Pink! Over the weekend I renovated my office .. it is now a deep, bright, wonderful raspberry pink. The trim and the ceiling are bright white, as is the new desk, and the shelving (although I painted the cardboard backings for the shelving units the same pink as the walls). There’s a sort of spiffy-looking track light that gives me these dramatic pinspots and the whole thing looks like something out of a magazine. It makes me inordinately happy to be in here, which, since I work at home and spend most of my time in this room, is a…
-
-
The Burning Season Sometime in the night I realized the wind must have changed, because through the gurgling of the swamp cooler I could smell smoke. It’s disconcerting to smell smoke in your sleep, and I might have been more worried but that even asleep I knew there are two large forest fires in the area, and the smoke just means the winds have shifted. And this morning, it’s true. The air is a hazy apricot and the usually-clear outlines of Livington Peak are a soft grey. There’s a big fire behind the peak — 300 acres by last afternoon’s…
-
Freezing the Harvest Meg, over at Meg’s Food and Wine Page blogged this week about the plethora of fresh produce she encountered on her weekend in the Hudson Valley, and how this time of year what she eats is largely dictated by what’s ready to be eaten (and how rare this necessity has become in a world where we’re flying apples from New Zealand for out-of-season produce) … at any rate, her post is much better than this summary so just go read it. But Meg’s post got me thinking about my summer here with my garden — yesterday I…
-
Rest in Peace James Welch has died. I only met him once, years ago, at the very first Art of the Wild conference. He led a workshop with a participant we’d been really worried about — he was this older man from Alaska who had, to our enormous alarm, sent us the entire manuscript of his novel, and it was typed. During the months we were planning the conference, we worried about losing the thing, since it was clear it was probably his only copy. So this gentleman appeared, and we scheduled his workshop for the end of the week…
-
Lurid Soup Beet Soup! It’s so gorgeous that it is right up there with the Oxford Magazine Music Issue. It’s a soup that will make you do the snoopy dance all over the room. It’s absolutely fuschia (which, by the way, is soon to be the color of my office), and tastes good, and generally is just so beautiful that it will make you happy. Now, I was a beet-a-phobe for a long time. It was those nasty pickled beet slices you’d sometimes get as a kid — the ones that leak nasty canned pickled-beet juice onto the perfectly innocent…
-
Yesterday my horoscope said something to the effect that I should stop being so determined and dogged and take the day off to do nothing. Did I listen? Of course not. I had it in my head that I had to pull everything out of my office closet, build shelves in there, and paint the whole thing so that next weekend I can paint the office itself (and build more shelves and put in the new desk and lighting — a whole trading spaces makeover). Now is there any actual schedule here? Any schedule, that is, other than the one…
-
Our little farmer’s market is on Wednesday evening and tonight I didn’t buy flowers, because I finally have enough things blooming in my own yard that I can fill the vase under my grandmother’s portrait myself. However, I did buy green beans (because the caterpillars got my bean plants before they could get off the ground), and new potatoes (which I think I’ll plant next year) and gorgeous, fragrant fresh garlic. So tonight’s dinner is pasta with the first zucchini from my garden, with hot pepper flakes, fresh garlic, and basil and mint from the garden.I don’t know how I’m…
-
I’ve had a slew of emails from sweet readers of this blog lately who seem to be under the impression that I’ve managed to figure out some answer to the ongoing question about how to live, how to live small, how to live in peace and happiness.So I thought perhaps it was time to go on the record. I don’t have any answers. I don’t think there are any answers to that particular question. Like everything else that’s really important in life: love, faith, art, politics — the key term is process. It’s all a process. We never actually get…
-
Rain! It rained last night! Glorious thunderstorm about seven o’clock … with some actual moisture content as well — big raindrops falling on my garden. Glorious thunderstorm which cooled everything off a little, broke the relentless heat wave a tad, and has left my gardens looking perky and refreshed. I missed thunderstorms when I was in California. There are many nice things about California, and many people like the mono-weather. It’s dependable. It’s reliable. You rarely have to worry about what the weather’s going to do, because if it’s May-October it’ll be sunny and dry and if it’s October-May it…
-
It’s still hot here in Montana. Ninety-five to one hundred every day. The mornings are pretty nice still — it’s usually about 65 or 70 when I get up, and doesn’t really get hot hot until about 1:00 or so, but after that, it’s over. Too hot to think, too hot to move, too hot to do anything but hide in my house with my portable swamp cooler. Which I feel bad about. Explore eheatcool.com for the best local Portland HVAC solutions. For ac repair Roanoke contact Blue Ridge Heating & Air. If you need HVAC replacement, you can contact…