Luke and I moved a couple miles north, to an apartment where my friend Barbara used to live. It's big and bright, and surrounded by rose bushes. I'm excited to have an apartment where I can do some home remedy projects to make it look more like ours. I'll be posting before and after photos as I get stuff done around here. Right now the only room that is pretty much done is the kitchen, and with it's shockingly-yellow walls, it's my favorite room in the house:

It reminds me of a kitchen an old Mexican lady would have.

Look at that! Built-in cutting board counter, a feature I love.

 

Plus, there are nice shelves where for all my tea stuff.

 And Luke doesn't mind when I announce things like "In our new house, we arrange dishes by color!"

 

 

Aside from the kitchen, I hope this place starts looking different this summer. (So that you know what to totally look forward to and so that I have a list that isn't on a scrap of paper that will sit in the bottom of my purse for a while until I lose it) In the next couple months I plan to:

- Find some cheap lamps, make them look like they weren't cheap.

- Paint the bedroom (did you know paint costs, like, thirty dollars a gallon?! I had no idea! Yikes!)

- Paint the entryway

- Make an end table for the livingroom 

- Make a bench for the entryway (install some hooks?)

- Sand and refinish the patio

- Make rose petal jelly (as if we need any more jams or jellies. But I can't help myself).

- Make a headboard for our bed.

- Make a bedside table for Luke

Ooo-eee ooo-ah-ah, ting tang Walla-walla bing-bang

A few weeks back,* Luke told me that if he lived in the middle ages, he'd want to be the village baker. He likes the idea of waking up in the wee hours of the morning to bake big loaves in a stone oven. When he lived in Guatemala, there was a baker in one of the towns that was a good example of what he has in mind: a fat man with strong arms and a big laugh.

*On a side note: I have no concept of time. Anything that was longer than a week ago is "a few weeks back." It could've been two weeks, it could've been six months. I don't know.*

When he asked me what I would be, my first thought was of taking the job of midwife. But I should leave that to someone who actually likes birth, and not just the idea of liking it. The job I would really choose is the herbalist/medicine woman/witch doctor. I like learning about herbs and plants and mushrooms- edible things that can be foraged, medicinal properties, etc. It would be fun to have a job of it (and if I was the baker's wife we could combine the two and give medicinal breads).

For my friend Drew's birthday I got to play medicine woman, and made him some tinctures. It was fun to research which herbs I wanted to use, which medicinal properties they had, etc. I ended up making a St.John's Wort tincture for mood elevation; nettle tincture for colds and hay fever; and a sleep tincture using chamomile, spearmint, lavender greens, and lemon balm.

 

 

As I do any time I want something to have a cute label, I asked Luke to do it.

Also for his birthday I finished his Christmas present that I never gave him. It's a magic bag. It can hold his tinctures, stuff for reiki sessions, books on shamanism, whatever. The front of the gray linen bag is embroidered with wheels ("chakra" means "wheel") with the corresponding color and number of spokes for each chakra. The crown chakra is represented by a lavender lotus (just to make it more interesting and because I was not about to embroider 960 spokes). This was a fun project. Though I don't believe in chakras the same way Drew does, it was fun to learn about them and the ideology behind taking care of them. And it seems like something a witch doctor should make, right?

Sewing, take two.

Yesterday I spent a really lovely rainy afternoon listening to music, drinking iced green tea, and re-teaching myself to sew. I was working with a rainy-day gray linen and looking-forward-to-sunshine yellow eyelet, and it was perfect. Kind of. I talked to the sewing machine, the needle, and the fabric when, at various times, they all refused to do what I wanted them to. I yelled at nothing in particular when the tension would get messed up and there'd be a big knotted mess of thread, but then fixed without me knowing what I'd done to fix it. There was a huge pile of strings next to me when I finished.

 

But the first project turned out- better than I expected, even- and I was encouraged enough to start a second, a skirt for my sister-in-law's wedding on Saturday. Fast forward three hours, and I had to quit and go to bed, because I had a I had a boxy apron instead of a springy skirt, like I'd hoped. The longer I worked, the more frustrated I got and the less I knew what to do to fix it. I'm hoping that with a day of separation I'll be able to look at it anew, and won't have to go buy a skirt last minute.

Happy Easter!

I'm going to go ahead and name this the best Easter I've ever had. Luke and I have decided that Easter is the holiday we do together at home, rather than spending it at one of our family's houses. Last year was our first one, and this year we outdid ourselves. We planned a lovely meal of:

salmon with a mustard herb sauce,

 

red potatoes with bacon, blue cheese, and green onions,

.

and roasted balsamic asparagus with poached eggs.

After lunch we went to a AAA baseball game.  I love baseball, and this was a good game- the Bees beat Tacoma 10-5.

And now we're ending our night with a pizza party and You've Got Mail. A perfect Easter. Hope yours was, too.