Cheers

Today is February first and the weather was glorious; it reached into the 60s. After last year’s miserable winter, I’d say that a day like today deserves a toast. How about we toast with my new favorite drink, the BLT?

Word on the street (or on the internet, to be more exact) was that Bulleit Bourbon was delicious. The problem was that no one told the package stores in Connecticut and I’ve been searching for it since the end of summer. I finally spotted it on the shelf of my local shop and grabbed a bottle this past weekend.

So then… what do I do with bourbon?  Gin drinks, rum drinks, even tequila drinks—I’ve got you covered, but for bourbon drinks, I needed some help.  I went straight to the source: bulleitbourbon.com and that’s where I found my new favorite.

It’s simple, it’s tart, and it’s surprisingly refreshing.  It’s a BLT (bourbon, lemon, tonic).

BLT
(recipe from bulleitbourbon.com)

1 1/2 ounce Bulleit bourbon
1 lemon slice
tonic

Fill a rocks glass halfway with ice, add bourbon, squeeze lemon and toss in, then top with tonic and stir.

Now raise your glass and make a toast to beautiful weather and 60-degree winter days. Welcome February!

I’m On a Boat!

This weekend? It was pretty awesome. I hope yours was just as fantastic.

Summer Wrap-Up

It’s officially fall now. The calendar tells me so, and the frost warning issued for tonight nails it home. Fine. Whatever. I’m still holding onto my awesome summer, and since I was too busy having fun to stop and tell you about it then, why don’t we all relive those warm-weather days and have a late summer wrap-up?

Look! I’m wearing shorts! Remember those days? Long-time family friends of ours bought a house on a private lake in Hubbardston. MA and we go up each summer for a day of barbecue, catching up, and hanging out by the water.

It’s lovely there. Sigh… I discovered, though, that I am not cut out for fishing anymore. I used to love to fish with my dad and have so many great memories of our time in the canoe, but this time fishing was frustrating beyond all measure and something I’ll leave to Luke. He swears that fishing is the most relaxing activity. NONSENSE!

According to my photo record, nothing at all happened in August. Until that, you know, hurricane. But we’ve already beaten that one to death here.

We celebrated our anniversary this year by doing something I wanted to do all summer: get together with friends and go to a Friday night concert at Cassidy Hill Vineyard in Coventry. This picture is actually from the following week when Luke and I went back, just the two of us, to enjoy the evening all over again.

What a gorgeous place.  Everyone brings picnics and camps in the grass by the grape vines. Live music plays from the deck of the tasting room/store while the sun sets over the hill.  Just perfect. I can’t wait for next summer so we can go again.

The next weekend we went to an epic birthday party at our neighbor’s house. This is me and Tiffiny at the party. Miss Tiffiny is approximately 100 months pregnant and hopefully she’s currently in labor as I type this.

Now how many birthday parties have you been to that featured a hot air balloon AND a bouncy house?  I told you it was epic. Unfortunately the balloon ran out of fuel before Luke and I had our chance to take a ride, but I managed to laugh myself into a set of sore abs jumping around in the bounce house instead.

Up next on another sunny, gorgeous summer weekend was the Crusin’ on Main Street car show in Manchester. They close down a section of Main Street for this car show every summer and holy cats, I have never seen this many people in Manchester at one time before.

Perfect weather, beautiful old cars, and we even managed to run into my dad who was there showing off his very own hot rod.

This is my dad’s car here. Funny story: Although Dad finished restoring his Model-A around the time I graduated high school (and let me tell you, that was not a short time ago) I have still never ridden in this car.  My mom, my sister, my sister’s boys, my parent’s dog… everyone has ridden in Dad’s hot rod but me.  I guess I’m just never in the right place at the right time.

And that pretty much catches you up to speed. After the car show, Autumn swooped in and I’ve been inappropriately dressed ever since. Other than taking away summer, that’s the real reason I don’t like fall.  I never know how to dress. The mornings are in the 40s, by lunchtime it’s in the 70s, and by the time I get home from work it’s back down to the 50s.  Add to that the fact that my office leaves the air conditioning on until it’s cold enough outside to turn on the heat, and I’m either sweating or layering on multiple scarves and cardigans over my lightweight dresses.  Sigh… I’m sorry, I promise that this is the last time I’ll complain about fall. This year.

So what have you all been up to? Do you miss summer, too?

Uncle

I’ve been fighting it tooth and nail. All of this pumpkin/cinnamon/apple-flavored, crisp weather, isn’t-fall-nice talk around here lately. I’m not ready to let go of summer. Alex asked me the other day when we were going back to the beach again and I almost burst into tears because the answer is: not for another year. SOB! Then today it rained and the temperature dropped and the weather forecast says that this weekend it’s going to be in the 40s overnight. So I stopped at Starbucks and bought a pumpkin spice latte. When I got home, I baked an apple pie. My house smells like cinnamon and I have the urge to go buy a mum. Fine, fall.  You win. AGAIN. I will accept you, but I’ll never love you as much as summer.

I Miss Convenience

We’re entering day four of our own, personal hell. The power has been out since 8:03 Sunday morning. That was exactly eight minutes after my sweet husband woke me up to invite me to sip coffee and eat French toast while we watch the hurricane rain blow sideways, and exactly three minutes after he warmed up the frying pan and started the coffee.  Not the best start to this hurricane morning.

We boiled water on the camp stove so I could pour it through the drip coffee maker and finish brewing the pot, then tried to make the best of it by sulking, shooting the evil eye out the window at the weather, and eating cold banana bread. Stupid Irene.

We put on waders and rain coats and went for a walk to see how much damage there was. There were some trees down, one completely blocking the road in the neighborhood next to our house. It was a big pine that fell and too the power lines with it.  All in all, the storm wasn’t that bad. The river came up in the back yard, close enough that we could see it, but not nearly as bad as we’ve seen, and it receded as quickly as it rose. We lost a big limb in the front yard but not the giant dead one that hangs, threateningly, over the chicken coop.  The big problem, of course, is that big pine on the lines in the neighborhood next to us.

Connecticut Light and Power’s website tells me that 61% of Andover is without power and there is currently no estimate for when we’ll get ours back.  The peaceful sound of our rural backyard has been replaced by that of twenty-five of our neighbors’ generators humming all day and night.  We can’t open the windows because all we smell is exhaust fumes. We do have a generator, but it only runs when Luke is home, and since we work opposite shifts, I get about an hour of electricity between 4 and 5pm. I get home from work, rush to take a shower, fill my water bottles, and gather my flashlights, then Luke leaves for work and the electricity leaves with him.  It was fine for a couple of days, I knew it was temporary, but now it’s really starting to wear on me.

Luke needs to shower when he comes home from work, he’s so covered in diesel soot and grease after his shift, there’s no way he can go to bed without a scrubbing. This means that every morning around 3 or 4am, the generator comes on so he can shower and re-cool the refrigerator.  This also means that I don’t sleep, which might be lending to this at-my-breaking-point, want-to-cry feeling.  I miss sleep, I miss power. I miss convenience.

Friday is our anniversary. The traditional gift for the eleventh year is steel.  How about those lovely people from Connecticut Light and Power come to Andover and reattach the giant, steel, electrical cables that are dangling on the ground around the corner from our home, and bring back our electricity? That would be the best gift ever.

Scenes From a Winter That Won’t Go Away

It’s February 5 and Connecticut has already suffered five winter storms. Today we’re getting rain/sleet/snow and I hear there are storm expected Tuesday and Thursday of this week.

Looking out from the inside the warm house, I will admit that all the snow can be pretty, but I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.  Luke broke the snow shovel trying to clear the snow off the wood shed after it started to collapse.  I stopped at the local hardware store this morning to ask if they had any snow shovels in stock.  They laughed at me.

That damn groundhog had better be right…

File This Under “Miscellaneous”

To avoid going another week without updating, today I present to you a collection of random of details hardly relating to eachother.  Hey, look! It snowed.

Wednesday a storm blew through the state and dumped a load of snow on us.  It started out pretty…

…and ended with rain and gloominess and slush. Yuck.  Even the pups didn’t want to go out in it.  Speaking of pups, I’ve had this lump on my floor since last weekend and I can’t get it off.  Any suggestions?

Peanut’s been visiting this week while her lucky parents are soaking up the warm weather in Florida for work.  She’s been a perfect houseguest and she cracks me up each night when she puts herself to bed around 10pm.  We stay up late in our house – last night I turned in around midnight – but Miss P will quietly get up from her bed in the living room around 10pm and head down to find a rug in one the bedrooms where it’s quiet and dark and the floors are warm from the wood boiler.

Unfortunately this means that she’s ready to get the day started at 5:30am, but a sharp “SSHH!” generally quiets her down and she goes back to sleep until 7am when Molly and I are ready to get up.

Speaking of warm, (?) I’ve been a knitting machine lately, cranking out these winter hats at an alarming rate.  Can you see the skull and crossbones?  I love this pattern.  This one’s for Alex, I thought he might like the pom pom.  I made one for me and one for Cameron, too.

Well that just about sums up this week.  Looking ahead, my mom had a birthday on Tuesday which we’re celebrating along with my dad’s birthday this Sunday, and Saturday is the big family Christmas party at my sister’s house.  Today I have a work holiday luncheon of Thai food that I’m pretty excited about.  Let’s kick the holidays off in chocolate-covered, high-calorie style!  Have a great weekend, everyone.

Sunday, Lovely Sunday

After an early breakfast and seeing Luke off to do some work at his mother’s house, I decided that maybe I’d take advantage of the lonely, gray Sunday morning and head to the flea market in Mansfield.

Just a side note here, I always call that flea market – the one at the Mansfield Drive-In – THE flea market because I know of no other.  I’ve never been to another flea market and in my mind that is THE flea market.  Whenever I tell anyone I’m going to, or have just been to the flea market, they ask me, “oh, which one?”  Which one?  The ONLY one.  Is there another flea market in Connecticut that I don’t know about?

Anyhow, I dressed in layers – because I learned my lesson the last time I went to the flea market when was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers as I counted out my dollar bills – and headed out to the flea market.  The one in Mansfield.  I got there just as it opened, but unfortunately the rest of Connecticut was jonesing for some bargain-hunting, too, and everyone and their mother’s girlfriend was there  getting in my way.  It was crowded and the crowds seemed to encourage the sellers to raise their prices and suddenly value their crap a whole lot more.  If I heard one more person – there, allegedly to SELL stuff – say “well, that’d fetch $40 in Brimfield” I was going to punch them in the nose.  With all due respect, we’re not IN Brimfield.  We’re in a crummy, dusty drive-in in Mansfield.  I’ll give you five bucks.

I did manage to find a few good things and left the flea market with roughly thirteen yards of fabric that totaled about $12 all together.  That, and some rusty bottle openers because, well, why not?  You can’t ever have enough of those, can you?

From the flea market I went to the Farmers’ Market and had the luxury of strolling around in the gorgeous sunshine – did I mention that the sun came out as I was leaving the flea market? Glory be! – browsing the stands before the market officially opened and the crowd rushed in.  I bought a coffee and sat on an old wood bench and marveled at how completely gorgeous this day was turning out to be.

I bought veggies to pickle, got free flowers and blueberry-zucchini bread for being a “Friend of the Market”, talked to a very nice lady about cheesemaking and why she thinks my mozzarella might not be coming out correctly, and then grabbed a 1/2 bushel box of the “junk” peaches (the uglies, as I like to call them) for only $5.  That’s a lot of peaches.  Luckily I have a plan.  Well maybe not a plan, more like a book.

This gorgeous book came in the mail on Saturday and I am irrationally excited about making jams and jellies now.  Also pickles and chutneys and who knows what else.  It’s chock full of interesting, simple recipes and has been completely inspiring.  Also it has about a dozen recipes involving peaches, so there’s that.

Back home with my loot, I opened up the patio umbrella and made myself a cool drink to sip while I bookmarked peach recipes.  It’s sort of my take on a cherry lime ricky with crushed fresh cherries, limeaid, and seltzer.  Delicious.

Shortly after I sat down, Luke came home and we soaked in the sun while snacking on kettle corn and queso fresco from the Farmers’ Market and marveling at the fact that we’ve now had three fantastic days of weather in a row.  Amazing.  It truly was a lovely Sunday.

Growing Older But Not Up

I really wish that everyone would declare a three-day weekend on their birthday.  I took Friday off to celebrate my turning 33 and spent the weekend celebrating and enjoying and smiling.  It was the best birthday weekend ever.  It kicked off Thursday evening with the repainting of my kitchen.

I call this color “33rd Birthday Blue”.  After the change of cabinet hardware and the painting of my washer and dryer, the only next logical step was painting the kitchen walls the most amazing shade of electric turquoise you’ve ever seen.  It makes me happy just looking at it.

My birthday was as perfect as could be, starting with breakfast cupcakes, then sushi for lunch, Mexican for dinner, presents, family, laughs, but guess what?  No pictures.  I didn’t take a single picture on my birthday.  Neither did my usually camera-toting sister.  That’s OK, you can just take my word for it, it was a perfectly beautiful day.

Check out some of my loot!  I’m going to be very busy.  On top there is the extremely sharp (trust me) pair of left-handed dressmaker’s shears I mentioned on here a few weeks ago.  My mom, she can take a hint.

The rest of the weekend was spent, as usual, in the garden.  Also in the hammock, enjoying the view of the garden.

I managed to finally plant the veggie garden.  Two kinds of Swiss chard, three kinds of cucumbers, yellow and green summer squash, basil, sunflowers, zinnia, cosmos, and this coming weekend the tomatoes will go in (after I buy the plants at the Farmer’s Market).

It’s all very neat and orderly and makes me happy just looking at it.  Of course in a few weeks when the weeds take over, it will make me feel overwhelmed looking at it, but for now I’m loving it.

It truly was a perfect weekend.  Thank you to everyone who helped me celebrate and a big shout out to Mother Nature for sending the amazing weather.

Bliss

Another perfect three-day weekend. Gorgeous weather, visits with friends, digging in the garden, breakfast, lunch, and dinner outside on the deck, and my new fisheye lens came in the mail.  Sigh…  The only thing that could possibly ruin the high from a weekend like that would be having a tooth pulled.

So guess what I’m going to have done today.  Wish me luck!