April 2005 Archives

By request of Susie at Underpaid Kept Woman (you are getting a lot of air time on my site, young lady!): The weather in central Virginia is getting on my LAST nerve. It is almost May for pete's sake and it is still cold. I am in no mood to garden wearing a winter coat and boots with 2 pairs of socks. dogwood.jpg Dogwood in bloom It is a good thing that the gardens are not waiting for me! They are doing very well on their own. The most impressive to me is the sight of tiny little damsons hanging on the trees. I hope every single one ripens! I really want to experience all that is the damson. My strawberry jar is full of little green strawberries and a few that are turning a brilliant red. They are small but red. I know my 7 year old will enjoy eating them this evening. The herb pots have double in size this past week as well. There is also little butterbean sprouts pushing out of the ground in the kitchen garden proper. The tractor is in the shop. It seems something broke loose in the PTO case and broke a gear and bent the shaft. It had better be under warranty. That thing is only 6 weeks old! With the tractor out of service and all the rain we have had you can imagine the state of my grass. By next week I am sure it will be knee deep in places. Great we will look like some hillbilly family with the yards over grown. If we were to put a refrigerator or a broken down washing machine on the front porch we would fit the description of said hillbillies perfectly. Next week I will be taking my monthly photo of the front of the house. I like seeing the visible changes. A year in pictures is a great thing. The changes always amaze me.

Susie over at Underpaid Kept Woman beat me to the punch with her post about blogs yesterday but I am going to go ahead and post my thoughts today. I have been thinking lately how much I dislike the word blog. When I see the word blog my mind reads weblog and breaks it into the syllables web - log. This is a word I dislike even more. It makes my skin crawl how everyone is bundled into a group and labled a blogger. Even my own URL contains the word blog. I carefully mulled over if I should use that term and gave in to it because it is short and easy to remember. If I were not so lazy I might even take a stand and change the folder name to journal. In the event I did so and lost everything, I would be angry with myself, might even cry, so for now the word stays. Without much thought I automatically catagorize as I read things online. It is multitasking. I read and subconsciously my mind begins filing like a roladex. I lable them blogs, weblogs, diaries and journals. Those who write them are bloggers, webloggers, diarists and journalists. How easy is that? The print media has been known to feature an article or two on our little pasttime, highlighting the most popular of our sect, using the word 'blogger' to define and put us in our place. Their tone is one that seems to always leave me feeling like they have reached out and wiped a huge nasty booger across the internet. I know I am not the only person who has felt the snobbery in those pieces from those getting paid to write. I find that most of those reporters/columnists have no real ideas of their own and when they write they can only write by following the methodology of "who, what, when, where, why and sometimes how." Monkeys can be trained to plug words into spaces, too. Ya know? When the term blog is used by the broadcast media it brings to mind all those sites that seem to have a theme along the lines of politics. Political bloggers seem to be a big thing on MSNBC and CNN. The media has given these folks a voice. They have become a noted political pundant with their opinions being read live on the air and discussed by others who deem themselves experts in some area or another. I do not read these online havens of satire and critisism. Actually I despise them. I steer clear of them as if they are some huge turd floating in the pool of the internet. The term "web-log" conjures the image of one of those reports a security guard fills out when making rounds. Clipboard and flashlight in hand logging entries at a set time noting anything that maybe out of the ordinary, suspicious, or indicating that things are just fine and dandy as the perimeter is walked hourly. Many of those Linker-Not-Thinker places exist on the internet posting links to this site or that site and nothing else with much thought behind the entry of the day. I do not visit these places much. When I do I may click a link or two while shielding my eyes at the same time because you never know for sure what might pop up and make you want to take your eyes out and wash them with bleach. Then there are those who post entries that literally log their day: where they went, who they saw, what they did and what they ate. I feel they are better suited to use the word diary though. Reading those entries I silently begin "Dear Diary, Today I ... " even if it is not actually there. These are not the places on the net that I visit very often either. I might check in once a month to see if there is something of interest and move on quickly. Finally there are journals. Ahhh the journals. This is where my weakness lies. I am addicted to internet journals. Much the same as Just Ask Judy posted yesterday, beating me to the draw with her post on her addiction. I love reading internet journals. I spend a couple hours each day clicking my favorite links. Some of the journals I love because I like the way the writer can turn a phrase, lead off with some insane thought and come full circle with a life changing revelation. Some journals I read because the humor gives me much laughs and I see myself or my kids in their entries. Some I have read for so long that I have an interest in their lives. I want to know what is going on in each life each and every day. I want to look into the window and see all the people who live real lives and think similar thoughts. This might lend some to place us readers into the catagory of voyuers but that is OK! I like reading that a mom on the other side of the world has the same kind of life as I do (and I hate the term "Mommy Blog" with a passion!). In reading events and thoughts of other people I find validation and justification of my own life and thoughts and quirks and out bursts of emotion. I laugh out loud and read snippets of posts to my husband in the evening. It opens avenues of conversation and we use our brains and think. We use our brains and mouths and communicate. Now I don't want to sound like my husband and I have nothing to talk about (because we do!) or that all we talk about is something I read in a post online (it is not!) What I am saying is it brings to light topics we may or may not have talked about before. It opens a door into a subject we not have walked through and is stimulus for deeper thoughts we have never shared before. We readers of internet journals are thinking and reading and writing because we ARE thinkers and readers and writers. We have beliefs and opinions that we express. We can step back and make a bad situation funny or view it from a different angle. We can get all the junk up and out and breath deeply with a sigh of relief that somewhere our thoughts have been heard and are felt by others. We know we are not alone in the journey called life. So with this entry I stand up in front of the crowd to say: My name is Angie. I am an internet journal addict and this is my journal. jour·ney n. A process or course likened to traveling; a passage: the journey of life. Etymology: journey c.1225, "a defined course of traveling," from O.Fr. journée "day's work or travel," from V.L. diurnum "day," noun use of neut. of L. diurnus "of one day" (see diurnal). As recently as Johnson (1755) the primary sense was still "the travel of a day." The verb is from c.1330. Journeyman (1424), "one who works by day," preserves the etymological sense. Its Amer.Eng. colloquial shortening jour (adj.) is attested from 1835. jour·nal n. A personal record of occurrences, experiences, and reflections kept on a regular basis. Etymology: jurnal "a day," from O.Fr. journal, originally "daily" (adj.), from L.L. diurnalis "daily" (see diurnal). Sense of "daily record of transactions" first recorded 1565; that of "personal diary" is 1610, from a sense found in French. Posted by Angie at 05:50 AM | Comments (4)

I find my mood drifts like dandelion seeds on the wind each and every day. While yesterday I was sarcastic and teasing all day long this morning I find myself quiet and introspective, hungry for intimacy that is not physically present. To turn a cliche 'absence makes the heart grow fonder'. I do not always pick apart poetry to find the deeper meanings hidden in each word. Sometimes I accept them at face value and treasure the turn of a pen that can write strings of words that elude me. This is one of those times. This is one of my favorite poems by e.e cummings. It is romantic and sentimental and intimate. It is perfectly eloquent. i carry your heart with me i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) - e.e. cummings I wonder what mood those who might read this find themselves today ... Steven once wrote me poetry back in our days of courting. (We courted we did not date.) I treasure them, now more than ever because since that time he has never written me another poem. Yesterday I was asked what gift I would like for Mother's Day. His turning of a pen once more would be gift enough. The intimacy of thought would be a perfect gift. Don't you think? Are those things that should be asked for? I do not know. I only know that I miss that part of us. The first poem we shared was Disirarata by Max Ehrmann.

The man I married ... ... Is ... - a gentleman. - my confidant. - a gentle man. - my better half. - honorable. - my soulmate. - patriotic. - my best friend. - a certified diver. - my partner. - a licensed minister. really. - my hero. ... Can ... - wire a dishwasher. - temper my moods. - wire a ceiling fan. - leave me speechless. - hit the bullseye on a target with a .45. - break my heart with a word. - almost hit the bullseye on a target with a compound bow. - set it right again just as easily. - rekey door locks. - cause my knees to buckle with his smile. ... Has ... - wired a house so every room has a LAN drop. - my trust. - a degree in biotechnology from RIT. - my respect. - a Master's in Computer Science from GWU. - my devotion. - two grandparents that are immigrants. - my support. - one grandparent that is first generation American. - my heart in his hands. - one grandparent that descends from settlers of Jamestown. - my love. ... Will Not ... - Lie - to me. - Cheat - on me. - Steal - from me. - Betray you - or me.

Steven and I are internet junkies. On days like yesterday (which was grey, raining and cold) we are most often found sitting behind a machine. Yes, we spent several hours, each on a different machine, communicating through messenger or shouts down the front hall, tweeking and making changes to the CSS and look of our web sites. For those who use Internet Explorer as your web browser you will have to make a slight effort to see the biggest change here. Add me to your favorites (bookmark me), close IE, reopen, come back to this web page. You should see a little red barn icon beside the URL. It should look like this: barn.jpg http://www.bigredcouch.org/blog If you are more web savvy and know that Internet Explorer is really a poor browser, you are using Firefox and you can see the icon with no effort what-so-ever. With some help from my resident geek husband the MT tags were added so that the catagories each entry is post under reads at the bottom of said entries and some CSS tweeking makes it look much nicer and conforms with the look I am trying to achieve. I must be honest. Getting those MT tags in the right place and getting it to look like I wanted was frustrating. My husband hears what I want to accomplish and he helps with a literal translation. He gave me the tags, showed me where they fit properly in page template, but what he did not do was hear that I wanted the output to be pretty and small and red. After much frustration, raised voice and seething rage, he help me add the CSS to make it exactly as I imagined. Yes, folks, I have no patience, get frustrated and it comes out in seething spats of conversation from between my gritted teeth and tight lips. However, Steven is a saint, who laughs at me and asks questions that only fuel the rage. "Whhaaaat?" he says. Smirky half grin. The look of one who can tweek and change with very little effort. The look of one who can write entire strings of code and make those words and symbols behave in any way he desires. The look of a geek who realizes his wife isn't as prolific in the areas of his geek expertise. A wife who gets frustrated which provides comedy for his future blogging pleasures. But also his wife, who is much better at graphic arts than he. A wife who hears his pain that the little picture he has is 32 x 32 and 256 colors that will not work. A wife who hears his unspoken desires to have a tractor icon that really looks like a tractor and not a walk behind lawn mower. A wife who sat and colored each and every pixel a compatable shade of green until he had a 16 x 16 green tractor icon that loads up at the top of the web browser right beside his URL. One that looks strikingly like this: greentractor2.jpg . Marriage is a partnership. Last night we complimented one another in the ways that partnership should work. Through barter and exchange, frustration and seething rage I got the code snippets I wanted. Through the heartfelt compassion of a wife who really wants her husbands web pages to look as her husband knows he imagines he got the icon of a little green tractor. You have to give a little to get a little, folks. We both gave and both got. We both gave and we both got what we wanted in the end but it is the journey to the destination in where memories are made. "Why are you so angry and shouting? I gave you the tags." "Because you do not listen. If you listened you would know I wanted it pretty and small and RED!"

For those who think I have made up 'pee shivers' in the title of this post, I will have you to know it is a known neurological phenomenon that most often is experienced by men. More scholarly minds than I deduce that it is a result of a sudden change in body temp when the male of our species empties a too full bladder. I had never heard of 'pee shivers' until I met my husband. He told me once that he experienced 'pee shivers' on occassion not long after I had moved from Georgia to Virginia, in the days when we slept on a waterbed. "Pee shivers? You're making that up, right?" There is an air bubble in the waterbed. You can hear the slight slosh as he climbs on. "No," sexy half smile shows his white teeth, "some men shiver when they pee." "Every time you pee?" Slack jawed at this discovery. "No, just sometimes." Climbing deeper under the covers as if climbing into a sleeping bag filled with hot water. "You're shittin me?" Adjusting my position so I can be sure I can see his eyes clearly while he acrobatically positions himself on the moving mattress. "No, I was peeing." Doh! I looked it up. It's was real. Some people might find it odd or bordering on something akin to golden showers. IT IS NOT!!!! I want to witness a 'pee shiver'. I want to see this male urinary phenomenon live and in person. But honestly, more than a shake is a stroke and I think it might have something to do with that more than change in body temp. Really. Think about it. If you don't want to think about it you can read about it on Google Answers. *** I plan to buy a new laptop. I have my eye on the IMB Thinkpad R51. My husband is not completely sold on the idea but often suggests that I should be coveting a new Toshiba. If he thinks he is going to pull a "Dad" on me well that Mr. has another think coming. You see, Steven's mom bought herself a nice laptop. She does little more than check email and look at baby photos but the laptop was for her surfing pleasure. Over a brief period of time she lost that notebook to her husband, my father-in-law, Steven's dad. When he wore it out she bought another one at Costco. No idea which brand or model. Guess who now has a new laptop? Right! His dad. That is one dog that will not hunt in this house! Are you reading this, honey? You already own a laptop and I am currently typing this post on it. *** I talked to the service guy at the local John Deere dealer. It seems three things are wrong with my husband's new toy. 1. It needs a new PTO case. 2. It needs a new rear PTO shaft. 3. It needs a new PTO gear. I am praying it is under warrenty. If not, sweet jesus, it is going to cost some bucks. I was hoping they would not quote me a price and thankfully my prayer was answered. They had no price quote available. I guess I can look forward to heartburn one day next week. Steven has not been sleeping well this week. At first I was worried it was the huge amounts of stress heaped upon him at work. Now I really believe it is worry over his new toy. He says not. I am still on the fence.

Bedside Tables Blackbird's Show and Tell Theme Courtesy of Pomegranates and Paper My bedside table is one of two in a matching set of furniture my husband and I purchased when we married. It is solid cherry in the "Savannah" style. I love the way it is 'aged' so as not to look brand new. On the top of my nightstand are: My Bible, a candle, an antique pill box of silver with a knights head in relief which contains a lock of my husband's hair from our time of courting, a crystal clock given to me by my daughter when she was 7 and an only child as a mother's day gift, my wedding ring because when I am home I bang it around when I am doing projects and it begins to irritate my finger, the cord for charging my cell phone, my address book, a notebook and a small box of note cards, a horseshoe given to me by my husband on Valentine's day for good luck in our new house and farm, and a metal basket filled with the cards and letters from my husband and homemade cards the children have given me that touch my heart to its very core. In the first drawer you will find, a small heart shaped dish with an old key, a heart shaped shell from our beach vacation last year and a pair of diamond earrings, a small container of blistex, a barrett, the handkerchief I carried at our wedding, the small bible from my babyhood from Rev. and Mrs. Love and a tin of altoids. In the second drawer is a small selection of thank you cards and two new candles scented of rose and sandlewood which are a gift from a very dear friend in a far distant land. The bottom drawer contains magazines I have not read completely and need to cut out a couple recipes, the first CD my husband burned when he recorded the kids on the DV camera, and the chore chart that I sometimes fill out and post when the children slack in their tasks of keeping their rooms neat and tidy as well as their bathroom. This is the table on the other side of the bed. Inside the innersanctum of the drawers is my husbands secret stash. He is a snacker in the late evening and I keep things in there for him because if you have kids you know they will eat everything and leave nothing for anyone else, so this is his private stash. There are nuts, sunflower and pistachio, beef jerky, slim jim's, meat and cheese sticks and his favorite reese cups. It also comes to my attention that his stocks are looking low. I need to replenish. He will agree that he is spoiled rotten.

1. Kenju, check the epinions.com user reviews. The new Maytag and Whirlpool washer and driers, Neptune and Calypso, have horrid feedback from most of the people who have purchased them. It seems the part that is the equivalent to a motherboard often burns out leaving the folks with as much as 3 months with no washer/drier that they paid $1000+ for. I have done a lot of research and the next appliances I buy will be the german line Bosch. They are priced lower than their American counterparts as well. 2. Thank you, Irene. It was nice to have you visit. If anyone reads this visit Irene @ MOMster. I wish I could write with such eloquence. 3. Thank you, Millie. I check daily for updates on your journal. I am honored to have you here. I wish you updated more often. 4. Thank you, Kate. I like the photo of you and your husband. The progress of your gardens is one I am following. 5. My husband seems to have great delight in tormenting me. He even blogged it this morning. He is a BRAT! 6. I have budgeted carefully for the repairs and improvements we will be making to our house. When the townhouse sells we will kick into high gear with the larger projects so things will be in some simblance of order by late fall. The kitchen will be remodeled, the kids do not know it but they will be getting a swimming pool, steps will be rebuilt and a fireplace in the kitchen will be built with matching brick work, a quadra 4100i will be installed in the livingroom fireplace, etc., etc., etc. I do not often buy things just for me. The children come first and then my husband (read his expensive tractor that he broke) but I am dead set on a new laptop and a new camera just FOR ME. If you read my husbands blog you will know why. 7. I am in a pisser mood this morning. The dog kept going into the kitchen last night. We removed her shock collar and I think she is testing the garbage can in there and VERY soon she will be back to her habit of waiting for everyone to sleep then she will pull out the garbage and leave a paper trail everywhere since she seems to be a fucking pig and thinks sucking dirty napkins and papertowels is a form of feeding. Not to mention she managed to find a bag of chocolate kisses Steven had and she chewed and spat out the foil wrappers in tiny pile. I would wish she would get sick but the last thing I need is a puking fucking dog. It was after 2:30am before I went to sleep because of said damn dog who is worse than any child could ever be on their worst day. 8. The house is very quiet. Kids are gone to school. Steven and Colby will be back by 10am. Until then I am sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes in the blessed silence of this cool spring morning. I will be surfing, answering any incoming from messenger and pretty much doing nothing else for the next two hours. Maybe all day. Who knows. 9. In the aforemention time in #8 I will also be composing an email to be followed up by a phone call to my husband's brother and his wife. They are invited to come to our house this saturday. I do not want them to come. Their entire house has been sick with something like the flu. Our children are finally healthy, no coughing, no snotty noses and I do not want their germs brought into this house. I am not in the best of moods and being tactful is not easy for me. Plus it is predicted to storm all day saturday and I would rather not have 3 boys under the age of 5 trapped indoors, in my house, with all their shouting whining and crying. I CAN'T TAKE IT! 10. I hope to be importing more past posts today to get things up-to-date and bridge the gaps in my internet time line history of journaling and being creative with PSP. 11. Did I mention how very quiet it is here this morning? Heavenly.

Yesterday on messenger with my husband: Steve has just signed in. Wait.Wait.Wait. I type, erase, type again. Cold in Virginia says: I love you, my sexy geek (hearts and kisses) Steve says: I am in a meeting. You are now on the wall and everybody says "hi". Steve says: I will talk to you later. (kiss heart flower) He is sooooooooo lucky I did not type what first came to mind. But I am not the first this has happened to. One wife nibbled body parts. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ... an office filled with geeks ... is there anything better!?!

I am sure everyone can finish that singsong from childhood. Perhaps vulgar and crude, but nonetheless truthful. There seems to be two schools of thought on butterbeans. 1. Butterbeans are a different variety of bean than Lima Beans. 2. Butterbean is another name for lima beans, they are the same. I am a graduate of school #1. In my grandmother's kitchen a lima bean was a giant dried bean most often cooked in the fall or winter, simmered on the stove in water with a small piece of ham or fatback added for flavor. Butterbeans, mmmm, butterbeans were small and light green, pale with speckles gently cooked on the stovetop after a morning of sitting on the porch and shelling until your thumbnail was tinted green from the pods. I will eat the dried bean. I admit to eating them over rice with raw white onion chopped and sprinkled on the top but I love fresh summer butterbeans. I go out of my way to search them out at farmer's markets, buying them by the bushel and hoarding them in my freezer so that in the long months of winter I can have them and not the dried lima beans. A very sharp eye can spot a real butterbean in the freezer section of the grocery store, but I know those go fast. I have even seen the real deal for sale in 5 pound bags, frozen, on the internet. My favorite meal in the summer is gently simmered butterbeans, fresh creamed corn, slices of fresh vine ripened red tomatoes and cornbread. Each cooked exactly like my grandmother taught me. Each a delicate summer offering yearned for in the throws of winter. Each one is prepared with a very simple recipe. This is how my grandmother taught me. Please note, southern recipes almost always contain fatback or a piece of ham, you don't have to use it but you can't imagine what you are missing. Butterbeans Get yourself a mess of butterbeans. Sit on the porch in late afternoon or early morning and shell them into a pan. At the sink in cold water look the beans, searching for imperfections and flaws that would be evidence of insect feasting, throw those out. Once looked and washed place them in a pot of cold water, enough water to be twice as deep as the beans. They need lots of water to make good pot liquor. Add one thin strip of fatback or ham, NOT bacon!, and gently simmer until the beans are fork tender. Creamed Corn Select fresh, juicey ears of corn. Shuck, desilk and wash the ears in cold water. With a deep pan and a very sharp knife, cut the tips of the kernels from the cob. When you have the entire cob detipped rake your knife over the cob to milk it of all the delicious juices and inner fillings of the kernel. This is a job that will create great splatters until you get the hang of it. It can be very messy and require much clean up, but it is worth your efforts! In a cast iron frying pan melt a stick of butter, gently, do not let it melt too fast or it will burn. Whent he butter and pan are hot, pour in the creamed corn, juice and all. Keep the heat low and stir frequently so that the corn does not scorch and stick. Add salt and pepper to taste until the corn is tender and soft, not crunchy to the teeth. If you follow the same process and cook that corn in drippings from fatback you will then have "fried creamed corn". Equally as delicious as it's cousin cooked in butter. How to choose perfect ears of corn: Do not be shy in your produce market. Be selective of the corn you choose. Old corn will be dry and not have much milk and it will taste like eating cow feed. With your thumbnail break the husk on the corn so that you can see the kernels. With that same nail push into the top of the kernel. It should break easily and give you a burst of corn milk. That is a good ear of corn. When you get home with the corn, do not let it sit for more than a day in your refrigerator. The corn will dry out much too fast and your dish will not be tastey. When shopping at a farmer's market I always buy a bushel at a time. I take it home and get busy right then, shucking, desilking and creaming it for the freezer. Juicey corn waits for no man and will turn hard on you in no time. There are also two schools of thought on corn. 1. Yellow 2. White I prefer white with some yellow mixed in for creamed corn. For corn-on-the-cob, roasted on the grill or boiled, I prefer yellow. For corn-on-the-cob to be cook in the same pot as summer peas I like some of both. For those who are health conscious and are gasping at cooking in real butter and fatback, you are missing out on some of the best eating you will ever partake of. It is the fat that lends great flavor. In my kitchen butter and pork fat RULE! It is good stuff and in moderation it is not bad for you! Fatback and butter are not causes for remorse! Peel and slice the tomato thinly and arrange the slices on a plate, letting the edges of the rounds slightly over lap, a beautiful red circling of tomatoes. Sprinkle lightly with salt and black pepper. Cornbread Check back later for cornbread. It deserves a posting of its own! You cannot beat this meal! Bon Apetite! Note for Jo: Search for fresh frozen butterbeans. You will NEVER eat one from a can again. If you love butterbeans you will find equal joy in a butterpea. I promise!

Announcer Voice Over: "This message is brought to you by Susie Sunshine of Underpaid Kept Woman." You did all that work AND managed to make a kick ass supper WITH dessert?! I bow to your greatness. Posted by: Susie Sunshine at April 18, 2005 08:43 AM When I was growing up my mother and grandmother cooked. Everyday. Breakfast, dinner* and supper**. For us cold cereal in the morning was a TREAT. We did not eat fast food. If we did it was once in a blue moon and was a TREAT. Being raised in the homes of old fashioned women who liked cooking, who liked serving their family a good meal, who kicked ass in the kitchen, who took pride in their skill, cooking rubbed off on me. I love to cook. It is a great pleasure. It is a creative expression. It is one form of my art. I take pride in serving my family a good meal. It is the one meal of the day where everyone is required to be present. No one eats before Dad comes home from work, not even if he is running late and only if I know he won't be home until after the kids bedtime. It is our social event of the day. It is the time we sit together and talk about the day. We bow our heads together and we eat together. I have been cooking for at least 25 years. At the age of 13 I was capable of putting a full meal on the table and did so every time I had the chance. It is a skill that took time to develop. My mother and grandmother nurtured my budding skills. My skills became more defined and took shape in my early teens. My grandmother's brother rented a place from my parents and each day I went down to his house and I cooked for him. I cleaned his house, did his laundry and cooked his supper. My matriarchs never saw themselves as a chef, head cook, or short order cook. They were moms. It is by their example that I raised my own children. My daughter is now 18. She has been cooking since she was 13 also. She can prepare a meal and properly set the table the same as I can. I nutured her skills and in return she has expressed her desire to attend Chef school. She is currently torn between her love of cooking and her love of history so I do not know which will win out in the long run. If she doesn't choose chef school it is no big deal because like her grandmother and great grandmother she kicks ass in the kitchen. A good meal doesn't have to take all day slaving away over a hot stove. I am blessed not to have to work so I have time to do little things through the day that culminates in a good meal every evening. I feel guilty if I haven't put a good meal on the table when my husband comes home. He works very hard every day to provide for us. He does his job exceptionally and he earns a great meal at the end of his day. He calls when he is leaving his office and in that time I get busy and finish up whatever I have going in the kitchen so that when he walks in the evening meal is on the table. Everyday. Our evening meal is usually little bits of lots of things. I much prefer a small portion of several items to large portions of one thing. Meat is not always the entree. Sometimes we have a kitchen sink type salad bowl and anything and everything in the frig is up for grabs. Sometimes I may take the time to fry chicken, cook a roast, make a homemade soup or chilli while other times we may eat leftovers or something I have in the freezer from a mega cooking explosion. If it is on sale at the grocery store and it is something my family likes, I buy quantity, spend time cooking and then freeze it for quick meals later. It doesn't take all day to cook a great meal. Experience creates efficiency. I do not understand women who do not cook. I do not understand serving a happy meal to a child for supper. I wasn't raised that way. It is foreign to me. I cook. I am a good cook. I like to cook. I feel pride in my skill. I do not find it to be "woman's work." I do not get tired of cooking. I do admit I hate cleaning the dishes. But that is what kids are for. I cook a good meal the least they can do is help with the dishes. Given the choice of cooking supper or dining out, I usually never choose dining out. I cook better than most restaurants anyway. Thank you Susie for the compliment. I am just doing what comes natural to me. I am a mom who cooks. *In the south dinner is the midday meal known by many as lunch. ** Supper is the evening meal. Posted by Angie at 07:18 AM | Comments (2)

Today's home owner project was pressure washing the back deck. You can see the before and after. I have been at it 4 hours now. I needed a break. ***Update 10:30am - 4:00pm with one break for a bite of lunch and a trip for gas for the pressure washer. I do not think that deck has been cleaned since it was built. OMG it was nasty where the previous owners dogs had lived on it. :-/

We worked on putting in the kitchen garden today. We put in a variety of hot peppers and sweet peppers, black beauty eggplants, 4 short rows of clemson spineless okra, 5 short rows of butterbeans, 1 row of brocolli, 3 rows of red and green cabbage. We also worked on a small bed for rubarb. Having never worked on a garden of this scale Steven stopped about midway and asked, "Isn't there a machine we can use to do this?" Hoeing rows was kicking his butt. Using a pry bar we lifted the fountain in the side garden and managed to get it to sit level. One side is resting on the ground, the other has bricks under it. The vinca and the ivy and plants hide the fact one side is not touching the ground. The solid mass of concrete is so heavy we tried to lift it so we could shovel in soil to help level it but there was no way we could lift it. The statue is back on the base and the pump works to send a trickle of water cascading down from the top. It is a lovely sound. We spent hours cutting and pulling and clipping and cleaning in the garden in that area. At the end of the day, you couldn't tell we had done much at all. We cleared 2 carts of clippings and debris, old lights, wires ... I cannot believe the people who put in that fountain had buried an indoor extention cord to power the pumps. It was an electrocution waiting to happen. The ivy was pulled down out of the tree. We found about 5 old metal birds and butterflies that had once been staked out there. There was a tiny cedar tree growing in the mass of leaves between the trunks of the tree that had to be cut out. I cut back the azaleas branches that were scraggy and near bare. The liriope got a much need hair cut. I was choaking out the new grown trying to sprout. We really needed to work on the boxwoods somemore on that side of the house but I was too tired to start. Taking down 3 feet off the height of those things requires a ladder and a lot of stamina in the upper arms. My arms are too tired for it. Maybe I can work on it tomorrow and tuesday before the rains come. I am not going to complain about the rain this week. We have predicitons of rain from this Tuesday night thru next Tuesday. I want the rain since we put in the kitchen garden and well water just maintains it. It is the rain that really makes things grown and I want it to rain. Even though rain means we won't get much more done for more than a week. We installed a new series of low voltage lighting around the side garden as well. We set the timer for the lights to come on around 4:30am and 7:30pm and to go off at 5:30am and 11:00pm. It really looks pretty. I took some photos after dark but the flash on the camera washes out most of the lighting. The solar lights around the koi pond look inviting at night. I can imagine on warm summer nights sitting in either garden and listening to the night music. I can't wait for those sultry summer nights. The day was long and during the hottest point, the sun beat down and we couldn't drink enough water. After weeding one more bed we called it a day 6:30pm. I drank water all evening and just knew I would be up half the night running to the bathroom, suprisingly I guess my body needed the water. I didn't wake up once and I wasn't running to go when I woke. All in all is was a very productive weekend. Steven always acts as if we didn't get near as much work done as we should have. I am always asking him to please stop selling himself short. We are making headway. Everything is showing vast improvements. The mountain of debris is over our heads out in the back, evidence is piling up to attest to the amount of work we have accomplished. Still he thinks we could more. If I could find a handyman/gardener I would hire him. We do need help out here to get this work done. I have asked around and no one is interested in minial labor. I would like to have someone, maybe a retired man looking for some extra cash, who would work 4 to 5 hours a day for 2 or 3 days a week. Perhaps I should put an ad in the paper. However I am not looking forward to a formal arrangement where I would have to file SS and tax payments. Whatever happened to teenage boys who did yard work for pocket money? Posted by Angie at 08:29 PM | Comments (2)

This was in my inbox. I find it so completely funny I was PMP. My husband did not see any humor in it all and gave me the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. Waxing Woes All methods have tricked me with their promises of easy, painless removal: the Epilady, the standard razor, the scissors, the Nair, the EpilStop, and now ... The Wax. My night began as any other normal weekday night. I came home, I fixed dinner for my family and got everyone settled for the night. I then had the thought that would ring painfully in my mind for the next couple hours: "Maybe I should use that wax in my medicine cabinet." I made sure no one would need me and I could head for the bathroom in peace. It was one of those cold wax kits. No melting a clump of hot wax, you just rub the clear strips in your hand, peel them apart, press it on your leg (or wherever). No muss, no fuss. "How hard can this be?" I mean, I'm not the girliest of girls but I'm mechanically inclined so maybe I can figure out how this works. You'd think. So I pull one of the thin strips out. It's two strips facing each other, stuck together. I'm supposed to rub it in my hand to warm and soften the wax. I go one better. I pull out the hair dryer and heat it to ten thousand degrees. Cold wax, noooo. I lay the strip across my thigh. I hold the skin around it and pull. OK, so it wasn't the best feeling in the world, but it wasn't bad. I can do this! So with my next wax strip, I'll move north. After checking on my beloved family again, I sneak into the bathroom for The Ultimate Hair Fighting Championship. I drop my panties and place one foot on the toilet. Using the same procedure, I then apply the wax strip across the right side on my bikini line, covering the right half of my vagina and stretching up into the inside of the right cheek. (Yeah, it was a long strip.) I inhale deeply. I brace myself. RRRIIIIPPP!!!! I'm blind from the pain! Vision returning. Oh crap. I've managed to pull off only a half an inch of the strip. Another deep breath. And RIIIP! Everything is swirly and tie-dyed. Do I hear crashing drums? OK, coming back to normal again. I want to see my trophy -- my wax covered pelt that caused me so much agony. I want to revel in the glory that is my triumph over body hair. I hold the wax strip like an Olympic gold medalist. But why is there no hair on it? And why is the wax mostly gone? Where could the wax go, if not on the strip? Slowly, I eased my head down, my foot still perched on the toilet. I see hair -- the hair that should be on the strip. I touch. I feel. I am touching wax. I look to the ceiling and silently shout "Nooooooo!!" I peel my fingers off the softest, most sensitive part of my body that is now covered in cold wax and matted hair, and make the next big mistake -- up until this point, you'll remember, I've had my foot on the toilet. I know I need to move, to do something. So I put my foot down on the floor. And then I hear the slamming of the cell door. Vagina? Sealed shut. Butt? Sealed shut. A little voice in my head says, "I hope you don't have to shit anytime soon. " I penguin walk around the bathroom trying desperately to figure out what I should do next. Hot water! Hot water melts wax! I'll run the hottest water I can stand and get in. The wax should melt and I can gently wipe it away, right? Wrong. I get in the tub -- the water is slightly hotter than is used to torture prisoners of war or sterilize surgical equipment -- and I sit. Now the only thing worse than having your goodies glued together is having them glued together and then glued to the bottom of a tub. In scalding hot water. Which, by the way, does not melt the cold wax. So now I'm stuck in the tub--literally! I call my friend, Liz, because she once dropped out of beauty school so surely she has some secret knowledge or trick to get wax off skin. It is however, never good to start a conversation with "So my butt and vagina are stuck to the tub." She wants to know exactly where the wax is on the butt. "Are we talking cheek, here?" she asks. She isn't even trying to hide the giggles now. I give her the run-down of the entire night. She tells me to call the number on the side of the box, but to have a good cover story for where the wax actually is. "You know that if we were working the help line at XX Wax Co. and somebody called with their entire crack sealed shut we'd just put them on hold and then record the conversation for everyone we know. You're going to end up on a radio show or the internet if you tell them the truth." While we go through various solutions, I have resorted to scraping the wax off with a razor. Boy, nothing feels better to the girlie goodies than covering them in wax, sticking them to a tub in super hot water and THEN dry shaving the sticky wax off! In the middle of the conversation (which has inexplicably turned to "other" subjects!) I find the lotion provided with the wax to remove the excess. I rub some in and start screaming "It's working! It's working!" I get hearty congratulations from Liz and we hang up. I successfully remove all the wax and notice, to my dismay, that the hair is still there. So I shaved the stuff off. I was numb by that point anyway. I put the box of wax back in my medicine cabinet. Never know when a moustache might start to come in....

Steven did this today. It is the spot for my kitchen garden. :-)He had to use the front end loader to break the top of the soil in order to till it. While I did this. Pots of herbs for my kitchen: dill, greek oregano, thyme, flat and curly parsley and cilantro for starters. More of these plus others will be seeded in the herb garden. And the kids did this. My youngest is so proud of her wildflower/weed wreath. And finally a photo where her eyes are not looking funny. I decided to use this to make supper: We cooked this on it: After an hour it needed to rest: Then it was ready for slicing, it was perfect pink I don't think the photo shows it well. For dessert I made this. I use bakers cream. It doesn't break or get watery if it sits in the refrigerator. After cleaning garden beds, various house chores, a trip to the grocer and to Lowes, we are all tired, well fed and ready to be couch potatoes for awhile tonight. The recipe for the beef is under the link below. Patio Steak Marinade Ingredients: 1/2 c. dry red wine 1/4 c. olive oil 3 tbsp lime juice 2 tbsp vinegar 2 tbsp minces onion (I used dried) 1 bay leaf, crushed 2 tsp dried whole thyme 1 tsp whole marjoram In a ziplock bag mix together well. Add one 3-4lbs boneless chuck roast. Refrigerate for 5 to 8 hours. Occassionally shaking up the bag and massaging the meat in the marinade. Remove from the refrigerator and let stand 1 hour at room temp. Drain roast and reserve the marinade. On the grill, cook the roast over medium hot coals 30 minutes on each side. With a meat thermometer 140 degrees should be rare, 150 degrees should be medium rare. Baste frequently with marinade. This recipe is from the 1987 Southern Living Annual Recipes listed as a Summer Supper. Page 141.

Blackbird's Friday Show and Tell theme is by MaineLife. My gardens are here. The sun is up and very bright this morning. The temp is only going to be 60 today. The air is cold. My daughter wore her winter coat this morning, it was 39F this morning. Brrrrr! I long for the heat of summer. Last night I worked on the links to my about me pages and my faq. I am sorry it took so long to get them working. Some days I plan to spend a few hours just working on getting my website back to what it once was and find I have far too many other things to do and it gets left to last. Posted by Angie at 08:14 AM | Comments (6)

We bought this house for a couple reasons, one of which was because it was in such an undeveloped county with a tiny county seat and no real industry. Orange County, Virginia is pretty much an agricultural community. It is small town America, quiet, with a few towns and villages but nothing like a real city. There is no Wal-mart. There is ONE, yes, I said ONE, grocery store, various and sundry small town businesses owned by the locals, but no retail chain stores save for the CVS pharmacy and the ONE grocery store. After we bought the house, someone at Steven's job told him a story about a woman here who killed her husband for his millions of dollars. I took that pretty much as gossip and a very old story. Well, guess what?! It is true! We watched a tv program last night that documented the case. You can read about it here and here. I really wanted to see the house. The inside. I am sure it has to be decorated in such a way that my eye teeth would hurt and drool would slip from the corner of my mouth. Historical houses just make me .. umm, well, ask my husband! Grrrr! But that was before I knew this story and it was THAT house. If I had the chance now I would not go to see it. It is tainted. The woman was charged with killing her husband and although she was found not guilty due to circumstantial evidence SOMETHING happened there and a man is now dead. Only his widow knows the truth of what happened that evening. But this is what sticks in my craw. She was charged and found not guilty because there wasn't enough evidence. She can run up and down the street and proclaim to the world she did in fact do the deed and there is nothing that can be done about it. It is the double jeopardy loop hole. She was tried, found not guilty and can never be tried for the same crime again. Somehow that just isn't right. From what I have read I believe she is guilty. Some of the friends of the deceased stated he was planning to divorce her for her carryings on with other men. I guess she figured she wouldn't get much in a divorce settlement and wanted it all. Even if she didn't do it, the details just cut me to the core. They rip through everything I believe a marriage should be. The idea that a wife could kill her husband for any reason leaves me feeling disgusted and sick and sorrow filled. How can you profess love for a man and even think about killing him? How can a heart be so cruel? This man did not abuse her. She had it made. She was given the key to all that he had, was trusted with it and she betrayed him. I can't even begin to express the thoughts that swirl in my head. Let's say she is innocent. There is still that fact that she cheated on him. In fact had a string of men she caroused with. In a town this small those things do not go unnoticed. She had ability and money to go to any other city in Virginia and have her liasons and yet she did it right under his nose. I do not understand a spouse who cheats. How can you betray someone that way? Yes, I cast judgement on all who cheat. Every single one! To my way of thinking cheating is the same as killing me. I can't imagine how a man would even want to put his woohoo in the place that so many other men had put their woohoo. If you are going to cheat, divorce me! Do not pussyfoot around. Be blunt and tell me. Do not protect my feelings. Because if I find out I will divorce you and you will NOT touch me ever again. You have defiled the sanctity of the holy temple of marriage and there is no forgiveness in that. NONE!!! Not one shred! Before we met, before we married, Steven and I had this conversation. Cheating is the one thing neither of us can forgive. There is no going back. To cheat is to end it all. I look at Steven's sweet face. He is over on the couch, trying to wake up with his hair looking like Sonic The Hedgehog. I think about the total intimacy we share, the things he knows about me and I know about him. I could never betray him. I know him well enough to know he would never betray me. How can you betray someone who has given you the gift of all they are and will be? "This man loves me!", the voice in my head screams. "Me! And only ME!" And I love him. When he walks into a room I feel my heart swell and the butterflies flutter in my stomach. What have I done in my life to be loved this way? The only thing I can find that this man was guilty of was loving her and trusting her. Did she kill him? Only she knows. Did she cheat on him? Yes, the whole town knows it. The shame of it all. My condolences to the family. (Just incase those links no longer work you can read the story under this cut.) http://readthehook.com/stories/2004/02/26/coverBlackWidowANativeSons.html COVER- Black widow? A native son's death rattles Somerset Published February 26, 2004, in issue #0308 of The Hook BY DEBORAH HASTINGS AP NATIONAL WRITER In the mannered society governing flowing valleys and tree-covered hills of Orange County, phrases such as "blood tells'' and "pretty is as pretty does'' resonate. Gentility is paramount. Breeding is preferred. There are certain things just not done in this part of the South. One does not call attention to oneself with common behavior. If bourbon has been consumed, allowances are made. While seated at table with one's husband, one does not rub the thigh of another man at the table. And one most definitely does not fatally poison said husband and then order his body cremated on the same night. Donna J. Somerville, 51, widow of Hamilton A. Somerville Jr., who was born on this fertile land back-dropped by the Blue Ridge Mountains, is accused of doing all these unseemly things. Her murder trial is scheduled for June. Though Hamilton Somerville-- "Ham'' to his friends-- has been dead for more than two years, his life is well remembered. His widow is well disdained. And so the murder of Ham Somerville is doubly offensive. Not only was he killed, allegedly for his money, but his wife's behavior, beginning about a year before Somerville's death, has been deemed appalling, cheap, and just not right. Free on $300,000 bail, Donna lives at Mount Athos, a 450-acre hilltop farm once part of President James Madison's Montpelier estate, about 20 miles northeast of Charlottesville. Donna says little or nothing to her husband's family and his legion of friends. A "No Trespassing'' sign has been staked in the red Virginia soil at the entrance to Mount Athos, just behind stone pillars in front of a winding driveway. Her silence may be understandable. According to court documents, some of the evidence used by a special grand jury to indict Donna Somerville came out of her own mouth. A church divided A media beast feeds steadily on Ham Somerville's death. Donna has become, on glossy magazine pages, "the black widow," a brazen gold-digger who seduced a grieving widower into a quickie marriage and eventually grew tired of him. A much-published news photograph from last year shows her shackled and dressed in a prison suit of broad black and white stripes, standing outside the tiny circuit court in Orange. Hamilton Somerville, in the same shiny magazine, became a squire, a gentleman farmer, a millionaire, and a recovering alcoholic killed in his own bed at age 57 in his mansion on a hill. But the simple, human truth, as black-and-white as his widow's weeds, is that a gentle and vital man with grown daughters, who loved his church as much as he used to love liquor, is dead. And all because he ingested large amounts of the drugs morphine, codeine, and oxycodone, according to the coroner's report. In the community and at Christ Episcopal Church in Gordonsville, where the Somervilles worshipped, people who knew them continue to suffer. Neighbor has turned against neighbor; worshippers have stopped speaking to each other. "No one can talk about it,'' says parishioner Dorsey Comer. "It's broken our church up. Everyone is just silently grieving.'' Those chasms, some say, cannot be bridged until Donna Somerville is judged in court. Ham's new wife Part of the murder's intrigue is steeped in the land itself; Mount Athos has a certain kind of history revered by Virginians. It once belonged to Montpelier, the family plantation of the fourth president of the United States. Originally covering more than 4,000 acres, Montpelier changed hands several times before its last private owner, Marion duPont Scott, bequeathed it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1983. She was briefly married to Ham Somerville's uncle Thomas. In the divorce settlement, he got Mount Athos, which later was given to Hamilton Somerville Sr., Ham's father, as a wedding present. The duPonts and the Somervilles remain entwined by blood and land, like many families here whose descendants pride themselves on roots spanning 400 years. Conduct here is noted and judged-- especially the conduct of outsiders. It was hard not to notice the arrival of registered nurse Donna Scott in the summer of 1990. She was a Yankee, for one thing, and no one seemed to know her in the tight-knit enclave of Somerset, where two-lane roads ramble past fenced horse farms with gorgeous homes set a mile back. Ham Somerville hired her from a local hospice to care for his first wife, Sidney, who was dying of breast cancer. Donna Scott, 39, tended Sidney Somerville at Mount Athos. Her duties included administering morphine to ease Sidney's pain. When Sidney died three months later, Ham hired Donna to care for his mother, Henrietta, who was also dying of cancer. Henrietta died four months later. Seven months after that, Ham married Donna in a civil ceremony-- her fourth trip down the aisle. There were, of course, whispers and gossip. Sidney had been dead for less than a year. But Donna, Ham's friends thought, seemed to be a good influence on her new husband. She persuaded him to quit drinking. They became pillars of Christ Church. Both were members of the vestry. He was church treasurer; she was the Sunday school superintendent and sometimes served communion. They were inseparable. "When you saw one, you saw the other,'' says Tony Garnett, a local farm worker. If they weren't in church or working the farm, they were lunching at the picnic table inside the Somerset Center Store at what passes for an intersection here. From the wooden porch, you can see Mount Athos on a snow-covered rise, flanked by leafless trees of winter. Every morning started the same for Ham. He woke early and sat on the porch drinking coffee and smoking, Garnett said. He fed and tended 50 head of Black Angus cattle, then got in his Suburban and headed to the Somerset store for a coffee refill. There, he'd hook up with Garnett, whose father had worked at Montpelier for nearly 60 years and knew Ham's father. Garnett was a boy when he first met Ham, who was nearly 20 years older. Over the years, they became close. "People said I was the son he never had,'' Garnett says. About a year before Ham's death, Tony Garnett grew increasingly appalled. He considered driving up there and just telling Ham to his face. But he couldn't. "He was my friend,'' Garnett said. Garnett had watched Donna caressing the leg of another man, under the picnic table, as she, Ham and others ate lunch, he said. So had Garnett's girlfriend, Sarah Rogers, who works at the store. "We didn't know what to do,'' she said. "We couldn't believe it.'' They also watched her park her car in the tiny lot outside, then get into the cars of other men, slouching down as they drove away, both said. If Donna was having affairs, why be so blatant? There are nearby cities such as Charlottesville, where cheating wives have a better chance of going unnoticed. "It was like she just didn't care,'' Rogers said. Soon, Somerset was buzzing. But Ham never said a word to his friend. "All of a sudden, they weren't together all the time,'' Garnett says. "You could tell something was bothering him, but he wouldn't say nothing.'' How Ham died On the last night of his life, Ham Somerville said he didn't feel well and went to bed early. Donna brought him soup, she later told deputies. He hadn't felt well for more than a month. He was unnaturally exhausted, he told friends; some days he could barely get out of bed. One day, on the farm with Garnett, Ham wondered if he'd had a stroke in his sleep. "He was really tired,'' Garnett says. "He said he felt like he'd been drugged.'' But he didn't see a doctor. "Donna said she checked his blood pressure and it was fine,'' Rogers says. At Sunday church, after a vestry meeting, Ham chatted with Dorsey Comer, who'd known him for 18 years. "I asked how he was,'' Comer recounts. "He said, `Dorsey, you know, I'm not feeling very well. I'm just so tired and I don't know why.'" Two days later, Donna called 911. Her husband had stopped breathing, she said. The procession of sheriff's cars and rescue squad trucks snaking up the Mount Athos driveway lit up the hill. Down at the Somerset store, people stared. Garnett and Rogers drove to the house and pulled around to the back. Jeff Carpenter, a farm hand temporarily living in the guest cottage, sat outside. Garnett asked what was going on. "The old man done croaked," Carpenter replied. Donna was in the house with authorities. So was Lance Clore, another local man who'd been working, and sometimes staying, at Mount Athos. Garnett pointed his car back down the hill. Except for the funeral, "I never did go back up there,'' he said. "I knew deep in my heart that she had killed him, and I didn't want to be around her.'' It took about 15 months for investigators to announce they'd reached the same conclusion. On Valentine's Day 2002, Donna Somerville was indicted on one count of first-degree murder. She was sole heir to Ham's $15 million estate. Modest trusts had already been established for his grown daughters. Phone messages left for Donna Somerville by the Associated Press were not returned. Prosecutors, investigators, and Donna Somerville's attorneys declined comment on the criminal case. So did lawyers representing the estate and his daughters, who have filed a wrongful death suit against Donna Somerville. Orange County sheriff's deputies, aided by a state police investigator, interviewed more than 80 people connected to Ham and Donna. According to court documents, much of the state's evidence comes from the sworn statements of deputies who responded to Donna's 911 call and from wiretaps placed on telephones belonging to Donna and Lance Clore. Sgt. James Fenwick says that when he arrived at Mount Athos, he followed Donna's voice to the second-floor bedroom. Ham was on the bed, still alive. Donna told Fenwick she tried to administer CPR but "was unable to do anything because of her husband's physical size.'' After serving Ham's dinner, Donna said, she'd gone downstairs. When she returned, he was "blue in the face.'' Paramedics worked for 45 minutes, administering CPR and inserting an intubation tube. Deputy Shane Nelson said Donna "pleaded several times for the rescue workers to stop,'' saying her father "had gone through this and they didn't save him.'' Nelson and Fenwick said Donna insisted she wanted her husband cremated that night, saying it was what Ham wanted. But Virginia law prohibits cremation until a death certificate is issued. At the urging of one Somerville daughter, the Commonwealth's Attorney ordered an autopsy. The results: death by drug poisoning. The investigation A piece of carpet was cut from the bedroom floor where Ham had vomited in front of deputies. It tested positive for morphine, codeine, and oxycodone, according to the state forensic lab. Also seized from the property, according to court documents, were cocaine; marijuana; prescription painkillers; Klonopin, a sedating drug usually prescribed for anxiety disorders; herpes suppression medication; and a snippet of plastic straw containing cocaine residue. The warrants do not specify whether all of the items came from the big house, or whether some came from the guest cottage. Months later, authorities charged Carpenter with felony possession of cocaine. He is now listed as a material witness in the murder case. As the days tick by leading to Donna Somerville's murder trial, a semblance of normality has returned here. Life in the Somerset store goes on, though Donna does not come in anymore. "For awhile, nobody trusted anybody,'' Rogers says. "It's disrupted everything. It's just a little country town.'' Donna no longer attends Christ Church, where some worshippers balked at taking communion wine from the hands of a woman suspected of killing her husband, Comer said. She still shops at Faulconer's hardware over in Orange, where people know her and what she is accused of doing, and don't say a word to her about it. "She's innocent until proven guilty,'' says Conway Faulconer, who helps run the family store. "These are people with lives we're talking about.'' There are certain things just not done here. Abandoning civility is one of them. http://news.findlaw.com/court_tv/s/20040618/18jun2004102125.html Trial opens for Virginia wife accused of poisoning millionaire husband By Emanuella Grinberg, Court TV (Court TV) — Black widow. Adulterous gold digger. Since Donna Somerville's 2003 indictment and arrest for her millionaire husband's death, these are just some of the ways the former hospice worker has been characterized in the extensive press leading up to her first-degree murder trial. Somerville will stand trial Thursday for Hamilton "Ham" Somerville's 2001 death in the tiny Virginia hamlet of Orange, where the Somerville family resided for three generations in an opulent home perched atop a hill. It was there on Mt. Athos, the 445-acre estate the Somervilles inherited from the duPont family, on land that once belonged to James Madison Sr., that police found Ham Somerville dead in his bed on Nov. 13, 2001, from a drug overdose. Prosecutors say Donna Somerville, 51, poisoned her 57-year-old husband with codeine and morphine and then sought an immediate cremation to destroy the evidence. Ham Somerville's daughters intervened and canceled the cremation just 30 minutes before Donna Somerville had scheduled it, the morning after his death. Because of the media frenzy surrounding the investigation, defense attorney Charles Bowman's initial request for an out-of-town jury was granted. Then Bowman sought, and was granted, a bench trial. "Even the cause of death, a central issue in this case, has been widely published as 'murder' as if there was no question of suicide or accidental overdose," Bowman wrote in a May 14 court filing. Prosecutors supported the defense requests. "We all felt that we wanted an impartial trier of fact to hear this case. Both sides are satisfied with the decision," said Mark Robinette, a Hanover County prosecutor. Robinette and co-prosecutor Randy Krantz came from neighboring Virginia counties to try the case in the place of an Orange County prosecutor who faced a conflict of interest for having taken part in a business deal with Ham Somerville. Robinette said nearly 100 witnesses have been subpoenad to testify against Donna Somerville, in a case he admits its "largely circumstantial." "People are conditioned to expect some smoking gun evidence that will conclusively prove someone's innocence or guilt," said Robinette. "But really what we're doing is putting together one case like pieces of a puzzle." Robinette plans to introduce recorded phone conversations to bolster the prosecution's contention that Donna Somerville was having numerous liaisons with local men before her husband's death. The prosecution believes a divorce was imminent for the couple, who married in 1991 after Ham Somerville's first wife, Sidney, died of breast cancer under Donna's care as a hospice worker. They contend Ham's younger wife stood to gain significantly less than the estimated $15 million he was worth had the relationship ended in divorce, amid rumors of infidelity. Donna Somerville says her husband, whose health was flagging in weeks before his death, administered the deadly dose himself. According to press reports, defense attorneys are expected to argue that Ham Somerville had used both drugs for months before he died. Tests performed on one of his hairs showed concentrations of three opiates, including the two on which he overdosed, according to a toxicology report ordered by the defense team. If convicted, Somerville faces life in prison. Ham Somerville's three daughters filed a separate civil suit against Donna Somerville for $15 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages for their father's death. Posted by Angie at 06:42 AM | Comments (1)

Grey Skies The light outside is grey. Just dim and grey. It reflects my mood. I have no will to do anything today. I have put on a happy face when I have to interact with a living breathing person then I go back to my sad sack face where I don't have to hide that I am having troubles today. I have tried to be fine for 3 days now and it's not working. I am not fine. I am angry, emotionally frazzled. I am weepy and morning for what could have been. I do not like being me today. I was late. I have spent 27 years never being late. The 14 days past the day I knew what was going on. I have birthed 3 children, my two girls and the surrogate baby. I know what being late means. I know what being sick in the late afternoon means. I know when the weird rash breaks out on my hands what it means. I do not need a doctor to confirm what it means. 3 days ago when my period started I was thrown into the deepest pit. When I told Steven I had started he was emotional, too. I tried to reason with myself and him. "All things happen for a reason." "Things like this happen when something is terribly wrong." "It is nature's way of dealing with a biological mishap." I am tired of putting on the face. I want to scream and openly cry. I want to weep and sob out loud. I can't. The children will hear and want to know what is wrong. Steven will hear and it will upset him. How do you get through things like this and stay in one piece? How? Why? I just want to crawl into my bed and pull the covers over my head and hide. Hide from what? I don't know ... other people's eyes maybe. I want to openly morn for what was to be and is not to be any more. Maybe all I need is swift kick in ass to get moving again, but I don't want to move. Not today. Today I want what is not meant to be. Posted by Angie at 01:30 PM | Comments (5)

April 11, 2005 A Weekend of Work We spent the entire weekend working outside. Save for a trip to Lowe's and a birthday party lunch, we spent all the hours of the day working in one area or another. The boxwoods around the house and lining the drive, a couple dozen of those things, have been left to grow pretty much unattended for many years. The ones in front of the house block the porch and are between 8 and 9 ft. tall. We have consulted with a landscaper, he consulted with some others in the trade, and the general concensus is they need radical pruning. It is suggested we take off as much as 4 feet of the boxwoods in front of the porch. It will take 2 years for them to recover. The less radical approach is to take off 2 foot this year and 2 foot next year. I like the latter MUCH better. The larger ones along the drive we will just shape and not remove any height. Those are 15 feet tall and trying to bring them down to size may cause a loss. I prefer not to risk it. We could never replace them at the size they are. Steven mowed the grass in yard area around the house and in the orchard. It was quick work with the new belly mower. Out in the back field we moved all the rotted bales of hay the previous owners left, about 8 in all we hauled to "the pile". Steven had already moved nearly a dozen scattered around the fields. All over the fields piles of old rotted hay. I wonder if their animals ate that stuff. I have not seen anything that looked as if animals should be eating it. With snow in December and January they had to be eating something. As soon as we get the barns cleaned and disinfected and the fields clean we will getting chickens and milk goats to start with. I have so missed the animals I once had in Georgia. We have a 5 room chicken barn that will hold 500. While I do not plan to raise 500, I do plan to have many. I also plan to have some pure breeds. My favorites are Rhode Island Reds. In Georgia I was able to sell the excess eggs and hope to be able to do the same here. I want cows, but I don't think Steven is ready for those. We have a lot of work to do before we can have goats. Dogs and sheep were left to run wild and they did not bother to clean up behind them. The chicken barns are filled with poop. Dogs lived in the lifestock barn. We have to pressure wash and disinect both barns before any animals come to live here. I do not care to have eggs nor milk as part of our daily nurishment that is produced in filth. The large barn where the previous owners had dogs has to be treated for fleas too. We moved in on the day we signed the papers, January 25th. Since then it has snowed or rained nearly everyday through the middle of March. The past 3 weeks is the first time we have been able to do anything. We did have one day of sunshine and it took the entire day to cut down the honeysuckle that had grown over the gardening shed. It was so tall and so thick and had choked itself out to the point rats had been nesting in it about 3 feet off the ground. The nests we ripped down were huge. The back fields are not too badly overgrown, everything is briars. The orchard is in good shape. I was able to start spraying and trimming in the cold weather in preparation for spring. This weekend the damsons got another healthy spray of "Orchard Spray." Sometimes I look at the state of things and wonder if we will be able to put in animals at all this year. There is no way to get water to the barns other than carrying it in a bucket. We have to have a well put down. There are spigots out there but have long been dry and cut off from the well we are currently using. Our well, from which we drink, I am told is one of very few left in the area. About 4 years ago all the wells around here went dry. I don't know if this is a good thing or not. So, add us to the waiting list and maybe by next month we might have a new well. It will be nice to have real water pressure. We have enough water now but we have little pressure, the pump that is 'new' is not very big and the previous owners put it down but have no idea what size the pump is. Between the fields, the barns and the house we seem to be playing catch up. If the rain would not come every other day we might accomplish something this summer. I am also trying to learn how to say things in a way Steven understands and doesn't get so grumpy with me. I know he hasn't ever lived on a farm. I have spent my life on a farm and I have to stop myself and try to remember that things that come natural to me are foreign to him. I sincerely apologize to him often for making him feel like an idiot. I spent most of the day today installing shelving and sorting out all of our tools from the boxes we are STILL unpacking. It took longer than I expected as things had to be sorted into what will be used in the barns, what should be in the gardening shed and what tools we will use around the house. I was so close to being finished then I had to go to Georgia last month and haul everything I own here. So may boxes still to unpack. Tomorrow I plan to tackle the tack room in the big barn. I am tired thinking about it. Maybe I'll finish in time and the sun will shine long enough for me to pressure wash the back porch. It is green. So far I have learned one lesson, think twice before buying a farm from a junk dealer! Posted by Angie at 06:47 PM | Comments (1)

April 10, 2005 Spring has Sprung In the past week I have watched spring burst into life right before my eyes. I have been so ready for spring. I am still learning to adjust to the seasons here in Virginia. I have yet to acclimatize although I have been living in Virginia for the past year. The cold is a very different cold to that of Georgia. It is more of a wet cold not to mention all of the ice and snow. This year will be a true test of my gardening skills. I have to learn when and where to plant as well as what will grow well here. Being in the new house now I have to learn the soil and figure out what I need to feed it. The soil in most places has a lot of clay but it is rich and seems fertile. It is a far different clay than that of the rich red Georgia clay I know. We have added a mild fertilizer to the garden patches. Steven tilled it in when he plowed. We bought an organic fertilizer made of sterilized chicken poop. A vendor at Lowes convinced me to try it. Cockadoodle Doo is the brand name. Read about it here. Normally I only trust my tried and true methods but being in Virginia everything is new, nothing yet has been tried, well not by me. I have a learning curve that may take several years to develop a feel for the agriculture of this area. However I am willing to take a risk. I have been told the locals have an unwritten competition to see who can produce the first fully vine ripe tomato BEFORE July 4th. Back in Georgia I usally planted and had ripe tomatoes by the end of May or early June. Stay tuned for more of the play-by on the competition. This photo is one of my favorites. The japanese magnolias are in full bloom. I love the white with the hints of purpley pink. I didn't think this photo would turn out clear. The wind was blowing and the branch was shaking. I am surprised I captured a clear view. The trees make me happy when I look out and see them fully dressed in their best spring fashions. There are a couple more near the koi pond and they too are blooming to beat the band. The orchard has burst into life. At first I wasn't sure they were doing anything and then as if over night there are apple blossoms and damsons readying themselves for fruit production. I had never seen a damson tree until we bought this house. I am excited to see what developes. I have been told it is a prestigious thing to have a damson orchard in these parts. I can hardly wait until harvest time. I have read that damsons smell like roses when being prepared for jam. I do hope we have a nice crop. I want to try my hand at damson jam and slow gin. I am not sure what is in these containers on the front porch but they are blooming in great shades of purple. I love the contrast with the deep dark green of the leaves. I have never seen wild pansies until now. Back in Georgia we have lots of clover and wild sweet pea. These are a pleasant surprise. Steven cut the grass yesterday but some have managed to miss the blades of the mower. A few miles from our house the open fields are just gorgeous wearing a sheen of purple. I wish I had had the forethought to bring the camera with us yesterday. Fields and fields of purple lay on either side of the road. They appear to be filled with wild purple clover and the same little wild pansies. This is my tomato patch, just getting started, but soon I know in the heat of the sun it will take off. In the back is another patch we will plow under and plant more vegetables. In the area beside the gardening house we plan to clear this week I am planning an asparagus patch. I want to try the Mary Washington variety. I don't know where yet, but somewhere, I want to put in a patch of artichokes also. Both crops will need to grow for at least 2 years before we harvest. I know they will be worth the wait! Asparagus and artichokes are two of our most favorites. Asparagus is so expensive in the markets it will be almost sinful to have a patch of our own. I am sure you can't see the blossoms on this tomato plant. The sun was so bright I think it washed out the color. I assure you, I have tomato blossoms. I can't wait for that first red ripe tomato of summer. I have planted better bush, roma, cherry, better boy and beefstake tomatoes. We also have added a few sweet bell peppers, a red, green and a yellow. Gardening will produce a lot more work around here and weeding is not one of my favorite tasks. I don't know anyone who likes weeding. Some of the little projects around the house will have to be put off at times to work in the gardens, a sacrifice I am willing make in order to have fresh summer vegetables on the table. I think the tending and harvesting will be good lessons for the kids, too. Besides when it comes to weeding, it is a good chore for the kids! lol Posted by Angie at 05:16 AM | Comments (4)

I have been over at Sue's house riffling through her drawers, peaking into her closets, opening windows and poking in to corners. I have come to this final conclusion: I want Mr. Jo! Not want as in want. My hubby is exceptional in that department. I demand she send him here to do all the things I need done. Are you listening to me, Sue? I need Mr. Jo. I must have him! I want my husband to say, "Mr. Jo is coming to __________ (fill in the blank)." or "Call Mr. Jo and have him ________(fill in the blank)." It would be near to orgasmic to hear those words! There is so much to do around this house. We can live just fine like it is but in a few years it would start to crumble around our feet. - The kitchen needs a major overhaul and I am working on the design. - The bathroom was put in half-ass and it needs to be ripped apart and redone. I am working on those plans, too. - Some fool painted all the floors upstairs save for one and painted 2 downstairs AND THE FRONT AND BACK STAIRCASES! They have to be stripped and sanded and refinished. - The paint colors are garrish, every room needs new paint, but there is so much paint the old stuff has be chipped away before painting. - The house was built without indoor plumbing. 4 storage closets (HUGE) were torn out to put in 2 bathrooms. The one upstairs has a period 1909/1910 clawfoot tub and there is NOTHING to protect the walls from splashes of water AND it has ugly linoleum. - The cellar seeps dribbles of water. We need a french drain installed on the outside wall. - The wood stove in the kitchen is in the wrong place so that it eats up about 1/4 of the area and it needs to be relocated to a more central area where I am going to have a fireplace built for it to rest its weary iron legs. - The mudroom needs cabinetry and shelving. - Every contractor has looked at our lovely glass french doors and said, "Installation of these doors are fail proof." But whomever put ours in failed. It is causing a water problem when it rains and we have to pull out the floor and have that fixed under the house. - The 1960's redo of the fireplace is totally out of place and is UGLY! You see I NEED a Mr. Jo. Neigh, I deserve a Mr. Jo! I have searched high and low and so far I cannot find a Mr. Jo. Please, God, please send me Mr. Jo or someone like him. I'll be good. I promise! I'll make him coffee or iced tea, I won't complain of the mess that needs to be made. Send me a Mr. Jo and let's get this show on the road. I mean, summer is coming and I have to have a pool installed in the back yard. We are burning daylight here! I want to look out of my attic window and see this space filled with blue water sparkling in the summer sun! Please, please, I won't complain about the cost. I know I am a cheapass tightwad but with a Mr. Jo assuring me I am spending too much money I can assure myself I am just frugal. Yes, frugal. I want to be patted on the back for being frugal!

When I was growing up it was common practice to be called something other than your name. I mean something beyond the common nickname (and no, SOB, jackass and the like was not allowed). My birth name is Angela. My nickname is Angie. My grandmother called me Pan-An or Angie-Pangie my entire life. She passed away last September and nobody calls me by those names, no one is allowed to, except for my Steven and that's only because he provides me with things like money and food and internet service that is NOT dial-up. I mean, this man has EARNED the right! My grandmother had other names she called her children, too. My uncle is named Melvin (do NOT play games with this name, it was my grandfather's name and it is a GREAT name, but I won't be naming any son of mine Melvin because I don't want his butt kicked on the playground for having such a nerdy name.) My grandmother called him "Buck", some family members called him "Buckshot". My mother hated her name. Her name is Martha, her nickname is Mot, but her other name was "SquashBottom". My Aunt Sue was "Sally Pumphandle". My Aunt Rachel and I were both addressed as "Fatty Rabbit" by my grandfather. My Aunt Sherry was called "Fe-Fee" by her younger bother and my sister. My youngest uncle was often called "Sport". Yeah, we know that is a dog's name, but we don't acknowledge it in public. My great uncle, Jesse, code name: "Uncle Tittle", (OMG the names) called him "Hammer" or "Hammerhead", stemming from an incident where the previous wacked the latter with a hammer on the head while he was napping on the couch. My grandmother was known to her brothers and my grandfather (and his mother and sister) as "Sis" and after my grandfather passed away her second husband called her, "Lovey". I like the name "Lovey". I was honored when for no reason my husband has started calling me "Lovey." He didn't know my grandmother was "Lovey" and it gave me a thrill to know that once again I had something in common with my grandmother. I asked him one night while we were in the truck why he called me "Lovey". I was expecting some great little tidbit about him loving me or some such romantic notion, but it wasn't to be. He called me "Lovey" in honor of Mrs. Thurston Howell, III, from Gilligan's Island. Oh, well, so much for romance. When my own children came along, I followed the family tradition and began giving my daughter other names. It's a wonder in the early years that she even knew her real name. She was "Sally", "Frog Bottom", "Flossy" and "Eulealeigh Quattlebaum". For a while between the ages of 4 and 8 she refused to answer to her birth name, ColbyAnne, and insisted she be called, "Francey". My younger daughter was given names like "Lollipop", "Hop Noodle", "Droopey Drawers" and "Eupheginia Pennyworth". My kids answer to just about anything these days. I mean, I did my duty as a southern mother! Colby is now nearing 18 years old and she too has picked up on the family tradition of changing peoples names. She might bring me a glass of tea and will sit it down with an off-handed "Here's you a glass of tea, Ethel." My husband and my step-daughter (age 9) does not understand this Southern Tradition. They are confused by it. Steven gives the kids names, like "Huggy Bear" and "Sugar Buggar", but that is the limit of his imagination and the only names he uses and only when he is in a playful mood. J., my step-daughter, gets upset when her name is changed. My oldest often calls her "Janet" and she shouts, "I am not Janet!". Suffice it to say that is two yankees who have no sense of humor of the southern variety. Which leads me to this thought. Steven thinks he is southern simple because he has lived in Virginia for the past 23 years. He thinks his daughter is southern because she was born in Virginia. My God! This man has 2 degrees and he doesn't understand the concepts of southernism. I point out nearly every single day he is not southern. He was born in Illinois, raised by two yankees from Chicago and his not understanding the word "yonder" clearly support this fact. As to the daughter born in Virginia who is not southern either, I simply point out: "A cat may have kittens in the oven but we don't call them biscuits any more than we would call your child, raised by yankees, a southerner." Being southern is a way of life and you know little to nothing about that life therefore you are not Southern! Get it, son? So what is all of this leading to? Last night we lay in bed, talking in those moments just before sleep, listening to the night music floating in the open window. Me: "Have you ever seen a may-pop?" Him: "No." Me: "Have you ever tied a thread to a June bug and watched it fly around?" Him: "Why would I do that?" Me: "Have you ever eaten a watermelon in the field while it is hot from the sun?" Him: "No." Me: "Have you ever used just a string to go fishing?" Him: "No." Then he tries to turn the table on me ... Him: "Have you ever crawled through a sewer pipe?" WTF? Me: "We have septic tanks in the country." Ha, I want to see his ass climb through a 'sewer pipe' from a septic tank. He is NOT southern. But he is getting to be a little bit country. I wish he would hurry up and learn were yonder is because I am tired of the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look he gives me when he asks "Where do you want this?" and I say, "Put it over yonder." **** Addendum 10:13 am**** Steve says: and what's so wrong about gilligan's island? it was a very popular show, and clearly mr. howell truly loved mrs. howell. Cold in Virginia says: no one but you would see the romance in gilligan's island Steve says: deserted tropical island, basic necessities made from coconuts and palm leaves. what's wrong with that? Cold in Virginia says: no internet Steve says: that's made from a palm tree, bamboo, some palm leaves, and an old can. Cold in Virginia says: if that were true they could have blogged it and been rescued Steve says: they went through the anonymizer. why would they spoil the tropical island? Cold in Virginia says: to get rescued Cold in Virginia says: you forget the whole show was written around getting rescued which they fucked up many times over Steve says: and be subject to taxation, overcrowded suburbs, pollution, etc.? Steve says: well - gilligan did. Cold in Virginia says: they all did Steve says: i think it was deliberate. Cold in Virginia says: ha Cold in Virginia says: i am sending jason the link to your tractor pics if you can't come up with something more believable or funny

Ask me what the motherfucking dog just did. I dare you! Go ahead, ask. It is not enough that I have resorted to a shock collar to keep her ass out of the kitchen garbage. It is not enough that she gets fed a fucking gourmet sensitive stomach dog food that is fucking expensive. It is not enough that she actually gets fed MORE than is actually recommended for a dog her size, but that fucking bitch of a dog just jumped into the dining room chair and onto the fucking table to steal a fucking piece of cold damn toast the kids left from their breakfast. To say I am not an aminal person is not true. Not true at all. I generally enjoy animal life and being from a farm have alway emmersed myself in the care of animals. However ... This damn dog of Steven's has pushed my buttons for the past 8 months. She has been near being sent to the dog pound once too many times and the only reason she didn't go was because the kids cried and I didn't want to be the "bad one", again, in this game called parenting. Not to mention the drama Steven plays out when I start yelling about his bitch of dog. :-/ I am still holding a grudge for the day we picked her up from the vet after being boarded while we were on vacation last summer and that bitch ran wild through the house while we were gone for 2 hours and shit in every fucking bed and all over the floor and in the dirty laundry pile and EVERY FUCKING SURFACE WAS COVERED IN DOG SHIT!!! Steven wasn't home, he was at work and who do you think had to wash every damn piece of bedding and clean that almighty dog shit up? That fucking dog holds her shit and refuses to go when she is boarded. That is bad enough. To top it off whatever her fucking problem was that day it was also the result of some virus that made its way through the kennels and the vet treated her at no charge, making no comments, but knowing it was their fucking fault every damn animal in that fucking place had been sick and they did not tell a single soul about it. Mother fuckers. Ohhhh, spring is here, the weather is getting warmer everyday, except when it rains. That damn dog is finding herself outside more and more and by summer her ass will not be a house dog. If she were to run away, which she won't, dammit it all to hell and back, she would not exist in the wild more than a couple days. She has been catered to and pampered since the day Steven brought her free-to-a-good-home ass into his life -all at the whining and urging of his ex-fucking-wife. The bitch did not take the damn dog with her when she left. That fucking dog is just another reason I get to hate her. Steven says stupid shit like he doesn't cater to the dog, she is not spoiled. Oh, the fuck you say. When I moved in that damn dog thought she was Steven's wife and climbed into bed everynight and put her fucking head on my pillow. The bitch got pushed off the bed everynight until I taught her not to get on my bed! It is one thing to have a dog in the house. It is another when the damn dog lays on everything and leaves mounds of fucking hair everywhere. The first time I cleaned the townhouse after I moved in, I could have used that dog hair and made every single one of us a winter sweater! I kid you not! 5 complete sweaters with the big cowle neck collars straight out of the 80's fashion trend. I think I have finished ranting. All of you house-dog lovers out there reading this are NOT allowed to offer any advice on this matter. I now return you to your normal everyday blog surfing. Posted by Angie at 07:53 AM | Comments (2)

April 06, 2005 Ga to Va 1 year and 3 months ago I moved from Georgia to Virginia. I lived in the same place in Georgia most of my life, which was a farm. I grew up with everything imaginable. I left the bliss of the Georgia countryside and moved to Va. to marry my sweetheart where I spent the past year crammed into a townhouse in the crawling/sprawling DC metro area. Now, I am back in the country, Va , not Georgia and today is the first warm day we have had. The last frost date is April 15th. I have it marked on my calendar. I dream of digging in the soil with my bare hands, feeding new chicks, milking goats, serving the family the fruits of my garden labors, but to pass the time I am planning the kitchen remodel, planning the bathroom remodel and dreaming of the swimming pool we are putting in "for the kids." Yes, it is "for the kids!" - I keep telling myself. I am trying every day to restore my site to its once bulgingly full and daily posted blog past. One day I know I will get there. Answers to Counting Sheep Blog Chocolate or Vanilla? Dark bittersweet choclate, I prefer Belgian. Vanilla icecream, yogurt, custard, creme, etc. Foreign or Domestic? Domestic, I buy American. However, American beer sucks - I buy foreign beer. Standard or Automatic? Both, my Explorer is Auto, the Mustang is Standard. I grew up on a farm with both. No preference. Laptop or Desktop? We have 9 machines in this house. I have 2 desktops, 1 windows OS, 1 Linux OS, when I am lazy on the couch, I have the laptop, like right now! Arthouse or Mainstream? Both Gin or Vodka? Gin, because I have a damson orchard. I want to make my own slow gin. Cotton or Silk? Cotton. I love the feel of combed cotton, comfy t-shirts and sheets ... silk sheets - your ass will slide right off at the most inopportune time! Comforter or Duvet? I have a luxurious down comforter and feather bed, both are in battenburg duvet covers to protect them. Down or Synthetic? Down! Medium weight, please! Film or Digital? Digital. We have an Olympus. I want a new camera. My husband asks, "Why?" I answer, "Because." Peanut Butter or Nutella? Peanutbutter, unless I have sinful choclate to have with the nutella. White or Wheat? I buy both weekly. Sometimes I mix the sandwiches I serve the family. White on 1 side, wheat on the other. Or black rye or pumpernickle or sourbdough or ... I love bread! Chinese or Thai? Chinese mostly, cantonese style. But I prefer Thai when I am in southern California. Sushi or Sashimi? Sushi. My husband made me sushi for Valentine's Day. He makes GREAT sushi. Salty or Sweet? Both. I love the saltiness of chips and crackers. I love the sweet of the filling for eclairs, barvarian style. Comfort or Fashion? Comfort. I am 38, fashion be damned. Ocean or Lake? Lake, I love to fish. I prefer freshwater fish. However the sea produces my favorite of all time, shrimp. Warm or Cold? Warm weather. Cold tea. Standard white headphones or alternative?Standard black. Coffee or Tea? Coffee in the morning. Iced Tea the rest of the day. Iced tea is the house wine of the south. Tap or bottled? Tap. Our well is the original on the farm, hand dug, stone lined. Pure water. No chemicals. Blonde or Brunette? I am brunette. I was born blonde but it only lasted a few months. I prefer dark haired men. Summer or Winter?S ummer. Spring or Fall? Spring. Money or Time? I need time to make money! Posted by Angie at 03:58 PM | Comments (1)

April 03, 2005 I Married The Absent Minded Professor My husband has started a blog. I did encourage him and am very glad he found the motivation and followed suit. I think the comment I made was along the lines of: "You should start a blog." "Why?" "Just because," pause, "you don't really do any of the average things most geeks do," followed by laughter. A couple days later he surprised me when I found him making an entry in a blogspot account. "Why are you using blogspot?" "I thought it might be interesting to write about things, repairs to the buildings and things we discover about old houses. Someone might be interested." "I think it is a great idea. But why don't you just install Movable Type on your website?" "What website? I have a website?" "The one I paid for as your Thanksgiving present..." "Oh ... where is it?" Followed by my search for all the account info. Somedays I feel as if I am actually married to The Absent Minded Professor. He can be so smart, yet so dumb at the same time! Actually installing Movable Type and getting it to work was another thing. He wanted to use SSH and had to use Leech to upload all the files, which is far below his standards. He is CommandLineGuy with no time for other ways of accomplishing the same result. I know HE was frustrated with ME! He ended up deleting everything he had uploaded and started all over again with my "guidance". I think he is so accustomed to development he just skims through things and doesn't follow instructions. It took a not-so-geeky-girl approach to get him up and running. Anywho, back to the purpose of this post... I love to read what he writes. It doesn't make any difference what the subject is. I like hearing the voice of his writing. I like the way he chooses his words. I like his style. I like discovering the little things he doesn't always say out loud. I like reading the small details of his plans for our farm and outbuildings. I like his humor, dry at times, geeky, too, and sometimes grade school boyish. How his brain works is completely sexy. Posted by Angie at 04:11 AM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2005 Yes, Dear "I am thinking about buying an Apple iBook." A look of total horror slides across Steven's face, "Why?" "Just kidding! I am thinking about a ThinkPad..." Horror is replaced with a dumbfounded look, "Why?" "When I say I am thinking about buying something instead of asking 'Why?' and making me justify my wants/needs the answer is always going to be, 'Because.' OK?" "Yes, Dear." Posted by Angie at 06:22 AM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2005 Our Kids Are Not Funny If any of you don't know today was April Fool's Day. The two youngest came downstairs bright and early and said, "We are giving you a diamond pin." I looked up from where I was busily trying to read the blogs I didn't get to read the night before and said, "That's nice. Thank You." Knowing these two not funny little people were up to something. A box is extended and it is open in the "ta da" fashion and inside is a dime and a pin. They laugh and laugh in that 'get it? get it?' kind of humor that only kids should try at any given time. The rest of the day is spent trying to find a way to 'get' Dad when he comes home. It is all goofy, hokey stuff that is not even remotely funny, but you can't tell them that. When Steven comes home he is bombarded with reasons he should put his hat on. Like I had warned he was not interested in putting on his hat ... his John Deere cap. So the 7 and 9 year olds keep trying to get him to put it on thinking in their delight of trying to pull the world's best April Fool that he won't notice the wad of stuff they have placed in his cap and believing that on this one day gravity ceases to exist and the said wad of stuff won't fall out. I am a very bad mother. I have raised children who are not the least bit funny ... but they THINK they are. Actually, maybe I am a great mother because I have raised children who believe that on any given day ANYTHING is possible. Yahhhh me! Posted by Angie at 06:27 AM | Comments (0)