Zooey on TV

Zooey Deschanel has been in my top 5 girl crushes since Elf (and have you HEARD She & Him?!?) Which is why now, when I am absolutely zombie-tired and ought to be dragging myself to bed, I am instead blogging about a very exciting thing I just learned: she's in a new show this fall! The trailer below actually makes the show look really terrible, but I will watch it anyway. Because I watch tons of really terrible TV, and at least this will be really terrible TV starring Zooey. (Sorry for the reeeeeeally long and stupid ad before this video.)



Love (and goodnight),
J

PS ~ In case you haven't heard She & Him...



And one more, this one also starring one of my top boy crushes:

Art for the Animals Submissions

If you make it to Art for the Animals this Friday, here's a little bit of what you'll see:

This sweater was made & donated by my lovely grandma

I suspect there will also be a lot of serious art there, so we definitely have our bases covered - something for everyone!

Love, J

Purple potatoes

I pulled this from the garden yesterday morning:


See the four tiny potatoes at the bottom, next to the funny carrot? This is my first year growing potatoes, and yesterday was the first time I tried to pick some. They were so small, I knew I'd have to wait a while to pick any more.

But as I worked in the garden, the potato plants called to me. It's so fun to root around in the dirt, searching them out with my grubby little hands. I had to go back and try once more.

And I found some! Still not huge, but a respectable bounty. Enough for my lunch and an afternoon snack for the hubs, certainly.


The real pleasure in these is their beauty. Taste-wise they're okay, though I prefer the sweetness of new baby reds. But man these purple guys are gorgeous, and colored all the way through.

My first garden potato bake:

Cubed potatoes
Chives
Black pepper
Two large garlic cloves, sliced
Drizzle with olive oil
(taken from jar of preserved garlic eggplants - oh, my - more on that later)

Cover and bake at 400 for 20 minutes. (This was the perfect amount of time for the two yellow potatoes, but probably 4 minutes or so too long for the purples; they got a tiny bit mushy.)

Serve over bed of snow peas.



Yum!

Love, J

Peas and lettuce and pumpkins

Altogether in one patch. I sort of thought the peas & lettuce would be fried from the heat and pulled out before the pumpkins really took off, but that's not how it's panning out. It will take a few years of trial and error before I figure out how to overlap crops!

This year we're trying Cinderella pumpkins, which I think are SO pretty. I hope we get at least a couple monster ones - I've never grown a really big pumpkin before.

I've been eating about a cucumber a day from the greenhouse for a couple weeks now, but they're slowing down. Maybe because they're in pots, I need to fertilize or add some sort of food? I'm contemplating a bunny-droppings-tea. (That sounds gross, but my garden books all swear by the concept, only usually with chicken poo.) Anyway I am SO glad we got the greenhouse up this year, because it was a rotten cold spring and I feel way spoiled with my early cukes. If I'd planted them outside, I don't think I'd have any ready yet!


The calendula are happy too. They're on my list of seeds to save this fall. I sort of overdid the seed buying this spring (nothing unusual there), and hope to get a system down this year where I only need to get packs of the hardest-to-save seeds each year, like greens and stuff.

I keep encountering little tomato and squash sprouts in the garden, where I let some of the fruits decay. If the seeds will volunteer and plant themselves like that, I'm hoping they'll do even better when I purposefully collect them and keep them safe over the winter!

Love, J

Misc. rabbit stuff

First here are a couple of my homemade bunnies, which will be included in a silent auction basket at Art for the Animals at the end of the month:



And then, here are some funny rabbit shots we've recently captured. They mark their territory by "chinning" stuff, and Lily is constantly rubbing her dainty little chin on everything she encounters.



And this was just lucky timing with Bread licking his nose; so cute.

Love, J

The Bean Biz

I have a new project going on, and it involves a lot of my favorite things:

*fresh, local produce
*fancy jars & labels
*craft fairs & farmer's markets
*not wearing pantyhose

My business license is set to arrive in the mail this week. The state's food processor requirements are pesky, to say the least, but I *believe* I will have muddled through them all in time to snag and jar some of this year's harvest. (Knock on wood!)

Love, J

* I really don't deserve to use this picture, because as soon as I heard the shutter click, I spun around and shrieked at the hubs for bothering me while I was in the middle of the water bath. The water bath makes me edgy. Sorry sweetie. (And thanks for the photo ; )

Funnies

More funny things found on Pinterest:

stumbleupon.com

reddit.com

This last one made me cry, I laughed so hard:

akwardfamilyphotos.com

Love, J