Off The Beaten Path

It’s so easy to get to the end of a season or a year, and only see what you DIDN’T accomplish, not what you did. It is important to reflect and remind oneself of the goals met and progress made. We DIDN’T make progress on our house this year, and that’s hard, but we DID…

When we got to mom’s on Wednesday, I had a very large pile of boxes waiting for me. My herbs arrived far sooner than I had expected them, Amazon had left a few, and a seed order I’d put in BEFORE the mail strike, that had wandered off and gotten lost, had finally arrived. One…

We don’t celebrate the Christmas holiday, but statutory days off happen regardless, so today is a half-day, and tomorrow and Thursday are off days. One of them we will use as our regular weekly hygeine trip, because we got a huge snowstorm on Saturday and it took them until Monday to get the road cleared…

All of November rained. There was no sun whatsoever the whole month. Early December was very snowy. This past week, it popped up to 14 above zero for 2 days, melted all the snow, turned the yard into a muddy horror amd then froze again. In between the rain and the snow and the thaw…

All of November pretty much looks like this: It rained today. We stayed indoors and drove each other insane. The children have found 27 new things to fight about and it isnt quite lunchtime. The end

There are sales, you see. And I don’t have alllll the plants yet. So now, in the winter nursery bed I have I also have three live plants that need to be put in soil, but it is quite late in the season for planting in the ground, so I will likely pot them and…

Prior to the weekend, I was entirely caught up plant-wise. All my purchased potted plants are in the ground, my winter-stratification seeds are planted and dug into the garden bed, and my greenhouse-overwinter plants are potted up and ready to be moved when it gets colder. On Sunday, though, I cadged a couple Monarda fistulosa…

I am not, in general, a fan of current technology. I see very few things that are socially positive in the computer-age tech. Since the 60’s when computers first came about, and then increasingly quickly since the advent of the internet and most particularly social media, society has by and large become fractured, contentious and…

It has been an unusually dry summer. It is normal for us to have a couple weeks of scorchingly hot July, but usually we have a lot of warm, humid, rainy weather. This year, we got scorching for ALL of July and good bit of August, too, and very very little rain. I live in…

It has taken WAY longer than we planned or hoped for, but we have FINALLY emptied out the storage truck. It took us 2.5 years when we had hoped for a year or less, but it is done. Now, just to pay that final bill…