Dwindling Summer

I don't have much summer left. This is actually my last week of summer at home. I technically have this week, the next, and the next. Next week though, we will be in Spain. And the week after that I will be working in my classroom. So this week is the last chance to be lazy at home.

Kalyn finishes up this week in Spain. She spent last weekend in Madrid visiting some museums that she doesn't want to have to drag the rest of us through when we come back to Madrid for a couple days before we leave Spain.

She actually sent me pictures of her in front of each museum she visited. She's a museum geek.

We will fly into Madrid and take a bus to Salamanca to meet up with her. She will have moved out of her dorm earlier that day and we will meet at our hotel. We'll visit Salamanca, Segovia, Seville, Cadiz, Cordoba, and Madrid while we are there. Very exciting.

So this week I am taking care of some of the garden produce. I have been making sauerkraut in a fermentation crock for the past 4 weeks, and yesterday I finally opened it up and ladled the sauerkraut into mason jars to keep in the fridge. It was perfect!

I use Alton Brown's recipe. It calls for juniper berries, and I pick them right from the trees in our yard.www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sauerkraut-recipe-1942351 

I grow my own cabbages, you know. This photo is from a couple years ago when my cabbages were just beautiful. I always said I would grow them just to look at them in the garden. They didn't look that great this year. None of my garden looks great this year. You can tell from this picture that my garden is never weed free. I got pieces of carpet last year to put between the rows to help keep the weeds from getting too out of control. This year the carpet is a little ragged, and the weeds have just kind of popped up through the pieces. Now, I'm not a perfectionist. I think when the plants are well established and doing fine, a few weeds aren't going to hurt anything, they just don't look pleasing. This year though, I have decided that I have too much of a life outside gardening to worry myself too much about weeds. I just wander through the jungle that's growing out there and try to find the tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers that are growing amidst the chaos. (maybe it's not that bad)

Let me tell you about the book I am trying to read. My mom knew I was struggling to find something to read and wanted to help. So, way back in June sometime, she checked out 4 older books from the library that she thought I might be interested in. I think she's right about them. I only picked up one and liked it. It's just a fiction story about a southern woman's life, nothing heavy. I read a few chapters. All the books were due back at the library while I was in Colorado and I was still working on the one, so she renewed them. Then they were due back again, so I took the other three back and checked out the one that I had started but hadn't finished. So....were talking like 4 weeks or so I've been reading this book. A couple pages a day, probably. I am not quite half way through the 315 pages of the book.  I am really pathetic. I noticed when I was in Colorado that everyone I was with settled in with a book for an hour or so before going to bed. I settled down with my laptop. I have a short attention span. I am always teasing Alina about her short attention span and I have no right to do that, what so ever. My new approach is dedicating about an hour to reading every day. I don't know that right before bed is going to work for me, I know that is what most people do. We will see.

Those little get aways!

Note: This post contains some poor quality photos of scrapbook pages from dozens of scrapbooks lovingly put together in DesMoines, Iowa annually on weekend trips just like the ones I refer to in this post!

Troy and I went to Tucson, Arizona after Christmas one year when Kalyn was little with David and Lisa.

This post is about what makes me happy.

I've had good fortune in life and I'm grateful. I can't take credit for most of the circumstances that have landed me in a pretty happy spot at this point in life, but I am responsible for a portion of the development of my own happiness over the years. I learned quite early in my adult life the importance of nourishing my own soul before I try to take care of others. And I do that. I whole heartedly agree with that wise, anonymous person who is quoted to have said "If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." It makes perfect sense to me. Who's job is it to take care of the care giver? Answer: the care giver (herself)!

 As I write this, I am sitting in a truck in a hayfield while my husband is out on the tractor cutting hay. I'm here so that he can have his truck available for tools if he needs them (and he has) and also to be available to run to get fuel if he needs it (which he has). Earlier today I made two trips to a town several miles away from our home so that my daughter could hang out and swim with a long distance friend. Plenty of my life is spent taking care of those I love. But I know how to balance taking care of them with taking care of me.

I like to go places. Home is where my stuff is, it's where I sleep and where I cook. I like being at home, but I don't have the attachment to my home that I know some people do. I could get rid of everything in my home and still be happy. (Except my scrapbooks)

I am not a wealthy person, but if I was, I imagine I would blow all of my money on experiences. And I imagine this because I currently live paycheck to paycheck.....and I blow all of my money on experiences. Going places, taking trips with my husband, my family, my friends. On a regular basis. As in, there is always a trip in the process of being planned. A couple weeks ago I was on a trip in Colorado, planning my next trip to Spain. This is what makes me happy.

It mostly hasn't been big trips, it's mostly been weekend get aways. Many with Troy, several camping trips with the kids, a lot of little trips with the teachers that I work with. I got out my scrapbooks to find some pictures of weekend get aways over the years and there are just so many of them! I am just showing you some scrapbook pages of a few, to get an idea of what kind of things I think are fun to go off and do.

This was a trip down to a beautiful cabin in Arkansas with teacher friends where we hiked, played games in the cabin at night, rode horses. We tried to canoe the local river but the rental place owner wouldn't let us on the water that day because it was so high and we didn't seem experienced enough. Smart guy, seriously, what were we thinking?

To the beach with the kids and my sister

To Branson with friends

To the Stanley Hotel with friends

To New York with Susan, Kalyn and Emily

This was a fun weekend trip to Hannibal, Missouri with teacher friends. We did a riverboat dinner and stayed in a charming Victorian era bed and breakfast Leah had a groupon for. The next morning over breakfast, the owner told us a long, creepy story about how the house is possessed with an evil spirit. At first they thought it was a lovely little girl, but now they know better, and he believes it is responsible for him cutting off his own fingers with a saw on Halloween night while he was working in the basement. Yeah.........over breakfast.

To Utah with Kalyn and friends

Here is a bigger trip with Carrie, to Scotland. We had hiked down a cliff on the Isle of Skye to the beach and might have had tea and biscuits down there.

And we took a dip in Loch Ness. In our clothes, of course.

My family remembers a time that I left my barely potty trained almost 3 year old behind to take a short trip to explore Scotland with my friend Carrie. Troy had to spend a night coaching our 10 year old daughter's softball team with the barely potty trained almost 3 year old on his hip because she wouldn't let him put her down. Guilty feelings on my end? Mmm....not so much. It was such an amazing trip that I took him back to do the same tour with me two years later.

Here we are!

 He gets my need to go places....which helps. I returned home from one of these week long trips last week. He was grateful when I returned home and affirmed to me that life is a little bit harder when I am not there. That's kind of a good feeling, hearing that.

This trip was what has become an annual summer trip to Colorado with some of my teacher friends, using my sister's house as a base of operations.  It was an incredibly fun time, as always, with little memories and stories to tell. Like how the house alarm went off at 4:30 in the morning because of a faulty smoke detector. (YES, DesMoines friends, another after hours fire alarm incident! Not because of bacon wrapped chicken this time.) And the firemen showed up, in the big red truck, in full gear, prepared to protect us from whatever danger.....fire, intruders, bears....old smoke detectors.....
And we felt bad because we were in our nightgowns, not dressed decently enough to feel comfortable  even to offer to make coffee or something to thank these fine gentlemen for their trouble. I think our shame was apparent through our nervous giggling.

Or when one of us accidentally left a size GIGANTIC black underwire bra in the bed of a truck that belonged to one of our group member's brother in law, who graciously transported us to and from one of our hikes. The puzzled look on his face as he brought the bra over to us while we packed up our car was priceless.

At this stage in our lives, these stories are what we live for!

fail

I talked about summer goals. I made reading the book Catch 22 one of them. I failed. It was due back to the library on June 21 and I decided I would give myself until that date to determine if I would finish it or not, and I determined that I would not. So back it went.

Over 400 pages

I talked to my mom, who I consider to be a model reader, and she said she no longer forces herself to finish books. It's not worth it. She wants only to read for pleasure nowadays.

And I was forcing it. I found myself spacing out and going back to reread parts, and spacing out again. I think I have an attention problem. I know it's probably like running, you have to train. Just because I admire people who run marathons doesn't mean I can just go out and do it without training. And this is seriously kind of a marathon book.

I wanted to read it because I accidentally found out one day that it was considered one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And the phrase "catch 22", referring to no-win situations, made it's way into the English language from this book. I was interested in knowing more, and I do know more now. Because I cheated, of course. I found notes summarizing every chapter of the book online and I read those. Much faster way of learning. It's actually what I used to do in high school and college if I needed to read a big book.

Wanting not to cheat this time though, I tried learning a bit about speed reading. I know that I am too detail oriented and I fixate while reading. I have actually turned back a few pages to reread details of what a character was wearing at times. I need a good visual of what is going on for the story to work in my head. The speed reading methods I looked at all said not to concern yourself with comprehension at all. And I tried the methods and I comprehended nothing when I did.

I tried to pick and choose what parts I was going to read. Skimmed over parts, trying to pick out what is probably important. I read someone's review of the book, who said chapter 18, The soldier who saw everything twice, was an important chapter. So I read it. Skipped a whole lot of other chapters.

If I were on Jeopardy today, and the book came up as a category, I might be able to get some of those. Which was what I was interested in in the first place. Because I read a whole bunch of reviews and analysis of the book. But don't let my knowledge of anything ever fool you. Chances are I didn't come by it honestly. I'm about half full of crap.

However, the quest to find books that I like to read is still on.

Class of 1987

This year I have been out of high school for 30 years. I had the opportunity to meet with some of my classmates from the class of 1987 last weekend at a fellow classmate's house. It was Girard's reunion weekend and this was a casual get together. But another fellow classmate brought his band, so it was a great casual get together with great music! Why is it so fun to visit with people from your past?

There really is something to the feeling you have around the people that you've known the longest. In the case of a high school reunion, it doesn't matter after 30 years how well you knew each other back then, you have ONE thing in common that gives you mutual interest in seeing each other happy, healthy, and doing well: you started out in the same place together. We all launched our adult lives from the same place. It really is a family of sort.

I didn't get any pictures, myself, but someone took this one of a few of us when we were looking at our senior yearbook. There were 79 of us in the class of 1987. We have only lost a couple in the past 30 years, so that is a pretty good thing!

Troy and I started dating the same year I graduated. Again, 30 years ago. 

We were baby adults, that's how I look at it today. I feel like that gives our marriage an advantage in the "will it last?" department. Why? 

Well, have you ever said to someone "I am really surprised the two of you are such good friends, you don't seem to have anything in common." And they responded with "Yeah, well, we were raised together, so....."

That's it. That's often all it takes to form a really strong bond. 

Sometimes Troy will start to tell me a story about when he was young, which I have already heard, of course. And I will remind him that we have lived MOST of our 50 year and 48 year lives together and I have had 30 years to hear the stories about the first 20 years.

When you've known somebody for that long, grown up with them in a sense, they get a free pass on a lot of aggravation you don't put up with from your more recently formed relationships. It's just the way it is. There is an investment there that you don't walk away from.

The older you get, the more important relationships become. If you get a chance to visit with someone who knew you back when, don't pass it up. Never let the notion that you won't have much in common set in. You already have enough in common to give you a warm, fuzzy feeling when you get to talking, guaranteed!

I'm not an angry person

I do get angry, everyone does.

But I know people....perhaps even live with some.....who run with that anger when they feel it. They explode, throw fits, yell. My personality doesn't deal with anger that way. I don't really want anything to do with anger. My response to it, when I feel it, is to find a positive way to channel it. And I usually do a pretty good job. I realize that I am in control of how I react to things that happen, even when those things are out of my control. I think about what I can do differently to prevent things from happening in a particular way that causes me anger.

I find silver linings in grey clouds.

So you think I'm bragging about myself, but I'm not. Because I realized something about myself today that isn't very pretty. I do let my mind go to dark places. I have very negative thoughts while I am push mowing.

It takes me about 45 minutes to push mow my lawn, but I have to do it with a PUSH MOWER and I hate it. I see people smiling and waving on riding mowers and my mind sarcastically says "Good for you!"

I feel guilty about resenting this activity because it's an outside activity, it's good for me, my legs still work, my heart pumps just fine. And I'm off from work every week day in the summer to do it! I should be grateful that I am physically able to do it and have plenty of time for it.

But I just can't help myself from feeling sorry for myself. As I'm pushing the mower with one hand, and pushing back a tree branch with the other so I can get underneath it... and then have to let go so that I can brush away the worm or caterpillar or whatever it was that fell out of the tree and landed behind my ear.... which is dripping with sweat, I let myself rant silently about everything I'm not enjoying about my life right now. And as I'm pushing that mower down into the steep ditch and pulling it back up about 20 times along the west edge of our property, trying to keep my balance and wiping my brow with my shirt sleeve after every heave up the hill, I go over all the conversations I've had with people in the past week that I felt could have gone better. What I should have said to someone, why I feel like I wasn't treated fairly in some situation, why haven't I heard from some person in a while? Why do I have so many problems? All the negativity just comes out. 

I realized today that it's all angry feelings throughout the whole time I'm mowing. And then when I'm finished, I'm proud of myself. And I take a shower and I feel like I've accomplished something. 

Maybe it's kind of like therapy.

Maybe it is a good thing.

And also, I realized this today, because I think I may be guilty of taking positive people for granted in my life.  Maybe when you think about someone you haven't talked to in a while but you think everything is good with them because they are pretty good natured.....it's possible that they are out angrily mowing their lawn and wondering if you still care about them. It's something to think about!

Where does fried chicken come from?

If anything about this post sounds like it was written by a person who didn't grow up around chickens, it's because it was. At least my mom knew how to cut up a whole chicken that she bought at the store, I did not even know how to do that most of my adult life.

My kitchen and farm skills have improved over recent years, though. I have come to appreciate very much growing or raising your own food, and these days I participate in raising chickens of our own and butchering them when it's time. It is time again for the butchering, and my mother-in-law, Helen, and I started yesterday.

This is how the yearly process goes: Troy, his mom, and his brother James pick out chickens that they want to order from a catalog in the spring and the baby chicks are delivered in a box to a local post office for us to pick up. We keep them in a stock tank up at Troy's shop with lights on them to keep them warm. We feed and water them there for a while, until they are big enough to keep in a pen at the farm, it only takes a couple weeks.

The kind of chicken that we raise to butcher are called Cornish Crosses and they grow big quickly. These we ordered in April, and it is June now, so they were ready in two months' time.

They eat and drink a lot, they are just little growth machines. And they are cute, Alina takes pictures of them and wants to name them when we go to feed them and refresh their water. But once they stop looking like fluffy little chicks and they are taken to the farm with all the other chickens, names are forgotten and feeding and watering them is just an evening chore.

Now, I don't think anything that I am posting is gross, though I know there are varying levels of squeamishness in people. I have heard people say that simply handling raw meat from the package from the grocery store makes them a little queazy, and if that is the case, then this process is too much for you. I have also heard people say that they prefer to have no knowledge of how the meat gets to their plate, which I just don't relate to.

I want to be actively involved in how the meat I eat is raised. Is that weird?

I will name this one "Fluffy"

Helen says that her mom would go out and butcher and process 15 chickens in a day, all by herself. She remembers having a friend over one time and her mom asking them what they would like for lunch. When they answered "Fried Chicken", she went out, killed a chicken, cleaned it, and fried it up for them.

Helen and I decided six chickens is enough in a morning, so we did six yesterday morning and six more this morning. We will need to get together three more mornings to finish up. Troy is usually involved in this process, and he is extremely efficient in catching the chickens, killing them, and cutting them up. But he is working during the day, and right now in some stage of the haying process, along with other farm duties. Helen has been butchering chickens for years. She tells me she taught herself. As efficient and skilled as her mom was with the task, she never taught Helen how to do it.

The picture above is of Helen fetching chickens from the pen. She caught three of them to kill. She just grabs them by the feet, she's very quick for a woman her age.  I didn't take pictures of her killing them, in fact I don't even watch that part. But she and Troy do it the old fashioned way. They use a long metal bar, lay the chicken down on the ground, face down, place the bar down over the back of the chicken's neck, hold the bar down and pull the chicken's body up. It takes a second. Yes, the bodies flop around, it's part of it.

We have a pot of scalding water ready to dip the chickens in to help make the feathers easy to pick. They are actually very easy to pick, the feathers pull right out. It doesn't take long to have them ready to clean and cut up. Helen likes to do the rest inside at the kitchen sink to avoid having to deal with flies outside. Troy and I usually do the whole thing outside with big pots of water for cleaning.

54 piece bucket of chicken!

This is what they look like after we pick the feathers and cut off the feet. The dogs get the feet, we don't make chicken feet stew with them.

Me eating chicken feet stew in Peru.

Then we clean them off a little better in the process of cutting them up. Here is one ready to be gutted and cut into pieces. I got to practice today with the first part, as Helen does it, cutting off the wings, and the legs and thighs. Then there is the process of cutting the body cavity open at the ribs to gut the chicken, which I will need to practice in these next three mornings that we meet. Everything (gut wise) is intact in there, really, it's just a lot of pulling and tearing to get it all out. We save the heart, the livers and gizzards. Though I personally think the gizzards are pretty gross to deal with and also, the texture is like rubber to eat. If I had it my way it would just go in the bucket with the guts. The neck too. But Helen likes to keep it for stewing.

We cut the breast in two pieces, the top part Helen calls the "Pully Bone" the rest of us call it the "Wish Bone". (but of course you have to pull it to make the wish) And the back is cut as well. 

Then I put each chicken at a time in a ziplock freezer baggie and they go in the freezer, except for the one I take home immediately and marinate in sour milk to fry.

I never used to be confident enough to fry chicken at home. But last summer I decided to teach myself how to fry the perfect fried chicken and I did with the help of the internet. This is the link to the recipe. I follow it to the letter. I hope you try it and enjoy!

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/8805/crispy-fried-chicken/?internalSource=hub%20recipe&referringContentType=search%20results&clickId=cardslot%204

Hello!!! Hey, I have 71 published posts on this blog, so it's worth keeping around. I sure did have a hard time getting to it tonight. I couldn't remember the process. Kalyn has started a blog to document her stay in Spain this summer and it inspired me to revisit mine.

Actually, I have some hard goals this summer. Not hard as in difficult to accomplish, but solid goals that I really want to meet. Blogging and journaling more, like daily, is one of them. I want to become good at writing. And you know, the least that can come of it is me becoming sort of a rock star to future generations of my family. I'll be their favorite ancestor, because I was all over the place, blogging and facebooking and also paper journaling and scrapbooking! Not digital scrapbooking, actual paper and photographs bound in albums. Those will be very cool if they make it to future generations. My actual handwriting is everywhere. That kind of thing is important to me. Future generations will know a lot about my life, if they choose to go back to it.

Reading more is another goal. Smart people read. My mother and my daughter, Kalyn, are readers. They are very smart people, and they are in the habit of going to the library. I am not. I don't read for pleasure, unless it's articles on the internet that interest me. I browse recipes all the time. Well, this week I went to the library.

One day Troy and I were riding in the truck together and he asked me where I thought the expression "Catch 22" came from. I looked it up, because I had no idea. Google took me to Wikipedia, which said it was a book by Joseph Heller and it's often cited as one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And I didn't know about it or recall ever hearing about it. I have never thought that I would be a good contestant on Jeopardy, but this information pretty much confirmed for me that I would not be. I want to be a smart person, I admire smart people. Maybe I can start by reading some of the classics. That was just the first one to pop up, so it's the book I checked out. I tried to read some today while waiting in the hay field for Troy.

 Which brings me another goal, making myself more useful and helpful for Troy with the farm stuff. He has so much to do, so much on his plate, he is overwhelmed and I have more time in the summer. I just need to jump in and do it. I will begin by going out to the farm in the morning and help Helen butcher chickens. That will be a blog post.

The last big goal is getting rid of stuff. Kalyn is wanting to move out of our house when she returns from Spain, so I can send some things out with her. I went through cabinets in the kitchen tonight and took out things that I don't use often. I put a pile of stuff on the patio outside to deal with tomorrow sometime....storage? Give away? I don't know yet. But out of my kitchen.

Notice I have left off "getting in shape" or "exercising more" because yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah.

I'll be updating.