This is the whole manuscript of my novel-under-revision, printed out in 8-point type and hung up on my guest-bedroom wall. (Suitably redneck for my Alabama origins, the duct tape sticks to plaster where Scotch tape won’t.) “So that’s how novelists work,” said a friend on seeing this picture. Well, I don’t know about other novelists […]
Read moreSo I suppose it was inevitable: when a friend and fellow backyard-gardener told me last week that she and her husband and toddler are moving into a new house on the other side of town with a large yard and a somewhat dilapidated pre-existing chicken setup, I immediately thought: This is the chicken-raising chance I’ve […]
Read moreOfficial information from the credit counseling firm, as of today: Original Balance: $22,885.01 Approx Current Balance: Debt Free Total Debt Paid Off: $22,885.01 Last Payment Received: 7/7/2011 Last Payment Amount: $195.18 Next Payment Due: Debt Free Next Payment Amount: N/A
Read moreWhat you see here is the result of my past couple blogging-less weeks of garden work: several big and long-planned projects including the construction, priming, and painting of a new fence (to the far right, now completely enclosing the yard – other people built it and primed it, I painted it); weeding everything and trucking […]
Read moreSaw a kid dismally picking weeds out of a crack by a curb (obviously assigned by parent or other authority) and remembered a great FREE and ecologically sound tip for controlling those little bitty weeds that come up through cracks in pavement: boiling water. I used what was left in my canning pot to kill […]
Read moreOr, two ways of looking at a lawn. (With another glass of wine I might be able to manage the standard thirteen….) Mower A: Mower B: Mower A: used, gas-powered Craftsman gifted to me by my brother-in-law, then traveled by circuitous routes involving broken promises of mower transit in an SUV by male family members […]
Read moreIn the words of the great Candi Staton, self-preservation is what’s really going on today. Or what went on yesterday, for the first time ever in the Cheapskate Intellectual kitchen. But it won’t be the last. Following the directions in the super-easy and super-fun book CANNING FOR A NEW GENERATION, I rendered a colander full […]
Read moreThis is me this past weekend, celebrating my summer self. Gloriously, the season is shifting inside my head — the loosening and breathing and unconscious release of the anxious, trouble-borrowing, multitasking clench which I realize only in retrospect is my school-year norm. And the shift is outside my head too. Literally, right on top. Because […]
Read moreLess than $200 left to go.
Read moreI’m here again at last at my desk on a damp gray Sunday morning in which one season ends and another begins, and subtle kinds of fertility are churning despite the overcast sky — I’m feeling the familiar-to-college-professors sense of release from the clutch of preoccupation that marks the school year and a lightening, lifting, […]
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