first efforts

Vintage Christmas

When two full-fledged adults combine households, you learn stuff. For example, my beloved and I were excited to discover that both of us have some very old ornaments passed on to us by our parents. I put a dozen or so of them on a tiny tabletop tree in our dining room, where they look very cool and vintage-y.

Happy and merry to you and yours.

Orange and golden

 

The results of last night's pumpkin carving event. All in all pretty good, esp. for folks who hadn't carved a pumpkin in over two decades. The great "angry eyebrows" pumpkin on the right is courtesy of Mandy and Bengineer, who was celebrating his golden birthday yesterday. We toasted that with homemade calzones, beer, and Mandy's fabulous chocolate inchworm cake.

Orange food and crockpot season

The local eaters in this household have gone decidedly orange this week, as we officially made the transition to the farmer's market's autumnal offerings. My beloved was skeptical, but even he admitted the sweet potato quesadillas I made the other night were damn tasty (Moosewood Cooks At Home recipe here except I nuked then whipped the potatoes rather than shredding them). Last night we broke out the crockpot for maple ginger squash and glazed carrots. And this weekend there will be pumpkin carving - for displaying, not eating, but I may toast the seeds. I do love pumpkin seeds.

Things I like about my neighborhood

It's practically dark out now when I start my morning runs, so I have to force myself to think about positive things instead of being grumpy. This morning I realized how much I really like my new neighborhood. It's not that far from my old one, but just different enough to be a change. And a good one. So here's a short list, cobbled together in my brain while I slogged through this morning's run.

(1) Quieter than the old place, which was located on the not-so-busy end of a busy street.

(2) Kids of all ages doing non-organized, non-programmed, non-scheduled kid stuff with nary a minivan (or a parent, for that matter) in sight. Racing bigwheels. Jumping on pogo sticks. Screaming at the top of their lungs for no reason. Chalking the sidewalks. Sometimes they even look bored, which is awesome.

(3) Neighborhood dogs that bark, making our barky dogs not stand out so much.

(4) Nuns! A group of them lives down the street; they teach at the nearby Catholic school. They were gone at their convent all summer, so have only recently appeared in the neighborhood. My beloved, however, never seems to be around to catch a glimpse and is starting to doubt whether they exist at all. What I haven't told him is that you only see them if you are a Nice Catholic Boy or Girl; otherwise, they are INVISIBLE.

(5) The guy that sped by me on his bicycle last week and called out, with no hint of irony in his voice, "Howdy, neighbor!"

Pesto!

Spent much of my Saturday afternoon making pesto with basil from our garden. The purple might not look as spectacular as the green, but it promises to be just as tasty. And it sports the secret (well, not so secret now) ingredient of lemon rind to give it a little extra kick. A couple of these jars will go to friends as hostess gifts for various Labor Day weekend gatherings, and we'll happily eat up the rest ourselves. In addition, there's an ice cube tray full of both the purple and the green in the freezer, for when the garden is just a vague summery memory.

Discombobulation

Our household is heavy into pre-semester stuff this week. While my oratorical half is busy getting oriented and being received (two orientations and three receptions this week alone), I'm busy orienting and receiving. So we're both more than a little discombobulated. Monday morning was the first time in a long time that I've had to pull myself together to be somewhere on campus in a 9-5 kind of way. And to top it off, I had to do it looking more or less like a real, professional professorchick: big-girl clothes, makeup, blow-dried hair. Yikes! As I scrambled around doing these and other things, I realized suddenly that I don't know how to do this here. Because of our move to the new house, I don't yet have a rote, automatic, bodily script for how to Do the Things You Have to Do to Get Out of the House in the Morning. I realized a new house and a new living situation means we have to re-write that script, too. And just when I was confidently telling people, "Yes, we're all settled in..."

Still life with garden tools

When I lived in the woods we used to joke that clear-cutting was the Forest Service's idea of "forest management." Today we did our own bit of forest management as we tackled the jungle in the side yard, a sort of no-man's land between the tomato plants and the neighbors' house. In the process of raping the land, we uncovered the remnants of a landscaping plan long since gone to weed and discovered lilies of the valley trapped under ferns, weeds, and a huge crop of mint. After we dig up a bunch of battered but still good hostas, which we'll donate to a friend's newly landscaped yard, the area we cleared out will make a great vegetable garden for next summer. And in honor of my mom's irrational love of ugly prairie plants, we saved four big ones from the brush pile, "just to see what they do."

Past its prime

Hurry up, tomatoes! We're waiting!

Officially moved in

 

We finished the last few little tasks leftover from our move today, including organizing the last place in the house that still contained unopened boxes and homeless stuff: the garage. We figure that if you can park both cars in the garage, that counts as being officially moved in.

We also learned that if you leave two large metal shelves and an old, gas-guzzling lawn mower in the yard next to the street, and decorate them with a sign that says "free," they will be gone in 90 minutes or less.