This is my second Cinderella pumpkin. It’s smaller and less pancake shaped than its predecessor.
I am drying the seeds from the first pumpkin and saving them for next year.
Jill Doughtie
Doughtie is pronounced DOW-tea.
- Stewart & Brown’s mulberry lydia cocktail dress
- Red wellingtons and yellow clogs
- Hand knit tabi socks
Monday wishlist
Some day, I want to live in Kirkland.
I’d like to live right by the lake. There’s so much water there, and there are so many green things growing.
I like all of the new construction. I like how the coffee shops are full of people in the tech industry. I like the walkable downtown. I like the shops, especially promesse. I like Bombaii Cutters, where I got my first very short haircut. I like the restaurants, especially Trellis. I like the cocktails at The Slip.
I like balconies with lake views.
A condo in Kirkland by the lake
These are my new favorite vegan shoes.
They’re outdoor tabi. They’re made of cotton, and they have a thin rubber sole. They split between the big toe and the other four toes. They have virtually no support, which some people like, including me. I think it makes your foot work harder and develop muscles. When I wear them, I feel the ground I’m walking on.
They fasten with hooks and four rows of loops. You connect with the row of loops that fits you best at each hook, up to your mid calf.
I like to wear them under jeans, and I like to wear them with a black dress.
Several tabi styles, including violet tabi, at Jika-Tabi.com
Tabi
I just finished the fifth book of Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series. (The link is the the first book. The picture is of the fourth book. All of them end in cliff hangers, including the fifth book. The sixth book isn’t written yet.) I like them because they feel like historical fiction, science fiction and kick ass Joss-Whedon-style strong, interesting female protagonist fiction rolled into one.
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Paul Krugman calls them economic science fiction.
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What I’m reading now
North side of the front yard (View larger)
Here’s what the north half of the front yard looks like right now. The yard slopes down toward the sidewalk, I used the ground up palm tree root and soil to make berms to try to stop runnoff water. One runs along the sidewalk, and another one is about five feet up from the sidewalk. Then I mulched over the berms and the bare dirt — and about ten square feet of grass that I thought I’d just try covering instead of digging out.
South side of the front yard (View larger)
On the south side of the yard, I stopped pulling up grass entirely and just mulched right over it. When I did that in the back yard with a thick carpet of pine needles, most of the grass died. This is pear tree mulch — I don’t know if the pine needles were a special part of killing the grass so easily last time, or whether any mulch will do. I want to avoid buying and using plastic, and I don’t have lots of newspaper or cardboard handy to layer below the mulch, so I’m giving plain mulch a go.
These are the berms I made out of palm tree root and soil. They’re about half mulched over — mulching is on hold right now because of the brush fire up in La Canada and all of the smoke in the air.
Mulch report
We were exploring the Arroyo near the Aquatic Center, and I saw this scrap concrete used to make terraces and borders. I want to do something like this in my garden.
