It’s sunny and gorgeous today, and most of my seedlings have gotten their second set of leaves, so out they go for their first day in the cold frame. It’s supposed to be sunny and gorgeous all weekend — the apple trees are leafing out, there are spinach and Italian mustard green seedlings sprouting — the chives and the Chinese garlic chives are up (I thought the garlic chives were a total loss, but the 2nd year they came up beautifully, and now they seem to be self-seeding all over the place). I’ve also got some raddicchio and chicory that…

Well, this is a week I don’t think anyone will be sorry to see end. The creative writing connection to this whole Virginia Tech tragedy really threw me for a loop for a couple of days. I have a couple of advanced degrees in Creative Writing and I spent almost 7 years teaching undergraduate writing. There’s been a lot written this week about the ubiquity of oddball students, and the difficulty of determining who is odd, and who is dangerous. I never had anyone who was seriously disturbed — just the garden-variety stories about beautiful twins who are model/assassins and…

Some girls get roses for Valentine’s Day, I got a wall, denuded of it’s really messy old horsehair plaster. It’s the beginning of the bathroom renovation — while my tiny bathroom isn’t getting any bigger, we’re moving the door, putting in tile, moving the bathtub to the opposite wall, painting, and putting in a fan, lights, and new towel bars and stuff. I’ve been putting this off for three years, because it was just too overwhelming — but it’s begun. The bathroom transformation.

Just after Christmas I was in Target looking for a new phone, but I also checked out some pawnshops to see if I could find a good deal. I even browsed valuepawnandjewelry.com to compare prices and options. We’re experiencing something of a total electronics breakdown at LivingSmall — the TV (a future blog topic), the phone, the move to the new blog — it’s been a month of wrestling with technology. Anyhow, as I was wandering through Target I came around an end cap and found this, the perfect sewing machine. This is the sewing machine of my childhood —…

That a six-hour, subtitled Italian movie (that began life as a mini-series for Italian television) would turn out to be the best thing I’ve seen since I can’t remember when. I wanted to see The Best of Youth  last year when it was in the theaters, but it never played in Montana, and I didn’t think my stepmother would want to spend a whole day at the movies when I visited her in Seattle last spring. I’ve been just exhausted lately — there’s been sort of a spate of personal crises, and I’ve just been getting crushed at work with…

My latest novel is Oran Pamuk’s Snow and it has finally happened. I picked up the paperback in bed the other night, opened it up, looking forward to a good read, and realized that the type is very very small! I’ve worn glasses since my late teens when I discovered that there was a reason I’d never mastered that essential skill of 1970s’ upper-class life — tennis — I have no depth perception. Astygmatism. No wonder that all those years when I’d been stranded out there on hot tennis courts bending my knees, keeping my eye on the ball, and…

Despite having grown up deep in the heart of the preppy, upper-class suburbs in the 70’s and 80’s (Ordinary People was shot in my high school my junior year), I had grown weary of the pink-and-green design. So voilà! A new design — I’m still no webmaster since as you can see, this is one of the standard Typepad layouts, but I’m hoping that like re-arranging the furniture once in a while, re-designing the blog will help me come back to it more often and with renewed energy …