Hi, friends!
How is your week going so far? Anything new? Anything fun? Anything that was such a duh moment that you should have thought of it sooner?
I’m at the point with my tomatoes that I have too many to eat fresh but not enough to justify making a red sauce or canning them.
Which means it’s time to chop up, hit with garlice, salt, pepper, and olive oil, and roast them into deliciousness which I then freeze for use later in the year. I ended up doing several batches of these last year and holy fuck did it make my winter chili, stews, and sauces so much tastier.
The duh moment is how much easier this is with paste tomatoes. Hahahhahaha. Last year I had slicers and cherries and even with draining them before tossing the chopped tomatoes in the oven it took a long time to render things down. This year I planted Roma tomatoes along with some slicers and fuck yeah it baked up faster and denser.
Our first figs are almost ripe – maybe another couple of days if the squirrels and birds don’t hit them first. It should be a good year though and we can share *some* of them with the critters.
My dad gave up harvesting sour cherries on his two trees for that reason. Being a bird watcher, he realized it was better for him to watch them feast when the cherries are ripe.
Fortunately there are a lot and we can’t eat them all. What drives me crazy is when they don’t systematically finish ripe ones and ruin multiple half ripe ones along the way.
Oohhh fresh figs are positively sublime! So excited for you!
I finally got my new furniture! Getting the old stuff hauled out was a bigger chore than I anticipated. Habitat Restore said they couldn’t get it for a month.Goodwill wanted to charge $170 to pick it up, Salvation Army doesn’t pick up here. I wanted to set them out on the curb for the junk pickers but it won’t stop raining long enough. So I listed them on Craigs list and someone just came to pick them up. I’ve hung the new curtains, put down the rug, repotted the ficus, and am shopping for lamps.
Lovely!
You have described one of my nightmares.
Light fixtures in general or just lamps?
Just a couple of table lamps.
Ooh, that’s fun and exciting!
My area has a “Buy Nothing” group on Facebook and it’s a pretty good way to get rid of stuff or ask for stuff. The philosophy is to reduce waste and landfill, while fostering community.
I don’t know if we have one of those or not. We have a Mutual Aid group though. If someone didn’t get it this week I was going to have a friend post it there over the weekend.
Here’s something new, although it doesn’t concern me personally. It is a fascinating detail from the Raid on Mar-a-Lago:
“Once inside the air-conditioned, white marble-clad private quarters, agents fanned out to search every room, while shocked staff were instructed by Trump’s lawyers to unlock doors and provide the FBI access to every room, including the sumptuous Versailles Master Bedroom, renovated by Melania two years ago.”
Oh please God let there be pix. “Sumptuous!” “Versailles!” Trump’s vulgarity and pomposity as interpreted by an Eastern European “model”/rent girl/mail order bride. I suppose my real question is, was a stripper pole added or removed? And exactly how thin, in microns, can gold be pounded to make gold leaf, to give the appearance to the amateur that some shoddy Home Depot overstock is actually more than it seems? Yards of black satin, yes or no? I’m going to go with yes.
Who wrote this?
I think you’ve brought up that Mar a Lago was originally Marjorie Merriweather Post’s baby, and while she had more class than Trump, still she was always a step and a half shoddier than she needed to be. Everything she did was too big for the budget and therefore too close to shoddy Home Depot overstock.
I’m settling in (i thiiiink, anyway!), at the other job with the kids (same school district, but helping out over in the summer version of the before & after-school program).
It’s fun, but there are SO many kids (close to 100 i think at this site alone), so I’m stilllllll learning kids’ names.
These kids are older than my usual pre-K group (they’re K-6), so I’m getting a chance to stretch my skills a lot more, & develop more of my “talking them down” skills than I typically have a chance to use…
With my pre-K kiddos, I’m usually operating on a non-verbal/developing-verbal-skills basis a lot of the time, and I get to communicate with so many of my kiddos *without* that many words. I.e. lots of signals, some ASL, and other times body language–like an outstretched arm with an open hand (fingers together, palm open) pointing in the direction I’d like the child to walk or sit… these kids ALL talk, so it’s basically a TOTAL flip of nonverbal skillss & verbal ones, which is SO different from what I’ve been doing the last few years😂🤣
Although, I’m often finding that I can quiet the room faster than most of my coworkers, just by walking around the classroom, giving quiet directives, and speaking in a *slightly quieter than normal* tone of voice😉
It’s fun, and even the “harder” kids ARE a really GOOD bunch of kids–it’s just so dang HOT this summer, and some of them have some rough stuff they’ve gone through.