Fall Purge.

2 Comments
Last week when I shoveled out the bottom of the chicken coop to put on my garden, I couldn’t help but notice that my tomatoes had the end of season blight.  Having given up the bulk of the harvest to the psycho squirrels this summer, I was very grateful for the late season comeback, only to be disappointed by what I called the funk. 
Sigh.
So, Saturday I commenced to ripping out my tomato plants, leaving my pole beans, tomatillos and malabar spinach.  Along the way I pulled up some volunteer butternut squash plants too.  I yielded 6 squash (with a few more left in the garden), a nice size basket of green tomatoes for us, the bulk of which I pickled (of course) and a really nice size bucket of tomatoes with blight for the chickens.
I always like to wait until first frost to rip out my tomatoes – they will produce until then and I hate to think of any tomatoes I won’t get.  This year though, it was just too pathetic looking. 
Maybe I can put in a little fall crop though.
Sunday morning, I got up and decided it was the day to finally clean out the attic, a task I’d been putting off for some time.  Years to be honest.
Cleaning out the attic is actually part of the greater list of projects I have lined up for this fall. Technically, it was the last one on the list, but since it was the one I could do by myself and cleaning the attic meant making space in our room, I decided to jump on that instead.
I have a bad habit of just opening the door to the attic space off our bedroom and shoving stuff in.  It had gotten so crammed with stuff, you couldn’t just open the door and shove in.  So, sitting outside the door, spilling into our bedroom was a collection of suitcases (from all the roadtrips this summer), as well as Edie’s camp trunk, the cover for her upright bass and countless other items that didn’t fit in there. 
As I made my way to the back of the attic, I realized I hadn’t gotten rid of any of Edie’s clothes since about the time she finished up preschool.  (She started 5th grade last month.)  Worse, there were infant things I had been hanging onto – her crib mobile, a bouncy seat, the toddler bed rail she used for all of about a week before she convinced us she didn’t need it and a baby gate.  I’m sure I was saving most of this for when we had visits from friends with younger kids, but the fact is, they were totally inaccessible in the back of the attic and by the time I got them out, I realized they just needed to go elsewhere.
A few freecycle posts, a facebook post, an email or two and a shout to the second grade girl across the street and I had those 17 bags of clothes and miscellaneous baby gear out of here. 5 bags went to a refugee family a neighbor is collecting for, one went to Li across the street (including some pieces that have been passed around this neighborhood from little girl to little girl to little girl, like the purple chenille cardigan with fringe that is most beloved) and when Mo came by to take a bag, she offered to haul it all away.  Score!  Thanks Mo.  Still left are the pieces of plywood, 2x’s and tile grout I pulled out of the attic, left over from when we built it out, when I was pregnant with Edie almost 11 years ago.  Pat says he will find a use for them.  I’m seriously eyeballing at hauling them to the habitat store, as we have a basement full of things we might use.
It felt great to purge. I kept a few things – mostly dresses I made Edie or some of her favorite pieces I couldn’t bear to part with, like the seersucker skirt she insisted on sledding in a few times and the adored BabyGap faux fur leopard print jumper that is too fabulous for words.  A few favorite toys and books.  And the rest?  Gone. I was able to put her trunk away and find a spot for the suitcases not piled on top of other stuff and still have room for more treasures.
Meanwhile, Pat was outside doing his own fall purging.
He pruned the peach tree.
It’s supposed to help it put out more fruit.
Considering the squirrels get all the fruit, I applaud him for trying.
Although a smaller tree will make it easier to net and keep the rodents out, so maybe we might get a peach off that thing one of these days.
He also trimmed the saucer magnolia back.  He removed one of the trunks and trimmed many of the lower branches off, so that you don’t have to duck to walk under the tree.
By the front porch there you can see the piles of plywood and bouncy seat I dragged down from the attic, never to be in there again. And the window we replaced last fall that needs to become a coldbox for my garden.
Clearly, getting things out of our house is my happy place, while cutting things is his.
Up next is the basement cleanout.  We need to make room so that the ping pong table can be opened up down there, per Edie’s requests, so she & her friends can hang out down there when the weather is subpar per my request.  I also need to get going on refinishing the desk I got for her room, but I need space to work (which is what really is spurring on the basement cleanout, while the things coming out of her room is what spurred the attic purge.) It seems to be a never ending cycle of get rid of stuff to make room for more stuff, with one project leading to another and another…. Does it ever end?

It happens.

5 Comments

I used to hear women say they hadn’t had time for shower that day and I would wonder to myself, how freaking hard is it to take a shower?  Especially when it was women with older kids – you didn’t have to worry about what they were doing while you took a few minutes to lock yourself in the bathroom with hot running water.  And most especially when it was women who didn’t work outside the house.  Really, what were you doing all day that left no time for a shower?

I now find myself among those women and I sincerely apologize to all of you that I had previously mentally judged.

Take yesterday for instance.  I got up, got Edie off to school.  I had made plans to meet Nancy at the gym for a class at lunchtime, so I ran some errands and got dinner started and figured I’d take a shower after my workout.  No need for two showers really. I sat down and put together the schedule for my Girl Scout troop for the year, having had a mom’s gathering the night before to finalize our details, and got it sent out.  I realized I wanted to take Snapfish up on their 99 prints for 99 cents deal that expired yesterday because I haven’t printed out any photos in eons and I really should.  So, I started going through photos and uploading them, finding the process much quicker than I had anticipated.  I took off to go to the gym, dinner halfway done, photos halfway loaded, feeling pretty good about things.

And then, somehow, my day got derailed.  I spent a little more time than I had intended at the gym, when Nancy convinced me to try doing pull-ups with her after our workout and stretch.  She’s in great shape and I have noticed a difference in my clothes since I started working out with her on a regular basis, so if she asks me to try something, I figure why not?  Instead of paying for my own personal trainer, I just work out with her.

So I came home and thought I’d finish uploading photos which shouldn’t take too long, because the first round didn’t take long. First the website showed I’d loaded them, then it didn’t, so I went back through and reloaded, only to discover that the first process had gone through, so then I had to edit and sort through which photos I wanted to print.  We’re talking over 100 photos and next thing I knew, it was almost 3 pm.

It was a night I was doing Dinnaah, my meals to go, and I had quite a few orders, as I was serving a very popular curried sweet potato, spinach and quinoa dish.  I went out to the garden to harvest some of my spinach and somehow managed to clip my finger with my clippers while I was harvesting.  I finally got my main dish going on the stove when Nancy showed up, having just picked up her youngest from after school clubs, wanting to know if I could put some books I’d promised her on her Kindle.  So, dinner’s on the stove, and I’m looking on my hard drive for those books when Edie comes through the door with a friend, looking for a snack.  They have exactly 25 minutes to grab a snack, get their gear and head back up to school for soccer practice, so I hand Edie a loaf of baguette I’d baked the night before, tell her there’s cheese and fruit in the fridge, make a fruit & cheese plate.  Her presentation was flawless and even if she didn’t clean up the cutting board and knife, she did wrap the bread & cheese back up and put them away.   So, the girls are chattering away, nibbling on bread & cheese and fruit when Betty comes in, announcing that when I heard her son Ben yelling the afternoon before, it was because he had broken his arm again, the second time since June.  (Edie & I had heard him yelling for his mom and I had started out to check on him because I could hear in his voice something was wrong, but by the time I got up there, Betty was pulling out in her car and now I know they were headed to the ER).  So, while she’s telling the story of Ben’s latest ER broken arm adventure to Nancy & myself, Edie & Claire & Alayna were chattering away, I’m trying to figure out where that book is on my harddrive and making sure I don’t burn dinner.

Just as quickly as my living room filled up, it emptied out, as everyone had places to be.  I finished dinner, got orders wrapped up and was getting ready to start baking cupcakes for my friend Rebecca’s birthday, as I had invited her & her daughter down for dinner in celebration that night.  The phone rang and it was Rebecca, asking if I was ready for her to drop Charlotte off.  She’d asked if Charlotte could come down and play when they first got home when I had invited her to dinner on Thursday, as they were getting ready to go on a trip and she wanted to get packed.  I had somehow forgotten that Thursday was Thursday, meaning that Edie had an after school club followed by soccer followed by an immediate playdate that I had set up for her with Charlotte, only she wasn’t home yet and she had homework she hadn’t done because she’d had yoga club followed by soccer practice and Thursday is THURSDAY.  So I told Rebecca to go ahead and drop Charlotte off, Edie wasn’t home yet, but Charlotte could help me make Rebecca’s cupcakes.

Meanwhile, people were stopping by to pick up dinner and commenting on the fact that we had an empty keg sitting by the front gate.  (We are cleaning out the basement – Pat had intended to use it in brewing beer at home, but then realized that just wasn’t going to happen, so he posted it on Freecycle and left it out there to get picked up, making the entrance to our house resemble the entrance to all the houses I lived in college. The universe is shaped exactly like the earth, if you go straight along enough you’ll wind up where you were.) Charlotte was helping to man the door, help whip up chocolate truffle filled cupcakes (the recipe is one I’ve posted before from Cook’s Illustrated, it’s damn good and quite easy) and write some last minute photo descriptions as part of wrapping up my big free lance project.  Pat had to attend a public meeting on behalf of work last night, thankfully, this one was in town which meant he was only gone but a few hours, but it still meant he wasn’t home and Edie had a question about her math homework that I was totally unable to answer.  Edie surpassed my math skills at some point in second grade and why not ask Betty’s son Ben, who’s good at math. So we ran down there, saw the new cast and after a few eye rolls, both of them expressing complete disdain for me admitting to my shortcomings and making them actually speak to each other, Ben was able to answer Edie’s question in about oh, 5 seconds.

I’m really pretty sure she gets a good idea of what it would be like to actually have an older brother in her exchanges with Ben. 

By the time the homework was done, frosting made and on the cupcakes (again, with a huge effort on behalf of 9 year old Charlotte, who can whip some egg whites by hand I tell you), and I had finally managed to sit down to breathe with a glass of wine, Rebecca walked through the door and it was time for dinner.  We ate, had dessert, the girls put on a show and suddenly, it was 8 o’clock and I was still in the clothes I had worked out in, unshowered.  Cleaning the kitchen took the very last of the energy I had – I was cold, I was tired and I was sore – not sure if it was from my workout and my  big 5 pull-ups earlier in the day or leftover from an earlier workout in the week that I didn’t stretch enough after – or my marathon day that had gone off rail or if I was just sore from being cold, because I now get stiff and sore from just getting cold.  Awesome.  If this is September and I’m 42, I cannot wait for January when I’m say, 60. 

At any rate, by the time I finished arguing with Edie about bedtime and had delivered Ben some cupcakes, I was too tired to bother with a shower, so I just crawled into my own bed, realizing that when I worked in an office and had a younger child,  I had way more time to take a shower.  I’m not sure how I got to this point in my life, but here I am.  I really didn’t have 5 minutes to take a shower yesterday.

Not Pickled.

3 Comments
I put some produce up this week that believe it or not, wasn’t pickled. I know, right?
I stumbled upon this last summer and it worked well, so I decided to try it again. I take an assortment of chili peppers and roast them in the oven until they are done.
Most were from my garden.
The thing about chili peppers is that one plant produces buckets of them.  There is always plenty to share.
I happened to be the lucky beneficiary of a chili pepper enthusiast I met at Leni’s Second Wednesdays last week who brought a few extras along.
I’m digging the Peruvian Purple Peppers. I may need to grow some next summer. I grow purple basil & purple pole beans, why not purple hot peppers?

 

You can also find chili peppers for about 10 cents each at the farmer’s market this time of year.  $1 worth of peppers is a great deal.  Enough to make a nice hot sauce.  (That’s my next experiment.)
Roasting helps the skins pop off and I read somewhere that it makes them hotter because the roasting releases the capsaicin. Don’t quote me on that.  It does make them easier to chop up and throw in the freezer.
Last year, I filled small jars with them, but by the time I would finish a small jar, some of them had gone bad in the fridge.  So I thought I’d freeze them in ice cube trays and have smaller portions I could work with.  It doesn’t always take much of my mix to flavor a dish and I like having my own, local chilis, you know?
I didn’t think about wearing gloves though, so my hands tingled for a good few hours yesterday afternoon and evening.  I think I did that last year too.  I blame my blondeness.  I’m good about washing my hands after chopping peppers, but I did two cookie sheets full of peppers, a grocery bag worth.  When you deal with that amount of peppers, you really should consider gloves.
Last year I tried making a hot sauce with cayenne peppers and vinegar and Pat didn’t care for it.  So, I’m going to try again, but get a little fancy with it.  Maybe add some fruit?  I don’t know.  Anyone ever make one?  Know someone that makes one?  I’m now accepting recipes.

Breathe.

3 Comments

The last two weeks around here have been busy.  Pat’s been overhauling his boat – which has been much needed but generally put off with all his other duties for some time.  This past weekend’s Clean Water Act’s 40th Anniversary Celebration and Rally in DC with the Waterkeeper Alliance and plenty of his fellow Riverkeepers about gave him the excuse he needed to just buckle down and do it. He had a volunteer help strip it, but he did the final sanding and then priming and painting.  He finished it up about 3:30 Friday afternoon, just as it was time for him to head up to DC.

I meanwhile, was up to my ears in a free lance project that you will hear more about next week, as well as attempting to sort out details for my next pickling class, doing my home cooked meals to go and picking up some catering as well as back waiting shifts for a friend’s restaurant, trying to bump up our cash flow, in addition to my regular wife & mom duties.

I turned in the last piece of my free lance project this morning, having done most of it last week, writing 4 articles in a writing frenzy last Friday.  There is much relief, although I still have things to wrap up, emails to respond to, an inbox to clean up, a hard drive to clean up, a desk top to find under a mass of clutter…and that’s just for that project.  The house isn’t in too bad of shape overall – moments where I need to procrastinate I found myself cleaning. 

My uncle’s memorial service was this past weekend. It had been pushed back and pushed back for a variety of reasons and Friday afternoon I realized I just wasn’t going to make it.  I was still finishing up one article and after the rush of the last few weeks, I wasn’t looking forward to making a mad dash up to Baltimore and back.  I spent the weekend here with my girl, intent on chilling out.  We had some nice impromptu fun with friends and neighbors, including dinner one evening.  At the time the service was being held Saturday, I was down in the chicken coop, shoveling out the bottom layer of composted leaves and chicken droppings to put some on my garden.  I think, wait, I know my uncle would have appreciated that, as we had many a conversation over the years on our shared love of gardens and chickens and how much better my garden would grow if I had my own source of chicken manure.

It was good to spend some quality quiet time with Edie this weekend.  She seems to be making the transition of new school/new soccer team/bff moving to Guatemala fairly well.  She began last week complaining that one of the boys in her class from her elementary school had stopped her in the hallway to talk college football – the horrors!  I reminded her that she spent most of last football season talking football with this young man (as well as basketball during that season) and that he was probably in the same boat as her, dealing with new school, he was probably looking to talk to any friendly face he knew about anything he could and with her, he knew their common denominator was college football.  I was pretty tickled to discover that by week’s end, she had gotten over the horror of a boy (!!) talking to her in the middle of the school hallway enough to give me the scouting report and matchups for this week’s games.  When I asked how she knew, she just shrugged and admitted to having talked to said boy all week about football in the hallway as if it was no big deal.  I was quite happy to hear it. 

This week is already shaping up to be busy too, although not as frantic as the last two- meetings, get togethers or work just about every night, with a final editing session before my little project is sent to the printer.  I also have some big house projects planned – Edie’s room is getting a desk, but I need to refinish it first, which is prompting a basement clean out so I have space to work before I make over her room.  I also have a glimmer of an idea for a whole new business, because I don’t have enough irons in the fire, clearly.  Last night I dreamt I was pregnant and in labor and we had to get to the hospital before the floodwaters stopped us.   This morning I looked up what all those things meant in dreams – apparently dreaming you are pregnant is a sign of creativity, and dreaming about floods can mean rebirth or unhappiness.  Hmmm.  I can’t quite figure out what the two of them together mean.  Thoughts?

Updates

2 Comments
I have a gazillion things to do, but being the structured procrastinator that I am, I thought I’d use a blog post to help me organize my thoughts and photos.  Or continue to put off what I really need to be doing…
First up, the chickens.

They are almost full size hens.

Ozzy has gotten even more bizarre looking.

Although she is beautiful, isn’t she?
We love our funky chicken.

Butters may very well be a he. 
But he’s well mannered and as long as he stays that way, he is welcome in the coop.
The first time he gets mean to anyone, he’s chicken pot pie.  I’ve explained this to him/her and I think he/she gets it.

Harriet and Cuddles.  Cuddles is still the fluffiest chicken around. 
Brian named Harriet in honor of the old show ‘Ozzie and Harriet’, trying to balance out the fact that we named a chicken after a bat-eating heavy metal rock star.  At least someone around here has family values.
Remember last spring when I was all about ripping up the back yard by hand and I was on a mission to find a metal table and chairs for back there?

Well, I found one.  When Edie’s bff and family moved to Guatemala,  I offered to save them the trouble of shipping their table and chairs by letting them store it in my back yard.  We plan on painting it at some point, but in the meantime, it’s getting alot of good use.
And the butterfly bush that I thought I killed not only made a come back, but it bloomed this year!  A small one and only one, but it’s a bloom. 

The patchouli plant has taken off too. 
I’ve been playing around with a nice camera these days and I just happened to snap this as I was wandering around the back yard.  I sort of like how it turned out.

All that time spent digging weeds up by hand, we still have lots of weeds back there.  Sigh.  Every time I think I make headway, it rains and things grow back.  Still, it’s getting there.  I do like the lush, overgrown look.

Although this zebra grass by the side of the road needs to go.  I seriously thinned it this spring and look at it.  Anyone want some zebra grass?  I’m hacking it back to a tiny amount and I hate to throw out living plants, but I have no other place for it.  Drop me a line if you want some ornamental grasses.

Another view of my new table and chairs.  Don’t they look sweet back there?  What color should we paint them?  Definitely something to hide the gunk that seems to collect on outdoor furniture.  Chocolate brown?  I know white is classic and I’d love, LOVE to paint them white, but they will show so much dirt and I’ll have to repaint them every year and I’m way too lazy for that.
The weather has finally cooled down, the humidity has gone away and after I tackle this deadline this week, I’ve got some house reorganization plans I’m a little excited about.  It’s never a dull moment here.

Although, I do wonder how many more moments like this we have left – where she drags her kitchen set and babydolls outside for a picnic while Pat paints the boat.  She yelled at me for taking pictures “WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO TAKE PICTURES?” but someday, she’s going to look back and be happy I did.
At least I hope she is.

Once in a Lifetime.

2 Comments
So while most of my weekend was spent doing boring house chores like cleaning both bathrooms in a single day, I did have one interesting event of note.
I worked a catering job Friday night with a friend’s catering business.  It was a dinner thanking the supporters of the University of Virginia Marching Band, in their rehearsal hall. I drive past that building quite a bit, as I cut through Culbreth regularly, so it was neat to see the inside.  I hadn’t been wowed by it before, but having been in it, I can say that I am now.  Clean lines, warm finishes and lots of big windows with a great view of Lambeth Field behind it. 
While we were setting up Friday afternoon, we got to listen to the entertainment for the evening do a little warm up and sound check, running through the majority of their show for later on.  While they weren’t in costume for this performance, I think it was the better one of the two I saw.
Although their costumes definitely added something to the later performance.
That, dear friends, are The Temptations.  I took the photo on a friend’s phone.  They were dressed all in pink, right down to their shoes.  Warming up, they started their rehearsal with a few acapella gospel numbers before moving on to all their hits, including my favorite “Papa was a Rolling Stone”. Tell me you don’t find yourself moving to that beat. And “Ball of Confusion”, another favorite of theirs, although I was in my thirties before I discovered that they did the first version.  I always thought it was a  Love and Rockets original. I am an Eighties New Wave child through and through. 
Definitely a once in a lifetime experience, watching them warm up in a room of less than 20 people, although seeing them in a room with less than 150 folks later in the evening was a once in a lifetime experience as well. Pretty hard to top that, so yeah, other than seeing The Temptations, the highlight of my weekend was cleaning both bathrooms.  What an exciting life I lead.

Plan B.

3 Comments

The plan was for an group playdate at the park for my Girl Scout troop after school yesterday.

Despite my saying we weren’t going to continue once they left their elementary school, they all asked if we could please do Girl Scouts again this year.  They have so many other activities, I hesitated to say yes, until I realized that what they wanted was the social aspect – they wanted to know that they had time set aside here & there for their old pack of friends in the middle of making new friends at a new school.  So I said yes.  I’m a sucker for those girls.

We’re not officially starting it off until they are more settled in school, but I thought a get together would be good for the girls.  I thought they could all walk down to the park, I’d have a nice snack and they could play together until they had to run off to their other activities.

I knew there was a chance of rain in the forecast, as there has been all week.  But for the first time in days, the sun was actually out yesterday.  Until about 10 minutes before the girls were due to be released from school.  The clouds rolled in, but I perserved, having packed my little red wagon with a cooler of bottled water, tablecloth and napkins,  a big bowl of grapes and a very special treat, what we call “Uncle George’s O’Henry Bars” – named for the fishing buddy of Pat who gave me the recipe after I downed about half a pan of them at his house one night.  One of the very recipes in my repertoire that isn’t completely from scratch and super healthy. 

Normally, I ask that parents send a healthy snack.  I specifically request fruit, no sugary treats, because I don’t give a rats behind what any study says, you put sugar in that group of girls and get ready to peel them off walls.

As the some of the girls came up the street, thunder boomed.  I had the girls break down the park set up and bring it back to the house.  I ran around my house, totally unprepared for nine 10 year old girls.  I moved the coffee table out of the living room, spread the tablecloth and declared it a ‘floor picnic’.  They devoured their snack, piled on my sofa and started crawling the walls. 

My living room is exactly eight and a half feet wide by eleven feet long.  It is not big enough for 9 girls.  It’s definitely not big enough for 9 girls who are crawling the walls thanks to the sugar I had just fed them because I thought it’d be nice to give them a treat and because I thought they’d be running it off at the park.  Rain plans are never my thing and usually, it works out for me.  Not so much here.

I tried capturing the sweet moment of all of them piled on top of each other on my sofa with a very nice camera I’m currently borrowing to see what I want to upgrade to.  Apparently that plan didn’t work out so well for me either, as I really don’t know how to use a nice camera, only my fancy point and shoot.  I have a whole slew of pictures that look like that. 
Sigh.
Finally, it stopped thundering, the anticipated downpour never happened and the girls asked if they could go outside.  So, back to the park we went and they happily spent the rest of the afternoon running around in the misting rain. Alls well that ends well, even if you have to scramble to get there.
Thank you all for your comments and emails after my last post.  There seems to be some bumps in being able to put my uncle to rest – things like no will – so for the time being, we are on hold as to when we will have to go up for any sort of service.  In the meantime, life goes on, even when nothing seems to go to plan. Which seems to be the plan.
Uncle George’s O’Henry Bars
1 cup sugar
1 cup light Karo corn syrup
1 cup peanut butter
Combine over heat until smooth.
Stir in 6 cups Special K
Spread in pan.
Melt:
1 bag semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 bag butterscotch chips
Spread on top.  Chill. Serve when hardens.

When the going gets tough….

6 Comments

Cooking is my happy place.  When I’ve had a bad day, there is nothing more soothing to me than heading into my kitchen and playing.

Friday afternoon, as I was procrastinating about several projects I have going on right now, I checked what I like to call ‘the crackbook’ aka….Facebook.  There, I saw one of my cousins had posted a RIP in regards to their father.

I immediately picked up the phone and called said cousin.  Before the rest of our family members could read about the news on the internet, I turned around and proceeded to call other family members, most importantly, those not on the crackbook. 

The uncle in question that passed can best described as a character.  He could be a hard man to love, but I adored him. And he adored me right back.  That fact was evident to anyone who ever happened to be around us – or so says my husband.

He was married to my mother’s younger sister Loretta.  She was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 39 – she may have actually just turned 40 – anyway, when I went through my whole stomach tumor ordeal a few years back on the eve of my 40th birthday, all I could think of was Aunt Loretta. Andoreda as we kids called her.

She fought a long hard battle 10 year battle with cancer that she didn’t win.  She willed herself to live years after her 6 month expiration date given by doctors because she wanted to see her kids grow up. She wanted to make sure they could take care of themselves at the very least, and once the first one was old enough to drive, she let go.  My Uncle Peter had had diabetes since he was a kid – and as long as I’d known him, he’d never really taken care of himself.  I will give him this – I did see him make an effort to take care of himself when he came to visit us a few years ago.  We had a great visit and that memory will live in my heart right next to the one where he would take me to the candy store (the 7-11 on Old Court Road in Pikesville) in his orange Datsun pickup truck.  During that visit, he never stopped talking about his wife.  He was down here to meet up with a woman he’d been talking to on-line, through an equestrian dating website – he told her he was staying with his niece and her husband, he told her my husband had a rack of canoes parked in front of our house and that we lived near some park and she totally knew who we were and where we lived, which amused him to no end and backed up my theory that everyone in a 4 county area knows our house.  We are a landmark even if we don’t have canoes anymore.

I digress.

Uncle Peter’s passing has made me realize that I’m going to have to deal with my estranged siblings and possibly mother in the coming days.  My last run-in with them resulted in several years of heavy therapy, with a therapist that I really love but our current insurance company tells me I can no longer see.  (That’s a totally different tangent).  Thankfully, at the same time I got the news from the insurance company, the therapist and I had agreed, I had come along way and we could use some space between us. 

So, I’m dealing with the dual whammy of losing my Uncle Peter as well as prepping to deal with my family.  I knew Peter’s passing was coming, but what has me most in a tizzy is the fact that I have to face at least the one of my sisters at the service to say goodbye to him.  I have chatted with several friends about this (Thank you Clarabelle!) but mostly what I’ve done is cook.

I got up early Saturday morning and headed down to the market, where I proceeded to purchase no less than 40 pounds of tomatoes.  It’s been unbearably muggy here, but I have had all four burners of my stove cranking with pots of boiling water since 10:30 Saturday morning.  I have canned at least 30 pints of local organic tomatoes, I am working on turning I don’t know how many pounds of them into concentrate via my crockpot, I’ve got a pot of gumbo simmering as I type this, as well as several loaves of sourdough baguettes in the oven (Thanks to Leni for giving me the starter).  I did a batch of green bean pickles earlier today and I’ve been catching up on laundry for the first time since we got home from the beach. Somehow, sand is still EVERYWHERE.

I know the typical response to hearing about a death in the family is “I’m sorry for your loss”.  Ever since my father passed away when I was 19, I have come to hate that phrase.  It just feels false.  I hate it.  Please don’t use that phrase when you leave comments and email me.  I’m not just dealing with the loss of my uncle – which I knew was coming – he had taken himself off of dialysis last winter, so really, the fact that he lasted as long as he did is something – but I’m girding up to deal with having to be in the same room as my family. The family that lives for drama and will stop at nothing to cause a scene.  I’ve already made arrangements for Edie to be elsewhere because I will minimize the damage they do to her.  Peter always held out hope for reconciliation between myself and my mother and siblings – thanks to the same website that told me about his passing, I’ve learned that my most unstable and nastiest sister has jumped in to ‘be there’ for one of my cousins.

The most meaningful family relationships I have, besides my Aunt Jenny, has been with my cousins.  What I don’t have with my siblings, I have with my cousins.  I want to say goodbye to my Uncle Peter, but I also want to be there for my cousin John, whom I have a very deep soft spot for.  We know what it’s like to lose a parent way too early, we know what it’s like to have difficult relationships with our siblings. 

So,  I really just need to pull up my big girl pants and get through it.  I went off on a tangent last night in bed to Pat about well, everything. How I’m terrified about dealing with my family, that it could set me back years, that I’m slightly pissed at Uncle Peter for expecting me to deal with it but at the same time, I know he, nor any other of my extended family members really should have to be in the middle of the whole mess, but you know what?  I’m so incredibly grateful that I do have all that extended family in the middle of the it all that let me know they are there for me, unquestionably, always.

So, I’m going to try to get through the next week.  For their sakes.

Gardening (mis)adventures that tasted good.

3 Comments
It’s almost September. It’s been a long hot summer and my garden is looking scraggly.

I finally found some time to give it the attention it has been craving.  I weeded, ripped out some dead things, cut some things back hoping for a fall revival, planted some new greens.
In my enthusiasm,  I cut back what I thought was a dead branch of sage.
Turns out it was just leggy, because at the other end of the foot long branch were some happy new sage leaves.
The only squash plant that has produced anything in my garden this summer were a few volunteer compost bin butternut squash plants. When the squirrels were on their rampage to eat everything in sight just a few short weeks ago, they had gnawed through the vine, causing an unripe (green) squash to become unattached. I was not about to let them have it, so I brought it in and hoped to be able to do something with it.  It actually did ripen sitting on my counter for a few weeks. 
So, with the sage I hadn’t meant to cut back and the butternut squash that I hadn’t planted, I made our first fallish dinner the other night – Roasted Butternut Squash, Sage & Feta Pizza.

I peeled and diced the squash, tossed it with some sliced onions, salt, pepper & olive oil and popped it in the oven at 350 or until it was browning nicely. Probably close to an hour, but I tend to not keep an eye on the clock and just depend on things smelling right.  Highly technical cooking skills in use there.
For the pizza, I prebaked a crust for about 5 minutes, then covered it lightly in olive oil.  I had some jack cheese in the drawer, so a light sprinkle of that, spread the squash & onions on top of that, added some feta and the fresh sage leaves.  I covered all of that in a light dusting of more jack cheese and then baked the whole thing until it was golden and well, looked right.
That’s a highly technical cooking term.  Use it at your own risk.