At Least The Sun Shone

Well, it wasn't warm today, not up to 70 degrees anyway, but at least the sun shone so it got up to around 50 degrees, which isn't too bad for nearly the middle of November, I guess, but it sure was nice having those 70 degree days last weekend.  I stopped for gas on my way home from Zambaldi this morning and the wind was sharp enough that I had to zip up my jacket.

When I looked out the kitchen window this morning I was surprised to see that there was a little tuft of green leaves and a cluster of flowers on the honeysuckle.  Five days of 70 degrees and the honeysuckle woke up.  All the rest of the vine is bare of leaves, there's just that little bit of green and the cheerful clump of orange.

Today's recipe was Chicken Cacciatore. It's made with chicken thighs which is what sent me back to the grocery yesterday. I haven't made that in a long time and it sure made the house smell good.  I cooked up a batch of brown rice too so I could scoop a bit of it into each Tupperware before slapping on the lids, labeling them, and placing them in the freezer.  I confess that I had a little nibble while I was portioning out the chicken.  Yum!

Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal came to the feeder together this morning.  I haven't seem both of them in a long time and they tolerated the House Finches being there at the same time too.  Very unusual.

I finished the cast toe cover sock thingy this afternoon.  I like the self-striping yarn and the colors are cheerful.  I searched around for a different pattern because I want to try using thicker yarn for the next one.  Looking for that took a good long time.

 

 

11 November--Barbara Malcolm, The Seaview. 

There were a lot of local fishermen who pulled their boats up onto the sand on the northern arm of the beach near the cluster of little houses where they lived with their families.  Most of those houses were so small that the owners had built canopies out of scrap wood and grew vines over them for shade.  Under the canopies were tables and chairs for family meals and quite a few of the houses had their stoves installed on the porch.  I supposed that having the stove indoors made it too hot in there to cool off in the evening to sleep.

I liked walking down that far and seeing the small gardens planted with a few yams and squash, every garden seemed to have at least three chickens clucking and pecking for bugs, earning their keep by providing eggs and eating pests from the vegetables.

At the very end lived Old Reynaldo, the man who staked his goats on their black nylon tethers along the road every day.  He had built a rough corral for his herd behind his house with an ingenious watering trough that reminded me of some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption.  It was made of tin cooking oil cans, a pair of rusty auto tire rims, and some steel pipes that been cut in half to make troughs.  It was connected to the cistern perched on top of Reynaldo’s cement block house so that told me how important his goats were to him, that he would share his precious water with them.

Billy the fisherman that I sometimes shared a beer with lived down there too with his wife and their six children.  I enjoyed seeing them go off to school in the mornings.  The girls wore pressed white blouses and navy and green-plaid pleated skirts, the boys wore navy pants or shorts and khaki shirts, all of them looking like they had been scrubbed and polished to within an inch of their lives.  Each of them carried a backpack heavy with books.  The littlest girl, with her hair in braids tied with plaid ribbons to match her skirt, held the hand of the eldest boy and chattered to him all the way up the hill to where the school bus waited in front of the recycling plant.

Today's toss was a box of Christmas ornaments.  I know that Aunt B and cda are both hoping for a photo but there's really nothing to see unless I unpack half of the box.  All that's on the top layer is separators with empty tissue paper in it and a few plastic ornaments.  I'm not sure what's underneath but I know that I haven't missed any ornaments so I'm going to just let it go and be done with it.  Sorry, ladies.

Writing was a little easier today but my laptop decided to update in the middle of my writing which made it hard to keep going.  So I took a break, did some dishes, and came back to it when the update was finished.  I'm a few thousand words off the pace to finish 50,000 words in 30 days but I don't really care.  I'm just glad that I am able to eke out a few hundred words or a thousand words a day.  I've been cheating and starting with a "diary" entry, a recounting of the day and the way I'm feeling before plunging into the story.  It helps.  I'm just happy to be getting any words down.

--Barbara