domicile

Modern Cottage

Things are busy, hot and emotionally draining round these parts lately. Summer has definitely arrived weather wise, but we definitely haven't mastered those "long, lazy days" of summer myth. But while there may not be much going on around our house inspiration wise, I was pretty excited to find this new blog last night: Modern Cottage seems just up our alley.

Flurries of Activity

  Inside looking out 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

Martin likes to describe his approach to renovations and household projects as periods of dormancy, punctuated by intense moments of activity. For anyone who knows him, this is really not to say that his dormant periods are often or the norm, he's generally a pretty busy guy, but it is certainly true that everyonce in a while he is overcome with some unseen force that drives him into sudden projects.

It was apparently just such a burst of inspiration that caused me to come home this evening to find him with a chisel and exact-o knife monkeying with the livingroom windows. A burst of inspiration, or perhaps a heat wave. We've been waiting a while for summer to arrive here in Vancouver and this weekend it sort of burst on the scene with a vengence. Temperatures in the high 20s low 30s, which are not really the norm around here, suddenly replaced the kind of grey, often rainy, dour weather that dominated June.

And unfortunately, our little house gets pretty warm. Old windows that neither keep cool air in particularly well are also painted shut making things like cross breezes, or breezes at all, a bit tricky. The windows on two sides of the house were replaced sometime in the 70s or 80s by the looks of things, aluminium framed jobbies that open and shut just fine but aren't that pretty to look at. The other two sides (the ones that face the front and side street) are the original models and are pretty firmly painted shut. Or at least some of them were. Right now they are sitting painted out of their frames on the front porch drying in the late evening heat.

After jimmying the windows (and to my despair chipping away at my trim paint job from months ago now) for a while it was clear that no amount of exact-o knife action was going to make for easily opened and closed windows all summer. And so Martin did what would never cross my mind: he dismantled the frame and pulled the windows out whole. Honestly, before I got into this whole home ownership/handyman-boyfriend deal I wouldn't have even thought you could do that. But you can. And frankly, as someone who has tried to unstick and old-fashioned sash window in the past (our sashes are long gone and the windows will need to be propped open, but no matter) with the exact-o method, I'd have to say this way, while slightly more involved is in some ways much simpler.

Once out, the windows and surrounding frame bits were taken out back and power sanded to smooth out all the rough edges that were preventing happy even sliding of window against frame. They were then given two coats of paint (one before dinner, one after) and now we just need to wait for things to dry to put them back together.

Yes, that's right, they're not yet back together and I'm already extolling the virtues of this method. Oh fate, how I tempt you.

So wish us luck for an easy, late night window reinstall and pray that all glass remains in tact.

EM + FT = TL4FVR

To say that our house is not the domain of sports is to kind of understate matters. While we are often cajoled into kicking around the soccer ball with Martin's daughter in rather spastic impromptu bursts of activity, we never have sports on TV (we don't have cable), we never attend big sporting events (unless you count the 9 year old Langley girls soccer league) and it generally never comes up as a topic of conversation (unless we're fawning over Kevin Sylvester, an in-joke for all the CBC Radio 1 listeners out there). And while I can't speak entirely for Martin, I can say that I am without a doubt just generally not that interested when it comes to professional sports. And by not that interested I mean my eyes glaze over at the mere mention of. This position on sports has to do primarily with my upbringing, which was equally as light on the sporting culture, and my own war years working a sports bar during university (a job I took for money and convenience that showed me some of the very ugly sides of the sports world, hockey in particular).

But, as with most things, there is one notable exception that proves the rule. And that exception dear readers is the Fifa World Cup.

I have not always been a fan of soccer. As I already mentioned, my upbringing was almost totally sports-free, save painful years of PE class. No, my love of soccer is very closely tied to my first real love, who probably now finds it amusing to think of me trundling off on my bike early in the morning to the Italian coffee bars to watch games before work. When he and I first met, I wasn't always keen to spend my Sunday afternoons holded up in coffee bars watching Serie A games (Italian soccer league), but watch them I did, and slowly I adopted his undying support of AS Roma. As far as games go, it was certainly more my speed than say hockey which I have never been able to drum up a passion for. Soccer enjoys little in the way of fighting or violence, its fairly quick play, the on-field over dramatics are entertaining at least, and let's face it there are some darn pretty folks on the field (a statement that holds true for men and women's leagues). But in the early days, I still begrudged some of those hours spent over numerous coffees, and am sure that he would look back at my specatatorship as less than enthusiastic. All that changed when I saw my first live game in Rome, sometime around 95 or 96. The game was against city rival Lazio, we had pretty cheap seats and couldn't see the play nearly as well as the TV view I had become accustomed to, but the experience was unlike anything else I'd ever witnessed (remember, I'd never been to another professional game prior and haven't since).

I was hooked.

Suddenly, I almost understood the previous mystery of sports culture all in one fell swoop. People were wearing team scarves, jerseys and hats. They were waving banners and shouting and chanting their team on. And what I had once seen as totally inexplicable pack-mentality, started to make some kind of anthropological sense. And, for the first time, I actually found myself getting behind the success of a team. Specifically, I, like many Roma fans at the time, began to place my hopes and affections in the young and fresh faced Francesco Totti. Totti, raised in Rome, an AS Roma fan from birth it would seem, who later turned down well paid contracts for rival teams while he waited for a spot on the team of his heart. Totti, the golden boy who would pull Roma up to the top where they belonged.

Roma's ascendence didn't happen that year, and still hadn't happened a few years later when my soccer mentor and I parted ways. At the time, I took a respite from the weekly Serie A games, and now only watch them if I happen to find myself on Commercial Drive on a Sunday with time to spare (so almost never). I do check in on the standings a few times at La Republica during the season just to make sure Roma is doing ok, and that Totti continues to do well by his adoring fans. But nothing too devoted. However, when the World Cup comes along, I indulge. And so it has been that I've managed to catch at least half the time in each of Italy's three games in this year's World Cup Tournament (with time off only for work) so far. And, I'm pleased to say that my Italian skills (my vocabulary is strongest with soccer and food) have held me in good stead to even go so far as to joke with the older guys at the coffee bars at 7am. Unfortunately, due to my pesky career I had to miss Totti's brilliant goal this morning in real time, though I have seen it replayed now. But when I heard it announced on the radio as I prepared for my conference call, my heart swelled with pride that my dream-soccer-boyfriend Totti, more experienced now than he was when I first fell for him 10 years ago, had saved the day bringing Italy through to another round. And, I'll be there on Friday chearing him them on to the next.

Forza Italia.

Taking Pains to Reinvent the Wheel

  watering 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

Recent conversations inside my head:

"Damn it. If I drag the hose across my pants/skirt/dress one more time in the morning getting big lines of dirt ground into the thighs I'll scream. Why do I keep forgetting to change into gardening shorts first? How many times will this take? But then, I hate having to change into a new outfit for 10 minutes of watering. What a pain in the butt that is. If only there were some kind of thing... a piece of cloth maybe, that you could wrap around your lower half to protect it from the dirty perils of the gardening hose. Yes! That's it! I special piece of cloth that would protect your clothes underneath! Maybe I should make one! Yes! I should! Oh I am so clever. Why has no one thought of this before?"

Pause.

"Oh right. An apron. I think I have a few of those."

Hard Beans!

  Spotted rooster pinto beans for planting 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

A friend came by the office today and dropped off a wee package of GE Free "Spotted Rooster" pinto beans which I'm pretty damn excited about growing.

Last week, said friend and I were having a drink and discussing the ups and downs of local eating. He happens to be something of a literal expert on the subject and is a true wealth of info on all foodstuffs local. In my dream universe of local eating, life would work as follows: I'd have the time to tend a very large garden that would allow me to support most of our fresh fruit and veggie needs in the backyard; I would can and preserve like a 60 year old Italian Grandma for the winter months; I would supplement my backyard crop with the bounty of my own grandma's backyard; I'd get the odd harvest from the Farmer's Market to stock up on things like blueberries and flour; and, we'd indulge in the odd tasty exotics from the Italian deli up the way. (This might not be Martin's ideal, but he types too slowly to butt in). The biggest thing missing there would be local sources of protein (canned legumes from the deli not counting as local obviously). I've always kind of assumed that save being able to raise goats for cheese, or maybe having a hen house for eggs (something I'm actually increasingly finding myself daydreaming about which is so very ridiculous that I laugh at my own daydreams), that there weren't that many local resources for vegetarian protein. And here is where the hard beans came in. According to my drinking buddy the local edibles expert, it would seem that you can successfully grow hardbeans in this climate. With abandon! Who knew? (Likely many people, just not me). I always thought that our climate was limited to the regular green, wax and odd purple bean for eating at their young and fleshy stage.

My enthusiasm for the hard bean growing project was such, that my friend dropped off a wee paper packet containing some pinto beans this afternoon. Fun times. According to the somewhat bombastically labelled package, the "spotted rooster" bean variety that I'm holding in my hand there hails from Peru and is over 7,000 years old. (Older than Jesus!)

I'm going to take advantage of the current warm season and get these little dudes in the ground quickly (probably on Sunday morning to coincide with the new moon for good luck). I'd like to end up with enough of them to harvest some beans for drying/storing, which may mean going outside of my two square containers. I may just fill up the empty spots in the flowerbeds with a few bush beans, and then pot some. If we can hurry up and eat tonnes of lettuce, I should also be able to squeeze in a square or two.

So thanks James! We'll see how much protein we can grow here in East Vancouver.

Seed Ratios

  cucumbers 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

As I’ve mentioned before I’ve taken the Square Foot Garden approach to my veggie garden this year, and am so far growing and harvesting a fair crop of our most regularly consumed veggies. I’ve been taking advantage of the very mild climate of the West Coast here and so far have direct seeded pretty much everything (save some cheater lettuce seedlings I bought early in the season, and the basil I bought from my favorite herb lady at the Farmer’s Market). I’ve had surprisingly good ratios, which I’m almost too superstitious to brag about here, lest the gods of the veggie seeds hear my bravado and punish me for the rest of the season. But really, I’ve been lucky. Of my 3 bean squares that I planted I’ve had 1:1 success so far (though beans aren’t exactly tricky stuff), my lettuce has been almost the same, though I often put two seeds in each hole and just thin out if necessary, but I’ve always ended up with a full square. And my radishes, for whihch one 1′ x 1′ square will accommodate 16 seedlings have so far shown about a 7:8 ratio of success at worst (we’re on our 5th replanting already, though they’ve been staggered).

In fact, the only problems I’ve experienced so far have been directly related to my planned dill pickle canning blitz. For starters, the dill that I seeded a good month ago or so now, refused to grow more than two of the four spots alotted it in the square. I’ve reseeded twice now and nothing. Not sure if there’s some dill seed loving ant somewhere in my garden or what, but it looks like I may have to pick up some dill seedlings from my herb lady. Perhaps more importantly only 5 of my 8 cucumber seeds seem to have taken, which isn’t too bad in the scheme of things, but when it comes to pickling time I’m going to want a full crop (I’m already regretting not having more room for growing goods for canning projects like this). So this weekend I reseeded the missing 3 and with the clarity of the computer here in front of me it strikes me that I should perhaps seed a few in some currently dormant squares and just move them over as they take.

As I’ve already said, I think I’ve been extremely lucky with my direct seeding experiments, but given the limited space I have to work in, and my desire of even more veggie goodness I’m starting to see the ways of the seed starting and transplanting route. So far my gardening experiments of this year continue to point in the “oh boy would I ever love a greenhouse” direction, so I think I may have to officially write that on the wish list for household projects.

{Cross posted at The Dirt}

Happy Father's Day

  it's recorder time! 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

You know you've officially become domesticated and kinda of hideously sappy when you are charmed by your partner and his daughter doing a "In the Jungle" duet on the recorder and baritone ukulele. Because really.

Blackcurrant Season

  Currants 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

The currants are ripening quickly in the back yard and I'm starting to amass recipes for things to do with them. Our one bush is very prolific, and if I cut a few recipes in half I should be able to get a few different preserves as well as some baked goods out of them. After a bit of poking around here at the current (no pun intended) top contenders. If you've got any favorite currant recipes or uses, please share!

• Blackcurrant  Syrup;
• Blackcurrant Cordial, which looks great if I can only figure out what "TO" is;
• Blackcurrant Double Crust Pie;
• Blackcurrant flan;
• Blackcurrant Jelly, which seems to be the same basic recipes wherever I find it;
• Three Minute Blackcurrant Jam, which aside from the idea of piercing each currant with a pin seems extremely easy and rewarding givent he glowing testimonial;

Now I just need to find the time to start picking...

Bitty Baby Booties!

  Sassy Slip-ons 
  Originally uploaded by Heather Bailey.

Loobylu highly recommended this awesome pattern from Hello My Name is Heather, and I have to agree. Simply adorable, and from the looks of it a pretty easy project. There are a few babies on their way in my life this summer and I think they just might be getting booties. I'm loving sewing projects lately for kids, or that involve using smaller bits of fabric. Lordisa knows I've got scads of it (all recently well sorted I might add) in the basement that could be being put to good use. You can get the pattern yourself here. And if you're not the bootie type and are looking for something for yourself, these headbands are a nice little treat too.

More Scando Lust

  Kragh Rosenberg Bag 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

Alexa posted about this Danish textile/design house Kragh Rosenberg over at the Lille Hus Blog, and I'm totally in love. I currently have a wonderful Orla Kiely bag which I adore (acquired for a steal at a thrift store). I'm a bit of a bag person, having a rather staggering collection of wonderful options to choose from, but since I obtained my Orla Kiely it is pretty much all I use, every day. Being coated canvas it is pretty durable, but I do fear that I'm being a bit hard on it, so I've been keeping my eyes open for an eventual successor. One of these Kragh Rosenberg's just might do the trick. I'll be able to check them out for myself in September when we're in Copenhagen (!), and if the bags aren't a good fit then Alexa is right, this dress is awfully dreamy.