LivingSmall

It’s sunny and gorgeous today, and most of my seedlings have gotten their second set of leaves, so out they go for their first day in the cold frame. It’s supposed to be sunny and gorgeous all weekend — the apple trees are leafing out, there are spinach and Italian mustard green seedlings sprouting — […]

It’s been a grim spring here weather-wise. Cold. Gray. Snowy. Gray.
And yet, it’s been warm enough that these pretty daffodils bloomed. I don’t even remember planting them — they must have been in the batch I bought from one of Nina’s kids as a fundraising thing. At any rate, I was silly enough to […]

Well, this is a week I don’t think anyone will be sorry to see end. The creative writing connection to this whole Virginia Tech tragedy really threw me for a loop for a couple of days. I have a couple of advanced degrees in Creative Writing and I spent almost 7 years teaching undergraduate writing. […]

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other […]

After the bear came back a second night, and bashed in the Mighty Hunter’s front door, he called the game warden who brought this impressive culvert trap over and parked it in the back yard. About eight last night we heard clanging noises and went out to watch the warden set the trap and bait […]

The MH called this morning to tell me there was a bear in his neighbor’s yard last night. Looks like it came up the creek from the river, and took out the neighbor’s birdfeeder. He said there wasn’t too much damage, but the sliding glass door is covered in big bear paw prints.
We discussed whether […]

The weather here is still awful, cold, grey, damp and just dreary, but in my basement, spring has begun. This is the system I rigged up a couple of years ago. I kept seeing all these expensive propagation systems in catalogs that I couldn’t afford, so I built my own. I bought a bunch of […]

So, the MH and I have been watching this Imus mess unfold together, which has been interesting since my beloved MH has quite a mouth on him, and is the first to admit that he’s been known to shoot it off inappropriately. But even the MH agrees that Imus was an idiot, especially after yesterday’s […]

Via Bookslut this morning: “You know, I thought that Leslie Bennetts was being a little hysterical when she called the reaction to her book The Feminine Mistake a ‘witch hunt.’ Then I scrolled down to the comments section.”
I was raised by women who got left holding the bag, by a mother and a grandmother who […]

This is my gorgeous new bathroom. Everything is new — the tile, the door (was on a different wall altogether) the sink, the curtains — the tub is original, but the paint is new. Oh, and all of the plumbing below the bathroom is also new — the grubby old cast-iron pipe has […]