Dreadful blogger that I am — I didn’t blog my fabulous Thanksgiving — nine adults and two kids and I carved a lovely grotto-like dining room out of the basement — it’s a wonder what you can do with many tablecloths, a couple of sheets to partition off the basement-y stuff, and pine boughs stapled to the bare rafters and intertwined with twinkle lights. “It’s like a restaurant in Prague!” my friend Margie said as we all sat down with plates laden with ham and turkey and all the trimmings. It was very festive and I’m now done entertaining for…
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Well, we found the bridge — it’s about 25 yards downstream in some weeds. It’s hard to tell whether some kids pulled it up and cast it aside, or whether it was swept up in the periodic flooding they’ve been doing to flush out the trout habitat. I’d actually been wondering why it seemed as stable as it was. From what I could tell it was a construction truss balanced on two logs, which formed the footings — the whole thing was about 18 inches wide, and probably ten to fifteen feet long. Turns out, there are two parts to…
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Off we went tonight on our fabulous walk — we got to the bluff at the end of Clark Street where we cross over the creek into the dog park, and I let the dogs off their leashes and they went bouncing down the hill and through the creek and I was all set to follow them BUT THERE WAS NO BRIDGE! The little bridge that someone had built out of a construction truss, and had balanced on two hunks of log set into the bank — IT WAS JUST GONE! GONE! I had to call the dogs back —…
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For big dead animals. I drove up to Suce Creek this morning to run the dogs, and there were two guys standing looking into the bed of a pickup truck. Once of them was wearing camoflage, always a tip-off. So as the boys ran up the hill in search of grouse, I walked over and took a peek. “What’d you get?” I asked. “A moose,” the one guy said. “That’s not a moose!”I said looking at the big black dead animal, “The antlers are wrong.” It was a very beautiful, dark, almost black elk. He was nestled in the bed…
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Hi folks — all is well here at LivingSmall but blogging will be on a tiny hiatus due to the day job, the memoir, the screenplay, and the proposal I’m working up for a book on sustainable farming … too much other writing and I just can’t seem to find the time to keep up the blog for no. But in the meantime you should all go over to the Montana Women For … website and check out the photos of nearly 70 Montana women marching in the Livingston Roundup Rodeo Parade dressed as Statues of Liberty and wearing banners…
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Yesterday morning I got the bug to fix my living room windows. I had nearly all the other windows in this house replaced when I moved in three years ago, but the living room has lovely old wood moldings and the windows have that old glass with bubbles and waves in it, and vinyl windows would have looked terrible. So they stayed the way they were — old, double-hung, and permanently shut and gummed up with caulk. Until yesterday. Yesterday I decided they needed to open. Despite the last six weeks of snow and rain, I have a hunch it’s…
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It’s funny, the things you don’t notice until you’ve left a place for a while. I’ve lived in the Bay Area twice, when I was getting my Master’s Degree, and then again when I left academia and decided to get a “real job”. I liked it okay. I never really felt at home there, but it always had its charms. There were good restaurants and fabulous produce in the Farmer’s Markets, and the landscape itself was lovely. There were evenings I’d be driving home from the South Bay, and I’d come over the hill from Pleasanton, and there would be…
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… that I live in this particular small town. Because tonight there were four, then six, then ten of us at the local bistro for dinner. Because on Sunday nights they’ve started doing all-you-can eat dinner with a big bowl of salad on the table and then a parade of their fabulous wood-fired pizzas. Because dinner conversation was all about Brian Schweitzer’s inaguration as the first Democratic Governor of Montana in 20 years, and about how when the Governor came into the Ball, it was the Plains Tribes drummers who drummed him into the ballroom, not something anyone ever saw…
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Blogging has been slow here at LivingSmall because I just haven’t felt like I had anything interesting to say. It’s been a weird month — I’ve been a tiny bit depressed — I have to say, I sort of thought this grief thing would get easier at some point — like after I made it through the first anniversary, or got through the holidays — but it still just sucks. And trying to write this book isn’t helping — I mean, last January was SO horrible what with the crying on the couch with the dog in my lap, and…
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Here it is! In the back of my car on it’s way to the first of the three parties it graced over the weekend (yes, the car is dirty — I have two dogs, but that’s why I put the newspaper down). Part of the reason I made a croquembouche this year is because one of my all-time favorite Martha Stewart episodes was the one where she and Julia Child made croquembouches together. Martha was over on her side of the counter carefully and precisely arranging her cream puffs, while over on the other side, Julia was sort of flinging…