Water the Flowers, Not the Weeds.

Quillebeuf, at the Mouth of Seine by William Turner

Moving back to Minnesota has inspired me to put down roots, metaphorically and physically. Having an investment in a place means a lot to me after our nomadic lifestyle. I've planted a garden for the first time this year, and I enjoyed including perennials that will take years to become truly established. My grandmother and aunt gave me transplants from their gardens, including a peony bush, a rhubarb plant that came from my great grandmother's farm in Austin Minnesota, and a pretty wisp of a white bleeding heart for the shade garden out front.

We've been here for about two years now, and I've enjoyed creating a life in Minneapolis far more than I expected. The satisfaction I feel has many sources, but one of the most enduring was a decision to focus on the positive and avoid complaints. It's that old saying- water the flowers, not the weeds.

I first learned to direct my thinking in Bikram class, where Mark, my teacher,  urged me to smile when I felt discomfort or frustration. He suggested breathing deeply and avoiding making grunting or groaning noises, which send the message from your mind to your body that you can't handle what you are experiencing. "Your mind gives up WAY before your body does," he said. I was amazed that I could stop grunting easily and that smiling really did make the postures more bearable- even fun. I became curious about other ways to create endurance and resilience in my mind and body.

Laughter Yoga embodies much of the same philosophy, but without the physical demands. Instead, you just need to a willingness to fake it, whether you feel like laughing or not. Mary, my teacher, says the idea is to practice making laughter your first response to frustration and discomfort to see how that shifts things.

When we moved back to Minnesota from Hawaii, I made a conscious choice to avoid complaining about the weather. Since griping about the weather is Minnesota's official state sport, it isn't always easy. But for me, complaining is not as innocuous as it might appear. It actually puts my brain in a groove where I'm actually seeking out other things to be grumpy about. And believe me, there is never a shortage of things to be grumpy about.

The weather is one area where I most definitely have no control at all. So I chose not to complain about it, doing my best to accept whatever comes and be prepared for it. I have begun to extend this no complaining philosophy to other, far more important, things in my life too. I'm prone to ruminating on people and situations in my life, forming judgments about their choices and how they affect me and expressing mystification at their motivations.

I'm making an effort to change the stories I tell myself about other people, and especially what I saw out loud about others. It's way harder than not complaining about the weather, because it feels far more personal. But in the relationships where I have been able to change my story about what is going on, I've seen huge shifts. A relationship that felt tense and uncomfortable has become relaxed and friendly in the course of a year. I suspect the major change was my effort to suspend judgement and be kind in my thoughts and words. If only I could do that in every relationship!

Yesterday, a storm rolled across the sky. I could have felt discouraged at a rainy day in our precariously short summer, but instead I was transfixed by the sky. It was a breathtaking study of light and shadow, roiling blue black clouds mixing with brilliant sunlight and shimmering white wisps of fog. William Turner would have had a field day painting the scene. What beauty.

Before & After: Bistro Chairs

Before: Our patio table was cheap and dated looking, and the grill was hogging up a lot of extra room. 

Minnesotans cherish their summertime. With the winters we endure here, being outside in pleasant weather takes on a religious fervor. Living in the city means we have to maximize every inch of available outdoor space, since we don't have a large yard. This patio is a shared space, regularly used by most of the residents in our building.

We've been revamping this outdoor room since we moved in two years ago, living with it and making adjustments as we thought of them or could afford it. We replaced a glaring overhead light with softly glowing cafe lights using a lightbulb outlet converter to avoid hiring an electrician to rewire our 120 year old house. I planted herbs in the window boxes and switched out a tired, not-so-white-anymore rug for a more durable black one to handle the heavy traffic of the front entrance. I also rehabbed the mailboxes with chalkboard paint, a great move for an apartment building where the names on the boxes change frequently.

The final touch was replacing this ghastly patio table and chairs, that's been around the place for more than ten years. I hated the cheap looking plastic chairs, and the umbrella hole in a table sitting on a covered porch. We also added a grill to the set up, but it all felt quite tight and constricted.

I found a few patio ideas I liked online at Target and World Market, but I felt they were overpriced for their quality, style and durability. I needed a round table that could comfortably seat four. I decided to see what I could find locally.

Before: We purchased 10 of these bistro chairs
on Craigslist for $70. 

We found a lovely wicker table with a heavy glass top on Craigslist that looked right at home outside. We found the chairs separately, though they needed some serious rehabbing. They were rusty and the seats needed cushions to make them comfortable enough for daily use. However, the shape was just what I was looking for, and I felt up to a little elbow grease. Poor Eric got suckered in too.

He kindly and dutifully scrubbed down all ten chairs with sandpaper and steel wool. Then he coated
the chairs with  Rustoleum spray-paint in Soft Iron. He also found replacement chair feet to keep them from scratching up the deck.

Next, I went over to S.R. Harris to pick up cushion foam and upholstery fabric. I painstakingly traced the wooden seats onto the foam, and cut it out. I used the seat as a pattern for the fabric too, adding four inches to the perimeter of the circle to allow it to comfortably cover the seat. I used a staple gun to cover the cushions, and Eric screwed them back in.

We also moved the grill to a smaller, unused nook on the other side of the patio which opened up a lot of space and helped it all to feel much more relaxed and inviting. The grill is getting more play too, since it's far easier to cook without bumping into the table and chairs. As a final touch, I've been toying with an indoor outdoor rug under the eating area, but I think there is just too much dust and debris to keep it looking great.

After: Painstaking Sanding, Spraypainting and reupholstering gave us a pretty new look. 

I'm pretty delighted with the results of all the tinkering. I think it looks far more polished and airy and I like the way the new furniture complements the iron railings and accents the orange red shades of the bricks. We've been spending lots of time out here already, and the new look feels much more inviting to me.

Do you have any "outdoor rooms" at your place? What have you done to make them more user friendly? If you have mosquito prevention tricks, I'd love to hear them!

Book Report: The Unsettling of America

Wendell Berry has been calling me for many years. His thoughts glowed like gems in Michael Pollan's books and I've heard his poems from time to time on The Writer's Almanac. But, my illuminated path brought me to him now, at this moment, after about a year of settling into the Waldorf approach to education, and family life.

The Unsettling of Americais about farming, but it's author argues that this subject touches all others. His central argument is that the Industrial Revolution was dedicated to specialization and expertise, which eventually lead to isolation. Modern life has applied specialization and the rule of experts to every aspect of human existence; in farms, factories, schools, hospitals, churches and banks. The trouble is that isolation is deadly to a human being. We thrive on making connections, on our sense of being part of a whole, and on working jointly. 

Though this title was first published in 1975, many of the problems he described  have become further exaggerated. For an example, look at our increased reliance on technology that insists that we connect to each other by being alone in a room sitting before a screen. Consider the way consumerism has become the supreme method of personal expression and goods have become cheap in both senses- inexpensive, yes, but shoddy and disposable too. 

This dislocation and constant striving to separate systems into finer and finer parts, is what I find so deeply appealing about the Waldorf approach. At it's best, it is rooted firmly in holism.

I am not a machine that can be separated into parts and then reassembled, made to run quicker, faster, and more efficiently. Instead, I am a creature with parts that all function differently, but rely on complex integration to work with greater depth and wisdom over time, as I develop my capacities.

I have a spirit, which can experience things my mind and body cannot. It can sense elation, freedom and despair. It knows things my mind and body don't- it has foresight, and the power to restore. It relishes mystery, beauty and the unknowable.

I have a body, which gives physical sensation to my existence- it gives me access to the bounty of sensual experience, the delight of a ripe cherry- perhaps too many, like Zorba the Greek. My body knows the pleasure of sinking into my bed after a long day of hard work, the smell of my husband's unwashed hair, or the texture of his beard on the soft skin of my neck.

I have a mind which relishes the task of absorbing new information, then analyzing it's strengths and weaknesses, then synthesizing it into something that belongs to me because I have applied myself to it and created my own thought from it. My mind enjoys a puzzle, a challenge, sorting, organizing and solving.

But none of these parts of my being can function totally independently of one another. My body must be fed and well for my mind to be engaged. My spirit must be willing, even delighted, for my mind to take on the task of learning with sustained effort. My body's sensations are what help me feel the existence of my spirit- the soaring feeling in my chest that echoes and thrums in the soaring arches of St. Peter's Basillica- that is my spirit stirring restlessly, but it was my body that let me feel it's existence, and my mind that helped me name and reflect on it.

The point is that for me as a human being, these complex systems must interact and work together. They can't be singled out or walled off from one another and still allow me to grow and change- which is what all healthy living things must do.

Here is one particularly eloquent passage about unity. He quotes Sir Albert Howard's words: "Real organization always involves real responsibility," and describes how this man went from the laboratory to the fields to stop studying and start knowing.

"He unspecialized his vision, so as to see the necessary unity of the concerns of agriculture, as well as the convergence of these concerns with concerns of other kinds: biological, historical, medical, moral  and so on. He sought to establish upon agriculture the same kind of unifying cycle that preserves health, fertility and renewal in nature: The Wheel of Life, by which death supersedes life and rises again from what is dying and decayed.

It remains to be said only what has often been said before, that the best human cultures also have this unity. Their concerns and enterprises are not fragmented, scattered out,  at variance or in contention with one another...If a culture is to hope for any considerable longevity, then the relationships within it must, in recognition of their interdependence, be predominantly cooperative, rather than competitive.

A people cannot live long at each other's expense or at the expense of their cultural birthright-just as an agriculture cannot live long at the expense of it's soil or it's workforce, just as in a natural system the competitions among species must be limited if all are to survive...

The definitive relationships in the universe are thus not competitive, but interdependent...Under the discipline of unity, knowledge and morality come together...To know anything at all becomes a moral predicament. Aware that there is no such thing as a specialized- or even an entirely limitable or controllable-effect, one becomes responsible for judgments as well as facts. Aware that as an agricultural scientist he had 'one great subject' Sir Albert Howard could no longer ask What can I do with what I know? without also asking How can I be responsible for what I know? "

Unity offers the sense of purpose and responsibility that is so woefully absent from the culture I live in. If I can see myself as part of the place I live in, with other people who depend on me and on whom I depend, then the decisions I make have a greater weight, because they are not contained to my life alone.

When I am responsible only for myself, I don't always make healthy or conscientious decisions. (Like, eating PopTarts for dinner with the T.V on.) But when I am responsible to those around me, I am motivated to do my best. (Cooking for days to prepare a Thanksgiving feast for our community of transplanted friends in Hawaii.) Simplistic examples, to be sure, but tangible ones.

Escape from the Internet: A Digital Diet for Creativity

Escape Key by Elhorno

Being submerged in the internet for work each day means that managing my screen time has become a central issue in my life. I'm developing tricks for limiting technology use so I can stay present in my life. One is the digital diet outlined here. I like the simple metaphor of food he uses, because we all have to eat, but what, how much and when, all need to be tailored to our own bodies. 

I've personalized my digital diet by staying offline before and after work, (including my smartphone). For me, the five to eight hour window at work to check and reply to emails and get updated on Facebook is more than sufficient. I've also begun using mindfulness practices, list making and task batching to keep focused- a huge challenge since managing social media is my job! The cyclops we know as television is still part of my life, though I like to keep it at less than one hour per day, preferably none. 

However, none of this addresses the issue of finding time to be creative outside of work. Brene Brown says, "Unused creativity is not benign. It metastasizes." This haunts me, and I feel it with increasing urgency being back in a city so devoted to the arts. 

I've been trying to see a live arts performance at least once a month, since the Twin Cities is second only to New York City in theater seats per capita. The quality is impressive, and it's quite affordable if we see something edgy. During each of these performances, I feel that pang Brown spoke of. It's a squeeze of admiration, awe and jealousy for the people up on stage who are living their dream so fearlessly. It's not that I want to be a great actor. It's that I am an artist and I am not practicing my art. 

In the film Pollock, Lee Krasner says, "You are Jackson Pollock and you don't paint!", and it is her deepest recrimination. He's also a womanizer, and an alcoholic, but she can't forgive how he has turned his back on his talent. 

When I had the luxury of more time to pursue my creative work, I often wasted it on household tasks. I love to potter around my house, baking, organizing, crafting and sometimes, blogging about it. But do those things develop me as an artist? They are creative, but are they art? Are they the one, unique song of my soul? 

I don't think so. They are things I do to feel productive, without actually tackling the work. Artistic work is internal, it means peering into your own soul and seeing what bubbles up from that dark, deep, mysterious well. The housework is tangible, I can see the result when I sort my underwear drawer or mop the floor. Art  sometimes has a physical result, a drawing, an essay, but that isn't the reason for it. That is just an after image, a footprint, a shadow. The real thing art does is to fills you up, in an invisible way, with satisfaction at the effort of looking, taking, and making. It also fills you with a yearning for more of that. 

So how can it be that something so good for me can be so hard to do? So hard to make time for? What is stopping me? My jobs aren't stopping me. My housework isn't stopping me. The internet isn't stopping me. It's me stopping me. But why? Where does fear come from when only good things have ever come from practicing art? 

Do you wrestle with finding time to be creative? Do you want to take the time to listen to the song of your heart, but also feel afraid to listen? 

Flower Arrangement of the Month: February

Trader Joe's is one of my favorite places to pick up flowers during the winter- they have a lovely selection to mix and match and have alternatives to the carnations and gerber daisies found in most grocery stores. I'm hoping to carry on with my fitful arrangement of the month series now that we're a bit more settled in. Things will be thawing out here any moment and spring flowers bring an almost painful pang of joy to my heart. Those first crocuses are mighty brave flowers, to poke through the snow and slush.

This arrangement features red tulips, burgundy godetia and, my favorites, orange roses. Pinch the blooms at their base when you are choosing them- they should feel firm but not too stiff. This signals that they are ready to open beautifully the way these did. Too firm and they stay tightly shut before withering. Too soft and the heads go limp. I would have added a berry of some sort and maybe a bit of curly willow, had money been no object. I love making romantic arrangements at Valentine's day that don't involve a dozen red roses. After my years at Dilly Lily, there is nothing I find more boring.

Did you get flowers this Valentine's Day? I loved Tahiti's take on being your own Valentine- great advice!

Before & After: Becky Kazana World Headquarters

One of the challenges with living small and working from home is finding a way to concentrate on work tasks when personal tasks (that pile of breakfast dishes, the grocery list, the lure of facebook) surround you. Living in such a small space, we desperately needed an office space to shut out chores and concentrate on growing our business. 

My Dad's massive Victorian house had a tool room in dire need of organization. Though of ample size, precious floor space was squandered; strewn with tools, construction remnants, paint cans, electric supplies and various furniture left by previous tenants.  I felt certain that we could relocate the tool room to a walk in closet by editing and organizing, leaving this space free to become Becky Kazana World Headquarters! Here's what it looked like when we started out:



Yikes! The room was so choked with clutter, I could hardly get photos of the space.

After several hours of work, with the mantra "Like Things Together", I started to create some space. I pulled out anything I could sell on craigslist. All told, I made $175 selling items we found down here, all of which went back into the house. Still scary, but looking a great deal better.

Once my dad (on the left) saw the room cleared out, he started to get excited about really making it special. I had planned to move in "as is", perhaps with a coat of paint or two but he called his construction expert Tom (on the right), and got things rolling. The first concern was containing the asbestos paint on the ceiling, which they sealed up by powder coating with paint. The ugly pipes snaking overhead disappeared when the ceiling was painted black, which hid the pipes without sacrificing height. Then an electrician installed several florescent lights and additional outlets on each wall. It was incredible to see the transformation of brilliant light- the room suddenly seemed like a legitimate work space, no longer part of a dingy old basement. But it also shined brightly on the cracked and crumbling concrete walls and floor!

 A bucket of leveler helped even out the dips and crevices in the floor and gave us a smooth surface on which to install a beautiful wood floor. Eric spent quite a lot of time on his knees with a bucket of glue and a jug of foul smelling mineral spirits to get it installed.

My dad had a stack of pine lumber cut from our backyard (my friends may recall the infamous Log Rolling story...) and he decided that would create a nice texture for the walls, also solving the problem of putting drywall in a damp basement where it is likely to warp and crumble. It created a nice warmth for the space and the whole room smells like pine- clean, rich and warm.

All that was left now was to furnish it. We spent a lot of time combing craigslist and made more than one Ikea trip for a row of tables that would create a long L shaped work space.

Here, at last, is the finished product. We are so proud of it. The artwork is all by talented Etsy artists; the Man Riding Lobster poster from Nate Duval, the Ironing Ostrich and Piano Playing Pachyderm are from Wild Life Prints. The matching fawn colored leather chairs were craigslist scores, hardly used from Ikea. The tables were new from Ikea. The custom monogrammed wastebasket is from Two Sisters Designs. Our lightbox is now a permanent feature in our studio, making snapping beautiful photos much easier and we have ample storage for our inventory and all my crafting supplies in the cupboards mounted on the walls. 

Our packing station is actually a cabinet door mounted at waist height so you can stand while you assemble boxes. Eric's greatest innovation has been finding a way to print first class postage at home so that our parcels can go out with the mailman on the same day, without us ever leaving the house. He also mounted a towel rack above to store tissue paper neatly.

I'm so delighted with how this project turned out- it was far better than what I had initially imagined, thanks to my Dad, my husband and the talented Tom. I know great things will happen in this little room.

Our goal is to make this our full-time income stream, with the capacity to support a family someday soon. We'd love to run a business from home, giving us the flexibility to be with our family every day. I'd like to focus on my writing, finding new outlets in free lance writing and adding new facets to the blog and website. Eric is planning to expand our sales outlets to include Amazon and Ebay, in addition to Etsy.

These are big dreams for such a humble little room, but when I look back at the dusty junk yard it was, I have no doubt that it is possible to imagine and create beauty in unlikely places. The first step is making room.

Movie Review: Young Adult

Young Adult stars Charlize Theron as a deranged teen fiction novelist who returns to her hometown in northern Minnesota, fixated on stealing her high school boyfriend Buddy, away from his new baby and happy marriage. Although Theron is famously glamorous, with mile-long legs, luminous skin and a Christian Dior contract, her character Mavis is a bum. She parades around town in a saggy Hello Kitty t-shirt and grungy sweatpants, stringy hair pulled into a ponytail. Upon waking face down in the clothes she wore the day before, she guzzles Diet Coke straight from the bottle like a thirsty horse. Mavis has a drinking problem that is veering into serious alcoholism and compulsively pulls out her hair while watching television. The young adult series she's been ghost writing has come to the end of it's faddish popularity and she's trying to figure out what to do next.

Diablo Cody wrote this film, and her stamp is everywhere. The dark, mentally disturbed, but gorgeous anti-hero feels perfectly in line with her other work. She and director Jason Reitman make a great team, because this film has his touches of modern day American realism. The strip malls and cheezy chain restaurants aren't glossed over, because they are part of the story being told. This is the same world you and I live in, with people we might actually know. 

As Mavis tries to put her ham-fisted plan into action, she runs into someone else she and Buddy went to high school with. Matt (the brilliantly cast Patton Oswalt) is still the dork he was in high school, now an accountant at a local bar, busy perfecting an elaborate whiskey distillery in his garage and painting Star Wars action figures in his ample spare time. He's trying to forget the physical and emotional scars of an attack that happened their senior year, when a group of jocks jumped him, mangled him and left him for dead because they (wrongly) thought he was gay. Eventually most of the people in town forgot all about it, though the pain is still fresh for him. When Mavis drunkenly reveals her plan to him, he half-heartedly tries to stop her, but they are both lonely and in need of a drinking buddy. 

As the story unfolded, there were a few things that got in the way for me. One was Charlize Theron. She's beautiful even in her schlumpy clothes and her celebrity overshadows her considerable acting talent. I would have loved to see this part go to some lesser known actress who could help me sink deeply into the story for the entire film. The part of Buddy seemed forced, perhaps because he had the unhappy task of convincing us that he was uninterested in Charlize Theron. In order for the plot to move forward, Buddy has to show disinterest without registering obvious disgust at her mental illness. This allows her character to continue making her advances toward him, not realizing, or simply ignoring the fact that he doesn't want her. It didn't work well in my opinion- and the climactic confrontation scene felt contrived.  

 But most pressing of all is the problem of a resolution. Though Mavis doesn't get what she wants in the end, she doesn't appear to have learned much either. Perhaps that is the ultimate mark of Reitman's realism. Real life doesn't usually have tidy endings and dramatic, overnight personal transformation either. This dark little film gave me plenty to mull over in the days after watching it. I definitely enjoyed it.

Have you seen it? What did you think? Any suggestions on what to watch next? 

Before and After: Window Treatments

The finished product!

Eric and I moved house for the fourth time in 2012 on December 1st. Another apartment came available in my Dad's building that was a little larger than our tiny attic and we couldn't resist. The horrific kitchen needs to be remodeled, but it has huge bay windows, a bathtub and a beautiful fireplace (read: a coal burning fireplace that needs to be converted to gas or rebuilt for wood. We've filled it with a mirror and some candles for the time being.) As you can imagine, we'd spent a lot of time and money getting the attic tricked out, and now we've had to start the process all over again in our new place. The windows were my biggest challenge. The previous tenant left these chocolate brown damask curtains which were pretty, but too short for these windows and too heavy for the room. It felt dark and claustrophobic. 

Before: These curtains were left by a previous tenant. I sold them on craigslist and used the cash to buy fabric. 

I put them up on craigslist and used the cash towards upholstery fabric. I paid a visit to SR Harris Discount Fabrics in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. It's a massive warehouse crammed to the rafters with discontinued bolts of fabric- everything from Barney Rubble costume fur to delicate silk chiffon and embroidered upholstery fabrics. I wandered the aisles with my measurements, wrestling with the heavy bolts of fabric before throwing caution to the wind and settling on a vivid coral printed with a metallic golf floral. It's called "Carlotta" for Bailey & Griffin. A bit of googling tells me fabric from this vendor usually runs around $90.00 a yard, so my $100 investment for thirteen yards was a steal. 

A good seamstress measures twice and cuts once, right Grandma?

My sweet grandma helped me cut the massive bolt of fabric into four equal pieces. We stretched all twelve yards the entire length of her basement and she gamely crawled around on her knees with her measuring tape, pins sticking from her mouth, brow furrowed in concentration. Her perfectionism helped set me up to finish the job properly, and I'm so grateful. (I can get a bit sloppy as a seamstress if left to my own devices!)

Next I hung up the unfinished swaths of fabric from drapery rings to make sure I got the hems just exactly right- not too long, but not too short either. (This window treatment guide from Real Simple was a very helpful in choosing a length that felt intentional and casual but not sloppy.)  I wanted my finished curtains to just skim the floor and be simple to open and close every day. Then I got out my pins and iron and got to work.

Actually sewing the hems took almost six hours. 

All told, this project took my about six hours to complete. Although this was a lot longer than I anticipated, I'm so in love with the final product. I feel like I succeeded in creating the look of expensive custom window treatments for a relatively small investment of time and money. These let in much more light, are easier to open and close, make the whole room feel lighter, more cheerful and totally work with the colors I've used in the rest of the room. If I'd ordered them from a designer, it would have been around $800 for the fabric alone. 

Here they are closed up for the night.

I couldn't be more delighted with how these window treatments came out. 

I love how the light picks up the gold in the fabric and adds an element of shimmer and shine, even in the darkest nights of winter.

What have you been working on lately? I have another massive bolt of fabric ready to tackle for curtains in my bedroom right this second. I'll be sure to share the results with you! Thanks for your kind patience as I get back in the swing of incorporating blogging into my new life in Minneapolis.

Welcome to the Attic!

I've had a few requests for a peak at our new space and it's finally coming together, just in time for the party we held last night. Let's throw in a before and after while we're at it!

BEFORE: The living area and kitchen.

BEFORE: The living area and kitchen.

AFTER: The Kazana living room, complete with library and bar! The kilim rugs were wonderful finds. Mom gave up one of hers and I layered it with another found via craigslist.

These sumptuous ikat and embroidered pillow covers are from India and Afghanistan via Etsy shops Old Silk Route and Silk Way.

I'm especially proud of our bar and library. We scored this table 20% off at World Market with a coupon from their store club, and I think it does double duty beautifully. It was such a treat to get my beautiful collection of Taschen books out of storage! The mirrored lamp and burlap shade are from Target. I collected the little wooden birds on the shelf during our travels in Uganda. 

I guess I've been in the mood for brown liquor of late- should probably add a bit more variety, eh? The beautiful silver cocktail tray was another Etsy find from Vintage We Treasure, it's engraved with recipes for cocktails popular in the 40's.  The crystal decanter was a wedding gift to my parents. 

BEFORE: Kitchen area.

AFTER: Kitchen area. We found another beautiful kilim rug on craigslist for the kitchen. I'm so delighted with the color and pattern of this rug. The king palm is from Ikea. His name is Filburt. He's very happy to meet you. 

My brother Jake did all the food prep for the party we had last night, which was celebrating many things, including his return from the Peace Corps, our new city, our new home, my Dad's beautiful remodeling job, my 30th Birthday and two Kazanas in serious need of some fun. It's rather a hazardous kitchen for tall people (did you see that slanty wall?) but he made it hum and turned out a beautiful variety of hummus, home made pita bread, and crudites. I cheated and ordered some sweets from Wuollette's, and made a bite sized caprice salad with a Greek twist: cherry tomatoes, mint, feta, red onion and cucumber on a skewer squirted with lemon. Bite sized salad is fun to eat and adds a dash of color to the table. We also had broiled bacon wrapped dates, our absolute favorite party food ever. Try it at your next party- guaranteed hit!

BEFORE: Bedroom nook

AFTER: Bedroom nook. I found this rather Psychadelic bed cover at a thrift shop and impulsively bought it this summer. How perfect is it in there? 

This dresser was another craigslist find that I know we can enjoy for years. Eric and my Dad had this television installed on a bracket so it can swing out to be watched from the sofa or the bed. Everything in this tiny 250 square foot space needs to multi-function to save room and effort. 

Eric demonstrating the scale of our little hobbit door! It leads to a balcony three stories up- above the tree line. A spiral staircase (that takes some bravery to navigate!) lead down to the backyard parking area. We can barely stand up straight inside the peaked ceiling here. 

Thanks for visiting our newest tiny house! I hope you enjoyed the sneak peak.

Athena and the Pineapple

Source: 25.media.tumblr.com via Lisa on Pinterest

White pineapples are popping up all over our yard, toppling over with the weight of their own spines, sweet juices and fierce crown of thorns. It takes three to seven years for a pineapple to reach maturity, so it feels quite decadent to slice them up after our two month tenure in the tree house.

New pineapple plants can be started by simply planting the sharp green crown. An image keeps popping up in my mind of Athena springing fully formed from the head of Zuess. There is the pineapple regenerating itself through it's head, like a god, and me with those juices dripping down my chin. What blessings I've enjoyed in this sacred place.

I feel myself vibrating with life in this moment of transition- more so than in any of the many moves I've made before. Is that because of what I've learned here? The changes in myself? Growing older? The excitement of having another challenge at last? The light seems to glitter on every leaf and mossy rock and wave as I walk up and down the side of this volcano. I feel holiness in every sharp spike and slurpy bite of this delicious plant. Savoring it all with a bittersweet delight.

August: Going Steady Cake

August’s Cake of the Month is really a cake from June and the truth is, I was feeling too blue about Dan & Lisa leaving the Big Island to write this post. In Heartburn, Nora Ephron wrote about how when you are part of a couple, you date other couples until you find a pair you want to go steady with, and then you do everything together. She describes a foursome that go to great lengths and long adventures to find great food and happy moments together. 

Dan, Lisa, Eric and I cooked pizzas, drank fancy chartreuse cocktails, went on long hikes, paddleboarded, sewed, hot tubbed and went hunting wild turkeys. We spent entire afternoons at our favorite black sand beach. We had very boozy all day long Thanksgiving dinners and Easter brunches. We waited three hours in a parking lot icy Waimea to get Jack Johnson tickets. We went steady with Dan and Lisa. 

Their last party was celebrating everything- their engagement, Lisa’s Birthday, selling all their stuff, and their precious time in Hawaii. It surprised me how sad I felt to see them go. After all, we'd only really known each other two years. But these two charming people are so crazy in love with each other, and with life itself, that knowing them makes you feel more in love with the world you live in too. I was sad to lose them as a daily part of our lives- where you don't have to tidy up or change out of your sweatpants before they come over. You can root around in their fridge, and they can root around in yours. You know each other's secrets and complaints, pet peeves and favorites and your text history is pages and pages long.  

Anyway, I wanted to tell them all of this but knew I would cry, so I decided to bake a really beautiful cake instead. I spent a few days on an almond cake, in a very classic wedding style. It was a rich yellow cake with  a light almond flavor, whipped cream, raspberry filling, loaded up with rich fluffy buttercream and the sides coated with more toasted almond slices. I put two little yellow birds on top and cradled it in my lap on the bumpy south Kona road and through the leafy greens of the coffee farms up to their sweet little cottage in the woods.

All their friends came out to say farewell and everyone brought something delicious to share. Lisa outdid herself (as usual) with braised ribs and bruschetta and stuffed mushrooms and Dan built a big bon fire in the backyard, and his friend who runs the Kava farm brewed Kava and served it in hollowed out coconut shells and we all relaxed and talked and ate and celebrated all the many ways you can love other people. And then they cut the cake, and I made them feed little pieces to each other, and they were embarrassed, but they did it anyway, and then everyone had a slice and a glass of champagne and toasted these two people who so obviously belong together and are so well loved by anyone and everyone who knows them.  And I didn’t cry, my eyes just got a little watery, because of love, love, love.

Eat Like a Local on the Big Island of Hawaii: Hawaiian Vanilla Company

Eric's parents were here on the Big Island to help us celebrate the big 3-0 this year and I knew I wanted to plan a special outing. I'd heard great things about The Hawaiian Vanilla Company, so I booked a reservation for their afternoon luncheon and tour.

Our afternoon began with a vanilla themed lunch. Iced tea and lemonade were generously laced with teeny tiny black specs of real vanilla seeds and served in mason jars for a homey touch.

Next up was a chicken sandwich with a vanilla seed bun, barbeque aioli made with cayenne, paprika, curry and you guessed it: vanilla! The chicken was incredibly tender and juicy and the homemade bread was still warm from the oven.

What dessert showcases real vanilla better than ice cream? It was topped with a delicious lilikoi sauce, and the tartness of the lilikoi flavor was in perfect contrast to the cool, creamy, sweetness of the ice cream. Can you see the vanilla seeds?

After lunch, we toured the farm to learn about the time consuming art of growing real vanilla. Vanilla comes from an orchid- the only orchid species in the world that produces a usable fruit. It takes four years for a plant to produce pods, and the process is slow and labor intensive. Each flower must be hand pollinated during a one week blooming season, which goes a long way towards explaining why real vanilla beans are so expensive. This plant is just a baby at only two years old. It will creep slowly up these poles and begin to create its first blooms in two more years.

Our tour was brief due to rain, but we enjoyed learning more about this exotic plant, first discovered by the Mayans and cultivated continuously ever since. (Chocolate AND Vanilla? Those guys had some precious knowledge, wouldn't you say?) It was a great way to celebrate Eric's birthday, (he has a secret fascination with spices and farms!) and if you are paying a visit to the Big Island of Hawaii, I would highly recommend this for an afternoon adventure in the rural mountain country of our island.

Have you ever tried a culinary tour before? I can't wait to do it again.