My Favorite Conversation of the Day

Today I fulfilled a life goal of going to Ikea and staying as long as I wanted--no rental car to return, ferry to catch, or mandatory meeting to attend. Upon arriving home, I realized that I had accidentally shoplifted a rug (don't worry, I'll call tomorrow and make good). But that is not the point of this story. The point of this story is to share the conversation that happened immediately upon my returning home:

Me: Is Ashley home?
Roommate: No, I think she's still at the football game.
Me (with emotion bordering on horror): What?!!!! There was a game tonight?!!!!
Roommate: Yeah, the first NFL game of the year, I think.
Me: Oh!!! Thank goodness!!

Apparently, it had temporarily slipped my mind that teams other than BYU play football.

Go Cougs!!!!!


PS. I'm publishing this post from my iPhone in bed at 3:30am because I can't sleep because I'm so so so excited about my plans to decorate and organize my room/life. Thanks Valerie for all the ideas and inspirations.

First Day of the Rest of My Life

I'm back in the "city" (ha ha ha) now, and my new life is going even better than I had hoped.

It turns out we have a totally awesome grapevine in full bloom in the backyard, so of course (since this is exactly the kind of thing I do now that I'm living it up country girl style), I decided to can grape juice. It was my first ever solo canning experience and it went GREAT!!

Grapes on the vine:

A close-up (can you even believe how perfectly beautiful they are?)--

There were lots and lots of grapes. Just to put things into perspective, this bowl when de-vined contained about four cups:

Here they are in the hot water bath. Luckily, a pressure cooker was not needed because, in addition to not having access to one, I am deathly afraid of them. I could only do three jars at a time, but it worked out pretty well. Thank goodness I decided to bring my trusty, much-loved stock pot with me to my new life.

And the glorious finished project:

There are so many people I'd like to thank:
Thank you Ashley for discovering the grapes.
Thank you Ashley's mom for giving me the jars.
Thank you Mom for being available throughout the day to answer questions.

And, just to make life even better, I was able to buy 12 more canning jars today, so I'll be able to make even more! Yippee for suburb living! Yipee for canning!!

Just call me Farmer Holly

I've mentioned before that I have both a city girl and a country girl happily living inside me. The last few years, of course, I've spent more time developing my city girl side. I have often referred to my move to Salt Lake City as relocating "to the country" but I know that's not probably legitimate, so for Labor Day weekend I decided to bump it up a notch and try out real bona fide country life. So I trucked it up to an Idaho farm to visit my roommate Ashley's family who live on a real, working farm. And let me just say, a girl could get used to this. Allow me to share some highlights--

*this is how meal time goes--we spend maybe like 30 or 40 minutes in the garden and then we have four kinds of unbelievably yummy, just out of the garden veggies and fruit for dinner. (everyone had a good laugh when I was found looking for green beans to pick in the tops of the potatoes. I am such a city girl.)

*you maybe think you understand Idaho potatoes because you have procured them in the grocery store, but trust me on this one--you don't understand how tasty they are until you've had one fresh out of the garden.

* we had cooked carrots for dinner toight and I could not believe there was no sugar on them. they were SO stinkin' sweet. In a good way.

* this afternoon I laid in the grass for an hour and just listened to the wind blow. I also spent a while trying to get the horse to let me pet him, but that didn't work.

* Saturday morning there was a big excitement because Grandpa caught a corn-stealing raccoon in a trap. It was an vicious fellow, or at least he seemed that way when he was being poked with a stick. We woman folk felt bad about it, but Ashley's brother had to drown it. That's how life is here on the farm.

* they have NINE boxes of fresh super yummy peaches. I'm allowed to eat as many as I want.

*today for dinner, in addition to four kinds of veggies from the garden we had beef that was raised on their farm. I couldn't even believe how tasty it was.

* the grasshoppers here are fascinating. there are SOO many of them and they fly a little and they look just like butterflies when they do it.

* if it's not too windy tomorrow, we're going water skiing.

I could go on, but I won't. After just one evening here, I told Ashley "I can see why you didn't want to stay in Manhattan, if this was your other option." I think that just about sums it up.

Here and Now

Did you realize that I had been living out of my car, adventuring across America for three weeks? I had no idea until right towards the end. No wonder everyone kept asking me "What? You're not in Utah yet?" No wonder people were getting on me about updating my blog. That also explains why I've run out of so many of my toiletries while I've been on the road. I didn't realize I'd been gone so long until I was thinking one day: "I've never been away from New York City more than two weeks. I bet it will be hard when I hit the two week point." I did the math in my head to find out when that would be and realized it had been four days earlier.

Well, time flies when you're having fun.

But the epic cross-country trek has ended. I'll probably write about it later. For now I just want to report that yesterday I arrived safe and sound in my new place in Salt Lake City. I don't have a bed yet, so like any good suburbanite, I slept in the grass in the back yard. (photo taken and edited by my new roomie Ashley, who is a graphic designer who knows who to do fancy things with digital photos. You can see her sleeping bag on the futon.)

I'll report more on my new life and my most recent adventure later. For now, I will just report: so far, so good.