Ramblings

I was feted all last week for my 30th birthday. There was a family day, fireworks, a camping trip, a fancy lunch out, an aerial view of Lookout Mountain and a surprise party. Not too shabby. But this week I'm back to the reality of laundry/vacuuming/cooking and it's kicking my tail. The thought of uploading pictures of all the festivities makes me want to curl into a ball and cry, so I'm buying some time with a random post this week about what else we're up to around here. 

I'm currently reading An Everlasting Meal and LOVING it. (Thank you Nesting Swans for the Kindle moola, it is being put to very good use.)  It's a primer on a whole new (to-me) way of cooking...the way my great-grandmothers probably fed their families. I want to stuff my fridge with vegetable-filled mason jars now.  Watch the trailer for more goodness. Don't you love that books have trailers like movies now? I also just finished 7 which conveniently has a trailer as well.

I made fake Febreeze over the weekend to use when Sweet B threw up on our living room rug. Into my father-in-law's hand. Yup. He caught most of it too. Amazing and disgusting. Phony Febreeze works great and cost practically nothing, do try.

Last week we took a walk around the block after the kids went down (we do this on occasion, I find it very refreshing for our marriage and our sanity) and B Daddy wore a kilt. It was still 98 degrees at 8:30pm and the man needed, "a little breeze." You can't walk 10 yards in this 'hood without running into neighbors and sure enough we were chatted up by three of them in short order.

I picked up our first bag of produce from our local CSA yesterday. $31.25 bought me eight peaches, two avocados, 4 oz of blueberries, two heads of garlic, two red onions, one bunch of curly green kale, one pound of snap beans and something called an eight ball squash. All organic (whoa Leipprandts! gettin' awfully fancy) and everything but the avocados are local. Exciting and intimidating.  I'm quite certain my great-grandmothers would approve.

We're harvesting tomatoes (little tiny cherry ones and bigger than your fist Big Boys) from our itty bitty garden daily now, as well as cucumbers, basil, lavender and other herbs. My squash and peppers were both a big FAIL this year. B Daddy wants to take out more bushes from the front of the house to make room for legit raised beds. Thus far I've been in protest. I like our non-suburban weirdness to stay firmly in the background (where the chickens are.) When I was growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, there was a lady in our town who had turned her yard back into a prairie...letting native grasses and wheat grow up in front of her home instead of having a nice chemically-treated square of green grass for her children to run around on. We'd drive by her mostly-hidden house a lot and I remember thinking Prairie Lady had to be a total weirdo. Now I think back and wish I'd have gone to visit her. She was probably super interesting. Nonetheless, memories of the Prairie Lady have kept my impulses to turn the lawn into a vegetable patch in check.

Let's see - oh yes, we cut cable today. I've turned on the TV twice just to confirm it really is gone. Right now I'm on a self-righteous high, but I'm sure we'll all be in mourning by this evening. I haven't even got a game plan for entertaining the children tomorrow before my second cup of coffee kicks in.

What have y'all been up? What'd you do for the Fourth? How are your gardens growing? What's the best thing I'm going to miss out on cable-wise this summer? Does your husband have a kilt?

Thanks for reading!