Marmaladies

Every single time I walked past my wonderful, abundant, takes-what's-dished-out-and-keeps-producing lime tree for the past month, I've felt guilty. "Got to make marmalade," I'd mutter to myself, and then not do it.

Thank goodness for friends with agendas. I have one, and marmalade was on her agenda. She brought blood oranges, enthusiasm, sugar, and a willingness to do a fast dish turnaround. I brought limes and canning kettles.


We only made something like 7 or 8 pints of each type and didn't reduce lime mountain


too much.

If you look close, there's an intrepid mountaineer:


I'm going to have to give some limes away. I'm not preserving many, I don't think, although I might make another batch or two of the marmalade. I like it, although I'm not eating any sugar right now, it would make dynamite gifts (or cookie filling).

Denise came over with her little one. Remember newborn fuzzy ears? She is certainly as delicious as any marmalade.

Progress without pictures

A few rounds more on the mitten today. My sister asked how many hours I thought it took per mitten, and I once again wished that I had a portable chess clock for my knitting. Apparently I could use a downloadable app to do so!

At any rate, I estimated 13-15 hours a mitten (I'm a painfully slow knitter, alas). The sobering realization is that I knit maybe 30 minutes a day, even though I'd like to do more. Seems that between chauffering, and cleaning, and cooking and feeding and homeschooling and working, there isn't a lot of time to knit.

Tonight there was no knitting because it was Spinning Night at the library. I wish I'd brought my camera (and if my friend sends her pictures I'll edit them in) because my Grafton Fibers batt looked so lush laid out I almost wanted to just leave it as is or felt it for a lap robe.

Instead I spun it, and then decided I liked it best without the neon yellow and orange. It's going to be a tweedy brown. Maybe I'll make enough as a long-draw single to make a teeny girl sweater. If not, the standard hat, I suppose.

The dog appears to be standing guard. It's an illusion. He'll follow me upstairs as soon as I go. Definitely a mama's boy.

The price of direct-seeding

Growing from transplants is generally agreed to be not as cost-effective as starting your own.

That's not, alas, true for me this year.


That's right -- the birds. The birds are eating everything intentionally planted in my near-wasteland garden. Between the rain and the birds and the cold, I have just grumpily harvested the preexisting kale and ignored everything else, including my carrot bed which is either not germinating because it's cold or the birds have also pulled every teensy carrot I saw right out. I'm going with option two because I actually saw teensy carrots. And now. . . nothing.

So last weekend I hied me to the hardware store and bought a package of my most loathed outdoor product -- plastic bird netting. I figured I'd engineer a nice pvc box for each garden bed, zip-tie the netting down, and have something I could reuse year after year.

Unfortunately, I'm the Queen of the Jury-Rigged. The repurposed pvc is just curvy enough that the corners keep springing loose:


Although I was confident enough in that one to replant some carrots the other day.

I tried another box style in bamboo, and am not yet happy enough with it to drape netting over it.

But today, I found the least material-intensive design so far:


White tip is NOT a skunk; it's Mikey's tail. He had been lounging in that bed before I chased him off of it and then capped it with netting. If both he and the birds stay away, maybe I'll get some peas, spinach, and tat soi.

If it's warm enough.

Yesterday's harvest? 9 1/2 ounces of red kale and 1 pound 10 oz of Yukon Gold potatoes. The bed they came out of has a scab-type disease in it. No more grocery store potatoes; no more in that bed!

And check out the eggs! Three normal ones; one as though a chicken was channeling a hummingbird. We don't have a light in the coop, and I know we'd be getting a lot more eggs if we did! Maybe bigger ones, too. I should have taken a close-up of that wee egg, but I was tired.


Today, 14 pounds of Bearss limes which will be lime shred marmalade tomorrow. Only one egg today, but normal chicken-sized.


Maybe tomorrow I will weed!

Doing yoga with a stuffy nose

It's kind of hard to feel on top of things when you wake up to your spouse saying, "The alarm didn't go off," and you thought he was saying, "The dog has to pee," so leaping from bed is the only sane option.

I dragged on my comfy clothes and ran out front with the dog (who did, in fact, very much need to go) and then watched as Eric almost sprinted out of the door, on the way to his new year.

Even though we were later than we'd hoped, it was early enough to feed Mikey in his crate and use that relative peace to do some yoga. Kristin is my inspiration here. I don't have a fancy yoga/honey house like she does, but now I am the proud user of a deck of yoga cards. Nothing quite like easing into a down dog and realizing that there needs to be a box of Puffs as part of your practice.

Waking up is hard to do. . .

Darn you, Neil Sedaka. What else, I ask you, fits this kind of morning?


I've learned that making children go to bed early is relatively useless, but waking them up early eventually works on the other end. They think I'm cruel, and they might be back asleep, but baby steps will do us all.

At the halfway point?


The second first mitten is now halfway done. That has to be some kind of milestone, right?


Breathing in the wave

Just before I woke up, I was finishing a long dream about being at the beach with the homeschoolers. I know I was with them because there was much discussion about which glass lasagne dish was whose, and we hadn't even started with the Dutch ovens. I finally announced that even if no one else was, I was going swimming. The water was perfect -- still and clear, and there was another shore across from us. It was some sort of bay!

I struck out across the water, and then a giant wave rose up under me. I could feel the power as I kept on swimming. Looking at where the wave was going to land after it crested, I knew I was in trouble. Growing up in Southern California, I spent a lot of time riding waves, and landing this one was going to be a doozy. However, in the dream, I had my face right at the level of the water and kept breathing in and out, deeply and calmly. I thought, "As long as I can breathe in the wave, I'm okay."

Since we can't predict the things that happen, it seems as good a way to proceed as any.

Back on the Bandwagon

Last year I just quit keeping track of what I got from the garden. It was, believe me, only a symptom of the general falling-apart I suffered. Nothing serious, thank goodness, just what it was.

This year I figured I'd keep track here. So here's the tally this far for 2011:



Eleven eggs and just shy of six pounds of uncleaned honey mushrooms. They ought to clean out to about five pounds. Pilaf for dinner!

(Let's all hope Denise doesn't email me tomorrow and say, "No!! Those arent honey mushrooms! You'll dieeeeee.")

Eye can't see well

I need to call the vet this week because it's time Mikey got some shots and other doggy things. But it seems I'm going to have to call the kid-vet too, since Benadryl isn't touching this one:



As a general rule, panic isn't my first reaction. It's still possible that this is a mosquito bite-type thing, but it's gone on for days, and it's getting worse rather than better, and it is uncomfortable. If it's not changed soon, we'll get it looked at.

About four more rows today -- that mitten is halfway done.

As you mean to go on

Resolutions and new beginnings just seem to go together, as do the concomitant disappointment when keeping them is more difficult -- the pounds won't come off, the photos don't get organized, those pesky weeds just keep coming up, and who said twelve pairs of mittens in a year was doable?

I've managed this in years past by not making resolutions, other than the most general: "Eat breakfast. Walk occasionally. Eat kale a lot."

This year, though, I'm brimming with them. Maybe it's tipping well into my final half of life; maybe it's not having a truly little child of my own any more (thank goodness for a new niece!) that's freeing up some space in my head. And this blog is part of that. While researching when we got the cats for a pet insurance application, not only did I discover when we got the cats, thanks to the blog, seeing the pictures of the kids and reading about what we were doing was so pleasurable and not having it was an actual ache. So I resolved to post at least one picture of one kid per day and blog something. Alas, that's only one thing I want to do.

Some of my plans involve the kids in other ways:


And, as any parent knows, rearing kids means limits. Screen time is an ongoing struggle here -- in fact, many things about this child are struggles. Rarely do parents blog honestly about their challenges with their children, and the line between exploitation and sugar-coating isn't easy to find. I hope that this year, we're going to unlock some of the more difficult puzzles with our son, even though paying for the professional help to do so is going to be painful.

I'm also embarking on a self-taught course of dog training. Mikey, who recently joined our family, was trained to be a show dog and not much else. He's big, and mouthy, and not quite sure what's expected of him. He's also very lovable.


I love the look he's giving the kid here. "Squirrel? You call that a squirrel? Take me outside!" In researching training methods, I've fallen completely for Karen Pryor and her positive reinforcement classical conditioning clicker training. Her Reaching the Animal Mind book provided hours of entertainment for us, and then gave me a place to start when Mikey came home. As I've delved more into training, I'm feeling overwhelmed, so finding this website with its structured instruction has been a boon. I think it might also save me a few hundred dollars in private training lessons.

So what else? Um, study Italian, teach my courses, keep homeschooling as effectively as I can, walk briskly a few times a week - that leg is still not at all run-able - do some yoga, keep decluttering the house, and oh, yes, knitting.

I started working on the second of the Norwegian Snail Mittens a few days ago:


This would be great almost-two-years-to-a-finished-object stuff if I didn't also bite the fit-bullet and do this:


And it's not done. That "first" mitten was just enough too tight around the thumb area to make it not up to snuff. In a moment of strength, I figured, "I can do this" and just started ripping. When I get down below the tight part, I'll set it back on the needles and start over. By then the "other first" mitten will be done, and I'll be halfway to the first pair done.

As I mean to go on, I mean.