April 27 Friday Farming (on Saturday)

Really not much to talk about today...

Unless we want to talk about spring bulbs surviving Winter Storm Warnings.

And dogs with snow on their noses.

Another 2 days of sunshine and I'd have a lovely bouquet of tulips.

Muscari.

 Aspen trees and leaves.

The farm started out on the porch this week, to enjoy the 70 degree weather. And now they're back inside indefinitely. I need to split the tomatoes from their 4-in-a-pot configuration and give them more space.

Hopefully the weather will be better next week!

Gardening grows community

I love gardening and growing food. Not just for the food production either, as my total haul from farming this year is limited to handfuls of sugar snap peas and a single salad. 

I love it because folks walking by comment on the garden. They admire plants and express shock at how many things we have growing. It's a fun way to interact with people you usually wouldn't talk to. 

Plants are an easy conversation starter, especially when standing outside on your porch with a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning. Our new neighbors popped over this morning, to discuss watering for each other when one was out of town. Then they showed me how to prune tomatoes, an educational session much more fun than youtube. Li May (sp?) and Chad just built a house two lots down, and said they decided on that lot last fall after walking down the street and seeing that I was growing tomatoes in the front yard. 

It makes me smile when my gardening welcomes people to the neighborhood, without saying a word. 

Yard Prepartations

Have I mentioned my parent’s lake place on Coeur d’Alene yet? Oh, I guess I covered how much we all love it.

Getting married there is pretty so incredibly unbelievably awesome really hard for me to put into words. It means so much for me.

The lake place is, however, a second home. And as such, delayed maintenance between the house and the yard often adds up. We’ve painted the house and done a major water project, but we’ve really just maintained the yard.

The yard where we’re having the cocktail hour for the wedding.

Mom and dad went up to the lake last weekend to start working on the yard and formulate a plan for rehabbing the yard through the spring. The first thing to go is the pond that a previous owner put in. Too high maintenance; and a great breeding ground for mosquitoes.

The hole will be filled in by rocks and dirt, and be a home for native grasses, and other perennials that are low maintenance.

I’m sorry, I just caught on that the grass in Harrison is GREEN. So jealous!

Mom, Dad, thanks for putting some sweat equity into my cocktail hour location. I wish I could have helped (if only for the sunshine and the green grass!). I promise to put my back into it in April!

Disjointed McJointerton

I’m struggling to find a word to describe the past week or so. “Disjointed” is about the best I can come up with. Nothing seems to flow, nothing seems to be as easy as I think it will be. Last week at work was maddening; super busy, then slooooowww. The disjointedness seemed to bleed into the weekend too.

First, DJ’s Mighty Mighty Blue Jays game was rained out. Dang, I’d been looking forward to a nice Friday evening watching the little league baseball team he coaches and even recruited some other people to watch with me! It’s kind of weird to sit there and watch by myself; last year one of the mom’s asked me which kid was mine… uh, the tall one with the shaggy hair and the clipboard? Later, another mom asked me if my little brother was playing. Hm, clearly I either got knocked up at 15 and have a 10 year old son playing baseball, or have a mother whose children range in age from 26 to 10. Uhh, which is better/ worse?

After the rainout, DJ and I headed down to one of our favorite restaurants, Montana Ale Works. Actually, MAW isn’t that great of a place to eat. I usually find the menu is more limited than I think it will be and tend to rotate through three items. You can’t go wrong with the Black and Blue burger, the blue cheese fries, or a house salad. Their beer and wine menu (they serve hard alcohol too) is decent, with a lot of Montana brews. Mostly we just really love the atmosphere! It’s a former Northern Pacific storage facility which has been adaptively reused to include restaurant space, more casual bar space, and pool tables. The only downside is that their parking lot is always full (I sound like such a lazy American); on Friday I swear to god we parked in Livingston and walked. http://www.montanaaleworks.com/
(Photo of Montana Ale Works, courtesy of concierge.com)

Anyway, after MAW we went home and hung out. I read and drew on the porch, wrapped in a cozy blanket since it was about 40 degrees out. I love this time of year, when the sun goes down at 10pm, and even if it’s cold cold cold I’ll try to be outside.

The arctic (god damn COLD!) weather meant I had to cover and pull my plants inside. The sweet peas, and potted flowers got a couple of blankets on the front porch, while the vegetables in back got pulled into the garage. They’re too big now to pull into the mudroom. DJ kept telling me that we’d need a hard frost to kill them, but they’re flowering and getting ready to start producing fruit, so I didn’t want to stress them any more than they needed to be. Into the garage they went on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. (Photo of plants under wraps on the proch).

Saturday morning we had an early coffee date with friends at Rockford Coffee. We usually end up here Saturday morning to meet Emily, Joe, Alisha, and whoever else they can round up. It’s a nice little coffee klatch to discuss local politics, catch up, and if you’re Joe and DJ, regularly gross everyone at the table out with some sort of sexual or bodily function banter.
http://www.rockfordcoffee.net/ (Photo totally pirated off of someone’s Flikr account).

After the Rockford fun, we went home and made a list… no, spreadsheet (go figure, with DJ involved) of the to-do list before putting the house on the market. I got to work organizing and cleaning out the linen closet, and came across a sheet of fabric I’d purchased in Lexington. It’s a shimmery green, with tan stripes in it. I think I had it hanging over my balcony door. Well, one glance at that and I found myself head deep in a Crafty McCrafterton project. I made said green material into drapes for our room. DJ bought cheap blinds from Wal-Mart when he bought the place and since they block almost no light he ends up sleeping with a shirt on his head in the summer when the sun comes up early. With the need for darkness in mind, I decided to put a backing on them too. (photo of wrinkly-ass fabric).

So off to Jo-Anne’s fabric’s I went, and got this tan stuff (I don’t know fabric names people!) on 50% off. Score! Once home, I realized its almost the exact same fabric DJ's mom built our downstairs drapes with five years ago. So yeah, at least we all have the same taste. Beige, dark green, sage green, white. Our house is so neutral it could double for a psych ward!

The drapes took me much longer than I actually though they would. About six hours, total, and until late Sunday afternoon, but I think they turned out well! They’re currently hung on a tension rod, but left a lot of fabric at the top when I built them so that when we move I can hang them from a taller window on a proper rod. Again, Crafty McCrafterpants! Grandmas would be proud. (photo of completed project).

Saturday night we watched Changeling (while pinning hems for drapes), with Angelina Jolie. Duuuudddeee, tell that lady to eat a burger. I couldn’t just see all of her clavicle, I could see through them into her scapula. Regardless of her boniness, it was a really good movie. And terrified me about loosing a kid, especially at K-Mart in 1985 during a blue light special, like my parents did to me. Not to worry, I turned up in my kitty-cat coat in the parking lot.

Sunday was devoted to a delicious breakfast of French Toast, from the bread DJ made on Saturday (Baker McBakerton!) as well as Kramer Sausage. MMMM… 2,000 calories plus coffee! Then we went to the Mall to try to see Angels and Deamons… expect there was a line. Out the door. In the rain. And one staff member selling tickets. AWESOME. We browsed Barnes and Noble, then stood in a slightly shorter line before buying tickets to a later show.
We went home, I finished the drapes and DJ napped. About 30 minutes before the movie started I prodded DJ with a “we should leave”, and got the usual answer… “ok, I gotta poop first.” Every. Damn. Time.

So after that delay, we got to the movie theatre where only the front row of seats were left open. With the tickets purchased and no where else to sit, we sat front and center for Angels and Deamons, which PS, is like architecture porn for a building nerd like me. Oh my god I want to go to Rome. NOW. It was a good movie too! I’ll definitely watch it again. (photo from Sony) http://www.angelsanddemonsmovie.org/

After the movie DJ spoke with his mom on the phone (she lives about 10 hours away), and then made chicken Coeur don Bleu for dinner. YUMMMYYY. I started cleaning the bathrooms. I mean really, REALLY cleaning them. With a (old) toothbrush. And scrubbing floors by hand. Lets just say two things: 1) in a neat pile does not clean make; and 2) its shocking I have any hair left on my head after all of it I vacuumed up from behind the door. Barf.

The last thing we did was go for a walk, then haul the plants inside for another night. Yeah. Disjointed. Nuts.

Edited to add that the Blankety McBlankerton format comes directly from Madam Ali Judge, whose Multi antics while intoxicated at 1am are a show not to be missed. Welp! Ope!