Our unappreciated hippie fantasticness...

It was pouring cats and dogs outside this morning, a nice February day, for sure. But that didn't stop us from hitting up Old Town Cafe for our traditional Valentine's Day breakfast together. And they had the candlelit breakfast again this year, which is my favorite! Then church, naps, and by early afternoon the clouds rolled out and the blue sky amazingness rolled in, giving us a perfect get-outside-and-be-productive kind of day. So we did. We decided to conquer some gardening areas around our house as they were getting overrun by previously planted flowers and choking out our strawberry plants that we had transplanted at the end of the summer. Not good. PS, not sure if we've mentioned this yet, but we will not be having our garden space at the community gardens this year. As fun as it was last year, we got about seventeen too many calls from the garden police complaining that our beautiful plot was, indeed, not nearly beautiful enough to be seen with the rest of the plots. Apparently they're not much of a fan of the hippie, letting things run a tad wild, exotic type of experience in gardening, which is really surprising considering we live smack in the middle of hippie land. I mean, honestly, our plot was not any less weeded than any of the other jungles around ours, but for some reason they just thought it was necessary to continuously call us and "make sure we were still tending to our veggies," and "oh, did you realize that it was windy last night and parts of your greenhouse came untucked, could you come fix it immediately?" I swear they just had it out for us, and we thought about staying on this year and being a thorn in their flesh just for the fun of it, but we ended up just saying the heck with it. We did, however, take several bucketfulls of our well-fertilized soil back with us to the house for our new little garden in our front lawn. After all, we'd put about a hundred dollars of good soil into the plot to begin with and in no way were going to let them run us off without taking what was ours to begin with. Anyway, that's the story of the garden plot. Someday when we have a couple acres to play with, we'll have a ginormous garden where the weeds can be tangled into the plot as much as our little hearts desire, but for now we're going to utilize the small area of soil around our little rental. Hence, our outside activities this afternoon. Our lawncare is hired out, so I assumed the flowerbeds and decorative plants around the strip where we wanted to garden was put in place by our landscapers as well, but Isaac didn't think it would be a problem to rip it all up and plant veggies of our own. He was pretty sure most of them were weeds anyway. And I scoured the lease and could find nothing prohibiting us from taking lawn matters into our own hands, so we did. Well, we did the ripping out today at least. I will say one thing, it will be really nice to not have to drive all the way to the garden every day just to water things. We also took our blue-mobile out for a little spin since she's been sitting in the cold and rain for the past few months, and she ran like a gem!

I tried my hand at a new gluten free bread recipe today. It was this yeasty rosemary concoction that had been refrigerated for a week (which the recipe clearly said was okay to do). We took a little sniff before it went into the oven and it definitely smelled a tad fermented, but that just got us excited for a potential sourdough loaf. And sour it was, my friends. Sour and disgusting. It was very disappointing as we were pretty hungry and definitely looking forward to spreading a nice chunk of butter onto the bread and feasting before we did our manual labor. Instead, we just about threw up and spent a solid five minutes washing our mouths out with water. Lesson learned? Fermentation does not equal sourdough. Bleghhh. I'm not sure what went wrong because I baked a loaf right after I originally mixed the dough a week ago and that loaf was great. I suppose that's the beauty of being a baker - you win some, and you lose some. Thankfully we'll be winning some in about an hour as Isaac is making a fantastic cobbler-amazingness for dinner tonight. Happy Valentine's Day to me!