Okay, I have a lot of other things that I ought to be doing right now, but this critter update is important.

I just spent fifteen minutes on the deck, looking over a beautiful Back Forty despite the fine crop of chickweed, with Miss Mama Kitty. For the first time ever, she laid down in my lap. She received a major kitty massage, and she purred and kneaded her paws in my lap. Every now and then I leaned down and talked to her in a low tone, telling her about how long I had dreamed of doing what we were doing at that moment and how much I loved her. Finally she turned around and looked at my face next to hers, and rubbed her forehead against mine.

::heavy sigh of contentment::

Oh, I wish it hadn’t taken 12 years and I wish that she wasn’t so incredibly bony, but I will treasure this time I have left with her.

The Fabulous Zha K, formerly of A Fine Dish, has come back to blogging after a hiatus of about a year. She is a fantastic writer, cook, idea farmer, and friend. Her new blog is A Fine Kettle of Fish and is “about life that meanders into cooking.” Please go say hello to her.

I’m not going to have time to blog for a while, but I had to share this photo that my grand-nephew Jake took of me holding a mussel. He is almost seven. Isn’t it great?

We had a fun time making a series of photos of things that he found in the lake this weekend. You’ll probably see this photo again as part of that post.

If you miss me it’s not because I’m sick with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - it’s because I’m going here for a couple of nights. And I try to make these occasions computer-free.

Plus I’ve just been incredibly busy so I promise to mail the beans off early next week. K? Have a great weekend!

Doing…basically nothing but lying in bed with the lights low. When I would have really, really, really preferred doing almost anything else. Every now and then I am plagued with cluster headaches that come and go for a day or so. These started last night and I hope, hope, hope that they are done. I keep getting up and testing it just to get flattened again. I managed to sleep most of the morning and this afternoon I made myself a pot of tea and watched Fur, with quite a few breaks to lay quietly with eyes closed.

I received my package from Rice and WOWEE! What a package it was! It got me so excited I went down for a couple of hours! Loads and loads of stamps with vintage and retro faces and people, snowflakes, and the two best: The Divine Miss M and a stamp of the Mona Lisa saying “Housework Rots the Mind.” I could not believe how many were in the box! Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

Now I guess I need to buy some stamp pads, huh?

Okay, I’m not going to push this any further. Gotta get well so that I can get up and at ‘em.

So I go to Dye-In Day to play with fiber and dye with a few weavers and spinners today. When I get there, I notice some fabulous found-object welded sculptures that look very much like John Martin’s work, Susanne’s husband, the artist I was planning to go to Italy with this summer. And it turns out that they are John’s work, because the owner of the house takes care of the Martin animals. Now I’m thinking “pet-sitter,” but how about that!

Then I go into the house to use the restroom, notice a cat in a crate in an adjoining room, walk in to say hello to the cat, and notice veterinary diplomas on the wall. Hmmm. So I ask this person where her practice is located, and she says, “I have a house call business.”

So it turns out that I am at the veterinarian’s house that I was about to look up to make the house call to give Mama Kitty her shots and an exam. The one that Susanne recommended, but either didn’t give me her name or I didn’t make the connection. The plan that I just discussed with Sandy last night.

Okay, that’s pretty strange. Greensboro is not a huge city, but we’ve got about a quarter million people here and growing.

Then, a woman who showed up just before the thunderstorm rolled in who was really interested in my cardboard loom weaving mentioned blogging as she was walking back to her car. I asked her if she was a blogger, and she said yes, look up Gingerbreads House. She’s only been blogging a few months so she only has a few people on her blogroll, but whose link does she have on her blogroll? One of my very favorite people, Kathie from Two Frog Home!

Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite as much of a coincidence as showing up at the vet’s house that I had just decided to call within the last week, but with all of it put together, it was a very fun, strange day. And I got to give Virginia a shout out and Kathie another plug.

Why Michael Pollan is at the top of my lists of role models:

From the NYT Magazine today:

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

Read the rest here.

I can’t write long this morning so I’m already on the last half of my second (last) cup of coffee. When I do a coffee pot post, I write whatever until the coffee pot is empty.

This morning I have things to do, including one task that I procrastinated on until the last minute. If ever there was proof that my new medication was working, this is it, although I don’t see it as a positive! Normally if I have something I have to do I am anxious to be done with it so I get it done early.

Anyway, there are three must-dos this morning. I must pick up my chicken from my CSA farmer at the farmers’ market. I must pick up my raw goat milk from my super-secret source (the raw cow’s milk gets a taste that I don’t like this time of year, so I switch to goat milk). And I must redo the Slow Food display board before about 11:30 a.m., because I need to be at the Deep Roots Taste Fair before noon. No big deal but for some reason I am resisting doing it.

Last night I spent a few hours with the fabulous Zha K, while she waited to pick up her daughter and date from the prom. We went down to Sushi Republic and I tried their sea urchin and a roll called “Spider” - a fried soft-shell crab roll. The sea urchin was really awful - I was disappointed because I had sea urchin at Lantern in Chapel Hill as a part of that amazing dinner with Carlo Petrini and it was wonderful. Maybe it was part of the excitement of a one-of-a-kind experience. The waiter said that it was an “acquired taste.” I don’t know. But the soft-shelled crab roll was great, and I’ve noticed that is something that not all chefs can handle well.

Zha K is thinking about blogging again after a hiatus of about a year, so that will be a welcome return.

Movies watched this week: Wild Caught, a documentary about N.C. fishermen; Notes on a Scandal, starring my current favorite actress, Judi Dench.

Okay, it’s 9 am. Gotta go!

Oof, I’m tired. I’m feeling a little obsessive, and I’ve been clenching my teeth again. Not that there’s anything bad going on at all! The problem I had last week is definitely resolved, thank God, and not only that, I won a Staff Excellence Award and that means some unexpected cash to play with! Problem is that I can’t get my mind off paying off the car. I can’t stand being in debt, although I can handle the thought of the house mortgage just fine. But the credit cards must be paid in full each month, and here I am with car payments for the first time in years.

I got out in the garden this afternoon and did a bit of clean-up - moving containers to the side of the front porch to get ready for planting tomatoes and cucumbers, moving other containers for peppers to the side yard. Transplanted some fennel volunteers, yay! I sat down and sketched out a plan of sorts for planting over the next couple of months. Mulched a bit more path, but I’m still hunting for cardboard. I can’t do too much at a time anyway, because it takes so little to start my elbow hurting. But the whole plan of this garden was to develop it in a way that would be physically sustainable for me as well as the earth, and I’ve succeeded with that, I think. It’s just frustrating to see big patches of dandelions and chickweed gone to seed! I’d love to knock it all out at once.

This Saturday is the Deep Roots Taste Fair, and I’ll be there with Gwen at a Slow Food table. The weather report sounds like it might be a bit stormy though. I don’t mind rain since we’re under a tent, but chasing down display materials in wind is no fun at all. One year I brought paperweights to another fair and the kids kept wanting to run off with them, so I’ll have to find something less appealing to hold things down. Maybe vegetables! I like this fair a lot because there is free food and samples of organic products and good music.

On Sunday, I plan to venture back to my weavers guild. Each year my guild has a dye day before stopping meetings for the summer. I haven’t been to one since my friend Elaine moved to Arizona so this will be at another weaver’s house. I have some wool on two cones that are both icky shades of light green that I have overdyed for years at these things! So I’ve been winding off skeins to dye and that hasn’t helped the old elbow either. I also took some of the cotton muslin remnants that I’ve been obsessively buying at Jo-Ann and bound them up for tie-dye. There is also the matter of the two fleeces that Beverly so graciously sent to me - there are sure to be some spinners there who can give me good advice on where to send them for processing. I had no idea that it was so expensive to have fleeces processed and spun into yarn!

There is just too much to do this time of year. I know it’s because the weather is nice, but dammit, it’s overwhelming. I hate having to choose. For example, the pottery festival is also Sunday. Next weekend I have to go to a family reunion, and I’ll have to miss the freaking Liberty Antique Festival again. Anne-Marie is having a Slow Food potluck next Sunday and I doubt I’ll be able to go to that either. I don’t like missing Slow Food potlucks. They are rare pleasures.

Waa waa, my life is too full. Isn’t that disgusting?

Sunday afternoon I planted Golden Rocky wax beans, Black Valentine beans, and Royal Burgundy beans. These are bush varieties and the Golden Rockys are especially nice. The yellow color makes them beautiful and easy to pick, and boy, do they produce a lot of “green” beans for a small area. They are very tender and delicious, and I am not a big green bean fan.

The Royal Burgundy are purple beans that turn green when you cook them. They are not as prolific as the Golden Rocky but they are very attractive, especially if you grow them together.

The Black Valentine have black beans inside green pods.

Soldier, which I haven’t planted yet, is a bush bean best for dry shell beans. The beans are white with a dark red badge.

To be planted a little later, the following pole beans and field peas:

Whippoorwill field peas - originally from Monticello, these field peas bear until frost. Tolerate a lot of different light and soil conditions. A soul food and country tradition, especially with okra and hamhocks. The “snaps,” tender young pods, are better than the peas. Much tastier than black-eyed peas, which I despise.

Jacob’s Cattle - a dry bean that is lovely to look at - white and dark red.

Borlotti - smuggled by yours truly from the Mercato Centrale in Florence, Italy. Customs apparently bought the story that they were all intended for food. A brownish pink bean.

Toscanelli - same story as above, but these are pretty much the same as cannellini beans (white and delicious).

I saved a lot of these beans from last year, and so I can’t guarantee how well they will germinate. And I may have mixed up some Golden Rocky with the Black Valentine, since the beans look exactly the same! You’ll know when they bear.

The deal: leave a comment with your first, second, and third preference. I send you an email, you send me your address, I send you a little sampler. You let a few go to seed, save your seed for next year to plant or give away. This offer will be good until Thursday, April 24.