Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Sun That Would Not Go To Sleep

In High School I met one of my true soul mates. She was a Finnish exchange student named Mari and she quickly named me her "American Sister." She is my "Finnish Sister." She's one of those people with whom I just "connect." I am so luck to have met her.

Since the time that we became friends I've always wanted to be in Finland for June 21st-The longest day of the year. called Midnight Summer- A night that the sun literally does not set. Her family has an island and they spend that night there each year. I should have already experienced this but I have not. Someday, I will spend that night with her!

This year she made my daughter a video about it. Please watch! It's wonderful!


Friday, June 26, 2009

Staying Close To Home!

Oh my, I have not posted since June 7th! What have I been doing exactly? I don't know but I sure have been feeling busy. A little of this and a little of that and before you know it you have a lot of stuff going on!

Anyway, normally at this time of year my school teacher husband is off from work and we plan a trip to see friends/family. Then we plan an end of summer 2 week vacation. Last year we found 2 weeks was a little too long so we are cutting that down to one week and pretty much staying close to home and not doing a road trip anywhere else. It feels a little strange not leaving for another locale right now but it also seems like we have the whole summer stretched out in front of us which is nice.

So, wanting to make the most of the time we have off together, over dinner the other night we came up with at least 20 different places we would like to go around town for family outing days!
We'll start next week! Most are free or low cost and I'll share them as we do them!

Actually I started this week and my mother-in-law and I took my girl strawberry picking! We picked 10 quarts in a relatively short amount of time. They ended up being $2 a quart, which is half of what we are paying at the farmers market this year!

Head on over to my other blog and you can see what I did with them!

Sunday, June 7, 2009

More Adventures in Book Selling

A little over a month ago I posted about selling a used book to Sotheby's. It generated a bunch of discussion around the ethics of buying used.

Today this reached a new level when I noticed that the person buying the secondhand book from Amazon was the ACTUAL AUTHOR OF THE BOOK!!!!

To be fair, the book was out of print so she could not have purchased it new online However, I wonder how many authors out there need to buy their book from someone else! (Don't they like get a box of their own books when they are published!)

I thought about writing a little note to the author to tell her I liked the book!

Farmer's Market Update

I just have to post an update on the Farmer's Market last Thursday.

We purchased
-1st Strawberries of the season
-A beautiful bunch of green onions
-A huge bunch of really delicious fresh spinach
-Some gourmet pasta
-Bread from The small world Bakery, who are new sellers at this market this year. It was $4 which is the same as the sprouted grain bread I buy BUT WAY more than the bread I can make.
-AND, EGGS. Free range eggs NOT from the surly woman with high prices and low personality (as well as supply!!!) A competing egg seller! A family with a bunch of young girls who all looked the same and were as tickled as I was that they were making their very first egg sale!!! I told them I would be back if they would be! I'll be seeing them this coming Thursday!

It was so nice to be buying fresh local food!

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Farmers Market & Garage Sale

Tonight begins the 1st night of the Farmers Market here in my town. It's a five minute drive from my house and I feel like I've been waiting for this for way too long! Finally, Summer (in my mind) is beginning.

At this point we'll be looking for spring greens & veggies. Also at this time of year many of the places have flowers and vegetables for gardening. I'm mostly done with mine but I do still need a Rosemary plant. There is also a guy that sells local honey and I'm almost out of mine.

We've made a standing date with our favorite neighbors-4pm every Thursday. The market is not huge but supplies everything we need-They even started selling grass fed beef last year. There is one woman who sells organic eggs but she tends to sell out rather quickly and her prices are more than I've seen elsewhere for organic eggs-A competing egg seller would be a really welcome addition!

In other news we are having a garage sale here at my house tomorrow and Saturday. I've asked a few people if they wanted to sell their stuff as well. We've got a lot of stuff and there will be coffee! Stop by and say hi!

A friend of mine is moving and she's bringing a lot of stuff including a front loading washing machine! If you need one give me a shout!