-
-
This year’s rodeo just wasn’t the same — last year the rodeo was the highlight of the summer. This year was a little tough. Rodeo was one of the things Patrick and I did together — we grew up at horse shows back east. I went to my first horse show at six months old, tucked under the bleachers in a basket while my mother ran the old Lake Forest Horse Show, which like the stables at Onwentsia, is now long gone. From the time we could talk we were told by various grownups to “watch that” as a horse…
-
The weather has been wonky lately, which is one reason for the light blogging. There isn’t much to talk about in the garden because, well, it’s been raining. Which is good, and up here in drought country, we’re not complaining, but it is getting just the tiniest bit boring. Summer is so short that it’s hard to lose a whole month to cold and rain, but on the other hand, maybe we won’t have fires all summer. So anyhow, we came back from a little hike yesterday afternoon just as the clouds were gathering and took refuge in my kitchen.…
-
Last night we had a perfect dinner in the garden. It was a beautiful day — sunny and warm with those big blue skies for which the state is famous. My friend Jim Fergus has been here for the past few days and so I invited Bill and Maryanne to join us for dinner in my backyard. I miss cooking and miss having people over. And so it was lovely to have a normal dinner in the back garden — the daisies are starting to bloom, as are the iris, the columbines and the pink shrub roses I planted last…
-
Look at that — my very own white picket fence! It’s taken a couple of weeks, and when the guys first came to build it, somehow we’d agreed on a four-foot fence (to match last year’s big investment, the board fence on the south side of the yard). When they put the posts in I nearly had a heart attack — at four feet, it was going to look like Fortress Charlotte. They were nice enough to cut the posts down some, and build the three-foot fence I’d envisioned. So I spent my Memoiral Day weekend painting the fence —…
-
Ah, The Kentucky Derby. When we were little kids, our parents belonged to a not-terribly-fancy Hunt Club in northern Illinois. Admitting that I come from people who foxhunted is, in the circles in which I travel as an adult, sort of like saying we wore hoop skirts or held slaves. Stange, exotic and totally not PC. (But if I was to take up riding seriously again, it’s the only thing I’d be interested in pursuing — hunting is fun. I once interviewed an infamous Himalayan climber, who originally hails from a working-class family in Yorkshire, and who was embarassed nearly…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…