In Which It Keeps Raining

How was everyone's weekend? Did you do anything fun for Mother's Day? Or fun just because?

We celebrated Mother's Day a day early since Twin works on Sundays.

Twin, our Mom and I hit up an annual plant sale. It's massive and hosted at our State Fair grounds. We bought an apple tree and a hazelnut shrub. As well as veggies and herbs. Our mom also bought some shady plants for our cabin.

Then we went home, planned a baby shower for our cousin, played some dominoes, ate take out, cooked some smores and sat in the hot-tub. All in all, it was a pretty fun day.

It's been raining on and off here for pretty much a week. And we have another week of rain coming up, too. Which, I mean, I know it's good. The lakes can use the water. But also, our lawn is really long and could use a mowing but we just haven't been able to find a dry spell to do so.

Also, I'd really love it to be warmer, high sixties or low seventies, instead of wet and cold. It's May and I feel like it should be nicer. And, you know, whine whine whine.

 

In Which I Revise (Still)

So I'm revising Break Free. Scratch that. I've been revising Break Free for maybe 2 months? 3? I dunno, I'm a terrible estimator of time and I'm waaaaay too lazy to go look.

Okay I lied. I'm not that lazy. Okay wait. Yes I am, I'm just more curious than lazy. It's been just a little over 2 months say my records. Granted there were a few weeks in there where the day job was so so busy that there was no writing done at all. And also a week of vacay where the writing stuff was not done. But still, you get the idea.

Anyhoo, where I'm going with is, next week I have another week of vacay. Staycay actually. And by vacay I mean, not working at the dayjob. Instead twin and I will be working around the house. Preparing the veggie garden for winter, yard work, house repairs etc. So, you know, better than work, but still actually doing work.




True story: this is not our garden

I'm really, really close to finishing these rounds of revisions. And then I can send the MS to a few beta readers and hope they give me the sign off to send that baby back into the world. If not, it will be more revisions. It's not like I'm really in a hurry, but I kind of am in a bit of a timing crunch to get it back out as soon as possible for varying reasons that I won't get into because that's a whole post on it's own.

So for right now, my goal is to try and revise the shit out of the MS this week in the hopes that I can send it to beta readers and not have to worry about it on my staycay. And by worry about it, I mean, not have to worry about how I'm not revising because I'm tilling the garden or tevs.

So anyway, wish me luck!

How about you? Are you revising? Or writing? Or brainstorming? I want deets!

In Which We Garden

A few weeks ago I promised some readers (*cough* Maria *cough*) photos of the veggie garden exploits this year and now that things are growing fairly well and I've gotten some better photos I figured today's a good day for them.

These pics are a few weeks old, so the garden's much more fuller and filled out now. We've got blossoms on the cantaloupe and tomatoes and should see them on the zucchini any day.

long shot of the entire garden along our front fence

this is just a close up of the garden after we expanded it this year. You can see how much bigger we made it, from back to front, where the dirt color changes. The plants on the right is the garlic, which you plant in Oct. Next to it is green onions. We have no idea where they came from. They just popped up this spring. Kind of a nice (and delicious) surprise

Left, potatoes in a tater bag. Top to bottom, clockwise, asparagus, peas, cucumber, zucchini

top to bottom, clockwise: peas again, soybeans, cucumbers

Top to bottom, clockwise: peas, yellow onions, green onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, carrots in their nice little rows

Top to bottom, clockwise: green onions, garlic, corn, cantaloupe, watermelon

The watermelon is having a tough time of it. We've got two plant left, and they're fighting, but really anything could knock them out. We just have to cross our fingers. Also something mowed the top off of one our corn stalks (it's growing back) and has been snipping off the tops of the soybeans. Probably rabbits. But otherwise things are looking good.

We've got plans to plant another crop of peas, once this one is done, since we like eating them the most. Corn and soybeans are new for us this year. As is the watermelon. I really hope we get some corn, because that would just be cool. And since we love edamame, I really hope we get some soybeans. There's a bit of a monopoly on soybeans, so it's really hard to find soybean seeds, but we found some at seedsavers.

And that's it. How about you? Doing any veggie gardening this year? How's it going?

In Which I Have A New Obsession

"A new obsession?" you ask.

Yes. Yes I do.

What is it?

Why, it's PINTEREST!

"Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard.
Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.
Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests."

So let's say you're on a website and you see an awesome picture of, oh I dunno, a cat. Because, you know, the interwebs is bereft of cats. So you click your little "pin it" button, select which pinboard you want to add it to, add a caption, and voila! It's pinned, while linking back to the original source.

The best part about pinterest is, you can repin - so if someone pins something to their board and you love it, you can repin it to your board. The original pinner still gets credit AND the original source link is never lost, so you can repin to your heart's content, knowing you can always get back to the original pinner, or the original source.

Or, if you find another pin that you like, but you don't really want to repin it to one of your boards, you can "like it". Your account will keep track of your likes as well.

You can also comment on people's pins, and use @mentions to draw someone's attention to a specific pin.

Better yet, if you have an etsy shop (and I know a few of you do) you can install an easy "pin it" button next to your etsy items. So then if someone sees something on your shop they love, they can pin it on their board and it's like FREE ADVERTISING.

Seriously, guys. I. Am. Obsessed.

You can request an invite to get started, and once you do, you can make as many pinboards as you want. I currently have 6. Here's a list of mine, with examples of my pins.


Books, Writing and Stuff: Anything to do with the aforementioned title

Home, Garden and Cooking: OMG, guys. I have found THE MOST AWESOME recipes on pinterest - I find anywhere from 2-6 a day. I actually had to stop looking at pins of recipes because I found too many

I'm actually making these potatoes tonight!

Tattoos: A pinboard to highlight all the awesome tattoos out there

Themes I Love: A pinboard specifically for themes I love (for no specific reason), like paths, doors and doorways, eyes etc. Similar to the next board, but with more focus







Inspiration: I use this pinboard to pin things that creatively inspire me and make me want to write a scene or a story. Seriously, sometimes I look at this board or the Themes I Love board and they just hit me in the gut





Awesome Things: Which is kind of a potpourri of "awesome things" I find on the interwebs or on other people's pinboards. Honestly, it's probably my favorite pinboard because it makes me laugh a lot.










If you decide to sign up, you can follow me by clicking on any of my boards. If you do, I'll be sure to follow you back! I'd love to have more pinning friends. You can also find my whole pinterest account by clicking on the little red Pinterest banner on the right hand side of my blog.

Hope to see you there!

In Which Pepper Returns

Last year around this time, I posted a a garden update Here and in the update I had a picture of snakeskin as proof of the garter snake living in our flower garden.

Here's the pic. We named him Pepper, because he spices up our lives.




Well, I was just thinking earlier this week about how I missed Pepper hiding in our yard, when, low and behold, what did Brother find mucnhing on a toad in the flower garden?









Pepper!!

His eyes are milky blue, which means if we keep out eyes open, we'll probably have another snake skin hanging out in the lawn before long.

He actually let me take quite a few pictures of him, once I sat down and stopped moving. I resisted the urge to pet him and instead just held the camera a few inches away to snap some photos.



I feel bad for the toady that Pepper scarffed up, especially since it could've been one of the toads we saved from the egress window a few days ago, but Pepper's welcome to stay as long as he wants.




Also, a reminder that I am officially on vacay, and probably won't be back to the blog for about two weeks. See you when I get back!

In Which I Return

Yay! I'm back from my week long hiatus! I'm excited to take some time today to catch up on everyone's blog. Here are the things Twin and I accomplished this week with no work and very little internets (even though it rained every day but 2. Sigh)

Went to the hardware store like 15 times. Serial.

Planted the veggie garden (veggies include: carrots, spinach, eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, white onions, green onions, cantaloupe, peas, cukes and zucchini. Also included (though we didn't plant them this year) is asparagus and garlic)

Installed some pavers on a high traffic area of our yard

Repotted house plants

Got the composter started

Stained our bay window which was installed before Christmas

Played board games

Saw Thor and Priest. Watched Tron and Easy A (omg, LOVED Easy A!)

Read 2 books and started a third

Played discgolf

Hit the dentist (boo) No cavities (yay!)

Entertained some guests

Celebrated mother's day (since Mom was out of town on the actual day)

Oh also I called 911 for the first time ever when the neighbor's house caught fire. Again. (2 times in 3 days is more than just a little suspicious, so says the arson investigator)

We still have a few more things to finish up, like spraying the weeds in our yard, fixing the lawn mower, installing edgers around a tree and adding even more extra boards to the fence, but all in all I'm quite pleased with all we got done.

It's kind of a bummer to have to go back to work, but I'm also looking forward to getting back to my schedule of things. Like querying. Haven't messed with that for almost a whole week.

So tell me, was there anything exciting I missed in the blogoverse?

In Which I Share A Garden Update

So it's been a little over a month since we planted the veggie garden, and almost everything is going fantastic.

Here's a quick look at the flower garden. It's got some sort of blight going on and killing the lillies, but there are so many that it's still pretty.

We also have a garter snake living in the garden. He suns himself in the lawn until he sees us coming, then he books it to hide in the lillies. I tried to get a pic of him the other day, but he's just too fast.

But here's some proof (with my foot for size comparison)

we've named him Pepper. Because he spices up our lives...

The herbs are doing pretty well. Though for some reason the thyme up and died. It was doing the best of all the herbs too. I guess it wanted to go out in a blaze of glory

basil, parsley, rosemary

Also the wildflowers I won from Summer actually seem to be doing quite well, regardless of the digging a squirrel did early on

The veggie garden is doing awesome. First our red potatoes came up. We have some planted in this potato bag and some coming up in a pile of leaves we never got around to composting.

what's taters, precious?

Here's a full pic of the whole veggie garden

From left to right again:

Asparagus and scallions. The empty spot in front of the scallions was supposed to be spinach. But apart from two little plants that came up under the Roma tomato plant, nothing emerged. sadface.


The scallions are awesome, because no matter how tiny they are, they still smell and taste amazing. We pulled a whole bunch to thin them out and put them in some fried rice.

The Roma tomato plant and the cherry tomato plant, which is about 5 feet tall.
They've both got tomaters growing.

cherry tomato

Roma tomato

Then we have the green beans behind the tomatoes.

Next is the golden bell pepper and the lilac bell pepper. The lilac already has peppers.





Behind them the peas! Peas are great because you can harvest them so much sooner than the other veggies.

YUM

The cantaloupe is spreading nicely. We're really hoping the melons turn out tasty, because nothing beats a sweet cantaloupe.

Then we have the lettuce:



And the carrots:



And finally the cucumber, which is crawling up the a-frame nicely





And the zucchini:








So there you have it. We're excited to be getting close to the time when we'll be able to eat some of the veggies.

How are your gardens coming?

In Which We Garden

One of the things Twin and I were most looking forward to when we bought our house almost three years ago was the gardening we'd be able to do.
Twin always has a few guinea pigs running around (not counting the multitude of foster pigs we take in for the shelter) so fresh veggies was something we thought would be fun to grow. Anything we didn't eat could go to the pigs and, to a lesser extent, the dogs

Last year the garden went really well. We had far far more Roma tomatoes than we could ever use and cooked up our peas in a stir fry.
Normally I don't like carrots but the ones we pulled out tasted so good I felt bad about saying mean things about carrots in the past.

This year we wanted to make the veggie garden bigger so we could plant a larger variety of veggies.

Here's the before pic of the veggie garden, along with the kale that survived the MN winter.





The kale actually did so well it went out to seed, sending up pretty yellow flowers that reached over four feet in height before we had to take it out. The dogs enjoyed playing with the stalks.

Here's the new garden.




We replaced the wood borders (which we had originally recycled from our flower garden) and added bricks. We also made it twice as long.

Here's a breakdown of what's planted:

on the left we have asparagus, which is a two year crop so no harvesting until next fall. Then we have spinach and scallions. Beans begin right where the netting starts and runs into the next picture and the two seedlings are grape and Roma tomatoes.



Here we have the beans along the fence until the netting is bunched on the bricks. That's where the peas start. In front we have a golden bell pepper and a lilac bell pepper



The peas continue until the A frame where cucumber and zucchini are planted (the A frame is awesome. The plant will grow up the netting and the veggies will hang down, preventing them from yellowing or molding on the ground)
The seedling on the left is cantaloupe and we also have lettuce and carrots planted in the front under the A frame.

We will be planting red potatoes but the cut seed potatoes need a few more days to dry and callus before planting.

Also Twin and our mom want to plant some giant pumpkin seeds to try and grow a massive pumpkin, something a cousin of ours is really into. I'm not really against the idea, per se, I just worry that if we get a massive, state fair worthy pumpkin, it won't be as fun to deal with or move as they think.

We planted herbs in containers:


From the top, clockwise, rosemary, thyme, parsley and basil. We use these a lot in cooking. Except basil. We rarely use that (except on margherita pizza) but just really like the smell.

We lost a few houseplants over the winter (a few are still struggling) so I got a 3 more when we went to Ikea for a new bookshelf.




Also I planted the wildflower seeds I got from Summer from her contest.



I was really excited about these but that night something (most likely a squirrel) for whatever reason dug a huge hole in the dirt so I'm not sure how many will end up growing. sadface.

Then we moved onto trying to zazz up our main flower garden.



For some reason whoever planted this garden was crazy. As you can see from the front picture it looks OK, well filled out (the top tier hasn't been weeded yet). But the whole back side of the garden is empty. Nothing planted at all.

So last year we added some mat plants to try and fill it up a bit and this year we're going to try and give it some symmetry. I'm sure we'll need to add some more plants next year as well. Some day the garden will be filled with perennials and then we can add some mulch to make it look even prettier.

Mostly we added some lilies to even it out (which twin really likes) and some purple flowers (of which I can't remember the name right now) which I fancy. We're planning on hopefully adding a few more lilies this year (it was really windy when I took these pictures...)






After all of that we bought a few vine and creeper plants to grow along our fence.

Here's a clematis we got that has already bloomed along with a trumpet creeper.






We also planted a new lilac. We had planted 4 last year but one of them didn't make it through the winter.



And by "didn't make it through the winter" I mean "didn't make it through a certain someone who has a fondness for sticks and stick like bushes".