Rainy Days and Mondays

It's fall. Fally fall in full force.  We've had several rainy days in a row, and the air has that cool dampness to it that collects itself on soggy leaves.  It's funny how so recently the air was filled with green, swaying hotness.  Now, a walk in the park means a fine snow of colorful leaves.  It smells like oak outside, and a wet leaf got stuck under my windshield wiper while I was driving today.  Every time it would be pushed across the windshield, a slimy autumnal streak would follow.

The front steps at our house on a rainy fall day.

I was out because I ordered a shawl from Free People for winter.  Our house gets super cold in the winter and sitting around in heavy sweatshirts sometimes makes me feel like I'm stuck in a permanent sick day (but one where I still have to work!), so I wanted something that looks nice and makes me feel like I got dressed that would also keep me warm.  I knew it had arrived at the post office over the weekend, so I headed out to get it.  After that I drove over to a small fresh market where I bought some fruits and vegetables for the week.

While I was driving, I had a thought: this is peaceful and nice.  Something about that thought kind of hit me like a ton of bricks.  So recently and so many times, rainy days really got me down (just like the song says...).  The mixture of soggy and cold is bound to infiltrate any bubble of happiness that could exist around someone.  Particularly when you're walking around in it (New York City, I'm looking at you...!).  Sure, I was in a car, so it was easier for me to avoid that common bone-chilled feeling.  But I don't know.  There was just something about the leaves and the trees and whatever contentedness has been brewing within me over this past year here in Vermont that just let me have no anger or discontentment or annoyance toward the rain.  I just thought, "Oh, it's rainy today."  That's really never happened to me before, that I can think of.  I guess I just wonder what it means, and I hope that it'll last.

In other news, we got a garbage can!  It has the best name/label ever:

Our bear-proof garbage can label.

I mean really, why would a barracuda ever be attacking a bear?  And the bear has such a hilarious expression on his face.  Is he scared of that barracuda?  Did he really not notice the blue sea creature circling him as he went to touch that garbage can?  And didn't he notice that the garbage can he's trying to get into also has a Bearicuda Bin label on it?  There was no way he was getting away with this!  Learn something, bears!

Giant Turkeys

Tomorrow may be the official start of autumn, but there was something very autumnal about the way we woke up this morning.  There we were, asleep, and suddenly Murgy starts growling.  This is a serious but low-so-as-not-to-cause-too-much-alarm growl that only occurs when something out of the ordinary is happening (bears, snow, the fireplace turning itself on once before we knew how that worked).  Tired, I told her to "shhh" because I myself didn't hear anything odd.

Awake, Garret left to go make some coffee.  As soon as he was gone, Murgy hopped up by the window on his side of the bed and started barking.  I always like to be right, even with the dog, so I promptly hopped up by the window so that I could say, "See, there's nothing there!".  However, there was something there: five giant turkeys!

I mean GIANT.  I did not take a picture, which I'm kind of proud of myself for.  Maybe I'm learning to just "live" life a little more and not see everything as a potential blog post (er... I say as I... post about it in my blog).  Anyway, we went downstairs to get a better look out of the window in my office/the guest room.  These things were HUGE!  I am telling you, they were like, the size of a sheep.  Garret said, "They're like DINOSAURS!".  (I think he was referring to the fact that they were so out-of-place large that they seemed prehistoric.  They weren't roaring or anything.)

Happy Fall!

Tomorrow Tracy is headed out to attend the Vermont Wine & Harvest Festival with us.  We were all set to go last year but it got cancelled because of Irene, so we're excited to finally have our wine festival date one year later.  On a separate little note, I find it pretty *awesome* that The Vermont Wine & Harvest Festival's web address is simply "thevermontfestival.com".  I guess the Wine & Harvest Festival is THE festival.  Be there or be square, VT!

In other news, we still don't have a garbage can.  A bear ate ours two months ago and since then we've been trying to get a new one... but we need a special one, because it has to be bear proof (that's right: lesson learned, bears!).  Our landlord ordered us one a million years ago, but then there was a fire in the bear-proof garbage can factory (???) and then something else happened (???) and we still have yet to see the arrival of this so-called garbage can.  Maybe some day...

It stands to reason that there's bears running that bear-proof garbage can factory, though, and they're just trying to keep us from getting a can in the hopes that they'll get more of our pic-a-nic baskets.

One Year!

Wow, August flew by!  As summer always does, it seemed race to a finish.  And before you know it, here we are: August 31st.

August 31st is actually the one-year anniversary of my last day at my job in Brooklyn.  I can't believe a whole year has passed!  Though I miss the people I worked with back in Brooklyn, I feel really good about where I am as a writer and an artist these days.

Writing means I spend a lot of time alone in my new office, which of course is my house.  On this anniversary of leaving my cool (populated) Brooklyn office and taking up in my solitary little cabin, I thought I'd share a few pictures of the details of my new space.

I've taken to shutting off my computer for hour increments and using notebooks to write.
There's no Facebook to click on in notebooks! I feel like being away from the computer
really lets me dig into whatever thought I'm chasing.

When I'm using my desk for notebook writing, my computer hangs out on an old diner chair
I got in Brooklyn, which sits next to my desk.  I also keep a calendar on there - it's hand-carved
prints by a Vermont artist.

                   

I have always been really into to-do lists, and I realized recently that being able to see
all of the tasks I have for my various pursuits as once helps me organize myself.
I have personal writing, client writing, blog writing, and wedding planning tasks on here.
Oh, and a few pictures of Murgy!

Hanging above my desk are several photos my dad took in college. I love this one of my mom.

I call these guys "Blocky and Buddha".  Buddha's actually on a
necklace.  I bought these at 'Gallery in The Woods' in Brattleboro.
When I bought them, the woman at the front said that the two artists
are actually best friends and they'd be excited that their art was bought
together.  It got me thinking about all of my artists friends that inspire me,
and about how art is so collaborative.  Blocky sits on my desk as a reminder.

Most days I enjoy working outside for at least a bit.  Garret and I got this purple chair for free on the side
of a road.  It's really comfortable and weird and I love it.  Next to it is an old kitchen chair,
a box full of my cards, pens & pencils, and an awesome owl painting our friends Evan & Crystal gave us.

Evan and Crystal got this owl painting while they were living in Montana, and then it hung in their
home in Atlanta for a while.  They gave it to us as a housewarming gift for our new home here.
I love it. 

Some plants that sit on a little wooden table in the "outdoor office".

Though I usually need to write in complete silence, the windchime outside is soothing and beautiful.
I got this for Garret for his birthday. His house in Buffalo was next to a house with windchimes, and the sound
of them became somewhat of a reminder of home for both of us. So, we got one in this home, too.

Hope you enjoyed a few of the details of my "office"!

honestly though, (bears).

So, the whole bears-in-the-yard thing has been a real emotional roller coaster. You can glean all of this by psychoanalyzing my tone in past posts (I mean, if you want...?) but I've gone through a real process with my enthusiasm/non-enthusiasm for these bears. It's like its own several-step grieving process. 

 1. Excitement! Garbage has been strewn all over the driveway and I am frankly giddy over it (I am also not the one who has to clean up the garbage. Thanks, Garret!) and I am oddly defensive when anyone suggests that since I did not see a bear throw the garbage everywhere, it could technically be something else.  I'm all like, "Um, no, it's totally a bear..."  

2.  Mystified!  When one night we are sitting on our deck and the bear actually ambles up to the driveway, silently, I am wide-eyed and amazed to be seeing such a giant, awesome creature.  (I am also a little like "HAH! Told you so, naysayers!") 

3.  "Oh, again?"  Once I saw the bear in person, I was rather immediately of the attitude that, alright, we've done this.  Go away now, bear.  

4.  "WHAT?!"  When a bear shows up at 11am and I have to call the Sheriff because I can hear children playing down the hill, I am definitely getting a bit eye-rolly toward bears. 

5.  "OH COME ON. GO AWAY." When, a week later, it's nighttime and Garret and I are enjoying a glass of wine on the deck, and a bear helps herself to our garbage as though we invited her over but didn't provide her with dinner, I'm very over the bears.  Especially when we yell at her to go away and she basically just looks at us like, "Oh, please."  

6.  "When does hibernation start?" A bear ripped our garbage box apart the other day.  We're awaiting a new one.

We have been in touch with the police station a few times, and they put in word to the warden about little miss steals-the-garbage.  At the beginning of my apparent six-step process, I thought this was just kind of a cute fun thing that would be a one-time experience.  By step 5 when we were literally shining lights at a bear and yelling at it and it wasn't even blinking an eye, I was very concerned.  They're supposed to be afraid of people and when they're not, it's problematic.

We haven't seen her in a while, nor does she have any garbage to get from us anymore since our box is destroyed.  From what I can tell from research, bears typically prowl a fairly large radius, and they're solitary within that radius.  So it's possible she's over in another neighborhood and maybe the warden has actually gotten her and we don't know about it.

Then again, there's always the good chance I'll go outside on any given day and she'll just be lounging in a chair in my front yard, sipping lemonade and getting a suntan.

A Shifting Focus (Part 1)

May means we're eight months in to our 'adventure'.  In a large sense, we came here following an impulse that was telling us to change our lives and to shift our focus within those lives.  Eight months later, I can say with confidence that my focus is much different than it once was.  I don't know that I'm ready to put into words what my focus was, wasn't, is, or isn't... but I've nevertheless felt a major shift in my energies and my idea of "who I am" or "what I do".

Impulses, of course, can be big and small.  The impulse to leave the city and move to the mountains of VT was, needless to say, a big leap.  I've since coming here, though, learned to follow smaller impulses as well.  I think (though, I'm projecting - hindsight is always...edited) that in the city I had let myself believe I was so 'busy' that I'd often have a fleeting artistic thought and it would usually be chased with "I'll do that when I have time."  Sometimes if I was lucky, I scribbled it down in a notebook for when I did have time.  But of course, when you aren't remembering to have time, it's easy not to.  We all know that.

We do literally have a lot more time now than we did then.  But I think that I could have had time then too had I wanted it.  It's more a mindset that I've melted into now that I simply wasn't prepared for then.  And it's certainly been a gradual process, this "shift in focus" I feel like I'm experiencing.  I came here buzzing with the energy (or lack thereof) of commuting to and from work, walking no less than a block to get something if I needed it, and trying to catch express trains.  You can relax and enjoy a walk to work, you can even enjoy a subway ride; I just wasn't, and because of it I was always "rushing" for no apparent reason.

And when we first got here, I was mimicking city life in the woods.  I was breaking up my time very specifically, working essentially 9-5, just in my house. I put work before home even though work was at home.  I took business calls on Sundays.  I somehow managed to be stressed about time even though I had a lot of it.  There was something in my wiring that told me time was something to be concerned about.

By late October, a month and a half in, I was (very slowly) starting to realize that it was "okay" to take time on something if I wanted it.  Or to not force time on something if it wasn't clicking at that very moment. To just stop what I was doing and finish that later, so long as I really did finish it.  But I remember, very clearly, the day I first actually forced myself into really stopping because I felt like I had to.  It was November 16th, the day after my brother's birthday, and I had just finished my first full-length book project as a freelancer (which I had approached with a very "must work 8 hours a day and be stressed from time to time" mentality).

A mentor of mine passed away that day, and I was crushed and isolated (isolated in a good way). Had I been in a position to, I know what I would have done: I'd have gone to a few stores, taken a busy walk, taken a subway ride. I'd have been "alone and thinking" but I wouldn't have been alone.  Here, we live in a neighborhood without anyone even in it.  Garret was home but he was working.  I was just sitting in my home office.  I was alone enough that I couldn't easily get out of it and... I actually had to process my feelings.  I got the phone call that he had passed around 9:30 am and by noon, I was sitting in my home office in a daze.  But could I really just sit there?

I promise you that at a time, I could not have just sat there.  From the circumstances of everyday life and from my own inability to commit to it. But the truth is that here, I have no schedule that I need  to stick to here.  Just one that I usually do stick to.  Somehow I willed myself to really do it.  I sat, and I let whatever was going to happen, happen.  I thought a lot.  I cried.  I sat and wondered and felt confused and weird.  And then, around four - four hours after I'd started just... sitting... I had an impulse.  Of course, the sitting had been an impulse too, but this was an artistic impulse.  I suddenly felt like I should draw on a canvas something that I realized over those four hours I was incredibly grateful had been instilled in me by that mentor. "Be Great." See, he never cared if you were the best at something, as long as you were giving it your all.  Be great, I thought.  That's what you're trying to do.  You followed the impulse and you're trying to figure it out.  It's a process.  Just worry about being great at it and don't worry about knowing all of the answers.

That day, for the first time ever, I had an artistic impulse and instead of writing it down or deciding to do it later, I acted on it, right away.  I pulled out a canvas, I painted it, and by that same night, hanging in my office, was a canvas: Be Great.

I look at this canvas often.  At the time, I was responding to an overall life value that I believed my mentor had forced me to live by simply by living by it himself.  Meanwhile, now, seven months later, I look at it and think "See? Follow whatever idea tingle you're feeling." I'm learning to - upon having an "idea" - trust the spark of "?" for what it is.  Every idea is a possibility if we let it take us where it wants to go.  Yes, there's the possibility it'll turn out to be nothing.  But what if?

Over the past seven months but more specifically the past three, I've seen Garret and I follow idea after idea.  We're learning to be open to our own creativity.  We're learning not to say, "I'm feeling ___... I'll deal with it later!".  Instead, when sadness, silliness, fascination, or inspiration finds us... we let it.

It's more difficult than it sounds.  Trusting yourself enough to spend solid time doing something that you do not know the direction or purpose of?  For people who lived (as most do) through school assignments for 23 years and then jumped right into very fast-paced runs-on-linear-subway-lines lives for a while, just listening to a flighty idea can take some practice.  Of course, it wasn't really school or New York that made me distrust the "whim". It was a mindset I adopted in both of those times and places. But nevertheless...

"It's okay if it's a waste of time because, what if it isn't?" Can be surprisingly hard to hear especially if it's your own voice saying it.  After all you are always keenly aware of that "...what if it isn't?"  But: I'm happy to say that following our impulses and letting them manifest themselves in writing or art or whatever they want to be has produced for us some projects that I don't think either of us would have predicted we'd have taken on.  Projects we're excited about and projects that are making us really happy and... well, we're having a lot of fun!

I sat down to write this post intending to share what those things we're up to are.  Of course, true to form, I've rambled on far longer than a blog post should be, and instead of doing what I came to do, I talked about a painting I made months ago.  But, in the spirit of following ideas and impulses, I decided not to shut it down when this post didn't take the direction I had expected it to.  Instead, I'll let this sit.

I will come back tomorrow to show you what we've been up to.  A lot of you probably already know, but I'm excited about some of this stuff so I feel like it all deserves a post.  So I'll be back.

Unless, that is, I get distracted and do something else!  haha.

BEAR ATTACK!!!

Okay, so, we didn't see a bear.  But all signs are pointing to a bear (or a dinosaur, or an elephant, or - something big!) helping him or herself (gotta be politically correct, people! we just can't just assume it was a he) to our garbage last night.

Garret took Murgy out before bed last night as is typical.  Murgy has a variety of barks and cries that she employs for different situations.  For example, she barks in this high-pitched "hello?!?" way when she wants you to do something with her.  She cries the saddest little mourning cry ever when she accidentally kills one of her moth friends.  And she growls if Garret or I are giving another dog attention, teeth and all. What an overly protective dog.

So anyway Garret takes her out last night and she's apparently doing her sad/curious/I Really Want To Go Over There cry toward the road.  Garret didn't think much of it because as of late, it's been apparent to us that Murgy is preparing to film her audition tape for Best Dog Chipmunk Hunter.  She always wants to go somewhere, because there just might be a chipmunk there.  In hindsight, I guess she was "spooked" but another reason this didn't get mentioned to me is that Garret was spooked due to there being new neighbors across the street who he didn't realize were home and yet were still watching TV and lighting candles in their house (GHOSTS!).

Well, this morning, Garret took Murgy out again (dogs! they always need to go out!) and he found a surprise at the end of the driveway at the very place Murgy had been crying toward.  Our garbage can, which is a wooden box that is supposedly "bear proof" had been knocked over, and all of the garbage bags have been ripped open.

The scene of the crime. BEAR ATTACK IN VERMONT!

The normally nailed down garbage bin, completely turned over.

We're figuring it must have been a bear because:

-  If it were a person trying to steal our identity by going through our garbage, this is a supremely strange neighborhood to go identity huntin' in and also why not just open the can like a normal person.

-  If it were a deer, fox, possum, turkey, beaver, or raccoon, the task of knocking the entire wooden box over (it's heavy!) seems a bit extreme/impossible.

-  As Hanna-Barbera allowed to enter the history books of cartoonish time, bears do really love pic-a-nic baskets.

-  On the other hand, Hanna-Barbera also taught us that not all bears are smart, as Yogi who was (no offense) no genius was "Smarter than the average bear." But then again, it doesn't take a brilliant mind to knock over a garbage can, just a hungry one.


Anyway, hopefully this does not become a recurring problem.  Our garbage is always tied up and everything.  We'll have to see if it happens again.

power outage lolz

Well, it's 1:30 pm and I'm just having my first cup of coffee for the day.

On the plus side, I finally got to live out my dream of becoming one of the Boxcar Children this morning. By which I mean for some reason I've always had it in my head that the Boxcar Children were in constant search of water (via streams or melting snow) and thus anytime I've ever crossed a stream and/or gotten even slightly creative about a water source, I'm immediately some illustrated girl from the mid-90's, there with my three siblings, holed up in a boxcar, really roughing it.

Anyway, apparently we had some sort of ice storm last night.  This was unbeknownst to me, except that Murgy woke up in the middle of the night barking, there wasn't an intruder (phew!) and then for the rest of the night we heard strange noises outside (apparently: branches falling).  It was extremely quiet in our house this morning - quieter than usual, that is, which is: really quiet - which it turns out is because our electric baseboards were not doing their normal clanking (apparently: they were off).

At some point in the daylight, Garret woke up and reached for his phone, which he noticed was not connected to the internet.  I heard him click on the lamp, which didn't go on, and then he said, "Uh oh... we don't have power."

The branches outside were really pretty and covered completely in ice.  That much was good.  And actually, this was all fine, because I thought, "Well, I'll sit by the fireplace and write sans internet - I'll get a lot done!"  Or at least, this was all fine for the two seconds before I remembered my deep, unwieldy, tireless (lol - pun alert!) coffee addiction.

So really, this is a story about coffee addiction.

Coffee addictions are all fun and games - delicious, warm, comforting fun and games - until your power goes out.  And I don't even use an electric coffee maker - I use a french press.  I think in some ways that made me think I was immune to things like power outages.  That my coffee addiction was untouchable.

But french press or not, I do use a coffee grinder to grind beans (electric) and an electric stove (duh electric) and water from a faucet, which here is apparently electric.  Or, the pump that brings the water is electric.  I have a theory that this is to prevent the many unattended ski chalets in my neighborhood from having burst pipes in the event of an ice-related power outage (like today).  This is a theory that I could easily verify by asking either my landlord or the homeowner's association, but honestly I'll probably just keep it a "theory" because it makes me feel like a sleuth (on any given day, I'm a little Boxcar, a little Nancy Drew, and a little Babysitters Club).

So - no water, no beans, no heat source.  But wait!  There is always our propane stove -- that thing gets pretty hot at the top.  And we have a teapot, and tea - not ideal, but it's better than nothing.  Water... water... come on, Lauren - think like a boxcar!  Oh!  I know!  We'll just grab some snow.

Well, the snow was all covered in ice, but there was a lovely icicle just outside our door that was literally streaming water.  Like a faucet of love from Mother Earth herself.

So Garret got a glass and held it right under this lovely stream of water.

Now, that water was obviously ice cold, but whatever, it was water.  We put it in the tea pot, and put the tea pot on the stove - as in, the stove that heats our house.

In a matter of two hours, the water did actually reach a temperature of "warm".  It was not boiling and so maybe I shouldn't have drank it, but have I mentioned that I'm addicted to coffee?  Which means - I'm wholly dependent upon caffeine entering my bloodstream on a daily basis.  Which means that when it doesn't, my brain shrinks, which hurts!  So with warm icicle water, I made myself a chai latte with some chai powder we had from Trader Joe's.  Ah, sweet, spicy, lukewarm relief.  Welcome to my system, caffeine.

I was waiting for the burst of energy that I was counting on from the chai latte when a strange screeching sound was heard throughout the house, followed by a gleeful yell from Garret - "WE HAVE POWER!"

By the time I started filling the teapot with tap water, Garret already had the (electric, cooking) stove burner on high, preparing to boil the water as quickly as it possibly could.  Beans were ground, the french press was prepared.  Sighs of relief were heard.  Thank you, Mother Earth, for turning our electricity back on (uh...?).

So, as I prepare to get up to pour myself a second cup of coffee (omg it's 2pm how is this happening I have gotten nothing done today) I say: that is the non-victorious story of the time we woke up in a nice house that didn't have power, on a day when we had no where to be, but we whined and complained the whole time anyway because there wasn't any coffee (poor us).

Oh - and though this might all in a narrative sense point to the idea that maybe we should cut back on coffee consumption so that we're not quite so dependent, I'm far too in love with coffee to think that way.  Instead, I'm planning ahead: I'm going to grind some beans ahead of time so I have a stash of ground coffee, and I'm going to get one of those big jugs of water to keep on hand so we don't have to use icicle water (though, that was pretty fun).

Favorite Morning Quotes:
-  "Is the water warm yet?"
-  "Do you think we could grind the beans ourselves?"  "Um... maybe if our mortor and pestle was bigger."
-  "Do you think I could just chew a coffee bean?  I mean, I've eaten chocolate covered ones."
-  "Is the water warm yet?"
-  "Is the power back on yet?"
-  "Man, I want coffee!"

P.S. [Edited at 4:53 To Add] I think the ice storm itself is over, but now it's super windy out, so every time the wind blows, a million little tree branch ice cubes come flying at our house!  It's so scary!  I mean it's fine, we're fine, but YIKES! What an odd noise.

.lsm

eating white snow

Taken today during a snowy walk around the neighborhood in Wilmington, VT.

I just got back from a walk around the neighborhood.  This, after four straight days of not leaving my house.

Don't worry I'm not a hermit (or I am).  I haven't left for a combination of reasons.  The first being that between my trip to Long Island a few weeks back, Christmas, and then our trip to Buffalo, it kind of felt like we hadn't been home for three weeks.  Plus, I've been working on my screenplay (the one I promised myself I'd have done by the time 2011 was) 8-10 hours a day.  Plus, it's been snowing.  And freezing!  Every day!  She says this as though surprised, forgetting she moved ten miles from a place called Mount Snow.

Today it's warm (okay, it's what the weather man calls "mild") or, at least, it isn't Ice Cold.  Around 3pm, I think I finished a draft of my script (we'll see when I start reading the PDF and feel the need to change every fifth word) and by then, I really felt like I needed to get out of the house.

It is still winter, after all, so in anticipation of leaving I put on a sweatshirt, a Patagonia coat, and my new thermal boots.  I put Murgy in her harness and leash and we were out to meet the world.

I hadn't walked around the "neighborhood" in about a month.  By the way it's not a neighborhood, it's a bunch of houses situated on a mountain, made to look like a neighborhood.  It's a challenge.  I clocked it -- at a normal pace, the first sixteen minutes are either downhill (at points steeply so) or flat.  That's pleasant, and you think "Why don't I do this more often?" Then, it happens.  You start going uphill.  And not just "up a hill" - UP hill.  Up a mountain.  Serious incline.  Three minutes into the (at a "please don't let me fall over" pace) twenty-minute ascent, conversation is no longer possible.  I went from urging Murgy to discontinue stopping to sniff the ground every two seconds by saying, "Come on, Murgs." to doing it by just yanking her (Talking. Not. Possible.) to eventually just letting her stop every two seconds to sniff because it meant I got to stop every two seconds.

I was sure to feign annoyance in case anyone was watching so they'd think I was totally into the uphill walk, I just had to stop because my dog stopped.

There's three and a half of these mountain hills you have to get up to get to my house.  The first one is fine, the second one is death, and the third one is like, "Are you? Come on. No." Turning the bend from second to third, I was overcome with thirst.  Why did I wear so many layers on a fifty degree day?  And do tell why I would wear thermal boots?

And then...

I stopped and ate snow.

It was white, clean snow.  It was at least five feet off of the path.  I only ate two bites of it.  It was the most refreshing, wonderful, pure cold beverage I have ever had.  I had forgotten what snow tastes like.  Crisp, fresh.  Suddenly I was eight again and didn't have any pretenses about things like eating snow.  Oh man, it was wonderful.

Luckily no one was around to see the scene:  A twenty-six year old weirdo in way too many layers for a sunny (albeit snowy) day, savoring the lovely coldness of snow, while her dog just stares at her like "Um, really? I didn't even eat that stuff."

Snow consumed, I powered on.  By the end of the walk, the feeling of death wore off and was replaced by that good feeling that comes after exercising.  Whenever we don't have a frostbitten blizzard day, I'll try to keep going.

But maybe I should buy a water bottle?



.lsm

picturesque

In our house, the bedroom that we sleep in is upstairs, and when you come out you're on a landing which leads to another bedroom and a bathroom. From the landing, there's open space that looks down on the living room.  When we moved here in August, I exclaimed "This would be perfect for Christmas!" I guess imagining myself in that scenario as an eight-year-old, coming out of my small bedroom and looking over the landing to see that Santa had left many presents under the tree.

Of course, we have a tree in the living room and it is a lovely sight to see from above, but I am not eight, nor will I wake up Christmas morning to see that Santa left copious gifts under the tree while I was sleeping.

The knowledge of which created in me a childish elation when, this morning, Garret left the room and exclaimed "OH! WOW!" Murgy and I were still laying in bed - I had promised I'd be up in two minutes, but intended to stay another twenty (it was one of those perfect blanket mornings where you're warm and toasty under the covers, but not too hot - just perfect).  I jumped up - had Santa arrived? (honest subconscious emotional thought) and then I heard Garret say, "IT SNOWED!!!"

Surprise snow is rather exciting, especially when viewed through a wall of windows from a second-story landing that looks down on a rather Christmassy living room.  I'd heard tale of snow coming last night, but it was raining when I fell asleep around midnight, so I really thought nothing of it.

I went out on the deck and snapped this picture, which, though I will say is a pretty picture, is nothing compared to what was actually here.

Stepping out on the deck, I felt the surprisingly warm air that accompanies snow - it's winter at its best - not bitter cold, just cool and welcoming.  There was total silence - the kind that's a presence of calm rather than an absence of sound - and untouched, marshmallow snow covered absolutely everything.  The tree branches outside of our house were coated in this cozy way that I had never seen before, extending their arms toward us in a hug. This is not the snow of the suburbs or the city, salty around the edges from plows and tires, sunken in from heavy boots and heaving pedestrians.  This, is the snow poets write about - deliciously quiet, a feather-filled blanket, seemingly put there just for us.

Garret took a picture or two as well, on his fancy pants camera.  I took mine with my phone, and said, "Mine didn't come out good," and he said neither had his.  Truthfully, I'll bet his pictures look beautiful enough for a calendar, but they still won't do it justice.  "Maybe this is just one of those things that's really pretty but doesn't photograph well," he said.  I think he's right.


.lsm

a very murgy christmas

reinventing the greenwich burger from fiddlesticks in manhattan

yesterday, i wrote something that brought me visually to greenwich street in manhattan.  which got me thinking about fiddlesticks, a great irish pub on that street.  it basically has the most perfect "irish pub" ambiance i've ever encountered; it's a great place to go for a beer before or after a meal.  it's also a great place to have a meal - they have a full menu, which contains: the most delicious burger i've ever eaten.

now, in my new york life, if i'd found myself thinking about this while writing, i probably would have emailed garret: "want to go to fiddlesticks tonight?" he probably would have answered "sure" (and i probably would have thought too far into the fact that he didn't use an exclamation point after "sure" and then wonder if he really wanted to go or not, but that's just me being a complete crazy lady even in hypothetical form).

obviously, this could not be the way these events played out yesterday.  were we to go to fiddlesticks for dinner last night due to some whim that i had while writing, we'd be insane.  but, i couldn't shake the idea of that burger...

as i recalled, the burger had some sort of sauce inside it that made the whole thing savory and juicy.  i had to have it!  which meant i had to make it.

in case you want to try this at home (wherever your home is, unless your home is NYC in which - go to fiddlesticks!) here's a pseudo recipe for my made up burgers.  i'll call it the "can't get to NYC burger".

you will need: 
-  ground beef
-  an egg
-  breadcrumbs
-  an array of sauces from your kitchen. i used worcestershire sauce, A1 sauce, a bit of honey, a bit of spicy mustard, italian seasoning, and crushed red pepper.  also, a little olive oil and balsamic
vinegar.

directions:

in a bowl, mix your ground beef, egg, and breadcrumbs.  once it's mixed, make patties.  you're going to want to make a little "cup" in each patty for the sauce, and then a "top" to each cup.  so, make a few bowl-like patties and a few flat ones as "tops".

beef "cups"

in a separate bowl, mix your random  mix of sauces.  i used the worcestershire sauce as the main base, and then mixed small amounts (1/2 a teaspoon or less) of the rest.  then, using a whisk, i mixed it all together as i would a salad dressing.

then, i took one tablespoon of this mixture and poured it into each burger "cup".  i don't have a picture of this, because my hands were all covered in burger, so you'll have to imagine it!

once the "cups" were filled with the liquid, i put the "tops" over the burgers and melded the meat with my fingers so that there were no holes.  they looked like regular burgers - you couldn't tell there was a surprise center.

then i cooked them and presto chango: a delicious and very juicy/savory burger was ready to be eaten.

we topped them with some aged cheddar and onion crunchies that i bought during my thanksgiving shopping trip even though i didn't need them for anything i was making for the holiday..... i just find them really, really delicious.

enjoy! :)

thanksgiving wrap up//welcome christmas!

well, admittedly i dropped off the face of the blog planet for the past couple of days, so i missed quite few daily photo updates.  i do have some to share today, though!

but not of thanksgiving.

don't worry, thanksgiving happened!  it happened and it was quite lovely - i was just too busy eating every hour or so to think to take any photos of the wonderful foods i was eating.  in fact, this is the only picture i thought to take and it's of nothing but a mostly empty wine glass!

the tail end of thanksgiving.

don't let this sad, unpoetic, "i'm a lonely wine glass on an empty table" photo fool you - this was probably one of the only times the table didn't have food on it.  there was so much! we somehow got ourselves on an eating schedule reminiscent of that of a baby bird - we ate small bits very often.  in the days following thanksgiving garret and i have more than once looked at each other and said "um... are you... hungry?" despite the fact that we just ate.  your stomach can get used to eating a ton of food pretty easily, i guess.  we're waning ourselves off of the large appetites that thanksgiving left us with.

we're still [happily] knee-deep in leftovers.  it seems that no matter how many times we take out the containers that hold all of the wonderful leftovers, we can't even put a dent in the food.  anyone have any creative turkey recipes to share?  if not we'll gleefully continue to eat plate after plate of the thanksgiving classics - turkey and gravy, green bean casserole, and garret's new favorite food, stuffing.

our company left on saturday morning, which left us with two days before the work week started again to continue holiday-ing.  yesterday we did my favorite thing of the year and went and got a christmas tree!  in brooklyn this usually meant going to a street corner and finding the smallest possible tree.  literally tiny - here's our tree from brooklyn last year:

our tiny little charlie brown tree in brooklyn,
christmas 2010.

we also apparently have a love for underdogs and bought the most deformed tree possible last year?  why are it's branches facing upwards instead of down?

anyway, this year when we went to get our tree, we realized that we actually didn't need to get the smallest tree available.  we have pretty high ceilings, here, and the space for a giant tree if we wanted one, too.  old habits die hard though, and i found myself sizing each tree up by its comparison in size to me (read: how small it was).  we picked one only slightly taller than us, and though we could have gone bigger, i think we found the perfect one.

i love christmas trees.  literally, i love them.  when i was a kid, i would wish i could sleep beneath the christmas tree.  when we lived in brooklyn and i would have to leave to go to work in the morning, i would actually feel sad that i couldn't spend more time with my christmas tree.  it's ridiculous, but in the scene in home alone 2 when buzz is putting candlesticks behind kevin's ears and embarrassing him, i'm hardly even paying attention to the narrative because i agree with the song they're singing so much.  so while it's great that as a writer, i get to work from home now and be with garret and murgy all day.... currently, i'm just really really excited that this year, i can sit by my christmas tree and do work all day every day.

we got our tree from the river valley market in wilmington, a small country style grocery store/deli down the street from us.

river valley market in wilmington, vt

the trees at river valley market

they had plenty of trees to choose from but we chose this little guy.

garret with our tree

murgy, like last year, was suspicious of our decision to bring a tree indoors.  some dogs just don't understand.  here she is investigating:

once the tree had passed murgy's inspection, we put it up and got to decorating.  here it is decorated: 

christmas in vermont,  2011.

i now only sit in the seat right next to the tree - hah!

all decorated for the holidays, we sat down and enjoyed a glass of champagne to celebrate our first christmas in vermont.

cheers! happy holidays!

here's to a happy and healthy holiday season!

p.s. if you happened to click the hyperlink to the clip of home alone 2 above within the text, you're welcome for finding a version where the dialogue is dubbed.

cranberry sauce and other thanksgiving preparations

as i may or may not have mentioned to everyone i know, this year garret and i are hosting thanksgiving - it's our first thanksgiving with family visiting our home!  garret's parents, his aunt laura, his grandma, and his aunt rusty are visiting us.  and vermont couldn't be a prettier backdrop to such a holiday! i know this is something we'll remember forever.  i'm just hoping we remember "oh, the great thanksgiving we had in vermont our first year" instead of "the time we ruined thanksgiving" aka "the disaster of the century" aka "thanksgiving 2011: a comedy of errors".  here's hoping we pull it off!

in my newfound quest towards preparedness i've been baking/cooking a lot today - two days early!  being prepared and cooking in advance is literally something that would have been a foreign thought to me as recently as six months ago.  i didn't do much by way of preparing anything in advance in my tiny brooklyn kitchen (where would the prepared stuff have gone? also, when would i have done that - on the subway?) and by "didn't do much by way of preparing" i pretty much mean that i never prepared anything in advance.  as in... there was one time when we had friends coming over for dinner and i was walking down the street with groceries for that dinner no more than 30 minutes before their arrival.  yikes!  

i don't know what changed, but at some point i realized - if you want to serve quiche for breakfast, make it a day early and you won't have to get up at 6am to make a mess and cook that day.  novel idea, me.  so, today i made two loaves of bread (banana and cranberry, for breakfast on friday) and homemade cranberry sauce.  now, i'm usually a big fan of the canned stuff (seriously - it's delicious and the shape is charming) but i felt like "real" cranberry sauce seemed more appropriate (read: grown up?) so i went for it.  it was really quite easy and the result is delicious.  it's chilling in my refrigerator waiting to be consumed two days from now as i write.

in case you want to try it out, here's the recipe:

1 12 oz bag of cranberries

1/3 cup of white sugar

2/3 cup of brown sugar

3/4 cup of orange juice

the zest of one orange

the juice of one orange

directions: put everything in a pot on medium high.  let it go!  as the liquid starts to cook off, you may want to turn it down more - maybe to medium low or so.  the cranberries will burst from time to time - the skins will crack open as the sauce forms.  the total cooking time is around 25 minutes.

i was amazed at how quickly it became something resembling cranberry sauce!! here's a (rather unpoetic) picture of the finished product... though i swear that in real life it's citrusy delicious cranberry stuff and not zombie guts, which is what it looks like here.

(photo a day) november 10, 2011

the new potted plant that sits on a diner stool
next to my desk.

in other news, the windchime that i gave garret for his birthday randomly plays the first few notes of the tv show "are you afraid of the dark", so more than once i've stepped out on our deck and almost died.

for realz

well, it's really happening! this week garret and i are to sign a lease for a wonderful little house in the woods. we'll be there at least a year.

after three years of living in brooklyn, i can't even imagine what the shift is going to be like, though i am envisioning it all the time. i feel like i did when i was waiting for my freshman year of college to start. i find my mind wandering to how i'll decorate the new place, what mornings will be like, what walking around will be like...

meanwhile, we'll be living city life behind entirely. so, also currently on my mind are the things that are part of my daily life now that are going to quickly be eliminated are:

- ordering takeout
- walking to restaurants
- stopping at the market on the walk home to pick up some stuff for dinner
- bakeries
- starbucks

...apparently all i think about is food.

here we are last month when we visited the house!

us on the balcony of the house!