the opposite of every day

Clearly I was not ready for a daily blog challenge.  I am really not much of a joiner, so it doesn't surprise me, but I do feel a bit ashamed for not stepping up. Really, I am too much into the doing of it to be writing about it just now.

I read something recently on the On Being website, which I love and is becoming an integral part of my current self-care regimen, about the culture of busy, and how we should probably try to remember that we are human beings, not human doings. Yesssssss. Lots of time for fermenation. Connecting the dots. Ruminating. I am a big big fan.

But really, there has been a lot of doing as well around here, and without much further ado...please enjoy the hamming, the creating, the physicsing (that's a word, right?), the loving...

Maps! The girls got excited about creating maps for their stint as bees in the Honey for the Heart Parade.  They were supposed to be lost, and for props they thought it would be funny if they had maps of elsewhere, so that's what they drew. Narnia and the land of Oz.

Believe

Ah! Such a funny writing game. We all wrote three questions and three answers, and they did not have to go together.  Then we took turns reading to each other: Eliza would read a question, Ani would read her first answer, we would laugh hysterically, and then Ani would ask me her first question, I'd answer with my first answer...yes, it was ridiculous and so funny.

physics day on campus

Does this happen in your kitchen? A demonstration in favor of cocoa?

Exploring surface area...

beauty by eliza

So the painters forgot to replace the window screens.
It means I can see the birds so much better!! Goldfinches.

"the worm" from Beowulf, made with pennies and connectors

So sorry to just dump it all here in a pile.  It gives you an idea of what my kitchen counter (and desk. and dresser. and bag.) looks like - a bit cluster of magical happenings that I don't want to forget...More order next time, I promise.

home!

a girl in her natural habitat

You might have noticed that our girl is home? Four weeks away from home, three from me and from Ani...it was maybe a little too long, she says.  But what an adventure! She was invited to Seattle to visit friends she's had since she was born; Laney and I were in prenatal yoga together and often rode the same bus to work while we were huge and lumbering.  A few months later, she and her little family moved into our building, and we spent almost every day of that first year of our kids' lives walking, nursing, talking, and concocting amazing lunches for ourselves to eat on the floor and drip onto our babies' heads.

These people are some of Eliza's deep family, and I didn't give her trip a second thought, except to say that there was no way she was traveling across country by herself!! Through a combination of a second trip in one month to Wisconsin, a serendipitous midwest wedding, and a generous and willing Laney, who accompanied Eliza home, it happened.

We had one day with Laney before she turned around and went home, and when we could stop talking for two minutes, she found ways to connect with Ani, who doesn't know her well, as she was only one when we left Seattle. 

 I think they connected.

autumn yarden

We don't have much of a garden, but there are a couple of things that flourish. One of them is our comfrey, dug up from our plot at the community garden, and unwittingly transplanted here when I read that the leaves make great compost. Yeah, great compost and tremendously deep tap roots that are impossible to dig back out!  It's not that I don't love the comfrey - I really love that it still has purple blooms, long after my friend Jen's comfrey plant on their hilltop farm has completely died back, because on really warm days like today there are still bees and monarchs out doing their thing, and our comfrey is their favorite spot.

We also have impressive "poop mushrooms" that flourish on the presents the neighborhood dogs leave in abundance in our yard.  They're like little condominiums of fungi, aren't they?

Ah, then there is the horseradish.  Our horseradish did so well that when I ripped up the pot to move it out of the way for the house-painters this summer, the plant in the pot died, but there were so many healthy roots left in the ground that a whole new village of horseradish popped up! My favorite part of the horseradish, of course, are its pests.  I know, it's not right, and I'm clearly not really a gardener, but you have to admit I have honed my ability to appreciate the littlest things.

My friend Molly, who has an admirable passion for healthy soil, has given me buckets of wealth from her compost pile, and along with the soil came a few volunteers. My favorite is a dark purple beauty from the mint family, called shiso.  Look who we found amongst its leaves:

Ani and I spent quite a bit of time this fall puttering in the yarden, taking photos and finding bugs. We harvested our abundant lemon balm and made a tincture for the first time...

end of summer toes

...and more than a few hours reading on our little stoop, enjoying our tiny kingdom.  I think that every year somehow our garden will transform into something respectable, but every year it does its own thing and the deer eat the morning glory leaves and the beans, or the hollyhocks just downright disappear and the milkweed I thought was definitely dead just shows up one day.  It's a ride, I tell ya. 

*I can't even pretend to understand what is happening with the formatting in this post! I've fixed it several times, but I SURRENDER! There is a husband, a cat, and netflix waiting for me and time's a-tickin!

eliza's community art book

pokeberry

I've written about pokeberry before, and received the only anonymous comment whose identity I did not actually know, telling me that I was irresponsible for using and writing about poke; didn't I realize it was toxic? Well, I did, which is why we were not dining on pokeberries, but using them as an ink for our drawings.  However, I have since heard of many and varied uses for poke, including ingesting it in small amounts.  I'd want more information before doing that myself, but the more I learn the more I want to learn about this plant.  (As a side note, many of the foods and medicine we consider safe are also toxic at high levels. It is helpful to understand what it is you are eating!)

M with her hands in the poke. Her headband is dyed with the berries.

Our friends have been dying wool with plants this fall and invited Ani and I over to dye with poke, which is plentiful in this area.  We picked as much as we could find in a morning, and headed over. Using vinegar as the mordant, and this book from the library, we dyed wool roving we'd brought over, and a couple of cotton items.

The wool turned out beautifully, the color so deep.  The cotton was much lighter, and from what I've read, the pokeberry dye is not light-fast, so I expect the color will change over time. When we made the pokeberry ink, the color started out a nice purple, and turned brown after a while.  Apparently, poke was a popular berry used for ink during the Civil War; any letters or writings from that time that appear to have been written with brown ink are written in poke.

drying in the driveway

Ani's tye-died shirt turned out a lovely light pink. We'll see how long it lasts!