Still Raining

I can almost hear the parched ground slurping it up.  As much as I don't like having 2 rainy weekend days, it's been so catastrophically dry here I'm okay with it.  How dry has it been?  It's been so dry that yesterday we had to make a gallon of brine to pour over the cabbage shredded for sauerkraut because the salted cabbage was hardly making any at all on its own.  Thanks so much to DD & DIL1 who donated a couple hours of their afternoon to helping.  Thanks also to Porter who kept Durwood on his toes making sure she didn't eat my slipper or anything else.  "Treats!" is an excellent behavior modification tool.  Hey, whatever works.

Today's Photo a Day theme is "makes you laugh" and I was thinking last night that very little makes me laugh lately.  I took a snap of Durwood reading today's paper because he can usually make me laugh even if it's because he's being a goofball.  Then I remembered him mugging for the camera at Little Bighorn, me scolding him, and then both of us laughing.  That's when I clicked the shutter.  So just know that I'm behind that lens laughing too.  Is this what happens when you get old?  Do you forget how to laugh?  Do you get so serious about stuff that you lose the knack?  Eek.

One thing the rain's doing is stripping the leaves off my maple tree in jig time.  Seems like last weekend the tree had a full head of leaves and today it's reduced to having a thinning fringe around the lowest branches, kind of a monk's tonsure look.

You should have seen the wasteland the rainy chilly morning made of the Farmer's Market yesterday.  There had to be no more than 25 or 30 of the usual 100 vendors there.  I got Durwood's weekly tomatoes from his usual stall and then found the last 10, and only non-sprayed, cabbages there.  (Dad discovered that sprayed cabbages just rot, they don't ferment so they're not sauerkraut cabbages)  I'd planned to get crab rangoons and bring home a meatball skewer for Durwood but none of the food booths (except for the booyah guy) were there, so I bought a loaf of apple cinnamon bread from Baker Bill to toast when I got home.  (tsk, not all of it, just a couple slices)

There've been a slew of IHOP commercials on lately touting their "special flavor" pancakes, so many that I fell asleep last night planning to make Durwood make pancakes and bacon for breakfast.  I remembered to tell him when I got up, then I discovered that our Bisquick's "death date" was July 2009.  That wasn't going to work, so for the first time ever I made homemade pancake batter.  I found a recipe I liked in Joy of Cooking, one that I could cut in half, and stirred it up.  It was only after I got it made that Durwood wondered how old the baking powder is... and the date on that is this past February, so we decided that it'd be okay.  And it was.  Whew.  I could see how out of practice both of us are making breakfast that isn't Cheerios or tomato slices on toast because he almost burned the bacon and I scorched the first 3 pancakes.  But we ate it all anyway and it was delicious.  Then I stirred up a small batch of ricotta dip I found in a WW cookbook because I'm going to Z-Dawg's Knit Studio this afternoon to knit with her and Skully and, hopefully, Cookie if her job's intrusion into the weekend will allow her to, and Z-Dawg asked us to bring something.  I've got a bag of pretzels but thought we needed dip.  I had the ricotta cheese and was thrilled to find a dip recipe.  It's kind of reminiscent of shrimp sauce, you know, ketchup with horseradish with a bit of minced onion flakes, garlic powder, S & P only with the ricotta to make it dip-y.  Should be good to scoop up with pretzel twists.  I'm on a pretzel jag; have been for a few months now.  I find that the Aldi house brand is better than any others, even Rold Gold which used to be my gold-standard of grocery store pretzels.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh, hey, it's lightening up a bit outside.  Maybe the clouds are thinning.  That'd be good.  I don't think it's supposed to rain all next week, it better not, we're going down to Racine to meet the Hubbards, old traveling buddies, for a couple nights.  Should be a good time.

October 14--Edouard Manet, Peonies.  The warm winds of early summer blew in threatening to strip the petals off the bouquet of peonies on the table.  Maya loved the blowzy pink flowers especially the dark magenta ones with their ragged and ruffled petals.  She didn't like the big black ants that seemed to grow in the blossoms.  She swept one up and put it out on the planter next to the French doors and then she closed and latched them for the night.  By then it was already too late.

I was determined to go to sleep before 11 o'clock last night and I barely made it.  I know I do better when I turn out the light before 10:30 but I have the devil of a time dragging my body into bed before 10:30.  I need a mother to chase me, kicking and screaming all the way, to bed at a decent bedtime.  More evidence that a keeper's what I need.
--Barbara Sue

P.S. I decided to try breaking this stream-of-consciousness ramble up into paragraphs.  Whaddaya think?