good natured

It's not as if Ed enjoys being photographed. At some level, I'm not sure he fully understands why I bring the camera to the breakfast table every morning.






Or, if we're both outside, why I point it at him instead of... elsewhere.






But he doesn't object. He has a quiet and gentle disposition and he doesn't protest the inconsequential.

Today, since I worked at home, I felt especially that much of my off-work thoughts drifted toward our quirky curious (and in many ways so conventional) life together. And maybe this is because we are actually scheduled to go out on what you might call a date -- movie and a dinner (better value in that order). And so I thought about how rarely we do that and how mostly this is my fault: I've always loved cooking a meal in the evening with someone there in the background to whom I might make an occasional remark. It's such a good way to end a day! And so when asks -- do you want to go out? -- I almost always say no, thank you.

But one must step out of one's comfort zone occasionally and so I pick an Oscar nominee that has a high chance of appealing to me ('Silver Linings Playbook') and out we go.


(Later) And it could not have been a better night. True, I cry my way, loudly, uncontrollably through the last five minutes of the movie, but if you've seen it, you'll surely understand why. Dinner? We drive down to a Taste of India -- a small place with very typical very good very Tandoori Masala kind of cuisine...





So you see a lot of Ed in today's photos. It's not intentional. But it is as it really is.

the week in review

My work week, like your work week, doesn't end until tomorrow (and actually, mine is rather fluid, often spilling over into odd days and even odder hours). But except for rare Fridays, I do not usually teach on that day. And so Thursday feels like the end of one week and Friday feels like the beginning of the next.

As my "work week" came to a close, I thought how unpredictable it all is. You start the week anticipating nothing more that a few tight hours, a handful of long days, and maybe one small screwup somewhere along the way.

You don't bargain for a crushed back, a lost vote before the Plan Commission, a tooth that falls apart before your eyes... and so on and so forth.

But you also can't know that at the end of it all, you may well come out whole. And if and when you do, it feels quite humbling.

So here I am, humbled.

 As for the trivial aspects of the day, I'll give you, of course, breakfast -- note that I trimmed Ed's beard, finally!






Then, a shot of the iced-over dirt driveway, in the glow of the morning sun...






And finally, at the end of the day, the week, at the end of it all, a pot of home made chicken soup. For the comforting elements that it provides.

mid-week

Wednesday daylight hours are precious time for me: I work on my classes for the remaining days of the week. I make sure time wont run out on me. And, of course, I teach.

Not so clean cut this Wednesday.

I had been sitting in my office earlier in the week wondering if I had a tooth ache. You know how that goes: it hurts, it doesn't hurt. You wiggle it, press on it, chomp with it and then you assess. Yes hurts. Maybe not.

I call the dental office. How about coming in sometime in March?  -- the receptionist asks.
In March? That's weeks from now! And suddenly the pain in my mind grows to something big.
The receptionist reconsiders. How about tomorrow (Wednesday) at 7 (she means a.m.)?

Well alright. You can't say no to someone who's trying to do you a favor. Even if the dentist is a half hour drive from the farmette.

There is a long story in the series of events that then unfurled, but surely dental stories are the least interesting stories on the planet, so I'll short cut to the punch line. Root canal. Now, today, soon. Over at the endo guy. After that, in a few days, a crown.

Don't think this is news to me. I have postwar Polish teeth. It's like being raised without childhood vaccinations: it stays with you for the rest of your life.

So in between appointments I go home to gather my papers for work and yes, I pause for breakfast, because this day surely offers few other delights...





...and then I go back and spend hours in a half reclining dental chair.

When we pass the noon hour, I start to get nervous. I have a class to teach at 1:20, I tell my excellent and wonderful endo guy. You think I'll be able to get there on time? He is reassuring. We continue. And at 1, he proclaims he is done (for now).

I fly out of there, numb, drugged, a bit wacky really. But I am before my Property class at 1:22.

I apologize profusely for being late. And for having a face that really isn't all that functional.

I survive, they survive.

After, I work hard to make up the time lost this morning. No Paul's cafe after classes. And you're asking about lunch? No, not that either.

I come home to the farmette completely wiped. No new photos for you. Wipedness doesn't lend itself to photography.

Well, maybe this: as I am about to turn in toward the farmhouse, I think -- this is so us! A long, slick, impossibly slick driveway. Framed by pools of ice to the side.






After, I reheat the soup, make the usual salad and admire the little icicle just outside the window.





Since I like a glass of wine with dinner, I've not bothered with the prescription for pain killers. You can't have both. I choose a very full glass of Cava.

There you have it, that's my day. And yours?

hardy souls

Well, there's no reason to pretend otherwise: it was a treacherous morning: a cold, freezing cold morning that blustered in overnight, freezing every melted strip of water or slush, freezing it so solid that nothing heartwarming can be said of it.

I do have the colors of breakfast for you and I must post these because otherwise the bleakness of this day would stand out. Do note the flowers: the last days of February in the upper Midwest must have flowers brought to kitchen tables. They make life sane.









Immediately after breakfast I struggled to get into the Donkey car and, predictably, I could not get the doors open. With a still sore back, I wasn't ready to climb in through the hatch and so I had Ed run out in his nighttime attire to help me out.

The country roads were covered with frozen slush, the winds blew horrific gusts of icy snow across any bare patch of asphalt.

In the city, the street were manageable but the sidewalks were a mess. Winter was taking a final brave stand here -- showing off all that it can do.

Sometime while I am tucked away in the law building, things settle down. The sun even comes out for a bit. But the cold stays with us.

Back at the farmette, nothing seems photographable (rare is the day that I think that). The light dusting of snow on trees no longer looks unusual or delightful.





It seems tired. Done that already. Let's move on. (I'm not unreasonable: I'll accept a solid February snowfall, but this isn't that. It's an ice over, without the benefits of a good base for, say, skiing.)

Reluctantly, I take out the camera -- my good one no less, as my pocket guy is away for yet another repair. Click. There you go. With a bit of blue. A patch of hope.





It is unfortunate that the night is bitter cold. Ed and I are out attending a Plan Commission meeting where the long term fate of the fields around us is being debated. I have to say, in the long long run, it's a foregone conclusion: the beautiful fields that give us so many market fruits, vegetables and flowers will, I think, one day be developed. We're too conveniently close to downtown Madison. It's a dream spot, really, for that sprawling entity called the never ending suburb. But not now, not yet, not when we have development elsewhere, pushing its way in all directions!

The skies are clear. We're heading significantly into negative temperature territory. May it be the last really cold spell this winter. We're hardy souls up here in the northern Midwest, but let's switch air currents now for the rest of winter. No more Arctic blasts. We're ready to move on.

Monday

This afternoon, as I prepared to lift myself out of the Donkey car so that I could carry my MacBook Pro laptop in for a check-up (I mean, it shouldn't be crashing every time I work on photos stored within), I thought seriously about taking a day off from work tomorrow.

My back is wagging its finger at me: do not scrub the house so forcefully next time, or be prepared to pay the consequences!

Not moving for a while, a long while, suddenly seemed so very appealing.

The moment passed. At the Apple Store, the Apple Genius at the Genius Bar did this check and that check and then looked me in the eye and said -- I have never, ever in my life seen so many photos stored in iPhoto. Your computer is crashing because iPhoto was never meant to be responsive to manipulations on... (insert 25,000 here) photos. Buy the Aperture Application and your problem will disappear.

How I hate it when people tell me to BUY more stuff. Especially after I am still processing the realization that I underestimated my taxes for the past year.

The Apple Genius, smart as he was about the inner working of my laptop, never even noticed that I was in complete back pain while sitting at the cool-but-very-uncomfortable-for-people-with-pulled-back-muscles stool.


Earlier, I had to scoot and rush to the clinic to have stitches removed from my leg. The nurse asks -- is your leg bothering you? Leg? Who cares about my leg! Please just assist me in lying down on your ever so appealing patient table so that I do not have to support myself in this upright position for another minute. Because my back is killing me!

She tells me worriedly -- maybe you should talk to your doctor. I smile benevolently. I need a few hours lying flat on a hard surface. In the alternative, an Advil or Moltrin or some pill, which, frankly, I should have taken hours ago, but I am just so pill averse and now here I am wanting to pat a sweet nurse on the shoulder to reassure her -- it'll be okay. Let me go now. It'll be okay.


In other news... well, there was breakfast.





And the promise of a mild weather day...





...which will be replaced by less mild days imminently, but who cares. We have a mild day. 

And so it's perhaps odd to be making a pot of tomato soup tonight, but I had pulled out a huge pack of garden tomatoes from the freezer yesterday and there they were and there was I and it seemed right. Even as my back protested the whole while long.





How did you do this to yourself? -- the nurse had asked me earlier.
Well now, I was meticulously house cleaning on Sunday.
You too? So many people told me they did major house cleaning this past week-end.

Sigh. We are a boring lot.

overdone

Maybe it's having spring thoughts that spurs the clean-up machine within me. Or maybe it's that I'd been lax with my weekly scrubbing and I was beginning to notice the effects of that. Or maybe it's because I took out all the cleaning paraphernalia from underneath the kitchen sink and that prompted me to get serious and use it all today.

I don't really understand why there are people (like me) who insist on overdoing once they start something (just as I had overdone it yesterday with so much effort put into a failed project! Not my fault there, by the way. The website I was working with refused to load...), but there you have it, I belong to those who plunge, full speed forward and then, much much later, sit back and study the damages.

Today's cleaning extravaganza resulted in a very sore lower back and a very clean everything else. Including the basement. Because yes, we even attacked that -- me, vacuuming cobwebs from the rafters and a year of dust from the floor, Ed tidying shelves of whatever stuff he wont store elsewhere.

So please forgive this post: it is what it is. We did little else today.

Well, unless you want to consider the breakfast. Front room today. (With my sweet guy, with his oddly broken pinkie finger and a shirt that should have been retired decades ago.)






And, too, I can give you yet another photo of the farmhouse, from it's less photographed side -- the one that actually faces the street. (You can't see its original front entrance, because it's behind trees and besides, it is in a sad state of disrepair and Ed has little interest in fixing it. His reasons are irrelevant and unconvincing but there you have it).





We had gone out that way, toward the cluster of neighbors (we have a few, but we are separated by more than fields -- we are isolates, all of us and we rarely (never?) knock on each others doors so today is a milestone). We were distributing information about a town meeting this coming Tuesday. Oddly enough we belong to a town, even though that town along with any commercial point is really miles away. We plan on attending the meeting we want to encourage others to attend. There are rumors of a development that may someday (soon?) replace the fields where farmer Lee and her extended family now grow market produce. There are many reasons why a development here, now, is not a good idea (and they are not only NIMBY reasons). So there we were, going door to door -- a most unusual activity for the two of us.

How come you hate this so much? -- he asks, after I wince at the prospect of yet another house.
I have to be friendly.
You don't like being friendly?
I don't like failing at being friendly.


In the evening Isis is a little under the weather. Ed works on an engineering project I cannot begin to understand. Supper is simple, the evening is too short. I watch a movie about young love. ("Like Crazy.") Sad. But then, when is young love anything but sad?  Or is it that it has to be sad before the good years come spilling forth?

Day ends, house is clean. Ready for the week ahead. And that's a good thing.

Saturday

Today I learned patience. I spent seven hours on a project that ultimately failed. I'd let you know what it was, but, in the spirit of forgetting failures and forging ahead with success, I'll let it go for now.

So tonight we watch a more than mildly depressing movie -- "the human resources manager" -- an Israeli film about... well, death and family and a little bit of Rumania thrown in (which, in this movie, reminds me of Poland twenty years ago).

And you'd think this would make for a dismal day. Well no.

There was early morning yoga.

And mid morning breakfast.





And much later, I stepped outside to see if the opossum had eaten the ginger cookies we'd left out for him.

He hadn't.

But there was a break in the clouds and even though it was cold, it felt very pre-spring.





So let's stay with that image. Of forming buds, of melting snows and of successful projects. To be here tomorrow. Or soon after.

counting

A few math problems for you, to keep your brain cells sharp:

First of all, if Isis spends 80% of the day napping and Ed spends about half as much time at napping, how many wakeful hours do I have with either one of them? (Assume I sleep about 7 hours per night and that my sleep hours overlap with Ed and that I work for the better part of the time before dinner.)

Second question: how many photos of breakfast did I take to finally end up with these -- of a breakfast partially set...





...and of a breakfast ready to be consumed by my breakfast companion (who is really into his Toasty-Os lately)? [5]





Next: if, in the last twenty or so years I have never owed additional taxes on April 15th, what are the chances that I'd owe this year?

I'll give you the answer to the last as it's fresh in my mind, having completed my tax returns just today: 100%. It has something to do with no longer claiming deductions. I don't really object to taxes in principle, but I do object to being surprised, nay, shocked by a bill for anything that exceeds $100 and yes, my liability exceeds $100. So that's a bummer.

I offered this deal to Ed: I would chip away the ice on the path to the sheep shed in exchange for him picking up my tax liability. He politely declined.

Still, it is a sunny (coldly so!) day and as I walk the farmette lands to lift from my shoulders the preoccupation with the almighty dollar, I think how it really is so very sublime when the winter sun has finished three-fourths of its journey across the great Midwestern sky.
















At home, the sun lingers on the bouquet of colorful rose buds and this, too, is such a fine moment that I nearly forget about all those math computations.






Just one more arithmetic query then: how many suppers can I make out of one head of cabbage? Especially if I supplement it with salads with roasted beets, just to put some color into the package? [3]

Valentine

I asked in my classes today if anyone really truly liked Valentine's Day. I was thinking that maybe women would say yes, men would say no. (I personally do not know many women who hate this day and many men who absolutely love it.) The show of hands surprised me. (It was mixed.)

And so I pushed it a little: why do you like it, I ask. I admit that I, too, like it, even though I don't really understand why. I'm not usually one for Hallmark holidays.

Because it's a reminder to do something with your loved one...

Because it's February. The south has Mardi Gras. What do we have?

Why? Why not?

Chocolate!


So maybe this is why I wake up and the first words I say are Happy Valentine's Day Ed, even though he is really, really not into Hallmark holidays.

I pout and I groan when I see that I am not going to engage him in this. This is our eighth Valentine's Day together - you'd think I'd know better. Conventional expressions are not ever the most important expressions of love or caring.

At the same time that Ed comes to back down on such trivials as chocolates and flowers. Get your self some after work, he tells me. We so often do meet each other at a good halfway point in life.



We eat breakfast. A beautiful, calm meal. Happy red heart day!







Many many hours later, the work day comes to a close. I go to the cupcake store on State Street and I am thrilled, really thrilled to see that they now have begun to make these:





Yes, definitely a few of those to take home.

Where would be be without bakeries! On this day, they are the best at giving you ideas on how to convey adoration to your beloved.





Lovely ways, with pink and red frosting on top.






A long long time ago, when we were first together, Ed would occasionally bring over prepackaged bouquets of little roses. He'd pick them up at the grocery store along with the needed quart of milk or dozen eggs. When I saw a version of such a bouquet at Whole Foods this evening, I knew that fate had spoken: these should come home with me. Along with a small box of chocolates. Silly things, to be sure. Or, maybe not silly at all.






...even if I really don't need such conventions to tell me that my days with Ed are rich indeed.






Dinnertime. Ed scoots down to our newly discovered Thai place. We opt to have take out for dinner because it's so lovely to stay home after a long day away from home.





I'll say Happy Valentine's Day one more time in a few minutes and maybe now they will finally be genuine words of affect, without a question mark, without that reminder that something should follow. Words of gratitude, certainly that. An expression of caring, tied not to Hallmark, nor to a midwinter day, tied to nothing at all but this silly feeling of love and bubbly mirth and all those fine things that we sometimes take for granted and today remember not to take for granted.

So Happy Valentine's Day. Yeah. I really do like this mushy, blushing little day stuck in the middle of a winter month. A day celebrating love. What an utterly brilliant idea!

consider the peppers

A pretty interlude. Not a gorgeous day, not one that screams beauty at you, but one that lifts up your heart just a tiny bit.

I wake up to sunshine...





... and of course, that calls for breakfast in the sun room. And here, I want to show off something on the sill of that room -- there is the Christmas Cactus which, irrationally blooms in months that have nothing at all to do with Christmas. And there is the pepper plant. This guy was sown from seed last spring. When we slipped into the fall season and frost became a danger, I pulled out the pepper plant (which had yet to produce a single pepper), packed it into a pot and carried it indoors. Why not. And sometime in the winter it bore two peppers and they have been hanging in there for months now. Delightful as they are, we cannot decide if we should eat the peppers or keep them on the plant, as mementos of a better time (weatherwise).






Okay, okay. Breakfast. A variation on the usual, but in the beauty of sunshine.










Late, much much later, after work, I drive home by way of the isthmus lakes. Where you can still find a solitary ice fisherman waiting for a fish.






I'm heading home. The sun is still with me. Faint now, but still there, letting me admire that  great and magnificent evening sky...






The paths around the farmette aren't entirely free of ice yet and so I help them along, using a sturdy shovel to chip away frozen (but softly so) surfaces. Just to bring us that much closer to... spring.





I'm thinking of spring now. Every single day, it's on my mind. Even though I've got a chunk of life to confront before that.

a Tuesday...

A Tuesday in the middle of February.


 


Don't hold me accountable for the text here: my thoughts wander on days like this. To the past, to the future. Just not to Tuesday in the middle of February.

It is for this reason that I'm bugging Ed incessantly about Valentine's Day. (That's a Thursday, unfortunately even busier than a Tuesday and still in the middle of February.) I tell him how he must make plans for it, how chocolates and champagne are never wrong, I tell him all this, though not with the expectation of observing Valentine's Day. It's merely my way of being grumpy. As in -- if this is all that February has for us, can't we at least go along?

This morning is busy, this afternoon -- busier. Sometime, the sun comes out and I ought to take note of that because I love sunny days so much, except on this sunny day I can only observe from within.

On the way home, it seems to me that the world is suspended -- between winter and non-winter, snow and not snow...





...satisfying no one at all.

In other news, we talk again about raising goats and chickens and other farmish things and though these discussions never go anywhere, they make us feel like we are being true to the land around us.

On the upside, the sun set significantly after 5.










...and I made thick cabbage soup. With turkey sausage. (Our meals seem both strange and predictable.)

wild things

Anyone who is predisposed against farm living ought not keep reading. There's too much of the rural stuff. Too much of stray animals and their perverse habitats.

There's too much of the wild, the uninvited.

It starts in the predawn hours, when I hear the telltale thrashing of the mouse trap downstairs.
Ed!
Sh, go to sleep.
I know we have another catch. And that I will be the one looking for a field in which to set this brat free. Ed's the stay at home guy now. I go to work, releasing mice along the way.

Farmhouse living. We eat breakfast at the kitchen table.


 


We talk about how the weather people had miscalled the temperatures. Above freezing turned below freezing. We have a sheet of ice on the driveway. Ed stands ready to push me and the donkey car out onto the road.

But as I leave, I spot the intruder.

The intruder was around last night. Isis and he exchanged stares for a minute and then the cat retreaded. Maybe because the intruder has very large, sharp teeth. Or maybe because they know each other. The intruder appears to be living beneath the writer's shed. He comes out to hunt for food in the makeshift compost pile that we keep by the garage during winter months.





'Possum. In the south, people cook them. Our region is as far north as these guys go. No one cooks opossum here. We leave them alone, they leave us alone.





Sorry to interrupt your breakfast, Mr 'possum. Go hang out with your family now.

I take the trapped mouse and head to campus. I pass cornfields, rather submerged right now...





Canadian geese love it here. We're less in love with them. They multiply faster than rabbits (it seems) and they squawk at you if you get too near. And, worst of all, they leave behind many tons of poop.

I stop at a snow covered prairie field and let the mouse out.





He looks at me defiantly and scampers off toward a plant hole, disappearing somewhere in the snow.

In the evening, back at the farmhouse, Ed reads me passages from a book written by a woman (Jennifer Reese) who took to raising chickens, bees, ducks, against all odds -- against intruders who invented clever ways to get into the fenced off areas and raid them for her birds. She never gives up, building bigger and better (meaning more expensive) enclosures and I laugh at these stories appreciatively, as if this was my fate too -- protecting Isis, protecting the warm spaces inside the farmhouse from the wild things that roam the farmette fields.