The Gray Weather Blues

We’ve had a lot of gray weather this winter. We live in Washington, which everyone (who is not from here) automatically equates with rain – and maybe the Space Needle and Frasier, I don’t know. But not everyone in Washington lives in Seattle, of course.

We live on the east side of Washington, just about 10 minutes from the Washington/Idaho border. We have beautiful mountains, skiing, hiking, tons of lakes, and we are supposed to have all four seasons. Evidently mother nature misplaced her rule book this year. We are supposed to have white, beautiful, winters. Not gray, wet, and depressing winters like Seattle. No offense Seattle. I love to visit you in the spring and summer but would never make it through living an entire winter under a rain cloud. Or so I thought.

Soon, well maybe in two months or so, we’ll finally begin to get the first peek at spring. Unless it comes early, which I’m sure everyone in my neck of the woods would certainly welcome. But until then, I’ll just have to continue turning every light on in the house to fake the light of spring and mentally prepare my summer gardens with lots and lots of bright colors.

For now, this is the most colorful thing in our garden.

See?

It’s even too wet for my beautiful yellow finch birdies (my favorite) to come out and munch on their thistle. That feeder has been full for almost three days…

I’ve decided to chase away the winter blues today by going through cookbooks and misc. recipes that I’ve been “meaning to get to” over the past few months. Seems like time flies until it’s raining and cloudy and then everything slows way down and you feel like catching up on things you never have time to complete.

I’m kind of a recipe “aholic”. At one point I had close to 75 cookbooks stuffed and crammed  in my kitchen cupboards. Then, there’s the piles and files of torn out magazine recipes or other blog recipes that I run across that I hope at some point to convert to gluten-free and do a little experimenting with. The piles and piles of torn out recipes I try to keep in an organized file until I’m ready to use. Usually though, I end up with piles instead of filing them every time I run across one. Then, on days like today, the gray weather makes me feel like organizing and I sit down with a nice cup of hot lemon and honey water and file, file, file. I love going through them all over again, allowing them to fill my head with all kinds of exciting ideas!

I’ve whittled the cookbooks down a bit to about 30 of my favorites. They are now displayed lovingly in my new home office/craft room/reading room. 

 Abigail Grace is never far away.

She’s decided my new chair is now hers and likes to cuddle in it when I’m in the office. The other morning she wedged herself in right next to me while I was reading and kept sighing as if I was the one taking up all the room.

It took two weeks to go through all of my boxes and bins of craft things in the basement.

I purged quite a bit and now feel wonderfully organized. What you don’t see is the other half of the shelf and more bins in the top of the closet. A girl can’t get rid of all of her treasures…sheesh!

I love to wrap packages in pretty ribbons.

Still have several more bins and boxes to go through in the basement, but look what I ran across!

Did you grow up in the 70’s when it was fun to collect spoons? This is a jar full of spoons that we collected when we traveled and also spoons that my mom and grandma would bring me from their travels.

 I guess if anything, these gray weather blues are at least a form of motivation. I’m going to go through all of my cookbooks and recipes and dedicate a couple of weeks solely to testing and baking different types of gluten-free & dairy-free breads. Now that’s something to look forward to!

So stay tuned and I hope that if you’re also suffering from gray weather blues, that it sparks something creative in you.

~April