The sun was out today. I spent the bulk of the day cleaning up the gardens, removing the winter die-back and so forth. And I found some flowers!







Gonna get some dirt this week... the garden is waking up!

I should feel guilty about this. But I don't, surprisingly enough.

Caitlyn and I skipped school today. Sure, she's been coughing all week and has a sniffle in her nose. And yesterday, two of her teachers commented on it, one to me, one to her. Today she told me that one of her teachers said, "You sound sick. I'm going to stay over here, away from you." So, we had a reason. But Caitlyn's not feverish, and she's gone to school with a cough before.

No, the big reason we didn't go to school today: I didn't want to. I didn't want to deal with the train/bus routes and the nearly hour-long commute there and back again. I didn't want to drive 20 minutes. I didn't want to sit in Tully's for two and one-half hours. I didn't want to pack lunch. I just didn't want to do any of it today.

If we were going to play hooky, I suppose we could have done something significant with our day off. But we didn't do that, either. Caitlyn rested and played quietly in her room. We read a bunch of books. We made it to the library to pick up our holds and to the Post Office to send our OLPC to Haiti. Caitlyn broke a needle (plastic) working with foam beads (I don't know how) and did some puzzles and practiced some letters. I got about as much work done at home as I would have at Tully's.

But the benefit: I'm not a basketcase tonight. And that seems worth it.

Caitlyn and I walked from school to the Westlake Link station yesterday afternoon. We found cherry trees starting to bloom (one totally covered in buds so that it looked pink from a block away) and daffodils pushing their greens up. Caitlyn nearly burst with joy when we found a camillia in bloom; she's been waiting to pick up faded camillia flowers for a full year now.

And while I don't mind not being frozen whenever I step outside, I worry that this past record-breaking warm January will have unpleasant side effects later: a cold snap just as the fruit trees are setting, costing us the cherry or apple crops, or a insufficient snow pack that will have us running out of water in August. It's rather depressing to be (re)confronted with my ability to find the downside to anything, including sunshine and flowers...

In completely unrelated news, I have found a way to make fruit muffins palatable to Caitlyn, I think. She's objected to peach, strawberry or blueberry muffins in the past, something that made no sense to me since all those muffin varieties are sweet. She loves the fruit straight, and she eats carrot muffins, so what's the problem?

Lumps. Serve her a bowl of potato-corn soup with chunks of potato in it, and she won't eat it. Run it through the blender so it's lump-free, and it's delicious. So, perhaps the same principle applies to muffins. I replaced (most of) the milk in the muffin recipe with raspberry purée and (so far) the result is fruit muffins Caitlyn eats. And as a bonus, muffins made with raspberry purée are pink when you put them in the oven! The raspberry seeds get stuck in my teeth, but nothing's perfect, I guess...

Caitlyn and I ate our last honeycrisp apple yesterday. I'd bought 18 pounds of them from Jim and Carmela at the end of our local farmers' market season. The apples stayed in the refrigerator, in their box on the bottom shelf (crowding the beer, which somehow Wednesday seems to have forgiven me for) since purchase in mid October. I think we ate most of them as-is, not using them for pies or crisps, just slicing and enjoying them.

Our last apples were starting to get a little wrinkly. I'm not sure if that's the result of four months in the fridge or if four months is about the "shelf life" of the honeycrisp variety. But they were still wonderful, sliced up and eaten for lunches before school.

I believe the apples are the first thing, of all the produce I put up, we've finished. So far, so good.

I think words are superfluous sometimes.



Don't you?

I have great hopes for this stuff: Fast2Fuse, a heavyweight, double-sided fusible interfacing. I picked some up with a book of no-sew crafts for kids for Caitlyn for Christmas. The goal is a fabric craft she can do all by herself (while I'm using the sewing machine, for instance). The book comes with tons of templates to copy, cut out, and trace. Use the iron to fuse the fabric to the interfacing and make hats, bags, toys, games, mobiles, cards, boxes. Get out your glue and your sequins and embellish to your hearts' content.

A family member had a birthday this weekend, so Caitlyn and I made a card with some of the Fast2Fuse.






I think the card came out well. And I think we have a successful proof of concept. Time to turn Caitlyn loose with the stuff and see what happens.

While in the kitchen this afternoon to make dinner rolls and a batch of muffins, I discovered that the carrots were no longer happy with their storage method. Lacking a root cellar, I had scrubbed the carrots, popped them into bags and put them in the drawer in the bottom of the refrigerator. The previous batch of carrots hadn't objected to this treatment, beyond sprouting little roots and trying desperately to grow new tops. This new batch was rotting. My guess is that I had not closed the bag tightly the first time, allowing the carrots to "breathe"; these newer carrots' bag was twisted closed and tucked under.

Fortunately, I noticed this before I lost all the carrots. So, much like last year's Adventure with Saved Onions (wherein I put several pounds of onions into airtight containers only to discover that onions don't like this (a vegetable trend, perhaps?) and then spent an afternoon removing the molded parts and dicing the inner parts for a session in the dehydrator), this afternoon was spent on Project Save the Carrots. I threw the gross ones in the yard waste, scrubbed the rest, removed tops and tails and tiny rootlets, and then cooked them all.

We now have two batches of carrot muffins, two loaves of carrot bread (based on the muffin recipe - I just couldn't be bothered to make more muffins), a batch of carrot-cumin soup (thanks, Ian!) and carrots reserved for tomorrow's vegetable hot pot with biscuits. Which is probably a silly thing to have for dinner, given that we have a pile of leftover bagels from the weekend's activities and that tonight's dinner rolls were shaped in a moment of Carrot Distraction and thus are roughly the size of my arm. Maybe I'll freeze the rolls, if I can find space in the freezer around the muffins and the carrot bread.