7/27/10 – Tuesday

Thanks, you guys, for your suggestions on what to do with the dill. Right now my plan is to use most of it to make Ina’s chicken stock (which I will then can!) and some of it to put in egg salad. The rest, I’ll print out and use next year when I have my very own fresh dill from my very own herb garden!

Our garden this year is just head-to-toe FAIL, I’m telling you. The goddamn something-or-other bugs have hit the squash. And while it’s fine with me if we don’t get any more scalloped squash, I’d like more yellow squash, and I’ve been so intent on shredding and freezing the zucchini we’ve gotten so far that I haven’t even made any zucchini bread yet.

The two regular tomato plants are putting out nice green tomatoes, but they’re getting big mushy spots before they have a chance to get more than half ripe. I told Fred yesterday that we’re going to pick the tomatoes green from now on, and oven fry them and use them in green tomato chili. Oddly, the cherry tomato plants are going like gangbusters, so I guess I’m not going to complain.

We got a ton of spaghetti squash, but when I started roasting them so I could pull the squash out and freeze it for future use, the squash wasn’t stringing. It wasn’t a matter of the squash not being ripe – they were definitely ripe – and it wasn’t a matter of being undercooked, so fuck if I have any clue what the problem is.

Did I tell you about the corn? Fred planted 7 rows of corn. Guess how many ears we ended up with.

GUESS.

17 fucking ears. Luckily, we still have a ton left over from last year, so we won’t go corn-less for the next year, but GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY, this year has sucked garden-wise.

Oh well. Maybe the second round of green beans will do better than expected. Here’s hoping.

 

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Yesterday morning I was sitting at my computer, and I heard the driveway alarm go off. I glanced out the door and saw a regular egg buyer walking toward the door. I opened the door and he called that he wanted two dozen eggs. I got them for him, and went out to hand them over to him.

“I was here, oh, two weeks ago?” he said. “Both vehicles were here – ” he motioned toward my car and the truck, “but the house was closed up tight and no one came to the door!” (“Both vehicles” amused me, because I don’t think anyone in town knows that Fred actually has his own car, since he parks it in the garage.)

He put both hands on his hips and looked at me like he expected an explanation for this. Like it’s a rule that if both vehicles are here SOMEONE BETTER BE HERE TO SELL HIM EGGS DAMNIT.

(The “Eggs for sale” sign wasn’t up, for the record. It bothers me a lot less than it used to when people stop by to buy eggs even when the sign isn’t up because the driveway alarm goes off and alerts me that people are approaching. I guess my real issue before was that I’d be sitting at my desk minding my own business and then look up to see someone RIGHT THERE on the other side of the door which always startled the hell out of me. Now that I know they’re coming to the door it’s still an annoyance, but one I can deal with.)

“I was on vacation in Maine,” I said.

He nodded, handed over his four dollars, thanked me, and left.

I went into the kitchen to make lunch, and as I did so, I glanced out the window over the sink. This window, I’m sure I’ve only mentioned 340 times before, looks toward the next door neighbor’s back yard, and I could see her sitting on her deck talking to two men who were wearing suit pants and button-down shirts.

I immediately wondered who they were. They seemed like some sort of professionals, maybe lawyers in business casual clothing. They would talk and she would talk, and they were filling out some sort of form. There was a large book they’d occasionally refer to.

Obviously my inner Gladys Kravitz was in residence, because I spent far too much time watching them through the window while I made my lunch.

I actually went out at one point to move the water in the garden (I watered the garden row by row, all day long, so of course it rained yesterday afternoon.) and oh-so-casually didn’t look over in their direction, but I had my ears perked and listening, and couldn’t hear a damn thing.

They must have been there sitting on her deck talking for at least 45 minutes – don’t look at me like that, I didn’t stand there and WATCH them talking the whole time, I’d just peek out there every once in a while. Nosy, me? NAH. – and when I went into the kitchen to check on my green tomato chili, they were gone.

I’d just started chopping up yellow squash to boil, when the driveway alarm went off. I went to the porthole window in the dining room to see who was out there, and as it turned out, it was the two guys who’d been sitting on her deck for the last 45 minutes.

My reaction, when I look out into the driveway and see a stranger getting out of their car, is inevitably “Oh, hell no.” If I don’t recognize the person/ people, and I’m not expecting anyone, I don’t answer the door. This might be a bad habit, because maybe they’re thieves and if I don’t answer the door they’ll think no one’s home and they’ll break into the house and steal all the cats (IN MY DREAMS), but it’s a habit I intend to keep up, ’cause ah hates strangers.

They went to the front door (another reason to not answer the door – if someone has bought eggs from us before, they know to come to the side door. If they haven’t bought eggs, the sign isn’t out and I’m not expecting them, why would I want to deal with them? Ed McMahon will probably come back with my $30 million check if I don’t answer the first time.) and knocked. I didn’t answer, just kept chopping squash, and they left pretty quickly.

When I heard the driveway alarm go off again, I went and watched them pull out of our driveway, to see where they’d go. They pulled into the driveway of the house across the street, but either those people weren’t home or they didn’t answer the door, or possibly they sent the strangers on their way when they heard what they wanted, but in any case five minutes later the car was gone.

Wow. I just used an awful lot of words to describe a completely unfascinating afternoon, didn’t I? Don’t you wonder how I get shit done around here, given that I spend all my time with my nose pressed to the window watching to see what’s going on?

Funny that when I lived in a subdivision and there was always stuff going on outside, I rarely even looked out the window, isn’t it?

 

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Poor Miz Poo. She’s all “Do you SEE what I have to put up with, here?”

Sugarbutt thinks Bolitar’s just a little too close. Bolitar doesn’t care.

Jake’s face is KILLING ME. He’s like “PARDON ME THIS IS JAKE’S CAVE THIS IS NOT MEANT FOR KITTENS TO COME TROMP ALL OVER THIS IS MY PRIVATE PLACE FOR PRIVACY.” And Corbett’s all “See my butt?”

 

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Something I learned yesterday – Moxie is scared of thunder and will hide under the chair in fear every time the thunder happens. She doesn’t want to be coaxed out from under the chair, she doesn’t want to be snuggled safely in your arms. She wants to hide under the chair, thank you.

Melodie could not be less scared of the sound of thunder. A particularly loud crash of thunder happened yesterday afternoon and Moxie dove under the chair. From her perch on the cat tree, Melodie just sat and gazed out the window at the rain. I would have surely expected it to be the other way around.

Martin and the pink fluff.

That’s Moxie’s tail he’s chewing on. She puts up with this for far longer than I would expect, and then when she’s had enough, she turns around and smacks him. It’s a system that seems to work well for them.

Melodie, following Martin around.

“What?”

This morning, Melodie came immediately out of her Melodie cave (the condo on the cat tree) to greet me when I went into the room. Either she’s getting more comfortable with me (she was ALL OVER Fred last night, purring and rubbing on him. The lady cats love Fred, for sure.) or she’s figured out that when I come into the room for the first time in the morning, I give them canned cat food. Either way, it’s progress!

 

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A couple of weeks ago, I said that Stinkerbelle spends 99% of her time on top of the bookcase in the front room. Well, she must have gotten word of what I’d said, because she immediately set out to make a liar out of me. She’s been coming out more and more, sitting angrily in the computer room glaring at me, climbing up onto the top of the cupboards in the kitchen, sitting on top of the canning cabinet in the dining room. She’s been a social butterfly, if by “social butterfly” you mean a cat who stalks around the house smacking at any kittens who venture too close to her, that is.

 

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Previously
2009: I screamed at the top of my lungs, and then I took a gasping breath, and I screamed some more.
2008: No entry.
2007: (Unless there’s a secret “Robyn is a blithering idiot” message board somewhere, which is possible but – given that the world apparently does NOT revolve around me (even though it should), my blithering idiotness probably doesn’t occupy the minds of others the way it occupies mine.)
2006: I look like a fucking Simpson!
2005: “I dropped my purse!” I lied.
2004: I’m a slug in a family of energizer bunnies.
2003: No entry.
2002: My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts.
2001: No entry.
2000: I’m just not feeling very chatty today.