'Tis almost Spring, we had a few beautiful sunny days and the buds of the red maples on the edge of the orchard are starting to open.

The male flowers (catkins) of the hazelnuts that have been slowly developing for weeks are starting to release their yellow pollen as, just in time, the female flowers have appeared as well.

 

Isn't it funny how their fertile parts rather compare to ours in size, the female flowers are those tiny red ones whereas the male parts of course are those long, dangly things ..

The first little daisies have appeared in the grass, although the poor things weren't around for very long since James decided to do the first mow of the season:

The grass never went dormant this winter, it kept looking very green and even grew some. It's what happens in a state with moderate temperatures and lots of rain ..

I've cleaned up some more around my raised vegetable beds and rearranged the bamboo stakes in teepees instead of the trellis' I made last year.
I think it will work better this way when adding the netting in the coming month.

I removed the top slats of the pallets as well, the ones that I had left initially to divide each bed into 9 squares, as you can see in this old picture from last year ..

It turns out that slugs love to hide under these during the day, where it's nice and cool(er) and wet, and than appear at night to help themselves to a vegetable Smörgåsbord!
I just used some string instead to make the squares. We'll see ..

On closer inspection of the beds I discovered that the mint, chives and parsley survived the winter. Cool!

I did a little project in the house this week, I replaced the old and somewhat sagging foam of the couch and our two Ikea POÄNG-chair pillows with new foam I'd ordered online.

Cutting the foam with a bread-knife was surprisingly easy, but wrestling the foam back into the covers was a whole 'nother story!

                                                          

By the time it was done my arms were sore and I had the sweat on my back!

           

Of course I forgot to take before and afters but you might see here in a zoomed-in old picture of last week (left) that I went with an inch thicker foam (right) for the chairs.
My hope is that it will be more comfortable for that 'pain in my butt' (piriformis syndrome), that I can't seem to get rid of. The old foam had compacted so much that it was like sitting on a plank, which doesn't help of course. We'll see ..

With St. Patrick's day coming up I already baked some Irish Soda Bread, probably the most easy bread to make:

Like last year I divided the dough in two and added raisins in one of the loaves. Of course 'somebody' already had to try some .. the verdict: delicious!



By searching for something unrelated in the freezer I also found a roll of leftover pumpkin-chocolate chip cookie-dough way down at the bottom.
I made them last November, froze half, and apparently forgot about it ..

                                   

So, since we conveniently happened to be out of cookies, into the oven they went as well!

OK, that's it for another week.
Like I said, Spring is almost here and we're having a few beautiful days right now with sunshine, blue skies and temperatures in the low 60'!

Time to move our happy hour outside again! Cheers!

 

The weather has been all over the map this week with snow, sleet, rain and sunshine within hours on some days.
It's been mostly cold and uninviting and I'm still not walking on that toe that I might have broken or not 3 weeks ago, so I stayed inside for most of the week.

I've done a lot of reading and currently I'm halfway through 'The reading list' by Sara Nisha Adams.
It's is a heartwarming book about people connecting with others as they share their ideas about books. The story is about grief, loneliness, mental health issues, family dynamics, and friendship.

I've actually read quite a few books from 'the list' myself and I'm learning a few things about them that I didn't realize or picked up on when reading them myself. I like it very much!

When I'm not reading I'm puzzling:

My current puzzle is another very difficult one, a painting of Degas 'girls at the piano', it will keep me busy for a while for sure!

                                                    

I'm also always working on my blog, selecting pictures, making notes of what's happening as the week's progressing ...

Or, I'm knitting or spinning ..
I just realized that for some reason I never mentioned I got another spinning wheel. Another charkha to be precise, an Indian cotton spinning wheel.
Several years ago I bought this charkha on e-bay, an 'attache' charkha as it was called. As charkhas go, it was a fairly big, and also a very old, one.

I was thrilled to have scored an authentic, made in India, cotton spinning-wheel and happily got into the 'art' of spinning cotton on it.
Just like Ghandi wanted the Indian people to do, to peacefully protest against the English monopoly of producing Inian cotton in English mills and selling the cloth for high prices back to the Indian people who grew and cared for the plants to begin with.

Any-who, after some time I started to realize that this 'wheel', although authentic and wonderfully historic, was not the easiest and smoothest contraption to work with and I started to look for newer and more 'up to date' charka's ..
So, bring in .. the Book Charka de-Luxe, sold by stores for $299.99. Too much for my frugal mind of-course, so I started to watch E-bay and Ravelry, an art web-site, and finally found this one .. for $110!

This charkha is much smaller than the 'attache' and is based on the traditional Book Charkha, but the manufacturer has made some great improvements over the traditional models. 

It is a smooth finished book-shaped wooden box that opens up to reveal an accelerated Charkha that uses rubber O-rings in place of the traditional cotton drive bands, stainless steel and coated steel fittings and a self contained skein winder and it comes with 3 spindles.

The seller included a whole bag of cotton sliver (brushed cotton) in various colors and even added some cotton seeds so I could try to grow some of my own.

This winter I finally got to 'set it up' and spend some time getting familiar with this pretty little machine. It takes quite some time to get the hang of it, and I know a lot of people that have thrown in the towel and admitted defeat, but I stuck with it and lo-and-behold, I'm starting to 'get it'!

(I did sell my 'old' charkha by the way, for $65, which is $15 more than I bought it for!)

James is still studying .. I know, it's getting old, but he's still waiting for the State to approve the appraisals he's send in to be approved, after which he can sign up to take the final exam.
He's taking practice test after practice test, and is now passing pretty much every single one so it seems like he's ready!

We have a little pool going on when he will get the go-ahead; I'm thinking late March or more specifically the 21st, Doug and Brenda are predicting April and James himself thinks May. We'll see!

For a little break he drove to Portland last Sunday to attend the Portland Golf Show in the Expo center.

                                     

Unfortunately, it wasn't a very big 'show' and he called it quits after an hour and a half of walking past a lot of uninteresting stuff like trying to sign him up for expensive golf get-a ways and equally expensive golf-clubs or clothing.

I've hobbled (courtesy of that #$@%$! toe) outside for a little in between the snow and the rain and noticed the buds of the blueberries starting to 'shift' as we say in Holland, meaning they start to swell and open up ..

                         

There's some growth at the Rhubarb as well ..

           

The daffodils are finally starting to form flowers:

                                                                                     


And despite the frost of lately it looks like the Camellia in Doug's yard came through OK and buds are starting to open up:
                                                     
           

I was sorely tempted to buy some herbs and sugar snaps at Bi-mart this week but I talked myself down from that ledge by remembering what happened last year when I planted this early .. nothing really grew ..
This year seems just as cold and especially just as wet, which causes root-rot and seedlings to grow stunted or die altogether.

                                        

Also, what do I do with a Jumbo Pack? It's just the 2 of us ..

Going to the grocery store was about my only outing of the week and on the way home I grabbed a take-out dinner at the Panda Express.
It's been ages we went there, it's a very uninviting, cold and usually very noisy kind of take-out chain but we really like the food so I thought 'why not bring some home'?

Because of the cold, dark winter days we've not been going out for dinner every Wednesday-evening like we did last summer but I'm usually picking something up on my shopping days instead.
I still don't have to cook and there's no dishes. It's cheaper too .. no tip!

I have been cooking some more 'stick-to-your-ribs' food on these snowy days, like 'stampot boerenkool', a dutch dish best translated as 'mashed potatoes with kale' .. with (polish) smoked sausage .. and bacon bits .. and a good moat of gravy .. what's not to like?

I also went back to baking bread again .. it makes the house smell soooo good! It tastes pretty good as well of course.
I baked an 'artisan', 'no knead' bread with a nice crispy crust, and a basic, more traditional sandwich bread, although with a short rise, which had a weird shape coming out but tasted just fine!

Well, I think that's about it for this week. I guess it's just 'all quiet on the Western front'!
Everybody is waiting for Spring it seems like ... but I hope it will take a little while longer, I'm perfectly fine with how it is right now!

I got another shot of the-buck-with-the-strange-antlers this week when he re-appeared in our back-woods again.
You'd think he would have shed this ugly pair by now, which they usually do around January through March, but he's still hanging on to them ..

Talking about deer and woods, we went 'into the woods' ourselves during McMinnville's Gallery Theater's first show of the year:

As usual we picked the Sunday matinee, which is a good choice during this time of the year when evenings are dark and can be frosty and therefore slippery!

'Into the woods'  is a 1987 musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. The musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales, exploring the consequences of the characters' wishes and quests.

The story line:
As the result of the curse of a once-beautiful witch, a baker and his wife are childless. Three days before the rise of a blue moon, they venture into the forest to find the ingredients that will reverse the spell and restore the witch's beauty: a milk-white cow, hair as yellow as corn, a blood-red cape, and a slipper of gold.
During their journey, they meet Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Jack, each one on a quest to fulfill a wish.

As before we were very impressed by the talent and professionalism of the play, for such a small-town theater they're doing such an amazing job. The show was fast and very funny with great songs and quirky conversations.
We're blown away every time we go!

                                             

This season's shows seem to lean a little more to the 'for the whole family' style of musicals but, as with this latest show's fairy-tales (which are actually pretty gruesome), they are probably just as delightful for us adults/young at hearts!
We're looking forward to Harvey, for which we already have tickets for the second of April!

James had signed up for another golf-lesson at the Red Tail golf Center:

 

So I spent another hour in the close-by Washington Square shopping mall.
                                                        
                         

As you can see in the pictures it's a rather upscale mall and after cruising the stores for a second time I now know that none of these stores sell anything remotely interesting for me.

                                                                            
 
The shoes, clothes and accessories are too stylish and fashion-y (which is just not my style), I'm also not interested in jewelry or all kind of crazy gadgets or newest electronics and we have all the furniture we can possibly have in our small 'house' and are not interested in replacing anything that still works perfectly fine to begin with!
On top of that, or is it just me, but everything seems just insanely expensive these days?!

Any-who .. been there, done that!

We did go for an early dinner at Din Tai Fung this time around though.
Last time we were there we had no desire to wait for over two hours to be seated as walk-ins (!) so this time we'd made reservations.



The interior is rather simple and dark, all black with bamboo accents and stylish Asian lamps.

We ordered their signature dish Xiao long bao, a soup and pork meatballs filled dumpling, spicy chicken wontons and string beans with garlic.

                                                      

Well .. we can't say it was bad, but we weren't too impressed either.
The food was rather bland and the dumplings not very hot but the beans were great, the atmosphere pleasant and different and the waiter very friendly and knowledgeable, explaining into detail how the food was made and supposed to be eaten.

Of course we'd eaten most of it before I thought of taking a picture ..

But as with everything in this mall, for what we got, it was over-prized and lacking that something that would make it 'special' for us.
There are lots of Asian restaurants that do an equally, and often better, job. I don't think we'll be back.

After dinner we also picked up some pastries from the 85ºC bakery. (Another thing I didn't do last time and had regretted since).
By the way, the name 85ºC comes from the idea that the perfect brewing temperature for espresso coffee is 85º Celsius. It symbolizes their devotion to provide coffee, breads and cakes of the highest quality to every guest.

The French pastries and fluffy Asian breads and buns are baked onsite and are still warm when you get them from the self-serve bakery area. All are delicious and uniformly light, fluffy and not overly sweet and prices are very reasonable.
Funny enough, almost everything is individually wrapped, or will be placed in beautiful and artfully folded boxes at the check-out.

We took a tray and tongs and went to town filling our tray with goodness. 

                                         

We stopped ourselves at 2 pieces each (such restraint): a chocolate 'bun', a mixed berry bun, a sort of coconut danish and that box is hiding a slice of double chocolate mousse cake, the latter we had for desert when we got home.
Delicious! And Yes, we'll be back!

Let's see, what else?
Last week's snow had melted away by Saturday, which was convenient because we had places to go, but Monday morning we woke up to ..

                      

Yikes! 22F! And not too long after breakfast it started to snow again!

I guess Punxsutawney Phil wasn't kidding when he predicted 6 more weeks of winter!
Unfortunately the snow didn't stick around for long, after a couple of hours it turned into sleet and by the afternoon it was raining and everything turned green again.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted and according to the weathermen (and Phil) we have more coming. I'll take it!

Last, here's James' swing as recorded during his lesson and compared to Rory Mcilroy's:

As you can see, if you're a golfer and know what you're looking for, Rory swings beautifully 'in to out' as they say (see his club there coming from the left) and James ... not so much.

It makes a big difference in accuracy as well as distance so .. back to the driving range it is! Practice, practice, practice ..