The Heat Is On, The Heat Is Off

The temperatures FINALLY dropped, as of last week we were still in the 80's - it's hard to enjoy your Pumpkin Spice Latte wearing shorts with the air conditioner blasting, isn't it? Everyone has been speaking about it being October next week with nothing short of amazement, but here it is. I froze the last of the zucchini, my plants have a few small specimens but they aren't getting any bigger. My tomato plants are beyond huge, but not one tomato!! Not one this summer, I have no idea why. David's started clearing the pasture, with all the rain we've been getting a lot of huge old dead trees  falling and snapping in half. One of the neighbors has been here twice and I think we have a couple more coming next week to collect the wood to use in their wood furnaces. And yes we could sell it - if we collected, split, stacked and advertised it. It's just easier to give it away and honestly - free firewood makes WONDERFUL neighbors. 

 The neighbors share with us too - our neighbor Jane is the one that has been putting the word out about our free wood and she also gave us a jar of her homemade zucchini relish. I wasn't here and David asked her for the recipe - I laughed when he told me that! Around here most people would rather cut out their heart and hand it to you than give up an old family recipe. David told his friend Bobby he'd asked for it and he said Bobby responded with "so, how'd that go for you?" and he laughed! David will not be asking for any more recipes.

So, I took Molly and Reuben's Halloween pictures the other day, I thought they came out pretty good. And for the record I do NOT "make" them sit for the pictures, I actually have to gate it off until I'm ready or they both come up and start posing(as you can see in the two pictures above)

I've done these holiday pictures for about 5 years now - it started off with them sitting on the couch with bows on - to this. The secret to getting your dog to want to pose for pictures is one word - cheese. They picked up the association pretty quickly and understand if they sit for 3 to 5 minutes they get a a large amount of cheese. When I start putting up the background there's a huge amount of excitement with running up and down the stairs, etc... When I call them they come up and just sit while we get them ready - they understand when David puts his hand up to stay, they sit til I remove everything (usually there's long ribbons and I'm always afraid they'll break their long skinny legs running down the stairs), when I say "ok" they take off. Everyone assembles in front of the fridge where there's a Cheese Ruckus for about 5 minutes. I get my pictures, they get their cheese - everyone wins!

Haste Makes Waste

Years ago, when I was a teenager I bought a lot of my yarn out of the bargain bins - they were mill ends, odd colors, they were cheap because there was something wrong with them. I bought this great black yarn and was over visiting with my best friend Liz and her grandmother Bakeum while I struggled with this stupid yarn.  It had been super cheap because it was super tangled - SUPER tangled. ARRGH. After about an hour I was completely exasperated and announced it was going in the trash. Now. Bakum told me to keep working at it but it was useless I said and I was tossing it - good riddance.  Bakum told me if I was going to throw it out I could give it to her which I did in most likely a Very Dramatic and Exasperated ed Way. You know what happened, 

don't you?

The next time I saw Bakum she had my black yarn all neatly balled up and no, she didn't give it back - in her head that wold have been a useless thing to do since I would have learned nothing.. But she let me know she was keeping it because she had worked for it, I hadn't. Given the fact that the rule of grandmas is, well, grandma rules I had no recourse and in the grander scheme of things it made a big impression. So, when I went to roll this skein of beautiful, raw cotton yarn it tangled immediately into a huge snarl. David told me to throw it out but even to the this day, I cannot. It took a couple of hours but as you can see - success! And so glad I did, I'm making a few pumpkin hats and this is the perfect color for it. I'm taking a little break from shawl making. I went through my yarn the other day which is how I came across this little tangled gem.

So, I'm making my pumpkin hats, nothing says fall like that to me. Well, maybe pumpkin lattes do too. The weather is not as fallish as I'd like it to be, David asked if we could take the air conditioners out of the windows a couple of weeks ago and it was a big no! When September rolls around I think we all go into fall mode - the sage green table cloth replaces the sea blue one, we hunt down farm stands for the last of the summer vegetables, Halloween decorations start appearing. But reality? It's still 80 degrees, it'll be in the 90's at 30 more times before fall really hits. But the leaves are slowly starting to turn, my zucchini plants have stopped pumping out zucchini so it's definitely on it's way - just not fast enough. 

Fall. I Hope.

It finally cooled down today, after being boiled gently every time I stuck my head out the door for the past week,the temperatures felt so good. Then it started raining. And raining. Sigh. So it's cool enough to go out and play, but no one wants to stay out very long. Since there's been no break in the rain the dogs go out regardless, even Molly toughs it out today. When we come back in it's a free for all because for some reason only known to dogs, being sopping wet is Super Duper Exciting! I tried drying them off with a towel but that just took it up a notch, especially when they grabbed the towel and ran off with it playing tug of war. 

So I had to find Rainy Day stuff to do - knitting of course but I can't spend the whole day.....well, I SHOULDN'T spend the whole day.... I really didn't.  I did however dye a couple more skeins - I've got this one skein that's a beautiful cocoa brown but it's one of my smaller ones, so I ordered brown dye to see if I could make my own. It was more difficult than the light pink since I had to use the entire jar to make sure it was dark enough and it had to be boiled longer. But doing this in 70 degree weather with the windows and doors open was much easier than when I did it in 90 degree weather. It came out pretty good so far, I'll have to wait til it's fully dry though to see if it's the color I wanted - I dyed a full pound of lace weight yarn (about 6,000 yards) so it had better be the right color! 

For the rest of the morning I just cooked stuff so I'll have it for the week. With vacations, summer, etc... we are WAY off base so I'm getting it back under control. Since I've already lost 20 pounds I'd hate to start gaining it back. And yes, I did make zucchini cake today, I'm starting to get down to it finally. The plants have slowed down and I think I'll get a couple more, then that will be that. I haven't gone through my winter clothes yet, it's way too early. The way it works around here is it will be cool for a couple of week lulling you into a false sense of Autumn and then BAM 95 degrees and you're sweltering in your flannel. But for today, I'm very much enjoying the fallish temperatures, I can't wait!

One zucchini, Two Zucchini,Three Zucchini Four

So. I tried container gardening this year, I had SEVEN large pots which I filled with Professional Dirt mixed with horse poo that I gathered from my own yard. I put them in a place which got sun, but not too much. I watered them carefully, removed and replanted when it looked too crowded, weeded when the weeds appeared - and got for my troubles TWO cherry tomatoes which are not quite ripe yet. The cantaloupes got to the size of baseballs and then gave up completely, leaving tiny and sad deflated fruit. The zucchini blossomed and that was it. But I had some zucchini  and tomato seeds left over and threw them in the old horse poo in front of the little horse barn we use to store the tractor. I did nothing to nurture these plants, nothing. No water, I only weeded enough so I could find them, they were in the sun all day. And they grew to heroic proportions. 

The leaves on these plants are a good foot across, the plants themselves are huge. And zucchini is still pumping out despite my having given away bags of it. The dogs are no help at all since when I'm over there looking for zucchini they are right there investigating. I have noted that if I say something like " Would you like a biscuit" or "dinner" both Molly and Reuben understand me perfectly. However, the phrase "Get your big fat dog feet off of my plants" they peer at me as if they can't understand where all that yelling is coming from. They are the most tiresome creatures I know some days. 

So far we've had zucchini noodles, zucchini fritters, stir fry zucchini and a very unsuccessful Zucchini Lasagna. I got the recipe off of Pinterest and here is something you should know - just because someone puts great pictures and a recipe on Pinterest does not mean they're a great cook, they just may be good at taking pictures of their suck ass recipe. The idea was you could slice the zucchini thin and use that instead of lasagna noodles - what the recipe did not tell you was due to the high water content is you'll be bailing it out more than a leaky rowboat. UGH. I left it out on the end table and when I came back Molly and Reuben were stealing it so I gave it to them. David said he didn't think that was much of a punishment but I replied 

Well, you haven't tried it yet.

I did find a way to freeze it though so I've been grating it up with my Kitchen aid attachment and freezing it so we can stop eating it three hundred different ways a week. The other benefit is if nuclear winter occurs we can sit and around and zucchini until we want to die.  Since I still have tons more I bought stuff to make zucchini bread because according to David EVERYONE likes zucchini bread which actually means David likes it but throws in the word "everyone" so I'll make it faster.  I did notice the tomato plants I have out in front of the little barn seem to be producing so that will at least break up the Zucchini Monotony. I hope. 

Dress You Up

So with things calming down I've got a bit more time for blogging I suppose - I can't believe how long it's been since I last posted. So this morning it's this, then I'll work backwards. I've started shopping for the granddaughters - we live in the Land Of Cheap Clothing so I contribute quite often. My son and his family live on an island off the coast of Washington state and the only things nearby are the NEX, an expensive boutique and Walmart. I live between Pittsburgh and Morgantown, clothes are weirdly inexpensive and most of what I buy is usually between 75 and 90% off, not bad

When I first started buying them clothes I had a little bit of a dilemma, as most people that know me I've always been a feminist so that begs the question - what do you buy? With boys it's not so hard, aside from pictures of cartoon characters let's face it - you're pretty much limited to a color palette ranging from grey to black to blue and everything is plain. As long as you know which imaginary characters are in style, you're good. But girls, that's a whole different ball game. Juicy Couture and like clothing are generally out as I have no desire to dress them like wee little bar flies, but the plain stuff? What fun is that? But maybe that's the image we're going for - strong and straightforward. Not to change the topic but I'm a huge fan of Ted Talks, where people speak on a range of topics. They had a transgender parent speaking and he said something that really cleared it up for me. He and his wife had a little girl, they struggled with the same issue and he went on to talk about how they'd discussed dressing their daughter in non gender role, no ruffles, no pink. But then he said 

"you know what the absence of feminine is? Masculine". 

And there is your answer. Because if you insist on dressing your girl like a boy the message is Girls are Worthless. Because you can dress like a girl and still be a powerful force of nature, the center of attention instead of nondescript. And gender neutral? No thanks! Because any child under the age of about 8 looks like a boy or girl to the people that know them - to the rest of the world we can tell by the clothing. There's nothing more uncomfortable than desperately guessing at junior with a 50% chance of insulting the proud parents. And clothes should be fun, if you can pull off a sparkly unicorn shirt with rainbow pants you should have no problem with the rest of your life. Years ago I had a patient that lived on a multigenerational farm. The uncles that ran the farm were also in charge of the kids too young to go to school. One of the children was a girl and she was pretty big on tutus - one morning I was there and she tromped by wearing a hoodie, sweatpants, muck boots and a large purple tutu - I asked where she was going and she yelled as she went out the door after her uncle "We're going to feed the cows!" - if you can be comfortable feeding the cows in your tutu you've obviously got no self esteem issues.