It's Audience Participation Day!

Also known as Kristin Can't Think of Anything Amusing To Write and Wants To Make Her Readers Do All the Work Day. But I think Audience Participation Day is much catchier. And a hell of a lot shorter.

Okay! So smart people, you tell me: what the hell is this thing hanging from my kitchen cabinet? What in the world could I be making?

Hint: I'm doing it every. single. day. At least as long as the season lasts.

Update: Cheese? Cheese? Please, take another look at the color there. Have you ever seen purple cheese? Although . . . perhaps Bat Cheese would be purple. Thank you for introducing that totally disgusting concept, Jive Turkey.

Ms. Picket LOVES Me!

Do you know Ms. Picket? If you don't, you should go look at her site now. NOW. Go on.

Are you back? Okay then. So you know that Ms. Picket is a very cool, funny mom with excellent taste in music (and a potty mouth) who GAVE ME A PRIZE! A trophy, even. I haven't had a trophy since I was 15 and playing soccer. Check it out, y'all.

It's the Arte y Pico award. You can go look at the Arte y Pico blog for an explanation, if you can read Spanish. Y yo puedo. Mas o menos.

I'm supposed to pass on the blog love to five more people. Following the rules, of course. What a relief--I like rules and directions. And here they are, copied and pasted from Ms. Picket's blog, because I am lazy.

1. Pick five (5) blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also for contributing to the blogging community, no matter what language.

2. Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.

3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her or him the award itself.

4. Award-winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of Arte y Pico blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.

There are a lot of people who do this blogging thing a hell of a lot better than me. They're all listed in my sidebar, so you can look at all of them. And I don't want to pick just five. It makes me nervous to have to pick, because that means I'm excluding as well. But, with the proviso that you should go read all of the sites I link to in my sidebar (GO. NOW.), here are my five picks, in no particular order:

1) Jive Turkey at Jive Turkey. Besides the cool name, Jive Turkey is one of the funniest people I have never met. I'm a Jive Turkey groupie. Go to her site. NOW.

2) Drew Kime at How To Cook Like Your Grandmother. He looks nothing like my grandmother (since he's, well, a HE), and appears to cook better than her, too. Good recipes, good photos, funny guy. Go to his site. NOW.

3) Mindy at Coffee and Queso. Props to anyone who would do a whole post about how messy her kitchen is. With photos. She bakes, too. Aaaand . . . you can go to her site. Yes, now.

4) Meadowlark at Just Wandering Through . . . She thinks hard about her life choices, and she doesn't want to sound like a nutjob. An admirable goal, and one more people should aspire to. Plus, she's going to use her pressure canner first so she can tell me what not to do with mine. So, you know what to do. NOW.

5) Mayberry Magpie at Mayberry Magpie. Love the name, love the content, love the design, love this lady. You can go now. To her site. Go on.

I'm tired now from bossing you all around. So you can go.

In Which I Once Again Demonstrate Total Lameness

Yesterday's story was just a weensy bit long. And I know you agree. So today, less words, more pictures. With a garden theme, because I am lame and like to take pictures of and in my garden.

Potatoes in bloom. This is just one row of seven, God help us. Please, send me your potato recipes. I'm going to need all the help I can get using up the potato harvest.

Hello, little tomato baby. Mama's been waiting for you for a long time. Now hurry up and get ripe so Mama can eat you.

A Portrait of the Gardener as a Young Woman. Dirt on chin? Check. Geeky hat and glasses? Check check. Calluses, sunburn, and sweat? Check check and check.

Yup, like I said, lame.

Big Red and Me: A Hate Story

Yesterday's introduction to Big Red, the pick-up, reminded me of a tale of shame that I thought you might all find amusing. Because I know you like to hear about when I make an ass out of myself, right?

One day in late winter, when the sheep were still eating hay, A. asked me to take Big Red for the day so I could stop at the feed store to pick up more hay. I HATE driving Big Red. I avoid it at all costs. I never really learned to drive a standard until I drove this truck, and I've still only driven it maybe a dozen times. We don't have a good history, Big Red and I. But the sheep needed hay, and A. had to go to work, so I reluctantly agreed.

I reversed in the driveway, got down to the road, pulled out into traffic, and made my merry way towards the feed store, all with no trouble. I was feeling pretty cocky, thinking what a bad-ass I was, driving around in this big truck, shifting gears and listening to country music like a real redneck chick. Snort.

I decided to stop at our mechanic's on the way to the feed store, to see if he could fix the driver's side door so it opened. So I pulled into his parking lot, set the parking brake, and went inside. He fixed the door quickly, and then I got back in the truck, trying to hurry because the mechanic was waiting for me to move the truck so he could pull in another car. I released the parking brake, put the truck in gear, pushed in the clutch, then applied the gas and started easing up on the clutch. And the truck started bucking like a damned saddle bronc. Then it died. This happened four times. The mechanic was sitting there, 20 feet from me, watching this fiasco. And I was getting more and more flustered, which wasn't helping matters.

Eventually, I jerked my way out of the parking lot and managed to get to the feed store. There they told me to bring the truck around to the loading bays on one side, which required reversing and angling the truck in correctly. And once again, we repeat the shameful bucking, the stalling, the whispered cussing on my part, and the open amusement of the feed store owner as he watched this stupid woman try to maneuver a truck that is clearly too much for her. I finally managed to get to the bays, only to have the guy tell me, oh sorry, you'll have to go around the other side, there aren't enough bales here. And I'm thinking, "You have GOT to be kidding me, jackass." But no.

More reversing, more angling, then pulling in between a large horse trailer and a brand-new truck, more stalling and not-quite-hidden amusement at my expense. They loaded the goddamned bales of hay that I had been sent on this hellish errand to fetch. And then. Oh, and then. I had to back out of this area, boxed in by trucks and trailers, with not one, not two, but THREE people standing there watching me. I managed, with more of my trademark bucking and stalling, but I overdid the gas and very nearly took out the sign in the front of the store. Then I drove away while all of them laughed. Openly.

And hey, have I mentioned that the truck bed was full of scrap metal? And the tailgate was broken and couldn't be put up? Yes. The feed store guy had to shove the bales of hay behind the metal, right on the edge of the lowered tailgate. Because you know what would make this whole thing MORE FUN? Worrying about flying hay bales. JESUS CHRIST.

Next I had to go to a friend's house, who also got the great entertainment of watching me try to back up out of his driveway, jerking and stalling and looking, as I had for the previous half-hour, like a complete fool. This time I missed nailing a stop sign by about a foot AND almost landing in the ditch. GO ME.

AND THEN I had to stop in the village, where I stalled in the middle of the road trying to get out of my parking space. Three times.

By the time I got home, I was shaking and swearing, at myself, at the truck, at the sheep, at A. for making me drive this piece of shit. And at all the men that day who had watched me make a complete moron of myself and thought it was funny. I definitely re-enforced some gender stereotypes. I called A. at work to tell him exactly what kind of nightmare he had forced upon me. He laughed at me, too. But at least he apologized for making me do it.

The next day, he came home from work and told me the truck was still not driving right. He asked if I had put the parking brake on the previous day. And I said of course, isn't that how you keep a standard from rolling? Well, he replied, I forgot to tell you (italics mine) that the brake doesn't disengage properly on the truck. So the parking brake was partially engaged the whole time after the mechanic stop.

I felt vindicated, relieved that it wasn't all my fault for being such a complete idiot with a stick shift. But it took me a long time to forgive him. And I haven't driven Big Red since.

Where's Big Red?

Big Red is A.'s pick-up truck. Can you find him in this photo?

Big Red is, clearly, a work truck. Despite being two-wheel drive, he can get in and out of anywhere with the chains A. bought for the back tires. A. drives him all over the property: pasture, front lawn, paddock, wherever. He has no air conditioning, no CD or tape player, no power anything. Hell, the driver's side door doesn't even open. Something that I'm sure I should be concerned about in the event of A. wrecking his truck and needing to exit quickly in the case of a raging fire, but eh. We'll worry about that when it happens.

ANYWAY, Big Red is used and abused on a daily basis. He carries cinder blocks, lake gravel, trash, scrap metal, and, as you can see, entire trees. This is a black walnut tree that we cut down yesterday to make way for the chicken coop we built. (Yes! Chickens to come! And I will post pictures, but don't get attached, because these birds fall in the category of Not Pets. And you know what that means at Blackrock. Mmm, chicken dinner . . .)

I have to admit that when A. first bought Big Red, I thought he (Big Red, not A.) was a huge pain in the ass. We were living in an apartment in the city where we only had one parking space, so the truck was always parked right behind my car, sticking out into the street. But Big Red has proved himself over and over again since we brought him to his natural element in the country. I suppose it's possible to live in the country and not have a pick-up truck, but it would be really hard. Especially if you want to do a lot of projects, like we do. And forget those pretty-boy, short-bed, extended cab pick-ups. They do not do the job here.

Big Red is not pretty, he is not stylish, he is not easy or fun to drive, but the boy can haul. And that, my friends, is what a pick-up is all about.

The View

This view is a lot more peaceful than those harpies screeching away on morning television. In my opinion.

We have a very nice front porch. Okay, so the roof leaks a little and needs re-shingling, and maybe some of the floorboards could be replaced, but let's not quibble over petty problems. You can forget them all when you're sitting there looking out at this.

Not bad, right? You can't really see the lake so much in the summer, what with the gigantic trees on the lawn, but in winter when all the leaves are gone, there's a nice view of the lake and an uninterrupted path for the howling winds to blow snow from the lake directly at the house. That brownish looking tree you see in the center isn't dead; it's a tree called a Copper Beech and it's supposed to be that color. It is also just about the only tree I can actually identify, despite numerous repetitive tutorials by A. on the subject of tree identification.

That little group of three trees to the right is where Mia killed and ate a bunny just last week. And to the left, just outside of the picture, is the driveway. Just below that first tree on the left is where Leda killed and partially ate the woodchuck. It's kind of like a Civil War battlefield--peaceful, and yet filled with the ghosts of the fallen.

There are also tons of fireflies out there now at night. And there are hammocks on the porch, suitable for gentle swaying in the summer breeze. Perhaps you would prefer to focus on that. A guided tour of Blackrock can be a gruesome thing.

P.S. Please note that this is post #100. Can you believe I've been spewing this drivel for over three months now? Yeah, me neither.

Any Volunteers?

Why, yes! We have several volunteer plants in the garden. Volunteer means we didn't plant the things or plan on them, they just appeared on their own. The chervil is always volunteer. I think it was planted last century (slight exaggeration, perhaps), and yet it grows like a weed all over the damn garden every year. There are always some brave little potatoes that survived the fall harvest and poke out their shoots in the spring, only to be ruthlessly exterminated because they're in the middle of the beets. You gotta be tough to be a gardener.

But some volunteer plants get to live on. The volunteer lettuce was much appreciated this year, and was spared by the rototiller. As were the chives. And then there's this monster.

This is our compost heap. I know, it's kind of ghetto. It is yet another sterling example of junk farming. But you see that gigantic plant that appears to be right inside the compost heap? It is indeed right inside the compost heap. That's a volunteer squash plant. Of some kind. We're not sure yet whether it's acorn squash or pumpkin. I'm hoping for the acorn squash, because I like those better. And whatever it is, there's going to be a lot of it, because there's already like 50 blossoms on that thing (perhaps another slight exaggeration).

And on another completely random note, it is clear to me that the majority of my readers do all their blog reading at work, because I don't see a whole lot of traffic here on the weekends. What a bunch of slackers you all are. How do you stay employed? But that's why I'm posting about a volunteer squash plant today. I can be as weird and boring as I want on weekends and know that only a handful of people will be witness to my randomness.