smoke screen

Remember I was supposed to come back from my mini-vacation all tanked up and ready to shower you with my brilliance? yeah, well, it might not have happened. The vacation itself was great, and I got to visit two beloved friends, Julie in Oregon and Laurel in Seattle, who have put up with far more of my nonsense than I have any right to expect--Julie, for almost a decade now, and Laurel, since seventh grade. 

I returned home on Friday night and spent the weekend with Dean catching up on all my home-again things. Then tonight it got late and I had one of those moments of realization you sometimes have late at night and it occurred to me that for the past couple of months I've been using this blog as a means of avoidance. Avoidance: my spiritual gift.

If that isn't exactly clear, rest assured it isn't exactly clear to me, either. But it appears I need to prioritize some other things for the moment, so I'm taking some time off from blogging. I can't imagine it will be very long, but probably at least a month. You can email me (address: bnelson four seven seven at gmail dot com), or find me on Instagram at @bhnmt61 for real, or @bookspate for books.

7ToF: Fruit salad, fresh air, Burts Bees, and filling up

1. When we first moved to Montana 26 years ago, it seemed so exotic, like we were moving to the edge of the known world. It felt like a Real Adventure. Then we got here, and realized that there is an entire country north of us, a vast country, and we're nowhere near the edge of the world. Really it's astonishing how ignorant I was about Canada before we moved here.

2. But that's not the point I was going to make. Montana is gorgeous, and there are plenty of world class outdoor adventures available, but it is also pure Midwest. A small town in Montana is going to bear a remarkable similarity to any town anywhere in middle America. And that means that we do POTLUCKS. Often. When our church has a potluck, there is enough food to feed twice as many people as are there, and you can feel your arteries hardening just looking at the spread. I adore potlucks.

3. So after 26 years of experience with potlucks, I'm telling you that if you don't particularly like to cook, the answer is fruit salad. All you do is buy a bunch of fruit (apples, bananas, and grapes at a minimum) and cut it up, and everyone loves it. If they're not too outrageously expensive, throw in a pint of blueberries, or pomegranate seeds, or sliced strawberries. If it's February and all the fruit is sad looking, you can stir in some vanilla yogurt, but I usually just go with bare fruit, since after it sits for 30 minutes, it creates its own dressing with the fruit juices.

4. As a fruit salad aficionado, I've been intrigued recently to see a new development: fruit and veggie salads. Just like a regular fruit salad, except with chopped up carrots or halved snap peas or even bits of radish thrown in. It's great. I've had green salads with oranges or strawberries or blueberries plenty of times, so it makes reverse sense, I'd just never thought of it. Thumbs up.

5. There are lots of cool things about winter (XC skiing, alpine skiing, ice skating, fires in the fireplace, Christmas), but one of the things I don't like is having the house all closed up. I like fresh air. So we've still got windows open trying to get every last bit of non-frigid air before the cold sets in. The longer I live here, the harder it is to remember the good things about winter, especially since the last two winters have been truly harsh. I'm really working on not feeling a sense of dread that winter is inevitably closing in.

6. Is anybody else having post-menopause chapped lips? It started for me a few months ago, maybe back in May or June. Some days it's so bad that I have to put chapstick or vaseline on in the morning so I can get my mouth open. Dean told me the name for it, which of course I can't remember right now. He's got me using over-the-counter cortisone cream, which helps, but I'd really like it to just go away. If you have any advice let me know.

7. I'm a little bit proud that I have never, ever run out of gas. (excuse me while I stop and knock on wood.) So it was odd the night before last when I had a long, extended, very vivid dream about running out of gas. I was on an interstate, and hadn't even noticed that my tank was low. I realized I was completely out of gas as my car died. When I woke up, I was so distracted by the vividness of it and by bemusement at the fact that I ran out of gas that I missed the obvious dream interpretation at first. If I managed to schedule this correctly, as you're reading it, I'm on a quick trip to the west coast, so I hope that next week I will be all tanked up. Maybe I just need a few days away.

Have a great weekend!

7ToT: I'm on mini-vacation. *waves*

1. I read the first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, years ago. Now there is a whole series of of them, told in first person from the point of view of Flavia, a wildly precocious 11-year-old who solves mysteries using her wits, her trusty bicycle Gladys, and her great uncle's chemistry lab. I liked that first one OK, but I couldn't really connect with the voice of Flavia, so I never read any of the others. But recently I tried the audiobook, and the narrator is terrific. Finally understand why people think these are such great books.

2. Flavia does not get along with her sisters. They torment her unmercifully. Sometimes it amounts to outright torture. My first reaction was to be horrified at how awful her siblings were, but then I started remembering some of my own worst moments with my sisters. I have the best sisters on the planet, and as adults, we get along great. But we definitely had our moments growing up. I used to "cook" my younger sister in the oven as a game. The oven was totally imaginary, but I suspect a therapist would be only to happy to unpack that tangle of sibling rivalry issues. We spent hours playing that game. Did you play awful games with your siblings? How normal is this?

3. PellMel will not be home for Christmas for the first time ever. I've known that for quite awhile, but for some reason the implications just sank in this week. This is a heart wrencher. We are big on Christmas around here--not necessarily gifts, but we have a boatload of traditions, including specific movies to watch, the trip to get the tree, decorations to put up, special meals, music, and so on. *Ouch* We're trying to figure out a way we can get down there to celebrate some earlier weekend in December but everyone's schedule is complicated.

4. It's funny, we quit going back to Texas for Christmas more than 30 years ago, and I don't think I ever once thought that might be hard on my mother. So heartless.

5. I am still trying to keep a revolving door on the books, so that at least as many go out as come in. (spoiler alert: it's not working all that well. My most recent method for freeing up space for new books involved packing away old pre-digital photo albums rather than actually getting rid of books. Don't tell Marie Kondo.) I decided the easiest way to cull books right now would be to go through my cookbooks. I have a bunch, more than 40, which is a bit odd, because as we all know, I'm not much of a cook, and when I do cook, I don't usually follow a recipe. But for some strange reason, I looove to read cookbooks.

Some of my cookbooks. This is the stairwell down to our basement.

6. Also, I have several ancient cookbooks that I keep because of exactly one recipe. Those are actually hard to give up-- they are recipes I've used for years, and I know exactly where they are, because it's the wrinkly page in that cookbook. But really, it's ridiculous to keep an entire big fat cookbook for one recipe. So I made copies of those pages and off they went to our church bazaar. I did not cry.

7. But true confessions: then I bought a new one. I read a review of the new Better Homes & Gardens cookbook (titled, appropriately enough, New Cook Book, 17th edition) that intrigued me, so I ordered it. I'm surprised how much I like it. I tend to use cookbooks for ideas more than for actual instructions, and I've already seen a bunch of innovative ideas, in addition to all the old stand-bys. And also it has loads of beautiful photos. Thumbs up.

Hope you are having a good week.