A long weekend, a big snowstorm, my sweetheart’s delightful cabin (available as a vacation rental!) with a woodstove and snow outside and two deer in the yard in the morning, which meant I had a lovely, unplugged stretch of time to catch up on some reading. If you’re looking for romantic books to read on the weekend, you may look into these passion novels. Somehow I’d missed Nicole Krauss these past couple of years, probably because I had been dismissive of the Brooklyn writers. They seemed like emo music to me, one of those things I’m too old to find charming,…
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We’ve had about ten days of snow and temperatures, sometime daytime as well as nightime, in the single digits. We’ve had over two feet of new snow, which is good, because it insulated my one experimental hoop house where I planted cold-hardy greens. There’s one row each of chard, laccinato kale, bok choi, and arugula, plus I started komatsuna seedlings in mid-October (they’re tiny). I also transplanted a row of scallions between each row of greens, since they’re the one thing I buy most often during the winter. Here’s what the hoop house looked like before I dug up the…
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Six years ago today Vivi and Lola arrived in our world. It was the first good thing that had happened in a while — both for me, and for my friend Nina, their mom. We’d both had a rough couple of years — people we loved had died, and we were both sort of losing our faith in the universe. And then this unlikely, and terrifying pregnancy Nina went through worked out. Two squalling babies with full heads of hair emerged, biting the doctors on their way out, and dropped into our world. They were so tiny that they scared…
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Winter has arrived with a bang here in southern Montana. That’s my patio furniture which is suddenly buried. The storm came in yesterday, but the real snow seems to have fallen overnight. I shoveled yesterday, and it was a only a couple of inches of powdery fluff; this morning, nearly a foot, and a little heavier (but I think that’s because the ground was still warm). I don’t dare peek in the hoop house, because it’s supposed to go down below zero tonight, and I’m hoping the snow will insulate. We’ll see if anything survives. It’s slated to run a…
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Funny, this summer, while the garden was in progress, I found myself uninspired, and not actually eating that much from it. Perhaps its because the season was so strange — once my early success with spring greens under hoops burned out (because it got hot, and the plants burned up), I wound up in this long odd period when there wasn’t much out there a person could eat right now, most of it was things like carrots and beets and tomatoes and peppers and beans that took a long long time this summer to ripen. However, I did put in…
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Run, do not walk (well, in internet terms) to the London Review of Books and read Hilary Mantel’s Diary of being ill. It’s by turns hilarious and hallucinogenic and scary (and probably not for the squeamish) and brilliant. Especially her take on Virgina Woolf’s On Being Ill. (Although I feel a little bad for enjoying her ad feminiem attack on Woolf, since it wasn’t until I became chronically ill in grad school that Woolf’s work started to open up for me.) Nonetheless, I loved this essay.
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This time of year the only safe place to hike is Yellowstone, so since it was a gorgeous day yesterday, off we went. It was the last day that the roads are open, so we headed down to Swan Lake flats and took off to the west. About an hour in, we saw two grizzlies, high on a ridge to the south of us, eating grubs or something. I don’t have a photo, but they were unbelievably beautiful up on the high ridge with the sunlight gleaming off their guard hairs. They were illuminated. Meanwhile, a couple of magpies were…
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So I went off to vote this morning — we vote at the fairgrounds here, and as always, the act of voting restored some of my confidence in the American people. There we all were — ranchers in their muck boots, my fellow Democratic activists, the guy who fixes boilers, and next to me, a very very very old woman (who said “God Bless You” to the election worker as she handed over her ballot to go through the counting machine). It was, to say the least, a diverse group. And yet, was there shouting? Was there tension? Were people…
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I’ve been just the tiniest bit obsessed with peppers this year. I grew a bunch of different varieties — Hungarian Wax, Cayenne, Aci Sivri (a Turkish pepper), hot Italian cherry peppers, Spanish pequillo — and for once, I got a decent crop. I also bought a few bags of hot peppers from the local farmer’s market (as well as several bags of roasted New Mexico green peppers from another vendor). I made salsa out of the roasted green peppers, and I pickled just about everything else. For the pickled peppers I used Michael Symon’s Pickled Pepper recipe (via Michael Ruhlman).…