The Good with the Bad

Yesterday was the fifth of May. In case you didn't know. The fifth of May is not just the fifth of May for those of us who look for any excuse to eat guacamole. It's Cinco de Mayo. And unlike the first Cinco de Mayo we celebrated at Blackrock, it was unseasonably warm and sunny yesterday.

A sunny, warm Cinco de Mayo? We know what that means: frozen margaritas for all!

You know how to make good frozen margaritas? Lemme tell you how I make good frozen margaritas. Limeade. Yup, the frozen stuff in a can from the supermarket. Limeade plus triple sec plus tequila plus lots of ice in a blender and that's one delicious margarita.

We didn't have any limeade on hand, but we did have LOTS of limes, so I squeezed and squeezed and squeeeezed some more, until my hands were tired and there was enough lime juice in the blender. Then, instead of making simple syrup, I dumped in the remains of some peach syrup left from thawing frozen peaches.

Turns out the only thing better than frozen margaritas on a sunny Cinco de Mayo evening is peach frozen margaritas on a sunny Cinco de Mayo evening. DAMN THAT'S GOOD.

Then we ate guacamole and salsa and chips and chili and roasted squash, with Mr. Jason as our dinner guest. He used to live in Arizona too, so he gets Cinco de Mayo. Also, he wanted to go fishing on the glassy-calm lake in the canoe with A. and Cubby.

So after dinner, they set out to troll in the canoe. I did a million dishes and then sat on the porch reading for awhile and admiring the astonishing sunset. Around eight, I went down to the beach to wave them in, since it was already past Cubby's bedtime. They were nowhere in sight. And they didn't appear until the sun was down and it was almost dark, WAAAAY past Cubby's bedtime. They had caught a few perch, and just as I was starting to bring Cubby up to the house for bed, Mr. Jason caught a pretty big pickerel from our dock.

That's a good day.

Unfortunately, the good day was followed by a not-good night with Charlie after I got to bed too late myself. And that not-good night was in turn followed by a painfully early morning, with both kids up and cranky at 5:30 a.m.

So I spent today so damn tired I felt woozy. But you know, we all take the good with the bad. And yesterday was good.

I'll take it.

Just When You Thought You Were Safe . . .

Maybe you thought you had seen the last of the Baby on the Ground photos (to say nothing of the Baby in the Flowers series). Maybe you would have, but then we done went and had another baby. And so of course . . .

But really, who could resist?

Weeding and Mucking, Ad Infinitum

Last year's horrendous mess in the garden (it really was horrendous--I still cringe to think about it) is coming back to haunt me in the form of an intimidating number of weeds already trying to establish dominance in my soil.

Bastards.

I refuse to be beaten down by them, however, and have been fighting back now, before they can totally take over and before I have actual harvests to contend with. Now is the time to smack those weeds down.

Or, more often, dig them up. As I did with some truly terrifying grass that was growing in the blackberry patch. All grass has an impressive root system, but this shit was ROOTED. All over the damn place. I had to dig a crater, no lie, about a foot deep to get it out. I don't even know what it is, except that it is surely in league with the devil. Satan Grass? Sounds about right.

I've also been digging up quite a few dock plants and dandelions (and, in the case of the dandelions, eating them, because why not), as well as yanking by hand the evil horse mint. It must be pulled out by hand and carried out of the garden, or else it will re-root. And it's already flowering.

Man, do I hate horse mint.

My other weapon in the epic battle of the weeds is sheep-shit straw. Good thing there's an inexhaustible supply of it right at hand in the barn adjacent to the garden. The wheelbarrow and pitchfork are permanently parked by the barn and whenever I have a few minutes, I fill the wheelbarrow with the noxious, ammonia-heavy straw from the bottom layers and dump it on any weedy areas. If it can (almost) kill my tomatoes, I figure it should be quite effective against the pigweed.

I have learned, however, that there's no point in spreading it after it's dumped. To be of any use, it pretty much has to be the thickness of the pile as dumped out of the wheelbarrow. Any spreading means it gets too thin and the weeds can come up through it.

So I'm weeding and mucking and weeding and mucking, until my shoulders give up or the baby wakes up, whichever comes first.

The war is just beginning, but dammit, I intend to triumph this year. Or at least win some of the skirmishes, which is about all I can hope for.

Bah

I often send a grocery list with A. when he goes into the Small City for court. Why not, right? He's there anyway, unencumbered by small, disruptive children. Whereas I am here, definitely encumbered, and unwilling to drive fifteen miles for milk.

So. List.

Today's list, however, went unfulfilled, because he ended up being in court so much longer than he thought he would be that he just stopped at the gas station on the way home for the milk I had requested. We're pretty much always almost out of milk, so he figured that was the biggest imperative.  I was glad to have the milk, and I said everything else could wait.

I was wrong.

When I rolled my sleeves up (literally) this evening in preparation for doing the day's enormous accumulation of dishes, I remembered that we're out of dish soap. All the way out. Not even a tiny bit in the bottle to be rinsed out with water.

Aw shit.

There was no one home to go to the store to get dish soap, and with two sleeping children upstairs, I could hardly leave the house myself. But surely, I thought, we have something that will work. I mean, it's just soap, right? We have lots of soap! How about . . . this stuff?

"This stuff" was the homemade liquid hand soap I made awhile ago. I have not been too impressed with it since I made it, and I'm not planning on making it again. But I did still have a quarter gallon of it, and it is liquid. So I dumped some into the dishpan, whisked it around with water to dissolve it, and commenced washing.

Since we're always mostly out of hot water by the end of the day, I took the precaution of boiling water in the tea kettle for an extra rinse, just to make sure there was no soap residue on the dishes. It seemed to work for awhile. But the wash water ended up with little floating globules of fat on top. No doubt because we had lamb for dinner, and sheep fat is the most solid, difficult-to-clean fat EVER, but still. Gross.

I guess that meant the fat wasn't on the dishes anyway, but every time I pulled a plate or whatever out of the water to wash it, I was dragging it through this scum of fat. It got rinsed away with the scalding water rinse, but I was still not too happy with that.

I changed the wash water a couple of times, but the fat kept appearing shortly after I started washing, so I gave up after I had cleaned most of the mess up, leaving the plastic things like the salad spinner* for tomorrow when I have proper soap and hotter water. Because plastic is a lot harder than glass to rinse clean of soap residue and grease.

So I wouldn't recommend that soap for hand washing OR dish washing. My public service announcement for the day: Stick to Dawn. I certainly will.

* We had the first salad of the year from the garden today, from the thinnings of the hotbed planting. WHEE!

Multi-tasking

If you're going to do something, you might as well make sure it fulfills many purposes, I figure. Take digging up the weedy corner of garden near the rhubarb, which I did yesterday.

Obviously, I dug up and disposed of the weeds. But I was also doing the following things:

1) Preparing the area for planting lettuce and spinach. Which I did after the digging.

2) Exercising. Better than running on a damn treadmill.

3) Communing with nature. I found myself talking back to the black-capped chickadees: "Hey sweetie sweetie sweetie." That's what they say, you know. So I replied in kind. Not that I would admit to doing such a thing. (Except, uh, I just did.)

4) Serving others. I collected the bigger worms I dug up for A.'s fishing stash. Always thinking of others, that's me.

5) Relaxing. Because both kids were asleep, so there was no monitoring of a destructive child with a shovel or a baby who keeps dropping his chew carrot. That counts as relaxing for me.

6) Taking time for myself. I detest (DETEST) the phrase "me time," but that's what it was. No kids. No talking. No listening and answering questions and reprimanding and explaining and chasing. Just digging.

Of course, there were many things I was NOT getting done in favor of digging in the dirt--boring things like washing dishes or cleaning the bathtub--but we'll just focus on the positives. Look at all I got done in that half hour! I'm a machine.

Once More Unto the Breach

Spring has come! And so have the wretched ants.

Yes, the arrival of warmer weather heralds the arrival of dozens of tiny black ants in the downstairs bathroom. I set out the Death Jelly for them yesterday in there and haven't seen any today.

Unfortunately, the ants are venturing further afield this year. Specifically, into Charlie's room.

I didn't know they were in there until last night when I went to put Charlie to bed. He's having some Issues With Teeth lately (very screamy issues, unfortunately), so I gave in yesterday afternoon and dosed him with some medicine. Which is, of course, acetaminophen dissolved in sugar syrup. I was holding him in my lap in the big chair in his room when I gave him the medicine and not having anywhere else convenient to set the dropper thing after I dosed him, I just set it on the floor next to the chair.

When I retrieved it that night to wash it out, it was covered with tiny ants. GROSS.

I washed all those ants down the drain, and then crawled around the floor, peering closely for any remaining ants, which I crushed with my finger.

I'm all about live and let live, unless you are an insect in my baby's room. In that case, you're dead.

Luckily, the ants usually disappear from the house when it gets truly warm outside, but in the meantime . . . here ants. Have some delicious jelly.

Suckers.

The King Is Dead, Long Live the King

A few weeks ago, the rooster that survived a fox attack disappeared. We figure a hawk probably got him. Or maybe the fox came back for seconds.

Whatever was his undoing, there was no doubt our small flock was rooster-less.

Hens will lay their eggs without a rooster around, obviously, but if there's to be any hope of fertilized eggs for natural reproduction? Yeah. Gotta have that rooster. Plus, roosters kind of keep free-ranging hens in order, herding them around and making sure they all go into the coop at night.

We didn't make any great efforts to secure a rooster immediately, however, as there was no urgent need. Plus, it is a great truth in the chicken world (and really, in any animal world) that there is always a surplus of males. It's not exactly hard to find a rooster someone wants to get rid of.

Sure enough, last week a woman who rides the bus with the MiL mentioned she had four roosters. That's three too many. She got them from another woman who couldn't bear to kill any of them.

We're all about eating our excess roosters, but not everyone is so pragmatic, I suppose. And lucky for us, because that's how we came to be the new home for a pure-bred Welsummer rooster.

The Welsummer is a Dutch breed, which is funny because A.'s family is very, very Dutch (ancestrally speaking, that is). And did you know the Kellogg's rooster is a representation of a Welsummer rooster? I didn't, but I do now.

There is no doubt the new rooster is very striking. Luckily, he seems to just be visually striking, and not literally striking. Rooster spurs are no joke, and there's always the possibility that the reason a rooster is being given away is because he's a mean bastard. I haven't seen any sign of that yet, though, so we can hope we got another good, safe rooster.

And of course, he sure is purty. You know, for a bird.

Look out, ladies; there's a new sheriff in town.