The blog will be pretty quiet this week, I’ll be out of town for work and then Jon and I have lots of fun plans: NFL game, decorating for the holidays, and enjoying this dark time of year– perfect for this cocktail and nights on the couch with a book.

(Image via Martha Stewart Living)

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Perhaps the World Ends Here
by Joy Harjo
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. [...]

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It’s nice, when the weather gets cold and the days are so dark, to reflect on the year behind us and the things in our life that bring us joy.  Today, a (short, incomplete) list of things I am thankful for this year:

Being lucky, in all sorts of ways;
Being employed at a job I love;
Being [...]

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We finally did it!  This weekend we brewed our first batch of beer.  It’s still fermenting, as we speak the wort is bubbling away in the fermenter.  At least, I think it’s called wort.  It has the yeast in it now, obviously, so perhaps it becomes something else?  Clearly I need to brush up on [...]

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Humph.  I had a great idea for my holiday cards this year– it was going to use my hip color palette and my new-found embroidery skills.  Sadly, it was not to be.  Embroidering text onto paper is a lot harder than I thought it would be.  In fact, I quickly realized that I could do [...]

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Since I’m *trying* to make the gifts I’m sending out to friends and family as well as the 40-something holiday cards I send out (some of which are no-doubt heading to people who read this blog), I’m going to keep mum about my plans for this fabric, paper, thread, and decor.  Just know two things: [...]

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“Relax, don’t worry, have a home brew” advises Charlie Papazian, writer of The Complete Joy of Home Brewing.  After weeks of talking a big game about how we were for sure going to be brewing our own beer we finally made the trek out to the middle-of-nowhere MD to pick up some supplies.  We were [...]

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Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
Robert Bly
It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.
from Silence in the [...]

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Just a quick hit today- the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, which I adore and have written about before, offers free desktop wallpapers for the philatelic fan.  I’ve got “Owney on a Mail Train” as my desktop background now (above).
Owney is one of my favorite postal history stories, you can watch a video about him at [...]

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This hardly counts as charity, the Red Cross is collecting holiday cards for American service members stationed overseas (and their families) this holiday season (thanks to Sara B. for  bringing this program to my attention). Whatever your feelings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d like to believe that we can all sympathize with [...]

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