I should have known that the minute I took the snow tires off the car — it’d snow. Tuesday was nearly 80 degrees, I had the snow tires taken off the car, and I nearly killed my tomato plants by taking them outside and exposing them to the unseasonably warm weather. Yesterday it snowed/rained all day and this morning the thermometer read 31 degrees. My apple trees in bloom are looking considerably under the weather, and I haven’t gone out to pull the plastic sheeting off the raised beds yet — I ran out of plastic too, so the pea…
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Spring is three to four weeks early this year, and it’s a little unsettling. My apple trees are on the verge of bloom, and the lilacs aren’t far behind. I gave a party last year for Patrick’s girlfriend on her birthday, which is the end of May, and I have photos of the lilacs in bloom. It’s not yet the end of April. My veggies are all coming up just fine, and it looks (knock wood) like my premature planting wasn’t so premature after all this year. I’ve started bringing the tomatoes and peppers up in the daytime and putting…
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My friend Gary Short was here this weekend. He’s touring around the west for his wonderful new book of poems: Ten Moons and Thirteen Horses. We had a great weekend, but come Monday morning, I find myself with that sloggy feeling one gets after a weekend of dinner parties. It was great fun, but there was a lot of food, and a lot of wine, and much good talk … but even after coming back from the gym I had that ooh-I-overdid-it feeling. So what’s the cure? Weed soup, of course. I was outside this morning checking the garden beds…
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Sometimes all a girl wants is a nice, simple, dinner-in-a-bowl. I have a lovely bowl my cousin Elizabeth made for me many years ago, during her pottery stage, and it’s the perfect single-chick-dinner-alone bowl. Tonight, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted. There was a leftover chicken breast in the fridge, there were plenty of lamb chops and salmon steaks in the freezer, but none of that was what I wanted. The weather has been odd here lately — mostly unseasonably warm, but after a very windy day, the skies got gloomy and the temperature dropped some, and suddenly, that…
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So, Easter — there were eight adults, two children, and more food than any of us needed. I think it’s because we all love to cook — or maybe because when you get a lot of people together for holidays, everyone wants their traditional holiday foods. So we wound up with one leg of lamb, two roasted chickens, a ham (borne on Easter by the one Jew in the group, which caused all of us great merriment), the green-bean-and-crunchy-onion casserole, a big tray of asparagus, roasted potatoes, a potato gratin, a big salad, and a fluffy cake made by your’s…
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It’s raining this morning for the first time in weeks. It’s been a weirdly warm and dry spring here in Southeast Montana — the driest March on record at the airport over in Bozeman, and last week I had to break out the hoses and start watering. While the sunshine was a blessed relief after a long dark winter, such a relief that I wound up in my backyard, basking in a strappy tee-shirt despite my long-proven tendency toward sunburn. I felt like one of those TB victims from an old photo — sent outside to soak up fresh air…
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Is so not living small, but sometimes, a girl just gets sucked into the bedding aisle at Target. And when you can give your entire bedroom a makeover for under, well, for more money than one might have wanted to spend, but less money than one would have spent on similar stuff at a less-discounty kind of store, then, as our friend Martha might say, that’s a good thing. And I guess living a tiny bit large isn’t going to kill me (despite post-spending terror that my job will get outsourced to India). So now I have a very fluffy,…
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It’s been kind of a rough week around here — six months last week since Patrick died. I thought I was past the worst of the weeping, but it’s been a little soggy here these past few days, and I’ve had a slight relapse on the daytime-tv-on-the-couch-with-dogs front. So tonight, a roasted chicken (I get more hits for the blog entry titled “Roasting a Chicken” than I do for anything else), some kale, and basmati rice. A glass of red wine, and a decent dinner and one of my many Netflix movies … it’s okay. I’m getting through this and…