Today I learned that I've learned a lot in February

Here it is the last day in February and so I’ve decided to review what I’ve learned this month from my Learning Something New Every Day challenge.

I've had fun playing with photos in Elements 8.

Thanks, first of all, to you who take the time to follow this blog. I always have more fun doing something when I know that I can drag someone else along. :)

I feel like I have learned more in the past month than I ever thought possible. I’m not just talking about the posts I’ve made either. I’m talking about the hundred other little things that come and go in the course of the day. Because I’m so focused on learning new things for my blog, it’s like I have my learning radar on. Beep-beep-beep…lesson detected! It’s like when you focus on the color red and suddenly you see all the things in the room that are red. I’ve been focusing on learning new things, so when I learn something new, that lesson blips on the radar. –Oh, cool! You can use a wad of aluminum foil to scour your pans? –Beep!- Hey – I just learned something new. And I’ve had this epiphany that just stopping to notice that you’ve learned something helps you learn it better!

And the same way that my learning radar goes off when I learn something new, it blips when I see something I don’t know about. I feel sometimes like my childhood curiosity has been rebooted. When we were making something with eggs the other day I held an egg in my hand and wondered how it got from the chicken to my house. Do they inspect these on a conveyor belt? If they do, how do they keep them from cracking and rolling around? We drove past a herd of horses the other day and I realized that I don’t know how to put a saddle on a horse. And then I wondered when the first saddles came about and how many different kinds of saddles there are and how much a saddle costs.

And when my four-year-old daughter starts asking me questions, I’m right there with her wondering the same thing. “I don’t know why – let’s go find out.”

Like this stuff.

I’ve passed it a hundred times in the grocery store and never gave it any thought. But recently when I saw it – after I started the blog - I wondered about its purpose and function and origin. What do you do with it?

It turns out that you can do A LOT of things with it. There’s an eight-page pamphlet on the Borax website that tells you about SOME of its household uses. Wash laundry. Clean your garbage disposal. Preserve flowers. Extinguish flames. But a little extra research turned up even more interesting info. Like you can use it to make homemade Super Balls or Silly Putty! (You can bet I’m going to learn how to do that!) This stuff is crazy awesome! My sink is shinier than I’ve ever gotten it before! And I never would have known if my learning mindset hadn’t piqued my interest.

You know, I’m the sort of person who easily gets stuck in a rut. I’m the kind that gets the same thing every time I visit a restaurant because I know I like it. I take the same route to the grocery because I can go there on autopilot. Before this blog I ate either Eight-Grain hot cereal or a granola bar for breakfast pretty much every weekday. I never had to think about it. Recently on a day my husband was home we decided that waffles sounded good for breakfast but we realized we were out of batter mix. It’s so much trouble going to the store just for batter mix, and we probably would have just had our standard breakfast if I hadn’t thought to just look up a recipe for waffles from scratch. Oh my goodness. They were WAY better than the box mix. And breakfast has been completely morphed at our house. Now I eat fresh-cut mango or a poached egg with hollandaise or even scones with flower petals in them. Breaking out of the rut and going off the beaten trail, I’ve realized the scenery here is much more impressive.

A trip to the grocery usually ends up looking more adventurous than it did before.

Tonight I bought these:

Can you tell me what these are?

Because before tonight, the only one I could identify was the artichoke.

This one is a rutabaga.

Did you know that they carve into jack-o-lanterns in Britain and Ireland?

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Hello, Mr. Parsnip.

Did you know that parsnips are related to carrots, and until the discovery of the Americas they were the main starch on the menu? What new starch came from the New World that made everyone ditch their beloved tuber? None other than the potato. The Romans thought parsnips were an aphrodisiac, but how sultry can they be if they were replaced by potatoes?

The Recipe I Plan to Try

This one is a turnip.

The Persians believed it was a remedy for treating the common cold. And that was even before they knew these babies are high in Vitamin C.

The Recipe I Plan to Try

An Artichoke

I knew what this is. Well sort of.

I didn't know it's actually part of a thistle.

The part that the little purple poof grows out of...
I bet Eeyore would like this dip:

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Celeriac –AKA Celery Root
Is it just me, or does it look like it's smiling?

I’ve read that tossing some of this in when you’re boiling potatoes to mash not only increases the nutritional value, but also the flavor. Hmm. Interesting. Health Benefits

The Recipe I Plan to Try

Another thing I’ve learned is that I’m not the only one who doesn’t know these things. I was driving my shopping cart around the store with this surfer-headed looking root and I had about five people stop and ask me what the heck it was and how the heck you use it. (Hi to my fellow midnight grocery shoppers! Thanks for asking about the address to this site. I hope my recipe ideas help...)

OK, and here’s another produce-related Learning Experience I’ll toss in for fun.

The fruit on the left is a pomelo. This is basically what a grapefruit would be like if it were in a good mood. Sweet, and mild-mannered. The one on the right is what happens if Waybums uses her imagination and pretends that the one on the left is a T-Rex egg and hides it away in a nest somewhere in the house until it become petrified.

I will spare you from what happened to the avocado/brachiosaurus egg…

It was not pretty.

What else have I learned this month? Well the most surprising thing I learned this month came from a conversation I had at the store tonight. I had a happenstance meeting with a reader that thanked me for my snowblower post. I'd never met her before but she heard about the site from her friend, a grocery store employee that I shared the site with the day that I bought mangoes. :) It's a small world, after all.

She said that the idea of learning something new every day sounded cool so she went back and started at the beginning and was sucked in by my stories. And she said that when she got to the snowblower story she read the part where I wrote about my husband explaining that the snowblower was supposed to do all the work and that I was pushing it too hard. I wrote that something in life "will either work or it won't, but pushing something harder than it's supposed to go will wear you out," and she said that it hit her like a ton of bricks. You see, she had been in an abusive relationship and she realized that she was working so hard at constantly trying to keep him happy that she was wearing herself to nothingness. So she left him that day and although it's been a challenge stepping out on her own, it's been completely worth it to feel so freed. She said that reading about me doing things that I used to be afraid to do or unmotivated to figure out helps her to think outside of her box, too. She said that her boyfriend always did the engine maintenance on her vehicles and that she figured if I could push past eating moldy cheese, she could figure out how to check her oil. Wow. How humbling!

(Oh, dear reader, how I treasure that you shared that with me, and thank you for allowing me to share that here. I could barely keep myself from becoming a big puddle when you told me your story. You are a very brave person and I am glad to have met you. You single-handedly made those nights that I stay up waaaay too late working on this blog worthwhile.)

So, the greatest thing I've learned from this blog is that we all have something to learn in life. We just have to make sure our radar is on so we can catch the opportunity to learn it.

Thanks for a month of fun and . . .

I'll keep you posted.