Have You Hugged Your Opossum Today?

Even scavengers that hiss at your dog and root through your trash deserve to be loved. Just watch out for those 52 pointy teeth (that's more than any other land mammal!).

Fun facts about the opossum:

- They are only marsupial found in North America.

- They have prehensile tails but they cannot hang upside down from them once they reach adult size.

- They typically only live 2 or 3 years.

- Gestation is only 12-14 days. When the babies (usually around 15-20 at a time!) are born they can all fit in a tablespoon and must crawl into the mother's pouch and attach themselves to a teat. Only about 12 will manage it.

- They have at least a partial resistance to many kinds of snake venom, including that of cottonmouths and rattlesnakes.

- Playing Possum, in which the animal plays dead, drools, and emits the odor of rotting flesh, is an involuntary behavior. They regain consciousness within a few minutes to an hour.

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How to Repot a Cactus without Gloves

Let's face it, some people just don't have gardening gloves. And even if you have cloth gardening gloves, they're not going to cut it when dealing with cacti. But there is actually no need to wear gloves while repotting a cactus. It's quite a simple matter. Let me illustrate.

First, you've got your cactus (or in this case your cactus family) and your new pot. Use cactus/succulent blend potting soil as regular potting soil is too heavy and retains too much moisture.




The secret to repotting a cactus without gloves is the object on the left of that photo. Paper towels. Simply take one or two squares of paper towel, fold over once then once more the long way so you have a long, thin piece that is 4 layers thick. Then wrap around the cactus like so.

Next use a trowel or spoon to pry up the cactus from the soil while you lift gently with the hand wielding the paper towel.

Then repot as you would any plant, firming the new soil around the base. With ones as tall as mine have become, you may need to bury them a little bit deeper or brace with stones until the roots really grip the new soil.

Now, what do you do when a new cactus is growing out of the head of an old one?

{Quick aside, the fatter old cactus in this pot is Dylan and he was a gift from my husband (then-boyfriend) during the summer of 1997, so he is nearly 14 years old. During Dylan's life so far has has produced three children from the top of his head: Dixie, Daisy, and Dorcas. The next child will be a boy and we will name him Denton.}

Back to the question at hand. You simply grasp the new cactus and twist off (works if the baby is fairly new) or slice off with a sharp knife or shears (works better if you've let the child grow too much as I have).

Like most succulents, a part of a cactus like this will form roots if you just plunk it down in some soil and water it occasionally. So just shove it in the new pot and surround with soil, them tamp down so it doesn't fall over.

Water well (but not so you have standing water or anything) and put in the sunniest window you've got.

Voila! Now the three cactus sisters have their own place and make a great vertical statement, especially among the other succulents I potted up today in my collection of green pots that once stood empty and useless on the shelves above my kitchen sink. They just have a lot more impact tucked in close than they did spread out.

And what about old man Dylan, the patriarch of the Bartels family cacti? He has an empty nest at the moment, back on a tiny round mosaic table I made a while back. But we are hoping he'll have a child late in life and we can name him Denton.

As for the other plants I got today, I don't know the species of most of them, but they are so very cool and seem happy in their pots.

Why do I have mostly succulents and cacti in my house? Because they are the only plants the cat doesn't eat. Oh, and they are almost no maintenance at all. They forgive you when you don't water them for two months. They don't mind that the air is bone dry in the winter months. They seem fairly long-lived. They don't grow fast so you almost never need to repot them.

Oh, and they are really, really interesting and beautiful plants.

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Eating Like a Miner

For the past week or so we've been enduring an elongated winter. There is no snow on the ground at the moment, but it has been in the teens overnight and low to mid-thirties during the day. Our crocuses and daffodils and scilla are stalled after popping up a bit back in mid-March when we had a couple 60-degree days. And everyone seems to be under the weather and generally in a pretty foul mood. In the meantime I see photos of daffodils and lilacs posted on Facebook and blogs by well-meaning friends to the south. (Note to Southerners: this is very, very cruel and, quite frankly, we're surprised at your thoughtlessness.)

We Northern folk need comfort.

What better time to give our favorite comfort foods a last hurrah before getting back to grilling? In that spirit, I made homemade chicken pot pie a couple nights ago, I'll make chili in the near future, and I'm making pasties tonight.

Chances are good that if you're not from Michigan or Northern Minnesota you may not know what pasties are. Don't look "pasties" up on Wikipedia; you'll just find an article about those things some women (Lord knows why) paste to their breasts as though the only really immodest part of a woman's anatomy was the part she uses to feed a baby. They do have a fairly interesting article for the singular "pasty" though.

Pasties (pronounced "PASS-tees" not "PAY-stees") are a Yooper food (a Yooper is what we affectionately called someone who lives in the Upper Peninsula = U.P. = Yooper, get it?) that are sort of a cross between a meat pie and a calzone. Yes, they're Cornish calzones. They have a long history (thousands of years, apparently) as a staple dish of those who live in Cornwall, which is a county in the southwesternmost point of England. When Cornish people emigrated to other parts of the British Empire, most notably America and Australia, they brought the recipe with them. Cornish miners appear in the U.P. in the 1860s as the American Civil War is winding down and are followed soon after by Finnish miners who adopted the pasty so that now I think most Michiganders would tell you that the pasty is a Finnish food.

Making pasties involves a lot of chopping. A lot.

Essentially, a pasty is made up of finely cubed beef, potatoes, rutabaga, and onions, (and sometimes carrots) plus some parsley, salt, and pepper, all wrapped up in a pie crust which is closed and crimped on the side to made a "D" shape. Easily eaten with one's hands and quite portable, the pasty would become a favorite food of miners (tin mines in Cornwall, copper mines in Michigan, and iron mines in Minnesota). They are dense, filling, and stay warm for a long time. It's likely that the meat in many of those miners' pasties was venison, which would have been more plentiful and far cheaper to procure than beef in the U.P. Some people eat them plain (as the miners probably did) but they can be a little on the dry side. Most people I know today enjoy them with gravy (meh.) or ketchup (yum!).

My mother procured a recipe for Cornish Pasties for my husband (who is a pasty enthusiast) for Christmas this past year, but apparently a true Cornish Pasty must be created in Cornwall. Ah, well. I'm not flying to Cornwall to make my pasties. They'll taste just as scrumptious and comforting made here in Michigan.

Here's the gist of it:

Finely chop and mix together 1 rutabaga, 1 or 2 potatoes, 1 largish carrot, 1 small onion, and 3/4 lbs stew meat. Add 1 T parsley, 1.5 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp pepper. Mix then place filling on one half of a pie crust. (Note: you'll need 4 to 6 crusts, either homemade or bought, depending on how much filling you actually make. I didn't measure mine and I ended up with enough filling for 6 pasties. Having only 4 crusts, I just froze the rest of the filling for another time). Dot filling with margarine and fold over the pie crust to make a "D" turning up the bottom edge over the top and crimping shut with your fingers (these seriously don't have to be fancy - remember, they're miners' food). Cut two slits in top, brush top with beaten egg, and bake on ungreased cookie sheets for about 30 minutes at 425 degrees.

These freeze well and can be frozen assembled but uncooked (do not thaw before putting in oven and increase cooking time to about 50 minutes), completely cooked, or you can just freeze the uncooked filling.

If it's still cold where you are, wrap just-cooked pasties in foil and stick them in your coat pockets to warm yourself while you toil in the frigid mines. Then when you get a hankering for food, there they are as convenient as anything. But don't fill your pockets with ketchup. Trust me, that never ends well.

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Springy Tea Cozy

Okay, I have no idea if a tea cozy has any effect whatsoever on the temperature level inside a tea pot, but isn't this cute?

I found the pattern through Ravelry.com, but here's the direct link. Alice at Crochet with Raymond has a lot of fun tutorials and patterns on her site, and they are so colorful. I will definitely be visiting her blog regularly now.

The pattern was easy, even though I had to make some adjustments because my tea pot was a slightly different shape. It's a very adaptable pattern.

It only took a few hours to complete, so it was a welcome but short distraction from quilting. It's nice to start a finish a project so fast once in a while. Keeps you from getting discouraged by your bigger projects that take days, weeks, months . . . or years.

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Dog Math

1/2 + 1/2 = 1  Right?

So why doesn't one half-wit dog plus a second half-wit dog equal out to one moderately intelligent dog?

One of the mysteries of the universe.

This weekend I'm giving myself a diversion from hand quilting and making one of these. I don't know if tea cozies are functional, but I've been wanting to try one for a while. The colors I've chosen match the sunroom. I hoping someday I will be able to have tea in there again. Once I finish the quilt I'm avoiding by making this tea cozy, that is!

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A Poem on My Sister's Birthday

I don't know what it is about March, but I always feel a little poetic despite the dreary weather. On March 24, 1978, my older sister Alison was born into this world. I like to think her appearance, the firstborn child after a miscarriage, elicited the same sort of hopeful and joyful feeling I hope this little poem elicits.

Alison's Poem

Clear dawn over the snow-dusted lawn
Deep gray gives way to a subtle ray
Then bright and vibrant hues chase the night
Sweet pink, then yellow - orange - green, I think
So fades cold evening to the next day
So things of winter melt into spring

Happy birthday, Ali.

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My, How Time Flies

In mid-February of 2010 I posted this at my old blog address. It took me awhile to get going on the hand quilting, but by the end of March I was definitely at it. Now it is nearing the end of another March in another year, and I'm still . . . not . . . did you think I was going to say "done?" I'm still not even half way done.

Hand quilting does take awhile, but not a year. Unless you put it away for an entire summer and don't work on it once. Unless when you finally pull it back out again you feel that somehow it will finish itself if you just leave it in your sunroom long enough. Unless you largely ignore it even on the week you took off work to work on it.

Sigh.

The past few mornings I've been working diligently on it. I figure that one really nice thing I could do for my family during my Lenten mornings would be to get the gargantuan quilting frame out of the sunroom by the time we really want to be able to spend a lot of time in that room. The yard is a swamp now, but in a month it will be beautiful and I know that we'll want to spend some time in the sunroom with the windows open. I'd like to have a few friends over to tea in that room, but it's a little hard to have a conversation with someone with eight and a half feet of quilting frame at about eye level. The boy is interested in watching the birds eat from the feeders, and that's the best place for a little guys to see them. Even my husband has been using that room to work on sermons.

So my fingers will continue to trudge along, stitch by stitch, trying to get this silly thing done and out of that room. Mornings, evenings, weekends. I know Zach will be happy when it's done. And so will I.

In other news, my yard is filled with birds enjoying the feeders, including these house finches.

House finches are not natives in this area of the country. They were brought from the Western US to the East Coast as pets and eventually enough of them escaped to produce a viable wild population. So their range includes both the coasts and a ways inland, but you won't typically find them in the middle of the continent. Eventually, I imagine, the two populations will meet somewhere in Nebraska and think, "Hey, you look familiar!"

Besides quilting, which is a fine indoor activity for an adult, today we've been finger painting.

That, my friends, is a look of supreme concentration. In a matter of minutes, the boy produced five lovely works of art. If only I could be so productive in my creative efforts! Of course, they do all look strikingly similar, and quite a bit like his palette at the end of the session.

Incidentally, if you want to be transported instantly back to childhood, the smell of fingerpaints will do it. Smells just like elementary school.

So the rain and sleet come down outside, but inside our little brick house it is warm and full of color, and we can hear the birds singing.

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Straw into Gold

Guess who's putting on their bright spring plumage?

That's right. Goldfinches.

Fun fact: birds that are sexually divergent (meaning that the males and females do not look alike—think cardinals, goldfinches, house finches, etc.) tend to be birds that must attract a new mate every season, while those that look the same (like Canada geese) tend to mate long-term (though not necessarily "for life" because if someone way better flew along, Mr. or Mrs. Goose may just fly the coop and hook up with a new long-term mate).

We're the lucky bystanders in this yearly search for a mate. Songbirds, which tend to be sexually divergent, use their beautiful songs to attract new mates. If they were more monogamous, spring would be far less cheerful because they would have no reason to sing!

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Storing Fresh-Baked Bread

Would you believe it if I told you that this is the best way to store fresh-baked bread after you've cut into it?

Just put the cut side down on a non-porous surface, like a cutting board, plate, or your countertop. This keeps the outside crispy (if you put it in a plastic bag, the moisture from the bread will redistribute and make your crust soggier) and the inside from drying out. But it is short-term storage for bread that is really meant to be eaten within 24 hours.

I thought is was strange that Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day had you make such small loaves, but it makes sense. If you want fresh bread every day, you need to bake it every day. And when you do that, you don't want lots of leftovers unless you have a recipe that calls for day-old bread (and there are many such recipes in that book). So if we eat half a loaf at breakfast, we store it like this until lunch or dinner when we finish the loaf.

Then there's new, fresh bread the next day. I'm loving this process, and I'm not a big baker at all. I encourage you to check the book out and start making yourself and your family fresh bread. It's so much better than storebought or even bakerybought!

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Movie Night

How do you prepare your house for 7 or 8 men to come over, watch The Fighter, and consume pizza, chips, energy drinks, and cigars? You don't do the same things you'd do if you were preparing for, say, a bridal shower or a family get-together. You still clean the bathroom, but maybe you skip dusting the living room. You still vacuum, but maybe you skip underneath the dining room table. None of those guys will notice.

Wink.

There's one thing, though, that you must tackle. The basement. You've let it go because no one goes down there except the people who live in your house. It's littered with trains and cars and blocks. It's peppered with tiny bits of popcorn from movies past. It's piled with DVDs you never put away after watching. Oh, and there's the small matter of the aquarium.

Ugh.

But to make you feel better, it has been six days since you cleaned out the kitchen and it is still clean because you've kept up with it all week.

Yes.

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Signs of Spring

I know this is old news to you southerners, but look at these . . .

The first floral harbingers of spring have sprung! And other early risers are showing as well . . .

Birds are filling the air with their beautiful songs, bathing in the melted snow in the bird bath, and enjoying my feeders. I got to walk to the library with my son today because the sidewalks were finally clear of snow and ice. The boy got to swing and play on the slide at the park. The windows are open so we can finally get some fresh air in this old house.

And I have the pattern and fabric for my Easter dress this year! The pattern was a gift from Mom via eBay and the fabric I've had since last spring but never used because the right pattern hadn't come along yet.

Can't wait to get started on this beauty!

I'll be making view 1 with this lovely fabric . . .

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1930s Dress, 1930s Frugality

Q: What do you get when you take $3 of thrift store fabric and add thread and a zipper from the stash, contrasting fabric from a de-stashing friend, and a vintage mail order pattern and buttons from a kind relative who stalks estate sales?

A: You get one of my favorite dresses yet!



This photo was taken in the kitchen, because I think
this dress looks just a bit like I should be wearing it while
waiting tables at The Whistlestop Cafe from Fried Green Tomatoes.


The pattern is Marian Martin 9327 and it is so simple. Super fast construction, super comfortable fit, super flattering length. I just love this dress!

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Fresh Bread

I pulled this out of the oven at 7:30 this morning. It was a bit mishapen and I need to add a bit more flour next time, but it was fresh, warm, homemade bread made of just four ingredients and took me all of 5 minutes of hands-on work to make. Sound like something you'd like for yourself? Check out Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day and see how easy it is.

Add some homemade strawberry jam and a cup of coffee, and you have breakfast, my friend. No preservatives, no wondering if that guy who prepared your food washed his hands first, no waiting in line at the coffeeshop, and way cheaper than packaged or prepared foods. Just flour, water, yeast, and salt plus strawberries and sugar. Bonus: your house smells like fresh-baked bread. So, so good.

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Cleaning Out a Cluttered Life

Daylight Savings time has never completely made sense to me. Just when it's getting light enough in the morning to make me want to get out of bed earlier we switch our clocks and it's dark for an extra hour in the morning! But I do love those summer evenings when it's light until 9pm, so I suppose we must start working our way toward that. Yesterday I felt completely befuddled every time I looked at the clock all afternoon and evening. How can it be dinnertime and still so light? How is it that I'm not hungry and we didn't have dinner until after 8 o'clock?

This morning I was in the dark far longer than the past few mornings of getting up at 6am. But when the sun rose on the first morning it has been clear enough in the sky to see the sunrise rather than just a steadily lightening blanket of gray clouds, I was happy to be in the sunroom reading the Gospel of Matthew rather than snoring away upstairs. To feel the sun coming through the (dirty) windows was a blessing. To be in a sunny kitchen while making coffee was a blessing. And it was a blessing to be in a very clean kitchen and remember the weekend.

Gloriously well-ordered and a little room to spare (what a concept).

Thursday evening my mother came into town and Sunday morning she headed back home. In the time she was here she did every scrap of laundry in our house (which was a lot). Probably 8-10 loads. Washed, dried, and folded, and partially put away (that's my job, which is why it's still not totally done). Also, she helped me clean out and organize the hall cupboard, which had become the go-to place for stashing miscellaneous stuff that was sitting on the dining room table before someone came over to our house. And, best of all, she helped me completely clean out every cupboard and every drawer in the kitchen. We scrubbed every shelf, every door, and every handle. We put stuff aside for Goodwill. We washed seldom used vases and glasses that had gathered dust. We organized and reorganized.

Because I moved the waffle iron to somewhere accessible, I used it this morning to make actual waffles.
I think it's the third time I've used it since we got it eleven years ago.

There is nothing quite like spring cleaning and in the five years we've lived in this house, I'd never gutted the contents of the kitchen and started from scratch. It was just what was needed. There are still a few small jobs to do, and I hope to make them part of my early mornings this week. This morning I cleaned out the coffee maker. I have to take some boxes and bags to Goodwill this week. I love getting a nice big chunk of needless stuff out of my house. I'd like to get to the point where it's not necessary as often because that would mean I was no longer buying needless stuff!

Remember the green and white stuff from up here? Some of it is going to Goodwill,
some of it will house succulents in the sunroom this spring, and some of it has been
moved to other cupboards. What's up here now are mostly serving pieces I actually use.

Last year I read about some people doing the 40 Days, 40 Bags challenge for Lent. In case you're unfamiliar with it, it is an exercise in getting rid of material things that you don't need so that others can use them and so that you can have fewer things to occupy your time and energy, thus allowing you to focus more of those resources (time and energy) on the things of God. I don't know if I could get forty bags, but with clothes Calvin has outgrown and stuff from the kitchen I already have at least six and there have only really been five days in Lent so far (Sundays aren't counted).

Mom removed about 500 plastic grocery store bags from this cupboard. She also
removed about 10 reusable grocery store bags we had bought but almost never use
because they were buried in this very high cupboard. Mom took the plastic bags to
recycle and we put the reusable ones in the car trunk. Duh.

If you spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning, organizing, and figuring out how to store your stuff, maybe it's time to start getting some of it off your back. Just make sure you police your buying for the next year so it doesn't just get replaced with more unnecessary stuff! If you have trouble parting with things (even things you don't like, which you keep because they were gifts) you need to do your decluttering with a firm friend or relative who isn't so emotionally attached to the stuff. He or she can help you see past the sentiment to the reality that you seriously don't need 50 coffee mugs or 300 pairs of shoes or every single scrap of construction paper that passed through your children's grubby paws.
If you're anything like me, you love the feeling of a well-ordered, uncluttered home. It takes work to make it like that, and even more, I fear, to keep it that way! Spring is the time to do it so plan that spring cleaning weekend today!

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Modern or Vintage?

What do you think? Is this dress and jacket a modern or vintage pattern?

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A Textured March

I took this photo in early March, 2009.

For the past two weeks, I've been working with these fabrics.



And even though this March is far more gray and white than brown and blue, I feel sure the brown and blue is coming soon. Even it snowed today, I feel sure that it will rain soon. Even though everything is filthy everywhere, I feel sure that soon it will be new again.

Because that's how it always is. And God is faithful.

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