My Milk Lady has returned! The cows calved and had a nice rest, and once again I’m getting my recycled gallon jar of milk every week. She had to raise her prices because the price of hay and fuel have gone up so much, and although I assured her it was fine, I understood, I still found a surprise present of a dozen duck eggs in my box last week. I don’t know if all the health claims for raw milk are true, but I do know that it’s worth what I pay for a real food product, produced and…
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They finally came yesterday and finished my new fence. Every time I’ve gotten a fence put in, it’s the hardest part — living through the three or four days when the posts are in, but the fence isn’t in — last weekend was like that. I could see how the fence was going to be, but it wasn’t a fence yet — until yesterday. Now both sides of my backyard match, and it’s peaceful and private out there. After yesterday’s funeral, which was as lovely as a funeral for someone who died too soon and too suddenly can be, it…
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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…
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A big weekend of gardening — I dug the crabgrass and feral mint (I love my mint, but it was taking over everything) from the perennial beds. It was hard. There was digging, and pulling, and tugging, and sprays of dirt. I have an entire trash receptacle full of roots out there on the parkway waiting for the first yard waste pickup of the year. My perennial beds have moments of gorgeousness, followed by long periods of bedragglement, caused in part by the weeds. My lawn too, is plagued by weeds — not dandelions so much, I don’t mind dandelions,…
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Finally! A day of real progress in the garden. I was very surly yesterday morning — it was cold. Too cold and icy to get any garden work done. I was taking it personally — storming around doing my errands, grumping about the damp wind. Then, finally, about one, it warmed up and I managed to get my compost corner cleaned up. My composting system has been a frustration for a couple of years. I had three different backyard composters — one square one that came apart in layers that the waste district in California sold me for cheap years…
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So, it’s snowing again this morning — and although I’m quite tired of snow, it’s a lovely soft morning — bit fat snowflakes, no wind, not too cold. So off for our morning dog walk I went — I’m babysitting the MH’s dog while he’s gone to Arizona for a couple of days and it was good to have 2 dogs with me again. So we get to the dog park and we’re coming around the edge of the bluff and there’s another couple coming toward us. She’s on the phone, and he barely nods hello. I don’t recognize them,…
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We got up early this morning and drove over to Billings to see the orthopedic vet. He said it looks like the tendon is healing up quite nicely, which was an enormous relief. Then he knocked my poor Owie out and re-adjusted the pins so that he’s putting a little bit of weight on the tendon. The pins and rods will stabilize it for another three weeks or so, and then he’ll be freed from the aparatus and will get a soft cast for a few more weeks. And here’s what poor FrankenPuppy looks like beneath those bandages:
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I have a lot of gardening books — I’m one of those people who learns how to do things from books, so the first couple of years I had this garden, I bought a lot of different things (especially if they were in the bargain bin at Borders). But there’s a very short list of books I go back to again and again: Second Nature by Michael Pollan and This Organic Life by Joan Dye Grussow. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstal’s River Cottage Cookbook is also probably in this category (except that every time I look at it I have such livestock-envy that…
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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…
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I’ve been wondering all winter what was up with the birds — I’ve had a feeder up, and a suet block, and there haven’t been any birds at all. I was getting curious — last winter I had woodpeckers and finches and chickadees starting right after Christmas. Of course, last winter we had no snow and the spring thaw came very early, so perhaps the birds came early too. But the birds are back. Rosy finches, chickadees, and a couple of crows who seemed quite interested in the suet block. So perhaps spring will come again this year after all.