dusting off the old keyboard

It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I’ve sat down to write anything here, for which I apologize. Of course, the longer the gap the greater the barrier to restarting. So this meta commentary is to serve as the restart. Go!

During the interregnum I’ve been busy with life. We took a weekend (plus a couple of evenings) and painted the bedroom, a nice warm beige that makes you feel like you’re going to sleep and waking up in a cappuccino. We then (finally) painted the upstairs bathroom, a nice soft blue that makes you feel like you’re brushing your teeth in…a room that’s blue. The blue is pretty mellow, partly out of deference to my partner’s desire not to live in A Fun House ™ but also because we’re trying out low-VOC paints and the color spectrum is much more limited. Apparently it’s the nasty chemicals that make you high as your brain cells keel over that give wall paints their lovely bright vibrant colors. Sad but true.

In addition to knocking those two interior jobs off our my seemingly endless list of home improvements, we’re mostly just planning planning planning. We need to install some exhaust fans, replace some light fixtures, make the basement improvements, and replace the second pump on the boiler which bit the dust last month (we’ve been using a space heater in the family room, which is the only area affected). And then, of course, I have big plans for the garden! Number one: make it seem like an actual garden! I suppose all the other plans are just sub-plans, really. With the gardening season comes the food-growing season, which now means the food-stockpiling season, so I’m kind of already looking forward to that. Even though we are still working our way through last year’s frozen and canned stockpile. Which is fine, because even though it seems like the bounty is just around the corner it’s actually a few months away. So there’s plenty of time to use the frozen cherries, squash, and blueberries and use up the jars of apple jelly, right? Right.

On the art front, my workspace has been disrupted by the water problems in the basement, so I’m switching gears while that gets completed. I’ve started a quilt, for which I am (a) using a pattern and (b) following generally accepted principles of quilting with regard to measuring and ironing seams and the like. I say this because ten 12 years ago I made a quilt, knowing absolutely nothing except how to use a sewing machine and pretty much entirely winging it, and I am therefore duly chastised by my partner whenever I refer to this new quilt as my first quilt. The use of modifiers like ‘proper’ or ‘real’ does nothing to help the situation.

So there you have it. Since I seem to be mired in domestic concerns, I am attempting to bring the art in where I can and just roll with it.

dusting off the old keyboard

garden log : forsythia in bloom, plants a’poppin, and pruned trees


Sedum by the south fence.

I was happy to see that the sedum wasn’t at all hurt by being moved a foot to the west last year. I discovered it popping up under the rose bush along the far part of the south fence when I was clearing that area of vines. When I transplanted the peonies gifted to us by our neighbors I also moved the sedum to give both it and the rose bush some root room. The clump is a lovely splash of green back there now that I’ve cleared the fall’s leaf cover off of that bed, and it could probably be separated in two without hurting its overall growth. I have a small bit in the front bed, and I wouldn’t mind moving a larger bunch to the front. Herbaceous perennials are kind of a weird mystery to me, one of the neater forms plants take. I mean, they die off, right? And then they grow back. It’s pretty cool.


The forsythia bush at the back of our house, in full bloom.

This year I’m making a concerted effort to take photos of the shrubs and trees as they bloom. Partly for my own cataloguing effort, but also to have a reminder of what the yard looks like at various points through the year as I’m planning new additions or relocations. The forsythia is a particularly striking bush; set against the rear of the house it gets the setting afternoon sun and positively glows. Sadly, it is a plant that I’d never encountered before moving out here and appear to be specifically allergic to. Last year’s experiment with bringing in a striking array of cut branches for the dining room ended with a lot of sneezing and a lovely arrangement greeting visitors on the porch. This year I’m admiring them from afar and remembering to keep the window closed. The sheer volume of pollen from the pear and cherry trees in bloom in our town leads me to strive to keep the windows closed anyway, which is hard this time of year as the weather is just starting to get lovely and cool.


Front to back: orange daylilies, garlic chives, and yellow daylilies, with variegated violets off to the left side.

And, it’s amazing what a difference two weeks makes! The front bed is growing like crazy, and we haven’t had all that much rain. It’s supposed to be quite wet this weekend, though, so I’m sure that they’ll sprout up even more. I look forward to seeing even more violets come into flower; I love the look of the scattered throughout the front lawn. In terms of work I did in the garden this week, rather than work the plants did for themselves, I pruned the deadwood out of our neighbor’s cherry tree that abuts our house. It’s a lovely old weeping cherry, but it’s in close competition with several large maples for sunlight and it had a few large limbs that needed to be removed. I’m hopeful that I got to them early enough that the tree will start to believe it’s not actually dying and send up some new sprouts to balance out its lean. Even if it doesn’t, cutting deadwood out of fruit trees is one of my favorite gardening activities. Seriously, it is. It’s my favorite thing to do at the farm and I’ve gladly applied that experience to the trees around our property here.

Finally, I rescued from ivy strangulation and relocated to the front bed the last of the daylilies that were growing up along the alley at the back of our yard. There are still some along the back of our neighbor’s fence, but I plan to just pull the ivy up and mulch around those. I’m sure that with a little encouragement they’ll fill out to make a nice drift; he has a double lot with his garage off the street, so the alley facing is long and unbroken. First things first, though: killing the ivy in my own yard is of highest priority!

garden log : forsythia in bloom, plants a’poppin, and pruned trees

late summer trip north

We’re leaving this week for a trip to see our families, and won’t be back for a couple of weeks. Time and energy has been taken up preparing for the trip, and writing has taken a back seat. I have a log of half-written posts piling up, most of them book reviews, and I’ll clear them out when I’m back. I’ll have my wee clamshell with me, of course, so I may write as I go. We’ll see.

On this trip, in addition to collecting some of the world’s best blueberries, I’ll be birding at Point Pelee. I haven’t been to the park since I was a kid, but it was always one of my favorite places. I look forward to revisiting the boardwalk and trying to catch a glimpse of some of the songbirds that have eluded me around here.

As a final preparation for our trip, I’ll be stopping at our garden plot and collecting any peppers—hot and sweet—that have survived the drought through the benevolence of strangers. Thank you, strangers!

See you down the road.

late summer trip north

birds in Oregon

One of my favorite parts of any trip to a new region is seeing birds I’ve never seen before. My trip to Portland last month was no exception, and I was happy to catch sight of even the common regional birds. I’ve updated my lifelist to include the birds I saw out there, bringing my total of birds seen in North America up to a whopping 104! I’m still working on gathering photos of the European birds, but the list itself is complete.

birds in Oregon