Cat perch

We've been shifting things around and are donating this mattress to the Community Warehouse. In the meantime, the cat is enjoying the perch.

It always amuses me how cats want to be very high up.

Garden

A late winter view of the garden:

In the fall I covered our remaining patch of grass with straw and laid cardboard over the top. I then set milk jugs (left from cheese making endeavors) filled with water on top of the cardboard to hold it in place. It looked, well, trashy, but the key to gardening, I've decided, is to look at the garden as you plan on seeing it soon, not as it is now.
I moved over the boxes, and dug out a path next to them. The double box has the transplanted asparagus. The single box on the left will hold strawberries, the one on the right (barely visible) will be the seed starting area. On the left of this picture the Belgian Fence will run along the current fence. All the greenery you see are weeds, as the clover never got planted last fall.
There are already some seed starts in the seed starting bed.
Peas have been planted here, and you can see how I've used the empty peanut butter jars to hide the markers.
Here is the taller of the columnar apple. It's grown a lot.
This is the shorter one, but it has grown tall enough that I can't reach the top of it.
The cherry tree is about waist height, but it will soon be cut back to encourage it to grow into a bush.

I inverted the pots and let the rain wash them off.

This collard green made it through two very cold weeks in December and one big snowstorm. I love collard greens.

This year I will plant potatoes in Emilia's part of the back yard and do away with the grass. Then I will put in a rain garden. I've dug several holes for the potatoes already.

Seed starting

It's a little early in the year, but garden fever has hit me. I spent this afternoon starting seeds.

I love these peat pots, just because they inflate when you just add water.

I still haven't found a good way of taking notes about what I plant. This year, I'm trying the index card.

Here are my index cards all lined up with their seed packets.

I made these flags with toothpicks and masking tape to mark the peat pots.

Here are my tomatoes.

I also am experimenting with a new way of marking what was planted. These markers will go under an empty peanut butter jar for protection from the elements.

Here is everything in one pile ready to go in the garden.

Paul B. still M.I.A

Things are getting serious now. Paul has been gone for some time. Will he return?

Ikea Gift Card

Matt's mother gave me a very generous Ikea gift card for Christmas and I had a great time spending it. I bought some poultry shears and a pump for the dish soap and then bought the kitties a lot of fun stuff that I never, ever would have bought for them. They now have matching dishes and water bowls and three different tents/hiding places. Thanks, Linda.

Store

Just down the street from our house, and on our way to and from Fred Meyer, is a building with an Indian grocery. The grocery takes up half of the building. The other half has been essentially vacant since we moved here nearly three years ago.

At first, it looked like storage for the Indian grocery. Then for awhile, it supposedly sold Indian women's fashions. I say supposedly because things shifted around and there were clothes in there for awhile, and a sign said they were open on weekends, but they never looked open.

Last year, it looked like we were finally going to get a store here. "It's going to be a soccer store" I told Matt excitedly. He pointed out that we would never go there. This was true, but I was still excited. We watched construction over the course of a few months. There was the cool sign in the window and a platform was built and a strip of lights outlined the platform. The walls were turned into areas for display. It looked great.

And then: nothing. For a few months, nothing seemed to progress and then one day, when Matt was out of town, I noticed a "For Rent" sign in the window. When I picked him up, I told him about it and he was incredulous. "What?" he said, "they never even opened?"
So now we've started the cycle over again. The "For Rent" sign is gone and things are happening. The lighted platform has been taken away and the display stuff has been taken off the wall. There is a small room being built in the back and a counter case has been added.
I have no idea what this store is going to be, or if it will actually open, but again the excitement mounts.

Squash

I finally cut into the huge squash, last seen in October. It made some good soup. And lots of it.

Paul B! Oh no!

Paul's return was a short one.