• Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting, and autumn a mosaic of them all. ~Stanley Horowitz
  • I Took The Handmade Pledge! BuyHandmade.org

June 12, 2008

here comes the sun

Front porch cookies and lemonade

The daily downpours, that we have received for weeks, transformed my front porch cement into a lovely carpet of algae. Today we were blessed with a full day of sunshine, so I mopped the porch floor. It wouldn't have mattered what I did today as long as it was spent outside. Any task was enjoyable. After I finished the floor, I went inside and brought lemonade and peanut butter oatmeal raisin flax cookies out to the table and Dick and I sat a spell watching a "thirteen line ground squirrel" skitter back and forth under the lilac bushes. He stopped long enough to spy our cookies... hoping, I am sure, that we would leave a crumb or two. The gray weathered wooden box is an old chicken nesting box that I cleaned up and Dick hung it on the wall for me to set potted plants in. I tied a variety of aprons, from my stash that I had gathered from yard sales, onto the backs of the chairs to give it a softened "garden party" atmosphere.

Gerbera daisy  

I wanted you to see this unusual gerbera daisy on my front porch because when it is beginning to bud out, its petals are a lime green color with a burgundy center. (See little flower in foreground.) In its mature stage, it turns a sunny yellow color with the same burgundy center. 

March 02, 2007

porch fireplace

Porch_fireplaceA marshmallow floating in a steaming cup of hot chocolate... a fire lazily crackling in an outdoor fieldstone fireplace... Relax in twig chairs on Whiteley Creek Inn's huge screened-in porch while savouring each bite of the evening's complimentary dessert. A refrigerator on the porch is available for storing items to prepare a simple lunch for day trips into the surrounding Brainerd area, as well as for storing leftovers after dining out in the many area restaurants.

learn something new

  • Clean Eating Magazine "Improving your life, one meal at a time."
  • The Smart Baking Cookbook by Jane Kinderlehrer
  • Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew
  • Chickens in Your Backyard: A Beginner's Guide by Rick and Gail Luttman