-- How pleased am I about summer fruits? Peaches are really coming into their own already. I guess I forget every year, but May seems early for peaches as good as the ones I've had recently. I also picked up a few tiny 'red flesh' apricots, which taste more like pluots to me (actually, they taste like plums, but they have fuzzy skin like an apricot and are the same size).

-- Beany is currently fetching me the rolly yarn ball that my friend Cara made for her. It rolls, it rattles, and it's easy for a cat to pick up; what could be better? Sometimes I have to hide it from Beany because she loves it so much (and so wants to play with it all night). Cara, you're a cat toy genius (in addition to your other, more traditional sorts of genius).

-- I've picked out a pattern to try from my Japanese dress book. It seems to be the most straight forward and simplest of the dresses I really like, so I'm looking forward to figuring it out. I'm going to use tissue paper to trace the pattern pieces on; is this how other Japanese-book-crafters do it?

-- A trip to Half Price Books yesterday yielded a $5 CD (Elvis Costello's My Flame Burns Blue, which is all jazzy and good); a $4 graphic novel (Three Shadows, which I've been keeping an eye out for ever since I saw it here, so I was VERY pleased to find it for so cheap!); a $4 book of New York Times crosswords; and a $5 blank journal which is nothing special except that the spine isn't bound very well, so the pages lie perfectly flat, making it ideal for zine/comic drawing.

-- Will we get rain today? My lawn looks like it's the middle of July, not late May. Very disappointing. I love the look of a lush spread of turf, but I don't really hold with manually watering and fertilizing it. At least the most problematic areas have now been covered and mulched over. Maybe what I should have, instead of a nice lawn, is a thick carpet of dandelions. I'd keep them mowed, of course.

-- I woke up too early today. 5:45? Was the time when I'd finally admitted defeat, got out of bed, and made pre-breakfast. I'd been awake for over an hour at that point. I'd usually be able to fall back to sleep that early, but my brain was restless and my belly was hungry. So toast and tea it was, to tide me over until a sensible breakfasting time.

-- I've been feeling very nostalgic all morning. I think it's partly the weather; it cooled down overnight and there was a rain shower shortly after I got up, yet it's partly sunny at the moment. That's pretty much perfect, in my book. But for some reason it's got me thinking about summers spent in La Crosse during college. And B&Bs in the Lake District.

-- I can see a squirrel drinking from a puddle right now.

-- Yesterday, during our 50mph gusts of wind, the storm door at the back of my house was ripped open (it never latched very well) and broke. I was able to hook it shut for the night, but I was a bit annoyed; I certainly didn't want to spend any money on a new screen door. This morning, I solved the problem by A) removing the air pressure mechanism, which had bent out of shape and was keeping the door from closing and B) going into the basement to fetch up one of the new handles I had bought back when I first moved in. I was originally going to install them on both screen doors, but then we realized the existing ones DID have locks, after all. Now I just need to buy two (longer) screws, and the door will be usable again (and sporting a shiny new handle!). I'm feeling rather clever -- and all this was before 7:00am.

-- Another gem from that Minnesota book: 'Never was a city laid out so badly as St. Paul. The plat of the town with its numerous additions looks as if some accident had knocked all the streets into pi. Measures should be taken immediately to straighten and reform them as far as practicable, before it is too late.' The Minnesota Democrat Weekly, Sept. 30 1851

Oops, looks like that never made it on the to-do list. I'll admit, it's funnier if you've been to St Paul. And live in Minneapolis.

Hello, books! I was doubly pleased when the postlady knocked on my door this afternoon to deliver BOTH packages I was expecting -- the Japanese pattern book I got off etsy and my Amazon order. It was unnecessarily hot today AND I was constantly hungry (despite eating the same meals as usual -- very annoying!), so sitting down with a bowl of oat bran in the middle of the afternoon (despite the heat -- it was the only thing I could think of to keep me going!) and having books to look at was a welcome treat.

Seriously, at some point this afternoon, I was wondering how it was possible that I was so uncomfortable in the middle of May -- it was as bad as the worst days from the height of last summer! Unreasonable! Was I broken? But then I looked at the thermostat, which read 85F (indoors), and I checked the outside temperature, which was 95F, and I figured fair enough. I felt so hot because it WAS so hot (IS so hot, actually). I won't be disappointed to go back to the mid-70s for a while, though.

I'll leave you with a favourite selection from Bring Warm Clothes: Letters and Photos from Minnesota's Past, collected by Peg Meier -- under the 'cut'.

Two lists for you today, the first day it actually felt hot in the Twin Cities.

On my bike ride to the library I...
-- heard frogs singing.
-- saw kids at a skate park.
-- watched a dinosaur great blue heron fly overhead.
-- had two woodchips on the path magically (and startlingly) turn into butterflies.
-- saw a woodchuck, who flallumped back to its burrow as I went by.
-- smelled that sweet, Minnesota-woodsy-creeky smell.
-- went by two youths who would have looked a lot tougher had one not been leading a pair of grinning puppies while the other pulled an upright vacuum cleaner.
-- thought to myself that it really didn't need to be any hotter, and then worried that it's only mid-May.

Edible things I've planted in my gardens so far include...
-- five tomato plants (three heirloom slicing tomatoes, one hybrid, and one yellow pear... and I have three Brandywine seedlings indoors that are still too young to go out).
-- three different bell peppers.
-- jalapeno.
-- two different eggplants (Ichiban and Dusky, I believe)
-- six brussels sprouts.
-- seven broccoli.
-- four cauliflower.
-- Swiss chard.
-- one green and one yellow zucchini.
-- pumpkin and butternut squashes.
-- 'earlysweet' cantaloupe (which grew well for me last year!) and a small watermelon variety.
-- seeds sown directly: kale, lettuces, spinach, radishes, beets, carrots, corn, peas.

I still have half a raised bed to fill in with veggies, not including space I've set aside for bush beans. I'm planning to grow parsnips and rutabagas from seed (although I should have started those a while back -- I didn't find rutabaga seeds until today!). And I might just grow loads more kale anywhere I have an open spot.

I went to the library with nothing specific in mind, and I came back with a couple books on Minnesota history. The one I'm reading now is full of gems -- letters and newspaper ads and such -- and I've been diligently copying them down to the computer so I can share them later. There's definitely an element of 'the more things change, the more they stay the same'! So you can look forward to that (well, I hope you'll look forward to it).

-- Look what I found in my garage! Tucked back on a 2x4 near the door, there were three bicycle licenses: '45-'46, '46-'47, and '47-'48. This was the only metal one; the other two are made from heavy card, and I think removing them would mean damaging them (and they sort of 'belong' to the garage at this point!). The second half of my house was added in 1952, so my best guess is that these must have belonged to the father in the family who lived here the longest. They raised three boys (in my little house!), but I think they would have been too young for bikes (or not yet born) in the mid-forties.

--Although, having said that, the mother lived here until she was in her nineties, and that would have been five or ten years ago. So maybe the kids were old enough. I think my mind just boggles at the thought of raising three sons in 500 square feet (which is probably a little more than the pre-1952 footprint of the house).

-- Gardening continues. On and on and on. My friend Alex is coming over tomorrow to help out, and I might have to cheekily ask her to do the heavy lifting. I'm completely fine, except for my wrists -- bizarre! But it's totally worth it, because the yard is already looking really nice, and it's only going to get better.

-- Beany is having a rather high-energy morning. She just ran up a wall and used it to ricochet her in the opposite direction. For real.

-- I was SO looking forward to the Bones season finale, and it really disappointed. Without purposefully spoiling anybody, I'll just say that it would have been a great 'fun' episode halfway through the season, but the penultimate episode had been so great, and this did not continue on from that. Those crazy kids. But Elvis Costello on 30 Rock? He really is the Coolest Guy Ever.

-- For those of you who clicked over to that Tiny House Blog and enjoyed it, check out Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. There aren't even words to describe how amazing they are, except: wood paneling! The shelves! Teeny porches! I am so, so smitten.

The weather here was very strange today (a classic Whirling Weather Octopus, Rob), going from sunny and warm to windy, overcast, and cool. And back. And back again. I was spending some quality time with my sofa this afternoon, admiring the lilacs outside -- so I snapped a picture to share. Imagine that, but running the entire length of my house. Too many lilacs, some might say. But not me.

My mom and I went to Plants and Things today. Plants and Things -- for all your garden dino needs! I would get one, but I think they might be too overpowering for the size of my garden. But my parents should definitely stick one in the woods at their new cabin. If anything can scare away a bear, it's got to be a dinosaur, right?

While we were at Plants and Things, I had to look inside about two dozen different sheds (some of those are playhouses, and some are full-sized 'sheds'). Someday, when I have money going spare, I really want to have one of these out on my parents' new property. It will fulfill my sophomore-year-of-college dream of living in a shack (I read a lot of Kerouac that year, unsurprisingly). Except it would be well-insulated and have a kitchenette and be white and bright and breezy. Pretty much the perfect one-room summer house. I'm partial to this one or this one.

Right, i have to go read the Tiny House Blog for a while now.

-- Hello, blog friends! I am beyond pleased (super-pleased?) to say that all the copies of my zine have been sold. They're in the hands of the postal service now. Thanks, everybody!

-- Another photo of the apple blossoms, up above. They smell as nice as they look, although it's a fairly subtle scent. The lilacs, on the other hand, have gone a bit crazy with the perfume thing -- and they're not even all open yet! I really must prune the hedge back once they're done blooming, because it's kind of out of control at the moment. One of these days, I might open the living room curtains to find that the lilacs have literally broken through the windows. (Literally being used in a figurative sense, there. For annoyance.)

-- It was a lovely day today, and I was able to get out on my bike (to the post office) in the morning and then did some yard work after dinner. I was pulling out grass and last year's growth from the row of hostas along my alley, and I couldn't help noticing how nice my new garden looks. I still have to get woodchips as soon as the city chops down some trees, but it's looking good. I wish things could always be as lush as they are in the spring. I mowed that grass just a couple of days ago!

-- I feel like I got a lot done today, although it was in bits and pieces -- no big projects to tackle. I stopped at Whole Foods in the afternoon and brought home a pint of blueberry cheesecake soy ice cream. It really IS chock full of real blueberries. Nom.

-- I bought this book with some of my zine earnings (that link is old; if you go to the shopfront and flip through the pages, there should still be copies available). Then I hopped over to Amazon.com and bought Jeffrey Brown's latest book and Molly's book (not with PayPal money, sadly). Now to sit by my mail slot for the next week, until things start showing up. I'll be like Beany, contorting myself in an effort to see if the post has arrived.

Happy (American) Mother's day, all you mothering-types! Here's some photos and words from my day:

After a rather too leisurely breakfast and paper-reading session (if such a thing is possible on a Sunday morning), I had to get myself in gear. First up was baking this cake. I've had some almond meal in my cupboard for a while now, and I'd been meaning to make a pear cake with it -- Mother's Day seemed like a good excuse!

I can recommend the recipe, although I baked mine in a 20cm tin (roughly) instead of 25, and the timing and temp wound up being a bit crazy. After 40 minutes at 325F (the temperature the recipe states, although I knew I should have trusted my gut that it was too low!), I turned the oven up to 350 for ten minutes, and then up to 375 for another TWENTY minutes. Luckily, it doesn't seem to be any worse for wear -- not too dry on the outside or underdone in the middle.

Gifts for my mom. The cake, a vase of lilacs from my garden, rhubarb from the farmers market, and a funny little woven bookmark-y thing. I found a little bead loom from when I was growing up, so I've been playing with weaving, using embroidery floss.

Lunch at Ember's. It was just my mom and I, and we ordered the same thing! After lunch, we went -- along with my dad -- to see the new Star Trek movie. I really enjoyed it. The jumping-to-warp-speed effect has gotten even more awesome. Bam!

Back at my parents' house, we checked on the baby bunny that the dogs found the other day. It's been back in its nest, and it seems alright, but there hasn't been a sign of the mother rabbit having been back. Maybe it's just really careful about putting the twigs back exactly right. You know, maybe.

Also, I thought I would mention that, as I was driving to my parents' this morning, I saw a woman walking a poodle with its five very-tangled-up poodle puppies. A nice Mother's Day sight.

-- Guess who went to the farmers market this morning! It was my first visit for 2009, and it just seems to get bigger and busier every time I go. Among other things (plants, mainly), I came away with a chocolate cherry scone for Sunday's breakfast, some cinnamon roasted almonds (in the best paper cone ever), and locally grown asparagus and rhubarb.

-- I'm always torn between the various ways of punctuating 'farmers market'. Honestly, I think it should be farmers', as it's a market that belongs to multiple farmers. But the market I go to seems to go with the simple plural, so I'm dedicated to sticking with what they use. I support my local market, even in grammar.

-- Speaking of supporting, I still have two copies of my 'Grow' zine left. Two! For you, and also you. I'm going to be hitting up the post office Monday morning, so you've only got a day left to claim your copy. If it helps motivate you, I'll almost certainly be using the money to buy a Japanese pattern book of shirts and dresses. And maybe a comic book, if there's any left over. But focus on the pattern book, because you'll get to see the fruits of my labour when I finish sewing something!

-- In garden-y news, I got more soil and compost to finish filling my second raised bed. At the moment, about 2/5ths (maybe 4/9ths) of it is planted -- with chard, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. I'm trying to pack the plants in more tightly this year, both for weed control and just because I don't think it will do any harm. We'll see!

-- I was thinking how strange it is that having about 300lbs of dirt in the trunk of my car makes such a difference to its momentum and how it feels on the road, etc. I've certainly had that many pounds of human passengers in the car before, but it's not so noticeable. But, then, I never make passengers ride in the trunk. Maybe if I placed the bags of dirt on the seats (belted in, of course), it wouldn't make such a difference. And I could go in the carpool lane. Double score!

-- I think I'll wake up tomorrow morning or the next (or the next), and BAM -- the apple tree will be decked out in blossoms. There must be at least fifty buds, and it's a tiny tree (maybe six feet tall, at its tippiest top). I wonder how many will set into apples, and how many the tree can actually sustain.

-- Yesterday, I mowed the lawn for the first time this year. The lilacs are starting to bloom, and all the perennials are up. Summer! Let's celebrate with some rain and a ten-degree (F) drop in temperature, okay? Starting tomorrow.

-- I've never been able to get a photo of my side yard that makes it look as charming as it seems to me. This one might be the best yet. There's just so much to detract from its niceness, though -- meters on the house, power lines near the street (this was taken from the backyard looking towards the front), all the junk I've left lying around (oops). I also have to sink those pavers into the ground, now that it's not frozen. But it's a nice strip of garden, walled in by the (MONSTROUS) hedge of lilacs. This time last year, it was such a wasteland.

-- Even though it was objectively A Perfect Day outside, I didn't spend that much time outdoors. I was reading submissions for work and did a bit of decoration/organization inside. Just shuffling things from here to there. I have a lot of 'stuff' -- but luckily, I think most of it's nice stuff.

-- As you'll know, the cats and I spend most of our time on the porch during the weeks/months it's neither too hot nor too cold (right now is prime porch-sitting season). I work on my laptop while sitting in an armchair a lot of the time, and Beany often finds any available lap space and curls up on it. And I often take a picture by holding up my camera and using autofocus.

I may have dropped the camera on her head today. While she was deeply asleep. It had the big lens on, too. She freaked out (as you would) and ran all the way through the house and down to the basement, where she hid from me while I pleaded with her. She assumed she had done something bad and that I was angry (and chose to demonstrate it by dropping a camera on her head), so I had to convince her she wasn't in trouble -- and that I wasn't going to drop anything else on her. We made up, and I'm going to make sure to keep a better grip on the camera in the future.

-- I still have four copies of my 'Grow' zine available -- you know you want one! Just read the enthusiastic reviews in the comments of the last post. If you can't trust Rob and my mother to be unbiased, well... um... then buy it anyway. Thanks.

Hey, what's that? It looks like the zine I made about my garden last autumn and then totally forgot about, but it must actually be the zine I made about my garden last autumn and then strategically filed away until it was seasonally relevant again.

Nope, it's the first one.

Either way, though, I now have twelve copies of my sixteen-page zine, 'Grow' (The Story of a Girl, a Vegetable Garden, and Two Anthropomorphic Cats) -- hot off my home printer some six or seven months ago, and then gently and slowly cooled for your reading enjoyment.

It's the story of my garden last year, as told by my cats (because, as I explain in the zine, I can draw cats but not people), along with various tips and a handful of recipes. Drawings! Hand-written words! Fancy lettering! Oh, the excitement.

I've got a dozen all ready to go, and I'd be happy to send one your way for $5. That's five American dollars, including shipping (within the US -- please add another dollar for international shipping). If you e-mail me at anna.torborg[AT]gmail.com, I will send you a PayPal request. And I'll make sure to update this post if/when I've run out of copies!

Did I mention the envelopes have address labels with a drawing of Booty on them? He has a fancy mustache!

Monday again. They just keep happening, don't they? For lunch, I made some tofu tacos -- I should get real flour or corn taco-sized tortillas, but I had to just use a lavash wrap cut in half today. A couple of months back, I made the best tofu taco, but they weren't quite on the same level today. Of course, you can't really go wrong with seasoned tofu and salty, garlic-y kale.

I also made a single-serve batch of broccoli slaw. When I bring broccoli home from the supermarket, I cut off the florets and keep them in a lidded glass storage container in the fridge. I've been chucking the stalks in the fridge too, thinking I'll grate them up for slaw (seems a shame to waste such a large part of the veg), but I inevitably forget and then wind up tossing them out when they go a bit shriveled. Not so this week! I don't have a recipe, but coleslaw is pretty forgiving if you're planning on eating it right away, I find. A little bit of vinegar, a bigger bit of mayo (or Miracle Whip), a pinch of sugar and some salt and pepper. In addition to the grated broccoli stalk (which I peeled pre-grating), I tossed in some grated carrot and minced red onion.

It was warm today, although I didn't get out much to enjoy it. I had Stuff To Do in the morning, and I felt so drained of energy in the afternoon that I HAD to have a short nap. It was a slightly disconcerting nap, actually -- as I was trying to wake up, I either experienced sleep paralysis or DREAMT I had. The latter seems more likely, to be honest, because it was clear to me when I really woke up and was back to normal. But, then, Wikipedia says that it's possible to 'interpret the experience as a dream' -- and when has Wikipedia ever been wrong about something? I bet they have an entry about that, and I bet it says 'never'.

Oh well. May you all have a nice night, with normal dreams about normal limbs.

Hello! What a gorgeous weekend we're having! I spent several hours gardening yesterday, and I managed to get the last strip of sod out of my new garden area (well, one of them, anyway) and actually PLANTED some things. I put in a section of raspberry canes that my mom dug out of her yard -- super excited about that! -- and divided some of my own perennials.

One of the only bits of gardening that the previous owners of my house had done was a tiny corner of perennials in the back yard, and it's really started to get crowded over the past couple of years. So I dug up day lillies, stellas, and irises (just the standard, big purple ones) and put them in the new space. It instantly looked like a real garden instead of a strip of dirt, and I didn't have to spend a cent!

I'm pretty excited about my apple tree this year (it's a Haralson, I think, and one of its branches is in the photo above). It's its third season in my yard, but it didn't put out any blossoms the first two. Right now, it looks as though it could have a dozen or two blossoms, at least -- I'd be very happy to get even a single edible apple off the tree!

I think Booty had the happiest day of his life yesterday. He spent quite a long time outside with me, both in the morning and the afternoon. He's very good about staying inside the fence (he CAN slip out through the gaps by the gates), and he just strolled around, alternating between nibbling grass and lounging in the sun. Every now and then he'd come over to see what I was doing, and when the wind picked up in the afternoon, it seemed to blow some mischief into him, because he suddenly wanted to play chasing and hiding-behind-the-tree. It's a bit sad for Beany, who I don't let out except on a leash (she's too fast and agile and wouldn't think twice about chasing after a rabbit or dashing up the big tree), but Booty definitely appreciated his outside time as an only-cat. I think he's probably earned it after sixteen years.

Anyway, I've got plans this afternoon, involving a tempeh gyro (probably) from the Seward Cafe and then May Day parade fun (definitely) involving giant papier mache puppets. Sounds like a good time to me!

Hmm, cocoa isn't a very May-y, spring-like thing to photograph, is it? Oops. But, see, I spent four hours in the garden yesterday, and two more today. I'm not talking about leisurely hours pottering around -- I've been tearing up sod, which is pretty back-breaking work. So I've needed some extra fuel to keep me going, hence the cocoa (and the Reeses eggs, in such a clashing shade of green).

I don't particularly like ripping up sod, but my garden ideas get more elaborate each year, so it's always the first (and biggest) step in getting things going in the spring. If I try really hard, I can imagine a year in the future when I won't have to tear up big patches of lawn first thing -- it'll be the year right after the one when I finally rid my yard of grass altogether!

I do like the manual labour aspect of it, though, once I get going. There's no looking at clocks to know when it's time to stop; there are only the tasks at hand and the point at which my body starts complaining. Both yesterday and today, that was in the form of a sore wrist. The bending and heaving and twisting don't seem to have hand any effect (although it's often the second day that's the worst, so we'll see how I'm feeling tomorrow!) -- but the gripping and pulling have taken their toll on the tendons in my arms.

Never mind. I only have one skinny strip of grass to pull up tomorrow and then I'll be done... with half the yard. I'll have to tweak the PDF I made last year to reflect the changes, so you'll be able to see what I've been up to. Basically, the entire perimeter of my back yard will be garden. Three good reasons for this:

1) More garden! How could that be bad?
2) I can never make my weed whacker/strimmer work, so it's always been impossible to keep the grass by the fences looking nice.
3) There are patches of lawn that are always dry and deadish, so I've incorporated them into my garden design. Last year, I turned the entire strip of land on the side of my house into garden, and it went from a dry wasteland to the best spot in my entire yard for growing veggies!

Happy May Day, everybody! Hope yours has had at least a little sunshine and green.