So...whats for dinner?

Bob picked our first quart of black raspberries this afternoon, saying he didn’t want me to risk scratching my right arm & hand on the thorns. He gets dibs on as many as he wants to bring into his office (he promised them some).

I took advantage of the cooler temperatures this weekend to make spaghetti sauce and 4 lbs. of toasted sugar. A portion of the sauce became last night's dinner along with some Italian sausages and fresh thick spaghetti. There is enough left over for lunch today. The toasted sugar is destined for some baked good down the road no doubt. I may even make some ice cream with it. DS and DDIL are coming in this month to celebrate DDIL's and my birthdays. (Hers is today, mine later this month.) She and I have decided that we are cooking for our own birthdays -- lasagna, all from scratch. The toasted sugar should make for a caramel-ly flavored ice cream to go with some kind of cake. Should be fun.

Since Thursday, we have gotten 7 1/2 inches of rain. I am ever so grateful. It was a perfectly slow, steady rain, so no big washouts. In spite of the wet, I managed to dig enough lovely potatoes for a potato/green bean salad today. That will go with the ribs and a tangy coleslaw. The garden has perked up nicely and I even have some tiny peppers coming on. The cucumbers and squash are finally blooming. We're in for a spell of hot weather again this week, so that should help things catch up. The rain made for a 5 hour baseball game yesterday. Yike! A few die hards were still at the stadium. I love baseball, but not me, man! It was hard enough to stick with it on tv.

All of the deer have shown up to eat apples today. And all of the squirrels. Did I mention that one of our foxes was in the yard a week or so ago with a dead squirrel she caught (and partially ate)? I gleefully told her that apple stuffed squirrels were a great delicacy and that she should have all she wanted. The apples are one to two weeks from being ready. I still don't know if we'll get any. The critters have emptied one tree and are working feverishly on the other two.

Sadly, the rain has stopped so people will no doubt be shooting off fireworks in the subdivision tonight (and today too probably.) I wouldn't mind so much if they just did it for an hour or so, but They. Just. Won't. Quit.

Yesterday, our clothes dryer quit heating (hope this is not an epidemic). After some googling and you tubing, we determined that the problem is the thermal fuse -- an easy fix, so tomorrow it's off to the parts shop and trying to convince them not to charge us $30 for a $3 part. Thinking of you Eric!

Happy 4th all y'all!

I just caught up reading posts. I was 3 pages behind. Olivia is adorable. Goodness, she is growing and has already changed from being an infant. Joyce, your pool is lovely. No wonder you're staying home and enjoying the back yard. Luv, glad you're back. Nance, my mother is doing well in the nursing home, too. She just won a Blackout Bingo for the first time.

Love the deer pictures. Apparently we have a mother deer and two fawns making visits in the "back" area of the campground. They ate one of the weekender's blooms off all her potted plants and even grazed on the hostas.

I'll be flying to Louisiana on July 12th and staying 2 weeks to give my youngest sister a break from her daily visits to the nursing home. My sister is very pleased with the way my mother is making the transition to resident.

We participated in a 4th of July boat parade around the lake today at 11 am. All the boats had flags and decorations. There were about 22 boats. It was quite a procession.

DH and I have been going out on the lake fishing. He has learned to operate the trolling motor. It's lovely out on the lake with loons surfacing here and there and occasionally eagles soar overhead. Yesterday I caught a keeper size walleye. We put it in the live well in the boat and brought it back to the dock. But it was so pretty and energetic that I opted to release it back into the water rather than harvest the fillets.

Most of my cooking has been on the grill. I'm learning to do the aluminum foil packet technique. Last night I sliced up potatoes, sprinkled the slices with seasoning and added pats of butter and cooked in a foil packet. Put shredded cheese on at the last minute. Yum. Delicious with a ribeye.

Tonight I'm roasting skin on bone in chicken thighs in an iron skillet, using the grill as an oven. The side will be asparagus cooked in a foil packet.

Things are going well here at the resort. DH is enjoying being busy with various duties. His brother is arriving on Wed. for a brief visit.

So that's about it from Pine Hollow Resort in northern MN.

Glad to read that you are doing well, Carole....and that your mother is adapting nicely. She will no doubt be so happy to see you! I have loon envy, since we have just a few on our lake. They are so beautiful and love hearingtheir haunting calls in the evening.

Carole - thanks for checking in. I love foil "bag" cooking, but have done more on campfires than back yard grills. Hope you have a great time with your Mother.

Nance - the nursing baby deer are delightful.

Carol glad that you are doing well. I am at camp and am still waiting to cook foil dinners over the camp fire

Susan So much fun to meet new people!

Sandy, I love bluefish when I am home in Rhode Island. I'm missing the weekly farmer's market and my fish guy. I have tried everything from whitefish, wreck fish, skate,you name it. I'm hoping for some sea robins when I get back. We try to eat the fish who eat the endangered fish.

I love the deer pic

Here I am at camp. So as far as dinner, they don't serve fish for some reason, so there is a salad bar at lunch and dinner and I eat lettuce, tomatoes, mushrooms, beets, hard boiled eggs, sometimes tuna, tofu, pickles, olives, hummus mandarin oranges, croutons, cottage cheese, shredded cheese, apple sauce, crinkly Asian topping things from the 60s, and 10 other things which I can't remember right now.

Sometimes there is mac and cheese or spaghetti

For breakfast either yogurt or oatmeal with brown sugar cinnamon, or raisins

And lots of coffee in the am There are 600 campers here!

Tomorrow I take the swim test so that I can swim and do all the kayaking and water sports.

I bought red Keds, as our camp colors are red and white. Red Keds! How fun.

I got the University job for the Fall and will have a 10 day break after camp and before starting.

Gonzo cat is loving it here

It is very beautiful here

Thank you Internet Gods

I read all your posts and thought about each of them. It is hard to answer with the internet, and my hours are spread out so I sleep in between clinic.

The campers are so cute

Happy 4th everyone

That cracks me up Special I don't think I've ever lived in a state with legal fireworks except a lake house in Alabama. Right at the state line there was a huge billboard FIREWORKS!! And since our county was dry, right over the line of the county Wedowee was in, was a beer store, but you could only buy warm beer. Go figure.

Celery, chick peas, pinto beans, radishes, shredded carrots, six different kinds of dressing.....

Bedo, so good to hear from you, sounds like you're enjoying summer camp and it's a blast! Bet it's so much fun.

Yesterday was the quietest 4th we've ever experienced here. The only fireworks we heard were from the display in the neighboring town. Don't know why, but I hope it's a trend. When our dogs were alive they would be stuck to me like glue for the duration. We tried to keep the tv loud and to distract them as much as possible but it was hard on them.

We got the part for the dryer (for a whopping $20). We decided ahead of time that that was the most we were willing to pay locally for the convenience of getting it fixed today. They must have read our minds but the dryer is fixed. Yay! I love You Tube!

Got some more sweet corn today that's destined for the freezer. We didn't get any last year because of the poor crop due to weather. I'm trying to make up for it this year by eating as many ears as possible.

Dinner tonight is grilled ham and pineapple steaks with baby Yukon gold potatoes and green beans from the garden.

Hi Minus!

You don't sound wimpy at all. I only exercise since I have to walk every place and kayaking is fun. 30 minutes is a long time on the treadmill!

I will stay in Rhode Island this Fall and for at least a year, and the University is about 2 miles from my house. I'm moving out of the cabin to a bigger old house which I love.

Have to take the swim test. 2 laps crawl, 2 "other" then 2 laps crawl, 5 minutes treading water and then floating.

The kids are hysterical there are 2 other "blonds" in the clinic, one 32, one 39 and me, lots older. They can't tell us apart as over 30 =OLD PERSON and we all look alike apparently.

When I grew up in NYC, no fireworks or firecrackers were legal for civilian use, except for licensed professional pyrotechnicians hired (with permits) for public displays. Even the sparklers sometimes put on birthday cakes by restaurants were illegal--they burn at >1000F. We were able to use only those little spring-loaded metal spark-generators: pushing the plunger repeatedly made a metal disk fitted with clear red and blue windows spin as flint & steel struck each other. They were available at toy stores as well as the corner “candy store"/newsstand/soda fountains that also sold yo-yos, tops, Spaldeens and Fli-Back rubber-ball-and-paddle toys. Made for some very sore thumbs and occasional pinched fingers, but no real injuries. When I was a teenager, there was an empty lot down my block (I used to cut across it as a shortcut to my high school). Until condos were built on it, our precinct cops would use it to set off ashcans, M-80s, cherry bombs and Roman candles on the Fourth while we stood a safe distance away behind sawhorses and crime-scene tape.

In Seattle, where we moved after our wedding day and college, “safe & sane" fireworks were seasonally sold in pop-up supermarket parking lot kiosks run by Kiwanis, Lions, Rotary, etc.. What made them “safe & sane" was that they had no projectiles and produced no explosions--thus no Roman candles, bottle rockets nor even firecrackers. Just sparklers, “fountains" and Piccolo Petes that just made whistling noises and stayed put. But 45 miles to the southwest was the Puyallup Indian Reservation--where, as sovereign Native American territory, sold cigarettes and liquor tax-free, and real firecrackers & fireworks were sold without regulations. For awhile, the WA State Patrol tried to stop non-Native Americans as they left the reservation and inspect their cars for contraband, but it was too costly and time-consuming. People would use the projectiles and firecrackers bought there to combine with the legal stuff and thus create “unsafe and insane" fireworks. One year, a friend gave me some of those little fingerling firecrackers at the beach. I lit it and tossed it......overhand. (I'd never before held, much less lit, a firecracker). It exploded in the air mid-arc, just above and about six inches from my right ear. My hair was singed, I had a small cut requiring a Steri-Strip, and first deafness and then extreme sensitivity to high frequencies in that ear for at least a week or two. Since then, I've tried to steer clear of firecrackers--not always easy as we drove home from Green Lake on Bicentennial Night (when drunks would throw firecrackers in the path of or even beneath cars), or years later as we walked back from SF's Chinatown during Chinese New Year when we had to dodge and weave around them all over the sidewalks.

Minus I want what you had. All of it. I don't remember snakes but I remember little black BB things, individually wrapped in paper that you threw on the ground and they made a loud noise. That screwdriver sounds good. I almost never drink hard alcohol, but now I'm wondering if a Bloody Mary with fresh tomatoes would be possible when I get back home?

Instead for lunch I had the usual salad with all the other veggies and I remembered cauliflower, broccoli, red and green pepper.

We had a bar-b-que tonight and I had a veggie burger, corn on the cob and watermelon

I went to Hudson NY yesterday with another staff member. I was a BIG DAY for us. We went to Walmart and I bought peel and stick wall decals for my cabin. Then we went to Copake and had salmon burgers with wasabi sauce. It was the best salmon sandwich I have ever had

This might not sound very exciting to you but it's all relative.

I am drawing faces on the bandages. To amuse myself and the campers

Tomorrow I'm going to Bash Bish Falls, the biggest waterfall in Ma state. I'm going to stick my feet in the water, which is so clear that you can see straight to the bottom, and commune with nature.

Bedo, camp sounds wonderful! I remember those little paper-BB thingies from when we first visited London in 1991 with Gordy. We were at a playground in Hyde Park, and he and a couple of diplomats’ kids (with nannies supervising) had a grand time throwing them onto the ground. We didn’t have those in Brooklyn in the ‘50s and ‘60s--we had to resort to taking strips of cap-gun refill paper and hitting & scraping the gunpowder-filled dots with rocks until they went “bang.” More than a few kids got singed fingernails from doing that.

One of Bob’s patients is the Operations Manager for U.S. Cellular Field, in the White Sox front office. So he treated us to a party tonight in his skybox. We had a parking pass, but Bob had to go there directly from work, so I took the CTA train. (Quite pleasant--we live far north and the train was empty when I boarded, though SRO and then some by the time we reached the stadium station). There were lots of low-carb options in the skybox: arugula salad, insalata caprese, salumi, cheeses, buffalo pulled chicken breast, oil & vinegar slaw, grilled asparagus & prime rib. (Also had a bunless hot dog). For dessert I helped myself to some of the fresh fruit platter while everyone lined up out in the corridor for the dessert cart. But in walked Bob with a giant hunk of red velvet cake and two scoops of ice cream, with blackberries & strawberries. Alas, I did give in and have a sliver of that cake. Oh, and........SOX WIN! SOX WIN! (5-0, over the Yankees). Complete with fireworks at the end.

Happy dance for you Minus!

Hello all, it's been too long to try and catch up with all past posts. I did read a few pages and see lots of familiar names and will be catching up soon.

Wanted to say hello and see how everyone is. I am doing well. Kids and work keeping me busy. I finally accumulated some time and am home on vacation...trying to catch up on house things that need doing. Have been working on house slowly mostly weekends and upstairs is 95% done. Now comes downstairs.

Getting ready to start dinner soon. Penne pasta with turkey meatballs in tomato, garlic and basil sauce. Garlic bread and salad. Bought some cherries for dessert, if I don't finish them first.

Vivian

Phew!!! Minus that is great! I am going to admit that I had not allowed myself to think the results would be otherwise, but it is nice to have this affirmed by someone with an MD at the end of their name!

Whoohoooo! *susan*