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…
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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…
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Summer Vacation in the Backyard I have this week off from my Big Corporate job, and I’m having an old-fashioned summer vacation … it feels just like when school let out and you’d get to hang around the house for a few days doing nothing (we went to camp every summer for eight weeks, which was wonderful, so I never had enough time to get really bored with summer, a week or two at each end lying around the house reading books and eating popsicles was usually plenty for me). They finished my fence yesterday afternoon, and I am now…
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New Blue Bike I bought a blue bicycle for forty bucks yesterday — it’s perfect. A Schwinn Collegiate — a blue “girl’s” bike with a front handle brake, three speeds, a big wide bouncy seat, and a coaster break. It’s much like the bike that was so fatally wrong that I was taunted all through sixth grade, but now, as an adult, it’s perfect. What I wanted was a bike I could ride around town, and which was old enough that no one would ever ask me to go mountain biking on it (don’t like mountain biking. I’ve never seen…
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The Perfect Yellow My living room is now the most perfect, Provencal, mustard yellow … actually the color is called “Golden Pollen.” Since this is an old house, there are beautiful old oak moldings and window trim in this room, moldings that remind me of my grandmother’s farmhouse in Illinois (sadly torn down now, but it was really getting pretty unsafe), and against the yellow paint, they look even warmer and more lovely than they did before when the room was painted in 25-year-old flat off-white paint. And with a coat of fresh paint, the, shall we say, topographical element…
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Everybody Likes Cake, Part 2 Yesterday I moved a dumptruck load of compost into my new raised beds. I do not recommend moving a dumptruck load of compost by oneself, especially if one is, as I am, a small-ish woman who is no longer the strong thing she was in her twenties. It was hard. It was really hard and I had to get it all done yesterday because had been dumped in such a way that it blocked open the big gate to the alley. The dogs were pretty good about it, but every once in a while, something…
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Roast Chicken to Cure the Blues My darling brother has a new girlfriend, and of course, when you are no longer young, new relationships tend to come with some baggage. The Nice Girlfriend had a tough day yesterday, her baggage was all noisy with her about the fact that she’s moving on in life, and she was a little blue. She’s also renovating her house, and domestic disarray never helps when feeling blue. Plus, the brother has a cold, and was a little low himself. So late in the afternoon they came over and we sat on the new, comfy…
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What is there to say? Be prepared for the focus here to get smaller, small to the count of my fifty-by-one-forty foot lot. I am going into nearly full news blackout mode, because I just can’t even begin to formulate a way to deal with this madman president and his end-time cronies who actually seem to want a war. I really thought we’d avoid this — perhaps it’s my tendency toward optimism, but somehow I though that millions of people marching in the streets all across the globe might make some impact on this president. But I’m now convinced that…
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Temptation strikes at LivingSmall: On Sunday, I clean my house. My brother takes the dogs for the day, and I clean, then go to whatever movie the Danforth Film Festival is showing in the afternoon. It’s not a very big house, about 1000 square feet, so it’s no gargantuan task, but I have hardwood floors throughout, and two dogs who during the midweek thaw tracked in big globs of mud from the plowed field in my backyard that will eventually be a vegetable garden. I did a little mid-week spot mopping, but by the time I got around to real…
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Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism: There have been a number of articles on the web lately about Kate Moses new book Wintering, a fictional account of Sylvia Plath’s last months when she was writing Ariel. The piece that got me thinking was the essay Kate Moses wrote for the Guardian called “Baking with Sylvia”. In this essay, Moses talks about how for both herself and for Sylvia Plath, baking was a way of creating order out of chaos, and how as she found herself up against her deadline for the book, Moses also found herself baking on a near-daily basis,…