Monday in Pictures

The weather is almost perfect today- except when the clouds are covering the sun. My idea of paradise on earth would be temperatures in the 70’s all year round. There’s no need to point out the flaws in that scenario or how much I would miss the seasons or anything like that. Let me have my dream of perfection to hold to! 

It’s Monday.  I used to do my laundry on Tuesdays (and one other day of the week), but lately I have been doing it some Mondays. Today is laundry day.  Kierra has school today. I always have a plenty of things to pick up around the house on Mondays. It seems we take Sunday as a day of rest and a license to not pick up after ourselves. Oh, who am I kidding?  I am the one that picks up after myself and pretty much everyone else around here. And since we usually go flying out the door without a lot of time to spare on Sunday mornings, we leave a tornado of clothes and towels on the floor and unmade beds and toothpaste on the counter in our wake.  In the afternoon, if we are home, everyone else usually takes a nap. I usually don’t, but why would I pick up things when everyone else is sleeping? That’s my quiet time! And it’s actually fairly rare that we are home all afternoon and evening, so that adds to the lack of time to keep up with everything and everybody.  I actually don’t mind too much- it’s kind of fun to get everything put back in its place on a Monday morning.

I am thinking a towel shower would be a good idea for tenth anniversaries. Most of our towels are falling apart. The ends have mostly came off, leaving them way too short. They work, but they aren’t ideal and a lot of them won’t last a whole lot longer. We’ve been married 9 years, hence my idea that a towel shower would be nice next year. LOL!

Today  is also the day that I needed to go out to the garden to pick whatever produce is ready. There wasn’t that much, so it’s not overwhelming, but it should give us a good meal this evening.  It’s so wet this year that it’s impossible to till the garden at all, and the weeds grow like crazy.I guess I could pull every weed in our large garden by hand, but that would be an enormous amount of work. Keeping the rows free of weeds is hard enough, let alone pulling them all between the rows. And even then, the ground is often so muddy I have to be careful where I walk. Let’s just say that there is no way I could win a neat, weed-free garden award this year!! 

 

A not-so-pretty cabbage that I think can be salvaged for Kai Si Ming from the Trim Healthy Mama book. It’s hamburger and cabbage cooked with spices and while it’s not pretty, it’s always better than it looks and better than I remembered. I am not a huge fan of cabbage, if you can’t tell.

So I think we’ll have Kai Si Ming with fresh broccoli and green beans this evening.

I am not getting a lot of beans this year. I only canned once, and since then, I’ve gotten just barely enough for a meal twice a week. My beans were damaged by late frost, and apparently never fully recovered. I should have replanted, I suppose. We actually eat green beans fairly frequently. The girls don’t profess to love them, but they eat them fairly readily.

I am collecting cucumbers to make Claussen pickles. Last year I canned pickles and had THESE in the refrigerator. We went though quite a few quarts of these in a really short time. The only thing I didn’t like was that in my pickling spice, there were some whole cloves, and I didn’t care for that flavor. Other than that, they were divine. We ate them like candy for snacks!! I want to do as many this year as I think my refrigerator can hold while leaving room for other things. If I had a spare refrigerator, I would fill half of it with these Claussen knockoff pickles! The other pickles that I canned have hardly been touched. 

I have a number of plants LOADED with these garden salsa peppers and no idea how to use many of them. I will use a few in canning, but I don’t know what else to do with them. My jalapeno peppers frosted in a late frost, and I could find any more at the greenhouse so I chose these. Then one plant of jalapenos survived so those will get priority.

And then since we have pictures of imperfect produce that hasn’t been cleaned yet, I give you pictures of some girls who seem just about perfect to me- you know, when they aren’t making me pull my hair out!

 

 

 

Emily loves her cats and sneaks them inside whenever she can.

 

Kierra was complaining about school this morning and how her fingers hurt too much to write, blah blah blah. Someone had a big day yesterday and didn’t have enough rest. I am proud of her though. We got home at 5 something yesterday afternoon, having been gone all day, and then she and I went on a bike ride. I don’t know the exact mileage, but it had to be at least 7 miles total. She was sure she was going to die when we were about a mile from home. But when we got home, she was so happy with her accomplishment that she forgot how hard it was. She just learned to ride this spring, and we hadn’t done much riding most of the summer because of the heat, so I think she’s doing great! It’s fun to have someone to be active with, too!

This morning I had Emily put uncooked macaroni in a mini cupcake pan. It actually kept her happy for awhile, but after a certain point, it became something to haul all over the house, so I will have to sweep it up when she’s not around. 

Emily is a busy little girl challenges me only a million times a day, more or less. But she is so loving and affectionate. She gives hugs and kisses freely. She learned the song “Baby Mine” recently and wants me to sing it to her, and then gets all lovey and cuddly.       

And outside, there are flowers. I don’t plant a lot, but I am glad for the ones we do have. Actually, my girls picked these out, otherwise we might not have any! 

We pruned our grapevines down to almost nothing this year. They weren’t bearing  fruit to speak of anymore, so we had nothing to lose, even though we don’t know much about growing fruit. For the longest time, everything looked dead, but now there is the most prolific growth. There aren’t any grapes though. Maybe next year. I am sure I could find several spiritual lessons to draw from that, but I will spare you!