Waiting

January is a suspended month.  The poets describe the month as forlorn, though Hal Borland quips that “there are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter.  One is the January thaw.  The other is the seed catalogues.” This year we’re actually, oddly, waiting for winter, which seems reluctant to even start. [...]

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Living by the rules

Recently a new friend remarked that I had “a lot of rules.”  This was in response to my statement that I don’t read the gossip magazines anymore, triggered by the death of Princess Diana, but supported by my belief that we are too susceptible to bread and circuses and that it interferes with our ability [...]

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How to Survive a Cookout when You’re a REAL Foodie

Summer is the season of cookouts. You can spend almost every weekend at a cookout if you want to. It’s a danger zone for those of us that are REAL foodies though, all that CAFO meat and heavily processed food. How’s a REAL foodie to survive the cookout season without looking like a food snob, [...]

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REAL men round up- gardening with the menfolk

It’s been great meeting all the men, and their cheerful willingness to be exploited. All that fresh food must have gone to their heads. *** The week did NOT start auspiciously. I (Xan) was having trouble firing up the lawn mower (a 30 year old dinosaur of a gas mower, way out of proportion to [...]

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A gardening community

One of the hardest things for some gardeners to do is to let people in to help. Since I’ve been teaching about gardening in the last couple of years, I’ve gotten better at this. After all, the plants know what to do; someone’s “mistake” in a garden is not going to have that big an [...]

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Real Clean, Real Fast!

While I hate grammatical errors like the one I made in my title, it seems to fit colloquially. Heh. Tanglewood Here! I was supposed to have almost an hour to write this blog post. I had it scheduled into my day perfectly. My husband is set up (exhibiting) at the local comic book convention this [...]

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