Actually, I call these banana oatmeal scones, but they aren't scones in the generally accepted view - i.e. the prissy tea-room scone made of white flour, loaded with butter, and tarted up with expensive fresh berries.  They are more like what scones used to be, if Scotland had had a banana… Read full post »

The excavation in Dogpatch required to allow the delivery of new kitchen appliances uncovered some surprises, one being a bushel basket full of dried gourds in the mudroom.  How, you may ask, could I not know there was a bushel of gourds in a room that is approximately 3' x 7'… Read full post »

Um.  TPTB - you do realize 31 pages of "Most recent" have been taken over by imaginary blogs, don't you? 

I suppose I should be grateful, as this totally screws my plans to waste time this morning.

  Read full post »

Recently it has come to my attention that my fine porcelain miniatures collection has taken a serious hit from one of my recently instituted, poverty-influenced economy measures.  The Pet Shop series, one of which is included in every box of Red Rose tea bags, is fixing to come to a close,… Read full post »

Groundhog Day is not observed in Vermont.  We don't have groundhogs.  We have woodchucks.  The woodchucks are asleep in their dens under two feet of snow and four feet of dirt.  You couldn't drag a woodchuck out with a pair of Percherons.  It will be spring whenever spring de… Read full post »

A few nights ago I finally finished shelling my heirloom Hutterite bean crop.  I grew a thickly seeded 48 linear feet.  I now have a whole 3-1/2 cups of beans.

The disappointed gardener is what my neighbor Bob calls his wife .  Becky is an incredible gardener, with the greenest… Read full post »

The dead of winter is not when I would expect to be extolling the virtues of electric refrigeration.  For the past six years, it has been the one season when I could count on having more refrigerated space than I could possibly fill - i.e, large sections of Dogpatch itself,… Read full post »

There are so many languages I can't speak.  I am so not fluent in French.  I speak terribly broken Italian. I know enough farsi only to write myself rude notes in English in the Arabic alphabet.  My latin is dead.  But it's my lack of Spanish that embarrasses me the most.… Read full post »

It's community service day.  I'm serving soup.

I read somewhere that ramen is in for 2009, due to all the unemployment and financial hardships being spread around by dark forces I know little of, being too crazy and too poor to be intimately involved.  This might have referred to hand-made… Read full post »

Dogpatch quickly becomes a kind of snake-biting-its-tail thing.  If you haven't vacuumed for eight months, one more month hardly seems to matter.  The dust drifts get only slightly higher.  But the longer you put off vacuuming, or recycling, or laundry, or dishwashing, the more… Read full post »

The dogs, the cat and I share Dogpatch with a sporadic ghost, occasional infestations of rats, and a changing cast of mice.  But now there's someone else here.  I don't know who it is. 

I think whatever it is has been here for a while, but I only noticed it… Read full post »

First, please know I use the term "geek" in the most admiring way, as you people control the universe as far as I'm concerned.

It has long bothered me that I am so dependent for my sanity on a collection of equipment that is a much a mystery to me… Read full post »

If you are already feeling cabin-feverish from an overdose of ice and snow, you might consider growing a carrot-top garden.   In my family, we usually waited until the last dismal weeks of February.  I haven't had a garden in several years, due to the rat problem.  Feeling the grimness… Read full post »

I love the English tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas.  It's fine to do it at Halloween, but Christmas seems more ghost-friendly.  If we're allowed to come back, I want to come back on Halloween and Christmas both, and also maybe on the full moons, and Divali, and the Fourth… Read full post »

I hate going to the laundromat.  I hate it passionately.  There is nothing that makes me and my failings feel quite so exposed as having to drag my dirty laundry to a public laundromat and sit there for two hours contemplating my sins.  

 For a couple… Read full post »

Theoretically, Dogpatch has a front door and a back door.  The back door is in the kitchen, and the front door leads out of a small foyer (aka the refrigerator) between the living and dining rooms.

In practice, the back door is never used anymore.  The decline in use… Read full post »

That would be me.

Honestly, I didn't know what I was doing was illegal for months after I started, and by the time I found out, I was too hooked to get out of the criminal life.  

Poverty requires one to be flexible about entertainment.   I gave up renting… Read full post »

Someone used the word "perseverating" in a post I read this morning. Seeing that word set up a clanging in my skull that is drowning out thought. I need to self-exorcise.

It's the tenth anniversary of my first official nervous breakdown - the staying-in-bed kind rather than the walking-around version… Read full post »

We had a respectable snowfall during the night, which then crusted over into ice with a brief freezing rain, and since the first dog  walk this morning, several more inches of  snow fell to cover the ice crust.  I had shoveled the front steps and a path to the driveway earlier,… Read full post »

Yesterday I took a shower for the first time in a week, and washed my hair for the first time in - I'd like to say two weeks, but I think it was longer.  Winter in Dogpatch presents certain hygiene challenges.  At least, that's what I tell myself, but truthfully, it's… Read full post »

Many many years ago, I had  little book about Rootie Kazootie and pineapple pies.  Until the other day, I didn't remember anything about Rootie, or the plot, but the pineapple pies stuck with me.  When I was growing up, my mother made a lot of pies, but never pineapple.  They soun… Read full post »

Rats are smart.  I have experienced things with rats in Dogpatch that beggar belief, but which happened:  an errant jar, rolled to lodge just so under a trapping door, and a high-pitched noise repellent switched to a lower frequency.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  Maybe not. 

S… Read full post »

So the rats of Dogpatch were completely disdainful of Mini, my large boy cat.  This seemed unnatural.  Mini had always been meticulous about leaving me mouse noses and tails in the bath tub, as evidence of his attention to work.   In the years before I had cats, I trapped mice in… Read full post »

Contrary to the Chinese calendar, the year of the rat at Dogpatch was 2007.  The last official one had been in been in 1994, but every year is the year of some kind of rodent at Dogpatch.   Two weeks ago I caught a rabbit in the living room with my bare… Read full post »

I used my food stamp card today for the second time.   The first time was a month ago, when the sun was still shining, and an early snow hadn't beaten down the goldenrod to blackness in my field, and my princess cat was still alive.  Today was a grey and  icy… Read full post »