It’s lovely today — the heat has broken a little bit and so when I took Raymond off for his morning dog walk, we ran into the whole gang down in the creek behind the dog park. We were yakking away when suddenly Bob said “Hey … look at that!” And there on a dead branch not 20 feet of the ground on the far side of the creek was a great big fluffy owl. At first I thought it might be a great gray, but then we saw its little horns — it was a Great Horned Owl. So…
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From CNN: Eat your Yard From Salon: Why I pick lettuce for the Black Panthers
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… to console themselves after a breakup, and some women buy the complete Tales of Chekhov. Because Katherine asked in the comments below, and because he’s been a semi-regular character here on LivingSmall, it seems only fair to mention that the Mighty Hunter will not be making such regular appearances in the future. We hope that the friendship will continue, and that perhaps there might be some game coming our way in the fall, but alas, it looks like I’m going to have a little more time to catch up on my reading, and my blogging, in the near future.…
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Hot. It’s hot hot hot here. We’re going into another week of 100 degree weather, and with the crazy pace my day job at the Big Corporation lately, I took the opportunity to prep some cold food in advance. I roasted a baby chicken one night last week when it wasn’t so brutal out, and so this afternoon I pulled the breasts off. I was going to make some chicken salad, but I decided that cold roasted chicken breasts by themselves would give me a wider variety of options (that’s how hot it was last week, pulling the chicken breasts…
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It rained yesterday — we even got a big fat thunderstorm/downpour in the afternoon. It’s the biggest adjustment when one grows up east of the high plains where it actually rains on a regular basis — living out here where we average only about 14 inches of rain a year — well, that quarter inch that drenched my yard the old-fashioned way yesterday afternoon was more welcome than I can describe. This morning everything is still damp and cool. It’s supposed to be another scorcher today — high 90s — but that we’re starting out ahead of the game is…
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Work at the Big Corporation has been crazy lately — and last night was one of those evenings where I just couldn’t figure out what to do about dinner. It was hot — we’re having a heat wave — and although I have some gorgeous fava beans, I wasn’t inspired to do anything with them. And they’re too gorgeous to squander — so I rattled around in the kitchen trying to figure out what to do about dinner. I must admit, I considered all of the following: mac and cheese in a box, fried chicken from the grocery store, ordering…
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The Fourth of July is a three-day-event here in Livingston, although this year things kicked off a day early with the unbelievably great concert called “A Song Runs Through It”. It was worth the three hours in the blazing sun to see my beloved Rosanne Cash sing four songs off Black Cadillac“, acoustic, backed up by her friends JD Souther, Victoria Shaw (who was *so* much fun) and Jim Photoglo, friends she then backed up on a selection of their songs. I really love listening to these songwriters talk about their work — there was a lot of talk about…
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Yes — that’s my dad, happy — hard to believe from the grumpy look on his face — and he’s happy because I sent him a big box of mac-and-cheese for his birthday. Dad lives in the Czech Republic and he too has a blog, PragueWriter.com From Dad: Post lady stopped by yesterday morning with your birthday gift. Wow, all that comfort food. Your chef friends would crack up if they knew what you sent your dad for his birthday. The really amazing thing is that the box hasn’t changed a bit in 60 years–still all that great Dow Chemical…
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I went out last night, and when I came home — Raymond was missing! He wasn’t in the basement, or in his crate, or in the yard. He was gone! Owen was home, wagging his butt and licking my leg as though to say “I don’t know where he went! He’s gone!” I’m not sure how he got out of the yard — sometimes the front gate doesn’t close properly, but it was closed when I got home. And the back gate was also latched. My hunch is it was the front gate, and then Owen somehow closed it by…
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This photo doesn’t do the soup justice — it is a much more vibrant green — a lovely live-plant sort of green. So, this morning I was confronted with half a dozen spinach plants that really did need to be picked — they’d bolted and well, it was beyond time to do something with them. I wanted soup, but spinach can get tricky — it gets that funny soapy taste on the back of your teeth — wanted to avoid that. I surfed around in the cookbooks for a while, and finally found a soup that sounded good in Rick…