family
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beyond the house
Doris, age 16, in 1926, with her Aunt Mae, left. Hey, loyal followers — just wanted to post a link to my current project. Since my Great Aunt Doris passed away in March 2011, I inherited her journals, and have since been transcribing and compiling them for posterity. Fabulous funny stuff from a rebellious teenager in the Roaring 20s, spirited entries from a stubborn college girl in the Great Depression, and delicious posts from an independent young woman arriving in San Francisco on the eve of World War II. Love, laughter, cocktails and lovers — it’s all there. I may not be posting at the Muse for a while as…
- family, Green House, House, Mr Husband, My Little Country Cottage, photos, poetry, sustainable living, work
raising the roof
or, our fate is ceiled. More work at the Green House: look, we have a ceiling! And then they (our dear friends Arturo and G) covered up that beautiful insulation with Sheetrock, and it looks like this (below), except with tape and mud over the seams; the ceiling awaits some love from a paint roller. Thanks very much to the efforts of Arturo and Guillermo, we are almost ready for — wait for it — prime time (painting joke there). That’s on the inside of the house. On the outside, all is well. All our girls came up to visit and hang at the river last weekend, and here they are on the deck with Pa.…
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boxes, bells and whistles
Every day is a challenge when you’re trying to avoid plastic. Every. Single. Day. Plastic is so ubiquitous in our lives that it’s hard to really see it all — it attaches itself to products like static cling, and is almost as hard to get rid of. At the beginning of the month I took everything plastic-bag-like back to the grocery store bin for recycling (these are bins near the front door of most grocery stores, where you can recycle your plastic grocery bags). I put other plastic bags in with the grocery bags — from other stores, plus other types of plastic wrap, baggies, etc. I figure I can…
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green guilt, green quilt
The book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, has been recommended to me a couple of times and I wanted to offer it in case anyone else wants to read it. It’s on my request list at the library; I’ll post a review when I have read it. Yesterday was a hot one — hot and smoggy, so they declared it a Spare the Air Day: don’t drive, don’t BBQ, don’t have wood fires, and try to keep energy use low. But I was in my car, driving up the highway to meet the roofer at our soon-to-be house, and man, it was really and truly hot on the road and smoggy in…
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winning
Here are a couple of wins for the record. 1) The Sunday newspaper came with no plastic wrap, per my instructions. (I forgot to mention it earlier in the week.) 2) I cooked a lot today — all of it without Teflon or the plastic utensils you need to use to avoid scratching the finish. In fact, I took all the plastic spoons, spatulas and sporks out of the drawer and all of the Teflon-coated pans, pots, cookie sheets and muffin tins out of the cabinet, and they are all ready to donate. My family is going to hate me. 3) The 7th-grade picnic went off without a hitch. I wrote a…
