A Personal Peek: Sunsets and Vegetables

Hi there! How are you today? This week, I am trying something a little different. I am going to share a few pictures from my personal life with you. I would like to start doing this once a month, just to add a personal touch!

Please let me know what you think of this feature! Okay, here goes …

Oh, the vegetables, the vegetables!

My husband and I live on an almost-acreage in Manitoba, Canada. We have plenty of room to grow a garden but this year, we were having work done on our house and I never got around to it. So, instead, I was excited to join something called a CSA (community sustained agriculture.) This is a deal where you pay a farmer for a share of their crop at the start of the year and then get a share of the harvest as it comes out.

Well, blow me away! We have been getting MAJOR vegetables and ours is only the half-share, the apartment-size version, if you will! Here is a picture of one our weekly hauls. All this for one week, for two people! 

This has been very challenging to cook, forcing me to use vegetables that I hadn’t cooked before, such as cabbage and turnips. A couple things I have learned from this CSA experience:

• You can fry up cabbage and beet leaves and add them to stir fries.
• Relating to above, beet leaves are edible
• You can freeze cabbage and almost any other vegetable

Here is a picture of one of my creations. This almost paleo (except for the sauce) stir fry had broccoli, radishes, red pepper, yellow pepper, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage and corn, with prepackaged stir fry chicken.

A Bird and then a Bear

Here are a few shots of the place where I live.  We live pretty frugally here but the scenery makes our simple lifestyle worth it. This is a beach near our home  where the lake sometimes looks more like an ocean because it is so massive:

It is quite a remote location and occassionally, we happen to see a bear coming through our yard. The night I took this next picture, I was so enthralled with this delightful little bird getting chased by the waves that I didn’t notice a lady desperately trying to catch my attention. “There’s been a bear spotted over there!” she told me and then we both started to run towards the path leading to the parking lot. Along the way, a couple of other groups also ran with us and one person looking back saw that the bear was on our path! And no, I don’t have pictures to show you because you know, safety was more important!

Sunset —  Sunrise …

These next images are from my Instagram feed and the Instagram caption is included on the bottom. This sunrise is from Monday, Eclipse day. The reason I was so up so early was that I was obsessing about the eclipse and could not sleep. Were any of you also roused by the coming big event?

This next sunset was taken a few days ago, at the same beach where the bear was seen. (In actuality, bears almost never come when there are people around. The one night he came, it had become very quiet and that is probably why he ventured out.) I can’t get enough of these sunsets and this water, perfect for swimming.  True fact: my husband and I had just had a big disagreement that evening and this Instagram message was my way of telling him “sorry.” Please, summer, don’t be over yet!

And another one from July, from the same beach. We love to go in the early evenings because the beach is not as crazy hot but the water is still pleasantly warm.

Well, that’s it for this post. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know in the comments below.

To look at my book, go to Second Marriage: An Insider’s Guide to Hope, Healing & Love.