Marie – Page 84

Garden Readying

January 10, 2012 Marie Leave a Comment

Readying? That doesn’t look like a word to me, but whatever.

I picked this little journal up at a local store on clearance last year. It started with an idea from SouleMama’s blog post about having a farm journal in her home to record everything from seed orders to garden plans and such. I thought it was a fantastic idea and a perfect excuse to find a journal (I think I paid $3 for this one?) to write in. As much as I love the internet and blogging, I really enjoy writing in journals.

I placed my big seed order for the garden this morning. Which wasn’t a big seed order after all – just $20 or so. We have a small area, though – not the big farm like I want to own eventually. I’m trying some new veggies this year – our garden has normally been a ‘salsa’ and ‘pickle’ garden, raising tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and onions. This year I’m trying some multi-color corn (for use as decorations and for tortillas, since the description says it can be ground up and used as so) as well as pole green beans and some black beans for soups and stews.

There are trellises to build, seeds to start indoors, and so much more. This year we’re going the vertical route, trying to trellis up as much as we can to maximize space. I love cucumbers and pickling, but one cucumber plant takes up a giant part of the ground space the way we normally do it. I hate that our growing season isn’t as long as some of the blogs I read (I’m talking about you, Californians!). We can’t do anything during these winter months but dream of digging back into the soil after the temperatures rise and the ground thaws. So until then I’m keeping myself busy with everything I can do.

Cake. Redeeming my wasted day.

January 8, 2012 Marie 2 Comments

I needed something to keep myself busy this afternoon. I attempted sewing myself some new pajama pants, only to fail miserably. It takes a special kind of stupid to end up making the top waist area into legs, effectively reversing the entire pant. The project was thrown into a wad in the corner of the closet – I couldn’t bear to look at it any more.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I went to the kitchen to console myself by baking a cake. With a recipe I’ve never made before. With the hope (and maybe a prayer) that I could make something work today. The big challenge: I really need to make a grocery run. So a lot of recipes were out. Too many of them needed a lot of butter, or heavy cream, or whole milk. I had a stick of butter, about a dozen or so eggs, and cream cheese.

So I made do. I used this recipe for the cake. I had powdered sugar, cream cheese, and oranges in my possession, so I attempted a half-assed citrus cream cheese frosting. 1 package of low fat cream cheese, some orange zest, about a 1/4 of an orange’s juice, and probably way too much powdered sugar (maybe 2.5-3 cups?). Seriously, it tastes a little too much like the powdered sugar and has lost its ‘cream cheese’ goodness. With a mild orange flavoring. Icing the cake was, well, cake. It was smooth/supple and spread nicely, and has that pretty drippyness to it over the edges that I like.

I haven’t cut a slice yet, so I can’t vouch for how the cake itself turned out (though it got a lot of great comments/reviews). But at this point I don’t think I give a damn what it tastes like – I just needed something to turn out today and, at least as far as the pictures show, I think I accomplished that.

By Moonlight

January 7, 2012 Marie Leave a Comment

We’re having a ‘partly cloudy’ evening, and it made for a very pretty view of the moon on my drive home from shopping today. I really dislike how dark it gets so early, but Mother Nature does make up for it with some spectacular views sometimes. Laying on the grass in the middle of the summer to look at stars is usually pretty disappointing for me – it always seems like the best views are when I least want to be outdoors – in the middle of winter in the bitter cold.

Those moments

January 6, 2012 Marie Leave a Comment

I have very few things I know in life. Well, I know quite a bit about quite a little. But what I’m talking about here are those feelings – the feeling of knowing you want to be a chef, or that feeling of knowing you’ll spend your life traveling the world. Some people seem to just know what they want.

I, however, do not share this trait. I never seem to know anything except that I don’t know anything. And any time I start thinking I know what I want, I start second-guessing myself. Talking myself out of something. “Is it really what I want?” is usually the beginning of a very long conversation held between me, myself, and I.

But there are these moments. Moments that, I like to think, occur to those like myself because its the universe’s way of telling me that I’m on the right track. That this is the right choice. The right path. The right direction. For me, its the moments that make me smile and giggle with the tiniest tear in my eye – the moments where my heart feels so full.

This, dear readers, was one of those moments.

To you it may look like just a little sewing project, a little quilt. To me, it means so much more. For my complete and utter lack of planning I managed to make something that turned out not just exactly as I hoped it would look – it turned out to be the very, very perfect size for a very, very special wooden cradle. Which, sometime in the future, will hopefully hold a precious little girl’s very own doll, wrapped up in her very own special little quilt. And as soon as I placed the quilt with the cradle and realized how effin’ perfect it is together I realized that this was one of those moments.

Winter perks

January 5, 2012 Marie Leave a Comment

Sometimes being lazy with the gardening has it’s perks.

Last spring I bought some bulbs from the local home improvement retailer. I realize that a. I should have purchased bulbs in the fall and b. I could have gotten a whole bag for what I paid for the potted ones… But it was really a spur-of-the-moment choice.

Failing to plant these babies into the ground in the fall, they sat indoors by a window looking rather pathetic (after all, it was just a plastic container of dirt to anyone who didn’t know better). Until now – now they show signs of life. Signs of growth. Signs of the thing I need most this time of year: reassurance that winter, my least favorite season – made only enjoyable by warm hand knits, will be over before I know it.