contemplations
My heart is still here, where we spent the weekend camping with 2 dogs, 4 kids, 1 sheep, 1 bunny rabbit and a gazillion mosquitos (more on this odd and fun assortment on Wednesday. Also, we were dressed for a wedding and though I may not have taken the dress off all weekend, this was our peak moment, hygienically speaking).
The rest of me is home, contemplating:
1) How many earwigs I will pluck out of my salad before losing my appetite.
2) How the mosquito bites on my inner thighs will ever heal if they keep er, rubbing together when I take a step.
3) How Col and Rose’s rag-tag assortment of half-broken, chewed-up, 2-steps-from-the-landfill toys have multiplied while we were gone and flung themselves under the couch.
4) And, if I’ll ever be able to stop swooning over the broccoli heads and just eat them.
And you dear ones? How was your weekend and what are you contemplating?
ps: those yellow flowers are called mules ears. Aren’t they stunning?
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Cute dress! It’s crazy how the toys multiply when you aren’t looking, isn’t it?
I know! I’m contemplating the wisdom of tossing out 75% of their toys and letting them play with sticks, rocks and grasshoppers.
The weekend… watching a storm moving from the south scatter a small outdoor barbeque indoors before the platters of food were whipped away by the wind.
Leaving my Durango for the place I call home. Leaving my Durango…
Spending from 8 AM until 8 PM in flight and in airports. Leaving my Durango…
And reuniting with my husband (after ten days) and daughter (after five weeks).
Bittersweet.
That storm! We were in the mountains, counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder, trying not to flinch in front of the children. When we returned our 30-gallon rain catchment buckets were overflowing! Thanks for showing up in my garden last week, Kathy, it was great to meet you.
PS: thank you for the quick visit. there will be a next time.
Great photo! We were on vacation at the beach last week and came home on Saturday to the task of packing up our entire house, as we are moving tomorrow. It wasn’t until a few minutes ago when the panic began to set in. And, as you can see, I’m dealing with it by getting caught up with my blogs! :)
http://amysreallife.wordpress.com
Sounds logical to me!
Beautiful photo-you all look great. Good job Dan. We enjoyed a hike out in Pt Reyes Seashore this weeekend on a warm, sunny day.
Contemplating becoming 70 yrs old in one week, grateful to still be here on this amazing planet and being healthy enough to travel back and forth to Durango and to visit all of you
Love
Baba
Amen to all that!
That is a great picture. Me – I am relating to your comment about earwigs in the salad. While I merely have to pluck them out of the roses before I bring in the bouquet, earlier this week, I chewed heartily on a small slug – contemplating it’s flavor, texture, and density before my brain realized I should spit it out and see what it was. I’m mortified. Nothing like eating a slug to make me crave only cooked veggies – and it’s tested my bounds of just how much of a nature girl I really am. Yup – still thinking about it – days and days later…!
Oh Ami! A slug! I can totally relate. And cooking your veggies doesn’t necessarily help. Last summer after eating a plate of cooked, garden broccoli, I found several cabbage worms on my plate all dead and dressed in stir-fry sauce and wondered how many I had already eaten.
What an amazing place to spend the weekend.:) I am contemplating too many things right now and need to focus on just a few….and I’m off to do just that.
all of you are stunning. :)
I’m contemplating not having enough room in my garden now that everything is filling out. Rip some stuff out and call it a day, or start moving veggies into my flower beds {which is most likely what I’ll do.}
Love the pic of you guys.
Katie – I know what you mean. There is never enough space. Around here, flowers have to earn their keep by being either 1) edible 2) medicinal 3) honeybee food 4) so stunningly gorgeous and easy to grow that I can’t say no.
Contemplating your beautiful writing! Still loving the sentence, (paraphrased) “the beets are like teenage girls, all clumped together and wishing for more curves!!” Lovely, lovely!!!!
gorgeous photo!
we spent the weekend putting up peaches, making tequila peach pie (which then inspired peach margaritas) and the man made some black ipa. good times.
thanks again for the salsa recipe…. I am making that next :)
Beautiful photo of you three.
I’ve been to weddings when we camped. The criteria for getting gussied is quite different. Cleaning feet with baby wipes, sprinkling creek water on a skirt to get the wrinkles out, mascara application in the reflection off the coffee pot.
This weekend started with Margot leading Ruby around with a dog leash clipped to her pacifier. Then garden porn, crying as I watched my friend finish a 3:26 marathon, going for my own run with Alice, feeling thankful we have a 6′ fence separating our neighbor’s house and ours for, if not, Andy would have surely gotten in his first fist fight (he continues to shoot squirrels), Margot flooding our entire upstairs by flushing a whole roll of toilet paper and warm adventures with friends. It was a good, if a bit nutty, weekend.
toss the toys and keep only the beloved ones! we did that and it made cleaning up so much more manageable.
i kinda love that you wore the dress all weekend. my husband rolls his eyes when i do stuff like that.
On a broccoli note, we have been getting so much from the CSA that I’ve made gallons of Cream of Broccoli soup (it freezes, too). My 4 year old loves it (especially with lots of cheese). Hard to eat when it’s 90′ outside, but if it’s raining or cool, it’s a good first course :)
1. love how the mule ear petals look in the breeze
2. earwigs totally freak me out
3. we have a new-ish rule: if it breaks, if it’s plastic and made in china it doesn’t get glued, it gets a good-bye send off
4. my friend calls a mosquito bite love’s tainted note from the outdoors, as in *remember me, the good and the bad when we’re apart*
1) We totally play by that rule too. And I hate throwing things out, but I sort of love saying goodbye to the plastic, broken China-made crap. 2) Love’s tainted note from the outdoors! Ha! I’ll have to contemplate that one.
Such a lovely photo! I’m contemplating my garden failures & miracles and already planning that the 2012 garden will be infinitely better.
Hmmmm.. Mule ears. I found a huge patch of very similar flowers here last year – wonder if they grow at this altitude? I never did look them up, having gotten slack with both cladistics (is that even a word?) and binomial nomenclature. When I found them, I decided they looked like they belong in france, except, I’ve never been there, so there’s a small chance I was wrong. Tiny.
I throw all the kids toys away every night after they go to bed, and they grow back overnight, except dustier and broken-er. They have a precise catalogue in their brains of what should be there, and can describe in minute detail they thing they want, that they haven’t touched in 2 years, 5 seconds after I secretly give it to the thrift shop. Weirdly, they always get over it, whereas I am STILL not over the beloved blue fleece jacket I left on the bus to Prince George 15 years go. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. It reeked of cool, and now all I reek of is sweat and inchworm juice (unintentional salad ingredient. Oops).
And ahem, we spent the weekend canoeing with the small fry, who were rock solid awesome in the boat, and begged for more every day. Also, the mosquitoes seem to like young blood better, even though the surface area is more limited.
Earwigs. Oh, dear. I’m going to think about broccoli and mules ears instead.
you look beautiful in this photograph. what a lovely mama!
I don’t like plastic toys (except for Lego and Playmobil) either and I hate throwing things out so I could second what you’re saying but my husband is a voice of realism in our house. So our conversation on the subject would go somewhat like that: me: we don’t need/want those plastic toys; him: yeah, but Wojtek likes them much better than all wooden/ ecological ones he has; me: I’d rather not buy made in China crap; him: it’s only made in China but ordered, approved and sold by American companies; me: it’s Chinese who bear all the environmental costs of production; him: but they have their jobs and their economy is growing.
And each of those points has a long list of “buts” to add.
I went camping this weekend with only my sister and her boyfriend ( two other adults) and was stunned about how much more simple/smooth everything was. I almost can’t believe there were days that me and my husband would go hiking in the mountains with only our backpacks containing everything we needed for two weeks. Not to mention that we came to this country with 2 suitcases and those same 2 backpacks (and one child) 4 years ago and we have accumulated sooo much more stuff since then. Most of it (plastic) toys.
Eh…, contemplations.
Ania
love you and your blog! XXOO Dan
love the photo of you and Rose and Col walking in the tall flowers!