I’m leaving early Friday morning to go and see my daughter, Amanda, in Kentucky for a long weekend. I’ve been madly packing and getting things ready around the farm for me to leave, and will return on Monday afternoon.

I’ve brought lots of things to post while I’m down there, so keep checking for updates throughout the weekend.

Have a great one!

Around noon yesterday my husband and I went into New York City for the night. He had bought tickets for us to see the Broadway hit show The Book of Mormon as a Mother’s Day gift, and we had tickets for the 2:00 show. After dropping our bags at the hotel, we arrived at the theatre with about 1 minute to spare before the show started.


This show was hysterically funny. I’m no theatre critic, but if you haven’t yet seen this show you should try and figure out a way to.

So, being done with the theatre around 5:15 or so, we had a whole night and until early afternoon today to do other things.

We somehow managed to snag a table (at the window no less) in the roomy bar of Danny Meyer’s Maialino. The food was outstanding, and I have to say that I give huge props to any restaurant that has a few specialty non-alcoholic drinks on their menu, and there were 3 here, all delicious-sounding. I went with the Bergamo Cooler, which was sanbitter soda (whatever that is), grapefruit soda and an orange peel twist. Really yummy.

Then we walked around Manhattan. I dragged Jim into Sephora so I could pick up a few necessary beauty items. We walked around Gramercy Park and admired the beautiful brownstones surrounding the private park.

In the Flatiron district we went into a brand new store called Beecher’s, which started in Seattle and has only recently opened in New York. They actually make their own cheeses right there in the building, and carry them, along with a huge variety of other cheeses in the store/cafe there. Downstairs there is a restaurant and bar called The Cellar. The store had just closed for the night, but I will certainly be going back there to sample their cheeses soon.


We ended at Eataly, Mario Batali’s amazing gourmet store/restaurant . I’ve been there before, but this time I was armed with more than my iPhone camera.

Although it’s always been extremely crowded when I’ve been there, it’s definitely someplace worth visiting if you’re any kind of a foodie.

We went to the Museum of Modern Art today, but that’s for another post.

I live in a nice town. It’s what people refer to as a “commuting suburb”, as many of the men in this town (and some of the women) commute on the train into Manhattan for work (it’s about a 53 minute train ride to New York City.) People have nice houses. They drive nice cars. They wear nice clothes. The movie The Stepford Wives was filmed in the next town.

Stickers like this are extremely popular on the rear of cars around here.


If the people are feeling adventurous they might add a pet sticker.


And dog stickers are popular, often a Labrador Retriever.


These Nantucket, Massachusetts, stickers are popular, often multiple stickers are displayed to show how many years you have spent there.


And then there’s the back of my car.

I don’t know when I decided to become one of those crazy bumper sticker people. I don’t think it was a conscious decision. I just realized it was a way for me to speak my mind and not actually have to talk to people.

I’d picked up some new stickers in my travels over the last 6 months so I decided I would take a few off that I’d never fallen in love with and change things up. At the same time I could cover up that stupid un-repaired dent.


I love the back of my car. I love being able to say what’s important to me. I get a lot of friendly comments about my stickers and have had many a fine conversation with strangers about them that start chatting with me. I’ve had people stop to ask me specific questions about chickens and bees that I am more than happy to answer. And a lot of people love one of my favorite quotes “Well behaved women rarely make history.”

I’ve heard there’s some new craft machine out that you can make your own custom car decals with. I was thinking about getting one and cutting out 4 goats, 56 chickens, a couple of thousand bees and a dog and sticking them all over the back window just for laughs.

I still can’t quite believe it, but thanks to all of your votes,  Crafty Farm Girl was chosen as the winner of the Country Living Blue Ribbon Blogger Reader’s Choice Award in the “Lifestyle” category!

I’m totally amazed and so thankful to all of my readers, friends, and family that voted for me. And if you happen to be one of those people that got assaulted on the street by my sister to vote, then I’ll apologize for her — she was so excited that I’d been nominated she practically shouted it from the rooftops!

So THANK YOU.

You can see all of the winners in each category here.

My youngest son and daughter, the twins, started a new school on Tuesday.

Today my son was bullied.

Not maybe it might have been bullying.

Outright, mean, inappropriate bullying.

By a kid 2 grades higher than he’s in.

By a kid several feet taller than he is.

He was bullied because he’s small.

My son has been bullied before for his size.

He’s been bullied before because he stutters.

This time two of my daughters were witness to the event.

Having my son come home from school and relate a story like this to me makes me mad.

It makes me cry.

It makes me want to take that kid into an alley and show him what bullying feels like.

But I won’t.

It makes me tell my son how to defend himself if this kid puts him in a similar situation again.

But I hope he doesn’t have to.

It makes me doubt humanity.

It makes me want to homeschool.

It makes me want to take my children and run away somewhere safe where I can protect them.

But where is that?

And it drains me of all my creative energy. So I have nothing else to post tonight.

I’d had a very long, bad day on Wednesday for various reasons — mostly involving two separate people that wasted my entire day by not showing up for scheduled appointments. Couple that with a hurricane and not having internet access for 4-1/2 days and I was one grumpy human being.

Then I got an email on the one remaining device functioning capable of receiving cyber news that I had been selected as a finalist for Country Living’s Blue Ribbon Blogger award. My twins were with me when I read it and even though they didn’t know why I was hooping and hollering, they were as excited as I was! That tiny little email on my iPhone screen made up for all of the bad things that had happened that day.

My sister had told me about the contest a month or two ago and said I should enter. I filled out the entry and sent it in, but it’s been such a busy summer that I really hadn’t given it another thought. I just couldn’t believe that my little blog had been chosen by Country Living! Then, when I finally got my internet back yesterday and discovered that I’d been chosen out of over 700 entries I was truly humbled. Twenty-four people out of over 700 were chosen as finalists in 7 categories, and I am one of 4 finalists in the “Lifestyle” category. Wow. Somebody actually liked my blog. Thank you. Whoever you are. Thank you.

Oh, and if you want to vote for my blog to win, the “People’s Choice” award voting will be going on until September 15th. They say you can vote once a day.

Click the link below to get to the page listing the finalists in seven different categories. If you click the “Vote” button on the upper right of that page it will take you to the voting.

Thanks for your support! I’ll keep you all posted!

If you want to see a blogger do a “happy dance”, just restore her internet after 4-1/2 days without it!

It’s been five days since I posted anything because Hurricane Irene rolled in to our town on Saturday night and there’s been a lot of chaos since then. We live on the water here in lower Fairfield County, Connecticut, and while things could have been much worse, we still got hit relatively hard. While almost 70% of our town was without power at first, somehow we did not lose power. We did, however, lose our cable and internet, which just came back on late this afternoon. Losing your internet when you are a blogger makes life difficult. You also don’t realize how reliant you have become on the internet until you don’t have it.

Thankfully we did not get the rain quantities that they originally anticipated which helped ease the flooding away from the coast. We live near the water, but not next to it. The image above is about two blocks down the street from us. About the same distance away but in a different direction this bridge was still overflowing with water. This is nothing compared to how high the water had been just a few hours earlier.

A very large tree came down in our yard, roots and all. Fortunately it landed safely away from hitting anything. For size perspective, that is my husband standing on the tree.

There were large trees across streets and power lines were down everywhere.

And Jim probably should have put a piece of plywood over the roof of his car. A large branch ripped a whole in the roof of his Miata.

This is what all the streets looked right after the hurricane passed through. There were branches large and small everywhere along with lots and lots of leaves.

When it was all over the goat and chickens came out to survey the damage. What a mess! I had visions for days prior to the storm of a tree coming down and crushing the new chicken coop or goat house. Thankfully that didn’t happen.

I’m grateful we are all OK and that my animals are too. Although I do not normally watch TV, I hope to catch up on the news tonight and see more of the devastation in Vermont and other area. I’ll also be catching up on some blogging!

When I was in Jackson in July I really thought I had done a thorough job finding all of the hotels & motels with cool old vintage signs. I was wrong. I found a few more this trip.