I had no idea my home state had wine this good. I’m representing WordPress.com at the Wine Tourism Conference in Leesburg, Virginia this week — talking to winery owners and wine trail guides about the work they do, and learning about the passion and pride that go into wine making — and I’m learning all about my region while I’m here.
Grape vines at Stone Tower Winery in Leesburg, VA
Wine makers and promoters have come from as far as Portugal, Nova Scotia, and California for the conference’s first visit to the east coast of the US, and it’s here in Virginia. Where I live.
11:30 am wine
I’m taking notes for when my husband and I need a weekend getaway.
I’ve had “get firewood” on our family Trello board since we moved into our house in June. In July, when we had our chimney cleaned, I asked the sweep if he had any recommendations for where to get firewood around here. He tilted his head and said, “Most people don’t share their firewood sources. It’s not easy to get good seasoned wood around here.”
I tilted my head back at him. I was skeptical. We are surrounded by forests and pickup trucks.
In August, I wrote about getting excited for autumn. In September I started calling around. I called the one number our chimney sweep gave us. I called numbers from “Firewood for sale” signs we saw by the road side. I replied to “Seasoned firewood” ads on Craigslist.
Sold out.
No answer.
Won’t deliver.
We’re flooded and can’t get to our wood.
Come get it with your own truck.
Will deliver a minimum of two cords for $485.
We wanted half a cord. We don’t own a truck. We’re not spending $500 on firewood.
For eight weeks this went on. “We can deliver a 6-foot pickup bed full.” How much is that in cords? No call back.
As of October 31, we’d had frost on the ground more than once, and we still had no wood. I was completely baffled by this. In Minnesota we had our choice of firewood options. One phone call and we’d have a standard measure of seasoned wood delivered and stacked the following weekend.
On Halloween day, before we even bought our pumpkin to carve, I was on the phone again. I finally found someone who sold in a measurement I could identify, and who would deliver. He sold in loads twice the size of what we were prepared for, but given the trouble we had finding wood, that was fine with me.
Derek, who is my new best friend, pulled his truck alongside the rack my husband built and dumped it within feet for easy stacking: a pile as tall as me of beautiful, seasoned, hard wood. He eyed the rack. “That will hold about half of this,” he said.
He pulled away, and my daughter and I started stacking. We filled the rack in about 20 minutes. I turned around and the pile didn’t look any smaller.
Hmmm.
I didn’t want to leave the wood piled there, where it would kill the grass, and we didn’t have a plan for where it would go, so I made a makeshift stand out of firewood and started stacking again.
Proud of my stacks.
There were a couple of times I thought my pyramid would tumble, like when you pull the keystone apple from a produce display and the whole thing collapses, apples rolling everywhere. I don’t think we’ll be sending our kids down to get firewood from that stack.
I love wood.
But it’s there. We have wood. Winter is coming, and we are ready for it.
Lots of wood.
For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Solo but with others is kind the story of my life right now. As an employee of a distributed company, with teammates all over the world, I am physically alone in my home office, but am mentally together with people all day long. I chatter online at with customers from around the world and with colleagues in California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Canada, Wales, Sweden, England, Austria, Brazil, Malaysia, Australia…
I never feel alone, even though I am the only one in the room.
The same is true of my experience running the annual Worldwide WordPress 5k this year: I could have run a 5K in real life with my co-workers last week at our annual meeting in Utah, but I, um, didn’t.
Instead, I am taking the opportunity to join the worldwide WordPress community in running a 5K together this week — virtually — just like I join my coworkers every day. Starting today and going through November 1, members of the WordPress community will be running, walking, or crawling their own 5Ks and documenting their journeys on blogs using the tag WWWP5k. If you’d like to join, please do! You can find more details in the Automattic Worldwide WP 5K 2015 post on our news blog, Hot Off the Press.
My personal 5K journey was a quiet autumn one — my favorite kind. The air was crisp, and the gold and ruby colored leaves shone brilliant against a grey sky. The hills around here kill my legs and my lungs, but the views of the mountain sides are worth it.
We thought we were going to wait till spring to start any gardening, but none of us could stand waiting.
I’ve been poring over gardening books, planning the spring beds. Our house looked sad and bare, though, after we ripped out the previous owner’s shrubbery. So we decided, we can at least put in some evergreens for winter, right?
Hick’s Yew (Taxus x media “Hicksii”)Japanese Holly (Ilex crenata “Helleri”)
With our freshly painted porch and door, we thought it might be nice to add some garden boxes too.
Fresh paint and garden boxes
We’ve never had garden boxes before. They are my new favorite thing about our house. Besides the turquoise front door. And the oak floors. And the kittens.
Pansies and flowering kale
We wanted something alive at our house when winter comes, and the man at the garden shop said pansies and cabbages would be great for garden boxes. The only real gardening I’ve done was in Florida, and I know nothing about winter plants. I am trusting blindly. Even if they don’t last through winter, though, they look awfully pretty now :-).
My coworker Jeremey DuVall wrote recently about adventuring. Specifically, he wrote about taking more microadventures: little adventures taken at little cost, that take you out of your normal routine, and can be done in your own back yard or your own small town.
I took his advice today. For my birthday, my son gave me a book on butterfly gardening with native plants, and now I’ve been bitten hard by the gardening bug. With a naked lawn — a blank slate — I decided I wanted to go find some ideas. So in the early morning, before the tailgaters were out for the big game tomorrow, I packed a water bottle, my real camera, and a Luna bar; slathered on sunscreen and donned a baseball cap; strapped on my day-pack; and I walked across town, across the Virginia Tech campus, to the University’s horticulture garden.
And boy did I find ideas. Now I want a butterfly garden, an herb garden, a woodland garden, a meadow garden, a waterfall, a pond with lily pads, and much, much more.
I would also like to identify the plant in the images below. Its fragrance drew me across the entire garden, and I want one. If you know what this is, please let me know!
Our daughter’s greatest struggle right now is, “I know I want to be a pastry chef, but I also want to be a swimmer and musician. I know I can play guitar on the side, but I doubt culinary schools will have swim teams. Maybe I can find a local swim team in the town where my culinary school is.” And so on. She is 9.
Regardless of what she will ultimately choose for her life’s course, I am more than willing to encourage all three. Especially the pastry chef idea. So today, I helped her make her first pie.
Butterfly Mind 