Yup. It’s snowing this morning. Not really sticking — but definitely snowing. The thermometer on the garage reads 33.8 degrees while the one under the plastic tents covering the tomatoes reads 41 degrees. And I have to go over to Billings today, so I’m not going to be able to do any garden salvage until tomorrow. Oh, the excitement of short season gardening!
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I took last week off — and while I didn’t go to Paris this year, tant pis, c’est trop cher, I must say, I highly reccommend the vacation-at-home. I slept late every day, often with both dogs snoring away in a big snuggly pile in my bed. I got some writing done, and got back on top of the memoir, which had been woefully neglected. I made a little progress on the Secret Life Change — a project that seems to be moving in a two steps forward one step back sort of fashion. And I got some real reading…
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Yesterday was the second anniversary of that sad event Maryanne has named, “Patrick’s Very Bad Day”. Last year I was in Paris for this day, wandering around in a tres melodramatic haze, thinking to myself “Mais, il est mort. Mon frere. Il est mort.” Paris is, in general a good place to go when you are feeling sad, melancholy or blue, because the city lends itself to soulful lingering at cafes, gazing into the middle distance while every once in a while using that little tiny spoon to stir the sugar you have, so sacreligiously, put into your cafe. Luckily,…
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Sorry I’ve been such a bad blogger lately — there are any number of things afoot here at LivingSmall as I attempt to make some big changes in my daily life. When it seems safe to go public, believe me, you all will be the first to know … And so here’s a little photo of some of this year’s garden love. I’ve finally got some tomatoes — made a nice pot of sauce with the bowl you see here. Not shown in the photo are the milk crates of greens — chard, escarole, endive, kale — all of which…
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I spent the entire day sucked into Katrina coverage … full geek mode — CNN on the TV, and surfing the web for all I”m worth. The whole thing still makes me sick, and yes folks, the response to this crisis, the fact that we simply abandoned all these people, this is racism. On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I heard an open conversation on network and cable news stations about racism. Yeah, sure, Tucker Carlson lost his shit with the Rev. Al Sharpton, but on the other hand, when even Tucker Carlson is appalled by…
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What has happened to our country? When did we become a nation who abandons our sick, our elderly, and our poor in the face of what everyone thought was, until the last minute, a Category 5 Hurricane? When did we become the kind of nation that tolerates that our elderly are dying and being left outside the Superdome like detritus? What would have happened if this man hadn’t come along? Would someone’s grandfather just be left out there, dead on a park bench? When did we become the kind of country that just leaves it’s poor and sick and old…
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A guy came to my door today selling fish. More specifically, a ratty old blue mini-pickup pulled up in front of my house, a truck with a chest freezer in the bed, and a guy got out and came bounding up my steps with the false cheer of a true door-to-door salesman. I was on a conference call at the time, and I tried to get rid of him by telling him I was on a call, that I work at home. “What time do you get off work?” he said. “I don’t buy things from people who come to…
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Poor Owie — we came home from a very joyful morning walk today and Owen climbed into a corner of the couch and curled up. Then I noticed something sticking out of his eye! An eye that was sort of swollen and puffy. There was a piece of cheatgrass sticking out of his eye! Cheatgrass is this terrible stuff that grows everywhere around here — it’s a grass seed, with a long tail on it, but it’s barbed with gazillions of little barbs and it’s famous for worming its way into dogs skins, and infecting their blood. So, I pulled…
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It’s 63 degrees outside at 3pm today. Nina tells me from her house down valley that it’s snowing on the peaks. And my tomatoes and zucchini have taken on their late-summer clothing — swaths and swaths of clear plastic sheeting. I’ll probably be able to get a few tomatoes to ripen — last year they all ripened in my basement while I was in France. It may freeze tonight, so this afternoon, I was the Basil Fairy — running around town delivering big ziploc baggies of basil to various friends. It happens every year about the first of August —…
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Just a little one — sitting here watching TV and surfing and my first thought was that it was the dogs — that Owen had jumped off the bed with a big thump. But Owie only weighs 40 pounds, so that couldn’t be it, and frankly, it felt like an earthquake. I’ve only been through a couple of them — my first was actually in New York City — I lived in Queens and thought, “That must be the subway,” but the subway was 2 blocks away. Anyhow, this one felt like a little wave bumping up and under the…