snow day!!

both of my clients cancelled today. i wasn't surprised, or upset - it meant more snuggle time with E, and postponing warming up the car/digging out the end of the driveway (*shakes fist at snowplow drivers*)/driving home in a -23F windchill. it was a wonderfully lazy day, balancing nicely with the afternoon/evening's productivity.

so far tonight, i've finished two partially-watched movies (The Hunger Games and Darshan), knitted two inches on my sweater, folded and put away laundry, cleared unnecessary papers/stuff off of two dressers and a desk, made the bed, sorted through/re-organized my bug-out bag, exercised the cat, made a template for the valentines, and figured out how many boards and how much peat moss, vermiculite, and compost we'd need to buy in order to have three 4'x4' square foot garden beds this year.

can we talk about garden porn for a minute? i don't know of many things that are more pleasant than browsing seed catalogs and planning your fantasy garden when there's a foot of snow on the ground. and this year, the first catalog showed up in the mailbox the week before Christmas! YAAAAAAAY!

so far, we've got seeds for rapini, Tom Thumb lettuce, San Marzano and Cherokee Purple tomatoes, Pink Beauty radishes, Provider bush beans, Lincoln peas, Dorata di Parma onions, Moon and Stars watermelons, Detroit (!) Dark Red beets, Genovese basil, a Winter Squash Mix that has a little bit of everything (pie pumpkins, butternuts, acorns, and dumplings), and a Rainbow carrot mix (because why not?). all we need now are soup beans, kale, and corn! i'd like to get one garden bed assembled in time to plant the peas and cool-weather greens this spring. and we're hoping to be living together by then, too, which would make things much easier - this past growing season, between my two jobs/scattered days at E's and E starting her new and very physically demanding job, we lost a lot of produce. it sucked, but we know where we went wrong and are determined to do better this year.

once we get a handle on the vegetable garden, i'd love to get a couple blueberry and blackberry plants. and in a perfect, perfect world (womanifestwomanifestwomanifest), we would have a couple of acres - plenty of room for berry plants, veggies, an asparagus patch, and maybe some grapevines or a small grove of hazelnut trees. and chickens. there WILL be chickens someday!

the roast was a smashing success, by the way - i'm never using any other method again! it was SO GOOD - moist, tender, and flavorful. next time, i'm going to attempt Yorkshire puddings, too. we've never had them, and they've always seemed like such a storybook food to me. i hope they're as good in real life as they are in my imagination!

winter is so great for daydreaming, isn't it?