Weekendy stuff

Saturday was, well, annoying: Omaha and I had a ton of paperwork to slog through, so after scrambled egg and cheese sandwiches we spent most of the day indoors slogging. By lunchtime we were stir crazy and the weather was beautiful, so we took Kouryou-chan to the park for a picnic.

After the picnic I went out with a friend and spent the evening with her, shopping and snogging. I spent too much money on books, but I bought Jay Lake's American Gods, Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Scion, Karl Schroeder's Lady of Mazes (Cory Doctorow keeps telling me to real Schroeder but I bounced hard off the woo-woo in Ventus ("hard sci fi" my descending colon!) and I'm reluctant to give him a second try, but I will), Justina Robinson's Living Next Door to the God of Love, and Susan Wright's To Serve and Submit (which looks like a fun mashup between your typical S&M novel and extruded fantasy product).

I got home around midnight.

Sunday, we woke late, had a batch of pancakes (yummy, but oddly less sweet than usual; wonder what I missed, I know I put in sugar), and then went outside to garden.

Tree

Stump

Hole

Once upon a time there was an apple tree that Omaha and I loved very much. It gave us ripe, sweet apples every other year. It was a funny ol' tree, so desperate for sunlight that it leaned over. The 2006 windstorm knocked it so far over that it was brushing the ground and it was time to take it down. Omaha and I dismembered it, the cut it down to a stump, and then I dug around the stump, finding all the roots and cutting them away until finally there was nothing left but a hole in the ground. It's a very sad thing when a tree dies, but now we have room for a cherry tree, and we still have one apple tree and one pear tree.

The rest of the garden is doing well. The Roma tomato plants are tall, the Stupice short but already fruiting, the basil robust, the sage just taking over. Only the parsley is spare, but it's flowering like mad even though we try to stop it by pinching off the buds.

Solar Faery Ring!

There's just so much to do. We didn't get to the grass much today. Just watered it. While I was doing that, I looked up and saw a solar faery ring! How cool! I immediately took a picture; the black is the card I used to sheild the camera's CCD from direct exposure to the sun.

Omaha and I also did the monthly Costco run. I took Kouryou-chan to the park next to the store, but it was so hot she just wanted to sit on a bench and complain about how hot it was. We started to wander back even as Omaha called us and said she was ready to be picked up. She found "organic feed" beef at Costco. How crazy is that?

I did some of the more serious chores, cleaning up the kitchen top to bottom. We had grilled barbecue chicken, corn on the cob (the secret to grilled corn on the cob is to pack crushed ice under the leaves, then wrap it in tinfoil) and couscous made with turkey stock leftover from last Thanksgiving and still waiting in the deep freeze. Very yummy, especially since I finally replaced the corn on the cob holders and had some leftover melted butter from the pancake breakfast.

Life is good right now.