Ferns and Ivies in the Kitchen

The asparagus fern waits for us to find a pot big enough for it.

Every March I typically have a fever to see green things. This is understandable to people living here in the Kingdom. With three feet of snow on the ground, it can be difficult imagining that summer will ever return. This past March, my sister, Camille, and I made one of our famous shopping trips. Instead of going book shopping, we went plant shopping in Lyndonville.

Camille lives in the Lyndonville area so she took me to White's Market to look at houseplants. Camille also advised me to get an asparagus fern because, she said, they are easy to care for and grow a lot. The asparagus fern at White's Market was huge and I wasn't sure that I wanted it. But then Julia, the floral designer, saw us and came to assist us. Julia is a gem. She knows her plants and is so enthusiastic that she convinced me that I can grow anything. She introduced me to new plants that I never considered buying, and made me very excited about the prospect of being a successful gardener. I ended up buying the asparagus fern, a large Boston fern, two small lemon button ferns (which are variants of Boston ferns), a huge grape ivy, two small English ivies, a large shamrock and a small schefflera. White’s Market must be very pleased with Julia!

The asparagus fern takes a bath.

All of the plants are doing very well here at the house. In fact, the asparagus fern is doing so well that it was growing in front of my eyes — it was growing into other pots that were near it. It became bigger and bigger and by April 9 we had to repot it. It took the brute strength of John to get it out of the pot and had to be divided into two. After a nice bath, we hung it in the living room where the spider plant used to be. We moved the spider plant into the kitchen sun porch.

Repotted asparagus fern now hangs in the living room.

The spider plant now hangs in the sun porch. John built the bookcase on the side of the double oven. It holds our cookbooks. The bookcase is made from pine salvaged from the old porch

The divided and repotted angel wing begonia.
This begonia was a gift from Barb, a friend at the library.

Instead of curtains, I have used the Boston fern (right) and a Swedish ivy from the C&C (left) to frame the kitchen windows. John used a 200 year old piece of Douglas fir as a functional trim to hold the weight of the hanging plants. We can add smaller planters as we desire in the future.

I am more than pleased with my numerous houseplants. May they continue to thrive (and may I continue to successfully care for them)!

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My New Kitchen Sink

New cast quartz kitchen sink

On February 17 the new kitchen sink was installed. It is cast quartz and they make them by mixing a lot of ground up quartz with some epoxy. The quartz glitters in the sun. It has one shallow basin and one deep basin. The faucet is Glacial Bay with a spray and a soap dispenser. It is a great set up and I love it. When the sink gets dirty, I just wipe it with a dishrag and it's clean. It's strong enough to withstand the abuse that John gives it with his tools and substances such as joint compound and paint that he dumps in it. My sister, Camille, has a cast quartz sink also, but it is made out of black quartz and is gorgeous. Hers has one huge basin (I must get a photo of it).

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Garage & Attic Renovations

The brush hogging is still going on, the ancient stream beds are being rebuilt. Obama's economic stimulus plan has paved Route 16, the septic engineer is designing a new septic system, and the town road agent has approved a new culvert and drainage for the driveway (we pay for the culvert and the town performs all future maintenance). But there is a lot of activity inside the house as well . . .
Having four households of "stuff" in the house is quite a bit of stuff. Half of the square footage of this house has never been used by me or my daughter. But now it has to be used well and wisely. Above you see new shelving to store our stuff while the house is renovated. Those of you who are used to the clean, empty garage? Forget about it! It's now workshops and storage. For the time being, there is no room for cars. John has added cabinets and work benches and storage for his carpentry equipment. The handicapped ramp that I was always going to get rid of after my father died, is now really gone. The back stoop is half-gone. And now stairs go from the garage to the attic that is over the original woodshed of the old house. The attic floor had to be rebuilt, also, so that we didn't fall into the house! John's finding all sorts of nasty surprises: poor construction, old construction, and a lot of evidence of animal infestation.

The insulation in the walls of the garage, built in 1992, was a maze of mouse tunnels and nests. No wonder my cats began to ignore the mice here! The number of mice was overwhelming the cats!
All this, and we have been sick in bed for nearly a week, been watching movies at the library and baking brownies, planting pansies each time the dogs have dug them up, and unpacked. On top of all of this, there is going to be a big party Memorial Day weekend when all of my children and their loves and children and my sister and sister-in-law and friends are coming. We have rented Pageant Park for a day. Sister Camille and daughter Amelia and I shopped for this party on Monday, then had lunch at the Miss Lyndonville Diner. This is an old routine for the three of us because I hate shopping so much. But I will go with them because they are powerful and fast shoppers! I'm not saying anything more. Yet.

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Three Sisters

Taken at my nephew Justin’s wedding in September
in Wheelock, Vermont
Taken by my daughter Amelia
left to right: Camille, me, Simonne
This is the first time the three of us have been
together in over forty years.

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Winter Weekends

We do other things in the winter besides cook and eat. The bird feeders require replenishing. Matt took these photos. Above you see the bird tree. I have added another thistle feeder sack because the redpolls are flocking by the dozens to them. Below you can see me, in my warm winter robe, leopard jammies that were a gift from my sister, and my boots, smearing all-natural, organic peanut butter on the bird tree. Today I put blobs of peanut butter on the tree instead of one huge smear. The chickadees and blue jays kept slipping off of the large area of peanut butter. Now they can safely peck away at it.

Amy spends her evenings knitting with Mouse Cat and Sophie Dog (below).

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Meo & Mordecai

Camille (my sister) has two new little Siamese kittens — crossed eyes and all. Both boys, they are indistinguishable to me. These are some of my favorite shots of them that I took last week.

All of the photos can be seen in my Camille's New Kittens Flickr Set

Technorati Tags: Siamese kittens
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Wheelock, Vermont

This is the Wheelock, Vermont town hall. My sister had her wedding here on February 10, 2001. I lived in Connecticut then and I couldn't get here because the weather was so awful all over New England that I had to turn back in Massachusetts. I told her to never get married in February again!

Last week I drove by this town hall twice a day on my way back and forth to the class "Teaching Mathematics to ADD/ADHD/LD Students." It was three intense eight hour days. I learned a lot and got a lot or resources for this coming school year.

Here is some more information about the founding of Wheelock:

WHEELOCK

The Dartmouth College Land Grant

When Eleazar Wheelock founded Dartmouth in 1769, he sought land grants to support the new college.

In 1785 the Vermont legislature chartered and named a town of 23,000 acres for Wheelock.

In the early 1800s substantial support for financially impoverished Dartmouth came from this one grant, a gift of Vermont.

Technorati Tags: Wheelock, Vermont, Dartmouth College
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First Crocus

My sister has more snow on the ground than I do. But she also has flowers blooming and mine are not even coming up yet. Her elevation is 1215 ft (370.3 m) and I am at 1330 ft (405.4 m). Photographing the first crocus of the year is always fun. These were taken Thursday, April 18, when I visited my sister in Wheelock.



Technorati Tags: crocus
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Busy Sick Day

The new garage doors went up this morning: one man alone took down the old ones (the pile on the left side above) and put in the new ones. I wish the windows were bigger like the old doors. I can barely see, with these windows, if the cats run in from the barn.

This is what it looks like inside. Of course, I now have to keep the far right (right from the inside) door up about 6 inches so the cats can come and go as they please. The door man said everybody does that and it does not harm the mechanism.

Of course, my old remotes for the old doors are now broken with age, so I had to order 3 more at $45 each. Also, Amy took the chain off the middle door when trying to fix it a year or two ago. It is $75 more to fix that. So at this moment I can only raise and lower one door with one remote. That should be fixed by this weekend.

See the flume in the photo above? It is very dry right now. I guess the upstream beavers have repaired or built up their dams.

In other news, I am home on a sick day. I thought I had pneumonia or something but everybody says it is severe allergies after being outside all weekend in the wind and pollen. I feel awful but better than this morning.

And guess who is my sub? Adam from Green Mountain Shuffle! What an ironic coincidence! I hope he is around tomorrow so I can chat with him.

Remember My Coke Rewards? They have changed, and for the good. It is an all-flash site now and works much better. Flashier than ever, but better. And the prizes are much better. I can also use 60 points a day to enter a contest for a Canon 35mm digital camera (3 points each entry, 20 entries a day allowed). The camera is way more than a Rebel. A bit over my head but I'll take it if I win. I have a Boston Acoustics mini-stereo and some other stuff on my wish list now.

I chatted with Camille most of the morning while I caught up with soaps and did some housework. I don't want to leave this house until all the pollen is gone.

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It's Back!

Camille and I went on our annual Montpelier trip today and saw our first flowers of the year. The white flowers are my favorite but I don't know what they are. I love the little bit of green at the end of each flower (click the flower or go to my flickr set for today).

UPDATE: Janet59 of flickr has told me that these white flowers are snowdrops.

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Red Sox Twitters

The game was called. Spring has retreated. We were allowed to go home an hour early. The drive was the worst of the season because of the wet snow. I slipped several times even though I have studded winter tires on.

But it was a good day. I stopped by the road to take another photo of Jay Peak this morning. A van of parents and students stopped to make sure I was OK. Then another teacher stopped for the same reason. M. told me that she saw me pulled over on Monday and turned around to see if I was OK. I was. I was on Rt. 5 taking a photo of Barton Mountain from the Coventry side. I will have to attach a sign "TAKING PHOTOS" to the car so nobody worries.

The rehearsal for the spring concert was wonderful. I had to sight read because I had failed to practice. But I did fine! I was the best player there! So from now on I will only play with young students who have only one to two years experience on their instruments. It makes me feel great! The concert is May 9.

Tomorrow is the last day of school before vacation. I have activities planned: at least two dates, and a date with my sister in Montpelier for our traditional bookstore tour and lunch at the New England Culinary Institute grill. It may even stop snowing (although as of now, every day on the NOAA forecast has snowflakes in it through Monday).

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Christmas 2006

It has been snowing for three days now. Not much accumulation yet but finally, finally enough to prevent me from going to the dentist. But I also won’t be able to see Sue or Camille.

Christmas was a big disappointment.

flickr update: over 800 hits! Several awards! No Explore photos yet! :-(

How many photos can I favorite? There are hundreds of thousands of gorgeous shots there and I can’t seem to get enough of them. I have begun my inane iMovie of The Planets. I have over 100 NASA images of Mars to work with and have gotten almost 2 minutes edited halfway to how I want them.

Anna and Aaron are coming this weekend. Not for New Years though. Another damn New Years alone.

No word from Camille. One letter from Simonne. I am still baking my special secret recipe cakes for gifts. I tried to make bread too, but I used a new Fanne Farmer recipe and misread ingredients so the bread is as heavy as bricks!

So Happy New Year to this fractured family! I want to go back to work and feel productive, useful, and valuable again.

Lost weekend

I've been working on the computer for two days now, just cleaning things up and playing around. Friday Camille and I went to Montpelier and went to two bookstores (Rivendell Bookstore and Bear Pond Books) and had lunch. I had the most wonderful strawberry shortbread cake. I can't forget it. We had a wonderful, quiet time. We took the wrong road out of Montpelier (Rt. 12 North) but found our way home very easily and made a trip over Stannard Mtn.

My car went to Taylor's Thursday night so that they could find the leak. And they did! The problem is that I don't have the car back yet and don't know when I will. As a result, I am missing my VAST class today. Did Taylor's forget to call? I called them late yesterday afternoon and Nick promised he would call when it was put back together again. I asked for snow tires but of course they don't have my size in stock. And of course it will be more than $300 this time.

So I promise myself to do my work at home today and stop playing on this machine! I will watch my DVDs, do my Sunday School, CCV, and VAST work, and read my new books and sleep. And answer my e-mails from Marcia and Gerri! It is so cold! Twenty-eight degrees now at 10:30 AM. I need a down comforter for these nights. But I need the septic system fixed, part of the roof fixed, and all of the garage doors fixed ($500 each). And two new computers and the wireless networking equipment for them. I always did require a lot. :-(

Anyway, I am supposed to go to Camille's for supper tonight and I don't even know how I will get there! I don't even know how, besides walking 3 miles, I will get my car!

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