In Progress

Suddenly tomorrow is September (!) and with the change in the weather this week (rain, finally) it feels absolutely like harvest time and the season for cozy indoor crafting. Really, who am I kidding - summer in Portland continues through September - but I'll make the most of this week of cozyness and cool nights after so many months of heat and drought.

In progress these days:

• This chili ristra, made with the glowing fruit of my Dragon Cayenne plant. 

The peppers turn red a few at a time, so the ristra is hanging by the window with the needle still on the doubled thread, ready to add a few more chilis every couple of days.

• Coriander seed

 Mostly dried on the stalk in the garden (from a handful of generous volunteer plants) after we ate all the leaves, I rescued a big handful of these from the rain this weekend. It is finishing its drying in a paper bag hanging in my room, then will move to the spice cupboard.

• A braided rag rug. Perhaps my newest favorite crafty endeavor, I'm completely hooked on this project!

When I moved in with Bill, I was finally able to move my fabric scrap collection from a big bag into some Ikea wire drawers, and I took the time sort it all and purge out all the scraps I didn't want to keep for future sewing projects. A lot were old clothes and linens. Some (read: the bright orange 70s print above) came with other, more desirable fabrics in cheap bags found at secondhand stores. I wanted to make use of all the scraps in some way, and my longtime love of the Little House books immediately came to my aid - a rag rug! I looked up a tutorial and immediately found this one, fittingly on the Little House Living website.

 My rug will not be chic in its color scheme, which is a complete hodge-podge, but it sure is fun and easy to make. Once I had torn all of the fabric into strips, I organized it by color (sort of). One ball is entirely a red and purple based print that I had an overabundance of, one ball is all of the solid colors, and another is all of the other prints. I have no real idea how big the final product will be, but I'm already looking forward to making another in the future. I like the idea of finding some old sheets at a thrift store to create a more consistent color palette. [Tip: Cut the strips into ~3 foot strips. Any longer and they get easily tangled with each other. Also, try not to be adding two new strips at exactly the same point, or the braid gets extra lumpy; try to stagger the bulk of adding new strips]. 

This is a really great project to have at hand to pull out and work on for a few minutes in the evening or on a Sunday afternoon. I've been enjoying listening to podcasts (Backstory is my current favorite) while braiding away. 

Happy September, everyone!

Checking In

Hello, there! It's been an absurdly long time since my last post - life has been busy! Things have happened! For example:
  
I moved out of the shoebox apartment where I spent a great 2.5 years, and joined forces with Bill at the house he has lived at since before I met him.

We share the house with two roommates and a cat, have a small but lovely garden, and the spare bedroom became "my room," where all of my stuff lives and I have a sewing table and a futon for guests.

Life is so much easier without our constant going back and forth between each other's homes, although there are the small irritations of living with housemates (lack of space in the fridge being a primary one for me), although the housemates themselves are excellent people. Most of my kitchen gear is in storage in the basement since the house was well furnished already, so it will be fun unpacking it all someday.

It's been an unnervingly hot and dry summer in the northwest, but we've made the most of it. Sail camping, a fantastic backpacking trip in the North Cascades, a family reunion in Port Townsend, and my birthday at a cousin's new farm - this summer has been one of the best.

 

Day four of five in the North Cascades

Point Wilson lighthouse and Admiralty Inlet

How I spent my 31st birthday

 A summer ritual

It's been summer since April, with weeks of temperatures over 95 F, and even if the entire American West wasn't burning right now, I'd be ready for fall. But now we're praying for rain and here, at the edge of September, I am absolutely looking forward to cooler nights, wool socks, red leaves and baked squash. I've got some new autumn-y projects to work on which I will share here, as once again I try to revive my writing a bit. I hope you're all well, and I look forward to spending more time here in the coming weeks.

Lately

It's that wonderful sunny busy time at the front end of the summer, before things get REALLY busy. Here's a little of what's been going on in my life lately. 

:: I spent Memorial Day Weekend up north with my family, babytending my wee niece and enjoying a stay at my childhood home, where my favorite wildflowers were blooming. 

:: My mom and her grandbaby

:: A gift-in-progress for a pink-loving six-year-old

:: The final batch of starts are now safely into the garden, with Bill's help this morning. Ararat basil from the farmer's market, tomatoes grown under my shop lights. Peas abound.

:: Some of Bill's students got a gorgeous day to launch the boat they built. Bill took them on their maiden voyage, and later a smaller group of us went sailing in another student-built boat.

:: Life is pretty darn good.

In a Holding Pattern

I've been absent from here for awhile, mostly because things haven't felt...blogworthy. My life is good, and filled with good things, but mostly I feel like I'm just waiting for The Next Big Thing. I feel maxed out at my current job. I'm lucky to have a good employer and a supportive boss (who lets me switch my schedule around to accommodate interviews for other jobs!) but my work doesn't stimulate me, and I feel like I have nothing left to learn from my position. It's been nearly a year since I earned my MPH, and I want to be working in my chosen field. I'm currently in the process of interviewing for a big state job that would be a career maker. I may get it, I may not.

I've been at a loss for big projects of my own to work on, so sometimes I get home after work and just wonder what I should do with the evening. For a person who places high value on productivity, I've been having a hard time figuring out what to work on. I have a hard time with feeling at loose ends-- no big trips planned, no big events to look forward to, finished with a big round of sewing/crafting projects and now casting around for new ones. I would be planning summer vacations or trips (one of my goals this year is to go to a national park I've never been to before), except that there may be a job transition in my near future, which makes for unpredictability in terms of time off. Although now I'm considering just planning a week-long trip, so that I have plans regardless, and can take unpaid time off if I have to.

The biggest event that I had been looking forward to happened at the end of March, when my niece, Margaret, was born. I was antsy as all get out to meet her, of course, and had the most wonderful nine day vacation in April, as a live-in auntie. It was so great to be there, to know that I was being useful to my brother and sister-in-law by doing dishes and laundry, making dinner, and waking up in the wee hours of the morning to give Maggie a bottle. It's so incredible (and yet totally normal) to see my brother as a parent, and it was amazing just having so much time with that gorgeous baby.

She was asleep when I first got there, so I only saw her at that point, swaddled and passed out in her crib. I truly met her at 2 AM after a shift change with my sister-in-law. Maggie woke up hungry, and as I picked her up for the first time, she locked her big blue eyes on mine, with a deeply furrowed brow (which is precisely my father's), as if working out that although she had never met me before, I was kin. Just me and her in the middle of the night. Pretty magical.

The weather has turned summer-like, and I've been getting back into garden mode. I kind of got out of garden gear over this winter full of surgery and laid-up-ness. Now it's so very nice to spend my lunch breaks in my community garden plot, and to potter around at home with the little starts under the growlights and the herbs and flower in the pots outside my front door. Still, I have been longing for a big garden outside my back door, always with work needing to be done to fill my evenings. 

 Scapes!

Peas!

Pollinators!

Tonight after work I spent an hour at the garden in 80-degree heat, planting my home-started marigolds, plus beans, lettuce, and another round of radishes. I also cast out some dill. I never plant a patch of dill- I just throw some seeds around the plot, and get lovely stalks coming up here and there. Some self-seeds every year, but I always want to make sure I have enough for canning dilly beans come August.

The neighboring plot is home to this gorgeous (and knee-weakeningly sweet smelling) rugosa rose.

Bill is very busy teaching at the moment (have I mentioned here that he teaches a combination of math and boatbuilding to kids who aren't thriving in traditional math classrooms? It's a job he was born to do), and he's trying to finish his own boat in time for summer sailing, so little progress has been made on my kitchen island. However, we decided we'll get it done in time for my birthday in August, so it will only have taken us 10 months to build!

Otherwise, I've been reading a lot, cycling a lot, job searching, and trying to stave off the itchiness for change. New job, better income (read: pay off student loans and buy a house), bigger projects, traveling, something to feel like I've got a little more forward motion in my life, early in the summer in which I will turn 30.

Homey Dreams

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always have those future dreams, of the kind of house and garden I want someday, permanently. I'm pretty content with what I have now, knowing it is very affordable and comfortable and pretty great for the point I am at in my life. But still, those dreams pop into the front of my mind once in awhile...usually in the winter when I am getting restless for the options and comfort of summer. Here are a few, mostly things I have had a taste of at some point and found how well they suited me.

A sewing/craft project room

One of my biggest roadblocks to tackling larger sewing projects is the lack of space to spread out, and to always have my sewing machine set up and ready to go. How I would love, someday, to have a room (or half a room) that can simply be a dedicated sewing/crafting area. A nice broad table with my sewing machine set up on it, and shelves where my fabric, yarn and notions can be stored in plain view and easy reach. Thread stored on a thread rack (preferably handmade), and with a bit of luck a nice big window right over the table for lots of light.

 Something in this vein...but maybe more colorful.

Photo credit home-designing.com

A pantry

I grew up with one, and there's just no way around how awesome it is to have a room, however small, that is dedicated solely to food and other kitchen-related storage. Get those canned goods and spare jars out of my kitchen cupboards, and the less-frequently-used kitchenware out of the way. I would love to re-create my parents' sunny yellow pantry; they have their fridge in there to open up space in the kitchen, and last time I was home, my mom had added another set of shelves, custom built to fit the Adams peanut butter jars that they use to store dehydrated herbs and veggies.

Yes, please. 

Photo credit New England Home Magazine

A proper garden

And by proper, I mean big. Big enough to grow plenty of food, plus herbs and flowers. How nice it will be, one day, to just be able to pop out the back door to pick veggies for dinner, or to weed for a few minutes, rather than plan a trip to my community garden. When I own a place, I can plant more long-term things, like strawberries and asparagus and maybe fruit trees. To build a garden from scratch, of my own design, not the previous owners'....well, a gardener can dream, right?

(Have you ever searched for images of gardens on the internet? The possibilities are endless and amazing. And a bit overwhelming.)

Photo credit Garden Diggings

Chickens (again)

Maybe just three next time, but I miss their beautiful and delicious eggs, their hilarious and exasperating chicken-ness, the way you can feed them all the weeds and slugs from the garden. Someday.

(Photo credit Me!)

The list goes on, of course, but these are the ones that stay constant. Dreaming about them is such fun; sometimes the anticipation of something is just as enjoyable as the thing itself.

Green Amid the Gray

I think I did a post like this last year...it's always this time of year when the gray and the rain all become too much and I go actively searching for green growing things to hold me over until we start to get a few signs of spring outside.

The new year didn't start off quite as I had hoped. Just before I was supposed to be returning to work, I was admitted to the hospital for 24 hours with a very un-fun infection. It's all in hand now, I'm being barraged with antibiotics and was able to go back to work on Tuesday. The extremely good news is that my healthcare provider/company is covering all of my medical costs (surgery plus the later hospitalization) since I am on the lower income end of things. It is a massive, massive relief that I have only my student debt to contend with as the new year begins.

As soon as I returned to work, the rain hit. It's been a remarkably dry couple of months, much to the skiers' chagrin- there's really only a couple feet of snow on the mountain, when there should be many many feet of snow. Now it's raining in town and snowing up high, and I know we need the moisture but it's hard to be grateful for rain when everything is cold and soggy and the low clouds make it get darker half an hour earlier than it would otherwise.

I headed over to my garden on my lunch break yesterday. I haven't been to visit it since the end of October, and only have garlic, leeks and collards growing. I always plant garlic in mid-October, and have never had it sprout earlier than Christmas. This year, I planted it two weeks later than usual, and it was four inches tall three weeks later. What the heck, overenthusiastic garlic? We had a big old cold snap at the beginning of December, but I hadn't yet gotten a chance to run over the garden and see if my silly garlic had survived the hard frosts.

It would seem that it has! The tips of the leaves are definitely a little worse for wear, but it all seems to be alive and growing. The collards bit the dust, and the leeks are also a little yellowed along the edges, but otherwise all seems to be well.

Back at home, my New Year's present to myself was a whole bunch of green growing things to have around inside my apartment. A big row of paper whites on the windowsill has been brightening my days and sending their nice aroma all over the apartment. Since my poor old geraniums gave up the ghost a couple months ago (they were five years old), I got three new house plants to keep plenty of green around.

I also realized it's time to order seeds for this year's garden. I haven't given the garden much thought the last couple months, but now, with the restlessness of midwinter, it is the perfect time to pull out my seed box and figure out what to grow this year. Most of my pepper and tomato seed will be several years old at this point so I'll be starting fresh with most things. Exciting!

Recently

:: berries turned into jam in a sunny kitchen

:: a family reunion in Northern Idaho, with one of my best friends along for the ride

:: dilly beans

:: beautiful corners of Oregon

:: San Francisco with wonderful friends; crewing a sailboat around the bay

:: garden goodness

:: t-minus 7 months until I'm an aunt!

:: tomorrow I turn 29, then leave town to tick another box on my list of goals for the year: go backpacking for the first time in nine years.

Grassytop Mountain, Salmo-Priest Wilderness, August 15, 2004