rainy days and fallen limbs

I haven't done any yoga since last Wednesday at class though I could still be doing my core strengtheners and hip openers. My upper arm/shoulder was really aching and I even opted not to do some of the asanas during class that would put pressure on it. So, I thought, give it a week to heal except, of course, I'm out in the yard doing shit every day but at least I'm trying to use my left arm for the work, favoring my right. So the day of rain Sunday was good, forced me to take a day off and Monday too being too wet to do anything outside and because it's a sunny day, horribly humid. I suppose I could get the azaleas fertilized for the last time this year which just involves tossing handfuls of the stuff on the ground around the plants, which ideally I would follow with a layer of mulch but that's more labor intensive and since it's supposed to rain more this week, I'll wait. So two days of being lazy. I always feel like a slug when the day ends and I haven't accomplished a thing. I have to keep reminding myself that resting is also an accomplishment. Well, I've been to the library today so I have two books to help me accomplish resting.

Sunday night, closing up the house about 8:30 I looked out the back door to see a huge dead limb had fallen off the tallow tree in the little backyard. Hard to believe we neither heard it break nor thud to the ground. Gonna be a major effort to get that cut up and moved to the burn pile. I swear, some days it feels like all we do is pick up and cut up fallen branches off the pecans, oaks, and now the tallow.

Also Sunday, since I was housebound and had finished the book I'd been reading I figured it was a good day to make these,

an idea I got from Boud of Field and Fen and her creative cooking that she posts about. I don't know what to call them, if they were smaller, I'd call them empanadas. I had been saving the pie crust that gets trimmed off when I make pies and had five balls of dough in the freezer and also some shredded roast from a previous meal. I chopped up some onions, garlic, celery, carrots, broccoli, boiled some small potatoes til they were still a little firm and then cubed them, skinned and cut up the five or six very ripe little tomatoes I got at the market last Saturday, sautéed the vegetables, added the potatoes and tomatoes and let it cook a little longer and then spooned some of the mixture on the round of pie dough I had rolled out, sprinkled on some parmesan cheese, folded it over, crimped the edges, and baked for about 20 minutes. Rolling out the pie dough proved to be a challenge though as I don't have a rolling pin but a tall smooth sided glass did the trick.

You might remember I did a spate of cooking with butternut squash a while back and the seeds went into the compost pile. This is what my compost pile looks like now

and it's producing two nice sized butternut squashes.

----------

Well, it rained most the day yesterday, Monday, off and on, but not heavily until last evening. It had stopped by late afternoon though still overcast and so Pam and I took off for El Campo for yoga class. As we were sitting in the car waiting for Abby to arrive Pam got a text from a friend telling her some bad weather was on the way. We looked up to the north and it was black and roiling and moving toward us so we checked the weather and radar and heavy rain was bearing down on us and would hit about the time we would be leaving for home. Neither of us wanted to drive back on the highway in that so we decided to skip class just as Mauri drove up. I jumped out to explain why we were leaving and to please tell Abby and she had just been looking at the radar map as well. Better leave now if you want to miss it, it's coming fast she says. So we did. It had just started to rain when we got home and then the heavy stuff hit and another, smaller, branch fell out of the tallow.

And we're supposed to get even more rain this week.