One Community is a monthly photoblogging project where participants take pictures of their homes and communities with a theme in mind. The goal is to showcase similarities and differences in our communities worldwide.

I gotta tell you One Community peeps, this month, I’ve got nothing! Road, Float, Sprinkler and Oasis? Things have been busy here and I’ve barely touched my camera.

Except that I got a new phone and am pretty impressed with its camera. Sitting out on the patio yesterday, I casually aimed my new iPhone 5S and snapped these in about two seconds flat. With a little Picmonkey action, they are not half bad.

OK. So I’ve got a little bit of Oasis. That’s all I got.

The herb patch in our small courtyard garden has been hard dirt for years. In the years BM (Before Maceo), we had luscious basil, rosemary and thyme. But as soon as Maceo could toddle, he colonized that patch and made it his own personal dirt pit. And we gave up.

This year, I have to say, we have hope. We’ve planted the patch, explained to him what the herbs need to grow and how he can help, and so far, so good. Crossing fingers.

Tau grew this basil on his bedroom window sill in a teensy plastic greenhouse that I found in the Target dollar bins. This was the only seedling that survived the transplant into this pot. Maceo calls it “baby basil,” and I’m thinking it’s going to make it.

Below is what he calls “big basil”—one of two four-inch plants we bought from the nursery. Because we love our summer pesto and caprese in this house! These are only about the size of a soccer ball now but they are growing fast.

I have a thing for marigolds. Dave doesn’t get it, but he still humors me and lets me plant them along the border of the herb garden.

And finally, below you can see our first baby step into the world of veggies: tomatoes! Actually, not true. I tried to plant some South-African gem squash a few years back, and they worked their way up the trellis beautifully and flowered but never fertilized. Boo!

I think I picked up this tomato rocket at Target also. The kids have been excited to watch it sprout and grow. They will be beside themselves if it actually bears tomatoes. But will they eat them?! Stay tuned for the next exciting installment! Da-da-da-dum!

’til next month peeps!

Click the link below to read more One Community posts and join us!

The Rules: Post one or more photos interpreting the words for the month, and add your blog post to the link-up. Please include a link back to the link-up post on your One Community post, and take a look at some of the other links and comment on them. This link-up is all about building community!

One Community is a monthly photoblogging project where participants take pictures of their homes and communities with a theme in mind. The goal is to showcase similarities and differences in our communities worldwide.

I got to pick the words for this month’s One Community challenge and then had a challenge finding pictures for them! Five, Mother, Recipe and Remember

Five, or as we say here in California, cinco … de Mayo! Mayo also being the fifth month of the year. See what I did there?

Tau came home with this fabulous Cinco de Mayo chicken painting. Understand that art is not Tau’s thing, so I consider any art from him fabulous. For bonus points, he wrote the title of the picture and his name at the bottom of the painting in cursive, his other least favorite thing to do. Mother’s Day came a little early for me!

Mother: One Community peeps, many of you are new here, so allow me to introduce my mom Di. She passed away two years ago and this picture makes me smile. It’s just so her! So her, in fact, that we used it on the pew leaflet at her funeral service.

Four years ago, Mom and I took a three-day Mexican cruise out of San Diego. And at the port of Ensenada, we took a Mexican cooking class, with fancy margaritas and a charming, engaging local chef, and ingredients that my African mother had never seen or used, which she absolutely loved. The dish we started with was guacamole, which in my opinion should be considered a main food group.

I can’t believe she’s gone, I miss her every day, and I love that we made guacamole together!

Recipe and Remember: I think I’ve spoken before about feeling closer to my mom and gran when I bake and cook. The recipe that reminds me most of the two of them is the scone recipe that they both used.

It’s pretty foolproof but the lighter your hand and the less you mess with the dough, the fluffier they turn out. The scone recipe is pretty versatile too — I’ve added raisins as shown below to get the kids to eat them, or grated cheddar when I wanted something savory.

Ready for the oven:

The picture below is of the recipe, hand written by me into my recipe book as a teenager. The blue additions are my mom’s writing, and as you can see, this page has seen a lot of use.

The ingredient list and method are very Mom and Gran—how much milk do you need? Meh, just enough to klits with the egg and add until the dough is right. Paint tops with left over egg? My Gran would dip three fingers in what was left in the jug and just pat-swirl the top of each scone. Perfect every time.

‘Til next month peeps!

Click the link below to read more One Community posts and join us!

The Rules: Post one or more photos interpreting the words for the month, and add your blog post to the link-up. Please include a link back to the link-up post on your One Community post, and take a look at some of the other links and comment on them. This link-up is all about building community!

Two Christmases ago I gave Dave a paper gift bag. Inside it was a handful of fat quarters, half a yard of interfacing and a velcro strip. Also, the pattern for the Family Passport  Wallet.

For the past 23 years, we’ve been traveling with our passports and boarding passes in this:

Awful, right? I’d intended to make the new travel wallet and give it to Dave that Christmas, but that didn’t happen what with December being December … and also Christmas. So he got all the materials in a baggie, along with the promise that I would sew it as soon as I could.

Fast forward a year and a half and I’m visiting Kelli for the weekend. I know I can take one small sewing project with me, and the travel wallet it was!

With its clean lines and many pockets, this project is all about neat pinning, carefully ironing and precise stitching. It sewed up in an afternoon over a glass of wine and a bowl of guacamole and tortilla chips.

I am very happy with the result!

If there is one thing that astounds me living in America, it’s that people go hungry, and that very few people seem to care. Did you know that 30 percent of all food ($48.3 billion worth) is thrown away each year in the United States?

All the farms, the supermarkets, the corner stores, the farmers’ markets, the restaurants and cafeterias, the dinner tables. One third of all that food is wasted. We are just not very good at getting it into the hands of people who need it.

A month or so ago, I started researching food pantries in my neighborhood to see if I could volunteer. I found only one in our area, an incorporated city of 50,000 people on the north-east outskirts of San Diego. Statistics say that one in six people in San Diego County do not have a stable food supply. By rough estimate, that means our neighborhood has one food pantry distributing groceries once a month, trying to meet the needs of a potential 9,000 people who might need it.

A few days later, I happened to be in my local Starbucks and saw an event poster for a day of service at Feeding America San Diego (FASD). So I signed up.

Quick Facts About Feeding America San Diego:

• They distribute 23 million pounds of food annually in San Diego, serving 73,000 children, families and seniors each week.
• FASD’s Farm2Kids, BackPack and School Pantry programs give kids basic food items plus three to five pounds of fresh produce to take home each week.
• Their mobile pantries reach under-served communities, and FASD partners with food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters across San Diego county.
• Every dollar donated to FASD results in six meals. SIX!

Two Saturdays ago, Tau and I joined around 600 volunteers, mostly Starbucks employees, at FASD’s Mira Mesa warehouse. We worked on a team that sorted green apples, boxing them up for distribution. Our group also stripped the slightly moldy outer leaves off about 300 heads of cabbage and crated those too. Other teams stuffed backpacks, labeled cans and measured out family-sized packets of breakfast cereal from the mega packs that FASD purchases with donated funds.

During the three two-hour shifts organized for that day, volunteers prepared the equivalent of 31,280 meals, which will be delivered to our community. This organization is making a dent in hunger in our city, and I will definitely be volunteering again.

As for my kid, he learned in a very real way that not all children know where their next meal is coming from. He learned that food needs to be tediously hand sorted and distributed for people to eat. And he learned that both green apples (his favorite fruit) and cabbage (which he had successfully avoided up to that point) were key to our neighbors not going hungry.

God’s joke on us? That evening we got home to a meal prepared by Dave — a sumptuous one-pot pork dish with green apples and sauerkraut!

One Community is a monthly photoblogging project where participants take pictures of their homes and communities with a theme in mind. The goal is to showcase similarities and differences in our communities worldwide.

Our cues this month come from Rebekah at Honeysuckle Life, and they are:  Flowers, Spring, Purple and Rise

Spring! What better way to celebrate than to go for a walk this past Saturday to our local Farmers Market with this guy. Maceo’s job was to sit back, chill and eat strawberries. He’s very good at it.

Flowers. There is a stall at our market that sells proteas, which just happen to be the national flower of South Africa. Obviously. Would you expect anything less of South Africa? I mean, come on!

Spring. The market positively hums with new growth — succulents, fresh flowers, organic eggs, every variety of cheese … you name it!

I bought two skeins of handmade pasta, one of which came with a recipe for creamy lemon-garlic fettuccine with asparagus. So I had to buy asparagus, right? 

Purple. The beets and their shocking purple! Beetroot always reminds me of my mom, would would steam and pickle large batches of it, and savor eating every slice. I’m not the biggest fan of beets, but they make me smile whenever I see them.

Rise. There is a woman at the market who specializes in French breads and pastries. There is always a swarm of customers around her stall, waiting to buy.

And oy! The BUTTER! And the CUSTARD! And the SUGAR! All of it, light and poufy fresh, fresh, fresh!

Maceo and I came home, stroller laden with goodies. All good!

Click the link below to read more One Community posts and join us!

The Rules: Post one or more photos interpreting the words for the month, and add your blog post to the link-up. Please include a link back to the link-up post on your One Community post, and take a look at some of the other links and comment on them. This link-up is all about building community!

Not sure if this falls into the 15 minutes Surface project or the Spend fifteen minutes and then quit one!

One of the joys of living in Southern California, is that your washer and dryer are often located in a closet outside the house. And no one likes to talk about it, but when it rains or the weather gets cooler, all kinds of critters make their way where it is warm and dry. Hence, rat poop on the shelves in my laundry closet. I know.

I had a 45-minute gap between work and picking up Tau for karate. So I donned disposable gloves, a face mask, and went at those shelves with my vacuum cleaner and disinfectant.

I also purged the piles of old towels and assorted pool toys that we store in that closet, and will wash (in hot water) the remaining pile before putting it back. I stopped with three minutes to spare, and just enough time to change my tee, wash my face and hands, and head out to karate!

For my birthday in late February friends gave me a set of beautiful new Crate ‘n Barrel champagne flutes. Other friends gave me a new set of martini glasses.

Either my friends think I don’t drink enough or they know the new glasses will be well used!

Anyhow, this led to me purging our glassware cupboard last week. Out with all the nasty plastic kidware — keeping only what we USE — and the Mexican glass goblets we probably haven’t used in a decade, and in with my pretty new glasses.

Turns out the beautiful new flutes are too tall for our shelves, so I’m displaying them on top of the cupboard.

The second in my series of 15-minute declutterings. You can find out more and play along here.

This is the spot in Tau’s room where toys that are not played with go to die get tossed aside. But he had a friend coming to sleep over and so we tackled his bedroom together.

I know the before picture doesn’t look that bad — a plastic bag containing small gifts and stocking stuffers from Christmas (!), his stuffed animals in their pet bed (yes, we had to buy them a real pet bed from the store), and a pirate’s treasure chest, which contains at least five years’ worth of plastic birthday-party and fast-food crappy giveaways.

But consider that this project also involved purging and reorganizing the books and toys on the THREE bottom shelves, and making the floor so that you could walk on it again … at least until Tau’s friend arrived, and then 30 minutes later, it was covered in Beyblades and Lego all over again.

It was clear for those few moments — I have the picture to prove it!

I decided to play along with Beth Woolsey’s 40 Days of Lent: 15 Minute Projects. My intention is to do at least five of these 15-minute purges throughout Lent, in the hopes that our home will be less messy and my mind feel less cluttered!

Maceo’s room doubles as my craft area — he’s too young to care! And the craft table and shelves, of course, become the dumping ground for anything that doesn’t fit in his closet or that I don’t know what to do with just right at that moment.

Truth told, this was more of a 25-minute project than a 15-minute one. The purging and neatening took a wee bit longer than 15 minutes. I then spent another 15 minutes after the tidy up framing those four little pictures you see on the wall below — the frames have been sitting on said craft table for at least two years, waiting! It feels SO good to get this done!

One Community is a monthly photoblogging project where participants take pictures of their homes and communities with a theme in mind. The theme varies by month. The goal is to showcase similarities and differences in our communities worldwide.

Our cues this month come from Sarah at Beauty School Dropout, and they are:  Shower, Calm, Green and Friendship

Here goes!

Shower. We haven’t had rain in San Diego in — pfft! — 300 days or something crazy?! Then this past week, it rained on and off for four days. It may as well have stormed for a month, punctuated by tornadoes, an avalanche and perhaps an earthquake or two.

San Diegans have a hard time with weather and with rain in particular for some reason. Local TV stations refer to coming showers as thunderstorms, even when there is no thunder, and a friend told me last week that we were due to have the worst weather in recent history for the region.

I got nervous for a moment until I remembered the night of torrential downpour, thunder and lightning that Dave, three-month-old Tau and I survived in Africa — a storm so fierce and unrelenting that rangers at the game lodge we were visiting had to drive us back to our rondawel through the mud in a big-wheel jeep, and even then it was touch and go.  I decided that the killer storm of San Diego 2014 probably wouldn’t be that bad.

This picture was taken through our dining room window Sunday. A steady but light rain, three days of it and, ahem, we survived!

Calm. Meet my new friend Shimi, that’s short for Sashimi. He sits on my desk at work and is charged with keeping me chilled and focused on the bigger things in life.

Green. Here is my little one, Maceo, watching the rain make puddles Sunday morning outside our bedroom window. He took every opportunity to slip outside and ride his push bike through the wet on our patio. He also took great pleasure in putting on his swim goggles and dunking his face in the deepest puddles.

Friendship. This past weekend was my birthday! And throughout the week I got small parcels from friends. Lovely books and fabric from Kelli, and this fun naked mail from my friend Joslin. She knows I love me some Dark Chocolate Raisinets!

Click the link below to read more One Community posts and join us!

The Rules: Post one or more photos interpreting the words for the month, and add your blog post to the link-up. Please include a link back to the link-up post on your One Community post, and take a look at some of the other links and comment on them. This link-up is all about building community!