than a 95-inch strip of moulding, and cost 22.40 plus shipping. That doesn't cover the cost of hooks and wires and installation supplies. If you're still like me, you're thinking you could do better than that, and you're right!

Here's how I made a picture rail that extends the length of an entire wall of my living room, and cost me almost nothing!

Supplies

• Measuring and marking tools -- a tape measure and a pencil
• 1 piece of wood moulding cut to length
• A Dremel and cutting wheel (I'm open to suggestions on better tools for this process—basically you need something that can cut a groove down the length of your moulding. One alternative is to find a piece of moulding that already has a groove or lip you could hang a hook from!)
• A stud finder
• A drill (strongly recommended, but optional)
• Finishing nails
• A nail sink (optional)
• Paint to match your wall (optional)
• Several picture-hanging hooks (you'll need at least one hook for every picture, but two makes it easier)
• Wire to hang the pictures

If you have to buy all of these things, this won't be a cheap project, but if you have (or borrow) most of the tools and can repurpose materials you already have, you can do it all yourself, as I did, for under 10 dollars.

Directions

Step 1: Get thee some moulding

Because the shape and size of the wooden rail will advise the measurements of every other part of this project, you really need to choose it first. Determine the approximate size of piece you're looking for, based on the length of the wall or space you want to fill. If you don't yet know, overestimate, because you can always cut it down later.

I get all my materials for minor construction projects like this at Community Forklift, my local home improvement thrift store. If you don't have any place like that nearby, you can always go to a regular construction store, where simple moulding can be bought for a dollar or less per foot. If you're looking to do less work, you should look for a piece which already has a lip about 3/8-in. wide, or a groove about 3/8 inch from the outer edge. This lip or groove is what you'll eventually hook the hanging wires onto. I couldn't find anything like that at the Forklift, so I settled for a piece of  3/4-inch shoe moulding (I had to look up its name just for this post), which is one of the cheapest and most plentiful types out there. I can't remember how much it cost, but I'm pretty sure it was less than a dollar.

Step 2: Ready the rail

If you were not lucky enough to find a piece of moulding with a conveniently sized lip already, you will next have to cut a groove into which your picture hooks will later fit. On my shoe moulding, the best place for it was on the narrower flat side, slightly closer to the rounded side than the other flat side. 

Positioning of the groove.

 

As you can guess, I wasn't a real stickler about the measurement. I just wanted the space between the groove and the edge to be wide enough that the weight of a painting wouldn't cause the wood to break.

Mark the location of the groove the full length of the moulding.

Then dig in! Like I said above, I used a Dremel and a cutting wheel for this part of the project, but I'm not sure that was the most effective option out there. It didn't cut nearly as fast as I'd expected, it produced a ton of smoke, and if I accidentally dug too deep into the wood, it shattered the cutting wheel. I lost a couple of wheels before I learned to make delicate touch-and-go strokes that enabled me to cut the groove without getting the tool jammed. It was surprisingly difficult to carve the groove an even depth and width, but that fortunately wasn't too big of a concern because it would be hidden above eye level at the top of the picture rail. 

Another view of the groove

If you know of a better way to cut a groove into a length of wood, by all means go for it! But if you don't, then the Dremel and cutting wheel are good enough.

Last substep in this part of the project—painting the rail! This is optional. A bare wood picture rail can be elegant in some rooms, but in my case, I thought it would look out-of-place with my all white-painted everything, so I chose to paint it white as well. The only matching paint I had was a gallon of white primer, so that's what I used! I've had the rail up for a couple of months, and so far it looks fine even though I never painted over the primer.

Step 3: Measure twice (or thrice, or four times, or as many as it takes to get accurate results from your stud finder!)

Once the picture rail is ready, it's time to make a commitment: where do you actually want it to be?

The wall where I planned to place my picture rail had some thick ornamental crown moulding at the ceiling (a little too baroque for my taste, but it came with the house!). I could have installed the picture rail directly below the moulding (like, stuck to its bottom), but something told me that wouldn't look right. So I gave it a little breathing room and decided to install it a few inches below the moulding. The moulding inexplicably comes to an end a few inches before the wall does. Having the picture rail stick out past the bottom of the moulding would look silly, so I decided to line up the end of my picture rail with the vertical portion of the crown moulding.

Final endpoint of my picture rail

I marked, in pencil, a few spots to align to the top of the rail.

Because the picture rail could potentially support any amount of weight, you need to be assured that it is firmly attached to the wall. And this means you need to nail it to studs, not just the drywall. Ugh, stud-finding is the bane of my existence! We have an electronic stud finder that's supposed to make this work easy, but it never really is. Prepare to spend several frustrating sessions running the stud finder along your wall until you're reasonably confident you've found the position of the studs, then mark the position of a future nail so that it will be as close to the center of each stud as possible.  

HELPFUL TIP: Mark this nail hole exactly above where you want the top of your picture rail to be, because once the rail is on the wall, you still need to be able to see the markings.

If you want to be a renegade, I suppose you could do this part without the stud finder and just attach the rail to your drywall, but you might want to use more nails, and hammer them in at different angles so they're less likely to pull out by accident.

Step 4: Hammer Time

This was a frustrating part of the project for me. I don't know if the nails were too weak, or my form was too poor, or my studs were too tough, but I bent more nails than I ever imagined possible. Because I had so much trouble getting the nails into my wall, I recommend that you pre-drill the nail holes before even touching a hammer.

This means holding the rail to the wall wherever you want it to be (you might need a partner!), then drilling through both the rail and the wall to the depth of the nail (I used 2-inch finishing nails). Even drilling a hole was difficult and sometimes impossible, so good luck! Once you have a hole, it should theoretically be simple to hammer a nail into the same spot. But I still ruined plenty of nails that way.

While I'm usually a cheapskate, I invested in a nail sink just for this project, which is a metal tool that you use when the nail has already been hammered most of the way in,. The get the nail to sink all the way into the wood, you place the pointy end of the nail sink on the head of the nail, then hit the nail sink with the hammer instead of hammering the nailhead directly. The nail sink, with its tiny tip, will push the nail deeper into the wood, without running the risk of you smashing the hammer into the wood and leaving a dent.

If you succeed in attaching the rail at both of its ends, then you can release your partner from servitude, which is helpful because then he will be fresh when you inevitably call him back to help with the hammering after you have bent too many nails and need to take a mental health break. At some point, you will both be finished, both with the work, and probably in a figurative sense as well. Take that mental health break! I'll be here when you get back!

Step 5: Cleanup

There's no time like the present, so even though you're tempted to skip on to hanging your pictures, take a few moments to make this picture rail look its best. Erase any visible pencil marks, wipe the greasy-fingerprints from every surface you touched, and dab a dot of matching paint onto each nailhead.

Step 6: Get hooked

This part was my favorite part, because it involved converting some useless hanging hooks into the most versatile hanging hooks I've ever owned. 

The hanging hooks were these, which, ridiculously, had holes that were too small for the nails that came with them. Whenever you tried to hammer one into the wall, you'd end up bending the nail on the first stroke. Totally useless. Since I didn't have anything to lose, I decided to make them into hooks for my picture rail.

With a bolt cutter, I snipped the "collar" around each nail hole on the hanging hook. This broke it into two parts, and it then fell off, which is what I wanted. 

The hook on top is one that has had the collar removed.
The one at right still needs surgery.

 Using a pair of needle-nosed pliers, I bent the top end of each hook into another hook with a reversed direction and flat top. 

The top portion was meant to slot into the groove on the picture rail, while the intact original hook would hold the picture wire.

A hook in the groove of the picture rail

You can do the same, but if you're going to have to buy hooks anyway, you might as well save yourself the effort and just get some hooks that are designed for use on a picture rail. In fact, you might want to buy the hooks first, so you can customize the position of the groove to best fit them.

Next, you'll need to shape some wire to hang your pictures from. Picture hanging wire is expensive AF! But there's no reason you need to use that! Get creative—strip some old electrical cord (or don't, and just use it with the insulation still on!). Use ribbons or shoelaces or any other kind of long skinny stuff you might have lying around.

I myself still had quite a bit of that wire I found on the street and used for my rabbit-in-a-hat costume, and so far that has proved sufficient for hanging 4 pictures, with plenty more wire to go! I'd like to come up with a way to reuse one wire for multiple lengths, but so far I've been content to cut a new piece of wire every time I want to hang a new picture.

The way I use the wire is to form a smallish loop with needle-nosed pliers. I hang this loop from one of the hooks on the rail. 

At the other end of the wire, I thread a few inches through the hole in another hanging hook, then stop it from slipping out with a series of twists to form a plug. 

One coil keeps the wire from slipping back through the hole.
The second coil was a previous attempt that ended up being too low on the wall.

This hook attaches to the hanging hardware on the back of the painting.

Step 6: Arrange and rearrange

Congratulations! You are now an art curator! The only thing left to do is to acquire a sizable collection of pictures, so you can swap them out at your whim!

Since I have had my picture rail, I've used it to hold up four different art  arrangements. 

The first was a summery set of painted-metal art pieces, which I kept next to a couple of family photos of me and my boyfriend. Next, I replaced the summery art with a Chinese brush painting of goats on a hill. This painting is the first – and for over a decade, only – piece of real art I've owned (I got it free from a neighbor who was moving out), and I am still proud of it today. When Christmas rolled around, I swapped that out for a huge snowman painting, in a style I might describe as American folk. 

Now that it's January, I've returned to the goats, supplemented with a pair of Japanese minimalist watercolors, which were Freecycle acquisitions from last month. They were originally advertised as just frames (I guess the offerer didn't think the paintings themselves would get any takers), so I'm doubly glad that they just happened to have a similar starkness to my beloved goat painting.

Quite a few different looks for one living room! What's next? Well, I've been collecting art from Freecycle every chance I get, so ultimately my goal is to be able to decorate the living room with a different theme every season! Thanks to my picture rail, now my wall can change outfits almost as often as I do!