day trip, food prep, and a dismal failure

It's been a busy few days. Saturday I tagged along with my sister and niece for another trip to Galveston. You might remember we had just gone when our brother was here and the car broke down on the way back. This time the car performed perfectly. I wouldn't ordinarily have gone again so soon but there were several purchases I wanted to make. And of course, getting to spend a day with my niece who is visiting.

pillow graffiti

street graffiti

my sister and my niece

And then on Sunday I finally put up the dozen or so ears of corn that had been in the refrigerator for several days. The quality not that great (don't know about the taste yet). I expected some of the kernels to be a little dimpled since I had procrastinated so long but half the ears had more or less of completely dried up kernels I guess because the farmers haven't been able to get into their fields because of all the rain.

I ended up with five vacuum sealed bags of 1 1/4 cups of cut corn and one with 3/4 cup.

Then I decided to deal with the peaches so I skinned the half that were perfectly ripe and sliced them up for freezing but decided to make a peach cobbler instead. I've used the recipe before and didn't like it all that much as it only called for 2 cups of sliced peaches so I doubled that and it came out great!

Then Monday the county came out with their scooper bucket and dump truck to 'fix' the ditches and drainage problem on our street. Which they did not!

You might remember someone from precinct 2 came out and pulled into our driveway a week or so ago to inform us that they would be sending a crew out to work on the ditches and they would scoop out two places in our ditch that he thought were high spots to improve the drainage. My ditch has never needed improvement as it has always drained perfectly well but whatev. It's not my end of the street that doesn't drain, it's the other end because culverts are clogged or collapsed and because in the 15 years I've been here the county has never regraded the slope of the ditches from the high end to the low end nor cleared the culverts. I'm at the low end. So the crew showed up and all they did was scoop out dirt from the ditch at each end of every culvert on the street creating pools for the water to collect and stand because the ground level is now deeper than the rest of the ditch. And in addition at my house, the two 'high' spots were completely ignored. 

water does not flow uphill

They did not ream out and/or replace culverts, they not did regrade the slope of the ditches, they just created pools for standing water. I was pissed. I called the county commissioner's office and read them the riot act and then I sent a long detailed email to the commissioner for my precinct with pictures about how inept they were. Other neighbors are pissed as well, especially those who still have water standing in their ditches that don't drain.

And speaking of things that don't drain, my kitchen sink is draining very slow again so I'll be working on that today.

Some good news. Pam finally sold her old house yesterday after the closing got pushed back three times because the buyer's bank's employees are incompetent.