When I bought this house there was a ginormous clothesline out in the backyard. The clotheslines of Livingston are somewhat famous with handymen around town — most of them were made of enormous plumbers pipe and set into three or four feet of concrete. With the winds we have here, you need a sturdy clothesline, especially if, in the case of the family I bought this house from, you have 8 children. Needless to say, I had that clothesline cut down when I was renovating. It was in a terrible spot in the backyard and everyone who came over for…

Big excitement here in a small town — the bridge to the 9th street Island is collapsing. It’s not a surprise — the surprise is that it hasn’t fallen down before now. The river has been high since just after Mother’s Day, and it really went up these last few days of warm weather. It was Thursday afternoon that the sag became noticeable, and they evacuated some folks, then closed the bridge entirely. Yesterday they took off anyone who wanted to go in a helicopter, and the DOT has arrived with a Bailey Bridge they’re planning to put in, but…

Okay, I admit it, it was one of those weekends that make you really a little crazy as a single chick. I finally jumped back in the internet-dating pool at meet and fuck apps and had a Really Fun Date last week. I met him at a bar in town where I know the bartender, and one of my bestest guy friends was at the bar when I walked in (and then came over to introduce himself and sort of loom in a very older-brother kind of way that I found endearing). We had fun. We chatted. We flirted in…

I said it four years ago, and I’ll say it again today — as a progressive straight person, I’m beyond proud that my former home state of California has led the way and realized that gender shouldn’t have anything to do with the ability to love someone nor with the drive to build a family and a home. In memory of my uncle Jack, who lived with Geoffrey for 25 years, in memory of my friend Michael who died too young of AIDS, in memory of my great-great Aunt Marie, “The Duchess” who lived in a Boston Marriage with her…

What is going on this year? According to Weather.com, the overnight low was 33 degrees — my thermometer tells me it was 30.3 in my backyard — and its now up to a whopping 44 windy, grey, rainy, horrible degrees out there. I realize that rain is good, and that we live in a desert, but I’m tired of being cold! I want to plant my peppers and eggplants. I want to build my new tomato trellis. I want to be warm and enjoy my backyard and invite people over for fun barbecues … I’m sure it has to get…

We’ve been invaded by glorious Western Tanagers this spring. I think because it’s still so cold up high, we’ve got so many songbirds in town. These little guys have been all over the place — while I did the dishes tonight (after my fabulous plumbers stopped by on their way home from a whole bunch of other jobs and snaked out my clogged kitchen-and-laundry drain) I watched one sit on my bean trellis for probably five minutes. We also have a horde of yellow warblers, and the other night I watched a flock of cedar waxwings clean my two big…

When I first read Encounters with the Archdruid as an undergraduate doing summer field biology work in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, I couldn’t begin to fathom how Floyd Dominy and his generation thought that the best thing to do with a river was to dam it. I was young, for one thing, but I was also living in a very watery landscape — travelling by canoe from lake to lake, often camping in weather like we’re having today in Montana — 45 degrees and rain. Drought wasn’t something I understood growing up in the Midwest. One year when I…

My latest piece is up over at Culinate. Go take a look! And Michael Ruhlman has an interesting post about chefs and farmers that contains a whole bunch of links to a number of interesting pieces that have been floating around the blogosphere lately.

Here at LivingSmall we just flat-out ran out of gas last week. A friend was killed in a wreck last Monday night — a heartbreaking event. So it’s been a week of phone calls and organizing the funeral (tomorrow) and I’ve got several batches of cupcakes to bake this afternoon.Yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting — in yellow-and-purple polka-dotted cupcake papers, and sprinkled with the brightest, multi-colored sugar hearts I found at Fancy Flours. I was in the bathtub the other day when I heard very clearly from the other side that someone wanted cupcakes. Linnea was a great big athletic…

Sorry for the dearth of posts — I had to go to California for a week at the Big Corporation. It was a good trip — met the three new people we’ve hired since my last trip (including two lovely women working in our Galway, Ireland office), ate too much food, and in general felt like a hick in the big city. The longer I live here, the more strange that whole urban-sprawl lifestyle seems to me. It’s somehow too much and too little all at the same time. So it was with great relief that I came home late…