Mid-winter Trip, 2012

Steve and I recently spent a long weekend trip in the Charlottesville area. We ditched Ally and the dog at Grandma's in Roanoke and immediately celebrated our new childless freedom with french fries at McDonald's.

(Yeah, we don't get out much. We're working on it.)

During our trip we visited James Madison's home Montpelier. There's a walled formal garden on the estate that was renovated in the early 1900s by Annie du Pont, after the duPont family purchased the property in 1901. The garden is beautifully landscaped with sweeping beds, boxwood hedges, symmetrical layout, and marble urns and statuary.

The brick walls surrounding the garden, with the horse stable beyond it.

I'm not a big fan of formal gardens, but I do find them impressive in terms of the landscaping and the effort it takes to maintain all that symmetry. 

Being the dead of winter, there weren't many plants to look at beyond the boxwoods and some other evergreens, but the statuary was impressive.

I'd like to have a pair of these urns, but they're not something you can just pick up at the local garden center.

And then it hit me....we have a pair of matching almond colored toilets that Steve took out of our house. I've been waiting to find the perfect project to use them in this summer! I was thinking about filling them with water and adding some goldfish for a water feature, but now I think I'll fill the bowls and tanks with potting soil and putting in some plants instead. I could have a tall, arching daylilies in the tanks with some nasturtiums spilling out of the bowl. Or maybe a mounding clump of coreopsis in the bowl and some sweet potato vine in the upper tank. The possibilities are endless!

The hard part will be deciding to position the toilets at either side of the entrance to our driveway, or flanking the steps to the gazebo.

The Thick and Thin

It's the dead of winter and I am so tired of wearing heavy corduroy, thick fleece, and multiple layers of clothes. I long for that first day of spring when I can wear just a long sleeve t-shirt and not freeze in it. I hate winter's dry air, the constant static electricity, the flaking skin, and the relentless chill in the air. I cannot wait to chuck my winter clothes back in the closet and revel in short sleeves, lighter weight fabrics, and brighter colors.

Can I get some heat and humidity, y'all?

To complicate things, I started an exercise program that last week of December. We have an elliptical machine in our basement and I've been doing 2-3 miles on it about 4 days a week. I'm astonished that I've logged over 40 miles on the thing over the past month. In the grand scheme of exercising, this really isn't that big of an accomplishment. I have friends who regularly run 10 miles or bike 80 miles in one day, far outdistancing my paltry achievement of 40 miles in a month. But those 40 miles are mine, and it's 40 miles I didn't get the previous month. Or the month before that, or the month before that.

I can't say that I've actually lost weight, but some of my pants don't fit my waist very well now. There's a lot of extra material gapping around there and I've got to cinch them in with a belt. Don't get me wrong, I'm not whining about needing a smaller pant size. It's just making my dissatisfaction with my winter clothes all that worse. I'm not about to go shopping for new winter pants when the last thing I really want right now is more winter pants.

I'll just fold the biggest pants up and stash them on a shelf in my closet and use a belt with the smaller ones for now. And that has me wondering about why women do this stashing of their "fat" pants. You would think that we would chuck those bigger sizes out the door as soon as we could, because who really wants to hold onto a reminder of being overweight? But no, we dutifully keep them in the back of the closet just in case we gain weight again and need those bigger sizes once more. Talk about a self-defeating strategy. We're setting ourselves up to fail and we remind ourselves of this each and every time we spy those fat pants hanging out in the back of the closet. And what if we do gain more weight and need a larger size again? Putting on a worn pair of big old jeans certainly isn't going to be a boost to your self esteem. Go out and buy a new pair.

I suppose if you lost a significant amount of weight you might keep something as a reminder of how much weight you've lost. We've all seen the ads for the woman swimming in a pair of humungous jeans, grinning like a hyena and holding out the waistband a half foot from her belly button to show how much weight she's lost. I can see myself doing that if I ever lost that much weight. And keeping a pair or two of nice looking, slightly larger sized pants to wear after bingeing at Christmas or on vacation is practical and makes sense to me, too. But keeping a whole stack of big pants, or worse, an entire fat wardrobe? No, there's no sense in doing that. At that point the visual reminder of those old clothes goes from a peppy, "Hey, look how much weight I lost!" to a relentless, depressing chant of, "You might get fat again...you're gonna get fat again." If you need a strong visual reminder to motivate you to lose more weight, just tape a picture of yourself in your larger days to the inside of the closet door. You'll get the same effect AND you can still use all that precious shelf space in your closet.

So now you might ask me why I'm holding on to those larger winter pants. It's because I want to see how many pairs of pants I can stack up there on the shelf by the end of winter before donating them to a thrift store. And then I'll go through my old spring clothes and see how many of those still fit well before I go buy myself a new spring outfit. With glee.

Mr. Stinkbug's Winter Vacation

On Tuesday morning Ally was sitting at the dining room table eating breakfast when she pointed out a dead bug on the floor beside the door leading to our back deck. It was a brown marmorated stink bug, a newly arrived pest species in Virginia. Over the past couple of years populations of these stink bugs have built up to where they spend all summer feasting on your tomatoes and other garden produce before coming inside your house to stay all winter with you. They're a lot like Cousin Eddie in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation in this respect. This particular specimen was on its back in the classic folded leg yoga posture that announces, "I'm a dead bug." However, when I picked the stink bug up I noticed that one of its legs and antenna were still twitching. Figuring that the little bugger was on its way out, I decided to toss it in the compost container so it could at least fertilize the tomatoes this summer after sucking out the juice of my tomatoes all last summer.

I'm a dedicated composter. I don't maintain my compost pile in the most efficient manner, but I do put every possible scrap of organic material in it that I can. Fruit peels and cores, egg shells, coffee grinds and their filters, old dry bread, vegetable peelings, even the paper mache cartons for my eggs get torn up and tossed into the compost, along with any grass clippings or mulched leaves from the yard. I don't add any dairy or meat products as I don't want to attract any more varmints out of the woods than we already get, but I've been known to toss shrimp tails and the occasional fish skeleton in there, too. I'm always amazed at how much biodegradable material we, a family of three plus a small dog, can generate in a week. I like the idea of all this stuff going into my compost pile where it will eventually break down and nurture my garden instead of merely filling up another spot in a landfill for all of eternity.

The only problem is that after making dinner in the winter, I'm not motivated to run out in the cold and dark to dump that day's offering on the compost heap over by the woods. So I keep my compost fodder in an old red plastic Folger's coffee container. I'm sure the blue plastic Maxwell House containers work just as well, but ours is from Folger's because that's the kind of coffee we prefer. I just keep it on the kitchen counter and add scraps to it throughout the day. I've used this type of container as a temporary compost holder for years and I have never had a problem with any type of smell coming from the container as long as the lid is on securely. Sure, they get a little worn looking after a while and someone unfamiliar with my composting habits might get a nasty shock if he's looking for ground coffee for the coffee maker, but they work great, they're easy to clean, and better yet, they're free after you use up all the coffee. When they get too worn looking you can just rinse them out and put them in the recycling bin. Not a bad deal, especially compared to buying a specialty "composting pail" that can easily cost $30.00 from a gardening supply catalog.

But because I add so much material to the old coffee container each day, it fills up after a couple of days and I still don't want to run out to the compost pile to empty it due to the winter weather. So I put the full container to the side and start up another one using an empty container. Usually it's another coffee container, but this week I had a plastic container that had previously held spring lettuce mix. It's a nice size, but I don't typically use a container like this as it's clear plastic and not everyone enjoys seeing compost material in a pre-rotting (or worse) stage. But that's what I was using when I tossed Mr. Moribund Stinkbug in there.

Imagine my surprise Tuesday afternoon when I opened the container to add an apple core and found Mr. Stinkbug alive and well, walking over Monday's coffee grinds. Apparently the extra humidity and warmth of the compost container was just what he needed to perk himself up. I left him there figuring it was just a minor reprieve from the inevitable. When I opened the container on Wednesday to add more coffee grinds, Mr. Stinkbug was jauntily sitting on the apple core, sucking out some juice and clearly having a good time. He had found himself the stinkbug equivalent of a mid-winter paradise, much in the same way I long to drop everything right now and spend the weekend on St. John's in the Caribbean with a cool fruity drink in my hand and my toes in the warm white sands. And I've left him there to enjoy it as long as he can. Eventually the wind will stop howling and the snow flurries will cease and I'll take all the full containers out to the compost pile. It's possible that Mr. Stinkbug can bury himself down in the leave mulch to ride out the rest of the winter despite the freezing temperatures. Even though he's nothing but a pest and they reproduce by the gazillions in the warm months, I can't bring myself to dispatch another fellow soul hunkering down to make it through another round of bitter temperatures and freezing wind this January.

However, I won't hesitate to smush him or any of his kin this summer when I find them on my tomatoes. Winter compassion officially ends as soon as the temperatures rise above freezing.

And now it's time for my mid-winter breakdown

It's the middle of winter now, my least favorite time of the year. The dead of winter, so to speak. Emphasis on the dead part. The holidays are long gone, except for a few stale cookies left on the kitchen counter and an infinite number of Christmas tree needles scattered about the house. It's cold and dark and I'm tired of being cold and dark. My soul seems to wither just a little bit more each time I hear the heat kick on.

I'd like to crawl into a burrow and hibernate for a couple of months like a groundhog. That might actually be a blessing for all of us as I am cranky these days. Don't tell me there's no such thing as seasonal affective disorder as I am the poster child for it. I firmly believe that at some point in our lives every single one of us could easily be diagnosed as having some kind of mental illness, and right now is my personal winter of discontent. There's an unread copy of Cormac McCarthy's utterly bleak novel The Road sitting on my bookshelf and there is no way in hell that I will even pick it up spring shows up sometime in April. I simply don't think I could stand that much postapocalyptic devastation right now. Instead, I'm going to start looking at all those seed catalogs and drool over the pretty pictures of flowers and vegetables. Right after I come out of my burrow sometime in late February, that is.

Blog? What blog?

It's the first week of the new year and I'm still trying to sweep up needles from the Christmas tree, put away new toys, and otherwise get life back to normal. Or what passes for normal for us. Blog entries may be sparse until I can get ourselves organized and restarted. I'll leave you with a picture of my dahlia wind spinner and our house with a fresh blanket of Christmas snow. We've had a warm spell where the temperatures have risen to the upper 30s (a veritable heat wave!) so most of our Christmas snow has melted. It was a gorgeous snow fall, but I'm glad to see the bare ground again as it seems more appropriate for a fresh start to the new year.

Nearly Wordless Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2010

Jeeze it's cold.

Today I'm going to share a series of pictures I took in early November when the first couple of heavy frosts hit us. Back when frost and ice crystals seemed novel and pretty. Back when there were still some leaves on the trees. When I could easily spend a half hour outside before breakfast because the wind chill wasn't -5 and the sun came up before 7:30 am.

Sigh. I'm going to go take a hot shower and then climb into several layers of fleece now.

Oscar in a Pink Snuggie

Oscar is a miniature short haired dachshund. She's practically nekkid on some places on her body. This means she gets cold and likes to burrow into blankets, dirty laundry, jackets, or anything else on the floor that she can wriggle into to stay warm once the temperature starts to drop. Once, when she was a puppy, she met me at the door wearing a pair of Steve's flannel lounge pants. She had her nose stuck out of the fly and each leg trailed behind her like a pair of tentacles. She's also been known to worm her way down inside the sleeve of a sweatshirt or the leg of a pair of sweatpants. Alas, it's a lot harder for her to do that now that she's bigger.

I don't typically dress my dog up but I have been known to buy her a sweater if I thought 1) it would keep her warm and 2) it would actually stay on her. Like the stereotyped dachshund, Oscar is built like a hot dog with stubby legs. The length of her legs makes it easy for her to step out of the arm holes and neck of most doggie sweaters, so she usually just "walks" out of any sweater I've bought her.

Yesterday I found a fleece Snuggie For Dogs! at the thrift store, size small in shocking bright pink. Knowing full well that this was probably not going to work on a dachshund, I paid my 50 cents down and brought it home.

Oscar was less than enthusiastic about my new purchase for her.

She walked out of it in about two minutes. I think I could add a few strips of hook-and-loop tape to secure it better around her body, but I'm not sure it's really worth the effort. For starters, the length of the fleece barely covers her chest and leaves the rest of her back and belly exposed to the elements. Those are critical heat loss areas for a dachshund. I'd probably be better off just making one myself with extra length and closure ties for Oscar's um, unique build. Plus I can use whatever color fleece I want. Preferably something not Pepto-Bismal pink.

Just take the picture and be done with it, Mom. And for heaven's sake, get me out of this thing!

Snow Doggie

There's something under the snow!



Maybe if I dig a little....



Maybe if I dig deeper....



Later, the final score was set at Oscar 1, pine vole 0.

Wordless Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010

Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez!

So I honestly thought that Mardi Gras was last Tuesday, not today. That's a fair indication of how much I'd like to wrap up February and get on with March now, thankyouverymuch. February hasn't been much more than snow, ice, cold temperatures, and cabin fever. I was telling my mom about how much snow still remains in our yard and she asked if I'd seen any daffodils yet. I don't think we're going to see any spring flowers any time soon, not unless they come equipped with a miniature flame thrower to blast through the 18-24 inches of snow and ice still on the ground here. And we got another snow squall yesterday, which thankfully "refreshed" the area of the yard we've stamped down so that our dog has had a place to use the bathroom for the last two weeks but didn't accumulate so much that our driveway returned to its previous status of a luge run.

Mom lives in Tidewater, so the concept of this much snow on the ground is completely foreign to her. Remarkably Poquoson has had two snow storms with actual snow accumulation on the ground already this year, and there's a chance that they may get even a third snow shower this week. That's a harsh winter for that part of the state, but none of the snow lasts very long. Unlike where I live, where snow that fell in mid-January is slowly compacting into a glacier under the weight of all the snow that has fallen since then. I think I heard yetis yowling in the yard Saturday night.

I may be exaggerating a little here. I believe that's one of the symptoms of cabin fever.

At any rate, I was very surprised this morning to hear that Mardi Gras is today, not last Tuesday. Some of the participants are complaining about how cool the weather has been in New Orleans the past couple of days, even dipping down to 34 degrees one night. We've had unending weeks where 34 degrees would have been a welcomed high temperature, but I'm done complaining about the weather. For today.

At least the fact that Mardi Gras is today gives me a fantastic excuse for polishing off the rest of those cheesecake bars in the fridge. Laissez les bon temps roulez, let the good times roll! Lent begins tomorrow, and while I don't observe Lent, I'd like to participate by giving up winter. Please take it away now.

Stupid Groundhog

So, as you may have heard already, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning in Pennsylvania, signifying that we have another six weeks of winter before spring arrives. And it's been snowing here going on three hours now. Gah! I'd like to shoot the groundhog and make brunswick stew out of him....at least the stew would help keep me warm.

It's been a long, hard winter so far and February is usually the hardest month. I find myself turning up the hot water in my shower and craving salsas and hot sauce. Soon I'll be showering in the hot sauce. I'd gladly take a week or two of August's heat and humidity right now, just for the novelty of it. Of course I know that I'll be wistful for all of this snow and sleet come August after several months of heat and humidity, but I'm willing to deal with that later.

Now is the winter of our discontent

Ah, snow. You were such a novelty when you fell in late December. Never before had I seen 16 inches of fluffy white snow fall in Virginia. I welcomed your fresh mantle for a white Christmas. We were amazed that you were still with us at the end of the year.

Now, weeks later, I simply loath you. You're a guest who has outstayed his welcome and I can't stand to see your filthy, rotten presence anymore. I'd rather have a bare landscape of browns and grays than the stained, gray icy crust peppered with gravel that continues to lay around here. I long for a break in the weather that will allow the temperatures to climb into the 40s and finally melt this slush away.

The snow and ice and the continual subfreezing temperatures has left me in a funk. I am the poster child for seasonal affective disorder. The holidays are a distant memory and spring is still far, far away. I'm tired of hearing the wind howl outside the window. I hate having to go outside in 20 degree weather. The skin on my hands is dry and cracked. I hate the static electricity that comes from bone dry air and the wool or fleece sweaters I can't do without. I long for fresh air in the house, greenery outside, and birdsong in the mornings. I've seriously contemplated going to bed for a couple of months until spring returns. I figure with any luck I'd lose twenty pounds and Ally might be potty-trained by the time I wake up.

Hello, November?

Seems like I just greeted October yesterday and now it's November. November in all its "I don't want to see another miniature candy bar for awhile and no kidding, winter is definitely on its way" glory. November with its bare trees, frosty mornings, cold rains, and gloomy skies. November with its warm fires, flannel pajamas, and much good food to be eaten. Early November gives you just enough time to finish up the leftover Halloween candy before plunging headlong into the winter holiday season. Late November barrels past you in a rush.

This year I want to make the effort to truly enjoy the change into winter, the holiday season, and the end of the year. I have much to be thankful for but rarely take the time to appreciate it the way I should. This year we'll see the holiday season through the eyes of our two-year-old daughter, and I'm hoping she'll remind me of all the magic and fun this season really holds for us.