Bird and Little Bird

Birthday Boy.

 

 

As it turns out, today is the day that my puppy is not really a puppy any longer. Miso the dog turns two today.

It should be noted that I am not a dog person. Or, perhaps more accurately, I am a reluctant dog person. Previous to the appearance of Miso in my life, I was the sort of girl who could sort of appreciate the idea of dogs, provided that they didn't touch me or get too close. That sort of thing. But then: Miso. It is ridiculously difficult not to be charmed by a creature that follows you everywhere and responds to your very existence with complete enthusiasm and joy. I mean, who says no to that?

Not me.

He is love in canine form, and I'm all in. I have become that crazy lady that shows strangers pictures of my dog. At night, I let him sleep with his nose on my shoulder. I find myself making scheduling decisions based on how long I can feasibly be away from him without either one of us feeling sad. It is inexcusably dorky, but also makes me pretty happy.

Happy birthday, pup.

 

And...We're Back!

So. That took a bit longer than expected. Being busy with things like chaperoning middle school trips to our nation's capitol and what not, I wasn't super on top of what was happening with the whole Typepad fiasco. But when the blog was still down this morning when I tried to post, I finally decided I should email and complain a bit. And, what do you know... It's back up!

I'd been wanting to share a bit about my new spring garden and have been meaning to get in here to do it for the last few weeks, but I think we all know that my appearances here are sporadic right now. Dawn and I have been working away on the book, on posts for Mud Puddles to Meteors, and then there is all the full-time job and parenting stuff to be on top of too. But we did manage to get a garden going in our new backyard, which I am very pleased with.

The raised beds that we built are very basic; just some 2 x 6 lumber cut to the proper length and held together with wood screws. We had a truckload of soil delivered to the yard on a weekday afternoon a couple of Thursdays back, and then spent part of the following weekend moving it into the beds.

I picked up some onion sets from a local produce market and started out by planting about two-thirds of them. I gave the rest to a neighbor, who has a garden bed just on the other side of our fence. Our house is on a very busy street in an urban neigborhood, with buses and other traffic going by in a steady stream pretty much around the clock. But you almost wouldn't know that from the state of affairs out back. Our yard has a short chain link fence on three sides, and on two of those sides there are neighbors with gardens as well. The guy to the side has a flock of chickens and is a professional bee keeper (raising queens for sale) with a couple of hives in the yard. To the back is an older Greek couple with a garden just a few feet from our own. In the evenings, we often stand in the yard and chat with the neighbors about bees, chickens, and who is growing what. We share plants, seeds, and advice. It is absolutely lovely.

 

Peas! Always the first thing to go in the ground here. I let the kids plant them this year, which I initially thought might have been an ill fated decision when the seeds didn't seem to be sprouting according to the expected timeline. But they are starting to come up now, so I guess it will work itself out. Even if they are not necessarily in the tidy little rows I might have imagined.

 

In the years that I have been living in New England, I've found that Fedco is a good seed company to go with here. They are in Maine, so the seeds tend to do well in our somewhat challenging climate and their shipping is timed well for the tragically short growing season.

Beets, lettuce, kale, carrots, and fennel have all started to sprout in the days since I first took these garden photos, so provided that all continues to run smoothly here on the blog, I'll be back to share more of that soon. Planting potatoes this afternoon!

Run Like You're Being Chased.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran the New York City half-marathon with my little sister, who lives in Manhattan not far from Central Park. We fueled up on significant quantities of Mexican food the night before, and arose at what can only be considered an unseemly hour the day of the race. "Race," however, is an interesting word for the whole phenomenon because I was certainly not trying to beat anyone at anything. My goal was, essentially, just to finish.

Which I did. And, I had a pretty good time doing it. The first eleven miles or so were actually fairly easy, and it wasn't until the last couple of miles that I found myself having to frequently refocus and come up with distracting things to contemplate while running along. There were 20-odd thousand other people running, so I suppose the effect of mass momentum cannot be underestimated.

My overall review: it was super fun, and I would definitely do it again, but I don't think that there is a full marathon in my future. I don't think. Although I'll be the first to admit that doing things that seem really hard and having them go relatively well is good for morale...

Oh, in other news, there is a great giveaway over at Mud Puddles. Just open for one more day, I believe, but if you miss out, be sure to check back at the end of the week for another cool giveaway (from our publisher!).

Sloth Skeletons and Refrigerator Pickles.

So, things got busy and I disappeared from the Interwebs almost entirely for some days, and now I am sort of back, but have nothing to show for my time away aside from a photo of a dock in Maine and a picture of a fossilized giant sloth. Right.

But this is not because I haven't been doing things. I have indeed. I went to Colorado for a week with my smalls and enjoyed things like airport trams and crisp mountain air. I went to Maine two weekends in a row, and can definitively say that I would recommend doing so to my friends and neighbors alike. I got semi-settled in at the new middle school teaching gig, and trained somewhat sporadically for a half-marathon that I am supposedly running in about three days time. Oh, and I moved to a new apartment.

I also made some seriously delicious refrigerator pickles, but feel like maybe this isn't quite momentous enough to sit well with the rest of the items on this list.

But I guess it's all a matter of perspective.

A Little Bit Here, A Little Bit There.

 

 

 

I had originally planned to try to work on my new quilt some each day, the way that I did with the last one that I made. That worked out well; the piecing work never felt overwhelming and I developed a rhythm with it that gradually built until the top was all of a sudden finished.

But there is a lot going on here these days. Work on the book. The kids and I moving from one house to another. I started a new teaching job the end of last week and now it is school vacation for the big kid.  So, not so much with the quilting and the knitting and the other non-required activities.

Just a little bit here and a little bit there, when the pace of things slows enough to allow it.

On Cats and Bags.

As some of you might have already guessed, I kind of like projects. And to be busy. And to make stuff. And do things. And, when it gets quiet here, it is often because I am making and doing things in secret. Shhhh...

 

This turns out to be the case right now as well. As of yesterday, Dawn and I received our contract from Roost for the book that we are publishing with them in 2015. As you might expect, we are just a *little* bit excited about this, and have been all twitchy with wanting to share the news. But these things often have to be kept quiet until they are all official and what not, so I have had to bite my tongue in many a post here over the last couple of months.

 

I don't think I'm allowed to tell you anything more just yet, but when I am, believe you me- I will do so. In the meantime, I can tell you that if you are an Alphabet Glue or Mud Puddles to Meteors fan, this book will be very much up your proverbial alley.

So, a little cheer for good things happening during times of big transition. Life might be tricky here and there lately, but it certainly has its bright spots.

disclosure: These photos are really and truly random and unrelated to anything I just said. The cat sign is awesome though, right?

The Book I'm Not Writing.

 

If I were going to write a book about quilting,* it would be called something like The Lazy Girl's Guide to Making Quilts and Stuff. It would be about two pages long, and both of them would be dedicated to detailing the dangers of rotary cutters. Because I'm pretty sure that the rest is all just unimportant details. Right?

Hmn.

* I am not going to write a book about quilting, so don't worry.

From the Glue Department: An Update

As I slowly dip my toes back in the waters of blogland, I'm finding that I am getting an ever so slightly increasing number of emails wondering just where the next issue of Alphabet Glue might be hiding out. The answer is, of course, in my brain. And a little bit on my harddrive. But you all have been sweet enough to wonder (thank you for that!) and so I thought I should return the favor by offering a little update.

With this fall and winter having so very much to offer in the Big Life Changes Department, I have to admit that my inspiration for things like whimsical science experimentation and paper folding took a bit of a hit. But a new routine is beginning to take shape, and I found myself missing the creative work of putting the magazine together every couple of months. Knowing that there are still going to be a fair number of ups and downs in daily life around here, I felt ill prepared to do much of anything on my own and asked Dawn if she might be willing to help me knock out Volume Sixteen of Alphabet Glue. She said she would indeed.  And thank goodness- because she is my own personal taskmaster and we are now on track to have a great new issue ready for you all very soon. I'm hoping it will be ready for launch in about a week.

I'll keep you all posted, and in the meantime, I hope that you will accept my true and honest gratitude for letting me know that you'd like to see another issue of The Glue land on your virtual doorsteps. It means quite something. Really.

Have a Snow Day.

 

 

 

We are having a bit of snow here on the East Coast. Perhaps you have heard? As a recent transplant from Vermont, I was feeling a bit smug yesterday afternoon as I watched all of Boston shut down early to get ready for the foot or so of expected snow. I was not impressed. But I suppose that when I look out my living room window this morning, it does indeed look like there is a good bit of shoveling to be done. So fair enough. More coffee and a bit of sock knitting needs to happen before I'm ready to tackle a two hour shoveling project though.

People of the greater Boston area, let me give you a word of advice: When looking for a rental here, it is a good idea to ask about the snow removal policies of the leafy little suburb in which you find yourself contemplating a residence. For example, will you personally be responsible for shoveling the entire city sidewalk in front of your home each time it snows? By your own self? It turns out that the answer 'round these parts is very often a resounding "yes." Thank goodness for a lovely downstairs neighbor who happily shares the task with me.

Oh! And thanks to all of you who have left comments or sent emails in the last day or so letting me know that you are glad for my sudden reappearance here and wish me well in this phase of transition. I truly appreciate the kindness, support, and thoughtfulness. Indeed.

Hey, there.

Well. It's been a little bit, huh?

The last couple of months have been a time of intense transition for our little family, and although I don't think that I am likely to ever delve into the details of all of it here, I guess I will share that Dan and I have separated, and are sharing custody of the small people. Relatively amicably, I think.

 

For weeks I hesitated to post anything here at all, because there were (and still are) a lot of people in our collective lives who read in this space and may or may not know about what has been going on. But enough time has passed now that I am starting to feel that if someone who should know what is happening doesn't already, it is simply because the pace of life here lately has been such that there truly hasn't been time to make the calls or send the emails to share. And because my being kind of sick of talking about it all is not a reflection on my love for our friends and family in any way. It just means that I needed to stop telling the whole story over and over for a little while, you know?

 

So. I don't know exactly what all of this means for this space, but I think that I am diving back in. At first, I thought that I wouldn't; that this shift in the structure of my life meant that it was probably time to let go of this blog and simply focus on my work with Dawn over at Mud Puddles to Meteors. But the emails and comments from folks out there asking if I would be coming back here (and ever so politely asking me to do so) made me realize that I like showing up here to share random bits of daily life at my house, and that the honest thing to do would be to continue on during this time of change. Plus, despite all that is hard about suddenly finding myself in this situation, and without my kids so much of the time, there is a lot of really good stuff going on as well, including things that I am really happy to be able to share with you when the time is right.

Happy New Year, all. Here's to finding rhythm in change and peace where we can get it.