Since my younger sister is a baker by trade, I talked her into signing up for the Daring Bakers Challenge along with me, and since this weekend was our Seventh Annual Sisters Only Weekend, we decided to combine the two and do the June challenge together.

(Required text commencing: “The June Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart… er… pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800’s in England.”)

The Bakewell tart is comprised of a short crust pastry, a layer of jam or curd, and a layer of frangipane, which is an almond ‘pudding’ (more like a very rich, moist cake). This was a new experience for me in several ways – the first of which is that I’d never made a tart before, so actually had to go track down tart pans before I could even start the challenge. Since we wanted to try several different fillings, I bought a set of six small tart pans. Oh, and of course there’s the fact that I had never even heard of frangipane before (let alone knew how to say the word).

After I picked my little sister up from the airport, we headed home, poured ourselves some coffee, and got started. She put together the short crust pastry dough while I washed all the tart pans, and then while the dough was chilling, I put together the frangipane. I’ve no idea where one goes to find almond meal around here (probably the natural foods co-op) but I recently got a new stick blender that came with a little chopper attachment, so I just bought a huge bag of almonds and ground them up using that, and it worked just fine.

Here’s the frangipane, once it was all mixed together.

The recipe had all sorts of cautions about how I shouldn’t worry if it looked like it was curdling. Um – it has bits of nuts in it. I would be surprised if it *didn’t* look a little lumpy.

Once the dough was chilled, my sister rolled out the first batch.

My attempts didn’t look nearly as pretty. However, since the ugly patched bits were covered with filling and frangipane, I figured it wasn’t all that much of a problem.

We made a double-batch, which was a total of a dozen tarts, and used the following fillings:

• Apple butter
• Lemon curd
• Spiced plum jam
• Pomegranate jelly
• Peach/blueberry/strawberry jam
• Sliced fresh peaches
• Nutella
• Chocolate

All the jams, jellies, and curds were all homemade, naturally, and the peaches were fresh from the CSA box that arrived on our doorstep this morning.

Here are the tarts, fresh out of the oven.

And here is a view where you can see the fillings (well, sort of). This image shows, from top to bottom, fresh peach, spiced plum jam, and chocolate.

By the time my older sister arrived for the weekend, the tarts had cooled enough to do a little tasting. And while we all agreed that they were pretty tasty, the verdict was unanimous that if we ever make these again, we use a LOT more jam and a LOT less frangipane. My favorite fillings were the spiced plum, apple butter, and Nutella, primarily because those were really the only ones where I could taste something besides the almond of the frangipane.

While I’m not sure I’ll be making these again any time soon (unlike last month’s challenge, where I’ve already made strudel #2, and will likely keep that in the general meal rotation going forward), it was certainly fun to make them. And of course it was especially fun to be able to bake them with my younger sister, since she lives far enough away that working together in the kitchen is a rare treat.

Normally, birthdays really do not bother me all that much. I’ve never subscribed to the whole outdated notion that a woman never tells her age, and will readily supply the exact number whenver I am asked (even if I usually, at this point, have to pause and think “wait, how old am I, again?’). But there is something about approaching 40 that really started to get to me. It’s only a number, I realize, but there’s so much significance attached to milestone ages, that it’s hard even for a confirmed age ignorer like myself to completely pretend that it is just any other birthday and to instead start to feel insecure and grouchy and, well, *old*.

I also rarely do anything for my birthday (beyond the usual gathering of immediate family, or dinner out with Richard) – I think the last time I had an actual birthday *party* was probably back in grade school – but I started to wish maybe just this once I’d taken the time to organize some kind of celebration, and was feeling a little bit grumpy that I didn’t, and really, by the time this week rolled around I would have been just as happy to have the universe magically skip forward to June, and bypass the stupid birthday completely.

With nothing at all planned on the actual day, I figured my birthday would just be a quiet day at home. I’d putter around in the kitchen (have I mentioned lately how much I LOVE our new kitchen? Because I do. SO VERY MUCH), bake myself a cake (it’s not as pathetic as it sounds – I found this recipe for caramel cake with caramelized butter frosting, and I was really looking forward to giving it a try, because seriously, I really enjoy baking and trying new recipes, and also, how can you go wrong with cake, caramel and butter?), do some knitting, and do my best to ignore all the things that I *should* be doing with my free time, like classwork, and writing up patterns, and trying to figure out why the air conditioner mysteriously stopped working, and painting the baseboards downstairs, and on and on and on.

Then mid-week my mom called to say that although my parents and my older sister would busy during the day, they didn’t want to completely ignore my birthday, so how about we come over to their house for cake and ice cream later in the evening. So instead of making myself a birthday cake, when I got up yesterday morning, I instead made us a coffee cake, swirled with chocolate and topped with walnuts and brown sugar crumble, and we ate huge pieces of that with coffee. We’ve been holding off on vacuuming upstairs because there’ve been workmen making messes, cutting holes in walls to move light switches and install new ceiling fans all week, so the house was getting pretty dusty, and it was really starting to annoy me, so Richard told me that as part of my present, he’d clean the house, and I wasn’t allowed to help with that at all. He gave me a lovely pile of presents, and I camped out in the living room with my knitting and my coffee and a few cats for a while, and then he unpacked the rest of the books downstairs so that the library is finally (mostly) complete. I decided I wanted to give the strudel recipe another try, so I chopped up onions and peppers and mushrooms, and rolled out the dough, and this time managed to do it with 90% fewer holes and a whole lot more length and width (alas, I did not take any pictures this time). And then once that was baked and my hands were a little sore from knitting, I camped out on my computer for a few rounds of Plants vs Zombies (I may be a wee bit obsessed with that game currently. Just a bit), and was just starting to think that we ought to eat dinner and then I should go downstairs and change (black t-shirt + white cat = major shedding), when I heard bagpipes outside the front door – my dad, playing Happy Birthday, and thus my marvelous husband managed to pull off a surprise party for me, without me ever once having a clue what he was up to.

My parents arrived bearing a huge chocolate cake decorated with cat paw prints and balls of yarn (in icing, of course), and a selection of ice cream, and they were followed shortly thereafter by my knitting mom, and my older sister and her family, and then over the next half hour, more and more friends started pouring in. We got to show off our kitchen to a few people who hadn’t yet seen it, and our lovely freshly-painted and organized library downstairs, and our slightly messy, but extremely lush vegetable garden in the back yard. There was lots of yummy food, and several adorable babies to entertain the guests, and even though most of the cats took one look at the crowd and hightailed it downstairs to hide, a few remained upstairs for purely decorative purposes. It was chaotic and noisy and so much fun, and just the sort of thing I would have planned if I’d done it myself. And all in all, what with the chances to putter in the kitchen, and play with the cats, and check off a few more projects on the House To Do list, and a lovely, crazy surprise party to round out the day, it was the perfect way to mark a big milestone birthday.

So yeah. Now I’m 40. And you know what? I’m perfectly okay with that.

Over the past several months, I’ve been seeing more and more of the cooking and baking blogs I follow talking about an online collaboration called The Daring Bakers. I like baking, but I will be the first to admit that I’m not very adventurous when it comes to trying things that look more complicated, so I figured this might be just what I needed. At the end of last month, I finally signed up. The rules are as follows – when you sign up you agree to make the recipe assigned each month. Sometimes there might be parts of the recipe you’re allowed to modify, but there will always be a major portion of it that *must* be done, as written. This month’s challenge – strudel. We could do whatever we wanted for the filling, but no matter what we put inside it, or on top of it, we had to make the dough ourselves.

The dough is pretty straight forward to make – just flour, water, salt, cider vinegar and a little vegetable oil. I mixed it together, kneaded it for a few minutes, and let it sit in a corner of the counter for about 90 minutes (which gave me enough time to run off to the store and buy the walnuts I needed for the filling). Rolling out the dough, however, was a bit more of a challenge. One of the distinctive features of strudel is that it has a series of extra-thin, flaky layers of crust wrapped around the filing. And order to have those layers, the dough had to be rolled out to about the thickness of tissue paper. Literally thin enough to read through.

The recipe recommended using some kind of cloth for the rolling/stretching process, not only to help corral the mess, but also to make rolling it up later a bit less of a hassle. I decided to use one of those thin plastic tablecloths they sell next to party decorations, figuring that it would be large enough to cover my kitchen island, and easy to clean off later. There is really no way to roll the dough as thin as it needs to be, so once you’ve reached the limit with a rolling pin, the next step is to move slowly around the dough and stretch it out with your hands. Because the dough is so thin at this point, tearing is extremely likely. You might notice in the picture below that I obviously need to work on my strudel-stretching techniques a bit more.

The dough might be full of holes, but I have to say I’m pretty happy with how thin I managed to get it stretched.

The next step is to melt some butter and brush that lightly all over the dough – a task easier said than done, because at this point, the slightest touch was enough to tear the dough even further. On top of that, I sprinkled bread crumbs which I’d previously toasted in a skilled with a little more melted butter. The crumbs are put on the dough to help hold the layers apart while it cook. Once the dough was prepped, I added my filling (a mixture of finely chopped apples, walnuts, cocoa, sugar, and cinnamon), and then used the plastic tablecloth as a guide to very carefully roll the whole thing into a log. I managed to shift it onto a baking sheet with only a minimum of damage (and then did some discrete patching to cover up the worst of the holes), and popped it into the oven to bake.

Here it is, prior to being baked, and looking like some sort of disturbing, grub-like creature.

And here it is, straight out of the oven, now looking less grub-like and more like edible pastry.

It wasn’t very attractive at that point, and I knew that the addition of the cocoa likely meant it would require a little bit of extra sweetness. So I first drizzled it with a powdered sugar glaze, and then followed that with a chocolate glaze.

The moment of truth – I sliced off the first two pieces for Richard and myself to try.

Success! The layers are perfectly light and crispy, with plenty of separation between the top ones; so much so that it was hard to cut the strudel without crispy pieces falling off. And the taste? Absolutely delicious. The apples practically melted during the cooking process (just the way I like them), and the cocoa and the cinnamon gave it a rich taste without being too sweet; in fact, the glaze turned out to be a good thing because without that little drizzle of sugar, it might have been a touch too rich.

I am extremely pleased by how this turned out. The strudel dough was surprisingly easy to make, despite its tendency to tear if you look at it cross-eyed, and it bakes up deliciously light and airy. I could see wrapping it around fillings a bit more savory than sweet (I am currently pondering making a second batch, and this time filling it with a mixture of caramelized onions, potatoes, mushrooms, and some fresh herbs from the garden). While the entire process does take several hours, most of it that is due simply to either letting the dough rest, or else waiting for it to bake / cool, so it could be scheduled around other tasks with a minimum of effort. I’m counting this month’s Daring Bakers Challenge a success.

Strudel Dough is available from the Daring Kitchen recipe archive.

Chocolate Cinnamon Apple Nut Filling
2 lbs baking apples, peeled, cored, and chopped
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Stir all ingredients together; spread on prepared strudel dough.

White Glaze
3/4 cup powdered sugar
3 to 4 teaspoons milk

Stir together until all sugar is dissolved. Drizzle slowly over top of baked, cooled strudel

Chocolate Glaze
1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 1/2 teaspoons shortening

Melt chocolate chips in microwave (do short bursts of about 30 seconds at a time; stir after each burst). Stir in shortening and mix until smooth. Drizzle slowly over top of baked, cooled strudel.

The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.

The thing about owning a house is that there is always a myriad of little things that need to be done to it. And when you own an older house, or a house that has a history, that list can grow even longer. I’ve been keeping somewhat of a list of things for our house, of all the things that we need to do, one of these days (and I should point out that this list is separate from the list of ‘must do at some point’ items, like replace the rotting back deck, and strip the crumbling carriage house down to studs and fix all the water damage, broken windows, and so on). So faced with the perfect combination of a three-day weekend, and predictions of gorgeous weather, we decided that this was the time to tackle just a few of those little things/

One of the big items on my agenda this weekend was to tackle the front steps. Since the house is a raised high-water bungalow, the front door is actually on the second story, which means that anyone coming in or out has to traverse a flight of steps. These steps are made of wood which has been painted, and in the winter, when the steps are wet, they get a bit slippery. We’d already improved the railings alongside the steps to add a raised hand-hold section, but I’ve spent the past two winters worrying about someone slipping down those steps during a heavy rain and breaking something (I should point out here that so far, the only person who has actually slipped has been me, but that only means that my worrying was *justified*). So we made a trip to the hardware store, and picked up a gallon of exterior porch paint and some powdered additive that you just stir into the paint (helpful hint – have them do it at the store for you – it was messy!), and Sunday afternoon I painted all the front steps. Of course, this meant that prior to painting, we had to clean the steps, which turned into a two-day process of first spraying it off on Friday, and then getting up Saturday morning and going out with a bucket of soapy water and some sponges, and scrubbing down every single step by hand.

But that particular task is now done, and happily, it appears to be successful. The steps are definitely not slippery anymore (although the true test won’t come until we get them wet first), plus repainting them has done wonders for the curb appeal of the house. White paint has such an annoying tendency to show EVERY SINGLE SPECK of dirt and dust.

And since I was on a painting roll, I also decided to finally finish up in the library. Shortly after we moved in, we pulled down all the ugly wallpaper in that funny little hexagon-shaped room off the master bedroom, and I managed to get the longest wall primed and painted, mainly so that we could then assemble the huge bookshelf and unpack a majority of the books. But it’s been sitting there, unfinished, ever since. So while Richard did another run to the hardware store to get the right color paint, and very helpfully taped all the baseboards and around the window and ceiling for me, I first primed the remaining walls, and then painted them. There’s still quite a bit of touch-up work to do, mainly around the baseboards, and a couple spots on the ceiling, but at least it’s finally (mostly) done!

We’ve done a bunch of smaller chores this weekend as well – cleaned off both front and back porches, cleared out the remaining assorted dead plants underneath the front porch, did another small round of clearing and sorting through stuff that’s been accumulating under the back porch, and so on. During one of our trips to the hardware store, we picked up two new ceiling fans, which were installed in the office and living room this morning (and what a lovely difference they make in both roooms). We hung the two remaining magnet boards in the kitchen, so now there is space for every single piece of our massive magnetic poetry collection (a combination of Shakespeare, cat, knitting, and regular poetry kits). And in the middle of all the cleaning and organizing and painting we also managed to sneak in dinner with my older sister and her family one night, and dinner with my parents the next.

There are still a whole lot of things left to do on that list of chores for the house, of course – I’m not sure it would even be possible to have a house with no To-Do list whatsoever. But at least, for now, I’m feeling a little less anxious about the length of it, and can instead feel pleased at what we’ve managed to accomplish already.

The weekend before I headed off to Yosemite for the meetings, we had some pretty heavy rain. This meant that we didn’t have to go out and manually water the garden for an entire week. So by the time we finally made it out there this past Monday, we were a bit astonished at the transformation.

The cherry tomatoes have all exploded. The sprawling ones are advancing with grim determination toward the nearby tree and the tomato fencing we put in place is definitely going to need some serious reinforcements, while the fourth has become a bush so dense that harvesting from it is likely to be an interesting sort of challenge. The cucumber plants has more than quadrupled in length, and at some point apparently one part broke off and took hold and is now veering off toward the tomatoes, despite the fact that I keep trying to train it another direction.

The potatoes are now more than waist high and vibrant green. There are flowers on the blueberry bush (although I hesitate to call it a bush quite yet because it’s still little more than a leafy stalk with a few random twigs), and even though the regular tomatoes are growing more slowly (due to the unfortunate fact that we located them in an area that gets more shade than we’d realized) they’ve all more than doubled in height and are starting to produce flowers. And the pepper plants have so far managed to survive being sat on by the (very friendly) neighborhood cat, and being nearly flattened by the sage plant (which I am now forced to hack back almost weekly in order to protect the rest of the veggies), and have not only been producing dozens of flowers, some of them are even turning into itty bitty baby peppers! Glee!

Oh, and best of all, this week marks our first, and second, harvest of the season – cucumbers!

I only ever remember seeing one or two flowers, but apparently all it took was a good rain soaking, and poof, spontaneous cucumbers. There’s a handful of additional little cucumberlets lurking about under the leaves, so it looks like we’ve got lots more to look forward to. I just hope it keeps up with the production long enough to overlap with the tomatoes, because fresh cucumber and tomato sandwiches are a treat.

I suspect at some point this summer we’ll try transplanting the overly enthusiastic sage bush to somewhere else in the yard (once we figure out where that ‘somewhere else’ should be). And the issue of the shaded tomatoes is just confirming my thought that investing in a collection of very large pots would be a good idea in the long run, so that things can be moved around if necessary. But so far, the decision to put the garden in a month earlier than last year seems to be paying off quite nicely.

This week, I am in Yosemite (don’t get excited, it’s a business trip, not a vacation). It’s the third time since I started this job, and amusingly, this appears to be the only way in which I actually ever *go* to this park. This time we’re staying at a hotel right on the river, about half an hour out of the park. On the plus side, the room is very nice, and if I step out onto the little concrete pad outside my room, I am only inches away from the water. On the negative side, I haven’t managed to get a cell phone signal since shortly after we entered the valley, the wireless offered by the hotel costs $9 per day and can only be accessed from their lobby (and I did try from outside), and the hotel staff seems to take great pride in being as unhelpful as possible. I am usually willing to give counter staff the benefit of the doubt, but it’s been pretty consistent since we arrived, including the rather distinct lack of wake-up call the first morning, and the half hour late wake-up call the second morning. This might not ordinarily be a problem except for the fact that I can’t use the alarm feature on my phone (see earlier note regarding lack of signal) and the standard hotel room issue alarm clock does not work. Good thing I never sleep well in strange places, and woke up in plenty of time away, but it would be nice to be able to go to bed and relax, instead of waking up every hour or so because I’m too worried about sleeping late.

As for why I’m in Yosemite in the first place, it’s the usual sort of workshop for assessing an upcoming project. Usually these take place in large meeting rooms, with minimal interaction with the lovely outdoors in which we’re located, but this one started off with an actual site visit. This would be a good time to mention that, as I was unaware of the site visit until after we arrived last night, I did not come prepared with site-visit-appropriate footwear. So yesterday morning, I hiked all over slightly muddy, and extremely hilly section of Yosemite National Park, wearing a pair of very cute leopard print flats, and here is the important thing – I did this without once tripping, sliding, or otherwise embarrassing or injuring myself. Those of my readers who know me in real life might be surprised to read this, since I am well known for my distinctive lack of grace and ability to injure myself in novel ways, but I should point out that I fully believe that the only reason I did *not* fall/trip/hurt myself was because I was wearing inappropriate shoes. If I’d been wearing hiking boots, I can pretty much guarantee this entry would have less of “how hard is it for a hotel to give me a damn wake-up call for crying out loud” and instead be an amusing anecdote of How Jennifer Fell Down a Hill and Broke Something.

Last night after the meetings ended for the day, a bunch of us decided to head into the valley. The official reason was to go hike up to Yosemite Falls, but the fact that one can actually get a cell phone signal in the valley was certainly an added bonus. We ate dinner at a little restaurant near the lodge, with a lovely view of the falls, and then just as it was dusk, we headed up the trail to the waterfall. I tried taking some pictures, but my camera doesn’t like to lay nicely in low light (and taking it without a flash just gave me several unattractively blurry shots). It was a nice walk, though, and I’m not saying that just because it included 100% fewer charred trees, extreme hills, and clumps of pants-snagging manzanita than the site visit earlier in the day.

I feel like the last few weeks have passed in sort of a blur. It’s not that I’ve been all that excessively busy. Maybe it’s just the time of year, or the fact that with all the wind and roller-coaster temperature changes we’ve been having lately, my sinuses are all out of whack and so I’m spending a majority of my days in a decongestant-induced stupor.

The veggie garden, so far, seems to be thriving, especially the tomatoes. But then, that is no surprise because we are smack in the middle of prime tomato-growing region. The cherry tomatoes are doing far better than the regular ones and I’m not sure if that’s because that’s just how they are, or if it’s due to where we planted everything, but I keep telling myself that this whole gardening thing is just one long experiment, and each year we will learn important new lessons of what not to do.

We decided to put in potatoes this year, mainly because as we were purchasing all the vegetable starts last month there was a selection of starter potatoes and one of us said ‘oh, that might be fun’. I do not even remember what kind of potato it is that we planted; only that it had two eyes, so I cut it in half, like the lady behind the counter at the nursery told me to do, and we dug some holes and stuffed the pieces inside and covered them up and then stuck some random sticks into the dirt to mark them, and then spent the next few weeks anxiously peering at the ground and wondering which of the sprouts coming up might be potato. Eventually, two extremely leafy, sturdy stalks started coming through, and since they’re both in about the right spots, and they’re identical, and they don’t match any of the other weeds in the yard, I am making the assumption that they are potatoes. We may be in for a surprise a few months down the road, but in the meantime we are carefully watering them and hoping for the best.

We’d put in a sage plant last year, and apparently they thrive on neglect, because at this point it is doing its best to take over the entire raised bed. I have had to hack it back twice – the second time rather severely – if only to prevent it from trying to wipe out the little bell pepper plants. One of those has started flowering, so I am crossing my fingers that this year we might actually get something besides wilted plants.

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I recognize that if left to my own devices, I would become a hermit, because I am the sort of person who likes being in her own space, all by herself. But sometimes even someone with hermit-like tendencies has to push past it, and so there’s been all kinds of socializing going on these past few weeks. I’ve gone to a post-concert party with the rest of the Vox Musica gang. I’ve gone out to a lovely park to celebrate a friend’s baby’s first birthday. We’ve gone out to dinner – twice now – with some new-to-me friends; Richard knew one of them back in high school and they recently reconnected through Facebook and they happen to live in the area so we all met up for dinner and it turns out we all have a ton in common so hooray for instant new friends! We’re still trying to hook up for dinner with some other friends, but through no fault of anyone’s schedules keep getting changed, so there’s been a string of emails trying to figure out a date where everyone will actually be in town, at once – easier said than done.

I’m busily knitting, but most of it, these days, is knitting I can’t really talk about, or even if I can talk about it, I can’t show pictures. I’ve been doing a bunch of test knitting for a designer, and just volunteered to test knit a pair of adorable chickens for another designer. I’ve finished up a group project and recently took advantage of having friends with cute babies to do a photo shoot so I can write up the pattern and try submitting it for publication. And I’m working hard to get a gift done ASAP for a dear friend of the family. One of these years I think it might be nice to not have deadlines for everything I am knitting, but ha – I suspect that won’t happen for a while.

I am now sporting a ‘lovely’ brace on my right hand and wrist, because after several weeks of progressively worsening tingling in my hand, I finally broke down and went to the doctor. The verdict – carpal tunnel. Considering I spend a majority of my time at work (and a not insignificant time at home) on the computer, this came as not remotely a surprise. The good news – she says I caught it early. The bad news – I have to wear this thing for 6 to 8 weeks, and it is very, very annoying. I spent the first week or so sucking down huge quantities of ibuprofin in order to relax the muscles around the nerve (not, mind you, that I noticed one bit of difference, so…whatever). Supposedly if I wear this thing long enough, eventually my hand will stop feeling as if it is continually asleep, and my arm will stop with the sudden massive jolt of tingling racing down from the shoulder and driving me crazy. Considering it has been two weeks and I haven’t noticed much of a change, I am starting to get a bit grumpy about the whole thing, but I am wearing the damn thing anyway, day and night, because if this doesn’t work, Step Two is injections into the wrist, and if that wasn’t enough to make me shudder in horror, Step Three is surgery. I think I’ll stick with the brace, thank you, even if the velcro does hae a tendency to stick to EVERYTHING.

In response to the diagnosis and the brace, I’ve now switched to mousing (yes mom, it really is now a verb) with my left hand, and I’ve procured a track ball mouse to use at work. I’m also trying to become ever so slightly more ambidextrous, but this is not as easy as one might think. I’ve spent nearly 40 years being quite decidedly right-handed, and my brain is fiercely resistant to change in that department.

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We put in veggies again this year, although this time we got them in a few weeks earlier. Also, having learned from last year’s mistake of planting all the tomatoes too close together, we have given all eight (four regular, four cherry again) plants twice as much space as the book says they need. Everyone’s response to that number of tomato plants has been to gasp and say ‘you’ll be swimming in tomatoes’, to which I respond “yes, that’s what I’m *hoping* for.” Here’s hoping we have a wee bit more success in that than last year.

In addition to the small army of tomatoes, we’re giving bell peppers a try again – one red and one green. We’ve also put in one small cucumber plant, which I am hoping I can train to climb, so that it does not try to take over the garden bed, and we also bought two spindly berry bushes and stuck them into large pots at the back of the yard. One of the bushes keeps falling over and is looking a little sickly, but the other seems to be grimly holding on, so I’m hopeful that at least that one will survive. Assuming, of course, that we do not get more freak hailstorms and freezing rain in between now and when the poor things can finally establish a decent root base, but…I have learned never to be too optimistic when it comes to my ability to garden.

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And now, please excuse me while I slide into a little nerd-speak here. Battlestar Galactica is, sadly, now finally over. We watched the series finale and I have decided to be happy with how it ended. I know that there are a lot of people who have worked themselves into a frothy lather of self righteous indignation about the role of gods and religion destiny in the series, and there are those who are all worked up about how the writers did (or did not, as the case may be) explain some of the character arcs, but I really just cannot see the point in expending that kind of energy. It was an amazing show, and I enjoyed watching it more than I can possibly say, and I can think of a lot more important things to get all worked up about, if I really felt the need. Which I don’t, actually, because first of all, who *cares*, and more importantly, there are so many other things to focus on, like finding ways to keep an elderly, slightly senile cat happy and warm for as long as I am still lucky to have him, or going outside in the mornings and hand-watering baby vegetable plants and looking forward to the day that they start to bear fruit, or challenging myself to find ways to use up all the stuff in our veggie box, even when it is things that we don’t normally like (yellow apples, fennel, collard greens).

There is a box sitting on our kitchen island right now, holding an assortment of fruits and vegetables. But my favorite part of the box is the bunch of carrots sitting right on the top, bundled together with their green tops still attached. Ever since the box arrived, late Friday evening, I’ve been dipping into the box to snack on those carrots. They are small and sweet and incredibly delicious, and the very best part about them is that, because Richard is not a fan of raw carrots, they are all *mine*.

The box is the second one we’ve received from Farm Fresh to You, a local organic CSA. Right now, we’re getting the Small box, every other week, since we figured it was better to start slow and make sure we can use up everything they deliver. It’s also giving us a chance to try some new (to us) items. The first box came with a big bunch of kale, which I turned into this soup, and it was so delicious we are already looking forward to making more. This box’s new-to-us ingredient is baby bok choy, so I suspect there’ll be some new stir-fries in our future as we figure out how to use that up.

It’s been a productive weekend so far, carrot-snacking aside. I had Friday off, so I whipped up a batch of whole wheat pizza dough and made half a dozen little mini pizzas to toss into the freezer. Friday evening we had dinner with some friends, and then (finally) went to see Coraline in 3-D. The 3-D technology is absolutely amazing, and the movie was a lot of fun (and I say that not just because all those tiny little sweaters were knit by hand). Yesterday we spent most of the day in Napa, eating lunch with the extended family and celebrating my older sister’s birthday. And today we’ve already vacuumed and mopped and done several loads of laundry, and later there will be more constructing of mini pizzas with the rest of the dough, and the making of a huge batch of that kale and potato soup, and an alto sectional for the women’s ensemble, and if there is time I will try to get the taxes done and finalize the sock pattern that’s been accepted for Knotions’ summer issue. Phew.

Apparently my response this year to 31 straight days of posting (for Holidailies) was to simply not post at all for nearly as long after it was over. Oops. So, to recap the last few weeks, here’s what I’ve been up to.

The weekend before we got ourselves a shiny new President (a condition which still fills me with ridiculous amounts of glee every time I think about it), we headed off to San Francisco to go see *Jonathan Coulton in concert. Richard has been a big fan of his music for a while, so I managed to score major wife points by putting a pair of tickets to the concert in his Christmas stocking. The concert hall where he performed had wonderful acoustics, but a completely horrid seating layout (we counted ourselves incredibly lucky to find two chairs wedged right next to the front of the balcony, but even then most of our view was blocked, and the floor seating looked to be a tangled mess of tables and chairs, with pretty much no visibility unless you happened to either be directly in front, or else extremely tall). I’ve heard a few of his songs when Richard would play them for me, but in preparation for the concert, we tossed a CD of music in the car and listened to it the whole drive down, and of course, we then got the benefit of hearing them all played live that Saturday evening. So now I, too, am hooked on his music, and I suppose I should admit that lately I have been avoiding all news about the worsening economy by simply cranking up the dial on the CD player in my car and belting songs about lonely giant squids and zombies and mathematical equations at top volume every time the talking heads on NPR start spouting more doom and gloom.

That weekend we also got (long overdue) haircuts, celebrated my mom’s birthday, ate our body weight in roasted garlic at The Stinking Rose in San Francisco (perhaps not the wisest choice for where to eat dinner shortly before attending a concert in an extremely crowded music hall), and went to the SF zoo to check in on all of our favorite zoo critters (lemurs! penguins! busy little meerkats!). I am still amused by the fact that, despite getting nearly 5 inches hacked off and a whole lot more layering put in, not a single person noticed the new haircut until over a week later, and even then it was my little sister, over the admittedly poor quality of Google’s videochat.

Since then, it’s been mostly the usual sort of day-to-day activity around here, with a few little extras thrown in for fun. I somehow managed to get my niece’s birthday present into the mail in time for it to actually arrive on her birthday, for a change. We went to the farmer’s market and bought several monster sweet potatoes and have managed to only make our way through one of them, despite using it in at least three separate meals (all made using one of our recent Christmas presents – a wok). I made another batch of apple butter and sealed it into jars (because we had run out) and probably need to get busy making a second batch because there are a lot more apples sitting there on the counter, slowly going soft. I’ve been for two mammograms in the space of two weeks (no need to be concerned, everything’s fine). We got together with our old gaming group and spent about five hours playing one round of the Battlestar Galactica board game (I ended up as a cylon, much to my delight, especially since the game ended with the cylons winning – woohoo for dooming the entire human race!). I went to a yarn-swapping party with a bunch of my knitterly friends in Vacaville, where I brought a huge sack of yarn to donate, but then ended up coming home with a huge sack of completely different yarn. We watched a bunch of movies (some good, some laughably bad) and played games on the Wii, and cheered for the return of some of our favorite television shows from too-long hiatus. I’ve done some knitting, and also some crocheting, and Richard’s done a lot of writing. And oh, in the middle of all of that I also passed my ninth Journalversary (I guess it’d be called a Blogiversary now, even though I still really do hate that word). And as for what’s going on in the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, well, let’s just say that at this point, I pretty much have that whole Jonathan Coulton CD memorized now, and we’ll just leave it at that.