3/17-26/10 - Got fever....

Yep, it's here! Much like Martha, I've been spending the better part of the past couple of weeks planting seeds and photographing flowers. I managed to cut back and repot many of my houseplants in anticipation of their annual move back to the front porch in a couple of weeks. In the meantime my little seedlings are sprouting away on my windowsills and a few have even been moved up to little pots from their eggshell starter homes. The peppers seemed to lag behind a bit, but since I moved them to the mantel above the heater a few days ago, they're busted through the soil as well.

And on top of it all, I seem to have regained something of a social life. I'm the first one to use cold or rain as an excuse to not leave the house, and as a result, I've had little face-to-face contact with the world beyond my immediate neighborhood for much of the past three months! Things appear to be changing.... I actually made it out to an art opening Friday evening with my pals Jim & Kenneth. We swilled wine, rubbed elbows, & spouted sarcastic amongst some pretty cool stuff that included a day-glo painting of a patterned monster shooting a neon rainbow out of its naughty bits, a meticulously displayed collection of drain clogs and pissed-on copper tiles gone green, a series of pearl necklace-strewn flesh-colored latex chest casts overseen by a couple of lovely ladies clad in translucent gauze, and a hot-air balloon performance/sculpture that wandered around the reception area propelled by a pair of human legs.

By the time we made it back to the house, Charles was home from the office and settled into schoolwork while me & the boys spent the rest of the evening around the dining room table eating leftover gumbo, tossing back Sailor Jerry n' tea, and pouring over recent issues of Country Living and Saveur. My guests had left by midnight, but apparently I was just getting started....

[Insert backstory: About a week earlier, I caught Charles humming "The Meatball Song" (a.k.a. "On Top of Spaghetti") and decided to chime in. Keep in mind that carrying a tune is a Sisyphean task for me and when compelled to perform, I tend to turn to comedic overdramatization. Charles petered out somewhere in the third verse but I carried on and on and on in a mock opera performance that left him stunned. This is what passes for romance in our marriage and I may as well have serenaded him with an aria from La Traviata—every couple of days afterwards, he'd sweetly ask me to sing the meatball song. Somewhere along the line, while enjoying my second cup of Sailor Jerry n' tea in the tub a few days later, I hatched a plan to perform an interpretive dance to the Meatball Song. I worked it all out in my head giggling along the way and managed to forget about it, until.....]

This is what happens when I relaunch myself into society after a long winter's nap! Possibly inspired by the creative energy and overdue human contact of the evening, I decided it was my turn. I mentioned my rum-inspired performance aspirations to Charles and he jumped on it, immediately reaching for the camera and egging me on. Needless to say, I was hung over and barely remembered the performance the next morning. By the time I made it out of bed and on to brunch, Charles had already gone into the office and showed the video to his coworkers! I gotta admit it's humiliatingly hilarious, especially since I crap out during the last verse and forget the words. My husband is determined to post it to YouTube, but I'm not sure I'm ready to go viral yet....

With that hovering over my head, I've managed to carry on. Though I've been thoroughly occupied by cleaning up and cutting back around my garden, I'd realized I hadn't attended to such tasks around my own being! This finally hit me during yoga class the other day when, while in downward facing dog, I glanced over to see a small forest sprouting from my armpit and looked back to realized my feet & ankles had gone Sasquatch. Though I'm not a particularly hairy person, I truly believe that at some point in my ancestry a Hobbit & a fairy must've gotten freaky—somewhere around mid-calf, my legs break into fur and tufts of inch-long hairs sprout out of each big toe (this must explain my long-standing celebrity crush on Chewbacca). It's not exactly something I keep on top of during the winter months as the only time I'm apt to put on a skirt is if someone gets married, someone dies, or the temps soar into the upper '90s. I'm pretty sure the last time my legs had seen a blade was in early December when the spaghetti-strapped minidress I wore to a wedding required some ladyscaping. I figure with temps in the '70s, I'm likely to bust out the cargo shorts & flip-flops soon enough, so I set aside a good hour of tub time and went through three blades tackling the issues. I'll be submitting the drain clog to an upcoming art exhibit....

3/5-17/10 - While you were out....

I really suck at this blogging thing—it's been nearly two weeks since my last entry! Not that I haven't been busy, and actually Martha might be right approving of my erstwhile pursuits. Though she's been engrossed with duties such as deep-cleaning her kitchen appliances (I'm betting this task was thrust upon minions?), cleaning stables (again, minions?), fertilizing & edging the lawns (still more minions?), vacuuming upholstery & curtains (ditto), shopping for art & antiques at fancy NYC shows (she could probably handle this one, though I bet minions were in tow to fend off the paparazzi), and flying to LA and back, I did manage to clear out & plant one garden bed w/greens & root veggies, clear out another bed & lay down black plastic to kill off weed seeds, start my seedlings, clear a nasty patch of privet & replant with native beautyberry bushes, pull the last straggling specimens of lariope from my patio flower/herb garden, take some lovely shots of spring blooms around the yard, cook quite a few Martha-inspired meals, and travel to Tallahassee & back to meet my brand-new nephew in-law, Max (and present him with his own Aunt Melissa-made baby quilt).

Still tackling recipes from last month's foodcentric issue, I served up an easy dinner of croque monsieur sandwiches with a side salad one night (translation: Mr. Crunchy) and whipped up some arroz con pollo on another (this was really tasty but a bit flat, It coulda used a little brightening up with thyme & fresh parsley & a dash of paprika for heat). I also delved into my backup supply of frost-discount local farm carrots and some freezer-burnt broccoli and knocked out a quickie veggie/venison stroganoff one night (in an effort to put a dent in the massive supply of ground Bambi in our freezer). Once upon a time, I toyed with various degrees of vegetarianism for about 12 years. Veggie stroganoff was one of my favorite meals (the chewy creamy tangy combo of sauteed mushrooms, worcestershire, wine, & sour cream makes up for any missing meat—though in these frugal d-i-y obsessed days, I sub homemade yogurt for sour cream). It must've made me nostalgic, because just a couple nights later I set my heart on another favorite vegetarian meal, the Golden Bowl. This is the signature dish of The Grit, a much-adored local vegetarian restaurant. It's basically rice topped w/ soy sauce-sauteed veggies, topped w/ savory twice-sauteed yeast-sprinkled tofu cubes, topped w/ yeast gravy. The Grit cookbook reveals the secret formula for the tofu, but it takes a special touch to pull it off anywhere close to Grit good—Charles declared it almost indistinguishable from the real deal.

Now that Spring has finally decided to show herself a bit, I'm having a hard time staying inside during daylight hours to do stuff like clean my house or blog, much less get around to mending clothes, making curtains, and covering couch cushions. I've been spending every possible sunny afternoon on my hands & knees elbow deep in the red earth of Georgia. I'm not one to wear gardening gloves and my orange-stained fingernails and cracked, calloused hands would definitely cause Rhett Butler to scoff—I wear them like a badge of honor! It is kinda a pain in the ass though when I'm doing something delicate like darning a sweater or sewing a button on a silky flowy thingy and my sandpapery fingers keep catching & scratching the fibers. But when I break a nail, I need only turn to the other hand for built-in file!

In the meantime, daffodils of every variety are all abloom and the yard weeds have exploded into a carpet of tiny flowers—this is when I know winter is truly behind us. Say what you will about daffodils & crocuses as the harbingers of the season, those lyin' ass flowers are known to show their sunny faces well before the final snowstorm—shit, in these parts they tend to be up & at 'em around Christmastime! I'm more prone to celebrate the miniscule little blossoms of stuff like henbit, chickweed, pepper cress, violets, and a dozen other adorable little mystery weeds that appear scattershot across the lawn. Unfortunately so many people go to great measures to eradicate these precious little specimens. I won't let Charles near the mower 'til the purply haze of henbit cloud has started to dry up in the near summer sun and the chickweed has long gone to seed. Instead I head out with my camera to photograph the blazing glory. I'm even prone to creep around on hands & knees and collect some of the edible varieties to toss into a salad—this practice won't seem so freaky when the shit goes down!

This is exactly what I did yesterday as I picked through a patch of dock and collected a handful of dandelion greens & violet leaves. Today is St. Patrick's Day and in an effort to acknowledge my ancestors, I always make corned beef and cabbage and colcannon. Though supposedly, corned beef isn't purely Irish. From what I understand, the proper Irish meal is boiled bacon and cabbage (Irish bacon being more akin to what we know as Canadian bacon rather than those fatty pork belly strips we like to fry to a crisp). Apparently the Irish immigrants to America were introduced to the corned beef brisket via their new Jewish immigrant neighbors and adopted it into their traditional dish. As for the colcannon (mashed potatoes and greens), that's pretty damn Irish and I made it just like my peasant kin would've done back in the homeland—with lawn-gathered greens, overwintered onions, wrinkly old potatoes, and a healthy dose of homemade soured cream (in my case, yogurt). And in an effort to make proper use of our Bambi supply, I actually corned a venison roast myself. A three-day cold bath in a seasoned brine made for a perfectly savory little hunk of meat. I even lay a couple strips of American bacon on top as I piled on the cabbage, local farm turnips, and mutant forgotten carrots discovered during spring planting prep.

I'm pretty damn proud of my efforts to acknowledge my ancestors and Charles repeatedly declares corned beef & cabbage to be his favorite meal of the year. Though he was a bit suspicious when I informed him of my plans for a more home-grown version of the dish. The meal was ready and waiting for him when he walked through the door carrying grocery bags full of on-sale corned beef and potato chips—my Irish ancestors are likely spinning in their graves knowing the fate that's fallen upon their precious potato! I pretty much banish crap like potato chips from the house, but apparently our weekend with the in-laws kindled some nostalgia in my husband. At some point he'd polished off a bag of readily available chips and it reawakened his craving for nutritionally vapid crack food—he just couldn't resist when he came across the 2 for 1 sale on the way to the checkout aisle.

In the end, I had the last laugh. He gobbled down a second helping of the venison & veggies & even declared the weed-infested colcannon a hit. And I'm already hatching plans for an appropriate eviction of the potato chips....

2/23-3/4/10 - Beware the Ides of March

How the hell can anyone with a real life keep up with all this crap?!!! With two deadlines, a couple of meetings, a presentation & a workshop to give, and a neighborhood function all piled into the same week, my house has gone to pot! In the meantime, Charles had a client in town which had him out for dinner on the company dime a couple of nights. Although this conveniently relieved me of my obligation to cook for him (and he managed to sneak home with enough leftovers to keep me fed as well), that box of crap he'd swept off the dresser over three weeks ago is still sitting in the middle of the living room, and it's attracting followers—piles of schoolbooks, pairs of smelly socks and shoes, unopened mail, scattered DVDs, an empty box of Cheez-Its, and a half-eaten jar of peanuts.

Apparently Martha spent her week attending to pleasantries such as arranging pussy willows, harvesting spinach from the greenhouse, repotting seedlings, wandering the grounds in search of snowdrop & witch hazel blooms, and showing off her orchid blooms. Granted, I am the mistress of procrastination and I function best under pressure—I certainly did my fair share of late evening lazing google-eyed in front of the TV watching the lovelies on ice of the Olympics (Evan Lysacek is my new celebrity crush and I'll be asking Santa for a Johnny Weir dress-up doll come Christmas).

I'm a bit hyper-involved in our little neighborhood association, and we had a potluck party to throw at a downtown bar Saturday afternoon. I found myself running the bake sale and managed to use what was left of last week's runny chocolate icing on a dozen or so s'mores-themed cupcakes (they were quite a hit with the kiddos). I also somehow managed to take it upon myself to come up with a neighborhood park proposal to be considered for a list of future sales tax-funded projects. Friday evening had me baking cupcakes while most of Saturday was occupied with icing them, baking venison sausage balls for the party, and constructing a display on the park project for the neighbors to check out that afternoon. Somewhat sadly, partygoers seemed more interested in swilling beers, shooting the shit, & shoving cupcakes down their throats than offering any constructive commentary—the Power Point that I presented to the local gov committee had a much more interested audience (OK I guess, since they're the ones that wield the power).

When it rains it pours. Part of the reason I even took on this blogging project was because I found myself bored & broke as the freelance writing gigs just weren't pouring in like they used to. Blogging certainly won't cure the broke, but it definitely helped with the bored. With that said, I've suddenly got two articles and a copyediting job due within a week of one another. And while I managed to hold a seed-starting workshop for my townie hipster community gardeners on Sunday, I've yet to get my own garden started—probably a good thing considering it snowed again this week! I swear Mother Nature if fucking with us. While they spent two weeks trucking in snow to Vancouver, we managed to get slammed with two snowstorms in Georgia! And lately she seems to be bustin' out the big guns & getting tectonic on our asses—Hell hath no fury.... Can't say that I blame her.

While I wiled away at my Power Point late Sunday afternoon, Charles got busy on my belated Valentine's gift. Both the south-facing windows in our house now sport handy little shelves hungry to host happy little seedlings. In the meantime, March arrived and I've moved on to my new issue of MSL. This week's duties seem a bit spring-cleaning oriented (not my forté), but I did manage to bleach-soak the kitchen sink yesterday (only after a foul smell started emanating from the drain) and I finally tackled a massive pile-up of laundry. And when I was through, sitting triumphantly amongst towering piles of fragrant freshly-folded clothes, it dawned on me that it had been nearly 72 hours since I'd washed myself! Deadlines be damned, I retreated to the tub with a hot cup of Sailor Jerry n' tea. By the time Charles made it home from night class, I was pajama-clad and soundly passed out!

2/15-22/10 - Good shit

Sometimes I feel like my day-to-day life is defined by a series of run-ins with shit—I mean like literal shit! If I'm not frantically trying to discourage my dog from dropping a pile in the neighbor's yard, I'm wrangling cat turds back into the litterbox. If I'm not scraping the bird crap off the car door handle, I'm digging the dog shit out of my shoe. I write this as I've just finished unclogging the Poover Dam from the toilet for the third time in a week.... I wonder when was the last time Martha Stewart ever picked up a plunger? Though I imagine she may have had plenty of opportunity for such activity during her stint in The Big House.

While Martha spent last week enjoying the Westminster Kennel Club Show and attending to anal-retentive chores like "Clean window shades and blinds," "Groom cats," "Organize pots-and-pans cupboards," "Season wooden cutting boards," and "Harvest kumquats from the greenhouse," I managed to walk and bathe the dog, measure my south-facing windows for seed-starter shelves (which Charles promised to build as a Valentine's present), buy cat food, clear out a garden bed for early planting, and make some headway on my ant problem (finally broke down & set out poisoned bait to be carried back to their secret lair). And while Martha made a dogfood cake for her pooch Sharkey's birthday, I made a birthday cake for my pal Kenneth. It was intended to be classic yellow with a rich chocolate icing, but I've still not come across the perfect frosting recipe. This one was still runny after cooling all afternoon, so I opted to whip up a pastry cream filling & poured the icing over the top to transform it into an "eclair cake"—it was actually a big hit!

I did follow Martha's lead and hosted something of a Mardi Gras dinner—I boiled up a pot of gumbo (a regular late summer meal when the garden is bustin' with tomatoes, peppers, & okra) and a quickie chocolate-chip bread pudding sprinkled with what's left of this fall's yard-gathered pecans. A couple girlfriends stopped by for a quick nosh before we hit the town to checkout our buddies' bluegrass band, The Mudflapjacks. And despite the fact that I managed to keep my top on, I still came home strewn with several strands of plastic beads that are likely to find their way to the landfill any day now.

Tolerable temperatures settled in by midweek, allowing me to catch up on the previous week's command to "Pick-up winter debris from garden" as I hauled a month-old pile of privet & holly branches to the curb less than 24 hours before the city trucks came by for monthly pickup. By the time my dad blew into town, using the excuse of dropping-off a few things I inherited from my dear departed Grannie's Brooklyn brownstone to escape the snow mess up North, the weather was sunny & balmy and more akin to what we're used to for winter in the South.

It was a perfect weekend to get busy in the garden. Ironically though, I managed to score a press pass to an organic farming conference that came to town & I spent a sun-soaked Friday afternoon befriending a llama & alpaca while exploring greenhouses & fallow fields on a farm tour & most of Saturday in dimly lit conference rooms learning about herbal medicine & seed saving—skills I can put to use for many sunny days to come, and which are sure to prove absolutely necessary when the shit goes down. I've been to a handful of conferences & expos in my day, and usually end up walking out of them with a bag full of worthless schwag—crappy pens, magnets, keychains, etc.—I came away from this one with a stack of seed catalogs and a bag of compost.... Now that's the kind of shit I can actually put to good use!

2/8-14/10 - A long winter's nap

Somehow a week has managed to fly by & I've not much to show for it.... Many of Martha's commands of the past week have either been foiled by crappy weather, an overfull schedule of meetings & deadlines, impossibility, or sheer ridiculousness. Like Monday's "Prune weeping willows in the wetland while the ground is still frozen." With all the rain we've had of late, my entire yard is a wetland—though I've no weeping willows in need of pruning (I guess I could've braved the driving rain & tackled some privet & honeysuckle). And Tuesday's "Make glittered valentines; address and stamp envelopes" and "Assemble candies for heart-shaped boxes"—What am I twelve? I know Martha's hard up to unload her custom line of glitter in these hard times, but I'm not falling for it.

I did, however, fall for the cute little heart-shaped pies on the cookie-of-the-month back page, although I didn't get to them 'til much later in the week. Martha tells us to make pie crust in a food processor, well I don't own one of these (my cabinets barely have room for my Salad Shooter and combo mini-chopper/stick blender and my lime-green Kitchen Aid mixer lives out in the open on a shelf in the dining room). I took my pastry-making cues from the November '08 issue of Saveur that featured step-by-step instructions on making the perfect pie crust. I settled down with a ice-cold metal bowl and watched Keith Olberman's left-wing pontifications while working my fingers through a pile of flour & chilled butter chunks 'til they morphed into a lovely cohesive lump. Martha's recipe called for a filling of pears & fresh raspberries, but I happened to have apples & craisins on hand—where the hell do you get fresh raspberries in February and why would you wanna ruin them by baking them into a pie?! My version simmered on the stove for an hour or so & got stashed in the fridge with the dough for the night.

The next morning I got to assembling them. I don't own a 4-inch heart-shaped cookie cutter, so I fished an old bean can out of the recycling bin, scrubbed it out, & bent it into a slightly wonky heart shape. Martha didn't recommend to crimp the pies' edges, but I figured this would be a good idea lest the filling come oozing out in a sticky mess. It was a pretty labor-intensive process & I ran out of filling toward the end (the last 3 pies got a scoop of marmalade which actually did run out in a sticky mess), but I've gotta admit, they're really friggin' cute!

Martha also commanded me to "Make compost tea for plants in greenhouse." I don't have a greenhouse, but I do have a collection of houseplants that occupy assorted cobwebby corners in my bedroom & bathroom. They're definitely looking rather sickly as they await their springtime return to the front porch and could use a litle pick-me-up. To make a proper compost tea, you're supposed to use aquarium equipment to aerate the compost/water brew. I don't exactly have that stuff kicking around, but I figure I'll give it a good stir & maybe blow through a length of pvc pipe to add some bubbles to it once in a while.

Apparently Martha spent Thursday attending the opening day of New York Fashion Week and having cocktails with friends. For my fashion quest, I managed to drive out to the Goodwill past the mall & pick up a few new button-downs for Charles to wear to work and a green wool sweater that I hope to felt into a fun purse some time in the near future. As for the cocktails, a hot bath with my friend Sailor Jerry will have to do.

Friday arrived with a threat of snow, an occasion to freak the fuck out here in the deep South. My compost tea had developed a respectable crust of ice & I'm thinkin' not much biochemical action is happening under such conditions. By mid afternoon the flakes had started coming down and I'd yet to make it to the post office to mail off my valentine pies (so what if they won't get there 'til the middle of next week—like me, my loved ones aren't exactly sticklers for a schedule). I braved the icy conditions & went on an errand run—from the looks of the mobs at the grocery store you'd think a nuclear winter was nigh. I also decided it was a perfect time to visit the garden center and pick up ingredients for my seed starter mix. My seeds had arrived in the mailbox and I decided to stare down the wintry mix with some kind of proactive gardening activity. Close to five inches were on the ground by midnight—a pretty respectable accumulation for these parts—and it made for the perfect excuse to stay in and eat leftover pizza, watch the Olympics opening ceremonies, and make vanilla cinnamon cake layers for my pal Lysa's 40th birthday party Saturday night.

Saturday was occupied with enjoying the winter wonderland. The world was bright and sunny & stuff was melting fast! We assembled a posse of friends & neighbors & our accompanying pooches & set off for a long walk around the 'hood, down the tracks, and through the woods. The rest of the afternoon had me wrestling with the tiered birthday cake. I'd hoped to make a nice dark & shiny chocolate frosting, but the recipe I lifted off the internets was sticky & gooey & set like fudge as it cooled. I one and a halved it and still had to make a second batch to cover the whole cake. Needless to say, I was running pretty late for the surprise party, but so was the birthday girl ! As they say, "Birds of a feather....."

Several hours and many bottles of red wine later, Charles appeared at the party to chauffeur me & my drunkass girlfriends home. Apparently it took some degree of force as we threatened to ditch him at a stoplight and make a mad dash for a local bar for late-night disco. The child safety locks on our Honda actually had to be deployed.

Valentine's Day found me hungover & we eventually made it out for brunch after tracking down at least one drunkass girlfriend to return her to the scene of her car. Charles & I celebrated our love by braving crowds of well-clad churchgoers and random pairs of heathens out for an awkward Sunday brunch post Saturday night hookup. I made it halfway through my Southern-style eggs benedict (two biscuits topped w/ a slice of country ham, fried eggs, and a puddle of sausage gravy) while Charles doused his homefries, pork chops, & eggs in hot sauce & inhaled the entire plateful. Back home, I immediately collapsed into a carb and cholesterol-induced coma and spent the rest of the afternoon in bed while my beloved slaved away over school books.

I did manage to arise by dark to resurrect those almost forgotten duck breasts.... A couple weeks back, I found a recent issue of Field & Stream laying on the toilet seat opened to a recipe for Duck Salmi—this is Charles' subtle way of requesting a particular meal and I figured Valentine's Day would be the proper occasion to make it happen. Salmi is a red wine-based mushroomy game stew—served over the toasted remnants of last week's home-baked bread, it was rich and hearty and finally put to rest my red wine-induced fuzzhead.

And by the way—yes, we get Field & Stream too. Some anonymous benefactor must've signed us up, but Charles actually re-upped the subscription as the writing is actually really good, it's chock full of pretty nature photos, and there are some great survival & hunting tips that will really come in handy when the shit goes down. If Martha had only included the occasional recipe for squirrel stew or illustrated instructions for field-dressing a doe, I might never have doubted her.

2/4-8/10 - An ongoing battle....

Three straight days of cold, cold rain was enough to keep me inside to conquer the kind of busy work I'm prone to ignore 'til it's out of control. I managed to put a significant dent in my copy editing duties, plowing through articles on interspecies etiquette and urban sprawl.... I also took on a pile of unpaid bills and an off-balance checkbook while poverty breathed down my neck.

Martha's commands for Thursday included "Take inventory of potting soils and mixes and restock if needed" & "Order metal stakes and labeling supplies for vegetable garden." The weather outside was frightful and I wasn't about to leave the house to mess around in any kind of dirt, and I use scrawled-on recycled plasticware to label my plants, but I did spend much of the evening drooling over my Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog and made a lengthy wish list—here in the South, planting season is right around the corner! Unfortunately that list got taken to the chopping block after my checkbook revelations....

Friday's order #1: "Check burlap covers on boxwoods and repair any tears." Yeah, right—a) I don't have boxwoods, b) If I did, they wouldn't need coverin' in these parts, and c) It's cold & rainy outside! Order #2: "Bake bread." Now that's something I can get behind! Believe it or not, I'd never baked bread on my own before. I'm pretty sure I'd helped my mom with it as a kid, but it wasn't exactly a regular occurrence. I followed the steps in MSL & came out of it with two perfect loaves! The article had a handful of suggested variations on the recipe, but I improvised on my own, using half & half wheat & white flower & adding a little garlic salt & a few pinches of thyme, dill, & tarragon. Charles was so excited about the promise of fresh-baked bread, he picked up a pile of roast beef on his way home, thus sandwiches for dinner. And in light of the measly funds, we bailed on a night out—Charles uploaded random obscure documentaries on Netflix while I swept the floors & folded laundry—very romantic!

More intolerable wet cold on Saturday had me heeding Martha's command to "Scan files and receipts in home office, and shred and recycle papers." My version of this task was to clean off my dresser and weed through the triple-tiered plastic bin of old cards, article clippings, and photos in the bedroom corner while Charles cleared off a shelf in his Mancave to make room for his school books (yes, he has a Mancave—more on this later). While I carefully examined every box & bauble, tossing anything that wasn't valuable, hand-crafted, or irrefutably sentimental, Charles simply held up a cardboard box & swept off the entire contents of his dresser surface and retired to the living room to watch more Netflix. The cardboard box is still sitting under the coffee table.

I eventually got around to making dinner—a cheesy potato casserole layered with seasoned ground venison & served with an arugula salad & edamame & a slice of buttered home-baked bread. In an effort to avoid factory-farmed flesh, we make wild hunted deer a pretty significant part of our diet. No, my husband does not hunt (though I encourage him to take it up eventually as it's a skill that will definitely come in handy when the shit goes down), but there are plenty of gunslingers out there who shoot Bambi for shits & giggles & never get around to claiming their kills from the processor. Each season, we fork over 50 bucks or so & stock up on this unclaimed meat 'til our freezer overflows. I imagine there's an entire culture of sharp-shootin' country boys who subsist on fast food burgers & fries while we city folk dine on free-range venison thanks to their skills.

Much of Sunday was spent fulfilling my Master Gardener duties as I met with a group of townie hipsters who are starting a community garden. Martha commanded a "morning walk with the dogs," so Andromeda rode along with me on an afternoon trip to the fabric store (where I found fringed trim for my naked couch cushions for fifty cents a yard!). On the way back, we stopped at our favorite riverfront park to take a little wander through the woods. With all the recent rain, the river had obviously overflowed its banks & much of the park was a muddy, silty mess. Andi had the good sense to stay out of the mud & instead ran around in the brambly underbrush on the ridge above the pathway.

Back home, Charles was asserting his manhood by cooking ribs to eat while watching the Superbowl. Although he thankfully doesn't give a crap about football, he gets a kick out of the ads, so the game was blasting away while I had a couple of girlfriends stop by to put in their seed orders. Yesterday's cleaning spree had yielded me forty bucks found in a forgotten hiding place, so I replenished my own wish list & had the order placed by midnight....

This morning, before I was able to enjoy another eggy sandwich (this time on fresh baked bread), I awoken to yet another ant invasion. I'd deduced that they were coming from behind the stove where I suspected a bowl of sugar may have spilled when we had some 30 of our closest friends over for black-eyed peas & collards on New Year's night, but saw no evidence of such when we inspected & laid down boric acid & vinegar spray. I refuse to use pesticides—I'd honestly rather ingest an occasional ant than expose myself to poisonous crap (if Anthony Bourdain can do it, so can I!). At this point, I don't know where the hell they're coming from, but they sure as hell love barbeque sauce! Charles' efforts at cleaning up his ribby feast were a bit half-assed & the couple of smears on the drawer fronts & the sticky pan in the sink had the ants out in battalions for an all-you-can-eat-buffet.

I swear there's some mutation on the Y chromosome that leads to domestic retardation! If all the women on the planet suddenly disappeared, I'd give the dudes six weeks before they're grunting naked around a campfire—well maybe the gay guys would keep them in order, but I'd hope they'd have the good sense to hole themselves up in gated communities of orderly, impeccably decorated homes and throw fabulous nightly parties while the straight dudes wallow in piles of their own filth on the outside. As for straight girls like me, we're cursed with this biological urge to cohabitate with such creatures.

This evening I joined a friend in attending a commission meeting a couple counties over where there's a proposal to build a really scary trash incinerator that would belch all sorts of nasty pollutants into some of the most pristine countryside left in the state—ugh! I came home to Charles passed out on the couch as Chris Matthews tore into some hapless Republican on gigantovision. I fed myself with leftovers before heading to the tub with a mug of Sailor Jerry-spiked cinnamon chamomile tea. By the time I got out, Charles had made it to the bed where he was catching up on his schoolwork while sharing a box of Cheez-its with the dog!!! Although I was able to wrestle the snack food away from him, I expect the marauding ants will have sniffed out the crumbs in the sheets by morning....

2/2&3/10 - Steppin' in it....

Yesterday was one of those cold rainy days that keeps me snuggled up in bed with my laptop, kitties, and pooch 'til noon. When I finally did arise to find sustenance, the leftover quinoa wasn't gonna do it. So I whipped up a dilly scrambled egg, arugula, & ham sandwich on wheat toast with a thick shmear of cream cheese. It didn't take Andi long to coax me into the damp, chilly outside world where I spent a good 45 minutes tramping around the muddy yard in my rain boots begging her to come back inside. For some reason she kept creeping through the tangled hedge along the property line to investigate the neighbor's front yard—I suspect she may have left behind a hefty poo pile to match yesterday's backyard deposit. By the time I got her back indoors, I'd stepped in shit and she was covered in mud—a dog bath suddenly became the next item on the agenda.

Martha had listed "Tweet and blog" and "yoga" on her calendar. Well I don't tweet, and I failed to make a blog entry yesterday, but I did manage to get most of the way through a 50 page manuscript on the semantics of ecological discourse while intermittently fucking around on Facebook before heading off to power yoga class.

By the time I got home, I was smelly and starving and had a fridge full of leftover Persian rice to contend with. I had some radishes and tiny turnips kicking around in the veggie drawer & recalled a recipe for sauteed radishes in yogurt sauce that I'd seen posted on my local online farmer's market site a couple of times. It called for a layer of hard-boiled egg chunks, topped with cooked diced radishes (I threw in the turnips and some chopped beet stems to boot), and drowned in a lemony, spicy yogurt sauce. It was a perfect accompaniment to the leftover rice and I went through two piled-high platefuls. Charles, however, was grossed out by the concept of cooked radishes and wouldn't even try it. I abandoned him to fend for himself with a pile of week-old sweet potatoes and a piece of reheated mystery meat while I retired to a tub of lavender-infused hot water with a steamy mug of Sailor Jerry-spiked chai tea.

The rest of the evening was occupied by the season premiere of "Lost"—more aptly known as "Daddy Issues Island"—and I ended up editing Charles' Langston Hughes research paper 'til I was too tired to think about this blog. Much of this morning was taken over by the paper too. My husband is a middle management slave for a customer service call center where he regularly puts in overtime—AND he's taking night classes toward a M. Ed so he can be a high school English teacher. Yeah, he busts his ass big time & I do what I can to make it easier for him, which means keeping him properly fed & clothed & serving as his personal research assistant & copy editor.

Outside it was a beautiful sunny, almost balmy day, unfortunately, between Charles' paper and my real-job editing duties, I didn't get to enjoy much of it. Martha's calendar for today lists an appearance on the Today show which I tried to find online—she must have bombed, 'cause it didn't get posted. The calendar also says, "Polish shoes and take pairs with worn heels or sole guards to the cobbler." The only shoes I wear regularly are flip-flops and faux Crocs, so I translated this command into "Clean the dog shit off the rain boot that's been sitting on the back step since you stepped in it yesterday afternoon." I half-heartedly headed outside with a bottle of spray cleaner and a handful of paper towels, filled a watering can at the rain barrel, found a sunny spot in the back yard, and used a few twigs to dig the encrusted feces from the deep treads of my rubber boots. It was in there pretty good and I actually had to refill the watering can to get it all rinsed away by the time the sun descended to the treeline and it neared dinnertime.

I hadn't forgotten about the duck. I'm right proud of my ability to stretch a single fryer hen into a week's worth of meals, and I figure I can do the same with this bird. Since I'd ripped off all the fat, I figured it's not right for roasting, and I wouldn't want to waste prime breast meat in a boil pot, so I carefully cut them off to pack away in the freezer. I'm pretty damn good at this butchering thing and I figure when the shit goes down we'll be OK as long as I can get someone else to kill, decapitate, and defeather the little critters. Although if the shit's gone down, I doubt we'll be worried about putting aside prime cuts—we're more likely to stake a whole carcass over the fire pit and pray the zombies don't get to us first!

As for now, the carcass has spent the entire day in the crock pot brewing up a hearty broth. I'll soon be tossing in some turnips, carrots, and what's left of that magically endless pile of family farm beet greens to make a stew (maybe thickened with a duck fat roux?)—and there's still plenty of Persian rice to suck it up.

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