Too Hot To Handle

 Ugh.  As you may know, we moved to the Pacific Northwest from Orange County, California a couple years ago.  There were many factors involved in this decision.  My sister lived here already, and when Wonderful Husband and I visited, we were amazed at how green it was.  Our family expanded, and we wanted both boys to eventually have their own bedrooms.  We also needed a better school district for them, and couldn't afford that in southern California, not without moving out to the desert.  (And I was NOT going to move out to the desert.)  And, year after year, it kept getting hotter and drier.  This was before global warming and climate change were as prevalent in my consciousness as they are now, and even so I knew that California's drought was never going to end.

...The pictures I've seen of Lake Oroville, where my family used to go houseboating in the summer, have broken my heart.

At the moment, we are being VERY grateful that we boxed up and brought our bulky portable A/C unit with us in the move.  In the summers, it lives in Wonderful Husband's office, which has an unshaded south-facing window.  A few days ago, Wonderful Husband hauled it upstairs to the master bedroom, where it has been installed in the master bath and running in tandem with the tower fan ever since, trying to keep the temperature there down around 75 Fahrenheit.

We hauled the boys' mattresses into our room last night so they could sleep better.  As I write this, at my desk by a north-facing window, it's 91 Fahrenheit in the rest of the house.  And it's only 11am.  We've been opening the doors and windows at night and in the early morning to let heat seep out, and shutting them (and their blinds and curtains) after a certain point each day.  I've been watering all the outside plants daily, and taking rinse-off showers a few times each day, just to cool down.  The chickens, fortunately, have plenty of shady spots to hide in the yard, and they do make use of them.

Remembering last year's run on them, I bought an inflatable pool a few months back.  It's situated on top of foam flooring blocks on our pergola, and has been a blessing in the evenings the last week or so, as the boys play naked in it before bedtime.

After today and tonight, the heat's supposed to break.  Thank goodness.

This fall, when the boys are back in school, I'm planning to paint their bedrooms.  And at the same time install ceiling fans, because our house sadly lacks them...

Catching Up

Ugh.  First we had a bout of lice.  Which probably came home from preschool with Jazzy.  And I was far, far away the worst infested.  After OTC remedies failed, we found a lice clinic up in Silverdale, and I (with my long hair) got the full treatment: comb-out, heat treatment, oily serum slathered on my hair.  The malefolk opted to go home and shave their heads and do at-home oily serum treatments.  So right now Wonderful Husband, Squiddle, and Jazzy all look like they've just joined the military.

Then Jazzy got sick yesterday.  The fun started at a quarter to seven when he woke up, feverish and with his eye glued shut by nighttime mucus.  Screaming ensued, and panic, until he worked himself up to a pitch where he actually threw up because he was so upset, which I had previously thought to be only an expression, not something that really happened.  The upset wailing of "I can't see!" recurred through the day, though he was able to see well enough to watch Trollhunters for a few hours with me acting as a comfort object.  Eventually he (who hates naps) burrowed into Mummy and Daddy's bed of his own volition and slept away most of the afternoon.  Fortunately today, other than a stuffed up nose, it all seems to be gone.

I did make a bit of gardening hay while he napped, and pruned back and dried my oregano.  Four hours in the oven, varying between a sort of stank and half smelling like an Italian restaurant, just add garlic.  After stripping the stems and tossing them into the chicken coop, I have three pint jars of uncrushed oregano leaves.  I crumbled a tiny bit into my eggs this morning.  Yum!  I also have seeds starting in containers, since a lot of what I planted in the beds hasn't come up.  I got about ten baby dills, maybe, from a whole packet of scattered seed, and no basil, chard, or monarda seedlings at all.  Sigh.

And, finally, I went out to thrift stores and a used book store today, and only got books.  Two living-abroad memoirs, two Michael Pollan books, a quilting book, and the first Hunger Games book.  And something innate in me shuddered, because I'm reading like an adult.  Quick, I need a hit of speculative fiction!  I'm also amused at the price differences for the same book within a 1-mile triangle: $.50 at St.Vincent de Paul, $2 at Goodwill, $7 at Book 'Em.  Ah well, better supporting local business than Amazon.

Eagle Adventure, and Shopping, Deferred

I've been letting the chickens free-roam in the backyard.  Wonderful Husband and I hammered some 4' t-stakes into the ground in a few places and have hooked rabbit fencing into them to keep the ladies from getting out into the front yard.  Perfect, I thought!

Until yesterday, around 6pm, when I was halfway across the yard, and looked up to find a bald eagle, talons extended, in the air about 4' above my chickens, clearly looking for a chicken dinner.

"HEY!" I bellowed, in my best "What The Heck Do You Think You're Doing?!" mom-voice.

The eagle took note of me, and decided it had better places to be.  (Kind of stupid, but then bald eagles reputedly are.  Seriously, if it came down to a fight between us, I might be bigger but it has a beak, talons, and no moral compass.  The eagle would win, easily.)

Two of my ladies were at the verge of the brush between us and the neighbors; I got out the scratch grains and lured them into their coop and shut them in.  Another was deep in the brush and clucking in distress now that the threat was gone; after a bit she came out and likewise got put in for the night.  The last two hens I was worried about, as they weren't responding at all, but about half an hour later they reappeared from where they'd squeezed between the propane tank and its fencing.  Clever girls!  So, Bald Eagle: 0, Team Flock Mama: 1.

Unrelated to the above, it has been two weeks since Wonderful Husband and I got our second Moderna shots, so we are now fully vaccinated!  But we are also still wearing masks.  We had planned to celebrate by going to Ikea this weekend and looking at outdoor/lawn furniture.  Except that it's Memorial Day this weekend, so nopenopenope.  And starting next week, my sister is back at work after her brain surgery has (mostly) resolved itself.  So my parents will be taking care of Niecelet on weekends.  I am not dropping all three grandkids on my parents, no matter how much they say they can handle it.  Niecelet on her own is a handful; adding my two to the mix devolves rapidly into chaos.  And we can't take the boys with us to Ikea; Jazzy still will not wear a mask.  So I guess lawn furniture gets to wait another year....

Catching Up

No pictures, I'm afraid.  But I've finally got the quilt for my inlaws basted!  Now I just need to quilt it.  And, y'know, steam-mop the basting spray off the floor.

Jazzy has started extended-day preschool two days a week - it's an hour to an hour and a half longer, so I'm packing him a lunch now.  But there was an opening for the rest of this school year (a whole month or so) and his teachers thought he might benefit from it.

Squiddle, meanwhile, has finally been shown Episode IV in honor of Star Wars day.  His favorite character (so far, we're paused just after the escape from the Death Star) is Darth Vader, because of the music.  I... cannot argue that?  Though I do have to say, rewatching the film for the first time in several years, I'm discovering anew how much Episodes V, VI, I, II, III, and Rogue-1 influence and reinterpret my understanding of the movie.  (Example: Obi-Wan: "This is your father's lightsaber. He wanted you to have it, when you were old enough."  Me: "Obi-Wan, you lying fuck.")

The veggie garden is finally fully planted, in a very intensive square-foot gardening way.  The raspberry and boysenberry beds have chives and parsnips in with them.  The strawberries will be sharing space with bush beans, peas, and, if I can find some starts or seeds, cucumbers.  Another bed is two kinds of beets, two kinds of carrots, two kinds of scallions, and leeks.  The next bed is 4 tomatoes (each a different variety), basil, dill, two kinds of squash, and thyme.  And the last bed is oregano, parsley, more parsnips, Swiss chard, monarda, borage, luffas, and Minnesota Midget melons.

My fruit trees are almost finished flowering.  I've decided that the ones I planted last year, I'm going to pluck the fruit off while tiny and give them one more year to develop root strength.  (The persimmon trees, hurrah, are finally putting out a few leaves and proving they're not dead sticks.)  Time to turn my attention to the blueberry bushes next, I guess.  That plus working out a decent-sized run for the chickens, who are giving us more eggs than we can eat.

And with that, I'm off to bed!

Spring Things

It's a dreary, drizzly day, so I'm working on tidying, dusting, and revamping my desk/sewing area with an eye toward decluttering and ending up with streamlined, increased functionality.

I've also been working on things out in the garden.  I added three more 4'x8' beds!  And promptly turned two of them and one of last year's into permanent berry beds, so I've not actually gained more space for things like carrots and tomatoes.

Two of the new beds got trellises built in them, as they've been planted with boysenberries and raspberries:

There's trellis wires between the posts now, to weave the vines up and through.  And more soil, both sieved from the grass we dug up, but also purchased.  The fun part of building the beds was that the ground not only slants east-west, but also north-south!  So the northwest corner of each bed is only two or three inches above the ground, but in order to have relatively level beds, the southeast corners had to be shored up like this:

The other major thing I've been working on is making 289 5" blocks:

And turning them into a 50th anniversary gift for Wonderful Husband's parents:

It's not done yet - the quilting and binding still need to be finished.  But I think it came out nicely, I'm proud of the work, and, most importantly, they like it!

Cookie Jar

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an empty biscuit (cookie) tin must be in want of sewing supplies.

This pepparkakkor tin is currently filling up with 5" quilt blocks.

(I took this picture a couple days ago.  Now the roof and driveway behind the tin is white.  I haven't measured the back deck yet, but we've likely got somewhere in the 3"-4" range.  And the snow's still falling.)

On January 31, I Made Bread

My post title is a riff on graffiti from the gladiators' barracks of Pompeii.  Where I would like to visit someday.

Meantime!

*rolls up to the quarantine, 8 months late, bearing Starbucks*

Today I made bread!

I've had the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day for a while now.  Yesterday I decided I wanted to actually use it, so I prepped the dough, popped it in the fridge, and then this morning baked the above two loaves, which accompanied dinner at my parents' tonight.  They came out pretty well, like a light slightly sourdough.  I might try baguettes tomorrow morning.  If I stick with this, I think I'll invest in a new baking stone and pizza peel.  Ours got respectively broken and downsized in the interstate move.

Being me, I also baked a blackberry pie to go with:

They always end up looking vampiric when I cut smiley faces for vents.  It's why I usually stick with either the pi symbol or a heart.