Winter is on the wane — it was in the mid-fifties today, blue skies, sunshine, birds singing and I dug the quackgrass out of an entire bed at the front of the house. Three years of serious spring composting and my dirt is lovely — even after being trampled hard last summer during construction. Stick a fork in it and it just turns right over, all nice and loose and friable. Hardly any clumps. Big fat earthworms. The youngest dog was quite interested in the whole process, which isn’t surprising since digging holes seems to be his outdoor hobby. Tomorrow…
-
-
The seductive thing about Theory is that once you get a meme like hyperreality in your head, you can spend days (weeks, years, academic careers) viewing various unrelated bits of news through the filter of that particular theory. For example, writing the headline … is it because I spent so many years in academia, or because I am submerged in the welter of culture that the phrase “creeps in” is automatically followed in my head by “on little cat feet.” I have to go look up that it’s Carl Sandburg, but it’s stuck there, just like so many other bits…
-
I spent last weekend in Seattle — I had two days of meetings last week for my Corporate Job, then hung out with my stepmother for the weekend. Susan’s only eight years older than I am, and she and my dad have been divorced for a long time, but we kept her after he moved to Europe. During all those years I was the bratty teenager living with Susan and my Dad it would never have occurred to us that all these years later that Patrick and Dad would be gone and it’d just be the two of us together,…
-
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…
-
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.
-
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…
-
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…
-
I had to go to California last week — the Corporate Job was calling. My office in CA is right next to my favorite store in the world, the Ranch 99 Market. The Ranch 99 has many wonderful things including fresh shellfish in little tanks through which fresh water continually flows, a stupendous selection of condiments, and Hong Kong-Style roasted items. The Mighty Hunter wanted a roast duck, so the morning I was leaving I bought one, and with a significant amount of pantomime communicated to the man behind the counter that while I wanted the head and neck cut…
-
Christmas is over and the seed catalogues are arriving! I pushed the remains of the Christmas baskets aside, cleared out the last of the cookies (the Pastura were particularly good, although the dogs got into them, and since chocolate is not good for dogs, well, it was a very fragrant Christmas eve around here), and have been happily perusing seed catalogs, dreaming of new varieties of endive and chicory, searching for an insect-resistant bean that won’t get skeletonized, musing over asparagus crowns and the idea of artichokes. Hmm. What to order?
-
I’ve been sort of following this story for the last couple of weeks, and today comes the sad news that they found Charlie Fowler’s body on a peak in China. I didn’t know Charlie well, but for a couple of years, he was my next door neighbor in Telluride. He was a kind, softspoken guy who was a little older than we were and who had climbed a whole bunch of impressive peaks in Asia and South America. I lived next to this big blue house full of climber guys — it was an ever-changing group. This was before Telluride…