A Knitting Confession

I haven't done any knitting for about a month. Even though it is still After the Bat Mitzvah, I haven't yet brought the knitting out from the corner I stashed it in. I did not finish Sports Nut's blanket by the All Star Break. And though we are ever-hopeful, the Red Sox have suffered so many injuries this season that I'm not even going to mention the World Series in conjunction with this blanket.

However, before the end of the upcoming weekend, I should be sitting in a car on my way to La-La Land. Car time is usually a good time to knit. As long as I'm not the driver.

What is it, Indeed?

There is nothing to wonder at today because -- really, who's had time to go through boxes lately? I'm not sure about next week, either, as I will return on Tuesday evening from taking offspring and their belongings to La-La Land. I have no idea whether I will feel like decrapifying on Wednesday. I might decide just to spend next Wednesday holding kittens.

Update on the Kitten Project

Someone pointed out that I missed the other BIG summer project of 2010 -- kittens!

The good news is that there are no longer 15 cats in the house. The bad news is that there are now 14 cats in the house. And no, we did not adopt all those foster kittens.

To backtrack just a bit, we were fostering 7 kittens for the city shelter. There were two single kittens and one litter of five kittens.

Technically (as far as the city is concerned), all five of these kittens and one of the singletons were adopted by other people. In reality, two of these kittens are still living with us, though which two is our secret. We also formally adopted the other singleton kitten, a beautiful little female named Kaylee.

On the day that we were accomplishing all these adoptions, we -- and the other adopters --spent several hours at the city shelter dealing with paperwork. And while we were standing around minding our own business, a man walked in clutching three tiny kittens to his chest.

I did my best to ignore the kittens, but the Drama Queen eventually went over and started talking to the man, who was suffering under the delusion that the city shelter has a good adoption record for strays. Long story short, the three kittens came home with us instead of entering the city system.

There really are three baby cats in that picture. There's the gray kitty on the left looking straight at the camera. There's the diffuse tortoiseshell (light gray and orange) with the split face on the right side. And in the background, there's another tortoiseshell kitten. She's almost all black, but you can see the orange blaze on her forehead if you look closely.

We may have a home for at least 2 of this batch of kittens. After that, however, I am out of acquaintances here in Dodge. The shelter has already called to see if I would consider fostering more kittens. I know what to say -- it's better if kittens never enter my life at all than if I worry about whether they were among the fortunate kitties adopted out of Dodge's city shelters.

Projects, Projects, Projects

I suppose that hosting the Bat Mitzvah could be considered one BIG project, but it's over. Shipping the offspring back to college could be considered another project, but I have almost an entire week before that happens. In the meantime, I do have a project in hand -- something I've been meaning to get to for a long time. It made it up to the top of the priority pile at the request of Future Vet, who wants to do some cooking when he goes back to school.

For years, decades even, I have been collecting recipes that I like. The very best of the best -- at least in my mind and mouth -- get written into my own private recipe collection.

Nothing fancy, just one of those blank books with a cover that appealed to me 30 years ago. In addition to the basic recipes, there are notes about how I really prepare a recipe, experiments I have tried, and some inexplicable stains.

It's been clear for some time that several of the offspring would like to take this book off my hands some day, or at least would like to receive their very own copy. I am way too lazy to make four by-hand copies of this book, so a while back I researched recipe software and bought a package called Now You're Cooking. Every so often, I would type in a recipe or two, but this has been a back-burner project for a really long time.

Future Vet goes back to La-La Land on Sunday, so I've been slogging away at the cookbooks. You see, in addition to all the recipes that I have painstakingly copied into my recipe book over the years, there are a fair number of recipes in cookbooks that I never bothered to copy. Instead, I would just remember that, for example, Spinach-Noodle Casserole is on page 121 of American Wholefoods Cuisine by David and Nikki Goldbeck. The original edition, though I think we also have the revised edition lying around somewhere unless I gave it away to someone worthy.

Since neither my cookbook library nor my memory will be on hand once Future Vet goes back to school (Not that that has ever stopped him. When he was in a far away country, he used to call for recipes and help with metric conversions.), I decided it was time to put all these recipes into the recipe software and print them out for the offspring to use wherever they may be.

In addition to the flowery recipe book of my own, I have managed to get through a respectable pile of other cookbooks. The big brown book over on the left is my original copy of "American Wholefoods Cuisine", by the way.

I've also entered lots of loose recipes printed out from internet sources and kept with the intention of copying them into my recipe book as soon as I have time. Right.

Between recipes and pulling puncture vine, I have a very full life right now.

The State of the Yard; the (almost) Death of the Garden

Two days in a row. I'm on a roll here. Unfortunately, as I intimated yesterday, the yard and garden are not doing as well.

But perhaps I need to back up to July for just a moment. When last we checked on the greenery, in late June, things were growing nicely. By the middle of July, some serious problems were manifesting. Like sick squash plants:

And even dying squash plants:

A young friend pointed out the problem, one she could identify because her mother was having the same problem at their house. Squash bugs!

Not only were this pernicious little beasts all over our squash in all stages of development from eggs to hatchlings to immature models to adults as seen above, but we also found more eggs on our cucumber leaves:

We treated everything with organic bug killers and things seemed to be doing okay for a while. At least, the plants that hadn't died were still green and leafy. Like the cucumbers and tomatoes:

And the squash that the bugs hadn't yet found:

And even the pumpkins:

Tomatoes were starting to ripen:

The only anomaly was that one of our apple trees was suddenly producing pears:

Huh. On reflection, we realized that this "apple" tree had never actually produced mature fruit before in all the years we have lived here. And the leaves did look more like those of the two pear seedlings we put in this year than they did the leaves on the apple tree. So when the previous owner told us that the fruit trees at the bottom of the slope were apple trees, he was either mistaken or lying. Take your pick.

The slave labor and I had been working diligently in the yard, pulling weeds and cutting back some of the more obnoxious plants. The back yard, where we were going to be hosting a Bat Mitzvah, was looking pretty good.

We even put some flowering annuals along the back wall of the house to give the place a little color:

We also hired some guys to come and haul away the trash and yard waste that had been piling up. Things like the carpet from the Wizard's office, which the offspring had tossed out the window, and the pieces of the playhouse that they deconstructed. And bags and bags of weeds that just didn't fit into our trash barrel each week. It was a mighty load:

It was so impressive, in fact, that I took another picture just to feel the full impact of how much had been accumulating in that corner of the yard:

Look at that pretty blue sky! And look at all the empty space that magically appeared behind the wall where we had been hiding the trash:

There is still some lumber there from the playhouse, but some friends are interested in using it to build their own playhouse. If not, I'm sure we can freecycle the boards and things.

Getting rid of the trash was good, but as I mentioned yesterday, we had three solid days of rain somewhere in there and the yard -- the yard we had pulled so many weeds out of -- was becoming green:

It was also green down the slope where we had nearly eliminated unwanted plants:

Really, there was nothing around these new pear trees just a month or so ago:

And the squash bugs, which we had treated to within a nanometer of their lives (or so we thought) were back. Or they had never gone completely away.

Which meant that the squash plots were totally gone. Not worth saving at all.

(But look at all those weeds surrounding them! Why don't the squash bugs go after the weeds, I wonder?)

And, having decimated all of the yellow squash and zucchini plants, the bugs are now after the pumpkins:

We are on the point of calling the entire garden thing quits for the year. The squash and zucchini are gone, the pumpkins are on their way out, and the cucumbers are still under attack. On the other hand, there are plenty of green tomatoes on the vines and this morning, I found cantelope!

I'm just hoping those brown leaves aren't an indication that the squash bugs also like melons.

The pears (the ones that weren't really apples) are about ready to pick:

And the apples that really are apples are getting there as well:

And even better, the peach tree has come through with flying colors. This picture was taken after two other families came and picked peaches for their own purposes:

We also brought in a first batch of peaches to eat and freeze for ourselves:

I guess this is a year of fruit rather than vegetables.

In the aftermath of the Bat Mitzvah, our back yard has almost returned to normal. This was the scene of the event:

The canopy we put up to shade the Torah is still there, but all the chairs that were between the platform and the swing have been put away. All that remains is the weeds that need to be pulled. Again.

Especially the puncture  vine.

Guess what the slave labor and I are going to be doing for the rest of the week.

Sunday Decrapification Update

See? I know what should be going on in the blog, even if I haven't had much time to write this summer.

Unfortunately, the state of the crap is that it has multiplied. Or at least, the crap has shifted around enough so that it looks like it has multiplied. It's far too depressing to post pictures, so I'll just try to explain.

Last Saturday, two young women of my acquaintance celebrated becoming B'not Mitzvah (that's sort of the plural of Bat Mitzvah) in my back yard. And from that simple occasion, all kinds of things sprang. For one thing, we had to make the house look reasonably presentable. For another, we kind of needed to make the back yard accessible and not dangerous to young children. And for a third, we thought there were going to be around 50 or 60 people here who would want to eat.

The food was the simple part. The bags of cookies pictured in the last blog post were but a small part of the food preparation that went on for three weeks. If 50 to 60 people had shown up, we would have been in good shape. Instead, we had about half that number and lots of leftovers. I suppose that's better than running out of food, all things considered.

Making the house presentable was probably the second-easiest part. The slave labor and our sort-of kind-of foster slave daughter slaved away and things looked pretty good. Whatever we couldn't find an immediate place for, we just shoved in the garage or the master bedroom. (Told you that pictures would be too depressing!) Now it's time to clear everything out again and figure out where it should go.

That means, of course, that making the back yard look presentable for a crowd was the hard part. We actually thought we had the yard under control until the last week before the B'not Mitzvah. We had pulled weeds, planted things, removed obnoxious plants, and more.

Then we had three straight days of rain. In the desert, such as we have here in Dodge, rain means that all kinds of seeds and plants that have been lying dormant for years suddenly have a chance to explode all over the landscape. Despite all the thousands of puncture vine plants that Sports Nut and I have gotten rid of over the past three years, there are thousands more springing up in the yard as I type. (Really. Yet again, it is raining in Dodge.)

We reached a temporary detente with the weeds and managed to have a lovely Shabbat service last week. Now we have just completed an entire week of taking it easy. Tomorrow it will be time to start pulling weeds and clearing out the crap. Again.