Monday Morning

Both girls had the day off from school this morning, so we took advantage of that and a gorgeous morning and headed downtown to our local main street.

After dropping a few things off at the post office, we indulged in some treats at the bakery. The girls shared a cookie, while I had my favorite combination: a pain au chocolat (or "Chocolatine" as they were called in France) and a double espresso. Decadent and flavorful. Natalie provided a little "whine" to our petit dejeuner, but otherwise is was parfait. ;)


We wiped our crumbs from our laps and walked down to the water with some expired buns, set on feeding the myriad sunfish that gather at the end of the dock. On the way, we found some spent rose bushes. Since we couldn't stop and smell the roses, I stopped and shot the rosehips. That counts, right?


The fish were a no-show, but I told the girls to throw in a few bits to see if any lunkers (a.k.a. gi-normous carp) came up from the murky depths for a nibble.


Still, no fish, but soon entered about six or seven gulls, squawking and screeching and eyeing the goodies. They were timid about entering the water while we watched, but they hung around, modeled a bit for me, and continually pestered one another.






After a bit, they all flew away, and at the same time some crows began calling to one another. Soon thereafter, two bald eagles flew overhead. I'm guessing these events were not coincidental, and I kicked myself for not bringing my bigger zoom lens -- not that I could have changed it AND shot a decent pic anyway.


Still, the avian wildlife we saw more than made up for the lack of fishies. We said good bye to the birds and took a spin through the tiny pet shop. I paused almost too long at the baby dumbo rats for sale -- they were SO CUTE -- then we kept moving and ended our trip at the library. With a bag loaded with new books, we came home happy and satisfied.

It was a lovely way to spend some free morning hours, and I couldn't imagine two girls with whom I'd have rather spent it.

Piles o' White Stuff

When assembling the photos for this post, I couldn't help but think of the Showcase Showdown on the Price is Right and the themed collections of "fabulous prizes!" So this blog post features "prizes" that all include piles of some sort of white, fluffy stuff.

Knowing we live in the the arctic state of Minnesota, it's easy to predict that the first set of piles are comprised of white, fully snow. We've had snow that has stuck around since early December and most of it has fallen in relatively easy-to-shovel increments. Our last batch measured just over a foot within 48 hours. I'm always grateful for any balmy blue-sky days after a load of snow like this. Makes all the sweat and back ache from shoveling well worth it. And for the record, nearly every inch of this was cleared, lifted, hoisted, scraped, scooped, etc. without the use of a snowblower. If we get another storm like this one, that fact may change.

The homestead from the road:



View from the front door:



Looking from the front porch out to the street:



The next white fluffy stuff is edible even when in shades of yellow. I made a batch of vanilla meringues, let Natalie sprinkle some red sugar on top, and dipped each into a bit of melted chocolate chips. They make the perfect little sugary treat sometimes, and they look pretty cute too.



The final white, fluffy stuff is in the kitchen sink. Following in her big sister's footsteps, Natalie volunteered to wash a few dishes after I had done the bigger ones. She still had a bit of a stretch even with the help of the step stool, but she was fully engrossed with scooping, pouring, and scrubbing for a good twenty minutes.





Sorry, there's no trip to Exciting Las Vegas and no one will win a mid-size sedan with California Emission, but there's no need to guess the price since this package is... well,... priceless. *cheese*

We Liked November Very Much!

Dear November 2009,

Thank you for being so exceptionally mild, sunny, and beautiful. After fearing that winter had won an easy battle over summer in early October, it was to our delight to find, upon opening our door, balmy temperatures, clear blue skies, and a chance to reclaim a bit of autumn for ourselves. Here's how we celebrated the opportunity:

We ate well.

I made my first batch of caramel corn. I used this recipe and doubled the amount of caramel per the overwhelming suggestions in the comments. It was a messy task and I was disappointed that the caramel didn't completely coat the popcorn, but one bite turned into handfuls and the aesthetics were soon forgotten in favor of flavor -- sinful.



Despite her innocent look, Leah was sneaking bites when I wasn't looking. Can't really blame her though, can we?



We traveled.

Matthew and a fellow rider took advantage of the late fall beauty and spent a few hours attacking over 60 miles of hills on the roads along the St. Croix and Mississippi rivers near Redwing. I've always loved that area of the state and brought the girls along to tootle around the shops, marvel at the size of the waterways, and enjoy the scenic landscapes. November, darling, you somehow convinced my girls to pose for a semi-decent photo, too! I can't thank you enough.



Leah and Natalie were excellent tourist companions. Upon returning to the pickup spot, Leah remarked that one of the lift bridges near Prescott on the Wisconsin side looked like Mickey Mouse. Too true, I thought, if in a steampunk sort of way.



We tried something new.

Due to non-weather related issues, thanks again, November, we had to relinquish our beloved minivan to the dealer for repairs. To compensate us during that time, they outfitted us with a smooth as silk '09 Accord. Natalie found it especially soothing as it got closer to her nap time. That's luxury, baby.



We fell in love.

November, one of your greatest gifts to us this year was the views. With the leaves gone from the trees, we've had sunny interiors in our home once again, twilight nights with full moon shadows, hand-painted sunsets, and even this sunrise, captured on one of the last days of the month.



Perhaps more than the subject of the photo itself, I appreciate the fact that the photo was taken by Matthew, not me. It's not often he takes the time to notice such wonder, and to grab the camera, play with the settings, and capture it perfectly, no less. Yes, November, you've outdone yourself.

December has come and we're already missing those warmer breezes and clear, blue skies. Please consider this an open invitation to return during any year in the future. We'd be lucky to have you stay with us again.

Sincerely,

The Karger/Tift Family

Early May Update

Hello? Are you still there? You are? Really? Alright! Let's get started.

One of the perks of living closer to family is being able to drive up for a weekend birthday party. Here's the recent birthday girl and her cousin Leah being pretty darn cute.



Natalie spent a litte (too) quiet time with a crayon and was very proud of the art she drew on two walls of the house. Hard to be upset with that face shining back at me. And thank gourd for Magic Erasers.



I found a rainbow in the sink after a load of dishes. How nice!



Leah, in her ongoing quest to care for all animals while simultaneously organizing the world, found a little niche for each of a bunch of her toys. I didn't ask but there was probably a logical and lengthy explanation as to why each animal was placed where it was.



This year, Mother Nature had an April Fool's Day trick of her own. We were greeted in the morning with over an inch of wet snow, most of which, thankfully, was gone by sundown. It was pretty, though. Maybe it was more of a treat, then.



One of the highlights of my extended blogging hiatus was a trip back to Madison to see some great flics and be uber-crafty. Mrs. Happy Stuff and I tried our hands at some screenprinting using professional screens and contact paper. Way cool.



Just a bit of the fun and lovely things we made:



I took the girls to the park on one of the glorious Spring days we've been having. Here, Natalie contemplates the park as a metaphor for something important.



Riding a pig - don't think she can catch H1-N1 this way.



Leah preferred the Toucan:



I completed a fun custom "Topo" piece that incorporated some islands and ended up being 26 layers thick and a solid half pound!


I'm beginning to tackle the wallpaper border in the girls' room. It's in fine shape, but I'm not fond of the pastel/Aztec design. I'm planning to paint some uneven stripes in different colors and add a little chair rail about a quarter of the way from the ceiling around the walls.



I purchased four classy, little, hand printed chair cards from Etsy seller LeiLiLaLoo. I inteded to find a pre-matted frame with four openings. IKEA had one with three and one with five. So, five it was, and I added a little hand cut table in the middle. I think it turned out pretty well!



I stumbled upon another of Leah's little organizational displays. Using two halves of a styrofoam cup holder, she has divided her small animals into soft (in the background) and hard (up close). She then divided them further by putting babies with females and males by themselves. I asked her why there was a rabbit with the mother and baby lion. She said that it couldn't be with a male because the males are mean and of all the mothers, the lion is the nicest.



For another custom request, I cut out the entire San Francisco Bay. I must admit I enjoyed marrying the two hemispheres of my brain as I learned a little about the bathymetry of this body of water and crafted it into paper as accurately as I could.



Leah colored this piece of paper she brought home from our fellowship. I get the feeling that the Earth in this picture is sort of giving up, hands raised in defeat, while still keeping a sense of humor. "Earth Day?" it asks. "Whatever."



Whew! That's it. If you only look at one picture a day, maybe it won't seem so long until my next post! Thanks for being here!

Y!IMBY!

That stands for: Yes! In My Back Yard! And by "back yard" I mean about two miles from my front door. I am stupefied by the fact that I have never before last week seen this part of Madison.



I had been to the UW-Arboretum three and a half years ago when Leah fit facing me in the Bjorn, and we walked the prairie bit close to the noisy beltline in chilly September. It was grassy, wide open, and everything was calling it quits for the season. I was nonplussed.

I had visited the Arb again about a year ago, grabbing a fast food lunch with Leah when Matthew was out of town, and eating it in the van in the parking lot of visitors' center. (That's how the old folks do it in England.)

Then, last week, after an appointment on the east side of the Arboretum, I took the scenic route through the park and slowed waaaay down to take in the roadside beauty. It was so woodsy! I spied a parking lot and bookmarked it in my brain for later that week.

Later turned into now and the girls and I packed up, drove up, and dove in. On the way to the parking lot we saw three big turkeys ambling by the road, and as soon as I turned off the car, we were surrounded by bird song. I put Nad-O in the backpack, slid the camera into my pocket, and grabbed Leah's hand, ready for our adventure.



Ten yards in, I was near breathless. I'm not that out of shape even with a baby on my back. No, I was just jointly floored by how beautiful it was and by how stupid I've been for never having seen this part of it before. I told Leah to keep her talking to a minimum and then to speak in a soft voice so that we could enjoy the sounds of the woods. She did better than me as I was soon pointing out various tree saplings, lichens, moss, deer tracks, a sapsucker's rattle, and how squishy a rotten log was. We approached a pair of mallards who patiently watched us pass by. We braved a wobbly boardwalk to reach a bog overlook filled with everything green, muddy, and froggy. We hiked up little hills, Leah explaining to me how her energy works. And we rested on a large, flat overlook that I later learned was positioned to view several burial mounds. It was all so lovely!

Those of you Madisonians reading this are probably yawning by now. "Yeah, yeah," you're saying. "The Arb is cool and you're a fool for not having seen it before. Get with the times, already."



I'm sorry. It was such a perfect moment for me and the girls. It was the perfect day, the perfect place, and had Matthew been there too, it would have been perfect, perfect, perfect. We're going back tomorrow. ;)

Flowers for My Mama

Happy Birthday, Mom!



Every time something green breaks through the soil and blooms in my garden I am held in awe that anything can actually grow there, and I am reminded of my mom and the blood and sweat that she tills into the soil of her gardens every year. While I may not put into practice even a quarter of the things Mom does, I will never forget the times she walks me through her gardens, naming her plants in Latin, talking about how high they get where the temperature is warmer, and inevitably getting her fingernails dirty scratching around some poor seedling choked with a day's growth of weeds.



This little crocus batch has come up reliably every spring so that I know where to look for the striped, grass-like leaves as the snow melts. I didn't plant them, and I don't weed around them, but like my mom and her gardens, they persevere and they thrive. The best thing I can do is take pictures of them and share them here for you as a virtual bouquet.

Mom, I hope your anniversary of another complete tour around the sun is easy, sun-filled, and one that brings you nice things all day. I love you!

The Big Melt

I think you can only truly have a "big melt" when you've had all the snow we've had this winter. (And the weather reports say still MORE snow tonight and tomorrow!) With overnight lows still above freezing, the gi-normous mountains of back-breaking precip, are quickly dwindling into dirt covered mounds. More snow be damned, Spring is on its way. The cardinals are belting out their video-game songs at first light, the piles of dog doo in the back yard are resurfacing like b-movie zombies from their graves, and we can take a walk without a coat or mittens. Yes, by golly, winter has had its day.

Because of that and the fact that Trader Joe's always has super cheap flowers, my mommy bought a few springy buds to banish the winter doldrums. Here are two pics from "Day 1" of the bouquet. Don't they look purdy? I think I may have to replace my desktop picture with one. Help yourself!



(Yes, I know these photos are a little Mapplethorpe-ian or O'Keefe-ish. They are "two-lips!" O.K. get your minds out of the gutter, people!)

Fa-la-la-la-OUCH! in 2-part Harmony

Uffta!

Ja, vee got sum snoh, den. Southern Wisconsin was Whomp-cracked (just for you, hon) with snow yesterday. Matthew got his aerobic workout in the morning, picking up the 5-6 inches we received over night. I planned to do more of the chore during the day when it "let up." Yeah. It didn't let up until nearly seven o'clock. That's when Matthew gave it another shot before his back began singing him a siren song to crash on the couch. I took over and spent about an hour digging veritable trenches to civilization. The hardest part was finding a place to put it all. Although what we have is peanuts compared to what my uncle is "enjoying" down in Utah, or what they receive annually in Rhinelander, we have to pitch each shovelful onto an avalanche-prone mini-pyramid of snow and ice. By the end of the evening, my back was harmonizing with Matthew's.

Today, it's a brilliant scene with bright blue skies, temps in the high twenties, and so far no vehicles have been stuck in the intersection (there were at least four yesterday). Not teaching this year means that I "missed out" on a snow day, but what am I saying? Every day is a snow day for me and my little snow bears.

p.s. I updated the Picasa site, so check out the Our Pics link on the left.

Obligatory Kid-With-Icicle Shot

Ooooooo-eeee! We got some snow, ya! It was warm-ish yesterday. Just enough to melt some snow from the roof and form this gi-normous icicle (or ice stalagtite, if you prefer). Seeing as it was about as big as Leah, I snapped it from the gutter edge (silently praying the gutter stayed on) and brought it into the kitchen for the photo. I know my folks have pictures of us holding similar specimens back when we were scrawny little tykes. I seem to recall, though, that we weren't wearing mittens. Our mouths were less smiley than Leahs, and opened, instead in wide expressions of delighted pain. "Cool, a huge icicle! Man, it hurts! But it's so cool!"

As I type, we are getting blanketed yet again with another winter storm. O.K. we get it. Really.

Tie-Dyed Tree

I like trees. I even have favorite trees. There's the big spruce that towered over a corner of my childhood house -- you could walk "into" it and be surrounded by sappy-smelling boughs. There's the tree that grew or eroded straight out over the lake in my hometown -- you could shimmy along the trunk and sit over the water. And then there's this knockout. Every year, this maple two doors down throws out the most vivid tie-dyed display in the neighborhood. It's got every color from green to bright red, and against a clear blue sky, well, it's photo worthy. Enjoy!

Oooo! It's chilly!

Yes! It finally feels like fall! It's not too cold as to warrant a call to the furnace gremlins, but it's just the perfect "ooooo" to pull my favorite hoodie off the hook in the closet, "birth" myself through the opening, and tuck my hands, almost instinctively up into the frayed sleeves.

Matthew and I both used to like fall as our favorite season - camping is often bug-free, it smells like dry leaves and wood stoves, and we both are hoodie-fans. Recently, however, we both have jumped onto the "I Like Spring Best" bus as we prefer warming (versus cooling) temps, longer (versus shorter) daylight totals, and the fact that our garden looks halfway decent before the carnival of native weeds gets too rowdy. Maybe it has something to do with working 8-4/9-5 type jobs when we leave for work in darkness and return to darkness during the late fall and winter weeks. Or maybe, having seen two babies enter into the daylight of being, we relish all new growth with more passion -- eh, sounds too poetic. ;)

It's a start

So Matthew has caught the low/no-impact bug and, as with most of his new passions, he is persistently trying to get the whole family "on board." Since reading this guy's blog, we've been trying to reduce the amount of junk we buy, eat, and especially throw back out into the big, green world.

What have we been doing? Mostly we've been more picky about what we buy. And here's a little list of other things we have done, many of which were inspired by "No Impact Man."

• We became members of the co-op within walking distance from home. There we can fill our own containers with bulk food, purchase local and organic produce (do you know how far YOUR bag of baby-cut carrots traveled?), and easily find other products that, if they have to be packaged, are done so out of recycled/recyclable materials.
  
• We don't buy cups of coffee anywhere unless we brought our own mugs.
  
• We avoid buying cookies and other "treats" (we probably should avoid buying anyway) because of their packaging.
  
• We take the bus when we can, even though with a toddler and a newborn we tend to look a little like a small circus.
  
• We are calling businesses and asking them to stop sending us junk mail.
  
• Matthew makes granola every week with Leah and, in addition to some cage-free eggs, has that for breakfast every morning.
  
• I made my very own batch of chocolate cupcakes -- NOT from a box!
• I hang the clothes on the line outside whenever I can, although lately with 7+ inches of rain in a week, it's been a bit hard!

So, we won't win a peace prize or be Al Gore's heroes or anything, but it's a start. And so far, minus missing junk food, it's been quite easy to do. I can foresee that the things we have to think about now will become second nature to us and buying anything in styrofoam will seem as awful as throwing away an aluminum can.