What the Heck?

I was only gone a week. When I left town, it was still hot and summery. A week later we’re in full-blown fall. Even on hot days, there is a chill dryness in the wind that reminds me hard frosts will soon be here.

Unlike other years, there will be no bulb planting this fall. There’s simply been too much happening around these parts that has put me woefully behind on many critical personal and professional areas. I’ll be doing good to make room in my schedule for leaf raking. And frankly, I may use the “wait until they blow into the neighbor’s yard” approach this year. They pay people to remove their leaves, so it’s not like I’m making their weekends harder than they need to be, right?

The past month has been a mixed bag of successes and failures and/or frustrations. Fortunately the successes have outnumbered the rest, but only by a hair.

A week before we left, I finally attributed the cause of our shower door sticking to the fact that the frame was coming completely apart at the seams. The surprise wasn’t that this had happened, but that we discovered it when two people were at home to fix the problem, and before the glass fell away creating a pathway of death between the naked person and the exit. We tried to fix it with the door in-place, but it turned out to be a much bigger problem, so the fix involved saw horses and a complete removal and dismantling of the door so we could replace two screws that had sheared off. Yay Michael for being lead mechanic on this one!



Did you know I was a plumber? Neither did I, but I did manage to successfully fix a dripping faucet even though all the hardware stores in two towns were out of the specific part I thought I needed. Hmmm... Maybe my tightening it when I re-assembled it will turn out to be a permanent fix. Or maybe the faucet is a ticking (or dripping) time bomb. We shall see. But until then and for the last three weeks it hasn’t dripped a drop. Success!



Speaking of time bombs, I’ve known since we bought this place that we were operating on borrowed time with the built-in microwave. Chunks were missing out of the handle, and I discovered that it was being held to the door with sheet rock screws and joint compound. A few nights ago, while thawing our dinner, the handle came completely off in my hand. Add “shop for new microwave” to our task list for the next day, and “schedule installment” for a day not too distant in the future, I hope. (The $$ I saved fixing the faucet myself proved to be a nice off-set to the price of the microwave, too!)



I stopped at some very cool stores during our multi-state venture, and could have done way more damage if a) my budget had allowed and b) if I already owned the kitchen of my dreams so I had a safe place to store and/or display things. I still bought a few things that are too big to fit anywhere, but at least they are metal and therefore fairly unbreakable.

This is my haul from the Dutchman’s Store in Cantrill, Iowa:



You’ll note a brand-new large cast iron skillet that I bought for the sole purpose of making biscuits and gravy. This Sunday is my next attempt when I’ll be trying out my Grandmother’s recipe for buttermilk biscuits straight from her old recipe file (in foreground of photo). You may note that it leaves off many of the criticals, like time and temperature. Gotta love it!

Also shown is a staple to the turn of the century Midwestern housewife: a grease cup. I’ll get use out of this every time I make bierocks. The massive metal bowl will be used for making bread. There’s real salt, straight from a mine with no purification, the skinniest elbow macaroni I’ve ever seen, and a bag of cheddar cheese powder to make my favorite popcorn.

I was extremely successful stocking the larder in Oklahoma, too. We stopped at Lovera’s Italian Market in Krebs.



There I picked up caciocavera cheese, aged caciocavera cheese, glop (parmasan and asiago cheeses blended in olive oil), smoked Italian sausage, Italian sausage with tomato basil...



a rosemary dipping oil, Fusilli bucati macaroni, lime tree honey, Tarallini with fennel, and various rice mixes and mints.



I could have gone a lot crazier there, but I can always order more by mail later. Lovera’s makes the caciocavera cheeses in-house.

As much as I’m trying to avoid buying new stock for the lawn and garden (both because of $$ and time), I couldn’t avoid replacing this arborvitae that we’d originally bought in June.



Yes. Massively dead. And as big as it was, it didn’t come cheap. Fortunately it did come with a warranty, so a section of last Sunday was spent making a return trip to the nursery where I a) had to endure a lecture about the proper care of my new plants (in my defense, it’s been a really really crappy year, and we left on a week-long business trip just as the hottest, driest week hit our area so no one was home to ensure it was properly watered), and b) lectured back about the fact that the original plant had two leaders which is a no-no-no for any good nursery, and c) learned how this plant (when alive) can be used to do a traditional Indian spiritual cleansing. After the nurseryman (who is in fact, a Native American) heard just a tiny fraction of what this year has been for us, he seemed to think point c was something we should really consider. He might be right.

Next post: an actual finished object fit for a bride.