The weather here is still awful, cold, grey, damp and just dreary, but in my basement, spring has begun. This is the system I rigged up a couple of years ago. I kept seeing all these expensive propagation systems in catalogs that I couldn’t afford, so I built my own. I bought a bunch of ten dollar shop light fixtures at the hardware store, some light chain, some s-hooks and the most expensive part of it all was the grow light bulbs. I had the metal shelving — Patrick bought a whole bunch of shelving for his business just before…
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So, the MH and I have been watching this Imus mess unfold together, which has been interesting since my beloved MH has quite a mouth on him, and is the first to admit that he’s been known to shoot it off inappropriately. But even the MH agrees that Imus was an idiot, especially after yesterday’s press conference by the coach and the team. We’ve spent all winter watching high school basketball together, and those girls are only a year or two older than our girls team (who performed much better than the boys did this year). They’re just kids those…
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Via Bookslut this morning: “You know, I thought that Leslie Bennetts was being a little hysterical when she called the reaction to her book The Feminine Mistake a ‘witch hunt.’ Then I scrolled down to the comments section.” I was raised by women who got left holding the bag, by a mother and a grandmother who got stuck trying to support children after having believed they’d never be responsible for the financial end of things. It wasn’t pretty (see below on serial financial disaster). I knew, in my bones, from the time I was about ten that if I wanted…
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This is my gorgeous new bathroom. Everything is new — the tile, the door (was on a different wall altogether) the sink, the curtains, new hot water heater installation — the tub is original, but the paint is new. Oh, and all of the plumbing installation below the bathroom is also new — the grubby old cast-iron pipe has all been replaced with very high-tech water lines after the plumbing repair services and emergency plumber that does plumbing repair in Greenville, SC saw the need to do some water leak detection. I have clean water running through new pipes with…
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Winter has returned to Montana — it’s been three days of cold, dank weather with low grey skies. Now the heat wave we got in the early part of March was as little scary — it’s not supposed to be in the mid-70s that early, and it was alarming to have to break out the sprinklers. But this, well, it’s completely expected, not a surprise, and yet … sigh. We’re all ready for some blue skies, some sunshine, for the fruit trees to start filling town with pretty flowers …. in the meantime, we’ll have to settle for daffodils in…
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It was cassoulet-o-rama last night here in Livingston — our friends are home from LA for their spring break, and we all gathered over there last night to eat Paula Wolfert’s Toulouse-Style Cassoulet from The Cooking of Southwest France. This contains pork, pork skin, duck legs confit, pancetta, proscuitto, sausage — oh, yeah, and beans. This has been a three-day cooking event involving Nina and Elwood and my MH and last night the gang of us all got together — it was so much fun, and the oeneophiles brought so many bottles of Bordeaux that after a while all I…
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Nothing says spring in Montana like six inches of new wet snow — I’m thrilled, actually — we need the water very badly — it’s been so dry that I had pulled out the sprinklers before I went to Arizona. My bathroom is all but done — we need to hang the towel bars etc… this afternoon, then it’ll be done! Of course, now I have to paint the pantry, kitchen and repaint my bedroom because the construction impacted all those rooms too, but the bathroom is done. And my fake kids are home for Easter week — we had…
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People are funny — they keep asking me what I’ve been doing, when for me, the whole point of a vacation is to sit in a chair in a lovely spot and read books, interrupted, if I’m lucky, by stretches where I actually get some writing done. This is why, if you are leaving a beautiful house, with dogs, and a tricky koi pond, and you need someone who wants to hang around the house a lot, what you’re looking for is a writer (well, maybe not a poet — sometimes they don’t notice things like the koi pond pump…
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So, four days into my Arizona sojourn, I’ve come down with a massive chest cold. It might be the flu. It’s not hot here, but it’s not really cold enough to have built a fire during the day or to be wearing a big old fleece jacket I found lying around the house. I’m freezing. And I woke up with a chest that felt like when I used to get croup as a kid — I had to rocket off and stand in a hot shower for ten minutes before I could breathe. And so, about noon, after not eating…
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I’m in Arizona for a week — just south of Tucson, housesitting for my dear friend Jim who has taken his beloved and her daughter to Italy for two weeks. It’s a perfect writer vacation — I’ve got three little dogs to take care of, two of whom need to go for a walk in the morning and in the evening. This morning we spent an hour meandering through the trails in the riverbottom through which all the birds in North America are migrating — the entire place is alive with the twitter of songbirds. The MH was teasing me…