put one foot in front of the other...

Beautiful fog this week.

Amazing new life in the garden...I love to see green growth coming up out of the tangle of dead leaves.

Hello, old friends:  columbines and hostas.

Hello, bleeding hearts.

I bought a bunch of .25 bulbs at Walmart a few weeks ago and have planted them successively.  These blue irises, of course...

...but also these pretty little things, reminiscent of muscari, although I can't recall the name in the moment.

It was St. Patrick's Day last week, so besides the rainbow cookies, I baked some soda bread...and also made corned beef, cabbage, carrots and potatoes, and sprouts.

Tabitha approved.

I decorated with green banners and window clings.

We had a nice little party!  It's important to keep doing certain things, I think.  I try to do the things I normally do - celebrate holidays, plant spring bulbs, and enjoy the new growth - but I'm not fully present in the moment.  I suffer from anxiety on a good day - during these uncertain times, I'm really struggling with panic.  I know people who are sick with the virus.  I know people who have lost their jobs.  I go online for news and updates, but get frustrated with the (typical) lack of national leadership and the conflicting messages.  I get on Facebook to see how acquaintances are doing, and see a lot of the usual jumble of misinformation ("We enjoyed movie theatres too much, so God removed movie theatres!!"  "It's just the flu, people.  Calm down." "Stock up on your essential oils!  They help!!").  I'm also seeing a lot of positive things - people bonding with their families, playing games, hugging pets, sharing with neighbors.  It helps.

Personally, we're staying home.  We're working a lot.  We're reading.  We're watching a lot of distracting T.V. - and we are not necessarily practicing social distancing!

I'm just trying to enjoy the little things, keep our traditions going, and take a lot of deep breaths.

I think the British had it right during World War II:  "Keep Calm and [try to] Carry On." So I'm going to knit, sew, read, work, garden, watch trash T.V., and hope that things improve over the coming weeks.

Stay healthy, friends! 

Disembodied heads and rainbows, instead

Part of becoming ultra-organized and taking time to appreciate the little things includes making a bigger deal out of heretofore-ignored holidays.  So when St. Patrick's Day came around, I decided to go all out.

First, the cookies.  A simple batch of chocolate and vanilla, but you divide up the vanilla batch and color it.  Rainbow order, of course!

You then roll each color into a log, Play-Doh-style, and smash them together.  In hindsight, I wish I would've rolled each color out flat so the distribution would've been more even...more like a rainbow and less like a peacock feather or a creepy rainbow eyeball.

Encase the log in chocolate...

Refrigerate, then slice and bake.

See the creepy eyeball?  Oh, well.  The chocolate isn't very sweet, and the vanilla tasted almost like frosting.  Delicious!  Here's the recipe if you want to try it yourself.  

Moving on to decorations...I found this 4-leaf clover banner at a thrift store for a quarter.

Green placemats and napkins...green-tinted flowers (helleborus from the yard)...a green box to set the mini vase in...

...and green ribbons for the chairs.

We felt very festive eating our rainbow cookies here!  Time-wise, the cookies were made over 2 days. The slice-and-baking day was very quick.  The "greening" of the dining room was done amid shifting batches of cookies in and out of the oven, so the whole thing was done in 30 minutes.  Not a huge time investment for a lot of enjoyment!

Speaking of time investment, though, I'm ready to put a fork in Fancy Baking Day.  My March effort was a total bomb.  I tried to make a strawberry fraizier - a lemon chiffon layer cake with homemade almond paste, homemade pastry cream, and homemade whipped cream.  I took a morning off work to make it and it ended up taking over 4 hours in total, not counting the clean-up after (which was considerable).  My pastry cream was runny, I didn't have enough almond paste, and the thought of trying to stack and decorate it in the fancy way the example showed was too overwhelming at the end.  I did it my own sad, slanting way, with strawberries sliding in the wet pastry cream and big empty patches from the scarcity of whipped cream.

At least the taste was amazing.  But...NEVER AGAIN.

I've very slowly been working on a new quilt, but my heart hasn't been in it.  I'm not crazy about the scrap fabrics (by the way, those corner stars have been fixed and now align with the rest of the quilt), and my lack of enthusiasm affected my work, with sloppy joins and wonky seams.

I guess I'll go ahead and sew it together.  Maybe I'll be more inspired.

Here is the quilt on day 2.  I'd thought it would be fine on the floor overnight, but I underestimated the vigor of our cats!

Speaking of cats and quilts...they might love them more than I do.

We're back to the season of beautiful sunsets...

But alas, the warm and intermittently very cold days have decimated our azaleas.  They should be going full-bore until late April, but the blooms are all spent now.  I got one poor-quality picture of the two under our living room window last week...

...and have eked one last limp bouquet out of one of the front bushes.

The real disappointment is that my very favorite double-ruffled azaleas didn't even get a chance to open up before the frost got them.  No more until next year...sob!

I've got a few last camellia blossoms around, their blooms frequently toppling over and rolling around on the floor like disembodied heads.  I'm not ready to rely on dyed carnations from the grocery store yet...I went out and cut tons of helleborus.

Helleborus last FOREVER in vases - weeks! - but I just don't like them much.  Maybe the brevity of the other bouquets make them a little more special?  Whatever the reason, I'm just glad that I've got SOMETHING to enjoy!  And there's always next year!

At least Todd is in a good mood, despite our poor flower season.  ;)

Have a great week!