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.

Our favorite room.

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We have this room on the back of our house that when most people enter, they immediately fall in love with.
We call it the sunroom. 
It is three walls of 4′ tall windows. 
Considering the room has a ceiling height of 7’6″, that’s alot of window.
The windows are old steel casement windows. Some of the don’t quite shut anymore, some don’t open anymore.  They are quite simply glass and metal and energy efficient is not one of their qualities, so we can only use the room three quarters of the year.  But for those three quarters of the year, it’s lovely. And the quarter of the year we can’t use it?  Well, it still gets used, just not in the same way.  That’s when things start collecting out there, because I can throw something back there, shut the door and out of my eyesight it goes. It also works as a fantastic walk-in fridge when it’s cold enough.
It’s really sort of a glorified porch, one that stays dry. The room faces south, with windows on both the east and western walls.  It has a glider sofa, glider chair, stereo and ceiling fan, everything you need to hang out.  Every spring I deep clean it, wiping down the floors, walls, ceiling, getting rid of all the dust that accumulates in there, the spider webs, the stuff that collects.  I do a decent job of staying on top of that room the portion of the year we use it, but then, every spring when we first open the room back up, I am taken aback by the state of things.  Stashing things you don’t know what to do with and closing the door can add up.
In the last few years, Edie’s art supplies have found themselves a home out there, so there is now an easel and bins of paints, pastels, crayons and other implements of artistic endeavors out there. She works out there year round, not letting the chill bother her. I have to say, having just spent the last 24 hours cleaning it and putting it freshly laundered slipcovers back on the furniture, it is a dreamy space.

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.

Tabouli, with a twist.

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I find tabouli to be one of those things you can toy with in many ways and still have it come out scrumptious every time.  With the weather leaping over early spring into what feels like early summer, I have been wanting lighter dinners, like salads.  Tabouli is actually sort of perfect this time of year, as my herb garden is springing back to life, offering fresh mint, parsley and chives. 
Tabouli is a salad that is basically a grain, tossed with olive oil, lemon, parsley and mint, rounded out with vegetables. Traditional tabouli is made with primarly tomatoes, bulghur wheat, onions & garlic. I’ve used a variety of grains, ranging from couscous, quinoa, millet to barley in lieu of bulghur.  Even my traditional tabouli has been known to have some cheese (feta or fresh mozzarella is quite nice), and black olives.
Last week, I was in the mood for some tabouli, but seeing how it’s not tomato season, I felt the urge to get creative with it.  And that is how I came up with ‘Other Side of the Mediterranean Tabouli’.  I plumped up some dried tomatoes with white wine, threw in some marinated artichoke hearts, black olives and feta and tossed it with quinoa, mint, chives, parsley, salt, pepper, lemon juice and olive oil.  I served it on a bed of arugula, fresh picked from the garden.  A perfect spring dinner.

Chickpeas two ways, gardens and more.

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It started with this recipe.  Mock tuna salad made with chickpeas?
Had to try it.  You should try it.  It’s good.  I was surprised at how much the flavor resembled tuna salad.  Texture not so much, but flavor, yes.  I made it the way I make my tuna, right down to chopped pickles.  In this case, pickled okra. So good.  You should try that in your next whatever salad you make.  I am definitely thinking of trying my lemon basil green bean pickles in my next batch.
Up next was something that caught my eye over at E.A.T. (Which incidently is fast becoming one of my favorite food blogs, I’ve gotten a few great ideas from there recently and since it’s a Richmond blog, that’s practically local!)  I digress…
Spicy Carrot Sandwich– That had my carrot loving girl’s name all over it. Only, as I was making the hummus to go with, I added too much liquid. Necessity being the mother of invention as they say, I had to get creative with the sandwich idea, as my hummus was just a little too thin to stay on a sandwich.
I borrowed a trick from the first chickpea recipe and made the spicy carrot sandwich in rice papers.  I added sprouts and romaine and we feasted.
They liked it.
And no one complained we had chickpeas for dinner two nights in one week. 
That’s pretty huge. 
Especially when you consider it was chickpeas in rice paper wrappers, twice.
I represented Edie’s school at a meeting of the city elementary schools with the schoolyard garden folks at Buford Middle School yesterday afternoon.  It seems all the elementary schools here in Charlottesville City are in different stages of starting up gardens.  There was a group of students from the University of Virginia who are involved in different aspects of some of these schoolyard gardens, including a group that is helping to develop curriculum that ties what the kids are doing outside into things like S.O.L.’s, Virginia’s standardized tests.  Some of them are headed to California this summer, to see Alice Water’s Edible Schoolyard and gleam some ideas from there. There is going to be a celebration/fundraiser for the city elementary gardens in May – I may have volunteered to help with that.  I also asked about a garden at Walker Upper Elementary.  With every elementary school now developing a garden as part of the curriculum, as well as Buford’s garden, there is a two year gap for the kids in 5th and 6th grade at Walker.  I was told there is a plan for that and so I may have offered to help with that as well, since I will be a parent there next year.  Yes, I may have a problem with volunteering for too many things, but this is something I believe in so much – teaching kids about food, how to grow it, to think about where it comes from….it’s so exciting to be a part of and make change happen.  This is one of the big ways I truly think we are going to change our food system.
Speaking of schools and food, you might want to check out this month’s Chew on This potluck. It’s my friend Ivana‘s latest initiative, to get us talking about food issues.  This month is a conversation on her recent visit to the DC Central Kitchen and is it possible to bring something like that here.  Sadly, Wednesdays are my jam-packed days with things like Girl Scouts and piano lessons and I won’t be able to make it. But you should go, definitely.
And on a completely unrelated note, Pat superglued my glasses yesterday, so they are a little more stable than just the duct tape fix.  I do love that man of mine.

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.