Transplanting & Camping

Ahh finally Granola Girl is getting her crunchy ass back into the woods tomorrow. Yep I'm going camping for the first time in 2011. I'm pretty stoked, but yet I'm pretty worried because unlike camping with the hubby where we normally hike into the back country and rough it for a few days... I'm going with my lil sis and the brother in law who well um are not so rugged. And no we're not backpacking 10 miles into the back country of the Adirondack's. We're going car camping in Clarence Fahnestock State Park. Now I've never camped in Fahnestock Park so I'm pretty curious about it. I've driven thru the park countless times on our way to or from me and hub's favorite little Hudson River town of Cold Spring. You can learn a tad bit about Fahnestock here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Fahnestock_State_Park

I actually just realized thanks to this article that Clarence was in fact a man when all along I thought it was a woman. And theres really not a whole heck of a lot of info on the park so I guess I'm best off seeing it for myself. Not too mention I've been pretty keen on exploring the eastern side of the Hudson River Valley so it should be fun. And two of my girlfriends are driving up Saturday and camping out with us Saturday night. This will be my friend Caroline's first time ever camping so I'm pretty stoked for her to experience it all. And as far as lil sis and bro in law go, well they are pretty good sports so I'm really not too worried about them.

So with me being away all weekend, I worked feverishly on the garden since the weather is supposed to be premo these next several days. Last week I planted onions, radishes, peas, lettuce, kale and carrots. And now that its been over 10 days the radishes and onions have already sprouted! Saaaweeet! Its been raining pretty steady this past week on and off so I haven't had to water and I weeded a bit a few days ago. Things are looking good out there.

I also took some time and thinned out my seedlings that I started indoors. I had about an hour of semi warm temps on Tuesday after I got home from work so I brought the little guys out, picked out the strongest looking ones and transplanted them to bigger containers.

I was sort of bummed that I couldn't spare all the little dudes, but honestly I don't have the space for all the veggies I have planned for my little garden. So now what I have started are tomato's, cucumbers, chili peppers, bell peppers, jalepeno peppers and 2 butterfly bushes for a container.

Now that looks way better. I have other veggies planned but I am going to direct sow those seeds once the temps are a tad warmer. Anyway I've gots to sure up the rest of my gear for the weekend so I'll check back in next week. Happy May Day to y'all!

Corks with a purpose

I hope those who celebrate had a Happy Easter yesterday. We here on LI were surprised to have had a beautiful 82 degree day when they were calling for foul weather all along. I was happy for all those kiddies out there who were thrilled to be able to hunt for their eggs in such fine weather! I remember being a kid and being super bummed when it would rain on Easter. Something about hunting for eggs in the living room is not nearly as awesome as digging around in the bushes looking for them. Saturday was a whole different story though. Ugh the weather was total crap. And it was my birthday and the hubby and my sister both had to work which left me with a lot of time on my hands. So I decided to take a drive and hit up some of my favorite places to kill indoor spur of the moment time: Anthropologie.

I love walking around Anthropologie. I'm not so crazy about their clothing though because #1 its ridiculously expensive and #2 its not quite my style. But sometimes I luck out and score something good off their sale racks. And they certainly have some hefty mark downs. I once bought a sweater for $5o (which is still too expensive) marked down from $200. Just goes to show the mark up on their stuff. Regardless, they definitely have the best displays and chach-kee around. I can walk around that store for a good hour looking at everything. There is such attention to detail, it amazes me. So first thing I noticed when I walked into the store Saturday were these awesome cork balls. Complete with succulents and moss!! I nearly died I was so excited.

Totally stoked me up because I've recently been saving some serious corks for an upcoming not yet determined project. Apparently Anthro held a cork drive and asked their customers to help contribute for this Earth Day specific project. At the end of the month they are going to dismantle the displays and send the corks to a cork recycling plant where they will find new life as flooring, shoes, walls, whatever. I dug that. Whats amazing is the fact that they were able to collect so many actual corks. With the price of cork skyrocketing due to its demand and the huge potential of the cork tree extinction, wineries are going more of the way of synthetic corks which is kind of a bummer. I mean look at all the different variations and colors going on here. You just don't get that same effect with synthetic corks. You can check out more of their cork displays here which I suggest looking at http://www.flickr.com/photos/anthropologiephotos/sets/72157626551862864/with/5642678505/

Anyway this whole cork thing reminded me of a recent trade I made with an old college buddy. He started making cork boards so the request went out for corks. I'm not much of a wine-o but my in laws sure are! And with a slew of bar tending friends I was able to save up and ship out a whole ton of corks to him on 2 separate occasions. Here's some of the stash back around Christmas.

I then threw in 2 crocheted hats into the deal and we had ourselves a trade. Here's one of the hats.

And here's what he sent me

Pretty neat huh? You can check out his wife's website here. http://recyclemoe.com/default.aspx

They are pretty crunchy kids living up in Burlington VT. They even took 6 months off and thru hiked the Appalachian Trail. Buy something from her OK! Everything she sells is fully recycled / up cycled. Some cute stuff and very creative. Anyway do me a favor and start saving up them wine corks. The projects are endless. Me?? I'm thinking some cork love beads in the future? Or maybe a necklace?? I'll let you know. Ta Ta for now

10 years ago? Really?

OK if you are anything like me than when it came to turning 21 it felt liker worlds away, especially when your 20 and so close to being legal enough to enjoy an alcholic beverage at the bar without worrying about being busted for being underage. Now am I the only one who feels that "HOLY SHIT THAT WAS TEN YEARS AGO ALREADY?" Probably not. But let me just tell you holy shit I turned 21 ten years ago. So with my 31st birthday being tomorrow I've spent the past few hours recollecting about that day a decade ago in which I became legal to enjoy alcohol.

To make a long story short I was in my Junior year at Le Moyne College in Syracuse NY and the local tradition went as follows: The first "real" day of spring the students at my small, conservative, liberal arts school (at the time under 3,000 were enrolled) would blow off classes for the day and party in our teeny tiny school's quad. The day is known as Dolphy Day, no relation to our college mascot the "Dolphins" but ironically related to Jazz musician Eric Dolphy. OK keep in mind that during my Freshman and Sophomore years in college I was on Le Moyne's softball team so we were forbidden from participating in any sort of "partying".

This is me pitching for my college softball team back in 1999. Gosh I wish I was still that svelte! Oh to be young. Anyway the whole point of this story is that during those 2 years I played ball at Le Moyne I was forbidden from attending Dolphy Day which is my school's biggest and only party day of the year. Gosh now why would the coach deprive us young hard working ladies from participating in our school's only party of the year? I guess because the coach was mean, that's the only reason I could think up.

So my junior year I quit the softball team because I basically hated that mean coach and couldn't keep up my grades because it was just too demanding. So guess what that meant?? I was finally allowed to party it up at Dolphy Day! And guess what the higher powers above provided me with?? A Dolphy Day on my 21st Birthday! Man did I strike gold! Not only was it my first Dolphy Day, but it was my big day and it was beautiful out. I mean it was close to 90 degrees and for April in Syracuse that was huge. So huge that it was front page paper worthy. And guess who else was front page paper worthy?? Birthday Girl! Yep, this poor deprived Dolphy Day Le Moyner really got compensated for her 2 years not being able to party out at Dolphy Day. I made the front page of the Syracuse Post Standard!! Here's the photo and caption. I still have copies of the paper but its dark out and late so I'll photograph it tomorrow in anniversary of my big day! I have to say that those 2 years that I couldn't hang out at Dolphy Day were a total drag and I was super bummed, but when I was finally able to legally enjoy it I was totally blessed with the best birthday a hippie gal could ask for! And just to remind you once again "HOLY SHIT THAT WAS 10 YEARS AGO".

Happy April 23rd everybody!!

First painting of 2011

I've been painting since middle school. I will never forget my first painting. It was in art class in 5th grade and it was a copy of some painting with a white house and red roof. Thats all I can remember and I just spent the past 15 minutes trolling the world wide web trying to find it. Gosh its hard to find something you don't know the name of. Anyway where I'm going with this is I've been painting for about 20 years now so my good friend Caroline asked me to paint her a scene from Taos New Mexico. We spent a week skiing under the brightest blue skies I've ever seen about 3 years ago and on that trip she met her now current beau Ned so NM is pretty special to her. So I happily accepted her request since I had been needing a good kick in the bum to get the paints out. It has been about a year and a half since I painted anything, so I was stoked. I worked on it here and there for about 3 weeks. I took some time in between to catch up on some magazines reading too.

You can get a peak at how cluttered my place is. Notice bicycle pump, snowboard bindings, clothing on chairs, I spy some bike wheels behind the table, a fan atop the orange bin that houses my sewing machine, some flowers from a party, a plant that needs to go outside soon and my cabinet of "curiosities". Yes I have a china cabinet with no china. But I actually have china but thats in a crawl space at my parents house. Don't ask. And please don't laugh at my ghetto easle rig that I set up using another canvas as support. Hey when you have limited space you have to make due with what you have. Anyway back on task here. This was the finished product and needless to say Caroline was more than pleased. She actually said that it was the nicest gift anybody has ever given her. Of course I was not going to charge her for it so I was so happy when she nearly teared up when I gave it to her. It came out pretty good, for the crappy need to be replaced acrylic paints I have.

So that brings me to today. Its almost Friday and the my little world is brightening up day by day. The trees are blooming the most amazing flowers right now and the grass is getting greener by the day. I'll leave you with the outfit I wore today and I'm off to bed now. Ciao.

First race of the season

Well yesterday's storms that reeked havoc on the Midwest did a pretty good job of tearing up the eastern seaboard according to my opinion. All I know is that I made sure I was in bed early since we had a 5am wake up to make it an hour and a half north for hubs first mountain bike race. Well that was a total wasted effort because as soon as the lights were out and I was just about to fall asleep there was the craziest electrical phenomenon going on outside and I immediately shot straight up in bed and totally swore the house was getting struck by lightning. Now bear in mind I'm a total scaredy when it comes to a good old t-storm so its not unusual that I get all nervous at the first sight of lightning. But this was different, like unnaturally different. And it was unnatural because what it turned out to be was a transformer about a block away exploding. Now anybody that has lived within a mile radius of an exploding transformer can attest to the fact that the lights and sounds coming out of that thing are enough to scare the crap out of the most seasoned tough guy. Well needless to say what was intended to be about a 7 hour sleep only ended up being about a 4 and a half hours nap so getting up this morning was brutal. But we're seasoned day trippers so we trudged along and hauled our asses up the NYS Thruway 60 miles to our destination. Singlespeed-a-palooza. This is the 3rd year this singlespeed only race has been going on here in NYS. Yes thats singlespeed only. And hubby isn't a singlespeed rider, but he does this race because its fun and it sells out uber quick, and its usually the first race of the season so its great practice for the NYS MTB Series which is the race series that we both race throughout the summer. Well to make a long story short, the weather was a million times better than yesterday with the exception of the mud. MUD. Ewww those guys and gals were soaked right down to their shammy's by the end of that race. Hubby placed 18th out of a field of 250 so we're super happy with that. Not too mention he's semi-pro and his field was combined with about 30 pro's so by finishing 18th that means he beat 12 pro's!! Not a bad first start to the 2011 season. I'll leave you with a few photos of the hubster from the race. Enjoy!

Look at that intensity! Yikes..

Look at that mud! Yikes!

"Get this wet cold ass clothing offa me"

Nursery of my dreams

Today I had every intention of beginning to plant my garden. But the forecast called for pretty crummy weather. We are receiving the remnants of those terrible storms that reeked so much havoc on the midwest over the past couple of days. So I decided that instead of planting which I pretty much couldn't have anyway, I would venture out to this nursery that my mom used to take me to as a kid. You know the nursery that always had the Easter bunny there, or always had awesome scary scenes set up around Halloween and got you so amped for Christmas with their amazing holiday displays? Yeah that kind of place. I can't believe its been at least 15 years since I had been there and the sad part is that its only about 20 minutes away. I'm a big fan of shopping local so generally when I need a plant, bush or that last minute Mother's Day gift hubby and I usually hit up one of the small family run places in our town. Not saying that this Nursery isn't family run, its just big... and its pretty awesome. So I rolled in there with the intention of just getting a few more seed packets and a set of onions, and I ended up leaving with an air plant, bird feeder, bird seed, herbs, a trowel, yes the onion sets and bone meal. $60 bucks later as opposed to my original plan to only spend $20. But I also left with a new found obsession.... Hicks Nursery. I am totally in love with this place. Not only is it still family owned, but its big... really big... and really awesome. They had everything. Every plant, flower, herb, veggie, cacti, succulent, pots, dirt... gosh I can't name it all. And the place was set up so amazing. I had to bust out my camera and take pictures of the place and displays. The colors were so invigorating on such a dreary and cold spring day. I'll leave you with the photos I took and if you live near me you really need to go and walk around this place. Cheery ho!!

Garden Fever

So the NY metropolian area was battered with one of the gnarliest winters seen in a long time. I mean I had never seen snow piles that high around our parts. We had close to 50 inches of snow during the month of January alone. Ok I know you mountain folks are laughing at us, and I'm with you laughing. But seriously the locals around here just can't handle it. I remember thinking during February that this snow ain't gonna melt until June. Well now we're in April and you would never had known what went we went through. Well except for the occasional wrecked bush here and there, but now everythings a blooming and spring fever is in high gear.

The weather has been shaping up each and every day, and with each and every day that I don't have to schlep to work I've found myself outside playing around the yard. But here's the catch. Hubby and I live in a teeny tiny apartment on the 1st floor of his parent's square yellow high ranch on a whole whapping tenth of an acre. So for the past several seasons I've been limited to keeping a random container garden on the patio outside our door. It was fun and cute and whenever we would entertain everybody would love it. But then it got lame. In my opinion.

I mean I mostly stuck to hearty flowers like impatiens and lily's because the area is pretty shaded. Here's my patio in the fall with some mums added to the mix. But I wasn't getting a huge reward. I needed more. So I planted some cucumber, string beans, peppers and I attempted a pumpkin. Needless to say I didn't do too hot. Here was my big harvest of 2010.

ooooh wow look at that! And with that I decided that next year its going to be different. So now its next year and I convinced my ma in law to let me take an overgrown and under utilized corner of their yard and let me attempt a real garden. Well lucky me she's into gardening herself so I didn't even need to ask, but figured I probably should. So here's what we started with.

She had the bricks surrounding the entire corner in some horrible unthought out design (sorry ma) and there is an almond tree and a peach tree that she planted many years ago. So we started off by pulling out the bricks and raking up all the leaves and dead stuff that was squashed under mounds of snow all winter. Hubby was awesome and helped out big time.

After we raked the whole area clean, we decided to encircle each tree with a ring of bricks. Yeah its a bit hokie for my liking, but we figure we'll plant some impatiens or some other flowers inside the rings. Besides what else were we to do with all those bricks? Hubs then turned over all the soil and we left the area alone for a week to let the soil have a chance to breath. Then the following weekend I turned everything over again and started digging in the compost pile my ma in law has had going for many years and laying it out on our area.

Yikes I don't even want to know what could be living under there. But it has great compost so I dug down and pulled up bucket loads. Oh and something had burrowed into the side of it over the winter, Hubby was looking in the burrow hole. I tried not too think about what it was or is each time I dug deeper. I then made my hills and spread out heaping amounts of compost over the hills and that pretty much brings me to where I'm at today.

Its been raining a good amount this week so I think that's a good thing. Its giving the compost a chance to work its way into the soil and sort of wash it out a bit. Now I could be totally wrong on my theory, but the hub seems to agree with me on it so that's what we're doing. Which leads to me now. I'm planning on planting a bunch of seeds this weekend, but I'll save that story for another day.

Home made croutons

So tonight me and hubbie were supposed to swing by my folks place so that my mum could do some acupuncture on the hub's back. He tweaked it at work last week and its been nagging him ever since. Not good especially when he's got his first mountain bike race of the season less than 4 days away. Well turns out the mum had a pretty rough day at work and canceled on us which left us with some unplanned downtime. So what did we do? We made croutons. Yay hubbie was so thrilled (insert sarcasm here). But he's such a good sport when it comes to my projects and he always does it without complaining. Although there was some complaining about his back, but thats fine.

So here's what we did. Took a loaf of bread that my ma in law made for us a few days ago and cut it up into crouton sized pieces. Dont' mind the glass of Merlot, it has nothing to do with the croutons.. well maybe it helped hatch the idea.

Next we rummaged thru our meager spice cabinet and pulled out olive oil, oregano, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Basically the only crouton appropriate spices we have and definitely staples in everybody elses cabinets. No I don't think star anise will taste good on crouts, but for some reason we gots plenty of that.

Next we threw all of the above in a pan and sauteed the little pieces of bread. Smelled amazing. Only took about 5 minutes for the crouts to brown up. I think we used a bit too much olive oil, but now we know for next time. Plus we pretty much just winged this, I'm sure if we had followed some proper measurements it would have been perfecto.

Then after the crouts cooled we laid them out over a paper towel to absorb some of the oil and harden a bit and wal lah.. homemade croutons. Not too mention a great way to use up your old leftover bread. Boy I can't wait for my next salad!

Here we go

Well what can I say? I'm gonna go and give the old blogging bit another go. Yes I've attempted this before and unfortunately I haven't been too consistent, but I've changed my attitude and now I'm going for it.

So its spring time. A bittersweet season for me. Yes I said bittersweet. See me and the husband are pretty hard core skiers so we really dig winter. So usually when everybody is getting all amped for warmer weather, we're usually pretty bummed. But only for a short time because warmer weather also means bicycle season, gardening, beach bumming, bbq's, walks in the woods.. ok ok I know you like the same things.

Anyway enough about all that, let me get to the real stuff here. Oh and ps I like to take photos in my yard of the outfits I might be wearing a particular day. Hope you don't mind.