For most of my adult life I’ve never thought much of Valentine’s Day. I don’t pine for a dozen red roses, Z and I don’t do romantic dinners, and both of us breeze past the displays of boxed candies at the store. Instead,February 14th marks the one day out of the year when we indulge in…
I’m in the midst of ribbing purgatory. The good news is I’m nearly through (three rows left to go). The bad news is it took me all week to get to this point, and I’m only just starting an adult sized sweater that requires 250+ stitches per row. The series of events that led me…
One of my greatest domestic failures is my inability to organize. I’ve probably mentioned this shortcoming elsewhere on the blog, but given the current state of my house, it bears mentioning again. Right now I am in the avoidance phase, willing myself to forget the explosion of fabric and yarn and notions that have overtaken…
We’re in the middle of a cold snap here. Not as severe as the polar vortex that gripped most of the states earlier this month, but still, the weather is not ideal for outdoor adventures, or really, anything that requires more than a few minutes of exposure to the elements. It’s a good thing I…
On weekdays I can usually keep my coffee intake to a reasonable level. One cup, maybe two, and I’m ready to begin my day. But on weekends I slip back into my caffeine addict ways. The siren song of the French Press compels me to casually ask Z if he was planning on boiling more…
My senior year of college I was elected to head the campus writers’ union. Essentially, this put me in charge of planning, or assigning the job of planning, student readings and a couple of parties. I learned two things that year: I enjoyed hosting events that had an air of seriousness but were actually excuses…
My love affair with peanut butter probably began when I was a toddler and it has not waned. I love it so much I can almost count my years in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I could eat, uncomplaining, for lunch, dinner, breakfast, and desert. What keeps me from a three-meals-a-day peanut butter sandwich…
I didn’t acquire a taste for legumes until relatively recently. When I was a kid I refused to touch garbanzo beans, and whenever my Mom made chili, I picked all the red kidney beans from my bowl before I deemed it safe for eating. I’d never even heard of lentils and all the legumes we…
I finally caved and added a mini muffin pan to my bakeware collection. I held out for a long time because I never understood the mini muffin’s utility. The “gone-in-two-bites” size, while cute, didn’t strike me as particularly practical. And honestly, I’d still rather gobble down a full-sized muffin instead of trying to approximate its…
The inside of my oven has seen a few too many batches of cupcakes this month, so I decided to let it rest this weekend. But this being the season of sweets and all, I couldn’t let the weekend pass without a homemade confection to share with my little family. So I turned to the…