Laila In Action

I am an excessively proud cat owner, and I think my cat is too cute for words.  However, she is notoriously difficult to photograph; not too surprisingly, she doesn't understand the concept of staying still.  I was lucky enough to get a few decent pictures of her recently, though:

Laila brutalizing her new toy mouse.

In the process of stealing Scott's water.

The look of a cat who has gotten away with something.

This Year's Balcony Garden

It's that time of the year again when I get to blog about my balcony garden!  I'm a real amateur gardener, but I do enjoy taking care of plants, and I'm thrilled when food results from my efforts.

This year, I started with yellow cherry tomatoes, green zebra striped tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, basil, and the feisty free mint plant.  Things are going a little differently from last year, and I'm not always sure why:

1.  Unlike last year, the tomato plants this year are thriving.  We're already getting plenty of ripe yellow cherry tomatoes.  The green zebra tomato plant is producing less fruit (and we haven't gotten any ripe tomatoes from it yet), but at least the plant looks healthy.

2.  On the flip side, our cucumber plant was sort of a bust.  It succumbed to the aptly named powdery mildew, and we only got a few small cucumbers from the plant before that happened.  So unfortunately, we were unable to recreate last summer's bumper crop.

3.  Unlike last year, I'm not seeing as many bees on our balcony, and pollination has been a problem, particularly for our zucchini plant.  The zucchini plant appears healthy, and has both male and female blossoms, but the tiny zucchinis at the base of the female blossoms are just withering up and dying.

4.  Among fellow gardeners, that might raise the interesting question of why we have so many tomatoes.  The answer--which I learned years ago after having a healthy tomato plant that yielded exactly zero tomatoes--is that tomatoes are easy for gardeners to pollinate in the absence of bees because don't have separate male and female blossoms.  This means that pollen doesn't have to be carried from one blossom to another--agitation is sufficient.  I forget where I read this tip, but you can agitate the blossoms with an electric toothbrush (bonus points for using a cheap crummy one that you don't use to brush your teeth, of course).  I have been advised that using an electric toothbrush on my tomato plant makes me appear...eccentric, but I don't care because I'm getting a lot of yummy tomatoes.

5.  The basil is doing well (such a wonderful hardy plant!), and of course I'm delighted with my free mint plant.

Independence Day Wish

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

-Emma Lazarus

This portion of "The New Colossus,"by Emma Lazarus, is rightly famous, and often quoted.  I realize that the use of this quote may seem cliche at this point, but I really do find the words beautiful and inspiring.  To be a citizen of a country that may serve as a refuge to others is an amazing privilege and responsibility.

Like most Americans, I am descended from immigrants.  My family came from various parts of Europe.  The last of the immigrants in my family left the Netherlands in 1912.  My great grandfather was among them, along with his parents and siblings.  My great grandfather died before I was born, but I did meet his two sisters, who lived into their nineties.  I sometimes wonder if contact (however brief) with older relatives who spoke heavily accented English helped cement in my mind the concept of the US being a nation of immigrants.

I know very few details about my family's immigration story.  However, to the best of my knowledge, none of my family's immigrants were wealthy, and none of them had attained a high level of formal education.  Yet, I am the daughter of a professor and an attorney.  I myself have one master's degree, and am on the verge of starting another.  I have held several professional jobs.  I also have the privilege of living in an area with a large number of recent immigrants and seeing how they contribute to our society.

My wish for this Independence Day is for the US to live up to Emma Lazarus' beautiful poem.  Whether the people in question are central Americans fleeing gang violence, Syrians fleeing a long and brutal civil war, Yemenis fleeing a war that the US government supports (!), or anyone else who needs refuge, I hope we can open our hearts and minds to them and allow them to enrich our great country.

Breaking The Blogging Silence With A Few Pictures

So.  Blogging has been a challenge for me lately, which is a pity, since it's something I enjoy.

There are a couple reasons for this, I think.  For one thing, I'm taking two science classes in an eight week period of time.  These are the last of my prerequisites before going back to grad school in August.  On the one hand, this is pretty much an exercise in checking off boxes at this point.  I'm already in a graduate program, and there isn't much pressure to ace these classes.  On the other hand, since it's two of them in a compressed time frame, there are lots of little boxes to check off along the way.  This leaves me feeling pretty busy and like there's always some task I need to finish.

The other reason is that I've fallen into a transition mentality at this point.  I find transitions stressful--even ones that I think will ultimately be good ones--and it's hard to think of blogging material when I'm stressed out about what's coming next.  I'm starting school again--what will it be like to be a full-time student in my late thirties?  I'm leaving a job I care about--what if I regret doing that?  And how much notice should one give when you've actually been pretty sure for months that you would leave?  On top of that transition, we're looking down the barrel of a possible local move to make Scott's commute more manageable.  Local moves are not the end of the world, but any sort of move is expensive and disruptive.  Plus, we would need to find someplace to move to.

All of this is to say that my mind has been mush lately, but I still want to blog.  So in the interest of putting something in this space, I'll put in a few pictures that I like!

Heh heh.  I took this one back in April, but I like it enough that I'm adding it to the blog now.

This was possibly the prettiest chocolate bar I had ever seen.  But, since it was chocolate, I ate it anyway.

I always love seeing turtles.

Groundhogs are pretty cool, too.  You can't really tell from this picture, but these were babies.  I had never seen such tiny ones before.

And for something that makes no sense at all...what sort of cat drops her toy mouse in her food bowl?!  This happened this morning, and I'm curious what will happen when she rediscovers it later.

Life's Little Triumphs: Me-Made-May Edition

Happy Me-Made-May, everyone!

For those of you out there who don't obsessively read sewing blogs, Me-Made-May is a time for sewists (I'm following the lead of others and not referring to people who sew as sewers) to celebrate their handmade garments.  Many sewists make pledges, such as promising to wear at least one handmade garment every day in May.  Many people put pictures of their me-made outfits on their blogs or Instagram.  I didn't make any pledges myself, but since my collection of me-made clothing has grown slightly since this time last year, I've found myself making an effort to wear some of the things I've made this month.  Me-Made-May has also encouraged me to think about what I want to get out of sewing as a hobby and what sorts of gaps I have in my closet currently (knit tops that don't cling relentlessly to my midriff and button-up shirts that don't gap open anywhere are high on my list!).

With that being said, my life's little triumph for Me-Made-May was making a very specific garment that I've been trying to buy from stores for the past couple of summers: a charcoal gray knit maxi skirt.

There were a number of problems with trying to purchase a ready-to-wear charcoal gray knit maxi skirt.  The first problem is my height.  Unless I buy maxi skirts that are designated as "tall" sizes, the skirt will end an awkward few inches above my ankles.  Needing to buy "tall" maxi skirts already limits the retailers I can shop from.

The color charcoal gray turned out to be another problem.  For solid colored maxi skirts, black seems to be the most popular color, with navy blue a distant second.  In terms of gray, all I ever saw was light heather gray (think of the color you often say on men's gray t-shirts), which wasn't what I wanted.

The final challenge is that a good number of knit maxi skirts are designed in such a way that they cling to the wearer's derriere, showing undie lines devastatingly clearly.  This I don't understand at all.  I realize that not everyone has my height issues with clothing, and that not everyone wants the same colors of clothing that I do.  But I'm pretty sure that NOBODY wants visible panty line, much let alone extremely visible panty line!  This raises the interesting question of why such skirts are being produced in the first place.

So I decided to take the plunge and try making the skirt I wanted.  Even though it's technically a very simple project, it felt like a stretch in my skills because I only recently started sewing with knit fabrics at all and I had only made t-shirts up until that point.  I opted for buying a pattern rather than using one of the online tutorials for drafting your own knit maxi skirt, which I actually think was a mistake because the sizing was way off, which I tried on the waistband for size and discovered I was swimming in it.  After removing quite a bit of fabric, I ended up with a skirt that fit.  I wore it to work the other day, and I'm happy to report that it didn't fall down even once.  :)  There is still plenty of room for me to improve my sewing, but it's nice to think that now I can choose projects more based on my clothing needs rather than (lack of) technical skills.

This Tops My List Of First World Problems

For the next week or so, I will be dealing with the fallout of  the king of all first world problems: pepper-infested feta cheese from Whole Foods.

I buy crumbled feta cheese pretty frequently to add to my salads in jars, and this week, I also have plans to add it to a casserole.  Whole Foods was horribly crowded today, and I had to reach over someone's head to get my tub of feta cheese.  In my hurry to get through the shopping and get the whatever out of the store, I didn't look closely enough at what I grabbed, and discovered the revolting truth once I got home.

I'll admit that I've always thought black pepper was pretty gross.  I have approximately 200 assorted spice bottles in my kitchen cabinet, so it's not that I'm against spices in general.  Just black pepper, the once spice that seems to be pretty universally enjoyed in the US.  But even putting aside my own personal distaste for black pepper, isn't it weird that pepper-infested feta cheese is even a product that is sold?  Does this mean that people were willingly contaminating their own perfectly good feta cheese with pepper before it was sold mixed together?  Did Whole Foods use a focus group to come up with this idea, or was this a pet project of some employee with idiosyncratic eating habits?

I have no desire to enter the fray of Whole Foods for a second time in one week, so I'm stuck with my weird, speckled feta cheese for now.  I'll see if my salads are better for the feta, or worse for the addition of black pepper.

Be Like The Mint Plant!

This will be my third summer in my current apartment, and for the past two years, I've grown small balcony gardens.  We've had an unusually chilly spring here, but I'm finally convinced that the plant-killing cold is done for the season, so I decided to buy a few plants at the farmers market today (yellow cherry tomatoes, cucumber, and basil--I'm hoping to buy a few more plants TBD). 

I haven't spent much time on the balcony lately.  Really, the last time I remember spending an extended period of time out there was in the fall when I decided that my dead plants from the summer were becoming too unsightly and I dug them all up.  My various planters spent the winter on the balcony, and I had noticed looking out the window that one of them had several green shoots growing up.  I just assumed that a bird had dropped some bird seed in the planter and that we might get a sunflower, but I didn't think too much about it.

So imagine my surprise when I went out on the balcony to plant this summer's crop of plants and found that the mystery plant in the planter was mint!  Sure, we had mint last summer, but I uprooted it in the fall!  When the plant appeared to be extremely dead!  Not to mention the fact that it spent the winter outside in the cold, receiving no water or attention from me.

So, I guess we're getting mint as a freebie this year, which is pretty cool.  I had been on the fence about growing mint this summer because even though I like the idea of having it, I didn't use it all that much last summer.  But apparently the mint decided for us.  I have to admire its tenacity, and if just being a plant on the balcony doesn't suit it, I can see it having a side career being photographed for inspirational posters.