catching up

Well, it's wet outside, too wet to do much of anything. Also, by evening I am too tired to sum up the day so I let it slide into and endless cycle. I have another puzzle done, but I don't feel like getting the pictures off the camera so it will get its own post later.

I did some much needed cleaning lat week while waiting for things to dry out - which they never really did. The smaller Air Conditioner blew a fuse last week, at least it did it while it was in the 80's rather than waiting until it was 101+ like the big one did last time. ;-)

They keep saying it's going to dry out and stop raining, but it just keeps coming down. We had .35 inches on Sunday and then another .8 inches on Monday. It rained most of Monday morning, which I didn't much care about since I was stuck at the dentist getting all the prep work done for the crown for the tooth I cracked. The mosquitoes were awful yesterday, but a little less so today. It's still very wet, we had a very heavy dew last night.

I made my first batch of feta cheese yesterday. Today I will make another batch with lipase, as yesterday's was without. Then I will compare in a few days. I never liked store-bought feta, but I have found that cheese made at home tastes different than store bought. It's probably healthier too, while researching rennet I found out a lot of the commercial rennet is GMO. Yet another reason to make your own. It's going to be worth it to buy my own cream separator before long. I'll need it to make skim milk cheeses.

The goats can't even begin to keep up with the weeds and grass with all this rain, so I guess I am going to have to mow. I have decided to try cutting some of the weeds for hay. They ate them last winter when they were frost killed, you'd think they'd eat them if I dried them intentionally. I'll mow the grass for bedding, which they will also eat as hay whether that is my intent or not. ;-) Of course, all this assumes it dried off enough to work with stuff. It's wet, then it's too hot to do anything. *bleah*

I also need to work on freezing some lambsquarters and amaranth catch up laundry and all kinds of other stuff, none of which i want to do when it's this wet. *sigh*

More puzzles

While it didn't rain most of Sunday (the 4th) with somewhere around 9 inches of rain total this week things were pretty damp, so we stayed in and watched tv and did puzzles. The square one one is Dancing Skeletons by Kemon Sermos. It's 500 pieces.

The round one is Halloween Night by Bob Pettes, also 500 pieces. That's the last 500 piece one until I buy more. Next up is a 750 piece one.

Spooked

Saturday's puzzle was Spooked by Bonnie White. It's a 500 piece puzzle.

Rain, Rain, Rain

*Sigh* Last time I checked the rain gauge it was at 4.3". That was from yesterday and today, but that doesn't count the couple of inches we got earlier in the week. The goats hate it. I'm not real good with lots of clouds for a real long time, either, but I admit it's lots easier to take when it's warm rather than cold.

I got my rennet and cheese press yesterday. Finally broke down and ordered them. Rennet just can't be had locally except junket rennet which I don't approve of, not sure what's up with the rennet shortage. I guess I picked about the best time to order, this about the coolest weather we've had in over a month.

Finally finished the first 500 piece puzzle, but the light is too awful to take a picture right now. Will try to get one tomorrow. Not much going on with all the rain. I'm about tired of it.

Lambsquarters and beef sauce

I'm not sure where people get these ideas. This is adapted from another recipe that calls it lambsquarters helper.

My version:

3 cups steamed lambsquarters leaves (roughly 8 cups uncooked)
1/2 cup diced onion
2Tbs butter
1 lb ground beef
1/3 cup flour in enough water to make a thick paste
2 cups milk
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp Ms Dash bold or any other spices you want.

Enough cooked pasta for 4 servings.

Saute onion and garlic in butter.
Brown ground beef in heavy 3 quart or 1 gallon pot and drain.
Add onion and garlic to ground beef and stir.
Make flour and water into paste and stir into beef and onion, add milk and stir well. Add salt to taste. Add any other spices you want because this baby is bland without them.

Serve over pasta.

Goodbye Blue

The cat was in renal failure big time. He did not look happy this morning, so we made him an appointment for this afternoon. He was "Off the charts" in terms of renal failure and also anemic. While he ate fairly well last night, it all came up a couple of hours later and was not terribly interested in food today. It would have been torturing him to bring him home and let him suffer.

I will miss him.

This has been a completely awful year for losing cats. Blue makes 5. I know I need fewer cats, but getting there is just no fun. It feels wrong when the young ones die way before the older ones. We've only lost one old old one this year, although Pink Nose was not precisely young.

The year all of the younger ones were born was the year someone did something in the neighborhood with poison or something and over half the kittens that were born were born dead or dying with their organs exposed. Of course, there were tons of strays around, too. I could never catch them all and have them fixed and it seemed like for every mother cat I did manage to catch and get spayed there were 3 more that appeared out of nowhere. That year was so bad that mother cats pooled their surviving kittens and you'd see 3 momma cats nursing 4 kittens in shifts and the kittens were from all the mothers together. I know they were inbred and immune challenged and probably poisoned with something like DDT, but it still hurts to lose them. Moving out to the country has taken me out of the never-ending kitten factory loop, which I needed both financially and mentally. Blue was like uber kitten and his mother abandoned him at 2-3 days old. He was 2 or 3 times the size of any other kitten I saw at that time so I thought he was retarded because I thought he was a week or two older than he was. He was a real sweet boy, even if he wasn't the prettiest cat.