SO MUCH FUN!

Seriously, check out this website for some awesome, time-wasting awesomeness.

Greenie by Theresa 'Orr' Bernard featuring Burberry bags

"Grrrrrrr," and other things that happened in my house last week

Penny's bestie, Gretzky, stayed with us last week because his people, my sister and brother-in-law, were on vacation.

There was a lot of barking at the window. Squirrels, bunnies, leaves, mailmen. Who knows. Well, I know one day it was a squirrel who had perched on the little table on the porch, just about two feet in front of the dogs, who were apoplectic.


There was also a lot of prodding of the dogs, since we were trying to get both of them to sleep on the floor. The first night, I woke up multiple times to shoo Gretzky off the bed. What I didn't know (hubs told me the next day) was that Penny was on the bed for some amount of time because she's sneaky and bad and didn't wake us up. Poor Gretzky just wanted to be included. I'm extremely disappointed that they didn't snuggle in Penny's bed. Gretzky would just approach it slowly when Penny was in there and then just back away. Pansy.


They did have snuggly moments when laps were involved. More often, they wrassled and growled, tried to hump one another, and were generally instigators of mayhem. Penny tried to sit on Gretzky's face, and he didn't know whether to kick her in the butt or bite her legs. Hilarious.


UPCOMING PROJECT: knitted doggie boots. Stay tuned.

This is how I do it

Well. I guess it's Fall.

And apparently it's also National Coming Out Day. So that's cool.

Hubs and I took down the garden today, so I thought I would share some last bits of garden delight before the snow flies. OH THAT'S RIGHT - it already did. Are we heading for another infamous Halloween storm? The 1991 Halloween debacle holds the record for the most snowfall in one storm in the state's recorded history (28 inches in Minneapolis; 37 inches in Duluth). Luckily, I chose to be the grim reaper that year. Wearing a cloak, I wasn't so cold that I couldn't still go trick-or-treating.


Aaaaanywho. This, once again, was our garden post-grass-tearing-up and planting/transplanting. Something I learned at this stage: it is WORTH IT to rent the ridiculously heavy and hard to operate sod ripper. Also, do not start your pole beans indoors - they will grow too fast and wrap their tendrils around each other, making it impossible to transplant them. Don't start carrots or herbs indoors, either, because their roots won't be big enough to transplant and you'll be forced to extract the clump of them from their little pot and put the very same clump directly into the ground, lest you try to separate them and thereby turn them all upside-down.


The easiest part of the season is when your little seedlings are becoming more substantial and you're all excited and all the hard work is done, you just have to water. This is the part when you go out there twice a day to see if you can maybe see a little bit of progress or maybe even a bud and it's very exciting because sometimes you actually can see progress! A watched garden, it turns out, does grow.


After a month or so, your hovering and hand-wringing pays off and you have peas! Hubs doesn't like peas, but he liked these ones. Your other plants are now budding and flowering and showing you what's to come. Suddenly, you realize that you should've planted more peas and carrots but fewer broccoli and absolutely no corn. Something else learned at this stage: tomato cages as sold in stores are totally insufficient - they should be about three feet taller and have more rings.


By the time the peas are done and dried out, the garden in is full splendor and the plans for canning begin. We were reading up on blanching and freezing and I can't believe all the stuff we learned in our first year. I started tallying our yields and couldn't be happier with our results. Here are the estimates:

Basil: a couple handfuls and growing more.
Pole Beans: hundreds, perhaps thousands. One day yielded 71 beans. Next year we'll be more diligent about picking every day and freezing batches.
Broccoli: three small heads. Could've picked a few more but they flowered first.
Carrots: aside from the mutants, 11. Delicious.
Chives: a lot, but we never used them.
Cilantro: a few handfuls.
Sweet Corn: zero. Failure. The cobs never got more than 4" or so and then the birds ate them.
Lettuce Mix: one row. Could've planted more rows for another harvest.
Oregano: four or so handfuls that we dried to store.
Green Onions: 10ish. Never really used them, though.
Yellow Onions: a few, but they never got bigger than about 3/4" so they weren't really edible.
Italian Parsley: about 10 handfuls, which is a lot. That stuff is prolific.
Snow Peas: many dozen. We'll do more next year and hopefully freeze some.
Green Peppers: eight, plus I'm still trying to grow some indoors since I couldn't bare to let the poor tiny things just sit outside and die.
Jalapenos: 22, and I'm trying to grow a few more inside as well. The heat level has been really inconsistent, but still worth it.
Red Bell Peppers: seven.
Chili Peppers: seven. Not hot, but good.
Spinach: none. It was too shaded by the broccoli.
Thyme: three handfuls to dry and store.
Better Boy Tomatoes: about 50.
Roma Tomatoes: over 100. Delicious. We'll do a lot more tomatoes and canning next year.
Zucchini: about a dozen. With four plants, I thought we'd be overrun, but we weren't.

And now it's all cleared out, but we've got beans in the freezer and salsa in the pantry. When the kids were here, they really appreciated growing and picking vegetables, even though they wouldn't eat them, and that was fun to see. I'm already excited for next year.

My first decorated cake is literally a "wreck"

Yesterday we had a baby shower for our friend Kim; it was officially the first gathering at the house sans family. We had a great time talking about babies and birthing and whatnot.

I love hosting things because I can indulge my organizational chakra and play event planner without the crazy demands of a bride or other such paying party. This time I wanted to do a carrot-riding babies carrot cake, a la Cake Wrecks. I was delighted to find the exact baby figures at JoAnn, and had planned on picking up a carrot cake at the bakery. But the places I talked to either didn't have carrot cakes with the frosting carrots on top or they had just had a sale on carrot cakes and were out. Blerg! So I made my own:



A wonderful young woman at the Cub Foods bakery sold me a couple tubes of frosting that she colored and then showed me how to make the carrots. As it turns out, it's not that hard. Sure, my weak little hands made the carrots come out kind of squwiggly, but they look more authentic that way, right? The hardest part was sprinkling/throwing the chopped walnuts at the cake to get them to stick to the sides. Then I just had to add the babies:

ready for fall. and, apparently, winter.

Wait, no. I am not ready for winter. That is blasphemous.

But now that it is officially Fall and the trees have started becoming that dry, yellow/green combo, knitting feels more cozy and comfortable. In that spirit, I finished a cowl:



And it matches my hat!



This is what it looks like open:



No, I'm not angry. That's just my face at rest. This one is better:



The pattern is "Swirling Petals Cowl" by Casandra Roberts and it's available as a free Ravelry download. After looking at a gazillion cowl patterns, I decided to add the button and loop so I could sinch it tighter for the winter months of December, January, February, and March. Sigh.

I also decided to start a scarf for the Red Scarf Fund using this pattern and some nice, soft, inexpensive Paton's Chunky Shetland Tweed (in red), the same stuff I used for my green hat, Penny's ill-fitting sweater, and my hand warmers.

Knitting for charity is an easy decision

But deciding on which charity is not. If I had the time and money to make a metric ton of things to donate, I would gladly do so. These are the charities that I want to help out, but I'll probably have to narrow down the list a bit (or a lot).

Bundles of Love: Provides basic items for local infants in need.

Hats for the Homeless: Distributes warm clothing to homeless individuals nationally.

Mother Bear Project: This locally-based group sends knitted bears to kids in Africa affected my HIV/AIDS.


Red Scarf Fund (Orphan Foundation of America): Sends Valentine's care packages to young adults entering college who have no immediate family support.


Sheila's Shawls (Silent Witness National Initiative): Named for Sheila Wellstone, sends shawls to mothers and sisters of women who have died due to domestic abuse.

Snuggles Project (Hugs for Homeless Animals): Makes the enclosures for sheltered animals a little more cozy.


I don't know why this always enters my consciousness when I'm starting to think about the winter holidays, because most of these orgs, if not all, accept and need donations year-round.

I am a domestic goddess

And the hubs is a domestic god. Yesterday, we spent the day canning for the first time! Knowing we'd be two worn-out deities by the end of the process, we started the day by whipping up a batch of chili in the crock pot (meaning we opened a bunch of cans, because our domesticity can only stretch so far in one day). Then we took a trip over to that other city across the river
for their lovely farmer's market. We had several pounds of roma tomatoes from our garden but needed more supplies. All told, we spent just about $20 on more tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, jalapenos, and cilantro. We *may* have also expressed some enjoyment of that particular city across the river. Maybe we were just delirious with salsa cravings.


The hubs - wearing one of my old softball jerseys (reuse, recycle!) did most of the tomato chopping while I blanched them to get the skins off. Definitely the most tedious part, but NOT the most painful. We clearly bought the most potent onions to have ever existed.


Here they are, the little shits. It actually worked out to our favor that we don't own a pot big enough to mix everything in. But splitting everything between two smaller pots (8 quarts each), we could easily make a "mild" batch and a "medium" batch. We'll see how that works out. It's kind of fun that you don't really know until you try it.


All of the canning equipment was FREE, thanks to my grandma. This kettle is old old old, but is exactly like the ones you buy new. It took us about four hours of washing and chopping before it was finally put to use.


Annnnnd, here it is! So pretty. Even though the lids from my grandma have fruit on the top - I guess tomatoes are fruit. We got 13 pints. It took five to six hours. We have a crap-load of tomatoes left over, but we also had to buy lemon juice, so I'd say the total investment was still about $20. Only one jar did not seal, so we'll just use that up first!

Final notes:
1) Making salsa is easy but time and energy consuming.
2) We have new-found respect for the domestic arts. And specifically for those who do it a lot, or lived before modern conveniences like gas stoves and running water, or who endeavor to do it alone, or who endeavor to do it alone AND have children running around.
3) $1.54 for a jar of salsa is pretty awesome.

Arrr, get on board with the holiday or walk the plank!

International Talk Like a Pirate Day be today, the nineteenth of September in the year two-thousand and nine. Tis only the fourteenth annual celebration, but - shiver me timbers! - me thinks it'll last longer than a gold medallion in me pocket.

Gratitude be owed to the two chums from parts out west who saw fit to make a day of it. May the scurvy be spare and their booties be large!

Mischief Managed: Chicken wire does not deter dog

I don't know what's between the compost and the garage (crickets?), but Penny needs to get them.


She is not deterred by only having three or four inches of space in which to wriggle around trying to find that elusive but must-have something. Nor is she deterred by the marigolds blocking the entrance to said space. One of those marigolds is now crushed.


She doesn't get that something on the first venture into the crevice, so she backs out and tries again and again. It's a little like the part in Finding Nemo when Marlon and Nemo are getting ready for school and they're going in and out of the anemone. "First you go out, then go back in. Then you go back out, and then back in. Then go back in a third time, and then out. And if you want to do a fourth time...". I think here (above) she is on her way out, judging by how the fence is directing her doggy-mustache.


I don't know which way she's going now, but it's hilarious to watch her scale that chicken wire and make little grunts of effort.