A year ago....

Can't believe this was a year ago last month...

First Veggies: Radish Harvest

At our home here in Minneapolis we were fortunate enough to inherit (ok, rent) a backyard with a charming veggie garden and 3 raised beds for growing veggies.  This was a pleasant surprise in the spring, as the whole yard was covered with a good foot of snow when we rented the house in January.  As a complete and total big city dweller for all of my adult life, the closest I have ever been to having my own garden before this year was cultivating a couple of window boxes full of petunias at our last apartment and a basil plant in the kitchen window. That's one of the great things about the Twin Cities - you can live in the city and still have a little earth to call your own without selling your first born child.

A couple days ago I noticed that the radishes I had grown from seed were looking big enough to eat.  It seems like a small miracle to me that anything I planted from seed grows into a plant.  Especially one that is big enough to eat.  Amazing.

Here comes my little helper.

Fiona helped pull these babies out of the ground. 

Check out these red beauties.  

Hmmm, probably want to wash them before consumption.  But a little dirt won't hurt.

We harvested the lettuce and spinach today and had a great salad with our radishes.  Fiona even ate her leafy salad.

I hope the Swiss Chard will taste as good as it looks.  Going to wait a little longer to harvest it.

Yum.  

Moving to the 'Minn'ies

   
So it's been a long, long time since I updated anything on this blog.  And a lot has happened in the meantime.   For the last year I've been writing about how our family was planning to leave NYC.  My last post of 2012 was at the end of November.  Things happened VERY quickly and on December 20th we packed up and moved out of NYC. After over 8 years of living in in the Big Apple, where most of the significant events of my adult life have happened, including meeting Patrick, giving birth to Fiona and meeting some of my best friends.

Where, exactly, we were moving was still up in the air until about 2 weeks before we left.  There were a multitude of possibilities: Copenhagen, London, L.A., Austin, Sacramento and Minneapolis.  In the end, it was to be Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota.  A decision that, after researching the Twin Cities, I was excited about.  Initially I was reticent but, other than the cold, no one seemed to have a bad thing to say about it.  It seems like a great place to raise a family, there is good food to be had, culture, art etc. and we could rent a house (a HOUSE) in a nice neighborhood for less than the cost of the rent on our 1 bedroom apartment in NYC.   And still live in the city.

So here we are.  Living in Minnesota.  One of those things I NEVER thought would happen, but it has and so far so good.

Things I like about the Twin Cities so far:

It's quite cosmopolitan - lots of culture, art and theater as well as restaurants, places to go out etc.
Nothing takes longer than 30 minutes to get to.  Even rush hour traffic is nothing compared to NYC or Chicago, where I grew up and went to college.
The lakes and parks in the middle of the city.  It's beautiful.
Tons of free activities to do with kids that are not nearly as crazy busy as the free activities in NYC where you always have to get somewhere super early to get a spot/participate.

Things I don't like:

Ok, so yes, the winter is long and cold.  And the snow this year (most years??) doesn't melt until spring...it just...keeps...piling up.  It's pretty but I miss early spring in NYC.   Although the snow is pretty too.  I sometimes missed the snow in NYC since the winters have been so warm for most of the last 8 years I lived there.

I miss all of our in NYC friends.

And I miss walking everywhere or taking public transportation.   We actually have a little neighborhood main street nearby that is about a 5-7 minute walk with a grocery store, library, post office, hardware store, bakery/bistro/bar, italian restaurant, clothes store, book store and shoe store.  Plus a micro brewery and bar is planning to open up in the summer. So we CAN walk to some things.  Which I love.  But it was too COLD to really do that (maybe I'm just a wimp) until the last month or so.  There is also light rail in our neighborhood that they are expanding and there are city buses that go everywhere.  But it's not Broadway.

So before this post gets too long, I just wanted to mention that I am hoping to share some Twin Cities adventures on the blog.  I'm still settling in here for various reasons that I will reveal in ongoing posts so I've been a bit slow to share but I'm hoping to getting back into sharing a bit more in this space.

So hello from Minnesota!