Tennis was my bête noire as a child. I took lessons, dressed in my proper white tennis skirt and tretorns, from the time I was about four until I was fourteen. And in all those years I could never hit the damn ball. It was a trial. My mother desperately wanted me to be one of those girls, tennis playing girls, nice suburban girls who get along with others and wear their hair in shiny ponytails and go out to play tennis on Saturday mornings. And I couldn’t hit the ball. I bent my knees. I kept my eye on…
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I don’t know what happened to blogging this week. But then again, I don’t know how it got to be Wednesday afternoon already. In lieu of new blogging, here’s my latest CookbookSlut review over at Bookslut.
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Walking around town this morning with Raymond, I noticed we’re in full sunflower season — every alley and garden and roadside is suddenly illuminated with sunny yellow flowers. The cosmos also did really well this summer — lots and lots of big banks of pink and white cosmos around town. I love this time of year — it’s so brief, and in fact, we’re supposed to get frost on Monday night — time to go buy more plastic sheeting. But for a short window every summer we get this period of flowering — the last gasp even as the first…
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I’ve written before about Owen’s robo-leg, but it’s worked so well that I had to send it back to the good folks at K-9 Orthotics in Nova Scotia last week for a tune up. It was really sad — the vet and I had to put him in a brace, like the ones he spent much of last summer in, except that because we didn’t have the fiberglass “cast” as a base, we wound up using a generic hard plastic brace for support. Since he really doesn’t have a functioning achilles tendon in that leg, it needs support, in large…
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I was picking tomatoes this morning when it occurred to me that part of my problem with seed saving is managing to remember which tomato is which. I planted nine varieties this year, and many of them are a lot alike — Perestroika and Grushovka, for example. And I tend to pick in a big basket, where they get mixed up. So tomorrow, I have to pay more attention, because it’s time to start putting some seed aside for next year. This morning I did Galina, this yellow cherry that I love, and Mountain Princess, which gets mangled by the…
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When my stepmother Susan was here last week, we went mushroom hunting. It’s been an uncharacteristically wet summer, and we really cleaned up. We found this gorgeous big bolete, which was nearly entirely clean of maggots (not always the case with these big ones), as well as a bunch of smaller boletes. It was a good haul and we only had throw out one of these for being too maggoty. But the big excitement, at least for me, was that we found nearly five pounds of Chanterelles. I love chanterelles and this was the first summer I’d paid enough attention…
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I’ve been meaning to blog about this for ages, but my vacation got in the way. We finally finished the chicken coop. Chuck built the actual coop part ages ago, but after Ray killed the hens, we had to enclose the whole space, which took a little while. And I’m proud to say that the only thing we bought for the coop was a roll of plastic bird fencing. Everything else was recycled. There is chain link fence along the bottom part of the enclosure and then I covered it with old twig fencing that I’d saved when I replaced…
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Here are the first tomatoes of the season. Yes, I realize it’s the end of August. It’s been a long cool summer here in Montana, and the tomatoes have only just now started getting ripe. Just in time to be swathed in plastic sheeting. The romas are looking good — I planted two kinds, Borghese and Milano Plum, both from Seeds of Italy. They’re just starting to pink up, but I’m beginning to see homemade sauce and salsa in my future. The Siberians are coming in nicely. I couldn’t remember the difference when I was planting between Perestroika and Grushovka,…
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Here it is — our whole pig, butchered, cut, wrapped, with the hams and bacons smoked. Chuck drove over to pick it up and he said it was a very festive atmosphere over there — a big refrigerated truck filled with orders. We paid $290 for this pig, which means we’re looking at $1.75 a pound for a local 4-H fair pig. We were late to go look at the animals with the kids, so what we saw was pigs and lambs being loaded onto trucks. It’s a rural ranching community here — that’s what happens after the fair, you…
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It’s been interesting, this “self-employment” thing. I must admit, I’ve taken a very big break — amazing how many things one can get behind on after working a real day job for ten years. I realize that most people work “real day jobs” for their entire career, so I’m not trying to be disengenuous, but before the Big Corporate Job That Vanished, I was a grad student and a ski bum and a raft guide and worked a lot of odd jobs and retail. I’ve worked since I was fourteen, and for most of that time I had more than…