And Finally

It took some fortitude to motivate me to cook that last recipe today. In fact I didn't get around to it until after lunch which is out of character for me. Usually I'm not out of my pjs before I've got the stove on and the recipe in the clip. Today I just wasn't in the mood but I could see the finish line so I persevered. I made Salisbury Steak and portioned it out with brown rice and it's down in the freezer with its compatriots ready to be carried upstairs one of each at a time to feed me for the next six or seven weeks.

We saw this Cardinal at the feeder yesterday and wasn't sure what it was because of the blotchy color of its feathers. I can't decide if it's a mutant or has some sort of feather condition but it's definitely a Cardinal. It likes safflower seeds like all the others.

Flash, the baby bunny spent the afternoon racing back and forth across the patio. It was a
good thing that it stayed mostly under cover because I saw a Red-tailed Hawk in one of the trees in the lot behind the house. Hawks eat bunnies.

I don't think that I drew today's figure from the 3-D book exactly right. I think it's too narrow and there's supposed to be another part on the left side that I just couldn't wrap my head around. I did a lot of erasing. A. Lot. Ah well.

I had better luck with the next page in 10-Steps: Nature. It's violets and the hardest part was figuring out which purple colored pencil and which greens were the best ones to make it look right. I know that there's no right or wrong but I liked the colors in the book and hoped to replicate them, especially the greens. I'll have to check out the greens in my other colored pencil sets next time.

Once the Salisbury Steaks were in the freezer I cast on another sock. Turned out that the yarn I brought up last night I'd already made a sock out of so I went back down and found this Villasol yarn I bought in Livingston, MT last time I was out there with Lala. Might as well knit up my souvenir yarn.

It was a nice day today, sunny and mild, so I could open the patio door to let the frying-beef-patties smoke out instead of setting off the smoke alarm which I usually do but today I remembered to put on the exhaust fan and the ceiling fan and had the door open so the alarm stayed silent. Whew. I also made the executive decision to trash my 12- and 10-inch Teflon frying pans. The coating looks like it's about ready to give up the ghost and I don't want tiny fragments of the stuff in my food, plus they're getting hard to clean. I'll splurge on a couple of the copper coated ones at Meijer.

--Barbara