Rain, rain, glorious rain! We are currently awaiting the second of three storms to visit us. I don’t need to elaborate on the fact that we desperately need this. I’m working hard at relearning my fire building skills. My father did his job and taught me how to build a solid fire, but those lessons were taught in an open fireplace and in a barbeque. Building a fire in a wood insert is an entirely different beast so it seems. I’m a very good smoke builder though. I could smoke you out of house and home with relatively little effort. Getting it into an enjoyable, productive fire is not coming naturally to me. Luckily it comes easily to Scott and luckily I have the whole winter ahead of me to practice.

What pairs well with rain and hot coffee and fire building and mornings is the Be Good Tanyas pandora station. I’m new to the smart phone world, having reluctantly obtained one last winter. We visited some tech forward friends at about the same time we got our new phones. They asked us what music we liked, they pushed a button on their smart phones and suddenly music filled the house! It blew! our! minds! Though Scott works at a tech job and I spend a good portion of my day on a computer, we are sorely behind the times on useful technology. So now after much head scratching and research we’ve figured out how to push that iphone button and have music play. My parents finally upgraded their stereo from 8-track and record player to a cd player right around the year 2000. This being behind the musical times seems to be in my blood. Did you know you can play library rented audio books on your iphone too? Wow – life changing. Anyway, rain + morning + hot coffee + fire + be good tanyas = good thing (thanks for the inspiration soulemama)

With the promise of rain, the children and I manically pulled out our tomato plants out yesterday, quickly raked the ground and broadcast fava beans as our winter cover crop. While we have a beautiful new raised bed area, we are keeping this adjoining flat garden area as well.

I’m decluttering still thanks to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up book that I told you about. Isn’t that a funny title? I really am fond of this book because it comes from such a different perspective than any organizational or minimalism advice I’ve read. First off, the woman is Japanese which gives it a unique cultural perspective and she’s young and without children, which again gives a much different spin that I’m finding refreshing. So far I’ve filled five full grocery bags that I’m ready to either throw out or give away. I’ve found two of her tips so far really useful in decluttering. First she instructs you to lay whatever category you are decluttering, for instance your closet, onto the floor. Everything goes on the floor. Then you pick up each item and if it ‘sparks joy’ then you keep it. If there is something you are feeling you are ready to give away, say a ‘thank you’ to the object. Thank it for it’s past usefulness to you, or thank it for teaching you something…that you really do need to buy a size medium next time, that it taught you that you actually look better in green than blue, that you need to be more proactive in returning what doesn’t fit. Without that item in your life you never would have learned that lesson. So thank it and place it in the bag to give away.

It sounds crazy to ‘thank’ an inanimate object. I thought it sounded crazy when I read it. But seriously, give it a try. It makes it a lot easier to give things away.

In completely unrelated news, I’m seeing a lot of Pinterest body care making pins suggesting that you can make an ‘easy’ ‘inexpensive’ body scrub by combining grocery store scented dish soap with sugar. Please, please make me a promise that you won’t use dish soap in any homemade body scrub gifts, okay? That’s just gross to use cheap artifically scented DISH soap. A good tip when making body care recipes as gifts is that you want to make it seem as luxurious as you can make it. Using a body scrub means that you are taking time to pamper yourself. You are worth more than cheap artificial dish soap. You shouldn’t even bath your dishes in it, let alone your body. (I use Oasis Biocompatible Dishwash for dishes- cheap dish soap makes my dish cloths smelly, that soap doesn’t) I’ll post a luxurious, yet economical body scrub recipe next month.

Well, that’s the dispatch from this Sonoma Garden. Be well, stay dry and warm.