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.