These were actually last year’s Christmas present, but I didn’t get to use them much as we got a warm spell right after the holiday. Today it’s sunny and beautiful. Clear blue skies, about 25 degrees, lovely. So at lunch, I took my new skates over to the lagoon in town park, and skated for about 20 minutes. It was great — the ice was bumpy and there were patches of snow on it just like when I was a kid, and the adventure is compounded by the fact that I grew up on figure skates, not hockey skates, so…
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I’m expanding my blog universe this year with a new blog venue on my personal site, Charlotte McGuinn Freeman. For an explanation of what I intend to do over there go take a look at my first post: New Year, New Blog. I have no intention of dropping LivingSmall — this is where I’ll continue to write about sustainability issues, gardening, cooking, my dogs and life on the edge of the Paradise Valley. But I’m looking forward to stretching my brain a little bit and to writing about some new topics as well. So bookmark them both, and here’s to…
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Raymond wants to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. And he says he’s sorry about eating the fluffy pompom off the hat (but it was so like a bunny and he just couldn’t help himself).
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I have a huge weakness for Nativity sets — I think I probably own three or four of them. It’s the dollhouse effect. You can play with them — I remember as a kid acting our elaborate nativity pageants in the days leading up to Christmas. Patrick gave me this set when we lived in California. It was the Christmas my friend Deb came to stay with us after her marriage came apart — the Christmas of Mr. Potato Head. She was very frayed around the edges, and Patrick gave her a Mr. Potato Head. The perfect present. She’s having…
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My week in Seattle was just lovely, but I’m so glad to be home again. It takes leaving for a few days to realize that I’m sometimes unfair to those of you out there in the “real” world — the wear and tear of ordinary things like commuting, or spending all day in a building lit with florescent lights and no fresh air, and the wear and tear for those of us introverts of just being around other people and talking all day. (I know, I know — I’m what one might call a chatty introvert, since I can certainly…
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A long weekend, a big snowstorm, my sweetheart’s delightful cabin (available as a vacation rental!) with a woodstove and snow outside and two deer in the yard in the morning, which meant I had a lovely, unplugged stretch of time to catch up on some reading. If you’re looking for romantic books to read on the weekend, you may look into these passion novels. Somehow I’d missed Nicole Krauss these past couple of years, probably because I had been dismissive of the Brooklyn writers. They seemed like emo music to me, one of those things I’m too old to find charming,…
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We’ve had about ten days of snow and temperatures, sometime daytime as well as nightime, in the single digits. We’ve had over two feet of new snow, which is good, because it insulated my one experimental hoop house where I planted cold-hardy greens. There’s one row each of chard, laccinato kale, bok choi, and arugula, plus I started komatsuna seedlings in mid-October (they’re tiny). I also transplanted a row of scallions between each row of greens, since they’re the one thing I buy most often during the winter. Here’s what the hoop house looked like before I dug up the…
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Six years ago today Vivi and Lola arrived in our world. It was the first good thing that had happened in a while — both for me, and for my friend Nina, their mom. We’d both had a rough couple of years — people we loved had died, and we were both sort of losing our faith in the universe. And then this unlikely, and terrifying pregnancy Nina went through worked out. Two squalling babies with full heads of hair emerged, biting the doctors on their way out, and dropped into our world. They were so tiny that they scared…
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Winter has arrived with a bang here in southern Montana. That’s my patio furniture which is suddenly buried. The storm came in yesterday, but the real snow seems to have fallen overnight. I shoveled yesterday, and it was a only a couple of inches of powdery fluff; this morning, nearly a foot, and a little heavier (but I think that’s because the ground was still warm). I don’t dare peek in the hoop house, because it’s supposed to go down below zero tonight, and I’m hoping the snow will insulate. We’ll see if anything survives. It’s slated to run a…
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Funny, this summer, while the garden was in progress, I found myself uninspired, and not actually eating that much from it. Perhaps its because the season was so strange — once my early success with spring greens under hoops burned out (because it got hot, and the plants burned up), I wound up in this long odd period when there wasn’t much out there a person could eat right now, most of it was things like carrots and beets and tomatoes and peppers and beans that took a long long time this summer to ripen. However, I did put in…