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We took Friday off.  Sarah dyed some eggs, and on Saturday we brought them back to New York to celebrate Passover.  Today we had an Easter egg hunt in Central Park.

We made ravioli Saturday night.  It’s a team effort: Jen makes the pasta, I make the sauce, and we collaborate on fillings.  In this way we can have thirds, all the while complimenting each other’s cooking skill.

We arrived at the farm for our Christmas vacation and found a deranged squirrel in the family room, hopping from bookshelf to bookshelf.  In the process, he knocked my ukulele to the ground, destroying it.  The squirrel had gotten in through the chimney in the mud room.  We chased him out the front door. Other […]

We had a very happy Thanksgiving, and quite a feast — roast turkey, mushroom and hickory nut stuffing, sweet potatoes, strawberry jello mold, green beans with almonds, and, a last-minute addition, Jen’s flash-pickled daikon radishes, broccoli stems, red radishes and carrots, all from the garden. We had a 2:1 person-to-pie ratio, which in many circles […]

At our current billing rates this is about four thousand dollars worth of shelled hickory nuts — about enough for a pie.  We are all looking forward to Thanksgiving!

For Sarah, possibly the best part of soccer is the post-practice ice pop with her friends and teammates Sophie and Michaela. Back at home, the supposedly wild animals are getting entirely too comfortable.  On Saturday we found two deer napping on the lawn. And on Sunday we found these two squirrels hanging out on the […]

Our biennial hickory nut harvest is upon us. We’ve gotten a bit smarter: we now know which trees produce the biggest nuts with the thinnest shells, and we’ve also learned that gathering two bushels of nuts is useful only if your goal is to have mice that look like Alex Rodriguez. Sarah maintains a laser-like […]

We took advantage of the spectacular weather today — about 68 degrees, sunny and dry — to go for a long walk.  In Jen’s bag are some wild grapes and the first of the hickory nuts. Sarah and Jen caught a frog … … but they couldn’t keep him for long. On Saturday, we retrieved Sarah’s […]

We were very excited to find this check in the mailbox Saturday morning.  It’s Sarah’s award for winning first place in the children’s landscape competition for the picture — a view of the pond — she entered in the Dutchess County Fair.  Now we have to figure out how to retrieve her blue ribbon. Sarah’s […]

Our garden cantaloupes were ripe as we entered a hot and sticky Labor Day weekend, with the emphasis, for me, on Labor, of both the town and country varieties (conference calls; barn-sweeping). Our third-floor neighbors the Seilers, including Sarah’s friend Annie, visited for the weekend.  The girls had a wonderful time, staying up late and […]