These days I mostly try not to write. My life is so full of work and family and weeding. But every now and then, my brain starts to itch and the only way to scratch that itch is writing. This is where you will find my most recent scratchings.
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Marmalade Redooo
The good news: It worked! I gelled a batch of marmalade! The bad news: I have no idea why it worked. I did put the seeds in a little cheesecloth baggie, and boiled with the rest, as some recipes suggested. But there weren’t very many seeds, I can’t imagine it was that. I also let the boiled till tender peels and everything (pre-sugar adding) sit overnight to “develop” the pectin, as some other recipes suggested. Was that it? Or was it that I made a smaller batch? One recipe did say it was hard to get a big batch to…
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Pulling Weeds/Screaming Baby
Ah, motherhood. The first step for my new community garden bed is to clear the space of weeds. Fortunately, the spot had been covered with a good 6 or 8 inches of sawdust, otherwise, I’ve seen what weeds can do around here, Holy Crappers! But still it was about half regrown with one of their most common and pernicious ground covering weeds here– acetosa. (Now you plant buffs out there will say, as I did, “hey! you can eat that!” And you can, tart and tender, delish. The garden coordinator looked at me like I’d just grown a third arm…
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Trash vs. Treasure
Spent my early morning scouting for trash. When I first went out to greet the day (and get this Baby back to sleep so I could enjoy a little blogging time) I heard a distant rumble, “Crap! The garbage truck!” I had been eyeing several bulging bags of leaves the last couple of days, and didn’t want to miss my opportunity, especially with the community garden plot looming large in my future. I finished my coffee quick and unlocked my bike. Babe strapped on in my mei tai, trailer rolling behind, I pedaled a block over and picked up four…
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Monastery Marmalade
Oh yes, you read me right. I’m quite excited about this one. For some reason it took me more than a month living here to realize we lived one and a half blocks from a monastery. I guess in my life up till now, monasteries are the stuff of fairy tales. Maybe they really exist, in Tibet or some such equally fairy tale-ish place. But not just down the street! Our neighborhood monastery has a big gate that’s usually open, with a sign that says Monastery Gift Shop, as welcoming as an iron gate on a ten foot tall brick…
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Coming Out of the Closet
Yup, I been making this here little blog on the sly. For some reason I like to write a shit-ton of posts, accumulate them in my draft box, and then break it out all at once. Plus, I had to sew up that cutie-pie apron, by hand (left my sewing machine in Cordova). And of course, this is all in between doing all those things listed in the sidebar, and oh yeah, birthing a baby. So here it is. My new lil’ blog. Cruise around and tell me whatcha think. Unless it’s not nice. I only want to hear nice…
calamity jane 