Happy Monday

The weather in my neck of the woods:
Mild and in the mid-50s. Ethan calls it June-uary.

Things that make me happy:
Knitting, playing cards or hanging out with the boys, lunchtime with coworkers.

Book I'm reading:
I have been (*gasp!*) too tired to read lately. I have The Red Pyramid and The Hunger Games in the queue. It doesn't help that The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a seriously tough act to follow.

What's on my TV today:
Veronica Mars

On the menu for dinner:
Leftover Chinese. I'm just not up for cooking.

On my To Do List:
Find freezer recipes, buy ingredients for cooking for the coming month, clean out the jeep and install baby seat.

New recipe I tried or want to try soon:
Cinnamon Rolls
Pizza Crazy Bread
Tangy Beef Stroganoff

In the craft basket:
The baby blanket (border still isn't finished)
The boys' sweaters (I'm running out of yarn and they still don't have sleeves)

Looking forward to this week:
Ob appointment, Chinese New Year

Tips and Tricks:
Buy as many pages of the current Forever Stamp as possible.
Keep forever stamps and a few envelopes in your wallet or everyday bag.

My favorite blog post this week:
A co-worker's status: "Some people are like slinkies. They aren't worth much, but they do make you smile when you push them down the stairs."

Blog Hopping:
Full Bellies, Happy Kids

No words needed:


Lesson learned the past few days:
Do not play Magic the Gathering with Ethan. He is really, really good at it.

On my mind:
How to afford a lawyer
Missing my farm

Devotionals, Scripture Reading, Key Verses:
A perennial favorite:
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.-- 1 Chronicles 16:34

The First Football Game of 2009-2010 Season

Ethan and Graeme and I had a wonderful time at the first ball game. Just at the end, he decided to show his brother the *awesome* vantage point he had found and ended up clothselining himself into a cervical collar and an ambulance ride. He was fine, and quite lucky. And all the high school cheerleaders came to make sure he was ok.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device from U.S. Cellular

The happy couple

September 24, 2008 The ceremony was beautiful, with Rev. Claire coming to the house from Charlottesville and David's family coming up as well. The sun was setting, the air was crisp and the mountains were beginning their autumnal glory as we exchanged vows and rings. What a fine day.

Megan

I'm not into MySpace and haven't been for years, so this most recent atrocity of internet bullying resulting in suicide only just now came to my attention. I am horrified, of course, and appalled at the people, mostly girls and women, who would do such a thing. But the worst of it is that i'm not surprised. Not in the slightest. What does surprise me, though, is that this has finally been taken seriously enough to produce charges against the cowardly perpetrators. Way to go, Los Angeles. I'm so glad we don't have the internet at home. On the way to the bus this morning, the boys asked if they could each get their very own tandem dump truck load of topsoil for their birthdays. While i informed them that "dirt cheap" was misleading, i laughed and enjoyed hearing their plans to make their own version of a Meerkat Manor. When i think of how fragile our children are in the face of peer pressure, it just crushes me.

recent events

The boys seem to have been out of school the past two weeks more than they have been in it. Between dental appointments and weather closings, this has been the strangest back-to-school month I think I have ever seen. On the positive side, we love our new family dentists. Dr. Mills specializes in children's dentistry, and the boys can't say enough wonderful things about her and her staff. Given that they used to lose sleep before seeing a dentist before meeting Dr. Mills, I think this is simply marvelous. Yesterday school started at the scheduled time for the first time all week. Of course, we ended up needing to take Ethan to have his hand x-rayed just to verify that Tuesday's fall wasn't any more serious than soft-tissue damage. Ethan and David went to an immediate care clinic in Salem together, and made the best of it, enjoying a late lunch at Five Guys before trucking back up the mountain to school. For his part, Ethan was a real trooper through the whole thing. David rescheduled his own appointment and does indeed have a serious sinus infection that has decided to make itself known in his lungs as well. He felt horrible this morning, and I'm keeping my ear out for pneumonia, which aside from being A Really Scary Thing to me, is also pretty serious. Between school weirdness, weather, dental and doctor appointments, David and I do somehow manage to show up to our jobs on occasion, mostly through tag team efforts¹. My job is going quite well, and I’m enjoying adding additional products to my testing responsibilities. I’ve just been ‘officially’ given my second piece of software to manage and I’m enjoying figuring out how it all fits together. It has a quite intricate interface, with multiple drop-in components, each with their own configuration, so I certainly haven’t any lack of intellectual work in front of me. And, as always with software, there is a release deadline sitting right on top of another build, so the pace isn’t anything to sneeze at, either. David has likewise seen his lab get into some serious R&D stuff, so the schedule there is tight and demanding and weird as only a biological lab would be. On this upside, they are doing some cool development stuff, and chatting about work is far from the typical ‘how was your day’ fare. We are also enjoying our time at home, weirdly scheduled though it might be. This past weekend we took yet another trip to Floyd, this time with the boys, and visited School House fabrics (which the boys tolerated), the general store (which the boys loved) and a custom woodworker’s storefront. We had dinner at the Mexican restaurant and ended up poking around in the clothes store, where I picked up a new pair of pants and a sweater than I just fell in love with. We ended up designing ever-so-many things, and it was a nice outing, all told. Sunday we had plans aplenty from which to choose: we ended up scrapping them all, staying inside and making a carrot cake. How yummy and cozy was that? The boys are looking forward to more snow, as the recent acquisition of snow-discs had them howling with glee on Thursday and Friday as they turned the driveway into a slalom course. David took the tractor and scraped the snow into banks around trees and at the end of the driveway, and I swear they would have stayed out until hypothermia set in if we hadn’t tempted them back with warm food and hot chocolate. At home we are watching netflix and library selections, with a few randomly selected episodes of Firefly just for fun. David and I watched Babel (not so great: quite dislocated and dislocating, perhaps by design) and The Devil Wears Prada (wonderful and funny). From the library the whole family watched Holes (outrageously funny and cute), The River Wild (a touching and exciting tale) and The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys (serious and thought-provoking, despite the humor; an entry on the Must See List). Those are all on their way back, and I'm looking forward to our next installment this weekend. 1. More than ever, this month I feel as though we are the Wonder Twins, assessing the latest split-second development, declaring "Form of. . a taxi!”" and dashing out the door in our various directions.

the latest from the weed patch

This morning while i was in the garden checking on the tomatoes, the vacationing neighbor was shooting a high-powered rifle repeatedly. Now, i'm certain that he was merely working on his new sight, or perfecting his trigger, and certainly was not after the many trespassers on Deer Highway, but it really disturbed me that he was firing near the Pine Forest where the boys had recently been playing. I know we are allowed to shoot, but what are the guidelines for shooting near occupied land? Mo sent along a link to local ordinances in Virginia, and Craig is notably not on it. So i suppose a good old fashioned drop-by-to-say-hi is in our futures this evening. The tomato news is that while we don't have any ripening as yet (congrats, Mo), we have several on the vine that look quite lovely. And to think it only took 32 plants to get a few! The beans have a poor showing; after Graeme and I finished weeding the bed there are only a half-dozen plants at best. The peas aren't doing well either, and I'm wondering what we can do: do we weed and wait, do we tear it up and plant something else, do we make it the world's best cat box? I put the questions to Morris, who was most helpful and full of advice. So now it seems that we will be replanting beans and scrapping the peas, which is fine with me. The beans we planted were from last year's seed purchase, so we might need to get some more of those. I like the burgandy ones best, and some pole beans are always nice. I'd also like to get some delicata squash seeds in the ground -- they are my favorite -- but i have No Clue where to buy them (if i could find a squash, i'd buy it, eat it, and plant the seeds). Perhaps Agnew will have some. I also would like to get the pumpkin seeds in the ground for Halloween, even if we don't harvest them for actual eating. The beets from last year's seeds seems to be doing quite well, and if early shoots are any indication, we'll have beets by the bucketload. The spinach (curent season seed purchase) is duking it out with the weeds, and i'm not going to sweat that crop so much. It's a shame, since i'm big on spinach and was really looking forward to making some spinach-artichoke dip, so it looks like a trip to the market is in order. Mo says it, like the peas, are an early or late crop and that i should try again in the fall. I'm a fan of weed barrier fabric, but even so weeds would still happen. I'm not certain what the horses got into, but it has been coming up in droves in all our beds. The cow manure will be a godsend next year. We set out three new beds that we plan to plant with potatoes, so i'm betting we'll be in Agnew soon. Will pick up some seeds then, tear out the peas and keep in mind that cool crops doesn't mean "july." I have some onion seeds for planting in the fall. We also have some serious garlic going on, Russian Red and elephant varieties. We didn't get it in soon enough to harvest or anything, but will leave it in the beds over the winter for harvesting next year. With the deer being what they are (read: p.i.t.a.), i'm thinking of building a low garden wall. it's not fool proof or anything, but it can be pretty, and i'm seriously invested in the garden. It's silly in a way, but there is a lot of me in the beds. The boys and I go out every morning, and I've come to really look forward to the roses and flowers and vegetables. Since the roses and lilies were a deer buffet, the vegetables have been getting most of my attention (that, and all the weeds that seem to spring up in the beds overnight). I checked on the roses this morning, and it seems they will recover, but i doubt there will be much in the way of blooms for several weeks, if then.

loving kindness

So often, I hear people talk about how it would be wrong or selfish to feel good about themselves, how they feel guilty if they treat themselves well or with genuine kindness. This is silly. When we cultivate feelings of compassion for ourselves, we begin to embody what love truly is. Manifesting love within fuels our ability to demonstrate our love outside of ourselves.

This morning, i am filled with love and compassion and true goodwill. I am blessed to have a wonderful partner, a loving family, and to be in a home that is warm and happy.

yesterday we went tromping through the woods a bit, thinking about streams and farms, houses and homes. on the way home, we bought nearly everything in the IGA and stocked the pantry high. The peepers were singing to the high heavens, and as we drove home i kept oo-ing at the frogs in the road, bouncing and skipping. david laughed (i mean, it just couldn't be helped -- i was silly).

Beware the Ides of March

This week has been strange, and it's only Wednesday. Perhaps it's the early arrival of Daylight Saving Time, but I'm telling you everything is being weird. David and I can barely seem to keep up with the chaos cloud ripping through our world. Fortunately, the boys are being wonderful, and the togetherness David and I have is the mortar that holds us. My dreams have been especially weird of late, and graphic as ever. This morning, i had to take some serious time to figure out where the dreaming sequence left off and the real world picked up. Trust me, after gaming goons, workplace weirdness, simple-minded stalkers and generically being lost, it was nice to find myself curled up lovingly on the organic flannel.

yes, i read the almanac

Thanks to Nate for sending along the picture of the lunar elcipse from the other side; pretty, isn't it? While David and i were driving home Saturday evening (after a much-needed trip to Sam's Club), I pointed out the emerging crescent. The boys and David and I watched the eclipse finish its path across the moon as we made our way up the mountain. My face pressed against the cool glass of the passenger window, I confessed: "The full moon in March is called the Worm moon. I meant to look it up, but I didn't." David asked me how it was that i knew the eclipse was coming up, and that it was a full moon that night. "Uh, i read it in the Farmer's Almanac?" I felt like a dork, but it's true -- the almanac provides a lot of my random farm-based information, and it's not really more sophisticated than that. I'm a weird-information junkie, and i like knowing stuff about the world in which i live; the two come together to produce a fascination of named things. In the case of the names of the full moon, i found a list online. For the latest on what is going on, i tend to visit more authorative sources. and while i was visiting, i found what i'd like to get Tiger for his birthday in July. my mind has an endless capacity for useless information.

Cool things this weekend:

• On Saturday morning we went out and rode Nitro (the Freesian). Everyone got a turn except David, who was doing the lead-around-the-field thing. We meant to ride longer and share more, but Nitro was slipping in the still-wet grass, so it was a brief outing. Satisfying though. Note: Nitro is one heck of a lot of horse. At 17 hands and over a ton-and-a-half, it seriously changed my approach to riding when i was in the saddle. He got a little frisky, jumping and swishing a bit, and it was noticable in a way it simply isn't in smaller horses. I felt small and insignificant, but in a nice way.
• After riding, we went to town and looked at furniture. We need a new dining table and the boys need height-appropriate dressers. We were more of the get-ideas-and-go-home-and-make-it mindset, and i think we might have figured out a solution to the boys' organization at long last (yes, it involves the woodshop and not a credit card).
• David introduced us to the age-old board game Careers and we had a ball. The game he has is so old that all the little score sheets are used up and have been erased and re-erased into onion skin. I hopped on the computer and made a new set, which we tested on Sunday night while the clothes finished washing and the boys fell asleep. David won, but i was only a hunderd dollars from victory. [A hunnerd!]
• The Sam's trip did my heart good in a way that i simply find difficult to describe. We have twelve pounds of rice and a big honking case of Charmin. We are beginning the Pantry Stock, and such are the things that calm me, especially as i haven't found a contract yet. (Yes, they keep saying there are tons of things out there for me. None of them comes through, though. It's that overeducated, overqualified thing again.)
• We had dinner on Friday night with Michael, which was a treat for us all. As he came in, Tiger looked at him and said "Did i mention that I think of you as a brother?" Michael was telling him yes, and that it was cool when Tiger then informed him that he could now join him in playing The Mime Game.
• Sunday was mostly calm and quiet, with house chores and movies and tree removal (when the axe broke, David got to show off the chainsaw before literally man-handling the tree into submission. My own personal superhero.)

this morning was a comedy of near-errors, but that's another story for another time. Hopefully, the day is on track once again.