dinner disaster, done all I can do, drawing dissatisfaction

Back to more pleasant topics, sort of. I fixed dinner Friday night, my night. I bought a little eggplant Tuesday and decided on the spot to make eggplant parmesan so Friday when I got out my recipe I had to go back and get another one and the mozzarella plus the tomato sauce since I lost all my homemade sauce when we lost power for three days during hurricane Beryl. The recipe I have is for baking the eggplant beforehand in stead of frying it and calls for chunky tomato sauce. Anyway, it’s a process and I started early. There’s no such thing as commercially available ‘chunky’ tomato sauce so I also bought a can of diced tomatoes to add in which turned out to be a big mistake because the end result at dinner was terrible. I should have use either stewed tomatoes or just plain spaghetti sauce. Anyway, I not only threw out the leftovers but also the recipe. I need a new recipe for eggplant parmesan.

Last Wednesday I got out the big boy chainsaw and worked on the pecan tree by the back of the barn cutting up the fallen big stuff and what I could reach that wasn’t weight bearing and made this neat stack of cut logs.

Then Saturday I went to work on the tree close to the house. There wasn’t nearly as much to deal with since none of the big stuff has fallen, still dangling, and made this not so neat pile. If I could carry it, I didn’t cut it up into smaller stackable pieces. 

Now I need to get someone who does tree work to get those big hanging limbs on both trees down, cut up, and hauled away.

Yesterday I mowed the little backyard and around the tree fingers holding up the limbs on the tree closest to the house, cut to the ground all the hackberry, and pecan trees that had sprouted up this summer in amongst other shrubbery some of which I swear I cut last spring and poisoned the stumps. I still come in hot and sweaty even though it’s not getting as hot. Now that I’ve done all I can do on the trees I can turn my attention to the overgrown flower beds.

Speaking of overgrown, this is the half acre next to me that belongs to the Wicked Bitch of the West. I think this lot has only been mowed twice this whole year. It’s easily thigh high.

A week or so ago the wind knocked the bird feeder off the platform which has happened several times but this time the bird feeder broke. I went to the feed store for a new one and the cheapest ones they had were $44 and not that attractive. So I went to Tractor Supply and got one for $15. 

I put four little nails around the perimeter into the platform to keep it from falling off. I like this one but the four slots that feed the seed into the little circular tray aren’t high enough to let the spanish peanuts and the bigger sunflower seeds easily pass through so I’m going to take my dremel tool and grind the openings a little larger.

I finished the butterfly and penciled in the scrappy leaves in the background. My original thought was to do the leaves in watercolor but the paper in my sketchbook is not very heavy so I decided watercolor wasn’t a good idea and went back to colored pencil but after I got one and a half leaves done, I very much didn’t like it and erased as much as I could so that now it’s faint which I like better but still not best pleased. Now I’m trying to decide how to proceed, I could probably get more of the colored pencil off if I continued to use the erasure. I’m going to sit with it a couple of days. I’ll have to finish the other half of the one leaf and maybe pick a third and then darken the pencil lines and maybe I’ll call it done.

the photo I’m working from

the finished butterfly

where it stands now