My friend Stella Capek helped to organize Conway’s first annual EcoFest this past September. She convinced me to give a tour of Covington Towers. Concrete is not a very sustainable building material, but once it is up, if the internal structure is kept from rusting, it is up for good. I also gave a tour of our raised bed vegetable garden.
It was great to get to share our home and our garden with the Conway community!
Started Christmas shopping early this year. Ty and I have a conversation in the summertime about gifts for family members. We usually have one immediately after Christmas too, just to bookmark ideas.
The best gift we got last year were Minnetonka Moccasins. They are so cozy, and we wear them every day after the temperature dips below 50F at night. We weren’t even supposed to get slippers! Ty’s father got himself a new pair plus slipper socks, and we just happened to run across the store when we were in upstate NY.
I’m wearing the slippers right now. I’ve never been a fan of the slipper, and sorta despised getting them as a kid because my feet were never cold. I told my dad about the slippers and he had a blast from the past. He had a pair of the tanned leather ones, and he really really loved them, but he wore them out in the rain and they fell apart.
I called my mother a few weeks ago to get his shoe size, and she said she just bought him a new pair of slippers and he hates them.
Not Martha strikes first with an awesome list of online gift places at meta filter.
Here is my disclaimer – I’m not giving anything on this list, so I’m not ruining any surprises. This isn’t my wish list either if you know me personally. I just really like online shopping and crafts and like mostly ideas!
So here’s the gift list!
1. SLIPPERS – either Minnitonka Moccasins, slipper socks, crocheted, or knitted and felted.
2. Cookie Jars – Paint your own pottery stores may have them in stock, and they make great gifts! For the hipster kids, there are other kinds of cookie jars.
3. Bar Ware – Ty and I have a bar globe like this. It is a classy accessory for academic types. The jigger cube is great for measurement. The swivel cognac glasses are pretty classy too, but aren’t you supposed to warm it in your hand? Maybe it just makes it a feat of trust to put them down.
4. Green – You can improve your gas mileage by 4% by keeping your tires properly inflated. These caps help you stay inflated properly. You can even use recycled bike tires in your day to day, for her or for him.
5. Games – My brother got my sister this LED hula hoop kit last year. It makes for excellent photography. The only new video game I can endorse is Katamari Forever for the PlayStation 3.
6. Tech – I am really digging my new Flip video camera. It records 60 minutes of video, and then I just upload the video to my computer like pictures off of a camera. Last year my sister got us webcams to help keep in touch. She got me a Kermit the Frog colored green Clique webcam, and the sound and picture is better than I expected.
7. Sentimental – If I could choose one gift to give everyone, it would be an online gift certificate to get a photo book of your own pictures printed out. (Shutterfly option – flickr option) Along those lines, one of the best gifts I’ve ever given was to my brother and my father. At the end of a day of deer hunting, my brother drug my cousin Amy the photographer and my father out a clearing in the trees with great fall colors behind them. I sent the picture to shutterfly.com, blew it up to 20×30, and selected a custom frame of distressed wood (Portico Wide). My dad opened the package and almost teared up. In the background of the image, Dad could see the place where he shot his first deer. Maybe I compile these gift lists because I hope more people get to have experiences like this with the people they love.
The newest site that does this prints to a canvas. Canvas Pop does this for the best value I’ve seen.
8. Nifty – Whenever I think of gifts I would want, I always think about how I need more organization, and how most of my relatives do too. So many people have almost received Dart Coat Hooks from me. Ty likes making noodle soup often, and these Udon Noodle Bowls warm fingers like slippers warm toes.
9. Manly – A Well Dress Bullet speaks for itself. My father always said a flashlight makes a good gift, so this clamp light probably does one better.
10. Safety – My new job has a super focus on Health and Safety. These flower fire extinguishers fit the bill!
There are no books on this list, but you can choose the “book club” tag on the right side of this page, and I’d suggest any of those as a gift!
My sister Jen is so cool. I really like the grass in the foreground in this video. Her skirt makes her look like a reverse tornado coming up out of the ground into a clear blue sky:
Long way to go hoop from Jen on Vimeo.
Many think the holiday season begins the day after Thanksgiving. I’ve always found this weird, because Thanksgiving is a holiday. I remember when I was a child and watch all of the Thanksgiving day parades. Santa Claus would always show up at the end, almost reflecting the European tradition of a Santa Claus visit on the first week of December.
Some people think it begins the day after Halloween when all of the stores throw out the orange candy, and bring in the green and red candy. I think this is a little too early to decorate. Being away from family, I have to start my gift buying early! Last year we went to Nebraska for Thanksgiving, and I brought up all of our gifts then to save on shipping.
If I had to set a floating date for the holiday season, I would say the first weekend of the deer hunting season. Coming from a farming community, that was the first point in time that the community seemed really relaxed. The holiday concert prep began, and there was a shift in sports season.
If I had to pick an exact date, it would be tomorrow, November 14. That’s my sister’s birthday. Buying her a gift, or sometimes just thinking about buying her a gift gets my gears going on my other gifting. It gets my gears going on what to bake. It gets me excited to see family members again, and just take a break from everyday life. It is also the time when my body realizes the effects of eating perhaps too much Halloween candy.
This year we’re spending Thanksgiving with two different groups of friends. We’re going to an early potluck, and I’m still not sure what to make. There will be many vegetarians there, so for that crowd I like making some turkey that they can actually eat.
My Aunt Carol makes these chocolate turkeys every year. I can’t find a recipe for them anywhere, so I’m going to take my best guess at the recipe, as ready-made as I can make it:
1 bag of BRACH’s Chocolate Stars
1 box of malted milk balls
1 can of chocolate frosting
1 tube of red frosting and an extra fine tip.
Place one star on the counter, point-side up. Place a 1/4 tsp size dollop of frosting on the point (or less!). Stick the malted milk ball on the frosted point. It should stick. Place another star on the counter and add frosting to it. Stick the ball/star combo on top of the counter frosted star at a 90 degree angle from the first one. The first star is the turkey fantail. The second is the feet/pedestal. Let these dry a little bit and set up. Whip out the red frosting with an extra fine tip, and start mid-way down the front. Make an extra elongated “S” down the front where the bottom of the “S” is the turkey waddle, and the top of the “S” is the beak.
I’m not sure what else to make. The next week I think we may be going down to Texas to see some friends and football there.
So this weekend it begins: looking for recipes, looking for gifts, trying to get the first clue about what I could use. Send me your suggestions! My mother already sent me a “what do you want this year email”. If only she had an amazon account!
…AND HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEN!
(don’t read this if you haven’t received your gift yet!) I got here a really cool felted coin purse from The Red Sari at the Box Turtle in Little Rock.
My new band played a Halloween show, and I just put together a video of our last song.
It is a curious thing living in The South in November, and still having a garden that produces ripe vegetables. Still getting pole beans and peppers. We still have green tomatoes, and last week I canned 14 quarts of pickled green tomatoes. I wanted to make the recipe for Crispy Green Tomatoes from Little House in the Suburbs, but it involved a three day process.
I opened a jar of the cucumber dill pickles Sunday, and they are pretty tasty. They’re soft, so next time the recipe must include alum.
So what worked and what didn’t in the raised bed high density garden? The spinach thrived, but I failed to plant a second crop before the temperature got too hot. The beets went nuts. We definitely planted too many of those. The larger tomatoes really liked being in the ground. They did not like the plastic tubs, unless they were cherry tomatoes. In September, the tomatoes officially outgrew the cages and fell over. Next year I’ll plant less cherry tomatoes, less romas, but more regular tomatoes.
The cucumbers absolutely thrived, but petered out in early August. Next time I’m going to plant ones that stay tiny for pickling. I think my friend Katie planted a type called “straight eight”.
All of the squash was a failure. I’ve been told that during wet summers, “stink bugs” transmit a virus to the plant, and within a week, it is dead. I got 2 summer squash and two spaghetti sqash before everything shriveled up.
I planted way too many Hungarian hot wax peppers. They did so much better when I ignored them. Next year I want to plant more bell peppers and jalapeno peppers. Planted some Serrano peppers, but they always seemed very bitter.
I couldn’t get the fall crop of lettuce or bush beans to come in properly. The kale is still going strong though. We got 3 heads of flat dutch cabbage to grow, but we had to plant seedlings very early before the brassica worms came on strong.
The lima beans and turnips put out a surprisingly small about of food for how long each plant took to grow. I don’t think I’ll be planting those next year.
My two biggest disappointments were the eggplant and the Brussels sprouts. Last year I couldn’t get a single eggplant to form. This year they looked great, but the vegetables didn’t get bigger than 3 inches wide. Sometimes the fruits were yellow instead of purple. The Brussels sprouts never even formed proper tight-headed sprouts. I checked the largest one today, and it is growing other stalks out of where the sprouts should be. Maybe I missed the sprouts in the month of October rain.
The biggest success of the late summer: pole beans. I always grew bush beans before. I had no idea that pole beans produced green beans for the entire season. They’re still going right now. They didn’t even choke off our first year asparagus crown.
The okra did alright. We never had enough for a meal ready at one time. When the temperature dips below 60 they shut down. I planted some snap peas in the same pot in August, and now they’re climbing up the dormant okra. That was a fun experiment.
Next year in short:
I want to acknowledge some other cool gifts I got for my birthday before the window passes.
My in-laws sent me some really cool plant stuff. The hand painted turtle planter will contain some sort of plant I bring indoors today. (Even though it has been in the 70s this week, it is starting to get down to the 40s at night.)
They also sent me some awesome mushroom-shaped garden stakes. I can never keep track of where I planted things, so the stakes will be attractive and useful.
Ty got me a gift certificate for the yarn store in Fort Smith. I bought some pretty cool stuff. I had to buy sparkly sock yarn from Turkey. I also found a project in the Vogue Knitting Winter 2009 issue. A short-sleeved sweater will be very handy to have here!
We’ve already made bread from it once, and I’ve pieced out the starter to several friends. I’ve never made kneaded bread before, but it turned out great! I’m using this site for the care and feeding of my starter. The recipe creates a very large loaf. I had to give half of it away before it went stale. I suggest halving the recipe for a household of 2.
When we left Nebraska not only did we leave all of my family and friends behind, we left our beloved dome house.
The dome was once green, but we had it coated with a light terracotta color this summer. I was hoping to go dark brown, but because of the polyurethane foam, the contractor suggested going much lighter.
We’ve got some awesome folks living there right now in the Schulze family. They really dressed up the dome for Halloween this year:
If you have some time, you should check out John Conrad Schulze’s writing on his website. He went to school with Ty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Spent almost all of my spare time this week working on my Halloween costume and practicing with my band, The Conway Twitties. We played a benefit for the Exquisite Corpse Annual Journal, and had a lot of fun rocking students and professors alike.
Robin (in pink) owned the pink wig, and Sam saw the blue one and had to to get it. That left me to make my own wig. I used almost an entire cone of Mary Loe’s Solo Green acrylic yarn (fingering weight?). I used Red Heart in the same hue to create a skull cap. Then I attached yard-long sections of the yarn to the skull cap. I was thinking about having a down hair do, or braids, but then the nerdy fun of Tina Fey’s Princess Leia buns popped into my head!
We played three originals and covered “The Monster Mash”. I’ll put up a video soon. Thanks to everyone who came out to the show!
