Real, Actual Words

Abby went to her first concert on Wednesday at Merriweather Post Pavillion. All day Wednesday, I had this weird butterfly feeling in my stomach, worrying about her at an all day concert with tons of mosh pits bands and the heat was pretty horrendous that day.

(Family Force 5. Please note the flying legs on the left side of the picture.)














I was mostly worried because her friend's parents had the luxury of dropping the girls off at 11AM. We had the more difficult task of finding them for pick-up when they were ready to leave. Lucky for us, and through the beauty of text messaging, the girls were ready to leave around 6PM and the venue was set up so that there were so many bands, there was not one mass exodus and so it was easier to find them than I thought.

Abby took the camera with her and sometime during the day the camera stopped working. Sound familiar? Who knows if this is fixable but seriously. It would follow our luck lately to have yet another thing go wrong. Plus, without a camera, that means that I have to type actual words here and Jean won't be able to see all our new blooms in the garden.

I started another infusion today. I stopped by our local co-op the Common Market today and bought an organic pineapple. I've had some awesome pineapple infusions at local bars in town lately, but there's something about pineapple that makes me feel a bit squirrely in an allergy-related sense and so I decided that it would be worth it to buy an organic one because I believe that tropical fruits have more pesticides than others. I'm convinced it's the chemicals and not the pineapple itself that bothers me. At least that's what I hope because I love me some pineapple. I'll let you know how the infusion turns out.

New Last Week

It's been hot and humid and stormy here lately. Here's some pictures I took last week of what's going on in the garden.

Jim is working on the wood pile for next winter. We've had a lot of tree damage from some recent storms. That damage will heat the house for the winter. Here, he's working on the tree that took out our power last month. The tree was located at the edge of our property and the neighboring farm. He went up to the farm last week to make sure the farmer didn't mind if he cut it up. Obviously, the farmer said no problem.














These are some perennial sunflowers we have. We moved them to the back yard, along the fence that hides the pool filter.














Here's a butterfly on the cone flowers we transplanted around the pool.














A flower on a Rose of Sharon that we transplanted around the pool.

Here's One Answer

Linda asked me earlier this week what I do with my homegrown garlic. While this isn't exactly truthful tonight (I used up the last of my store-bought garlic) here's a good example of a typical meal with lots of garlic.

Tonight I made homemade pizza. I had to make two because Abby won't eat the same pizza the rest of us will. She only likes cheese and pepperoni...no tomato sauce. But on our pizza, I layered a small amount of tomato sauce, then my roasted garlic. To roast the garlic, I cut the garlic head in half around the middle and roasted it in my toaster oven, drizzled in olive oil, for about 20-25 minutes. The little garlic sections (half cloves) get soft and pop right out of the outer shell. While the garlic was roasting, I sauteed some fresh spinach in olive oil with more minced garlic and shallots. When that was done, I removed it from the pan and set it aside. To the same pan, I added chopped red and white onions, red peppers, yellow squash and sliced baby portobellas and cooked them until they were slightly soft.

Now, back to the pizza. After the garlic was layered on top of the sauce, I covered the pizza in mozzarella, then added the chopped, cooked veggies, then the spinach and topped it all off with crumbled feta cheese.

Have a look for yourself. You can click on the picture to enlarge it. Yummy, if I may say so!

Fabulous Evening

Tonight, Jim and I went to downtown Frederick to see the very fabulous Mary Ann Redmond Band. If you are in the DC area and get a chance to see her, do it. She's an absolutely amazing singer and performer. We've seen her several times. The first time was at a local bar back in the mid to late 90's at the recommendation of our friends. They described her as a little white woman with a big black woman's voice. It's a great description because she has a big, soulful sound that can run the gamut of all types of music from rock and roll to blues to soul. Another time that we saw her, we were in downtown Frederick on a Sunday night at a local park. Emily, the total theater ham that she was and about 7 or 8 years old, caught Mary Ann's eye while she was dancing in front of the stage and Mary Ann invited her up on the stage to dance and sing back-up for the song Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones.

I actually had enough wine tonight to go up to Mary Ann after the show and thank her for coming to Frederick. I told her about inviting Emily up on the stage and being a fan ever since. I didn't expect her to remember the incident but I just wanted her to know.















The last time we went to this downtown happy hour, I noticed the girl with her own henna business that no one seemed to be participating in, so this time, I gave her some business.















I requested the purple glitter just for grins.















Plus, we got to see our chief of police on a Segway, which made the whole evening all the better.

Gonna Feel It

This morning, I went to a Pilates class for the first time since that one incident a couple years ago. And no, in case you were wondering, I didn't do it again! For the past couple years, I have been out of the habit of getting up and out the door early on Tuesdays and Thursdays and so I didn't have enough time for a proper breakfast so by the time class was over, I was shaky hungry. It didn't help that I was planning on going grocery shopping either and I briefly considered driving through somewhere to grab a bite. But I didn't. What I did do was go through a very unfamiliar grocery store, throwing all sorts of unnecessaries (yeah, I know it's not a real word) into my cart.

I am definitely going to feel my muscles tomorrow. Since I quit the gym and haven't been teaching as many classes, I've gotten pretty soft in all the places that Pilates aims at. I'm actually looking forward to that feeling of tiredness in my body.

First Garlic Harvested

Here We Go Again

As of June 24th, Abby became Driver's Permit eligible. Thankfully she was in Ohio then and we could put all that nonsense off for a few days. Since she's been home though, we've had emails from her friend's parents about driver's education classes and how the girls want to go together and I'm finding it all harder and harder to ignore. Quite frankly, I'm not sure I'm ready to go through all that again. Abby is nervous about learning to drive a manual transmission, which all of our cars are, and that's not making our stress over the whole driving thing any easier. I can't blame her really. I learned how to drive on an automatic and didn't learn how to drive a standard until a couple years after I had my license. The driver's ed cars are automatic as well, which makes me think she needs to know how to drive both transmissions. It's not like we are in a position to go out and buy a new used car though. I think it's safe to say we failed at setting an example last time.

Speaking of driving stress, the car that Emily usually drives now is Jim's old Mazda Protege. It's at the 150,000 mile-I need all my original parts replaced one at a time-stage of it's life now and the exhaust system is making the car sound like a Harley-Davidson. Also, Emily planned a trip to Philadelphia this week to see her boyfriend. The part for the car didn't come in time for fixing and so Jim offered her his new pick-up truck to drive up there. While she learned to drive in my old Safari Van, since then she's driven relatively compact cars and so when I heard about this offer, lasers flew out of my eyes and killed Jim dead. But, Emily left anyways and called me to tell me she arrived safely.

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Yesterday for the 4th, we had our friends over and had a cook-out. As soon as Jim lit the charcoal, the skies opened up and it started to rain. The rain stayed for the rest of the day and so, after a dinner of bratwurst and Italian sausage (along with the requisite sauerkraut and the packet of peppers and onions that went on the grill for the sausages), mac and cheese, baked beans, 4-bean salad (yes, I love me some beans) and Em's grilled veggies, we cranked the heat up on the pool and went swimming despite the rain.

Happy 4th Of July

Bee balm.