Tuesday 19 February 2008 @ 20:00

Greetings!

Henry and I have had a holiday weekend that is now coming to a close and I must take this moment to state out loud I DON'T WANT TO GO BACK TO WORK TOMORROW!

We've had a fun and productive weekend and the weather has been for the most part very good and conducive to getting a lot of yard work completed.

The weekend started out with henry having the day off school so he accompanied me to the office where I had a performance review with one of my accounts so I needed to be there for about an hour or so. We left the office and rode the bus up to the Pike Place Market for some lunch and a wander through the stalls just kind of sightseeing. We stocked up on some fresh spices and got a box of Market Spice tea for Henry's Mum and had a slice of pizza and some fresh mini donuts and then spent some time at Beecher's cheese watching them make some fresh curd and then wandering about in Sur La Table before wandering back uptown and onto the bus home.

Henry picked up his new bowling ball on Saturday and it is lime green and navy swirled and smells like limes. It is a weighted urethane cover and is 10#s now up from his previous 8# so between the reactive cover and weight as well as the new #s it created some challenges for him but he still bowled well and his team took 3 of 4 possible league points this week. The weather was sunny but cool so Henry walked up to have lunch with his Mum who is now working only a block or so away from the house and I trimmed my 14 rose bushes cutting them all the way back for the first time that any of my neighbors can remember in the past few years. They look a bit bare but I'm expecting them to be really great this year as I took my time and was very deliberate about how I pruned. I spent Sunday pruning my 3 plum trees and took off about 10 feet from the tops and thinned the lower branches and ended up with a completely full 60 gallon yard waste bin twice; it was emptied Monday and I filled it again today.

I have been researching Square Foot Gardening and I built a 2X6 raised bed yesterday and today filled it with a mix of 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 vermiculite so essentially it's filed with high quality potting mix and this is purported to be all the nutrients that my veggies will need. Next step is to build the trellis for my peas and get those planted in the next few days as well as some other cool weather crops if I can get away with getting them in the ground now; maybe broccoli or cauliflower but I may be able to get some radicchio or lettuce in. If this works as well as I believe it will I'll build another bed to go under the big cedar tree on the North side of the house for lettuces and spinach through the summer since it stays cool and gets only a couple hours of sunlight there. I bought two artichoke plants today to go in near the SW cornere of the house where it will get serious sunshine and another over at the North end of the front yard near where my neighbors have their raspberries. Henry has been planning some planter boxes for the desk in the backyard and I've been working with him on the planning of the lumber he'll need as well as the cost; trying to bring math home and show him that you need it now and then and that it is even part of having fun projects.

After reading The Unpredjudiced Palate last year and then attending a talk by Michael Pollan the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food and I am pretty inspired now to produce and forage as much of our food as I can this summer. I'm also beginning to bake all of our bread and making everything I can from whole foods. Some interesting things have really resonated with me lately about food and here are a couple of them that I have lifted from Michael Pollan. In his research he has simplified eating to just a couple of rules:

1. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
2. If your great grandmother wouldn't have recognized something at the grocer as food, it isn't.

Pretty simple, easy to follow and make a lot of sense. I baked bread from a mother starte today and Henry has proclaimed it as the best bread he's ever eaten. I can't get him to eat whole grain bread for the life of me but this was all whole grain and he ate it right up. Using a mixed mother starter I was able to bake two loaves with only 1/2 a teaspoon of yeast yet it still has a fully developed flavor and tender crumb with a good hearty crust and a light brown almost golden color.

Henry watched Alton Brown make homemade donuts the other day so that was one of the projects we did this weekend as well, Henry made the dough, his first experience with yeast and although it was a bit challenging and a bit more difficult than most of the things he's made so far and it was a lesson in the exactitude of baking from scratch the donuts turned out mighty fine! We made cinnamon sugar on Sunday morning and Henry took most of them with his friends to the swimming pool and I made the 2nd half as powdered sugar donut holes for Henry and his friend that stayed over on Sunday night when they got up on Monday morning. Henry had his first sleepover and the kids were still awake at 2am on Monday morning and then back up at 7. I was asleep well before them and could hear them playing video games and watching TV a few times and then again when I woke up to hear them talking in the morning. I wandered through Monday with a lack of good sleep headache and the kids just went about their day as if nothing was out of the ordinary then played all day at his friends house in the creek that runs through the property and riding bikes and skateboards. Henry finally passed out about 10 last night and slept 12 hours.

Anyway, we've gotten our yard cleaned up, gotten prepped for Spring gardening and had a really good time as wwell as being able to have a couple of lazy mornings just drinking coffee and reading the paper while sitting in the sun in my big comfy reading chair so all in all it's been a great few days off and still I don't want to go back to work tomorrow.

Best