C-ville, a local weekly paper, is currently accepting nominations for their “Best Of” contest. There is a local blog category. Voting closes in a week, but let’s see if I can’t make it to the next round. If this blog makes it to the next level, we will have a party to replace the May Margarita bash we didn’t have this year. I know that’s incentive for a good number of folks. So please, go vote for me, now. And when I make it to the next round, we’ll throw down.
Thanks.
Category: blogging
A Gentleman Buries the Cat.
The fifth of May came and went without a party at our house this year. While there were a few Friday afternoon threats of popping over tomorrow from neighbors, no one actually showed on the day itself. It probably didn’t hurt that at party time, it was pouring down rain. As I sat in my bathrobe watching the rain come down, talking on the phone to Betty, cancelling our plans to drink margaritas that afternoon due to a very sore throat and under the weather feeling on my part, she remarked that the party would have been a disaster this year had we gone through with it and that the sore throat and rain were just a message from the universe confirming this.
I thought so too.
All my productive weekend plans were thrown aside by the weather and whatever bug I happen to have. Instead of gardening and working on the chicken house, I curled up in bed, watching movies with the mini-me when she wasn’t building a LEGO garden in the den. It’s incredibly easy when not feeling 100%, the weather outside being crummy and being a single parent, to give in to the digital boxes like computers and television for entertainment. Heck, being home all day, even with my husband working from home, draws me in at the prospect of a conversation of sorts, even if it’s virtual. It’s even worse when he’s gone, as he was this weekend.
Last week, both online and in person, I’ve seen and heard others talking about various aspects of this. Jenny over Frecklewonder wrote this really inspiring and thoughtful post this past week that got me thinking about the long list of blogs I have either bookmarked under a folder in my favorites (I’m old school that way) or that I follow in my reader. I went through and started cleaning out the ones that I realize don’t do it for me. Thank you for the inspiration Jenny. I had been thinking maybe it was time to purge, but you got me to do it.
As I’ve pondered Jenny’s post all week, I had a moment Friday, where I realized my entire morning, while being spent off-line, was being spent with friends I had either made or gotten to know better on-line. I went for a walk with Jen. As I came home, I saw Vikki heading into the park, so I ran over and had a visit with her. I came home to find a package from my Send Something Good secret pal. I realized that I had yet to go through the entire list of blogs participating in the swap – there are something like 160 of them and while I’ve made it through part of the list and I do intend to sit down and make it through all of them at some point, that’s alot of time in front of a screen. And I’m having trouble committing to that. I think if it were the dregs of winter and I didn’t have a neglected garden calling my name it would be easier.
Like everything in life, online life is about balance. Knowing when enough is enough. Sitting here, home alone in my jammies, it’s easy to lose track of time as I surf the web, seeing the latest and greatest things I could be doing. I also realize that if the internet weren’t here to distract me, something else would. Something else always seems to distract me. There are pluses and minuses to the internet and putting yourself out there on it. Mostly, I’m grateful for the relationships I’ve gotten out of it. I love comments and emails, love hearing how I’ve inspired someone, love hearing how my babble here has touched them in some way, but most of all, I love when someone is moved enough by what I have written here to call me, or to say, let’s get together. Because no matter how much time you spend staring at a screen, real time spent with real people can’t be replaced or replicated.
Which brings me to the title of this post. It’s a quote from a friend, a reminder of a good time, as well as a reminder of what’s important. You can make new friends, get inspiration, ideas and how-to’s from the internet, but what’s most important are the real things you do. Like spending time with friends, your family and yes, burying the cat.
All about me.
I read about Send Something Good over at Gastronomical Sovereignty and since it sounded fun and I end up getting a present out of it (okay, a package. All for ME!), I thought, why not? Today is a link up where all the bloggers involved are introducing themselves. Welcome to my all about me post.
I’m a forty-something mother who despite my extreme dislike of soccer, has become a soccer mom. Don’t tell my daughter. I have a very handsome hubby that I met when I fell off the roof of my garage at a party in college. He is a Riverkeeper, which when I try to explain to people what that is, I just call him the old man of the river. He monitors and advocates for the river. I don’t really talk about being eco-friendly a whole lot on my blog because I prefer to just walk the walk rather than talk about it. I also like to say that Environment Non-profit isn’t just a job, it’s a life style. Together we have one completely amazing 10 year old daughter. She is the most responsible, punctual member of our family. She thinks that cleaning bathrooms and making beds are fun. I’m really not sure where she got this from. She also watches Martha Stewart and Julia Child and then comes up with these insane craft projects. I know exactly where that came from.
I love thrifting. Just about everything in our house we have gotten second hand. It’s the thrill of the hunt as well as I am just that cheap. I prefer old things. Among the vintage things I like to collect and use are tablecloths, napkins, aprons and cookbooks. You might notice a theme there.
I love to cook. I will rant about the state of our food system, which I think needs to be completely overhauled. There are changes that need to happen at the top, but we need a good grassroots effort to help make this happen. To this end, I am involved in local food issues where we live, I am on the vegetable garden committee at my daughter’s school and have committed to starting up a garden at the school she will attend next year as she moves up the upper elementary school. At the same time, I also have a fondness for food that really isn’t food, like Twizzlers and BBQ corn nuts. I think that fresh cotton candy and a perfectly roasted marshmallow are a certain happiness that can only come from sugar melting on your tongue. Everything in moderation, including moderation. I keep exactly one processed food in my pantry and that is Kraft mac & cheese. We don’t eat it alot, but man there are times when that is the bomb.
I love to bake. I show up at friend’s houses and immediately start baking in their kitchen. I love chocolate cake and will make you the best chocolate cake you have ever had. I am the sort of person who will make a cake that takes 2 days to complete. It is so worth it. It’s that good. And this is from a girl who used to never make a recipe that was longer than a paragraph. My husband dared me, I never stand down a dare, and the rest is history. He also bought me a stand mixer on the condition that I use it at least once a month.
I love to garden. Digging holes in the ground is my ultimate happy. My love of gardening and cooking are somewhat related, as I’ve had a garden so that I can have my own tomatoes most of my life. I even attempted a tomato patch in college. Somewhere along the way I learned to can, so I do a good bit of that. I even teach canning classes. My jams and jellies don’t always turn out, I prefer to just make fruit butters in the crock pot, but I might try jams again this summer, since you know, I am a canning instructor. I love to pickle things. I will pickle anything and everything, including radishes, green beans, okra and watermelon rind. I like to try things just to see if I can do them, which explains all the pickles. We grow all kinds of native flowers, flowers I just really like, vegetables, fruits like strawberries and blueberries as well as a few fruit trees (cherry and peach). We have squirrels that think all of this is grown for them and some years they win. They will hop up on my kitchen screen door and yell at me. I am trying to convince my daughter, who learned to shoot and liked it at camp last summer that if she wants to move up to moving targets as she claims, then she should start on our squirrels and I’ll get her a gun just for that. She just rolls her eyes at me and says shooting squirrels is not the same as shooting skeet. She truly is a little lady.
I love to read. My husband is pretty convinced we’re going to die in a crushing avalanche of shoes and books. He tries to keep me on a no-net gain of both of those and so far is only successful on the shoe part. He says I get a certain glow when I buy a new pair of shoes. Also, if I have the mini-me with me, she will rat me out if I made a shoe purchase around her. I’ve been known to keep a new pair of shoes in the box, hidden in the closet and he STILL can tell I bought a new pair. But books, I have books on everything. We are big do-it-yourself-ers, so we have books on that. I have quite the cookbook collection. Novels out the wazoo. I love British Chick Lit, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Louisa May Alcott, Anne of Green Gables, John Steinbeck and more, but I have never read the Twilight series. I just refuse to. I read the Anne Rice vampire books. One vampire series is enough. Pat got me a kindle for Christmas, hoping that this would mean maybe I’d get rid of some books. HA!
I am often called ‘crafty’ because I sew and knit. I am fascinated by quilting and the mini-me thinks this needs to be ‘our’ new thing, but honestly, I have enough trouble finishing any project besides dinner in a timely fashion – a quilt will take me freaking forever. I have been working on a sweater for my husband for over a year. Most of my knitting gets done on roadtrips, at soccer practice and watching tv. College football & basketball season are prime knitting times. I have a hard time sitting still, I definitely have a hard time sitting and doing nothing, so knitting fixes that for me. Also, you can drink and knit much easier than you do anything else while drinking. I like being productive, even if I have just sat on my rear and watched college football all day long. Knitting gives me something to show for that.
At one point, I ended up with a monthly wine column for a lovely local publication that is no longer. I will sometimes write about wine on here (some of my regular readers are still waiting on my post about Riesling and it’s coming, I just have a wee bit more research to do…). Despite this, I still claim to not know a whole lot about wine. But I like it.
My living room is painted orange and contains a purple velvet sofa with leopard print throw pillows. I mention this because every time someone new comes to our house, they walk in and stop to take it all in. I love color, even though I tend to wear black as much as possible. (It’s very slimming and forgiving of how much food I spill on myself. I don’t eat a meal that I don’t wear.) Those also happen to be my favorite colors – purple, orange and leopard print.
When I’m not babbling on here, digging up my yard, volunteering at school, running my girl scout troop or any of the other things that keep me running all day long, I have a small home-based business I started last year, where I provide home-cooked-meals-to-go for busy working people. It’s slowly growing by word of mouth, which keeps the growth manageable. I cook the way I cook for my own family, because I do feed my family the same thing – there is an emphasis on local, organic, whole grain & primarily vegetarian. We don’t eat alot of meat because I don’t like to touch it when it’s raw. What meat we do eat, we normally tend to be a on first name basis with, because we have a number of friends that raise livestock. The pig that is on my header is currently in my freezer.
And that is probably much more than you’ve ever wanted to know about me. I tend to blog about all of the above, as well as how much I avoid cleaning my house. Two bathrooms seemed like a good idea at the time, but having two bathrooms means you have to clean two bathrooms. Ugh.
Here are the rest of the bloggers. Go check some out and see if you can’t find some fun new blogs to follow.
Here’s the thing.
I find I write blog posts while I’m doing other things, mostly cooking, although it’s a good time killer when you are waiting on the floor to dry after mopping or babysitting the printer (because no matter what, my printer demands I sit next to it whenever I print ANYTHING or it will somehow screw up, then becoming an hour long study in frustration as to what the heck is going on with that thing and just when I am about to go all Office Space on it, it suddenly starts working again) or to avoid doing things, like cleaning the house or laundry. The batteries on my camera died last weekend, and I’ve been too lazy to run out to get new ones, so everything I’ve thought about blogging, like uhm, the latest scarves I’ve knitted, or what’s happening in my garden right now, has required me to run out and get camera batteries to either capture the moment or move the pictures from my camera to my computer. And since I generally have something on the stove at the moment I’m inspired, or, it’s late at night, I’m waiting for the big yellow angel to swing by and drop miss thing off, there’s always a reason to not drop everything and run right out.
What’s particularly sad about this is that just today, I drove not just right past the K-mart, but cut through the parking lot TWICE on my way elsewhere. Sadder yet, I have driven by it several times this week, as it’s right next to my current frenimy, Whole Foods, which I go to at least 3 times a week, because you know, they need me to. (Sort of like how Eloise was needed to oversee so many events at The Plaza.) Also, I have decided it’s the closest grocery store to my house, other than Reid’s, which I consider more a convenience store/butcher shop. When one has X number of errands to complete in X amount of time, I don’t always feel like adding one. more. stop. I am lazy like that. So, I drive through the Kmart parking lot without stopping.
It’s not like I’ve been that lazy all around – I’ve been cooking up some tasty morsels, sneaking in a little bit of gardening here & there despite the fact that it’s technically still winter and we got a bunch of snow while we were out of town last weekend and yes, mopping floors and doing laundry. I moved the vacuum cleaner yesterday – AND turned it on. Here’s a small confession – our vacuum really doesn’t have a good home that’s out of sight. We are slightly closet challenged here, so I use my mother’s old trick of just leaving it lying out in the middle of a room, so it always appears as if I am in process of cleaning. Of course, when it sits in that spot for 2 weeks right by the front door, it gets obvious that I’m not actually cleaning, so sometimes I just move it from room to room. Sometimes, in that process, it actually will get plugged in, turned on and used. Yesterday was one of those days. Honestly, no matter how much I vacuum or not, there is always glitter all over my floor. I think little girls off-gas it. Seriously. It is all over my house, even in my car. My house breeds glitter dust.
I almost made time to grab batteries yesterday so I could take pictures of my Girl Scouts doing a craft project, but then got nervous that if I was prepared to capture moments, they’d be their usually needy selves when it comes to crafts. Over the years I’ve learned that what the Girl Scouts say are age appropriate crafts turn out to be anything but. Or, if they are age appropriate, it’s with a one on one adult to child ratio. We’ve had some epic craft fail and I blame the Girl Scout Handbook for each one. It also taught me the lesson the hard way to run through every project ahead of time, especially the ones that look easy, because they are the ones that get you the most. Yesterday was different though – I don’t know if it’s because my girls have gotten big enough to do things on their own or if it’s because the project was fairly easy (Paper Beads), but they did an outstanding job yesterday. I probably have the only Girl Scout troop out there that avoids craft projects – honestly, I hate the kids making stuff to just bring home and clutter up the house more, just for the sake of making something. I don’t want that stuff in my house, so I’m not going to do it. We also don’t sell cookies. We are sort of a slacker Girl Scout troop, but it works for us. I make all the parents take turns helping, so we are all in agreement on how things go. If anyone wants to see something done, then they get to be the ones to make it happen. I feel that’s very democratic, yes?
In the immortal words of Scarlett O’ Hara, Tomorrow is another day. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find some time to swing by and get me some camera batteries. You know, in between all my other activities. ‘Til then…..
That was a good week.
Thanks everyone, for all the love for last week’s posts. Last Monday was most certainly a very good day, for when I had gotten home from that estate sale, in my inbox was the notification that my long awaited piece in Women we Love was going to run on Wednesday. As if that wasn’t enough, there was also an email saying that Bingo Night that I had put together at school the previous Friday was the biggest Bingo Night our PTO had ever had, with a record breaking fundraising total. I was feeling pretty darn tooting proud of myself.
This Monday was a little different, as I woke up to discover we were out of coffee. Oh well.
I got a good number of congrats on the success of my business with the “Women We Love” piece and while I am thankful for the good wishes, to be perfectly honest, the business still has quite a ways to go. There are certifications and licenses to be had and recipes, packaging and delivery methods to be perfected…..it’s a little overwhelming at times. And always, that little voice in the back of my head asking, am I really up to this? Learning to shut that voice up is a job in itself. I just keep putting one foot in front of the other and see where the road takes me.
After months of ignoring invites, I finally joined Pinterest this morning. I keep hearing it’s a time suck and I really do not need any more of that, but I’m hoping it will help organize all these recipe links I keep saving in various folders on my computer. Perhaps a little bit of method to the madness? One can only hope.
I think I might make these for my Valentines this year. Last year I made them in full size muffin cups and they were downright decadent. I’m going to go for mini muffin tins this year, so we can eat them in one pop. We do celebrate Valentine’s around here, maybe not in a full blown chocolates, flowers & jewelry sort of way, but it is a special day for us.
In the meantime though, there are bathrooms to be cleaned and floors to be mopped and I swear, laundry breeds while we are sleeping at night. Just when I think it’s caught up, I’m wrong. Sigh.
The Liebster.
Andrea over at Meandering the Maze bestowed the Liebster Award upon me recently. Thank you Andrea, I’m honored. For the longest time, I kept quiet about my blog, not knowing which direction I wanted to really head in with it. I started blogging following an exceptionally craptastic year where I lost my crafting mojo. At the first glimmer of it’s return, I had the idea that maybe if I started a blog, it would help that mojo stick around and maybe even inspire it. The fact that anyone likes to read my babble leaves me feeling sort of ‘ah shucks’. Really. Thank you.
“Liebster” is a German word meaning dearest, beloved or favorite, and the Liebster Award is sort of a chain letter among bloggers that’s intended to showcase exceptional up-and-coming blogs (typically, those with 200 or fewer followers). Now, there’s no evaluation committee or formal award process for the Liebster, but in a way it’s even nicer – it’s recognition that a peer has noticed and appreciated your hard work.
So, in receiving this award, I’m supposed to thank Andrea and pass it along to 5 others. They in turn are supposed to pass it along. Without further ado, five of my favorite blogs.
1. From Prada to Payless – Just your average American family, finding themselves living paycheck to paycheck, facing foreclosure, wondering how all their hard work has landed them there. Erin is honest, eloquent and real.
2. Savannah – Savannah is a rock star. Not just your average college student with a talent for photography, Savannah’s list of good works is long, starting with THON as well as her own foundation, The Jedediah Thomas Smith Foundation in honor of her late brother. How many 20 year olds do you know with their own foundation? She’s a do-er.
3. The View from Indigo House – Leni says she’s lived her life backwards, having had several careers before going to college. She’s raised chickens, pigs, ducks as well as children and can milk a cow. She teaches and muses about food, gardens, culinary history, rural life, among other things. She also can be found over at the Monticello blog where she has a monthly series on Jefferson era recipes.
4. Make it stop – While working on her novel, Vikki keeps us entertained with tales of motherhood, book reviews and social commentary. (She’s also my Cville Swaps cohort.). She makes some wicked French Chocolate Granola too.
5. Makin’ Projiks – Sweet crafts, sweet thrift scores, sweet holiday decorations for all seasons and even sweeter kiddos. Sarah may actually own more vintage linens and Christmas ornaments than me. I love seeing her latest projects and her latest scores.
All of these women, many of whom I am honored to call friend outside of the blog world, inspire and touch me in many ways. They are all smart, funny, talented women who shoot straight from the hip. Definitely my kind of gals.
Thanks again Andrea!
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 