Here’s what we woke up to Sunday morning — a little over two feet of new, wet, heavy snow — the dog door was drifted over, as was the front walkway.I shoveled, and luckily my neighbor with the sno-blower did my front sidewalk because this was like Midwestern snow — heavy, wet, soggy — did I mention heavy? Usually we have fall, then winter. It’s one of the things I loved when I first moved up here — a return to four actual seasons — but this year we went from summer, to a 20 degree frost, to almost 3…

I’m having another one of those weeks at work where there is too much to do and not nearly enough time alotted to do it — So here’s a couple of links — Bob del Grosso contemplates the chicken-and-the-egg nature of cooking on a farm. And Shuna gives me hope that even though I’m currently in the weeds, there might be a way out …  

So, in trying to find my mother an apartment that she can afford, and that isn’t a shoebox, and that is in a building that’s not just full of old people on oxygen, we wound up going to look at some buildings in Milwaukee. I hadn’t been to Milwaukee since my 6th grade field trip to the Stroh’s Brewery, and I remembered it as a grey colorless place, an industrial city full of tanneries and breweries and factories. Well, Milwaukee has certainly come up in the world. We looked at a number of very cool industrial buildings that had been…

LivingSmall will be travelling all week. I need to go back to where I grew up and give my mom a hand. Looking forward to seeing some old high school friends and my 97 year old granny. Back next weekend.

All summer I was getting up about 5:30 because that’s when the sun came up and I was really enjoying it. I had time to get a lot done before having to sign on at work — write a blog post, walk the dog, water the garden. It was lovely. And then the earth tilted back the other way and I found it harder and harder to get up in the morning. I thought about buying one of those fancy light alarm clocks that are supposed to simulate the sun rising — you set the timer and they gradually light…

It happens every year at Labor Day — the weather gets threatening and we all swathe our tomatoes in some sort of jerry-rigged cold frame/greenhouse kind of thing. One reason I’ve always sort of liked the trellis-and-string method is because it also provides a handy structure to hold the plastic up. With the new beds up against the fence like that, I just stapled the plastic to the fence, then draped it over the top of the bamboo and it’s held down with rocks. Lots of rocks. Big rocks because Livingston is windy. I also filled a bunch of wall-o-waters…

Now the Farmer’s Almanac is saying it’s going to be a very cold winter, and I have to say, if my mania for getting organized and stocking up is any indication, they’re right. It wasn’t a great year for jams and preserves — I didn’t get any cucumbers so I’ll have to make do with what’s left of last year’s pickles, but I did put up some gingered plum jam, some apricots in vanilla-cardamom syrup, peach chutney and tomato salsa. I’m hoping for another batch of tomatoes because I like that salsa — it’s clean and bright and it canned…