Mixed Bag. Missing My Mixed Greens

Well.  It's a mixed bag of news today.  My husband has well surpassed me in his number of Facebook friends.  He is the kind of person that makes such an impression-- people who meet him remember him, even when he doesn't remember them.  Oh, but I'm sure whoever is reading here is one of the people he remembers.  Actually, he is really good about it.  Part of that old-school Tucson society ethic, I think.  Anyhow, I probably won't be catching up with him anytime soon.

On a more positive note, I discovered an excellent substitute for pancake syrup:  two or three parts honey to one part water, one slab of orange zest using the vegetable peeler.  Microwave for 30 seconds & mix.  Truly brunch-worthy.  The things you discover waiting for payday.  It's national pancake day, you know.

I am missing my winter garden.  Last year we had chard, red leaf lettuce, peas, radishes, onions, cilantro, parsley and chives.   Or maybe it was the year before? Then after that we had a pretty good crop of basil, thyme and marjoram that lasted the summer.  My other summer veggies kept rotting out.   They either fried in the heat or developed strange fungi or fat caterpillars.  But the winter garden was wonderful.  I could pick the small chard, bok choy and lettuce leaves, and even the pea shoots, for salads and they'd grow right back.  The sugar snap peas never made it into the house most of the time-- we ate them off the vines.  And having parsley whenever I wanted it felt like a luxury.  The kids never did appreciate the radishes, but I did.  And the little white spring onions made grilling out a real treat.  I know I have better photos somewhere but here are a couple.  The garden wasn't fully established in the second one... but it didn't get a whole lot more verdant than that until summer...

It is absolutely a cliche to say that gardening grounds you.  But true.  It was a healthy sort of space-out, weeding around the radishes and peeking through pea vines to find just one more fat pod. 

However.  This school year I've been working on my National Board Certification.  The portfolio process is almost finished.  Just five more weeks.  In addition, Rich has been continuing to work toward launching a new product with his new company up in Scottsdale, Ability Dynamics, as well as both of us trying to finish renovating a property we've been working on and are heavily invested in, and trying to keep real estate clients happy even though most deals either never materialize or fall through for the same multitude of reasons that they have been all over the country.  It's been a lean year in terms of income AND time, and so the garden just did not happen this winter.  But I do miss it.

Meanwhile, today I realized that I have at least SOMETHING written for every prompt in my portfolio.  Amazing.  Amazing amazing.  So by the end of the day tomorrow, I do believe I will consider myself to have a working draft of the whole portfolio.  And then, it's chisel chisel, shape and shape.  A SAWP colleague who just received her certification said that by the end it was like writing haiku.  I can definitely see that.