the knee bone's connected to the...

Cabin fever!  I've been apartment-bound for almost a week.  I strained my quad at the gym and, since walking was painful and ill-advised, spent several days with my leg propped up, anxiously prodding it for sore spots. A few weeks ago, I'd signed up for an adult dance class that started this week and I hated to miss, so when I'd passed from sore to tender, decided to take the risk of going.  Bad idea.  A fascinating (and painful) anatomy lesson:  one of the jobs of your quad is to keep your kneecap in place. If your quad is compromised, your kneecap is at a much greater risk of sliding all over the place injury, especially if you are doing a lot of jumping.  By the end of class, my quad felt fine, but my knee was agonizingly pained.  Two more days of healing later and I'm pacing the apartment, looking outside (sunny and 75 degrees), and trying to keep myself occupied.  At least the cats are entertaining.  I bought this hammock-like contraption that hooks onto any window...

It holds up to 50 pounds, and the Amazon review page shows delightful customer photos of two cats curled together in the hammock.

So far, the cats have politely taken turns, but I'd love to catch a cuddle!

I'm a terrible invalid.  I've greatly missed our daily walks.

Just last week (the night before the injury), we had a wonderful one, seeing some chattering crows...

...and even a barred owl in the woods.

I'm hoping to, at the very least, resume the daily walk tomorrow.  Meanwhile, I've had a lot of time to plan the remodel on the house we're hoping to get.  My room-by-room analysis has been challenging and time-consuming, two absolutely welcomed characteristics this week.

-Rip up the carpet and put down light-colored bamboo flooring.
-Remove all pendant ceiling lights and fan and install recessed lighting.
-Paint walls (including paneling) Benjamin Moore Paper White.
-Paint bookcase Benjamin Moore Pale Smoke. 

Etc., etc.

If we do get the house (which we're hoping to know for sure by this time next week at the latest), we will be ready!

Have a great week!

Egg-straordinary!

Finally...finally!...I settled on a color for my office.  It's called Betsy Ross House Moss, and it's a light olive color.  I love it.  It felt so good to paint over all those sample colors!

Now my office is completely done, except for a few pictures I haven't hung.  So here it is:  first, my work station, which has a lovely view of the woods and the pond.  The two tables make an "L" and give me lots of space for both work and crafts.

The green is not as bright as it looks here, but you can see my 'craft corner' (binders, acrylic rubber stamps, paper punches, glitter, glue, blank cards, embroidery and embossing supplies, etc., etc.).

This is my knitting space.  The tall cabinet holds my yarn, and I've got supplies on both shelves of the little table, formerly an IKEA kitchen island.  My yarn winder is attached to the corner, and the chair - also from IKEA - is my favorite knitting spot.

Another craft corner view (again, the walls are not pea-green like they appear here...they're more olive and very muted):

This table is just to the left of my work station.  It holds my sewing machine and supplies, and beneath it I have my fabric organized by pattern.  The white cabinet holds a TON of patterned construction paper, and the structure on the wall, which is a bit hard to see here, holds my rubber stamps.

Finally, my favorite art - three pages from a 1920s children's book, each depicting a different insect (or arachnid):

LOVE!

Although we've been busy, it's been very peaceful here.

Still seeing lots of wildlife, like this barred owl.

The geese have returned to our pond, and they make a pretty picture on the water.

We stopped by the local farmer's market this weekend and picked up some fresh eggs.  I love the different colors!

Speaking of eggs, I was cutting invasive vines out of our berry bushes this weekend when I spotted an abandoned bird nest.  I knew it was abandoned because it contained one empty eggshell and one half-empty one with a deceased chick inside. 

I sterilized the nest with a bleach solution and attempted to boil out those egg fragments to clean them.  Boiling rotten eggs does not make a pleasant smell, and I'm afraid the dead-chick egg had to be tossed.  The other was able to be cleaned and placed back in the nest.  I am building a collection of bird nests and have them displayed on a table in our front living room.  That space isn't quite done, but I'll post a picture when it is.

I've been baking a lot.  This peach-blueberry pie was amazing.

I made challah for the first time, too.  It's an annoying dough...sweet egg bread is, for me, the most difficult to get a good rise out of.  After two rises, you spit the dough into two unequal parts - say, 1/3 and 2/3 - and braid them.  You then stack the braids and give it another rise.

To give it that dark finished look, it gets a very generous brushing with egg white and water.  Then, voila!

It reminds me again not to be afraid to tackle a baking project.  It's just one foot in front of the other to get to the finish line!  Full recipe and fantastic step-by-step directions can be found at Bakingdom.

Have a great week!

All Creatures Great and Small

We have our 'indoor creatures':

But there's been a remarkable amount of wildlife around our property, outside, too.  Just this afternoon, I spotted a red fox trotting down by our fireplace.  Yesterday, I saw a barred owl there.  At first, I thought he was injured, because he was flattened out on the ground.

Soon he raised up and hopped a bit...

I don't know exactly what he was doing...hunting?  resting?  Regardless, he flew away shortly thereafter.  I'm very fond of our barred owls and hear them hooting in the woods almost daily.  They have the delightful call of "Who cooks for you?  Who cooks for you?"  You can hear it here. 

Of course, since we live by the woods, we have lots of deer.

Lots of very tame deer who don't mind if you get quite close.

Sometimes we hear them barking/screaming in the woods at night.  It's the noise they make when they feel threatened.  Creepy! 

I startled this little guy in the front garden - a Fowler's Toad.

This one, too:  a harvestman, partially hidden by a leaf:

Overturn a few rocks here, and there's a good chance you'll see Greenhouse Millipedes.  Heck, we even find them in our bathroom from time to time!  They love moist, dark places.  

During another trip to the garden, I noticed what seemed to be a walking piece of fluff.

I looked closer and then gave the end a gentle pinch so I could take a photo for later identification.

He scurried away, and I got to work figuring out his identity.  Turns out he's a lacewing larva, and an absolutely fascinating creature!  In a real case of "wolf in sheep's clothing", the lacewing larva will pile debris on its back in order to sneak closer to prey (mainly aphids) undetected by aphids or their protector, the ant (ants and aphids have a symbiotic relationship.  Aphids produce food for ants, and ants protect aphids from predators).  This larva, covered by a bit of fluff, is looking for an aphid colony to infiltrate.  Impressive!

I don't have to go much beyond my front door to find insects.  The door is recessed, a type of alcove, and all sorts of insects cling to the walls in the protected space.  Last week I saw a curiously shiny spider there, and, after doing some research, realized that it was a black widow spider.

 

We've all heard about female black widows - venom 15 times more toxic than that of a rattlesnake, aggressive, cannibalistic.  Well, this is a male, and while those two round orbs on top of his head are 'biting mechanisms', they rarely bite and are not aggressive.  They are much smaller than the females.

A lightning bug is caught in a nearby web:

Between the spiders, the webs, and the prey, you can see why I have to clean this area so frequently!

I had a large insect collection as a child.  I caught them, put them in a jar with a rubbing alcohol-soaked cotton ball, and pinned them to a framed board.  I haven't started another one, even though I'm still so interested in insects.  I feel guilty snatching them from the wild for my own purposes, even though I know I shouldn't.  To combat this guilt, I decided to order some insects that were raised for the express purpose of display.  With my shadow box and a carefully-cut piece of foam core, I was ready!  First I laid out the specimens in different ways to determine what order they'd be pinned in.

 Next, I typed out their Latin names and did another sample layout:

I didn't have any entomology pins, but I did have ones for sewing.  Now, apparently different insects are pinned through different parts of the body, but I wasn't that particular here.

Inserted into shadow box frame and done!

Going with my theme, I also bought some pages from a vintage children's book that feature insects in the drawings.  Love!  I hope to get them framed in the next week or so. 

Keep your eyes open when you go outside...who knows what little creatures you'll see!

Have a great week!

Fog-et About It

We never had much fog in Indiana, so I was thrilled the other morning when I glanced up from my morning cereal and saw this:

I left my Raisin Bran to get soggy and rushed outside.

My understanding is that fog forms with rapid cooling and high humidity, but this was actually somehow the result of a cool night and rapidly warming temperatures.  Wait, is that the same thing?  :)

It was a great day.  I went outside and gathered up more flowers.

I'm so in love with Helleborus.

I made bouquets for the bedroom...

And, with the shorter flowers, a long piece of tape to give them stability, and a square, Crate and Barrel-knockoff vase I found at Goodwill, I made a little bouquet for the dining room.

I just love having bulbs on the table.  It makes every day feel more spring-like, even cold, windy ones like today.

Last year, I remember going to Eagle Creek with Todd and seeing something new every week.  First the undergrowth started greening up, then we started seeing early spring flowers like trilliums and mayapple stems, and then the Virginia Bluebells started coming up...well, we don't have a hiking place yet here, so I am making careful observations in our yard.

More bulbs!  This, I think, is a hyacinth.

The snowflake flowers are blooming endlessly.

The crocuses are coming up, too!

We have several azalea bushes, and a few of them are tentatively budding out.  Just one or two flowers can be seen so far.

I think we have several white azalea bushes, too, that look ready to go:

Suddenly, some sort of tiny sedum is growing around the low rock wall behind the house.

And,  a mystery groundcover is pushing up over the leaves.

I was very glad to find this in the front yard:

It's a wild turkey feather.  I used to see the turkeys almost daily in the fall, but have only seen them a handful of times since Christmas.  This feather tells me that they may be roosting in our trees at night, which they tend to do to avoid predators.  Just because we can't see them, doesn't mean that they aren't there!

I wasn't so happy to find this in the yard:

I'm nearly certain that this hole was made by a chipmunk, which can devastate a garden.  I'll have to keep an eye on this area.

This wide, flat rock shows me that probably a squirrel, or perhaps a chipmunk, was eating here recently.

I was pleased to see this puffball mushroom in the yard, too.  I think they're so pretty.

Supposedly most puffballs are safe to eat, depending on the color of their insides.  However, I'm much too afraid to risk it!

I've been hearing a lot of hooting lately, but was unable to catch a glimpse of the owl. 

Mystery hooting

Using online sources, I was able to narrow it down to either a Barred Owl or a Great Horned Owl.  The other evening I was out in the yard, and happened to look up.  I saw two owls in a tree above my head, mating!  I rushed to get my camera.  Alas, I just got a quick, blurry shot of one of them.

Actually, this was incredibly helpful in solving the owl identity mystery.  These owls had smooth, rounded heads, and Great Horned Owls have big tufts of feathers on either side of their head.  Mystery solved:  they're Barred Owls.

I love these little trips around my yard.  Each time, it seems like there's something new!

I've been working on a few projects indoors.  I'm knitting a pair of mittens that I've started many times, only to put away.  Using size 1 needles and worsted weight yarn makes my wrists ache, but if I can just get past the cuffs, I think it will be better.

A quick sewing project:  I found a pretty tea towel in the discount bin at IKEA for $2.

I folded it over, stitched around the edges, and stuffed it with some stuffing that I already had.  Two dollars for a cute and easy throw pillow?  Not bad!

I haven't done too much new baking, but I've been revisiting some old recipes.  I couldn't believe how long it's been since I made a pumpkin roll.

They're easy to make and this is a "healthy" version.  I blogged about it here, but I think this one is even better.  I left out the lemon juice...added 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, cardamon, and nutmeg, and 1/4 teaspoon of cloves and ginger, instead of the pumpkin pie spice...I used 8 oz. of neufchatel cheese and NO yogurt, sour cream, or crystallized ginger, and gave the filling a good dash of cinnamon.  Otherwise, it's the same.  Hey, I even used the same towel!  I hope you give it a try.  It was SUCH a nice treat this week.

Enjoy!