Snow and a Sweater

Otherwise known as an account of the past week of my life. First, here's our house last Saturday morning after 22" fell on it in less than 24 hours....

And here's our road looking to the east...

And to the west...

And here are my front shrubberies...

Did you say shrubberies??

And here is our neighbors' back yard...

Our neighbors are retired and are spending two months in Florida. Our neighbors are smart.

And here is my 5' 6" daughter standing in snow up past her knees...

She looks...happy. Kids. Sheesh. :}

And here is my husband doing his best to plow out the driveway, using our daughter as ballast to keep the tractor from slipping. (It should be noted that our son was actually an hour away, up in the mountains, for SNOW CAMP with the youth group. Ha! They picked the right weekend for that, lemme tell ya!)

She was having fun here, too. Him? Not so much.

And here is a car-shaped lump that would in fact be formed over my car...

And here is my actual car after I spent two hours Saturday afternoon digging it out from its snowy tomb.

Yes, digging...with a shovel...because there would have been no way for the husband to get the tractor in and around my car up there in its spot. But hey! All these months of kickboxing have definitely paid off because it turns out I'm in GREAT shape! Didn't get too tired or sore at all from the shoveling experience!

Indeed, by mid-afternoon Saturday, the snow stopped coming down, the sun came out, and it all looked very pretty...

No? Yes!

Being snowed in makes for excellent knitting time, and knit I did, finishing my Eyelet Cardigan...

I lurve it sooooo much!

Even though I have a slight linebacker-ish look to me from behind...yikes...

My butt! My butt! Where is my butt?? Alas, I inherited the buttless gene that seems to pass down to females on my mom's side of the family. We are buttless women, we are.

Had the perfect pewter buttons for it in my stash, too. How awesome is that?

Pay no attention to the fact that I cannot evenly space buttonholes to save my soul.

And look! I was not the only red thing outside! I finally got a semi-decent picture of a Cardinal with a snowy background (this has been an ongoing quest of mine for a long time)...

All in all, it's been a good week...other than the fact that I am now going stir-crazy and really MUST get out of my house SOON if I am to salvage what sanity I still possess.

The snow is either smiling at me or sticking out its tongue at me. I'm not sure which.

Where'd the week go?

Seriously! It was here a minute ago! Huh. 

Well...this was our second week of summer vacation, and much like the first, I seem to have gotten very little of importance accomplished. This trend must change. Soon. I'm just sayin'.

There was some knitting, of course (but no pictures of it yet because it is all uninteresting to look at right now), and the normal house stuff, and one day I really went all domestic and baked scones not once but twice (cinnamon chip scones in the morning, cheddar dill scones for dinner). And there was the gym...I even sparred two nights and the second night I kick-sparred for the first time. Boo-yah! That was fun! And it counts as something important! LOL

Oh, we had wildlife going on here this week! Can't remember if I mentioned that my bird feeders have been getting ransacked a lot, so I finally took them down. Kevin suspected a bear. I thought it was probably deer. Turns out, it was most likely this guy...

...here he is tearing apart our recycling on Monday night. It's bad enough to have a raccoon around, but to have an evil, laser-eyed raccoon...that's far worse, don't you think? About five minutes after he scurried off, an opossum showed up to mess with the recycling some more! Crazy!

But the raccoon had friends, and the whole bunch showed up on the front porch a little later the same night and helped themselves to the bag of bird food I hadn't put away...

Can you see all three of them? One is behind the bird food bag, the other is behind the post. They could have cared less that I was a mere three feet away (inside, safely behind the storm door), sticking my hand with the camera outside to take pictures. I've since removed the bird food from the porch and after one more night when they met with disappointment at the lack of a buffet, they don't seem to have returned.

Let's see...what else? Oh, Kevin and I celebrated our 16th anniversary on Friday! Sixteen years...it seems simultaneously like a long time and not very long at all, you know? We went out to dinner on Saturday night to mark the occasion. 

Then today was an active day. After church, the four of us headed out to Boyce Park for an orienteering event being put on by the Western Pennsylvania Orienteering Club which, before yesterday, I didn't even know existed. I also didn't know that this particular flavor of orienteering (as opposed to the orienteering my husband has done with the Boy Scouts) is actually a competitive sport in some parts of the world, like Norway. Who knew? Not me! 

Here's the hubby and the girlie at the beginning of our course. We did the beginner course. He's showing her how to use the map and compass...

The kids and I took turns navigating to the check points. I was the only one who got us off track and we had to backtrack to find a check point we'd missed. Here's Christopher punching our control card at one of the check points. They were all marked with those cool, triangular box things (which they referred to as flags).

Then here is photographic evidence that Kevin and I actually went out and did a recreational activity together, as it happens so infrequently. Our chosen forms of recreation just don't overlap all that much (me - concerts, the gym, knitting; him - tractors, tractors, tractors). LOL

And yes, Kevin's shirt says, "I do everything the voices (in my wife's head) tell me to." He said the lady who was at the register at Home Depot this afternoon was a little offended by the shirt and asked him if his wife knew he was wearing it. "She bought it for me!" he said. She was apparently not amused. LOL 

Later today, Kevin decided to give Emma grass-mowing lessons. She's driven tractors before, but she was totally freaking out over having to do it on our hill in the back yard. Granted, it feels more slopey than it really is when you're on the tractor, but there's no way the tractor is going to roll or anything. He finally persuaded her to give it a try, and she did pretty well...

...that's my girl! And those are our big gardens down below her. The main one is on the left there, with most of the veggies in it, and on the right, in a smaller patch, is where the potatoes, sweet potatoes and some peppers are planted. So far, everything seems to be doing well. I've been diligent about going down to check on stuff, and Kevin and the kids have been keeping after the weeds and such. My little salad garden has been yielding onions and radishes, and this week I should be able to pick the first of our lettuce and spinach! And one of my cherry tomato plants has three baby tomatoes on it already! I'm so excited. 

Ok, I promise the next post will have some knitting in it. Really. With at least one picture.

Mice and holes...

First the mice, because they're cute...

...catnip mice, made using Wendy's pattern. Very quick knit, excellent way to use up leftovers, and perfect for giving your favorite feline a little fun! I knit these two simultaneously, which always makes things go faster. (I really should learn how to do two socks at a time with magic loop!) My secret for stuffing these is putting the catnip inside a piece of old knee-high and tying it off with a little extra space (cutting off the extra length, because really, the mice only need two or three tablespoons of catnip to fill them) and stuffing the mouse with it. Despite knitting these at a very tight gauge, I can't imagine it holding in loose catnip without the extra barrier of the knee-high. These mice are for a friend's kitties, who I'll be meeting tomorrow. :)

Also on the knitting front, I finished my May charity hat today. I haven't added any more border to the afghan, though, because my hands were starting to protest all of that garter stitch, especially as the afghan is getting heavier to hold the bigger it gets...figured it would be good to give the hands a little rest. We knitters must learn to be kind to our hands, and taking a break from big projects by working on other things that use different weight yarn and different sized needles is one way to do that. (End public service announcement.)

And now for the holes...not mouse holes, but holes in my veggie plants!

Here is one of my otherwise healthy tomatillo plants (look at the blooms!), but do you see all those little white spots on the leaves? They're actually holes. These holes are also present in my tomatoes, radishes, beets, lettuces, cukes and several of my flowers. They don't seem to be killing the plants, but they look nasty. My online research into the issue leads me to believe it is a case of flea beetles, so now I'm trying to figure out the best way to deal with them. Sevin would probably be quickest, but I'm looking into some natural options too.

Otherwise, the salad garden looks pretty healthy!

Everything is growing at this point...the spinach and the herbs have been the slowest to get going, but the spinach is now finally starting to sprout its secondary leaves, which look much more spinach-like than the first ones, which just looked like grass. The radishes are going crazy. The onions are popping up by the inch as I watch, it seems. My cherry tomato plants are starting to develop little flowers (yeay!). The herbs? Well, they're being contrary. (I wonder if Mary, Mary was contrary because she was trying to grow stubborn herbs? Or maybe she had flea beetles eating her plants?*) Only small bits of the parsley and dill are up, and I'm not sure if the basil is actually up or not, or if those are just weeds I'm seeing. Thyme Time will tell. ;)

On the other side of the house, the flowers are doing their thing, too...

...two great big pink peony blossoms...

...and the dianthus is looking quite happy. We like happy plants.

*Ok, so I can't help but Google weird things today (like why a haymaker punch is called a haymaker, but that's a different story)...just when you think a nursery rhyme is just innocently contemplating flowers in a garden, you find this interpretation of it...well, ew! The Wikipedia entry for it offers some other interpretations, including additional Mary, Queen of Scots/Bloody Mary lore. Apparently Mary had more issues than flea beetles.

Epiphanies! Breakthroughs! Ah-ha moments!

Whatever you want to call 'em, I've been having 'em lately!

First, drop spindling. Seriously. I've been trying to learn to spin with a drop spindle for a couple of years now, and I have had very limited success. I do more dropping than spinning, and what gets spun isn't pretty. Still, I keep a spindle sitting in plain sight in my bedroom, and a little bump of fiber nearby, and every once in a while, I pick it up and give it a try, usually yielding the same old disappointing results.

Yesterday? I looked at it, and even before I picked it up, I just KNEW I had figured out what I was doing wrong. No idea how I knew that, and I'm not sure I can even put it in words, but I was right. I spun the loveliest, finest (think lace weight!), most consistent singles I've ever spun with a spindle. Incredible!

The only thing I can credit this epiphany to is something Amy said to me about spindling when I got to talk to her at MS&W, and then something Cosy said to me on Saturday when we were walking around the fiber show in Ohio. I can't even remember what their comments were exactly, but the essense of them must have been working on my subconscious, though if I had to categorize what I'm doing differently, I'd have to say it has to do with how I'm drafting the fiber, but I really can't explain it more than that. Whatever it is, I'm happy about it, and I am finally starting to see what makes people so happy about drop spindles even though they've got perfectly good spinning wheels sitting there. It's nice to have options.

My second breakthrough is pretty mundane...it has to do with my clotheslines. Yes. Clotheslines. See, I love hanging my sheets out to dry, and to this end we've always had clothesline poles in the small, flat area of our backyard (as opposed to the rest of our back yard, which is pretty much a hill). One end of the clothesline attaches to the pole, and the other end attaches to the house. The thing is, when my husband has one of the larger tractors here for some sort of destruction home improvement project, he needs to drive the tractors through this narrow, flat area, and he always takes my clotheslines down to do so (which is, admittedly, preferable to him garotting himself on them). But once they're down, they rarely go back up, and thus ends my open-air sheet drying for the summer.

But this year, I had an epiphany! Bungee cords!

See them there at the pole ends? I tied the clotheslines to the bungee cords, and now any time he needs to take them down, it will be easy-peasy, and I can put them back up again with no hassle. (And see the orange foot sticking out from under the yellow tarp to the left of the clotheslines? That would be the current tractor that is residing here, which is responsible for doing this to the lower part of our driveway...

This mess is brought to us by the intention of improving the drainage at the bottom of the driveway so the rain doesn't bring a river of mud down it and onto the back porch.

...because, seriously, it just wouldn't be summertime here at Chez Beamer unless some segment of our property was dug up and muddy. At least it isn't a grassy area this year. Yet. :::sigh:::)

Anyway...bungee corded clotheslines. A huge breakthrough in my, smell-good, energy-saving, sheet-drying efforts.

Lastly, a gardening "ah-ha!" moment. (You knew I'd sneak gardening in here, didn't you?) Upon reflecting about how much more I'm enjoying my gardening efforts this year than I have in years past, it occurred to me that one of the things I like least about gardening is that it usually makes me hot and sweaty. And I have always really, really hated the feeling of sweat trickling down my hot body, making my clothes stick to me, and gluing to my skin anything that is flying around -- dirt, bugs...whatever. Ick.

The whole "hate to sweat" thing is also largely responsible for why I've always hated exercising. However! Now that I've been going to the gym for the past six months, and I do nothing BUT sweat there, I seem to have gotten over my sweat phobia! Sure, sweat still feels icky, but I seem to have learned to transcend the sweat in order to reach other goals...such as learning to kickbox, and now, to be a better gardener! So, in essence, going to the gym has improved my willingness to garden! Isn't that interesting? Ok, never mind, maybe not...just look at the pretty flowers and forget I brought it up! ;)

The front corner of my flower bed...prolific lilies abounding, hostas that even God probably can't kill, the transplanted rhododendron from last year that my husband claims is looking healthier than it ever has (I'm not convinced, but it isn't dead, so we'll go with it)...and on the right, coral bells, which I didn't know actually flower because these didn't last year, but they are this year. And in front of the rhodo I added two dianthus (dianthii?) plants to take the place of the two hibiscus (hibiscii?) that did not survive the winter. (I chose the dianthus not only because they should be the right size for this spot, but also in honor of the quirky, half-demon character in Charlaine Harris's southern vampire novels that is named after them...I know, I'm a dork.) And in front of the dianthus are some annuals I bought just to fill in and have color. I can't wait until all this stuff starts to really flourish! :)

Things are growing here...

Yesterday I promised you flowers, and today I deliver!

I must first admit that the flowers I'm about to show you? I can't take much credit for. I put them in the ground at some point, and by the grace of God (and no skill or know-how of my own), they've managed to survive and flourish. If you know how much of a gardener I am NOT, you'd understand just how miraculous this is.

Anyhoo...the rhododendron on the east side of our house is just all agog with purply goodness...

...and now that I think about it, I can't even take credit for planting this bush. It was here when we moved in 15+ years ago. But I haven't killed it! And neither has my husband, a.k.a. The Mad Pruner. This is actually two rather large rhododendrons, and as beautiful as they are, it is sad that they are where they are because we are in this area of our yard the least. It is right by the stoop at our kitchen side door, a door we never use because the stoop has no steps coming down from it. I'm hoping Kevin is going to remedy that this summer. He's actually talking about moving the one bush down near the bottom of our driveway to fill in a spot on a bank that is a bugger for him to mow. He successfully moved another large rhodo last summer without killing it (though it hasn't bloomed this year), so I've given my blessing on this project.

And speaking of purple...


...check it out! I have Siberian Irises! And yes, I say that with a bit of surprise because I didn't know I had Siberian Irises! LOL A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a bunch of perennials that she'd thinned out of her gorgeous flower beds, and these were among them. But last year, the first full year they were in my flower bed, they did not flower, so I assumed they were just greenery. This year...purple blooms galore! I am so, so happy! You have no idea how much I love these flowers.

Then there is my lily corner...

...holy lilies, Batman! These suckers really proliferated, and as usual, I've missed my window of opportunity to divide them and move them around, so they're just going to be a big mass of bunched up lilies this year. They'll be pretty, though. I've got little Stella D'Oros that bloom all pretty and yellow all year, and then there are tall orange ones (Asiatic? I have no idea. I just know I love them.) And then there are some shorter orange ones, and one white one that my oldest son gave me for Mother's Day (or maybe Easter?) one year. And I just picked up two more lilies tonight when I was flower shopping...they're a pretty burgundy shade I've not seen before. I totally heart lilies.

Then I've got these things...


I put them in last year, they survived the winter, but I have no idea what they are. My friend Peggy told me what she thought they were, but she said they bloom, and these did not bloom at all last year. Maybe because I just planted them? Not sure. Anyway. I'm happy they're alive, and they seem to be getting bigger, so that works for me!

What doesn't work for me are these #@$! things...

...again, I don't know what they are, but they are a prolific, spiky, nasty, f***ing pain in the arse and they have popped up EVERYWHERE in my flower beds the past few years. They are nigh impossible to kill. Kevin has resorted to all kinds of noxious weed killers (all while trying not to damage the plants I WANT), and it kills of the leaves, but they grow right back. This year, he got out early and sprayed them. Ordinarily, I'd go out and pull them as soon as they'd start to turn brown, but I didn't get out there this year. By the time I got around to the first batch he's sprayed, they were gone. They'd shriveled to nothing. So I'm thinking maybe that is the key? Don't pull them after they're sprayed, but let them be until the roots (hopefully) die off from the poison too? We'll see. I've been waiting to yank these guys to see if it makes a difference. HATE THEM.

Back to the happy things. It was a gorgeous -- GORGEOUS -- day out today, and I got myself out and planted my little salad garden...

...yeah, I know...it just looks like dirt now, but there are SEEDS planted in that dirt! There are two types of lettuce, spinach, onions, radishes, beets, and cucumbers (I'm into planting small amounts of a lot of things in this garden...we've got a bigger veggie garden down in the back yard with larger quantities of fewer things...it all balances out). At the far end are a couple of cherry tomato and tomatillo plants. Around the corner are herbs...

...there were already chives (which I planted years ago and they come up every year without fair...probably my biggest gardening coup ever) and mint (which I'd transplanted a couple of sprigs from my in-laws' house a few years ago, and it took off and kept going, and going, and going...I regularly rip it out because it just takes over). These are my seemingly unkillable crops, so I love them muchly. To them, I added parsley, basil and dill.

Oh, and the other thing that is growing around here?

Caricia! I think I finished repeat #7 today, though now looking at the picture, it looks like there are only six. Hm. Will have to go look at it and count. It's too big to lay out flat on the 24" needle now, so it's hard to get a good shot.

ETA: Just counted. Seven! Whew! Would have been rough to have to have reversed my count on this project! I'm enjoying it, to be sure, but still...you never really want to go backward when you knit! LOL

Lastly, Nigel says...

"Would someone please remove these hideous weeds from my view? They are quite offensive!"

I couldn't agree more, Nigel. Hm...Nigel's been a little cranky lately. Maybe I need to find him a friend?

Happy Monday!

And yes it is a happy Monday. It is sunny out. The first view I see when I get out bed these days is the hillside to the west of our house, all resplendent in its autumnal glory. (In other words, the trees look darned pretty! LOL) And when the sun is shining on those reds and oranges, well, they're just set on fire and look amazing. 

And, the moon? Wow...I went outside late last night -- the first time I've taken the time to do that in a while, it seems -- and the near-full moon greeted me, shining bright and clear and simply beautiful. I surveyed the constellations and realized it has been a while since I'd been out to pay them a visit, because they've moved significantly. That means, of course, that my much-loved winter sky is creeping closer every night. I'm eagerly awaiting Orion's return to my part of the sky...I watched him all last winter, and he was my touchstone for learning several other constellations. I can't wait for him to come back around.

And it is a happy Monday because I have nothing making me leave my house today. I may voluntarily leave to go to the grocery store, because we need milk and a few other necessities. But otherwise? I'm good to stay home. And other than a couple of other regular outings and hair appointments for the kids on Thursday, our calendar is quite uncluttered this week, and that always makes me very happy. 

The fact that it is a light week schedule-wise gives me hope that I might make some progress in re-organizing the basement. Seriously. With the cold months coming, that place needs a good clean-up and I need to recoup space that the kids can use this winter to get their energy out lest they drive me batty up here! 

Plus, I am dying to get my office/studio-space re-organized. I removed the love seat from the room this weekend (because, really? the only thing that ever sat on it was junk) and replaced it with an old, beat-up conference table. This will give me the horizontal space I need to finally get my yarn all organized into less random collections in the storage containers, and once that is taken care of and I am (hopefully!) able to move around the room a little more, I plan to use that table as designated scrapbooking space. 

I've not scrapped in almost two year, and I really miss it. I have so much stuff (for every obsession there is a stash), even after purging through it a while back and getting rid of tons of materials that I'd collected over the years, and I have so many pictures...I want to get back to it. I figure if I give myself a designated spot in which to do it (because right now, my yarn has mostly displaced my scrap-goods to the nether regions of my space), then perhaps I can use one day a week to scrap. That would be good. And fun!

So...happy Monday to you all. May it be an enjoyable and productive week for us all! :)

P.S. Another Monday happy bit today? I finished a pair of socks for the boy (Rav link) last night, and he immediately put them on and hasn't taken them off. I love that he loves his hand knit socks!

The First Garden...

...as in White House, not Garden of Eden.

The Garden of Eatin': A Short History of America's Garden from roger doiron on Vimeo.

Found this little video through my Local Harvest newsletter...thought it was pretty cool. There are a couple of other fun, insightful videos at this site, too, including this one that is an encouragement for our next president to re-institute a garden at the White House. 

I found it interesting that the decline of White House vegetable gardening (and probably gardens of the general populous) corresponded with the passing of the National Highway Act back in the '50s. Suddenly, our food could travel, so why grow it? Sad.

I have fond memories of our garden when I was growing up. My dad, born in 1918, lived through The Depression era of the 1930s, and even before that, families pretty much just had gardens, at least if they lived in the country, which my dad did. I don't remember my dad ever having a bad gardening year. Ever. I'm sure maybe he did, but all I remember was there were always tomatoes to be canned and cucumbers and fresh lettuce and onions and radishes and eggplant. He was good at the garden, and I love that memory of him.

My husband comes from a family of garden-planters, too. Thus we've always had a garden here at our house. It's usually been his thing, as I do not naturally seem to possess the green-thumb my dad had. I tried this year, though...I had my little salad garden, which was more or less successful in that we did indeed eat salad from it, at least for a while, until the chard when haywire and took over and the weeds then sprung up over night and I was overwhelmed by the whole darned thing. I meant to rip it out mid-season and try again...I got as far as ripping, but I never replanted. But at least I tried!

Our large garden that my husband does wasn't so successful this year, either. Weather issues aside, him breaking his ankle this summer was not helpful. He couldn't keep up with the weeds and he never got the electric fence up. And since we no longer have a dog outside to scare them off, the deer pretty much had a field day romping through the garden and eating off the tops of the pepper plants. And the ground hogs dined well on the tomatoes. 

We did get a good crop of garlic, though, and a few peppers, and there are still potatoes to be dug. Once the tomatoes finally began to ripen, I managed to can a couple batches, but there was a high rate of rot on them this year, so for every one I picked, I probably pitched one or two over the hill. There plants are dying off now, so I need to go down and pick through one last time to glean whatever non-fetid, ripe tomatoes are still on the vines. It's sad to see tomato season end so quickly! 

This year, in addition to our own gardening efforts, we bought a half share of my friend Myrna's CSA. I'm so glad we did this, not only to support her farming efforts, but it was so much fun to have a variety of vegetables to cook with and eat throughout the summer. I'm not sure if we'll do the CSA again next year, not because it wasn't worthwhile, but because I'm hoping Kevin and I can work together to plan a better garden for ourselves. We've got the space to do it, so it seems silly not to.

I'm not a person who closely follows current events, but even someone as news deprived as myself hasn't missed the rumblings about the current economic crisis. I have no idea what the answer to that is...I honestly don't believe that either political party has a foolproof answer to it. Like most major issues, it's not something that happened over night, and there is no quick fix to it. But it is kind of mind-boggling to me that here we are, almost 100 years after The Great Depression, and we seem to be right back in that kind of predicament. That truly sucks.

However, I am one who always tries to look for the positives. Where there is a cloud, there is a silver lining, right? If the current economic situation prompts more people to take a  closer look at their food shopping habits and gets them to consider buying their foods more seasonally and locally or, better yet, growing their own, that would a very good thing for everyone.

So, if you're looking for something to do this winter, why not spend some time planning a garden for your family next spring? You don't need a lot of space. Container gardening is a great option for people without a big yard. And if you have no yard, check into community gardening with others in your area. Or support a local farm by purchasing a share in a CSA (you can find one through the Local Harvest web site). 

Just to get you started, a couple of my favorite gardening books are:

The Garden Primer, by Barbara Damrosch

Four-Season Harvest, by Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch

Friday...

"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air." Galadriel, Fellowship of the Ring.

It's Friday. The last day of my kidless week. It's been a lovely week, but you know what? I'm ready to see my kiddos again. I dreamt about them last night. It's time! I can't wait to hear how their week was. I can't wait to see how camp has changed them, because there are always changes.

It's time for changes, I think. I am sitting here on the back porch, with my coffee and a couple of blueberry biscuits left over from yesterday's bout of domesticity (recipe* courtesy of J. L. at I Live on a Farm). 

In about six months, I will be longing for a day like today.

It is a sunny day, but there is a refreshing cool breeze, and there is hardly even a hint of humidity in the air. It's another gift of a day...a misplaced fall day dropped here ahead of schedule. No complaints from me. I'll take it! 

[Edited: the day turned out to be Irish in nature...beautiful sun and clouds against a blue sky one moment, a rain shower without warning the next. The day went on like this, only enriching its beauty.]

But the autumnal feel to the day makes me think of what is to come. The first full week of August has passed. Neighborhood kids will be heading back to school in just two weeks -- two weeks! I've always kept fairly close to the public school dates in so far as beginning and ending our homeschool year. Last year we started nearly a month early, which was nice, because it allowed us to end early. This year our schedule won't allow for as much of a luxury. Still...we will begin soon. I need to take some time between now and then to get organized.

Autumn also means a busy time outside. With any luck, we'll have tomatoes to can (if they ever decide to ripen at all!). 

[Insert impromtu garden review here...]

I saw a hint of red peeking through the vines today. Hopeful, I picked it, only to see this indignity. Someone had the audacity to bore a hole into our first ripe tomato! The nerve! So I chucked it down over the hill.

The rest of them all look like this. Green, green, green. Perhaps it is only my imagination, but these two look like they're trying to turn. Maybe? Perhaps if they glanced over to their right, they'd be inspired...

...our neighbor's tomatoes seem to have the hang of this ripening thing!

At least there are peppers! Our first two! These aren't exceptionally large peppers, but I was afraid to leave them on the plants any longer lest someone decide to munch on them as well. They'll be perfect for stuffing.

Where we lack tomatoes we make up for it in potatoes! Kevin dug our first basket of potatoes last night, for which I celebrated by making french fries. Around here, it is never potato season, but french fry season, as Kevin insists there are no better fries than those made from freshly dug potatoes. I humor him. To me, grease is grease. :}

Seriously, though, look at the size of this bad boy! He's family-sized! There were two like this!

[Back to our regularly scheduled blog entry now.]

My husband and kids will work every weekend to cut fire wood for both our house and the in-laws' house. I know Kevin has other projects in mind to complete before fall ends. Even if these do not directly involve me, I will play a support role however I can.

As discordant an idea as it might seem, while autumn brings school and harvest and winter preparations to our world, it also brings calm to mine, mentally if not physically. Maybe it is my internal clock that for so many years centered around the school year. September always meant a return to a familiar routine. The details of the routine might change, but the routine itself is still present. And it is a comfort. There is much about fall that I love, but the re-establishment of routine after the laid-back nature of summer is usually at the top of my list.

Things are changing. Like Galadriel, I can feel it in the very air around me. Stay tuned.

*Just a note about this recipe...I tweaked it to use 1 cup whole wheat flour and 1 cup unbleached white flour, which then required closer to one cup buttermilk. I'm trying to add more whole grains to our diet, and this was an easy substitution that still yielded a very tasty biscuit!

P.S. Lest the flowers feel left out, here are a couple gratuitous flora photos...

The coreopsis is finally blooming again!

Doesn't Nigel look happy nestled back behind the Black-Eyed Susans and the purple coral bells? Far happier than he was, I imagine, when he was stranded back in the weeds that were towering over his head earlier this summer! (Yes, we named our gnome Nigel. We're nothing if not alliterative.)