I watched a lot of high school basketball this winter — the MH’s son plays varsity and while sadly, the boys’ team didn’t do so well, the girls won their division and they’re going to State. If you’d told me a year ago that one of the highlights of my winter would be high school basketball, I’d have scoffed like the hipster I thought I was — high school basketball? I didn’t even like high school sports when I was in high school. But the MH wanted to go watch his boy, and I figured if I can get through…
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I have four apple trees in my backyard. They’re old, and overgrown, and today I went out and scalped them. Pruning doesn’t quite describe what I did out there — I cut off everything that was sticking straight up into the sky. I cut off everything that was bigger than an inch and a half in diameter. I cut off everything I could in an attempt to take what was four scraggly trees that, granted, did provide good shade, but which also didn’t produce very well and when they did produce, the apples were 20 feet in the air where…
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This morning’s blog find, via Serious Eats, is The Paupered Chef — I first really learned to cook when I was living in New York, working as an editorial assistant on a bunch of cookbook projects and, because I was an editorial assistant without rich parents in the suburbs to pay my rent, I was absolutely flat broke.
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Michael Ruhlman had an interesting post last week about white meat and Jesus (Whiteliness is Next to Godliness), and the comment discussion in particular got me thinking about greens. I eat a lot of greens, largely because I have a garden and they grow really well here — but I’m a latecomer to cooked greens. We didn’t eat greens growing up because, well, “nice people” didn’t eat greens. Poor people ate greens. Black people at greens. We were upper class (even if we were broke most of the time) and we ate white food — chicken, fish, potatoes, pasta, salad…
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One byproduct of revamping the blog is that due to various formating issues, I’ve had to touch just about every entry again. It gives a girl a chance to rethink the blog — why I started it, what I want to do with it. Among the many things I noticed was that although I started out with faith as a real topic on this blog (see the Fourteen Precepts in Fourteen Days series from 2003), it’s not something I’ve written about much in the last couple of years. There are a number of reasons for that, of course, and cruising…
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So, after three years of avoiding it, I’m finally tackling the bathroom. Part of the reason I’ve been avoiding the bathroom remodel, is that there are just too many things to buy and too many decisions to make when renovating a bathroom. Some decisions were easy — the ceiling fan for example, but other decisions were more of a challenge. I mean, on the one hand I want it to look nice, but really — does the universe need so many styles of towel bars? To say nothing of tile — what kind of tile? pattern? shape? chair rail or…
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Some girls get roses for Valentine’s Day, I got a wall, denuded of it’s really messy old horsehair plaster. It’s the beginning of the bathroom renovation — while my tiny bathroom isn’t getting any bigger, we’re moving the door, putting in tile, moving the bathtub to the opposite wall, painting, and putting in a fan, lights, and new towel bars and stuff. I’ve been putting this off for three years, because it was just too overwhelming — but it’s begun. The bathroom transformation.
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A couple of days ago I got a voice mail from Wendy-the-Buddhist. She had a terrible head cold. Her kids were sick. She needed some novel recommendations because as she said on the phone, “I’m tired of all this Zen crap.” (One of Wendy’s best qualities is that while a dedicated Zen practitioner, she also understands that taking one’s Zen too seriously belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles.) So I went downstairs into my lovely hidey-hole office where the library currently resides and started looking through the fiction section (legacy of my bookseller past, my library is sorted by…
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I’ve added a couple of features to the blog — if you look to the left you’ll see a link to Interviews and Profiles, and Place Last Seen. One of the things I’m liking about WordPress is having the flexibility to post some longer pieces. In the Interviews and Profiles section I’ve posted an profile I wrote for the Corporation for the Northern Rockies of Rick Bayless. I spoke with Bayless shortly after returning to Montana after a visit to Chicago where I was astounded by the vibrant Farmer’s Market culture that has grown up in the 20 years since…
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It’s snowing this morning. Peaceful still snow. Sometimes big flakes, sometimes tiny, but the air is still and a quiet trickle of snow falls outside. It’s as if we’re all inside some quiet, gentle, still place. Looking out the back window as I did the breakfast dishes I saw a woodpecker on the birdfeeder — since my cat died last fall, I finally felt I could get a birdfeeder (Patsy in her prime was quite a birder. She once caught a hummingbird and brought it to us when we were barbequeing on my front porch in Salt Lake — as…