Category: another day in the life

Spring Break adventures.

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We are the sort of people that not only like having projects around our house, we will come help you with projects at your house too. This last week has been spring break for Edie, meaning we aren’t tied down to the homestead and we can take the show on the road.
After spending some quality time working on the neighborhood chicken coop in Brian’s back yard (there will be chickens this spring, just as soon as Brian & I can figure out what kind we want!), we hit the road to visit friends in Harrisonburg.  There was a most lovely Sunday Funday party, where it was commented that the last time some of those folks had seen me I had taken over the same friend’s kitchen and baked to my heart’s content, as I did this time.
What can I say?  It is what I do.
I think most of our friends like this about me, especially considering I usually leave the kitchen cleaner than I find it and I leave fresh baked treats.  In this case it was chocolate chip cookies and a few loaves of bread – some black olive & rosemary, as well as some just plain rosemary loaves, as I hadn’t noticed  Edie had chopped up most of the olives I had on hand while making dinner the night before.  I’ve found that’s a great new way to get her to stop complaining about dinner taking so long, is to get her to lend a hand towards the prep.  So far, it’s worked.  But you know kids, once you think you have a handle on whatever the current stage is, they mix it up and confuse you again.
We also headed to see friends in north western Virginia.  The idea was to make their farm home base while we took some day trips into the city.   Earning our keep there meant doing things like checking the chicken coop for eggs and bottle feeding the lambs. 
Amazing how you can be doing something like that and just a short time later, you can watch people flying kites on the National Mall.

Since Edie was in preschool, her spring break has consisted of the two of us heading to a city to take in the art museums.  Spring break has always coincided with Pat’s job picking up steam, and being an environmental educator and the schools across the state having different spring break schedules meant he was generally pretty busy, sometimes even out of town himself.  I’m not a big fan of sitting around the house, playing single mom, especially when all her pals are out of town too, so packing up and hitting the road always seemed like a better idea.  Pat’s job change last spring however, meant he doesn’t take other people’s kids out on field trips anymore.  It means he could take off and go with us this spring break.  I have to admit, it did sort of throw me.  Edie and I have a routine down.  I know if we have to run to catch a train, she can keep up, carting her own suitcase if need be.  In my super big mom bag, I will have a brown bag lunch packed, snacks and water bottles.  We like to find a nice bench and eat lunch and people watch.  I love my husband, but he’s not a city boy.  He agreed to ride the metro as driving in DC with me always means taking a wrong turn somewhere, circling around the monuments a few times, inexplicably ending up at the Pentagon where I get my bearings and then can get us to anywhere we want to go.  But first, I must circle the monuments and end up at the Pentagon.  Always.  Doesn’t matter which one of us is driving, I could be asleep in the car and this will happen.  Always. It happened to me & Pat just last summer, with a GPS, printed directions and a map in hand.  I swear, the magnetic north of my internal compass is set for the Pentagon.  To avoid this, we take the metro from the furthest point we can into the city.  It’s safer that way.
Pat thought we were being silly with the brown bag lunches I dragged along.  He felt we were missing an opportunity to discover some fun new lunch spot, heck, why not try some of the museum cafe food?  Through experience, I have yet to find anything affordable that I really like near the mall in DC – if someone knows of any, please let me know.  The people watching on the mall is just fantastic though.  I could make a day out of just sitting there and people watching the entire day.  Large school groups in matching T-shirts, even the parent chaperones wearing matching colors.  We saw families in matching ensembles, prompting me to suggest we do that for our next family field trip.  That went over about as well as you can expect.
As we sat on our bench, Pat suggested we make time for the Natural History Museum.  Oh, that one I pointed out?  The one with all the buses cued up in front, the steps absolutely crawling in school groups in matching T-shirts?  Maybe next time when it’s not field trip central.
Over the last few spring breaks, Edie & I have taken in some really great exhibits.  There was the Tim Burton exhibit at MOMA a few years back that gave us an excuse to take the train up to NYC.  Last year was the Picasso exhibit over in Richmond.  This year, I had read about this exhibit that started at the Frick in NYC

and was pleased to discover it was coming to DC and would be there over spring break.  I thought that since Edie declared Picasso “The artist that makes me feel the most”, she’d want to go see this. 
The collection wasn’t big, three small rooms of early sketches.  And I do mean early.  There was a sketch he did when he was 9, one when he was 11, in which the raw talent was amazing.  You could see a noticeable maturity of his talent in those two ages.  There was a watercolor sketch he did of his father when he was 15 that blew me away.  I also learned his father was an artist as well – I had not known that.
I think she was bummed I didn’t buy her the catalog as we exited this exhibit the way I did with last year’s Picasso exhibit.  I will get it for her, but a friend who works for museums tipped me off that you can find catalogs at reduced prices after the exhibit closes, so I think I’ll go that route this time.  I do understand a girl needs as many Picasso books as she can get, especially when they are catalogs of the exhibits she has seen.
As we left that exhibit, we stumbled onto the next one. We had meant to just breeze through it on our way to the next building, but it stopped us in our tracks.

Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800)
Wow.  Seriously WOW.
This is the first time these paintings have been seen outside of Japan.  They apparently were just restored – they are all painted on silk panels.  They are only there for 4 weeks through the end of April and if you can get to the National Gallery of Art in DC before then, then do so.  This exhibit is worth it.   These paintings are exquisite.
This is the second time we’ve gone to DC to see an exhibition, only to stumble upon another one that we walked away talking about more.  The first time, it was the Van Gogh Exhibit, way back in 1998.  That was pretty amazing, but then across the mall we found a Star Wars prop and costume exhibit at the National Air & Space Museum.   All these years later, we are STILL talking about how flipping cool that Star Wars exhibit was.   
We had fun with the triangles in the concourse between the West and East wings of the National Gallery.
While in the East building, we came across the Mel Bochner exhibition going on in the tower.  I liked it, probably because of the color usage. Pat & Edie not so much.  I snapped a quick shot before the docent told me no pictures please.  Whoops.  So of course I have to post my illegal shot.

 We exited the East Wing of the NGA and headed across the mall to the Museum of the Native American.
Pat had heard great things about the food in their cafe and really wanted to eat there.
Until he saw the prices. 
He suddenly got why I had so quickly dismissed the idea of museum cafe food.
That’s okay, there were other things to do and see there.

Like a VW bug covered in tiny seed beads. 
I think the hubcaps were my favorite.
I wonder how they would look on my car.

Edie wanted her picture taken by the tipi in the Song for the Horse Nation exhibition.  I liked the way this one turned out. I have talked here before how my camera is great with natural light, crummy with any other sort of light.  One of these days I will get a fabulous camera that’s not a point and shoot that can take pictures in all sorts of light.  Until then, I just live with it and appreciate the unique perspectives. I think the shadow in front of the tipi is more fitting anyway.

Finally, after a long day of walking up and down the mall, we made it back to the Metro station.

And before long, we were back to lovely scenes like this through our windows.
I do love the rolling hills of western Virginia. 

When we arrived back at the farm, the sheep were waiting for us in the driveway.  They were quite welcoming.  Those little lambs are just darling.
Twilight, with the not-quite-full-moon rising over the Blue Ridge, just to the east.
That’s the view our friends have from their front porch. 
Pasture, rolling hills and mountains.
I think it’s quite lovely.
Their house belonged to Ryan’s grandparents.  His father was born in that house. 
That view has been part of his life as long as he can remember.
You can see his parent’s house across the pasture. 

That’s the view out back from their kitchen window.  The free range sheep and chickens hanging out with the rabbits in their cages.  Just to the left of that is a pasture that had cows, horses and Ryan’s dad’s sheep grazing. Everywhere you looked was some sort of animal.  We even saw some deer frolicing.
We talked about heading back into the city for another day of museum hopping, but frankly, we were wiped out after the day we had had, and did I mention Pat’s not a city guy?  He wasn’t overly excited about it, so we had a lazy morning on the farm before heading home to start knocking out some of our own projects, like maybe get some of those plants sitting on the kitchen counter into the ground and figuring out if a long, slow deep watering will make the butterfly bush perk up or if I shouldn’t just hack it back and see how that goes.
Stay tuned. 

In progress.

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I currently have no less than 4 various containers, including a 7-11 coffee cup, sitting on my kitchen counter holding plants that were gifted, acquired or are in process of moving from one spot in the yard to another.  I moved the butterfly bush to it’s new spot in the back yard but it’s looking awfully droopy.  I wonder if I should have cut it back before I moved it.  I wonder if I should chop it back now.  Would that kill it? I thought they were supposed to be hard to kill. I might have a green thumb, but that thumb can turn black at any time.  It’s all a giant experiment, I really have very little idea of what I’m doing out there, although my garden seems to say otherwise at times.  There is a partial hole dug for the fig to move into, bags of mulch and compost scattered here and there in the yard.  I did manage to plant the strawberry plants I thinned from a friend’s patch, but the hibiscus someone gave me is still sitting in a pot on the front porch with zero signs of life.  I suppose I could just go set it in the sun and see what happens.
I finally got to see the building Betty has been rehabbing since her return from NYC in December.  We realized we need to schedule time together weekly because entire weeks have gone by where we haven’t talked since she moved back. Which seems slightly insane, since she lives two doors down and for years we saw each other several times a day without effort.  Life being what it is, even though we now have time set aside for each other on a weekly basis, sometimes other things pop up.  Which happened last week and so Friday morning turned into a spontaneous adventure of the sorts we used to have all the time, just rolling with things.  I had to run back home and grab my camera to capture some images after finally seeing the interior of the building that really is just up the street.  I love crumbling old plaster walls, I love layers of old paint.  The building is just a nondescript square box, but it has claw foot tubs, hints of pink & that green I call Southern Gothic Green that was visible through the crumbling layers and a view of Brown’s Mountain through the second floor rear windows.  Some of those things won’t be there by the time construction is completed, but I always like knowing they are there, just under the surface. 

They don’t take direction well.

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My Girl Scouts were asked to make signs for the spring fair at their school.  After some back and forth with the sign committee, where I tried to make it clear my girls were game for sign making, but they were going to be what the girls wanted them to be and not what anyone else necessarily envisioned, I was given a list of signs that needed to be made.  Admittedly, I didn’t really pay attention to the requested sizes, knowing my girls love to make big signs. (Okay, so they might not be the only ones who don’t take direction well.)  Also, I didn’t realize they were supposed to be directional signs.  Had I known that, I might have tried to steer them more towards that end.

Well, as much as I could steer them in a direction. I love my girls.  Individually, they are all quite sweet, but collectively, they can be a wild, stubborn pack.  Just a few weeks ago, they very politely, almost quietly really,  threw my entire plan for that day’s meeting out the window by just taking turns making this unholy high pitched but low volume screeching noise until I relented and just let them have their way, which was to run around and play on the playground at school.  They may have also called every dog within 10 miles – it was that sort of screech.  When Edie demonstrated it for her father that night, he called her off within seconds and then completely understood how I was on my third glass of wine since getting home. 

They are a great bunch of do-gooders that are someday going to lead the revolution, I have no doubt.  With fabulous signs.  Goodness those girls love to make signs. 

I was given a list of 10 signs that needed to be made.  I have 10 girls in my troop, so each girl was given her own sign to make.  Hannah decided that coloring a circle to be a basketball for the Wii Basketball sign was boring, so while she went and got paper to make her sign 3-D, the other girls managed to obtain scissors and glue from a still unnamed source.  They are resourceful that bunch.
Some of the girls knocked their signs in no time.  Others found themselves crunched at the end, so I had the girls who finished theirs help out the girls who had 10 minutes to get it done. 
They may not have been what the sign committee was looking for, but they did turn out great.
Face Painting!

Goat Petting!
Moon Bounce!
Wii Basketball!

The Game Room!

Wii Just Dance!
This sign was our biggest team effort, with most of the girls jumping on this to knock it out in the last 5 minutes.  When they got jiggy with it and made the face tye-dyed, the girl who had spent most of the hour drawing it got a little upset.  I swooped in to save the day though.
By adding a reminder to get your face painted too! 
I thought it was a brilliant save.
As did most of the girls. 
As you can see, they don’t take direction well.

Various things to do, read and eat.

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  • In case you missed it, my favorite Riverkeeper was on the local news over the weekend talking about his organization’s new initiative. You can find out more info on being a James River Hero at their website.

  • Lesa is having an apron pattern giveaway.  One can never have enough aprons.  I’m thinking about making one to garden in.

  • Want a quick and easy dinner?  Look no further.  Peanut Sauce that is quick, easy and good with just about anything.  We like it with rice noodles and any combination of nuts, veggies, tofu, and shrimp.

  • Have you read Frecklewonder’s  guide to thrifting?  Parts 1, 2 and 3.  She knows her thrifting.  I was in her neck of the woods this weekend and when we passed the Goodwill, Edie was feeling it.  I wasn’t, but considering all the times my gal has put up with my thrifting, I thought I’d play along and we stopped in. She scored.  Two dresses, a new blouse for the upcoming chorus concert and the sweetest little denim jacket with pink trim.  Never ignore the call of the thrifts. 

  • I’m currently on a dry German Riesling kick for those you wondering what wine I’m drinking these days. I’ve yet to fall head over heels with one label, but generally, if it says it’s dry and it’s on sale for less than $10, I’ll give it a try.  I think a longer post on this might be coming if anyone is interested.

  • The cotton candy picture has absolutely nothing to do with anything. No, I did not eat both of those, I shared part of one with Edie at her school’s Spring Fair Friday night.  There really is nothing better than freshly spun cotton candy.  It’s a certain kind of happy.

Long Term Reality

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Can we talk about my back yard?
That’s the current state of it, as seen from the back edge of the property. Well, overlooking the back edge, which is the creek that runs though all the back yards on this side of the street and is then diverted into a pipe under the road.
I don’t have any pictures of what the yard looked like when we bought the house 13 years ago June. 
It was, for lack of a better word, overgrown.  My nephew, who was a wee one at the time, called it ‘a jungle’.  For about 10 years or so before we bought the house, it was a rental.  The interior was maintained, the yard not so much.  Before that, a woman lived here who was apparently quite the gardener who had a fondness for pink, but the last few years she lived in the house, her health was declining and her yard suffered.  What we’ve figured out from neighbors is that the yard, specifically the back yard, was ignored and just left to run wild for oh, a good 15 years or so.   
That’s the view standing at the back of the house. 
We have a large lot – .33 of an acre. Our first priority when we bought the house was to get rid the ivy growing up the sides onto the roof and then cut down the trees growing into the house. The back yard could wait.
13 years ago, we started by taking a lawnmower and a weed wacker to cut a path through the jungle. We laid down newspaper, covered it in mulch and over time, grass grew and it became a path.  When Pat mowed the yard, he’d cut in closer to the jungle every time, so that every year, we claimed a few more inches. We’d walk through, dig up big stuff, cut down smaller trees we didn’t want, pull weeds.  For years, I had a constant patch of poison ivy somewhere on my body between March and November.  There were times it would become a full blown nasty case that required steroids.  Pat spent a lot of time pulling all the poison ivy out by hand (He’s not nearly as allergic as I am.  Also, he knows what it looks like.  Me?  Ha!)
When the sandbox got installed and the tiki hut built, he cleared those areas to be used, but by and large, big parts of the back yard were left untouched.  For a few years, he mowed it all down early, we covered the yard in straw and if anyone asked what the plan was, he’d refer them to me and I, him.  “Oh, Pat’s got something going on down there, you’ll have to ask him.”  It actually did help us get a handle on what was going on back there.

I did some small landscaping around the tiki hut, per Edie’s request, by moving some wild geraniums back there.  I have some more I will move back there.  Another work in progress.
During the microbusts a few summers ago, we lost some big limbs as well as some smaller trees back there on the side that had been previously still jungle.  I started noticing that maybe there was a new sunny spot to plant sunloving plants.  We only have so much sun in our yard and most of that is dedicated to tomatoes and basil.  Any sunloving flowers I have are in a thin strip ‘down by the side of the road’, along the edge of the back yard.  They are running out of room.  I have a lilac and butterfly bush that really could use some space to spread out. 
I have a fig that has lived in a bucket since before we had Edie because we can’t decide where we want to plant it.  We want to give it space to spread out and with sunny real estate at a premium around here, we just haven’t been able to agree to a spot.
The other day it dawned on me that we could start moving into the space of the back yard that had yet to be fully tamed.  We could actually start making inroads to the master plan of what we eventually want the back yard to be.  This was pretty revolutionary. 
Pat and I walked around there the other day, pulling up the first signs of weed life, and put out markers for what is going to go where.  I’m excited to have new holes to dig and super excited to finally feel like we have a plan and a vision to move forward with the back yard.  It has taken us 13 years to get to this part.
It was that or start terracing the hill next to the house into the most macdaddy vegetable garden in the city.  It’s a steep slope, it’s going to take retaining walls and alot of work.  Every winter I consider it, every spring I stand out there and think about it…..and bag it.
This year though, the back yard is finally happening. 
Stay tuned for updates.

Being Me.

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My rhinestone dollar store readers, the ones Edie calls my rock star glasses, had one of the arms snap in half as I was taking them off the other night. 
So I borrowed some of Edie’s tye dye duct tape and taped them back together for the time being.
I am that cheap.
I also didn’t have time to run out and by a new pair that day.
My family is of course, slightly horrified and bothered by the new look. I’m pretty sure they won’t let this last, although we do laugh about it.
Thursday night we met up with some of Pat’s co-workers and other guests (supporters of their organization) at Miller’s before a lecture at the Paramount.  It was my first time meeting some of them.  There was beer, nachos, wings…. 
I grabbed a wing, dipped it in blue cheese, took a bite and realized I had just dripped a huge amount of dressing on myself.  You know how when you try to wipe something off with a paper napkin and it just deteriorates and makes everything worse?  Yeah, that’s what happened here.  Smack dab in the middle of my chest.  Of course I was wearing black.  I spent the rest of the evening trying to politely cover it  – having a drink in my hand worked best. And while I did have a jacket with me, because of the prominent location on myself and the fact that the jacket has no buttons, well, that was no help at all.  Plus it was too warm for a jacket.
I did however, exercise restraint around the nachos. 
After the lecture, Pat’s coworkers, who work at the Richmond office, stopped by as his boss had to pick up the projector for a presentation the next morning and decided to stay to watch the end of VCU game.  I’m pretty open about my lax cleaning skills and my house was definitely not in a presentation for strangers state, especially a group of people I had just met with a glob of blue cheese and paper towel remnants in the middle of my chest.  We were about 2 minutes ahead of them and it’s really amazing how much you can pick up in 2 minutes flat when you know you need to.  It wasn’t until everyone had left however, that I noticed that the downstairs bathroom had absolutely NO linens in it – I had taken up the bath mats and all the towels in there to wash them and hadn’t put any back in.  Sigh.
No towels are better than dirty ones, right?
The lecture was Richard Louv, who wrote “Last Child In The Woods”.  It is hard for me to answer what I thought of his talk – his book, “Last Child” was about connecting kids with nature, although he has a new one out that follows up on idea of Nature Deficit Disorder.  My husband was an environmental educator for 17 years, until he switched jobs last spring, becoming a Riverkeeper, so the idea of connecting kids with nature? That’s our lifestyle.
When I’m not wearing blue cheese and duct taped dollar store readers.  It’s just how we roll.

Spring Soundtrack

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I looked outside my kitchen window this morning and couldn’t help but notice that the dogwoods in the back yard next door are starting to open up.
They always open up a little earlier than the ones in my yard.  I have no clue how or why that is so.
Growing up, we had a pink dogwood in our front yard
that said spring to me.
As a supposed grown up, I have a pink dogwood
 in my front yard now that I throw parties under.  
A big old pink dogwood in the front yard feels like home.
Just like sheer white curtains blowing open in the breeze are home.

Right now I want to bottle the smell of the magnolia tree. 
It’s fragrance fills half a block around it.

And the birds. 
They are twitterpated.
I think the wrens are building a nest under the back porch again.
I’m sure there is a family setting up shop in the basement, through a small hole in a window under the sunroom.  They scare the bejesus out of me when I’m down there doing laundry and they fly over.
We’ve had dinner at the picnic table and in the sunroom this week.
The weather has gone from snow last week to summer this week.  Apparently spring was last weekend.

The soundtrack of my spring is always, always R.E.M.   Old R.E.M.  
Starting with Chronic Town, when it first came out.  Yes, it goes back that far.
They fell out of favor for a bit, but then my last year in high school, along came Document. 
At that point I had my grandfather’s 1976 Ford Grenada, which I had fond memories of sitting in the back seat on old country roads when I was a wee one, while he was driving, listening to the jazz and big band music on the radio and him whistling along. 
I would put a boombox on the front seat to be able to listen to tapes in that car and that’s exactly what I did so that I could listen to Document.  Did I mention it was a 1976 model and the stereo didn’t have a built in cassette player?  The boombox on the front seat was the only way to go.
This morning I realized I had worn out yet another copy of Document.
I think that’s my first CD version, I know I’ve worn out at least one cassette before that. 
After Document was Green.  That was the soundtrack of me moving to Auburn.  The soundtrack of me leaving my parents house in Pennsylvania on a cold, snowy morning in March, driving 14 hours by myself and arriving in full on spring in Auburn and that’s why I decided I should go to college there.
Also, there were a number of pretty boys with long hair who also listened to R.E.M. so it seemed like a good place to go to college.
That was probably biggest decision of my life, since it has affected everything that has come since.
It’s good it turned out so well since I really didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it.
Clearly, the universe smiles upon me.
And Green, I’ve lost track of how many copies of that I’ve worn out.  Two cassettes and 3 CD’s. 
I tend to listen to the same album over and over and over.
There is other music I associate with spring, but I always go back to  R.E.M as they are my soundtrack for spring. They’ve been there for me since I was 14.  I can only say that about so many folks.
I once told Pat I was going to paint our bedroom the color of the room in this video.
And he knew exactly what I was talking about.
That is why I am married to him, he just gets things like that.
It really sorts of sums our marriage beautifully.
Something done on a whim, with a random obscure music reference thrown in for good measure.
You really can build a life around that.

Not Quite Full Bloom, but close enough.

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The magnolia is almost in full bloom.  With this warm weather, it opens more every day.
It’s delightful to look out the windows and door on the front of the house to see those blooms.
We are definitely feeling spring around here.  This past weekend was social and productive, with lots of work getting done in the yard, including the repair and re-installation of the compost spinner bins, weeds being pulled, more spring greens planted, a garden work day at Edie’s school, brunch with friends and of course, with us working in the yard and lots of folks out walking to soak up the sunshine, there were a number of little visits with neighbors.  Brian popped in Saturday to share some seeds and ponder if the tree would make it this year, without a frost.  There was a good bit of speculation about that this weekend, with everyone saying that our magnolia in bloom is the first sign of spring to them.  Us too.  
The peach tree is blooming now too. 
The greens I planted back in February are popping up. 
As Brian said the other day, all is right with the world again now that spring is upon us.
It’s true, nothing revitalizes me like spring.  I’ve been cooking up a storm, working up lots of new inspired recipes that I will share just as soon as I work out the kinks.  I’ve pulled that Amish Friendship Bread starter out of the freezer and am baking with it, only I’m determined to make it without adding pudding mix.  First batch turned out pretty okay, although, it was better with Vikki’s Salted Caramel Pear butter on it.  (Recipe please Vikki.  By the way, I made that granola recipe you told me about last week and it rocked.  Thanks.) I’m also experimenting with cutting back the sugar in that recipe.  I’m comfortable winging it in my kitchen, but not when it comes to baking.  Baking is chemistry and I was excused from participating in Chem Lab in high school because of the small fires and explosions heard from my corner of the lab each week.  Just like math, who knew I actually needed to know that stuff some day?  I thought they were just saying that. Turns out they were right.

From out of nowhere.

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Remember how I said I seemed to be missing some photos of a scarf I had knit and I suspected a certain smaller person who lives in our house that likes to play with my camera to be responsible for their going MIA?  Well, I owe her an apology.  I took some shots of the magnolia tree in our front yard yesterday, which is now opening up and gloriously pink and when I uploaded them to share here with you what came up instead were the missing shots from our Baltimore weekend.  My camera has been on the fritz lately and I’ve been worried it was the camera – I’ve been saying when this one goes, I’m moving up to a fancy camera and not another point and shoot, and quite frankly, that kind of toy is nowhere near our current budget.  But after a few different incidents, I’m starting to suspect that my memory card has gone bad, which is actually a much cheaper fix.  Phew. 

So, since they showed up from nowhere, I thought I’d share.  First up, seen on a front porch on Falls Road, near Hampden hon, in Baltimore as we ran around town one day during our visit there last month.

Yes, that’s a Christmas penguin hanging out with a member of the nativity, who is wrapped in a feather boa, with a half full (or empty, depending on how you look at things) large malt liquor beverage under his chair. 
I love Baltimore.
Also suddenly back were the pictures of the scarf I had knit my cousin’s girlfriend for her birthday.
Ginger, as we call her, is a lovely gal and has built quite a relationship with Edie.  I’ve told my cousin Mark, her boyfriend,  if it doesn’t work out with Ginger, then he is the one who has to break the news to Edie, because that is not going to go over well and he is going to suffer her wrath.  We hope it doesn’t come to that though.
I have a scarf I knit for myself a few years back in this style – just loose and freestyle, changing yarns as the whim hit me.  I thought Ginger might appreciate one, so I whipped this up for her the week before the party.
While most of the yarns were white, I did throw some pink and green eyelash yarn in for color.

I also did some cables, as I find them fun and I find when I knit cables, the process seems to go faster.
This section is in the eccentric cable pattern.  ( I used A Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara G. Walker.  Which was also one of my best thrifting scores ever.)
There you can get an idea of the different yarns used – green eyelash yarn, a bulky chenille, a pink eyelash yarn with bumps of color mixed in, a boucle, a fingerweight yarn, a multicolored eyelash yarn I mixed in with the fingerweight and lastly, a worsted weight cotton.  (If you need a reference on yarn weights, look here). I kept to just a knit stitch outside of the cabled sections.

That’s the basketweave cable stitch. 
I’m knitting a scarf in a similar vein for the silent auction at the annual luncheon for the Jed Foundation, using primarily blues, from the stash Kristin gave me.  February has been quite conducive to knitting, as the second sleeve on Pat’s sweater is really coming along as well.  I’m almost up to the elbow on it.  I’m even starting to kick around ideas of what my next big knitting project is going to be. 
Meanwhile, the shots I meant to show you.  What a difference a few days make!
What I call the tulip magnolia, Pat calls a saucer magnolia.  It’s the pink magnolia in the front yard.  It’s the first thing to bloom every spring and it’s starting to bloom.   Now let’s hope it gets to open up without a hard frost, which will turn the beautiful pink blooms brown.  The top is opening up, but the lower blooms have a few more days I think.  (Clicking on the image will give you a better view of the glorious pinkness.)

The peach tree is also starting to show some opening buds.
I love looking out my windows at the pink trees in the front yard.
Such a nice sight.
Hello spring. 

The weekend that ran long.

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It’s been a good weekend.  One that started off being mostly kid-free thanks to the social life of my girl, who managed to spend the weekend around town with friends, but not with us.  As a result, there was quality time with friends new and old, much needed mom friend time and quality time with my dear babydaddy.  Wine as well as music was involved, with front row seats at Cowboy Junkies Saturday night at the Jefferson.
They were lovely, as always.  
They are one of my favorite bands.  This is the second time I’ve been lucky enough to have front row seats for one of their shows.  I also came home with a set list, which my friend Chris grabbed for me.  He got me the set list last time we saw them, when we also had front row seats.  He’s good like that. They did two sets – the first one was all new stuff from the 4 albums they’ve put out in the last 18 months or so,  and a second set of all older tunes including Anniversary Song.  Which always leaves me a little choked up, since it’s a Pat song. To hear it live was a treat. (Thanks to Chaz for the photo.) 
This morning, we got an unexpected holiday.  It seems the possible dusting of snow being forecast when I went to bed last night turned into a little bit more than a dusting.
When I woke up and saw snow on the skylights in our bedroom, I checked to see what the schools were doing.  A two hour delay.  I rolled over and went back to sleep, only to be woken up by Edie just before 9 am, informing us she had seen cars sliding on the hill next to the house and she hoped she was not expected to go to school in this mess.  And that is when we discovered we were having a very unexpected snow day, despite the fact that spring has been coming on strong for a few weeks now, albeit early.
The tulip magnolia in the front yard has been making strides towards blooming, so while the hints of pink in the snow are lovely on it,  I’m worried it will be a giant brown mess for the next month. 
When it blooms, it is pink and glorious, the first sign of spring that you can see for a good block, no matter what angle you come at it from.  When it blooms and gets pinched by cold weather, as happens most years, it turns brown and just looks sort of sad and then we have to wait for the dogwood to bloom for a glorious pink corner.  It’s not blooming yet, so hopefully the snow didn’t hurt it too much. 
As I walked by this morning, the pink showing through the snow was lovely.  If you click on it, you can see a bigger view, one that shows the pink more.
A snow day can really only mean one thing though.    



One of the things I love about this neighborhood is that a snow day automatically means everyone heads to the hill at Walker School to sled.   We brought the tube, although the sleds were faster on this snow. Thankfully, everyone shares and is willing to swap rides.
It was the kind of snow that was perfect for snowmen.
He later went down the hill on a sled, because snowmen need to sled too.
We may have gotten 6″, but the sledding cleared the hill of snow in no time.

There was much joy and merriment.  I managed to miss the mud puddle there at the bottom when I wiped out.  I blame the wipe out on the small child that wandered into my path as I was going down the hill and to avoid running her over, I ended up rolling.  But hey, I didn’t take a small child out.  That may be a first because I’m good at taking out small children when I sled.
There was a group of wanna-be snowboarders that kept to the smaller hill.  Although every one of the hills up there are nice and steep for good sledding.

Lucia was fearless.

Right around noon, the snow suddenly stopped, the sun came out and it started melting. 

I think the kids were tired by that point though, as evidenced by Edie & Emily sitting on the tube, eating snow.  A tube in the snow is a much better seat than a sled, that’s for sure.  
On the way home, I got some shots of early spring in the snow.  
Some fared better than others.  The hellebore was not looking as majestic in the snow.
 There you have all my little garden markers from the greens I planted a few weeks ago peeking out above the snow.  If you look closely, you can see the tiniest hint of the arugula sticking out of the snow in the back.  On a walk through the ‘hood the other day, I saw someone else’s arugula bolting.  Somehow it made me feel better about mine bolting.   We may have gotten snow today, but it’s supposed to be warm again by the end of the week, so the arugula is just going to keep bolting.  Hopefully the new seeds I planted will do something soon, so I don’t have to go without arugula. 
The peach tree is getting ready to flower too.
  If the tulip magnolia does become a brown mess, at least I captured some of it’s pinkness.
We do have quite a bit of pink blooming trees in our yard, don’t we?
 Icicles on the blueberry blossoms. I’m not sure we’ve ever noticed blueberry blossoms this early, and from the looks of it, there are bunch on there.  Last year was the first year they did anything and I noticed the other day, one of the bushes has grown about 4 feet, doubling the height of it, which means they are starting to take off.   I guess we should look up if frost is bad for the blossoms. 
When I woke up this morning, I was tallying a mental list of things that needed to happen this week.  The unexpected holiday threw that out of whack.  I went from thinking about what I want to do to the garden to realizing what we really needed today after sledding was hot cocoa and brownies, with tomato soup and grilled pimento cheese sandwiches, products of last year’s garden, for dinner.  As much as I want winter to be done, I realized today I’m not quite done with hot cups of tea and long wool skirts yet.  It was a nice surprise to end a good weekend.