ephemera

the weather has been absolutely gorgeous this week - cold nights, warm(ish) days. it's perfect for the trees, which are getting prettier and more multi-colored by the day!

i was really jonesing for chai tea the other night, and so i made a late-nite trip to the grocery store. E: "Bring back cake!"

chocolate cake is delicious with chai tea.

there is a baseball player named Coco Crisp. i am not making that up. he must've caught hell for that in school, lol - some people should not be allowed to name their own children.

after a weeks-long nom-a-thon (it must be the cooler weather - my body wants to add a winter layer), i'm getting back to eating more fruits and veggies, and also going back to the gym. i will still be eating cake and burgers (and so on), just maybe not EVERY. DAY. because as much fun as that is, and as much as i looooooooove food, i do not have extra money for new clothing in larger sizes. and that's the road i was heading down.

tonight, Mom and i (and Mom's friend and her grandkids) went to a local park to see the International Space Station fly by! there was some confusion about which direction it was coming from, and Mom's star-tracking app failed...and um, we're near a major airport, so there were lots of false alarms. in the end, only the eldest grandkid and i saw it. i had it in my binoculars for a minute (definitely NOT a plane), but then there was a shooting star and the kids were shrieking with excitement and when i looked back, it was gone. but - I SAW THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION!!!!!!!!!!!

last Friday, E and i celebrated our one-year anniversary! it was wonderful - we went to an Italian place for a delicious dinner, and then we saw Gravity in 3-D at a local theater. being a total space geek, i wore my NASA flight suit to the movie, and the high-schooler behind the concessions counter was very appreciative. He said the whole movie was "just breathtaking", and boy, was he right! It really did look like you were orbiting the Earth. just amazing.

I AM OUT OF GARAM MASALA AND THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. 

oh! progress has been made on the purging - i condensed four storage bins of stuff down to two, threw away two giant bags of trash, and took two more giant bags to a resale store. i've also managed to bring my credit card current, and am committed to paying it off entirely, after which i will begin to tackle the giant mess that is (are?) my student loans.

(this is where i visualize/trust God for 20 clients a week, minimum. 25 would be even better, but 20 will get the job done short-term.)

and now, the time has come for all good Dragons to finish their giant bottles of water and get ready for bed. E's night shift schedule is really messing with me, lol. i've always been nocturnal, and looooooooved working midnights (for 5 years)! anyway, it's like this: when E crawls into bed next to me at 8am on a Saturday or Sunday, we curl up and i go right back to sleep. on a good day, i'll get up at 11am-ish; on a bad day, well, 2pm isn't unusual. this makes it very hard to go to bed at a decent hour that night, and then it becomes a vicious cycle. so tonight, the goal is to be asleep by midnight, even if i have to pop a benadryl to get the job done, lol.

sweet dreams, blogland!

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm

This:

Was totally worth having to get dressed and buy lemons in this:

Chicken Lemon Rice Soup. Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

ta-da!

Presenting...

Our Christmas Tree!

 

Do you like it? I put on some Christmas music this morning and had a very fun hour. :o) That's three 100-light strands (1 clear, 2 multi), and I'm really pleased with how it turned out - it's even better in person! And the tree topper? It's an ornament I found at Jo-Ann Fabrics. I KNOW. Perfect, right? I just wedged a couple branch tips inside it and put a twist-tie through the ornament loop. Is it Christmas yet? :o) :o) :o)

feminist housewife

I love being domestic. No, really - my June Cleaver streak is a mile wide! Not much makes me happier than puttering around the house, doing dishes, cooking...you know, generally nesting and being creative. I love making the house a welcoming place for E to come home to, or wake up to, depending on the day. It's not all deep-clean, all the time, though - we're both prone to clutter (two Chaos Muppets with Order Muppet tendencies), so mostly I just try to stay on top of things and straighten them out as needed.

Over the weekend, I did simple, not-noisy things. Dishes, sweeping, straightening, and cooking. Oh, the cooking! Back in 2008, my sister emailed me a quiche recipe. I tried it, and loved it, and then totally forgot about it until a few days ago. We already had eggs, milk, baby spinach, onion, and pie crust, so I picked up some shredded mozzarella and some smoked pork jowl bacon (just trust me, it's delicious, and was cheaper than the other bacon). Pre-baked the pie crust and the bacon (not together), chopped and sauteed the onion, wilted the spinach. Cheese in crust first, then onion and spinach, then chopped up bacon. Mix eggs and milk, pour into crust, bake for an hour or so...and then devour. It's delicious with salad, too, but we didn't make it that far, lol! And best of all, I must've had too much stuff in the crust, because only half the egg/milk mix fit - so I made another quiche the next day!

Quiche #1, Pre-eggs....

And ready to eat! Doesn't that look tasty?

And the fun didn't stop there. Oh, no. You see, back in August, the Fest workers woke up one morning to Dutch Apple Cake for breakfast, and it was so good that I started researching recipes as soon as I got home. A couple weekends ago, E took me to Erie Orchard, and I picked out a bag of Northern Spy apples. (We also got cider and doughnuts. And foam swords. And we fed the goats and chickens!) Yesterday, two of those apples (and one Honeycrisp) turned into a super-easy, super-yummy Dutch Apple Cake of my very own! No pictures, but never fear - I'll be making it again very soon!

I had to come home to mom's and do laundry last night, but I left the house in a mostly-welcoming state: the dishes were done, there was quiche in the fridge and cake on the table, and the bed was turned down, pillows fluffed. E works so hard...I love doing little things to make her life easier, make her feel appreciated.

Bonus Pic:

CHICKENS!!!  :o)

progress

The pickles are delicious! Crisp, sweet, tangy...everything a pickle ought to be. My favorite part is when the vinegar asserts itself and punches you in the mouth. :o) I chopped a few of them up and had them on my burger last night, sooooooooo good!

The purging is at a standstill for the moment, there's just been too much other stuff going on - work picked up a bit (yay!), I'm on the home stretch of a second hat that has to be mailed out early next week, and this past weekend we helped two tiny Italian grandmothers make 38 quart jars of tomato sauce (E went back on Monday and they made another 38 jars, 20 of which are ours. Double Yay!). I made a batch of liquid laundry soap (it works out to under $2 for 128 loads, instead of dropping $14 on a bottle of Tide that will only do half as much), and we love it. I have 4 clients today, plus a house call for a neighbor...a full afternoon of clients tomorrow (and possibly a full morning as well, won't know til later today)...one client on Saturday...furious knitting and cleaning to be done at E's...and then I have to help keep E awake on Saturday night. She has to sleep all day on Sunday, because that night she starts her new job!!!!!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!! It's not a huge pay increase, but she'll have more hours, more opportunity for overtime, and best of all, full benefits. We don't know yet if they offer same-sex partner benefits, and I'm not holding my breath, but it's within the realm of possibility. Most importantly, this means we are one giant leap closer to living together! It could even happen by Christmas! Which, uh, brings us to this:

 

After all that talk about stuff and de-cluttering, I bought a Christmas tree. In my defense, I've been looking for a long time, and this tree (with shipping) was only $35!!! Isn't it cute? It's 3.5ft tall, the branches are pose-able, and it's made to look more like a real tree - note the brown trunk. I love the little pine cones, and the openness. It's the perfect little tree for us, and I can't wait to decorate it! My plan is to wind a strand of white lights up the trunk for extra glow factor, and use the multicolored lights on the branches. Thanks to my parents, who planned for the future, I already had my own box of ornaments by the time I was ten, and every year, my collection grows...so, not all will fit on the new tree, but since most of them already get a home on Mom's tree, it's not a problem. 

CHRISTMASCHRISTMASCHRISTMASCHRISTMASCHRISTMASCHRISTMASCHRISTMAS!!!!! 

It's my favorite holiday. I love everything about it - the lights, the music, the food, the time with family. The sense of anticipation in the air, the way the cold and snowy nights feel hushed and sacred. The fun of making or picking out exactly the right presents for the ones I love. The decorating, oh, the decorating!!! We didn't do much at all last year, and I'm not planning to go overboard, but.... :o)

Happy Thursday! 

***edited to add:  Tree with white lights!! What do you think? ***

stuff.

***We interrupt this blog post to bring you an important Pickle Update: There are now six pint jars of pickles sitting on the kitchen counter, in the final phase of production (marinating in their sugar/spiced vinegar syrup). Judging by pre-jarring sampling, they are going to be super tasty! This concludes your Pickle Update.***

Remember how I've been meditating on the concept of Enough? Well, the flip side to Enough is Too Much, and it's a problem. Not that I'm a hoarder of any kind, understand, just...well...I'm in the house I grew up in, so there's 30 years' worth of stuff to sort through, never mind the stuff that I brought back from living on the west coast, plus stuff that has continued to accrue since the move home. I've already done one purge of my bedroom, with round two currently in progress, but the real problem is the basement, and working down there is...well...there are cobwebs, and it's lonely, and there are definitely spiders...

Purging is HARD. I'm sentimental, and there are memories attached to everything that has managed to stick around. I also love to be surrounded by things that have meaning for me, things I love, things that make me smile. Nothing wrong with that, but since I'm crammed into one room, most of those things are piled atop each other or in boxes because there's nowhere for them to sit. (Eventually they'll have homes at E's, but she's got her own purging to do, and space is at a premium until we convince her parents to remove most of her Nana's furniture.) And we're not even going to discuss the books, lol...at least those have both form and function...

Anyway. Yeah. I'm trying hard to downsize, mostly in preparation for moving in with E, but also because OMG HOW DID I END UP WITH ALL THIS STUFF NOBODY NEEDS THIS MUCH STUFF EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!!!!!!

Simplification. I'm working on it.

Picnics and Pickle-making

I'll begin by saying that E's friends' wedding reception was the most delightful reception I've been to in...quite possibly, ever! The ceremony was nice, and after changing out of my dress (vintage-y red with white polka dots) and those $@&%#!* high heels (silver and sparkly, but which rendered me utterly useless), I carried camera equipment for E while she took pics of the wedding party at a local park. It's fun to watch her work...she has a great eye and equally great ideas, and would love to do more professional photography gigs. Anyway - the reception!! It started out looking fairly standard: rented foreign legion hall, food buffet, round tables with fancy napkins. The food was pretty good, and there was free beer and wine, but what really made it a party was the music!!!! That was the first time I've ever heard so many not-standard songs (The Spice Girls, The Beach Boys, Footloose, Blues Traveler, etc), the first Neil Diamond sing-a-long (Sweeeeeeet Caroline/ "BAH BAH BAHHHHHHHHHH", good times never seemed sooo good/ "SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD!"), the first time I've slow-danced to Daydream Believer (and E didn't mind that I sang the whole thing to her while we danced! SWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON!), and most definitely the first time I've ever danced the Time Warp. SO much better than the Chicken Dance!! Plus, it turns out that the bride and groom are in a really awesome cover band, and they took the stage intermittently and rocked the house! Total wedding win.

On Sunday, we slept in, then did a little pre-picnic grocery shopping. We needed bacon for our BLTs, and then we got a bright idea - "Hey, we have all that cast iron that needs to be seasoned...we should use the bacon!!" Roughly two hours later, the bacon was cooling, and so were our newly-seasoned pans:

 

Then, using toasted onion rolls, mayo, lettuce, tomato, and bacon, I assembled our main course:

 

Nommalicious, right?! These tasty sammiches went into a cooler bag with single-serve bags of Fritos and Funyuns, glass bottles of Coke and Mountain Dew, some napkins, and some dark chocolate. We grabbed a blanket and our current books, and off we went to the banks of the Huron River:  

 (There's a street and some street parking behind us, but never mind that part. River! People fishing! Nature!)

The weather was absolutely perfect. Not too warm, a nice breeze, no bugs. We spread our blanket, enjoyed our sandwiches, and watched the ducks. There were a lot of ducks. Some were in the river, including three white ones that performed some formation gliding...and as time went on, we realized they did formation everything. Seriously, these three did not go anywhere individually:

And yes, there were quite a few ducks in the river. Most, however, were next to us. Like, right next to us:

 Do you see allllll of those ducks?! Look closer. Look further, by the pine tree. (Also, see that white goose? I named him Gordon. He looked very much like a Gordon up close.)

E and I decided that it wouldn't be so bad, coming back as ducks. Lots of swimming, soft feathers, the ability to fly...and you get to quack! One particularly chatty duck was very entertaining: "QUACK quack quack! QUACK QUACK QUACK!" You could totally tell that one was the loud relative at all the family parties. It was great to duck-watch, eat chocolate, and enjoy our books and each others' company in nature. Totally relaxing and blissful. We're hoping to do it lots more before winter!

So. Pickle-making. Having already dipped my toe in the fermented-foods pool, having six lovely blue mason pint canning jars that beg to be filled with something special, and having tasted some absolutely fantastic homemade pickles at Fest (Yes, in the woods. What?!), I was super excited when I found this recipe for Seven-Day Fermented Pickles. Currently, there are four quart-sized mason jars (for the fermenting process) in the dishwasher, and 5 pounds of (MI grown, local-business purchased) pickle cucumbers on the counter, waiting for their ice water bath. They'll soak for 30 minutes, then I'll slice them into 1/2-inch slices, pack them into the mason jars, and cover them with boiling water. Tomorrow night, I'll drain them, then cover them with boiling salted water. On Day 3, they'll be drained and covered with boiling water with dissolved alum. Day 4, drained and covered with boiling apple cider vinegar, and spiced. They'll brine for 3 days, fermenting all the while, and then...well, just read the recipe. LOL! I am so stinking excited to make these things! And I hope E likes them...she's more of a dill/sour pickle person, I think, so we'll have to do those next. 

Ok, the dishwasher's done...time to soak the cukes...wish me luck!