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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A New Morning
Wow. I’m in love. Yesterday, after a big storm, what they call here a “cold” front blew in. The clouds moved around all day with the chilly wind, and this morning when I opened my little eyeballs, through our sliver of window I saw blue sky, and the one leafy branch I always wake up to illuminated with sunlight. It’s usually sunny in the morning, so that was no thing in itself, but here’s the clincher– it was cold all night. I mean, we had to search around for our one and only blanket, and it wasn’t even warm enough.…
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Revolutionizing Christmas
***This is a post I wrote last Christmas, for my old blog Subsist/Resist. I don’t want to be a Bah-Humbug. At heart, I love Christmas. I grew up in a hippie family, where Christmas was about sparkly lights, magic, and doing special secret things for people you loved. We cut a real tree (spruce make very Charlie Brown-ish Christmas trees) and decorated it with handmade and old, cherished decorations. In our stockings we got mostly nuts and chocolate, one or two small presents, and a mandarin orange in the toe. Under the tree we had gifts, yeah, and when I…
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Finally, A Laundry Line!
And just in time for the rain too! No, actually, it’s been raining all along. It rains all the time here, at least in the months since we arrived. Probably one out of every two days. Short rains, but hard. The kind that soak you to the bone in 5 seconds flat. It’s an infuriating place to hang laundry because, on the one hand, it’s so damn hot it seems completely absurd to use the dryer. But on the other hand, even if you’re home and paying attention, by the time you hear the rain, jump out of your chair,…
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I Want to Ride My Bicycle!
Well, it’s not the bike of my dreams. I wanted a punk rebuild. But I looked for weeks and all I could find was overpriced old crap bikes with the chain not even greased up (seriously, I drove halfway across town to look at one for $160 that was just an old piece of junk, the shifter didn’t work, and it rode like a train wreck. “Antique” bikes are all the rage here. Maybe somebody else will care enough to spend $160 on something only worth parking in their yard) Finally I gave up, I just wanted to be riding…
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It’s What’s Fer Dinner
I made one of our favorite quick meals the other night– red lentil soup. It made me think about quick, wholesome, one-pot meals. Not the glamorous kind they always put in magazines, but the kind us mamas make all the time in the real world. I saw on the great blog Down to Earth a post and zillions of responses for super fast meals. These were the truly flash, emergency foods, ready in 10 or 15 minutes, like grilled cheese with tomato. But how about the more common just ‘quick’ meals? In the 30-45 minute category, and not making too…
calamity jane 