Taking Charge

I have a major case of garden lust. Seriously. Why? The last couple years I’ve grown cucumbers, tomatoes and squash and not really had a whole ton of luck, even tho I’ve been gardening for years. My tomatoes that I started from seed all died because of a late frost. So I’ve got no garden at all this year. I’ve seen other people’s lush, beautiful gardens around here and it makes me really sad. I don’t like that the only thing I’ve planted are my lilac bushes and rose bushes.

They seem to be doing well, though, so I can’t complain too much.. other than that they need the grass cut around them again. Stupid rain has made it hard to keep up with the yard this summer. I just hope that when he mows, he doesn’t mow ‘em down on accident. so yes, this year I have garden lust and I’m extremely jealous of those of you with good gardens

Made by alleigh

So, one of the things that I had on my list of things to do on Rob’s day off was go pick blueberries after his doctor’s appointment on Wednesday. I have never done it before, and thought it would be fun to do. Well, today Rob came home early and I had to send him to the store for stuff to finish dinner. We sat there talking and the decision was made that we’d go pick blueberries.

I really have no idea how that decision actually came about, but we got dressed and headed off to pick blueberries. It was fun, relaxing and it was thoroughly enjoyable to play in the field, listening to others who are doing the same thing. We plan on going back to pick more, since we left sooner than I would have liked. I had walked to the car to get my phone and it was ringing. Silly me left it in the car, thinking I wouldn’t need it. Oh well. That wasn’t really a pleasant phone call, so we cut the picking short.

I am going again, we picked just shy of 4lbs of berries and want more to freeze for use all winter. We even gave some to my cousin before we headed home, so we ended up with 3lbs or more when we came home. Anyway. That’s blueberry picking.

Made by goodgal996

Okay, so we’ll start at the top of the list I posted last night or this morning.. whenever it was. Friday was pay day, so we had to go to the bank and do a couple errands. One of those things was to head to the weekly Farmer’s Market in Sayre. I’ve never been, since he usually works on Fridays. I was looking forward to being able to buy fresh local produce. So we went to the bank, went to Salvation Army in hopes of finding Rob a few pair of cheap jeans since he tends to rip them quicker than hell.

We had no luck, so we headed out to get some lunch. We decided on Chinese, which was so good and for once I didn’t end up wishing I hadn’t eaten it. That’s rare since my stomach tends to rebel often with the meds that I take. After lunch, we headed to the Farmer’s Market which was a real bust. There was only 2 vendors with produce, one was organic, the other was just plainly overpriced. The other 5 vendors had crafts, which isn’t bad, but it’s a waste if you’re looking for produce.

I figure that if I want a decent Farmer’s Market, I need to go into one of the cities for one. I think figure that in a city it’s easier to get vendors because of the population not being out in the farming land. But anyway, that’s enough for this post. Got more to write about


Made by

Okay, so I’m officially annoyed with twitter.com. I can’t receive tweets from other people atm. No idea why, it says my ‘home’ page doesn’t exist, but my account is in tact, so it’s nothing I’ve done to get booted off. In a way, it’s okay because it’s one less distraction from the things I need to be doing. I should make a todo list of all the crap I need to do, but I don’t want to, I want to procrastinate some more.

While writing the rest of this post, my twitter got fixed. This is the result of it taking me 3 hours to write a post.

I spent much of my day either in the kitchen playing with a meat slicer or at the computer playing a game and listening to Leo Laporte. Seriously, I love my meat slicer. We sliced up a beautiful rib roast into 12 lovely steaks, all the same thickness and size. Those will make some lovely meals throughout the month. I also sliced up squash for stirfry. 4 lovely zucchini’s and 4 yellow squash, all cut to the same thickness for even cooking. So much nicer than I could do by hand and a LOT faster. Tonight, after Rob got home and we had dinner, I sliced up a large stick of pepperoni so that I can make pizza or calzones. We have a giant Lock ‘n Lock container full of pepperoni. More than I need for pizza, but it won’t go to waste.

I did try to make a strawberry milk tonight using fresh strawberries that we picked up yesterday, however that was an EPIC FAIL. I poured the berries into my blender then opened up a unopened half gallon of milk. Sniffed it, it smelled fine, took a sip.. tasted fine. Poured some into blender and it was… CHUNKY. Yeah all those fresh berries went down the drain along with an entire half gallon of milk. I’m not happy at all, especially with the sell-by date being July 10. I’m just glad I hadn’t done a shake and wasted ice cream.

I should be working on the deluge of blinkies that I have to make from before the monitor issues. I should also work on tagging my pictures on Flickr and Picasa. I should be working on a lot of different projects, including crocheting, reading Blood Noir and Kitchen Witch. Instead, I’m arguing about the difference in respect and being respectful with some overgrown children. Ah well.

Anyway, hope everyone had a lovely weekend and has a lovely week.

I meant to add more information to the last post, but I didn’t have it handy, so we’ll discuss cherries more. The cherry variety that I am used to picking are what are known as Windsor cherries, they’re bright and plump and similar to a bing cherry. The cherries we picked, however, are a Napoleon, which are half yellow, half red. They are also a bit more tart than a Windsor cherry is, which I don’t really care for. I want a sweet cherry that is sweet. So, next time it’s off to wine country for the good cherries.

Now, the day didn’t totally suck, in fact, it was a pretty good day, despite the fact that due to my lack of height, Rob did the majority of the picking. I wasn’t climbing a ladder in an orchard that is on a hillside. Nope, I don’t want to crack my skull, especially with the balance issues I have from time to time. He enjoyed himself, so that is at least one thing we can do together we both enjoy.

After we paid for our pickings, I took him on a back road *cough*wrong turn*cough* trip through Newfield and was able to show him the covered bridge that’s in the town. We then headed into Ithaca with the plans of procuring food and going to Stewart Park. What really happened? We went to lunch at one of the billion Chinese restaurants, then went to Salvation Army to get Rob some jeans and shorts since he can’t seem to stop ripping the pockets off. From there, we finally headed to the park. That is, with a quick stop at Taco Bell for Fruitista Freezes. Yum. The KFC/Taco Bell in the valley doesn’t have them, so I had to take the chance while I could.

We spent quite a bit of time just sitting by the water, watching the sailboats and fish. It was really nice to just sit there and relax and enjoy the beauty of Cayuga Lake. I want to do it more often, but I doubt that there will be any more opportunities this summer now that his vacation is over. We’ll see, since he gets 2 days off every week and not all of them are for doctor’s appointments. Speaking of which, he has one this coming Thursday. Hopefully the doctor will do something about his eye, since it seems that the antibiotics and hot packs don’t do it. I think there is something a bit more serious wrong and I’m about to take him to his PCP if the eye doctor doesn’t do anything.

Anyway, I keep getting sidetracked reading/catching up on other stuff, so that’s the end of this post. More to come later.

Today is update day. What does that mean? This is the post where-in I update about what I’ve been up to. Last I posted anything significant was Monday. Egads. So here we go! The first update of however many I get around to writing.

Tuesday was deemed cherry day. This started out with me finding out that the Orchard that we assumed opened at 8am didn’t open until 10am. Kinda pissed me off because I got up at 7am for no reason. It’s alright though, it gave me time to sleep for another hour then take my pills, eat breakfast and chill for a bit. Around 9:30 we headed off toward Newfield to find the Orchard. We stopped at the Dollar General so I could grab some cheap camera batteries, but they were having issues with registers, so they were closed. My day really wasn’t going all that well, can ya tell? I said screw it and we headed on to the Orchard, spent an hour picking what I thought were fairly unripe cherries (I’ll expound on it later.) in hopes that they would ripen up later. We picked 6lb’s of cherries, which is WELL under the amount that I had planned.

When we went to pick cherries years ago, we always went to Hector, NY. They have huge orchards with nothing but cherries as far as the eye can see. Orchards of nothing but bright, plump, juicy, beautiful sweet cherries. What did we find Tuesday? Small, light colored cherries spread across 2 rows of trees, mixed in amongst a ton of apple trees. I was sorely disappointed when I pulled a cherry off the tree that was supposed to be sweet and wasn’t. It was also supposed to be ripe, but didn’t appear to be. When I got home with them, however, I learned that they were perfectly ripe, they just were not the variety I was used to. I am still disappointed because the whole experience of weaving through rows and rows of trees was not what it was the last time I went.

Ah well, perhaps next year I can go back to Hector and enjoy the beauty of weaving my way through a real orchard.