Happy 4th of July!

In the spirit of that special transatlantic relationship, we have our own way of celebrating the Fourth. Have a happy one!

I’m still here…

Good golly, life has gotten so busy these last few weeks that I haven’t blogged in ages. Visits from friends from the UK. End of the school year for three kids (with multiple award ceremonies, graduations, performances, etc.). Work work work (it never stops, does it?). Gardening (while the warm weather lasts–this is a land of long winters, after all…). Very little knitting, though there has been some needle felting (pics of pumpkins soon to come). I’m alive, I’m here, I’m just not a good blogger at the moment. More soon!

two years ago

Happy anniversary, husband!

sunny day…indoors

It’s been a glorious day outside, and I (foolishly?) spent the whole day indoors…shopping.

You see, I’ve been planning a big shopping trip for months. After having lived for years in the Boston area, where I could get anything I needed almost any time, it’s been quite an adjustment living here in the Finger Lakes. Stores don’t stay open until 9pm, and sometimes aren’t open on Sundays. They ahve very limited selections, and most of the stores I’m used to having around the corner are now more than an hour’s drive away.

So, in desperate need of clothes and makeup, I headed to a giant mall outside Rochester. Wouldn’t it just figure that after more than a week of cold rainy weather, this would be a glorious sunny day? But this was my window of opportunity–both kids were out of the house until 5pm, so if I wanted to shop in peaceful silence (as opposed to shopping with the continual groans of a 3- and 6-year-old, I had to go today. I wore myself out shopping and came home with two pairs of jeans and one cotton sweater. How disappointing! Maybe I should just bite the bullet and schedule a few shopping trips to Boston or to NYC a year. I’m not a fashion snob–far from it–but it just seems like all the clothes around here are really dowdy or suitable only for teenagers. That’s just not what I need at a time of life when I’m desperately trying to avoid middle-aged-dowdiness–and have no desire whatsoever to look like a teenager…

Oh well. Maybe I’ll just have to knit a new wardrobe. (I can hear you laughing already–I know there hasn’t been much progress on the knitting front for ages!)

Jocelyn has a meme on her site and rather than tag others to do the meme, she asked for volunteers. So here goes!

The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

1. What was I doing 10 years ago?
I was living in Austin, Texas, totally miserable with my job, and secretly applying for jobs anywhere north of the Mason-Dixon line. (I was seeking cooler weather and liberal-minded folks.)

2. What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):
Get the boys up, dressed, fed, and ready for school; figure out how to get to the mall near Rochester; drive to the mall; buy gorgeous clothes that make me look younger, thinner, and fabulous; check the garden for progress; relax.

3. Snacks I enjoy:Good cheese, fresh-baked bread (whenever I can get it!), french fries, strawberries

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Pay off debt. Fully fund all the kids’ college accounts. Have my mom’s bills all sent to me. Pay cash for my sister’s chemotherapy so she can tell the insurance companies to f*ck off. Set up a scholarship at my alma mater for history students, who always have to scramble for every penny. Fund the local Teen Center so they won’t have to close in October if they can’t find other funding.

5. Places I have lived:
North Texas; Washington, DC; Graz, Austria; High Wycombe, UK; North Carolina; suburban Boston; Finger Lakes, NY

6. Jobs I have had:
Fettler, fast-food restaurant worker (2 days!), maid, kindergarten assistant, baker’s assistant, office assistant, teaching assistant, marketing assistant, editorial assistant, editor at various levels, and now digital content developer

I just can’t bring myself to impose on anyone’s work load, so I’ll leave this meme here rather than tag anyone.

Have a happy and safe weekend!

Feels like fall, looks like fall…

Global warming? Not here in this corner of the Finger Lakes. It’s still a bone-chilling damp 50 degrees outside. Half of me is delighted, because of course I can still wear my sweaters, but the gardener in me is frustrated by the coolness. How will I ever get tomatoes with weather like this? How will my beans grow? How will Aidan’s pumpkin plant grow?

Well, if the pumpkin plant doesn’t make it, here’s an alternative that arrived in the mail today. A needle-felted pumpkin kit from Patternworks!

This kit should be enough to make two medium pumpkins or a bunch of little ones. I love these colors! This should be a fun thing to do on these long chilly evenings. (But it still doesn’t make up for the lack of springtime around here…)

Happy Mother’s Day

What a delightful Mother’s Day this has been! I spent the morning hours perusing over the Sunday New York Times (which is finally coming regularly to our part of rural New York State, after I had to threaten the poor customer service clerk with canceling my subscription unless they could manage to actually deliver this paper for at least two Sundays in a row). I also spent a lovely hour or two in the garden, planting my peony, digging the southwest flower bed, and helping my 6-year-old plant the pumpkin plant that he’d started in kindergarten.

Then it was a fiber afternoon!

Several fiber farms in this corner of the Finger Lakes had open houses (open farms?) this weekend. We visited two of them: Sheepish Grin Farm in Lodi, and Bear Farm in Burdett. What fun!

First, the newborn lambs at Sheepish Grin. I got to hold this baby lamb, who was only born yesterday! Her mum wasn’t very happy about it, but her people didn’t seem to mind.

We met the other sheep and the guard llama, and had a very pleasant tour of this lovely small farm by a very precocious young sheep farmer (all of about 10 years old).

Next we traveled to Bear Farm. Carole and Mark Hatch made us very welcome at their faarm, showing us their new lambs too.

Not only did they have adorable baby lambs for us to ooh and ahh over, but they also had yarn. Lots of yarn. Lovely colors, and such reasonable prices. I couldn’t resist a little stash-building exercise while my kids were running up and down the hill (and up and down and up once more).

What will this become? Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know..

Not only did they have lovely yarns, but they also sell their own honey. My husband bought some (since he’s not a fiber-fiend, though he will indulge me), and I have to say, I haven’t had such lovely, sweet, clean and clear honey ever! It was wonderful. However, Carole explained that this may be the last year they produce honey. They lost their entire bee colony last year to colony collapse disorder, and they had to replenish the colony this year. She said, though, that it’s too expensive to continue doing so, so if the colony doesn’t make it, that might be the end of their honey production. Get some while you can.

land of palm trees

I’m back from a 4-day trip to the Bay Area (Palo Alto, to be exact) in sunny California. Okay, so it wasn’t so sunny, but there were palm trees and it was full-on spring while I was there. I was trapped under fluorescent lights most of the time, but I did have a little time to visit the Elizabeth Gamble Garden. Gorgeous! Check out my garden blog for the pictures. Spring won’t be happening in my neck of the woods for another couple of weeks, so I basked in the glory of the delphiniums and poppies and irises and wisteria and….

Earth Day on the road

I’m on a business trip to northern California today, and my whole world has been turned upside down. I got up at 4:00 in the morning—4:00!! And that was after my (beautiful adorable pesty) youngest son got up twice in the middle of the night because he wanted to watch Sponge Bob (curse that Nickelodeon!!). Flew to Philadelphia, ran across the Philly airport to make my connection in record time, then flew hours and hours to San Francisco (realizing all the while just how massive this country actually is.) Check into the hotel by noon (insecurity made me do it—I’m always afraid they’ll give my room away if I don’t get there in time.) Then off to the new office (complete with palm trees!) …

… to meet and greet for a couple of hours until I collapsed in a jet-lagged heap in my hotel:

But I discovered Whole Foods on the way back to the hotel.

Oh, how I’ve missed Whole Foods since we moved away from Boston. Whole Foods has a special place in my heart, since its early hippie days in Austin, Texas, to the time now when it seems to take over the whole of the green universe.

I got some pretty amazing enchiladas there for dinner tonight. Yes indeed, Tracy is a happy girl.

Oh, but about Earth Day. I realized it was Earth Day as I was hurtling down the 101 on the way from the San Francisco Airport heading toward Palo Alto. And then I realized that the rental car I was driving was a Prius. Was this a sign from the universe?????

My carbon footprint is ever so much smaller today. Hurrah!!

Obligatory kitty picture

This is Alec.

Also known as “Baby Cat.” Baby Cat is no baby—he’s a whopping 16 years old this year. You’d never know it, though, because he is as sprightly as a kitten sometimes.

There is something just so beautiful about a cat in the window. Why is that? Are we touched by the poignancy of watching an indoor cat look at the outdoors that he cannot reach? Or do cats and windows simply express the essence of “home” and make us feel cozy?

A warm welcome to a new job

Today, I started a new job. I’m telecommuting to a company in northern California from my office in upstate New York. What an adjustment it will be to work with coworkers three time zones away! But they made sure to make me feel very welcome my first day on the job. Look what appeared at my door!

(Okay, please excuse the chaos on my desk. I am still working in temporary digs while my office is under renovation. Well, to be honest, the chaos has nothing to do with my office. It’s me—I’m a messy-desk kind of person…)

I feel so lucky to have landed where I am! A little more than two months ago, I was spat out by a major publishing corporation. Yes, yes, I know I tried to philosophize about corporate mergers and impersonal decisions and all that, but in the end, I still felt spat out…

Anyway, this time around, unemployment has been an interesting ride. From the very beginning, I had companies approaching me—courting me and trying their hardest to get me to join their staffs. I had multiple offers, and this time I was able to choose where I wanted to go, rather than go by default to whichever company made me an offer.

And now, I’m feeling really re-energized about my career. For years, I’ve had a basic philosophical problem with the way that mainstream educational publishers (once referred to as the Big Four, now reduced to the Big Three) have to do business. Those companies are so massive that they have to win gigantic shares of the market in order to make a reasonable profit on their investments. They have to make sure that their approaches appeal to the widest possible audience.

But my personal philosophy of education doesn’t fit with that model. I’ve always believed that I was a bit of a fish out of water—that my beliefs in the way kids should be educated were somehow elitist or impractical or simply out of step. But no more. I have found a company whose philosophy matches my own. This is going to be fun!