Lion & tigers & bears? No, no...

It's more like, tomatoes & eggplant & basil, oh my!

I've been in a tizzy picking, freezing, drying, cooking this wonderful, glorious produce!

Not to mention zucchini, apples and blueberries, oh my.

Next week will be peaches - a good crop Clyde says. And the last messy project is applesauce. It's been so much easier doing these sloppy, drippy foods outside, since we picked up a free picnic table at a neighborhood "estate" sale. And the food dryer can just be out there, too. I love cleaning up with a HOSE! I do have qualms about the dehydrator, but feel better since I ordered an adapter for the vacuum sealer that will do mason jars - no more plastic bags!


I don't fuss about the squash,

because all they ask is a cool corner to nap in until dinner time. But where will we store the potatoes? Hmmmm.....


Kudos maximos to Emily for recommending the Alton Brown tomato sauce recipe. That's, hand's down, the best sauce we've ever had. I couldn't quit tasting it while we waited for the pasta, and could probably eat a bowl of it all by itself.

Will I have time to roast enough tomatoes to free us from tin cans? Tune in next time...

Ass Over Teakettle

So, in an amazingly inept move, I stumbled over the doorstop in the woodshed and while my body pitched hard right, my foot stayed put. I went down like a glacier calving. Except I didn't splash. Oh, and I didn't break into a million pieces.

Fortunately, there was no one home, because I turned the air midnight blue. Yes, it DID amaze the cats; they were curious as... well, you know ... walking around me with wide eyes and switching tails. Hmmmm, now I wonder if they were circling for the kill...

I'm pretty good at falling, due to lots of practice. I'm not clumsy; I just don't always remember to tell my feet where my head is going next and then we have to sit down, have a meeting, and try again.

This time, we got to sit down for a nice looong time. One part of my brain was shrieking that I'd never walk again, and then there was the part that was shouting profanities out loud, so it took a while for the rest of us to restore order. That done, All the King's Horses and All the King's Men (the rational part of my brain) quietly suggested ice, ibuprofen and elevation, which had me only muttering intermittently by the time Bill got home.

Today? A little swelling, a little tenderness, and a new respect for our doorstop.

Spring madness

Reading E's rant about hormone-drunk birds' attacking her house made me think happily about the dear boys, whose behavior is amazingly decorous for three-year-old male cats. They don't fight; they rarely speak; they walk in single-file to the door when we tell them it's time to go out... You get the picture. But they aren't wind-up cats; once in a while they surprise us.

Last Fall, we turned our compost pile and now have another 170 sq. ft. of vegetable garden. (We don't turn the pile very often, obviously!) The boys were happy to have a new, larger litterbox until we covered it with old alfalfa. But when they noticed great dingy poufs of aged wool we'd picked up with the hay... Oh, joy!

They roll; they root; they loll on their backs, clutching a tattered wad, in ecstatic trances.




I guess, sometimes they are just little boys who need their loveys.

Pink snow!

What have they done?

I've been watching flickers



for weeks now, poking deep into the soil, leaving so many holes behind that some places look like someone fired a shotgun. Although the flickers are around all the time, it's only in late winter that I see them working over special areas together. Then, today, I look out to see: newborn leaves on the roses, lilac, crabapples and flowering currants, glossy maroon buds on the horse chestnut,and suddenly there are more things blooming than I can easily list.

I think I know what the flickers were up to: they tore a hole in winter so spring could get in!

Dear World...

This pretty much sums up my feelings.