cabin fever | Thespunmonkey's Blog

the 52 project.
Portraits of my main squeeze(s) every week.

Winter Break: It was quiet, and full even though we didn’t go anywhere vacation-ish. Work and play happened, like any other week, but it was a little richer with friends and warm drinks. A nod to the joys of Winter, yes, but feeling in the end like a readiness to say goodbye. We’re still in it; just a thing we have to admit to ourselves. The position of the sun makes 12 degrees feel somehow more tolerable than even just a few weeks ago, and brightly glittering snow is so much more hopeful than dull, grey snow under an overcast sky, so I think we’ll manage.

I’m deep in scheming and dreaming up a trip out West in April to visit family and teach some workshops. Places I’ll hit this go ’round: Portland, OR, the SF Bay Area, and Denver, CO. I’ve got the latter location covered for a venue, but am still contemplating the other two. A new spinning workshop, and the tried-and-true nuno felt class are on the table. More information will be available soon, but if you have any requests, ideas, venues to suggest or offer, do let me know! All is still in the planning stage.

In other news: granola. I’ve posted about what I like to call Culture Crunch before, and I totally forgot about how I used to sprout sesame seeds to add to the mixture. Next time! This time, I went back to the original recipe that inspired my fermented granola experimentation and played with some of the post-fermentation wet ingredients. To the honey mixture, which I increased a tad, I added a generous scoop of peanut butter, probably about 3/4 cup for a doubled recipe, and a few heaping tablespoons of raw cacao powder. As soon as it comes out of the dehydrator, I’ll add soaked and dried sunflower and pumpkin seeds, toasted coconut, and raisins. A little taste-testing reveals that this is a subtle flavoring, not too sweet, which means it will be perfection once the raisins are added. I wasn’t going for cloying, just comforting. Win!

A pile of beauties all dressed up and ready to roll for Gather Here’s opening on February 19th. A wee teaser for you MA locals.

In other news, some elements all came together to provide us with one day of perfect snowman-building snow. All winter I’ve been trying to roll snowballs and the conditions have been less than optimal. I made a decent hill once. We carved steps into a snowbank. We sledded, we snowshoed, we made snow angels and pretended we were polar bears. None of these things are snowballs. This made me a little sad.

One fine, melty day, however, we were golden. C arrived home from work with precious little daylight and so we all got to work:

The Boy and I built up a smaller snowman, but C just kept rolling and rolling…he couldn’t stop until it became totally unmanageable…it’s rather like an Olmec head, just sitting there…mysterious and immovable. There’s no way we could lift another ball on top of it, and so it shall remain until springtime takes it away.

My spirits are always a little dampened by the freeze/thaw cycle that starts to repeat during this phase of winter. Very soon the days will be warm enough for the sap to flow, but the nights still frozen. I feel quite immovable myself. Part of me is so anxious for warmer weather, to see the earth again, to watch things grow…but the other part of me takes so much comfort in this hibernation…in curling up under blankets, in excuses to just…stay home by the fire and drink my weight in tea.

Or write on this blank wall with an icicle pen.