a peek inside the fishbowl

Many moons ago, my mother gave us a china cabinet. It was in the dining room in the house that I grew up in. Storage-wise, it’s great. It’s tall. The top half has glass doors, the bottom half has solid doors and hides all kinds of things. Dividing the top and bottom is a big wide (and deep!) drawer that holds […]

I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to look outside and see GREEN again. It’s about time. Here’s what’s blooming here at Casa Fishbowl: You know what’s funny? I took these photos a few days ago and everything is even bigger and greener. You can practically sit and watch this stuff grow. Coming […]

Over the past few weeks I’ve raked multiple lawns and moved what might possibly be a metric ton of leaves from one place to another. I raked the small forest around my mother’s place on two occasions this fall (picture full-size maple and oak trees, so many leaves they can’t be bagged), my in-laws small suburban front […]

In a recent post about our garden, I mentioned that squirrels have been digging into my containers. It’s really frustrating. It’s not like I’ve been stashing peanuts in there or anything. It’s not like those plants are EDIBLE, but they’re dug up and disturbed and don’t get a chance to grow. So I decided to […]

As I wrote about previously, we’ve been busy planting/weeding/chopping stuff down in our backyard. Mark trimmed some trees and took out a whole bunch of branches recently, which is great until you have to clean up/bundle up the aforementioned branches. Sigh. In these cases, it’s helpful to have an end game in mind. Which is: […]