Really, I’m just putting off having to change out of my jammies and leave the house.

This week was the first week of classes. It was frustrating at times, but I probably made too much of the aggravations due to sleep deprivation. Last night was tough again due to itchy insect bites and a lingering background headache that was hours old. Plus Theo yowling every hour or so. Once he settled down I slept until 9:30 this morning and it felt so good.

Last Sunday I finished peeling and cooking the pears, and froze most of them. They were so good and it wasn’t hard to do at all. My hands are much better, and this proved it.

I worked on cutting down a flower bed that is overrun with soapwort and laid down a thick layer of cardboard, to be covered with pine needles. This soapwort is a curse. Don’t plant it unless you have a place for it to spread that you don’t plan to use for anything else. It sends out runners like mint and breaks off when you try to pull it up. Nasty stuff, and not pretty enough to be worth it unless you plan to use it for its herbal properties.

The garden produced another round of field peas and butterbeans, and the peppers are going gangbusters. I could probably pull a bunch of carrots too. The fig tree is full of a second round of unripe figs. I picked my sole seckel pear, but it wasn’t quite ripe. It has gotten dry enough that the critters are stealing my tomatoes again, but at least I got a few before it happened this time. I had to water yesterday and unless we get some rain from Earl I’ll probably have to water all week. My rain barrels are full so I’ll try to use the water from them.

On Monday I finally heard from the instructor of the class I was going to take. I looked at the syllabus, and after about five minutes of thought, dropped the class. So I do not have any college classes this semester. I guess that the Library Information Studies program really does not have anything to offer my interests, which is disappointing. I was interested in conservation, but this class was all about organization. I might talk to my art advisor again - I could easily switch over to art history if I took a few more classes, and maybe I could do an internship in the summer with Don Etherington’s book conservation studio. That would be an awesome opportunity, since they are close by. My advisor had mentioned that briefly the last time I talked with him.

Tuesday I took Theo to the vet - he apparently is extremely allergic to fleas. I couldn’t find any on him or the other cats, and the vet found scant evidence of flea dirt. Poor thing licked himself raw in places and had rashes in others. I doused everybody with Advantage and Theo got a steroid shot. He is going to be an expensive cat if I have to keep them all on Advantage or Frontline year round. The good news is that the blood work showed a very healthy cat. He has gained 1.8 pounds since we adopted him on Oct. 31.

The rest of the week I pretty much worked, came home and puttered in the garden for a few minutes, watched an episode of Mad Men (I love Peggy Olson!) on iTunes, and went to bed early. I’m back on a vitamin regime and taking probiotics, so I hope that my flagging energy will come back this weekend.

With Theo in my lap. He is one hot kitteh. Yesterday I called him Goldilocks in the ruse that we were searching for a mattress that was just right for him. We found one, and we now have TWO real beds in our house! I guess this means that we have risen up in ranks. Theo responded by throwing up a hairball on the comforter.

As a result, I don’t feel like I’ve been pummeled with a bag of bricks this morning. Instead, I feel like I’ve been pummeled with a bag of old tennis balls. I hope to reach the point when I feel like I’ve been pummeled with a bag of mashed potatoes.

I gazed out upon the mess that is the Back Forty this morning, and noted that the fig tree is nearly 20 feet tall. I think that we’ll need to cut it back by half this winter. My second crop of field peas will be ready to pick this week, and I’m getting a few okra to toss it with them.

This morning I plan to make some woodcut prints, some on handmade paper and some on Stonehenge paper. I have some rubber block prints that I’m going to make some cards and bookmarks with too. I decided that if I set up in September’s Indie Market I want a few less expensive items for sale. I have a couple of woodcuts that I’ve never made prints from, and some prints that I made a couple of years ago that just need mats.

I still have a bucket of cotton/corn shuck pulp so depending on how my hands feel I may pull sheets of that today too.

One thing that I’ve been working on a little at a time is the Friends of the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market website/blog. Others have been entering the information and I’ve been monkeying around with the format and structure and links. Please link to it if you have a blog or website. We need to raise our presence on search pages. After I finish here, I’m going to try to figure out where to put some meta tags on that site.

Yesterday, Sandy and I went to the market and bought corn from two different vendors, milk, boiled peanuts, watermelon, walnut/pomegranate spread, pita bread, ground beef, and a Cherokee Purple tomato. We ran into old friends there, and Sandy remarked as we walked out what a great social place it is. One of the reasons that it is so special is that people are so friendly - it really is a community of like-minded spirit. Mornings like this make me doubly proud to be a part of the Friends group.

Based on one of our interactions yesterday, we are visiting some good friends in Summerfield for dinner late this afternoon. I’m bringing corn on the cob and I made whole wheat pita crisps yesterday to go with the walnut/pomegranate spread (both from Zaytoon’s table). If you are doing an Eat Local Challenge this month, as I know that a lot of people are, and you are suffering for crackers or chips, pita crisps are easy peasy. Buy your pita bread from a local baker or whip it up yourself from local whole wheat flour. Then divide it, tear or cut it into pieces, drizzle it with olive oil, and bake it on a metal baking sheet at 350 for 10 minutes.

Okay, since I just winged away to post the last paragraph on Facebook, which also has a Friends of the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market page - please join - I guess my coffee pot post is over. Have a great day, y’all. I plan to.

We’re enjoying a cool weekend, finally! Unusually cool for August 1, in fact. Yesterday Sandy and I tackled cleaning up the stack of shrub and tree prunings from the last time it was cool enough to work in the yard. I began yanking out ornamental grapevine and honeysuckle and English ivy and wild yam vines that quickly overtake our property if I don’t cut them back severely each late winter and spring. Which, of course, neither of us were able to do this year, so it is a jungle. We filled all the trash cans that we could for city pickup, and only managed to do about 10% of the yard, at most.

At one time I would have picked through the vines for usable basketry material and made some random-weave baskets. This time I plucked out all the dead daylily stalks and leaves to use for papermaking.

Figs are ripe and the fig tree is so big that if I get serious about picking them I will need a 8-10 foot ladder. They are sooooo good. There’s nothing like eating a fresh fig right off the tree.

We have a lot of Sungold and volunteer cherry and grape tomatoes now. A few green Cherokee Purple tomatoes - I hope that I will get at least one tomato sandwich out of this year’s crop before the critters wipe them out again.

I soaked dark red kidney, navy, and black beans last night to make a chicken chili today. I picked a few peppers yesterday to spice them up. The jalapenos nearly got too big - one turned red already. I guess I’ll save the seeds from it.

I also had lots of Jacob’s Cattle beans. In the past, I’ve let them dry on the bush and used them for soup and planting the next year’s batch. I decided to pick all of them yesterday, snap the tender ones, and shell the ones that were too big for green beans. I added the few butterbeans that were ready. The field peas are working on a second crop.

Today I’ll carve out some art time. I’ll probably make a small batch of paper from some of the frozen pulp leftover from last weekend. I don’t want to overdo it. Yesterday I picked up a Quilting Arts and Handwoven magazine. I want to stitch and weave again so badly, and I know that is exactly what would set the whole healing process backward again. I did get a great idea - well, it’s not a new idea to me, just a reminder of a previous idea - I can weave strips of fabric to make bases for further artwork, as well as weave strips of handmade paper, like Susanne is doing now. She was making paper on her porch yesterday with horsetail. I want to make some horsetail paper too!

And I’m daydreaming constantly about the next art retreats that I’ll attend - Journalfest in late October is paid for, and I was able to use my “rewards” off my credit card to pay for my airfare for the first time! For my fiftieth birthday, I’m going to study with Albie Smith in the Santa Cruz mountains among the redwoods.

Life feels pretty good right now. I felt like Gene Kelly yesterday as we ran around doing our errands in the light rain. Part of the reason is that I’m ignoring the news.

Sandy and I enjoyed roaming around downtown for First Friday. I had decided not to set up a table at the Indie Market for July and August. Of course, if I had had a crystal ball to tell me that the weather would be cooler than May and June’s events, I might have done well to jump on it. I’m sticking to my decision to wait until at least September to sell again, though. For one thing, I’d like some play time. For another, my hands are going numb as I type this.

I’m going to visit my chiropractor next week. During a visit down home with my old friend Cristy, she told me that she had identical symptoms and it turned out to be a spinal issue in her neck. She saw a neurologist and had surgery to correct her problem. I hope that won’t be the outcome here but wouldn’t it be nice if Dr. Lewis could fix it? I had a neck problem a couple of years ago in which I couldn’t turn my head to the left, so this really is plausible.

On the Back Forty front, we were beyond dismay when every single last damn green Cherokee Purple tomato disappeared over night. The only one I found was on the path half-eaten. I was so looking forward to these tomatoes, and if it is raccoons, it will probably take a lot of work to stop them from getting to them again.

On the positive side, I harvested my first batch of butterbeans and added these to the field peas that I picked down at my mother’s farm earlier this week. (I also got enough corn from Mama’s garden that I cut two quarts off the cob.) We have lots of basil and the field peas here will probably be ready next week. The peppers are producing well and one of my potted eggplants is putting out little tender ones. I made an omelet yesterday with green peppers, Vidalia onion, eggplant, basil, and feta cheese.

Over at UNCG, they tilled up the iris bed where I have been gleaning iris leaves over the winter and planted a tree. In early July, they planted a tree. You’d think that they would have learned from the experience of all the other dead trees from their previous summer plantings, but enough said about that. It was an unsightly bed for their campus, so I suspected that it wouldn’t last much longer. I snagged some of the bulbs on my way home and planted them in the strip between the sidewalk and the street at home. I guess I’ll plant more irises because the leaves make great paper.

We put in a lot of work outside and around the house yesterday, taking advantage of the cooler temperature. Sandy is not supposed to do any outside activity when it is over 85 degrees outside. He did a lot of pruning that I can’t take care of, and we cleaned up the front porch and inside the house too, although someone who doesn’t live here probably couldn’t tell it. Now Sandy is fretting because he thought that Fun Fourth was today, and he’s ready to go play somewhere. I’m very happy at home right now - I have artwork to do, peaches to slice and put in the dehydrator, and I’m getting rid of about half my clothes to donate to charity. The studio is a wreck and I’m trying to be ruthless about getting rid of most of the stuff I’ve hoarded for collage, papermaking, and mixed media uses. No wonder my hands are a mess today.

Okay, coffee’s gone and I’m ready to start my day. When I remember that I have tomorrow off too, it makes me smile.

As usual, my garden runs behind everybody else’s garden. I do have a couple of little peppers and the tomatoes are soon to come. The lettuce is just about to bolt in the hot weather, but there are many varieties in that patch under the maple tree, so I anticipate that I will be able to harvest the kinds that tolerate heat better for a while yet. The cherries are almost completely gone except for some of the “white” cherries, which are my favorites. It looks like I will have another bumper crop of figs, which I can eat until I make myself sick!

I still need to get more butterbeans in the ground. Maybe this week in the evenings. I have the room for more and plenty of seed. It would be a shame to waste the opportunity, but my hands are going numb as I write this.

My mama was talking about picking squash last night - she doesn’t give up her garden although she says that she is going to quit at the end of every summer. She is 86 and addicted. This year her garden is much smaller, which is good. Her garden was HUGE. Now she complains about nutgrass growing three feet tall. Nutgrass seems to be a particularly hard weed to deal with. I’d love to build her some raised beds so that she won’t have to stoop, but I would need a lot of help. She is putting off cataract surgery until the garden is finished this summer. This is a woman who knows the value of growing your own food.

Okay, I can’t type any more. My thoughts turn to going to Denver next week and setting up my Etsy store again at Slow Turn Studio. I relisted my older books and will have new books up there soon.

Update: Planted Carolina Sieva/Willow butterbeans in the same area where they were last year. (The beans look alike and got mixed up two years ago, so I guess I’ll have a nice hybrid after this year.) Planted Jacob’s Cattle beans with the peppers and broccoli. Pulled out the sugar snap peas and planted Tuscanelli beans (generation three from the ones I bought in the Mercato Centrale in Firenze -really they are cannellini beans. I have more beans but they will have to wait for a couple more spaces to open up. By the way, although it sounds like I have a huge garden, I plant a big variety of seeds in very small patches and containers in roughly a 20 x 20 foot space.

Ewww - 90% humidity this morning. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Fortunately I will ensconced (my new favorite word) in the studio with the little window AC unit. We try to wait as long as possible to turn on the central AC in the house, partially for sustainable living reasons, partially because we can’t get into the #$^^&*@ basement to change the filter.

The Back Forty looks lush after the rains, finally. I tossed out a French pumpkin that I bought last FALL and never ate it because it was so pretty I couldn’t bear to cut it. I had a couple of old pots that I didn’t dump the soil out of from last year, and since I doubt that I’ll be able to do all the gardening I wanted to this year, I threw some of the seeds in those pots and left the rest for the squirrels and rabbits to eat.

Our lettuce garden is beautiful, and I’ve eaten the few peas that managed to produce in the dry hot spring. The Nanking cherry bushes are bursting with fruit that I just now noticed - I doubt that I’ll do much with them so if anyone wants them, come on over. They are small and delicious, but have pits that have to be dealt with. I usually just snack on them and spit the pit out. The tomatoes are growing like crazy, the okra germinated under plastic juice bottle covers, the Genovese basil germinated but I don’t see the other varieties, the Dixie Lee field peas are coming up under wire protection. LOTS of little figs and blueberries. Beets, as usual, have given me the finger. Why, I ask. Why, when I love you so?

My attention is now turned to making books for the First Friday Indie Market. I’ll have a table on the corner of South Elm and MLK Drive with other artists on Friday, June 4, from 4-9, weather permitting. This weekend I’ll be tearing, cutting, and folding papers, sorting through my leftover paste papers from Diana’s class, painting more papers, printing with the rollers from Traci’s class, making book cloth with the batiks from Melanie’s class, and using the instructions for Albie Smith’s class in my bookmaking this weekend. I haven’t forgotten the metal book covers from Leighanna’s class, but I’ll save that for later when I get the Crop-a-dile that I ordered. I’d say that Art and Soul was money well spent. Life is good.

Our trip to Colorado is coming up fast, and it looks like one of our days will be spent rafting in Idaho Springs with my cousin and her husband. I’m getting very excited about this trip, since these are fun relatives we’ll be visiting and I’ve never been to this part of the country.

Okay, gotta go to the farmers’ market and get out to the studio. Next, I’ll be blogging Albie Smith’s, Melanie Testa’s, and Traci Bunkers’ classes at Art and Soul.

Whew! I feel sure that I overdid it in the Back Forty today, but the weather is cool and breezy and sunny and it doesn’t get much better than it was today in North Carolina. Sandy got out there with me, and we trimmed vines and mulched paths with cardboard and pine needles, and did a lot of weeding and general clean-up. I cut the bottoms out of square plastic juice bottles and put them over my okra seedlings and peppers. If I didn’t do this, I’d never get any okra. A few of the cotton seeds, green and brown varieties, are coming up in pots.

Yesterday I planted Dixie Lee field peas, Genovese basil, lime basil, and dark opal basil, bull’s blood beets, State Fair zinnia mix, stevia, and a few assorted little pumpkin and cucumber seeds given to me by a friend. I don’t normally have much luck with either cucumbers or the squash family, but I’ll give anything a shot and plant over it if it doesn’t succeed without a lot of crying about it. Like the broccoli seed I planted earlier. I knew that I should have started it inside, but I did get a couple of seedlings. The radishes and fennel didn’t germinate either so I planted pepper plants that I bought from the farmers’ market in their place. Last weekend I put in six Cherokee Purple tomatoes from Handance Farm and transplanted some volunteer tomatoes to the sunniest bed.

It is very, very dry here. I think that all the water is being dumped to the west of us on the other side of the mountains. Wish that there was a way to even things out! I put some mosquito dunks in my rain barrels. Since I can’t really carry a watering can the rain barrels don’t help much anyway. I was going to plant more seeds but when I saw the weather forecast for the week I decided to wait until there was a better chance of some decent rain.

We clipped some blueberry branches that were shooting up without any berries and dipped them in rooting hormone powder and stuck them in a pot of compost. If it works, I don’t know where in the hell we would put them but it would be neat to propagate them anyway.

Lots and lots of delicious lettuce! I recommend the Wild Garden Lettuce mix from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange highly.

We were able to get some good compost cheap from our friends who bought a truckload of it. I spent late this afternoon spreading most of it and planting a few more seeds before the expected rain tomorrow night. I have to admit that I had a pretty lackadaisical attitude about these seeds since I’m looking forward to tomatoes, okra, butterbeans, and field peas, all of which will have to wait. These seeds are pretty old, and I’ll be happy with whatever I get, or nothing.

I planted calabrese broccoli in the middle bed, with a couple of different kinds of radishes and fennel. I tossed some oakleaf lettuce seed saved from a couple of years ago in the area where the tomatoes will eventually go. Threw leek seeds behind the sugar snap peas in one of the winter beds.

The asparagus is coming up on four of the original ten crowns. I’m just happy that I have any after the neglect they received last year.

A squirrel has snapped off almost all the budding branches on the white Nanking cherry bush. This is a new low for the squirrels.

Peas are sprouting, the garlic looks healthy, and I found one little lettuce volunteer from the lettuce disaster last fall. I think that the ants in that bed carried all the seed away. The winter bed nearest the maple tree has a variety pack of lettuce seeds all coming up. I will have lots of fresh salad greens soon. There is nothing better than produce picked outside your back door and placed as quickly as possible in your mouth!

Divided and replanted about three dozen garlic youngsters sprouted from some forgotten garlic from 2 years ago. I think that they are a kind of hardneck, so I’ll have scapes in May if that’s the case! If not, they are silverskin, which I like just fine.

Found some parsley I’d forgotten about too. It was hidden by a wicked infestation of English ivy that is going to be my major nemesis this year, I’m afraid. However, that parsley survived the cold much better than the other parsley did, so there you go. Nothing is totally good or evil in the garden. Except poison oak and ivy. Haven’t found a virtue for them yet.

I ordered a few seeds and some Reemay from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange today. I realized that I will really need to do the tunnels this year to protect my seedlings from critters. I ordered a lettuce mix of sixty varieties (whee! I just love those mystery mixes), Nankeen cotton, which is a coppery brown, and Cossack pineapple ground cherries. Anne-Marie gave me a few seeds - she had loads of different pepper, eggplant, and tomato seeds but I am not starting seeds indoors this year. I took a few pumpkin, cucumber, and lime and Genovese basil seeds.

I laid down cardboard on the paths where weeds tend to come up and Sandy put down new pine needles. We switched to pine needles last year when a flood ran through the Back Forty and washed all the wood chips that I’d just busted my ass to put down to the side of the house. Later we had another flood and the pine needles stayed put, and it makes Sandy happier about the back yard, so unless I see a real decline in the soil we’ll keep using the pine needles. I’m trying to decide whether to use wheat straw or compost as mulch for the vegetable beds. I’d have to buy the compost since I don’t have enough. Maybe I’ll do both to see which is better.

Transplanted some feverfew volunteers to the strip between the sidewalk and the street. I send my toughest invaders up there, as long as they are pretty.

I am achy and sore, but this weekend’s work made me happy. Ask me that around 7 a.m. and see if you get the same answer.

This Saturday we woke up to snow on the ground. Again. Every frickin Friday for the past three weeks it’s been some kind of frozen weather. At least we don’t have three feet like our neighbors to the north. But everyone over the age of 12 seems to be pretty much sick of it around here.

Last Saturday the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market was closed for the second Saturday in a row, and it really should not have been. The roads were not bad. So Donna Myers and Greensborough Coffee collaborated to host a “Fair Weather Farmers Market” on State St. on Sunday. Sandy and I went and purchased cheese, beef, and eggs. It was a great idea that I believe they are planning to do again, but on weekdays when I can’t go.

I’ve been very lazy at home this week. Busy at work, though. We’re in the middle of graduate school application review and course scheduling for next year. I come home and tend to be in bed by 8:30 or 9 p.m.! I don’t quite know what’s up with that, but I figure that I must need it. A lot of times I am content to lay there, hug Theo, and just let my mind drift. Or if I fall asleep, I wake up in the middle of the night and read for a while. I attribute this to the prolonged cold weather and also my sinus infection, which is much better but probably has run me down quite a bit despite all the vitamins and neti pots and Mucinex.

So I’m pretty boring right now, don’t have much to say. I’ll post the latest update on my embroidery later.

An interesting group on Facebook has organized - Join the Coffee Party Movement. They are quite seriously developing a movement for progressives. I recently ditched the Democrats so I’ll follow this to see if they actually get something going. The Green Party lost me when they cost Al the election in 2000. I’d like to see a strong grass roots movement of something to counteract the Tea Party crazies. I assumed that the tea partiers would crash and burn under their own ridiculous paranoia, but in the same country where Dubya was elected twice I should know better. Americans are such sheep. The majority of us want to be told what to think for convenience’s sake.

Sandy and I will probably head down to our neighborhood corner bar, College Hill Sundries, for the first time in a long, long time later this afternoon. They are having a fundraiser for Save College Hill. We have a great lawyer for our side, but of course we need to pay him. And the signs and flyers all cost money too, but I believe that it has all been money well spent. I just wish that our city councilperson, Zach Matheny, would advocate for his constituents in this matter. By all indications, he might even vote for the developer, which would be a real blow for true democracy, considering that the vast majority of residents oppose this particular development and he knows it. I think that he will definitely be voted out if he doesn’t vote on our side, because the rest of the neighborhoods in his district are watching too. One can only hope that he will pay attention and do the right thing.

Latest addiction: Mahjong Titans, that came with my Windows 7 games. Augggghhh. What a time waster.

Thinking about the garden for this year. Cherokee purple tomatoes, lots of butterbeans and peas again, Choppee okra if I can get it past the rabbit, hot and sweet peppers in pots. Cotton - Erlene’s green and Nanking, a copper colored one, both from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. Garlic and leeks. I believe that I’ll buy tomato and pepper plants from Handance Farm this year instead of growing from seed. This will be the first year in a long long time that I have not started seeds indoors. I will be able to harvest my asparagus if it survives the cold and the weeds I let grow in it this year. I have enjoyed Tuscan kale all winter, but now with the snow covering everything for so long the rabbit has eaten the rest of it.

The flock of robins that showed up yesterday is totally confused. They thought that they left the snow behind. They bombed my car with bird crap yesterday to the point that I could not possibly drive it to the car wash without washing it first. I mean, it is covered. At least maybe this snow will soften it up so that I can sponge it off when the weather warms above freezing and then I’m parking on the street for a while, out from under the tree. Damn birds. It’s a good thing that I don’t need to drive this car often.

Okay, time to go to the market and then I promised myself some art time.