ramblings

  • February 15, 2025

    Garden Thoughts…

    By kit chase

    Winter has finally come to SoCal—and if you happen to live in a place that has real winters, go ahead and give a patronizing chuckle about now. Ok, so our winters look more like an early spring. At any rate, that would explain why my thoughts and greenish thumbs are trending towards planning that garden I goaled about back on New Year’s.  

    I have plans to overhaul the entire backyard and fill it with raised garden boxes and year round producing produce, but I’ll probably start with a handful of boxes for now. And I could take a before pic before I start, but I really don’t like taking pictures of things I can’t endorse, and I definitely can’t endorse the current state of my rain-soggy, weed-friendly, neglected yard.

    Just for fun, here’s my wish list of garden growers I’ve been compiling, in no particular order:

    Tomatoes (looking at you, Brandywines, Romas, and cherries)

    Basil, rosemary, cilantro, oregano, and a bunch of other herbs I’ll probably remember tomorrow

    Zucchini 

    Salad stuffs

    Pumpkins

    Strawberries

    Blackberries

    Raspberries

    Blueberries

    Massive floral cutting garden-zinnias and cosmos and lavender are what’s coming to mind at the moment, but there’s about 35 different flowers I’ve been meaning to plant. I need to go find my flower books…  

    And that’s it for right now. I’m sure I’ll come up with more after I get these planted only to find out I missed the optimal planting time, but hey there’s always next year. 

  • January 23, 2025

    Open Road

    By kit chase

     

    Confession: mountain biking brings out the Toad (from The Wind in the Willows) in me: “the open road, the dusty highway—Travel! Change! Excitement!”

    The whirring and feel of the gravel under the tires, the shrieking whoops of the kids riding down a steep decline, rolling hills and skylines floating by in waves of greens and browns and blues, and the smell of the dirt and dry grass, it’s a pretty magical experience. Heh except for when you pass the occasional desert squash, and then there’s the fleeting horror-filled moment of “what the—is that me???” If you haven’t smelled desert squash, you can get a good idea of what it smells like if you go without deodorant for a few days, onions and burgers is putting it mildly.

    I will say though, it can be and has been a bit on the nerve-wracking side too. Packing seven bikes into the back of a van is no joke, not to mention making sure tires are filled and brakes are intact, on top of the regular, getting-out-the-door ritual of finding shoes and locating jackets. And then there’s the ever lingering worry of flats, falls, and rattlesnakes. The adventure starts long before leaving the house.

    The kids and I started biking a few years ago, and it was eye opening to realize that those paths I had seen snaking across the hills along the freeways for years were actual, rideable trails, leading to hill tops and landscapes I thought existed only in my imaginings of faraway places. One of these days, most likely when I’m old and gray, I’m going to take my bike and watercolors and run away to the hills and take up an hermitic existence as a mountain biking, plein air painter.  The end.  



     

  • December 31, 2024

    Welcome, 2025!

    By kit chase

     

    Hello, January! And hello, 2025!

    I feel like January is quite the contrast to December’s whirl of holidays and merrymaking. It’s like the old year’s growth and excess gets plowed over, trimmed out, and cleaned up, and the new year is quiet and waiting for the germination of new ideas, adventures, and experiences.

    I know New Year’s resolutions are considered a thing of the past, but I really enjoy the process of trying to catch a vision of where I want to be a year from now.  Maybe the goals I make won’t end up turning out the way I had hoped at the beginning of the journey—kinda like that picturesque family meal that unfailingly turns out looking more like a small bomb detonated somewhere between the soup and the sandwiches-but I just might end up a little closer to realizing that vision than when I started.


    So just for fun, here’s some of the goals I’m setting out to accomplish for 2025:

    *write and work this blog consistently (I know,  dream the impossible dream, right?)

     

    *learn to play the guitar

    *plant and maintain a vegetable garden (2020’s garden had me thinking all ten of my digits were green but the past four years have seen a definite downward trend)

    *Go on more bike rides

    *learn how to make different types of bread (hello, ciabatta and como) and maybe even try to jump back on the sourdough train again-feeding that starter though is like raising a small child, needy and starving 24/7.

    *go on a camping trip (confession: I have only been camping twice in my life)

    *mayyyyyyybe learn how to surf (nothing like embarrassing teenage children) 


    We’ll see how far I actually get in making these things happen, but at this point, it’s fun to dream.

     

    Happy New Year, 2025!
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