fall

Dream house

October 19, 2014 Marie Leave a Comment

I often waver between wanting to stay in town and wanting to be out in the country in the middle of nowhere. I love both ideas, and have a horrible time deciding which I’d rather. This is complicated by the fact that I live on the edge of a really, truly lovely neighborhood with beautiful homes. These days the housing developments I see cropping up are full of cookie cutter-looking homes. They lack character and charm, and I often feel like I’m wandering through a sea of white and beige as I drive through them. Our little neighborhood is filled with lovely homes of various sizes, and walking through is practically park-like with all the large lovely trees.

This house is my dream house. I have always loved and probably will continue to always love it – the landscaping, the brick, the way the two trees flank the door, the way the path curves, the little wooden-with-metal-roof addition… This, dear friends, is probably a house that I will never ever be able to afford (there’s a reason why we live on the edge of the neighborhood). But every time I walk by I like to look at it and dream. The only possible way it could be more perfect is if it was set on a few acres of land out of town. With a sweet little chicken coop to match the style of the house.

Fall harvest

October 13, 2014 Marie 1 Comment

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I finally stopped putting it off. Yesterday was supposed to be around 66 degrees, and the rest of the week cool and rainy. I pretty much had to do it yesterday otherwise I might never get to it before winter. And you can see in the first photo how overgrown everything is – we sucked at weed control this year and we had volunteer tomatoes that the husband let continue to grow instead of hacking them back to keep the garden neat and tidy. Our garden has it’s own eco system of bugs and spiders which, naturally, I have a love/hate relationship with.

I pulled out the carrier and wore the kid in that while I picked tomatoes. At least for a little while before the extra weight of him got to be too much for my knees (this morning we found out he’s 11.5 pounds, so it’s no wonder!). Those tomatoes weren’t supposed to be that small. They were supposed to be San Marzano tomatoes. Clearly, they’re not. I’m highly disappointed, of course. We plant 2.5 beds of tomatoes – one for sauce, one for sandwich tomatoes, and one plant for the tiny salad ones. And you know what we don’t need? 3 plants full of tiny freaking tomatoes! (We also don’t need 2.5 beds of tomatoes, but the husband insists and then I’m left trying to figure out just what I’m going to do with it all.) It looks like I’ll be ordering a new pack of seeds to start this year since the pack from this last year was mislabeled. Ugh.

I’m attempting to dehydrate a batch of the tomatoes to see how they do (either for use in snacks or cooking, we’ll see). Other than that I’m not really sure what to do with them. The peppers will easily get used up – they’re always the thing we use the most of from the garden. The green tomatoes… I don’t even know. You can only eat so many fried green ones. I could maybe freeze them, but then I’d have to admit that I have freezer bags of tomatoes in the deep freezer outside from… 4 years ago? Things go out to that freezer and then end up forgotten about.

We ended up with monster beets this year. Every year I’ve tried to grow them (because I love them very much) and I rarely ever have any success. Most years none of them ever come up. This year 2 came up in the spring, but by then I was so tired and not in the mood to mess with the garden so I ignored it. I figured maybe it would go to seed so I could save seeds for next year (with the idea that maybe, just maybe the seeds would actually grow this time). We never got any seeds from it – instead I ended up with two giant monster beets that I’m not even sure are going to be edible. I haven’t yet attempted to cut one with a knife yet. I’m going to assume they’re woody and gross inside. It looks like two seeds did happen to germinate late in the season, so we have a small and a normal sized beet as well. I feel like I should give up on my beet dreams, but every year I tell myself “this will be the year!” and it never is. Chances are I’ll try to plant beets again next year. And chances are I’ll be incredibly disappointed all over again.

I’m walking into spiderwebs

October 1, 2014 Marie Leave a Comment

… for real. I took the trash out this morning and realized that my rose bush has this giant creation all over it. So I looked around more and found probably 5 more thick webs over other various plants.

I really hate spraying hazardous chemicals around the yard, but it might be time to get some bug spray and spray the foundation of the house. I keep finding big spiders in the house as it is, and it’ll only get worse as the temps get colder. Better to spray now than to feel like I need to nuke the house from orbit!

Darkness, then.

November 24, 2013 Marie Leave a Comment

Fall is far too quickly disappearing, and the dark of winter looms behind. My beautiful sunlight is going away, there is nothing left to tend in the garden, and the holidays are fast approaching. I leave for the workday in a bit of morning light, and I drive home in the tail end of sunset. Short days and long nights make for what feels like a long winter.

Everything here feels so lethargic. Everything feels like it takes longer – I snuggle up in bed longer because it’s too cold to get up for work, the car takes longer to get warmed up for the drive to work, I move slower and more relaxed around the house with little desire to hurry and get anything done. Even my energy to knit has seemed to slow.

I have little LED stars draped over my kitchen windows, to cope with the seasonal changes, permanently lit to add a bit of glow to the otherwise dark home. The poor pup, normally accustomed to going to bed when it gets dark, crawls onto her bed quite early now and then looks at us as though she’s confused as to why we’re not going to bed as well. So sweet, my little pup, and getting old. She always looks so worried, and she’s never very far from my side. If she’s not on her bed near the couch then she’s on the floor under my feet, or behind my chair in the office, or next to the furnace vent by the sewing machine. The little smarty-pants has even figured out how to bump the door to the second floor so she can follow me upstairs. It’s hard to be mad at such a clever, loving companion. ♥

We took to the woods

November 4, 2013 Marie Leave a Comment

Oh, the woods. That smell, fresh and pure and clean. That stillness – hearing squirrels rustling the fallen leaves, and the birds fluttering about, the tree branches moving in the wind – no cars to distract or intrude upon it. The pure and complete darkness that comes at night, with no street lights to brighten the unpaved road. Heaven for my heart and soul.

It was our 3rd annual knitting “retreat” – a weekend of food, wine, knitting, and movies. If you asked me 10 years ago if I’d ever have a group of girlfriends to go on a weekend trip with – not just once, but multiple times- I’d have told you that you were crazy. I’d never had real, true friends and I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be friends with me. But here I am, with 4 wonderful ladies that I call my friends. Truth be told, I still wonder why these ladies like me enough to spend time with me. I still don’t always feel like I “fit in,” and perhaps I never will. Perhaps I’m destined to be slightly socially awkward for my entire life.

There was LOTS of good food. Friday I made my family’s tacos and shared my love of corn relish with everyone. Lunch on Saturday was a delicious tortellini and spinach soup, baked potato, and cheddar biscuits. Dinner, homemade chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes. So much good comfort food for a single weekend. We never took our hike like I had hoped, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed about that. I spent a lot of time sitting on the porch looking out into the woods to make up for it. Not quite the same, and I felt like I was ignoring everyone a little bit, but it’s hard to explain my absolute need for quiet time in the woods to people who don’t feel it, too.

Our ‘usual’ yarn shop in the area had permanently closed (though, honestly, I wasn’t too sad about it – the shop just… didn’t have a lot and felt a bit run-down), so on Saturday we made a long trek about 45 minutes away to visit a different yarn shop. I wasn’t intending on buying any yarn, especially since I just received a new skein of lace from Knitivity last week (shhhhhh, don’t tell the husband!). I’m still trying to work my stash down in between projects that require yarn purchases, after all. But I saw this skein of Art Yarn Regal Silk and immediately fell in love. It was definitely a splurge, at $24 for only 163 yards. I didn’t realize until after I started going through the few pictures I took that the yarn matches the sky from Friday evening, with the subtle blues and grays. So perfect!