Thoughts from Alison that might at least entertain you!

Coming Up For Air

Alright, it's been a long time - and a couple of very long weeks!  Today is the first chance I've had in quite a while to catch up on the little things like groceries and a leisurely bookstore visit.  I believe I'll have a chance to be more present in life and blogging in the near future. 

Happy weekend, Friends!  Don't forget to turn your clocks back, and enjoy at least one little snack and possibly a spook or two for Halloween.  The best signs of coming up for air are these (finally!) new flowers in the kitchen at Prune Ridge:

Pockets of Beauty in Chaos

Some flowers currently housed in the kitchen at Prune Ridge for you...  And some insight as to why I haven't been collaging in a while.  I can't get to the table!  Granted, the drying rack is temporary and appears when I do laundry, but still.  As of this afternoon the table is a bit more accessible, the clothing seen piled on it in this picture has been moved (for mending), and a few collage ideas are swirling.  I need some fairies or elves or something to do these sort of things when I'm not looking.  Just imagine how much more productive I would be if I weren't my own obstacle!

Sometimes Peace Just Happens

Prune Ridge Vacationing

Well hello there...  did you think I was gone?  Not so, not so.  Just a little overworked this last couple of weeks, and a little under the weather the last several days.

As of this morning, The Reeds of Prune Ridge are both officially on vacation. Woohoo!  More to follow on vacation plans with these yammerings:

So far for vacation, we've slept in soundly, secured a few needed groceries (yay, cat litter!), cleaned up the house just a bit, stored the outdoor furniture in the basement for colder weather and winter ahead, had some simple lunch, and surfed the interwebs more than plenty.  As of this moment, the interwebs are still being surfed, Tori is sleeping on her newest favorite nap spot (an old padded piano bench stowed below a big bright window), and Maggie B is somewhere unknown, but she is known for the moment to not be causing trouble.  Life is good at Prune Ridge.

While fighting a cold in the week past, I have managed to survive the pre-vacation frenetics at work and even complete nearly everything I really wanted/needed to do before time off.  I also worked a few good shows - including an especially fabulous night with John Gorka (what a great and funny entertainer he is!) and Drew Nelson opening the show.  My job remains pretty neat - even when I'm stressed out, harried, and have a cold!  I also visited the good Dr. Kloster (my dentist since I was 12 or 13!) to get a good teeth bill of health and cleaning.  Dinner with my brother followed the Dentist, and Masterworks followed that.  John and I have managed to share very few meals together during this past work week, but we intend to remedy that on vacation time.

For vacation week, I've discovered I have a small pile of 7 magazines and catalogs waiting to be read or perused - after I filtered out and recycled a number of other things that didn't make the cut.  And did I mention I have no fewer than 4 books I'd like to start reading immediately, never mind the dozens of others stowed away in various corners of Prune Ridge?  Oh yeah - and tomorrow, I think I might need to roast the first chicken of the season.

I will have a rehearsal for Masterworks on Monday evening, so John and I will leave on Tuesday for a short vacation escape.  We're heading to a bed and breakfast in the Hocking Hills area of Ohio.  John has never been to Hocking Hills, so the plan is to go (without computers, although we have pretty fancy phones...) and poke around.  We plan to hike a few trails, see Old Man's Cave and a few of the other caves/falls in the region.  Yay!  Our super pet sitter will take care of the girls while we are away.  How lovely to have the services of this great person available to help us grab a little escape.

We'll return home on Friday next week - which happens to be our anniversary!  I return to work already on Saturday the 17th, but I'm not thinking about that until the morning of the 17th!

Happy fall week and changing weather to you, Friends.  Be Well and eat an apple, carve a pumpkin, roast a chicken...  or any other fabulous fall activity of your choosing!

Harvesting in Honor of the Harvest Moon

And so I've harvested the last of this year's amazing bell peppers at Prune Ridge.  They're pretty lovely looking, right?  We even have one from the supposedly "yellow bell pepper" plant that almost got all the way to yellow.  Oh, did I mention that these are rather small even though I left them on the plants for many, many weeks?

See display #2, which we shall call "Lovely Prune Ridge Peppers In Perspective."  That's right, 5 gorgeous peppers - together, all smaller than the blade of a butter knife.  I should mention that we do not have giant-sized utensils at

Prune Ridge.  This is your average butter knife.  Oh well, at least they tried to become peppers.

I decided it was time to harvest the peppers this weekend as the air is changing a bit towards fall-like.  The leaves are just beginning to turn in southeast Michigan, and a week from today brings the Harvest Moon!  According to the Farmer's Almanac, the Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox each year.  In 3 years out of 4, the Harvest Moon is in late September.  This year is the exception, with the Harvest Moon falling on October 4th.  The Harvest Moon gets its name (in the traditions that call it that - there are many different names for every moon of the year!) because it is a late-rising moon, and farmers are able to continuie harvesting late into the night during this crucial end to the growing season by the light of the moon.

A favorite book of mine (a children's book of course) is Thirteen Moons on Turtle's Back, A Native American Year of Moons by Joseph Bruchac and Jonathan London.  Bruchac is an amazing collector, teller, and author of tales including an astonishing number of tales collected from countless Native American traditions.  I don't know from this particular collection which moon lines up with the Harvest Moon, but I have always loved his telling of the "Moon of Falling Leaves" from the Cherokee tradition.  I'll leave you with that one here, and encourage you to check out the book if you can:

Long ago, the trees were told they must stay awake seven days and nights, but only the cedar, the pine and the spruce stayed awake until that seventh night.  The reward they were given was to always be green, while all the other trees must shed their leaves.  So, each autumn, the leaves of the sleeping trees fall.  They cover the floor of our woodlands with colors as bright as the flowers that come with the spring.  The leaves return the strength of one more year's growth to the earth.  This journey the leaves are taking is part of that great circle which holds us all close to the earth.

Happy Harvest, Happy Fall, and Happy Season of Change, Friends!

Tired and Such

Alright, I'm baaa-aaack!

I've come off a sort of overloaded work week, into a fun and super-ultra-busy weekend!  This weekend at Prune Ridge has been one of family and good times, with a little bit of running for all.  John's parents and Grandpa Reed have been with us for two major events centered (sort of) in Ann Arbor!  This weekend is Homecoming at the University of Michigan - and John's dad has been here for a Marching Band Reunion - and he marched with a very large alumni band in the football game today!  Michigan pulled off a win in a back-and-forth nail biter with Indiana.  We watched from Prune Ridge (no tickets to be had for the rest of us), but of course didn't get to watch any of the band stuff which they don't broadcast.  We'll be searching for video after someone has a chance to post it, hopefully!

Also this weekend, Grandpa Reed came to Prune Ridge!  John and I saw him off just before 5:30 this morning over at Domino's Farms - the rendezvous point for Grandpa's long-awaited WWII Honor Flight to Washington DC to visit the WWII Memorial.  He'll be back late this evening.

John has been a prince for all this weekend, offering his personalized limo service all about town.

Guess what's on the agenda for tomorrow?  Very Little!  Happy Weekend, All - perhaps a bit of blogging to come tomorrow.  Be Well out there in our World!

Day-O-Projects

Alright, here's what I've been up to all day!  Bring on the window coverings:

Window covering project #1 for today (actually this one was last night but I'm counting it all as today) was repairing the blinds destroyed with such precision by Tori earlier this week.  I can fix nearly anything with a hot glue gun.

The bedroom window covering adventures started

quite some time ago, not long after John and I moved to Prune Ridge.  While the window curtains were finished many months ago, the closet curtains took a bit longer.  Ever since the completion of

both we've had sime simple curtain hold-backs to install for the window curtains.  Voila, window covering project #2 for today!

Finally, the more substantial project for today that has taken a good several hours:  The first picture here is our large sliding glass door before today's project.  It was high time to retire these (perfectly functional, after lots of hot glue repairs) dated and ragged vertical

blinds.  "Demolition" of these took a little over an hour, time largely spent trying to not destroy them in the process - just in case the new curtains don't do it for us.  And here we have the new curtain rod and curtains.  The natural light is waning at this

point in the day, so the small picture is an attempt to show the detail.  These are a vertical stripe fabric with sheen, olive/rust/slate-blue/brown colors.  The pictures here aren't perfect, taken with my iPhone!  Our camera is traveling with John for the week, and what can I say?  I'm impatient!  There are still holdbacks to be installed for these new curtains but I wasn't quite ready to commit to them or tackle them today.

Ta-Da!  (PS - Turns out the new and improved TypePad platform isn't too great for fitting pictures artistically into a blog post.  Grrr.)

Flowers and Flowers

Some pretty things to share from around the house.  The orange/yellow sunflowers and really dark purple alstromeria are in our kitchen.  The pink blooms are on the bloomin' hens and chicks outside!  The weather today is perfect and beautiful - finally not so hot, a good breeze, and high puffy clouds in the sky.  The birds are glad I just filled the feeder outside, and the cats are snoozing inside.  Happy Saturday, All - maybe get out there and enjoy the weather in your neck of the woods, ok?  Ok! 

Prune Ridge Party!

Good morning, All!  Many, many, many Thanks to all you friends and family who joined us for yesterday's Prune Ridge Party!  We had a lovely day and lots of fun.  What a joy to have this place we love and to be able to share it with all of you.  And who knew prune appetizers would prove so popular?  If you didn't make it yesterday, come visit soon!  Happy Sunday, Friends.

Mission Accomplished?

This morning I checked a sort of big thing off my list - I bought 3 bags of mulch and several decent-sized rocks.  This is a big thing because I don't really know anything about mulch (I know there are lots of different kinds, but I don't know why or what to choose!), and I'm still new to this whole gardening thing.  The "accomplished" part is questionable for the moment because it remains to be seen what I accomplish with the stuff that's now sitting on our porch!

Happy planting or whatever you're doing, Friends!

Today's Plan

I'm working on having a real, actual, and complete day off work today.  (Although, granted, I plan to stop at the office - but only to pick up some fresh cherries I bought yesterday and left in the fridge there!)  Things I might accomplish today: hunt for curtain hardware for our bedroom, hunt for a couple of yard-things, hunt for more cat food can covers (we use a lot of these!), hunt for about 27 other things that are on the list or might pop into my head at any given time...   The girls also have a very busy day planned.  Their day involved lots of napping, plenty of eating, and a bit of complaining.  Oh yeah, and maybe soap operas.  Happy Day, All!  Be Well out there in the world!

Happy Day

Happy morning to you, All!  I don't think I can ask for a better start to the day than a brisk early morning walk with my husband.  Life is good at the Reed House!  (a.k.a. Prune Ridge)

Welcome Home

And so we really, truly live at Prune Ridge!

Here's a picture to share from moving day.  Wheeee, the fun and chaos of pulling up roots - even if you only move 20 miles!  We are much more settled after our couple of weeks in the new home, but the picture says it all about the transition!

The girls are thrilled with our new space, and John and I are at least as happy with it.  So far settling is going well.  We have a settled kitchen, a settled living room (with cable, phone, and internet!), a settled library (!), a settled bedroom, and a newly decor-accented bathroom.  We have very few final versions of window coverings, but they'll come in time.

You might have noticed Tori loves the sliding screen door to our backyard green space.  She is practicing her intimidating scary face and growling to establish her territory and fend off would-be intruder cats!  So far the cat transitions have gone well.

We've had a photographic theme since our move - "The Girls, In Things."  Maggie loved the new pantry until I filled it with stuff.  Tori has been taken with all the empty boxes.  ("I can FIT inside this one!")  Maggie has successfully burrowed under a large burlap sack for a good afternoon nap, as well as inside a gigantic fabric gift bag that also held several bed linens.  Note all the pictures as proof!

We have lovely white irises blooming in the back yard, which came just as the daffodils gave up their fight.  The rain has been making things nice and green - except for the large grass-less area in our "green space!"

The weekend ahead brings family to town from almost all directions to see Prune Ridge and visit, a Masterworks concert on Saturday night, and an evening of work for me.  Also maybe some peppered bacon farm bread from Zingerman's!

I hope all is well out there in the rest of the world, Friends.  Be Taking Care of Yourselves!

Brief Update!

Hi Friends and Family!

Just a quick update from me (I'm stealing a few seconds at work):  John and I are completely moved in at Prune Ridge but living in disorganized chaos, and still need to return our keys for the lake house in Milan.  So far in the new house, our kitchen is put together and functional, our living room is at least habitable, and our bed lets us sleep at night.  That's about it for "settled."

The new place is super!  The girls are having a good time exploring and staking out their respective spots.  They are both especially puzzled by the half bathroom on the first floor.  The door sits behind the front door to the house, so it's always closed except when we use it.  Every time I open the door to go in there, both girls come running.  They are so interested in that extra secret bonus room!

We are still without internet and a land-line phone in the new place, but will be back online in about a week.  More frequent updates and a few photos of our adventures will follow here at that point.

Happy Day, All!  Be Well Out There!

For Real

Finally, Really, and Truly.

Prune Ridge is ours.  We have keys and everything!

(Phew!)