Friday, September 24, 2010

New Kids in the Flock

Our latest addition is three Ameraucana pullets. Introducing: The Supremes.


Monday, September 20, 2010

Grace

There are miscommunications, everyone retreating to their separate outposts with a slammed door between them and the rest of the house, whining and bad behavior (mine, not the 3-year-old's).

Then there are evenings like this: Painting at the easel with Stellina, then making dinner to NPR, open door and windows with fall breeze blowing through, the stepkid showing Stellina -- and allowing her to help him -- make a smoothie, the recipe for which he found online, to accommodate a basket of overripe strawberries that I exhumed from the Crisper drawer (which I think of as the "Rotter"). He's taking Cooking in school and has been quietly applying it at home. I am careful not to react overly enthusiastically, as not to scare him back into his man, jr. cave., yet pointedly admire the results (and the process, his cutting and clean-up skills). I'm making dinner around them, Michael is watering his fig trees and hooking up a CB radio, which he bought for $40 on Amazon with a wedding gift card. He wants it in order to get traffic reports from the truckers. And to say "You got your ears on, Good Buddy?"

Monday, September 13, 2010

The Happy Yogini

LLVS moment o' the day: My friend Patti Tower just stopped by on the fly, fresh from a 500-hour yoga teacher training, and bequeathed me her grandmother's apron collection. Oh, the sheer cotton and rickrack and lace of it all! The woman who once worked the trading floor of a multinational bank and possessed 300 pairs of shoes is paring down. The contents of her charming 1800-square-foot brick row house now fit in an 25-foot storage unit with room to spare. She is flitting from housesit to housesit, but flit isn't the right word for someone so grounded in her new incarnation, residing where her (nowadays most often bare) feet are.

What's LLVS about this is that she could swing on by, since I live so close to southern CT's main thoroughfares (I-95 and the Merritt Parkway). If I was out-of-the-way rural or inconvenient-parking urban, she wouldn't have as likely pulled her thrift-store-on-wheels up to my front stoop, one of her errands about town.
 
Header Image from Bangbouh @ Flickr