Sometimes a person just needs a weekend where you really don’t do anything. This is a concept I came to late in life — until I moved to California and got my job at the Big Corporation, I’d always worked at least two jobs, and one of them was usually retail. Which means I didn’t have weekends — I’d have a day off somewhere in the middle of the week, and after a while I managed to get out of working Sundays, and so it was something of an adjustment when Patrick and I moved in together, and those weekends…
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It’s spring, which means time to spend the weekend doing little projects in my garden. Some of you may remember last spring when I built my cold frames. They were nice cold frames, but I didn’t take into account the famous winter winds of Livingston. The cold frames didn’t weather winter particularly well — the old storm windows I used blew off and the glass all broke, and the heavy-duty plastic sheeting also shredded over time. So I ordered some corrugated plastic a few weeks ago, figuring it would not only be tougher than the original cold frame coverings, but…
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Although it looks like the job issues are starting to settle down for the short term, I’m still not sure that this isn’t the beginning of the end for me at the Big Corporation where I’ve been working for the past few years. I never thought I’d ever have a corporate job in the first place — I mean, I was a writer and an academic and in general, ever since I gave up on New York City in my twenties, had been someone who’d chosen quality-of-life over making a living. But when I finished my PhD and was so…
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It’s funny, the things you don’t notice until you’ve left a place for a while. I’ve lived in the Bay Area twice, when I was getting my Master’s Degree, and then again when I left academia and decided to get a “real job”. I liked it okay. I never really felt at home there, but it always had its charms. There were good restaurants and fabulous produce in the Farmer’s Markets, and the landscape itself was lovely. There were evenings I’d be driving home from the South Bay, and I’d come over the hill from Pleasanton, and there would be…
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I’m embroiled in a some annoying work stuff that’s taking up all my time. I feel officially middle-aged now — I have a job I’m beginning to hate that I can’t afford to quit. Blogging will continue to be quiet as next week I’ll be in San Jose for meetings — the good news is that I’m going out to dinner with The Fabulous Pim one night, and on another night I’m having dinner with my beloved 75-year old aunt who is a nun, a practicing psychotherapist, and the best golfer in her age bracket in the state (you should…
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It must be a spring thing, but every year about this time, I become obsessed with green sauce. I want it on everything — grilled chicken, poached salmon, steamed cauliflower, my morning cheese toast. Green sauce varies — this spring’s version is slightly Indian — I was going for that great green sauce you get in Indian restaurants but I wound up with something slightly chunkier. Basically, here’s what I did. I took a bunch of scallions out of the bottom of the fridge that were slightly past their time, washed them and trimmed off all the skeevy bits, cut…
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On Friday, the day our Miss Martha was sprung from jail, I had six cubic yards of compost delivered. The first year I ordered three yards, then last year I ordered four and noted in my gardening notebook, that I could easily have used six. So, this year it was six yards, which is a very big pile of dirt. At this point, I have flower beds, about three feet wide, across the front of my house, and running thirty feet along the side. I also have a long perennial bed that’s about six feet by thirty along one side…
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We are all about the couch, the kleenex, the chicken soup here at LivingSmall. Thank goodness there was so much bad bad award show television this weekend. But it’s very sad, I missed the Spanish wine tasting on Saturday, that I was really looking forward to after Meg’s post on Spanish wines. But since I was all stuffy, couldn’t have tasted anything, felt dizzy, and really didn’t want to infect everyone else at the event, I stayed home. Tant pis. In other news, nearly a year and a half after being orphaned, Patrick’s dog Raymond (named after the late great…
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I woke up this morning thinking about a comment that Leah, over at Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen posted on her website. Apparently, by blogging about domestic life, and in particular, blogging about cooking a nice dinner for her husband and young son on Valentine’s Day, she called down the Voice of the Disapproving Feminists upon her head. Apparently, choosing to love one’s family, and to think about the ways one cares for them, and to blog about this “does next to nothing to promote woman as a healthy, vitally aware, culturally meaningful being in the world.” Clearly, something about…
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How did I live to be this old before realizing what fabulous television this is? I dropped the dogs off this morning to be cleaned up — it’s been a long winter and they were shaggy and dirty — and Barb, the dog groomer, mentioned that tonight was the sporting dog division (as my boys were, uncharacteristically, sitting and being attentive). So this afternoon, I checked out the USA network, and last night’s dog show was on during the afternoon. Who knew? I LOVE the dog show. The dogs are so fabulous (although the handlers, as a group, need a…