Spring has Sprung!

This past fall, I planted a bunch of early spring bulbs up the length of my front walk and outside my front door, and, finally over this weekend, the first ones opened up!!  It is my first spring in my new house, and I am really looking forward to starting up the garden.

My first crocus in bloom!

Definitely going to be planting roses and hydrangeas - it doesn't seem right to me to live in a Cape Cod style house without hydrangeas!!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

When Sister K and I went to Ireland back in 2010, I had my first experience with the very delicious potato and leek soup. I loved it and ended up eating some in pretty much every stop on our tour (along with the brown bread and scones. Actually, the whole scone thing became kind of an obsession.)

Today, I am hosting a St. Patrick's Day dinner at my house for my family and in addition to the traditional (American) corned beef and cabbage, I wanted to make something that was actually authentically Irish. I found this easy and delicious recipe over on the Irish American Mom blog and am really looking forward to sharing this with the fam this evening. (I made it earlier today - so that the flavors could meld more and so that I would have time for a redo, if necessary. It is sitting on the warming burner right now, smelling amazing, just teasing me with its deliciousness. But I am being good... for now. Couple of modifications that I made to the recipe: I doubled the number of potatoes and I added some chicken low sodium Better Than Boullion to the vegetable stock. I used Ina Garten's suggestion for cleaning the leeks - a salad spinner. Next time I might use more stock as the soup is on the thicker side.)

Off to start the corned beef...

"Winter is Coming"*

(Well, actually, I was hoping that winter is ending, but...)

I started watching HBO's "Game of Thrones" recently. LOVE IT!  I am really glad that I started now instead of earlier when I would have had a longer wait until the next series starts. (This must be how all the "Downton Abbey" newbies feel! And another reason why "series binging" is both a good thing and a bad thing.)

You know that you are a Brit tv/movie addict when you can ID Tara Fitzgerald's voice in a 10 second "Game of Thrones" advert. (I read on IMDB that she is going to be in series 3.)

Photo credit: BBC America on Facebook

You also know you are a Brit tv/movie movie addict when you get excited that a "Downton Abbey"/"Game of Thrones" person (Iain Glen) is on "Ripper Street" with the "Ripper Street" man (Jerome Flynn) from "Game of Thrones"! Worlds (or in this case, fandoms) collide!

And, yes, I have been watching "Game of Thrones" playing a mega game of "Name that Brit" with myself.  (Hello, Tonks! Hello man from Doctor Who "Tooth and Claw"! [There were 3 of those.])  The best one was when I learned that Dagmer Cleftjaw, the guy helping Theon Grayjoy (Alfie Allen), was Chris Finch from "The Office (UK)" (Ralph Ineson). That was making me NUTS! (Thanks, IMDB!)  Of course, the drawback to this is that I don't bother learning the "Game of Thrones" characters' names. I keep calling them "Ripper Street Guy" or "Full Monty Guy" or "Doctor Who Guy" or "Boromir" (just kidding about that - love you, Sean Bean!)


* The motto of House Stark. Sean Bean plays Ned Stark. I actually learned that one.

Blizzard Weekend

A friend from Twitter wished me luck weathering Winter Storm Charlotte (what CT called the storm)/Nemo (what the National Weather Service called the storm), saying that people from Connecticut are made of strong stuff. I like to think that I am made of strong stuff, in a Rosalind Russell/Katharine Hepburn (both Connecticut natives) kind of way. But I wasn't really into being strong when I had to dig myself out of 4' snow drifts. While I got my driveway done (with some help at the end from a neighbor) on Saturday, the street didn't get plowed out until during the second hour of Sunday's episode of "Downton Abbey". Thankfully the melting has already shrunk the piles on either side of my driveway.

(When the birds starting making appearances, I felt a little less like a member of the Donner party. I SO wouldn't have made it through that winter of 1846. The cabin fever would have gotten to me early on.)

I may not have one right now, but you can be certain that I will be buying a snow blower very soon. (I did the research on Consumer Reports over the weekend; I want a two stage with an electric starter. Let me know if you have one that you like!)

Style Council

The next time I go to the hair salon, I think that I will need a product intervention beforehand.

(Not that I purchased all of these today, but I have managed to accumulate these products at a much faster rate than I am consuming them. Does anyone else have this problem!?! I swear it is because the stuff just smells so darn good!)


Good house thing: I have finally recycled all of my boxes from my move!!

Could be better house thing: I am going to need to buy new a new clothes washer and dryer sooner rather than later. (I knew they were on the older side, but I was hoping to make it through the spring with the ones I had. Suggestions welcome...)

Not a Book Review, but a Recommendation

I think that there are two books that are essential reading for any Anglophile bibliophile, and those books are 84, Charing Cross Road and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff.

The first is a collection of Hanff's 20 year correspondence with Frank Doel, an antiquarian bookseller at Marks & Co., situated at the eponymous address in London. It all begins when Hanff, a great reader of English literature, but also a woman living on her own on a budget in post-WWII New York City, spies an advertisement for Marks & Co. in the Saturday Review of Literature. What starts out as a simple purchase order for some hard to find classics evolves into witty banter and, ultimately, a transatlantic friendship forged over a love of classic literature and books themselves.  (As a person who also romanticizes appreciates books, I completely understand Hanff's delight at some of the leather bound editions she receives in the mail at ridiculously inexpensive prices!) The book calls to me on so many levels: that of a reader and that of an Anglophile. I think that the only way that this book could be any more appealing to me would be if every time I opened it, a footman would pop out and serve me afternoon tea and then Tom Hiddleston or Richard Armitage would read me the book by candlelight in front of a fire. (Okay, that MAY have been a bit of an overshare...but I think you get the point.)

In the first book, Hanff had planned to travel over to England to meet her friends in the bookshop, but life (also known as $bills$), as it does so often to all of us, got in her way, and she had to postpone her visit. Unfortunately, she didn't make it to England before SPOILER (highlight to read - JR, you should be thanking me right about now...) ;-)

the untimely death of Frank Doel in 1968 and the closing of Marks & Co. two years later.

The book based on Hanff and Doel's correspondence was published in 1970, and due to the success of the book in Britain, Hanff traveled to England in 1971 to do some promotional work for the British publishers of 84, Charing Cross Road. She chronicled her visit in a diary; the resulting work became The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which was published in 1973. This book inspires in me a feeling of "I am so jealous of this woman that I want to eat my hat, and I wish I too could benefit from the kindness of random strangers because I wrote a book that touches the heart about books and my love of all things British." In 84, Charing Cross Road, Ms. Hanff wrote that someone once told her that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for, and she says that she would go looking for the England of English literature. That is exactly what she did, starting on the street with the bookstore that became her touchstone in the heart of its capital. She got her own personal literary tour of London and didn't take any of this for granted and approached each wonderful thing that happened to her in England with the same sheer delight that I would feel if I were in her shoes.

I think because that is exactly what I have tried to do on each of my visits to England, I feel utterly connected with this book. (She stays in Russell Square. I have BEEN to Russell Square, and I had a bit of a moment when I saw the Russell Hotel and thought that my next step was the Heaviside Lair! And, yes, I did just reference Cats!!) I love Charing Cross Road, but Bloomsbury Street is the book that I read when my heart needs lifting.

(Also, I would HIGHLY recommend watching the film of 84 Charing Cross Road. It stars Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, but the supporting cast is made up of people you might recognize...Judi Dench being one of them!)

Counting Down to Downton!

As if I needed another way to waste more money....

...Acorn is selling these cool Downton Abbey tees and totes! (My favorite is the "Free Bates" one... shocker!!!)


(All images from Acorn Online.)