Living Small in Eastern Europe My father, Jim Freeman, has lived in the Czech Republic since 1992 or so, and although for a number of years we didn’t really hear from him much, over the last couple of years he and I have developed a nice email relationship. Dad sent his last weekend, and since I have a weakness for draft horses, I thought I’d add it to the blog (although be advised, no one calls me “Char” except that handful of people who knew me before I was six): Dear Char— Seems I ought to share my day with…
-
-
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…
-
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,…
-
Living Small in my Small Town I’ve been home since Friday night and I’m only now beginning to recover enough to even think about adding to the blog. Five days in San Jose was simply draining … aside from the work things, which are too boring to blog about, just being around all those people, all that traffic, just the feeling of being in public for five days absolutely wore me out. Getting home was a trial, since there had been fog or snow or something in Salt Lake City that morning, which, since Salt Lake is the Delta hub,…
-
Even cafeteria Asian food tastes amazing after four months in southeastern Montana, which despite its many many charms is an ethnic food wasteland. I’m in San Jose for work this week, and today was something of an epic. I left Livingston at five this morning, only to run into whiteout conditions on Bozeman Pass. Who needs coffee before an early-morning flight when you can have a big old jolt of adrenaline? (Don’t worry Dad, I’m fine.) So, by the time I got to Cisco, I was hungry, but I had a lot to do, and about fifty emails to answer,…
-
To Blog or to Ski? Blogging has been hampered by the belated but beautiful snowfall we’ve had this week. I bought a season’s pass for Bridger Bowl this fall, but I haven’t gotten as much use out of it as I’d hoped. I thought I was going to be able to sneak out a little more during the week than I’ve managed, and I might have been more inspired to make the drive over the hill had our friend Bill Campbell not lured me up to Suce Creek for some cross country action earlier this week. I haven’t cross-country skiied…
-
Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins. I’ve discovered that of the blogs I read daily, the ones I really look forward to are the domestic blogs, particularly Julie, and Leah who Struggles in her Bungalow Kitchen. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about domesticity lately, and the unexpected pleasures I’ve discovered in domestic life. I’ve come late to this, having spent much of my twenties and thirties avoiding domestic entanglement. I had one of those childhoods that make one want to get out of the house as soon as…
-
Small Town Life Here’s what I love about living in a small town. My block has about six houses on each side of the street. Ed is my neighbor across the street. He’s an older gent, and he was in flooring for his working life. When I first moved in, Ed brought me a trivet he’d made from leftover flooring samples … it’s perfect to go under my rice cooker. Well, Ed owns a snow blower, and it snowed last night, about a foot and a half. Now Mike lives on my side of the block, two houses down from…
-
Marion Cunningham, one of my food heros, has a great piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about the demise of family cooking and mealtime. I don’t get it. My family life as a kid was pretty chaotic, but my mother always cooked, and taught both my brother and I to cook along with her. Most of my happy memories of my Mom’s house revolve around days we spent cooking, either experimenting with new dishes, or cooking things we all knew we liked. I’ll never forget the first curry I ever made, with instructions from a woman I remember only as…
-
Snow! For the first time in forty-one days, we have snow. Piles of snow. A foot of snow. Our local ski area is, for the first time all winter reporting powder conditions! Whooo hooo … of course, I’m working today, which is why I’m here posting rather than up there skiing, but perhaps later this week I can play a little hooky.