Hi folks — all is well here at LivingSmall but blogging will be on a tiny hiatus due to the day job, the memoir, the screenplay, and the proposal I’m working up for a book on sustainable farming … too much other writing and I just can’t seem to find the time to keep up the blog for no. But in the meantime you should all go over to the Montana Women For … website and check out the photos of nearly 70 Montana women marching in the Livingston Roundup Rodeo Parade dressed as Statues of Liberty and wearing banners…
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It’s HOT. Too hot to go look for mushrooms. Too hot to do much but close all the windows in the morning, draw the sunscreen blinds, and hunker down until the evening thunderstorms roll through. The good news is that my tomatoes and peppers and zucchini and eggplants should like it … As to the freezer part … it was hot tonight. I wasn’t terribly hungry, but I did want some dinner. And despite the many greens I grow, I don’t really love salad. I love cooked greens, but salad, not so much. Don’t know why, it’s just the way…
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All last week I kept hearing people say they’d seen grizzly tracks up in Suce Creek, and for a while there it sounded like perhaps I’d had an encounter with the Big Bear himself. Luckily, my friend Bill, who did a beautiful documentary for the Discovery Channel on grizzlies went up there on Sunday and checked out the tracks. It wasn’t a grizzly, he said. It was a very large black bear, but not a grizzly. Which caused me enormous relief — I”m really not ready for a close encounter with a grizzly bear. From what we hear, the morels…
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Well, on our afternoon walk today, we had a little bear encounter. So much for those fancy-dan bird dogs of mine who ran right underneath the bear who was standing uphill from the trail “chuffing” at us. Standing! On it’s hind legs! A bear! A very dark, very big, bear-person who was not happy to see us at all. Luckily, the dogs came right back when I yelled at them to come NOW, and I made them heel as I backed away slowly, holding out my bear spray, wondering if I should pull the safety latch off or not. The…
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I usually hate photos of myself, but this is me and my 94-year-old grandmother at my cousin Jason’s wedding this past weekend. It’s a family joke that my older cousin Brad and myself are The Favorites (so are Adam and Jennifer, but even among The Favorites, some are more favored than others), and well, it’s true. It’s good to be a favorite, and look at the picture, there I am basking in it. My grandmother and I adore one another — and although it was difficult to visit much since it was a big party, and she can neither see…
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Off next week to San Jose for work, then to Chicago — or rather Leland, for a family wedding. They hired a timeless wedding photographer to capture their special day. Looking for family photographer Highland contact Jill Daugherty Photography. My cousin Jason, who lives on our family farm, is finally making an honest woman out of Jackie — it looks to be quite a hoe-down, with all sorts of people from Jase’s Leland buddies (Leland is a tiny farm town about 90 minutes southwest of the city) to horse show people, to Chicago friends from his prep school days. I’m…
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It’s mushroom season here in Montana and I’ve spent much of the weekend obsessively wandering the bottomlands along the Yellowstone in pursuit of the beautiful, fragrant, and elusive morel. It started on Saturday morning, when Maryanne’s friend Tice took us down to the sweet spot by the sewage treatment plant where her family has been hunting morels for years. A little backstory here, Maryanne and I have any number of friends who hunt mushrooms — big men, some of whom are known as famous outdoorsmen. Would they share their spots with us? Would they take us out so we could…
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Yesterday morning I got the bug to fix my living room windows. I had nearly all the other windows in this house replaced when I moved in three years ago, but the living room has lovely old wood moldings and the windows have that old glass with bubbles and waves in it, and vinyl windows would have looked terrible. So they stayed the way they were — old, double-hung, and permanently shut and gummed up with caulk. Until yesterday. Yesterday I decided they needed to open. Despite the last six weeks of snow and rain, I have a hunch it’s…
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Look what I did with my week off! Those would be fourteen tomatoes planted all in a row. Fourteen! I’ll probably regret planting so many, but last fall when I was in France, I saw tomatoes trellised like this (not with copper plumbing pipe, which I like because it’s sturdy, easy to put together, and weathers to that pretty green color — but with much more rustic and charmant bamboo) and it seemed to me like a good solution for our short-season tomato issues. This time of year, I can start them with the wall-o-waters, about which I cannot say…
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Seattle was great fun — we went to the Cheese Festival at Pike’s Place Market, where we tasted many fine fine cheeses despite the crowds of corpulent tourists who could just as well have been at the free sample booths at Costco for all they cared about beautiful cheese — but who’s to complain? I tasted some lovely goats cheese camenbert, and any number of lovely bleus. I think my stepmother was a tiny bit shocked at what a cheese head I have actually become (that Wisconsin college education must be paying off). I kept saying things like “Point Reyes…