Cozy Day

Moxie has the right idea.  I walked into the living room this morning and found her just like this, all ensconced in her cushion and blanket cave.

It did indeed snow this weekend, so it's a good thing I saved those raspberries. We also lost power in the middle of the night. I'm told there were flashes of light and popping sounds when a few misfit branches, weighted down with snow, fell on the power lines outside our window. I was sound asleep and blissfully unaware.

We were all geared up for an adventure day (complete with coffee made over a camp stove!), but the fridge whirred back to life at about 10:30. 

That's ok.  An adventure day with a football game is fun too.  And the furnace is working again, so Moxie can go back to her regular perch on the back of the couch, blanket-free.

From the garden: golden raspberries

We're supposed to get 3 to 6 inches of snow tonight.  Snow, people.  Snow. In October.

I figured I'd salvage the last one or two golden raspberries from the garden, to freeze and then toss in a bag with the others we've picked since August.  Freezing them in the freezer is of course preferable to freezing them inadvertently on the vine.  The plants apparently didn't get the memo about it being decidedly not ripening weather these days, because a whole slew of them were ready and just begging to be saved.

In related news: what does one do with about a cup and a half of frozen golden raspberries?  It's not nearly enough to make jam, but they're already frozen, so not great for putting on cereal or the like.

Any ideas?

we're ready for shoveling season now

How awesome is The Awesome Husband? He patched and sealed the driveway -- and did a fantastic job -- kind of awesome.

I don't have pictures of the finished product because it's raining and, honestly, it just looks like a new driveway. Pictures of a looks-like-new driveway aren't exciting. *Having* a looks-like-new driveway is exciting, but the pictures would be boring.

Shots of the patching materials, though, now that's a whole other story. More fun than a barrel of monkeys, amiright?

(I'd just like to point out that the blindingly yellow shed in that middle photos isn't ours. The one with the metal eagle on the door? Yep. Ours. But not ol' lemony fresh over there.)

time warp

Is it weird to do a more thoughtful, introspective blog post on a Friday afternoon? It feels out of place when the rest of the internet is all "gah, I can't think anymore. here, look at this picture of a kitten in a hat!"

For a while now I've been trying to figure out why The Awesome Husband and I never seem to have enough time. We don't see friends and family as often as we like because we're constantly feeling like any precious free time needs to be spent decompressing and de-stressing. It's especially perplexing because we don't have children to look after (the pup is a lot of work, but I'm sure kidlets are a whole other ballgame), and The Awesome Husband isn't currently working 40 hours most weeks. Running the household should not be this hard.

I had an epiphany, though, as I was feeding boneless pork chops through a food mill to be ground up and turned into filling for baked egg rolls. In one sense, we live as though it's 1954. Obviously, I don't mean that our lives are 1954-esque in the sense of a wife maintaining the home while her husband goes off to work. Around here, the reverse if the norm more often than not. And I definitely don't mean it in the sense of getting all dressed up for dusting, because really, who dusts these days?

We tend to be a bit retro, though, when it comes to how we get things accomplished around the house. We try to live in accordance with our values (frugal/healthy/environmentally sustainable), so we do things like dry our laundry outside in the summer, reserving the dryer for rainy or cold weather. We grow a lot of our own vegetables, watering the garden from a rain barrel rather than a hose hooked up to the water supply. We make pretty much all of our own food -- not to the level of churning our own butter or anything, but we certainly don't buy a lot of processed or otherwise "convenient" foods (sliced bread, bran cereal, and granola bars are about the extent of it in a normal week). There's never been a dishwasher in our kitchen, and when our microwave died a couple years ago, we purposefully never replaced it.

For the most part these are all things we do happily and by design.* We don't really take anything to the point where it becomes unpleasant. I mean, if the tomato plants have a bad year, we just go out and buy tomatoes at the store. We're lucky like that. But there's nothing like a salad made entirely out of vegetables that you grew -- or our really low utility bills, for that matter.

The catch, though, is that a lot of this stuff takes extra time. Science and technology as a sociological catalyst, allowing households to run more efficiently and thus freeing up time for both spouses to work: that's great in theory, unless you opt out of many of those time-saving advances. And when one spouse works part time while the other works more than 40 hours a week, it's essentially the equivalent of having both people working, which of course is the expectation now for households without small children.

I suspect there may not be an actual solution here. I mean, there's very little chance that we'll just up and decide to have frozen pizza for dinner every night to save time. No way, no how. I'll have the pesto and spinach stuffed pork chops with bakes sweet potato fries, thankyouverymuch. (Did I forget to mention as one of our core values that we love-love-love good food?)

It is nice, though, to come to this realization that we're tired and we don't have as much time as we'd like because we're living the lives we want to live. It's so much better than thinking "what is WRONG with us?"



*The exception? Dishes. Oh man, the dishes. We would install a dishwasher in a heartbeat if we could.

he's such a good sport

It's been ages since I've posted anything about knitting, eh? For much of the summer, I was working on a sweater for The Awesome Husband as an anniversary gift. I wanted it to be a surprise so I didn't blog about it, obviously, and I didn't work on it when he was in the house. I learned something this summer: he and I don't spend a whole lot of time apart from each other when I'm not working. Certainly not enough time to knit a sweater in less than two months, anyway. So it wasn't ready on time, and -- Awesome Husband that he is -- he didn't make me feel bad about it.

He was also awesome enough to let me take a few pictures now that it's finally complete and wearable.

For those of you who still check in hoping for some knitting chatter, I used a pattern called Joukahainen. The ravelry page is here. You don't need to be a ravelry member to see the pattern here.

... But you do need to know Finnish.

the holy grail of lazy gardening

So I'm a lazy gardener. All other things being equal, I prefer to grow perennial flowers that I won't have to plant each year. I'll make more of an effort for vegetables because there's a tangible benefit involved (yes, I think of edible food as a more valid benefit than "oh, those flowers are pretty"), but I still prefer things that can be planted directly in the ground with no need for transplanting or otherwise fussing. Don't get me wrong, I definitely enjoy gardening. I find weeding to be oddly calming. I just prefer to get as much benefit for my work as possible.

This year, we had something in the garden that's even better, even lower maintenance than tossing seeds on the ground, watering, and waiting: a volunteer cherry tomato plant.

This thing grew in the flower garden on its own. We didn't plant it, we didn't plan for it, and we certainly didn't put in any effort for it. All we did was put some compost aound the asparagus (yes, the asparagus lives in the flower garden -- it's a perennial, so it doesn't live in the raised beds with the other veggies), and this cherry tomato plant was so determined that it presumably grew from a stray seed that hadn't decomposed.

A plant that provides edible food without a speck of effort required on my part is my kind of plant.

And as a bonus, it's pretty cute:

fall has arrived

Guess how I know?  When I got home from work today, Mr. Cecil and The Awesome Husband were getting home from their afternoon walk, and both of them were wearing a coat.

Sadly, one of them was moving around too much to get a better picture than this. 

The Awesome Husband really needs to learn how to calm down...

I'm a shining star.

I've had sort of a perfect storm of stress going on recently - nothing insurmountable or even very difficult in the grand scheme of things, but enough to take the wind out of my sails a bit.

- I injured my foot a month ago, and while it's almost completely better, I haven't been able to go running since the beginning of September.  I could have done strength or core work instead, but I didn't.   Whoops.

- The Awesome Husband has been going to work several days a week.  I'm PSYCHED for him and for our bank account, but the transition is unpleasant.  Change isn't always fun, especially when that change is "and now you have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, potentially to wash dishes."

- My own work situation is stressful.  I like the people I work with, but the nature of the work can be frustrating. 

-Cecil reminds us often that, while he's making progress, he's still a pretty neurotic puppy.  I have to make an effort to remain calm when I'm around him so he doesn't perceive my angst as a sign that he should be concerned and, for example, start barking because -- alert the media! -- there's another dog outside.  It's exhausting and, in light of the above, not always doable.  He's a very good dog. We just want to help him be a better and happier dog, and there have been steps backward.

- I'm not sleeping very well.  Because, of course, insomnia on top of all this is just what I need.

So I've been in a bit of a funk. 

And you know what that calls for? A little Earth Wind & Fire Pandora station. Funk to help with the funk.

Oh yeah.