coincidence? and beautiful things

Wednesday night during one of my several dreams, I had to solve a word game where every other word in a phrase was missing and I had to fill in the missing words and the phrase was a lyric from a Rolling Stones song…”you can’t always get what you want”. Thursday morning when I got in the car to leave for SHARE and started the engine, that song came out of the radio starting with that exact phrase. Whoa! And the really interesting thing is that that song and the rest of the lyric…”but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need”…has always been one of my guiding mantras or life themes. 

Other song lyrics had a big impact too…”sometimes we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key” from Already Gone by the Eagles; “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make” from The End by the Beatles.

Others just from general wisdom like ‘what goes around comes around’, or from the Navaho story of Spider Woman about the importance of balance in your life and the danger of perfectionism; or from a sign in my friend Gene’s studio which said simply ‘PERSEVERE’.

But the one I probably focused on the most especially during trying times, days or years of struggle, was straight from my own head…’this is only temporary’, a distillation I suppose of ‘the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes’.

Three other things. I made cheese enchiladas with meat sauce for dinner last night. Finally getting the hang of it. This time and the previous attempt came out really good.

My night blooming cereus, queen of the night, bloomed last night for the fourth time this year. Only half as many flowers as the previous three blooms but this time I remembered and went out after 10 pm with my flashlight and breathed in the sweet scent on the air.

Sitting here this morning reading blogs, hearing Cat thumping around the door to the little bathroom, figured she had brought in an anole. Finally got up to rescue the little creature. She was in the bathroom peering between the door and the wall. I looked, and her persistence over at the old turtle pond paid off. Not an anole but a leopard frog, still alive. 

(picture off the internet)

Dammit Cat. Don’t know if she chased it into the house or carried it in through the open back door. I picked it up and it croaked, examined it for damage, didn’t find any, carried it back to the old turtle pond, put it on the edge and it leapt back into the water.

 

musing, meals, streaming, and spring

Another picture of my dwarf redbud tree in full bloom.

For practically my whole life I have been taking art lessons, either in school or out, or making, from craft kits as a kid to sewing as a teen to exploring different mediums in college to finally as an adult building my own art studio making etched and carved glass for architectural installations and small cast glass sculpture for over 40 years. We retired from the etched glass at the end of 2017 after the house flooded and we spent the next two years dealing with FEMA and the Texas Land Office for funds and getting that half of the house repaired. Since then I have made some cast glass sculpture and even took two watercolor classes which I enjoyed but I have also had extended periods of complete lack of motivation or desire to create. I’m in one of those times now, going on a year and a half this time; I don’t draw, I don’t watercolor, I don’t make models for casting. The last piece I made was the Coral Reef box that I completed September 2022. I keep thinking I still have some work in me that I want to do but I’m not motivated to go over to the studio or getting out my watercolors. Am I done? Marc mentioned the other day that he was going to close the business bank account and put that minimum $5,000 required to not have a monthly service fee to better use, like earning interest, and I’m fine with that. Last year there was no water in the studio due to a busted pipe from our new very cold arctic vortexes that have been hitting us the last three winters and the horridly dry and hot summer and now the pipe is cracked again. So, I don’t know. I guess we’ll see. Right now I’m happy enough to watch the birds, read, write, work out in the yard, volunteer, go to yoga and spending a couple of hours a day in the studio means not having the time to do other stuff.

We finally fixed and ate all three of our HelloFresh meals and they were without exception very good. We tried the soy glazed steak with zucchini stir-fry and jasmine rice with scallion ginger oil (10 ingredients), penne with spinach and grape tomatoes, garlic butter breadcrumbs and parmesan (9 ingredients), and apricot, almond, and chickpea tagine with zucchini, basmati rice and chermoula (14 ingredients). The pasta dish was very similar to one I make only a little fancier. I’ve never eaten chickpeas that weren’t in the form of hummus or falafel, which I really like, and I’m not that impressed. The tagine was very good but I’m not likely to add canned chickpeas to my staples in the kitchen.

I mentioned we had watched two episodes of Mr. and Mrs. Smith on Prime and that it was nothing like the movie and at that point we weren’t sure if we were going to continue watching it but we did. It’s one season of eight episodes and it’s actually pretty good. It’s not just about two people working for an unnamed powerful secret spy organization given missions, it’s also about two complete strangers paired together as partners with their cover being a married couple and their developing relationship. Anyway, the last episode was the only one that mirrored the movie and it ends in a cliff hanger intentionally so as to let the viewer decide how it ended. It also sets up for a possible second season but there is no indication at this time that there will be one.

I was able to get out in the yard yesterday, a cool but pretty blue sky day and the wind had mostly died down. I pulled up one of the two remaining cabbages and clipped all the little broccoli sprouts that come out after you harvest the main head and then pulled all the broccoli plants up and continued turning and weeding the dirt in preparation for planting the spring garden. Not sure what I’m going to plant besides tomatoes. The mustard greens are bolting so I need to pull those up. I never thinned my carrots and I have no idea how they are growing since I haven’t felt around the tops. I’m thinking they probably aren’t even as big around as my little finger.

Minnie and Cat enjoying the pretty weather outside today, cat in the shade on the right, dog in the sun on the left.

Still nothing much happening in the yard here but over at Pam’s house the white crinum lily started putting up a bloom stalk a week or so after the freeze here

and the fig tree is putting out new growth.

The cuttings I took when I pruned back the yellow angel trumpet to cover it for the deep freeze have started putting out roots 

as have the fire spike but the small branch that broke off the pink angel trumpet when I moved it into the garage is still stubbornly refusing to root.

A small cluster of pink 10 petal anemone.

 

seasonal stuff and social anxiety

It's October so that means the confederate roses are blooming. Confederate rose is a not a rose but a mallow, part of the hibiscus family or, I guess, hibiscus is part of the mallow family.

There are two times a year, spring and fall, when two things happen. The first thing is that I have to wear a cap in the morning sitting at my desktop because I face east and the sun is rising later and has moved so that it shines in my face when it breaks through the leaves of the photinia. The second thing is the chair in the bedroom. You know, the chair where clothes go that have been worn enough not to be folded and put away and too clean to go in the wash. These two times every year the chair sports not one season's garments but two, warm weather and cool weather. Wake up, check the weather app, select the appropriate clothing off the chair for the day, get dressed. Tomorrow it may be the other set of clothes. My yoga clothes also live on the chair Monday through Thursday. I usually wear the same clothes for a week unless they get really dirty or smelly. I don't go anywhere except the grocery store, an occasional errand, and SHARE (I do wear fresh clothes to SHARE) so I see no need to put on fresh clean clothes every day and it cuts down on the laundry.

Monday was a good day. I got rid of a lot of the give away stuff. Rocky took all the fishing gear, the two footlockers, and a National Geographic telescope that was given to my grandson at some point and everyone thought it was a great idea to leave it at Granny's house out in the country. All well and good but we could never figure out how to make it work. Rocky knows a guy into that stuff so he took it to give to him. The other stuff was the box of games and puzzles, the box of yarn and crochet hooks, and the box of memories from the kids growing up. I took those over to where my son in law works for him to take home to Robin and Sarah. After Sarah goes through the box of memories she can take it to her brother for him to sort through.

It was pretty breezy Tuesday and the pecans are really starting to fall. Up until then, for the past three weeks or so, I've been picking up a handful or pocketful or two a day. Tuesday I picked up two gallons worth and I could hear them falling now and then when I was out there,

filled this bucket twice

was still a little breezy Wednesday, overcast and humid, 50% to 91% chance of rain starting today and for the next seven days. Walking the yard at midday picking up pecans and fallen trees branches I was hot and sweaty enough to change my mind about going over to the shop and doing more clearing out and reorganizing. That's going to change on Sunday when a front comes through. Instead of dropping 50 degrees from high to low as previously predicted, it's only going to drop 40 degrees.

I've stopped buying lunch meat because we are sick and tired of all the choices and too processed for our preference anyway but just so convenient so we've been making do with leftovers and tuna and the like, grilled cheese. I decided I wanted to make tostadas from the leftover refried beans in the fridge so I looked for already crisp tostada shells (not really a shell, just crisp corn tortillas) and I could buy them if I wanted 32! So I got a small package of corn tortillas (10) and I'm going to crisp them up myself. So that was a success and they were really good.

Tonight, Friday, is a little social gathering and dinner at the home of one of the couples that volunteer at SHARE. I have RSVPed my attendance but I'd be lying if I said I was really looking forward to it because I'm basically anti-social. I told Marc he did not have to go since he doesn't know any of the people besides our two neighbors that volunteer so he's staying home. I wouldn't want to go either if the situation was reversed. I get along with everyone and we joke and kid around but we're there to do a job so it's easy. Plus, you know, I've had weeks and months to get comfortable with everyone. But a purely social situation is different. I'm very different from the rest in many ways, I don't do religion, not conservative and in fact am an unapologetic liberal, I smoke pot and drink, I'm fluent in profanity, I'm an old hippie fer cryin' out loud. Anyway, my anxiety surfaced in my dream last night. I dreamed that I was having this party and I had waited til the last minute to clean house or prepare food and get in drinks so I was frantically running around making beds and picking up personal belongings, searching every closet for the dress I wanted to wear and couldn't find it and people were starting to arrive and somehow there was some drinks and some sort of hors 'doeuvres made out of graham crackers while I was still trying to find the dress but not the promised dinner. Then the whole group moved out to the park where some sort of competitions were planned and one of the women was a little pissed about either not winning or not being chosen, something. Anyway, I woke up.

cooking, watering, shopping

Because I only have to provide dinner twice a week it allows me to 'cook' as opposed to just put a meal on the table so I'm always trolling for new recipes. I don't do something new every time but I've tried several new recipes lately though I haven't always taken pictures. I've made garlic butter baked cod with a cherry tomato sauce (really good), improvised my own gumbo with instant roux powder, okra, onions, celery, catfish and shrimp, and rice (better than I thought it would be), and most recently blistered broccoli pasta with walnuts, parmesan, and mint (also really good).

Thursday I printed out a recipe for french onion galette but I have to find gruyere cheese which is not to be found in this little town nor any of the acceptable substitutions two of which I've never heard of so I guess I'll be making a trip into Shopping Mecca to the giant grocery store there which I need to do anyway because the grocery store here stopped carrying the organic mayonnaise and the orecchiette pasta that I like so much.

High 90s was bad enough. Now that we've hit day after day of triple digits with no relief in sight for the foreseeable future, shit is even worse. My toad lilies are dying no matter how much water I give them every day, same with the white butterfly ginger. Even the drought tolerant mistflower is wilty. The rock rose, members of the mallow/hibiscus family, don't seem to mind, getting along with the watering I do in that flower bed which is less than some of the others. The picture is off the internet because I can't seem to remember to take a picture of mine in the morning when they're open.

I've started walking the dog in the early mornings while the street is still mostly in shade. Finally got to visit my friends at the other end of the block. Leonard was sitting on his porch yesterday so I stopped to chat and Judy heard my voice and came out so that was nice. Haven't seen them, or anybody on the street, for weeks.

Made a run to the Evil Empire Friday to get a new hose for the little backyard and a new sprayer nozzle to replace the one that leaks more water than it sprays out. Also got a nicer soap dish to replace the crappy plastic one in the bathroom and a new pair of cheap sandals of which they had maybe half a dozen left but miracle of miracles, one pair in my size. And then to the new hardware store/lumber yard in town for 3 repair kits for the hose in front that I've already repaired twice. You'd think I'd have just replaced that one but the hose in the little backyard is ancient, stiff, cracked, and not worth the trouble to repair.

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I'd intended to publish this yesterday, yesterday being Friday, but instead of uploading the pictures I decided to repair the hose so I hauled it inside to work on it. Found the slit that I thought the geyser was shooting out from, cut the hose and put it back together with the repair kit, then found another slit about 6” away and another slit about 6” away in the other direction and then examined the hose and found not just the two bulging spots but two more that would soon be bulging and declared the hose a piece of shit and undid the repair I had just done and then removed the two repair/splice pieces already on the hose and in the process gouged a bit of flesh off one of my fingers that bled profusely. So back to Alamo H/L to return the three repair/splice things I had bought earlier and bought another new hose. After that I had to fix dinner which was no great shakes either.

And today, Saturday, I finally girded my loins for a trip to Shopping Mecca down the highway in Rosenberg but first stopped at the little market on the way for some okra, yellow squash and another little miracle, peaches. The owner of the market scoured the state and found one orchard that still had some but these are absolutely the last Texas peaches of the season. Then on to SM to the grocery store there to get the gruyere cheese and a few other things including stocking up on the organic mayonnaise and then to J C Penney's to get some shorts which I didn't expect them to have being the end of summer and stores are putting out their winter merchandise and another miracle of miracles they had two pair in my size of the style I like. Then to another grocery store at the other end to stock up on the orecchiette pasta and finally swinging by the Evil Empire to return the 16 gauge extension cord and get the 14 gauge that I should have bought.

Between yesterday and today I am shopped out and hope I don't have to go into another store for the foreseeable future.

 

busy days, EarthLab, spending spree

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were very busy days so I've been missing hereabouts. Thursday, of course, is my volunteer day at SHARE and man were we busy. It was a food delivery day from the food bank in Victoria, we were down several volunteers back in the food area, we had 33 requests for food with 8 or 9 of them being the largest families when usually it's one or two or none, and an equal amount of the next largest families. We gave away a lot of food. Including two huge cartons of watermelons.

Friday I wrote my last post and then was greeted with ants in the pantry for the second time in several days. The pantry is an add on, built against the wall in the kitchen.

The trim on the outside is tight so I have no idea how the ants were getting in there but inside there was about a 1/8 to 1/4 inch gap between the side boards and the wall with other smaller gaps wherever two pieces of wood met. First time I threw out all the food they had infiltrated, crackers mostly, and sprayed orange oil to kill the little bastards but two days later they were back, infiltrated more crackers. So I emptied the entire pantry, cleaned it thoroughly and then set about to caulk up every damn gap and crack in it floor to ceiling.

before and after

Yesterday was the Farmer's Market and this month's EarthLab at Hesed House. I thought the program on hibiscus started at 10 AM as all but one of them has and so I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot and my heart just sank. No one is coming. I was walking up just as Stephanie came out to let me know the program didn't start til 11. So I went to the market to get my honey, tamales for Marc, and another of the blue daze plants while I waited. As it turned out, it was one of the most attended programs with an enthusiastic audience with lots of questions and lasted nearly two hours as opposed to the one hour they usually last. And look what they brought with them!

They let us take home the ones we wanted if we wanted to. Other people selected some first but these are the ones I brought home.

In other news, we've been spending money like drunken sailors. Marc bought a new riding lawn mower yay!

and I bought an air purifier for my bedroom like the one in Marc's, two extra filters, a six pack of rice milk, and three jugs of Palmolive dishwasher soap through Amazon. The last two items I have not been able to get at either of the two stores that sell groceries here for months.

Today, I finally accumulated enough tomatoes for making tomato sauce so after breakfast I did all the prep and they are now in the oven slow roasting. All four of my plants are represented...beefsteak, old german, big boy, and black krim.

Still have some for eating and more coming along on the plants.

food and flowers (of the wild kind)

Tuesday night I fixed my favorite salad for dinner. We had had chicken salad with avocado for lunch and it was an easy dinner to put together after cardio drumming which is still a lot of fun. Anyway, the ingredients are always the same but quantities vary...mixed baby greens, celery, granny smith apple, dried cranberries, mandarin orange segments, pecans, orecchiette pasta. Tonight I'm fixing the Italian sausage with shallots and apples.

Here's two tips for keeping food fresh longer, one I tried and it works...if your avocados are getting/have gotten ripe but you aren't ready to eat them/it yet, immerse it in a glass of water and put it in the refrigerator. It will keep the avocado from going bad. It really does work. I had one in water in the refrigerator for almost two weeks (because I kept forgetting it was in there) and, yes, it was perfect when I finally ate it.

The other I haven't tried but my neighbor says it works...wrap your celery in aluminum foil to keep it fresh longer. I don't use much celery, just cooking with it now and then or in a salad and so it always goes bad before I use it all up. I've wrapped mine in foil. I'll let you know how well it works.

We're having winter this week. Of course we are, I took the plumerias and bird of paradise out of the garage. It's in the 40s and rainy (and yay for that) and a little windy and only supposed to get in the 50s with drops in the 30s the next two nights but as long as it doesn't freeze it'll be OK.

In the meantime, the indian paintbrush has painted the pastures and empty acres reddish orange.

A field on the way to the grocery store.

The fallow 12 acres behind me

is also spotted with little yellow flowers.

The evening primrose is coming into full bloom and the stretch between Wharton and El Campo is a mosaic of pale pink to dark pink. Unfortunately, I can't get a picture of that as I'm hauling ass down the highway.

Some are so pale as to be white like this patch over at the shop.

The fleabane is also in full bloom.

The bluebonnets are at or past peak,

my little clump of blue eyed grass I dug up from the side of the road,

and the baby blue eyes are looking good.

 

another day's effort, donations, and deflated baby

Cold front blew in Wednesday, very windy and overcast. That was early yesterday morning. About 11:30 I hauled the garden cart over to the shop yard and started hacking away with the hoe, getting out the roots, and spreading out the dirt and before too long the sky cleared up. I started at the other end this time and finally managed to get the last side of sheet metal out. As I thought, the very end had way more roots in it than the other half, almost solid for the first 6” or so. By the time I'd worked my way in about 3' the cart already had more roots in it than the whole 8' section I did Saturday. By the time I quit not quite through at 1:15, it was mounded up pretty high.

I could have persevered and finished spreading out the last of mound but it was time to go in for lunch which the dog was reminding me of. So, dumped that load on the burn pile and trundled back home. The weather should still be good enough Friday to get out there and finish that, not too hot, not too cold, sunny enough, and start on the last mound of dirt which is 4' x 8' but not as deep as the previous ones so less volume of dirt to move. Still full of roots though. I will be glad to be done with this task.

before

after

I brought home a bag of frozen perch fillets from SHARE last week so that's what I fixed for dinner Tuesday night, brown butter fried perch fillets and zucchini tots which are grated zucchini, minced onion, finely grated cheddar cheese, breadcrumbs, and an egg. Squeeze all the water out of the zucchini, mix all ingredients, form about a tablespoon of mix into an oval and bake, flipping midway. Not too much trouble and really good.

Speaking of SHARE, Monday was our little holiday potluck 'social'. Pleasant enough and I got lunch out of it. And today, of course, was my SHARE day. Some company had a drive and donated a huge amount of personal hygiene items...toothpaste, tooth brushes, razors, soap, shampoo, shave cream, lotion, creams, and I don't know what all, enough to fill four grocery store carts to overflowing, at least, stuff people don't usually think of donating. And socks. Of course I didn't think to take a picture while I was there but it was really an impressive sight.

So, yeah, the christmas season. Outdoor decorations are popping up, or rather inflating and deflating. I don't really care for those inflatables and the reason is people tend to only have them 'on' at night. Puddles of fabric on the lawn during the day don't really exude 'festive'. This is one neighbor so I do see it inflated and illuminated. Another neighbor has an inflatable creche. Poor little baby Jesus, a puddle on the ground, seems almost sacrilegious. 

nothing left but dirt and roots

A reminder of last post's progress on the vines.

Tuesday I did this.

Wednesday I did this.

And this.

Now I'm down to spreading out all the dirt and cutting out the roots as I come to them, way more work than just cutting back the vines. And it's hot again, in the 80s and humid.

The second bonfire was because the guy that mows the shop yard came on Tuesday and cut up a dead tree pulled down by wild grape and virginia creeper vines behind the shop that completely filled the space between the back of the shop and the fence. There's a lot of it still on the ground but at least we can mow there again. 

It was a huge pile, easily more than twice as big as the previous pile and the fire only burned the middle. Had a hard time getting it started too so I still need to torch the rest.

Thursday was SHARE and it was a food delivery day from the food bank in Victoria and fortunately we weren't too busy with clients. They sent four or five boxes of organic bananas that were so green the were almost emerald. My guess is they will go bad before they ripen. We still had one box left which we left out on a table to see if they would ripen during the next week. There'll be somebody there on Monday to check on them. Well, most the volunteers will be there on Monday for our little holiday potluck lunch.

Today I gave away two of my big plumerias and raked up leaves off the driveway and spread them around on the low spots in the yard. Tonight Is one of my nights to cook dinner and so far I have no idea what I'm going to fix (decided on pizza). But speaking of cooking, I promised to post the recipe for the stuffed acorn squash which I made last week and it was really good.

not my picture as I failed to take one

Sausage Stuffed Acorn Squash

Acorn squash:
2 medium acorn squash
2 T olive oil
1/4 tsp salt
pepper to taste

Sausage filling:
1 T olive oil
1 small onion diced
10 oz Italian sausage, spicy or mild crumbled (I used mild but added 1/2 tsp of red pepper flakes)
4 garlic cloves minced
1 T Italian seasoning
4 oz fresh spinach (I used pre-washed baby spinach)
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/2 cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 400˚ F. Cut off the top and bottom of each acorn squash to create a flat base (not too deep in the bottom, my flat spot was about the size of a quarter), cut each squash in half crosswise, scoop out seeds and strings. Place cut side up on a baking sheet, drizzle cut sides with olive oil, rubbing it in, season with salt and pepper, turn cut side down and roast in the oven for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and lower temperature to 350˚.

In a large skillet heat olive oil, add onion and cook on medium high heat about 2 minutes until cooked and a bit charred. Add sausage, garlic, Italian seasoning and cook about 5 minutes more until sausage is cooked through. Add spinach and cook another 5 minutes until wilted, add cranberries and pecans and mix all together. Season with more salt and pepper if desired (I didn't).

Flip roasted squash halves and fill with sausage mixture. Bake stuffed squash an additional 10 – 20 minutes until heated through (I split the difference for 15).