Sharon's Compendium

Desk organizing for the chronically untidy

2012-02-25T19:54:00.000-06:00

How to clean your desk:
• Put the papers in file folders and into a simple rolling file cart that you keep near at hand;
• Stick the small scrappy paper stuff on something on the wall;
• Put all the loose little stuff in a couple of bowls and mugs;
• Gather everything still on the desk surface in one corner, more or less, in a pleasing arrangement, so the rest of the surface is mostly clear.

This is very important:
(1) Don't get too fussy about exactly where things belong.
(2) Surround yourself with things that please you, especially the things you use to help you gather your clutter, and consider the items on your desk as components for an attractive vignette — but it only needs to be attractive to you!

Although I have long believed in the "a place for everything and everything in its place" system of organizing, sometimes I stumble over the idea that each thing's place needs to be precise and separate from each other thing's place. And if I don't know exactly where that place is, or I haven't established it yet, I just leave things lie where they are.

So, I simplify:
• A couple of mugs for pencils and other stick-like things;
• A couple of bowls for the assorted small things I like to keep handy and that would get lost in a mug;
• A rolling filing cart near at hand for assorted papers (and a stack of blank file folders on a low shelf, ready to use);
• A bulletin board for notes to myself and small ephemera I don't want to discard (including a couple of "I love you mom" notes from my kids from many years ago; how could I ever discard those?);
• A homemade cork strip for additional notes and arty inspiration from friends — the odd little wire picture holders (you might have to click and zoom to see them) are paper clips that I unbent, more or less, at one end and bent a little more at the other end and stuck into the corks. Brilliant, eh?

The art on the wall by my desk — all by local artists I have met — also helps to make this corner of the room feel like my own special spot, and that, too, makes me want to keep it attractive.

The wide shallow bowl in the first picture, that has the jump drive and paper clips and other small items in it, is one I made of papier mache, using pages from MOQ, the little quarterly zine Craig and I used to publish. I spattered it with some paint left over from some other projects and found the result both pleasing and idiosyncratic. I wasn't too sure anyone else would want it, or appreciate it as much as I do, so I put it on my desk to replace a couple of smaller containers I used to use for this sort of thing, and I find that I like this shape and style of bowl much better. It's easy to rummage in it to find the various little items I have put there.

A bowl made from a vintage math book, available in my Etsy shop

There are a few versions of papier mache catch-all bowls in my Etsy shop, including one made from the same mold as that one, pictured at left (the mold is a plastic faux basket bowl I bought at a secondhand shop). If you appreciate handmade bowls but would like one that's also lightweight and unbreakable, this may be the thing for you.

I keep planning to make some more cork and note holder strips like the one shown above, too, but I haven't done it yet. Maybe they'll show up in my Etsy shop one of these days.

I don't really think my system, such as it is, is right for everyone, but I figured I'd share it, Maybe somebody who has trouble tidying up because they're too much of a perfectionist, or simply too overwhelmed, will find something helpful in the foregoing.

Maybe you'll want to make your own papier mache bowls to help capture the clutter on your desk. It's kind of a fun project, albeit messy, and you could use pages that have some personal meaning for you. Or, of course, you could buy one of mine. (I just had to say it.)

Buffalo Guy

2012-02-10T19:35:00.000-06:00

I love it when someone who buys something in my Etsy shop tells me a story about why they bought it:

"It's a funny card. It's perfect for my husband. We once visited a safari that you drive thru and you get a big bucket of food to feed the animals from your car and my husband put his bucket out the window to feed this huge buffalo and it took the bucket right out of his hands and ate it all and threw it on the ground. And we had just gotten into the park. So we had no more food for the rest of the drive. LOL! Then we saw in the brochure that it said 'no feeding the Buffalo!!' Guess we should have read the rules a little closer. LOL!"

Pretty little purses

2012-02-08T19:06:00.001-06:00

Sometimes a girl is just drawn to pretty little things. So, even though I should probably have revamped my little purses to make them a bit bigger, as long as I was reworking the basic design anyway, I didn't. These are still only about 4 inches high and across, not quite big enough for an iPhone. But then, you don't want your keys and coins scratching your iPhone anyway, right? And a bigger purse wouldn't look nearly so sweet hanging in a tree pretending to be a flower, would it?

These are available in my Etsy shop now, and I'll be adding more of them as I make them.

A light house-work-out

2012-02-06T17:27:00.001-06:00

Find any cat toys yet?

My husband gets up most mornings way before I do, enters the second bedroom (our home office) and closes the door, meditates for a time, then puts himself through some fitness routine that's a bit of a mystery to me (I'm usually sleeping, but I sometimes lie awake and listen to the strange thumping and grunting coming from the next room); he makes a brief appearance when he emerges from the room, then disappears into the shower. By the time I'm fully awake, he's gone to work. (Who was that sweaty guy?)

I'm not a slug, really I'm not. I'm just a night owl, often staying up until well past midnight, and also a light sleeper (except after about 7 a.m.). When the dog walks into the second bedroom and throws up on the hand-tied Turkish rug at 3 a.m. (the same rug where Craig sits in meditation, etc.), I'm the one who hears it and gets out of bed to clean it up.

But other than cleaning up the occasional dog oops, neither of us does a lot of housework. So the spot where I just cleaned up after the dog is often the cleanest spot on the rug.

I mention all this as a preamble to describing what happens when I try to follow hubby's lead and get a little exercise at home during the day.

As I get ready to roll out my yoga mat on the rug, I notice how much the fur has accumulated there, and set aside the mat to get out the vacuum cleaner instead. While vacuuming the rug, I notice that there's still more fur and dust attempting to hide in the corners and around the base of the bookshelf and other furniture. So I get the broom and the dust mop and round up the dust and fur, sweeping it out to where I can suck it up with the vacuum.

Oh, but look. The bookshelves are dusty, too. I get a rag from the closet and start dusting, first the shelves, then the top of the printer stand, and the printer itself. My, but the dust does accumulate on the picture frames and baseboards, doesn't it?

The cat begins to follow me around once I put the vacuum cleaner away. He no doubt senses that this could be entertaining, especially if I find any of the cat toys that he has lost under the furniture.

Now I have a few dirty rags, I add them to the laundry basket in the bedroom, which is getting pretty full, so I may as well bring it all down to the laundry. Walking down and up stairs isn't a bad workout, anyway, right?

Next thing, I'm sweeping the stairs.

Every notice how, when you clean one thing, everything else looks that much dirtier?

I finally decided that I had had my workout, what with sweeping, dusting, vacuuming, carrying laundry down, cleaning the cat pans as long as I was downstairs, and so forth.

Time for yoga. The cat, of course, thinks I rolled out the mat for him. Still, I manage to get in a few stretching poses and then a shower.

"Asana this," says Tres.

As it turns out, it's not a bad workout, and the house looks pretty good when I'm done. But it took a lot longer than the half hour or so I had intended, so I'm not likely to try again for some time. And by then, the house will need cleaning again.

Craig says that when he does his push-ups, he looks right down at the fur on the rug and it doesn't bother him a bit. It's just as well or he'd end up being late for work.

Pounding those keys

2012-01-28T01:42:00.002-06:00

(click on the image above to get a larger view that you can read)

Okay, I was going to do this whole blog post with photos of the text typed onto paper with the typewriter I just bought at an estate sale today (you got that, right?), but I think it's going to be too hard to read and you'll just give up, so: besides the typewriter, I bought these four paperback books. I brought the books in to show the girls at Three Tiers bakery, and they seemed to especially like the "Rate Your Date" charts in All About Boys (published in 1958).

This copy of Etiquette for Young Moderns, first published in 1954, was in its fourth printing in 1961. The author is Gay Head, a pseudonym for Margaret Hauser, who wrote advice articles for Scholastic (also the publisher of this book). Frankly, I'm disappointed Gay Head wasn't a man.

The World of Pen Pals, from Dawn Publishing (1961) offers advice on finding a pen pal and how to write interesting letters, encouraging the would-be correspondent to begin their letter with a first sentence that is "bright, interesting, sparkling, attractive and to the point." Like: "What a treat to receive your letter," or "Your handwriting thrills me."

It's actually rather a sweet and high-minded book, encouraging its readers to "Promote Pen Pals for Peace": "If you agree that writing to pen pals can help people around the world to become friendly with each other, and thus promote peace ... you should try to interest other people in the activity."

And this book of Great French Short Stories (Dell, 1960) has a note tucked inside of it dated June 1, 1966, with the book title and "Reaction to book" followed by lots of blank space, and on the back of the note, "Write summary," followed by more blank space. Looks like somebody didn't do their homework.

I also picked up an old dictionary. I like to use parts of the pages or individual definitions in artwork sometimes, although I also think it's interesting to see how words and definitions have changed. More on that in another post (I'll find some interesting examples).

And a bingo game. I know people who like to use bingo cards in mixed media art, and the little wooden markers can be cool. (I thought it had only the plain markers shown in this photo, but later I found the red-letter-&-number ones inside that red box. A happy discovery.) Overall, I'd call it a pretty successful estate sale outing.

Draw (Almost) Every Day

2012-01-14T16:21:00.001-06:00

I can't say how many years I've started out with the intention to draw every day and never got much beyond good intentions. But it still strikes me as a worthy challenge to give myself, so here I go again. I didn't start this time until January 7, and I've already skipped a few days, but at least I'm drawing more than I have in a long time, and that's really the whole point of the exercise. My motto this time around: No excuses, no apologies, no guilt!

I think one of the things that has stopped me before is choosing a time and place for drawing. So far this year, in acknowledgement of my night-owl ways, I have done them while sitting in my favorite chair in the living room, late at night after Craig has gone to bed and usually after I've either finished the Sudoku or gotten stumped by it.

I also decided to use a medium-sized sketchbook (8.5 by 11 inches), which is small enough to be easily managed, and large enough to let me play around on the page and write a few notes and such. Using an ordinary sketchbook of good quality (the Canadian sketchbook brand) and not a "journal" also helps, I think. The book and paper aren't so nice that I feel intimidated by it, but it's still nice enough to be a pleasure to work on.

I also made a list of prompts, which I haven't felt the need to consult, because just writing down some ideas has helped, and sitting in my chair helps, too, because I do try to surround myself with items I find appealing.

The newest issue of Conservation magazine, published by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MnDNR), featured a cover story about foxes, with lots of nice photos. This, right after I saw on the Etsy merchandising blog that foxes are "trending," whatever that means.

A few days ago, Nora brought home a few cuttings from an ivy plant she was given by a relative of her current employer/client (she's working as a personal care attendant, or PCA), and I put them in a vase I bought last month from my friend Judy Anderson (aka Dragonfly Guild). I've been really enjoying the way the wiry stems extend from the vase, so last night I drew that, first sketching lightly in pencil, then finishing in ink, then deciding to add some color with watercolor pencils.

Using this practice to flesh out ideas for projects is a good way to keep me at it, too. So after a woman contacted me via my Etsy page to suggest that I consider making bookplates, I have been thinking about and sketching some ideas for a design.

So, my goal for 2012 is more like "draw almost every day," or "draw pretty often." Maybe I'll even keep at it this time around.

Stuck and Unstuck

2012-01-13T21:30:00.000-06:00

On a forum of local Etsy sellers recently, a colleague posted the question, What do you do to get unstuck? She was contending with having many ideas and inspirations for projects, but finding she kept getting distracted and was having trouble getting at any of them.

I welcomed the topic because I often find myself there, too. So I took the opportunity to think through what sometimes works for me and post a response. Just doing that is helpful, of course!

When my work space is messy, everything seems overwhelming and it's hard to organize my time or anything else, so often I will start there. Once my desk/table/art room is at least somewhat tidy, I feel more ready to tackle some tasks.

The next thing I like to do is make myself a cup of tea or coffee and sit down to prioritize, using a few criteria:

Valentine cards: timely

• What is most timely?

• What can be accomplished with materials I already have on hand?

• What will take the least amount of time and effort to complete? The satisfaction of finishing something often sweeps away some of the mental/emotional clutter and helps me to move on to the next thing.

• What do I feel the strongest urge to work on? Sometimes, I feel a strong desire to work on a new idea even though it's not the easiest one to complete or the most timely, and I may think I must finish other projects before I can start on the one I really want to do, and so everything feels like an obstacle. If that is the case, I think if I could just ignore those other “shoulds” and throw myself into that wild impractical thing that is tugging at me so fiercely, I would probably make meaningful progress. I rarely give myself permission to do this, though.

And, of course, it's all much easier to say than do!

Household Discoveries

2012-01-04T00:26:00.003-06:00

Visiting an estate sale is like walking into a house-sized cabinet of curiosities all focused on the life of a particular person, which is why I so enjoy them. I especially enjoy looking through the books a person leaves behind. I think books—as a collection—suggest so much about their former owner.

One that I visited last fall in a rather grand house had dozens of books about Catholicism (I bought a Pocket Dictionary of Saints there), alongside about as many about various forms of New Age spirituality and mysticism, another batch on philosophy, and many popular histories. I tried to imagine what fascinating dinner party conversations they might have had in their large well-appointed dining room.

Some households have few books for sale, and I'm left to wonder whether the people had little interest in them or if the family valued the books enough to keep them all.

Some have mostly practical books—cookbooks and how-to's—which can be quite fascinating if they're old enough to provide insights into how things were done in a low-tech do-it-yourself age.

So I was delighted when I came across this practical tome a couple of months ago. The woman was letting go of some of her mother's old things that she had been keeping for some time, including this book, Household Discoveries: An Encyclopedia of Practical Recipes and Processes, dated 1909. It even has a chapter on how to make your own paints and varnishes.

The other appeal of such old books is, of course, aesthetic. Some have beautiful graphics, like the above-mentioned book's title page, and lovely tooled and embossed covers. Even those that aren't especially beautiful have a certain charm, with their period typography and yellowed pages. If I am certain that an old book is not particularly rare or valuable, and if its content is not all that special, I'll even consider using pages for some craftsmanship of my own. I am not a book artist in the fine art sense—not to the level and skill of some who have done wonderfully intricate and ornate sculptural carvings from books—but I will alter a book or use book pages in art sometimes.

Just so, the chapter in Household Discoveries on dealing with pests is just too rich to leave untouched. And since I had carved a rubber block into a rat image a couple of years ago when it was year of the rat, I couldn't resist doing a little printmaking on the pages that offer rather macabre ways to deal with rats and mice (and which had me feeling quite sorry for the poor rodents). Three such prints that are trading card size (2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches) are now for sale in my Etsy shop, and two more full-page ones will be added there soon. If you care to visit the shop, you will find a link just over there, up and to the right.

Flowers and flour

2011-11-29T17:03:00.000-06:00

The autumn clematis, shown here in September, is still green in November.

Flowers in the house didn't happen this month, apparently because of everyone's preoccupation with flour of a different sort and a certain feasting holiday. I would have been late to the party anyway, for much the same reason.

Still, I have found the monthly floral blog crawl to be a nice motivator to do some sort of botanical arrangement in my house, as well as an opportunity to feast my eyes on and be inspired by the floral and artistic talents of the other participants, so I paid a visit to a local florist and made a couple of arrangements anyway.

My son's apartment is just one block from Roger Beck Florist, so when I dropped him off yesterday after he was done borrowing the car, I stopped in. I picked up a disparate assortment of elements, and I think the nice fellow helping me had his understandable doubts about their combining into a pleasing display, because I intended to supplement them with what I could find still in my yard and garden.

In fact, when I got home and started playing around with the blue and white mop head hydrangea, sprig of rose hips, purple seeded eucalyptus, tall green-purple foliage thingy (protea, maybe?), and branch of curly willow, I quickly surmised that they weren't all going to go together no matter what else I introduced into the mix.

So I added the willow to my existing front step urn.

The rose hips and mystery foliage branch, plus a few more quirky black orbs from the black-eyed Susans in my yard, helped fill out the small gilded pail in my front porch, which I had filled with sand to hold the cuttings from the too-long dogwood when I made the front step urn display.

The porch bouquet

For the indoor display, I cut a whole bunch of lavender from the back garden, which was still looking perky and smelling wonderful, and several tangly leafy stems of the autumn clematis, which appears to be largely undaunted by the several frosts we've had so far.

The hydrangea proved a disappointment, since it had wilted by this morning, so into the compost it went. I had cut the stem and put it in fresh water, so I'm not sure what the problem was. I will admit the mop heads are not my favorite hydrangeas, I much prefer our native Annabel and the panicles and lacecaps. Maybe it knew I didn't think much of it and went into a sulk.

The resulting arrangement is all foliage and no flowers, but I rather like it. The afternoon sunlight was a bit harsh when I took this photo, but when the sun isn't shining in on this spot, it's too dark to photograph it at all. Maybe next time I want to photograph something on the buffet we'll have a cloudy day, and then the afternoon light will be just right.

In the Middle of Everywhere, U.S.

2011-11-23T12:02:00.001-06:00

At the corner of Cretin and Marshall in St. Paul, Minnesota.

(Teachers and homeschoolers take note: Wouldn't this make a fabulous geography project? Add seeking permission to use the city's light pole, and you've got civics in the mix. A variation on this concept: the community solar system.)

Lingering Autumn

2011-11-15T15:02:00.002-06:00

My front steps

Yet another beautiful mild sunny day in Minneapolis. I'm experiencing something akin to spring fever, but with a twist: I feel drawn to the outdoors even when I have things I need to do indoors (that's the part that's like spring fever), but with even more compulsion, because we are headed not to summer, but to a Minnesota winter.

On my not-quite-daily walks with Brigit, I usually head to the mailbox to drop in a postcard or two for my Postcrossing exchange. The round trip is about 2/3 of a mile (1 km), just right for an old dog, and for me, too. I tend to be somewhat purposeful when I walk or ride my bike—I need a destination to motivate myself. So when I don't have anything to mail, I'm not so likely to get out for a walk. Hence, the Postcrossing hook.

I like my neighborhood and its mix of natural areas along the Mississippi River and Minnehaha Falls, and its small residential gardens and houses. Most of this area was built up in the 1920s after the Ford plant opened across the river in St. Paul, and the Intercity bridge, known informally as the Ford bridge, was built. Soon workers at the Ford plant were building modest Craftsman bungalows to live in, just a short commute from work, and the Longfellow neighborhood was born.

Some of those bungalows now have sweet gardens and I enjoy varying my route from time to time to change the view. With this lingering autumn, there's often still plenty of green and even an occasional blossom, especially with cold-tolerant flowers like this lovely little periwinkle tumbling over a garden wall.

Today I turned up a different street than usual and discovered a second pensive gargoyle in the neighborhood, sitting in a less abundant garden than the first (shown in this post, also about my walk to the mailbox), but still in an attractive setting.

A few jack-o-lanterns still sitting on front stoops have that weary after-the-party look.

Although most of the trees and shrubs are bare, some colorful leaves are still hanging on.

And back in my own garden, where, on Sunday, we finally raked our leaves off the lawn and onto the gardens, a couple of cheerful violets peak through the debris.

Sounds Heard on a Walk

2011-11-07T14:58:00.000-06:00

Brigit, my 90-year-old (almost 14) dog

On a recent walk with my dog, Brigit, I heard a woman talking on the phone, kind of loudly, sounding like she was engaged in a bit of an argument; then I saw her leaning against her fence, seemingly oblivious to our presence as we walked by. Her voice faded away gradually as we made our way up the street.

The next day, as we walked the same route, and passed the same house, there she was again in the same spot, with her phone, sounding like she was having the same argument as the day before. It was as if she had never left that spot or stopped talking.

On another block along our regular route, there is a dog hidden from view by a solid wood fence. It knows when we are passing by, and barks a steady staccato rhythm until we are well past. It sounds like it's actually saying the word bark.

Bark bark! ... Bark! ... Bark bark! ... Bark! ...

Late October Floral Gleanings

2011-10-31T10:17:00.000-05:00

The flowers in the house challenge today, being Halloween, was to create something goth, or at least Halloweenish. And when I peeked late last night at the blog page of the instigator of this monthly blog crawl, I was truly amazed, inspired, and intimidated. If you haven't been to see Jane's "Flowers in the House of Horror" yet, you really must. And from there visit all the wonderful blogs sharing their exquisite arrangements.

By comparison, mine is the floral equivalent of throwing a sheet over your head with a couple of eye holes cut out before heading out to beg candy from the neighbors. Oh, well, we do what we can with our limited resources and talents.

I went out into my garden yesterday evening and gathered several black-eyed susan seedheads, as well as some dogwood stems trimmed from my newly planted little shrub, a few grasses, and twisty willow twigs—from the corkscrew willow stems I put in my front step urn last fall, which sprouted in the spring, and which I finally planted in a big old whiskey barrel on the south side of the house a couple of weeks ago, because I don't want a monstrous willow taking over my yard, but I hated to just get rid of them. I figure this way I will have a source of cuttings, and if it doesn't survive the winter in a barrel, well, I'm none the worse for having tried. But I digress.

I combined these garden gleanings with a few of the dark red mums I have in a pot on the patio, and the flowers that were still good in a bouquet that a friend brought over last weekend (another form of gleaning), which included some orange lilies and more dark red mums and green mums and a few greenish alstromeria, which I figured were all the right colors (I dumped the ferns; I do have some aesthetic sensibilities). But now I see that all those flowers overwhelm the twigs and seedheads that would have given the bouquet a more Halloweenish flavor. I probably should have made two bouquets.

But, no time for that, I need to go grocery shopping, and I haven't even been to the store to stock up on candy for the little darlings who will come to the door yet. Horrors!

Why late fall in Minneapolis isn't so bad

2011-10-25T11:32:00.001-05:00

At the co-op: fresh cranberries from Wisconsin. And organic pomegranates and persimmons have recently arrived from points south, their season just beginning.

• • • • •

Yesterday, I was working in the garden. My neighbor came round to her backyard from the side with a sunny clump of marigolds in her hand, the roots and dirt still attached, and said that they looked so pretty she almost hated to throw them in the compost, but she didn't think they would overwinter in the ground.

"Put them in a pot on the front steps," I said.

"I'm not that ambitious," she said.

"Then at least take cuttings for a bouquet," I said

"I think I'll do that," she said, and gave me some.

As we were talking, a cedar waxwing landed on the fence. "A cedar waxwing!" I said. I was surprised and delighted because I hadn't seen them in the city before. "Oh, yeah, we get flocks of them this time of year," she said.

Later, as I was biking across the Ford Bridge, coming home from Saint Paul, I stopped and stared at a red cedar tree—it was alive with cedar waxwings. The pretty little birds' tawny yellow wingtips flashed brightly as they flitted about amongst the green needles eating the blue juniper berries.

This is why I love living so close to the Mississippi River, a major flyway for migrating birds.

Salt—so life is always flavorful

2011-10-18T12:28:00.000-05:00

My friend Marsha taught me this method of drying herbs: to immerse them in kosher salt until they are dry, then remove the leaves but don't worry about the small bits left behind. So you get your dried herbs and a seasoned salt as well. I think the reason for using kosher salt is because the iodine added to processed salts can discolor the leaves, but I'm not really sure if that's it. Since I'm using kosher sea salt to dry the last of the basil from my garden, and sea salt retains its naturally occurring iodine, I may find out. But I prefer sea salt because it's prettier than the plain white kind. (Even though I know that it's also supposed to be lower in sodium and higher in other trace minerals and more flavorful than regular white table salt, the real reason I buy it is because it's pretty.)

Last summer, after we bought this house, Marsha brought us a gift of a loaf of bread and some salt she had seasoned with rosemary, and a lovely card in which she had written this note:

"Bread—so you never go hungry, and
salt—so life is always flavorful"

Gathering nectar while they can

2011-10-14T21:11:00.003-05:00

The bees and the skippers sure have been loving the lavender this fall.

Winds-day on Friday

2011-10-07T13:48:00.003-05:00

I've been noticing that everyone's being kind of wistful these days. Such beautiful weather in October inspires a very different response from northerners than the same weather when it makes its first appearance in May. Then, we felt great relief and excitement; now, we feel wistful. It's no less a pleasure, I think, it just has a different context.

My new Prairiefire flowering crabapple was looking so pretty yesterday, with its leaves turning an unusually lovely shade of red for that species; and already today the wind has blown nearly all of them away.

Some landed in the birdbath.

The black-eyed susans have dropped their cheery golden petals, but still look handsome with their healthy foliage, round black seedheads, and colorful stems.

The fall raspberries offer just enough fruit for my yogurt in the morning. The canes are dreadfully overgrown, I need to cut them down and purge the unproductive ones—for some reason, there's a large section that just won't bear fruit, both on our side of the fence and our neighbors. Our neighbors Bonnie and Joe removed the ones on their side, and I need to do my part so that mine don't re-colonize their much tidier raspberry patch. For raspberry work, it needs to be cool enough to wear long sleeves, so I keep saving that one for later. I think "later" has come to now.

Besides the raspberries, there's still much to do in the garden. We need to tidy up the garden beds we've started but won't be planting til spring, cutting ditched edges with our spades and covering the exposed soil with woodchips, which we fetch by the carload from a spot where the city's forestry department dumps it for residents' use.

The kitchen garden has been fenced and boxed, but it needs the center leveled and covered with class 5 gravel, for a firm base under either a thin layer of pea gravel or pavers of some sort. The center, being too small for another raised bed but much larger than needed as a pathway alone, will be more like a small garden plaza, as I imagine it. I plan to have spaces held open to plant perennial herbs by placing plastic flower pots with the bottoms cut off here and there before spreading the gravel. I have a lovely image in my head for this; it remains to be seen whether I can pull it off.

The kitchen garden fence, adorned with an oil filter we dug up in the spot. Doesn't it (the oil filter) have an attractive rusted patina, though?

And the many perennials that have been trying to get by amongst the raspberry canes need to be transplanted to the not-quite ready beds along the south side of the house.

I do hope the forecasts of a long, mild autumn prove true!

Christmas in October

2011-10-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

Here's what I'm working on these days, hoping to complete a self-published chapbook or zine about "The Twelve Days of Christmas" for the Nokomis Urban Craft Fair on Nov. 12. It's a little research-and-art project I began five years ago, keep returning to each year at Christmastime, then realize I started too late in the season to do anything with it for that year, and leave off. This is earlier than I've started on it before, and I've got all that earlier work to build upon, so I just might get it completed in time this year. (If not for the Nokomis event in November, then before the next craft sale I plan to participate in, on Dec. 3).

I'm envisioning it as a kind of compendium, a compilation of lists and trivia and drawings. I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm gathering visual references as well as information, hence the partridge and pear.

Sweet harvest pickles

2011-09-28T21:59:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about making sweet pickles using my late mother-in-law's recipe, and discovering midway through that I didn't have quite enough sugar. I went ahead with them anyway, reasoning that, with the vinegar undiluted, it probably doesn't matter how much sugar I use as far as preserving them.

As it turned out, I rather liked them better a little less sweet (they're still plenty sweet). Then, in a comment, Ashley (aka Michigan Matron) asked me to share the recipe, and I meant to do so a little sooner than this.

I intend to make another batch myself, with some of my bounty from a recent trip to the Midtown Farmers Market, our local urban community market. I'll probably reduce the sugar again, even though I've restocked the pantry, just because I like them better that way. And I may include some carrots in the mix, reducing the cucumbers a little to keep the quantities the same, just because I like to experiment, and the additional color sounds appealing to me.

This recipe is the original, with my variations in parentheses, so you can choose the way you prefer to make them. Enjoy!

Ruth's Refrigerator Pickles (makes 3 pints)

7 cups sliced cucumbers, unpeeled (or 6 cups cucumbers and one cup thinly sliced carrots)
1 cup sliced onion
1 cup sliced green pepper (I used mostly red bell peppers, for the color)
1 Tblsp salt
1 tsp celery seed (I used Simply Organic's all-purpose seasoning, which includes celery seed)
1 tsp mustard seed.
—Combine all of these, stirring so that salt and spices get thoroughly mixed with the vegetables, and let stand one hour. (I put it in a large stoneware bowl and cover it with a plate.)

Boil together:
2 c. sugar (I used 1&1/2 cups)
1 c. white vinegar
—Stir to dissolve sugar. Let mixture cool a little. Put cured vegetables in pint jars, pour in vinegar-and-sugar syrup; wipe edges clean and screw on bands and lids. Or use any jars and lids you have. Refrigerate.

You can eat them as soon as they're cold, and they'll keep for months in the refrigerator. Make some now and you'll have a nice homemade condiment to bring to those holiday gatherings.

Flowers in the House, a little late

2011-09-26T18:19:00.001-05:00

I've been meaning to join the monthly Flowers in the House blog tour, but I haven't quite got the hang of when to expect it (it looks like it may be the last Monday of the month?), so after admiring the many lovely contributions this afternoon while at the coffee shop, I hurried home to gather a couple of bouquets and jump in.

Except first I had to run to the co-op to pick up some things for dinner, and then feed the pets, and then get the rice started and the squash in the oven ...

Hence, my rather meager contribution. I hope to do better next time, except late October in Minnesota is not a particularly bountiful time for fresh local flowers, but, who knows? We may be enjoying a lingering mild autumn at this time next month.

The orange impatiens are trimmings from my kitchen window baskets, which were in need of a bit of rejuvenation since their midsummer peak. I had considered simply pulling them out altogether, since I don't think impatiens tolerate any frost at all, but then I realized we may yet get that lingering mild autumn and perhaps they'll perk up a bit, so I trimmed them back to encourage them to give it the old college try. The ivy cuttings are from the window baskets, too.

And when I saw someone else's lavender in the bathroom (so sorry, now I can't find which one that was!), I thought it was such a lovely idea that I would just be a shameless copycat and do the same! My lavender is the English Munstead variety, which might survive our Minnesota winters, and I dearly hope it does because I would love to keep it going for many years.

So, that's my small and hasty contribution to Flowers in the House! Thanks for stopping by.

Sharon and Craig Plant a Tree

2011-09-23T12:27:00.002-05:00

I had begun this with a lead about how we have a custom of planting at least one tree at each house where we have lived since we bought our first house together in 1987, but it got to be too long, so I am saving that story for future zine. I like to draw trees, anyway, so I will look forward to crafting that one.

For this, I will just tell you about the tree we planted on Tuesday (which turns out to be kind of long anyway). We wanted a small tree to shade the patio but not the flower gardens in the backyard, and to avoid interfering with the power lines that reach diagonally across the yard, as well. After considering the various small trees that would be suitable for this site, I settled upon the ornamental crabapple Prairie Fire for its many fine qualities, especially disease resistance, since many of the crabapple trees around here were losing their leaves prematurely this summer due to something or other. My neighbor kindly pointed this out to me when I mentioned that we wanted to plant an ornamental crab, and since I really didn't know what was afflicting the other trees, I looked for one with resistance to as many diseases as possible.

But I also wanted a tree with a spreading, rounded form (the traditional apple-tree shape), that got to be about 20-25 feet high and wide, and had small persistent fruit that the birds could enjoy but that wouldn't drop in the yard and on the patio. I found a handy chart in an article offered by the University of Colorado Extension Service, and from that selected Prairie Fire.

The view from the home office window, where I'm writing this blog post

Our venerable local institution, Bachman's garden center, has always had a place in my heart because my grandmother loved Bachman's and was a loyal customer. For most things, I will go to our local independent garden center, Mother Earth Gardens; but for trees and sometimes shrubs, I like to go to Bachman's. And wouldn't you know they had a tree sale going on, which included free delivery. So, after calling to make sure they had the tree I wanted in stock, off I went to select a handsomely formed specimen and arrange delivery.

I think I mentioned that one of the reasons I like the flowering crab is because birds enjoy the fruit, especially in winter when other foods are scarce. Well, a similarly named crab (prairie something-or-other), is noted for its sterile flowers; it doesn't form fruit. I remarked, while my salesperson was writing up my order, that I thought a crabapple tree with no crabapples seemed kind of pointless to me, and another employee said it was to avoid the mess, especially from all the birds that eat the fruit and leave their droppings behind. So, apparently some people dislike the very bird-attracting qualities that's always one of the factors I consider when selecting a tree or shrub. Who cares if the birds poop on the patio? I have a hose and I'm not afraid to use it!

Future patio shade

The tree came on Tuesday, which was an especially blustery day. Craig was working at home, nursing a cold, and I headed off to an appointment and some errands shortly after the tree was placed in our backyard by a nice man driving Bachman's iconic purple delivery van. As I was heading out to the garage, the tree in its large pot was knocked over by the wind and I figured I may as well leave it lying on the ground, rather than set it up to be knocked over again.

When I got home in the afternoon, it was propped up at an angle, leaning against a bench. Craig reported that he had set it back up several times and was just trying to keep it from lying on the ground, possibly breaking some of the branches. We agreed that we really should plant the tree soon, so it wouldn't get knocked over anymore.

We proceeded to do so right after supper, but this time of year it gets dark quickly, which is why I don't have any photos of the tree planting in progress. The ground was so dry and hard from the long stretch of dry weather we've had since the middle of summer (after a summer that started out with much flooding!), that it took extra effort and lots of water to soften the ground enough to dig a decent hole. Then we discovered we had dug a little too deep and had to backfill a bit (planting a tree too deep dooms it to failure).

When we finally got it planted it was quite dark out. I set the sprinkler on low for a couple of hours to soak the ground all around the root zone.

The wind howled that night, but our newly planted tree just swayed and shook its branches, proving itself a tough little tree and seeming to be happy to have its roots underground at last. We'll get a load of woodchips soon to spread around the base, as well.

I turned on the sprinkler today again, since our recent rains have been rather scant, and soon after I sat down to write this, I heard a bit of commotion coming from the backyard. I looked out the window, and there, frolicking in the sprinkler and perched in the branches of our newly planted tree, were about a dozen sparrows, a couple of house finches, a goldfinch, and a cardinal!

Clouds and critters

2011-09-21T00:23:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been a little obsessed with clouds: noticing them, enthralled by their many moods and textures, wanting to photograph them. So I've been trying to remember to take my camera with me when I head out on my bike, just in case I get an opportunity to take an interesting photo of clouds. But clouds alone, no matter how billowing and layered, don't really make for an interesting photo without something else in the foreground or at the edges, to frame it and provide a bit of punctuation, don't you think?

Well, I also like the geometry of powerlines, especially when birds gather on them, and there are always a lot of pigeons on the powerlines over Minnehaha Creek near Hiawatha Avenue, right where the parkway bridge crosses over. But powerlines, even those with birds on them, could use a little something more, too, I think.

So what a perfect pairing, I say.

Noticing the restless skies when I got ready to take the bike on some errands in the Nokomis area today, which would take me over the aforementioned bridge, I actually remembered to bring the camera with me.

At one point, I was standing just under a light pole to the west of the creek, and I kept hearing a squirrel scolding me from above, so I looked up and turned my camera on him, and he continued to stare me down and scold! I guess he didn't approve of me standing right there.

Not-so-sweet pickles

2011-09-08T17:00:00.000-05:00

Many years ago, when my mother-in-law, Ruth Cox, was still living, I brought her some cucumbers from my garden and she made them into crisp, sweet, refrigerator pickles, and they were yummy. I've since learned that it must have been a tradition from the Scandinavian side of the family; I've had similar sweet cucumber pickles at the Swedish Institute, served alongside Swedish meatballs and potatoes, and at the Minnesota History Center on Sittende Mai, or Norwegian Independence Day.

I asked for the recipe and made them a couple of times since. I enjoy bringing them to my sister-in-law's house during the holidays—bringing something made from her mother's recipe feels just so, you know, nostalgic and all that, and they do complement the array of foods, both traditional and new, that other family members bring to share.

So when two of our neighbors gifted us with cucumbers from their gardens, I naturally pulled out Ruth's refrigerator pickle recipe again. Reminded that the recipe includes onions and bell peppers, I happily traipsed off to the Midtown Farmers' Market to add to the bounty.

But it didn't occur to me to check my supply of sugar before starting, and when the vegetables had had their hour or so with the salt and spices and were ready to be bottled up with the vinegar-and-sugar syrup, I found that I was a half cup shy of the two cups of sugar it called for, to be dissolved into one cup of white vinegar and poured over the cucumber medley.

I spent some time searching for the sugar bowl, hoping it had a half cup of sugar in it, only to finally discover that it had been washed and returned to the buffet some time ago. So I went ahead and made the pickles with what I had, reasoning that the amount of sugar probably isn't essential for preserving the pickles, since the vinegar is undiluted and the jars are stored in the refrigerator.

And when I sampled them after they had chilled an hour or so, I discovered that I rather like them a little less sweet. They're still sweet, but now they have a bit more tartness as well. I'm pretty sure Ruth wouldn't mind. Don't all hand-me-down recipes evolve a little from one generation to the next?

Pardon me while I indulge in a little shameless self-promo

2011-09-06T23:17:00.000-05:00

So, as some of you already know, I have this Etsy shop under the name Arty Didact (see link at right; or just click on the name, since I turned it into a link too), a name I coined kind of on the fly when I was marketing some dice games I invented back when I was homeschooling my kids and I wanted to find a game that used multiplication in scoring, and I couldn't find one, so I got some dice and made one up. Since unschoolers are really autodidacts, the "arty" play on words seemed to fit, so I set up the shop without spending too much time thinking about the name. If I wanted to be taken just a little bit more seriously as an artist, I probably should have set it up in my name instead, but due to some odd bit of probably false humility, I felt uncomfortable using my own name as my shop name.

Speaking of false humility, I'm also rather ambivalent about promoting myself, and am not particularly comfortable with churning out the hype and doing the whole rah rah look at my stuff! spiel. I just like to create unique and useful objects that are attractive or at least interesting, and put them out there and see if anybody besides me values them. And sometimes somebody does value them enough to buy them and, really, I couldn't be more thrilled.

So when I learned that the HandmadeMN Etsy street team, of which I am a member, was looking for people to offer items to give away as a way of promoting both the team and participants' shops, I thought, um, yeah, OK, sure. Why not?

So, if you'd like a chance to get this useful and attractive little zipper pouch, click on over to here and follow the instructions, OK? I'll even cover the shipping cost if you win it, so what have you got to lose?

With that kind of enthusiasm, you're probably wondering why I didn't go into marketing, aren't you?

My walk to the mailbox

2011-09-02T19:15:00.001-05:00

I don't walk the dog nearly as often as I should, but when I have something to mail that doesn't require a trip to the post office, I enjoy walking to the mailbox about a quarter mile away, taking a mini tour of my neighborhood, and marking the progress of my neighbors' gardens over the course of the season. I often think I should have taken my camera with me, but I never think of it before I head out the door. So this time, I went back on my bicycle and photographed a few of the vignettes that caught my eye this time around.

A few days ago this beautiful new retro-style bicycle showed up locked to the stop sign on the corner. First it had paper covering the fenders and chain guard, but today it was uncovered. Perhaps it is somebody's surprise gift and they haven't shown up to claim it yet. Anyway, I thought I had better take a picture soon, since it wasn't likely to stay there much longer, and, sure enough, when I came home this afternoon after riding my bike to the coffee shop to do some proofreading, it was gone.

Just a few steps before I reach the mailbox, I pass this charming garden on 42nd Ave., with its pensive gargoyle sitting on the porch. When I went back to take a couple of pictures today, a man pulled up in front and I asked if it was his house. No, it belongs to his friends, whom he was visiting, but he said he would pass along my complements on their garden. I was a little embarrassed to be caught photographing the house, but he didn't seem to think it all that odd, so I guess it's OK.

This grapevine, which I assume to be our native riverbank grape, has climbed right over the top of the privacy fence to show off the way its red stems match the fence's red paint (in truth, it didn't look quite that red to me when I saw it, but I was pleased that the photo turned out to enhance the color without me having to tinker with it.). Soon the birds and squirrels will likely feast on the grapes.

And here's my destination. I kind of wish the homeowner on this corner would plant something to decorate the mailbox, but at least the house is occupied. Last winter it was empty and no one was shoveling the walk for a while, so it became impossible to even get to the mailbox. Maybe once the new owners are all settled in they'll get around to planting a mailbox garden. Do you think?

Hydrangeas are for butterflies, too

2011-08-25T16:14:00.002-05:00

I hadn't really thought of hydrangeas as a butterfly shrub, and I don't recall noticing any butterflies on or around the Annabelle hydrangea that grew at our last house. However, it had only been planted just before we moved in there and it didn't really start blooming in its characteristic profusion until last summer, when we moved out.

Still, I was genuinely surprised when I was going for a bike ride about a week or so ago and spotted a tiger swallowtail happily sipping from a panicle hydrangea in an alleyside garden just a block away. The same shrub played host to a small blue butterfly (like the one I had spotted in my yard only a few days before and wrote about here) and several bees. I really like most hydrangeas, but because I believed that they didn't have much wildlife value, I've tried to temper my enthusiasm for them somewhat, wanting to emphasize wildlife-friendly plants in my garden as much as possible. Now I feel like I've just been given the go-ahead (by a butterfly, no less), to add a hydrangea or two to my landscape plans.

But the one kind of hydrangea I have not so much cared for are the Endless Summer macrophyllas and their mophead kin. They were introduced by Minnesota's own Bailey nurseries several years ago and received with great enthusiasm because they were the first mopheads that can survive our zone 4 winters. I'll admit that my tendency to be suspicious of anything that's too trendy may have somewhat influenced my tepid response to these popular flowers. But it's more than that. Try as I did to appreciate them, I just found them to be a bit too artificial looking for my taste; and I don't like the extra fussiness of tinkering with the soil pH through the use of various additives (most commonly aluminum sulphate) required to get the intense blue color that makes them so popular.

I don't know whether Endless Summer appeals to butterflies, but I do know that the more showy flowers are the ones that are not fertile, so they have no reason to offer nectar to entice pollinators. The kind of hydrangeas that have both the showy flowers and the nonshowy fertile ones (which tend to look like little buds, either clustered in the center, like in the lacecap above, or mixed among the nonfertile blooms, as in the panicle at top), are more likely to offer something for the butterflies. (I admit, I'm speculating here, but it stands to reason, doesn't it?)

I photographed the blue lacecap, above, at a bed and breakfast in Ludington, Michigan, last week when we took a road trip up and around the top of Lake Michigan after bringing our daughter, Nora, to college in Albion. I love the pale blue of the outer florets paired with the deep indigo blue of the small fertile flowers in the center, and was thinking that it would sure be nice if I could grow a hydrangea like that at home. But most of Michigan is in a much milder climate zone than Minneapolis. So, imagine my surprise when I learned that one of the newer introductions in the Endless Summer series, called Twist and Shout, looks just like that!

I'm still considering the different panicle hydrangeas and haven't decided which one I'll plant, or where. But now it looks like I may end up with an Endless Summer hydrangea as well, once I find out whether their soil pH preferences match up with my front yard, where two overgrown fir trees (slated to be removed this winter) have been dropping their needles for a few decades (which may have acidified the soil).

Baby Blues

2011-08-03T16:51:00.004-05:00

I was out in the backyard today when tiny pale blue wings fluttered by. I had my camera handy, so I grabbed it and took some shots as the lilliputian butterfly flitted about among the white clover in my lawn. I know there are a few types of blue butterflies in Minnesota, all of them with a wingspan no bigger than about an inch, and so easy to miss unless you're keyed in to spotting pretty little things. Maybe I'm even a little obsessed with them; I think they're adorable and will make a point of planting their favorite flowers to encourage them to stick around.

All the blues are small; in fact, the tiniest butterfly in the world is the pygmy blue, native to the American Southwest, according to Stokes Butterfly Book. Its wingspan is less than a half inch.

The upper side of the wings is the blue part, a pale almost lavender color that you only glimpse as it flutters about. This guy would not spread his wings when he perched on the clover, so all I could get is a shot of the underside of the folded wings, which is more silver, with distinctive spots. But that's how you identify them, so he was actually being helpful. See the hint of orange in the two splotchy spots near the base of the wings (you should be able to click on the second photo to get a larger view; it doesn't look as orange in these photos as it did in real life), and the two rows of black spots with white margins, and (this is really hard to spot) the really tiny threadlike "tail" by the not-quite-orange spots? All those markings identify this guy as a male Eastern tailed blue. (And you thought I was being sexist, didn't you?) The females don't have the orange spots and aren't as blue.

It won't be hard to provide both nectar and larval plants for these and the other blues—silvery blue and spring and summer azures are also found in Minnesota (and far beyond, of course). They all like legumes, such as clover, vetch and alfalfa, for both caterpillar food and nectar. The silvery blue also likes lupine and dandelions, and the spring azure goes for dogwood, wild cherry, and meadowsweet. (I believe that's the wild spirea, S. alba, although some sites that came up on a quick search say it's filipendula; that's why I often find common plant names a bit annoying, even if they are more poetic than their scientific counterparts).

Eastern tailed blues also like to take nectar from goldenrod, asters, fleabane, white sweetclover (that's our native clover) as well as the Dutch white clover often growing in lawns and pictured here. Did you notice how many of those plants are common weeds that many people work very hard to get rid of?

It's good timing on the butterfly's part, since I am in the process of planning the gardens; a delicate reminder to remember all the butterflies that may find their way to my yard, and not just the big showy ones (I already have a few species of native liatris planted to please the monarchs).

A poppy pops up most unexpectedly, and other reports from the late summer garden

2011-07-20T13:34:00.001-05:00

I went outside to bring out some trash this morning and was surprised by this sweet little poppy growing amongst the daisies and thistles next to the sidewalk. It's at the edge of the area that is slated to become our kitchen garden, and I am planning a mixed border, including self-sowing annuals, to run along the outside of the as-yet-to-be-installed picket fence, to attract beneficial insects and serve as a cutting garden for bouquets, as well as to simply look pretty. And here's a cheerful reminder to include poppies in that mix!

I have no idea how it got here, of course. I am pretty certain there were no poppies in any part of the garden last year (though it is possible I overlooked them or forgot). At first I thought the seeds may have come from the compost—mine or someone else's—but I don't think it's breadseed poppy (P. somniferum), that's usually taller and most likely a "single" blossom, not a flouncy double like this one. Perhaps it came from someone's wildflower mix, but how it got here remains a mystery. Birds? A squirrel or chipmunk? One of our many nonhuman gardeners of happenstance, surely.

The abundance of rain during this heat wave has certainly taken the edge off, at least for the plants. The lavender seems to be thriving, as you can see here. I envisioned something of a mini hedge of lavender when I planted these four earlier this summer. Even the most hardy lavender is only marginally so in Minnesota, though, so it remains to be seen if it will come back in the spring. It is currently on the west side of the garage, but I am thinking of moving it once I have some of the other gardens prepared. But digging new garden beds is not a project for 90-degree days!

The black-eyed susan and garden phlox are just coming into bloom. They, too, are slated to be moved, probably to the south side of the house. My current "plan" (more like an idea than anything so organized as a plan, really) is to have a wide strip of tall sun-loving perennials, both native and cultivated, all along the south side, except where the faucet and air conditioner are. I need to build up the soil a bit there, to get that gentle slope away from the house, and then plant deep-rooted plants that won't require supplemental watering most of the time, but will seek the moisture way below the surface. I'm envisioning something of a cottage/prairie garden hybrid, with some of those taller prairie forbs and grasses to the back, and the not-quite-so-tall cultivated perennials in front of them. Or something like that. That's a September project, though, when it's safe to move the peonies, which are the only plants (other than weeds) growing there now.

It definitely helps to be in no big hurry to get these various gardens installed, because my ideas have evolved over the past year as I've observed what's going on all around the property, where the sun shines most, where the rain water tends to puddle, and so on.

Let's Put on a Show

2011-07-11T11:11:00.001-05:00

A note card featuring my drawing

This post is, eventually, about a craft show I'm in this Saturday. But first, a little context.

So I have this Etsy shop, for which I chose the rather obscure name Arty Didact, trying to convey the marriage of art and information that appeals to me and characterizes some of my work, and playing off the meaning of autodidact, a self-educating person.

Informative back of the lily note card

Quite frankly, I haven't sold very much at all on Etsy. I tried reading the forums for advice, and joining a couple of teams, and adding more and more items to my shop, because everyone says that's what you're supposed to do (that is, those participating in the forums on Etsy say this, repeatedly and emphatically). And when you don't have something new to add, you're supposed to "renew" listings, which means that you re-list them as if they were new, because when someone is searching for a category of items on Etsy, the most recently listed ones generally show up at the top. So it's like keeping something in the front window at all times.

A paper mache bowl

But when I was being as obsessive as I could about promoting my shop, I wasn't spending as much time making stuff. And I found that spending time each day listing and re-listing and promoting my shop isn't really very interesting, and the people who say it pays off to do that appear to be even more obsessive about it than I was. There are websites and blogs where you can offer give-aways, for example, and some people offer discounts and deals through their Facebook page and blogs, and, well, really, I'm just not into all that. I don't go for promotional offers and hype as a consumer, and it's really against my nature to try to promote my shop in that way, too.

So I've eased up on the re-listings, and I haven't added anything new to my shop in a while because I've been kind of busy with other things (house, garden, freelance work, family...). But, the one thing that I have found to be helpful and fun is the local network of Etsy shopkeepers, called the HandmadeMN Etsy Team. They are a great group of creative people, and through the group forum, I learn about a wide variety of show opportunities, including the smaller ones that fit my budget and level of commitment.

Most notably, this Saturday is the HandmadeMN Summer Market, and the way it came about was kind of cool. First, it started back in March with Erika Herker posting an announcement that she learned that she could reserve a large pavilion in Roseville for free, and maybe it would be cool to put on a mini art fair there consisting of members of our team. From there, an enthusiastic series of messages followed, and eventually, the summer market was organized. It made me think of Spanky and Our Gang: Let's put on a show!

Photo by Erica Herker

I'm looking forward to it, despite the forecast of 90-degree heat that day—and am so glad we will not only be in the shade, but also will only be operating from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. No getting up early on a Saturday and no lingering in the late-afternoon heat! I am grateful to the ladies who chose that time frame!

If you're in the Twin Cities area, it would be really swell if you'd pay a visit. Sorry I'm not offering any coupons or specials or snazzy promos like that, but I will have some cooling peppermint candies on my table to share. I guess that's a give-away, isn't it?

HandmadeMN Summer Market
Saturday, July 16, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.
Rainbow Community Pavilion
1201 Larpenteur Ave. West
Saint Paul, MN 55113

A little harvesting, here and there, despite the chaos

2011-07-10T11:52:00.000-05:00

Even though the chaotic transitional state of our landscape means I haven't done much planting of my own yet, I have been able to gather what I may from the existing gardens, as well as from the little bit of planting I've done so far myself, in pots or baskets.

Harvesting bouquets is easy, of course, with the abundance of flowers and greens; sometimes I use a few leaves of the plain green lance-leaved hostas in bouquets. I find this particular hosta rather ordinary as a garden plant, but its medium-to-dark glossy leaves do complement flowers and showier foliage nicely. I also have two kinds of ferns: the common ostrich fern and a more lacy one, probably a type of lady fern (athyrium).

I used the lady fern in a bouquet recently, with a speckled orange Asiatic lily that started blooming about a week or so ago, combined with several of the wild oxeye daisies that are growing everywhere.

Edible plants include the rhubarb, which I have neglected to pick so far (I think of it, and then I forget! Or, when I remember, it's too hot to cook anyway). I should really pick some to freeze, at least. Conventional wisdom has it that you don't harvest rhubarb after the first of July, but my sister-in-law once gathered several stalks in late summer, shortly after moving and discovering that the garden boasted a robust rhubarb plant. It ended up none the worse for the late harvest, and the rhubarb tasted fine, so I don't think it really matters much. Perhaps plants that are only a few years old need a longer period to recover from early summer harvesting, but that old, established plants can take a season-long harvest.

I planted a large pot with a tomato, which is just doing so-so, and some basil and marigolds and thyme, and next to it another pot with some more thyme and marigolds, and a dill. I also included a couple of parsley plants in my kitchen window baskets, which I can harvest through the window when I want a sprig.

I especially like to use the fresh herbs to make my favorite summer salad dressing—a large dollop of plain yogurt with enough olive oil to thin it to a just-pourable consistency, then chopped fresh herbs and a bit of salt and pepper (I also include some cilantro from the farmers market, but since they sell it in a rather large bunch, I froze most of it and use the frozen herb just like fresh ones). It's delicious on sliced cucumbers, too!

More Garden Discoveries

2011-06-27T15:50:00.001-05:00

I was digging out a weedy patch between the house and our newly laid patio in back when I unearthed a few bulbs and then remembered there had been daffodils here in the spring. Darn!

I am trying to go around and take stock periodically so I know what's hiding amongst the weeds before I dig, but I haven't been as diligent as I need to be with that. Julia had an abundant flower garden in this sunny backyard, and I'm told by neighbors that she kept up with it right up to her final days, when she was in her 80s. But the house sat empty for two years, and last summer when we moved in, our attention was on the inside of the house, so that made for a third summer of neglect. Now all the gardens are completely overrun with weeds, as well as with raspberries and daisies—which may or may not qualify as weeds, depending on how you look at them. I see them (raspberries and daisies) as plants with desirable traits that tend to be a tad too exuberant in their growth habits. A few more years of neglect and I think the whole yard would become a raspberry-daisy thicket-meadow.

Daisies and sundrops oenothera

The daisies are really pretty easy to deal with, and I do enjoy them when they pop up in the lawn or cluster around the clothes pole where the mower can't quite reach them; and they harmonize nicely with most of the other flowers, such as the sundrops oenothera.

But the raspberry thicket is another matter—I know that it's hiding some real gems under its thorny arching canes, and yet the promise of their sweet berries had me reluctant to start cutting them down and digging them out while it was still cool enough to wear long sleeves for the job. It's not that I have any intention of removing them completely, nor any illusion that I can—they originated on my neighbor's side of the fence and will continue to volunteer on my side for, well, as long as my neighbors have theirs. And that's alright by me, I love raspberries. But they need to be confined to the area alongside the fence that directly corresponds to where my neighbors have them, and the flowers that are growing in the raspberries need to be relocated—I wouldn't have even known I had a pink dictamnus (gas plant) had my neighbor Bonny not told me. I found it blooming in amongst the raspberries, almost completely hidden by them.

But I don't want to move them in the middle of summer, and not while they're flowering, and not until I have prepared a suitable new garden bed for them.

Coral bells amongst the weeds and an emerging hibiscus

So in the meantime, I am taking pictures and making notes, and really should be shoving plant markers into the ground to identify them, especially the ephemerals, before they finish blooming and I forget what they are! Even those that are easy to ID from their emerging leaves, like the lilies, need to be labeled as to their color and height, so that I can group them in vignettes that I find pleasing.

Even though we paid frequent visits to this backyard last June after our offer was accepted, and were here every day after July 1st when we closed on the house, and moved in at the end of July, I'm "discovering" all sorts of flowers that I didn't remember seeing last summer, or had forgotten their color. Here are a few gems amongst the weeds that are currently blooming or nearly finished.

Rosy lilies that were all but hidden behind the raspberries—until they bloomed.

A surprise discovery of a white penstemon mingling with the oenothera.

Some rose-colored salvia that will need to be untangled from the grasses. Behind this (on the other side of the downspout) are two platycodon, which are not yet blooming, but which I photographed last summer and so was reminded of them when I looked at those photos (below).

Last summer's platycodon: white ...

and blue.

And more, many more. I have an abundance of perennials here, I just need to divide them and relocate them, after not only preparing new beds, but also making a plan for how I want to group them.

Good thing we're going to be here a long time!

An Urban Stone Garden Wall

2011-06-19T18:55:00.000-05:00

Craig removes sod and starts digging out the slope

You'd think a guy would feel entitled to take it easy on Fathers' Day. But no; we had planned to build a retaining wall across the front of our yard this weekend, and yesterday's rain left us with only today to tackle the job, and Craig was determined to get it done. He had suggested that we allow ourselves a leisurely start to the day and that we would begin the project at noon, but at a little after ten, he was done with all that lounging around and ready to get to work. With shovel in hand, he headed to the front yard and started to dig.

The first layer is set on a ditch filled with gravel.

I rode my bike to Mother Earth Gardens to buy something to plant in the wall, and settled on a creeping veronica called 'Waterperry blue' (you may think that's a typo, and I would agree with you that 'waterberry' makes more sense, but it's spelled with a 'p' on the tag). Besides the pretty sky-blue flowers in the picture on the tag, and its creeping habit, and the notation that it's a good rock garden plant, and its tolerance for part shade, I was sold on the care instructions: "Thrives in nearly any soil and requires little attention." It came in a pack of six small plants, just right for placing here and there in the wall.

It's getting there

Yesterday we had gone to Klier's garden center on Nicollet and 59th to get some class 5 gravel for the wall's base. Klier's has gravel in bulk, and we put a tarp in the back of the car (a Honda Fit, which is a hatchback) and brought a couple of shovels. Just when we got there, it started to pour. The wet gravel was pretty heavy and dense (class 5 is a limestone gravel with the crushed dust included, which makes it pack down to a firm base while still providing drainage, but it also makes it a lot like cement when wet), so we soon decided that we had enough.

Craig sweeps up

For stones, we had decided to use the broken chunks of sidewalk that Craig has been removing from the backyard. That wasn't our original plan; we were going to have all the sidewalk chunks hauled away and then at some point in the future buy nice limestone rocks to make a wall. Then we had to admit that we're not as rich as we sometimes think we are, and, besides, there's something appealing about recycling the sidewalk on property. Also, a polite note from the city inspector persuaded us that it was time to do something with that pile of concrete by the alley.

So, we built a wall. Our original plan was to build one on both sides of the steps, but we're kind of rethinking that right now. We'll see how we feel about that next weekend.

A lady's mantle (Alchemilla mollis) accents the corner

Not Quite a Room of One's Own

2011-06-17T15:45:00.000-05:00

My basement art room in progress

Ever since we moved last summer, I have been looking forward to having a real art studio space where I can get all my stuff organized, with enough shelf space to keep my work table clear so I can just plop down and dive in whenever I get the urge to create.

But it hasn't quite worked out that way. Just as the garden had to wait until other more pressing home-improvement projects were completed, the basement finishing, with art room and TV-watching room on either side, has been on hold, first because of those other more pressing projects (kitchen, bathroom, central air conditioning that still isn't working), and now because this is the time to act on those gardening and landscaping projects.

And, to be fair, it's not that I'm constantly feeling the urge to create stuff with no place to answer the longing. For a while, I was digging around in the various boxes in the basement whenever it was time to make ATCs for a monthly exchange I participate in with a few friends (two of whom I've never met in person, but still regard as friends—or perhaps I should say comrades in arts). I would bring the selected supplies up to my desk in our nicely appointed home office in the second bedroom on the main floor, complete my project-in-miniature (ATCs are artists' trading cards, and they are the same size as other trading cards), then, eventually, gather up the tools and supplies and bring them back downstairs.

An art bunny photo shoot using the natural light of an east window in our first-floor home office

When I brought things back downstairs, I also started to gradually move them into the space that was slated to become my art room, and get them somewhat organized in some freestanding shelves that didn't require finished walls behind them. That was going pretty well, and I was beginning to think that I might be able to create a serviceable interim studio, when I was persuaded that my art room and the family TV room—really two sides of the same large room—should switch places.

Now, my husband is far more expedient than I am, and I will sometimes admit that if it weren't for him, nothing would ever get done around here. So, he moved my shelves and various storage containers to the other side of the room, and, to be fair, tried his best to keep everything in the same order that I had it. But, since my "order" follows a spacial logic that exists only inside my head, he failed.

So I found myself back to spending fifteen minutes looking for something so simple as a glue stick. Compounding that was the return of my creative and lovely daughter, whom I adore, from college for the summer. She tends to borrow my stuff and doesn't tend to get around to always putting it back.

Grandma's sewing machine, from the factory

If you follow my Etsy shop at all (see how cleverly I slipped in that link?), you may well wonder how I could post so many items there if I have no space in which to work. I will tell you. All of the drawings were done before 2010, the note cards are made with scans of these drawings, and most of the rest is either knitted (which I do in my living room chair) or sewn. My sewing machine (a fabulous old factory machine that my grandmother used when she worked at Lockets Liberty Garments in the Wyman building in downtown Minneapolis in the 1930s and '40s) is located in the laundry room, and my small projects don't require much table space to cut out.

Grandma at the factory, ca 1940

And a good thing, that; because it is my capacity to create something, at least, that keeps me from being completely frustrated these days. The garden, too, involves a good deal of creativity, both in the form of problem-solving challenges and good old freewheeling artistry.

But I don't intend to wait until gardening season is over to get back to doing some paper arts, including making ATCs. In fact, with some muggy days in the forecast, and the a.c. sitting idle until Wednesday (crossing my fingers), I may be spending a little more time in the basement soon.

Rescuing the Peonies

2011-06-08T14:57:00.000-05:00

Last June, before we actually closed on our purchase of this house, I stopped by with a handful of Popsicle sticks and a Sharpie to label the peonies along the south side of the then-empty house, noting the color of their blossoms. I reasoned that by the time we moved in, their petals would have long since dropped and withered and I wouldn't know which were pink and which were white, and I thought I might want to dig them up and move them in the fall, with an eye to some to-be-determined color schematic.

But our house offered plenty of projects to keep us busy and I didn't get to the garden at all last summer. That's just as well, because it allowed me a full growing season to observe and photograph the garden. Among the things I observed was that nearly all the peonies were afflicted with splotches on the leaves and spots on the stems, most likely caused by one of several fungal diseases of peonies, especially if their spent stems and leaves are left to rot in place over winter. It also looked like some of the buds had failed to open at all.

Not remembering the blossoms themselves as anything special, only that some were white and some were a medium pink, I had pretty much decided they weren't going to be worth the bother and that I would just discard and destroy the plants and start over, planting new ones in a different location to avoid infecting them with the same problems.

Bloom of, possibly, Peony Annisquam

Then they bloomed, and I was smitten. As I hope you can see from the photos, the "white" ones are really a very pale pink, and their blossoms are so full of petals that even after dozens of the petals fell to the floor when I was rearranging them for the picture, they're still large and voluptuous flowers. And of course they smell wonderful, as do all peonies. A Google image search has me thinking these are probably Peony Annisquam, a 1951 introduction, and available from a Minnesota nursery, Hidden Springs Flower Farm. Since Julia Johnson had tended this garden from the 1950s on, and, from what I have learned from her children (who sold us the house) and our neighbors, was a pretty sophisticated gardener, it's likely she would have bought a few stylish new plants to enhance her yard. At today's prices, the several specimens that grow alongside the house would cost me $25 each to replace. I think I'll keep them.

Even the "ordinary" medium pink ones are, of course, beautiful and fragrant. How could I have thought I could so cavalierly discard them? Besides, ridding peonies of a disease such as this is pretty straightforward and amounts to nothing more than a few good cultural practices: adequate sun and water, good drainage, good air circulation, and—especially important in this case—a thorough cleanup of all plant debris in the fall.

Note the spots on the stem and browned edges of petals

Since I want to move them anyway, preferring a good swath of prairie next to the house (the reasons for which will be the subject of another post), I'll do so in September, a good month for dividing and planting peonies. When I do, I'll rinse the roots to remove the soil, which likely carries the spores of whatever is infecting them, and plant them in fresh soil amended with compost and manure. And as soon as the first frost zaps them, I'll cut all stems off at the soil surface and discard them and all the leaves (or, more likely, bury them at the bottom of a hugelkultur bed). I have treated similar peony problems this way before and did not have to do anything more, except to continue to remove the plant debris after frost.

Peonies are extremely long-lived perrennials, and I'm looking forward to many years (decades, really) of these luxurious flowers. It's also sweet to imagine that long after I'm gone, those peonies will still be here to delight future occupants of this house.

A (mostly) leisurely South Minneapolis bike and bistro tour

2011-06-06T14:13:00.000-05:00

A flowering tree at the Lyndale Peace Garden (rock garden)

Last Tuesday was our wedding anniversary, so Craig took the day off from work and we planned a day of leisurely bike riding, ending with dinner at Cafe Maude in SW Minneapolis's Armitage neighborhood. We chose Cafe Maude not only because it is a very nice restaurant and we especially love their lamb skewer appetizers, but also because going there by bicycle means following the bike trail along Minnehaha Creek for most of the way.

Never mind that we chose to head west on a day when winds from that direction were averaging 25–35 mph, with gusts up to 40 mph! (Hence the "mostly leisurely" reference.) I kept thinking that once we got down by the creek and more or less into the woods, the wind would be buffered. But not so much. And, of course, the creek being in something of a valley through the city, as soon as we parted from the bike path to head into a neighborhood, we had a steep uphill climb. So, we got a good workout as well.

We left before noon and stopped first at Patisserie 46 at 46th and Grand where we shared a sandwich and salad for a light lunch. Just as we approached the counter, the barista announced that he had made an extra latte by mistake, and he offered it to us. That plus a delicious chocolate chip cookie make a very lovely dessert. After browsing a cute and friendly gift shop at 48th and Grand called A Little Bird, which featured a chic/trendy mix of old and new items, we headed over to the Roberts Bird Sanctuary by Lake Harriet for a stroll.

Roberts Bird Sanctuary on May 31

All of our recent rains had rendered parts of the sanctuary more like a bayou, and in places the plank path along what should have been the edge of the bog was either submerged or squelching mud when we tried to walk on it, so we turned back and chose an upland route instead.

Jack in the pulpit in the bird sanctuary

The overhead branches of aspen and cottonwood swayed vigorously in the wind, and may have blown the birds away! The only one I recall spotting was a glimpse as we were leaving, shaped like a black-crowned night heron but smaller; I didn't get a good enough look at it to ID it. We did see of lot of jack-in-the-pulpit, with its huge leaves and distinct hooded spadix, and it was a pleasant walk anyway, despite the mud and absence of birds.

It was still too early for dinner, even after our stroll through the bird sanctuary was followed by a walk in the rock garden, so we pedaled uphill again into Linden Hills to Cafe Twenty-eight to enjoy a cold drink and a snack. After lingering on their outdoor patio for an hour or more, we rode to the Paperback Exchange used-book shop on 50th and Penn, where Craig found a Barbara Kingsolver book (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) and I found a few gems, including Words Fail Me by Patricia T. O'Conner, to add to my collection of language usage books.

Cafe 28 in Linden Hills

We arrived at Cafe Maude in time for their "leisure hour" specials on our salads and wine. We then split the lamb skewers appetizer and a steak dinner (splitting everything so as to pace ourselves, still), but didn't stay for dessert. Instead, we headed back east along the creek, with the still-strong wind at our backs this time, and finished the evening at Three Tiers Bakery Bistro in what Craig likes to call "downtown" Nokomis, for a couple of petits fours and some rhubarb sauce over house-made vanilla ice cream. We thought we had carefully paced our eating, but we were quite stuffed after that!

In the whole day, we had probably biked about 14 miles total, not exactly an ambitious day of bike riding. It really felt like we had spent the day as tourists in our own town, appreciating a few of the delightful cafes and bistros and bike paths and serene natural spots that Minneapolis has to offer.

Not everybody's cup of cappuccino

2011-05-17T16:58:00.000-05:00

I wandered around on my bike yesterday, wanting to pedal a little more than a trip to my usual neighborhood haunts would require. So I headed west along Minnehaha Creek, our wonderfully wild and natural urban bicycle byway that leads through little passages of woodland right in the city, then turned north at Pleasant Avenue and headed up—literally—through the neighborhood known as Tangletown. It's so-named for the rabbit warren of curving streets that lace through and across each other as they climb up from the creek. It's an excellent workout, especially since there's no way to get any kind of momentum before you find yourself on a rather steep incline.

I intended to end up at a new little bakery and cafe known as Pattisserie 46, at 46th and Grand, but discovered that they're closed Mondays. So I headed over to Anodyne Coffee, just a few blocks (and at only a slightly higher elevation) away.

The baristas were in good spirits, as they usually are there. A regular customer came in and the barista asked how's it going, and the customer said she'd been working in her yard all morning, digging weeds. "My back yard is almost completely purple with creeping charlie," she said with a weary sigh.

"Sweet," said the cheery barista, her gaze on the espresso machine as she prepared the customer's drink.

"And my front yard is full of dandelions," added the regular.

"I love dandelions," said the barista, seemingly oblivious to the exasperation in the regular's voice.

Gotta love that barista.

Sweet Violets

2011-05-16T00:16:00.002-05:00

I've been seeing lots of violets lately, in lawns and gardens and the crevices of sidewalks. They appeared about the same time as the dandelions, right after we had a hot day followed by lots of rain. I have no understanding, and certainly no sympathy, for those who consider them such a menace that they'll part with their hard-earned money to have some chemical company come and poison their lawn just to get rid of them.

Amongst the various definitions of insanity, I'd suggest that poisoning your lawn and, subsequently the birds and other innocent creatures who visit it, in order to destroy a harmless little flower growing amongst the otherwise boring blades of grass really ought to be one of the top ten.

Common sweet violets (Viola odorata) and their cultivated cousins the pansies (Viola tricolor), and also all members of the viola family, are not only pretty, but also tasty mixed in a salad or decorating a cake. They're mildly sweet and, in truth, offer more in the way of edible decor than flavor. One of our neighborhood bistros, Al Vento, has grown pansies in the planter boxes surrounding their patio, and last spring, I remember the waiter snipping a few for the chef, who used them as a garnish with dessert.

Of course, we're not the only species that can enjoy violas as food. Rabbits will happily munch on them rather than on your garden plants, if the supply in your lawn is plentiful. Fritillary butterflies prefer them as larval plants, and recently emerged bumblebee queens appreciate the nectar after their long winter nap—and anything you can do to get bumblebees to stick around will increase the yields in your garden, especially on the tomato plants, which bumblebees pollinate better than any other insect.

Despite their delicate appearance, violets are tough and sneaky little flowers. Hence, all the efforts to eradicate them from lawns eventually fail. They spread by underground runners as well as by seed, which is why they tend to colonize a given area once they get started there. And when they are ready to go to seed, they nod and tuck their little inconspicuous seedheads out of site and near the ground, so regular lawn mowing doesn't even affect them.

They have some medicinal uses, too, though I've never tried to use them in this way. According to this site, the ancient Greeks used them to "moderate anger" and strengthen the heart, and one of the common names for both violets and pansies in old England is Heart's Ease. A delicious bit of irony, when you think of the people so irritated by them that they'll do anything to kill them.

Julia's Garden: Emerging and Transforming

2011-05-02T11:05:00.000-05:00

Julia Johnson was the former owner and gardener at this house. She passed away a few years ago and the house sat empty for a couple of years while the family waited for the market to improve, or so I understand. I'm glad they decided to sell it when they did, because it was right when we were looking last spring (actually, I think they had listed it in January and by spring when we saw it, they had lowered the price—must have reached that point when an asset becomes a burden!)

We closed on the house on July 2 last year, spent the month of July madly doing as much as we could to upgrade and spruce up the house, as well as simply to make it better suit our own tastes, then moved in at the end of July. So, our focus all last summer and fall was on the inside of the house (except for installing gutters to redirect the rain from the roof, but that was for the sake of the inside, as well, of course). Now it's time to start on the outside, my favorite part!

Julia was quite an avid flower gardener, but apparently not a vegetable gardener. The space at the back that we had assumed must have been her kitchen garden because it enjoys such terrific sunlight and is completely overrun with weeds, raspberries, and a random assortment of flowers, was, as it turns out, where the family used to park their second car. That would explain the two slightly skewed rows of heavy concrete pavers we've been hauling out of there! (We hardly noticed them last summer, when the weeds were three feet tall!)

Our neighbor Joe informed us that Julia "threw some raspberries in there" because she didn't know what else to do with the suckering canes. Ah, raspberries; a mixed blessing, indeed! There is a thriving thicket of them against the fence that we share with Bonnie and Joe—a thicket that grows on both sides of the fence, and it's not clear which side it started on! Taming that thicket is one of my daunting tasks this summer. But, fortunately, we all love raspberries, so it'll be a labor of love.

I imagine the same explanation applies to the clumps of lupines, blackeyed Susans and echinacea in the former parking space, all of which also grow elsewhere in the garden. Chances are she needed to divide these robust perennials and couldn't bear to discard them. Who can blame her? I have started potting up clumps of them to bring to a spring plant swap or two. It'll nice to have something other than orange daylilies to offer!

And then there are the daffodils, tulips, and grape hyacinths. What a treat to see these emerging and opening up this spring. I should not be surprised there are so many daffodils, because it would seem that Julia really liked yellow. We painted over a few faded yellow walls last summer, and when we visited the estate sale for this home last June, I selected this figurine dressed in yellow as a memento of Julia. The daughter-in-law taking payment said, "This one looks like Julia, too." Whether that's true or she just said it because I told her why I was buying it, I like to think of this pretty little lady as Julia's totem, or maybe I should say "avatar." I named her Julia, anyway. She's too fragile to keep outdoors, but I brought her out to the garden to pose alongside Julia's daffodils for a photo.

Cabbages and eggs, again

2011-04-24T00:06:00.000-05:00

Boiled eggs, chopped red cabbage, turmeric, & vinegar

I wasn't going to color Easter eggs this year, what with Nora away and me not into doing the whole Easter Bunny thing anymore. Last year I announced to our two adult children that the Easter Bunny had retired, but if they wanted to hide eggs for each other, they should feel free to go right ahead and do so.

Here the eggs are inside the bowls

But I still enjoy coloring eggs, especially since I started playing around with food-based natural coloring agents a few years ago. It kind of seems more magical to me, to make your own dyes from foods and spices; or maybe it's just more appealing and kind of a novelty. It always makes me want to experiment with dyeing other things, like linen bookbinding thread (which I've done) and paper (which I've also done, but only with tea and rust—but not together; that is, I have used them together and it just turned the paper gray, so now i know better).

It's the one time each year that I buy white eggs. All the rest of the year I buy brown eggs. Either way, they're organic, free-range eggs from the co-op, but most of the time the brown eggs just appeal to me more. But I don't expect they would color up very well, would they?

To keep things simple this year, I just did two colors, with three eggs of each. I boiled up seven eggs Friday morning, and ate one of them for breakfast (taking it out of the water after only three minutes so the yolk would be soft), and let the others sit until I had finished my tea.

Not bad!

So, this year's egg dyes are from red cabbage and the spice turmeric, following the directions from Lakewinds Co-op. After letting them sit in the refrigerator for a few hours, I took the eggs out and rinsed them off and was pleased to find I got a deeper blue from the cabbage than in past years—and some little white splotches that make them look more interesting than if they were just evenly colored. The turmeric always produces a nice rich gold color. (Compare the result from a couple of years ago in this blog post.)

Next: make deviled eggs, of course. And cole slaw—there's always more cabbage than I need just for eggs. And maybe next year I'll try some different foods, like beets, too.

Another postal treasury on Etsy

2011-04-19T22:21:00.000-05:00

Vintage postage stamps from Verde Studio on Etsy

I do love getting and sending fun stuff in the mail, it's the reason I joined Postcrossing, and it sometimes inspires me to look on Etsy to see what handmade and vintage items I can find to make mailing stuff even funner.

So I curated a treasury in anticipation of Mothers' Day, Write Your Mother.

My most surprising and delightful find? Vintage postage stamps that haven't been used, so you can use them to send mail. Sure, you're paying more than face value for them, but, even so, what fun!

Little knitting/felting projects

2011-04-16T20:26:00.001-05:00

My new crafting zine, with three knitting patterns

I like to knit, but I have kind of a short knitting attention span; I'd rather not start a project unless I can reasonably expect to see it to the end in short order, before events intervene or I just get sidetracked. On top of that, I prefer to use quality yarns, but I don't like to spend a lot of money. So, I look for things I can knit from a single skein of yarn or less. This also allows me to sometimes rummage in the yarn shop remnant bin, for that discounted skein that's the only one left of its dye lot.

I like to knit socks, too, which are actually rather time-consuming, but they don't use a lot of yarn and the whole project is easily contained in my small knitting bag (it's a canvas tote that's less than a foot deep and wide). That's my other criteria: I want the project to be small and easily portable, so I can knit at the coffee shop or wherever I like. And I don't mind sticking that project out to the end, because I end up with a pair of handknit socks, which is a wonderful thing. No less an authority than Pablo Neruda has extolled the virtues of hand-knit socks in his poem "Ode to my Socks."

The other beauty of knitting socks is that you learn some skills that can be applied elsewhere; the short rows used to turn a heel can also be used for other rounded shapes, like little critters with well-formed behinds that allow them to sit up.

A couple of years ago, after knitting a bunny from a Fiber Trends pattern, which turned out much bigger than I had hoped it would (it was felted after knitting), but taught me a lot about how to knit an animal, I started thinking about making up my own patterns. There were things about the Fiber Trends pattern I didn't like, too: it seemed unnecessarily complicated, and, like all their patterns, it's printed on a kind of dark teal paper, which can make it a little hard to read. I assume they do that to discourage people from photocopying their patterns to share with others, and I find myself simultaneously sympathetic and disapproving of that. Why shouldn't friends share patterns? Knitting is such a social activity, it just doesn't seem right to be too proprietary about it.

A random free form cat toy

I've knit some cat toys totally freehand, without a plan or a pattern, using wool yarn so that I can then felt them in the washing machine, which makes them firmer and stronger to hold up to the kind of abuse cats dish out. I can't find the mouse to photograph for this blog (it's probably under the sofa or something), but here's this random alien-looking thing that I made when I first learned how to do an i-cord. Making cat toys is a fun way to do improvised knitting, since it doesn't really matter how they turn out.

Other small projects I've made are a coin purse, a needle "purse" (like a needle book, only it resembles a purse more than a book), and a frog. With each of these, I took detailed notes, and made revisions, and finally got around to typing them up and publishing them in a little booklet, which I decided to call a zine and name it Remnants, with the intention of sharing more scrappy projects in the future, not always about knitting. It's available at my Etsy shop, and it's printed on white paper, with permission granted to reproduce and share it with your friends, because that's what I would do.

So, if you're a knitter, you might like to check it out here.

Julia's Garden in Spring

2011-04-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

When we made an offer on this house last May, it was after most of the spring bulbs had finished their blooming, and I really don't remember seeing any evidence of bulbs at all. Yet it was clear that the former owner, Julia Johnson, who lived to a ripe old age and died a couple of years before we bought the house, had been a gardener—the peonies and phlox and black-eyed susans and their many floral companions attested to that! (They weren't all blooming in May, but were tall enough to be identified by that time.)

It was a hot spring last year, and that tends to shorten the life of the early frost-hardy blooms—they take the cold with cheerful abandon, but they whither and fade in the heat. Also, the garden had been neglected for a couple of years at least, so there were plenty of weeds to hide the fading foliage of any ephemerals that might be there. Fortunately, bulbs tend to thrive on neglect: The reason for tulips' reputation as not really being all that perennial is because the bulbs rot from too much water and fertilizer during their dormancy in mid to late summer.

Yet, even though I had plenty of reason to expect to find spring flowers emerging in this bountiful backyard, it's still been a series of serendipities as each day reveals a little more of Julia's legacy. First I spotted tulip tips emerging near the house, followed soon by daffodils—more and more daffodils around the perimeter of the yard, coming up through the thicket of raspberry canes and aggressive perennials—which are already swelling in the bud, very near ready to burst open.

And today I spotted the squill, first in a patch next to Julia's patio, mingling with the seedheads of last summer's black-eyed susans, then a few sweet little blue buds in the lawn by the clothes pole.

But no crocuses, which I find rather curious. I guess I'll have to plant crocuses this fall!

Window shopping on Etsy

2011-03-25T23:37:00.005-05:00

Since I've discovered how to curate a "treasury" on Etsy—that's their term for a mini online exhibition featuring 16 items from Etsy shops—I've found it to be an enjoyable way to browse the rather overwhelming assortment of handmade and vintage objects on offer at that online marketplace. A friend called it window shopping, and I thought that was a pretty good way to describe it.

Spider robot by Practical Creativity

I start with an idea or a theme and start searching the site using a few key words, selecting items that strike my fancy and that seem to complement each other in some way. Although I start with one theme, soon other commonalities emerge, such as a certain color palette, and by following that, my collection becomes further refined and hangs together rather nicely. I think I just like playing curator—how often do we untrained art admirers get to do that?

The first treasury I gathered was inspired by my desire to see if there were other artisans out there making oddball things from found objects as I like to do. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a lot of really quirky junk art, so I further refined my search by limiting it to small things, and named that treasury Scrappy Miniatures. That got a gratifying number of hits, and a friend even bought one of the items (Llama Boy), so I thought, "Hey, I helped somebody sell something, how cool is that?" Which naturally made me want to do more. But how do you follow an act like that? (The spider robot pictured above is one of the objects in the Scrappy Miniatures treasury. All but one of the images in this post are from the treasuries I've curated.)

Robot paper doll by KellyNewcomer

Well, it was February, and there were a lot of Valentine-themed treasuries that were all about romance and sexy this or that, which just makes me yawn. I think the way we celebrated the holiday as kids was more fun (which I wrote about in this blog post), so I put together a treasury of upbeat Valentine things, named Happy Valentine's Day with Love and Good Cheer.

My most popular treasury so far has been one about postal correspondence, in which I included some vintage items for the first time ("vintage" meaning not handmade, but purchased at an estate sale or something and then resold on Etsy). I'm disinclined to buy vintage stuff on Etsy because I'd rather score my own finds at estate sales and garage sales, but it's fun to look at what others have out there, and sometimes it gives me an idea of the value of those old hankies I thought I was splurging on when I spent a couple of dollars on them, and then found similar (or once, even, identical) ones for $7 or more plus shipping.

Tea Time assemblage by Lorelai Kay Designs

One treasury came about because I was doing "research," to help me better position something of my own. I had created a pattern for a small fabric bunny, and decided that I wanted to use it as a basis for making art dolls, because it's more unique and fun than just making bunnies, and I don't really want to be a one-woman factory trying to crank out stuff in quantity. To get an idea of what might be a realistic price range for comparable art dolls, I started searching for them on Etsy, and, wouldn't you know, got inspired to create a treasury of them. I'm disappointed this one hasn't had more hits, because I think art dolls are tremendous fun, even if most of them are quite expensive (but it doesn't cost anything to look!), so go have a look at Playing with Dolls, OK?

Pietra the un-Easter bunny by Arty Didact

Now, contrary to what I said above, here's a picture (at left) of one of my art doll bunnies, since I mentioned them anyway. (The cat just had to get in on it when I was photographing.)

I've just got two more treasuries to show you (you are clicking on all these, right?). One that is color-themed, but where I took my Etsy shop name, Arty Didact, to heart and offered a little etymology to go along with "In the Pink." And the last one, which was inspired by our recent snowstorm, which I posited as the real reason for the expression "March madness."

So there's your little Window Shopping with Arty Didact for today, kids. I should explain: We used to have a local newspaper that was really just a shopper, and there was a regular column called Window Shopping with Wendy, and it was really just an advertising column—all the mentions were there because the stores paid to be mentioned. It was pretty darn cheesy, and maybe this is, too, but I have found it quite enjoyable to browse this online marketplace in this way, and I thought you just might, too. Cheers.

Messing around in books

2011-03-16T16:44:00.002-05:00

I like books. I like to read them, of course, and I like the look and feel of them, and I like messing with them—writing in them, sometimes drawing in them, and, if the book's not precious and I don't want to read it anymore (or at all, in some cases), I like to carve the pages or otherwise alter the book.

Truthfully, though, I've done very little of that, and tend to get rather intimidated by the sculptured book as art form. Looking at the work of artists such as Jennifer Khoshbin and Brian Dettmer doesn't help, either. No, that's not quite right. These amazing and accomplished book sculptors are certainly intimidating in their skill and artistry, but also inspiring. I don't have to attempt to engage in the same level of intricacy and precision to take inspiration from their wonderful creations.

I'm not as inspired by most of the altered books that come up when I do a Google image search on the topic, though. It begins to look like a fad, and a highly redundant one, to me: too many images of fairies and butterflies and other things with wings (not that I don't love things with wings as much as the next person), and an overall similarity of images and textures and colors. You know, kind of pseudo vintage romantic whatever. And, it seems to me, not really responding to the book as a starting point, but just using any old book as a platform. Pretty soon you'll be able to buy books just for altering at Michael's (an arts/crafts supply store chain in the Twin Cities, and probably elsewhere), if you know what I mean.

Which brings me to The Beasts of Tarzan, a book I picked up at a used-book store a long time ago and, enjoying the imagery and melodrama of the text and its illustrations, thought I could have a bit of fun with it. It sat for a long time before I did anything at all with it, and then I got the idea to carve out niches and use it like a curio case to display some sort of little beasts, to play off the book's title and theme.

I found some guidelines on creating niches (that link isn't where I got my guidelines, but it pretty much says the same thing), and got as far as making a block of the pages by gluing the edges, and cutting my niches, and then pretty much stopped there, with the book, that is.

I was drawn to the "blocks" of paper that I had lifted from the niches as I was cutting them out, and so I turned my attention to those, making them into miniature artworks, two of which I traded or gave away, and three of which I've listed for sale in my Arty Didact Etsy shop. (Didn't I just sneak in a bit of shameless self-promotion there?)

Meanwhile, the book awaits my further ministrations. I'd really like to play a little on the metaphoric idea of beasts, and so, as I usually do, have made it that much more challenging to myself to come up with the kinds of objects and images that will convey the vague notions floating about in my head. Usually, I just need ample time to ponder an idea or theme before I create anything with it; but I keep discovering, in art as well as in writing, that it helps to get those thoughts out of my head and share them with others in order for them to coalesce into something more concrete. Like talking to my husband or a friend about it, or writing about it in this blog. Even just this much, just voicing what's in my head, is enough to get my creative practical gears churning, I find.

So, thanks for listening. And if you care to use the comments feature to say something about your particular beasts, I'd love to read what you have to say.

On Saints and Birds and the Commercialization of Holidays such as Valentine's Day

2011-02-15T02:01:00.006-06:00

In today's Minneapolis Star Tribune, artist Larry Hanson illustrates a quote about St. Valentine, from Episcopal priest Howard B. Harper, which says, "Poor old Valentine, a third-century priest, who was clubbed and beheaded on February 14th, in the year 270, would certainly be surprised to find himself a lovers' saint." And on the always-entertaining blog of Cul-de-Sac comic creator Richard Thompson on Friday, we have "A History of Valentine's Day Cards, Again," with the assertion that "every word of it is true," in which he illustrates the oft-repeated myths that (a) Valentine's Day is really just a re-creation of the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, and that (b) St. Valentine was arrested and eventually martyred for performing illegal marriages (banned during the reign of the emperor Claudius because it hampered his military recruiting efforts), and that he corresponded with his jail-keeper's daughter, signing the letters, "Your Valentine." (The image at right is from one of many sites that purports to relate the "true" story of St. Valentine.)

I love both Larry Hanson's regular "You Don't Say" illustrated quote and Richard Thompson's Cul de Sac comic. But while both are claiming to be presenting some truth about Valentine's Day that is little known, they are really only repeating what others have said, without question.

We all do that, of course, me included. When we learn something that sounds new to us that also happens to confirm our worldview, we are eager to embrace this new "truth" and even disseminate it to enlighten our friends and acquaintances. And while this sort of repetition of perceived fact without investigation has been going on for ages before the Internet was invented, the easy access to everyone's learned opinion makes the Internet an especially prodigious rumor mill. Which is sometimes fun, but also has the effect of helping myths to spread even more quickly and widely than they did when we got most of our information from the much slower but often just as misinformed print media of various kinds.

As Charlotte said to Wilbur in E.B. White's classic children's story, Charlotte's Web, "People will believe anything they read in print." Had he written the book today, surely he would have happily punned, "People will believe anything they read on the web."

For some reason I can't exactly explain, I have been obsessively curious about the history of holidays of late. I read The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum earlier this winter, which led me to read part of The Invention of Tradition, a collection of scholarly articles edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Soon a kind of intellectual domino effect was triggered in my mind, and I found myself hunting down articles in scholarly journals, which I found I could access online after logging in to the Hennepin County Library website and following the research page to the databases link. It was an exhilarating discovery: A person can do real research online instead of relying on Google, which tends to lead you into an endless loop of sources quoting each other and often all leading back eventually to Wikipedia.

Without delving any deeper into explaining the processes of my particular strain of geekiness, and with the advisory that I am still researching this and looking forward to putting together a zine or something on the topic of various holidays (And dubious saints! Maybe trading cards!), I thought I ought to take a moment to share some of what I've learned so far. I'll apologize for not citing more sources at this time (I've dropped in a few links, even so), but it's nearly midnight and I thought I ought to post something about Valentine's Day while the topic is still timely.

Herewith, a few things I've learned about Valentine's Day, which probably don't confirm anybody's worldview, unless you are an avowed skeptic of everything you've been told so far:

Lupercalia, which was celebrated by the Romans on Feb. 15 or thereabouts, was a patriotic holiday, a kind of founders' day, if you will. The etymological root of Lupercalia is lupus, Latin for wolf, referring to the wolf mother who raised Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome. If Valentine's Day were a reinvention of Lupercalia, surely we'd be setting off fireworks and waving Roman flags, not eating chocolates and sending cute love-themed greetings.

Valentine was a popular name amongst Romans. The name shares the same root as the word valor. It meant a brave, strong person. Who wouldn't want a name like that? Of course there were lots of people named Valentine. And of course some of them would have been Christians and some of them priests, and it's entirely possible that some of them would have been martyred for their faith. Persecuting Christians (and Jews, btw) was what many Roman emperors did. (But not all of them, and it appears unlikely that it was a predilection of the emperor Claudius who was in charge during the years in question—there also appears to be no record of any marriage ban during his short reign, from 268 to 270 A.D.). The early martyrologies had, in fact, identified at least two saints named Valentine who were both said to have been martyred on Feb. 14, in 268 or 269 or 270 A.D. But in the mid-20th century, the Catholic church concluded that the evidence about Saint Valentine, whether there were two or just one of him, was dubious enough to remove his feast day from any official observance. In other words, the church isn't sure of any historical facts about the saint.

The first recorded association that scholars have been able to find of Valentine's day with love and romance—and birds, incidentally—was when, in about 1383, Chaucer published his fanciful story poem The Parlement of Fowls, in which he describes an imaginary gathering of birds choosing their mates. Scholars think that he may have been connecting certain phenological observations—birds begin singing again around mid-February (I heard some especially bubbly house finches just yesterday), and the earliest signs of spring begin to manifest about this time—with the saint's day that falls at a convenient point in the natural year.

This association of Saint Valentine's feast day with courtship really caught on amongst the aristocracy in the 15th century, because it fit in so handily with the courtly love traditions already established there, and was a welcome diversion in late winter, before things got really busy in the spring (this was still an agrarian economy, remember).

The peasant classes appreciated a little late winter fun, too, and young unmarried people celebrated the day by pairing up as couples and going carousing in the taverns in groups. It appears that this folk custom was more about partying than about getting serious about romance, however. In a preindustrial agrarian economy, there's a certain amount of downtime that would be coming to an end real soon about this time of year, so why not party while you can?

Valentine's Day was largely unheard of in America until about the 1840s, right around the time people started getting into celebrating Christmas (coincidence?). A great deal of marketing by American businesses had something to do with it. What? You thought the crass commercialization of holidays was a late-20th century invention? It wasn't all crass, though, people had fun with it, and many of the 19th-century valentine greetings were quite clever and often humorous. And from these early beginnings in America, children were included in the exchange—it wasn't just about adult romantic love, but also about parents' affection for their children, and children's friendships, too.

The Hallmark company has a collection of historic American valentines at its headquarters in Kansas City, as does the Hennepin History Museum. (The image above is from Indiana University.) I like to think of this fanciful correspondence as early examples of mail art, but that might just be me seeking to confirm my worldview. The mailing of valentines peaked around 1850, at which time the post offices were swamped with seasonal mail, much like they are now at Christmastime.

It appears that ever since Chaucer's time, the holiday has taken on many meanings, from birds singing and pairing up, to courtly romance and poetry, to more lighthearted gestures of love and affection. I suppose people over the years have made of it what they like, according to their preferences and, dare I say, worldviews. And isn't that really the best sort of holiday?

I hope you had a happy Valentine's Day, however you chose to mark the day.

Let's put the fun back in Valentine's Day, OK?

2011-02-02T18:22:00.002-06:00

Remember exchanging playful silly Valentines in school when you were a child? I hope you weren't traumatized by this practice in some way (by being left out, for example), in which case I apologize for bringing it up. But what I remember about it was that it was fun to get all that pretend mail (and the teachers made sure everyone was treated equally by sending home a list of all the kids in your class); and I really liked the small size of the cards and the silly invitations to "Be Mine" when we all knew that none of us was exactly looking for a soul mate in third grade; and the candy hearts; and then when Dad came home he brought a heart-shaped box of chocolates, supposedly for Mom, except my siblings and I ate all the good ones and left Mom the ones we didn't like.

And that was pretty much the extent of it. It was fun and playful and sweet, and then it was over and we moved on.

Then when I got to be a teenager it started acquiring baggage: Will I get invited to the Valentine dance? (no) Will I have a boyfriend to exchange Valentines with? (no) It wasn't really fun anymore, at least that's how I remember it.

I didn't like the expectations followed by disappointment that the holiday had come to represent, not just for me, but it seemed like that was the case for a lot of people. And I especially didn't like the advertisements promoting all sorts of expensive, elaborate ways that we're supposed to show our love. Especially how men are supposed to shell out the bucks to buy expensive and sexy things for their wives and girlfriends.

So when Craig and I were dating, and later after we were married, I really played it down and said I had no expectations of the day. Which wasn't really true, of course, but Craig took me at my word, so again I was disappointed—but this time it was my fault!

So one tearful Valentine's Day (I was either pregnant with our first child, or else she was a baby—either way, hormones had something to do with it), I expressed my disappointment and we started going out on Valentine's Day. Eventually I realized that I didn't really want a candlelight dinner or jewelry or a mawkish card, I just wanted some thoughtful and cheerful acknowledgment of the day.

I mean going out to dinner is great, I love going out to dinner. But going to dine at a restaurant on Valentine's Day is, well—talk about mawkish and expensive!

So we've been making each other Valentine cards for several years now, and they're generally lighthearted and humorous and clever and I've really enjoyed it. I craft something a bit unique, like a bottlecap charm or a card involving a bit of paper engineering, or whatever craft I'm into at the time. He has made me a card featuring a collage from junk mail (with all its hype and promises), or quotations about flirting (including a great one from Oscar Wilde complaining about women flirting with their husbands in public!) with images of famous flirts, as he called them (Lauren Bacall, Mae West, etc.). Last year's featured a red paper heart pasted onto a sandpaper card and said something about loving me through rough times and smooth. When I mistakenly used it recently to sand some wood, he said that was OK, he had intended it to be practical, as well!

One year, when Craig was working at Utne Reader, I made a whole bunch of mini Valentines (about 2 inches square) with the greeting "Happy Heart Day" and had him bring them to work and distribute them to everybody. He reported back how delighted everyone was to get them. (And he said that he kept saying, "These aren't from me, they're from my wife." Especially to the women.)

So it was in that spirit that I went looking on Etsy, the forum for crafters and artists to sell their handmade things, to find items for a "treasury" of lighthearted Valentines. While I didn't find much that was as silly as I would have liked, I did find some clever, cheerful things worth showcasing. It's considered bad form (downright tacky, in fact) to feature yourself in a treasury, so my Valentines are not in that treasury, but are found on my Etsy shop, or at the Barton Handmade Arts from the Heart fair on Feb. 12, which I guess I'll have to tell you more about in a separate post.

Itty bitty craft fun in the mail

2011-01-16T18:23:00.000-06:00

I'm a sucker for tiny things, and I love projects that allow me to use bits and pieces of leftover craft supplies to make stuff. So I'm browsing on Etsy, and I search "zines," and I come across Tanglecraft's shop, in which she offers an issue of Craft Leftovers Monthly because she has a project in it, on how to make your own mini matchbox. I had a little money in my PayPal account, so I bought it for $12 including postage from the UK, and it came pretty quickly, like in a little over a week.

There's a section in front, "A few of my Favorite Things," with brief descriptions of some items on the Web, some to buy and some to make, that all fit in with the miniatures theme of this issue. Not surprising with the way things change so quickly online, and how easy it is to get a long url wrong (she has them all shortened through a service that uses the beginning "ow.ly/", kind of like the more-familiar-to-me bit.ly or tinyurl that people use), there is a bad link (just one that I found), but it was pretty easy to locate the correct site because she tells you the name--a blog called How About Orange that had a tutorial on making miniature origami houses (which, since I located it, I'll connect you to here). But, as I see it, without this mention in this little zine, I wouldn't have known that blog, and that tutorial, even existed, so it's still a plus.

Also in this issue are instructions to knit a dollhouse-sized cat, with photos, how to make a mini fabric banner, the afore-mentioned match box instructions, an interview with a crafter who crotchets miniature animals (and how to find her Etsy shop, where she sells the patterns), and several more features, including a little story by the editor/publisher about making a doll house with her dad, a recipe, a coloring page and a word-find game. The whole thing is just fun and clever and playful, I'm really enjoying it. And getting it in an envelope from the UK is part of the joy--who doesn't like to get mail, and foreign mail especially?

Holiday postage stamp choices

2011-01-02T16:10:00.000-06:00

About halfway through the holiday correspondence season, it occurred to me that, since I always notice what stamps people choose to put on their envelopes, why not make a survey of it. I already had a little stack of stamps from the cards we had received so far, but since I don't usually save stamps I find uninteresting (namely, the Liberty Bell and flag ones, although I'll grant that the newer flag ones are more artistic looking than the old ones), this isn't a very accurate accounting. Even so, of the 30 or so cards we received, I have 18 stamps. I'm going to assume that most of the 12 I didn't save were Liberty Bell forever stamps, because I remember noticing quite a few of those and wondering why people were using them when there are new forever stamps with images of evergreen trees on them. Of course, I do know why--because they bought a roll of 100 of the forever stamps and they're going to use them up before buying more stamps.

I know you're dying to know the results of my stamp survey, so, here we go. Of the 18 stamps I saved, evergreens are the clear winners, with all other categories, including the more explicit Christmas stamps, trailing far behind:

evergreens — 10
flags — 2
Liberty Bells — 2
Miss Liberty — 1
lute player — 1
Madonna and child — 1
English Christmas stamp featuring a snow-covered postbox and cartoon character — 2 stamps, both on one envelope
Original artwork matching the card, on a Zazzle stamp — 1

So there you have it.

Blizzard journal pages

2010-12-18T15:04:00.000-06:00

After our rather exciting weather last weekend—the fifth biggest blizzard in Minneapolis, at least since they've been keeping track of such things—I realized that I'd really be kicking myself years from now if I don't do a page or two in my journal about it.

Craig had gone to Albion, Michigan, on Thursday (Dec. 9) to bring Nora back home from college. They weren't able to start driving home until Friday afternoon, because Nora had a paper to write. So I had an image in my mind of the blizzard bearing down from the northwest as Craig and Nora were driving home from the east. They crossed into Minnesota around 11 p.m., just as the blizzard was starting to blow. "We met [the blizzard] in Woodbury," Craig said.

Then, on Saturday, Martin took the car to work at Target in the morning, and ended up working until 3:30 p.m., although he was originally scheduled to work until 1, because so many people couldn't make it in. In the meantime, we were running low on groceries—most notably, cat food—because the day that Craig left for Michigan was payday, and so I hadn't gotten to the co-op to stock up. Craig announced that he would walk to Lunds, a mile away across the river and the Ford bridge, and I said, "I'm comin' with!"

For much of the way at the beginning, the snow was knee-deep, and so it was much more effort than a simple one-mile walk! We had agreed that we would take the bus home, then learned that bus service had been stopped. We found Lunds to be surprisingly busy, and most people there quite cheerful, except a couple of women who had become stranded because there were suddenly no buses (I could think of worse places to be stranded, myself).

The walk home went a little better than getting to the store, mostly because we discovered that the sidewalk across the bridge had at least been plowed. There is something, too, about knowing you're on the home stretch that makes a challenging trip a little easier. Still, the wind blowing down the river corridor was really something—it even made us stumble sideways a few times. I had taken a few pictures of Craig walking before me on the bridge, but couldn't quite capture those moments when his scarf was blowing straight out like a weathervane, so I used one of those photos and my recollection to make the picture of Craig on the bridge.

We got home about 4 p.m., shoveled out our sidewalks, and enjoyed a lovely steak dinner that night with the whole family at home. There's nothing quite like a good old-fashioned Minnesota blizzard to make a home feel especially cozy!

My photos from the blizzard weekend are on my Flickr page.

Happy Bodhi Day

2010-12-08T11:00:00.001-06:00

Today, December 8, is Bodhi Day, which commemorates the day that the Buddha, while sitting under the Bodhi tree, attained enlightenment. I once asked a Buddhist friend how to observe the day, and she suggested eating an orange mindfully. Since the orange is obviously not the point, but, rather, mindfulness is, perhaps this is a good day to begin or renew a mindfulness practice, which usually means sitting in meditation.

Meditation, it seems to me, is about setting aside a little time to step outside of our daily activities for the sake of a few moments of mindfulness. I've no doubt that's a good thing. But the appeal of eating an orange (or eating anything) mindfully is that it brings mindfulness to our daily activities. Or at least one of them—and one that most of us are especially inclined to do without awareness, while our monkey minds are racing ahead to the next thing on our to-do list.

But what does it mean to eat something mindfully? A friend once told me that her doctor gave her guidelines for doing just that, advising her to consider the texture of the food, each little nuance of flavor and so forth. I remember listening to her description of those instructions and thinking that it sounded like way too much work. It was more like eating analytically—and I can't help but think how typical it is of Western medicine to complicate something that should be elegantly simple and natural, to the point of making it seem unnatural.

I prefer an eating-for-pleasure approach: slow down, savor, enjoy. It's explained very nicely, without prescriptiveness, in this interview with nutritional psychologist Marc David.

Happy Bodhi Day. Enjoy!

You Can Have Your Willpower, I’m Baking More Cookies

2010-11-29T20:24:00.002-06:00

Isn’t it interesting how sometimes seemingly disparate parts of our lives intersect one another, like a Venn diagram? Things that we probably would have never connected come together and offer clarity where before there had been only obfuscation. This has happened for me recently with the surprisingly overlapping topics of a children’s story, my failed efforts in the past to lose weight through dieting, and my recent experience with the Feldenkrais method. At the center of all that is the misguided notion of willpower.

I'll begin with the children’s story.

When our kids were little, we used to read the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. The stories are always about the friendship between the title characters, as they confront very ordinary problems together, things that we all deal with every day, and so gently encourage us to be more forgiving of our (and others’) shortcomings.

One of my favorite Frog and Toad stories is the one called “Cookies.” In it, Toad bakes cookies and brings them to Frog’s house to share with him, and soon they find themselves eating and eating the cookies, seemingly unable to stop. “We need will power,” says Frog.

“What is will power?” asks Toad.

“Will power is trying hard not to do something that you really want to do,” says Frog.

So they try to stop themselves from eating all the cookies by putting them in a box, tying string around the box, and putting it up on a high shelf; but each time, they realize that they can still get at the cookies to eat them if they want to. So, finally, Frog takes the cookies outside and feeds them all to the birds. Toad laments that all the cookies are gone, but Frog assures him, “Yes, but we have lots and lots of will power.”

“You may keep it all, Frog,” says Toad. “I am going home now to bake a cake.”

I always thought that story offered a pretty good explanation for why dieting doesn’t work! Who can sustain that constant effort? I know I never could. I have lost many pounds by using willpower to restrict my calorie intake, but eventually I got tired of the effort and slid back into old habits, and always ended up gaining back more than I lost. I quit dieting a long time ago, and eventually quit gaining weight. In fact, my current weight is about 30 pounds less than it was two years ago, despite my refusal to restrict my calories through dieting.

I thought about that story recently when the topic of willpower came up at a Feldenkrais lesson. My Feldenkrais explorations have expanded beyond my knee to developing an awareness of how I carry tension in my back and shoulders and neck. And whereas I pretty quickly got the hang of relaxing my back whenever I notice that I’m arching it, and so have largely eliminated the low-back pain that used to plague me, I was having trouble doing the same with my shoulders.

“When I notice I’m arching my back, I can relax it into a better posture,” I explained to Nick Strauss-Klein, my teacher. “But I find I have to push my shoulders down.” He responded with a knowing nod, like he encounters this sort of thing all the time. The rest of that lesson focused on my neck and shoulders, and one of the things he did was ask me if I could let my neck be long, rather than direct my attention to my shoulders.

That helped a lot, and although the hunched-shoulder posture is still a very persistent demon of mine, I at least have a more successful strategy for addressing it. When I reported this back to Nick, he said something that made me think of the Frog and Toad story—in essence (I didn't write down his exact words, of course):

“Moshe Feldenkrais said that whenever we try to make changes through effort and willpower, it’s much harder to sustain.”

Frog and Toad went to a lot of effort to try to not do something, and I think that’s a pretty good definition of willpower. They couldn’t sustain it, and neither could I. But just as the two friends couldn’t force themselves to be satisfied with the cookies they had already eaten, I can’t force my shoulders to relax.

A dieting mindset is one that focuses our attention on what and how much we should not be eating: Cookies and other sweets are taboo, as are high-fat foods like whole milk and butter. I always found that it encouraged me to obsess over those kinds of foods, which made me want them more—you know, the lure of the forbidden—and to feel bad about eating them, and weary from the internal battle over trying hard not to do something I wanted to do, or thought I wanted to do. So, just like Frog and Toad, I kept eating more, seeking the pleasure that the cookies are supposed to provide, and faulting myself for lacking the willpower to resist eating them. I got all of the calories and none of the pleasure.

When I quit dieting, I stopped focusing my attention on what I thought I shouldn’t eat. And when I quit choosing low-fat versions of foods that are naturally high in fat (like dairy products), I also stopped feeling the urge to eat more and more in pursuit of the elusive pleasure that whole foods naturally provide. Even though I’m not dieting these days, and I’m including high-fat foods as a regular part of what I eat, I’m consuming fewer calories while at the same time feeling more satisfied.

And that’s almost enough to make me relax my shoulders. Almost.

Ancestor Hunger

2010-11-18T11:38:00.000-06:00

Sometimes something I'm doing triggers thoughts of relatives long gone, and I find myself missing them. It's not so much a memory as a longing to share this experience with them, because there's something we have in common in that moment, an affinity for a particular activity.

When I discover a new coffee shop, I think of my Grandma Clausen and how much she would have enjoyed it. How she would have looked around and smiled and said, "Isn't this nice." She would have appreciated the proliferation of coffee shops, which really started after her death (in 1991). She would have understood them as places of conviviality, and I think she would have liked them all, and the way that they reflect their various communities. I often wish I could take her around to all the coffee shops I like and share them with her.

It's when I'm doing something inventive that my dad enters my head. Especially when it's something creative and a little bit quirky, something that seems in the moment brilliantly useful, but probably only to me. Yesterday, I was clearing my desk because I needed to spread out the proofreading I was doing (due this morning), and there were a few business cards I didn't know what to do with, and pretty soon I was cutting and folding and creating a little mini portfolio to hold business cards. I even fished some cardstock scraps out of my recycling bag and cut them and glued them on as covers. And as I was making this little scrappy portfolio, I was thinking what a good idea this is and how I should make some for my Etsy page (only out of more attractive paper). All this, while I should have been proofreading!

And this morning when I was looking at the little portfolio, I thought, Dad would have liked this, and I could imagine myself sitting at the table with him, figuring stuff like this out together. And I actually felt sad and missed my dad in that moment.

I know, they are still with me in these ways that I have just described. There's a piece of each of them in me, I know that. But it's in those moments when I feel their presence that I miss them.

Rediscovering the Joy of Reading Aloud

2010-11-08T11:01:00.000-06:00

About a week ago, Craig and I drove to Albion, Michigan, to visit our daughter, Nora, who's attending college there. It's about a ten-hour drive in the best of conditions, easily 11 or more depending on the whims of Chicago traffic.

When we drove Nora out in August, we brought along an audio book (one of the Artemis Fowls), but we didn't have one this time, so I brought instead a thick novel—Driftless, by David Rhodes—that I had bought from the publisher, Milkweed, at the Twin Cities Book Festival in October. I selected that one largely because it is set in southwestern Wisconsin (in the driftless region), and since we would be driving through Wisconsin for a good portion of our trip, it seemed apropos. I had also read the foreword and liked how the author strung his words together.

So I read aloud as Craig drove, for as long as my voice and the fading daylight made it possible, with several long breaks to rest my voice as we listened to one of our music CDs. By the time we returned to Minneapolis, I had made it through about half the book. After we got home, Craig took up the role of reader, and over several evenings this past week, followed the book through to its conclusion.

It's a terrific story (many stories and one story, skillfully interwoven) and I hope to get Craig to write a review of the book for the Minneapolis Observer blog soon, but right now I just wanted to tell you about the experience of sharing a book by reading it aloud to each other. It's so entirely different than reading silently, separately. For one thing, it drew our attention to the rhythm and sound of the words, and with a writer as skilled as Rhodes, that's especially delicious. Playing the role alternately of listener and of reader further enhanced this aspect.

Second, it led to an ongoing discussion about the book, and a very different sort of discussion than one you might have with a book club or even with your partner when each of you reads a book separately. It's very immediate, and we were always at exactly the same place in the story, so neither had to worry about giving something away that might spoil the other's experience of the book; and these pauses to discuss the book informed our inferences when we continued. And we've continued to talk about the book over the last couple of days since we finished it.

When our kids were little, we used to read aloud to them, of course, as all parents do. And I remember some discussion with other parents about the joys of reading aloud and how you never grow too old to enjoy being read to. And during that time, as well as before we had children, we used to read to each other once in a while—usually essays or poetry, though, not so much whole novels.

But somewhere along the way of raising children and the ordinary demands of life, we stopped doing that. And I don't think it would have occurred to me to resume the practice if I hadn't been looking for something to pass the hours on that long drive to Michigan and back. But now that we've shared a book in this way, we both agree we want to do it again soon.

Walking the Dog

2010-11-05T20:41:00.000-05:00

I've been taking Feldenkrais lessons since spring, but it looks like I haven't yet written about it on this blog. It has made a big difference in my life, and it's high time I said something about it. For one thing, it has allowed me to resume my daily walks with our dog, Brigit, a routine I had given up sometime last winter, when I realized it was making my bad right knee worse, and frequently had me limping painfully by the end of the walk. The dog is especially happy that we have resumed these walks, since nobody really picked up the slack when I left off.

Feldenkrais is described by its practitioners, who call themselves teachers, as "somatic education." I first learned about the method about a year ago from an article in the magazine my husband edits, but wasn't able to find a local practitioner until last spring, when a Google search lead me to Nick Strauss-Klein.

My knee problems stem from an injury more than 30 years ago and subsequent surgery to remove a torn medial meniscus. About ten years after I (and tons of others) had the surgery, orthopedists said, "What were we thinking?," and stopped routinely removing torn menisci.

Lacking this rather crucial body part, my knee has kind of collapsed on the side where the meniscus should have been, resulting in bow-leggedness and osteoarthritis, with a few bone chips in the mix. The bone chips may have resulted from my misguided attempts to take up jogging, likely causing excessive grinding where the bones meet. I didn't realize how bad it was getting until my husband watched me one time and told me that my knee actually wobbled a bit from side to side with each step. I quit jogging after that, and cut way down on walking, fearing that I was doing damage to myself with every step.

Last spring I finally sought out an orthopedist for the first time since the surgery, hoping for a referral to a physical therapist and maybe some recommendations for ways that I could be more active—like some sort of knee brace that would prevent the wobble so that I could try jogging again, or at least walk more.

He took an X-ray and observed me walking and offered the insightful diagnosis, "That is one messed-up knee." He then asked me a few questions that hinted at a certain incredulity that I could walk at all, that I wasn't in a great deal of pain all the time. I'll admit that I took a certain pride in this line of questioning, because I thought it suggested that I must be pretty tough.

He said I had two options, then changed it to three, which encouraged me for only a moment: knee replacement surgery (no surprise there), doing nothing, or getting an expensive brace that would hold my leg more or less rigid, to straighten out the leg and correct the bow-leggedness, at least while I was wearing the thing. It sounded like the equivalent of putting my leg in a full cast, albeit a removable one; a device that would hardly facilitate my desire to be more active.

So, remembering the article about Feldenkrais, and my failed attempt to find a local practitioner the previous fall, I decided to do another search, and this time found Mr. Strauss-Klein, who, together with his wife and two sons, had just moved into the Twin Cities area. I started seeing him in April, and have gone for "lessons" several times a month since.

What I've been learning, to put it simply, is what that old folk/gospel song "Dry Bones" tells us: The knee bone's connected to the ankle bone, and the hip bone, and all those other bones right on up to the rib, neck and shoulder bones. Over thirty years of coping with chronic pain and instability, I'd become very rigid, and that rigidity meant that my knee was taking the bulk of the impact of every step, rather than allowing it to reverberate upwards and throughout my body. During one lesson, Nick explained that our ribs act as shock absorbers—except mine. They were acting more like cinder blocks.

So the lessons involve roughly two things: helping me become aware (but without judgment) of the habits I've developed that are aggravating my problems, and helping me find different ways of moving that are easier, gentler on my knee, and more graceful. Sometimes, the different ways of moving involve intentional actions on my part—learning to let my arms swing more freely and my pelvis rotate naturally. Sometimes it involves him gently poking me in the ribs, for example, or pulling or pushing on my arm or leg, in an attempt to, as he puts it, ask my brain a question, or offer it a suggestion. Unlike massage therapy, a Feldenkrais teacher doesn't try to complete the process through external manipulation. Rather, he leaves you a little bit hanging, allowing your brain to chew on it a bit and find the best solution. This results in a more sustainable change, even if it's sometimes a bit disorienting. If you've ever left a great massage session only to have your muscles become tight again the next day, you'll appreciate the difference.

Yesterday when I was out walking Brigit, it suddenly hit me that I wasn't limping. A slight limp had become such an integral part of my walk, that this was quite a realization. Even near the end of our walks, which are typically about a mile and half long, I'm not limping. If I start to experience knee pain, and I sometimes do, I ask myself, "What can I do differently?" and then try shortening my stride, or slowing down, or turning my right foot slightly out (I used to turn it inward), or even swinging my hips a little more, and one or several such changes solves the problem. Whereas a year ago I would have thought I had blown it and walked too far, and felt very discouraged and defeated, now I have options.

I won't be taking up jogging any time soon (or probably ever), but I'm enjoying getting out on these beautiful autumn days and exploring on foot the parks and woodlands so near my house, and I can tell that Brigit enjoys it too. And I feel very optimistic that it's only going to get better, and that I'll be a happy and grateful perambulator for many years to come.

My quest for a shrubbery

2010-10-26T17:25:00.001-05:00

Since we bought this house this summer, I've been eager to get something planted now to enjoy next spring (not knowing what spring flowers are already here, if any), so I've decided to focus my attention on this corner at the front of the house, which faces west, because, for one thing, it's a rather dull collection of generic hostas with a little astilbe here and there; and because it featured a misguided attempt to deal with a waterfall that cascaded off the roof whenever it rained, pounding a depression into the ground, with the water eventually finding its way into the basement. An odd assortment of rocks, bricks and paving stones marked the spot where the water hit the ground.

Gutters we had installed in early July took care of the waterfall, and this fall I've been working on removing the rocks and pavers and digging up the hostas, which have developed a dense mat of roots over the years. What I thought would be one afternoon's work has occupied me over two weekends so far, with rests in between for my knee to recover after all that jumping on my shovel to cut through those hosta roots.

The long process has afforded me a lot of time to observe the sunlight that reaches this corner and think about what I'd like to plant here. I'm planning to whitewash the gray concrete foundation blocks so there will be no need for the usual foundation plantings to hide them. I decided that I'd like a shrub with an open form that won't grow tall enough to obstruct the windows, and to surround it with some ground covers and spring bulbs. I've got some purple tulips that I mail ordered from Scheepers (and that are sitting in their box in the garage, waiting to be planted). Plants with deep colors, such as a shrub with dark green leaves and dark berries or colorful stems for winter interest, along with the purple tulips, will stand out nicely against the white. Of course I want my shrub to get good fall color, too.

On my walks and bike rides, I've been noticing and admiring a shrub with dark, glossy oval leaves turning a nice, deep red, a graceful vaselike form, and shiny black berries. Thinking it might be just the thing for that corner garden, I did a bit of searching and learned that it's aronia, or chokeberry, and that it requires full sun. My corner garden gets only part sun, so do I have to start over?

I remember noticing on one of many neighborhood garden tours I have gone on over the years, a sun-loving shrub (in this case, Nishiki willow) growing in part shade and appearing to thrive. I asked the gardener about that, and he said that you can grow shrubs that are said to require full sun in part shade if you don't mind them developing a more open form. I tend to prefer the more naturalized look of shrubs that do not take on the dense form of, say, a well-pruned boxwood (although I also like that look sometimes, as an edging), and I was specifically looking for a shrub with an open form for this spot, to stay away from that foundation-planting look.

But, form is not the only consideration. Sometimes plants will not be healthy if they do not get the amount of sunlight they want. Is that a concern for aronia? I asked Google, and it led me to an entry at hort.net that answered my question: it will tolerate partial shade, getting leggy (that's the same as open, as far as I'm concerned), but it may be afflicted by mildew in "darker corners."

The usual way of minimizing the risk of mildew is through good cultural practices: plenty of air circulation. For that, I want nothing obstructing the prevailing winds, which in Minnesota in the summer come from the south/southwest. If I place it towards the center or slightly forward in this garden (on the west side of my house, but to the north of the porch), and plant only low-growing groundcovers surrounding it, it should have no trouble catching those southerly breezes.

The specific cultivar of aronia that I want is called "Autumn Magic," so I called Bachman's and learned that they had six plants in stock, and they were only $20 each, definitely affordable on my budget. Having done my homework, I headed over there today (Tuesday), after an appointment that had me out in the car anyway. Even though it's cold (in the 40s), rainy, and very windy (gusts up to 50 mph!), I was determined to capture my prize. I grabbed the umbrella I keep in the car and headed into the store to find out where they keep the aronia. A helpful indoor employee called an outdoor employee to help me locate the shrub without too much wandering around in this miserable weather, only to be told that they don't have any aronia.

"I called yesterday," I said, confident that they couldn't possibly have sold all six plants when business is so slow due to these uninviting conditions. After sorting it out and confirming that they did, indeed, still have six Autumn Magic aronias, I headed out into the lot to meet the hardy shrub man, holding my umbrella close against the wind so that I could hardly see where I was going. I heard someone call "Ma'am" twice before I located him, looking around my umbrella, which was braced against the nearly horizontal rainfall and completely obstructing my view of whatever was in front of me. After the umbrella inverted itself a couple of times, I gave up and folded it, getting a tad wet in the process but more easily finding my way back to the checkout while holding the shrub in its pot on the cart with one hand, lest the wind toss it to the ground, while pushing the card with the other.

And now it sits in its pot in the garden, where it will remain until the weather settles down and allows me to plant it, along with its companions, those purple tulips.

A popular plant

2010-09-26T23:42:00.003-05:00

Since we moved in to our new house this summer, I've been observing what's growing in the garden, thinking about what I want to keep and what will become compost fodder. Some plants that seem to impress visitors to my garden don't really appeal to me, such as the tropical-looking hibiscus, which gets rave reviews from visitors pretty often—it's quite showy. But it just looks so out of place in an upper midwest cottage-style garden, I can't see it sticking around and fitting in gracefully. Perhaps more significant, though, to me, anyway, is that, popular as it is with my human visitors, the plant's big pink flowers don't seem to be attracting any insects. That's not surprising, I don't think there's any relative of the hibiscus (that I'm aware of) that's native to Minnesota. So, naturally, there are no insects that have evolved here alongside it.

A marked contrast is this New England aster (despite its name, it's a native plant) which probably planted itself, since it's wrapped itself around the clothes pole, an unlikely place for a tidy gardener to have put it, and I believe that Julia Johnson, 60-year owner/resident and gardener here, was a tidy gardener. The garden itself has what I would call a good foundation—it was well-planted and well-tended at one time. This aster has not won any complements from my human visitors, but today I noticed how it's teaming with insects—not only the clouded sulphur butterfly that stands out in this photograph, but if you look closely, you will see two different kinds of bees on the flowers, too. Besides those caught in the photo, I noticed one or two types of wasps, and a couple other types of bees, and multiples of all these species all over the abundant blooms of this weedy flower.

I had been a little concerned that the raspberries growing along a fence on the south side of the backyard weren't getting pollinated—quite a few of the blossoms never formed into fruit this fall, and I haven't seen many bees in their vicinity. But the few straggly raspberry plants in the tangle of weeds between this clothes pole and the alley do seem to be producing fruit quite nicely, even though I haven't been able to get into the thicket to pick them. Those raspberries must surely be benefitting from their close proximity to this magnifient polllinator magnet, and that's as beautiful to me as it's pretty purple flowers.

Wren moves in to the chickadee house

2010-06-27T17:50:00.000-05:00

I bought a birdhouse from the Wild Bird store in Highland Park last summer, embellished it a little with bottlecaps, and hung it on the side of the garage, near the raspberries. I kept an eye on it, but it appeared that no birds moved in. I figured the bottlecaps were too shiny or the birdhouse was too new, maybe it just needed to weather a little. Then when Ian, who, with his wife, Julie, owns the house we live in now, needed to take things down off the garage in order to prep it and prime it last fall, I just put the birdhouse in the garage to try again in the spring.

In the spring, the garage was still ghostly white with primer, and I didn't want to put things back up that would have to be taken down again, so I hung the birdhouse on the clothes pole, close to the garden. Soon a chickadee was checking it out, and not long after, I saw stray bits of grass and weeds sticking out of the sides, just under the roof, where there were little gaps to allow for ventilation. When I was working by the clothes pole, running strings up and over to trellis the snow peas I had planted, the chickadee kept landing on the phone line above and scolding me! Soon, I heard tiny chirping coming from inside the house, and two chickadees were busy coming and going, with frequent visits to our birdfeeder in between.

Since we're moving later this summer, I had been watching for the chickadees to fledge so that I could take down the birdhouse when they were done with it. I figured I would clean it out (the roof is designed so that you can remove half of it fairly easily for that purpose) and store it in the garage so it would be ready to put up again at our next house.

But, although I saw lots of chickadees in the yard, perched on branches of the Norway maple that holds our birdfeeder, and sometimes flapping their wings insistently the way baby birds do, I wasn't sure whether they had truly fledged yet. The English sparrows who had built a nest above the back door under the eaves seemed to still be using their nest, and they had started at about the same time as the chickadees, so I thought maybe the chickadees were still using the birdhouse, even though it was hard to tell. And, of course, I didn't want to disturb them if they were still using it.

When it seemed like the chickadees had really moved out, and I was thinking I should clean the birdhouse soon, I noticed a little bird head sticking out of the hole. It wasn't the familiar black-and-white of the chickadee, though; it was brown. I knew it wasn't the English sparrows (who will invade a birdhouse and kill the occupants, if they find any) because I had bought a house with a metal plate around the hole to prevent the sparrows from widening the hole -- only chickadees and wrens could fit through that hole, and I didn't think wrens were very common in the city.

But then when the little fellow popped out of the house and landed on a nearby twig and began singing his happy bubbly song, I could see (and hear) clearly that it was indeed a wren! And he must have cleaned up after the chickadees, because the grasses are no longer sticking out of the vent slits. I've seen him bringing tiny twigs in his beak, and having to turn his head this way and that to get the little twig through the opening. And then he would land on one of the long dogwood twigs I had stuck in the garden for the snowpeas to climb on, and bubble away cheerily. I figured he was advertising for a wife to share his little house with him, and wished him the best of luck.

I told Julie about the wren moving in to the house after the chickadees moved out, and she took that as a good omen. "If the birdhouse found new renters already, maybe we won't have trouble finding new renters, too," she said.

Then, a couple of days ago, I didn't see or hear the wren anymore. I was a little concerned -- although we don't let our cats roam outdoors, there are cats in the neighborhood who sometimes make an appearance in our yard (mostly to hunt the mice in our compost, it seems). Could a cat have gotten our little wren?

Well, this morning (Sunday), I awoke to the familiar bubbling wren chatter outside my window. And when my husband went out on the patio with his newspaper and tea, he called back to me, "The wren is back! And there are two of them!" And the two of them have been hard at work all day, adding tiny twigs to the nest and musically declaring the backyard their territory. I may have to leave the birdhouse behind when we move, and that would be OK with me.

A cottage garden by any other name

2010-05-13T12:16:00.000-05:00

When we were reading the paper last night, hubby mentioned that there's a story on the front page of the Variety section about edible landscaping, "but there's nothing in it you don't already know." So I had to read it to see if he was right.

While it proved true that the story offered no great revelations about gardening--the gist of it was that you don't have to establish a separate vegetable garden, you can mix edibles and ornamentals--I kept reading because I wanted to know if it would occur to anyone (the writer or her sources) to credit this idea to the old English peasants and their cottage gardens. And of course it did not; there was no mention of cottage gardens or peasant gardens of any kind. It was as if this woman, Rosalind Creasy, who wrote a book in 1982 called The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, didn't just coin a new term for the old practice, but actually invented the practice herself. I haven't seen the book, which will be reissued and updated with the title, Edible Landscaping later this year, so I can't say that Creasy doesn't give credit where it's due, because she very well may do so in her introduction or something. I may have to get the earlier edition of the book from the library just to satisfy my curiosity.

But, really, "edible landscaping" is such a prosaic term. I'd much rather have a cottage garden. Wouldn't you? (My photo isn't really very exemplary, since it doesn't include edibles--I just picked up something I shot last summer rather than use somebody else's photograph. There are lots of wonderful images on the Web, though, such as those offered here.)

Earthly Delights

2010-04-17T23:36:00.001-05:00

This is our fourth spring in this house, and when we moved in there was no garden. I brought a few shrubs and perennials with me from my old house, and have planted more perennials and a serviceberry in the front yard, and quite a few bulbs, and I feel like we're really starting to reap the benefits. I'm enjoying the starlike blossoms of the serviceberry, but realized after I photographed it that white flowers don't really stand out against a light-colored house, It looks lovelier "in person" than it does in photos, but I took this photo by putting my camera practically in the middle of the tree and placing the red tulips in the background, so it shows you the serviceberry blossoms but not the tree, so much. I'm going to try to find the right angle on the tree so I can get a photo of it's overall form.

I posted some garden photos earlier on my Flickr page, but I don't know if anybody's looking at them there, so I thought I'd try posting them here instead.

I love the way a perennial garden unfolds in stages, so this is the serviceberry and hybrid tulip phase. Before this was the forsythia and species tulip phase, some of which you'll see on my Flickr page. Next to bloom should be flowering crabapples, except I don't have one of those yet! I know where we can plant one, though, so that will be this spring's planting project.

And the dandelion and violet phase is well underway in the lawn!

Hack Historian, a rant

2010-04-02T13:12:00.000-05:00

I've been fact-checking a list of historical trivia for a local publication, and was having a hard time tracking down some of the statements, so I asked the editor if the compiler of the list could provide me with his documentation to make it a little easier for me. Knowing where he got a given piece of information allows me to do two things: verify that he didn't transpose any numbers or mispell a name, and determine whether the source is credible.

The editor responded that the compiler acknowledged, "quite a few of the facts you will struggle to corroborate because they were found in strange places and that he hasn't kept notes." Well, that explained a lot, I said, and then, assuming that this must be a volunteer, and clearly someone with no training in doing history research, I offered to provide guidance next year to improve the accuracy of the list.

Then I found out that my assumptions were wrong, and that I had given the guy way too much benefit of the doubt. The editor informed me that this person, whom I will decline to name, is "actually a fairly well-known Saint Paul historian and has published a few books on Saint Paul history. He teaches history . . . [at a respectable local college]," the editor said. "He used to be a Minnesota legislator," she added, as if this somehow boosted his veracity (politicians don't ever get their facts wrong, right?). But the real kicker for me was when she added, "He said he didn't see these history facts as needing the same rigorousness of note taking as a research book, and I tend to agree with him."

I was flabbergasted. I had spent a total of about 8 hours trying to verify the accuracy of this list, and in that time had gotten through about 35 of them, and found 5 to be flat-out wrong. I sat and stared at that message for a few minutes, then replied: "OK. That's interesting. Since I've been finding a lot of errors, it raises the question, how important is it to you that these facts be accurate?"

I became a little obsessed. I googled the guy, I looked at some of the books he's had published -- none by historical society presses, that I could find. I searched the faculty directory of the college where he was said to teach and did not find him (that could have been a flaw in the college's search engine, of course, but still, it made me wonder . . .). Some of the books were clearly commissioned works, like the history of an organization. Now sometimes, people do an excellent job with such commissions, and for all I know, his commissioned history work could be very good. But what I came to believe is that he's a hack historian -- one who works only for pay, not for the love of history or out of a heartfelt desire to help tell the story of his community.

The editor responded to my comment about errors with some contrition. She admitted that she had found a couple of errors in the spelling of names in the list he submitted last year, and she rememebered that I had also. She wondered whether I was exasperated with her.

I was not -- I was exasperated with him. It appeared to me that he was applying a lower standard to the work he did for her than he does for his own books, which, if true, is incredibly arrogant.

I have encountered this sort of thing before. Writers who have established for themselves a good reputation, who have impressive credentials (ie, initials after their name), who command a high price for their work, are often not such good writers; and if they deign to write for you at a lower rate than that to which they are accustomed, they measure their words accordingly and give you exactly what they deem to be your money's worth.

Of course everyone is entitled to make a decent living, and some people are stuck in jobs that give them no joy but they slog along and do the best they can. But if you are fortunate enough to get paid to do something that many talented and dedicated people do for no money -- writing, art, and, yes, even history research -- then recognize that it's your good fortune, and not your innate superiority, that put you in that position, and rise to the standard of your profession.

Sorry. Just had to get that rant out!

Drawing inspiration

2010-03-18T11:36:00.000-05:00

At the beginning of the year I told myself I was going to draw something every day. I haven't done so well on that account; it's sometimes hard to make the time, and I often find myself uninspired. What to draw?

Recently I was surfing the Net for that very purpose and came across the Urban Sketchers Web site. It's exactly what I needed. It reminds me that very ordinary things are worth drawing, and look somehow not so ordinary when rendered as a drawing.

That evening I went to Spill the Wine restaurant with my husband, and when he left the table for a few minutes, I took out a piece of paper and pencil from my purse (yes, I do carry around a small envelope/pocket of paper and a pen or pencil everywhere!), and drew the parking meter in the snowbank outside the window, incorporating the branches from a tree across the street.

Earlier that same day, I was supposed to meet a friend at a coffee shop, and got my signals crossed, so I was waiting for her at Anodyne while she was waiting for me at Nokomis Beach. While I was sorry for my screw-up, I did take the time to do a drawing of the view outside their windows, and a person sitting there. (I want to practice drawing people more, but I don't want the people I am drawing to catch me in the act!) I have to admit, I find fewer things to draw at Nokomis Beach, even though it's my neighborhood coffee shop and I spend more time there than at any other coffee shop. I may have to resort to doing more people drawings there (discreetly, of course).

Other than a couple of drawings done this past week for the spring MOQ, which is almost done, I still haven't done a lot of drawing, But maybe I'll change my goal to spending some time drawing every week, rather than every day.

I may have to frequent a variety of coffee shops in order to find more things to draw -- but sometimes we just have to sacrifice for our art!

Shanty art town

2010-02-08T23:27:00.001-06:00

On Saturday, Craig and I went to the Art Shanty Projects on Medicine Lake, just 20 minutes northwest of Minneapolis. It's a site-specific art happening that takes place over four weekends in January and February, right out on the ice. Modeled after the ice fishing houses that dot Minnesota lakes in winter, these are artist-made constructions, each having its own specific function. Some, like the Science Shanty, are educational (when we visited, an ecologist was explaining about water quality and what's happening with the water under the ice under all those shanties), and all are interactive in some way.

I was excited to encounter the ArtPost Shanty, an actual post office on the ice, with flag, even, to let you know it's a post office. They had run out of the artist-designed postcards that were made just for this year's installation (they had printed 500, they said they would print 1000 next year), but they had supplies for making your own postcards, and since it was a week before Valentine's Day, that occasion was the theme, of course. There were several different hand-carved rubber stamps with heart motifs of one kind or another, and so I just grabbed a red card and stamped away, then addressed it to myself, bought a commemorative stamp to put on it, and left it with them to be mailed. They'll bring it to the Long Lake Post Office, which has a special cancellation just for the Art Shanty Projects. How cool is that? If I had known, I would have brought the addresses of a few of my art buddies and mailed postcards to them too. Next year, I'll be sure to do that.

I also visited the Art Swap Shanty, where I brought a handbound blank book I had made a long time ago, and traded it for an offbeat thingy made from a Dixie cup. It had a tiny drawing attached to one side with thumb tacks, and some loopy wire sticking out of the top like an antenna. I can go look on the Art Swap Shanty's blog to see who, if anybody, selected my contribution. They take a picture of you with the thing you brought, holding a sign that says "I brought," and then another picture with the thing you selected and a sign that says "I Got." When I looked at the pictures later, I noticed that were a lot of kids participating, and one kid was clutching something with his "I Brought" sign that could have been my Dixie cup (his mitten hid most of it). It's a pretty fun concept. What I liked about the Dixie cup thing that I got was that it was creatively quirky and not just a drawing. I added it to my car's dashboard gallery of found objects.

Craig wrote about our visit for the spring issue of MOQ, which will come out in March, so I won't go on any more about it. But I will say that I was glad I finally got out to see them, it was really great, and I will definitely do it again next year (with my address book!)

A little bit of spring in my kitchen window

2010-02-03T17:15:00.000-06:00

I used to think that Groundhog Day simply meant that there may be only six more weeks of winter, if we're lucky. No St. Patrick's Day blizzard to weigh us down in the middle of March? Sounds good to me!

Imagine my surprise when I learned that the second of February could mark the beginning of spring weather somewhere, provided that skittish fellow didn't see his shadow on that fateful day. Spring in February? What a concept!

And one of those harbingers of spring, wherever it is that they get that heartwarming season so early, are the wild yellow primulas that brighten wet, shady places along the streambanks in the woodlands. Maybe that's why I get a craving for these cheery flowers about this time every year. My mother's birthday is January 29, so I've taken to buying a yellow primula for her birthday, and then a second one for myself. This year I also picked up a couple of parsley plants and chives, to capture something of the flavor of spring, as well.

I'm also reacting a little to the preponderance of reds and pinks in the color schemes of both Christmas and Valentine's Day -- I want some yellow as an antidote to all that! (I do like pink and red, I just get tired of them!)

So, happy post-Groundhog Day to all, and here's a bit of a harbinger of things to come . . . eventually!

Winter walking meditation

2010-01-28T11:39:00.001-06:00

I just got back from a brief trip to Seattle, where the sidewalks are always clear and you can walk at any pace you like without fear of slipping on the ice. Walking outdoors in Minneapolis this time of year is different. It's more like walking meditation.

Walking on city sidewalks in winter requires mindful attention to each step. Even so, you may be placing your foot down with intention, and suddenly it slides out in front of you and down you go on one knee, like a medieval knight before his liege. Except nobody will dub you Sir anything. And somehow, when I have done that this winter, I have managed to go down on my bad knee, the one that doesn't want to bend more than 90 degrees. The fall forces a sharp bend in the knee and soon after, that poor abused joint swells up and is stiff for a few days.

After the second such occurrence this winter, I decided to give up on our city sidewalks until spring. So it was a treat to be in Seattle for a few days and walk around freely outdoors. The mild temperatures (in the 40s and low 50s) were just a bonus, it's the relief of walking on nonslippery sidewalks that meant the most to me.

Bird ornaments

2009-12-31T15:44:00.001-06:00

These sparrows, puffed up against the cold, like to gather in my neighbor's lilac bushes by the alley. I'm sure they hang out there all year round -- I often hear their chatter amidst the leaves in summer, but can't see them. Now that the branches are bare, the birds stand out like kinetic ornaments.

Gifted

2009-12-29T01:25:00.000-06:00

My sister-in-law made her usual cheese ball this Christmas, and packaged it very nicely in a basket with some crackers to go with it, After I put the food away, I set the basket aside to decide what to do with it later. Silly me. Obviously, the basket is a present for my cat Spot. Of course it is; and she did not hesitate to claim it (even though I don't think she really fits, do you?).

It sure would be easy to capture a cat: just put out a cozy basket or box (or paper grocery bag on its side) and wait for one to come along and sit in it. They can't resist!

The way to travel

2009-12-15T12:27:00.001-06:00

I'm at Kopplin's coffee shop in St. Paul, and the owner, Andrew Kopplin, is talking to the people next to me, and my ears prick up when I hear him talking about a recent trip to Europe -- to Norway, as it happens, by way of Iceland. I had to look up and say something, mostly to be transparent about the fact that I was listening (it's a crowded little coffee shop, with tables close together, so it's not like I could have avoided hearing the conversation next to me), and to acknowledge that his tip sounded like a really good idea -- to have a planned layover in Iceland that allows enough time to get out and visit the hot springs. Having endured a flight of 6 or 7 hours to Brussels recently, with our only layover at the Manchester airport (not much to do there besides being shuttled about from one terminal to another), I wanted to make a note of his advice for future reference, because I would like to go again, and I've long been curious about Iceland anyway.

He was saying that the break and the hot springs really helped to not only break up the time you're sitting in an airplane into more manageable segments of a few hours each leg, but also to allow his system to adjust to the time change.

"And they have great coffee," he added -- and he would know, being the owner of pretty much inarguably the best coffee shop in the Twin Cities. But I'll admit I have a certain bias in favor of any European coffee already (no surprise there).

[I borrowed the image of a map of Iceland from answers.com, but decided not to put a link here because the site has so many ads it's rather a pain to download!]

Thanksgiving bouquet

2009-11-26T21:33:00.003-06:00

We've had a weird fall here, weatherwise. It was cold and wet in October, and it's been unusually warm and sunny in November. No complaint there! Apparently this confused my yarrow into blooming again, albeit sparsely, so when I took the dog for a walk as the turkey was roasting this afternoon, I noticed the blossoms and thought, hey, I could collect a little bouquet from my garden for the table, and on Thanksgiving Day no less. So I picked some yarrow, along with some sprigs from the spirea bush that were still hanging onto their leaves, a couple of small hydrangea heads, and part of a fir branch I picked up in the alley on my way back from the walk. Altogether, a nice little autumnal bouquet. It's not often I can do that in late November in Minnesota!

Bee Brains

2009-11-20T00:53:00.005-06:00

I'm something of a bee geek. I collect interesting facts about bees with the intention that I'll put together a bee zine someday -- a compendium of bee trivia, serialized. If I ever get around to it! In the meantime, perhaps I'll share bits and pieces of my "collection" on this compendium.

So here's something I came across today on Science News: a new study that concludes that African-European hybrid honeybees (aka "killer bees") aren't as smart as European honeybees. The study gauged bee IQ by offering them a whiff of Jasmine scent followed by a little sugar water. When the researchers proffered a second whiff of Jasmine, more of the European bees were quick to stick out their tongues in anticipation of the sweet stuff than did the Afro-Euro bees.

This is apparently a standard measure of bee smarts, and since the killer bees have been taking over territory formerly forgaged by European bees, the researchers expected to find out that they were the smarter ones. Now they're somewhat at a loss for what to make of these unexpected results.

It seems to me that the scientists need to read some of Howard Gardener's writings on multiple intellgiences! Maybe those killer bees are smarter, and they're just not impressed with that whole scent-followed-by-sugar-water trick. They could be smarter in a different way than the scent/sugar test measures.

Bye-bye Jack, and Jack, and Jack

2009-11-17T20:18:00.004-06:00

In truth, I put the jack-o-lanterns in the compost about 2 weeks ago, but finally got around to taking a picture of them yesterday. They look so forlorn, don't they?

I needed a photo to go with an article about hugelkultur. And I just got a kick out of their sad little shrinking faces. The middle one, pictured again on the article page, is Nora's, which she carved Anime-style; but now she says it looks like an old lady.

Interesting coincidence that I should have gardening on my mind today -- I just got my first seed catalog in the mail! That's got to be the earliest I've ever gotten one. It's from Pinetree Seeds, one of my favorites for offering lots of variety, little or no hype, and modest prices. I'm already circling things I want to grow, and no doubt my wish list will outgrow my available space in no time.

The Philosopher Mailman and Poetry Journal

2009-11-10T15:21:00.005-06:00

My regular mailman is George, a nice fellow probably in his 30s who, I'm told by my friend who's also a mailman, is stridently liberal and is consigned to sort his mail every morning next to the local post office's only conservative, a mousy fellow who listens to talk radio on his headphones as he delivers the mail. So George's day often gets off to a lively start; but my house is near the end of his route and he seems to be in a good mood by the time he comes to my block.

This is an interesting contrast from Dave, my former mailman, who was the local branch's other right-leaning carrier (according to my friend, who used to stand next to Dave to sort mail). After the 2008 election, we didn't see Dave for a few days. My husband speculated that he was sitting in a dark room, staring at a picture of Sarah Palin. Dave went AWOL for a few weeks this winter, and then called in his resignation. For several weeks after that we had no regular carrier and our mail arrived at a different time most days, often after 5 p.m., as the post office parcelled out Dave's former route in pieces to carriers who already had a full route of their own to deliver.

I like a certain degree of predictability with my mail, whether I'm expecting a freelance check, some mail art, or the Poetry Journal I seldom get around to reading; and I like to know the name of the person who brings my mail, if for no other reason than because that person knows something about me and my reading habits. So one day last spring I grumbled to my husband that I wished the post office would give me a mailman. He gave me that look and said, "No, dear. You can't have a mailman."

Well, now I do, in a manner of speaking, and he's a nice, dependable fellow. On George's regular day off, our mail is usually brought by Tim, one of the few other mailmen I know by name. Tim sometimes takes a break after he finishes his route early and has an espresso at the local coffee shop, which I also frequent. Tim has a master's degree in philosophy, leans well left of center politically, and is a bit of an intellectual eccentric. He's friendly enough, but I'm often not sure what sort of topic of conversation I should broach with him, so I usually end up talking about the weather, unfortunately.

One day I was at the post office around 4:30 p.m. or so as Tim was just leaving for the day, he said hello as he came out the door, and added, "I delivered your Poetry Journal today."

That evening after supper I decided to ignore the Sudoku and read Poetry Journal instead.

Can you count to three? Or, the grumpy voter

2009-11-03T22:04:00.002-06:00

We voted today in the first Minneapolis election to use instant runoff, or what the City prefers to call ranked choice, voting. They say the term "ranked choice" more accurately describes it. Maybe so, but I suspect it doesn't matter what they call it, just as it doesn't matter how well they design the ballots or how plainly they explain it. Some people hate change almost as much as they hate reading directions, even when those directions are brief, clear, and illustrated.

At least that's what Martin and I observed when we went to the polls today. A woman was at the table unhappily returning her ballot for a new one because she had voted for her three Park Board candidates in one column, even though the ballot clearly indicates that you vote for one candidate in each of the three columns. There are three at-large seats for the Park Board, you see, and so all three were her first choice. The election judge patiently repeated the directions, and the woman said, with a tone of exasperation, "So this ballot is ruined, then?" Not to worry, the official assured her, you can have a new ballot. And they took her mismarked ballot and gave her a new one.

"Who came up with this stupid idea, anyway?" she demanded. The voters, explained the official. "I mean who designed this ballot, it's just stupid," she persisted. Listening to this, I just couldn't imagine any way that the ballot could have been designed that would have been simpler. I wanted to answer, "Someone who can count to three." But I didn't.

Later, as Martin and I were feeding our ballots to the voting machine and collecting our jaunty red "I Voted" stickers, this same grumpy woman also turned in her ballot and then declined a sticker. "I'm not proud to have voted," she grumbled, muttering something again about how stupid it all was.

Don't you just love democracy?

More small stuff

2009-10-14T10:12:00.009-05:00

Since I wrote that last post about small but tasty coffees in Belgium, there've been a few little stories inspired by my little coffees (and worth reminding myself before I slide back into old habits -- such as now, sitting at Anodyne with a mug of coffee, which I've just polished off and am about to get a refill!).

I thought that my new preferred drink -- two shots of espresso with a little foamed whole milk in a demitasse (6 oz., actually, which is really just tasse, not so much demi), was the same as a small cappuccino at my local coffee shop, but when I ordered a small cappuccino I got a huge mug, at least 12 or 14 ounces. I thought I had forgotten to say small, but the barrista said, this is a small." After that I would just say, "In the really small cup, I'd like two shots of espresso with a little steamed whole milk, please." Now they're all getting the hang of it and they ask if that's what I want, each one having a different way to summarize it.

One of the baristas, Tony who goes to MCTC (Minneapolis Community and Technical College), commented the first time I requested the drink, "The Italians would be proud." And subsequently, I would come in and he would have the same drink prepared for himself, which he showed me (using the only other small cup -- there are just two, I believe), and tell me that I had gotten him started on drinking it that way, too.

Then, the other Tony (who's in the military but hasn't been deployed anywhere yet, and, frankly, I hope that he remains that way! Maternal me, I suppose.) said, "You could simplify things and just say you want the Stockel special." Which refers to the now-retired mailman, Jeff Stockel, who used to have just such a drink there after he finished his route. Jeff has a teaching degree, and lived in Europe for a time before he came back and found that he couldn't get a teaching job, and so ended up delivering the mail. We have such sophisticated mailmen in my neighborhood -- besides Jeff, there's Vince who's published a book and traveled to Italy with his wife and is now taking Italian classes, and Tim with a master's degree in philosophy (and who also drinks espresso in the small cup).

But I digress; there's more. Another barista, Eva, is of Polish heritage; I often see her mother in the coffee shop when Eva is working, talking to her in Polish. Eva's mother was there one time when I ordered my little beverage, and she said to me, "That's so European." We talked for awhile, and she told me that when she went back to Poland for a visit, she ordered a double cappuccino because she had gotten used to the larger size, and her relatives there said, "That's so American of you."

So, I guess the thread through all of this post is that the joy of going against the norm is that you provoke all sorts of interest. I mean, how often do you order a coffee at your local coffee shop and hear so many little stories and comments in response? And that small is still beautiful, of course.

(The photo is of a demitasse cup I bought at the Magritte Museum in Brussels.)

Small is beautiful

2009-09-08T16:34:00.002-05:00

I'm in that post-travel mode where I keep finding myself comparing my home and surroundings to that fairy-tale world of the tourist visiting only the best a place has to offer, knowing full well that if we lived there we would begin to see and experience things in a more down-to-earth, less charmed way. But that's the beauty of travel, isn't it? We don't think about or see things in the same way as we do at home. And how could we? That travel mentality is hardly sustainable, especially on the budget! But I think there are also some things we can take back with us, things we may have learned from other cultures or from the experience of visiting a place with the enthusiasm and curiousity of a tourist, rather than the habits of a resident.

So I do find myself trying to re-create some of the things I enjoyed about our visit to Belgium, and one of those pleasures is coffee. Rediscovering coffee as a pleasureable drink, that is. At home, I had put away the coffee maker more than a year ago, and both hubby and I had taken to drinking tea in the mornings instead. I still enjoy this, although most of my relatives haven't gotten the memo, so we still have a bag of fair-trade coffee someone gave us for Christmas last year, stuck in the freezer, reminding me that I used to make a pot of coffee every day and a half-pound of good coffee like that would not have been around long enough to need storing in the freezer.

I had gotten into the habit of believing that if a mug of coffee (with cream) was a pleasure, then two mugs are twice as pleasant, and so on. Except after the second or third cup of coffee, not only would I get a bit jittery, I also didn't really enjoy it anymore. I didn't really like the taste by the end of the second cup, nor the coffee-mouth feel and breath, nor the knowledge that I had also consumed close to a half cup of cream along with it!

My husband had read in the guide books that in Belgium you drink cafe au lait. Naturally we assumed this would be the milky coffee beverage served in a large bowl-like mug that we know it to be here. But we figured there would be something special about it, and besides, we were in Belgium and wanted to do as the Belgians do. So when we went out to dinner for the first time in Brussels, with my sister, who has lived there for several years and was advising us on the ways of Belgians, I asked for a cafe au lait with my dessert.

That was my first mistake. My sister quietly explained, "Did you see how the waitress looked a little surprised? That's because Belgians don't drink coffee with dessert, they have it after." Ah. I immediately realized this was a lesson in mindfulness: savor the dessert while I am eating it, don't wash it down with coffee; then enjoy the coffee for its own merits.

So she brought us our coffee, and it was not what I expected: a demitasse cup (slightly bigger, actually, probably 6-ounces) of what must have been espresso, with a little container of evaporated whole milk on the side; at least, that was how I decifered the French and Dutch list of ingredients -- it was not thick and syrupy like our condensed milk, which is sweetened, but was more like, well, whole milk, with the fuller body of cream, but without quite as much fat (yet, it was whole milk, not a low-fat version -- the Dutch for that is volle melk, I learned).

I poured the milk into the coffee, took a sip, was surprised at how good it tasted (I expected it to be bitter, but it wasn't). It was served with a little ginger cookie, and a cute little spoon to stir it with. Despite its small size, it took me several minutes to drink it, perhaps as long as I would spend over a larger cup of coffee at a restaurant here. I think it was just something about the whole ritual, and the size, that led me to naturally slow down and enjoy it.

So now when I go to my local coffee shop, instead of asking for a "small" latte, which is served in something like a 16-ounce mug, I ask for two shots of espresso with a little steamed whole milk. I get it served in a small ceramic cup that the owner calls a demitasse, but it's really about 8 ounces, like an old-fashioned coffee cup. I find it a little bit bitter, but I am happy to put a little sugar in it. After all, when the portion size is small, I feel that I can afford a little sweetness along with it.

And when I find myself thinking, "That was good, I'd like another," I remind myself that the second cup never tastes as good. Old habits die hard, but enjoying the one small cup of coffee makes me feel a little bit like I'm still a tourist. Next thing you know, I'll be visiting our local museums and historic sites.

A little Belgian garden

2009-08-23T17:10:00.005-05:00

We're visiting my sister in Brussels, Belgium, actually in the adjacent town of Kraainem (suburb, I suppose, except it's nothing like what we think of as a suburb in the Twin Cities). It's kind of near the airport and the beltway, although neither of these seems to impose on this idyllic place, really -- not to us, anyway, as accustomed as we are to living near the airport and the crosstown freeway ourselves. In fact, we were sitting in her little courtyard garden this evening, and at one point I did have to pause while an airplane few over, and we kind of had to laugh: "Feels just like home!" I said.

But this little courtyard garden (and the cobblestone street on the other side of it) is very unlike our grassy backyard: it is all pavement like a patio, and one wall is covered in the kind of ivy we grow as a houseplant back home, while another has a wisteria vine clambering over it. It's very sunny in the morning and early afternoon, but cool and shady later in the day. The little stone statuary on the ivy wall is a nonfunctioning fountain (Penny says it leaks), which looks charming enough without water. It would look fabulous as a planter, though. Maybe I'll suggest it. Her housekeeper apparently takes care of the garden, insomuch as she trims the wisteria so it doesn't cover her doorway! So maybe her housekeeper would like the idea of planting the basin.

I, on the other hand, will try to resist the temptation to do this for her while we are here! (I wouldn't know where to get the dirt or the plants, anyway.) I am certain I can be quite content just enjoying the little courtyard when we are relaxing after a day of exploring.

Friendly bouquet

2009-08-09T11:27:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I stopped over at my friend Judy Anderson's house to look over her pottery, which she had on display in her front yard in an art-in-the-garden sale. I enjoyed touring her garden as much as looking at all the beautiful pottery. You can see some of it for yourself at her Web site, Dragonfly Guild.

Craig selected a mug for his morning chai -- when we were up at the cabin a couple of weeks ago, he had complained that none of the mugs in the cupboard were quite right for his tea (they were all a little on the small side, I guess), so I had suggested we buy him a handmade mug to keep up there. We looked a little when we were in Bemidji, which is quite an arty town, but he didn't see anything that struck his fancy. (And we didn't get to the gallery that our friend had recommended because it was surrounded by torn-up streets. What was it called, Terry? Wild Cat, or something like that. I want to visit that one next time we go up north.)

So when Judy announced her sale, I said, let's go. Craig didn't have much trouble selecting a mug, but I had a time looking over all the beautiful vases. I settled on this one for it's medium size, and I thought the black glaze would set off a bouquet of colorful flowers nicely -- although then I went and put all-white hudrangeas in it!

Bird gardeners

2009-08-05T10:03:00.008-05:00

Earlier this summer, I had reserved a spot in my garden for pole beans, and was waiting to plant them until I found some suitable poles. In the meantime, I saw sparrows pecking around in the bare soil, and I figured they were finding bugs or weed seeds or something to eat. Then, about a week or two later, sunflowers started sprouting in the garden! There are plenty of sunflower seeds in our bird feeder, and there are sunflowers sprouting under the feeder, which is usual, and not surprising, but I didn't expect the birds to actually carry the seeds the 15 feet or so to the garden and plant them there!

I thought about planting the beans anyway and letting them climb up the sunflower stems, but bean vines can get pretty heavy and I didn't want to topple the sunflowers, so I just resigned myself to growing sunflowers in this part of the garden instead. Beans are cheap at the farmers' market this time of year anyway, and the sunflowers are such a delight in the middle of the garden.

This is the first one to open, and as you can see, a fat bumblebee is enjoying the fruits (or pollen, more like) of the birds' efforts! And, of course, the bumblebee is returning the favor, since her foraging will pollinate the flowers and allow them to make seeds for the birds. I'm happy to just be the spectator to it all!

Good Vibrations

2009-07-19T23:17:00.004-05:00

My potato plants have blossoms, and I was amazed at what pretty flowers they are. I don't remember potato blossoms in quite this color before. Then, when I went out to photograph them, I discovered a bumblebee busily flitting from blossom to blossom, doing her pollination thing.

I know that bumblebees like this one perform a special service for certain types of plants, called "buzz pollination," but I didn't understand quite what that was until recently, when I interviewed an entomologist for the fall issue of MOQ. I wanted to know more about bumblebees in the city, and specifically what we might look for when observing bees in the fall.

She (Elaine Evans) explained that certain flowers, like potato and tomato blossoms (closely related plants, by the way), have this cone-shaped center that contains the pollen. In order to get the pollen out, bumblebees grab hold of the cone with their mandibles and then vibrate their wing muscles without actually moving their wings, so that their whole body vibrates, and in so doing, manage to shake loose the pollen inside the cone. From the bees' point of view, they get the protein-rich pollen to eat, an important part of their diet. But it has the added benefit, from the plants' perspective, of getting that pollen out and onto parts of the bee's fuzzy body, which provides a way for that pollen to mix with the pollen from other potato blossoms, thus allowing seed formation to happen.

While we humans don't really need this to happen with potatoes, because we eat the roots, not the fruits, for other plants with these pollen cones -- tomatoes being the most notable example -- this is such a valuable service that commercial tomato growers actually purchase or "rent" hives of bumblebees to ensure that their plants get pollinated and they get a good crop as a result.

Honeybees don't perform this particular service -- buzz pollination -- so the peculiar shimmy of the busy bumblebee is especially important to growers of tomatoes and any other plants with their pollen trapped inside these floral cones.

It was fun watching this bumblebee grabbing hold of the cone at the center of the flowers and doing the shimmy, then moving on to the next blossom.

Garden multitasking

2009-06-13T17:36:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I was rinsing out and refilling the birdbath in the backyard, and thought I should probably water my one-year-old cotoneaster hedge, which I planted as bareroot stock last summer. It also needed weeding, but I didn't think I had time to do that too. I don't have a sprinkler that will cover a long narrow strip like this hedge, so I started to just stand and water it with the hose, one little shrub at a time, thinking that would be better than nothing and I could do it fairly quickly.

Pretty soon I noticed that some of the leaves looked kind of chewed, so I examined them more closely with my left hand while holding the hose with my right. Not finding any obvious infestation, I started to use the hose, to which I had attached a spray nozzle, to rinse the leaves, paying special attention to any that were curled or chewed, rubbing my thumb over the undersides of leaves to scrape off any aphids that may have taken up residence there. I figured I could do this and water them at the same time.

Then I thought, well, as long as I'm doing this, and the ground is getting softened by the water, I may as well pull up the weeds too. After about a half an hour, I had watered, weeded, and debugged (more or less, as far as I could tell), the whole hedge. The weeding, in particular, I had been putting off for weeks, and it took just a half an hour -- while getting the watering and pest patrol taken care of at the same time.

I always seem to get the most done when I am trying to do less!

A Fond Farewell

2009-05-03T11:48:00.003-05:00

Mom's all moved, and her new place is swell -- a nice roomy apartment with oak woodwork and loads of closet space (I'm jealous) and a sweet little patio with a southeastern exposure. I'll have to get her a nice patio tomato plant for Mother's day.

And I thought it was auspicious that the magnolia tree at the old house, the one we planted in the spring of 2003 in memory of my dad, was blooming so prettily on the day she moved out. It often blooms earlier, in April -- even as early as April 11, my dad's birthday, which is why I chose that particular tree. But here it was at its peak on May Day, as though it were bidding Mom a fond farewell and wishing her the best. And what a beautiful moving day we had -- sunny and mild, with a high of about 60 degrees.

Pansy time

2009-04-16T12:28:00.003-05:00

Last weekend, we were at our local liquor story to stock up on wine, and we noticed that there were pansies and violets in the planter by the door. The sales clerk, a buxom, amiable woman who would look right at home serving pints in an old-fashioned pub, said she planted them and told us we could get some of our own at Wagner's, a Minneapolis greenhouse that grows their own flowers.

So on Monday, I headed over to 60th and Penn, just a few miles west of us, and bought two flats of pansies. Then my son, Martin, and I headed out to Mom's house to fill the two little planters in front before the Realtors' open house scheduled for Tuesday. Mom had finally got through the ordeal of painting and floor refinishing (a few weeks during which she barely had a place to sit) and her Realtor had listed the place at last on Monday.

The house has pinkish siding and a brick red door, so I selected pansies that picked up on these colors. Then I grabbed a bunch of dogwood twigs from my winter outdoor arrangement (I had long since tossed the evergreen bows from that onto the compost), and put them in the pots with the pansies to give the whole arrangement some height. It looked pretty good, and Mom liked it too, and then she said we have to go, someone's coming to look at the house in about ten minutes.

Mom called on Wednesday to tell me that she sold the house! In fact, she had two offers, and selected the one from the family with three children (the other couple had no kids), even though it meant a little less money for her because they requested help with closing costs. But she so liked the idea of providing a home to a family, and she told me that the oldest child was 8, the same age as my big sister (our oldest) when they moved into the house in 1960, and the younger two, twins, were 3, the same age that I was at that time (I'm the baby). So I guess it just felt to her that it was meant to be.

I planted some of the remaining pansies in my pot on the front steps, pictured here, along with the corkscrew willow branches I've had for about a year now, and I added a dangly ornament (you can see the star at the bottom of it here, I'll try to get a better picture this afternoon when the sun is shining on it). I had selected the plants with the most open blossoms for Mom's pots, so these aren't as colorful just yet, but I'm sure they'll be blooming like crazy in no time. They're getting lots of sunshine, and I mixed some granulated organic fertilizer in with the soil when I planted them.

It felt so nice to get out in the garden and do a little cleaning up and planting yesterday. I am deliberately doing just a little at a time because I don't want to wake up with a painfully stiff knee and an aching back in the morning! But it's only the middle of April, so I have lots of time, right?

Mom's Stuff, Part 2: A Roving Rooster

2009-04-09T16:39:00.022-05:00

At one of our visits to Mom's house to help with packing and sorting for her upcoming move from a four-bedroom suburban rambler to a two-bedroom apartment, we came home with a rooster.

Not a rooster like the one that patroled a friend's hobby farm where my daughter, Nora, sometimes used to farm-sit when the owners went out of town. That rooster was aggressive and downright scary -- and loud. Nora said that it only took him three days to figure out where she was sleeping and then position himself outside her window each morning to let her know loud and clear just exactly when the sun's rays first peeked over the horizon.

My mother's rooster is made of resin and had quietly occupied a corner of her dining room since 2003, when it had come home with her after one of her daily mall-walking escapades. It was shortly after Dad died (on December 13, 2002) and she had begun walking about three miles a day, indoors at Har Mar Mall in Roseville. She would walk past a garden store that had the rooster on display, and the colorful fellow had become a welcome and cheery sight on those daily walks.

Then one day it wasn't there, and she missed it. So when the store got another one in stock, she immediately bought it and brought it home. It's the sort of thing Dad would have gotten a kick out of, and probably on some level it made her feel a little connection to him.

And that may be why, when she said she was ready to part with the rooster, I claimed it. Neither of my brothers showed the slightest interest in it, and they may not have known how Mom came by it. To me, it's not only a colorful and whimsical garden ornament, something to jazz up our yard's feng shui with a shot of rooster energy, it's also a token of my parents' playful side; something that brought my mother a bit of cheer at a sad time, and a reminder of my father's mischievous nature.

It made me think of the time Dad bought my mother a stuffed animal, and soon after, she kept finding it in unexpected places around the house, posed in odd postures. Soon after the rooster came home with us, my husband started to notice that it showed up in different spots in the backyard each day when he came home from work.

Then I began to find it in new places when I would look out the kitchen window shortly after Hubby got on his bicycle and headed off to work. Our teenage son observed all this with his usual amused detachment. Or so it seemed. Then one day when my husband was still at work and I came back from a bike ride, I opened the garage door to find it inside the garage.

And so it continues to rove about the backyard, and seems to be enjoying its new habitat, spreading its animal energy wherever it goes; and maybe, just a little, channeling my father's playful spirit in the process.

Evidence that spring really is on its way

2009-03-31T13:45:00.009-05:00

March has been dragging on, even threatening to spill over into April. So I was surprised and delighted yesterday when I was out walking my dog and noticed that my neighbor's crocuses had not only emerged, but were starting to bloom. These lovely pale blue buds look so sweet, don't they? This is on the south side of her house, which is on a corner, so she gets lots of sun exposure. When I toured my own yard to see if any of my crocuses or tulips were up, none of them had even emerged yet. But I did discover my chives a few inches high; those are on the south side of my house. I'm thinking now that in the fall I really must plant some bulbs along the south side so I'll get a little early color next spring.

Other signs of spring in Minneapolis I have noted lately:
• On March 15, my husband cleaned out the garage and got his bike out for the first time. He rode it to work the next day.
• On March 16, my favorite mailman started wearing shorts; although I didn't notice whether he returned to long trousers when the temperature dropped again. (I know, how could I not notice?)
• Also on March 16, I spotted ducks in the puddles around Lake Nokomis, even though the lake itself is still frozen.
• There are loads of robins everywhere. I really should get mealworms from the bird seed store for them, they say that there aren't many insects or worms about yet, and the robins and other birds need their protein.
• Yesterday, as I was biking around Lake Nokomis, I heard red-winged blackbirds trilling in the trees.
• The wild turkey in Minnehaha Park has become a more common site, and a couple of weeks ago we even saw four of them all clustered together. Then one day last week my husband witnessed a male turkey chasing a small red car! He said it ran pretty fast.

Today it's rainy and gray, but not too cold. The birdbath water remains unfrozen. But the Eloise Butler Wildflower garden, which usually opens on April 1, has delayed opening for a couple of days. It does feel like April today, though, so that's encouraging.

Mom's Stuff, Part 1: Dumpster Diving

2009-03-24T17:40:00.010-05:00

My mom is planning to move on May 1, and she's been living in a big house in Roseville, a suburb of St. Paul, since 1960 (with a brief interruption in the 1980s). She's got a big Dumpster in the driveway, and my brother and I (with assistance from our spouses) have been throwing stuff in it as much as we can. There are also boxes and boxes labeled Goodwill, with stuff to be donated to that worthy cause, and then, of course, the boxes of stuff she wants to take with her -- enough of those to prompt Hubby to ask me more than once, "How big is this place she's moving to?"

This has been a good incentive for us to keep to our own downsizing agenda. Sunday, we came back from Mom's with my husband resolving to clean out the garage and the attic -- this weekend.

So on our way to Mom's on Sunday, as we pull up and eye the large Dumpster, I say "I promise I won't climb into the Dumpster and say 'Hey, this is cool!' and pull stuff out." He thanks me for that.

Then we park our '91 Honda (rather a piece of junk itself) next to the Dumpster, and the next thing I know, Hubby is saying, "Hey, that's one of those nice oak wall shelves your dad built, isn't it?" And he's climbing into the Dumpster to pull it out!

It's especially appropriate, I think, that we salvage those shelves, because I know that my dad made them from salvaged wood originally -- oak 2x4s that he reclaimed from some railyard or other. He thought that the wood was too nice to discard, and he was right. The shelves are narrow ("Perfect for paperbacks," says Hubby), but the grain is really quite lovely.

Then I spy the old avocado ceramic cups and saucers that were Grandma's, and insist that those don't belong in the Dumpster either -- at the very least they should go to the Goodwill because somebody could use them; and I know it's my unsentimental just-get-it-done project manager brother who threw those out. So I dig them all out and Hubby gamely assists me in putting them in the car to take home.

So now we are the proud owners of more stuff. But it's good stuff, and I am going to go through the buffet and remove something to make room for the avocado dishes. I have some other cups and saucers that once belonged to my other grandmother -- but I don't ever remember Grandma Parker actually using those dishes, whereas I do remember Grandma Clausen serving holiday meals on her avocado dishes; and since I have other mementoes of Grandma Parker, I tell myself I can let the other cups go.

Although . . ., I've always liked those teacups-on-a-stick you sometimes see in gardens, and I do have a couple of ideas about how to mount them for such outdoor display. Hmmm . . .

Who cares if it's gray? It's the end of winter!

2009-03-17T17:53:00.007-05:00

"I dwell in possibility." -- Emily Dickinson

A friend of mine here in Minneapolis told me today that he finds this time of year rather depressing -- it's so gray, and muddy, and the melting snow reveals a winter's worth of litter, and so on like that.

I was dumbfounded. I mean, c'mon, it's the end of a Minnesota winter! What's not to like? Sure, I can understand if you live farther north and it feels like winter is just dragging on, but here in Minneapolis we have air temps in the 50s, the snow is rapidly melting, the sidewalks, which have been icy and treacherous for months, are nearly dry. I can ride my bike without feeling like my finger tips are going to fall off. I can walk the dog without risk of injury!

On Sunday, my husband got his bike out for the first time since fall. He also cleaned the garage and scooped out all the ice that had accumulated there. Our garage is old and sits kind of low, so when there is a midwinter thaw, water seeps in and then freezes. Sometimes the door gets frozen shut. This is not a problem for anyone but me, since we keep our cars outside (it's a very small garage) and I am the only one who rides at all in the winter. Now it's all nice and clean and it's so easy to get my bike out.

I can be outside, I can ride my bike without freezing, the birds are singing -- and it's only going to get better. Who cares if it's gray? It's better than white! Maybe I'm odd, but I find this time of year exhilarating.

Our Friend in the Park

2009-03-12T23:06:00.003-05:00

We first spotted it last fall: the wild turkey that had taken up residence in Minnehaha Falls Park. A stunningly large, long-legged fowl, it was usually walking along on the grass, head down, apparently grazing on the seeds, acorns, and insects scattered under the oak trees. Then, soon after we published Milissa Link’s essay in the winter edition of MOQ, about the coyote she spotted in the area, we stopped seeing it.

I speculated that it had likely become coyote dinner. My husband accused me of being pessimistic. “Not if you see it from the coyote’s point of view,” I had countered.

Despite my coyote sympathies, I was delighted when I spotted it again on a late February afternoon (naturally, I assumed it was the same turkey). It had strolled onto the parkway that runs east of Hiawatha, and there it stood, in the middle of the narrow road, calmly stopping what little traffic there was. It took a few steps to the left, and a northbound car crept past; then it stepped to the right, and a southbound car edged by. It turned and watched these vehicles with a mild and curious gaze.

But as I approached in the northbound lane, I had to bring my rust-speckled ’91 Honda to a complete halt as the turkey planted itself right in the center of the road. It eyed me, then turned to gaze at the southbound car that had also stopped in the opposite lane. It was a standoff. I could see that the other driver was talking on a cell phone and wondered if he was reporting this event to someone.

Convinced that the turkey, possessing all the time in the world, had no intention of going anywhere anytime soon, I slowly eased the Honda onto the sloped curb to my right to edge my way around the recalcitrant critter. As I passed, it turned its magnificent homely head on its long turkey neck to look me in the eye through the driver’s-side window. I felt a certain relief that it was winter and my window was closed. My, that’s a big bird, I thought.

Now we make a point of looking for it whenever we pass through the park, and succeed in spotting it a few times a week. Even though we haven’t gone so far as to give it a name, we do refer to it as “your friend” (“I saw your friend in the park today”). Like a regular at the coffee shop, it has become for us a fixture in this place, its absence as keenly felt as its presence. Long may it wander there.

(From the spring issue of MOQ, which will be available next week.)

A god's garden in a pot, or just some grass for a cat

2009-02-20T22:33:00.005-06:00

For my garden column in Southside Pride in March, I'm writing about starting seeds indoors, which reminded me of Adonis gardens, which I first read about in Eleanor Perenyi's book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. She explained that women in ancient Greece and Rome would plant little pot gardens of wheat, barley, lettuce and fennel for the festival of Adonis, which I took to be in the spring, like Easter. The seeds would grow quickly, then became potbound and die, symbolizing the short life of the handsome young demigod and lover of Venus/Aphrodite. And then the women would toss them out into their gardens.

Except it turns out I was mistaken on several points. I thought it was a sort of fertility thing, and it even made sense in a way -- if you started a pot of seedlings and then tossed them into your compost pile while they were still green, they would add nitrogen to the pile. But when I started looking for more information about Adonis gardens, I learned that the festival most likely took place in the summer and was meant to symbolize the wasted and unfertile life of the young hunter -- for he died without fathering any children. Actually, I made up that last part (I'm pretty sure he had no children), but it makes sense to me. The original Adonis gardens were just tossed into a stream or something, they weren't turned into anything useful, symbolically or otherwise.

Then I got out the book and re-read the passage on Adonis gardens. Perenyi claims that the custom of growing these temporary gardens in pots on the rooftops is the origin of pot gardening. And she also claims that a Christianized version of the old Adonis cult continued in Sicily into the 20th century, when women would plant pot gardens to decorate the church on Easter. I guess that's where I got the idea that growing grass for our Easter baskets was a remnant of this old pagan practice. So I must have put these bits and pieces of information together with my own thoughts about turning the spent gardens into compost and made up my own version of the custom. I guess that's how rumors and misinformation get started!

I still like the idea of planting my Easter basket as a kind of Adonis garden, even if the precedent for such a practice is unclear.

This photo is of my young neutered male cat, Tres, doing his imitation of Adonis frolicking in his garden. No, there is no catnip in this pot -- just wheat grass and alfalfa.

I am such a wimp

2009-02-15T16:22:00.006-06:00

It's sunny out for a change, after a week or more of cloudy weather, and the temperature is in the upper teens. Not bad for February in Minnesota. I was going to bike to the coffee shop with my computer to do some writing, but after standing outside for a few minutes adjusting the dog's leash, I was feeling the cold on my legs. Besides, I couldn't find my long underwear -- not that I looked all that hard. So I tell my husband that I'm going to drive to the coffee shop instead.

So here I am at my neighborhood coffee shop when in walks our friendly neighborhood bike shop guy, Jim Thill of Hiawatha Cyclery. He's with a friend. He says hello and tells me that they've been biking "all around."

Oh, I say, did you bike the grand rounds? That's the route that loops through the Minneapolis parkways, about 50 miles if you do the whole thing, but I was just imagining the portion that goes around the lakes, which is still maybe 30 miles round trip. No, he tells me, they've biked out to the eastern suburbs, White Bear Lake and the like. Well, White Bear Lake is about 30 miles by freeway each way. And they've not only biked there and back, but biked "around" to other places as well.

When they get up to go, I ask, are you done now? Are you going home? I know that Jim lives in the neighborhood. "Well, I am," says Jim. "But he [referring to his friend] has a ways to go yet. He lives in Robbinsdale." That's about another 12 miles. The friend acknowledges that his legs are a little tired, but he is undaunted by the trek that remains for him. It's about 4:15, he's probably got an hour before it starts to get dark.

And I couldn't bring myself to bike the 1.6 miles to the coffee shop! I feel like such a wimp!

Cutting the rug

2009-02-03T21:47:00.004-06:00

A while back I bought a large woven rug for the dining room, and soon discovered that, being floppy and not very heavy, it gets sucked up by the vacuum cleaner, but being a bit large (about 5X7 or thereabouts), it doesn't fit in the washing machine. And being a nice solid red, it showed all the dog and cat fur within a few hours of laying it down.

So, what to do? Well, I folded it up and deposited it in the basement to deal with later. Then I got the idea that I should cut it down to fit the landing on the basement steps at the back door. The space is about 38 inches square, so the usual washable rugs are never quite the right size to cover the whole area. I had to think about this for quite awhile, of course, to figure out how I would finish the cut edges. I thought I might sew a binding around them, but I didn't think I was likely to match the red. Of course, red things usually bleed the first few times you wash them, so maybe it didn't matter what color binding I used.

In the meantime, Hubby decided to just fold it and put it down on the landing anyway. He put a couple of the smaller rugs on top of it, and that wasn't a bad temporary solution, but it bugged me to have it sit there with its too-thick folded edge hanging over the edge of the step threatening to become a tripping hazard.

So I just cut it today -- it made two area rugs the right size for the landing, with a couple of little strips left over. After some looking around for a sturdy red thread to overcast the edges, I realized that the warp thread (string, really) would serve very nicely.

So I pulled some from the remnants and was using this to bind the side where I had cut across the weft, but when I got around to the crosswise side, where the warp threads were exposed, I eventually realized that it made more sense to pull some more of the weft pieces out of the way and make a fringe. I then knotted the warp threads by taking three from the top and three from the bottom and tying them together. That worked quite well and only took about 20 minutes, and was kind of nice little meditative exercise.

And it lays nice and flat on the landing, and is just the right size. Happy ending.

Artists' books at the Walker

2009-02-03T14:10:00.003-06:00

Hubby and I went to the Walker to see Text/Messages: Books by Artists last Thursday and I thought it was fabulous. The exhibitions in the galleries that you pass through on the way to the artists' books were not my sort of thing so much -- severed body parts and phallic objects; you know, the usual Walker stuff -- so although I'd like to go back and have another look at the books, I'll be taking the elevator directly to gallery 7. Or maybe have lunch in Gallery 8 and then walk down to 7.

Text/messages is great, though, and even worth wading through the trashy "fine" art to get to. I found some of it quite inspirational, making me want to try something new when playing around with altering or constructing books, and some of it downright awe-inspiring, like the one with the intricately laser-cut notepad that had paper staircases and landings extending down from what was really just a regular legal pad attached to the wall. Wow. Sorry I can't tell you who made that one, I didn't take notes and I didn't see an exhibition catalog or anything like that. They did have some notecards featuring a few of the items, with information about events that go with the show, like panel discussions and a "Multiples Mall" sale of small DIY-press stuff.

You can get all the details on this page at the Walker Web site.

It's showing through April 19. Admission is free on Thursdays after 5 p.m. and on the first Saturday of the month.