The last of the roses

 

 

 

 

Frosty Hydrangea

Little Girl Bugs

This morning I spied an odd looking bug in the back yard. It’s black with a spiky back and two yellow stripes running down each side from head to tail. I wonder what it is?

Here are more odd looking bugs on another leaf of the same vine. There are lots of these bugs and the spiky bugs all over this vine. These papery, shedding bugs are frequently sitting next to the spiky bugs, so I suspect they are the same bug at different stages of its growth.

Aha! The spiky bug and the shedding bugs are all baby Ladybugs.

Huh. What would a baby Ladybug be called? Little Girl Bugs?

Summer garden update

Frank has a cookbook featuring old fashioned recipes such as pickles, kraut, yogurt, sourdough, and all kinds of fun projects. One of their tomato recipes is a very simple tomato sauce that I have been dying to try.

As of this afternoon, I have the main ingredient ready to go:

I’ll post the recipe if my in-house food critic approves of the sauce.

Summer Reprieve

Summer is too hot. I’m going to roll back the calendar for a minute to early April, when our Redbud trees were just starting to bloom.

Now imagine Oregon in April: sometimes sunny, sometimes drizzle, all the flowers start blooming overnight. Everything is fresh and new. 

The temperature tries to get over 60, but it just can’t.
You wish you could ditch the wool socks you wear with your Birkenstocks, but it’s just not warm enough.
(I did say this is Oregon, didn’t I?)

Ok, back to summer again.
Now 75 degrees doesn’t feel so incredibly hot, does it?
(Again, didn’t I say this is Oregon? I do wish you would pay attention.)

Our summer garden

I love our backyard. It’s small and plain, but there are some elements here that make me so happy that I love to just sit outside and enjoy the space. When it’s nice out, the back deck is my happy place. Here’s what’s growing and blooming right now:

Cherry Tomatoes

Thai peppers 

Lemon balm (it’s growing wild in patches here and there all around the property),
an artichoke, and a tomato plant that is as tall as I am.

Frank is checking out the progress of his red peppers. He says this is the kind used in making chimichurri, a kind of hot sauce/relish. That’s his plan for these peppers. I’m too much of a Scandinavian wimp, though, (Scandinavian hot sauce is butter with a pinch of black pepper) and don’t think I have the guts to try it.

Yes, Frank has long hair. He was growing it to see how long it could grow until chemo made it fall out. The plan sort of backfired though, when he didn’t lose a single hair from the chemo. Now it’s almost like a trophy, and so he continues to let it grow. I don’t care. Could be worse, like him wanting a sports car or a mistress.

Back to the yard…

My all time July favorite is this big vine-y shrub on the left: Jasmine.

Oh, I wish computers had smell-o-vision so you could breathe in the heady perfume of these little white flowers. The fragrance wafts into my open kitchen window and fills up the back of the house.

A little stroll down the alley behind my next door neighbor’s house brings another treat:
Gladiolus and blackberries and more wild lemon balm.
(This neighbor is the crafty lady with the colored pencil fence.)

I asked her what variety she planted and she said, “I don’t know, black ones?”

 

Did you know there are over 1100 varieties of blackberries. We have lots of commercial caneberry (blackberry and raspberry) farms here in the Willamette Valley. Marionberries were developed here in Marion County and are full bodied and sweet, like a cross between raspberries and blackberries. My favorite blackberries for eating out of hand are the hardest to find in the markets: Black Cap. They’re so mellow and sweet and will turn your mouth dark purple in an instant. They’re hard to find for raw consumption because they’re processed into food grade dye and sold to the meat packing industry to be used for marking sides of beef with grades such as “USDA Prime” and the like.

But I digress. With all those tomato plants I can’t wait until late August when we can start picking and eating and drying and canning all the tomatoes. Mmm.

Laundry tip: How to clean grease spots off a shirt

I’m a messy eater. Most of my favorite shirts get dribbled with salad dressing, splattered with grease when frying eggs, or globbed down the front with whatever is served for dinner. I’m also cheap thrifty and buy shirts at the thrift store. Would you believe people get rid of perfectly good clothes just because they weren’t able to wash out a grease spot?

With all those grease spots on the fronts of all these shirts, I figured out a secret weapon that cleans them up like a pro, without costing me a fortune or killing the shirt with bleach:

Dish soap

You know the old slogan, “Dawn gets grease {whoosh} out of your way.” They’re not kidding. If dish soap is so good at degreasing pots and pans, I figured it would work on clothes. Besides, I’ve never seen grease spots on my dishcloths.

I love this secret weapon for grease spots because it’s inexpensive and I always have it on hand. Actually, I now have two bottles; one in the kitchen and the other in the laundry room.

Here are some pictures of two of my shirts dribbled with grease from a carnitas burrito (yummm, pork carnitas) and some chocolate oops from a sundae. No, I am not sticking to my diet, thank you very much for pointing that out.

The burrito grease and tomato sauce tank top:

And the chocolate sundae oops on the t-shirt:

Both shirts are 100% cotton, which seems to be the hardest to degrease in a regular laundry washing.

All the spots are generously dribbled with dish soap, then I roll up each shirt and let it sit overnight. I did notice that blue dish soap will leave a light blue stain on pure white shirts if left to sit more than 36 hours, but it will eventually wash out.

   

Here’s the burrito tank top:

And the chocolate sundae t-shirt. Perfect.

If you have clothes in the back of your closet that have grease spots that you haven’t been able to wash out, give this a try. It has worked for me on shirts that have had old grease spots go through the dryer. It’s worth a try and you already have the secret weapon on hand in your kitchen.

If you buy clothes at thrift stores and garage sales, don’t be afraid of buying grease spotted shirts. This is such an easy fix to that little problem. 

Pencil Fence

Back in March or April, a few giant colored pencils began appearing on the other side of our backyard fence.

Pretty soon a lot of giant colored pencils were leaning up against the fence. Had a young family of giants moved in next door?

No family of giants, whew!

Instead, my incredibly creative and talented next door neighbor decided to change out the fence boards flanking her back yard gate.

I think it’s the coolest thing. Every now and then I’ll head out to work and open my front door to see someone taking pictures from the sidewalk. They sheepishly grin and wave at me, and then they ask: What kind of wood did your neighbor use?

I always reply: “Cedar posts… and a really big pencil sharpener.”

Love Fest

This morning, I walked into Rachel’s bedroom to discover a little head-and-ears-cleaning love fest in progress on her bed.

I guess Ollie could get at Violet’s head and ears better from this angle.
(He’s the black and white dork; Violet is our clingy and very bossy black cat.)

Rows of Roses

Yesterday the roses next to my driveway exploded.

It’s as if all the buds had a meeting early this morning and agreed that today would be the day they would open. And open they did. The colors and fragrance are amazing. I only wish you had smell-o-vision to go with these pictures.

   

I don’t think there could possibly be any more buds on this rosebush by the side door.

May Day

 hosta

We don’t have any big May Day festivals here in Salem like they do at Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis, and there’s nothing special going on around town today, but that isn’t stopping me from pausing to enjoy how absolutely gorgeous today is. To me, May 1st is kind of a personal, unofficial first day of summer that wakes up my Earth Mama Muse. Today is a double whammy of good, since it’s not only May 1st, but also brilliantly sunny and 61 degrees.

three lonely tulips, a hydrangea (still twigs, but wait until July), and thousands of bluebells

Every year around the beginning of May, I get the urge to do gardening, bird-feedering, and outdoor craft projects. The craft projects haven’t started yet (although there’s no excuse… wait, there is. I need to rig up some sort of table to work at.) Anyway, I thought it would be fitting to share some gardening pictures to kick off my personal unofficial first day of Summer.

Enjoy!

the gate to our back yard

flowering vine over the back gate

Spring 2011

It has been a long long time since I posted anything here. Did you miss me? Did you wonder what was going on? It’s been a heck of a Fall/Winter, and I just haven’t had the time or energy to do anything but survive for the last few months.

Last October, I shared a bit about Frank’s cancer. He’s still dealing with that and still recovering from all the surgeries last August. This week he finishes up his second to last round of chemo, and the surgical recovery thing has come a long way… just a little bit more to go and he should be done. With that part anyway. He’s getting there.

Last week we finally put the Christmas boxes away. (The tree came down just before Valentine’s Day.) The last of the Christmas cookie tins were washed tonight and maybe I’ll muster up some energy to put them away along with the wreath this coming weekend. Please re-read the last sentence of the first paragraph. I wasn’t kidding.

Anyway, I have some (exciting to me) news to share – I have been trying to come up with ways to earn extra money to help pay the bills. Frank and I miss just enough work each month, and have just enough medical expenses (prescriptions) each month, that our ends don’t quite meet. It bites. It’s depressing. So in January, Rachel and I rented a space at a cute little boutique in town called The Fussy Duck. I wanted a venue to sell my plates, and maybe sell other handmade items as well.

To be honest, it has been slow, but I think I’m still trying to figure out what people want. Risa, the owner, has been a huge source of info and a lot of help. She suggested posting our items on her shop’s page on Facebook, so I have been doing that. Meanwhile, I am dying to show you what we’ve made so far:

The “Sister Rock” was the first item to sell. Here are the other things created in our basement Girl Cave:

Pillow cases -

Duct tape wallets -

Map picture frames – (I’m still on the hunt for tiny cars to glue to the maps, but here’s what they look like right now)

Chip clips – (I love these)

Bottlecap magnets -

Femme Fatale Lunch bags/Gift bags –
(Thank you, E.)

Black & White and pink handbag with a purse organizer insert -

A Black & White and green handbag with inside pockets -

Mustache mugs –

Do you like my mustache?

One note about the handbags: I have been playing it fairly safe with fabrics as I practiced the pattern. (I actually used fabrics that were purchased to make pillow cases. I couldn’t help it; I just had to try the handbag pattern!) So this week I stopped at my favorite thrift store and bought a couple of big plaid flannel shirts. I’m going to cut them up and piece them together for a cross body hobo bag, following this same basic pattern. I’ll post pictures when the bag is done. I think it’s going to look great.

Speaking of the thrift store, I haven’t forgotten about my mentioning wanting to blog about Thrifty Nesting things. The plan is still there. During down time for my brain (there is no such thing, really) the little gears have been grinding away with thoughts and ideas. On weekends I get a chance to dig in a little and sew and research and glue and compile stuff. I can’t wait to get my next batch of ideas up and running.

Once we’re done with Dr. appointments 4x/week or more (some weeks it’s 2 Dr. appts every day after work,) I will take a big breath and dive in head first into Thrifty Nesting. 

So that’s that.

Please be patient as I try to work my way through everything that has piled up since last August. I can’t wait to get my life back. No, actually, that’s not quite true. My life before all of this was boring and ho-hum. The last 11 months have given me perspective, and I no longer want my dull old life back. I want the life I’ve been wanting all along, and right now I’m using the time to figure out what I need to do next.

Stay tuned!