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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Yup. It’s snowing this morning. Not really sticking — but definitely snowing. The thermometer on the garage reads 33.8 degrees while the one under the plastic tents covering the tomatoes reads 41 degrees. And I have to go over to Billings today, so I’m not going to be able to do any garden salvage until tomorrow. Oh, the excitement of short season gardening!
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It’s 63 degrees outside at 3pm today. Nina tells me from her house down valley that it’s snowing on the peaks. And my tomatoes and zucchini have taken on their late-summer clothing — swaths and swaths of clear plastic sheeting. I’ll probably be able to get a few tomatoes to ripen — last year they all ripened in my basement while I was in France. It may freeze tonight, so this afternoon, I was the Basil Fairy — running around town delivering big ziploc baggies of basil to various friends. It happens every year about the first of August —…
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Just a little one — sitting here watching TV and surfing and my first thought was that it was the dogs — that Owen had jumped off the bed with a big thump. But Owie only weighs 40 pounds, so that couldn’t be it, and frankly, it felt like an earthquake. I’ve only been through a couple of them — my first was actually in New York City — I lived in Queens and thought, “That must be the subway,” but the subway was 2 blocks away. Anyhow, this one felt like a little wave bumping up and under the…
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All day long. Some hail in mid-afternoon, but for the most part it’s been one of those days characterized by low-hanging clouds in the mountains, and nice cool, slow spring rain. I planted some potatoes this morning (dark of the moon is the time to plant root crops) and the rain this afternoon is exactly what my garden needed.
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The doorstep Buddha and the daffodils were buried this morning under several inches of new, wet snow. It snowed all day — big fat wet flakes covering everything in the garden. I love this time of year. One day it’s seventy and sunny and I’m outside checking buds on the roses, looking to see which perennials are up (trying to remember what I planted where), and then a day later, everything is covered in a nice wet blanket of not-very-cold snow. Luckily, the apple trees have only just started budding out. I didn’t get any apples last year, and it…
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Yesterday it was 75 degrees and sunny. Today it’s snowing.
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Last weekend it was five below, this evening I was sitting out on the front porch, enjoying the latest New Yorker on a fifty-degree evening, in a sweater and a light jacket. Lovely to get some fresh air again. Lovely to have daylight last past five o’clock again. No matter how dark December sometimes seems, the light and the warmth come back as always ….
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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…
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I knew I was in trouble when I caught my connecting flight in Salt Lake last night and didn’t find out until I got on the plane that we might be diverted to Billings. Although cleaning out Patrick’s storage stuff wasn’t nearly as bad as I (or Sally, or Hippie) had feared, it was still exhausting and all I wanted was to get home, pick up my dogs, and spend the evening on the couch watching part 2 of Angels in America. Luckily, the storm lifted enough that we landed in Bozeman, where I found messages on my cellphone from…