Monday again...and it starts all over...

 Yesterday I went to the garden and dug these red potatoes (about 4 pounds or more)  to make potato salad to go with the fresh catfish the boy caught earlier in the morning.  We cooked some corn on the cob and called it supper.  I cooked the big fillets with lemon and onion, fennel, baby carrots and a little butter, salt and pepper...folded up in foil in a baking dish. It was outstanding...and some of the sweetest, cleanest catfish I have ever eaten. We had a wonderful supper and it was a good day, all in all. The boy did his laundry and hung it outside to dry, went into town and picked up a few things, and got ready to leave early this morning to go to a job up in Peoria. He'll stay up there all week, because it's about 3 hours from here, a little less.

  SO..I'm home, the Irishman's at work, and all is well with the world.

 I've been busy already, trying to get some outside stuff done before it gets too hot, as it's headed for 105 today.  By 9 AM, I had watered the gardens, watered the flowers on the deck and a few others in the yard, picked tomatoes, fed and watered all manner of critters, cleaned the coop, and put new pine shavings in the floor and extra straw on top of that. The pine shavings really help keep the odor controlled, especially in this hot weather. I also fixed up a new nesting box and put it in the corner where I keep finding the pullet eggs. (OK--I've only gotten 2 so far...but STILL!!) lol  Hopefully they'll use it to lay in and not just kick out all the straw and poop there, which is what they've been doing...so I took it out for a couple of weeks. I weeded the garden a little and put the beautiful greens in for the chickens...and they were delighted. They also got a few small tomatoes that had blossom end rot, and they were squabbling over those too.  By now I was sweating profusely, came in the house, turned on the computer and poured a big glass of ice water...and saw that it was already 91 degrees.  I have the drapes all pulled and am trying to keep the house closed up as much as possible...yesterday the darn condenser line froze up again...I hope we can make it through the rest of the summer.  When that happens, I just shut down the AC and pray that it will thaw quickly.  lol

    I have a bushel of peaches to do today.  Saturday I did 20 pints of beautiful salsa.  All the ingredients grown right here at Honeysuckle Hill, except the cilantro that I got at the farmers Market. I cannot grow cilantro to save my life. Here a picture of the finished product:

  So...today I'll do the peaches...make another batch of peach salsa, dry some peaches and make some more jam. There's probably another bushel and a half at least still on the tree out there. I almost have enough okra for a batch of pickled okra too.  And enough tomatoes to can diced...I'm on the fence about whether I';m going to peel them first or not...Any step I can skip, I do. But the skins do sometimes get tough and stringy in the jars of diced tomatoes, and I don't like that either. I never peel them for  salsa, though. Never ever. It's so much more nutritious to leave the skins on...

  I have my tomato canning workshop out at La Vista a week from this next Saturday. That will be fun...I just hope we can still get tomatoes. They were crazy expensive (I thought) at the Farmers Market at 1.50-2.50 per pound. And I'm sure it's going to get worse as the whole coming week is going to be in the triple digits, and folks' gardens are burning like Rome in the time of Nero.

  This Thursday, we have a vegetarian potluck at our discussion group at La Vista--not sure what I'll take, but can't wait, as there's always so much good food that people bring. YUM!!

  Okay...I guess I've stalled about as long as I can.   I have to get going on those peaches...did I tell you I went to Walcrap and got a package of rubber fatigue mats for exercise equipment?? They interlock and were only 19 dollars. I am using only 2 of the 6 that came in the package as a mat in front of my sink...when I am standing there for hours on end peeling and chopping, my legs and feet hurt so bad from the wood floors. I used them doing the 25 pounds of tomatoes for salsa and I think it really helped.  (It was the boy's idea...apparently they had purchased them before for their family room).

  Ok-Ok...I'm going.  Have a great day, stay cool and drink lots of water.

Namaste,

A Quiet Sunday Morning...

 Yesterday, however...not so much.

 LOL  Yesterday was salsa morning.  I chopped and peeled and seeded my way to over 11 pints of beautiful salsa...2 of them extra hot for my boyo. During the bottling process, I added all the extra jalapeno seeds to his 2 jars.  Bahahahahahaha....every year I make a few jars just for him, and always with the seeds in, but he says (every time) "Good, but not THAT hot."  Well, we'll just see, Mister...  lol 

  I'll be putting my recipe on my other blog, DragonWoman'sKitchen...complete with pictures.

   The Irishman was out back, watering the poor garden when I got up this morning. Yes, boys and girls....he got the outside water hooked up yesterday! Quite ingeniously, I might add, by drilling  a hole through the back wall of the house where my kitchen sink is, putting a special pipe that attaches to the kitchen plumbing through the wall (where almost all of the pipe stays located inside the house--no freezing pipes!) and comes right out the outside wall.  His friend came over to help and then they went fishing...lol

   SO, now I have an outside faucet for doing whatever I need water for out there. Yippee!!  It only took 6 years!!!

   I was reading about a lovely curry dish that Kathleen had posted over at Hill Country Mysteries...and shared about eating goat at a Jamaican place in NC that I loved and in the middle of my salsa endeavors yesterday  the phone rang, and it was someone wanting to give me a bunch of goat meat from her freezer because she had just picked up a half side of beef and needed the room!!! She wondered if I might like it, and I said Hell yes!  So now, I have probably 45 or 50 pounds of ribs and chops in my freezer. Talk about answers from the Universe...after reading and posting on her blog, I sat around thinking about where I might be able to find some goat around these parts....lol  Ask, and it will be given. I like that. 

  I got home from MissB's last night and the puppy had shredded a newspaper all over the living room floor. I would have boxed her ears, but she looked so pleased with herself, and she and one of the other dogs were sitting on it all like a nest. Sigh...this morning I had to clean up pee again in 2 places..puppies.  Puppies and their charm. Puppies and their mischief.  Puppies and their walnut sized bladders.

  Cooling down just a tiny bit today, only 95 as compared to 100./..still high heat index of around 104, but a 40% chance of thunderstorms today. We can only hope.

  MissB had turned off her AC yesterday and when I got there it was 85 degrees in the house. It couldn't have been off very long, but it was so hot that it couldn't catch back up. When I finally left at 8PM, it was only down to 81. I was exhausted and yucky and drove home with my car's air going full blast. 

  For some reason, my left leg is swollen. Noticed it after I got home last night. I had an ace bandage on my knee yesterday and thought maybe it was from that. I sat with my leg up last night, but this morning it's still swollen. Last night I thought it was just my feet had swollen from the heat until I noticed it was only the left. Then this morning I see that it isn't just the foot, it's my whole leg.  Damn. Guess this will be the thing that finally makes me get to a new doctor...I've been stalling because it's always something...car repairs, property taxes coming due...something. But I'm just gonna have to bite the bullet and go. I've neglected myself for too long. I desperately need to get to the chiropractor too. And the dentist. Sigh....

  I have been reading a bit, and seeing the bewilderment and pain of people trying to make sense of the tragedy in Norway.  There are things that have no making sense of. I want to believe that somehow all this seeming madness around us must be part of the evolutionary catalyst that is bring a quantum change to our universal psyches. It is obvious that tragedy has a way of uniting people, and maybe it's as simple as that. Maybe these souls have agreed to make themselves the target of these situations so that the greater good of drawing people together (and in the day of the internet, quicker than ever before possible) can be achieved. In Norway, in Haiti, in New Orleans, in Joplin, in Japan...if the Christ consciousness ( loving and giving up one's life for his brother) exists in everyone of us, then why couldn't that be the "sense" of things like this? In a grand cosmic global playground...we are learning compassion, love and generosity of spirit every time we are touched by these disasters. In the age of the internet, we cannot turn a blind eye to things that happen, even if it's on the other side of the world. We are marked by our reactions to things that happen to our fellows, whether we know them or not. We are touched by the pain of another, whether we like it or not. No longer can we choose to be callous and unaffected by the pain of another human being. Surely-this is an evolutionary leap.

  In the meantime, I have beans to pick and berries to gather and a check to be mailed off to St. Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis. "To do whatever small thing I can...."

  Have a magnificent Sunday, and remember that we are all children of God..so let's ACT like it.

Namaste.