In my garden. And there is another on the way. I am also nursing along a single bell pepper, which is looking good but growing slowly. The tomatoes have been given up for dead; after the plant repeatedly struggled to grow any larger from the day I purchased it, it finally decided this whole corner-of-the-garden-bed thing was not working out and gave up the ghost. I generously watered and fertilized it, and there was no indication of insects or disease, so I can only conclude that the soil in my garden bed is death on tomatoes and plow in some peat moss for next year.
Tonight I did the shopping and cooking for dinner, and conquered fish. Spicy cornmeal breaded cod with a tortellini and broccoli salad in balsamic vinaigrette. The 500 degree oven was tough to endure in 90 degree weather, but since the fish only had to bake for 12 minutes, I toughed it out. It was worth it. Even my super picky eldest son gobbled down two pieces, although the salad was a pass after the shock of the vinegar. Odd that he can eat a whole bag of salt and vinegar chips and make his mouth numb, but the sweeter taste of balsamic made his face pucker up like a prune.
It's a small thing, but I love cooking and making good food, and growing food in my garden. I have done this. I have fed my family. I can.
This helps ease the upset of still not having a job after four months looking, pursuing, and interviewing. I can do anything I need to with skill and confidence.
And if I'm still in my house next spring, I WILL be growing tomatoes.
It's been incredibly hot here for the last few days, but unlike last week it hasn't rained each night to mitigate the swelter. With our swamp cooler broken we've been living with just fans, which makes our upper floor bedrooms just barely tolerable for the night. It's nice and cool just before dawn, but then the sun comes up and starts the scorch cycle all over again.
Imagine my delight when I saw a few flashes of lightning as I was going to pick up the kids from day camp yesterday afternoon. By the time we got home, the wind was picking up and some big drops were falling. This rain turned out to be far from torrential, but it brought some blessedly cool air and a nice breeze for awhile.
While the storm was relatively small and fast-moving, it was noisy. It wanted everyone to know it was passing through. I managed to catch some video of the lovely light-play, but the blog servers don't want to let me upload it, boo. If I can get it to work I'll post it here, but for now the noise and light show is stuck on my camera for only me to enjoy.
Thor was definitely happy though, and wanted us to know it. Thanks for the breeze Thor!
So in the last week, we've shown the kids Back to the Future parts two and three. They had already seen the first one a couple months or so ago.
Of course they loved them both, although the third received a more enthusiastic response than the second, likely because it was less confusing. I'd have to agree on that score. For me, the best parts were one and three. Two was essential to set up the situation for the third part, but it seemed somewhat hastily done, and there were so many twists and "here's a scene from part one but from a different angle" that the story quickly got lost in the shuffle. The story was not as strong as the other two to begin with, and all the camera trickery muddled it further.
That being cleared up, it's a tough choice between one and three for me. Part one is a classic and paved the way, with many iconic scenes such as Marty being blown off his feet by the giant amplifier Doc made for him, the DeLorean leaving twin trails of fire as it sped into the past, and Doc's cries of "Great Scott!" at every twist and turn.
Part three was a funny homage to spaghetti westerns and just plain visually entertaining in the sets and costumes. I loved the fact that Doc built a huge contraption in the blacksmith's shop that turned out to be a refrigerator that made one ice cube at a time. The idea of pushing the deLorean with a steam engine was brilliant, and turning the engine into a time machine? The sheer beauty and genius of it at the end of the movie was the perfect final piece to the puzzle. I even wonder if the current Steampunk craze might not have started by us young adults of the time oohing and aahing over Doc's crazy inventions, and that final scene of a tricked-out locomotive sparkling all over with lightning as it zapped off to some unknown past. It certainly inspired me to read more Jules Verne.
It did not escape me that the fuel for the time circuits for the time machine went from plutonium (stolen from Libyan terrorists) to a garbage-fueled fusion reactor, back to one of the simplest forms of energy, steam. The internal combustion engine for the deLorean time machine always ran on gas, although by the time Doc converted the locomotive, it ran solely on steam. Complications reduced to simple elegance. If all we're trying to do is create steam or heat anyways, why not keep it simple? It was a subtle but wonderful thing to put in the movies, I think. Perhaps a dream for the future.
At this point I don't expect my kids to be too attentive to the underlying message, but I hope in some subliminal, impressionable part of their brain it sticks. The idea that you can take control, and change your outcome, at any point in your life. Too many times I've thought myself stuck until I ignored the whispers of the past and took that leap.
As Doc said, your future isn't yet written. It doesn't have to be so tangled up with the past. Choose the best one you can, and write it for yourself.
I think it would be a dream to work in a chocolate factory. Not the kind of candy you get off grocery store or corner store shelves. Something slightly more upscale, like Godiva's or See's. Some of you are probably laughing at that comparison, but once I found See's, Godiva chocolates were just same old same old (Ok, not their chocolate-covered strawberries. Those are always phenomenal). And it's because of one flavor.
See's brown sugar buttercream.
Covered in dark chocolate or milk, this thing has made me its slave. I have scoured the internet for a recipe for a brown sugar buttercream filling I can make for myself, and have yet to find one. I fear I may have to become a chocolatier just to reverse-engineer it for myself. Not that I'd find that a hardship by any means, but I'm a little short on cash for classes.
Combined with the chocolate coating, this filling is very close to taste perfection for me; I could eat a whole box and not grow tired of it. Coming in a close second is the solid brown sugar filling; no cream (or less cream) involved. Yum. I enjoy soft centers the best of most types of filled chocolates, although I will eat nearly any type. I'll even eat coconut-filled chocolates although I despise them. I can't very well waste the chocolate enrobing the vile stuff now can I? If I happen to bite into one by accident, it's grin and bear it and chew and swallow it quickly, followed immediately by a tastier one. Orange or lemon or possibly strawberry filled.
Nuts add a nice variety now and then, and chewy caramel is alright, though I place it one step above coconut if it's very chewy, as in jaw-breaking, tooth-filling-destroying chewy. Soft caramel can be divine, and I only recently discovered salted caramels. Mmmm.
Chocolate lovers can get pretty passionate about their centers, I've found. I was insulted to overhear a classmate in college going on and on about how soft centers were disgusting and only chewy caramels were good. I've heard strong arguments for nut clusters and toffee centers too.
But still, the fillings are only as good as the chocolate enrobing them. If I'm willing to eat a coconut center just to avoid wasting the chocolate on the outside, it's good chocolate. (And no, I will NOT push a thumb into the bottom of the chocolate to see what it is, then put it back if I don't want it. Barbarians do that. It's chocolate for god's sake. EAT IT.) You don't have to pay extravagant prices for great chocolates, just hunt around a little.
With two days of thunderstorms rolling through, the lawn is getting lush and my squash plants are going crazy. I worry that my house will allow some water into the basement somewhere, as it did last summer during a white-out of a downpour, but that hasn't happened yet (cross fingers).
Yesterday my husband and I practically had to row the truck out of downtown Denver when the streets hosted a flash flood after a strong storm. I'll chalk that one up as an adventure, like driving through Iowa on a pitch black night through an intense thunderstorm.
But lush vegetation is unfortunately not the only blessing of lots of rain. Mosquitoes and other bugs are buzzing around like crazy, getting in the house and generally upsetting my appreciation of the weather following a severe storm.
As I was driving up to the house today, having picked my kids up from their day camp, I was greeted to what I at first thought I had seen before; a flock of birds wheeling and diving in the sky above the cul de sac. I looked for the hawk that must be disturbing them. Nothing. Then I noticed they were diving, rising, and diving again in circles, over and over, about twenty of them, way too low to the ground. I pulled slowly into the driveway and watched, fascinated, as they didn't scatter from the car. I opened my window, and the sun picked out for me what I had missed before....a ton of bugs rising from the grass. Most of them appeared to be mosquitoes. The birds were eating them. I even saw a dragonfly buzzing boldly among the birds busily eating his own fill of the smaller bugs.
Well hell, you could have knocked me over with a feather, as they say. I told the kids to be slow and quiet getting out of the car but I needn't have worried. The birds were feasting and wild cats wouldn't have driven them off. I caught some of it on my camera video, but the flock had cleaned most of my front yard by then and were starting to disperse. Still, I've never seen them just swoop and dart in my front yard over and over before. Thanks for cleaning my yard, birdies! Come back any time!
So of course this scene reminded me of this song. I love Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson.
So my husband and I had an appointment in downtown Denver today, about a half hour from our house according to Mapquest. When you come to Denver you find out that "everything is a half hour from everywhere else", and apparently Mapquest has bought into that too. Yes, really.
But naturally since there's traffic you have to add a good twenty minutes at bare minimum to the Mapquest directions, so it ended being about fifty minutes there. A half hour, plus traffic.
While we were in our appointment, the storm struck. A severe storm, that dropped more than two inches of rain in less than an hour. We were lucky enough (or not) to get out of our appointment at the height of the rain. Since the truck was parked right around the corner from the entrance we decided to run for it. It was heavy rain, but it didn't look too bad. We aren't afraid of a little wet. Halfway across the lot (which was about a thirty foot stretch from door to truck) I stepped in a wash of water up to my ankles. The parking lot was flat, with no dips in the asphalt. It was just a river running across it. Three steps later and a gust of wind blew a wall of water sideways over my entire body. I couldn't have been wetter unless I had jumped in a pool.
That was the start. Out in the street it was bad, and it got worse. Traffic was bumper to bumper and half drowned. It was moving at less than 5MPH. At first it was just us and everyone else trying to survive the drumming rain. Then, someone's car overheated in the lane ahead of us. We shifted to the right and crawled on. Then, someone else's car just stalled in the middle of the street. We shifted again and crawled on.
It took us an hour and a half to make two miles, and in the last bit of those two miles, the police blocked off two of the three lanes because a huge lake had swallowed half the block. There was uprooted bushes, bricks and loads of dirt everywhere. I've seen street flooding before, or thought I had, until this. Luckily we were in the truck, but at times I was doubtful we could even make it in that.
Yes that guy is up to his knees in water.
Did I mention we still had our kids to pick up from their day camp? We were nearly an hour late, but luckily the counselors were having their weekly staff meeting and were cool with it.
Apologies for the blur, it was a camera phone and we were moving, just a bit. That's two swamped lanes of road, looking across to the house. The police blocked off this stretch.
Even after we made it on to the highway we saw a stalled semi in the middle lane, a stalled van a guy was trying to roll off to the side with help, and another two or three cars to the sides with hazards on. It was a wet war zone out there.
Thankfully we all made it home in one piece, a little waterlogged and stressed out, but otherwise safe. The flash flood warnings coming from the Weather Channel app all helpfully said DON'T DROWN. Y' think?
I just adore fireworks. There's something about the combination of loud, booming sounds and sudden, brilliant colors against a dark sky that is just thrilling and awe-inspiring to me. I always see something different, I'm always hoping for more and bigger, and I'm always disappointed just a little when the show ends.
I've never been to a large city's fireworks show...Boston, New York, etc., although I've seen them on TV. I can appreciate the magnitude of the show and the symphony playing in time with the fireworks is an amazing thing. But it's better in person, when you're sitting on a blanket under the open sky, and dazzling blooms of fire open up right over your head.
From the time I was really small my sister and I had the luck of having a local fireworks show happen every year in the park right across the street from my grandparents' house. Every year we'd set up our blanket between the trees, staking out a great spot and rubbing in the bug repellent, and yelling with delight at each boom and flash of light. These days you need a chair, and you need to aggressively defend your stretch of sidewalk or you're liable to get a car trying to park in front of you and cut off your view. The park fills to overflowing with excited families and vendors selling garishly blinking necklaces and toys. But even these kid-attracting bits of flashing plastic pale under the extravagant colors and noise of the fireworks show. They've even started playing John Philips Sousa marches during the show now, which adds even more fun as far as I'm concerned. I love a good loud marching song, but they're odd and out of place unless you're in a big parade, or watching fireworks. Then it's so perfect I practically get goosebumps.
I haven't always been able to make it to local fireworks shows when I haven't been back East. But when I can hear the thumps of the blasts going off I'm liable to run from window to window, or out of the house into the street, looking for the colored fire in the sky.
As a teenager I spent a few Independence Days on the beach with my father and other "adults", setting off illegal fireworks. We had to be careful the police beach patrol didn't catch us in the act; one year the owner of said fireworks, (a huge amount of them too) spent weeks wiring all of them with slow match to large plywood boards. At zero hour the three boards were hustled out to the beach, just above the waterline, set down, and one end was lit. Oh the cops showed up pretty quickly alright, but what they found was a series of fireworks wired together and a bunch of cheering and hollering adults standing well back enjoying the show. No one in the act, no one to arrest.
We didn't always plan it so well. One year, absorbed with lighting off buzz-bombs (a personal favorite), my father and I were unaware of the beach patrol walking right up behind us. Oops. I had the lighting stick in my hand, and then a flashlight in my face, but they didn't arrest me ( I think I looked too young to bother with), they arrested my father right in front of me. They even slapped him in handcuffs, which was interesting to a seventeen-year-old who had never seen an arrest up close. My stepmother was not pleased at having to bail him out of jail, but my father and I giggled like idiots over it later. What we learned from that was: do not alert said beach patrol by "testing" a ginormous string of firecrackers longer than most people are tall in broad daylight before the main event. It tells them where to come looking at dusk later.
I have instilled a love of fireworks into my kids. They yell and cheer for the biggest blasts and groan with disappointment when it's over. Last year they got to sit in the same place I used to when I was a kid; across the street in grandma's yard. This year we're far from my family on the East Coast and we'll be watching the local show. But I know we'll all be doing the same thing, miles apart. Enjoying the tattooing of the evening sky with fire, celebrating our freedom.
