indoor laundry

back before it got cold, i was contemplating on a theorhetical level the idea of drying our clothes indoors. i wanted to put up a line of some sort.

fast forward to now, when i deal with drying our clothes indoors every week because it's bitter cold outside (half the time) and the clothes don't dry as quickly in the cold. we had one clothes drying rack already that we had gotten at target last year. over the summer we used it for socks and underwear outside (cuts down on the number of clothespins we needed). now we use it for clothes, mostly t-shirts. the shirts, pants, and underwear that doesn't fit on the rack are generally hung on hangers in the bedroom, wherever there seems to be space to hang them. generally, several items go on the pole in my closet, a few go on the hooks in another closet, and some hang on things that weren't meant for hangers to be attached to. socks get hung on a metal shoe-rack we found by the side of the street on trash day. it works :) i still look forward to sunny warmish days to hang laundry on the line again. they'll come soon enough, i'm sure.

sweet sweet love

my lady is terrible at keeping secrets and surprises. she gets very excited about it and it is very cute. so when she gave nothing away about valentine's day plans, i was completely unprepared for her to show up at my work with tissue-paper flowers to take me out to a lovely valentine's day lunch (at an all-organic restaurant: gustorganics.com). she loves me :) there were chocolates and a hand-made card, and a very special i-fixed-the-ring-you-wear-and-had-it-engraved. it was very very nice.

then in the evening, i tried to go low-impact by having a pleasant dinner at home. i moved the furniture to the sides of the living room, set up a table for two covered in red tablecloth (that was actually a pair of red pillowcases my dad had wrapped christmas presents in), put on the fireplace dvd (no really. we have a fireplace dvd), and cooked a nice dinner including a vegan pasta recipe that involved artichoke HEARTS and HEARTS of palm (get the theme?). we had some bubbly peach-flavored grape juice, and ate dinner by candlelight.

best v-day yet <3

on spring fever and sap rising

my sap is rising. i can feel spring in my bones. i sorted our seed packets this past weekend and bought some storage tubs to make into self-watering containers. someone linked to a plan to make a garden out of a wading pool, which is really awesome because we've had this wading pool in our backyard waiting to be trashed for the last year or two, haha. now we can make it into something beautiful and useful! erin suggested we make it an herb garden. i like that idea :)

speaking of herbs, our rosemary is still alive, and so is our sage. nice. i love perennials.

i ordered 5 lb of wheat and 5 lb of barley seed to do a little greening of some abandoned land i walk past on my way home. first step is to clean up the garbage in the plots, which might happen as soon as it stops being 15F out there. brrrrrr. we saw some snow flurries yesterday, which was Very Exciting, but it didn't lie on the ground more than an hour or so (making it rather Less Exciting).

my goal in 2008 is for me not to get bored with the gardening, and for me to start biking anywhere that i go alone.