Mini-Entry Sample Plate

-Good lord, y’all. These tomatoes I planted are aspiring to treehood. I even had one snap in half from its own weight a few weeks ago before I could get a pole for it, and that didn’t even slow it down from growing like an irradiated spider.

Dad has taken my idea of a spaghetti sauce farm* one step further and suggested that I jam a handful of dry spaghetti in the dirt. “Good point,” I said. “And the great thing about my self-watering setup is, I don’t need to worry about overwatering them! That is very important with noodle farming.”

The meatball trees may take a little setting up, though.

-There is a store for 18" doll stuff in the valley! How awesome is this? It’s actually not a doll shop devoted to scary-looking porcelain dolls! It’s got doll-size stuff (including my latest addiction, Iwako erasers), and clothes that fit American Girl dolls, including cheap knockoffs of AG styles and Shmisney Shmincess costumes. The lady said they’d be getting some slim-body clothes in this fall, too.

The one problem is, the shop is in the exact place you’d expect it to be—the middle of a village of Cozy Little Shops. The village used to be a farmstead, but now it contains a hive of stores selling country-style knickknacks and vintage farm-looking household wares for grandmas.** It’s scarily Mormon. Remember Ursula Vernon’s recent post on scrapbooking shame? Y’all don’t even KNOW from scrapbooks. Utah is a scrapbook CAPITAL. Pasty Mormon ladies LOVE their scrapbooks. And, as the lichen is a symbiosis of fungus and algae, a Cozy Little Shop hive is a symbiosis of a scrapbook shop, a quilt shop, and a knickknack emporium, and if the hive is really ambitious a doll shop.*** Couple that with a lovely old farmstead-turned-family-outing-locale, and I can totally see where the urge to grab people and yell, “It’s okay! My dolls are COUNTER-CULTURE!” comes into play.

Hmm. Maybe I should take Liz there when she visits. Just to gesture broadly at it and shout, “See, this is what I’m TALKING ABOUT!” before we flee.

-In news no less exciting to me, I have a new keyboard! I have been meaning to get a wireless keyboard for some time, just because I don’t type on a desk; I type on my knees. This is awkward with a Lappy. So now I can leave the Lappy on the chair where it lives while I type and I will not burn up my thighs or crush them. This is, in my humble opinion, the greatest thing ever.


*The idea is to get to the point where I’m growing everything that goes in spaghetti sauce. This might be slightly difficult because one of the things you can’t leave out of spaghetti sauce is cinnamon, and I have no idea if cinnamon would even try growing here. The only place I’ve seen it growing is Zanzibar, which has a SLIGHTLY different climate.

**What I can’t figure out is, why all the tea sets? It makes sense elswhere, but this place is MORMON. Tea is expressly forbidden because it was expensive to import to Utah in the 19th Century Your Body Is A Temple Of The Lord. So what the hell’s with all the porcelain saucers and sugar bowls?

***This doll shop is even called Georgell’s, which is one of those names that are short (but not too short) for “Hi! I’m from Utah!”