cacti at briggs nursery

where we go from here

matt received some very interesting replies to his post about a future home for our dogs and for us. the most intriguing of all came from the owner of this house:


which looks like this from the front:

and attached to the house is this:

which contains seven of these, none of which we will be directly responsible for but all of which we can slip peppermint candies on our way out to our cars:


and finally, because i know dad was wondering, the house also comes with this:


we have not yet met our potential new landlady, but we have emailed and talked extensively and i think she likes us. she is flying up from DC to meet us in person in mid-august. if all goes according to plan, meaning if nina doesn't do anything horrendous like eat a piece of dog poop or goose her during the meeting, we will start transferring our possessions from our one bedroom apartment to this five bedroom, three bathroom, three barn colonial and begin our new chores, which involve pretty much only watching to make sure that other people are taking care of their animals and all of which can be done from the comfort of the lafuma lounge chair. and the rent is exactly the same as what we pay now. we leave the natick farm for good on september 30 or as soon as they find a reasonable replacement, whichever comes first.

it's not that i won't miss the goat milking because i will, but then actually, no, i won't.

taste the rainbow

i've been hard at work canning the ripe things- so far, i've made pickled beets, strawberry jam, strawberry rhubarb jam (more like a sauce, really. a saucy sauce), peach jam (also more of a sauce than a jam), blueberry jam, dilly beans, and bread & butter pickles. now i'm looking for something to do with pounds and pounds and pounds of zucchini.

my new favorite lunch

since i started working in attleboro, my favorite lunch meal has been the #4 lunch special from el azteca with all beans instead of meat. it costs only $4.75 and it includes enough food for at least two meals, although i typically eat it all at once and feel sick and and then take a nap for the rest of the day.

but yesterday, i put together what i think will be my new favorite lunch- a crusty roll, a thick slice of colby cheese, and some besto pesto, freshly made by michele. in fact, as i am writing this, i am eating my lunch, even though it is only 10:00 in the morning. it is that good. the best thing about this sandwich, besides its taste, is that i am supporting michele's entrepreneurial efforts with each bite i take. and matt made the besto pesto website in exchange for bee gear and veggies, so i am also benefiting myself when i eat this sandwich.

i imagine i'll be adding some of those fresh sungold tomatoes to the sandwich in weeks to come. that'll be one for the deliciousness record book.

the next installment in the series "varying degree of ripeness"

pretend that i labeled the sungold picture "varying degrees of ripeness, part I"

'tis the season

the season for sungolds. here they come, folks!

and i'm totally digging this new camera.

gladiolus on a partly cloudy day

riley anne gets bigger

a new-to-me camera

after the unfortunate accident of evie falling on my digital camera, i was forced to look elsewhere to get pictures for my blog. for the first few days following my dad's party (the "scene of the crime"), i just posted the many vestigial pictures i had from that event or pictures i "borrowed" from other websites. realizing that my readers expect more from me than 10-day old photos (even if a.j. is doing something really cute in the pictures like eating an apple in a disorganized manner) or copyrighted material, i finally turned to my back-up camera.

"how extravagant," some of you might be thinking. "she has two digital cameras!" actually, i have an array of 24 digital cameras, an assistant to lug around my gear, a darkroom to develop my photos, and a trophy case to display my favorite shots from recent years, which i also force my assistant to carry everywhere.

"but sarah, you don't need a darkroom to develop digital photos."

right- you've got me there. i lied about the darkroom.

in reality, i purchased a second digital camera off ebay because i think matt takes really nice photos. and while much of this could be attributed to his skill as a photographer, along with the hustling abilities of his camera-gear caddy, some credit also goes to the rich colors and good close-ups that he can do with his 3-year old nikon coolpix 3200. while i love the olympus stylus 600 that my parents got me for christmas 2005, i went ahead and bought a used nikon for $50.

"crap," says my assistant. "not another thing to carry?"

"quiet you!" says i.

the camera works great and i think the colors are really nice and the close-ups are slightly easier to shoot with the nikon than with the olympus. however, the olympus was a bit more simple to use and fit better in my pocket. it remains to be seen which camera could better withstand what i now refer to as "crash test evie."

i have also learned that the reason matt's photos always look good is because he picks good angles and has a very artistic eye.

what not to bring on a picnic

i led a teacher training course at oak knoll on monday and tuesday. the most preferred activity was one called "ant menu," where you place a bunch of different food items on a paper plate and wait for the ants to arrive. here is a photo documentation of the results achieved on one plate.




the lesson i learned from this is not to sit at the base of a tree and to only bring sugar packets to eat. above all else, i learned to leave the cinnamon muffins and turkey with honey mustard at home.

i know that's not how it's spelled

for those of you who don't regularly check matt's blog, he has been feeling rather under the weather lately. a recent CT scan came back all clear, but the day after that, he started to feel sick. a temperature of over 102, aching joints, and finally a suspicious rash clearly indicated scarlet fever. or maybe the plague. botulism? ringworm?

oh right- lyme disease. a classic case. matt said they even brought in some doctors-in-training and doctors-who-are-trained-but-who trained-in-another-part-of-the-country so they could observe the classic symptoms of lyme.

melt in your mouth and also in a plate full of water

imp

another video poached from youtube

friday, july 13th, 11:38pm

please pay attention to this date and time, as we endeavor to learn exactly how long it takes to rid the fur between nina's eyes of its strong skunk odor.

old friends

julie, tom, and i were delighted to see our ex-next-door neighbor gabe at dad's birthday party. it had been 15 years since i had last seen him. he now has a wonderful wife and three great kids- two of whom spent hours exhausting nina by kicking a soccer ball for her. the youngest mini-gabe is not much bigger than a soccer ball himself.

honeycomb

matt was able to harvest some honeycomb from his hive. each of these little cells was built by the bees and filled with delicious honey. matt estimates that his bees made 20 pounds of honey in just a few days. i guess june and july are prime honey-making time.

examining the i-phone

birthday party weekend

we have just returned from the party circuit- matt and i went up to new hampshire for his sister's birthday and then to upstate new york for a big surprise party for my dad. mom arranged a wonderful day-long celebration with people from all segments of my dad's life. i took a lot of pictures, but somehow 98% of them are of evie and a.j. i don't know how that happened. also, i let evie use my camera and i learned an important lesson about the cost/benefit ratio of letting a three year old take pictures with a nice adult digital camera. the benefits are the humor value in 16 pictures of evie's toes. the costs are my broken camera which evie fell on. she did make sure to wear the wrist strap the whole time, just like i told her to. i think i will not be able to blame my niece for this unfortunate turn of events.

it's snowing in the beehive

actually, what happened was matt dumped powered sugar on his bees. in their efforts to clean themselves of their sugar-coating, the bees also clean off any mites that are attached to them. it's an organic way to get mites out of your beehive and to make the honey even sweeter.

note: i know the powdered sugar does not make the honey any sweeter. only butterfly magic flying dust and elf eyelashes can make honey sweeter.

have you ever put regular sugar in the blender? you will not believe what happens! hint: it makes powdered sugar. wait, that wasn't a hint.

and another one

now that i have the hang of black dog photography, i've managed to get a couple more good shots. this is my favorite.

matt gives nina a talking to

got him!

nina becomes a water dog

it took only a little encouragement to get nina excited about water. now, after every walk, she runs up the stairs and climbs right into her kiddie pool. in the following picture, she is taunting jake, who is still afraid of the water. man, it must be nice and cool in that pool.

blanketflower in bloom

message in a bottle

there's a very interesting article about bottled water in the recent edition of "fast company" magazine- not that i read "fast company" magazine ("Fast Company is the magazine for a generation of business leaders with high expectations for their companies -- and even higher expectations for themselves.") or had really actually ever heard of it, until there was a news story on NPR about this article and the bottled water phenomenon in general. here is a small excerpt:

"And for this healthy convenience, we're paying what amounts to an unbelievable premium. You can buy a half- liter Evian for $1.35--17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren't paying attention.

In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000."

it's not that i love him less...

you all know just how difficult it is to photograph a black dog, right? back me up on this, mom.

planning ahead

matt created the following advertisement for us, as we begin our search for new housing. it is posted on craigslist boston under the "housing wanted" section. so far, people have written some nice emails back, but no one has offered us a place to live.

hello, we are nina and jake — two friendly dogs looking for a new home.
we grew up on an organic community farm so we are well socialized with children, dogs, cats and all types of animals. we are not barkers. you would think it would be easy for us to find a new home but here's the catch:

we have to bring along not one but two human friends — sarah and matt.

we know. it is going to be tough to find a place for them.
but they're good humans. really.
they both work at mass audubon during the day. sarah teaches classes at night.
they are looking for something in a ruralish setting. they would like to have a garden, maybe a few chickens for fresh eggs (no roosters!), and a little space or nearby trails for us to run around. matt also keeps bees and could supply you with plenty of honey. they are currently the caretakers on a farm and are quite capable of taking care of a place if you are looking for a situation like that. we would like to move october 1 at the latest. our ideal location would be somewhere inside the red circle on the map below but locations near the circle might be close enough.

thank you for your consideration,
nina and jake

taking time to stop and smell the flowers

somehow or other, matt and i managed to successfully get an orchid to bloom. our friend adam, who does professional plant installations at places like banks and apartment complex lobbies, gave us the orchid a while ago, and through a combination of occasional watering, frequent neglect, and a good south-facing window, there are now a whole series of blossoms just waiting to open. jake took some time to stop and enjoy this one this morning.

sweet relief

we had a couple of days of brutally hot weather here this past week. i was nervous that our long-haired black dog was going to spontaneously combust. but the rain finally came and cooled everything off and joy returned once again to the kingdom as no one had to worry about armpit rings or sweaty brows anymore.


this shed is going to be the next thing to go in the ongoing effort to purge oak knoll of all its junk.

that's a big tent