Yes, my mother was right and trying to make the fabled pointsettia bloom a second year was not worth the time. Here (right) is the only real red half-flower. 
I read a feature in the Strib a couple weeks ago about creating beautiful autumnal windowboxes. I bought some pinecones as suggested but balked at paying for such additions as peacock feathers, which were expensive even at Michael's. Unfortunately, even with the bottom of the boxes stuffed with plastic bags to take up space, the effect looked skimpy. I was just thinking about the need to cut down some dead rudbeckia when a light bulb went off over my head--why not engage in a little crop rotation? (as my brother-in-law Mark said about growing a beard when going bald) So I added dead stuff from the front of the yard and voila! Not quite peacock feathers, but times are hard.
First a disclaimer for Liv: these fortune cookies came with our cheap chow mein from Dragon City Cafe, not from a restaurant meal.
I noticed that our baby (the pointsettia that I take out of the closet every morning and Joel moves back into the dark every evening) has one leaf that is turning red! Will it all turn perfectly in time for Christmas? Or too soon or too late? Stayed tuned!
I sent this photo in to the New York Times a few minutes ago. We'll see if they think it fits their feature of photos of election day around the nation. A neighbor who lives very near our polling place puts this sign up on election days. He's kind of our Bill Ayers.My 85-year-old mother is working as an election judge for the last time (or so she says) and my 21-year-old daughter is working as an election judge for the first time. I am not knocking on doors today, but we did drop off four loaves of homemade pumpkin and apple bread for the DFL GOTV workers this morning, and I did help put their packets together.
I had planned to write a prize-winning essay about American URBAN values after Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech when she said, “A writer observed: ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity’” (the “writer” being Westbrook Pegler, an anti-Semite and proponent of assassinating FDR and Robert Kennedy). I got sidetracked from writing and since then have read two good columns on this topic, one by the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman and one by the L.A. Time's Rosa Brooks.
I managed to keep our cheap Christmas pointsettia alive until spring, when I planted it in the garden. It provided green filler for an empty space. Now I am going to try to get it to bloom for Christmas 2008 by following instructions on the Internet. It requires TOTAL darkness for 14 hours every day (many warnings about not letting even a moonbeam touch it) and 6-8 hours of bright sunlight. Unfortunately, the plant has grown into a monster, albeit a healthy and well-shaped monster. Today Joel and I managed to get it into a pot and upstairs, where we will slide it in and out of Liv's old closet twice daily, using an old towel to protect the floor. Sound like more trouble than it's worth?? Think we'll remember our duties every day???
My name is Teresa and I have a Greek yogurt addiction. 
As Joel and I drove to Madison last weekend, we began to muse about water towers; specifically, how it could be cost effective to pump water up just to be able to use gravity to distribute it. Why it took us over 50 years to consider this, I don't know. Joel pretty much guessed the answer:
It's been a while since I posted anything, but I have some valid excuses. Joel and I were very involved with "Bye-Bye, Birdie" last week, spending every night in South Saint Paul. The play ended on Saturday night and on Sunday night we had about 45 Lex-Ham band members/family/friends over to our house for a BBQ picnic and rehearsal (in our garage). Then Monday morning we left for a 4 day trip to Crow Wing State Park and Pequot Lakes. We highly recommend the Paul Bunyan State Bike Trail which runs from Brainard to Bemidji. You can see it wasn't overly crowded!
Obviously, I am not a charter member of the Minnesota Taxpayer's League. I agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes , Jr., that "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society" (for an interesting website on this subject, visit Government is Good). This summer I've been enjoying many things my taxes have helped build and maintain. With members of my family and alone, I have biked to and around Lake Como and visited the zoo and conservatory multiple times. Here's a photo from the new seasonal butterfly house.
Well, I've started my 2008 State Fair crop art entry. I always plan my outline fairly carefully, but then fly by the seat (seed?) of my pants in terms of filling in with color and texture. To make a long story short, I probably should have planned more carefully. The categories are so specific (one has to have all the surface covered with natural seeds, one has to have all the surface covered but 30% of the seeds can be dyed or painted, one can have 30% of the background painted but the seeds have to be natural, 20% of the total can be processed crops like Cream of Wheat, etc., etc.) so it's easy to do something out of compliance. The good news is, I finally found a great quote today on the Internet (yes, I have been working on this for days without having any idea of the spacing needed for the words--this is an example of my sloppy approach).
My new, expensive, circular knitting needles broke in the middle of my vest project! I managed to recover all my stiches on an extra needle, but now I have to figure out how to transfer these 240 stiches to my new, cheap, circular knitting needles.
When replacing some vinyl flooring upstairs, we had to decide whether or not to keep the ugly old kitchen sink (from an earlier era when the upstairs was an illegal apartment). Norris said its enamel finish made it vintage and we shouldn’t jettison it—then when we kept it, he said, “You kept that hideous thing?!” But after 29 years, it has paid off. We haven’t been able to use our kitchen sink this week because of a broken sewer pipe under our basement floor. But we have a spare! Of course, we do have to carry all the dishes up and down a flight of stairs, but the view is nice.
I recently started knitting a vest for my son based on a pattern in the newly released Son of Stitch ‘n Bitch book. Not that Norris needed any more clothes, or I needed any more projects-- I thought it would be a learning experience, given that it required both knitting in the round and using multiple strand Fair Isle technique.
Time to write something again? This blogging is kinda a drag!
An Unexpected Twist story...
I have always been tickled when someone behaves differently than expected (at least differently that I expected them to act, based on superficial traits such as age, profession, etc.) These examples just go to show that human beings are complex, and not as easily pigeonholed as we sometimes think. So, here's a very recent illustration...
Last night Joel and I attended the touring production of “My Fair Lady” at the Orpheum Theatre. Being cheap, I had ordered the least expensive seats which turned out to be in the last row of the second balcony. A diminutive older lady followed us as we ascended to the heavens, and as we searched for our seats she pleadingly held out her ticket for us to decipher as she was afraid of heights and feeling too dizzy to read the small print. After we all sat down, I politely said, “This is high up, all right!” to cover any possible embarrassment on her part. But she obviously had regained her spunk, for she responded, “I’ve sat higher up before—at a Prince concert at the Target Center.” I thought perhaps I had misheard her, but she went on about seeing him close-up (second row) another time, which was thrilling, and how you could see then how small he was (she added, “But I think he’s taller than I am.”) At that point, the usher yelled up that we could all move down to any open seats, so we lost sight of our new friend.
A grey-haired New Power Generation?
