homesteading, Seasons

Beginning the season

 

I took my cough and sniffly sinuses outside today and started Project Garden, 2011, pulling weeds, adding compost to the veggie beds, installing the pea fences and planting pea seeds. The potato bed is just about ready for the seed potatoes, which I expect to arrive in two weeks. I brought in about half of the over-wintered kale, which opens up a half-bed for starting spinach and carrots, assuming I can find my row-cover-anchoring rocks. Things are actually looking pretty good in the garden, despite the snow and the hard freezes we had this winter. There’s plenty still to clean …

Seasons

Not there yet

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Ian was given an amaryllis bulb a few years ago for his birthday. I planted it, and it put up leaves but never sent up a flower spike. Amaryllis are marketed during the holidays and I’m used to them blooming during cold weather, but I figured it was a gimmick and if we just left it alone it would eventually do what it was naturally inclined to do. If that’s the case, we have the world’s laziest amaryllis. I moved it out of the sun room after Christmas on the theory that it wasn’t warm enough. This makes no sense …

sewing

Thread Catcher, Version 2

 

Well, I think it’s an improvement over the last one, but it’s not quite there yet. For one, I think the fabric combination came out too much like a circus tent for my taste. Less contrast, perhaps, or not using a spacious print/solid combination. A little interfacing would be good for structural integrity, and a tiny bit more height before the rim flips down. I think the most critical part, though, would be an adjustment to my template so that the outside rim doesn’t flare. I was hoping for something more vertical. It kinda looks like a mutant cootie-catcher to …

current events

The Long View

I feel badly that I don’t want to really think much about Current Events. The proposed federal laws that would redefine rape and shut down a national organization that provides a wide variety of health care services to low-income women. The protests in Wisconsin. The assault on the EPA and the shelter given to polluters. Citizens United. Really, I get sick to my stomach thinking about it. Where did rationality go? What are they all afraid of? Or is it that it’s all about greed? Why is it not possible to talk things through in a reasonable fashion without having …

quilts, sewing

Dis-proof of Concept, and The Answer

 

Sewing creates these tiny bits of thread that you cut off a project. I’ve always just had a little pile going on my work table, and sometimes I would sweep them into my hand and get them to a trash bin. More often they would get swept off the table (by my project or my arm) and wait to be vacuumed into oblivion. Last night, I decided that it was time to grow up. So I made a thing in which to put thread tails. What resulted is not quite what I had in mind. It’s edges are too wavy …

Caitlyn, parenting

Ah ha! I mean, Duh!

Everyone I encounter has a certain base package of knowledge, right? People generally eat with a fork, wait their turn before speaking, can approximate their feelings in words. Only with a mature brain, apparently. Which has been simultaneously both an “Ah-ha!” moment and a “Duh!” moment. Humans are born unfinished; it’s something about the angle needed by a pelvis for walking upright being incompatible with the size of a head with a completed brain. I knew that already. But what I didn’t know was how the brain was unfinished. And now that I think about it, of course, it makes …