My beloved DIL1's family concocted a reasonable facsimile of the French dressing they all loved from the defunct Red Lion Supper Club out in Shawano someplace, she brought some when they came for supper last winter, and it was a huge hit. She shared the recipe and now that we've been having salads more often since MW brought Durwood a huge carton of blue cheese, I had to make more. It's criminally easy to make. I even entered the recipe into WW and calculated how many Tablespoons are in a pint so that I know how much to charge myself. I don't like to drown my salad so a single Tablespoon is more than enough for me. BTW, in case you're wondering, it's 3 Freestyle points.
I whipped up some chicken salad from a recipe off the WW site today too because I wanted chicken salad. Had some on a small tortilla for lunch. It was yummy. Guess I'm on a chicken jag.
This morning Durwood found patio umbrellas for 20% off in the Fleet Farm ad and insisted that I go and get one for my Mother's Day gift from him even though I protested that the faded and only a little ripped one we had would make it another year. He was unswayed by my arguments on the side of frugality and since I needed another straw bale to use as mulch around the garden bale I went and bought it. A red one. (surprised? I didn't think so)
The only bale of straw they had left was one that was compressed and wrapped up like Harry Houdini before one of his escape tricks. There were five of those flat bands around the bale, then it was wrapped in plastic, and two more bands went around on the outside. I carried it into the garden before removing any of the wrapping because I feared that once I started cutting the bands it would fong out when the pressure was released. It didn't. *sigh* I ended up having to peel and pry each flake of straw apart and then crumble it apart. I ended up with a lot of chopped straw in my shoes. Straw is sharp and poke-y, did you know that?
Once that was done I finally made it downstairs to sew which was what I'd planned to do today all along. I discovered that in my haste the other day I'd sewn the neck binding on the wrong side first which meant that I either had to use the seam ripper and redo it or turn it to the outside and sew it down pretending I'd meant to do that. I didn't rip and I finished the Epistolary Dress No. 1. Epistolary because it looks like someone's written a letter or an essay on it but although it looks like I should be able to read it, it's no language I recognize. Very tiresome because my eyes are constantly searching for an arrangement of letters that I can read but I like it. Besides I'm not the one who'll be looking at it when I wear it. Then it'll be someone else's problem.
When I was clearing up the pile of stuff that made it to the bottom of the stairs and no further last week (or was that the week before?) I ran across my first attempt at Pants No. 1 that turned out to be too tight but now that I've lost 30# they fit, so I threaded in elastic and narrow hemmed the legs and, ta-da!, another pair of pants for summer.
May 6--Carlos Nebel, Family from Tierra Adentro. It was hot and dusty in the plaza. No trees crowded the space to make cool shade. Around the sides of the loose square, vendors' stalls offered everything from jewelry and pottery to vegetables and used clothing. Diane was drawn to a stall at the foot of the church steps. The crooked table groaned under rows of books, dusty volumes in Spanish, English, and what looked like Chinese or Japanese. She wondered how they had gotten to this tiny village in the middle of Mexico.
One thing that isn't easy for me to make lately is words that string together in some sort of sense. Maybe if I didn't wear myself out during the day... Tomorrow I have to measure the distance between garden stakes so I can get some 2 x 4s cut and wired in place. One step at a time. I've got 10 more bale conditioning days until time to plant so I don't have to rush. I took a walk after supper and stopped when I was just about home to take a picture of the setting sun when I saw a big bird land on a branch nearly overhead. It was a Sharp-shinned hawk that sat there while I inched forward to take it's picture without quite so many branches in the way. Cool.--Barbara
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