rainy days and Tuesdays…

…make me happy, actually. This week, anyway. The gardens are crying out for some cleanup, the invasive viny weedy things on the hill are begging to be dug up before they get much bigger, and while I thought the grass could go another week or so before I started cutting, the neighbors having theirs cut yesterday have revealed that to be not quite so true. But I have a full slate of editing projects on my desk this week, so I must resist the siren song of the outdoor work for a while longer. The rain helps.

the beauty of spring

Spring, finally. Real spring, not simply calendar spring (the advent of which is usually followed by at least one snowfall). Spring for me is the day the daffodils pop open, this year coinciding with the day the “Nana plants” start to bloom. (“Nana plants” because Nana had a lot of them, and some of those offshoots have made it through a number of years and a number of gardens to my own garden, and I can’t ever remember the real name of this pretty, spready plant with the cool leaves and pretty white flowers.)

Nana would have been 104 this week. Papa would have been 103 last week. We buried Aunt Vera, Papa’s sister, earlier this week, at age 93, the last of her generation that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. My family tends to live good, long lives, full of adventures and opinions and guts and general good health. I hope I’m as lucky.

Love of the garden runs in the family, too. When I was a kid, a visit to a family member’s house also meant a walk around the garden to see what was blooming and what was thriving and what was next up — and it is still so. We pass around cuttings and divisions and help fill in each other’s gardens with the bounty and overgrowth from our own. Our garages harbor rafts of extra pots and trays to throw in the trunk of the car to capture a cousin’s unruly hosta or an aunt’s choking iris.

I was thrilled with the progress I had made on my little gardens at my little house; here in the bigger house there are more gardens to fill, in worse condition to start with. There’s so much to do that it can be overwhelming, so this year I’m focusing on only three smallish areas: digging out the rest of the invasive vine from the little hill next to the driveway (started last year); the garden around the back patio; and the little garden right outside my office window, which is the one I see for most of the day most every day. That latter is actually part of my plan for my office. Since I spend so much time looking out those windows during my workday, I think that garden should be particularly nice.

And because today is such a lovely day for work in the garden, I think it’s time to get to it.

busy afternoon

Got my studio mojo back. I’ll be listing these over the next couple of days.

tidbits: snow day edition

I’m calling my own snow day today. The snow is blowing sideways and it looks just miserable out there, so I’m going to hibernate and not go anywhere. The author proofs I was expecting to receive yesterday didn’t arrive — not sure if UPS gave up after the snow started yesterday afternoon or if they were just delayed, so there’s no editing work that can’t wait until Monday. I’m still fighting the headache from yesterday, and I think I slept wrong, since my neck is really stiff. I’m declaring today a day for puttering and flitting from this to that as the whim strikes.

I started out with catching up on the women’s figure skating from last night. The winner totally blew the others out of the water — just gorgeous! My husband will be thrilled that the skating is over, though, if only because it will stop me from yelling “Shut up, Scott Hamilton!” at the TV until 2014. (Seriously, someone get to work on the technology whereby one can turn off the inane and negative commentary and hear only the music. You’ve got four years: GO!)

The rest of the day, who knows?

Our little white friend over there walked right by my office window the other day. I grabbed the camera, opened the front door, and took that shot a split second after he started to take off. His coloring is called skewbald, and it is caused by a genetic variation. Originally, I thought we had three different skewbald deer, but in looking at earlier photos, this one, which I thought was a female, has the same exact pattern as a one-antlered male I photographed a few weeks ago. (I didn’t know until today that deer lose their antlers over the winter and grow new ones in the spring.) I can’t lay my hands on the photos we took of the one with the huge rack of antlers soon after we moved in, but now I’m curious if it’s the same one after all.

tidbits: avalanche edition

When I think about all I’ve managed to get done in the past month, it makes my head spin. But yay, such a great sense of accomplishment, even if I had to let a few other things slide to get here (like fully participating in the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, as I had planned; it ends up I’m no good at zipping off five-minute posts).

Santa brought us a fancy new camera, which I’ve slowly been learning to use, with much thanks to the camera-specfic book Santa was so thoughtful to bring along with the camera. (Turkey portrait courtesy of the fancy new camera. Through a not-necessarily-clean window. Yeah, the FNC rocks. So does Mr. Turkey.)

No, this will not turn into an all turkeys all the time blog. When something more exciting happens than turkeys peeking in the window, I’ll let you know.

So, after Santa brought the FNC, my dear husband got me a Kindle for my birthday. That has been a learning curve, too, although a much less steep one. I plan to sign up for the New York Times subscription (once I actually have time to read it), and I wish the Cleveland Plain Dealer were available that way. So far I’ve been (finally) reading Sense and Sensibility—a free download—as I ease into setting myself a book budget and get used to reading on screen. One thing I especially love: The case my husband got me for it folds back and lets me prop the Kindle up to make for easier reading without having to hold it.

I ended up with three unexpected projects over the past couple of weeks, in addition to my regulars: a book about jazz, another Weird book, and a relatively short formatting project. Jazz is done, I’m just over halfway through the Weird, and I’m squeezing the other one in over the weekend. Thankfully, the other projects on my desk have long deadlines, so I can still finish them with plenty of time to spare even if I don’t get started on them before the end of next week.

One of the nicest things to come out of these unexpected projects is finding the music of Melody Gardot. Love.

Sometime in all that, I still managed to find time to get the registration form up for my high school reunion and finish the redesign of the Cleveland Handmade site (based on a free template, but with a lot of tweaking). One of these day I still need to get to my much-neglected professional site, poor, sad thing that it is.

Oh, and I had four custom orders the last week of December/first week of January.

Whew. I’m tired now. But back to the grindstone for me.

Best of 2009: Place

Another entry in Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge

Yeah, okay, best-laid plans and all that. I ended up with a much crazier week than anticipated, and only now am I starting to find room to breathe again. Maybe I’ll catch up on those other posts. Maybe not. So, where were we? Oh yeah, the best of 2009 — best place.

This is another one I could answer in a number of ways. I found a couple little coffee shops and restaurants this year that I like to visit when I need a change of scenery from the home office, and I always do my best thinking when I’m walking on the beach, strolling the paths at the zoo, or wandering the galleries at the art museum. But this year, “place” is all about our house.

Last month we celebrated two years here, and as much as it is still very much a work in progress (and will likely remain so on into eternity), this house is finally starting to feel like ours. When we met, John and I each had our own house; after we were engaged, I moved into his place (it was bigger) and put mine up for sale. Soon after our wedding, we began looking for a new place. One whirlwind house hunt later, here we are.

We’re in an inner-ring suburb, but our neighborhood is tucked up against the Metroparks and our lot is mostly woods, so it’s a weird little pocket of nature in the middle of the ‘burbs, complete with critters (raccoons, foxes, owls, groundhogs, deer, turkeys, etc.) and randomly falling trees. The house was built in 1967, and we are the third owners. It’s a quirky and unusual place, bigger than we need, really, but suited to our personalities and lifestyle.

The house has very few right angles, so furniture placement can be a challenge. The rooms aren’t really laid out in straight lines, either, so sometimes I still surprise myself with being able to see stuff that I don’t think I should be able to see from a given point. It’s a little Alice in Wonderland. But from every room there is a great view of the woods or the gardens, and there is room for me to have both an office and a studio.

When we got it, the colors were a little crazy (Pepto-Bismol pink, anyone?), but we’ve been slowly working our way around and neutralizing so that your gaze doesn’t stop at the shocking walls but continues as it should to the lovely outdoors. We took all the heavy and dated downstairs window treatments down, which has helped a lot, too. The biggest thing we did this year was start to remove the white (yes, white — who does that?!?!) carpeting from the downstairs rooms. We’re still undecided on what will replace it, but for now living with the cement is better than that grody carpet.

I spent a lot of time in the gardens this summer, improving the view from my office window, excavating some evil, invasive groundcover, and filling in a formerly swampy area with some dirt and a lot of deer-resistant perennials. The gardens are starting to make sense now.

While there’s still a lot to do, the house now feels like home, a comfortable space where we can just hang out and be. And that’s why it gets my vote for favorite place of 2009.

Whirlwind Weekend

I’ll be catching up on my Best of 2009 posts on Monday, since I’m spending the weekend at the Laurel School Artisan Bazaar. Last night was the preview party, which went well and was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend.

Best of 2009: Article

Another entry in Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge

I’m in deadline crunch today, so no great explication here, but this here post by the fabulous Havi on making a Dammit List completely rocked my world. As did many of her other posts, especially those on sovereignty and being yourself in your business.

Best of 2009: Restaurant Moment

Another entry in Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge

This one is difficult. How would I define “best”?

Was it the wine and crabcakes Kristen and I shared at Hyde Park to celebrate the publication of our book? (With a prelude of margaritas, of course.) A happy celebration of a momentous occasion.

Was it the anniversary dinner with my husband at the same Hyde Park, the one where we had our second date and where we now have “our” waiter? The joy of celebrating having found just the right person to share my life with while enjoying the best steaks on the planet.

Was it the long-delayed ribs and fries on the patio overlooking the river at the Moosehead Hoof & Ladder with my old friend Nancy, one of those rare friends you can pick right up with even though you (sadly, tragically, why-do-we-let-it-go-so-long-ly) may not have seen each other for a year? Casual and comfortable, followed by even more time catching up as we walked around the town center, window shopping and admiring the gardens.

Was it the impromptu visit to L’Albatros with my husband and our friends after viewing the Gaugin exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art, with all that wonderful atmosphere and the mouthwatering chicken confit? An unexpected treat a bit out of character, as it’s rare for me to not have planned such a thing in advance.

Or was it last week’s dinner with my alumni club girls at Players, and that fantastic, complex macaroni and cheese with chicken and bacon? A triumph for all of us, celebrating being shut of a highly dysfunctional situation.

Hard to say. Each was a favorite moment for different reasons, but I notice now that I’ve been thinking about it that on every one of those occasions, the company was just as important as the food. (Although I like me some stellar food to go with my friends; I won’t deny that.)

Best of 2009 Blog Challenge

I’ve been a bit challenged for material to write about here lately, so when I stumbled across Gwen Bell’s Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, I thought it was just the thing to give me a nudge. No promises that I’ll be able to chime in every single day, but I’m going to give it a try.

Today’s topic: What was your best trip in 2009?

We took only one big trip this year, which was to my cousin’s wedding in Las Vegas in May. We were happy to be there, and had a nice time, but both of us are pretty much over Vegas after having been there several times before. We’re not into nightclubs or spectacle, neither of us gambles or shops for recreation, and the party-party-party atmosphere gets old fast. The trip came in the middle of crunch time for both of us, too, so while it was good to get away for a couple of days, it was still a little stressful, even before dealing with plane travel and airports and fisticuffs in the hallway outside our hotel room at 3 a.m.

While I wouldn’t call it a trip per se, we took a wonderful drive back in October on a Sunday afternoon to see the changing leaves. We’ve both had a completely crazy busy year with work projects and other stuff, and it was nice to take a few hours on a sunny afternoon and just get out into the world, away from the computers and the papers, and take it all in. I’d have to say that that nontrip was the best trip of 2009.