Fact-O-Rama: Doing battle with the Ice

The first ice storm always catches me off guard, as it did today. In order to get from my house to the driveway I must navigate a slippery path-actually a path of solid, treacherous, ice. I haven't loaded up on sand yet so what's a country girl to do when there's no sand on hand? Kitty Litter is a suitable alternative, hopefully you have the unscented variety ( much less objectionable) or use the cold ashes from the wood stove. 

The downside: The kitty-litter is great outside but you want to avoid tracking it into the house, same for the ash. But in an emergency it's better to deal with a little dirt then to be calling out to neighbors "help I've fallen and I can't get up". 

-toolshed- Floral 2.0

How delicious is this Hewlett-Packard Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam edition? Even the keyboard is petal-red. And an in-body webcam and mic make for some stylish Skype-ing.

Hay Seeds: Something warm

Bad cold. Bad, bad, cold. The floorboards are chilled though the woodstove is on, and I can feel it through my heaviest socks. No amount of Dayquil is lifting the feeling that someone stuffed my Eustachian tubes full of steel wool.

I'm thinking about knitting. (By thinking, I mean just surfing for amazing hand-spun yarn. Not, you know, actually casting anything on.)

~Hay seeds: Chartreuse, I heart you

The flowers from Thanksgiving are looking less than vibrant these days, and that runner was caked in mushroom gravy when I moved the bouquet this morning, so it's off now, too. But wow, if I wouldn't like a fall sweater in each of these colors.

Hold the stuff.

There is absolutely nothing about living off the roads mostly traveled that keeps you from amassing stuff. That is, just because the options for walking by and purchasing things are fewer out here than, say, if you lived in downtown Chicago or Park Slope or even in the East Village of Des Moines, it just isn't true that country folk acquire or collect or hold on to less things. Ahem.

Sometimes, the mess is contained and, ok, hardly an eyesore. (Really, City Farm Girl!)

And others ... well, who doesn't appreciate a serious barn sale?

I don't know if wider, less populated spaces seem to excuse amassings of stuff more, or if out in the woods--with less visual noise to compete with it--an abundance of things just isn't as oppressive as it is, say, in a 500-sq-ft apartment in a major metropolis. (The "houses out here are bigger" argument just doesn't sell me; I've lived in apartments larger than my home here in the woods.)

All of this stuff-thinking stems from this incredible documentary video I watched yesterday (confession: while cleaning my milk glass compote collection) that absolutely warrants 21 minutes of your time, oh, now:

- the state of the lake - 1

Not frozen yet. Sure does make flannel sheets appealing, though.

Moons over my yammy.

They've begun to amass by the milk crate in our laundry room, the only unfinished room in our itsy house, which thusly makes it the coldest nook. Ten, twenty five, forty orangey tubers that just look us in the face each time we go to nab a pair of clean socks from the dryer.

Sweet potatoes, whatever are we to do with you?!

Current pang-inducing tater meals:

• Sweet Potato Souffle (this recipe terrifies me, with its rising and inevitable falling)
• Poached Egg with Hollandaise Sauce on Sweet Potato Hash (mmm, saucy. A coworker says she now fixes this thrice weekly for dinner. And it's from Supper in Stereo, a seriously yum cooking blog)
• Sweet-tater Fries! (These appeared at Thanksgiving. I will not say that I disliked them. I will say they certainly were not a casserole full of mashed orangey starch with butter and marshmellows. There is always next year.)
  

Gifts, Take No. 373654

City friends are getting these embroidery hoop hangings by Jenny Krauss this year:

Beyonce tears apart my woods

Full disclosure: I did a full-on, post-Thanksgiving-maelstrom cleanup (including the removal of approx. seven million pine needles that'd snuck indoors) while this wailed in the background:



Ms. Sasha Fierce would be pret-ty chilly wearing that here right now ...