I washed my yellow linen, but haven't yet measured it to see how much it shrank. I think I'm going to love the shirt I intend to make of it, but I'm a bit worried by the amount of lint it shed in the dryer.
After supper, I dashed out for bread, milk, and eggs. The cliché of it amused me. On impulse, I bought some lime juice because we are nearly out of lemon juice. What does that do to the "french toast index"? I guess one *could* make a lime-flavored syrup for french toast.
I DuckDucked "French Toast Alert" and the first hit was a recipe for "An easy French toast recipe to make during the snowstorm" that called for orange peel in the egg-and-milk, so I guess a bottle of lime juice fits.
I found a quart of "Cultured dairy blend" in the clearance, checked that it wasn't fat free, and said "for ninety-nine cents, I'll give it a try." I didn't take into account that the brand name "Carbmaster" means "sugar free", and "sugar free" means "contains a gagging quantity of artificial sweetener". Since they didn't actually say "sugar free" on the label, the sucralose was kept down to a bearable level — but I eat yogurt as a dip.
Perhaps I'll dip fruitcake in it.
A fine day, despite rain in the morning, but Dave was grumpy in the evening.
We woke to the sound of Mark Sill and his Beaver Dam crew cleaning up our willow tree. Despite the rain, they worked quickly and neatly, left no mess, charged less than the estimate, and gave us four dozen eggs from their flock of pastured hens.
They had to take down the weather station to be sure of not dropping a limb on it, and Dave took that opportunity to give it a long-needed cleaning and tune-up. He carried out two spiders that I know of.
Dave's new battery-powered Dremel came in today's mail, and he's been having fun with it. It takes the same accessories as his big one — which he was careful to check before ordering it.
Bright sun in the afternoon and evening dried the grass, which is in dire need of mowing — but Moore is still saying "tomorrow for sure!". Dave says that he's going to take the mower directly to the John Deere dealer the next time it needs service.
I don't recall doing anything except cutting and zig-zagging a piece of old mattress pad to replace the worn and filthy arm cover on Dave's computer chair. I also marked cutting lines to make another when it's time to wash this one.
Well, I also prepared a turkey dinner. When I made the emergency egg run yesterday (I didn't know we'd get four dozen today), I saw three turkey drumsticks for three dollars in the Manager's Special bin, and remembered that at Thanksgiving, or maybe Christmas, I'd bought a jar of turkey gravy and a box of turkey dressing mix, but never got around to buying a turkey.
I baked the drumsticks an hour and a quarter at three-fifty, putting in, at intervals, a pettit-pan of potato flakes and milk, a small skillet of dressing, and a very-small skillet of mixed vegetables tossed in olive oil. Started with radishes, carrot, and brussels sprouts, then added mini-sweet peppers half an hour before serving, and fresh asparagus and frozen snap peas fifteen minutes before.
Then I forgot to zap the gravy until we were sitting down. I served it in the glass jar it came in. Dave said it is good gravy; I think it needs a good bait of turkey dripping.
We cut into only one of the drumsticks, and didn't quite eat all of it.
"Tomorrow for sure" arrived at ten forty-five this morning, and Dave has already mowed the back yard. The windrows of grass clippings are gray with cottonwood fluff.
I ran the cultivator around the garden and pulled a few weeds. Also sorted the asparagus in the fridge and put the best spears into the freezer.
After mowing the rest of the lawn, Dave picked up the windrows with the lawn sweeper. They had dried into fine hay by then, so we put them on the compost heap. The yard looks really nice.
Later Brent hauled a couple of buckets of dirt from his beach cleanup to the idle end of the heap, to make it easier for me to hill up the potatoes. I hope to make a few more trips to the topsoil he exposed, and put it on the asparagus bed. The asparagus is high enough that I can fill up the bed as fast as I can haul dirt.
But today I went for a bike ride instead of working. I dropped off the last three dog quilts at the animal shelter, then went to Aldi. I skipped an extra loop I'd planned to make — partly, I suspect, because I hadn't been drinking enough. Sweating the way I was, I should have been drinking at least a bottle an hour.
I went two extra miles to avoid crossing 30 on Parker. That intersection is horrible, particularly when going west. Center Street isn't much better, so I went to Old 30 at K-Mart.
That took me past Sweet Corn Charlie. The tent is up and furnished, but the sign isn't up. I didn't think to peek into the jam shed to see whether it was stocked.
I absent-mindedly went out the wrong exit from Aldi and found myself going the wrong way on Parker. Fortunately, there is a sidewalk down the middle of Parker, so only embarrassment resulted.
I do hope none of the witnesses thought I did it on purpose!
<churchy la fem>
Friday the Thirteenth
done come on Wednesday this
month!
</churchy>
Rode to the grocery store twice this morning. I forgot that I'd put my debit card into my Sunday wallet. My certificate of human status was in there too, but at least I wasn't driving without it! But the small wallet was in the pocket of the pants I'd have worn if I'd been driving.
"Real ID" makes my nickname for my driver's license even more apropos. One day I handed it over by mistake for my library card, and the librarian just used it.
(If you don't think you need a driver's license to claim human rights, try doing without one for a few decades.)
Time for bed — after midnight on Tuesday night.
⁂
Spent the whole morning adding two photographs to my Web site.
But I also cleared off the ironing board. Perhaps I'll get three weeks of laundry ironed. That's three shirts and a dress. Ironing wasn't such a hassle when most of what I washed needed to be ironed. Probably helped that it was on my schedule!
Opened the curtains this morning and saw a pair of ducks and their family right outside. A moment of observation revealed that what the duck actually had was two leaves, a squirrel, a robin, and a passing acquaintance.
Just before supper I hauled a couple of wheelbarrows of dirt to the asparagus bed. I find it somewhat amusing that age is limiting the amount of dirt I can haul in one trip, but the age in question isn't mine.
Dave is shopping for a new wheelbarrow. In the meanwhile, I've learned how to load this one so that its wobbles don't move its center of gravity beyond its support.
⁂
In cleaning up my notebook for tomorrow's ride to Leesburg for stuffed chicken breasts, I noticed that on the fifth of May, I was astonished to see one-pound bags of monosodium glutamate for sale at International Foods. If I recall correctly, they were a lot bigger than one-pound bags of salt would have been.
It was so windy that I dried everything but the sheet and two washrags indoors. It must have taken me ten or fifteen minutes to hang up the sheet, and despite having pins not more than two inches apart, half of it had blown off the line when I went out to bring it in.
I washed two wool scarves and two pairs of wool tights; I think it is safe to put them away for the summer now.
I must have forgotten to gather the asparagus yesterday; there were a lot of spears, and I had to throw away several that had leafed out.
Time to freeze asparagus again. I've already frozen more than we will eat before next season — but the new bed won't produce more than a sample, if that much, next spring, and we plan to bury the old bed as soon as it stops producing.
We had duck soup for supper. It *was* easy, but no easier than soup from any other pre-cooked meat. I put in a potato, a stalk of celery, lima beans, two garlic spathe-tops, and some winter-onion bulbils. The bulbils are at the end of the stage where they are big enough to mess with, but young enough that I don't have to peel them. Which is well timed, as collecting for the soup took all of them except for one late bloomer, probably a second effort. There are more winter onions on the south side of the house, and I think they have spread enough, so I'll consider taking their bulbils.
I went shopping by car yesterday, because we've been drinking a twelve-pack of fizzwater a week and were running out. I was surprised when we got the trunkfull of seltzers onto the shelf and had space left over. I bought a bunch of other stuff too, and was quite a while putting it away. I *didn't* get any emmentaler cheese or small-patty sausage. We really liked the emmentaler, but apparently it was just passing through. I looked again at Owen's (where I stopped for Mountain Dew and a few flavors of fizzwater that Aldi doesn't sell), but couldn't find any swiss at all among the gourmet cheeses.
I took a cooler along for the frozen stuff, but didn't think to put the black ice into it. Not all the cold foods fit; I should have taken the Wheelie-Kool.
Today I spent a little time in the garden. The weeds are getting ahead of me. The new asparagus bed is clean, though. It helps that I keep dumping wheelbarrows of dirt on it. I planted the asparagus six inches shallower than the package said, and plan to make a bed the width of a railroad tie higher than the lawn, to keep it out of the lake in the spring.
I spent more time purging JOY98's C drive, which has run out of free space. I archived a lot of seldom-used files, and found and deleted a couple of directories that had been copied into other directories.
But I don't think this will hold me for long — I'm continually adding graphics files to my Web sites. I can't edit my .htm files on any later computer. I can open files on a thumb drive, but it has only two USB ports and they are both busy. One is full time uploading files from my camera!
Rained most of the day. I spent most of my time fiddling with the computer, but did sew two pockets that I'd already hemmed and pressed to the old T-shirt I'm wearing. I picked asparagus twice, and steamed asparagus for supper.
When 98 finally finished defragging, I copied Agent to XP, backed it up on XP's drive E, used it a bit, and deleted Agent from 98. Still a little shy of two hundred meg of free space.
⁂
I wonder how long it will take me to stop rotating ninety degrees instead of pushing ctl-tab when I want to read Usenet while a Web page loads?
Well, as long as I'm facing this way, I might as well open the Banner.
I had planned to come back from the farmers' markets by a long, circuitous route, but as I was leaving the fairgrounds on the way to the courthouse market, I realized that I wasn't having any fun and decided to come straight home, with stops at Zale's and Owen's. When I came out of Owen's, the weather had become much warmer and dryer and brighter, and I wished that I'd taken in the downtown market. There was time to go back before they closed, but I had perishables in my pannier.
Yesterday, I came home from church by way of Grace Campus. Pretty much deserted; I saw one moving car, and one bike rider came out of the Heritage Trail just as I was going in. I saw him again when he overtook me on his way back. I must have been pretty close to the crossing before he caught up, because I saw him turn off on the walkway to the athletic field.
The rail-replacement project was announced months ago. It has been creeping toward us for weeks. Yesterday's top headline was that it would get here today.
Warsaw has been caught completely off guard.
⁂
I'm a week behind in reading the paper — again. Last Monday's Mallard Fillmore is a belated reference to the cake-baking scandal. When I read in the paper that the baker had finally been acquitted, I thought "finally some common sense!", but on reading the story, I found that the case had been settled on grounds having nothing to do with the question to be settled: does setting up as a baker make you the slave of every tom, dick, and harry who chooses to give you an order? The verdict shouldn't have been "religion is an adequate excuse". It should have been "you don't need an excuse".
⁂
I pulled a winter onion in hope of getting a little fresh onion to put in my scrambled egg, and found that they have begun making bulbs. Some of the wrappers were also edible.
Only the uncultivated onions still have bulbils, and none of the heads are worth messing with, so I'm glad to have bulbs. They are bigger than bulbils already, but there's a *lot* more onion to throw away when I clean one.
It's only 73 F outside, so why did I break into a sweat after coming in? I've gotten up twice to mop my face. Perhaps I miss the wind.
The asparagus bed is finally full of dirt. I hauled two wheelbarrows of dirt working up the above-mentioned sweat, and put half of the second on a hill of potatoes.
I still need to build a ramp at each end so that Dave can mow the bed in the fall. There's still a lot of good dirt in my mine, but I'm having to move sand to get at it.
⁂
Received and deleted the weekly specials at Duck, Down, and Above — I'm too busy this weekend to go. I'm planning a dump tour for tomorrow, coming back by way of Big R to buy dry cat food.
I've got an even dozen winter-onion stumps on the cutting board, about to extract the bulbs inside for the turkey loaf I'm making for supper. I didn't intend to pull that many, but when I had enough, I pulled just one more and a whole clump came with it. Shouldn't be too much onion because the bulbs are still very small.
Some of the tops had bulbils that were too small to mess with, so I dumped all the tops into the untended winter-onion bed on the south side of the house. The onions there should become less anemic now that the pier sections aren't shading them.
⁂
The turkey loaf recipe is simple: one package of ground turkey, one box of turkey stuffing, two eggs, mix 'em. Stint on the broth because turkey cooks out broth, don't stint on the butter because turkey is dry. I used the half cup of butter the stuffing-box called for to grease the loaf pan. Most of it; some of it was still on my hand when I started to mix the meat.
Of course I had to dress it up a little. In addition to the above-mentioned onion bulbs (I reserved three) I minced some mini-sweet peppers, and before nap time I had chopped a stalk of celery fine, brought it to a boil in one cup of water and a chicken bouillion cube, put a lid on it, and set it aside to cool. I think I could have put in two celery stalks. (The stuffing box called for a cup and a half of water.)
Today was my day in the kitchen — and in the garage. I filled the second-largest cooler with seltzer (and three cans each of ginger beer and tonic water), then emptied it into the garage fridge. Thank goodness I did that first thing, before it got to be ninety degrees out there!
I also went into the garage to find the pitchers for lemonade and water. They appeared to be clean, but I washed them anyway.
I made yogurt dip: dumped a quart of whole-milk real (nothing in it but milk and micro-organisms) yogurt into the top of a steamer, then waited a few hours and dumped what was still in the top into a mixing bowl with half a teaspoon of salt and a handfull of kow choi (garlic chives).
I got a start on the cheese dip by mincing my last two mini-sweet peppers and melting half a stick of butter on them. Perhaps I should also measure in the flour, and cut up the cheese and put it into a sandwich bag.
Done. I make the cheese dip after the guests have begun to arrive, so I want it to go together quickly.
And I'm in the middle of making lemon syrup. I'm waiting impatiently for it to cool so that I can juice the remaining four lemons.
I intended to make simple syrup to put in the lemonade tomorrow, but while looking to see how many lemons and how much sugar to put into half a gallon of lemonade, I found a recipe for syrup to put in water or seltzer at serving time, and it sounded really good. You simply add an eighth of a teaspoon of salt and the rinds of two lemons to simple syrup —two cups of sugar and one cup of water— cool it, add the juice of six lemons, strain, and put two tablespoons into each glass.
Most of the lemon syrup was left over; I'll use it up by substituting it for honey in my switchel.
The boiled-in-sugar lemon rinds would have been better if I hadn't bothered to peel out the membranes, but they are pretty tasty. That would also have made cutting the peels into thin strips quicker; it's a pity that I don't intend to make it again — I prefer lemonade with the pulp in.
The fireworks were pretty. I particularly liked that the finale was a definite finale — that isn't easy to do when you are confined to skyrockets, and one is often left wondering whether it's time to go home or a pause for effect.
The old asparagus bed has been mowed. I found two spears in it today, and used them and what was in the fridge to make "pretzel asparagus" for supper.
When I made the turkey loaf, I baked asparagus on it for the last fifteen minutes. To make sure it was salty enough for Dave, I put it into my smallest skillet, tossed it with a little corn oil. sprinkled it with salt, tossed it again, and sprinkled it again. Then fifteen minutes before suppertime. I took the meatloaf out and carefully laid the asparagus one layer thick on one end. The salt made crunchy white spots that Dave compared to pretzels.
So tonight I tried it again, but did the tossing in the little cookie sheet that fits my toaster oven, and toasted fifteen minutes at 150. It worked!