Noodle and the Goose Again

It's a noisy day in our neighborhood.

About a month ago, I spent a day digging out azaleas and other assorted bushes/small trees from this area in our front yard:

and moving them to other areas, mostly here:

here:

here:

here:

as well as to the ever growing brush/compost pile in our back yard.

The purpose of all this digging and moving was to allow tree-cutting-down-people to reach this:

really huge and really, really old maple tree located right about on our property line and, since we first bought this house in 2002, threatening to fall over onto either our house or, worse, our neighbor's house.

Indeed, a very large limb did fall off this tree during a windstorm a few years back and crashed into what was and is now our girl's bedroom. We were in Indonesia at the time. You can imagine how excited we were to negotiate that whole fiasco from the other side of the world.

Under normal circumstances I am much more interested in tree-hugging than tree-removal. But these are not normal circumstances. This tree is HUGE. Or I should say, was HUGE. Because today the tree-cutting-down people arrived and all day they've been dropping pieces of the tree to the ground. All day. It is past 5 right now and they're finally to the main trunk which just landed with an earth shaking THUNK diagonally across the front yard. The entire front yard. That second THUNK you may have just felt (those of you on the NA continent) was a somewhat smaller, yet equally looming-threateningly-over-the house tree on the other side of the yard. Things jumped off of shelves when that one fell.

I, along with the dog, have been hiding out inside most of the day because I can't bear to see these proud old trees go, even though I know they need to. On my one foray out to walk the dog, I discovered that - ironically - one of the earlier thunks, a limb crashing from on high, did indeed glance off of our neighbor's roof - knocked into the guttering and will probably require some repair work.

But this neighbor? I love this guy. Said, "Better one small limb than the whole damn tree, Oh and by the way, you guys are NOT moving away from here are you? Please tell me y'all are NOT moving away".

That. Is a good neighbor.

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Update: Hot off the presses photos of the fallen trunk.

And the space in the sky where she used to be.

Sigh.

Hope Springs...

I woke up this morning feeling worse than terrible, with the persistent ache in my side howling in protest every time I drew a breath. It suddenly struck me that the last time I felt quite this way, with such a side ache, was back in 2006 when Goose was a baby and I had pneumonia. Which I didn't realize for some time because, well,  I was busy.

So today I'm assiduously ignoring the pain until tomorrow, when my doc's office is open and I can make an appointment. Hopefully its just my over active imagination, because I'm, you know, busy.

With what I'm not exactly sure. Working two days a week, teaching a class, preparing lectures, grading papers and all of that. Which is serving as distraction from the endless drudgery of cleaning up the house, doing the laundry, purchasing food and making something eatable for my voraciously hungry family who have the audacity to want to eat at least three times a day.  And then there's the dog. (I really, really, really miss our pembantu, our helper, who we left back in Indonesia).

But I am not thoroughly disheartened.  Though the groundhog saw his shadow, I'm gearing up for Spring. I'm planting seeds. Seeds. Something I've felt compelled to do in the past, with better results in the US than in SE Asia. So far the broccoli, bok choy, cherry tomatoes, swiss chard and basil have sprouted and are happily stretching their little sprouty leaves toward the lamp on my desk.

It is such a hopeful sight and daily I cheer them on to gaining their three real leaves and getting transplanted into their own special pot forthwith to venture outdoors when the frosts are gone and the ground warm. Exactly where they will all end up is totally hypothetical, as we live in the woods without much sun - sometimes I long for the vast open garden fields of my homelands. But truth be told, whatever makes it can probably be accommodated in some way on our very sunny deck. It is that big and my success with seedlings that pronounced.

Still and all, today we bought more and more seed packets - peppers, pumpkins, squash, beans, and flowers.

Because in February?

You just can't have too much hope or too many packets of seeds.

You know....

all those pretty, pretty blogs out there with beautifully styled photos of people's handiwork and cooking?

Yeah, I love reading those, but this isn't one of them.

I do, however, have some 'crafting' to share. Though I will refrain from posting a tutorial for your edification.

Seems that along with my close attention to the state of my countertops, I may also be developing an even stronger aversion to plastic bags. Indeed, it has become my raison de'etre to keep the flow of plastic bags into my house to a minimum. I'd outlaw them entirely but someone (adult male) in my house tends to forget to take shopping bags with him and it would just be one more point of contention that our household doesn't need. So. I'm totally down with shopping bags. Lots and lots of cloth bags, several that scrunch up nicely to fit inside my purse (a growing edge of anxious consideration for me is to become one of those people, like my Mom's friend Marie Hershberger from my childhood who always had everything you could ever imagine wanting or needing right there in her massive black pocketbook with the golden clasp - I find my self longing for such a pocketbook). I'm not to be caught at the grocery or the farmer's market or target without my  trusty cloth shopping bags. But what to do about produce and bulk products that need to be corralled to be weighed and put into the cloth shopping bag? It is one thing to put a bunch of naked bananas into your cart, onto the check-out scale and then into your shopping bag. It is quite another to do so with green beans. Or flour.

I have been reusing plastic produce bags from the grocery store. You know, after emptying them at home, washing them out (or not), stuffing them back into cloth shopping bags to be refilled on my next shopping trip. This has worked so far. Though holes do develop and occasional fruits/veges/bulk goods escape.  A longer term solution was needed.

So today I whipped up these

bright blue and purple produce bags. They're made of something called "scrubbing nylon" with simple up the sides zig-zag seams. I thought about drawstrings, but decided I have no real beef with twist ties or with simply tying off the tops as I do with standard plastic produce bags.  Outrageously simple.

But what about flour and other bulk type goods that might slip or puff through the mesh, you ask?

And I answer, these

bright orange, 100% cotton bags to rival the unbleached muslin bags that the extremely expensive un-partial foods store near me sells for extremely expensive prices. So they are not "unbleached"? I doubt that my flour and brown rice and cornmeal will care all that much, given that they are, instead, bright orange. Again I pondered drawstrings (having had to narrow hem the tops anyway), but gave that idea up for too much work. And, you might note, since I didn't change the thread after the first set of bags, yes, these have wonderfully decorative purple stitching on them. Further, I went ahead and threw caution to the winds and didn't finish off the seams. If they get all messy I can always go back over with a decorative top-stitch all the way around. As it is, all these products took me less than 30 minutes to cut out and sew up.

And since we're on the back deck viewing them, I might as well give you an artful look at this,

my compost tub, state of the art composting system,

and this,

Our back deck clothes drying system.

We are all about bringing up property values in our neighborhood. (Actually? Our back deck looks out on an empty wooded lot, the only thing gawking at our undies out to dry are squirrels and the owl who likes to roost on the deck railing).