fourth grade me

i loved jumping on pogo sticks, bike riding, music and definitely not school.

interesting things to see

a window in the west village below street level.

big momma ridin'.

it's fun to catch on camera things you are surprised to see. what my camera missed is the stuffed m&m doll bungee strapped to the back sissy bar.

cool.

a display for cuff links at lord n taylor

a new hobby

i can't help it. it started with wanting to live outside a somewhat urban environment, then the yard drew me to it by gardening (I blame Barbara Kingsolver also), then somehow we heard about having chickens, and now canning. never in my life did i imagine that i would be canning food! tonight i canned 4 jars of cherries in wine. Bill bought an awesome book that we read within the week it arrived in the mail. it's 'well preserved' by eugenia bone. i know the jars of cherries won't last, i tasted them before i put the lids on and i'm already dreaming of how it'll be on top of a mound of ice cream, add a piece of brownie... yum.

busy sewing

i love this sign. it's a house number along a street in my neighborhood. why did they make this? there is a number on the mailbox, so they didn't really need it. it's such a collection of nuts and bolts, paint, and metal scraps. kind of like a catch all from the work bench table in the garage.

new hens in the house

yesterday through a friend of ours, we found an ad for 18 week old chickens for sale. we jumped at the chance to build up our laying hen gals. striper was our lone chicken before the 8 other hens came along. you can see striper up on the brick ledge. if she gets too close to the other hens, she gets pecked. poor thing, we've turned her world upside down.

for my dad

i was listening to a podcast today called hello craft (.com). they had a woman speaking about her business called sublime stitching. it was inspiring and even though i thought i would never want to embroidery, i believe i will try a project with it. the project i would like to do is numbering, or initialing a set of cloth napkins. i won't be ordering anything from sublime stitching, but their designs are fun, very indie, no teddy bears or geese w/bonnets, as they like to say. http://www.sublimestitching.com/


another thing i heard about today was a company called knitouttathebox.com this woman was stuck in an airport for a few hours and tried and tried to find some supplies to knit with. she ultimately put a small business together on the basic premise that if available, people would buy a knitting kit as something to do when at an airport or even stuck on the plane. i enjoy knitting when traveling, and thought this was a great idea. everything you need in a cardboard tube, along with instructions for 3 different projects. there's enough yarn to choose one design.

family weekend

my brother doug

bill washing dishes, not his favorite thing to do.

dessert snack time

chicken

well, we're pretty sad that we are down to one chicken now. but we're loving the one we have left (striper). katherine and jordan are diligently cleaning the coop every weekend, and checking on striper morning and night.

grandpa relaxing outside with trixie

the girls and their friend giving trixie a bath before grandma and grandpa come to visit.

gymnastics

back in the middle of may, katherine and jordan had their gymnastics performance. a whole school year of work tumbled into one night. they were fabulous!

our first garden

a shot of our garden from a couple of weeks back. it's grown up quite a bit since then. the chicken coop is in the back. we lost the middle chick, really a teenager of a chick. we think a hawk got her, i need to think about getting some netting up now.

adam and eve came from an old book of images from the Florence Museum collection. what special things would you keep in this box?

spring weather:chicks

it's been a real pleasure having these little chicks. it makes me consider what a wonderful passage into spring it is to have these sweet little gals. katherine and jordan are delighted. trixie the dog, no so much. elevated heart rate, lots of panting... that picture of her is a quick snap while she was standing still--for just a second, knowing that the little chicks were outside in 'her backyard' pecking away at ants in the grass for the first time in their week long life. that is the one thing that is difficult, dealing with trixie as she battles with her instincts and her owners wishes for her to leave the chicks alone. if she had it her way, she'd have them for snacks, pretty much the way i'd tear into a bag of lay's barbeque potato chips. poor trixie. i had my chips for lunch today.

reflections...

fall trees reflected on a lake, gorgeous. books reflected on a flooded basement floor, a headache.

esse

speckled sussex, another brown egg layer.