Blueberry juice 2 days until Anders gets home 2 days until the weekend All the AWC board positions have been filled with nominees The Maxfield Parrish sunset sky tonight with bonus rainbow Starting a new book by an author I like Lots of fun things coming up to look forward to All the things I knocked off my to-do list tonight What are your reasons today?
So, THAT was a good birthday! Woken to roses, singing, hugs and presents: everything I wished for and then some! Martin got me a silver book bead for my Pandora bracelet. Karin gave me the latest Katie Melua CD, and together they gave me an ACTUAL box of rocks, which cracked me up completely because whenever one of the kids EVER, in all their lives, asks what they’re getting for their birthday/christmas/gift-receiving-holiday, the answer I invariably give them is “a box of rocks.” They even made the box themselves! My kids are great. And Anders? Even greater. He took my...
Despite being late in the summer, things are still blooming around here, both inside and outside. I have pelargoniums in the pots outside, most of them extravagantly fuchsia, some red, and the roses keep popping up and blowing open with beauty. The lavender is almost done but the bees don’t seem to have gotten the message. We don’t have a lot of flowering plants otherwise in our yard/garden…mostly I subscribe to greenery that comes back every year and except for the lungwort and the stonecrop I haven’t had a lot of luck with flowering perennials. I fill the pots in...
When I was growing up, we went on a lot of road trips. We had a huge purple* station wagon first, and then a big wood-paneled brown one that we came to call The Bomb. We 3 kids sat in the back seat, and sometimes (it being the 70s), one of us would be lying in the very back, or sometimes on the floor in front of the back seat. Road trips are very boring, if you are not well-prepared and if you have the type of family that doesn’t entertain itself by bursting into frequent song. My dad and...
I’m not really a cook, I just play one on TV (in the perfect-family-sitcom that airs in my head, of course). When I lived with roommates after college, in Chicago, I could barely boil water for rice. I made a lot of buttered noodles, as I recall. One didn’t NEED to cook, living in downtown Chicago…there were take-out places of every stripe and color on every street and corner. You didn’t have to eat the same cuisine twice in 2 weeks if you didn’t want to! When I wasn’t eating out, I subsisted mainly on Campbell’s soups and the occasional...
Quit’cher bellyachin’ and write! is what my inner author keeps yelling at me. All day I’ve been ignoring it, trying to cover it over with one part of my mental mantle. If you want to write, just write. Put your (figurative) pen to (virtual) paper and let come what may. As a wise commenter said (short of slapping me and yelling “Snap out of it!”): Words are never wasted. There were these things today, things I noticed: the way the water cleared and cleaned the pot I made soup in, the scarlet strip of sunset out across the fields. Pheasants...
Trip-planning, like party-planning, gives me hives, a headache and a bad attitude. I suppose I should be thrilled at how quickly the Internet and its myriad trip-planning sites can digest the information I give it (dates, places, price requirements) and spit it back out in the form of quickly scanned multiple choice format; nothing could really be easier. However, it’s taken me 3 days and numerous howls for help to my husband and my mom to figure out the best possible combination of departures and arrivals and layovers and airlines and prices. And that was only for 3 of us;...
Such clear skies tonight: frosty & chill and full of stars. The longer you stand on the frozen lawn looking up, the more stars appear in your vision. As if they’re multiplying. As if they never end. “Mom,” Martin asked me, just as we were walking back out the door after getting home, to enjoy the heavenly display for a few minutes longer, “when are the shooting stars again?” “August and November,” I answered. We still had our coats on, as we stepped from the door to the back yard. Just as we lifted our heads to the sky, all...
How much I love my space, love making it mine, love surrounding myself with ephemera and the pleasing shapes of furniture and items that speak to me in some way. Ever since I had my first own room, I’ve loved making my space mine. Choosing the colors around me, which paintings to hang where, which items to set out for admiration. Arranging books on shelves, picking out pillows for sofas, rearranging things until they are just so. My first own room was in Belgium, in the house we rented for 3 years in the little village of Overpelt. Isn’t that...
Two nights ago it was snowing again, kramsnö this time as the Swedes call it. Kram means hug. Hug snow! The kind that sticks, the kind that you lift your face up for and stick your tongue out to. The kind that mashes down just right in your mittened hands to form a perfect snowball; the kind that you can roll about the yard in serpentine trails that lead to a snowman’s body and torso and head. We’ve had an awful lot of the powder snow, the light glittery kind that sifts and blows and shines like diamonds in any...