Sweet Sleep

Mattresses are important, people! I had the best night of sleep last night that I have had in forever: dreamless and smooth, rippling on and on, with only a few hip aching moments of dim awareness as I rolled over in the night. I usually sleep pretty well during pregnancy, I'm just lucky like that, or chilled out like that or desperate like that or something. But this pregnancy has been different...our mattress had done its most valiant but there are limits. It had been with us through a decade of marriage and who  knows how many years with another family before us. I honestly think our mattress was from the 60's or 70's. This year it reached astounding heights of absurdity. A and I had begun to joke about going sleep in the soup bowl every night but truthfully it was more like sleeping in a real life game of Chutes and Ladders. There springs poking up, gooshy holes, hard ridges, and broken plastic handles sticking out in gouge-ready positions.

Thankfully, oh so thankfully....I report to you that we are now the proud owners of a new to us, 2 year old mattress that feels like heaven. We lay in bed laughing this morning about the strangeness of sleeping on such a nice bed in our own room, we felt like we were at a hotel! So silly!

Before we carted our old lump-fest of a previous bed to the dump I whipped out a pair of scissors and zipped off the beautiful fabric that covered the box springs. I've been eying it for years and knew even when we first got it that I would someday strip that cloth off for another use. The bonus of ancient mattress sets is the psychedelic, vintage fabric that they come wrapped in. What do you think? Curtains in the bathroom or the kitchen or something more creative?

Stone Walls and Kitchen Stoves

The weather is crisp, the air still and all of the leaves are starting to blush yellow and red. A and I spend the early morning hacking out the burning bushes and jet-berry that have grown up around the back edge of our property and then weeding and reassembling (in a rough way) the resurrected stone wall we hadn't known was along the back edge of our yard. Lovely to discover these little secrets. I had some qualms about ripping out the burning bushes right before they put on their amazing fall display but after the main trunks were sawed off and their various myriad sprouts trimmed away we were amazed at all the wide open space we'd been hiding there at the back of our lawn. I am still not sure what will go there to replace the errant shrubs. A second row of vegetable beds? A row of blackberries? A long strawberry bed? Who knows! But even if nothing else goes in there, it is amazing to discover that we have this hidden asset in space.

In other news, our rather ancient stove is now a bit dysfunctional. Not completely, just in a creeping sort of way. You remember this stove I'm sure...I mentioned it here and here. Well, welcome to a new stage in the saga.

First the oven thermostat is quite off...by as much as 50-100 degrees...too hot, oddly enough. I fixed that by adding a little temperature gauge that hangs inside the oven door. Then the broiler has never worked, which never seemed to matter much until our grill stopped working and then I was very sad about the whole notion. After the broiler the oven door stopped opening all the way. I had to move the racks up higher in the oven in order to be sure that I could get pans in and out without burning myself on the oven door. And sometimes it still makes me spill food off the pan, into the bottom of the oven with the angle of tilt that is required to maneuver the food in through the reduced opening. Pizzas are a particular challenge. Then this weekend two more disabilities visited our poor stove. First the oven door handle came off...fixable for now although hard to say how sturdy it is in the long run. And then one of the burners on the top of the stove had a sudden glitch which means that it now won't turn off.....worse yet, it is stuck at high power. We have resorted to popping the breaker after we finish making a meal to keep the stove from burning our house down while we're not looking.

Time for a new stove. That's expensive but also kind of exciting so, I'll go with the excitement part of it and be glad that we have a new subscription to Consumer Reports online to help with selecting a good bet financially. I am really relishing the thought of a modern self-cleaning oven, a smooth-top and another appliance with all the buttons and knobs working appropriately. Cold weather is calling and that will mean more baking and roasting and braising, and doing all of that in a newer oven sounds really alluring. I have a bunch of bananas in the freezer that want to be made into chilly leaf-kicking day, slices of toasty quick-bread with generous dollops of butter and hot mugs of tea. I can't wait to meet you, New Stove! Somewhere you're out there sitting in a giant box in a company warehouse, and soon you'll be in our house and I can promise once you come to live with us, the happy task of baking many birthday cakes, roasting many family Sunday dinners and a lot of happy wiping with toddler sponges! Please come quickly!

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New CSA

We're a good bit of the way through the harvesting season with our new CSA and I have to say that I like it. It is just as handy as I imagined to have our pick-up location down the street, instead of 45 minutes away, and kind of fun to meet neighbors there who also happen to have a share. I didn't count on the community interaction bit, kind of a fun bonus.

I do miss going up to an actual farm. It was a great built-in break that we had going and I feel like we've removed ourselves a little bit from the food-land connection. There was one scheduled members day when our new CSA invited everyone to come up for a picnic and help pull garlic and then go for a dip in the creek. Have to make sure to plan on going next year. I am an organization klutz and through a lot of fumbling we managed to miss it this time around. Am still kicking myself  although this morning I found out there is a special autumn farm festival scheduled for September when we can maybe make up the difference! Hooray!

Since there's such a small actual farm connection to speak of via our CSA this year, I find that I'm seeking out chances to go to drive out to the country for other things: caterpillar hunting, listening to the frogs sing, rural estate sales, buying farm milk, picking up local meat...etc. Kind of fun to mix it up anyhow.

So, the time savings is great, the produce is great, the community connection is fun and over-all I think we made a fine trade. You never quite know when you make this kind of a gamble and switch everything up, but this time it worked out.

Make New Friends but Keep the Old

Sometimes a little insanity is in order. This weekend we made a manic, somewhat last minute, ridiculous visit back to my alma mater. We didn't have any extra vacation days so we did the 14 hr drive in just a weekend which was really a lot of driving but was also really (sometimes life is incomprehensible!) exactly what needed to happen. The theatre club that my close chums and I helped found was celebrating 10 years and that was enough excuse for me to step up and insist on going.

I have recently decided to make a pretty directly clear life choice about friendship and important events. Somehow I became the girl who is too far away and too busy to come to anything her old friends are doing together and I hate it. I am determined to stay connected to old chums, attend those key events (weddings, baptisms, dedications, reunions, anniversaries...etc.) and whenever I am in town, I'm going to make lunch dates.

My beloved college theatre director and instructor.

When I moved away from my home state I was elated about the idea of a clean slate. I love the idea of creating yourself and the yawning possibility that exists in new friendships. And who doesn't like the hope of undoing old reputations and forging a newer, brighter image? While all of that is delicious and inspiring and wonderful, I accidentally lost touch with lots of old friends, missed a lot of wonderful opportunities and didn't have the nerve to try to meld the old me with the new one. I'm over it.

Not that I am saying I'm fearless, I'm just saying that I have come to understand that old friends and new friends both matter for different reasons, that old me and new me are still both me and both important, that relationships and connections are the feeders and safety net for essential, healthy human life and that I want my life to be one wild, spinning, knotted, weave with threads of all colors and strengths....and that meant that I needed to go to Michigan, come hell or high water.

I came home surer than ever that I'd done the right thing. There were screeching greetings with old friends, hilarious recollections, abundant warm words, more hugs than I can count, lots of long-waited-for introductions (hello husbands!), dress-up fun with my sister Foxy, sweet niece and nephew portraits, verbose and longed-for conversation (hello immensely long drive!) and a lot of coffee... It was one of the rightest things I've done in a while and so inspiring that I can hardly wait for the next chance!

My sister is a wizard with eye make-up. Isn't that beautiful?