Book Goals Mid-Year: A Fail

As you may recall, I made one New Year’s res­o­lu­tion when the cal­en­dar rolled over to 2010: I wanted to read 26 books this year, which aver­ages out to one every other week.

I’ve reminded myself again why I do not make New Year’s res­o­lu­tions. I stopped at five books when the weather warmed up. I only read what I had to read for work.

I was excited to jump back into my read­ing a few weeks ago with my book club’s pick of “The Senator’s Wife,” by Sue Miller. I’m not nor­mally a “Peyton Place” type reader, but I had skipped the two pre­vi­ous book club reads and instead went just for the con­ver­sa­tion and food.

This was a bad choice to get me back into read­ing. Continue Reading »

The Microbes are After us

When we moved to Our Little House 3 years ago, I almost tossed the microwave. While I didn’t know of any spe­cific dan­gers from cook­ing with radi­a­tion, I’ve some­how always inher­ently known that it must not be good for us.

Maybe it was one of the first expe­ri­ences I had with a microwave. I was about 12, get­ting ready to head with a friend to the pool for a day of sun­bathing (I know now, of course, that isn’t good for us either) and boy chas­ing (whether that is good for us depends on the boy).

As I recall, my friend had one of the first microwaves in our neigh­bor­hood and we pro­ceeded to blow up our hot dogs all over the new oven. I remem­ber we were a bit delayed after clean­ing it up, but I also remem­ber think­ing that any­thing that could make a hot dog explode in under 2 min­utes couldn’t be good.

And then there was the woman who con­tin­u­ously called the appli­ance ser­vice cen­ter at the depart­ment store where I worked as a teenager. The poor lady kept telling us she could see the “microbes” escap­ing her oven and she needed a ser­vice man out right away. We thought at the time she was just lonely — as she always had a fresh batch of cook­ies for him – and insisted he sit and visit with her while there.

But, maybe the lit­tle old lady wasn’t crazy or lonely as we thought…

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Summer's Bounty

As sum­mer winds down, some of our Living Large in Our Little House com­mu­nity might find them­selves with more sum­mer har­vest bounty than good recipes.

Unfortunately, that is not the case here this year. A wet, cool spring fol­lowed imme­di­ately by too hot of tem­per­a­tures made for a short grow­ing sea­son. As you can see in my post from a few days ago, my grape and vol­un­teer tomato plants have about had it and the ones in the gar­den didn’t fare much better.

Still, I know some of you are still pick­ing and grow­ing. Here’s a cou­ple of recipes from my mother’s recipe box that have long been sta­ples for sum­mer in our family:

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The End of Summer

Posted July 30th, 2010 by kerri and filed in small house living
Tags: , ,
16 Comments

The end of July, I can­not believe the sum­mer is almost past here at Our Little House.  Sure, the long term weather fore­cast says we still have at least a month left of these oppres­sively hot and humid tem­per­a­tures, but once July is gone, I feel the sum­mer slipping.

This too, is ingrained in my DNA from child­hood. July 31 marked the end of my Dad’s month long vaca­tion from his long-time rail­road job and August 1 marked the begin­ning of school clothes and sup­ply shop­ping (the rail­road paid once a month on the 1st) and the den­tist and doc­tor check ups.

While there were still plenty of days to run, bike and play and evenings to catch fire­flies the end of sum­mer was just around the cor­ner, as school usu­ally started by the 3rd week in August (as it does here now). My stay­ing up late with my mother also came to and end as she tried to get me back into a routine.

It was a time to begin to hun­ker down, spend more time indoors and get seri­ous about life again.

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