The night before last I woke up suddenly, long after midnight, with that strange, scratchy, dizzy feeling I get when the first grip of illness comes into my awareness. So I was not just tired, I was also sick.  We’ve had so few illnesses this spring compared to last year when Rose was attending pre-school…

Our friends who moved gave us a plastic toy ATV.  Clothilde loves it, and Ethan does too – he no longer has to carry her, but ties it to his belt and pulls her around on it while he does the chores. I woke up tired today.  I always know it’s going to be a…

My silence here this week is not only because of melancholy and exhaustion, also our computer has not been behaving itself.  There’s always something broken around here.  It keeps things interesting. Ethan and I almost killed ourselves trying to get the summer garden built.  We’re mostly better, but I’m still bone-dead exhausted, and Ethan’s back…

(M’am, could you pick the perpetrator out of this line up, please?) Ethan says it was probably April on the far right – not for any particular reason, other than he says her Shrek ears haunt his dreams.  She did turn out to look a little like someone did cruel genetic experiments on her (although…

The holiday is at an end – here we are, back to the grind of home-schooling.  Not that it is particularly grind-like, but at times I’ve made it that way for myself. Nutty is out with the herd at last, and seems to be enjoying it.  He and Sampson are great buddies.  I thought surely…

  The savoy cabbage in the garden isn’t ready yet, but I used a beautiful head of Chinese cabbage and made Halupki.  It wasn’t quite the same, but it was a decent home-grown substitute.  I learned how to make it from my French grandmother, who learned it from her Slovenian mother-in-law, my great-grandmother Anna. 1…

I’ll be honest – 2014 was a tough year.  I think starting off the first week of January with whooping cough made a really bad start!  And it was the Year of the Horse, supposedly a bad year for us Rats.  It wasn’t really a bad year.  Just intense, and I kept hurting myself and…

I’ve been woken up lately, in the middle of the night.  Fears have visited me in the darkness.  This happened last year, too.  Fears of what the new year might bring.  There are whispers of drought, disease, destruction.  The Karma of decades of Earth-abuse.  Radiation.  Petrochemical spills.  I never knew it would be so hard…

Christmas day was, as usual, very full.  I think we definitely made the most of the season, even if we never managed to put up a tree or lights or anything.  At least we did the snowflakes.  Not to mention pumpkin pie, the Angel chimes, gingerbread men, caroling in the neighborhood, and a wreath (Mirin…

I forgot to do a garden post last week!  But the garden new is good news – everything is green and growing.  No more rabbit damage so far.  I planted a whole row (the one Clothilde is tugging on) of new lettuce starts from Forage.  Melissa Desa gave out starts for many different lettuce varieties…

We celebrate Christmas three times – the result of having lots of family close by.  Christmas Eve is when we celebrate dinner with my family, tomorrow will be with Ethan’s extended family, and probably over the weekend we’ll have a smaller, quieter celebration with just Ethan’s parents.  Whew!  And somehow I ended up making most…